Category: Leading Article

  • Youtube screengrab.

    Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet has approved a plan to wage a war on Lebanon under the pretext of returning Israeli settlers to their colonies in the north part of historical Palestine.

    Historically, the Israeli government does not usually discuss its military plans in the public arena. The security cabinet meeting, initially scheduled for Sunday, was delayed to Monday until after the arrival of American envoy, Amos Hochstein. Following their meeting, Israeli Prime Minister told Hochstein thanks for U.S. support, but Israel “will do what is necessary” for the return of the Israeli settlers to the “Jewish only” colonies located along the borders with Lebanon

    According to Israeli sources, the Biden administration wanted to avoid a broader regional conflict that might involve the Resistance in Lebanon, Yemen and Iran, at least until after the U.S. elections in November. However, all indications suggest that Netanyahu is resisting the American demands, and even disregarding the opinion of his own war minister who does not believe it’s the right time to expand the war. Netanyahu’s preparations for the war could also include dismissing Yaov Gallant and replacing him with Gideon Sa’ar from the New Hope Jewish racist party. This prompted Biden to send Hochstein to warn the Israeli prime minister of dangerous consequence if he moves ahead and dismisses Gallant.

    The political posturing and the unusual public nature of these discussions—potential dismissals of a minister, and talk of military action—suggests that a decision to launch a war against Lebanon may have been imminent. Furthermore, the infighting within the Israeli government appears to have caused confusion or disorganization exhibited by “unapproved” actions taken by Israeli military units along the Lebanese border.

    As an example, on September 16, leaflets in Arabic were dropped in South Lebanon ordering residents to leave their homes and warning that civilians who remain become legitimate Israeli targets. But shortly afterward, the Israeli military announced that no official evacuation order had been issued and that the leaflets were distributed without proper authorization.

    Besides the hollow excuse for a lack of proper authorization, army units do not have printing machines to prepare leaflets that include the exact date and timing⎯4 p.m. (13:00 GMT)⎯by which civilians should complete their evacuation. Leaflets are typically brought by other specialized units to the frontline.

    This raises the questions, could the leaflets have been part of an earlier war plans? Did Hochstein’s visit force a delay in the timing, but the change wasn’t communicated down to the unit responsible for distributing the leaflets?

    Then on the following day, Tuesday September 17, approximately 3,000 pagers exploded simultaneously across Lebanon.

    Is there a connection between the original timing of the leaflets and the detonation of the pagers?

    The above two incidents suggest a serious misstep and could have possibly derailed the original Israeli war plans against Lebanon. In fact, these miscalculations may potentially become larger than Israel’s security screw-up on October 7, 2023.

    Before arguing the points for this hypothesis, one must acknowledge that booby-trapping the pagers was possibly one of the most sophisticated espionage operations orchestrated by the Israeli Mossad; no less than the assassination of Ismail Hania in Tehran. Having stated the above, however, one might be surprised in concluding that as far reaching as this covert action was for the Israeli spies, in all likelihood, this was a failure.

    The Israeli terrorist assault resulted in the killing of nine Lebanese, including a child, and injuring close to 3000 individuals. Despite what was reported in the managed Western media, many were innocent civilians, some were driving cars, while others were shopping in crowded markets.

    In this attack, Israel did not aim to terrorize civilians only, they do that daily. More importantly, targeting the pagers intended to interrupt the communication channels for Resistance operatives, as well as the civilian infrastructure such as hospitals and civil defense. Therefore, for the above to achieve optimum effectiveness, such an operation would need to have taken place during the initial Israeli military attack, not on a normal afternoon in Lebanon. Hence, the relationship between the “unauthorized” leaflets ordering Lebanese civilians to evacuate by 4 p.m. September 16, and the flub of the exploding pagers precisely 24 hours later.

    In essence, it appears that Israel had initially prepared to order the evacuation ahead of a planned military action on the 16th. At the same time, the pagers were programmed to detonate during the initial phase of the war, 24 hours later, to disrupt communication channels, create confusion and disarray in the midst of war.

    However, the overextended Israeli army that failed in preventing the release of the evacuation leaflets on May 16, when the war was likely delayed. It also did not halt the premature detonation of the pagers on September 17. The last oversight, the second within 24 hours, may have resulted in a missed strategic opportunity for the Israeli army, and another blunder for the Israeli leadership.

    The post Exploding Pagers in Lebanon, Another Israeli Terrorism Blunder? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The post When the Clintons Did Haiti: Keep the Natives From Breeding appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Georgia-Pacific Mill, Toledo, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

    I had teed up a post for last week presenting recent graphics that illustrate how extreme the climate crisis has become when something got in the way. I sat on it and realized I cannot look at these scientific depictions without feeling a sense of deep grief. I cannot be coldblooded about this. And if they are having this impact on me, I have to know they must have a similar impact on many of my readers. You are conscious caring people. And so I will still make that presentation. But first, a few thoughts on how we absorb all of this.

    Though the world has made halting steps toward reducing the fossil fuel pollution that is the primary source of climate disruption, fossil fuel use is still increasing. The growth of clean energy technologies may turn that curve around in the next few years. But it will be nowhere near the at least 7% annual carbon emissions reductions needed to keep temperature increases below the 1.5°C at which the risk of triggering climate tipping points vastly increases. For more on this, watch this excellent 18-minute presentation by Potdam Institute climate scientist Stefan Ramsdorf. It’s a comprehensive survey of the climate situation well worth the time.

    My basic honesty compels me to acknowledge it is highly unlikely we will reach that goal. It would require adoption of an economic model that downplays growth in Gross Domestic Product and put a wider range of social and ecological goals at the forefront. The kind of “doughnut economics” of which economist Kate Raworth has written that meets social needs within planetary ecological boundaries. See the below graphic.

    But powerful political and economic forces committed to business as usual stand in the way. Many of us struggle with a sense of powerlessness in the face of this all. I certainly do. But we cannot afford to succumb to this, and must continue to fight, as the heroic people of this past Summer of Heat in New York City who targeted financial institutions at the center of the trajectory to fossil fueled hell.

    As well as standing up against what we are opposed to, we must work for the future we need. We can take hope and encouragement from the fact that alternatives are being envisioned by thinkers such as Raworth and Jason Hickel, who is also delving into futures beyond conventional growth scenarios. That old saying, another world is possible, is being elaborated by many, and their visions give us a goal for which to shoot.

    In my own writing, I have looked at how we can begin to realize better futures where we have most traction, the places we live, under the rubric, building the future in place. We face highly uncertain futures at the global and national level, but whatever happens, we can and must work where we live to create networks of community institutions that build resilience in the face of inevitable turbulence. Institutions such as public banking, social housing, worker coops, circular economies, food security networks, public broadband, that draw us together in a time of polarization.

    The world and the places we live will experience increasing climate extremes. There is no way around this. The hope we must have is that at some point this will wake people up and force action at the scale that is required before we have plunged too much deeper into the danger zone. That is why we must continue struggling through our grief and uncertainties, and counter any sense of powerlessness with action, to do all we can to wake up the world and push its political and economic elites to action.

    I had to write that preface to present the following. Some of my friends have fallen into doomism, which can easily be promoted by what is illustrated here. I refuse, and will continue struggling for that other, better world which is still possible. In fact, I believe the awakening that is required, and will take place, will make a world that is better in so many respects, socially, economically, politically and ecologically.

    The record breaking year of 2023

    The largest fact is that 2023 was the hottest summer and year on record, while the 2024 summer has now exceeded 2023, setting up 2024 to be even hotter than 2023.

    First, let’s look at last year, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s State of the Climate 2023. Among the key findings (quoting a Climate.gov summary):

    + Earth’s greenhouse gas concentrations were the highest on record.

    + Record temperatures were notable across the globe.

    + Ocean heat and global sea level were the highest on record.

    + Heatwaves and droughts contributed to massive wildfires around the world.

    + The Arctic was warm and navigable.

    + Antarctica sea ice sets record lows throughout 2023.

    Climate.gov published the following graphics based on the report, beginning with the climate pollution that is driving global heating

    Greenhouse gas graphs over smokestack background image
    From NOAA: The three dominant greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere—carbon dioxide (left), methane (center), and nitrous oxide (right)—all reached new highs in 2023. NOAA Climate.gov image, adapted from Figure 2.59 in State of the Climate in 2023. Background photo from Adobe Stock….
    Global temperature graph over cityscape background
    From NOAA: Graphs of yearly global surface temperature compared to the 1991-2020 average from 1850 to 2023, based on data from four different sources: NOAA, NASA, the U.K. Met Office Hadley Center, and Berkeley Earth. Despite small differences among the records from year to year, all show our planet’s warming trend, ending with a new record high temperature in 2023.
    Global map of number of days of extreme humid heat in 2023 compared to average
    From NOAA: This map shows the frequency of extreme humid heat worldwide in 2023 compared to the 1991-2023 average. Extreme humid heat is defined as a day when the maximum wet-bulb temperature (fatal to humans after short exposure) is in the highest 10 percent on record from 1991-2020. The map compares the frequency of these days in 2023 to their normal frequency at that location from 1991-2020. Places that are darkest red experienced 60 or more days of extreme humid heat—2 months—more than average. Places where the frequency of extreme humid heat was less than average are colored blue.
    Global map of which land areas experienced either drought or wet conditions in 2023
    From NOAA: This map shows global drought status in 2023 based on a scale called the Palmer Self-calibrating Drought Index. Areas experiencing the most extreme drought are darkest brown; places that were extremely wet over the year are colored dark blue green. Nearly 8 percent of the global land area experienced extreme drought in 2023—a new record.
    Infographic of line graphs of ice loss over time for ice caps and glaciers in the Arctic, mountain glaciers, and the Antarctic Ice Sheet.Graphs are overlaid on a photo of an ice shelf
    From NOAA: This trio of line graphs shows ice loss over time from three different environments: (left) Arctic glaciers and ice caps (outside of Greenland), (center) mountain glaciers worldwide, and (right) the Antarctic Ice Sheet. From pole to pole and everywhere in between. Photo by Miguel Martín, used under a Creative Commons license. 

    New records in 2024

    In July Carbon Brief published a State of the Climate report looking at the first 6 months of 2024. Quoting the report: “Carbon Brief’s analysis indicates a 95% probability that this year will surpass 2023 as the warmest year on record . . . This projection emerges amid a series of climate extremes that have marked the first half of 2024.

    + The first six months of 2024 have each set new temperature records, extending an already remarkable streak of 13 consecutive record-breaking months dating back to 2023.

    + On 22 July, the world experienced its highest absolute global daily temperature on record, reaching a scorching 17.15C.

    + The heat has been felt globally, with 63 countries experiencing their warmest June on record. Over the past 12 months, a staggering 138 countries have recorded their hottest temperatures ever.”

    Since the report, NOAA reported the hottest July on record, while another global monitoring center, Copernicus, reported the second hottest, “but only by a whisker,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the center. “Globally, July 2024 was almost as warm as July 2023, the hottest month on record. July 2024 saw the two hottest days on record.”

    Then August continued the record of hottest months in the NOAA dataset. “August marks the 15th-consecutive month of record-high global temperatures — which is itself a record streak,” NOAA reported. “June–August 2024 was the Northern Hemisphere’s hottest meteorological summer on record, at 2.74 degrees F (1.52 degrees C) above average. The season, which also marks the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, was the Southern Hemisphere’s warmest winter on record at 1.73 degrees F (0.96 of a degree C) above average.”

    Copernicus also found summer 2024 the hottest on record.

    The following graphics are published with permission from Carbon Brief. Though the first only covers up through June, it illustrates how much recent temperatures have exceeded the record.

    The following illustrates how much of the planet experienced record hot temperatures from July 2023 to June 2024 based on records going back to 1850.

    The following shows how the planet has heated since 1940, with notable increases since around the middle of the past decade.

    I hope we wake up in time. It’s up to those of us who are aware and care to do all we can to make it happen.

    This first appeared in The Raven.

    The post Climate Extremes and Climate Grief appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Trump, weakens the underpinnings of our democracy.  

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

    The post Reagan’s Lessons: In and Out of Cold War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • Photograph Source: Nathaniel St. Clair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The post Harris Can’t Embrace Billionaires if She Wants to Win appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • US nuclear weapons test at Bikini in 1946. Wikicommons.

    The next president of the United States, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will face many contentious domestic issues that have long divided this country, including abortion rights, immigration, racial discord, and economic inequality. In the foreign policy realm, she or he will face vexing decisions over Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, and China/Taiwan. But one issue that few of us are even thinking about could pose a far greater quandary for the next president and even deeper peril for the rest of us: nuclear weapons policy.

    Consider this: For the past three decades, we’ve been living through a period in which the risk of nuclear war has been far lower than at any time since the Nuclear Age began — so low, in fact, that the danger of such a holocaust has been largely invisible to most people. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the signing of agreements that substantially reduced the U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles eliminated the most extreme risk of thermonuclear conflict, allowing us to push thoughts of nuclear Armageddon aside (and focus on other worries). But those quiescent days should now be considered over. Relations among the major powers have deteriorated in recent years and progress on disarmament has stalled. The United States and Russia are, in fact, upgrading their nuclear arsenals with new and more powerful weapons, while China — previously an outlier in the nuclear threat equation — has begun a major expansion of its own arsenal.

    The altered nuclear equation is also evident in the renewed talk of possible nuclear weapons use by leaders of the major nuclear-armed powers. Such public discussion largely ceased after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when it became evident that any thermonuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union would result in their mutual annihilation. However, that fear has diminished in recent years and we’re again hearing talk of nuclear weapons use. Since ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to employ nuclear munitions in response to unspecified future actions of the U.S. and NATO in support of Ukrainian forces. Citing those very threats, along with China’s growing military might, Congress has authorized a program to develop more “lower-yield” nuclear munitions supposedly meant (however madly) to provide a president with further “options” in the event of a future regional conflict with Russia or China.

    Thanks to those and related developments, the world is now closer to an actual nuclear conflagration than at any time since the end of the Cold War. And while popular anxiety about a nuclear exchange may have diminished, keep in mind that the explosive power of existing arsenals has not. Imagine this, for instance: even a “limited” nuclear war — involving the use of just a dozen or so of the hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) possessed by China, Russia, and the United States — would cause enough planetary destruction to ensure civilization’s collapse and the death of billions of people.

    And consider all of that as just the backdrop against which the next president will undoubtedly face fateful decisions regarding the production and possible use of such weaponry, whether in the bilateral nuclear relationship between the U.S. and Russia or the trilateral one that incorporates China.

    The U.S.-Russia Nuclear Equation

    The first nuclear quandary facing the next president has an actual timeline. In approximately 500 days, on February 5, 2026, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last remaining nuclear accord between the U.S. and Russia limiting the size of their arsenals, will expire. That treaty, signed in 2010, limits each side to a maximum of 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads along with 700 delivery systems, whether ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), or nuclear-capable heavy bombers. (That treaty only covers strategic warheads, or those intended for attacks on each other’s homeland; it does not include the potentially devastating stockpiles of “tactical” nuclear munitions possessed by the two countries that are intended for use in regional conflicts.)

    At present, the treaty is on life support. On February 21, 2023, Vladimir Putin ominously announced that Russia had “suspended” its formal participation in New START, although claiming it would continue to abide by its warhead and delivery limits as long as the U.S. did so. The Biden administration then agreed that it, too, would continue to abide by the treaty limits. It has also signaled to Moscow that it’s willing to discuss the terms of a replacement treaty for New START when that agreement expires in 2026. The Russians have, however, declined to engage in such conversations as long as the U.S. continues its military support for Ukraine.

    Accordingly, among the first major decisions the next president has to make in January 2025 will be what stance to take regarding the future status of New START (or its replacement). With the treaty’s extinction barely more than a year away, little time will remain for careful deliberation as a new administration chooses among several potentially fateful and contentious possibilities.

    Its first option, of course, would be to preserve the status quo, agreeing that the U.S. will abide by that treaty’s numerical limits as long as Russia does, even in the absence of a treaty obliging it to do so. Count on one thing, though: such a decision would almost certainly be challenged and tested by nuclear hawks in both Washington and Moscow.

    Of course, President Harris or Trump could decide to launch a diplomatic drive to persuade Moscow to agree to a new version of New START, a distinctly demanding undertaking, given the time remaining. Ideally, such an agreement would entail further reductions in the U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals or at least include caps on the number of tactical weapons on each side. And remember, even if such an agreement were indeed to be reached, it would also require Senate approval and undoubtedly encounter fierce resistance from the hawkish members of that body. Despite such obstacles, this probably represents the best possible outcome imaginable.

    The worst — and yet most likely — would be a decision to abandon the New START limits and begin adding yet more weapons to the American nuclear arsenal, reversing a bipartisan arms control policy that goes back to the administration of President Richard Nixon. Sadly, there are too many members of Congress who favor just such a shift and are already proposing measures to initiate it.

    In June, for example, in its version of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2025, the Senate Armed Services Committee instructed the Department of Defense to begin devising plans for an increase in the number of deployed ICBMs from 400 of the existing Minuteman-IIIs to 450 of its replacement, the future Sentinel ICBM. The House Armed Services Committee version of that measure does not contain that provision but includes separate plans for ICBM force expansion. (The consolidated text of the bill has yet to be finalized.)

    Should the U.S. and/or Russia abandon the New START limits and begin adding to its atomic arsenal after February 5, 2026, a new nuclear arms race would almost certainly be ignited, with no foreseeable limits. No matter which side announced such a move first, the other would undoubtedly feel compelled to follow suit and so, for the first time since the Nixon era, both nuclear powers would be expanding rather than reducing their deployed nuclear forces — only increasing, of course, the potential for mutual annihilation. And if Cold War history is any guide, such an arms-building contest would result in increased suspicion and hostility, adding a greater danger of nuclear escalation to any crisis that might arise between them.

    The Three-Way Arms Race

    Scary as that might prove, a two-way nuclear arms race isn’t the greatest peril we face. After all, should Moscow and Washington prove unable to agree on a successor to New START and begin expanding their arsenals, any trilateral nuclear agreement including China that might slow that country’s present nuclear buildup becomes essentially unimaginable.

    Ever since it acquired nuclear weapons in 1964, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pursued a minimalist stance when it came to deploying such weaponry, insisting that it would never initiate a nuclear conflict but would only use nuclear weapons in a second-strike retaliatory fashion following a nuclear attack on the PRC. In accordance with that policy, China long maintained a relatively small arsenal, only 200 or so nuclear warheads and a small fleet of ICBMs and SLBMs. In the past few years, however, China has launched a significant nuclear build-up, adding another 300 warheads and producing more missiles and missile-launching silos — all while insisting its no-first-use policy remains unchanged and that it is only maintaining a retaliatory force to deter potential aggression by other nuclear-armed states.

    Some Western analysts believe that Xi Jinping, China’s nationalistic and authoritarian leader, considers a larger arsenal necessary to boost his country’s status in a highly competitive, multipolar world. Others argue that China fears improvements in U.S. defensive capabilities, especially the installation of anti-ballistic missile systems, that could endanger its relatively small retaliatory force and so rob it of a deterrent to any future American first strike.

    Given the Chinese construction of several hundred new missile silos, Pentagon analysts contend that the country plans to deploy as many as 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035 — roughly equivalent to deployed Russian and American stockpiles under the New START guidelines. At present, there is no way to confirm such predictions, which are based on extrapolations from the recent growth of the Chinese arsenal from perhaps 200 to 500 warheads. Nonetheless, many Washington officials, especially in the Republican Party, have begun to argue that, given such a buildup, the New START limits must be abandoned in 2026 and yet more weapons added to the deployed U.S. nuclear stockpile to counter both Russia and China.

    As Franklin Miller of the Washington-based Scowcroft Group and a former director of nuclear targeting in the office of the secretary of defense put it, “Deterring China and Russia simultaneously [requires] an increased level of U.S. strategic warheads.” Miller was one of 12 members of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, a bipartisan group convened in 2022 to reconsider America’s nuclear policies in light of China’s growing arsenal, Putin’s nuclear threats, and other developments. In its final October 2023 report, that commission recommended numerous alterations and additions to the American arsenal, including installing multiple warheads (instead of single ones) on the Sentinel missiles being built to replace the Minuteman ICBM and increasing the number of B-21 nuclear bombers and Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines to be produced under the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion nuclear “modernization” program.

    The Biden administration has yet to endorse the recommendations in that report. It has, however, signaled that it’s considering the steps a future administration might take to address an expanded Chinese arsenal. In March, the White House approved a new version of a top-secret document, the Nuclear Employment Guidance, which for the first time reportedly focused as much on countering China as Russia. According to the few public comments made by administration officials about that document, it, too, sets out contingency plans for increasing the number of deployed strategic weapons in the years ahead if Russia breaks out of the current New START limits and no arms restraints have been negotiated with China.

    “We have begun exploring options to increase future launcher capacity or additional deployed warheads on the land, sea, and air legs [of the nuclear delivery “triad” of ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers] that could offer national leadership increased flexibility, if desired, and executed,” said acting Assistant Secretary of Defense Policy Vipin Narang on August 1st. While none of those options are likely to be implemented in President Biden’s remaining months, the next administration will be confronted with distinctly ominous decisions about the future composition of that already monstrous nuclear arsenal.

    Whether it is kept as is or expanded, the one option you won’t hear much about in Washington is finding ways to reduce it. And count on one thing: even a decision simply to preserve the status quo in the context of today’s increasingly antagonistic international environment poses an increased risk of nuclear conflict. Any decision to expand it, along with comparable moves by Russia and China, will undoubtedly create an even greater risk of instability and potentially suicidal nuclear escalation.

    The Need for Citizen Advocacy

    For all too many of us, nuclear weapons policy seems like a difficult issue that should be left to the experts. This wasn’t always so. During the Cold War years, nuclear war seemed like an ever-present possibility and millions of Americans familiarized themselves with nuclear issues, participating in ban-the-bomb protests or the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign of the 1980s. But with the Cold War’s end and a diminished sense of nuclear doom, most of us turned to other issues and concerns. Yet the nuclear danger is growing rapidly and so decisions regarding the U.S. arsenal could have life-or-death repercussions on a global scale.

    And one thing should be made clear: adding more weaponry to the U.S. arsenal will not make us one bit safer. Given the invulnerability of this country’s missile-bearing nuclear submarines and the multitude of other weapons in our nuclear arsenal, no foreign leader could conceivably mount a first strike on this country and not expect catastrophic retaliation, which in turn would devastate the planet. Acquiring more nuclear weapons would not alter any of this in the slightest. All it could possibly do is add to international tensions and increase the risk of global annihilation.

    As Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan research and advocacy outfit, put it recently: “Significant increases in the U.S. deployed nuclear arsenal would undermine mutual and global security by making the existing balance of nuclear terror more unpredictable and would set into motion a counterproductive, costly action-reaction cycle of nuclear competition.”

    A decision to pursue such a reckless path could occur just months from now. In early 2025, the next president, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will be making critical decisions regarding the future of the New START Treaty and the composition of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Given the vital stakes involved, such decisions should not be left to the president and a small coterie of her or his close advisers. Rather, it should be the concern of every citizen, ensuring vigorous debate on alternative options, including steps aimed at reducing and eventually eliminating the world’s nuclear arsenals. Without such public advocacy, we face the very real danger that, for the first time since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, nuclear weapons will again be detonated on this planet, with billions of us finding ourselves in almost unimaginable peril.

    This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

    The post Ensuring the Collapse of Civilization? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

    “You don’t have to ask me how someone is. You can see how they are by what they say and the comments they make.”

    Kara Young, biracial former girlfriend of Donald Trump

    “Beat them up, not once but repeatedly, beat them up so it hurts so badly, until it’s unbearable.”

    Benjamin Netanyahu on how to deal with Palestinians.

    “What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”

    Kamala Harris

    Americans live in a state of denial. We reject the evidence of our senses, even when it is screamed at us clearly and unambiguously and paraded starkly naked before us. We bow to the deceit and manipulation of the wealthy and powerful, turning off our critical thinking and recalibrating our moral compass, all the while avoiding the truth about what we have become and what this change says about us. Not only does this betrayal of conviction impact equity and democracy at home, it also affects those living abroad whose lives are devastated by its dehumanizing and destructive consequences and the paralysis of those who fail to challenge it.

    Donald Trump notoriously boasted that he could shoot someone in public view and not lose any voters. While his criminal acts have so far not included homicide, ironically, there is some truth to this statement from the self-professed “brilliant weaver” of towering tales.

    Every day, in every way, Trump tells us who he is — and gets away with it. Whatever skeletons he kept in his closet have largely been exposed. We know his playbook, which Trump returns to with the feverish regularity of an obsessive-compulsive. However, it appears he has caught the corporate media off guard. Recently, it has been sounding the alarm over Trump’s insistence that the 2024 election is being rigged against him. However, he began beating that drum as early as the 2016 election, when he declared he would accept the results only if he won. Sadly, he did. Now, eight years later, after rejecting the results of the 2020 election, he repeats the claim as he runs in another election. Though newsworthy, there is nothing new here.

    Another chapter in Trump’s voluminous playbook is birtherism. Given Kamala Harris’ melanated ancestry, did anyone doubt that Trump would resuscitate this old canard once she declared her candidacy? When racism was on the fringe, people believed it could be contained, but the fringe has moved closer to the center. What was once the Tea Party has hulked into MAGA and taken over the Republican Party. Conservative political organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) make no attempt to conceal their racism, which they would like to see elevated to national policy.

    Setting its sights on Harris, the NFRA has taken Trump’s birtherism a step further, claiming, based on its “originalist” (read bullshit) interpretation of Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution, that even though she was born in America, Harris is ineligible for president because her parents were not naturalized citizens at the time of her birth. (This would also apply to Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, no doubt to the orgasmic delight of Ann Coulter.) Not content with this vile sophistry, the NFRA goes so far as to quote the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott ruling, claiming that Harris cannot be a U.S. citizen because her ancestors were enslaved blacks. (Aside from the fact that the NFRA’s interpretation of the article is flagrantly incorrect and ignores the fact that the 13th and 14th Amendments overturned the ruling, one might wonder why the organization chose not to play this trump card when Harris became vice president four years earlier, as the position also requires natural-born citizenship.)

    The racist xenophobia expressed here is as obvious as it is hurtful. Imagine growing up as a black and brown child in America only to realize that your country is just not that into you and where racial progress is measured in terms of the evolution of racial epithets—from calling black people “niggers” to “rebranding them “DEI hires.” Then again, in the eyes of NFRA, it is not their country and never will be.

    This is, after all, MAGA’s raison d’être—to time-slip the nation back to an age when America was great and, as Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote in the Dred Scott decision, blacks had “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” These are the same fragile white souls who ban teaching unbowdlerized American history in classrooms because they fear it will damage the self-esteem of white children. No wonder Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 want to abolish the Department of Education to perhaps replace it with the Department of Truth Social.

    Despite these threats to governance and the psychological well-being of the people of color these attacks target, the media spends too much time debunking Trump’s distractions. Just when you think the media might catch up, Trump ejects some chaff to throw them off his trail. Given Trump’s history of bragging about his enormous ratings and the size of his rallies after Biden’s inauguration, was it really news that Trump would display a chronic case of Crowd Envy? We already knew Trump is a size queen, although he apparently does not measure up to his own exacting standards, which may account for his many insecurities.

    Speaking of chaff, Trump would also have us believe he is a “stable genius” who knows more than anyone about everything and everyone. He knows more about military strategy, taxes, construction, campaign financing, infrastructure, ISIS, the environment, drones, technology, trucks, Facebook, the courts, steelworkers, the Kurds, trade, nuclear weapons, lawsuits, debt, politicians, and even the circumstances of Barack Obama’s birth. He is an expert not only on racial determination but also on assigning qualities appropriate to each race. As he testified in 1993 before a congressional hearing on Native American gambling, Trump knows what “Indians look like,” going so far as to call Connecticut’s Mashantucket Pequot, a tribal nation with multiracial ancestry, whom he was engaged in one of many casino gaming disputes he had with Native Americans, “the Michael Jordan Indians,” and to dismiss their indigenous roots.

    Some thirty years later, Trump now assures us that he knows who is East Indian. Indeed, it wasn’t all that long ago that Trump, a connoisseur of the finer aspects of biracialism, could discern which attributes biracials inherited from each parent. In her 1997 book Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman details how Trump claimed that his biracial model girlfriend at the time, Kara Young, inherited her beauty from her black mother and her intelligence from her white father.Apparently, “low IQ,” biracial Harris —who Trump has admitted is “beautiful” like his plagiarizing spouse, though not “better-looking” than The Don himself—is also intellectually challenged, presumably due to her lack of superior white genes.

    The reality is Trump’s ability to read race and ethnicity like tea leaves is as reliable as his exceptional memory: He once claimed to have received a copy of Mein Kampf from a “Jewish friend,” although it turns out the book was a collection of Hitler speeches, and the friend was not Jewish.

    When matters turn contentious, under pressure, Trump’s omniscience is superseded by his self-avowed ignorance, and he suddenly transforms into an orange-skinned, blue-suited Sgt. Schultz. When asked, he knows nothing about David Duke, the Proud Boys, Nick Fuentes, Lev Parnas, Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll, any of the 18 women who have accused him of sexual assault, Mein Kampf and its 21st-century sequel Project 2025, and who shot the disgraceful Arlington National Cemetery campaign video and posted it to TikTok.

    Like his endless litany of lies and unchecked racism and sexism, Trump’s cognitive decline is in full view to even the most myopic of political observers. Even so, corporate media seems to be pulling its punches, perhaps because, like the assaulted Arlington employee, it fears possible future retaliation should he win in November.

    Again, none of this is a state secret. Trump has not attempted to conceal his authoritarian plans for the nation, even announcing that he would “terminate parts of the Constitution,” wants to be “dictator” (albeit for “only one day”), and will “fix” things so that no one will “have to vote again.” These statements cannot be easily dismissed as mere braggadocio and jokes.

    With every delusional, gaslit utterance, Trump proves himself mentally and emotionally unstable, someone who not only should not have access to the nuclear codes but, given his interminable, vindictive, fact-free rants, to the media, old and new. Unfortunately, even though the proverbial Framers of the Constitution anticipated the need to remove presidents from office if they were unable to carry out their duties, they failed to include a constitutional provision that would have kept demented candidates out of the White House. In an ideal world, where voters can distinguish fantasy from reality and choose leaders who share that ability, this would not be necessary. That, however, is not the world we live in.

    True, as Politico’s Alexander Thompson has suggested, America may have already unknowingly elected mentally ill presidents. Indeed, not only are there sufficient grounds to believe, according to Bandy X. Lee and 36 other psychiatrists and mental health professionals, that Trump was cognitively impaired during his first (and hopefully only) term in office, but also that his condition has progressively deteriorated since leaving office. Yet despite these concerns, he is the Republican nominee, and polls show him virtually neck-and-neck with his Democratic rival. Long gone are the days when an enthused howl could end your political career. Trump, however, is free to grunt and groan and produce whatever bizarre, cacophonous noises he pleases and remain the darling (at least publicly) of the GOP and about a third of the country.

    Despite the transparency of Trump’s behavioral quirks and seditious aspirations, he has yet to face any consequences. Impeachments have come and gone, as have attempts to remove him from the ballot in several states; trials pend indefinitely. Yet through all of this, the Felon of Fifth Avenue not only remains at large but is free to run for president in a race that remains obscenely close for a country that ostensibly embraces the rule of law and struggles to judge people by the content of their character and not the orange of their skin. Adding to these ironies is the possibility that, ignoring the dangers looming before them, like Germans in 1933, Americans may ultimately vote to end our democracy. Germany’s decision invited genocide. In America, a genocide precedes it, though its victims are located oceans away.The death of American democracy may be the price Americans pay for their myopia. But another group of people is already paying an existential price for our folly.

    A critique of Israeli policy may seem out of place in an anti-Trump polemic. Still, the core problems remain fundamentally the same: American regard for both Trump and Israel tends to deny the evidence of things heard, seen, and performed, often ad nauseam. Despite the overwhelming evidence of corruption and atrocity, despite statement after statement from Israeli officials dehumanizing Palestinians, despite report after report of war crimes and human rights violations, including the rape and torture of Palestinian detainees and the detention and mistreatment of thousands in the West Bank and Gaza, despite the evidence of things not only seen but endlessly reiterated, the American-supported genocide in Gaza continues unabated in plain sight.

    Those Americans who buck this trend are doxxed, expelled from universities, and fired. Those who call out Trump’s Bigly Lies and stand against him face a similar fate should he win in November and exact his promised retribution.

    Almost a year has passed since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel that has left some 1,200 Israelis dead, resulted in the deaths of 35 hostages, and incurred the genocidal wrath of Israel that has led to the slaughter of over 40,000 Palestinians, the destruction of Gaza, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Gazans, famine, and the outbreak of polio. Even without daily graphic reminders of the carnage, the intent of Israeli leaders is clear. From Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down, they have repeatedly and unequivocally expressed their hatred for Palestinians and their plans for Gaza and the West Bank, all while making no secret of their opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state and exposing American support for a two-state solution as a hollow ruse, a piece of performative art worthy of a Parisian mime. They know that America, which has proven itself unable even to persuade Israel to commit to a ceasefire, will do little to pressure its “most important ally in the Middle East” to accept a plan that might create such a state.

    U.S. leaders, including Harris, have declared their unconditional commitment to the existence of the Israeli ethnostate; their support for a Palestinian state has been more equivocal, limited to an idea, not the creation of an actual entity. For all the much-ballyhooed hope, joy, and diversity conspicuously displayed at the DNC convention in Chicago, the faces of Palestinian American families affected by the genocide in Gaza were nowhere to be seen, their voices deliberately silenced. Their absence from the stage is odd given the fact that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, Chicago is home to more Palestinian Americans than any city in the country. Yet despite sending 29 uncommitted delegates to the convention and touting the party’s diversity, organizers refused to give them a speaking platform on stage, effectively gagging them, apparently, for fear that to do so would cast a pall on the feel-good optics of party joy and unity. No one wants a Debbie Downer to spoil all the fun, particularly if, unmuzzled, Debbie’s pro-Palestinian, pro-ceasefire, anti-genocide voice prompts pro-Israel donors to withhold their contributions. (God forbid that the Harris go the way of Liz Magill, Claudine Gay, and Minouche Shafik.) American diversity is its strength so long as Palestinian Americans are excluded and American complicity in genocide remains comfortably out of sight.

    Harris has called the scale of suffering in Gaza “heartbreaking,” while failing to acknowledge the role America’s moral abrogation has played in shattering those hearts and much, much more. “So many innocent lives lost, desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety,” she laments, failing publicly to recognize that those hungry innocents are fleeing bombs made in the U.S.A. and an IDF funded by American taxpayers, including Palestinian Americans, a fact that should ensure their right to voice their concerns about the suffering in a public forum that putatively celebrates representative democracy. In 2023, speaking at a White House ceremony for the advancement of economic and educational opportunities for Hispanic Americans, Harris stated, “None of us just live in a silo. Everything is in context.” Sadly, the DNC chose to deliberately obscure some contexts and silence those who would provide them.

    But then, what did one expect? The former president uses “Palestinian” as a racist slur against his political enemies. White House officials mourn the deaths of innocent Israelis but portray the deaths of innocent Palestinians, when they are recognized at all, as the inevitable price of war, and 100 days into the conflict, express America’s determination to have Israeli hostages returned to their families but say nothing specifically about the 24,000 Palestinian lives taken at that point in the conflict. Where are the congressional hearings to parse these statements, preserve the safety of Palestinian Americans, and ensure the rights of peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters?

    It speaks volumes when it takes the eradication of nearly 2% of the population in Gaza for President Biden to finally admit that “Those protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.” Why is it that it took some ten months for him to come to this realization? Although some have welcomed this statement, woefully belated as it is, it fails to acknowledge the obscene disproportionality of the killing and suffering.

    In America, as in Israel, Palestinian lives don’t matter. The pain of Palestinian Americans who have lost family, relatives, and loved ones in the conflict, the plight of hundreds of thousands of Gazan refugees, and the rape, torture, and death of Palestinian detainees held in Israeli detention centers escapes the notice of mainstream media and mainstreamed politicians, revealing once again that Palestinian lives are inconsequential.

    Israeli leaders rain dehumanizing racist rhetoric and lethal ordnance upon Palestinians. Still, they are not held responsible for their actions because doing so would lead to accusations of antisemitism, just as criticizing Trump and his cult for their racism and sexism is cynically framed as anti-white misandry.

    In America, even if Trump loses in November, the dogs have been let loose; the damage already has been done, setting the stage for another January 6 and, perhaps, far worse. In Gaza, even if a ceasefire is eventually declared, its pulverized shell, the benighted product of moral indifference and political self-servitude, will remain, a shell-shocked elegy to the dead whose exact numbers have yet to be determined and may never be. In both cases, one did not have to be Cassandra to see what was coming, if only because it was already in plain sight.

    Note

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

    The post In Plain Sight: The Evidence of Things Seen appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

    In the Gaza genocide, now expanded to the West Bank, the US and UK have not only provided the main weapons of physical annihilation, they are also collaborating with their junior partner Israel in the war of public disinformation and deception. By now, it has become obvious to most observers in the US and UK that the provision of advanced weapons to the apartheid state, including thousands of American 2000-pound bunker-buster bombs, precision-guided air-to-ground hellfire missiles, and assorted other instruments of mass destruction, is part of an effort to wipe out the Palestinian civilian population through death and eventual deportation. Britain’s military corporation BAE provides Israel with parts of the F-35 fighter jets along with “systems for naval drones, missile guidance and components in fighter jets used against Palestinians in Gaza” (Lee-Doktor 2024).

    Both governments are widely out of touch with their constituents. By May 2024, a Data for Progress poll indicated that 70% of likely voters, including 83% of Democrats, favored a permanent ceasefire and de-escalation of violence in Gaza. A similar YouGov poll found that 56% of Britons favored cutting arms shipments to Israel and an immediate ceasefire (66%). Despite these findings, neither of the leading political parties in the US nor the UK have taken any serious action to end human slaughter in Palestine (Data for Progress 2024; Smith 2024).

    Zionism International’s Anglo-American Alliance

    What explains the contemporary se political alignments of the US and British governments with Israel, which has become a pariah state in most of the rest of the world? The first thing to look at is the role of the political class and how their foreign policy in the Middle East (West Asia) has been designed to bring about the horrific situation in Gaza. The genocide is organized on the ground by Israeli military and state politicians and technocrats but that is possible only through its relationship to the larger goals of the sponsoring powers that work together toward shared hegemonic objectives in the region.

    That the Israel lobby, also called Zionist lobby, plays a central role in enabling Israeli and very wealthy Jewish interests in the US and UK to instruct Anglo-American policy in Palestine, if not broader reaches of the region, is now indisputable. Mearsheimer and Walt (2008) lifted the veil on the Israel lobby in American politics at a time when few academics or journalists dared to explore the subject. Joined by the Anti-Defamation League, Christians United for Israel, and other constituent groups in the Israel lobby, an emboldened AIPAC has waged a money war on any politician not fully behind the US-Israel strategic alliance.

    In mid-June 2024, an AIPAC-partnered super political action committee had spent $14.5 million to unseat Jamaal Bowman, a Democratic two-term incumbent congressman in New York’s 16th congressional district. Bowman had risked defeat by daring to criticize Israel’s genocide in Gaza and called upon the US government to cut military aid to that country. AIPAC and associated Zionist groups are also among the largest contributors to favored political candidates, for the White House down to state legislative races, who can be relied upon as influencers and shields in the service of Israel’s agenda.

    In New York, AIPAC and allied organizations spent their money by “filling television screens, stuffing mailboxes and clogging phone lines with caustic attacks,” causing Bowman to lose the party primary to a pro-Israel Democrat. It was the largest funding pool any interest group had ever spent on a political race and was one of several where AIPAC sought to unseat legislators deemed unfriendly to Israel. Cori Bush, another progressive Democratic incumbent, was also unseated in the primary for Missouri’s 1st congressional district with the aid of AIPAC’s major financial contribution to her rival.

    AIPAC and its financial arm, the United Democracy Project (UDP), have a dual character, not only lobbying for Israel but also in defeating left-wing candidates who oppose both Israeli apartheid and overweening corporate power in American politics (Marcetic 2024). The linkage is important to recognize, as the apartheid system and its backers are directed against both Palestinians and the American working class and workers of all nations (Fandos 2024). One analysis of AIPAC found that the lobby’s “electoral efforts are largely in line with the interests of Wall Street and other corporate actors — the same interests that have, for years, fought to maintain a status quo of free market fundamentalism” (Marcetic 2024).

    By March 2024, AIPAC, its super PAC, the UDP, and allied groups had already spent $30 million during the 2024 election cycle to unseat progressives who took a stand against Israel. The amount spent by the Israel lobby for the full 2023-2024 election cycle was expected to reach $100 million. “AIPAC has become a fundraising juggernaut in recent years, raising more money for candidates than any similar organization this cycle” (Piper & Fuchs 2024). It is clear that the Zionist lobby has Kamala Harris under its supervision, as she has been listless in responding to the ongoing US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and mass murders and terrorism in the West Bank.

    Where does AIPAC gets its money? Created in 2020-2021 and designated as a 501(c)4 social welfare organization, AIPAC, like other super PACs, is not required to disclose its contributors. This lobbying powerhouse prefers to keep such information under wraps. But according to a Jewish newspaper, The Forward, in 2023 its biggest funders included owners of pro sports teams, “heads of private equity firms; real estate titans; a Maryland congressman… the former CEO of Victoria’s Secret; the co-founder of the dance-exercise company Zumba; and the creator of Squishmallows,” a popular children’s toy (Barshad 2024).

    As Bernie Sanders has pointed out, AIPAC is funded by corporations that are happy to support the defeat of progressive members of Congress who tend to stand up for both Palestinian rights and worker rights in America. Almost 60% of AIPAC’s money comes from corporate CEOs and other top executives from Fortune 500 companies. The largest single donor to the United Democracy Project is Jan Koum, the multibillionaire former CEO of WhatsApp and a regular Republican funder. The biggest institutional contributors to UDP come from FIRE, finance/insurance and real estate sectors (Marcetic 2024)

    AIPAC is cited for developing the strategy of targeting candidates in both parties, a practice that corporate funders can be expected to copy in the coming years (Marcetic 2024). In money-take-all politics, this makes sense inasmuch as there is no real difference in the two parties’ position on Israel and other major foreign and domestic policy areas. Harris’s message, no less than Trump’s, is more military, more wars, more neoliberal capitalism, more fracking. Without a radical shift, what little separation exists between the parties will likely be extinguished in the years ahead, giving way to a final bacchanalian orgy of destruction of the planet and its people.

    Neoliberal ideology, which has fetishized market fundamentalism, has encouraged the breakdown of moral and ethical social standards, destroyed any sense of a public realm, and has worked hand in hand with the neoconservative foreign policy agenda. This is true on both sides of the Atlantic. Similar to the US though on a smaller scale, Britain, going back to the Balfour declaration, has long allied with the Zionist cause, which in recent years has wielded great influence on the country through its lobby’s access to ministers, party donations, partnerships with British capital, and successful repression of progressive public opinion about Israel.

    Zionism International’s Political Front

    As opposition leader, Keir Starmer purged Labour’s ranks of MPs critical of Israel, taking cues from the lobby and marginalizing such critics as “anti-semites.” Starmer himself declared a few months before taking over the leadership of Labour, “I support Zionism without qualification” (Mendel 2020). More recently interviewed on Britain’s LBC radio, he stated that Israel has the right of siege in Gaza, including its cutting off of water and power (McShane 2023), an endorsement of genocide.

    Since becoming prime minister in 2024, Starmer has put into operation the next phase of his pro-Zionist policy by arresting British critics of Israel through the employment of the draconian “Terrorism Act 2000, Section 12,” originally enacted under the Tony Blair government. The act covers a range of offences, including anti-Israel materials posted online. A journalist and pro-Palestinian activist, Sarah Wilkinson was arrested under the act in August 2024 after a raid on her house by 12 police who confiscated all her electronic devices (Wilkins 2024). She was threatened with a long prison sentence for posting online remarks about the “incredible” way that Hamas was able to launch its assault on 7 October.

    The same month, an independent British foreign affairs journalist Richard Medhurst, who is also sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, was arrested at Heathrow Airport and charged under the act, which bans any writing regarded as favorable to proscribed organizations, such as Hamas. There is no conceivable application of this law to Jews or Israelis living in Britain who express a horrifying approval of terrorism, murder, and torture employed by the IDF against Palestinian civilians (Cook 2024).

    Israel exercises direct power lines to British electoral politics and Parliament through such groups as Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), both of which actively lobby for the Jewish state. For the Tories, upon election to Parliament, an MP almost automatically becomes a member of CFI. Conservative cabinet members have come to expect regular donations from the lobby, which has amounted to hundreds of thousands of pounds given to at least one-third of all current sitting members of the party. Large numbers of Labour MPs have also been feeding at the trough. Twenty percent of Labour’s sitting MPs have been funded by pro-Israel groups or individuals – including 15 who have been directly funded by the Israeli state ((Oborne 2009; McEvoy, 2024a and 2024b).

    A 2017 Al Jazeera documentary, “The Lobby,” exposed the fact that the Israeli government, working through its embassy in London, has had a direct hand in managing the various friends of Israel groups, including its multiple city branches. It also revealed that the Union of Jewish Students in the UK, which receives money from the Israeli Embassy, sends student delegations to Israel for propaganda immersion. Prior to the 2024 general election, 15 new MP candidates took funding from the LFI and CFI (McEvoy 2024d).

    The twelve winning Labour candidates and three Conservatives were quick to accept the handout, a quid pro quo for their showing solidarity with Israeli and genocide policies. Pro-Israel organizations gave the Tories over £430,000 in donations or hospitality gifts, including 187 trips to Israel (McEvoy 2024b and 2024d). US elections and in a parallel fashion, though on a smaller scale, those in Britain are open doors for contributions from wealthy individuals and corporate elites, and the Zionist lobby has front-row seats in exploiting these opportunities to block Anglo-American politicians from invoking human rights standards on the apartheid state.

    As the documentary also disclosed, Israel’s main propaganda unit, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, regularly funnels talking points to British MPs to get them to serve as spokespersons for Israeli interests, such as during Prime Minister’s Question Time. AIPAC is also channeling money to universities in Britain in support of the propaganda efforts organized by the campus-based think tank Pinsker Centre (named after a late 19th century Zionist). The Centre’s role is to construct a narrative of Jewish student victimhood that avoids even a word of condolence for Palestinian students whose relatives are being starved and slaughtered by Israeli Jews. Beyond the campuses, AIPAC seeks to create a stronghold in Parliament similar to the power it wields in Congress. “The Lobby” also exposed plots in the Israeli Embassy in London to take down public officials seen as critical of the apartheid policy or insufficiently pro-Zionist.

    Israel and its modern-day political Maccabees have made their mark. Members of Labour Friends of Israel have employed the “anti-semite” card to suppress opposition. It succeeded quite well in purging Labour of pro-Palestinian MPs and party members, particularly during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership period (2015-2020). The “anti-semite” tag is equivalent to the use of “heretic” during the Spanish Inquisition. Though contemporary heretics may not be burned at the stake, they are likely to lose their party membership, their jobs, or their student status. The militant attitude of LFI incites fear and intimidation among those concerned about social justice.

    Stuart Roden, hedge fund manager and chairman of the Israeli venture capital firm Hetz Ventures, based in Tel Aviv, “has given the Labour party over half a million pounds ahead of the UK’s [2024] general election,” part of the £1m he’s donated to Labour since 2023. Roden is also the principal funder of a Zionist educational program, “I-gnite,” which teaches British children that “the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) are acting proportionately in Gaza” (McEvoy 2024c). In October 2023, Roden was filmed confronting pro-Palestinian protesters. He was not charged with interfering with the speech rights or feelings of Palestinian Britons or others involved in the demonstration.

    AIPAC is just the newest of a number of pro-Israel influencers. These include the Jewish Leadership Council, the Zionist Federation, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, all elitist organizations amongst the 285,000 Jewish population in Britain. It was under Tony Blair, a member of Labour Friends of Israel, that the Israel lobby began to seriously make political inroads in the government, according to a 2009 (UK) Channel 4 investigative news program, Dispatches. The report also revealed that a press “watchdog” group on behalf of Israel, “Honest Reporting,” regularly challenged the Israel coverage in The Guardian and BBC. The group is headquartered in Jerusalem with another branch in New York City.

    Its managing editor at the time, Simon Plosker, had previously worked for the group, Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), the British equivalent of AIPAC, and for the Israel army press office. Bicom acts as an opinion creator within the British public, largely by issuing press releases to the British media, funding trips to Israel for British journalists, and organizing talks at British universities. Funding sources for Bicom have major investments in the occupied West Bank (Oborne 2009).

    Israel makes little distinction between facts and propaganda. After the 7 October uprising, Honest Reporting falsely claimed that Palestinian journalists knew about the assault beforehand, a lie that its executive director admitted to a day later (Højberg 2023). This very likely caused dozens of Palestinian reporters to be targeted and murdered by the IDF, especially after Netanyahu’s spokespeople repeated the unproven allegation. Benny Gantz, a member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, tweeted “journalists found to have known about the massacre… are no different than terrorists and should be treated as such” (Darcy 2023; Shamir 2023). From 7 October 2023 to 24 August 2024, at least 116 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed by the IDF, according to the US-headquartered Committee to Protect Journalists.

    Walling Off the Truth

    Journalists in the US and UK have paid little attention to what is happening to their colleagues in Palestine. It is another indicator of the racial hierarchy by which western media assign the status of victimhood (see Sussman 2022). The state and mainstream media collaboration of the US and UK with the Israeli propaganda apparatuses and their operatives in Britain and America make a farce of the notion of “freedom of the press.”

    Censorship operates in both countries not primarily as repression of the journalistic profession but at a deeper level of omission – a refusal to even discuss or analyze subjects outside the range of accepted hegemonic discourse. AIPAC and many trans-Atlantic journalists should properly be  registered as foreign agents of West Jerusalem. With British and American reporters acting as stenographers and PA disseminators official lies, it is independent journalists, and there are many, whom seekers of honest journalism have come to rely upon.

    In the film “Zone of Interest,” the family of the Nazi and SS commander Rudolf Höss blithely basks in the pleasures of an idyllic and beautifully landscaped home walled off from the Auschwitz concentration camp next door. Walling off what anti-systemic information reaches the public is a central function of the state. Outside the Gaza death camp, journalists in America and Britain casually spread lies about the situation and ignore the tragedies of Palestinians and the historical realities of Zionist apartheid and genocide while enjoying the perks of their own insulated zone of interest.

    References

    Barshad, Amos (2024, 6 February). “A Rare Look into the $90 Million AIPAC Has Raised Since Oct. 7.” The Forward.

    Cook, Jonathan (2024, 30 August). “UK Prime Minister Terrorizing Palestine Supporters.” Consortium News.

    Darcy, Oliver (2023, 9 November). “News Outlets Deny Prior Knowledge of Hamas Attack After Israeli Government Demands Answers Over Misleading Report.” CNN.

    Data for Progress (2024, 8 May). “Support for a Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza Increases Across Party Lines.” https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2024/5/8/support-for-a-permanent-ceasefire-in-gaza-increases-across-party-lines

    Fandos, Nicholas (2024, 20 June). “AIPAC Unleashes a Record $14.5 Million Bid to Defeat a Critic of Israel.” New York Times.

    Højberg, Jesper (2023, 24 November). “How an Israeli Media Watchdog’s Unsubstantiated Allegations Has Put a Price on Palestinian Journalists’ Heads.” International Media Support (Copenhagen).

    Lee-Doktor, Joseph (2024, 18 July). “£1 billion subsidy for arms company exposed.” Declassified UK.

    Marcetic, Branko (2024, 3 June). “The Corporate Power Brokers Behind AIPAC’s War on the Squad.” In These Times.

    McEvoy, John (2024a, 13 February). “Labour MPs Have Accepted Over £280,000 From Israel Lobby.” Declassified UK

    McEvoy, John (2024b, 23 May). “Israel lobby funded a third of Conservative MPs” Declassified UK.

    McEvoy, John (2024c, 2 July). “Pro-Israel Tycoon Gives Labour Half a Million Pounds.” Declassified UK.

    McEvoy, John (2024d, 27 August). “Israel Lobby Funded 15 New MPs Before Election.” Declassified UK.

    McShane, Asher (2023, 11 October). “Israel ‘Has the Right’ to Withhold Power and Water from Gaza, Says Sir Keir Starmer.” LBC News (UK).

    Mearsheimer, John and Stephen Walt (2008). The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

    Mendel, Jack (2020, 14 February). “Keir Starmer Interview: I Will Work to Eradicate Antisemitism ‘From Day One’.” Jewish News.

    Oborne, Peter, video producer (2009, November). “Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby.” Aired on Channel 4 (UK).

    Piper, Jessica and Hailey Fuchs (2024, 9 June). “Bipartisanship or Republican Meddling? AIPAC Is Biggest Source of GOP Donations in Dem Primaries.” Politico.

    Shamir, Jonathan (2023, 15 November). “Israel’s War on Journalists.” Jewish Currents.

    Smith, Matthew (2024, 10 May). “British Attitudes to the Israel-Gaza Conflict: May 2024 Update.” YouGov.

    Sussman, Gerald (2022, 27 July). “Russia-Ukraine Conflict: The Propaganda War.” CounterPunch.

    Wilkins, Brett (2024, 20 August). “UK Continues Use of Anti-Terrorism Law to Arrest Palestine Defenders.” Common Dreams.

    The post Zionism International is Working Both Sides of the Atlantic appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Aysenur Eygi after her graduation from the University of Washington in May. Photo courtesy of Aysenur Eygi Family.

    Beita is a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank a few miles from Nablus. Beita is an ancient town with houses dating back to the Roman occupation of Palestine. For the past few years, the residents of Beita, many of them farmers, have been under siege from militant Israeli settlers, who have seized their land, diverted their water and torched their fields and olive groves.

    In 2013, a caravan of militant Israeli settlers who were part of the Nachala Movement, whose explicit goal is the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, seized a swath of Palestinian land on Mount Sabih that had been a communal olive grove for the Palestinian villagers in Beita for decades.

    Without any authorization from the Israeli government, the settlers built an “outpost” on Mount Sabah with the aid of Israeli soldiers. The settlers proclaimed that one of the goals of the outpost was to “disrupt the contiguity” between Palestinian lands in the northern West Bank. The outpost was demolished several times by the Israeli government and quickly rebuilt after the bulldozers left, again with the assistance of IDF forces in the area.

    In 2023, thousands of Israeli militants marched on Beita, demanding that the Evyatar Outpost be “legalized” by the Netanyahu government. The march was led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Belazel Smotrich, with security provided by Israeli police and the IDF. On June 27, the Netanyahu regime officially declared the land beneath Evyatar as state property land authorized the outpost as a settlement, along with four other outposts. Smotrich smugly said the decision to “legalize” the five outpost was in retaliation for the five nations that had recognized Palestinian as a state a few weeks before.

    Since 2021, the villagers of Beita have conducted weekly protests against the illegal outpost, protests which have routinely been violently suppressed by the IDF and the settlers. On July 9, 2021, the IDF fired on hundreds of Palestinian, Israeli and international peace activists, wounding at least 379 people. Since 1967, at least 77 Beita villagers have been killed by Israeli forces, most of them during protests. In the summer of 2021 alone, seven Palestinians were shot and killed during the weekly protest, and nearly 1000 were injured.

    +++

    IDF forces deploying near the children’s park in Beita, before firing on demonstrators after a Friday prayer service. Image obtained by Washington Post.

    It was into this fraught and dangerous situation that a young American peace activist named Ayşenur Aygi came to lend her support for the Palestinian farmers of Beita. On the morning of September 6, Ayşenur and other activists took a taxi from Ramallah 30 miles north to Beita, where she told friends she wanted to “bear witness” to the relentless theft of Palestinian land and the violent repression of Palestinian farmers who were trying to protect their farms, animals, water supply and orchards.

    Ayşenur Eygi was not naive. She knew the score. The 26-year-old recent graduate of the University of Washington was a veteran campaigner who helped lead the Palestinian solidarity movement on campus and had gone to Standing Rock to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, where the demonstrators encountered brutal crackdowns by local cops and private security forces.

    Referred to in most of the media as a “Turkish-American,” as if to diminish the meaning of her death, Ayşenur was born in Turkey, but moved with her parents to Washington state when she was a young child. She was raised here, went to school here, and grew up as an environmental and human rights activist here. She had a model for her activism in another young Washingtonian, the Evergreen College student Rachel Corrie, who’d also been an environmental organizer and pro-Palestinian activist. Like Rachel, Ayşenur went to the Occupied Territories as a peace activist with the International Solidarity Movement. Like Rachel, Ayşenur would be killed by the IDF. Like Rachel, Ayşenur’s death would be met with callous indifference by her own government.

    Ayşenur went to Seattle Central College and the University of Washington, where she graduated this May, majoring in psychology with a minor in Middle East Languages and Culture. She mentored younger students and helped set up the anti-genocide camp on campus last fall, where she served as a media liaison, a mentor to younger student protesters and an organizer of teach-ins. Her friend Julia Majid described Ayşenur as an “amazing organizer” who was “energetic and passionate about justice…She was the heart of so much of what we did.”

    Ayşenur was nervous. Who wouldn’t be?  This was her first demonstration under Israeli occupation. She’d arrived in the West Bank on September 3 and had already experienced the petty cruelties of daily life there. She told friends back in Seattle that she’d been refused permission by Ben Gvir’s police to visit the Al Aqsa Mosque. She described the indignities of Israeli checkpoints and the ominous, looming presence of the Apartheid Wall. And she was well aware of the fact that two weeks before she arrived in Beita, Daniel Santiago, a 32-year-old teacher from New Jersey, also volunteering with the ISM, had been shot in the thigh by an Israeli sniper at a Friday protest. (Young Palestinian men are routinely shot in the leg by the IDF at protests, often with the intent of disabling them from joining future demonstrations.)

    So Ayşenur hung back with a couple of other ISM demonstrators as the local Palestinians began their weekly prayer vigil in a children’s park, directly across from a contingent of IDF soldiers. She told a friend: “I’m nervous because the Army is right there.” She was right to be worried.

    As the prayer session ended, the IDF forces, which had by then encircled the group, closed in, forcing young Palestinian men and children back down the road toward the village, first by dousing them with tear gas, then almost immediately with live fire. As the Palestinian demonstrators retreated, the Israelis claimed some threw rocks at the heavily armed IDF soldiers, always a pretext for an even more violent response. The ISM later said none of its member had thrown stones and at no point were any of the Israeli soldiers threatened.

    But Ayşenur wasn’t with this group anyway, she’d already retreated down the road toward the olive grove some 200 yards in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, several Israeli soldiers took up positions on the top of a hill and four or five others climbed on to the roof of Ali Maali’s house, parking their armored vehicle nearby. Maali told the Washington Post that the IDF frequently usurps his roof during the Friday prayers, because it gives them unobstructed views of the park, the road and the olive grove. On this day, Maali and his family huddled on the veranda of his house, trying to stay out of the view of the Israeli snipers.

    As Ayşenur and her friend Helen scrambled down the road to the olive grove, Helen tripped on a rock, spraining her ankle. Ayşenur helped her up and Helen leaned on the young American activist the rest of the way to the shelter of the grove, where they sat down behind a tree until the shooting stopped around 1:30 in the afternoon.

    The confrontation had died down. For about twenty minutes, Ayşenur stayed in the olive grove, talking about what she’d just witnessed when an Israeli sniper on the roof of a building fired a shot, striking a Palestinian youth who was standing about 20 yards from Ayşenur in the leg. Israeli snipers in the West Bank often shoot Palestinian protesters, especially young men, in the leg, often to cripple them and keep them from leading future protests.

    Then a sniper fired again. Ali Maali heard the shots fired from his roof, telling the Washington Post, the sound “shook the house.” This time it was a kill shot, hitting Ayşenur in the head. She collapsed immediately. Her friend Helen yelled frantically for help, as she bled out from a head wound.

    “We were standing in the street, and it was calm; nothing was happening. Soldiers climbed onto the roof of a house, and I saw a soldier aiming, and then I heard gunfire,” said Jonathan Pollack, a veteran Israeli peace campaigner and correspondent for Haaretz, who witnessed the demonstration and the Israeli response. “The first shot hit something metallic and then the thigh of a young man from the village, and then there was another shot. Then someone called my name in English and said they needed help. I ran about 15 meters and saw her [Eygi] lying on the ground under olive trees, bleeding to death. She had a gunshot wound to the head. I looked up and saw there was a direct line of sight between us and the soldiers…It was quiet. There was nothing to justify the shot. The shot was taken to kill.”

    Ayşenur was lifted into a stretcher by paramedics and taken to Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, where after attempts to resuscitate her failed, she was pronounced dead at around 2:35 p.m.–the third American citizen to be shot and killed by the IDF in the occupied West Bank this year.

    +++

    Biden falsely claiming that Aysenur was killed accidentally when an IDF sniper’s bullet “ricocheted off the ground and hit her.”

    Ayşenur Eygi died in the same olive grove where Daniel Santiago had been shot, also by accident, according to Israel’s account, when IDF forces “fired live rounds into the air” aimed at driving off non-violent protesters.

    “If Israeli soldiers are willing to shoot a non-violent unarmed American citizen from behind, imagine the level of violence they direct at Palestinians when no one is there to document the settler and IDF’s violence,” Santiago said. “The money I pay in my taxes as a teacher probably funded the bullet they have run through me.”

    Earlier this year, Biden warned that “If you harm an American, we will respond.” But five days would pass before Biden said anything about the latest killing of an American citizen by the IDF and then his response was tepid, devoid of any trace of empathy for Ayşenur or her family. He merely regurgitated the absurd line coming out of Tel Aviv: “Apparently it was an accident, ricocheted off the ground and just got hit by accident. I’m working that out now.”

    In a series of statements on her death, Ayşenur’s family condemned the Biden administration for accepting the Israeli and demanded an independent investigation.

    In the midst of this terrible tragedy, our family has been crossing continents to gather and put our beloved Ayşenur to rest. We will always remember Ayşenur as a kindhearted, silly, and passionate soul whose face expressed all those qualities. We cannot speak of what happened to those expressions when her temple met a bullet fired by a trained Israeli soldier.

    Ayşenur was an international observer who stood in witness of “violent extremist Israeli settlers [who] are uprooting Palestinians from their homes”–words President Biden himself used today. Despite this, President Biden is still calling her killing an accident based only on the Israeli military’s story. This is not only insensitive and false; it is complicity in the Israeli military’s agenda to take Palestinian land and whitewash the killing of an American.

    Let us be clear, an American citizen was killed by a foreign military in a targeted attack. The appropriate action is for President Biden and Vice President Harris to speak with the family directly, and order an independent, transparent investigation into the killing of Ayşenur, a volunteer for peace.

    The Israeli version of the shooting, which the Biden administration swiftly adopted, was quickly shown by witnesses, cellphone videos and a detailed investigation by the Washington Post to be not only implausible but absolute bunk. The murder of Ayşenur Eygi took place at least 20 minutes after the last confrontation between Palestinian villagers and IDF troops. Ayşenur never threw any stones and was never within 200 yards of anyone who did. The rooftop sniper had a clear view of where Ayşenur was standing, talking to her friend Helen, and she couldn’t be confused for a Palestinian “instigator.” For whatever reason, Ayşenur was targeted; the sights of the rifle focused on her head and shot. The bullet that killed her didn’t ricochet off of a tree or a rock or a dumpster. The sniper had a clear shot and took it. As Rachel Corrie’s father, Craig, said this week: “Israel does not do investigations; they do cover-ups.”

    Biden’s desultory reaction to Ayşenur’s murder contrasts vividly with his response earlier that week to the killing of another American, Hersh Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who had been taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 and held captive for nearly 11 months, until he was shot in the head, apparently by his captors, during an armed raid by the IDF on the tunnel where he was being held:

    I am devastated and outraged. Hersh was among the innocents brutally attacked while attending a music festival for peace in Israel on October 7. Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes. And we will keep working around the clock for a ceasefire and to secure the release of the remaining hostages.

    Biden couldn’t even muster up enough compassion to call Ayşenur’s family, console them for the senseless killing of a bright young American and promise them that his administration would investigate the circumstance of her shooting. His demeanor spoke just as loudly as Melania’s infamous jacket: he just didn’t care. Of course, Biden is hardly alone his indifference to the deaths of American citizens at the hands of Israelis. Since Rachel Corrie’s murder by an IDF bulldozer operator, there have been at least 9 other Americans killed by the IDF. None of their families have received any justice (or even much sympathy) from either Israel or their own government…

    Ayşenur Eygi
    Jacob Flickinger
    Mohammad Khdour
    Tawfiq Abdel Jabbar Ajaq
    Orwa Hammad
    Mahmoud Shaalan
    Omar Asaad
    Furkan Dogan
    Shireen Abu Akleh

    The FBI has jurisdiction to investigate the murders of Americans overseas. Why not send them to Beita to enforce the rule of law, instead of Tweeting performative outrage while allowing the murderers to exonerate themselves? The question answers itself. The US/Israeli relationship is forged by bonds of impunity for both the killers and their weapons dealer.

    Aria Fani, one of Eygi’s professors at the University of Washington, said Ayşenur went to the West Bank to “protect Palestinian farmers from settler violence. I know exactly what she would say right now if she were alive. She’d say, ‘The only reason I’m in the headlines is because I have American citizenship.’ Which I think is sadly true. We’ve become numb to Palestinian loss.”

    The post Murder in Beita: the IDF’s Killing of Ayşenur Eygi appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Trident II (D-5) missile underwater launch. Photo: Department of Defense.

    Last month, I reported on the Biden administration’s new nuclear doctrine to prepare the United States for a coordinated nuclear challenge from Russia, China, and North Korea.  The Biden doctrine revives the concept of “escalation dominance,” one of the main drivers of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s.  

    President Biden’s neglect of arms control and disarmament means that the next president will inherit a nuclear landscape that is more threatening and volatile than any other since the Cuban missile crisis more than 60 years ago.  The Cuban missile crisis, however, was a wake up call for both President John F. Kennedy and General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, leading to a series of arms control and disarmament treaties beginning with the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963.  

    We need another wake up call.

    Currently, there is little discussion of reviving arms control and disarmament.  Instead the mainstream media and many commentators are making the case for additional nuclear weaponry and the modernization of weapons currently in the nuclear arsenal.  The influential British newsweekly, The Economist, is leading the way in this campaign, arguing that the concept of deterrence demands that the United States build up and modernize its nuclear arsenal.  An oped in the New York Times this week, written by the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, argues that credible deterrence will prevent our adversaries from “even considering a nuclear strike against America or its allies.”

    Deterrence requires that nuclear weapons must be in a high state of readiness in order to address the danger of surprise attack, which increases the possibility of unintentional use of nuclear weapons.  We need a discussion of alternatives to deterrence, such as negotiations for confidence-building measures as well as arms control and disarmament.

    Instead, we are getting a discussion of the need for low-yield nuclear weapons.  The Economist and others have been making the case for such weapons—20 kilotons of explosive power, roughly Hiroshima-sized—that can be delivered with “extreme precision and less collateral damage.”  U.S. think tanks, such as the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), have argued that the “line between low-yield tactical nuclear weapons and precision-guided conventional weapons in terms of their operational effects and perceived impact is blurring,” and that “nuclear arms are more efficient at destroying large-area targets.”

    The current discussion is dangerously reminiscent of the nuclear discussion of the 1950s, which was dominated by false notions of a vast Soviet superiority in deployed nuclear ballistic missiles, the so-called “missile gap,” as well as the so-called “bomber gap” regarding strategic aircraft.  The conventional wisdom in the defense community was that we were facing a powerful enemy that was undertaking costly efforts to exploit the potential of nuclear weapons in order to gain unchallenged global dominance.  Is history abut to repeat itself, particularly in view of exaggerated concerns regarding greater threats from both China and North Korea as well as the possibility of Sino-Russian collusion?

    Henry Kissinger, the most famous and most controversial American diplomat of the 20th century, was responsible for initiating the idea that nuclear powers could wage a war that would involve limited use of nuclear weapons.  In his “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” Kissinger made the case for limited uses of nuclear weapons, which attracted him to Richard Nixon who made Kissinger the national security adviser in 1969.  It was fifteen years before a U.S. president—Ronald Reagan— and a Soviet leader—Mikhail Gorbachev—agreed that a “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” and that the two sides must not “seek to achieve military superiority.”  The initiative for these statements originated with Gorbachev, and they received greater attention in Soviet media than in their U.S. counterparts.

    Now, we are facing a disturbing situation that finds the United States modernizing its nuclear arsenal at great cost; China ending its doctrine of limited nuclear deterrence and expanding its nuclear arsenal, and Russia threatening the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine and issuing warnings of a World War III.  Russian publications are discussing the possibility of placing a nuclear weapons in space.  U.S. defense analysts project that China could have as many as 1,000 nuclear warheads over the next ten years.  

    Washington’s “Nuclear Employment Guidance” is based on the threat of nuclear coordination between Moscow and Beijing, but there is no evidence of such coordination and it’s unlikely that these former adversaries are formalizing their nuclear and strategic plans.  U.S. guidance is based on worst-case analysis, but there needs to be a recognition of similar worst-case analyses in Moscow and Beijing. In view of greatly expanded U.S. defense spending over the past several years as well as the discussion of a strategic missile defense, Russia and China have much to worry about.  Even worse, the United States quietly announced in July that it will deploy conventionally armed ground-launched intermediate-range missiles in Germany on a rotational basis beginning in 2026.  This is madness.

    Iran’s nuclear program is also expanding in size and sophistication, and North Korea has a nuclear arsenal that rivals three nuclear powers—Israel, India, and Pakistan—that were never part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  Iran’s Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.  North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has similarly indicated an interest in discussing nuclear matters with the United States.

    The only remaining nuclear disarmament treaty—the New START Treaty—expires in February 2026, and there is no indication that U.S. and Russian officials are planning for talks to renew the treaty.  The election year predictably finds Kamala Harris and Donald Trump boasting about maintaining and improving U.S. military prowess.  Next to nothing is known about Harris’s view of nuclear matters, and the thought of facing a new nuclear age with Trump back in the White House is positively frightening.  We are confronting this difficult situation because the Bush and Trump administrations abrogated two of the most important disarmament treaties in history: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.

    It’s time for the nuclear experts of the nine nuclear powers as well as the general public to read M.G. Sheftall’s “Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses.”  These first-person accounts educate and re-educate the global community on the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago.  The accounts of gut-wrenching recollections should be enough to make any sane individual reject the notion of “modernizing” nuclear weapons or discussing “tactical” uses of nuclear weapons.  

    The danger of nuclear war resulting from an accident, an unauthorized action, the danger of alert practices, or false alarms should never be far from our thinking.  Another nuclear arms race in the current international environment would be far more threatening and terrifying than any aspect of the Soviet-American rivalry in the Cold War.

    The post Biden’s Legacy: the Decline of Arms Control and Disarmament appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • How is it possible that the presidential election remains so close when, at this week’s debate, Donald Trump (R-Felon) warned the nation that, among the millions of illegal aliens laying siege to the American way of life, some in Springfield, Ohio (it’s between Dayton and Columbus), are living on a diet of snatched family pets. Trump ranted:

    We’re a failing nation….What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don’t want to talk — not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.

    In elections past, bizarre comments of this variety were branded as “gaffs” and often led to the disqualification of the candidate who made them (President Gerald Ford was seen off in 1976 for saying, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe…”) , but in Trump’s case, the dog-eating allegations caused little more than a ripple in the national conversation—perhaps some fodder for late-night comedians. Then it was back to the straw polls that show Vice President Harris and the narcissistic Trump in a virtual dead heat, the clearest proof we have that presidential politics have descended to the level of a carnival freak show (for which Trumps embalmers changed his hair color from howler monkey orange to a Baywatch tan).

    * * *

    I am assuming that very few Americans watched all of the debate to learn why Donald Trump or Kamala Harris represents the country’s future.

    Most people, I suspect, glanced at headlines, took in a few vlogs from their favorite social media distributor, and came to the conclusion that their candidate of choice prevailed in the marketplace of ideas.

    Or they followed a roving camera around the spin rooms and might well have heard Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Underaged) say: In places like California and the state of Washington, if a parent doesnt have the right gender-affirming approach to their own children, theyre at risk of losing parental rights.”

    The day after, I woke up to the resounding evidence that Harris had floated like a butterfly over the proceedings and occasionally had stung the hapless Trump like a bee. He, I was assured, had done no better on tariffs, Gaza, Ukraine, abortion, climate change, or January 6 than he had with his eloquence over the Springfield protein diet.

    Then I re-watched the C-Span feed, including the dismal soundbites from the spin rooms, and came to the conclusion that presidential debates are just a variation on Narcissus’s pond in which we only see our own reflections and hear our own words, which explains why debates rarely move the voting dials.

    * * *

    The location of this presidential debate was Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center, a museum as patriarchal as the original-intent document.

    Most of the exhibits and cabinets displays are arranged to capture the fleeting imaginations of field-tripping sixth graders (I know, not the worst thing), but the museum fails in its presentation of the document as something set in stone (in this case lots of granite inscriptions from the likes of James Madison), not anything that can evolve with the times.

    Today we can thank the flawed language of the Constitution for the failings of the Supreme Court (no term limits were offered, allowing it to become, in its current iteration, Trump’s in-house counsel); the oligarchy of the Senate (in which a majority of the American population gets a minority of the seats); and the absurdity of the electoral college (that routinely elects Republican candidates who have lost the popular vote).

    This complaint list doesn’t even take the Constitution to task over its toleration of the slave trade until 1808 or explain how Donald Trump could auction his presidency to foreign governments and still not be booked on emoluments charges.

    A presidential debate in the hallowed halls of a “National Constitution Center” is intended to reassure voters that the 2025 Projectionists have yet to seize the radio stations or suspend habeas corpus (perhaps so that during the debate Trump could say with a straight face: “…I have nothing to do with Project 2025. That’s out there. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it…”).

    Note: the Heritage Foundation, which is the author of this Volksgemeinschaft edikt, might well be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump Organization or the Trump-Vance campaign.

    * * *

    The debate itself took place inside a hermetically sealed television studio set up at the Center (it looked like the inside of a mobster’s coffin, as maybe it was).

    Other than the two ABC News anchors, no audience was present, and the rules dictated that whenever a candidate’s speaking time (mostly two minutes, except for rebuttals, which were one minute) had expired, their microphone would be muted.

    Ostensibly, this was to prevent the unhinged Trump from hijacking proceedings and having a 90-minute conversation with himself (the standard fare of his rallies), but actually the sound barrier came at the request of grown-up Republicans (can there be many left?) who didn’t want a national audience to hear Trump’s mutterings and deranged asides (“They threw him out of a campaign like a dog. We don’t even know, is he our president? But we have a president….that doesn’t know he’s alive…”).

    * * *

    When Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas debated the slavery question in 1858, when both were running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, they met on seven occasions and spoke on average for about four-to-five hours at each meeting (there was a break for dinner).

    There were no moderators; each candidate asked and answered their own questions. (And while slavery was the ostensible topic, the underlying agenda of the two railroad lawyers running for the Senate was to see what transcontinental route each could secure for their clients across the new territories of the West.) But at least they were exchanging ideas about state sovereignty, Dred Scott, and Bloody Kansas, not trading barroom insults (all Trump can offer).

    In their modern equivalent, presidential debates are reduced to simulcast, split screen press conferences, in which candidates are awarded points for smirks and body language, not just for their words.

    In Philadelphia, Harris’s handlers had her smiling (even at tense, serious moments) throughout the debate—as a coded way to express contempt or disgust for what Trump was saying, although the effect made the evening feel like the screening of a silent movie, in which the heroine had no idea she was about to be tied to the tracks.

    And there is something unnerving about watching someone being insulted (“The worst president, the worst vice president in the history of our country….”) and responding with a Miss America smile, when anyone else would have told Trump to stick his insults where the sun don’t shine.

    For his part Trump had only two facial expressions: he would close his eyes, like an exasperated school principal, to register disagreement with a Harris thought (“And I’d invite you to know that Donald Trump actually has no plan for you, because he is more interested in defending himself than he is in looking out for you…”) or he would scowl his disapproval, a man with a permanent wedgie.

    * * *

    What was astounding about the debate is how little both candidates understand about money, which, after all, is all that matters to both political parties, if not to most of the voters.

    You might think that Donald Trump, having presided over six bankruptcies with companies bearing his name or with him in control, would have some feel for economics, but apparently he has none, as several times during the evening he boasted about how tariffs on foreign imports were raking in “billions” from countries such as China. (He said: “We’re doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we’ve done for the world. And the tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China.”)

    Nice try, Fordham C student Donnie, but it’s the importers (Walmart, Home Depot, Target, etc.) who pay tariffs, not the exporting countries. Your billions came from the pockets of your supporters, the same chumps contributing $50 to pay Alina Habba’s appearance fees (perhaps including those at candlelit dinners).

    * * *

    For her part, Harris was equally clueless on the various causes of inflation (wage increases, demand for goods, expanding money supply, and even tariffs all contribute). All she could add to the economic conversation was to chant (it sounded like a mantra) the Hillary-esque “I have a plan”, for example, to assist first-time home buyers and parents of small children with tax deductions.

    Harris said several times: “And a vision of that includes having a plan, understanding the aspirations, the dreams, the hopes, the ambition of the American people, which is why I intend to create an opportunity economy, investing in small businesses, in new families, in what we can do around protecting seniors, what we can do that is about giving hard-working folks a break in bringing down the cost of living.” (Barack Obama used the same coddling language, and the only starter house it financed was his beachside mansion on Martha’s Vineyard.)

    Nor could Harris lower the boom on Trump’s conception of the presidency as yet another Madoff feeder fund, failing even to say: “He pays no income taxes, shakes down diplomatic contacts for backhanders, took $2 billion from the Saudis, raked in millions by renting rooms at his Washington hotel to foreign governments who then never bothered to check in to the suites, routinely obstructs justices, has sexually abused numerous women, declares bankruptcy to walk away from his many creditors, and now is engaged in an elaborate Ponzi scheme to use a shell company called Trump Media and Technology Group to drain billions (after he put up nothing) from Wall Street into his (overdrawn) bank accounts.” And I thought she was a hard-charging prosecutor.

    * * *

    The ABC News anchors asked thoughtful, probing questions, and occasionally injected a note of reality to the proceedings (Linsey Davies said to Trump, who was droning on about infanticide: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born…”), but overall their presence was that of mall cops during a shop-lifting spree, as neither candidate ever got close to answering the posed questions.

    For ABC, airing a presidential debate, even a political food fight, is better business than, say, rerunning episodes of The Brady Bunch or The Addams Family.

    Trump showed up in Philadelphia not because he has any interest in the democratic experiment or wanted to review the museum cabinets on The Great Compromise (that which gave states like Wyoming the same number of senators as California), but because he views life as a ratings sweep, and himself as the star of the long-running monologue sitcom, Trump: Me, Myself, and I.

    * * *

    Trump did not articulate ideas about governance so much as shout into the mic for 90 minutes, as if a talk radio shock jock. (I was a little surprised his didn’t go off on Aaron Rodgers and the Jets.) Here are some outtakes:

    But if she ever got elected, she’d change it. And it will be the end of our country. She’s a Marxist. Everybody knows she’s a Marxist….Every one of those cases was started by them against their political opponent. And I’m winning most of them and I’ll win the rest on appeal….You talk about the Capitol. Why are we allowing these millions of people to come through on the southern border?…Peacefully and patriotically. And nobody on the other side was killed. Ashli Babbitt was shot by an out-of-control police officer that should have never, ever shot her. It’s a disgrace

    And if that logic gets you close to 50% in many presidential polls, it’s worth the evening out, which in Trump’s case included a bizarro cameo (think of a professional wrestling promoter) in the post-debate spin room for more carnival barking.

    In the debate Harris wasn’t a pushover by any means, arguing in complete, often eloquent, sentences about the injustices of a past and future Trump government, but she conceives of the electorate as a jury—and one that holds prosecutors in high esteem. Remember the truism, Any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich,” but not all Americans love jury duty.

    As this debate made clear, Harris is the incumbent, running for truth, justice, and the American way, while Trump is Butch Cassidy, Henry Gondorff (from The Sting), Frank Abagnale Jr. (Catch Me If You Can) or Danny Ocean—looking to stick it to the man or knock off the casino. (And as Danny Ocean liked to say: “Because the house always wins. Play long enough, you never change the stakes, the house takes you. Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet big, and then you take the house.”)

    In this case, the recidivist Trump is betting big that he can take down the house.

    The post The Debate: Catch Trump If You Can appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Photograph Source: conceptphoto.info – CC BY 2.0

    In August 2024, due to a $4 million budget shortfall, Idaho’s Caldwell School District terminated its $296,807 contract with the local police department, opting instead for armed guards from Eagle Eye Security. The new $280,000 contract is just a drop in the bucket of the roughly $50 billion U.S. private security industry and the $248 billion global market that is reshaping law enforcement worldwide.

    While private military companies (PMCs) like Blackwater (now Academi) and Wagner have gained notoriety in war zones, private security companies (PSCs) are rapidly expanding in non-combat settings. Despite some overlapbetween the two, PSCs generally protect assets and individuals. Often collaborating with law enforcement, the effectiveness and ethical standards of PSCs vary widely, and armed guards are increasingly common. Security guards in the U.S. in 2021 outnumbered police by about 3:2.

    Public policy is still playing catch up. Unlike police forces, PSCs operate under contract rather than direct taxpayer funding. They also don’t have the same level of regulation, oversight, or accountability. Criticisms of the police—such as excessive force and inadequate training—are frequently directed at private security officers as well. Many former police officers with controversial histories find employment in PSCs, where barriers to entry are low. Turnover, meanwhile, remains high, while wages are minimal. Yet the sector’s ongoing expansion appears inevitable.

    Government forces and private security forces have been a part of society for millennia. Government forces mainly responded to unrest rather than preventing crime, often relying on volunteers. Private security options included hiring guards and bounty hunters, while communal efforts like the “hue and cry”—where villagers collectively chased down criminals— were also common ways of enforcing security. With increasing urbanization, though, traditional law enforcement methods became less effective, prompting the creation of the first modern police force, the London Metropolitan Police, in 1829. Distinct from the military, more accountable to city authorities and business interests, and focused on crime prevention, this model was adopted by Boston in 1838 and spread to nearly all U.S. cities by the 1880s.

    The emergence of public police forces coincided with the birth of the modern private security industry. Founded in the U.S. in 1850, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, as it was eventually called, is considered the first modern PSC. With its nationwide reach, investigative expertise, and role in safeguarding companies, Pinkerton distinguished itself by protecting businesses from theft, vandalism, and sabotage. Its controversial role in events like the Homestead Strike of 1892, when the company “essentially went to war with thousands of striking workers,” led to greater regulatory scrutiny, but the company continued to drive industry growth.

    After World War II, the rise in PSC use within U.S. residential communitiesboosted demand, further accelerated by the racially tinged civil unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, which spurred private initiatives to police cities. The 1980s brought deregulation and professionalization, as many corporations established in-house security departments and PSCs prioritized hiring former law enforcement officers over those with military backgrounds.

    Today, private security has a global presence, providing services ranging from bouncers and bodyguards to crowd control units and specialized armed teams. PSCs are generally cheaper than using police forces, and the widespread adoption of surveillance and other technologies has increasingly leveled the playing field. However, private personnel primarily serve as a visible deterrent, discouraging crime through their presence rather than direct intervention. They are often focused on monitoring and patrolling, which can divert criminal activity rather than resolve it. As the demand for private security grows, debate continues over their role and broader societal impact.

    U.S. ratios of police staffing to civilian population peaked around the early 2000s, and police agencies say shortages are now widespread. As police departments have struggled to boost their ranks, PSCs have filled the gap. Allied-Universal, with 300,000 American employees, is one of the largest private employers in the country. Meanwhile, for high-net-worth individuals like Mark Zuckerberg, personal security expenses can exceed $14 million annually.

    PSCs have stepped in to respond to a variety of situations, including protests at universities. In January 2024, Apex Security Group personnel dismantled pro-Palestinian encampments at UC Berkeley, later clearing similar sites at Columbia University in April and UCLA in May. Many PSCs, however, pursue more lucrative long-term contracts. UCLA has paid Contemporary Services Corporation (CSC) for campus patrols for years, and UC San Francisco spent $3.5 million on CSC in 2023, according to watchdog group American Transparency.

    PSCs are also widely employed to target the unhoused and address shoplifting in California. Following a rise in the state’s homeless population by 40 percent since 2019 and an increase in petty crime, PSCs have secured valuable contracts with local governments, private businesses, families, and individuals. The Bureau of Security and Investigative Services oversees the sector in the state, but incidents still raise concerns. In May 2023, an Allied Universal guard fatally shot Banko Brown, an unarmed Black person suspected of shoplifting. The San Francisco district attorney’s office chose not to file charges, sparking public outcry.

    In Portland, police budget cuts spurred by defunding initiatives following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests led to the disbanding of special units and a wave of officer resignations and retirements. 911 hold times increased fivefold from 2019 to 2023, as more lenient crime policies allegedly contributed to a rise in crime rates.

    In response, thousands of private security personnel now patrol the city, with the number licensed to carry firearms rising by nearly 40 percent since 2019. More than 400 local businesses pay Echelon, a Portland-based PSC, to deploy dozens of guards around the clock. Echelon and its personnel have attempted to build relationships with the homeless and people suffering from addiction and mental illness by providing food, responding to overdoses, and de-escalating conflicts. While crime in Portland has gone down since its peak in 2022, this reflects nationwide trends and comes as the city has attempted to reinstate police numbers.

    American PSCs are expanding their roles across the country. In Las Vegas, Protective Force International formed its own squad in May 2024 to clear out squatters from an apartment complex, in addition to its other security services in the city. In New Orleans, Pinnacle Security is one of many firms operating, with roughly 250 security guards patrolling neighborhoods, businesses, and government buildings.

    In Chicago, a 2021 accusation by Mayor Lori Lightfoot that businesses were failing to take adequate theft prevention measures spurred greater private initiatives. The Fulton Market District Improvement Association, a local group supported by local restaurateurs and developers, launched private patrols with P4 Security Solutions in 2024. P4 personnel operate both on foot and by car and provide security to other Chicago neighborhoods, with plans to expand further.

    Private security, however, is not just a U.S. phenomenon. PSCs are well established globally, no more so than in Latin America. From the 1970s onward, the War on Drugs fueled massive transnational criminal empires and widespread police corruption. As military dictatorships ended in the 1990s, the transition to democratic governments in Latin America often resulted in weak institutions, leading to instability and security challenges. In response, private security boomed, primarily serving the wealthy.

    Today, Latin America is home to more than 16,000 PMCs and PSCs employing more than 2 million people, often outnumbering police forces in poorly regulated markets. Their rapid expansion has led to serious issues, including criminal infiltration of PSCs in Mexico and El Salvador and claims of extrajudicial killings in Guatemala. Western resource companies, in coordination with local authorities, have also used PSCs to safeguard their operations and confront protesters in the region.

    Latin America has typically been a source of recruitment for the private security industry, with many U.S. PMCs employing personnel during the War on Terror. Recently, the region has also become a market for foreign PSCs. Chinese PSCs, while restricted domestically, are increasingly involved in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in the region, as well as in private ventures.

    Zhong Bao Hua An Security Company, for example, has contracts with businesses in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama. Tie Shen Bao Biao offers personal protection services in Panama, while the Mexico-Chinese Security Council was established in 2012 to protect Chinese businesses and personnel from violence.

    The collapse of security states in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, combined with the adoption of capitalism, created fertile ground for both PMCs and PSCs. In Bulgaria, early PSCs were often founded by sportsmen, particularly wrestlers, with connections to organized crime. By 2005, a United Nations report estimated that 9 percent of working men in Bulgaria were employed in private security—a pattern found across the former Eastern Bloc.

    Though growth has been slower in Western Europe, PSCs have still expanded. France recently deployed 10,000 security guards across Paris for the 2024 Olympics, only for many of them to strike over working conditionsweeks before the opening ceremony.

    The European Union has increasingly relied on PSCs to manage its migrant crisis, generating massive profits for the industry. Private actors were quick to label migration as a security threat while supporting policies that promote instability abroad. Major arms dealers and security firms like Airbus and Leonardo, for example, sell weapons in conflict zones that fuel violence and displacement. They then profit again by selling security equipment to European border agencies.

    While violence has decreased across Africa in recent decades, localized instability has led to a surge in the security industry. The distinction between PSCs and PMCs is often blurred on the continent, with PSCs frequently finding themselves undertaking quasi-military roles such as convoy protection, protection of natural resource extraction sites in hostile areas, and armed confrontations.

    Chinese PSCs have become more prevalent to compensate for the security gaps left by African governments for BRI investments, contrasting to Russia’s use of conflict-oriented PMCs in Africa. Regulation varies, with minimal oversight in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and more stringent controls in Uganda.

    South Africa’s PSC industry in particular has flourished since the end of apartheid in the 1990s. Rising crime and falling police numbers have led citizens to rely more on the private sector for safety and asset protection. According to the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority, there are 2.7 million registered private security officers working in South Africa, outnumbering police 4:1. Services include patrolling neighborhoods, providing armed guards, and tracking and recovering stolen vehicles.

    The PSC industry’s rise has been fueled by gaps in state security measures. However, in areas where PSCs operate, crime rates frequently remain high due to their focus on protecting private property and individuals rather than maintaining public order. Financial incentives can also lead to problems being managed superficially rather than addressing underlying issues. Additionally, PSC employees frequently face burnout, low pay, and negative working conditions. As PSCs intersect with private prisons, this has raised further concern over their expanding influence and overlapping roles.

    Despite its growth in recent decades, the PSC industry’s progress has proven reversible in the past. By 2001, Argenbright Security controlled almost 40 percent of U.S. airport checkpoints, but the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) after 9/11 centralized airport security back under government control, with limited private sector involvement.

    Nevertheless, the industry is likely to continue expanding, particularly as new initiatives find uses for them. India, which has the world’s largest private security force at approximately 12 million, is expected to continue seeing strong industry expansion, especially in securing its increasing number of private communities, colloquially termed “gated republics.”

    Private security already plays a major role in private cities, which are becoming more prevalent worldwide. In these cities, governance is largely handled by boards and CEOs rather than elected officials, and profit motives often overshadow public needs. The safety divide between rich and poor is further exacerbated, as security becomes a commodity instead of a public concern.

    In Honduras, the island of Roatán is at the epicenter of a clash between the government and local communities on the one hand and international entrepreneurs behind Próspera, a company developing a private city on the island, on the other. The escalating tensions highlight the realities of under-resourced government forces facing off against well-funded companies backed by heavily armed private guards.

    As the role of private security continues to expand, regulations must evolve at the same pace. In the U.S., with regulations primarily established at the state level and lacking uniformity, there is a need for greater oversight to address potential issues effectively. Failing to do so will undermine public accountability by allowing private companies to operate with minimal restrictions, as well as deepen societal divides.

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

    The post How Extensive is the Privatization of Security? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  •  “When a politician is in opposition, he is an expert on the means to some end, and when he is in office, he is an expert on the obstacles to it.”

    – G.K. Chesterton

    + The title of this column comes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s diary of the first eight months of World War II, when he was stationed in Alsace, working as a meteorologist, watching weather balloons and recording barometric pressure, while waiting for something, anything, profound to happen.

    + 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..

    + Harris’s emphasis on home ownership–instead of the cost of housing—appeals to a generation that no longer exists and is just as nostalgic as any backward-looking fantasy being peddled by Trump. Most young people have no interest in getting a 30-year mortgage. They want an affordable place to live while they spend 30 years paying off their student loans before being buried under medical debt in their 60s.

    + Harris put more distance between herself and Biden than Trump did with JD Vance, but all in the wrong direction, such as trimming Biden’s proposed tax on capital gains from 40% to 28%–an indication that FTC Chair Lina Khan should be putting feelers out for a new job.

    + A week after a school shooting in Georgia and a freeway shooting in Kentucky, Harris answered a question on gun control this way: “Both Tim and I own guns.”

    + This was basically the same Trump we saw against Biden, where the polls showed Trump winning 67-33. This debate’s polls show Harris–who was scripted & robotic–winning by something like 66-34–which shows you what merely being coherent, audible & not having moments of drooling aphasia can do for a candidate…

    + It’s evident that Harris could have won this debate just as decisively without the full spectrum of rightwing positions she’s adopted during the campaign, which suggests she will try to implement them if she’s elected.

    + Listening to Kenneth Branaugh’s terrific reading of Heart of Darkness on my morning walk (in a glorious rain today), I was struck by a Conradian phrase (there are so many memorable ones) that serves as a pretty good description of Trump when exposed: “a papier-mache Mephistopheles.”

    + Hot new MAGA conspiracy: Harris’s earrings were actually earbuds transmitting answers from HRC and Michelle Obama.

    + Hot new MAGA conspiracy 2: Harris’s earrings were a trap to get MAGA activists to speculate that Harris’s earrings were earphones.

    + It’s true that ABC’s moderators fact-checked Trump’s statements three times and let Harris spew falsehoods without correction. To compensate, they allowed Trump to blather on for six minutes more than Harris, though given what he had to say, this probably worked against him. In fact, at the next debate, Trump might want to have his mic muted for the entire 90 minutes.

    + Haiti will never be forgiven for its revolution, and 220 years later, its people are still being starved, immiserated, invaded, occupied, demeaned, and dehumanized…

    + Aiden Clark’s father urged these MAGA creeps, led by creepoid-in-chief JD Vance, to stop using his son to further their rancid political views.

    + Race “science” is the only science the rightwing believes in…

    + Childless Cat Lady Taylor Swift quickly eclipsed a dull debate by Tweeting out her endorsement of Harris to her 280 million followers.

    + Her Tweet should have come with a trigger warning since it set off deeply buried anxieties, especially among Trump incels and women like Megyn Kelly, who, try as she might, still can’t manage to squirm her way back into Trump’s favor…

    + Meanwhile, Jeanine Pirro on Fox’s The Five told Swift she should shut up and sing…

    + Then there was Elon Musk’s depraved stalker Tweet: “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.”

    + In his new coffee table book, Save America, Trump includes ten pages of photos with Kim Jong-un, suggests Canada’s Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro’s secret love child and claims that Mark Zuckerberg will “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he “does anything illegal.”

    + Et tu, Matt?

    + “The GOP will track our menstrual cycles, so we don’t have to.”

    + Sure, Bernie. Dick Cheney believes so firmly in the US’s “democratic foundations” that he helped steal the 2000 election, lied the country into a war and trashed the most basic Constitutional rights for eight years.

    + The Cheney Effect…

    + Of course, Obama’s imprimatur is scarcely an upgrade.

    + Not only did Obama indemnify the post-911 criminals of the Bush administration for lying the US into a war and committing heinous crimes against humanity in the process, he actually extended their crimes by using drones in the extra-judicial assassination of American citizens.

    + Harris won the debate. However, there’s little evidence that winning a debate against Trump means much to the electorate. If you read the transcript of the Biden debate, Trump’s answers were filled with lies and nonsense. They received almost no attention. People know he’s a hybrid of a WWE character and the world’s most obnoxious used car salesman & at least 45% of the country doesn’t care.

    + The one thing Harris could have done was use the debate to condemn the killing of Americans (if she can’t bring herself to condemn the killing of Palestinians) by Israeli forces and announce her support for an arms embargo. This is, of course, the one thing she would never risk doing (and didn’t).

    + 40 years of neoliberalism has demonstrated that the answer to our current political crisis certainly isn’t for activists to continue compromising with the likes of Dick Cheney and Jamie Dimon on genocide, police brutality, austerity or the climate crisis. We know what compromising liberals have given us: Serbian war, don’t ask, don’t tell, welfare destruction, NAFTA, Iraq war, torture, Deepwater Horizon, Wall Street bailouts, Libyan war, assassination by drone, Trump, record oil production in the US, and genocide…

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  • Photo by Dmitry Ant

    Invention is the mother of necessity, and Russia’s response to largely Western-imposed economic and trade sanctions has shown the extent of that inventiveness.  While enduring attritive punishment in its Ukraine campaign, the war remains sustainable for the Kremlin.  The domestic economy has not collapsed, despite apocalyptic predictions to the contrary.  In terms of exports, Russia is carving out new trade routes, a move that has been welcomed by notable powers in the Global South.

    One of the chief prosecutors of sanctions against Moscow was initially confident about the damage that would be caused by economic bludgeoning.  US President Joe Biden, in February 2022, insisted on the imposition of measures that would “impair [Russia’s] ability to compete in a high-tech 21st century economy.”  The Council of the European Union also explained that the move was intended to weaken Moscow’s “ability to finance the war and specifically target the political, military and economic elite responsible for the invasion [of Ukraine].”

    In all this, the European Union, the United States and other governments have ignored a salient historical lesson when resorting to supposedly punitive formulae intended to either deter Russia from pursuing a course of action or depriving it of necessary resources.  States subject to supposedly crushing economic measures can adapt, showing streaks of impressive resilience.  The response from Japan, Germany and Italy during the 1930s in the face of sanctions imposed by the League of Nations provide irrefutable proof of that proposition.  All, to a certain extent, pursued what came to be known as Blockadefestigkeit, or blockade resilience.  With bitter irony, the targeted powers also felt emboldened to pursue even more aggressive measures to subvert the restraints placed upon them.

    By the end of 2022, Russia had become China’s second biggest supplier of Russian crude oil.  India has also been particularly hungry for Russian oil.  Producing only 10% of domestic supply, Russia contributed 34% of the rest of Indian oil consumption in 2023.

    Trade routes are also being pursued with greater vigour than ever.  This year, progress was made between Russia and China on a North Sea Route, which straddles the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, running from Murmansk on the Barents Sea to the Bering Strait and the Far East.  The agreement between Russia’s state nuclear agency Rosatom and China’s Hainan Yangpu Newnew Shipping Co Ltd envisages the joint design and creation of Arctic-class container vessels to cope with the punishing conditions throughout the year.  Rosatom’s special representative for Arctic development, Vladimir Panov, confidently declared that up to 3 million tonnes of transit cargo would flow along the NSR in 2024.

    While that agreement will operate to Russia’s frozen north, another transport route has also received a boosting tonic.  Of late, Moscow and New Delhi have been making progress on the 7,200-kilometre International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), which will run from St. Petersburg in northwestern Russia to ports in southern Iran for onward movement to Mumbai.  While the agreement between Russia, Iran and India for such a multimodal corridor dates back to September 2000, the advent of sanctions imposed in the aftermath of the Ukraine War propelled Moscow to seek succour in the export markets of the Middle East and Asia.

    As staff writers at Nikkei point out, the shipping route will not only bypass Europe but be “less than half as long as the current standard path through the Mediterranean Sea and the Suez Canal.”  One calculation suggests that the time needed to transport cargo to Moscow from Mumbai prior to the initiation of the corridor was between 40 and 60 days.  As things stand, the transit time has been shaved to 25-30 days, with transportation costs falling by 30%.

    Much progress has been made on the western route, which involves the use of Azerbaijan’s rail and road facilities.  In March, Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Digital Development and Transport revealed that rail freight grew by approximately 30% in 2023.  Road freight rose to 1.3 million tonnes, an increase of 35%.  The ministry anticipates the amount of tonnage in terms of freight traffic to rise to 30 million per year.  In June this year, the Rasht-Caspian Sea link connecting the Persian Gulf with the Caspian Sea via rail was opened in the presence of Russian, Iranian and Azerbaijani dignitaries.

    A further factor that adds worth to the corridor is the increasingly fraught nature of freight traffic from Europe to Asia via the Suez Canal.  Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have been harrying vessels in the Red Sea, a response to Israel’s ferocious campaign in Gaza.  Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk suggested back in January that the “North-South [corridor] will gain global significance” given the crisis in the Red Sea.

    Despite the frightful losses being endured in the Russia-Ukraine war, it is clear, at least when it comes to using economic and financial weapons, that Moscow has prevailed.  It has outfoxed its opponents, and, along the way, sought to redraw global trade routes that will furnish it with even greater armour from future economic shocks.  Other countries less keen to seek a moral stake in the Ukraine conflict than pursue their own trade interests, have been most enthusiastic.

    The post Bypassing Sanctions: Russia, Trade Routes and Outfoxing the West appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

    The U.S. and many other societies are cycling into situations of toxic polarization today; discussion, let alone consensus, often appears impossible and the advantage goes to exclusionary social movements built on malignant rather than goodwill impulses. As Heritage Foundation president Keith Roberts stated in July 2024, “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

    As recently as a decade ago, violent social movements were gaining ground primarily in countries and regions that were struggling economically as they integrated themselves into the neoliberal global economy: examples include Russia, Hungary, and other states of the former Eastern Bloc, Turkey, India, and Greece. More recently, however, toxic polarization has also threatened to engulf countries at the core of the liberal democratic political grouping, including France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the U.S.

    In every case, the malignant social movement aims to overthrow a political order built—at least notionally—on principles of inclusion and goodwill, which the movement blames for its followers’ loss of economic and political status within their societies. What’s most striking, even counterintuitive, about this takeover is its seeming inexorability, due to the failure of parties of the center and left to offer coherent alternatives—and the resulting landscape in which extreme positions are steadily normalized.

    The result is a crisis of democracy, stunting people’s faith in collective self-government owing to its inability to help address practical problems such as climate change, economic inequality, and mass migration. To reverse this trend, we must first understand the conditions that brought it about.

    Nine Developments That Produce Toxic Polarization

    Toxic polarization becomes possible, if not inevitable, when a convergence of political, economic, and social conditions activate three powerful forces:

    Malignant bonding: An impulse to solidify communities built on resentment, bigotry, and a desire to exclude those who are “different”;

    The scarcity mind: A psychological state that frames social life as a zero-sum game pitting oneself and one’s social affinity group against a racial, ethnic, or class-based other; and

    Trans-historical trauma: The fears and compensating behaviors that accumulate over many centuries of physical and emotional violence and become encoded in our collective behavior.

    When they converge, these conditions lay the groundwork for a conventional wisdom built on limited assumptions about what can be achieved by society. This in turn produces a deep sense of alienation from the existing order, especially among the dominant racial, ethnic, and class-based groups, which in turn generates new, exclusionary social movements. By alienation, we mean a feeling of isolation and disconnection from the larger society or from what that society is becoming. Alienation can quickly turn into a lack of sympathy and lead to open hostility toward the supposedly undeserving portion of the population.

    The pivotal forces in this process are social movements, which are the incubators and carriers of the zeitgeist. Exclusionary social movements, which come to the fore in periods of toxic polarization, always either exist or are latent. So are inclusionary social movements, which aim to build on a very different set of impulses: empathy, goodwill, good-faith communication, mutual aid, and an openness to finding common ground in inclusive and widely beneficial change.

    Traditionally, these two types of movements either clash or coexist, but neither seizes the upper hand for more than a limited period. Today, however, we are witnessing the convergence of nine key developments, some of them dating back decades, which favor the rise of powerful and possibly long-lasting exclusionary social movements:

    Decreased economic progress and social mobility: The developed world has witnessed a decline in economic expansion and social mobility stemming from the outsourcing of jobs and vastly unequal growth patterns in the developing world. Rising global levels of migration, partly due to the imposition of neoliberal economic policies, complemented by insurgencies in the Middle East and parts of East Asia, have caused dominant ethnic groups in receiving countries to feel threatened. Often, the concern is with “job theft” or crime, but the underlying impulse is racial or cultural prejudice.

    Self-inflicted austerity: Four decades of fiscal austerity, rationalized by neoliberal economics and concentrated primarily on social spending, stalemate and stigmatize previously successful efforts to bring underprivileged and socially marginalized groups into the circle of prosperity.

    Over the past two centuries, the state has emerged as the core agency for delivering on the promises of the inclusive or goodwill agenda. Austerity has the knock-on effect of “starving the state,” causing programs that large sections of the population depend on to deteriorate along with the goodwill agenda they were founded on. Benefits are curtailed, service worsens, and the citizenry become disgruntled or even alienated from the system that created and built loyalty through them.

    A deteriorating retail encounter with the state: An additional effect of constraints imposed by austerity and rising debt is a decline in the state’s delivery of services. Bureaucratic agencies become less efficient and responsive and more impersonal. Also, the physical infrastructure deteriorates. These developments leave residents feeling further alienated from the state.

    Rising debt at all levels: While the severity of debt burdens is often debatable, they reinforce austerity at the government level and hold back households’ and governments’ ability to invest for the future, further weakening inclusive movements. Over the past 50 years, these debt burdens have come increasingly under the control of global banks, investors, and multinational institutions: a “debt industry” that sees them as an opportunity to exploit rather than a means of equitable growth and development.

    A sense of national decline: Political and economic collapse, stalemated wars that cost money and lives and lead to crises in national morale, and the erosion of a previously exalted geopolitical status give rise to a sense of decline within the society. Fifty years of failed wars, from Vietnam to Iraq, have been costly in blood and treasure, but are remembered in the American popular imagination as gallant missions that would have succeeded if the cause had not been betrayed by defeatist politicians.

    Fear of loss of potency: This is fed by a fear of declining fertility, especially within the dominant ethnic group; declining birth rates contribute to a sense that their overall position in society is crumbling. This creates a platform for theories like the “Great Replacement” to take hold, leading in turn to further marginalization of ethnic minorities and migrant communities and a new wave of racial bigotry and violence.

    Among men within the dominant ethnic group, the decline in birth rates aggravates misogyny based on a zero-sum, scarcity-based belief that women, by claiming their rights, are infantilizing and castrating them. This sometimes results in a violent backlash against women’s rights.

    Energy, environmental, and technological crises: Global warming generates fears that the current living model is unsustainable, or that the crisis is a hoax intended to persuade people to accept a lower living standard. Fears of nuclear warfare endure but are now accompanied by concerns about new, high-tech forms of warfare and surveillance being used against people. The increasing role of sophisticated, computer-based systems in nearly every aspect of daily life creates a deepening fear that many long-time occupations will be eliminated or downgraded, damaging millions of workers’ confidence in both their livelihood and sense of personal worth.

    Growth of corporate and financial power: As union power declines and business evolves into a new model in which companies are managed as a collection of salable assets rather than productive enterprises, people grow more alienated from the capitalist system. On the right, people are encouraged to blame stigmatized groups (the Jews, the Chinese, the Arabs) for wielding economic power against them and covertly encouraging their “replacement” by migrants.

    Inclusionary movements lose their capacity for movement-building:Social movements built on goodwill, while in the ascendancy, come to rely on the state to address challenges related to inclusion, through policies and programs that address socioeconomic inequality and marginalization. But with the state on a starvation diet, the leadership of these movements no longer have the means to address their inclusionary goals; their policies and programs become—or appear to become—untenable. The leadership can no longer deliver results for their popular base.

    Focused, in an electoral democracy, on winning elections, the leadership seek a new formula and new backing that will enable them to remain in power. They concede that capital is in the driver’s seat and that challenging its interests and ambitions is futile, leading to a shifting of focus to crafting technocratic, “third-way” policies such as welfare reform and marginally milder alternatives to closing the border. These fail to win back the movement’s base, instead creating an opening for exclusionary movements to expand their popular support.

    Over time, the leadership of the exclusionary movement are emboldened to claim the accomplishments of the inclusionary movement as their own, seizing control of the historical-cultural narrative. In this telling, the abolition of slavery, the vast expansion of the middle class in the postwar decades, and the end of legal segregation become examples of America’s greatness rather than the outcome of decades of struggle against violent opposition from exclusionary movements.

    When it refuses to buy into this version of the story, the inclusionary movement is demonized for failing to celebrate America. (“The American people rejected European monarchy and colonialism just as we rejected slavery, second-class citizenship for women… and (today) wokeism,” the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” declared. “To the left, these assertions of patriotic self-assurance are just so many signs of our moral depravity and intellectual inferiority.”)

    Exploiting Alienation

    The scarcity mind informs both the framing of the nine developments just described and the response to them. Some are quite real—declining economic growth, austerity, the resulting rise in migration and insurgencies, the climate crisis, and the rise of corporate power—and some reflect a psychological state—fear of the other, fear of debt in the abstract, and fear of national decline. Collectively, they nurture a profound feeling of alienation.

    As alienation increases, people grow more desperate to be seen and heard, to belong, and to feel that the powers directing society are on their side—and not someone else’s. These impulses generate new, exclusionary social movements, fueling a zeitgeist that spreads malignant bonding and toxic polarization, and which can then be used to forge a dynamic and passionate new political thinking of the right.

    Alienation gives malignant bonding a powerful, long-lasting pull, at least while the conditions that facilitate it persist. In our time, Roberts’s “second American Revolution” takes its place within a pattern of self-renewal that began with the 1968 “silent majority” election of Richard Nixon in a campaign built on coded racism (“law and order”) and extends to the 2016 and 2020 elections that brought Donald Trump to power and then solidified his right-wing populist MAGA movement.

    Starving the state helps sustain this cycle as it accelerates the delegitimation of the inclusionary agenda. To gain power, however, a social movement needs resources and a conduit to the institutional and financial apparatus of capitalism and the state. For this, it needs the support of at least a portion of what we might call the Third Force: the elites, including propertied individuals who amass capital and control access to it and the institutions that defend and promote their interests.

    The Third Force typically finds it easiest to form alliances with exclusionary rather than inclusionary movements, since the former find their organizing principle in imagined scarcity and dreams of a lost golden age and, therefore, seldom question existing wealth arrangements. Additionally, exclusionary movements fetishize power, making them useful partners in controlling marginal social elements.

    At the same time, often-chaotic exclusionary social movements need the organized, disciplined institutional structures and expertise that the Third Force can build for them:

    – Think tanks that can turn ideological preferences and resentments into policies (example, the Heritage Foundation);

    – Media and messaging platforms (example, Fox News, Newsmax, and social media influencers);

    – Advocacy groups (example, the Federalist Society); and

    – An electoral machine and fundraising capabilities that can pull together a group of well-to-do donors behind a populist leader (example, the Republican Party, political action committees).

    Over time, these resources enable exclusionary movements and their leaders to generate new elites, operating on a somewhat different set of assumed principles than the previous elites, but still desiring to establish a new status quo. The nature of this new set of arrangements always depends greatly on the movement’s relationship with the Third Force.

    The success of this cycle of self-renewal blocks progressive political forces from implementing changes that might address the concrete issues giving rise to feelings of alienation: economic stagnation and austerity, the loss of workers’ power and the rise of a corporate-financial hegemony, and technological fears.

    A Way Forward for Inclusive Movements?

    An exclusionary movement built on alienation and malignant bonding, when combined with the resources of the Third Force, can radically change the direction of society, potentially reversing decades of social and economic progress. It can also, as we have just seen, change the direction of the rival inclusionary movement, neutralizing it while setting it up as the enemy for supporters of the exclusionary movement to rally against.

    Even in the long periods when inclusionary movements have been ascendant, their rivals work to undermine them. In the 1960s and early 1970s in the U.S., when it seemed that many inclusionary goals, ranging from socioeconomic equality for people of color to universal health care, were within reach, the seeds of a powerful reaction opposing these goals were already sprouting. But inclusionary leaders often ignored or dismissed them. Real or perceived crises were then exploited, often very successfully, by exclusionary social movements as grounds for pinning the blame on their opponents.

    One reason why this strategy is effective for the exclusionary movements is that attacks on vulnerable groups—women, migrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and gender nonconformists—are easily rationalized and emotionally gratifying to embattled working people who are used to occupying a more favored place in society. Another and equally important reason is that inclusive social movements often respond by emphasizing the gap between society’s goals and its achievements, rather than highlighting its real accomplishments as reason to believe it can do better. This approach easily devolves into blaming and shaming the exclusionary movement’s target audience, which that movement can then easily exploit.

    Our next article will address the following questions related to the inclusionary movements: What makes them—despite generating mass support for long periods—susceptible to this cycle, and what does this tell us about the requirements for making them successful in the long run? Why have the inclusionary movements not been able to sustain and renew themselves to the same degree as their exclusionary rivals? What holds them back, and how can they find the capacity to do so?

    This article was produced by Human Bridges

    The post The Growth of Malignant and Exclusionary Social Movements appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • A person and person in suits Description automatically generated
    A person and person in suitsDescription automatically generated

    Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Presidential Debate, ABC News, screenshot.

    Santa Anas in Philadelphia

    The Santa Ana winds — “Devil Winds” — that blow west every Fall across the Los Angeles basin, make everybody jumpy. They are stronger and more insistent than the moist breezes from the Pacific and more than a little menacing because they bring the threat of fire. I haven’t lived in LA for more than 20 years but can still hear their rising whoosh and smell the rapid desiccation of foxtail and Eucalyptus. There’s a wind-spread fire burning right now in the hills east of Los Angeles.

    But Santa Anas are also idiot winds. They dry-out your mouth, eyes and nose, making it hard to speak, see straight or even breath. It’s just possible Dylan had them in mind in 1974 when he recorded “Idiot Wind” for the album Blood on the Tracks:

    Blowing like a circle around my skull
    From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol….

    Blowing through the buttons of our coats
    Blowing through the letters that we wrote….
    It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

    Written after the Watergate hearings, and recorded just weeks after Nixon’s resignation, the song is apposite again, 50 years later. Was it an idiot wind that was blowing last night in Philadelphia?

    Another great debate – not!

    When Harris told Trump in front of an audience of about 75 million that in any negotiation “Putin would eat you for lunch,” she was indulging in a bit of displacement. It was she, not the Russian dictator who was dining on the former president. That was the second alimentary reference of the evening that went badly for Trump. The first – Trump’s vehement assertion that Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio were catching and eating local cats and dogs – was quickly refuted by one of the ABC News moderators, David Muir. He told Trump that his colleagues had called the Springfield city manager and that there were no credible reports of pets being snatched and consumed. “Talk about extreme” Harris added, unnecessarily.

    And so it went. Harris mocked and scolded, Trump sputtered and fulminated. On abortion, Harris dispatched Trump’s repeated claim that “everybody wanted it returned to the states” by saying that a woman who is hemorrhaging from a miscarriage but denied a therapeutic abortion “doesn’t want that” and neither does a young girl who has been raped. Harris could have mentioned the more than one million women who obtained legal abortions in the U.S. in 2023, but those statistics remain politically taboo, at least in a presidential debate.

    When Muir asked Trump if he had any regrets about his response to the January 6 riot, he predictably parried – at once claiming no responsibility for the mayhem, and that no crimes had been committed, except the dastardly shooting of Ashli Babbitt by Capital police. (Babbit’s killing was arguably needless, though she was the avant-garde of a mob attempting to storm a suite of Congressional offices.) And of course, Trump refused to concede that he had lost the 2020 election, saying he had won with a record 76 million votes. Harris’s annihilating reply was that Trump had been fired by 81 million voters.

    Only on foreign policy did Trump score any conceivable points, but when a madman speaks truth, it sounds like lies. He was right that pre-invasion negotiations with Putin were fumbled, that “a deal is begging to be made,” and that the U.S. was “playing with World War Three.” But rather than engage any substantive geo-political discussion, (admittedly difficult in the allotted two minutes), Harris preferred to pontificate. She trotted out the domino theory, that a Putin victory in Ukraine would lead him to try to conquer Poland and then the whole of Europe and challenged Trump to say which side he was on. By refusing to take the bait, Trump won on substance but lost on style. He failed to follow-up and ask Harris what a Ukrainian victory would look like (a complete withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory, including the Crimea?) and whether such a triumph was worth the likely cost – possibly including a wider European war. If not, shouldn’t the parties begin serious negotiations now? But Trump’s image of a negotiated settlement goes no further than the fantasy of himself standing before a bank of cameras and microphones, one arm draped around the shoulders of little Vladimir and the other around little Volodymyr.

    Americans are focused on phony issues

    ABC News and the two candidates aren’t the only ones responsible for the poor quality of the discussion at last night’s debate. The American electorate bears responsibility too. They are consistently concerned with what impacts them least, and least worried about what affects them most. Last week’s New York Times/Sienna College Poll, for example, ranks “the economy, including jobs and the stock market” (22%) and “immigration” (12%) as subjects of greatest concern, and “inequality” (3%) and climate change (1%) among the least.

    Despite claims to the contrary, the overall state of the economy has improved since the end of the Trump administration. Overall growth (GDP), wages (adjusted for inflation), employment levels, and stock market valuations are up. Passage in 2021 of the Biden sponsored Child Tax Credit (part of the American Rescue Plan) cut childhood poverty in half, though refusal by Congressional Republicans the following year to renew the law, returned five million children to poverty. Well paid industrial jobs are increasing, especially in Republican states, and unions, led by the UAW, are increasing in power.

    Instead of the rising cost of bacon (a food as poisonous to people as it is cruel to pigs), Americans should focus on the ongoing increase in inequality. The U.S. ranks 27th (out of 82) in global economic mobility – well behind Slovenia, Ireland and the U.K., not to mention the Scandinavian countries. The child poverty rate remains stuck at about 16%. The overall poverty rate is 11% (defined as an individual salary below about $15,000), and the average personal savings rate is just 3% — that means almost nobody can save enough money either to buy a house or comfortably retire. To be born rich or poor in the U.S. is essentially a life sentence. Wage inequality has fallen slightly during the Biden administration, especially at the bottom of the wage distribution, but not nearly enough to indicate a significant trend. To paraphrase James Carville, it’s not the economy, it’s the inequality, stupid!

    The second issue that most Americans focus on is immigration or “the border.” Nearly 30% of Americans, according to Gallup, think immigration is the most important issue facing the country, and 8 in 10 , according to a Monmouth Poll, think it is either a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem. Trump has staked his whole claim on the White House on “fixing the border”, including a pledge to forcibly deport some 20 million immigrants he calls “insane,” “murderers,” “vermin” and blood poisoners. (There are probably no more than 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S.) In response to the blood libel, Kamala Harris has pledged to revive a bi-partisan plan promoted by Biden – and sunk by Trump – to significantly reduce asylum claims and periodically close the southern border when the number of migrants exceeds a given level. In short, she promises to do the same as Trump, only less.

    If there is a crisis on the border, it’s a humanitarian one entirely of our own making. The economic embargo placed on Venezuela has forced hundreds of thousands into poverty and exile. Failure of the U.S. to uphold democratic norms in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, unwillingness to tackle the American demand for illegal drugs, labor exploitation by multinational corporations and local compradors, and climate change have all led to mass migration from Mexico, Central America and elsewhere. In 2022, more than 150,000 unaccompanied children were met by authorities on the U.S./Mexican border, with an unknown number – perhaps 120,000 – held in some kind of temporary or long-term custody. There are too few judges and legal advocates to handle the number of asylum applicants. The crisis is not the number of migrants to the U.S., it is our poor treatment of them.

    Without migration, the U.S. would have a diminishing population, reduced productivity, lower living standards, and rising inflation. Whole industries – including hospitality, agriculture, construction and healthcare – would grind to a halt, if Trump was able to implement his planned mass deportations. More than half of all U.S. farmworkers are immigrants, and nearly 17% work in the healthcare industry. Over the next decade, migrants (legal and illegal) are projected to add an additional $7 trillion to the U.S. economy. If there’s an immigrant crisis in the U.S., it’s that there’s not enough of them.

    Devil wind and climate change

    To nobody’s surprise, global warming – the greatest human and environmental crisis of this or any other time – received short shrift at last night’s debate. There was just one question about it near the end of the debate, hedged with the preface that the issue was of great concern to “young people.” Harris started to answer, promisingly enough, by saying that the matter was not one for the future but the present, and that myriad American were already suffering from excessive heat, storms and flooding because of climate change. But then she quickly went off track, and spoke about industrial policy, car manufacturing, and economic nationalism. She concluded by boasting about increased U.S. production of natural gas! Trump refused to answer the question at all, preferring to talk up the wonders of tariffs, and a supposed Chinese bribe of the Biden family. Neither the moderators not Harris pressed Trump to return to answer the question. That was when I again heard in my ears Dylan’s nasal rendering of the phrase “idiot wind,” the first word somehow compressed into one plangent syllable. The single issue that will most impact debate viewers – in the U.S., along the Mexican border, in Europe and everywhere else — was the one thing that could not be spoken in what is likely to be the only presidential debate.

    Idiot wind
    Blowing every time you move your mouth….
    It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe

     

    The post Idiot Wind: The Trump/Harris Debate appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Kamala Harris won the debate. People being bombed in Gaza did not.

    The banner headline across the top of the New York Times home page — “Harris Puts Trump on Defensive in Fierce Debate” — was accurate enough. But despite the good news for people understandably eager for Trump to be defeated, the Harris debate performance was a moral and political tragedy.

    In Gaza “now an estimated 40,000 Palestinians are dead,” an ABC News moderator said. “Nearly 100 hostages remain. . . . President Biden has not been able to break through the stalemate. How would you do it?”

    Vice President Harris replied with her standard wording: “Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end. It must when, end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a ceasefire deal and we need the hostages out.”

    “End immediately”? Anyone who isn’t in fantasyland knows that the only way to soon end the slaughter of Palestinian civilians would be for the U.S. government — the overwhelmingly biggest supplier of Israel’s armaments — to stop sending weapons to Israel.

    Meanwhile, a pivot to advocating for a cutoff of weapons to Israel would help Harris win the presidency. After the debate, the Institute for Middle East Understanding pointed out that the need to halt the weapons is not only moral and legal — it’s also smart politics. Polls are clear that most Americans want to stop arming Israel. In swing states, polling has found that a large number of voters say they’d be more likely to cast a ballot for Harris if she would support a halt.

    What Kamala Harris and Donald Trump said about Israel and Gaza in their debate was predictable. Even more certain was what they absolutely would not say — with silences speaking loudest of all. “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth,” Aldous Huxley wrote, describing “the greatest triumphs of propaganda.”

    By coincidence, the debate happened on the same date as publication of a new afterword about the Gaza war in the paperback edition of my book War Made Invisible. To fill in for the debate’s abysmal silences, here are a few quotes from the afterword about the ongoing carnage:

    + “After the atrocities that Hamas committed on Oct. 7, the U.S. government quickly stepped up military aid to Israel as it implemented atrocities on a much larger scale. In truth, as time went on, the entire Israeli war in Gaza amounted to one gigantic atrocity with uncountable aspects.”

    + As with the steady massacres with bombs and bullets in Gaza since early October, “the Israeli-U.S. alliance treated the increasing onset of starvation, dehydration, and fatal disease as a public-relations problem.”

    + “In the war zone, eyewitness reporting and photojournalism were severely hindered if not thwarted by the Israeli military, which has a long record of killing journalists.”

    + “Although the credibility of Israel’s government tumbled as the Gaza war dragged on, the brawny arms of the Israel lobby — and the overall atmospheric pressure of media and politics — pushed legislators to approve new military aid. . . . Official pronouncements — and the policies they tried to justify — were deeply anchored in the unspoken premise that some lives really matter and some really don’t.”

    + The United States persisted in “violating not only the U.S. Conventional Arms Transfer Policy but also numerous other legal requirements including the Foreign Assistance Act, the Arms Export Control Act, the U.S. War Crimes Act, the Leahy Law, the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, and several treaties. For U.S. power politics, the inconvenient precepts in those measures were as insignificant and invisible as the Palestinian people being slaughtered.”

    + “What was sinister about proclaiming ‘Israel’s 9/11’ was what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the cloak of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy that occurred inside its borders as an open-ended reason to kill in the name of retaliation, self- protection, and, of course, the ‘war on terror.’ It was a playbook that the Israeli government adapted and implemented with vengeance.”

    Israel’s war on 2.2 million people in Gaza has been “a supercharged escalation of what Israel had been doing for 75 years, treating human beings as suitable for removal and even destruction.” As Israel’s war on Gaza has persisted, “the explanations often echoed the post-9/11 rationales for the ‘war on terror’ from the U.S. government: authorizing future crimes against humanity as necessary in the light of certain prior events.”

    That and so much more — left unsaid from the debate stage, dodged in U.S. mass media and evaded from the podiums of power in Washington — indict not only the Israeli government but also the U.S. government as an accomplice to mass murder that has escalated into genocide.

    Silence is a blanket that smothers genuine democratic discourse and the outcries of moral voices. Making those voices inaudible is a key goal for the functioning of the warfare state.

    The post Undebatable: What Harris and Trump Could Not Say About Israel and Gaza appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Ndola crash, Youtube screengrab.

    The night of 17-18 September 2024 will mark the 63rd anniversary of the death in a plane crash near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) of the second United Nations Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld and fifteen other people, UN staff and the plane’s crew. They were on a crucial UN mission to the newly independent Congo, where Hammarskjöld was to meet Moïse Tshombe, leader of secessionist Katanga province who was lavishly backed by Western political and mining interests, and negotiate the withdrawal of Belgian troops and deployment of UN peacekeepers. A large amount of circumstantial evidence screams murder, but the UN isn’t screaming at all, even though eleven of its staff, plus five Swedish crew members of DC6 flight SE-BDY were killed. Most speculation about what happened that night tends to focus on events in Congo, who killed Hammarskjöld, and why. But important questions about the United Nations itself are mostly left unraised, and the immediate and ongoing consequences of what amounts to an international coverup are largely unexplored. There are also other painfully significant but glossed-over questions about what Dag Hammarskjöld stood for, and what happened to his projects after his death.

    The UN web page titled “Death of Dag Hammarskjöld” is very strange. It notes that in her study Who Killed Hammarskjöld? Susan Williams concludes that “his death was almost certainly the result of a sinister intervention”. Yet, the UN’s meagre acknowledgement of ill-doing comes directly after a pussyfooting observation: “The official inquiries that immediately followed suggested that pilot error was the cause, but one of the reports, by the United Nations Commission of Investigation in 1962, said that sabotage could not be ruled out. That possibility helped feed suspicions and conspiracy theories.” It’s as if the UN is sowing a seed that rigorous scholar Susan Williams might be fuelling “suspicions and conspiracy theories”. And only one of the UN reports didn’t rule out sabotage? This simply isn’t true. The UN web page continues, “Western intelligence agencies, including those of Britain, the United States and Belgium, the former colonial power in Congo, had withheld information relating to Mr. Hammarskjold’s death.” The page gives the impression that Dag Hammarskjöld died alone. The glaring omission is the other fifteen people who also died. Is the UN trying to play down the monstrous nature of a crime in which sixteen people (at least eleven of its own staff), were cold-bloodedly murdered? The fact is that their names are hard to find in UN reports.

    In a 2014 report their names are given, but only in a footnote, “out of respect” but one name seems to be missing. Meticulous researchers like Susan Williams say there were sixteen people on flight SE-BDY, but the UN can’t/won’t accurately give—not even “out of respect”—this most basic detail as to how many and who actually died on one of its own highly important missions, just eight months after the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba was assassinated on January 17. The fourteen other names given in the 2014 report are Alice Lalande (secretary), Heinrich Wieschhoff (Africa specialist), Vladimir Fabry (legal adviser), Bill Ranallo (bodyguard), Harold Julien (acting ONUC chief security officer), Sergeant Serge Barrau (from Haiti, whose body was labelled as “coloured” in the first Rhodesian inquiry into the crash), former Irish Garda sergeant Francis Eivers, Stig Olof Hjelte and Per Edvald Persson (UN guards), Per Hallonquist, pilot-in-command, pilots Nils-Erik Åhréus and Lars Litton, Nils Göran Wilhelmsson (flight engineer) and Harald Noork (purser). Weischhoff’s son Hynrich confirms this UN negligence in PassBlue (a publication that monitors UN activities): “In their Dag Hammarskjöld Lectures, in Uppsala, Sweden (Mr. Hammarskjöld’s home base), Secretaries-General Ban and António Guterres each mentioned the search for the truth about the crash but at the tail end of their presentations, almost as an afterthought.” Not only that, but the dead were maligned when the crash was attributed to “pilot error” in the Rhodesian public inquiry of 1961-62 and as late as 1993 in a private inquiry for the Swedish government, despite ample circumstantial evidence of sabotage and expert testimony presented in the Othman report (points 250-259) stating that, “the crew of SE-BDY did everything properly and skilfully in the circumstances that they faced”.

    This more recent inquiry by former Tanzanian Chief Justice Mohamed Chande Othman, appointed in 2015 as head of an Independent Panel of Experts, notes that, “The UK and the United States must be almost certain to hold important undisclosed information”. The US and UK have been accused this year of obstructing the inquiry, as did the UN itself, which Hynrich Weischhoff also documents: “[…] in 2017, Secretary-General Guterres’s office sought to end the Judge Othman probe. Thanks to Sweden’s insistence, the General Assembly renewed his appointment. Did the secretary-general tip his hand last year when, rather than appear in person before the General Assembly, he sent a subordinate to present Judge Othman’s interim report?”

    After lamenting “the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind”, the UN Charter determines that “the peoples of the United Nations” aim “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom”. Hammarskjöld took this pledge seriously. However, his appointment as Secretary-General says a lot about the real workings of the UN. The big powers had agreed to the election of this relatively unknown outsider as Secretary-General as it was generally believed that he was politically “harmless”, a mere economist and technocrat. They were soon disabused, as Australian academic Greg Poulgrain (cited in the Othman report, points 241 to 246) details. Not only did he quickly set out to democratise the internal UN working environment, but he also emerged as “an outspoken advocate for the economic development of poorer countries”. He gave special attention to Indigenous peoples and, scorning Cold War tensions, insisted that the UN should play a major role in his democratising project partly by means of a Special Fund, thus greatly irking leading players on both sides of the Cold War, including CIA director Allen Dulles and Nikita Khrushchev, especially when it seemed that President John F. Kennedy respected the Secretary-General’s approach to decolonisation. This was just the beginning and, “The beginning of something may be beginning of everything”, to quote, from another context, photographer Richard Schulman.

    The UN responses (flying in the face of its own Charter) to Hammarskjöld’s decolonisation initiatives, and its refusal to investigate (when not actively hiding) so many aspects of his death bring to mind British Labour MP, Tony Benn’s five key questions for democracy. “What power have you got? Where did you get it? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you? What follows are just six of many deplorable aspects of the response of the UN and other institutions to the crash of flight SE-BDY, which bring to the fore the urgency of Tony Benn’s questions.

    1) The 2014 UN report accepts that there were local, African witnesses to the crash. They didn’t know each other. Although they coincided in most aspects (the main discrepancy being about the hour of the crash … maybe because they didn’t wear watches) their testimonies were generally dismissed. John Ngongo was in the forest with Safeli Soft, a charcoal burner. They saw a plane on fire, inside and on the wings and engines, “in a tilted position” in the sky. They also heard another plane. At first light, Ngongo and Soft went to the wreckage. Hammarskjöld’s body had clearly been moved and was left reclining against a termite mound. An ace of spades (favoured by 18th-century pirates to warn a traitor that his end was nigh, and also representing asexual, aromantic people, which is what Hammarskjöld was said to be) had been tucked inside his collar.

    Local residents Emma and Safeli Mulenga testified that they saw a plane circling and a “ball of fire coming on top of the plane”. Charcoal burner Custon Chipoya “heard some kind of a bang and then the fire … on top of the plane”, and a second, smaller plane following the first. “I saw that the fire came from the small plane …” When he went to the crash site at first light the next morning it was surrounded by soldiers, even though the official rescue team didn’t arrive until fifteen hours later. Two of the charcoal burners saw Land Rovers speeding to the place soon after impact, then driving off again, hours before the official search party came to the wreckage.

    Other witnesses suggested foul play. Davison Nkonjera, a storeman at the African Ex-Servicemen’s Club, said he saw an aircraft arrive from the north and circle the airport before flying away to the west. While it was circling the runway the control tower lights went off. Then two jets took off in the dark in the same direction as the larger plane and he saw “a flash or flame from the jet on the right strike the larger plane”. The Club’s watchman, M. K. Kazembe, gave a similar account. Other charcoal burners, Lemonson Mpinganjira and Steven Chizanga, saw two smaller planes following a larger one. One of the small planes moved above the larger one. There was a red flash, a loud explosion and then a series of smaller bangs. All this evidence was discounted as unreliable in the first (certainly racist) Rhodesian inquiry, which set the tone for most later official reports.

    2) A Swedish flying instructor with the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force, Tore Meijer, told a journalist in 1994 that, when trying out a short-wave radio set on the night of 17-18 September 1961, he heard a conversation mentioning Ndola. One speaker said, “He’s approaching the airport. He’s turning. He’s levelling. Another plane is approaching from behind — what is that?” Charles Southall, at the US National Security Agency’s naval communications facility in Cyprus, who’d been advised some hours earlier that “Something interesting is going to happen”, heard the following just after midnight: “I see a transport plane coming low. All the lights are on. I’m going down to make a run on it. Yes, it’s the Transair DC6. It’s the plane.” Another more excited voice then said “I’ve hit it. There are flames. It’s going down. It’s crashing.”

    3) The official search for possible survivors wasn’t launched until four hours after daybreak. The crash site was only eight miles from Ndola airport, along the plane’s flight path, yet it wasn’t “found” for fifteen hours. Part of the delay was caused by British High Commissioner to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Lord Alport who was at Ndola airport when the plane crashed but he bizarrely insisted to the airport management that Hammarskjöld had flown elsewhere, even after flight SE-BDY was reported as being overhead.

    4) One crash victim, UN staff member Harold Julien who, despite burns over about half his body, a fractured skull, a dislocated right ankle, and lying most of the day under a blazing sun, was still alive fifteen hours later. Once in hospital, he testified to Senior Inspector A. V. Allen of the Northern Rhodesian police that the plane blew up over the runway, there was a loud crash and “little explosions all around”. His comments were dismissed as the ramblings of a sedated sick man, although the doctor who attended him said he was “lucid and coherent”. It seems that no serious effort was made to save Julien’s life. He wasn’t airlifted to a more modern hospital, for example in Lusaka or Salisbury, and died on 23 September. In 2019, Susan Williams reports, the Zimbabwe government informed the UN that the Rhodesian authorities actively sought to silence Julien’s statements about the flight and the crash. Justice Othman concludes that “a general undervaluing of the evidence of Harold Julien…may have affected the exhaustiveness of the earlier inquiries’ consideration of the possible hypotheses”. His report also recognises that if Julien had not been left to lie so long in the sun with grave injuries, and if he had been transferred to a hospital more able to treat his injuries, he might have survived the crash.

    5) Astonishingly, the “UN” fact-finding process was entrusted to a single person, Hugo Blandori, a former FBI agent. The first UN Secretary-General, Trygve Lie, had opened the doors to the FBI which, in the McCarthyite purges, found that there was “infiltration into the U.N. of an overwhelmingly large group of disloyal U.S. citizens”. After Hammarskjöld’s appointment in April 1953, he defended and supported his UN staff and swiftly removed the FBI from the UN headquarters. Blandori sneered at the remarkably consistent testimony of the African eyewitnesses (“it is most difficult to distinguish from their testimony what is truth and what is fiction or imagination”). The UN “fact-finding” inquiry relied heavily on his proposals.

    6) Suggestions of UK and US involvement in the Ndola crash came to light when Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Chairman of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, released eight documents that appeared by chance among other material. They referred to an “Operation Celeste” of a shadowy South African mercenary group called SAIMR (South African Institute for Maritime Research), a plan to assassinate Hammarskjöld, in which CIA director Allen Dulles was involved. The 2014 UN report notes in points 12.34 to 12.36 that “Orders”, dated 14 September 1961 (the day after Hammarskjöld’s arrival in Leopoldville), read “1) DC6 AIRCRAFT BEARING “TRANSAIR” LIVERY IS PARKED AT LEO TO BE USED FOR TRANSPORT OF SUBJECT. 2) OUR TECHNICIAN HAS ORDERS TO PLANT 6 lbs TNT IN THE WHEELBAY WITH CONTACT DETONAT[OR] TO ACTIVATE AS WHEELS ARE RETRACTED ON TAKING OFF. 3) WE ARE AWAITING SUBJECTS TIME OF DEPART[URE] BEFORE ACTING. 4) WILL CONCENTRATE ON D. 5) REPORT WILL FOLLOW.”

    An undated document from some days earlier, with notes of a meeting of “M.I.5, Special Ops. Executive, and SAIMR” records that the group was told, “UNO is becoming troublesome and it is felt that Hammarskjöld should be removed. Allen Dulles [head of the CIA] agrees and has promised full cooperation from his people. [?He] tells us that Dag will be in Leopoldville on or about 12/9/61. ….. I want his removal to be handled more efficiently than was Patrice [Lumumba].” A final document on Operation Celeste dated 18 September 1961 states, “1. Device failed on take-off. 2. Despatched Eagle […..] to follow and take [……] 3. Device activated [……..] prior to landing. 4. As advised O’Brien and McKeown were not aboard. 5. Mission accomplished: satisfactory.” The documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld by Danish filmmaker Mads Brugger offers compelling evidence that SAIMR existed, and was engaged in many other atrocious projects like trying to infect the Black African population with the HIV virus.

    This final point, in which Allen Dulles appears, bodes one of the most terrible and probably least explored tragedies resulting from the Ndola crash. As Greg Poulgrain reports, Hammarskjöld was resolutely committed to a plan he had for October or November 1961 regarding the dispute between Indonesia and the Netherlands over sovereignty of West Papua, whereby he would declare Dutch and Indonesian claims to the territory invalid at the UN General Assembly. Kennedy welcomed his initiative not least because it saved him from having to decide whether to hand the disputed territory of West Papua to Indonesia or the Netherlands, in a thorny situation where the Soviet Union and China supported Indonesia’s bid to take control of West Papua.

    With the CIA closely observing UN activities, Dulles was determined to wrest Indonesia from communist control, internally and internationally. Hammarskjöld’s project of “the speedy and unconditional granting to all colonial peoples of the right of self-determination” also meant that, with 88 territories waiting for independence, he would create in the UN a counterweight to the neocolonially ambitious Cold War powers. Moreover, as a former Standard oil employee who’d arranged for control of the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company to go to the Rockefeller family, Dulles was also well informed about the huge magnitude of West Papua’s natural resources (which he hadn’t revealed to Kennedy).

    Less than a year after Dag Hammarskjöld’s death, what then transpired in the UN demolished all the decent principles he upheld. John Saltford gives a definitive account of the many deliberate UN violations of the infamous (from its very inception) 1962 New York Agreement by means of which, hosted by the United Nations, the Netherlands and Indonesia decided on the fate of West Papua, without any participation whatsoever of West Papuans. Article XVII of the Agreement states that all adults from the territory were eligible to participate in the act of self-determination, “to be carried out in accordance with international practice”. The international practice that occurred was far from what Hammarskjöld understood by the term. Washington overlooked the “niceties of ascertainment” in the interests of keeping Indonesia’s goodwill. A British official I. J. Sutherland spoke of the US, Japanese, Dutch, or Australian governments being unwilling to risk their economic and political relations with Indonesia on a matter of principle involving “a relatively small number of very primitive people”. The British Foreign Office opined that “no responsible Government is likely to complain so long as the decencies are [read: farce is] carried out”.

    In the UN farce of the “Act of Free Choice” in 1969, its representative Ortiz Sanz, bowed to Indonesia’s insistence on letting only 1,000 hand-picked, greatly threatened and intimidated “representatives” vote; lied when he claimed that West Papuans wanted to remain in Indonesia; refused to respond (“not his business”) when an Indonesian B-26 bomber strafed (anti-integration) Enaratoli and displaced some 14,000 people; saw nothing on inspection tours where he sometimes didn’t even leave the airstrip; and spent “the remainder of his time in the territory collaborating with U Thant and Jakarta in their efforts to conclude the Act with as little controversy as the situation permitted”. After giving many other brutal examples of the UN’s dereliction of duty (or successful pursuance of an insidious agenda), Saltford concludes, “it is clear that the Secretariat’s priority throughout was to ensure that West New Guinea became a recognized part of Indonesia with the minimum of controversy and disruption. This was the role assigned to the organization by the Americans in 1962, and U Thant saw no reason not to comply. It was Cold War politics, and the rights of the Papuans counted for nothing.”

    The circumstances of the death of Dag Hammarskjöld and fifteen other people have raised valid questions about the Ndola crash, about who caused it, why, and how. Yet, if mercenaries are involved, one can be sure that there are covert big stakes behind the visible facts, which have also overshadowed other general issues about the nature of national institutions and international order that we call democracy, the kind of issues that concerned Tony Benn. What is the real extent of power, where does it come from, who are the powerholders and to whom are they accountable? The highly suggestive evidence related to the death, the murder, of Dag Hammarskjöld, which can be found by any ordinary person in secondary sources, indicates that in global politics, checks and balances don’t limit power, don’t reveal where it comes from, or who really wields it, so there is no accountability. These obscure forces, dressed in democratic garb, have forged and underpinned a totally amoral neoliberal system that brings out the worst in human beings (encouraging individuals like Elon Musk who’s well on the way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire, whatever such wealth means), that has inter alia led to the killing—the sacrifice to greed—of some 500,000 West Papuans in the last sixty years and is ultimately responsible for permitting the present genocide in Palestine, as well as bringing the whole planet and everyone and everything that inhabits it to the brink of extinction. Tony Benn’s last (and favourite) question—how do we get rid of them?—has become crucial.

    The post Plane Downed at Ndola: A UN Self-portrait appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Cal State Long Beach pro-Palestine protest, May 2, 2024. Photo by Ben Huff.

    Last month, in a tangible victory for the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, San Francisco State University (SFSU) agreed to pull its investment from four companies tied to weapons manufacturing and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The four include Lockheed Martin, aerospace company Leonardo, military contractor Palantir, and construction equipment maker Caterpillar, whose bulldozers have been tearing up Gaza and the West Bank for decades. The success was four years in the making, as SFSU students successfully passed a divestment resolution in 2020.

    “I want to thank all the work group participants who dedicated time this summer to the creation of this plan, including the representatives from Students for Gaza and members of our Investment Committee,” said SFSU Vice President Jeff Jackanicz.

    While the sun may be setting on SFSU’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal mayhem, the situation isn’t as pleasant at Cal State Long Beach (CSULB), the second-largest school in California’s Cal State system, despite that students passed a similar divestment resolution in 2017. School administrators have done their best to stifle criticism of Israel and recently went as far as to send an email warning five faculty members for allegedly violating the school’s 2023-2024 “Time, Place, Manner” (TPM) rules by using a megaphone and a microphone at a Palestinian solidarity protest. While students have been cited in the past, this appears to be the first time professors have been accused of violating the policy.

    As college protests erupted around the country, over 500 pro-Palestine activists and dozens of faculty at CSULB held a teach-in on May 2. While many other faculty spoke at the peaceful teach-in on a megaphone, only five were targeted for their participation. The professors, all members of CSULB FJP, are predominantly faculty of color and disproportionately Muslim. They include Araceli Esparza, Professor of English; Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, Professor of Sociology; Azza Basarudin, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson, Professor of Sociology, and Steven Osuna, Associate Professor of Sociology. 

    “We were all hired because of our academic training in questions of race and racism both in the US and abroad and we are now being targeted for drawing on our expertise to take a stand against militarism and genocide in Gaza, suggesting that our viewpoints are only welcome if administrators agree with us,” explains Prof. Araceli Esparza. “As scholars focused on US empire and colonialism, we are taking the only ethical position available to us at this moment of US-supported genocidal violence in Gaza and we will continue to call for an end to the genocide against the people of Palestine all while facing attempts to repress our constitutionally protected rights to free speech and academic freedom.”

    The professors, whose supporters are calling “the CSU-5,” appear to have been targeted, not because they amplified their voices at a campus protest but because, along with another faculty member, they co-wrote a critical piece for Mondoweiss and CounterPunch. The sixth professor did not speak at the May 2nd protest.

    The widely read piece exposed CSULB’s ties to Boeing and other defense contractors’ complicity in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. In their essay, “Boeing University: How the California State University Became Complicit in Palestinian Genocide,” the faculty writes:

    Despite its complicity in occupation and genocide, Boeing has had a long and financially reciprocal relationship with CSULB, one going back decades with its latest iteration being touted as CSULB’s “Boeing Partnership.” CSULB is one of just 16 universities nationwide – and the sole university in California – to be selected by the Boeing Company for an exclusive university partnership. The Boeing Partnership is a university-corporate alliance that has further transformed CSULB into a public relations mouthpiece for the defense contractor. The CSULB-Boeing partnership illustrates not only how defense contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman profit from Israel’s violence against Palestinians, but also how these massive corporations simultaneously undermine the mission of public universities by harming students domestically and facilitating genocide, militarism, and mass death abroad.

    CSULB President Jane Close Conoley has a lengthy track record of stifling criticism of Israel on campus. During the 2017 student senate vote on divestment, Conoley penned an op-ed for the school’s newspaper condemning the resolution to divest from corporations with direct ties to the Palestinian occupation and genocide. At the time, faculty members argued that Conoley had a “chilling effect” on free speech by inserting herself into the debate. Despite the resolution passing (15, 7, 1) in a roll call vote, Conoley effectively killed the legislation by refusing to enforce it. What did Conoley get for silencing the divestment vote? Recognition for her excellent work from the Orange County/Long Beach branch of the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL) later that year.

    “Since coming to Long Beach as president, I have been blessed with many recognitions (e.g., from LAEDC, ADL, NAACP), which both humbled me and made me proud,” Conoley told the Long Beach Business Journal in 2018.

    The fact that Conoley is cozy with the ADL should be cause for concern. The organization deems nearly all opposition to Israel, including divestment, as anti-semitism. Early this year, ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt dangerously claimed that Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) are “Iranian proxies” equivalent to Hezbollah. Unsurprisingly, like the ADL’s Greenblatt, President Conoley believes pro-Palestine protests on college campuses are in “support of the awful terror attacks on Israel by Hamas.”

    Conoley makes good money squelching pro-Palestine voices from her campus perch while she oversees the crackdown on the free speech of students and faculty protesting genocide. In 2022, she made $479,505, a 7% jump from 2021. In addition to her salary, she enjoys luxury housing that is paid for by the university.

    “[While] Conoley has used her platform for many years to freely express her pro-Israel perspective without any fear of retaliation or harassment, unfortunately, this has not been the case for pro-Palestine faculty and students,” claims Prof. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson. “In contrast, we face increasing hostility, harassment, and apparently now an unequal enforcement of the university’s restrictive Time, Place, and Manner policy when we exercise our constitutionally protected speech to oppose the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

    Conoley also recently spoke at an ADL co-sponsored event last April called “Shining a Light,” where she addressed the crackdown on alleged campus antisemitism.

    The Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has condemned the targeting of the CSU-5. In a letter to Patricia A. Pérez, Associate Vice President of Faculty Affairs, ACLU free speech staff attorney Jonathan Markovitz argues, “[the university’s] policy very likely violates the First Amendment and Liberty of Speech Clause of the California Constitution … I am also concerned by the possibility that the University may have sent the warning … because of disapproval with their political positions, or with the fact that they have been outspoken in defense of Palestinian rights in the past.”

    Sadly, CSULB isn’t the only school working to silence students speaking out against the genocide in Gaza. Last week, two Columbia University student protestors were arrested, and several other Columbia faculty members were targeted, including Jewish law Prof. Katherine Franke, who is now facing termination. Columbia banned JVP and SJP chapters from campus, and NYU (my alma mater) has opened over 180 disciplinary cases against pro-Palestine students and faculty. The list goes on…

    It doesn’t seem to matter that the actions of these universities are antithetical to the very project of academia. “Academic freedom protects and nurtures the intellectual pursuit of knowledge and justice,” says CSULB Associate Prof. Azza Basarudi. “We are guided by the principle that knowledge production is inherently critical of colonial and imperial projects and repressive power structures.”

    In addition to notifying faculty that they had allegedly violated the TPM policy, students must also abide by the rules of a new interim TPM. On August 19, Cal State’s Chancellor’s Office sent a system-wide email to all 23 California State Universities stating that no encampments would be allowed on campus. Students are now prohibited from blocking access to buildings or wearing face coverings to conceal their identities. While the TPM immediately applies to Cal State students, the updated TPM does not impact faculty until their union, the California Faculty Association (CFA), meets and confers with university management. Implementing this TPM before the union agrees to the policy changes, say CFA representatives, violates California’s Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act (HEERA).

    However, the CSU-5 is being accused of violating the old 2023-2024 TPM in what they believe is apparent retaliation for their piece on Cal State Long Beach’s ties to Boeing.

    “There cannot be a Palestine exception to academic freedom,” adds Prof. Azza Basarudim, who admits they won’t stop until the genocide stops. “The university’s role is to support faculty and students, not to give in to pressure and interference from external donors, corporations, alums, and political lobbyists.”

    If there’s a silver lining to all of these attacks on free speech, it’s that efforts to stifle dissent are only likely to backfire and reinvigorate the pro-Palestine movement on college campuses. As long as children continue to be killed in Gaza and blood is shed in the West Bank, a new generation of students and professors of conscience like the CSU-5 will rise to pressure their employers to sever ties with industries that profit from genocide.

    The post Cal State Professors Targeted for Exposing School’s Ties to Israel’s Genocide in Gaza appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Last month, I reported on the Biden administration’s new nuclear doctrine to prepare the United States for a coordinated nuclear challenge from Russia, China, and North Korea.  The Biden doctrine revives the concept of “escalation dominance,” one of the main drivers of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s.  

    President Biden’s neglect of arms control and disarmament means that the next president will inherit a nuclear landscape that is more threatening and volatile than any other since the Cuban missile crisis more than 60 years ago.  The Cuban missile crisis, however, was a wake up call for both President John F. Kennedy and General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, leading to a series of arms control and disarmament treaties beginning with the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963.  

    We need another wake up call.

    Currently, there is little discussion of reviving arms control and disarmament.  Instead the mainstream media and many commentators are making the case for additional nuclear weaponry and the modernization of weapons currently in the nuclear arsenal.  The influential British newsweekly, The Economist, is leading the way in this campaign, arguing that the concept of deterrence demands that the United States build up and modernize its nuclear arsenal.  An oped in the New York Times this week, written by the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, argues that credible deterrence will prevent our adversaries from “even considering a nuclear strike against America or its allies.”

    Deterrence requires that nuclear weapons must be in a high state of readiness in order to address the danger of surprise attack, which increases the possibility of unintentional use of nuclear weapons.  We need a discussion of alternatives to deterrence, such as negotiations for confidence-building measures as well as arms control and disarmament.

    Instead, we are getting a discussion of the need for low-yield nuclear weapons.  The Economist and others have been making the case for such weapons—20 kilotons of explosive power, roughly Hiroshima-sized—that can be delivered with “extreme precision and less collateral damage.”  U.S. think tanks, such as the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), have argued that the “line between low-yield tactical nuclear weapons and precision-guided conventional weapons in terms of their operational effects and perceived impact is blurring,” and that “nuclear arms are more efficient at destroying large-area targets.”

    The current discussion is dangerously reminiscent of the nuclear discussion of the 1950s, which was dominated by false notions of a vast Soviet superiority in deployed nuclear ballistic missiles, the so-called “missile gap,” as well as the so-called “bomber gap” regarding strategic aircraft.  The conventional wisdom in the defense community was that we were facing a powerful enemy that was undertaking costly efforts to exploit the potential of nuclear weapons in order to gain unchallenged global dominance.  Is history abut to repeat itself, particularly in view of exaggerated concerns regarding greater threats from both China and North Korea as well as the possibility of Sino-Russian collusion?

    Henry Kissinger, the most famous and most controversial American diplomat of the 20th century, was responsible for initiating the idea that nuclear powers could wage a war that would involve limited use of nuclear weapons.  In his “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” Kissinger made the case for limited uses of nuclear weapons, which attracted him to Richard Nixon who made Kissinger the national security adviser in 1969.  It was fifteen years before a U.S. president—Ronald Reagan— and a Soviet leader—Mikhail Gorbachev—agreed that a “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” and that the two sides must not “seek to achieve military superiority.”  The initiative for these statements originated with Gorbachev, and they received greater attention in Soviet media than in their U.S. counterparts.

    Now, we are facing a disturbing situation that finds the United States modernizing its nuclear arsenal at great cost; China ending its doctrine of limited nuclear deterrence and expanding its nuclear arsenal, and Russia threatening the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine and issuing warnings of a World War III.  Russian publications are discussing the possibility of placing a nuclear weapons in space.  U.S. defense analysts project that China could have as many as 1,000 nuclear warheads over the next ten years.  

    Washington’s “Nuclear Employment Guidance” is based on the threat of nuclear coordination between Moscow and Beijing, but there is no evidence of such coordination and it’s unlikely that these former adversaries are formalizing their nuclear and strategic plans.  U.S. guidance is based on worst-case analysis, but there needs to be a recognition of similar worst-case analyses in Moscow and Beijing. In view of greatly expanded U.S. defense spending over the past several years as well as the discussion of a strategic missile defense, Russia and China have much to worry about.  Even worse, the United States quietly announced in July that it will deploy conventionally armed ground-launched intermediate-range missiles in Germany on a rotational basis beginning in 2026.  This is madness.

    Iran’s nuclear program is also expanding in size and sophistication, and North Korea has a nuclear arsenal that rivals three nuclear powers—Israel, India, and Pakistan—that were never part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  Iran’s Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.  North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has similarly indicated an interest in discussing nuclear matters with the United States.

    The only remaining nuclear disarmament treaty—the New START Treaty—expires in February 2026, and there is no indication that U.S. and Russian officials are planning for talks to renew the treaty.  The election year predictably finds Kamala Harris and Donald Trump boasting about maintaining and improving U.S. military prowess.  Next to nothing is known about Harris’s view of nuclear matters, and the thought of facing a new nuclear age with Trump back in the White House is positively frightening.  We are confronting this difficult situation because the Bush and Trump administrations abrogated two of the most important disarmament treaties in history: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.

    It’s time for the nuclear experts of the nine nuclear powers as well as the general public to read M.G. Sheftall’s “Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses.”  These first-person accounts educate and re-educate the global community on the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago.  The accounts of gut-wrenching recollections should be enough to make any sane individual reject the notion of “modernizing” nuclear weapons or discussing “tactical” uses of nuclear weapons.  

    The danger of nuclear war resulting from an accident, an unauthorized action, the danger of alert practices, or false alarms should never be far from our thinking.  Another nuclear arms race in the current international environment would be far more threatening and terrifying than any aspect of the Soviet-American rivalry in the Cold War.

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  • General Motors HQ, Detroit. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

    The evidence suggests that empires often react to periods of their own decline by over-extending their coping mechanisms. Military actions, infrastructure problems, and social welfare demands may then combine or clash, accumulating costs and backlash effects that the declining empire cannot manage. Policies aimed to strengthen empire—and that once did—now undermine it. Contemporary social changes inside and outside the empire can reinforce, slow, or reverse the decline. However, when decline leads leaders to deny its existence, it can become self-accelerating. In empires’ early years, leaders and the led may repress those among them who stress or merely even mention decline. Social problems may likewise be denied, minimized, or, if admitted, blamed on convenient scapegoats—immigrants, foreign powers, or ethnic minorities—rather than linked to imperial decline.

    The U.S. empire, audaciously proclaimed by the Monroe Doctrine soon after two independence wars won against Britain, grew across the 19th and 20th centuries, and peaked during the decades between 1945 and 2010. The rise of the U.S. empire overlapped with the decline of the British empire. The Soviet Union represented limited political and military challenges, but never any serious economic competition or threat. The Cold War was a lopsided contest whose outcome was programmed in from its beginning. All of the U.S. empire’s potential economic competitors or threats were devastated by World War II. The following years found Europe losing its colonies. The unique global position of the United States then, with its disproportional position in world trade and investment, was anomalous and likely unsustainable. An attitude of denial at the time that decline was all but certain morphed only too readily into the attitude of denial now that the decline is well underway.

    The United States could not prevail militarily over all of Korea in its 1950–53 war there. The United States lost its subsequent wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The NATO alliance was insufficient to alter any of those outcomes. U.S. military and financial support for Ukraine and the massive United States and NATO sanctions war against Russia are failures to date and are likely to remain so. U.S. sanctions programs against Cuba, Iran, and China have failed too. Meanwhile, the BRICS alliance counteracts U.S. policies to protect its empire, including its sanctions warfare, with increasing effectiveness.

    In the realms of trade, investment, and finance, we can measure the decline of the U.S. empire differently. One index is the decline of the U.S. dollar as a central bank reserve holding. Another is its decline as a means of trade, loans, and investment. Finally, consider the U.S. dollar’s decline alongside that of dollar-denominated assets as internationally desired means of holding wealth. Across the Global South, countries, industries, or firms seeking trade, loans, or investments used to go to London, Washington, or Paris for decades; they now have other options. They can go instead to Beijing, New Delhi, or Moscow, where they often secure more attractive terms.

    Empire confers special advantages that translate into extraordinary profits for firms located in the country that dominates the empire. The 19th century was remarkable for its endless confrontations and struggles among empires competing for territory to dominate and thus for their industries’ higher profits. Declines of any one empire could enhance opportunities for competing empires. If the latter grabbed those opportunities, the former’s decline could worsen. One set of competing empires delivered two world wars in the last century. Another set seems increasingly driven to deliver worse, possibly nuclear world wars in this century.

    Before World War I, theories circulated that the evolution of multinational corporations out of merely national mega-corporations would end or reduce the risks of war. Owners and directors of increasingly global corporations would work against war among countries as a logical extension of their profit-maximizing strategies. The century’s two world wars undermined those theories’ appearance of truth. So too did the fact that multinational mega-corporations increasingly purchased governments and subordinated state policies to those corporations’ competing growth strategies. Capitalists’ competition governed state policies at least as much as the reverse. Out of their interaction emerged the wars of the 21st century in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza. Likewise from their interaction, rising U.S.-China tensions emerged around Taiwan and the South China Sea.

    China presents a unique analytical problem. The private capitalist half of its hybrid economic system exhibits growth imperatives parallel to those agitating economies where 90–100 percent of enterprises are private capitalist in organization. The state-owned-and-operated enterprises comprising the other half of China’s economy exhibit different drives and motivations. Profit is less their bottom line than it is for private capitalist enterprises. Similarly, the Communist Party’s rule over the state—including the state’s regulation of the entire Chinese economy—introduces other objectives besides profit, ones that also govern enterprise decisions. Since China and its major economic allies (BRICS) comprise the entity now competing with the declining U.S. empire and its major economic allies (G7), China’s uniqueness may yield an outcome different from past clashes of empires.

    In the past, one empire often supplanted another. That may be our future with this century becoming “China’s” as previous empires were American, British, and so on. However, China’s history includes earlier empires that rose and fell: another unique quality. Might China’s past and its present hybrid economy influence China away from becoming another empire and rather toward a genuinely multipolar global organization instead? Might the dreams and hopes behind the League of Nations and the United Nations achieve reality if and when China makes that happen? Or will China become the next global hegemon against heightened resistance from the United States, bringing the risk of nuclear war closer?

    A rough historical parallel may shed some additional light from a different angle on where today’s class of empires may lead. The movement toward independence of its North American colony irritated Britain sufficiently for it to attempt two wars (1775–83 and 1812–15) to stop that movement. Both wars failed. Britain learned the valuable lesson that peaceful co-existence with some co-respective planning and accommodation would enable both economies to function and grow, including in trade and investment both ways across their borders. That peaceful co-existence extended to allowing the imperial reach of the one to give way to that of the other.

    Why not suggest a similar trajectory for U.S.-China relations over the next generation? Except for ideologues detached from reality, the world would prefer it over the nuclear alternative. Dealing with the two massive, unwanted consequences of capitalism—climate change and unequal distributions of wealth and income—offers projects for a U.S.-China partnership that the world will applaud. Capitalism changed dramatically in both Britain and the United States after 1815. It will likely do so again after 2025. The opportunities are attractively open-ended.

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

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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard D. Wolff.

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  • Photo by Sarah

    Polish-British author Joseph Conrad wrote that colonialism is not a pretty thing when one looks at it closely. Conrad, a subject of two colonial empires, well understood the institution’s grotesque features.

    When a group of people, let’s call them Group A, occupies the territory of another population—we can call them Group B—and implants its own people on Group B’s land, social relations rapidly deteriorate. A person can comb history books and find precisely zero exceptions to this.

    The oppression and conflict that Conrad said invariably came from various forms of colonialism 100 years ago equally apply to the twenty-first century. I especially have in mind Israel’s illegal occupation of the remaining 20 percent of historic Palestine (Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem) and Russia’s illegal occupation of about 25 percent of Ukraine (the Donbas region in the east and the Crimean Peninsula).

    Here are some typical features of colonial expansion:

    Group A steals much of the land that has been consigned to Group B by international law, consensus, convention, or treaty. But Group A gives all those things two enthusiastic middle fingers. Its leadership wants what it wants and sends in the troops. They throw many people from Group B out of their homes, and where they end up is none of Group A’s concern.

    For those from Group B who get to stay in their homes (for now), soldiers from Group A can with impunity come into those homes and take away whomever they wish without charge. Detainees can be gone for days, months, or years. The captives can be children or grown-ups. They can be students, militants, soldiers, protestors, professors, bakers, nurses, or farmers.

    Some return with physical marks on their bodies. Then, of course, there is the inevitable sexual violence. Many return with deep psychological scars. They are sometimes not recognizable to others and often not even to themselves. Some never return in any sense to the lives they led before the men wearing foreign uniforms and insignia showed up on their doorstep.

    Group A’s army also allows its civilian settlers, many of whom are religious fanatics, or uber-nationalists (there is little difference between them in my view), or people who just want a pleasant life subsidized by their state, to harass, beat, steal from, and shoot at civilians from Group B.

    The army also lets them commit arson, burning homes and the people inside them. If Group A can’t have it, they will burn it down.

    Also, Group A’s army uses civilians from Group B as human shields when they want to go into areas where Group B’s civilian population, after years of abuse, has cultivated a deep hatred for the soldiers of Group A.

    Group A’s army and government severely restrict the movement of Group B’s people. There are curfews. There are also roads and facilities for its own citizens, but people from Group B are suspect and are not allowed to use those designated roads or facilities. If they use them, they will be punished.

    After all, Group B is less than human. Some places are fit for people, not two-legged beasts.

    Group A recruits some from group B to be police, to surveil their own population. They collaborate so they can have a molecule of power and privilege, anything that elevates them a millimeter above the collective heads of the other two-legged beasts.

    Group A’s leaders encourage defaming, impeding, or destroying the cultural practices and artifacts of Group B. They ransack, bulldoze, or burn cultural centers, places of worship, museums, schools, and community centers. Whatever preserves a people’s memory or propels their culture into the future has to be dissolved. At the very least, those cultures are interrogated and found to be substandard.

    Members of Group A believe that Group B has no identity. Pseudo historian and amateur ethnographer Vladimir Putin said there are no Ukrainians. That is a strange statement given that he is at war with Ukrainians, not faceless, nameless phantoms. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, an extreme right-wing figure who has helped to author Palestinian suffering and dispossession, claims there is no such thing as a Palestinian. One wonders whom he has worked so hard to expel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also implied that there are no Palestinians when he said that a group of people called Palestinians have no right to a state.

    Group A can then endow itself with a rationale: Non-people don’t have a claim to anything. Only human beings can own land and houses. Only people can have a country.

    Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi said that it’s far easier to do horrible things to those who have been turned into non-people. I don’t know if Netanyahu has read him, but it seems that the Israeli prime minister regularly puts a version of the dehumanization that Levi observed into practice. In fact, Netanyahu has made a career of it.

    However, all this cannot go on forever, so a minority of people from Group B sometimes do horrible things to the soldiers or civilians of Group A. They do it out of vengeance, the pain of irrevocable loss, or a doomed attempt at deterrence. At root, there is the desperation of a people with little or nothing left to lose.

    Speaking of writers, if Putin ever read Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work, he read it poorly. Dostoevsky’s novels feature characters who feel they have little left to lose. When people’s lives are denuded of meaning and severed from human connection, they can become very dangerous. Powerful sociopaths, like Putin and Netanyahu, are often blind to this simple fact of cause and effect.

    So, it’s not about religion or some genetically endowed hatred for Group Such-and-Such. It’s the conditions that Group A creates and imposes, and their demonization of an entire (non-) people that compels a fraction of Group B to take it upon themselves to wield a knife, fire a gun, or strap on a bomb.

    In addition to dealing with desperate individuals, if a colonizer only manages to dominate part of a place or incompletely suppresses it, and that place still has an army, then they are up against lots of angry, traumatized people who have guns and training. Currently, Putin is facing this dilemma.

    Group A always prefers expansion over the security of its people. It is willing to expose them to severe threats so it can get what it wants. And what it wants is to grow in its rapid, chaotic, unmeasured manner, like a collection of cancer cells, even if the malformed mass kills off some of its own. Planners know the risks, but they are willing to accept them even though most of the rest of us do not.

    Colonialisms past or present produced and continue to produce control, power, and wealth. They also generated and continue to generate oceans of violence and misery.

    You do not, dear reader, need to be a trained historian or political scientist (I am not) to apply these scenarios, to one degree or another, to what is happening today in various places around the world.

    Sometimes, there is little we can do to stop human rights abuses and violations of international law that are the results of colonialism; at other times, there is much we can do. In the cases of Ukraine and Palestine, there is much we can do.

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  • Aug. 21, 2024, day three of the DNC, thousands of protesters from Chicago’s “Little Palestine” marched in support of Gaza and called on Kamala Harris to endorse an arms embargo on Israel and a permanent ceasefire. Sheri Maali, center, with friends, said “Holding out our votes” could force Harris to agree to the movement’s demands. Credit: Arun Gupta

    It’s not that the Democrats did not show any concern about Palestinians at the Democratic National Convention. They showed extraordinary concern given the lengths they went to erase them from Kamala’s coronation.

    Afterwards the Democrats seemed ecstatic that a little genocide didn’t disrupt their joy. But there were still plenty of protests and signs of divisions that could pose problems with Harris’s path to election especially as student protesters look to reinvigorate the movement.

    One high-profile protest took place inside the convention center on the first night as Joe Biden spoke. Delegates unfurled a banner reading, “Stop Arming Israel.” Nadia Ahmad, a Florida delegate for Harris, held up the banner along with a Jewish superdelegate. Ahmad says other delegates hit her “We Love Joe” signs. It revealed how liberals are more enraged at those opposing genocide than those committing genocide.

    During the DNC there were countless press conferences, vigils, street theater, and small protests in support of Gaza. There were plenty of cranks, conspiracists, and insurrectionists too. One wiry middle-aged Californian who drove a van across country outfitted with lightboards sat next to the park where protests were held and screamed “Nazis,” “Zionists,” and crude sexual slurs against Harris over his sound system. In 30 seconds of conversation he claimed “Jews control the government” and in another 15 seconds he veered into JFK conspiracy theories.

    The second night, “Behind Enemy Lines” organized a Judean People’s Front Suicide Squad-style mob to bring the fight to the Israeli consulate under the slogan “Make it great like 1968.” They were swept aside by cops outnumbering them ten to one.

    On three separate days, lively pro-Palestine marches drawing up to 3,000 people stepped off from Union Park, a half mile from the DNC. They called for an arms embargo on Israel and a permanent ceasefire. While protesters were defiant, the marches should have attracted ten times as many people given the popular outrage and gravity of the situation.

    At one exit from the convention center, protesters read names and ages of children murdered by Israel. One reporter said delegates chanted “USA!” at them. In a video, DNC attendees can be seen covering their ears as protesters read the names of children. One attendee shrieked in mockery, “18-years-old!”

    No Palestinians Allowed

    On the third day, two dozen delegates and supporters of a ceasefire staged a sit-in outside the VIP gate and inside the convention fencing. Protesters demanded that the DNC allow a Palestinian to take the stage to speak on Gaza. The Democrats refused.

    The Washington Post claimed the DNC made concessions to Palestinians. Ha’aretz said, “The DNC slams the door on Gaza advocates.” (The Israeli press is typically more unbiased about the U.S. relationship with Palestine and Israel.)

    The Democrats are mad that Palestinians dare protest their extermination. A supporter with the Uncommitted National Movement told me a long list of Palestinian speakers was presented to the DNC. All of them were rejected.

    One rejected speaker was Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. He is with the Atlantic Council, a pro-Zionist think tank. Alkhatib says he is “anti-Hamas.” He said:

    “There were several attempts to get me on the DNC stage to speak and share a message of healing and unity – all were unsuccessful. I even offered to bring a hostage family and talk together about ending the war in Gaza, releasing the hostages, and confronting hate and extremism.”

    Sit with that for a minute. A pro-Zionist, anti-Hamas Palestinian who offered to take the stage with a hostage family wasn’t good enough for the DNC.

    Consider a second rejected speaker, Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman. Mother Jones called her “a safe last resort.” Romman said, “If an elected official in a swing state who is Palestinian cannot make it on that stage nobody else can.” She added that her speech was “frankly, very sanitized.”

    Watch her speech. It is very short and mild. It is Midwestern grandma at Taco Bell mild.

    What does it say that Palestinians who are deferential to Israel, a state and society seething with genocide, are still not good enough to speak at the DNC?

    Harris is simply bowing to the diktats of the Democrats’ true constituency: billionaires and national-security interests. They tend to unconditionally back Israel, the most important U.S. client state. (For a primer on how Israel has been central to American global power, read Chomsky.)

    The Power Broker

    Take Haim Saban, one of the most prominent Democratic megadonors. He has said, “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.” Saban drops staggering sums on politics. He gave $16 million to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, $7 million for a new DNC building, more to liberal think tanks, organizes fundraisers that raise millions, and “as much as $30 million to the Clinton Foundation when Hillary was secretary of State,” according to Mondoweiss.

    Unsurprisingly, Saban throws his weight around and is an extremist on his one issue. When Biden paused a shipment of 3,500 U.S. bombs in April slated to kill Palestinian civilians, Saban harangued senior White House officials, “Bad, Bad, Bad, decision, on all levels, Pls reconsider.”

    Saban also told the White House, “Let’s not forget that there are more Jewish voters, who care about Israel, than Muslim voters that care about Hamas.”

    Let that sink in. Israel claims it is fighting Hamas. However, Israel equates all Palestinians with Hamas, meaning they are all targets. That logic animates Israel’s genocide of Gaza, which “is quite explicit, open, and unashamed,” as Jewish Currents states.

    Saban is doing the same thing. He is equating millions of Americans with Hamas. To Saban and his cohort, all Arabs equal Muslims, all Muslims equal Hamas, therefore any Palestinian who speaks at the DNC is Hamas.

    Why else would Kamala — the party’s decider — reject Ruwa Romman’s milquetoast speech or one by a pro-Zionist, anti-Hamas Palestinian?

    From an electoral standpoint it makes no sense. Having a Palestinian speak would have placated the Uncommitted movement, the bulk of voters willing to withhold votes until Harris endorses an arms embargo and permanent ceasefire. The issue is wildly popular among Democratsmore popular overall than abortion rights. Eighty-three percent support a permanent ceasefire and only 9 percent oppose it.

    Instead, Harris is risking losing hundreds of thousands of votes in a must-win state like Michigan as she sees that as less important than losing support from Saban.

    Saban’s influence outweighs millions of voters. In a 2010 profile in The New Yorker, Saban comes across as a dishonest manipulative power broker who is courted by U.S. presidents and Israeli prime ministers. Last September, Mondoweiss wrote, “Biden’s policy is now being scripted by Haim Saban, whose money he needs for the 2024 campaign.”

    While that probably gives Saban too much power, he is part of a group of oligarchs working feverishly to crush any opposition to unconditional U.S. support for Israel.

    Biden’s “Victory Fund” tilted toward Jewish megadonors from Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street, as Ha’aretz put it. Of the fund’s top 25 donors, nine who gave nearly a million dollars or more (some accompanied by matching donations from spouses) were pro-Zionist. Now that Harris is having her moment in the sun, pro-Israel megadonors have flocked to her blossoming campaign.

    Dollars for Genocide

    It must be emphasized that Biden and U.S. officials protect Israel not because of money but because it is vital to maintaining American Empire regionally and globally. Benjamin Netanyahu is unabashed about Israel’s role, calling it a “mighty aircraft carrier” for the United States.

    Neither are the many pro-Israel billionaires successful in shaping U.S. policy because they are Jewish. They are successful because Israel serves U.S. power.

    But we should not ignore the reality that moguls like Saban also support Jewish supremacism and the genocide. Days after Oct. 7, real-estate mogul Barry Sternlicht hit up Jewish billionaires for million-dollar donations for a media campaign. He wrote, “Palestinian suffering will surely erode [Israel’s] current empathy in the world community … We must get ahead of the narrative,” according to Semafor.

    Sternlicht claimed scenes of “civilian Palestinian suffering” may have been “fabricated by Hamas,” Semafor said. He aimed to raise $50 million and a matching donation from “a large Jewish charity” for a media blitz to “define Hamas” as “not just the enemy of Israel but of the United States.”

    Sternlicht enlisted media moguls Michael Bloomberg, David Geffen, CNN owner David Zaslav, and talent agent Ari Emanuel, investors Bill Ackman, Marc Rowan, Michael Milken and Nelson Peltz, and tech leaders Eric Schmidt and Michael Dell — who combined have half-a-trillion dollars in wealth.

    Their wealth, however, could not sway a world horrified by Israel’s atrocities in Gaza that’s been livestreamed for nearly a year. But the super-rich have other levers of power other than money, and they put it to work against student protesters.

    Pro-Israel billionaires scheme like cartoon villains in the Legion of Doom. During student protests this spring against the genocide, “billionaires and business titans [were] working to shape U.S. public opinion of the war in Gaza,” The Washington Post reported. The newspaper obtained thousands of verified messages from a WhatsApp chat group where the billionaires coordinated actions.

    They lent their cash-engorged muscle to the “Israeli government, the U.S. business world and elite universities” to “help win the war” of public opinion, said the Post.

    Plutocrats were particularly incensed by the peaceful student protests at Columbia University. They bullied university administrators and trustees to let NYC Mayor Eric Adams send in a notoriously violent police unit so students could be “dragged off campus,” and they bragged of funding private snoops to work with NYPD intel to disrupt student protests.

    The masters of the universe were not above getting in the trenches to slug it out. They amplified Zionist social media provocateurs, promoted propaganda films, organized “anti-Hamas” social media campaigns, coordinated with the Israeli government to influence media, and shopped around for Black celebrities to enlist in their crusade like “Jay-Z, LeBron James or Alicia Keys.”

    Zionist influence-seeking has become more brazen with the genocide. AIPAC unleashed a $100 million war chest that torpedoed two members of “The Squad,” Rep. Jamaal Bowman and Rep. Cori Bush. In June, some Democrats voted for a bill that amounts to genocide revisionism out of fear that groups like AIPAC would “Jamaal” them. (The bill prevents the State Department from using casualty figures from Gaza’s Health Ministry. The statistics are widely considered accurate but they now may be a vast undercount with Israel’s destruction of the health infrastructure.)

    We Have the Power

    Given the power of pro-Israel forces, liberals claim Harris is doing what she needs to get elected. This is lazy thinking. Neither AIPAC or Israel is invincible. AIPAC did not make a serious attempt to dislodge the two House members most outspoken about the genocide, Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib. It dropped a $4.5 million bomb in a California primary to defeat State Sen. Dave Min, who is running to succeed progressive champion Rep. Katie Porter, but that turned out to be a dud as Min won.

    As far as Israel goes, it is “already becoming an international pariah,” says Ha’aretz, and its economy has tanked. Nearly 10 percent of the population is out of action with 120,000 Israelis displaced internally, and up to 470,000 others who have bailed since Oct. 7 or never returned from summer vacation overseas because of the war.

    Israel is on the ropes, and Democrats are in denial. Its platform reads like AIPAC wrote it. In her DNC speech, Harris spoke of “dignity, security, freedom and self-determination” for Palestinians but couldn’t say ceasefire, occupation, or settlements. Harris, however, felt no qualms about dog whistling for genocide — endorsing “Israel’s right to defend itself” — and promoting the Oct. 7 rape hoax.

    “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on Oct. 7, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.”

    Compare what Harris said to what George W. Bush said in 2002. His words were far bolder, if as meaningless as Harris’s.

    “Permanent occupation threatens Israel’s identity and democracy. A stable, peaceful Palestinian state is necessary to achieve the security that Israel longs for. So I challenge Israel to take concrete steps to support the emergence of a viable, credible Palestinian state. … Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories must stop.”

    Harris is an extremist not just on Gaza. She has vowed, “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world. She says she will be tougher on the border than Trump, meaning more violent and racist, she wants to keep building Trump’s border wall, and she supports fracking.

    Migration, imperialism, genocide, and climate change are the top issues facing humanity. On each issue, Harris will be as bad if not worse than Trump. (Trump may want to “Drill, Baby, Drill!” but one pro-Trump oil billionaire says the oil and gas industry is already “producing everything we can” under Biden and Harris.)

    The decision by Harris and her campaign to erase Palestinians is a choice. They are choosing to stand with the plutocrats and against the people. Harris could choose to run a Bernie Sanders-style campaign and call for an arms embargo. He showed that a campaign based on peace and prosperity could do as well or better than one based on guns and crumbs.

    Harris, however, is a product of a system ruled by Wall Street and the war machine. She is another cynical opportunist, albeit with better memes and branding.

    Harris is explicit that Israel’s genocide of Gaza will continue under her. But for now we have power over her: The power to withhold our votes. That’s what she fears, and we need to make our threat credible that her only path to election is by ending the genocide.

    We need to proclaim loudly, “No arms embargo, no vote.” The more of us who refuse to vote for Killer Kamala, the more likely it is that Harris will realize sticking with the ruling class is a losing proposition.

    The post Why is Kamala Harris Erasing Palestinians? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair


    The horrors of the Second World War sparked the creation of international organizations and international laws to ensure that such horrors would never occur again.  The center piece of these international bodies was the United Nations and its regional and functional agencies that were designed to provide international guardrails to limit the use of force.  The National Security Act of 1947 was designed in part to make sure that U.S. administrations played an active role in managing and even transforming the international community.

    There was an economic component as well, including the Bretton Woods System, which included the World Bank to stimulate international development in those countries most devastated by the war.  The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was designed to manage international trade, and the International Monetary Fund was created to monitor the balance of payments.  U.S. officials were at the center of all of these institutions, placing Washington at the center of the world of multilateralism.  The current global trend toward isolationism and ultra-nationalism is threatening these institutions.

    As a result of increased international activity, the staff of the White House grew from several dozen individuals in the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt to the current level of more than several thousand in the administration of President Joe Biden.  The bureaucratic growth was marked by the Council of Economic Advisers (1946), the National Security Council (1947), the Special Trade Representative ((1963), the Office of Management and Budget (1970), and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (1976).  The Supreme Court has demonstrated exceptional deference to the powers of the president in the field of national security, and the U.S. Congress largely accepted without question the U.S. role in the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and a variety of other international organizations and security arrangements.  

    Nevertheless, there are too many engines of chaos in the international community that point to greater violence far beyond the boundaries of the immediate protagonists.  Two and a half years of war between Russia and Ukraine threaten to engulf Central and Eastern Europe in a greater conflict. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, but that has not restricted his travels to member countries of the ICC let alone ameliorated his terrorist tactics in waging the war. 

    A year of war in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas threatens a greater regional conflict that could involve two major non-Arab players, the United States and Iran.  Again, the ICC is considering arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, but there has been no let up in the genocidal campaign that Israel is waging in Gaza or the forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.  Israeli use of U.S.-supplied weaponry is certainly inconsistent with international law, and points to U.S. complicity in Netanyahu’s war.  Only Britain thus far has demonstrated a willingness to limit the supply of certain weapons to Israel.

    Meanwhile, the West pays no attention to the global catastrophe that is Sudan, African’s third largest country, where millions have been displaced, tens of thousands have been slaughtered, and there may soon be a famine that will rival the famine that enveloped Ethiopia in the 1980s.  Like Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Gaza, the civil war in Sudan will be an engine for chaos far beyond its borders.  The nations that border Sudan are already fragile, particularly Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Libya.  There is arms smuggling throughout the region, and it is very likely that Sudan—like Libya—will split into two geographic parts.  And there is the added risk from outside participants—such as Russia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Iran— that supply the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) or the Rapid Support Forces RSF).  The ICC is currently gathering evidence of the crimes and atrocities committed by the SAF and the RSF.

    With the exception of the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928, which renounced war as an instrument of national policy, there are no international laws that regulate—let alone prevent—war.  Genocide and torture are banned by various protocols, but this has not gotten in the way of Putin, Netanyahu, or the Bush administration in fighting the Global War on Terror.  The atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were acts of terrorism because neither city was a strategic target, and the overall purpose was to force a Japanese civilian community to pressure its leaders to surrender to the United States, the very definition of terrorism.  

    U.S. atrocities in Vietnam should have led to a serious debate regarding the need to differentiate between military and civilian targets, but there has been no international discussion of the importance of agreeing to humane rules of war.  Meanwhile, tens of thousands of innocent civilians are being killed in Ukraine and Gaza, and more than 150,000 civilians have been slaughtered in Sudan.  

    Two decades of U.S. warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan led to large numbers of civilian deaths.  The Defense Department went to significant lengths to control and suppress information about the human cost of war. It invited U.S. journalists to “embed” with military units but required them to submit their stories to the military for pre-publication review in order to co-opt the embedded journalists and make independent and objective reporting more difficult. It has erased journalists’ footage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan. And it has refused to disclose statistics on civilian casualties. “We don’t do body counts,” General Tommy Franks once said.

    The United States is devoting insufficient attention and resources to the possibility of bilateral dialogue with potential adversaries that could ameliorate the international horrors that currently exist.  Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has stated that there are “no barriers” to nuclear negotiations with the United States.  There has been no response from the Biden administration. China wants the United States to ease its pressures on Beijing in order to stabilize bilateral relations and to enter discussions of nuclear matters.  At this point in time, President Joe Biden is the first U.S. president to avoid travel to China in more than 50 years.  Putin is looking for ways to reopen a dialogue with the United States, but Biden believes he has nothing to say to the Russian president.

    The Biden administration is taking credit for building an alliance system in Asia against China, rebuilding the alliance in Europe against Russia, and working to isolate Iran in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.  Impressive partnerships have been formed with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines in the Asia Pacific region; NATO has been expanded to its geographic limits in West and East Europe; and efforts are being made to encourage Arab nations in North Africa and the Middle East to isolate Iran.  

    Perhaps it’s time for Biden’s lame duck presidency to rest on its international laurels and find ways to engage three key adversaries (Russia, China, and Iran) in order to reduce the level of international risk and to manage the political indicators of more stable relations.  Crippling sanctions haven’t worked in limiting North Korea’s nuclear program, but perhaps diplomatic inducements should be given an opportunity.  The formation of the quasi-alliances could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy that will do more harm than good to the international scene. 

    The post The Disappearance of International Law appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • American zombies. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair

    Nature is not mute. It is man who is deaf.

    – Terence McKenna

    + The school year in America hasn’t officially opened until there’s been a school shooting.

    + School shootings are American Exceptionalism in action. No other country does them like we do. None even come close. USA! NRA! USA! NRA! USA! NRA!

    + A country that tolerates the routine shootings of its own school children as the cost of doing business in our weird notion of a “free society” is unlikely to feel any empathy for Palestinian children killed by the weapons we sell Israel. Violence is our chief export; indifference to the bloodshed is our national characteristic.

    + While crouched in a classroom with her classmates as bullets were firing from the shooter’s AR-25 down the hall, a  16-year-old student texted her mother “I know I’ve not been a perfect daughter. I love you. I’m sorry.” This is how we build character in America.

    + Two public school teachers were murdered today protecting their students. Let the smears on them as brainwashing purveyors of communism, gender ideology and critical race theory begin…

    + Last year, the shooter threatened to kill people at school. Because there wasn’t “probable cause,” the FBI made no arrests and Georgia lacks a red flag law, the local police didn’t remove guns from the then 13-year-old’s home.

    + The father of the Georgia school shooter told the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that he purchased the AR-15 rifle for his troubled son as a Christmas present, just as Jesus would’ve wanted his birth celebrated.

    + I wonder where Dad got the idea?

    Xmas card of Rep. Andy Ogles, GOP-TN.

    Xmas card of Rep. Lauren Boebert, GOP-CO.

    Xmas card from Nevada lawmaker Michele Fiore.

    Xmas message of Rep. Thomas Massey, GOP-KY.

    + Number of school shootings in the US by year…

    2024: 45
    2023: 82
    2022: 79
    2021: 73
    2020: 22 (Pandemic school closures)
    2019: 52
    2018: 44
    2017: 42
    2016: 51
    2015: 37
    2014: 36
    2013: 26
    2012: 13
    2011: 15
    2010: 13
    2009: 22
    2008: 18

    + States with the highest per capita school shootings since 2008

    Louisiana: 32 shootings; 0.69 shootings per 100,000 people
    Maryland: 32 shootings; 0.52 shootings per 100,000 people13 s
    Alabama: 25 shootings; 0.50 shootings per 100,000 people
    Tennessee: 33 shootings; 0.48 shootings per 100,000 people
    Mississippi: 13 shootings; 0.44 shootings per 100,000 people
    Arkansas: 13 shootings; 0.43 shootings per 100,000 people
    North Carolina: 41 shootings; 0.41 shootings per 100,000 people
    Georgia: 41 shootings; 0.38 shootings per 100,000 people

    +++

    + Of all the issues for Harris to break from Biden on, she decided to go easier on the one percent. Well, it proves that she can break from Joe and if she doesn’t on genocide in Gaza it’s simply because she doesn’t want to…

    + Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Republicans have won the national popular vote only once–in 2004, when Bush narrowly surpassed the ineptly run campaign of John Kerry.

    + The 2020 presidential election was the first time that any candidate received more votes than the number of eligible voters who chose not to vote.

    + US Presidential Election Results by % of Eligible Voters

    2020
    Biden: 34% (won), Didn’t Vote: 33%, Trump: 31%

    2016
    Didn’t Vote: 40%, HRC: 29%, Trump: 28% (won)

    2012
    Didn’t Vote: 41%, Obama: 30% (won), Romeny: 28%

    2008
    Didn’t Vote: 38%, Obama: 33% (won), McCain: 28%

    2004
    Didn’t Vote: 40%, Bush: 31% (won), Kerry: 29%

    2000
    Didn’t Vote: 46%, Gore: 26.2%, Bush: 26% (won)

    1996
    Didn’t Vote: 48%, Clinton 25% (won), Dole: 21%, 3rd Parties 6%

    1992
    Didn’t Vote: 42%, Clinton: 25% (won), Bush: 22%, Perot 11%

    1988
    Didn’t Vote: 47%, Bush: 28% (won), Dukakis 24%

    1984
    Didn’t Vote: 47%, Reagan 31% (won), Mondale: 22%

    1980
    Didn’t Vote: 47%, Reagan: 26% (won), Carter: 22%, 3rd Parties: 5%

    1976
    Didn’t Vote: 46%, Carter: 27% (won), Ford 26%

    + A rational person would return this endorsement to sender…

    Q: “What can we do about lowering the cost of daycare?”

    + JD Vance: “…Maybe Grandpa and Grandma want to help a little bit more. Maybe there’s an uncle/aunt who wants to help a little bit more…”

    + The problem is Grandpa died at 54, Grandma lost her leg to diabetes. Aunt Martha’s working two shifts at Dollar General and Uncle Elmer is a greeter at Walmart.

    + Maybe they can lower the legal child labor age for the morning shift at McDonald’s to 5?

    + Speaking of child care, here’s a word scramble from Vance’s running mate, speaking at the Economic Club of New York Forum…

    Q. If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care more affordable? And if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?

    Trump: Well, I would do that and we’re sitting down, you know that I was, uh, somebody, we had, uh, Senator Marco, uh, Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that, because, child care is child care. You couldn’t, you know, it’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly, and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send products into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers we’re talking about including childcare. That’s gonna take care, I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time. Coupled with, uh, the reductions I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country because I have to stay with childcare but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about here, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive it’s relatively speaking not very expensive compared to compared to the kind of numbers we’re going to be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. We’ll take care of other people. But this is about America first. It’s about making America great again. We have to do it. Because right now we’re a failing nation. Thank you for that question.”

    + What was it that Bobby Jr. said the other day about the nation deserving a leader who could speak complete sentences?

    + This you, Bobby? “Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”

    + The question to Trump was on childcare, the “answer” was about tariffs on China, which are supposedly not only going to pay for childcare but wipe out the deficit. When Trump took office in 2017, the federal deficit stood at $19.95 trillion, when he left in 2020 it had swelled to $27.75 trillion.

    + Total amount of US government spending $6.7 trillion.  Total value of US imported goods is around $3 trillion. Total revenue raised by previous Trumpariffs on China: $80 billion.

    + Trump continues to falsely claim that not a single US troop was killed in action for the last 18 months of his administration. According to the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System database, four times as many U.S. troops died in combat during Trump’s presidency than during the Biden-Harris administration. Do they have a similar database that tracks how many people US troops killed under each administration?

    + The data also reveals that military suicides reached new highs under Trump, not seen since the Vietnam War: 318 in 2017; 363 in 2018; 366 in 2019; and 406 in 2020. 

    = Today’s message on the afterlife comes from our contemporary Aquinas, Donald Trump: “…If you’re religious, you have, I think, a better feeling toward it. You know, you’re supposed to go to heaven, ideally not hell, but you’re supposed to go to heaven if you’re good.” Amen to that.

    + Two months after the French elections were won by the left coalition. Macron finally nominated a Prime Minister for France, His pick? Center-right politician Michel Barnier is known internationally as the top Brexit negotiator for the European Union. The choice of this career insider, a clone of Macron, is sure to infuriate most French voters who have rejected the centrist politics of Macronism in two consecutive elections.

    + Though he survived longer than Liz Truss, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party continues to bleed support, while the rightwing parties in the UK rebound…

    LABOR: 30% (-3)
    CONSERVATIVES: 26% (+2)
    REFORM: 19% (+1)
    LIBERAL DEMOCRATS: 11% (-1)
    GREEN: 7% (-1)

    + After 20-plus years of austerity and Brexit, the wages of British men are lower now in real terms than they were at the beginning of this century, down by 11% since 2000.

    + Tony Blair releases the Farage within: “We’ve swapped out single people coming from Europe … for families from Asia and Africa. How has this helped us?”

    + According to data from the World Bank, China is solidifying its status as the world’s global factory. Just 20 years ago, China’s industrial output stood at only a fifth of America’s and Europe’s total output. Now Chinese firms are producing as much industrial output as the US and the EU combined.

    + Two decades of data from the Critical Technology Tracker, published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, shows that China now leads in the development of 57 out of the 64 key technologies of the future, i.e. 90% of the technologies. The US leads the other 7.

    + Nvidia’s loss in market cap on Tuesday ($278.9 billion) was greater than the value of all the chips they have sold to GenAI companies.

    +++

    + 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…

    +++

    + How the Police are defunding the rest of the government…In Philly, police misconduct lawsuits have cost the city $60 million in the last year and a half. In NYC, the city has shelled our $2.2 billion to settle similar suits in the past decade.

    + The murder rate in Houston is on track to reach a five-year low, while fatal crashes could reach a five-year high by the end of the year.  In the first half of 2024. the number of people killed in Houston traffic crashes outnumbered the city’s homicides.

    + I assume you heard about the “corn sweat” that fueled record humidity levels across the Midwest in August. Where’s all of that corn going? More than 40 percent of it is manufactured for biofuel, while 36% goes to animal feed. Much of the rest is exported.

    + In an attempt to track plastic recycling in Houston, Brandy Deason, now dubbed the James Bond of Plastic, dropped Apple AirTags in her recycling bin, which led her to find out that the city of Houston has collected 250 tons of plastic since 2022 and not recycled any of it. Most of it hasn’t even gone to the recycling center.

    + During a hearing on Thursday on the election interference case in DC:

    Defense Counsel: Justice Thomas directed us to raise this issue…

    Judge Chutkan interjects:  “He directed you to do it?”

    Defense Counsel:  Well.. he didn’t direct us to…

    + Then a few minutes later this exchange took place…

    Defense Counsel: That’s what SCOTUS called for in writing and I’m an originalist. 

    Judge Chutkan, raises her eyebrows: You may be an originalist but I’m a trial judge.

    +++

    + First, they’ll come for the civil servants, then the professors…JD Vance on a podcast in 2021: “There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.” (Vance’s wife, mother-in-law and father-in-law were all university professors.)

    + JD Vance has also lashed out at “professional women” who put their careers above bearing children, claiming that their career choices put them on “a path of misery.” Vance’s wife, Usha, has three degrees, clerked for three federal judges, including John Roberts and Brett Kavanagh, and handled complex litigation and appeals for a top law firm. Sounds pretty miserable…

    + With the decriminalization of marijuana, binge drinking has declined significantly among men aged 18-25 (who spend $105 a month on alcohol) over the last 20 years. 

    + Globally, infant mortality rates have plummeted over the last 50 years. falling by more than two-thirds, from around 10% in 1974 to less than 3% today. A recent study published in The Lancet estimates that 40% of this decline has been driven by increased access to crucial vaccines. Based on these figures, vaccines are estimated to have saved at least 150 million children over the last 50 years.

    + A study out of the University of Pennsylvania found that high school students in Turkey who had access to ChatGPT while doing practice math problems did worse on a math test compared with students who didn’t have access to ChatGPT.

    + Transit time between cities, if the US had high-speed rail lines:

    NYC to Boston: 75 minutes
    Dallas to Houston: 75 minutes
    CHI to Minneapolis: 125 minutes
    CHI to Toronto: 150 minutes
    NYC to Montreal: 125 minutes
    Phoenix to LA: 117 minutes
    Vancouver to SEA to Portland: 90 minutes
    ATL to Charlotte: 75 minutes

    + Every day it seems Elon Musk reveals a little more of his true character. This week he endorsed the idea that democracy can exist only under the control of “high-status males.” 

    + They call it car bloat. While vehicles across most of the world are getting smaller and more efficient, the reverse is true in the US, where the size and weight of cars, trucks and SUVs are growing with lethal consequences on the highways. According to the Economist, “For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles.”

    + Steven Thrasher, whose vitally important book The Viral Underclass I quoted from in last week’s Roaming Charges about Kamala Harris’s disgusting defense of the use of unpaid prison labor to fight California’s wildfires, has been suspended from his teaching duties at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, while he’s being investigated for his actions during student-led anti-genocide protests on campus. Thrasher wrote on Twitter: “My fall LGBTQ reporting & virus classes were canceled & I’m not allowed to teach at Medill while I’m “investigated.” Whatever happens, I’ll be fine— like Medill,  I “write boldly & tell the truth fearlessly”— but I’ll neither stay nor go quietly.” The humiliation is entirely Northwestern’s, not Steve Thrasher’s, who distinguished himself by defending students against a brutal crackdown by police…

    +++

    + The second Russiagate is even more absurd than the first. The Biden-Harris Justice Department alleges that Russia funneled $10 million through RT to fund a Tennessee-based “content provider” called Tenet Media to distribute videos and commentary from some of the most ludicrous misfits in rightwing media: Tim Pool, Lauren Southren, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin. The Russians asked their US asset to recruit Benny Johnson and Tim Pool to make some content and offered $2 m a year each. Johnson said he wanted $5 million. Pool, who apparently didn’t realize how deep his funder’s pockets were, demanded a mere $100,000 per episode to inanely inveigh against the wokeness of the US military.

    + According to the indictment, Tucker Carlson’s video of his visit to a Russian grocery store was apparently too over-the-top to be spread as Russian propaganda on its US-based outlets…

    + The day after the RT indictments were announced, Putin sarcastically (I presume) endorsed Kamala Harris, saying he liked her laugh: “She laughs so expressively and infectiously that it means that she is doing well.”

    + Ken Klippenstein: “Covert operations by RT employees…targeted millions of Americans as unwitting victims of Russia’s psychological warfare,” DOJ said in a press release. But the influence campaign generated fewer views than my Twitter account; and I’m just a guy!”

    + Yet more proof that the sanctions aren’t harming the Russian economy, if they can throw away millions on these comical cretins…

    + Speaking of Russia, Steven Segal is Lavrov’s new Humanitarian Affairs envoy?

    + James Gaddis, a cartographer in the Florida DEP Office of Park Planning, was fired after he leaked details on the DeSantis administration’s secret plans to add golf courses, pickleball courts and lodges at state parks. Gaddis said he felt compelled to act in order to “stop the madness.”

    + In Louisiana, the primary medication to treat life-threatening postpartum hemorrhaging is being pulled off emergency carts because of a new state law that reclassified misoprostol as a controlled dangerous substance…

    + Trump comes out for the legalization of recreational marijuana (as long as you don’t smoke it in public). How things have changed in the last two decades. As Cockburn and I reported in our biography of Al Gore, in 2000 the Big Al still wanted to jail cancer patients, like his own sister, who were using marijuana to offset the side effects of chemotherapy…

    + Trump may have succeeded in outflanking Harris on what should have been a slam-dunk issue for her. As I reported in last week’s Roaming Charges, the Biden-Harris DEA told the NPR station in Columbus, Ohio last week that it still reserves the right to arrest people on federal marijuana possession charges, even in states that have legalized recreational marijuana. Once a prosecutor, always a prosecutor.

    + Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson thinks the Great Depression was an economic false flag event: “The Great Depression was pretty well planned … I know it really sounds like a conspiracy theory. I don’t completely understand it, but I just feel it in my bones…” Don’t tell Ron, but Hamas did it!

    + Roberto Bolaño’s business card…(Poet and Slacker)

    + King Harald V of Norway: “Norwegians are girls who love girls, boys who love boys, and girls and boys who love each other. Norwegians believe in God, Allah, Everything and Nothing.”

    + Still the greatest correction note of all time…

    Through the Smoke and Fiction of Books and Pages Burning

    Booked Up
    What I’m reading this week…

    Metamorphosis: How Insects are Changing Our World
    Erica McAlister & Adrian Washbourne
    (Smithsonian Books)

    Leaving the Twentieth Century: Situationist Revolutions
    McKenzie Wark
    (Verso)

    Creation Lake: a Novel
    Rachel Kushner
    (Simon and Schuster)

    Sound Grammar
    What I’m listening to this month…

    Smoke and Fiction
    X
    (Fat Possum)

    Roll With Me
    Duke Robillard
    (Stony Plain)

    Baila Mi Son
    Los Reyes 73
    (Mr. Bongo)

    Acquiescing to Our Own Enslavement

    “We have become a civilization based on work itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care or assistance from their communities. It’s as if we’ve collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.” – David Graeber

    The post Roaming Charges: Ain’t That America, Something to See, Baby? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim.

    September 1, 2024, twenty-seven Palestinian families woke up to mourn their loved ones, including at least 11 who were killed at a “safe” shelter, Safad School in Zaitune neighborhood east of Gaza city. On the same day, the Israeli occupying army recovered the bodies of six Israeli captives, who died as a direct or indirect result of an Israeli incursion into a tunnel in Rafah.

    By the end of the day, the smiling faces and names of these six Israelis were prominently featured across digital and print media, while the murdered Palestinians, were reduced to mere statistics, nameless and faceless. Both groups, however, share one tragic commonality: their demise was caused by the same killer. Bombing without discrimination is a murder without distinction.

    Despite being warned of the risk of attempting to release the prisoners by force, Netanyahu opted to sacrifice the Israeli captives to eliminate a political burden that could be seen as an obstacle to achieve his “war goals.” Their disappearance⎯by a deal or death⎯would free Netanyahu’s hand and ease pressure from the public, who otherwise supports his war of genocide in Gaza.

    Inarguably, there is an inherent interest for the Palestinian Resistance in protecting the life of the Israelis, simply to exchange them with Palestinian hostages held in Israeli jails. On the other hand, the Netanyahu coalition government has a political motive to reduce the value of Israeli prisoners in the hands of the Palestinian, and their death could be an option.

    The Israeli public protesting in the streets today, individually and collectively, are responsible for nurturing Netanyahu’s unrealistic war objectives. The findings in a Pew Research poll conducted last March and April revealed that 67% of Israelis supported Netanyahu’s “war goals.” In fact, a staggering 86% believed Gazans should not have self-governance, not even the Palestinian Authority. Less than half of Israelis supported prisoner exchange, and 60% opposed halting the war for any such exchange.

    In December, 2023, support for Netanyahu’s war goals was even higher, between 76 and 84 percent. It’s significant to mention that the support for the war among Israeli Jews mirrored that of Jewish Americans. In the U.S. 62% of American Jews approved the Israel’s war conduct, compared to 38% of the general American population.

    These statistics reflect a broader issue of deep-seated Israeli Jewish dehumanization of Palestinians. A bigotry germinated in the political Zionist culture, where in the Israeli religious and cultural plurality most Jews perceive themselves to be more equal than non-Jews. Before anyone from the professional victim pack cries out October 7, this predominant attitude among Israeli Jews is neither an anomaly nor a new phenomenon.

    In a polling eight years ago, 2016, an undisputed majority of Jewish Israelis (79%) believed that Jews are entitled to “preferential treatment” over non-Jews. When asked if Palestinians should be deported from their homes, the majority of Israelis agreed.

    Imagine, the American Jewish leadership protestation if 40% (1/2 of the Israeli percentage) of white or Christian Americans supported a preference over the other. In the meantime, progressive Americans can ruminate on their reaction if a similar percentage of Americans favored expelling Native Americans from their homes.

    Palestinians need not imagen, for this is what they face under the American financed Israeli Jewish apartheid.

    It is this Israeli public mindset that drove Netanyahu and his racist ministers to take a chance to recover the Israeli prisoners by force, calculating that success would yield significant political rewards from the same public who is protesting today. In case of failure, the retrieval of bodies reduces the value of the exchange for the Palestinian Resistance. In other words, the Netanyahu coalition favors to play victim over dead Israelis rather than releasing Palestinian hostages from Israeli jails.

    Currently, there are approximately 97 Israeli captives held in Gaza, with 33 confirmed dead, most due to Israel’s indiscriminate bombings. Additionally, Netanyahu has “successfully” recovered the bodies of 37 dead settlers in the past eleven months. In spite of this blunder, Netanyahu capitalized on the innate anti-Palestinian Israeli Jewish bigotry to maintain strong support among Israelis, and American Jews for the war of genocide in Gaza.

    This time, however, the same public who supported Netanyahu’s “war goals,” amassed in the streets of Tel Aviv blaming him for choosing to save his government coalition at the expense of Israeli prisoners. Even U.S. President Joe Biden broke his public silence blaming Netanyahu for not doing enough to reach a deal.

    Biden’s latest remarks contradicted his own government officials who falsely absolved the Israeli prime minister regarding the ceasefire negotiation. Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken claimed Netanyahu had accepted the so called “bridging proposal,” while CIA Deputy Director, David Cohen blamed the Palestinian Resistance for the breakdown in ceasefire talks.

    To contextualize the extent of the influence of the Israeli firsters within the Biden administration, consider recent developments in Israel. During last week’s Israeli cabinet meeting, the Minister of War stormed out accusing Netanyahu of endangering the lives of Israeli prisoners. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Israelis filled the streets protesting Netanyahu’s mercurial position on the ceasefire plan. This is while American officials and Israeli firsters, Sayanim, including Zionists like Blinken and Cohen, lie blatantly about Netanyahu’s acceptance of a ceasefire plan when in reality he added 11th-hour demands derailing the plan that was already agreed to by Palestinians.

    Western appeasement of Israel, based on the flawed belief that this would give them leverage over Israeli leaders, is rooted in a corrupt philosophy promoted by Israeli firsters, Sayanim. Israeli firsters in the West use their positions to sanctify Israeli Jewish life while they demonize the Palestinian life. In the media, the Sayanim excuse Israeli atrocities against Palestinians, and as government officials, they sanitize Israeli malevolency by forging government expert’s reports helping Israel escape accountability and avoid global scrutiny.

    Surrounded by Sayanim, Joe Biden has been beguiled by Israeli firsters throughout his political career. This is one of the many reasons the “sanctified” 6 Israeli Jews count more than the life of the 41,000 “dehumanized” Palestinians.

    The post Why Would Six Israelis Receive More Attention Than Tens of Thousands of Murdered Palestinians appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Image by Emad El Byed.

    The most significant recent escalation in the ongoing Zionist real estate project, enabled by apartheid and genocide of the Palestinian people, occurred on October 7th, 2023, when Hamas fighters broke through Gaza’s prison fence, carrying out a bloody incursion on Israeli military installations and border towns. Since, the Israel “Defense” Forces (IDF) have engaged in the offensive flattening of Gaza, destruction of its infrastructure, extensive land seizure and elimination, torture and expulsion of its Palestinian population.

    Meanwhile, liberal Zionists have been whitewashing these events, regurgitating fantasies of a “two-state solution” and ignoring widespread use of the Hannibal Directive while scapegoating Netanyahu as a bug rather than a feature. Undeniably, Zionism remains a colonialist, white supremacist movement aimed at capitalist resource acquisition while appropriating Judaism.

    Viewing this dynamic through a behavioral neuroscientific lens, which studies violence as an expression of defensive and offensive aggression, provides insight into the mechanisms of a deadly, escalating cycle of eliminatory force, its underlying motivations and associated propaganda. The genocidal imperial practices in Gaza constitute a blueprint for future aggressive actions in the Global South and for suppressing dissent within the imperial core. Thus, such an analysis may assist in identifying state criminality, fostering an improved process of truth and accountability en route to reconciliation, peace, and justice.

    Defensive versus Offensive Aggression

    Vertebrates, including humans, exhibit defensive reactions to mitigate danger and ensure survival. These behaviors involve the activation of similar brain structures and associated neurotransmitters, leading to the consensus that they are species-typical and consistent across species in form, function and triggers.

    Defensive responsivity is influenced by several factors. Context plays a crucial role; an animal will typically flee a threat if escape is possible yet will freeze when trapped. The intensity of the stimulus is also important. Ambiguous stimuli trigger risk assessment behaviors, while clear and immediate threats trigger flight, avoidance, defensive threat and/or attack. The distance to the threat further influences defensive strategies; longer distances prompt avoidance, while shorter distances and contact lead to defensive threat and attack postures, collectively termed defensive aggression.

    The primary objective of offensive aggression, as opposed to defensive aggression, is resource acquisition. Offensive aggression targets competitors and typically involves disputes over territory and access to assets crucial for evolutionary success. Notably, in many mammalian and primate groups, offensive aggression is employed to establish authority within a social hierarchy, where both dominant and subordinate roles are crucial for collective survival, making it typically non-lethal.

    In contrast, defensive aggression, or ‘self-defense,’ is driven by the perceived intensity of the threat and can escalate to lethal force. Indeed, an analysis of fighting patterns in animals reveals offensive aggression targets protected body areas to convey dominance, while defensive aggression targets vulnerable body sites.

    An extrapolation to human social behavior reveals interesting parallels. Collective offensive aggression, aka war, a far later, explicitly human development, as expressed by the acquisition and annexation of territory through conquest, is prohibited by the UN charter and establishment and expansion of settlements on such land is a violation of international humanitarian and human rights law. In contrast, Article 51 of the UN Charter explicitly recognizes self-defense, including defensive aggression, as a right.

    Jewish Defense

    The 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II, carried out by the revolutionary group Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), triggered a surge in antisemitic sentiment and widespread pogroms.

    In response to this onslaught of violence by antisemites, Jewish people defended themselves via the above outlined patterns. First, those who had the means and ability chose to escape, leaving for Western Europe, the Americas, Australia and other destinations. Second, many opted for avoidance, further self-segregating in Jewish communities – shtetls. Third, a minority chose defensive aggression, forming organized self-defense units aimed at repelling antisemitic attacks.

    During this period, many Jewish inhabitants had become secular yet were not emancipated. Consequently, their understanding of antisemitism and its associated violence and trauma was modern, contrasting with the traditional Jewish belief that viewed oppression and hardship as divine punishment for sins.

    Zionism, emerging amidst the rise of European colonial and nationalist movements and the imposition of the restrictive “May Laws” on land ownership in Jewish communities in the Russian Empire, recognized the potential in this dynamic. It presented an empowering vision of a “new Jew,” rejecting outdated beliefs perceived as passive and weak, including sole reliance on defense. Instead, Zionists advocated for an offensive response to oppression and adopted the antisemitic notion that Jews were responsible for their own suffering, promoting segregation and land acquisition in a new homeland as a solution.

    Zionist Propaganda

    Nationalistic propaganda merges the perception of ‘self’ with that of ‘nation’ into a cohesive identity loyal to the ruling class. Zionist propaganda fused Jewish longing for safety with white supremacist, messianic and fascistic ideologies aimed at land theft.

    Settler colonialism often relies on depicting targeted territories as inhabited by dehumanized, primitive barbarians unworthy of land. Contrary to the reality of an historically continuous Palestinian society with an educated and politically engaged urban elite and a flourishing web of rural communities, this portrayal allowed Zionists to displace Indigenous Palestinian people without moral qualms, framing the establishment of ‘Jewish only’ settlements as a divine right.

    In this context, any threat to the manufactured Zionist collective became existential, used to justify an often-brutal, so-called ‘defensive’ response, which involved genocide of the Indigenous, Palestinian “other”.

    In the movement’s early days, Zionists employed various settlement tactics in Palestine, leading to frequent clashes with Palestinian people. The causes of tension were typically land disputes, quarrels over pastureland, the use of spring water and wells, thefts and robberies. Consequently, Zionist self-defense militias were formed with the aim of protecting settlements on acquired lands.

    The tangible rewards from Zionist offensive aggression – power and resources – in conjunction with increased Jewish migration encouraged by Zionists, the rise of antisemitism in Europe and the British Passfield White Paper (1930), which attempted to limit Jewish immigration and land purchases in Palestine and increased frequency of Arab rebellions, encouraged the various Zionist militias to transition increasingly to openly offensive tactics, such as the “wall and watchtower” doctrine.

    Their goal was to secure as much land with as few Palestinians as possible, using offensive tactics in concert with propagandized Jewish victimhood, so-called deterrence and dehumanization of Palestinian people to justify the brutality afforded by defensive aggression, i.e. self-defense – the ability to respond to threat by any means necessary, including lethal force.

    The concept of ‘self-defense’ carries entirely different meanings for the colonized and the colonizer. For the colonized, self is rooted in ancestral land, identity and resources. In contrast, the colonizer’s self is built on expansionism, a manufactured identity and stolen resources.

    Indeed, the foremost Zionist militia which later transformed into the IDF was called “Haganah” – “defense” in Hebrew – and the settlers’ mission was outlined in three stages: ‘from survival to defense to struggle to war.’

    This strategy culminated in the Palestinian Nakba, sanitized as the Israeli “war of independence” during which Israel, under the guise of ‘defense’, carried out mass expulsions, genocide and land grabs.

    Atrocity Propaganda and Genocide

    While the events on October 7th were still unfolding, Zionist leaders within political, military and media echelons launched a propaganda campaign serving their established pattern of colonial genocide.

    The campaign targeted Israeli citizenry with Zionist tropes aimed at fortifying a united front against Palestinian people, including their dehumanization by reinstatement of fear-conditioning with Jim Crow-style rape allegations and other fictitious horrors. This deliberate, malicious embroidery served to garner support for wide-scale eliminatory aggression branded as ‘self-defense,’ transforming the Israeli public’s shock into genocidal tribalism, diverting attention from Israel’s political, intelligence and military failures that enabled Hamas’s attack. Additionally, the campaign helped the government secure crucial public support for the mass mobilization of reserve units, paving the way for the subsequent full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip accompanied by a host of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

    While the underlying aim was consistent with historical Zionist criminality – the acquisition of the land of Gaza with as few Palestinian people as possible – the Israeli campaign sought to circumvent legal barriers to conquest by portraying the October 7th attacks as an existential threat and defense of hostages which warranted defensive aggression. In this manner, and throughout much of Zionist history, Jewish victimhood was used as a tool of oppression, apartheid and genocide of Palestinians, while enriching Zionist leaders and their benefactor in Washington.

    What began as an appeal to ‘self-defense’ has morphed into a military adventure with openly offensive aims and associated propaganda, including potential annexation of Gaza and possibly elsewhere, into Lebanon, whilst wallpapering over concurrent settler attacks and massive land heists in the occupied West Bank. ‘Self-defense’ has even been used as an excuse for torture.

    Similarly, the state of Israel was instituted under the propagandized premise of ‘self-defense’, yet now as then, as its leaders threaten nuclear war in the Middle East and by extension the world, its offensive aggression is clear and criminal. In contrast, Palestinian people have the full right to defend themselves against Zionist aggression by any means necessary.

    The post From ‘Defense’ to Destruction: The Evolution of Zionist Aggression appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Vaccination campaign, Gaza, Youtube screengrab.

    The Israeli war on Gaza has become a war on Palestinian children. This was as true on October 7 as it is today.

    On August 17, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for a seven-day ceasefire to allow children in Gaza to be vaccinated against polio. “I am appealing to all parties to provide concrete assurances right away, guaranteeing humanitarian pauses for the campaign,” he said.

    The first such case of the devastating epidemic was discovered in the town of Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.

    “It is scientifically known that for every 200 virus infections, only one will show the full symptoms of polio, while the remaining cases may present mild symptoms such as a cold or a slight fever,” Palestinian Health Minister Majed Abu Ramadan said on that same day.

    This means that the virus may have spread to all parts of Gaza Strip, where the entire healthcare system has been largely destroyed.

    The ten-month-old Palestinian baby who was first to contract the poliovirus, like many more, never received a vaccination dose against the disease.

    To prevent an even greater disaster in war-stricken Gaza, the World Health Organization (WHO), along with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said that they have to vaccinate 640,000 children throughout Gaza within a short period of time.

    The task, however, is a difficult one, as the vast majority of Gazans are crammed into unsafe refugee camps – massive tent encampments, mostly in central Gaza with no access to clean water or electricity.

    They are surrounded by over 330,000 tons of waste, which has further contaminated already undrinkable water which, according to experts, may have been the cause of the poliovirus.

    The challenge of saving Gaza’s children is complicated by the fact that Israeli bombs continue to be dropped on every part of Gaza, including the so-called ‘safe zones’, which were declared by Israel soon after the start of the war.

    The other problem is that Gaza has, for months, subsisted without electricity. Without an efficient cooling system, the majority of the vaccines could become unusable.

    But there is more to the suffering of Gaza’s children than the lack of vaccination.

    As of August 19, at least 16,480 children have been killed as a direct result of the war, in addition to thousands more who remain missing, presumed dead. The number, according to the Palestinian Minister of Health in Gaza, includes 115 babies.

    Many children have starved to death, and “at least 3,500 children in Gaza are facing (the same fate) amid a lack of food and malnutrition under Israeli restrictions on the delivery of food,” a ministry spokesman said.

    Additionally, so far, more than 17,000 children in Gaza have either lost one or both parents since the start of the war on October 7.

    One of the main reasons as to why Gaza’s children account for the majority of victims of the war is that homes, schools and displacement shelters have been the main targets of the relentless bombardment.

    According to a statement by the UN Experts last April, “more than 80% of schools in Gaza (have been) damaged or destroyed.”

    “It may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’,” they wrote.

    The trend of targeting schools continues. On August 18, Palestine’s Education Minister, Amjad Barham said that over 90 percent of all Gaza schools have been destroyed, the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA reported.

    Of the 309 schools, 290 have been destroyed as a result of Israeli bombing. This has left 630,000 students with no access to education.

    While homes and schools can be rebuilt, the precious lives of killed children cannot be restored.

    According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, as of July 2, 8,572 students in Gaza and 100 in the occupied West Bank have been killed at the hands of the Israeli army. 14,089 students in Gaza and 494 in the West Bank have also been injured.

    These are the worst losses suffered by Palestinian children within a relatively brief period of time since the Nakba, the destruction of the Palestinian homeland in 1948. The tragedy worsens by the day.

    No child, let alone a whole generation of children, should endure this much suffering, regardless of the political reasoning or context.

    International and humanitarian law has designated a “special respect and protection” for children during times of armed conflict, the international humanitarian law databases of the Red Cross resolve.  These laws may apply to Palestinian children in theory, but certainly not in practice.

    The betrayal of these children by the international community shall stain the collective consciousness of humankind for decades to come.

    Indeed, this is a war on Palestinian children – a war that must stop before a whole generation of Palestinian children is completely erased.

    The post War on Children – Gaza Kids Are Unvaccinated, Hungry and Orphaned  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • In the U.S. in 2022, 49,476 people died by suicide, and there were approximately 1.6 million suicide attempts. Not included in suicide statistics is the even more common U.S. “death of despair” of drug overdose death, numbering 107,941 in 2022. While most of us are not attempting to kill our pain in a manner that puts us in the emergency room or the morgue, the majority of Americans are less dramatically trying to disconnect from painful lives.

    It is convenient for apologists of U.S. society to see those of us overwhelmed by our pain—anxious, depressed, dissociating, or in some other way having difficulty functioning—as suffering from a “mental illness” and in need of “treatment.” However, the more that Americans have bought the idea that there is an epidemic of mental illness which requires greater access to treatment, the more fucked up we are all getting, and the more we enable a fucked up society to become increasingly more so. Not only is psychiatric treatment—which for most patients means psychiatric drugs—not helping many of them while making some feel even worse; we have also been sidetracked from examining what it is about society that is fucking up so many of us, and we have been diverted from pursuing those nooks and crannies that have yet to be dehumanized.

    First, how are the majority of us today disconnecting from our painful lives? Next, what is the core source of our painful lives? And finally, what is a path that makes more sense than increasingly more mental health treatment?

    Using Drugs to Disconnect

    One way to disconnect from our emotional pain is through psychoactive drugs, which includes not only cannabis, alcohol, and illicit hard drugs, but a wide array of psychiatric drugs. Drugs are by no means the only way we try to disconnect, but I will begin with them.

    Recently reported in the journal Addiction, a 2022 U.S. survey revealed that there are now “more daily and near daily” cannabis users (17.7 million) than there are such high-frequency alcohol users (14.7 million). While far more people continue to drink alcohol than use cannabis, the median alcohol user reported drinking 4 to 5 days in the past month compared to the median cannabis consumer who used it 15 to 16 days in the past month; and cannabis users were 7.4 times more likely than alcohol drinkers to use it on a daily basis.

    While there is little hypocrisy among alcohol and cannabis users about trying to disconnect from their unpleasant realities to feel better, there is enormous hypocrisy when it comes to psychiatric drugs among some users and most prescribers, who would rather call these drugs “medication,” even though these drugs are in the same psychoactive category as alcohol and cannabis.

    Thankfully, there are a handful of non-hypocritical, non-bullshitting psychiatrists such as Joanna Moncrieff, co-chairperson of the Critical Psychiatry Network and author of The Myth of the Chemical Cure (2008). Moncrieff points out, “Psychiatric drugs are psychoactive substances, like alcohol and heroin. . . . Alcohol helps to reduce social anxiety not because it corrects an underlying biochemical imbalance, but because features of alcohol induced intoxication include relaxation and disinhibition.” Moncrieff explains that psychiatric drugs—rather than correcting an abnormal state in the manner of insulin for diabetes— “induce an abnormal or altered state,” and are in the same category as alcohol.

    Just how many of us are using psychiatric drugs? In 2020, it was reported that 16.5% of U.S. adults were prescribed psychiatric drugs; so out of a U.S. adult population of 258.3 million in 2020, 42.6 million adults were taking the edge off with prescribed “medication.” This total does not include the millions more Americans under 18 put on psychiatric drugs, often to make their inability to adjust to an alienating school and other surroundings less painful for their parents.

    Disconnecting By Other Means

    Today, much of the U.S. economy is fueled by buying and selling that which disconnects us from painful realities. For many of us, our “drug of choice” is not an actual drug.

    Karl Marx (1818-1883), during his lifetime, saw religion serving as the major drug of choice, as he famously said about religion in 1843: “It is the opium of the people.”

    With the rise of the corporatocracy and the loss of power of both the Mafia and the Catholic Church, “deadly sins” such as greed, lust, and gluttony have been legalized and commercialized, not only providing huge profits for the corporatocracy, but also providing the ruling class with other non-drug disconnects for those individuals who are turned off by organized religion.

    Gambling—the buzz of betting, winning, and losing—is one of the most powerful ways to disconnect from how fucked up we feel about our lives. Statista reported in 2023, “The gross gaming revenue of the gambling industry in the U.S. reached almost 53 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, growing significantly over the 2020 figure.” Problem gambler statistics include: two million American adults meet severe gambling criteria; four to six million American adults meeting mild or moderate gambling criteria; and Americans in their early twenties are the fastest-growing group of problem gamblers (one study of college students estimated the percentage of “disordered gamblers” to be 7.89%). Once upon a time, Americans had to get off our asses to be a problem gambler, but now all it takes is a smart phone to place bets.

    Porn? Worldmetrics.org reports that “Pornography is a $12 billion industry in the United States,” and, “The global porn industry is estimated to be worth over $97 billion,” a global industry that many Americans are enriching. Worldwide, worldmetrics.org reports “10% of adults admit to internet sexual addiction”; and in the U.S., the average age of first exposure to porn is eleven; 40 million Americans are regular visitors to porn sites; and 200,000 Americans are “porn addicts.”

    Overeating may top the list of non-drug ways Americans try to disconnect from the pain of our lives. While obesity is sometimes the product of an unlucky slow metabolism (sometimes caused by psychiatric drugs), most obesity results from overeating in order to kill our emotional pain—including the pain of loneliness and boredom. How obese are Americans? Assessed between 2017 to 2020, the prevalence of obesity among U.S. adults 20 and over was 41.9%, and the prevalence of severe obesity was 9.2%, according to the CDC, which notes: “This means that more than 100 million adults have obesity, and more than 22 million adults have severe obesity.” An increasing number of us eat to kill our emotional pain, then become obese, which damages our physical health, which causes us even more suffering.

    Shopping? “Compulsive buying” is routinely defined as uncontrolled urges to buy with resulting significant adverse consequences such as bankruptcy or a spouse demanding a divorce. Using this definition, a telephone survey found 5.8% of Americans qualified for compulsive buying. And millions more Americans, without significant adverse consequences, are buying shit that they don’t need in order to divert themselves from their dissatisfying lives.

    Two of my personal favorite disconnects are spectator politics and spectator sports. The best spectator-politics buzz of my life was the 1973 Watergate Hearings, but spectator politics doesn’t seem to have the diversionary value it once had for me. And spectator politics can often increase pain, which I first experienced as a kid when the televised Vietnam War resulted in great anxiety about a future of either getting killed in a war that seemed to have no end, fleeing to Canada, or becoming one of those miserable male teachers in my school avoiding the draft. Luckily for me, when I was thirteen in 1969, my favorite New York City sports teams—the Jets, Mets, and Knicks—suddenly transformed from futile and frustrating to champions; and the buzz they provided made them my “gateway drugs” that began a lifelong “drug addiction” to using spectator sports to disconnect from painful realities.

    The above list of non-drug ways of disconnecting is by no means a comprehensive one. From playing video games to watching gamers play video games on YouTube, the list of diversions in our consumer society is damn near endless.

    The Source of the Pain We Are Disconnecting From

    In the 1960s and 1970s, there were many prominent thinkers dissecting our increasing dehumanization. A small sample from this group of well-known authors who immediately come to mind include: Erich Fromm, Lewis Mumford, Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, Jane Jacobs, E.F. Schumacher, Leopold Kohr, Kirkpatrick Sale, Jerry Mander, John McKnight, and Wendell Berry.

    Back in that era, the misery caused by capitalism—the prioritizing of profit over life resulting in human beings feeling alienated—was a given; and so original thinkers were delving into just how dehumanization was playing out throughout society: from technology, to schooling, to healthcare, to transportation, to the mass media, to neighborhoods and communities, to architecture and urban planning, and to every aspect of our lives. Back then, it was not all that radical to conclude that we are increasingly being forced to become machine components alienated from our humanity so as to fit into a large machine.

    Lewis Mumford, in this two-volumed The Myth of the Machine (1967, 1970), details the origins and the scope of the “megamachine”: a social and bureaucratic system that functions impersonally like a gigantic machine. To make the megamachine work efficiently, people are dehumanized to be machine cogs, and Mumford describes the structure that makes it possible for authoritarian control over large populations be it in a labor machine, a military machine, a school machine, or a healthcare machine.

    My experience is that while alienated young critical thinkers nod in intellectual agreement to a neoliberal capitalist explanation for their malaise, they resonate emotionally to the idea of being forced to be dehumanized cogs so as to fit into a particular machine within the megamachine.

    There are of course different experiences of the megamachine.

    There are those of us who simply cannot fit into any labor machine, becoming homeless or institutionalized in a prison, mental hospital, or in some other way.

    Then there are those of us who are able to adjust and adapt enough to fit into a money-making machine so as to not end up on the streets, but pay the price of alienation from our humanity. Some of us experience that alienation in anxiety, depression, dissociations, and various ineffectual rebellions, which today are commonly called “mental illnesses.” While others, in denial of their alienation, become capable only of relationships with machine-like people, incapable of a truly loving human relationship, including with their spouse and children.

    Then there are the most fucked up of all. These are the control-freaks atop of hierarchies who are running large machines within the megamachine. We’re talking about Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates. We’re talking about the most frighteningly fucked up machine-like individuals in society.

    To be sure, a handful of Americans have lucked into a way of obtaining money that is somewhat outside the direct control of the megamachine, but most of them are aware that their lucky deal can be eliminated at any time by the megamachine. Moreover, they likely experience the pain of other components of the megamachine (for example, the healthcare machine); and they would be incredibly lucky not to experience the pain of the megamachine’s crushing of an unlucky family member or close friend.

    What Are Our Options?

    Sadly, it is quite realistic to be hopeless about dismantling the megamachine. Even during a time in U.S. history when the megamachine was nowhere near as technologically and militarily powerful as it is today, when Native Americans were far more cohesive and talented warriors than any group is today, they had no chance against machinery that has no shame about genocide, and had they continued their fight, the result would have been total genocide.

    Certainly, a few times in U.S. history, political activism has made life within the megamachine less horrific. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, when financial impoverishment was causing severe pain for many people, New Deal legislation made the financial lives of some of them less painful. And during the 1960s and 1970s, the activism of Ralph Nader and Nader’s Raiders resulted in less physically dangerous surroundings through the creation of theOccupation and Safety Health Act, Environmental Protection Agency, Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act, Safe Water Drinking Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and other health and safety measures.

    However, throughout U.S. history, the megamachine has only grown in scope and power, and its destructive impact on us has been both direct and indirect.

    The dehumanizing impact of the megamachine is direct when, for example, workers are fully aware of simply being replaceable machine cogs who receive nothing of value in return for their efforts except money to survive in the megamachine. The impact is direct when, in addition to the labor machine, we suffer alienating dehumanization in various other machines such as in a school machine and healthcare machine.

    The megamachine’s horrors are also indirect. One of the few positive developments in my mental health profession is increasing awareness of the powerful relationship between “adverse childhood experiences” (such as emotional and physical abuse and neglect) with later emotional and physical difficulties. However, the seldom-asked question in our society is why so many parents are abusing, neglecting, and otherwise traumatizing their children? Abusive and neglectful parents are themselves almost always products of the megamachine’s violence (including its wars, layoffs, and other traumatizations), resulting in powerlessness, resentment, rage, substance abuse, and little frustration tolerance in parenting, which results in adverse childhood experiences.

    Big Pharma and their partners in psychiatry have successfully sold a biochemical, individual-defect story of our malaise, which has made billions of dollars for drug companies. This narrative also enables the megamachine to go unchallenged. The “mental illness” explanation for suffering is today the cultural norm, and those remaining critics of the megamachine’s destructive impact are now, unlike the 1960s and 1970s, pushed far to the margins of society.

    Moreover, the mental health machine has been an abject failure when it comes to helping people. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002-2015, acknowledged in 2011, “Whatever we’ve been doing for five de­cades, it ain’t working. When I look at the numbers—the number of sui­cides, the number of disabilities, the mortality data—it’s abysmal, and it’s not getting any better.” And in 2021, New York Times concluded that psychiatry had done “little to improve the lives of the millions of people living with persistent mental distress. Almost every measure of our collective mental health—rates of suicide, anxiety, depression, addiction deaths, psychiatric prescription use—went the wrong direc­tion, even as access to services expanded greatly.”

    Mental health machine “treatment”—be it biological, chemical, electrical, or behavioral techniques—is aimed at adjustment to the megamachine. Psychoactive drugs are the only treatment employed by the overwhelming majority of psychiatrists, while a few of them also use electroshock. And most of my psychologist colleagues offer techniques such as cognitive-behavioral therapy to help people adjust to the megamachine.

    So, if dismantling the megamachine any time soon is unrealistic, what makes sense?

    First, it helps to recognize the reality that the megamachine—directly and indirectly—results in painful alienation from one’s humanity and life in general, and this pain fuels anxiety, depression, suicidality, and other compulsions to disconnect and numb ourselves. To the extent that we do not deny, shame, or pathologize our disconnections as well as the pain that fuels them, we have a better chance to be accepting, loving, and wiser with ourselves and others.

    Of great importance, it is helpful to acknowledge that while it is difficult to remain fully human within the megamachine, it is possible not to be completely damaged by it. To accomplish this, we can embrace “harm reduction,” an idea that comes to us from social justice advocates who recognize that, given the nature of society, illicit drug use will continue, but that there are less dangerous ways of using such drugs (for example, sterile syringes rather than dirty ones). Harm reduction can be applied to both drug and non-drug disconnects. Furthermore, not only is it helpful to embrace this concept for ourselves, by helping others navigate their machines with the least dangerous disconnects, we will feel more fully human.

    Finally, while we can be realistic about the domination of the megamachine, we can also recognize that hidden nooks and crannies of non-machine life remain. We may have become so beaten down by the megamachine that we lack the energy to find those hidden cracks in which there are gems of humanity and life, so many of us need to acquire the energy required to keep seeking. If we keep searching, my experience is that we will eventually discover others who can energize us to keep looking, and when we find such people, we must value them. If we then find those nooks and crannies in which life remains, we can connect and restore some of our humanity, and we can become further revitalized by energizing other seekers.

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