At least 37 members of Congress and their families traded defense stocks in 2024, using a list of the top 100 Pentagon contractors compiled annually by Defense Security Monitor. A Responsible Statecraft analysis of data from investment research platform Quiver Quantitative shows that these lawmakers traded between $24 million and $113 million worth of Pentagon contractor stocks this year…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In April, the U.S. House passed H.R. 6408: “An Act To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to terminate the tax-exempt status of terrorist supporting organizations.” It was introduced in the Senate as S. 1436.
It sounds benign, but it reaches well beyond any narrowly defined or momentarily intended targets. If enacted into law, it can be used against any non-profit which engages in any issue not favored by whatever Administration is in power in the future.
The Act details procedures for the Secretary of the Treasury to designate organizations as having provided material support to groups deemed to be terrorist organizations. Section (C) (ii) provides “Opportunity to Cure” procedures. In addition to this being “guilty until proven innocent,” Section (F) states “ the United States district courts shall have exclusive jurisdiction to review a final determination with respect to an organization’s designation as a terrorist supporting organization.” Thus, if the Administration wants to silence some voices it can simply do so unless the courts intervene.
This bill legislates broad Executive authority to suspend normal due process, allowing the Secretary of the Treasury to strip US groups of their non-profit status in a peremptory manner with virtually no limitations, accountability, or meaningful recourse.
Immediate support for the bill is related to the present crisis in Gaza, but it can be used in any manner in the future. It also has a three year “look-back” feature, which means the government can designate an organization or country as “terrorist,” and then look back at any non-profit which has donated or supported that organization or country in the last three years.
The definition of “support” is also vague. If a non-profit calls for a mutual ceasefire and negotiations in Gaza (or any other future conflict), is that support for only one side? Some in Washington and elsewhere currently frame it that way.
Here is a sign-on letter opposing the bill, from numerous organizations.
And there’s a larger context here, provided by a recent Veterans For Peace statement:
California Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s recent claims that Code Pink and other peace protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza are either Russian or Chinese funded is absurd and insulting, and Veterans For Peace calls on her to withdraw such allegations and apologize.
In October of 2023, Pelosi told a group of Code Pink protesters (all of whom were White American women), to “Go back to China where your headquarters is.” Then in January of 2024, Pelosi said in an interview, “I think…some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere… Some, I think, are connected to Russia. And I say that having looked at this for a long time now, as you know.”
When asked whether she thought some pro-Palestinian protests were Russian plants, the responded, “I don’t think they’re plants…I think some financing should be investigated…and I want to ask the FBI to investigate that.”
Now that the US has declared Russia and China to be our latest enemies, Pelosi is trying to connect dots that simply aren’t there.
On August 5, 2023, the New York Times attacked Jodie Evans, Code Pink and other peace groups in an article entitled, “A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul.” But if one reads the article carefully, the evidence shows the headline was false. The American tech mogul in question made all his money in America and is donating his American money to American and international peace organizations.
Following the NYT article, Republican US senator Marco Rubio asked the United States Department of Justice to open an investigation into Code Pink and other entities for potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Then in November of 2023, ten Republican House members of Congress signed a letter saying that they are ‘deeply concerned’ with Code Pink’s ties to the Communist Party of China and requesting documentation.
The federal government has expanded its use of FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) to target Black liberation activists and Chinese Americans working for peace with China. Examples include the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement, where three individuals were charged with acting as foreign agents of Russia based only on normal international exchange and collaboration between peace and justice advocates from different nations, something Veterans For Peace and other organizations often do, as do businesses and trade organizations. It is normal human communication and networking.
In another example, Boston-area trade unionist Li Tang “Henry” Liang, a Chinese American activist and union member and advocate for peace between the US and China, has also been arrested and indicted under FARA.
The US has used FARA to repress peace and justice organizers going all the way back to the 1951 prosecution of W.E.B. DuBois and the prosecution of the Cuban Five. From 2018 to 2022, the FBI arrested and prosecuted Chinese American scientists under the “China Initiative.” Most were found innocent, and the “China Initiative” was finally dropped due to apparent racial profiling. But Chinese American scientists can still be arrested under other criteria, and there is currently an effort under way in Congress to reinstall the “China Initiative.”
On September 3, 2024, the Washington Post published an article claiming that the crowds of Chinese Americans who turned out to welcome China’s president Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit were “non-state actors to further China’s political goals overseas,” who had violently attacked Tibetan and Hong Kong anti-China protesters to silence them. But the Post relied almost exclusively on the Tibetan and Hong Kong protesters’ reports and videos. There is no evidence that the welcomers attended the event intending to create disturbance, and in fact a majority of them were older retired persons with no history of violence or law breaking of any kind. There is more reason to believe the anti-China demonstrators were the ones intending to create negative publicity for propaganda purposes. The Hong Kong protesters included leaders from the Hong Kong Democracy Council, a group with a history of violence during the 2019 Hong Kong riots who were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA offshoot.
One should also note the establishment looking the other way when violent right wing counter-protesters using weapons physically attack peaceful university protesters against the Gaza genocide. The police have let the attacks happen, then arrested the peaceful protesters.
Other recent events have highlighted the increasing suppression of activists and independent voices by imperial authorities, underscoring a troubling trend towards authoritarianism.
In the US, the FBI raid on former Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter’s home and the intense questioning of Jacob Berger, following his humanitarian mission to Egypt, reveal a similar clampdown on critical voices. Ritter’s home was invaded in a bid to silence his outspoken criticism of US foreign policy, while Berger’s scrutiny highlights the dangerous repercussions for those engaged in humanitarian work abroad.
Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with these voices, it is imperative to protect their free speech rights if we want to live in an open society where diverse perspectives can be freely expressed and debated.
These incidents collectively demonstrate an alarming trend of targeting and silencing individuals who challenge power and advocate for the vulnerable and dispossessed. The suppression of these voices not only undermines democratic principles but also threatens the very foundation of free expression and critical engagement. It is crucial to stand in solidarity with those being targeted, defend the freedoms of speech and action, and resist this encroaching wave of authoritarianism we are facing.
Remember Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous quote about Nazi Germany which began, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out…?”
Today, they come for Black Socialists, then Chinese Americans, then White CODEPINK women, then retired military officers, then peace activists in allied nations, and then for the peace non-profits.
Either we all stand together, or we will all fall separately.
END WASHINGTON’S NEW MCCARTHY PERIOD!
The post End Washington’s New McCarthyism! first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
It was a shock to some of us progressives when Liz Cheney—once a rising, strong Republican star in the U.S. House—recently declared she was endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, and would campaign and spend millions on it in battleground states.
As Cheney put it after a speech at Duke University: “Those of us who believe in the defense of our democracy and the defense of our Constitution and the survival of our Republic have a duty in this election cycle to come together and to put those things above politics.”
But even more mind-blowing to us (and Democratic leaders) was that father Dick Cheney , president George W. Bush’s powerful, two-term vice president, supported her decision and also endorsed Harris. Trump, he said: “can never be trusted with power again.”
Moreover, the Cheneys’ endorsements say something far, far deeper about human relations in this fractious election crisis. It might lead to millions of men changing their minds about voting for a woman president—or any woman seeking public office. Smart and strong women have existed elsewhere in the world for centuries from Cleopatra and Golda Meir to former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Or most men believing a vice presidency doesn’t qualify Harris for the White House, despite predecessors like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. They, like Harris, were U.S. Senators and experienced on how the White House operates in handling foreign and domestic affairs great and small.
At the heart of male prejudice about strong and smart women’s competence for any political office seems to be the ancient cultural fear of being stripped of power by those perceived as inferiors.
Perhaps the only two times fear of such women dissipates and true equality begins is either at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or between proud fathers and those strong, smart daughters. For example, King Henry VIII and daughter Queen Elizabeth I and Pelosi’s father, Baltimore Mayor and House member Tommy D’Alesandro Jr., in wielding public power. A true kinship of respect, political training, and love—and tough decision-making—is the reality. It should overcome bias against women seeking public office.
Interestingly, Author Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of America’s greatest authors (1804-1864) focused largely on this subject of foolish fears about strong and smart women.
Brought up in penury with two sisters by a young widowed mother, he knew economic and social chauvinism and trivialization of women firsthand, doled out by men of every class. He married an intellectual and emotional peer, and fathered two outspoken daughters. In college, he also appears to have studied the revolutionary ideas by Jean-Jacques Rousseau about equality at all levels.
Moreover, as the descendant of a harsh judge in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692-93, he probably would have agreed with author Virginia Woolf. She believed such women were hanged or set ablaze not for religious error, but because they threatened men’s desperate need to control other men, but, most of all, powerful and defiant women. Then, by labeling them witches. Today, it’s “bitches”.
To Hawthorne, such women were equal companions, not threats to men. He never viewed them as unimportant or as threatening Delilahs, but, rather, as men’s vital emotional, intellectual, and spiritual partners. As a writer, his mission seemed to be overcoming most men’s deep-rooted fears of the strong and smart. Yet to carry such a message in the literature of his day was a monumental undertaking.
He laid the fundamental cause at ending men’s monopoly on control and power. His novels and short stories were the first in this country to focus on the rigid second-class roles assigned women for life. Initially, he disguised this view in allegorical short stories. He finally threw that cloak aside with his 1844 masterpiece “Rappaccini’s Daughter” about the usual tragic result of male fears. The allegory was poison.
Rappaccini is a brilliant and famed botanist with an experimental garden of toxic plants tended by daughter Beatrice, now immune to their poisons and up for a university post in that field. She is spotted by Giovanni, an older student, from his boarding house balcony who is struck by her beauty as she feeds and waters the deadly garden. It becomes love at first sight for both. He enters the garden despite her warnings. Soon, however, he becomes frightened of losing domination expected of men over all women, powerful and brilliant though they be. Made immune to all the poisons, he accuses her of killing him. There may be no finer breakup line than Beatrice’s heartbroken: “Was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?”
That allegoric lesson applies to most biased and fearful men when it comes to women and seeking public office. Put the case another way:
If they had daughters running for any position in the upcoming elections, wouldn’t they proudly tout them to friends, neighbors, work cohorts, and the cashier and line-mates at the supermarket? Maybe help finance their campaigns? Or put up yard or window signs and paste bumper stickers on their cars? Do phone banking? Canvass the neighborhood? And with any action, wouldn’t they insist their daughters were as capable for office as male opponents?
In other words, if fathers—and mothers,too—don’t fear powerful daughters, why fear smart, strong women candidates on November 5? They’re somebody’s daughters, too, and just as worthy of fair consideration as any male on the ballot.
The post On Harris, Hawthorne, and Fears of Smart, Strong Women for Political Offices first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
It was a shock to some of us progressives when Liz Cheney—once a rising, strong Republican star in the U.S. House—recently declared she was endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, and would campaign and spend millions on it in battleground states.
As Cheney put it after a speech at Duke University: “Those of us who believe in the defense of our democracy and the defense of our Constitution and the survival of our Republic have a duty in this election cycle to come together and to put those things above politics.”
But even more mind-blowing to us (and Democratic leaders) was that father Dick Cheney , president George W. Bush’s powerful, two-term vice president, supported her decision and also endorsed Harris. Trump, he said: “can never be trusted with power again.”
Moreover, the Cheneys’ endorsements say something far, far deeper about human relations in this fractious election crisis. It might lead to millions of men changing their minds about voting for a woman president—or any woman seeking public office. Smart and strong women have existed elsewhere in the world for centuries from Cleopatra and Golda Meir to former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Or most men believing a vice presidency doesn’t qualify Harris for the White House, despite predecessors like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. They, like Harris, were U.S. Senators and experienced on how the White House operates in handling foreign and domestic affairs great and small.
At the heart of male prejudice about strong and smart women’s competence for any political office seems to be the ancient cultural fear of being stripped of power by those perceived as inferiors.
Perhaps the only two times fear of such women dissipates and true equality begins is either at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or between proud fathers and those strong, smart daughters. For example, King Henry VIII and daughter Queen Elizabeth I and Pelosi’s father, Baltimore Mayor and House member Tommy D’Alesandro Jr., in wielding public power. A true kinship of respect, political training, and love—and tough decision-making—is the reality. It should overcome bias against women seeking public office.
Interestingly, Author Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of America’s greatest authors (1804-1864) focused largely on this subject of foolish fears about strong and smart women.
Brought up in penury with two sisters by a young widowed mother, he knew economic and social chauvinism and trivialization of women firsthand, doled out by men of every class. He married an intellectual and emotional peer, and fathered two outspoken daughters. In college, he also appears to have studied the revolutionary ideas by Jean-Jacques Rousseau about equality at all levels.
Moreover, as the descendant of a harsh judge in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692-93, he probably would have agreed with author Virginia Woolf. She believed such women were hanged or set ablaze not for religious error, but because they threatened men’s desperate need to control other men, but, most of all, powerful and defiant women. Then, by labeling them witches. Today, it’s “bitches”.
To Hawthorne, such women were equal companions, not threats to men. He never viewed them as unimportant or as threatening Delilahs, but, rather, as men’s vital emotional, intellectual, and spiritual partners. As a writer, his mission seemed to be overcoming most men’s deep-rooted fears of the strong and smart. Yet to carry such a message in the literature of his day was a monumental undertaking.
He laid the fundamental cause at ending men’s monopoly on control and power. His novels and short stories were the first in this country to focus on the rigid second-class roles assigned women for life. Initially, he disguised this view in allegorical short stories. He finally threw that cloak aside with his 1844 masterpiece “Rappaccini’s Daughter” about the usual tragic result of male fears. The allegory was poison.
Rappaccini is a brilliant and famed botanist with an experimental garden of toxic plants tended by daughter Beatrice, now immune to their poisons and up for a university post in that field. She is spotted by Giovanni, an older student, from his boarding house balcony who is struck by her beauty as she feeds and waters the deadly garden. It becomes love at first sight for both. He enters the garden despite her warnings. Soon, however, he becomes frightened of losing domination expected of men over all women, powerful and brilliant though they be. Made immune to all the poisons, he accuses her of killing him. There may be no finer breakup line than Beatrice’s heartbroken: “Was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?”
That allegoric lesson applies to most biased and fearful men when it comes to women and seeking public office. Put the case another way:
If they had daughters running for any position in the upcoming elections, wouldn’t they proudly tout them to friends, neighbors, work cohorts, and the cashier and line-mates at the supermarket? Maybe help finance their campaigns? Or put up yard or window signs and paste bumper stickers on their cars? Do phone banking? Canvass the neighborhood? And with any action, wouldn’t they insist their daughters were as capable for office as male opponents?
In other words, if fathers—and mothers,too—don’t fear powerful daughters, why fear smart, strong women candidates on November 5? They’re somebody’s daughters, too, and just as worthy of fair consideration as any male on the ballot.
The post On Harris, Hawthorne, and Fears of Smart, Strong Women for Political Offices first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
There is only one country in the world right now, in the midst of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is guaranteed dozens of standing ovations from the vast majority of its elected representatives.
That country is not Israel, where he has been a hugely divisive figure for many years. It is the United States.
On Wednesday, Netanyahu was back-slapped, glad-handed, whooped and cheered as he slowly made his way – hailed at every step as a conquering hero – to the podium of the US Congress.
This was the same Netanyahu who has overseen during the past 10 months the slaughter– so far – of some 40,000 Palestinians, around half of them women and children. More than 21,000 other children are reported missing, most of them likely dead under rubble.
It was the same Netanyahu who levelled a strip of territory – originally home to 2.3 million Palestinians – that is expected to take 80 years to rebuild, at a cost of at least $50bn.
It was the same Netanyahu who has destroyed every hospital and university in Gaza, and bombed almost all of its schools that were serving as shelters for families made homeless by other Israeli bombs.
It was the same Netanyahu whose arrest is being sought by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, accused of using starvation as a weapon of war by imposing an aid blockade that has engineered a famine across Gaza.
It was the same Netanyahu whose government was found last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to have been intensifying Israel’s apartheid rule over the Palestinian people in an act of long-term aggression.
It was the same Netanyahu whose government is standing trial for committing what the ICJ, the world’s highest judicial body, has termed a “plausible genocide”.
And yet, there was just one visible protester in the congressional chamber. Rashida Tlaib, the only US legislator of Palestinian heritage, sat silently grasping a small black sign. On one side it said: “War criminal”. On the other: “Guilty of genocide”.
One person among hundreds mutely trying to point out that the emperor was naked.
Cocooned from horror
Indeed, the optics were stark.
This looked less like a visit by a foreign leader than a decorated elder general being welcomed back to the Senate in ancient Rome, or a grey-haired British viceroy from India embraced in the motherland’s parliament, after brutally subduing the “barbarians” on the fringes of empire.
This was a scene familiar from history books: of imperial brutality and colonial savagery, recast by the seat of the imperium as valour, honour, civilisation. And it looked every bit as absurd, and abhorrent, as it does when we look back on what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.
It was a reminder that, despite our self-serving claims of progress and humanitarianism, our world is not very different from the way it has been for thousands of years.
It was a reminder that power elites like to celebrate the demonstration of their power, cocooned both from the horrors faced by those crushed by their might, and from the clamour of protest of those horrified by the infliction of so much suffering.
It was a reminder that this is not a “war” between Israel and Hamas – let alone, as Netanyahu would have us believe, a battle for civilisation between the Judeo-Christian world and the Islamic world.
This is a US imperial war – part of its military campaign for “global, full-spectrum dominance” – carried out by Washington’s most favoured client state.
The genocide is fully a US genocide, armed by Washington, paid for by Washington, given diplomatic cover by Washington, and – as the scenes in Congress underlined – cheered on by Washington.
Or as Netanyahu stated in a moment of unintentional candour to Congress: “Our enemies are your enemy, our fight is your fight, and our victory will be your victory.”
Israel is Washington’s largest military outpost in the oil-rich Middle East. The Israeli army is the Pentagon’s main battalion in that strategically important region. And Netanyahu is the outpost’s commander in chief.
What is vital to Washington elites is that the outpost is supported at all costs; that it doesn’t fall to the “barbarians”.
Outpouring of lies
There was another small moment of inadvertent truth amid Netanyahu’s outpouring of lies. The Israeli prime minister stated that what was happening in Gaza was “a clash between barbarism and civilisation”. He was not wrong.
On the one side, there is the barbarism of the current joint Israeli-US genocide against the people of Gaza, a dramatic escalation of the 17-year Israeli siege of the enclave that preceded it, and the decades of belligerent rule under an Israeli system of apartheid before that.
And on the other side, there are the embattled few desperately trying to safeguard the West’s professed values of “civilisation”, of international humanitarian law, of the protection of the weak and vulnerable, of the rights of children.
The US Congress decisively showed where it stood: with barbarism.
Netanyahu has become the most feted foreign leader in US history, invited to speak to Congress four times, surpassing even Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill.
He is fully Washington’s creature. His savagery, his monstrousness is entirely made in America. As he implored his US handlers: “Give us the tools faster and we’ll finish the job faster.”
Finish the job of genocide.
Performative dissent
Some Democrats preferred to stay away, including party power broker Nancy Pelosi. Instead, she met families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza – not, of course, Palestinian families whose loved ones in Gaza had been slaughtered by Israel.
Vice President Kamala Harris explained her own absence as a scheduling conflict. She met the Israeli prime minister, as did President Joe Biden, on Thursday.
Afterwards, she claimed to have pressed Netanyahu on the “dire” humanitarian situation in Gaza, but stressed too that Israel “had a right to defend itself” – a right that Israel specifically does not have, as the ICJ pointed out last week, because Israel is the one permanently violating the rights of the Palestinians through its prolonged occupation, apartheid rule and ethnic cleansing.
But the dissent of Pelosi – and of Harris, if that is what it was – was purely performative. True, they have no personal love for Netanyahu, who has so closely allied himself and his government with the US Republican right and former president Donald Trump.
But Netanyahu simply serves as an alibi. Both Pelosi and Harris are stalwart supporters of Israel – a state that, according to the ICJ’s judgment last week, decades ago instituted apartheid rule in the Palestinian territories, using an illegal occupation as cover to ethnically cleanse the population there.
Their political agenda is not about ending the annihilation of the people of Gaza. It is acting as a safety valve for popular dissatisfaction among traditional Democratic voters shocked by the scenes from Gaza.
It is to deceive them into imagining that behind closed doors, there is some sort of policy fight over Israel’s handling of the Palestinian issue. That voting Democrat will one day – one very distant day – lead to an undefined “peace”, a fabled “two-state solution” where Palestinian children won’t keep dying in the interests of preserving the security of Israel’s illegal settler-militias.
US policy towards Israel has not changed in any meaningful sense for decades, whether the president has been red or blue, whether Trump has been in the White House or Barack Obama.
And if Harris becomes president – admittedly, a big if – US arms and money will continue flowing to Israel, while Israel will get to decide if US aid to Gaza is ever allowed in.
Why? Because Israel is the lynchpin in a US imperial project for global full-spectrum dominance. Because for Washington to change course on Israel, it would also have to do other unthinkable things.
It would have to begin dismantling its 800 military bases around the planet, just as Israel was told by the ICJ last week to dismantle its many dozens of illegal settlements on Palestinian territory.
The US would need to agree a shared global security architecture with China and Russia, rather than seek to bully and batter these great powers into submission with bloody proxy wars, such as the one in Ukraine.
The coming fall
Pelosi, remember, smeared students on US campuses protesting Israel’s plausible genocide in Gaza as being linked to Russia. She urged the FBI to investigate them for pressuring the Biden administration to support a ceasefire.
Netanyahu, in his address to Congress, similarly demonised the demonstrators – in his case, by accusing them of being “useful idiots” of Israel’s main foe, Iran.
Neither can afford to recognise that millions of ordinary people across the US think it is wrong to bomb and starve children – and to use a war with an unachievable aim as the cover story.
Hamas cannot be “eliminated” through Israel’s current bout of horrifying violence for a very obvious reason: The group is a product, a symptom, of earlier bouts of horrifying Israeli violence.
As even western counter-terrorism experts have had to concede, Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza are strengthening Hamas, not weakening it. Young men and boys who lose their family to Israeli bombs are Hamas’s most fervent new recruits.
That’s why Netanyahu insisted Israel’s military offensive – the genocide – in Gaza could not end soon. He demanded weapons and money to keep his soldiers in the enclave indefinitely, in an operation he termed as “demilitarisation and deradicalisation”.
Decoded, that means a continuing horror show for the Palestinians there, as they are forced to continue living and dying with an Israeli aid blockade, starvation, bombs and unmarked “kill zones”.
It means, too, an indefinite risk of Israel’s war on Gaza spilling over into a regional war, and potentially a global one, as tripwires towards escalation continue to grow in number.
The US Congress, however, is too blinded by championing its small fortressed state in the Middle East to think about such complexities. Its members roared “USA!” to their satrap from Israel, just as Roman senators once roared “Glory!” to generals whose victories they assumed would continue forever.
The rulers of the Roman empire no more saw the coming fall than their modern counterparts in Washington can. But every empire falls. And its collapse becomes inevitable once its rulers lose all sense of how absurd and abhorrent they have become.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post Only a Failing US Empire Would Be So Blind as to Cheer Netanyahu and his Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.
Democratic leaders in Congress are expressing concerns about President Joe Biden’s ability to triumph over Donald Trump, reports find, as the campaign is rapidly losing funds from donors, big and small, further solidifying critics’ case for Biden to step aside. Axios reports, citing three sources familiar with the matter, that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) has been fielding…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
As Democrats appear to be distancing themselves from the campaign to reelect Joe Biden and opening the door to other possibilities, the president has reportedly told a close ally that he is reconsidering whether he should stay in the race — the strongest indicator yet that he may drop out after his disastrous debate performance last week. The New York Times reported Wednesday that Biden told the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) has introduced a bill aimed at barring members of Congress from profiting directly off of war and military campaigns as a regional war threatens to break out in the Middle East, with the U.S. and other Western nations bombing and seeking to destabilize a number of countries in the region. Tlaib’s bill would ban members of Congress, their spouses and dependent…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
As The New York Times reported Sunday that more than 1,000 Black American pastors have joined the widespread call for a cease-fire in Gaza, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi suggested the demand was “Putin’s message” and said the FBI should investigate groups that are speaking out about Biden’s pro-Israel policies. On CNN, the former House speaker, a California Democrat, told Dana Bash that the “call for a…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Things did not go so well this time around. When the worn Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy turned up banging on the doors of Washington’s powerful on September 21, he found fewer open hearts and an increasingly large number of closed wallets. The old ogre of national self-interest seemed to be presiding and was in no mood to look upon the desperate leader with sweet acceptance.
Last December, Zelensky and Ukrainian officials did not have to go far in hearing endorsements and encouragement in their efforts battling Moscow’s armies. The visit of the Ukrainian president, as White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stated at the time, “will underscore the United States’ steadfast commitment to supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes, including through provision of economic, humanitarian and military assistance.”
Republican Senator from Utah, Mitt Romney, was bubbly with enthusiasm for the Ukrainian leader. “He’s a national and global hero – I’m delighted to be able to hear from him.” Media pack members such as the Associated Press scrambled for stretched parallels in history’s record, noting another mendicant who had previously appeared in Washington to seek backing. “The moment was Dec. 22, 1941, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill landed near Washington to meet President Franklin D. Rosevelt just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor.”
Then House Speaker, the California Democrat Nancy Pelosi, also drew on the Churchillian theme with a fetishist’s relish. “Eighty-one years later this week, it is particularly poignant for me to be present when another heroic leader addresses the Congress in time of war – and with Democracy itself on the line,” she wrote colleagues in a letter.
Zelenskyy, not wishing to state the obvious, suggested a different approach to the question of aiding Ukraine. While not necessarily an attentive student of US history, any briefings given to him should have been mindful of a strand in US politics sympathetic to isolationism and suspicious of foreign leaders demanding largesse and aid in fighting wars.
How, then, to get around this problem? Focus on clumsy, if clear metaphors of free enterprise. “Your money is not charity,” he stated at the time, cleverly using the sort of corporate language that would find an audience among military-minded shareholders. “It’s an investment in global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way.” Certainly, Ukrainian aid has been a mighty boon for the US military-industrial complex, whose puppeteering strings continue to work their black magic on the Hill.
Despite such a show, the number of those believing in the wisdom of such an investment is shrinking. “In a US capital that has undergone an ideological shift since he was last here just before Christmas 2022,” remarked Stephen Collinson of CNN, “it now takes more than quoting President Franklin Roosevelt and drawing allusions to 9/11, to woo lawmakers.”
Among the investors, Republicans are shrinking more rapidly than the Democrats. An August CNN poll found a majority in the country – 55% – firmly against further funding for Ukraine. Along party lines, 71% of Republicans are steadfastly opposed, while 62% of Democrats would be satisfied with additional funding.
Kentucky Republican and Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell continues to claim that funding Ukraine is a sensibly bloody strategy that preserves American lives while harming Russian interests. “Helping Ukraine retake its territory means weakening – weakening – one of America’s biggest strategic adversaries without firing a shot.”
The same cannot be said about the likes of Kentucky’s Republican Senator Rand Paul. While Zelenskyy was trying to make a good impression on the Hill, the senator was having none of it. “I will oppose any effort to hold the federal government hostage for Ukraine funding. I will not consent to expedited passage of any spending measure that provides any more US aid to Ukraine.”
In The American Conservative, Paul warned that, “With no end in sight, it looks increasingly likely that Ukraine will be yet another endless quagmire funded by the American taxpayer.” President Joe Biden’s administration had “failed to articulate a clear strategy or objective in this war, and Ukraine’s long-awaited counter-offensive has failed to make meaningful gains in the east.”
Such a quagmire was also proving jittering in its dangers. There was the prospect of miscalculation and bungling that could pit US forces directly against the Russian army. There were also no “effective oversight mechanisms” regarding the funding that has found its way into Kyiv’s pockets. “Unfortunately, corruption runs deep in Ukraine, and there’s plenty of evidence that it has run rampant since Russia’s invasion.” The Zelenskyy government, he also noted in a separate post, had “banned the political parties, they’ve invaded churches, they’ve arrested priests, so no, it isn’t a democracy, it’s a corrupt regime.”
Republicans such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley are of the view that the US should be slaying different monsters of a more threatening variety. (Every imperium needs its formidable adversaries.) The administration, he argued, should “take the lead on China” and reassure its “European allies” that Washington would be providing “the nuclear umbrella in Europe”.
On September 30, with yet another government shutdown looming in Washington, the US House approved a bill for funding till mid-November by a 335-91 vote. But the measure did not include additional military or humanitarian aid to Ukraine. In August, the Biden administration had requested a $24 billion package for Ukraine but was met with a significantly skimmed total of $6.1 billion. Of that amount $1.5 billion is earmarked for the Ukrainian Security Assistance Initiative, a measure that continues to delight US arms manufacturers by enabling the Pentagon to place contracts on their behalf to build weapons for Kyiv.
The limited funding measure proved a source of extreme agitation to the clarion callers who have linked battering the Russian bear, if only through a flawed surrogate, with the cause of US freedom. “I am deeply disappointed that this continuing resolution did not include further aid for our ally, Ukraine,” huffed Maryland Democrat Rep. Steny Hoyer. “In September, the House held seven votes to approve that vital funding to Ukraine. Each time, more than 300 House Members voted in favor. This ought to be a nonpartisan issue and ought to have been addressed in the continuing resolution today.”
As Hoyer and those on his pro-war wing of politics are starting to realise, Ukraine, as an issue, is becoming problematically partisan and ripe. The filling in Zelenskyy’s cap is inexorably thinning and lightening.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The pace of for-profit technological innovations is accelerating, but to what end beyond corporate sales? The gap between marketing new high-tech products and assessing their intended and unintended consequences has never been greater.
Let’s start with the ballooning of augmented reality inside virtual reality. Facebook’s Oculus Rift escapism has flopped. Trying to improve on this bizarre quest to envelop its customers, Apple plans to release the “Vision Pro”, a “mixed-reality” headset so large that Washington Post columnist Molly Roberts described it as “clunky and creepy” and predicted failure for this $3,499 rip-off.
Do mega-corporation CEOs – who spend company profits on massive stock buybacks for no productive use (Apple plans to spend $90 billion on buybacks this year) – spend any money on the lost practice of technology assessment? Do Facebook and Apple have studies on what fantasy goggles are doing to youngsters’ minds? Are these devices producing anxieties, fears or addictions? Do these corporations have more victims than customers? Do the high-tech CEOs care? If they do, they’re not saying.
Let’s move on to the big stuff! Congress has been spending trillions of your taxpayer dollars on technologies of modern weaponry, chemicals, drugs, medical devices, transportation, the Internet, biotechnology, nanotechnology and fusion energy. Yet the general public remains clueless about the adverse impact of these expenditures. Congress doesn’t even know if many technologies or products work as advertised.
You can thank the bombastic, ignorant Newt Gingrich for hurling our 535 members of Congress into this black void. In 1994 Gingrich orchestrated the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives. And, in 1995, after becoming Speaker of the House, Gingrich and the Republican-controlled Congress eliminated the funding of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). With a small $20 million annual budget, OTA produced scores of assessment reports needed by Congress. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) was one of OTA’s strongest supporters, who with other members of Congress served on its bipartisan board. When Congress was debating the creation of OTA, Kennedy said “without an OTA the role of Congress in national science policy would become more and more perfunctory and more and more dependent on administration facts and figures, with little opportunity for independent Congressional evaluation.” Kennedy was furious about the Republican defunding of OTA, but could not marshal enough of his dejected fellow Democrats to fight to restore funding even after Gingrich resigned in disgrace five years later.
The failure of Democrats to fund OTA when they controlled Congress allowed Gingrich’s demolition to continue the wreckage he launched. Technically unadvised members looked foolish for years in their questioning of Silicon Valley executives at public hearings.
Right after Obama’s victory in 2008, carrying large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, I organized an effort to refund OTA with Nobel laureates and other scientists on board. For many years, Cong. Rush Holt Jr. (D-NJ) led the effort in the House, only to be undermined by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said she didn’t want to give the Republicans an opportunity to accuse her of starting another bureaucracy on Capitol Hill. Truly shocking!
Now it is 2023 and the studied ignorance of Congress fuels the strategically useless F-35 Fighter planes at a $1.5 trillion projected cost. Well over a trillion dollars will be spent upgrading the nuclear bomb arsenal – currently able to blow up the world many times over. The unavoidable ballistic missile so-called defense program soaks up billions of dollars yearly (See: “Why Missile Defense Won’t Work” by MIT Professor Ted Postol). The rave for electric vehicles badly needs a thorough technology assessment for its lifecycle costs and benefits.
An adequately funded OTA would have alerted Congress early about the looming opioid crisis and crimes that have taken a million or more American lives. A similar alert from an OTA report, before Covid-19 struck, could have alerted Congress on the lack of preparedness for coming pandemics. Being part of Congress, OTA can command the attention and credibility from members far more easily than any studies or alarms from citizen groups or civically-minded Think Tanks.
Pressing the issue of funding OTA in the 21st century’s second decade brought the Democratic Party’s excuse that either one chamber of Congress or the other half was Republican-controlled. I, with Bruce Fein, Joan Claybrook and Claire Nader, explained to Speaker Pelosi in 2020 that the House or Senate can fund OTA without the concurrence of the other simply on the grounds of its prerogative to more fully fund its own institution. No reply. (See letter).
It took 86-year-old Congressman Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ) to publicly chastise his colleagues with articles titled: “Why is Congress so dumb?” (January 11, 2019, Washington Post) and “Congress Is Sabotaging Your Post Office” (April 7, 2019, Washington Monthly). Still no visible reaction from the tone-deaf congressional solons busily reducing their own significance under the Constitution and spending money unwisely.
The ongoing lack of local technology assessment capabilities leaves Congress without a grassroots infrastructure of fact-based, nonpartisan analysis.
Municipalities do not have formal little OTAs for their infrastructure projects, so the grasping, politically connected vendors take advantage of such ignorance to increase prices and delay projects and continue shoddiness. Think bridges, highways, schools and public buildings projects.
The science and engineering departments of universities are rarely interested in supplying such knowledge or even teaching the ethics of engineering to their students. In 2018 we sponsored a book titled Ethics, Politics, and Whistleblowing in Engineering by Rania Milleron and Nicholas Sakellariou (CRC Press) that delved into how disasters can occur when engineering professionals don’t take their consciences that reflect their expected responsibilities to work. (See Nicholas Ashford’s review). Three times we sent letters to about two dozen Deans and professors of Engineering around the country encouraging them to develop classes on ethics for their students. Not a single reply. (See, January 2, 2019, Letter to Engineering Professors or Department Heads).
In 1998, our community project in Winsted, Connecticut retained an engineer, Susan M. McGoey, as a “community technologist.” She proved her worth manyfold, catching over-reaches by the engineering firm hired to upgrade the town’s drinking water purification plant. She also advised the town on its municipal watershed stewardship, began a natural resources inventory and organized a successful river clean-up along with many other money-saving projects from redesigning traffic lights to improving downtown renovations. (See: Courant.).
Readers interested in collaborating with the renewed effort to fund the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in Congress can contact their members of Congress, and also connect with us at gro.redannull@ofni. It is high time to aggregate dedicated public opinion and advocacy on this inexpensive but very important restoration.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Listen to a reading of this article:
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Well it’s another big day for Democrats doing Democraty things.
At a Friday event commemorating the 20th anniversary of the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) hosted by the George W Bush Institute, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke glowingly of the president who instituted the program in 2003 at the same time he was preparing to launch an invasion which would inflict unfathomable horrors upon our world which continue to unfold to this day.
“I’ll just say this honestly, that the Bush family, it’s because of their humanity, their faith, their generosity of spirit, their compassion,” said Pelosi. “Once again, it’s an honor to be associated with President Bush in this.”
Pelosi then pointed to the former president, who was also joined by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and oligarch Bill Gates, with video appearances by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Bono of U2 fame.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>Pelosi: "The Bush family it's because of their humanity, their faith, their generosity of spirit, their compassion. Once again, it's an honor to be associated with President George W. Bush in this." pic.twitter.com/NrIqLxc8Ck
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 24, 2023
Also on Friday we witnessed what Glenn Greenwald described as the “most Elizabeth Warren tweet ever,” in which the Massachusetts senator took a bold stand against Big War Profiteering to advocate on behalf of the little guy (by which I mean Small War Profiteering).
“In the 1990s, America had 51 major contractors bidding for defense work,” tweeted Warren from her government account. “Today, there are only five massive companies remaining. Defense contracting should be reworked to break up the massive contracts awarded to the big guys and create opportunities for firms of all sizes.”
Yeah that’s the real problem, Liz. It’s not that the war industry reaps huge profits from global militarism and nonstop warmongering, it’s that the war industry doesn’t include enough plucky small businesses. Won’t somebody please think of the mom and pop war profiteers? They’ve been forced to close their small community military-industrial complex shops by Walmartian “big guys” like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman!
This is almost as embarrassing as Warren’s 2019 push to convert the US war machine to clean energy, saying “We don’t have to choose between a green military and an effective one” on the campaign trail during her run for president.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>The Pentagon is the single largest government consumer of energy, and it’s dependent on fossil fuels. To improve military readiness and help us achieve a #GreenNewDeal, the Pentagon should achieve net zero carbon emissions for all its non-combat bases and infrastructure by 2030.
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) May 15, 2019
Because that’s what being a progressive Democrat means in 2023: backing the imperial war machine to the hilt and gushing about how wonderful and compassionate the Bush family is while calling for sustainably powered aircraft carriers and more small businesses in the military-industrial complex. A Ukrainian flag on an electric car. This is as far left as you’re allowed to go in the political landscape of the most powerful nation on earth without being branded a treasonous Kremlin operative.
This is the Democratic Party’s true face. This is the Democrats telling you who they really are. Their whole function is to divert all meaningful leftward movement away from inconvenient areas like demilitarization and economic justice and toward convenient areas like whether there should be solar panels on Abrams tanks. And toward that end they have been very, very successful.
The sooner Americans stop falling for the fake two-party puppet show and begin pushing for real change, the sooner our world can move toward health. These people do not care about you.
___________________
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The House will intervene in a dispute between unionized rail workers and rail companies by moving to impose a labor contract on workers that excludes their top attendance demands, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) announced after President Joe Biden issued a call for Congress to act on Monday night.
In his statement, Biden said that the adoption of the contract, negotiated earlier this year and rejected by unions representing over half of the more than 115,000 rail workers affected by negotiations, is necessary to avert a “potentially crippling national rail shutdown.”
“[A]t this critical moment for our economy, in the holiday season, we cannot let our strongly held conviction for better outcomes for workers deny workers the benefits of the bargain they reached, and hurl this nation into a devastating rail freight shutdown,” Biden said.
Unions have expressed ire over Biden’s statement. “We’re trying to address the issue here of sick time. It’s very important,” Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen president Michael Baldwin told CNN. “This action prevents us from reaching the end of our process, takes away the strength and ability that we have to force bargaining or force the railroads to … do the right thing.”
“A call to Congress to act immediately to pass legislation that adopts tentative agreements that exclude paid sick leave ignores the Railroad Workers’ concerns,” wrote union Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes (BMWED) in a statement. “It both denies Railroad Workers their right to strike while also denying them of the benefit they would likely otherwise obtain if they were not denied their right to strike.”
The deadline for an agreement is December 8, at which point union members will strike if an agreement isn’t reached. Though several unions have ratified a contract, members across unions have agreed to strike in solidarity with the four unions that have rejected the agreement.
This could have an enormous impact on the U.S. economy, affecting water supplies and potentially costing $2 billion a day in lost economic output, according to railroad trade group the Association of American Railroads. Workers and union supporters say that the blame for the strike would lie nearly entirely on rail owners’ greed and their abject refusal to provide workers with basic provisions enjoyed by many other workers, like paid sick leave and not being penalized for taking time off.
The rail workers say they face grueling working conditions and are expected to work for weeks without a day off, not even for situations like a doctor’s visit, recovering from a heart attack, or the death of a parent. Indeed, one impetus for the current dispute was a locomotive engineer’s death from a heart attack earlier this year after he was forced to delay a doctor’s appointment due to work demands.
Pelosi said shortly after Biden’s statement was released that the House will take up a vote to adopt the agreement “with no poison pills or changes to the negotiated terms,” meaning that workers would not get the sick leave demands they have asked for. As it is, the deal contains raises and would allow employees to take a day off for routine health appointments, if requested 30 days in advance. This agreement, workers say, is not nearly sufficient to address the punishing attendance policies that they face.
It is unclear if the Senate will be able to pass the agreement; in its current form, it will likely see opposition from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who has called for Congress to ensure that workers’ demands are met.
“If the rail industry can afford to spend $25.5 billion this year to buy back its own stock and hand out huge dividends to its wealthy shareholders, please do not tell me it cannot afford to guarantee paid sick days to its workers and provide them with a decent quality of life,” he wrote in a tweet on Saturday, adding later that “Congress must stand with rail workers.”
Workers and labor advocates are furious over Biden’s statement, which comes at odds with his pledge to be a pro-labor, pro-union president.
“This is a legacy defining moment for Joe Biden,” wrote inter-union caucus of railroad workers Railroad Workers United. “He is going down as one of the biggest disappointments in labor history.”
A labor friendly Whitehouse wouldn’t issue a statement with misinformation and outright lies. Union leaders agreed put it to members for a vote—despite politicians and pundits strong arming members, 4 unions representing a majority of organized rail labor rejected the deal. https://t.co/MOa6cIP2cL pic.twitter.com/xvOd5BsmAJ
— Ross Grooters (@RossGrooters) November 29, 2022
“Full sellout from the White House for the majority of rail workers who rejected the deal the President brokered, preemptively denying them the right to strike,” wrote Labor Notes journalist Jonah Furman. “This was the ‘which side are you on?’ moment, and the White House chose the railroad bosses.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (California) announced on Thursday that she is stepping down as leader of the Democratic caucus after two decades in the role — and, while she often obstructed the left wing of her party during her time in leadership, the legislator favored to follow her, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, could be even more damaging to the left if he is chosen as her successor.
“With great confidence in our caucus, I will not seek reelection to Democratic leadership in the next Congress,” Pelosi said on the House floor. She will remain in office, as will her first and second in command, Representatives Steny Hoyer (Maryland) and James Clyburn (South Carolina), the former of whom is also stepping down.
As leader of the Democratic caucus, Pelosi, a centrist and one of the richest members of Congress, often butted heads with the left-leaning members of her party. She has publicly feuded with the progressive “Squad” — something that the group pushed back on in 2019, pointing out that the leader was picking on newly elected women of color at the time — and has made decisions that have deeply frustrated progressives.
In 2020, for instance, Pelosi endorsed a centrist in his race to unseat progressive Sen. Ed Markey (Massachusetts), an original sponsor of the Green New Deal. This endorsement came despite her supposed position of supporting Democratic incumbents, which she did with her endorsement this year of Rep. Henry Cuellar (Texas), the only anti-abortionist in the caucus.
Pelosi has proven a roadblock to progressive policy as well, and in recent years has dismissed progressive priorities like the Green New Deal (“the green dream or whatever”), Medicare for All (“I’m not a big fan”), and student debt cancellation (“not even a discussion”). In the meantime, she has repeatedly proved a supporter of policies that help enrich the ultra-wealthy.
However, Jeffries could be far more hostile to leftists if his past positions are a reflection of how he would lead; if Pelosi was a force that stopped progressives in their tracks, Jeffries could be a bludgeon actively forcing the progressive movement back, depending on how he decides to exercise his power.
Jeffries, a former lawyer, identifies as a progressive but has alliances in the center or right wing of the party; as The American Prospect reported last year, the New York lawmaker has stayed silent as supposed fellow progressives have lobbied for issues in recent years, and started a PAC last year, called Team Blue, that was formed specifically to protect Democratic incumbents from progressive challengers. His co-founder for Team Blue was Rep. Josh Gottheimer (New Jersey), a conservative Democrat who was key in torpedoing the Build Back Better Act last year.
Crucially, Jeffries has voiced unfiltered antipathy toward the left. In a profile by Edward-Isaac Dovere in The Atlantic last year, Jeffries contrasted himself, a “progressive,” with the left-leaning factions of the party that he was even then favored to take over in the House. “There will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism,” he said.
In a separate interview in The New York Times about the upcoming primaries for the midterm election and in the heat of negotiations for the Build Back Better Act last year, Jeffries took his stance against the left even further, outright attacking anti-establishment leftists.
“The extreme left is obsessed with talking trash about mainstream Democrats on Twitter, when the majority of the electorate constitute mainstream Democrats at the polls,” he said. “In the post-[Donald] Trump era, the anti-establishment line of attack is lame — when President [Joe] Biden and Democratic legislators are delivering millions of good-paying jobs, the fastest-growing economy in 40 years and a massive child tax cut.”
The left would say that there are plenty of reasons to be anti-establishment in a time when the establishment is embracing corruption and corporate rule, but Jeffries may view anti-establishment views as a personal attack. Even in times when Democrats as a whole may have been pivoting away from Wall Street, Jeffries has taken donations from deep-pocketed conservative interests; he has been one of Congress’s leading recipients of hedge fund donations and is one of the only Democrats who has taken donations from Fox News’s PAC, News Corp.
At the same time, Jeffries has taken positions that progressives — or at least many within the progressive base — would find heinous. For instance, he is vehemently pro-Israel, and has supported legislation that would penalize companies and Americans that support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement; this legislation is a major slap in the face to Palestinian advocates and could endanger Americans’ right to participate in political boycotts at all.
Jeffries isn’t facing other challengers for the leadership spot yet, but progressives aren’t likely to support him; after all, Jeffries was once rumored to be a target to be primaried by those close to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), though that effort never came to pass. The leadership election is slated to take place in roughly two weeks, on November 30, meaning that if there will be a progressive or left-leaning challenger, they will likely have to emerge soon.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Law enforcement analysts and voting rights experts are warning local officials of decentralized efforts by conspiracy believers and right-wing extremists to disrupt and sway the midterm elections on Tuesday, raising fears that the results could be marred by voter intimidation, a deluge of frivolous lawsuits and even violence fueled by former President Trump’s baseless election fraud claims.
From Florida to Pennsylvania and Michigan, far right groups and pundits are calling on their followers to surveil ballot drop boxes and volunteer as poll workers, observers and vote challengers, efforts that already sparked legal battles over election observation rules and allegations of voter intimidation. The armed vigilantes who staked out a drop boxes across Arizona’s Maricopa County last week heightened fears that precincts serving high concentrations of Black and Brown voters will be targeted in cities such as Phoenix and Detroit, which were at the center of baseless internet conspiracy theories after Trump spread lies about the 2020 election. After hearing from voting rights groups, a federal judge placed a temporary restraining order on the far right group in Arizona this week.
Law enforcement agencies recently distributed intelligence bulletins warning of a “heightened threat” of “domestic violent extremism” fueled by conspiracy theories and election denialism, with potential targets including “candidates … elected officials, election workers, political rallies, political party representatives, racial and religious minorities, or perceived ideological opponents,” according to CBS News.
Mary McCord, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, told the U.S. Conference of Mayors this week to prepare local election officials and police departments for right-wing disruption efforts. This could include a potential deluge of phone 911 calls claiming to report “voter fraud,” according to reports. With far right groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers focusing on local precincts and communities, officials must make firm public statements asserting that voter intimidation and armed militia activity around polling locations will not be tolerated, McCord said.
“All of these efforts are really part of this strategy to not only threaten and intimidate, but also to really gum up the works, which will lead to the ability to file lawsuits” challenging the election results, McCord said on MSNBC this week. “They might be frivolous, they might be baseless, but they are trying to set up a rational to allow for filing of those suits.”
News outlets first reported the intelligence bulletins warning of extremist violence on Friday, the same day that a man broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home in California and brutally attacked her husband with a hammer in an attempt to hunt down the Democratic leader. Analysts say the suspected assailant, David DePape, left a trail online suggesting a “standard case of online right-wing radicalization.”
However, the right-wing media quickly dismissed the attack with a bizarre and homophobic conspiracy theory with help from Trump and other figures who were quick to share debunked claims and hearsay online. Thanks to the insular nature of right-wing and pro-Trump media ecosystem, the baseless conspiracy theory was likely accepted as reality by a sizable chunk of the GOP base, according to Matt Gertz, a researcher at Media Matters for America.
The right-wing media bubble has pushed election denialism since 2020 and is currently spreading misinformation about the midterm elections and “voter fraud” as Republican operatives organize an “army” of poll watchers to contest the vote, according to Truthout’s analysis of content on conservative social media sites. Gertz argues that right-wing media consumers exist in a sort of “parallel universe” where they are “uniquely vulnerable” to conspiracy theories that frame political opponents as evil, Satanic enemies, fueling violence and extremism in the process:
The right-wing press spent decades spinning out these politically convenient narratives about the diabolical nature of their perceived enemies until the audience came to demand them. Few on the right — and none with any real degree of influence — are interested in debunking the rampant lies once they get going. Instead, powerful figures at Fox News and elsewhere end up pushing the likes of QAnon talking points and scoffing at its extremism. And decades of right-wing attacks on the mainstream press have created a bubble in which the audience is unlikely to receive or credit contradictory information from those outlets.
It’s within this media bubble that intelligence analysts, journalists and voting rights groups are looking for evidence that extremists are plotting to sow chaos on Election Day. While law enforcement cautions that violence could arise from any end of the political spectrum, the intelligence bulletin obtained by news outlets this week included grievances about Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden in 2020.
Madeline Peltz, a researcher at Media Matters for America who covers former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, said the far right agitator’s “War Room” podcast is a central hub for radicalizing people with election conspiracy theories and pulling together right-wing efforts to disrupt and subvert the vote.
“Over past few weeks and months, Bannon is using his platform as an organizing hub for dozens of election denial groups that are recruiting volunteers to participate in the election process, both externally and also has through government positions such as poll workers and watchers,” Peltz said in an interview with Truthout.
Bannon’s fans and other right-wing audiences are explicitly being called to challenge the vote in Democratic strongholds, Peltz added. Voting rights groups and nonpartisan observers will be on the ground to assist voters and document any abuses, if they occur. Voting rights groups are currently distributing resources to help voters identify and report illegal voter intimidation, including militia activity near the polls that is banned in several states.
Various state laws govern what designated “poll watchers” are allowed to do inside the polls, including challenge a voter’s ballot. Even if your qualification to vote is challenged by a “watcher” or observer at the polls on Election Day, voting rights groups say you still have the right to cast a regular ballot unless that challenge is sustained and, at minimum, you have the right to cast a provisional ballot before leaving the site.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Last week, when an intruder broke into the Pelosi’s San Francisco residence and attacked 82-year-old Paul Pelosi with a hammer, while demanding to see “Nancy,” I briefly hoped that the horror of the event would shock the GOP back into moral decency. It was, of course, a hope misplaced.
In this Trumpier-than-Trump election season, the GOP couldn’t resist piling in with conspiracy theories and memes to twist the meaning of the attack. First there was Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin who, at a campaign stop for a congressional candidate, dutifully acknowledged that the attack was awful but then couldn’t resist adding, “There’s no room for violence anywhere, but we’re going to send [Pelosi] back to be with him in California.”
That, of course, was milquetoast compared to the ghastly meme that Donald Trump Jr. sent out showing a hammer and underwear on a bed, and the caption “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.” And that, in turn, was nothing compared to Trump Jr.’s monstrous (and now deleted) social media posts that paid homage to a conspiracy theory (perhaps vaguely modeled on a particularly violent scene from the 1960s movie Midnight Cowboy) doing the rounds on “alt-right” and conspiracy websites suggesting that Paul Pelosi and his much younger attacker were actually lovers.
If how one treats the elderly — especially an elder who has just been violently assaulted — is any moral indication of how one was raised, clearly Trump Jr.’s parenting left something to be desired.
Not to be outdone, Kari Lake, the conspiracy-espousing GOP gubernatorial candidate in Arizona, who is now frequently talked about as a potential vice-presidential running mate for Trump Sr. in 2024, chose to use one of her raucous campaign rallies to mock Pelosi’s home security precautions. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has also retweeted conspiracy theories about David DePape, the alleged attacker. Despite DePape’s social media pages being filled with references to January 6 and “stolen” elections, Cruz apparently adheres to the idea that DePape was a “hippie nudist from Berkeley.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Clay Higgins, a far right figure from Louisiana, went even further into the realm of the grotesque. He posted a tweet — since removed — that showed a photo of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, her hands covering her eyes and the tagline: “That moment you realize the nudist hippie male prostitute LSD guy was the reason your husband didn’t make it to your fundraiser.”
These astounding reactions within the GOP to the attempted murder of the husband of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives are a window into the ethos of extremism and crude violence now coursing through U.S. politics. Many still have a vague expectation that U.S. political discourse will in some way be rational, yet, on a daily basis, we are now served up masterclasses of bile from provocateurs who substitute appeals to violence in place of genuine political debate. The GOP’s carnival of empathy-eschewing ridicule that ensued after the attack on Paul Pelosi is Trump’s gift that keeps on giving, his peculiarly destructive legacy. It is his fascist embrace of the violent attentat, the spectacle of bloodshed intended to tap into the emotive and bloodthirsty parts of the psyche. It is the stripping-down of the political language into its basest, most brutal, most vicious constituent parts.
Across the country, GOP candidates, especially those nearly 300 or so candidates who embrace election-denialism, are competing to generate evermore extreme “solutions” to what they see as the pressing issues of the day.
Some are, at this point, so well-known on the national stage that their names have become synonymous with irrational fanaticism, or with just plain ignorance. They include congressmembers such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, from Georgia, who believes Jews with space lasers cause California’s wildfires and also take literal potshots at Santa Claus; Paul Gosar, from Arizona, who takes pride in speaking at white nationalist events; Matt Gaetz, from Florida, who recently launched fatphobic insults against women who oppose abortion bans; and Jim Jordan, from Ohio, who accused Anthony Fauci of wanting to “cancel” the utterance of “Merry Christmas” because he urged people to think twice before traveling during the holidays at the height of the pandemic.
But many of these extreme-right candidates are less high profile. There’s Doug Mastriano, the GOP candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, who believes that women who have abortions should face murder charges, and who in recent months has made something of a sporting hobby out of repeatedly lobbing antisemitic barbs at his Democratic opponent, Josh Shapiro. There’s Texas State Rep. Bryan Slaton, who authored a bill last year that, had it passed, would have allowed for the Lone Star State to pursue the death penalty against people who have abortions — supposedly in the name of “life.” There’s Mark Finchem, the GOP candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, who apparently kept a “treason watch list” of political figures, including President Obama, with whom he disagreed. There’s J.R. Majewski, a congressional candidate in Ohio, whose social media pages, before he attempted a pivot to the middle, were filled with pro-QAnon hashtags and rants. There’s Carl Paladino, GOP candidate for a congressional seat in western New York, who said that Attorney General Merrick Garland “should be executed,” and then tried to walk it back by saying he had only been jesting.
The list of horrific, extremist, violence-encouraging acts by these candidates goes on. In fact, earlier this year the Anti-Defamation League identified 100 far right candidates around the U.S. running for office under the auspices of the GOP. They include members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers (both essentially paramilitary, or street-fighting, organizations); nearly four dozen people who promoted QAnon conspiracies; and several avowed white supremacists.
In the year 2022, this is what passes for conservative politics in the United States. The party that now appears poised to potentially regain at least partial control of Congress now resembles a hybrid of a frat house and a fascist summer camp. The political language of its rising stars is defined by banality, cruelty, crudeness and bombast. If any more evidence was needed, it is abundantly clear that the Republican Party has broadly reshaped itself in the image of its demagogue, Donald J. Trump.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In the wake of an attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-California) husband by an alleged assailant who regularly posted right-wing conspiracy theories online, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has rebuked Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (California) for his relative silence on the issue.
On Twitter on Saturday morning, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that McCarthy had not yet commented on the attack that took place the day before, and noted that he has a history of defending violent threats when they are directed at his political enemies.
“Last year, a GOP Congressman shared a depiction of himself killing me,” Ocasio-Cortez said, referring to an incident last year when Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) posted an animated video on Twitter depicting him killing Ocasio-Cortez. “When the House rose to censure, [McCarthy] defended him.”
“Yesterday, a man sharing that member’s rhetoric tried to assassinate the Speaker and her spouse,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “What has [Mccarthy] said? Nothing. This is who he is.”
The man who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi in the couple’s San Francisco home on Friday has posted about the 2020 election being stolen and other debunked conspiracy theories surrounding the pandemic, QAnon and supposed “grooming” from the LGBTQ community.
McCarthy has yet to make a formal public statement on the attack, remaining silent on his Twitter account and failing to publish any press releases on the matter. He did downplay the attack on far right outlet Breitbart on Saturday, however.
After Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet on Saturday morning, McCarthy said that the attack was “wrong” but quickly brought up threats that have been waged against Republicans and far right Supreme Court justices — a clear attempt to make it seem as though left-wingers are just as violent as right-wingers, which data has shown is blatantly untrue.
Ocasio-Cortez highlighted in a separate tweet on Saturday morning that there is a vast discrepancy between the way Democrats and progressive politicians versus right-wing politicians respond to political violence.
Attaching a video from 2019 when white nationalist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), then not an elected official, harassed Ocasio-Cortez and her staffers at Ocasio-Cortez’s office in the Capitol, Ocasio-Cortez wrote, “Reminder: This is who the Republican Party elects and elevates to positions of power. This is how they act in the halls of Congress, and this [is] the example they set for acolytes to follow.”
“These people want media to [claim there is] ‘both sides’ fascism. Don’t fall for it,” she continued. “For full context, one of Greene’s companions in that video was part of the violent mob on January 6th — in case there was any doubt at all about how closely these fascists work with one another. Do not give them an inch.”
McCarthy himself has privately admitted that he feared the most extreme right-wingers in his party would incite violence against other members of Congress in the wake of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — but he still hasn’t renounced the violence of the Donald Trump militants who breached the Capitol that day.
Violence and threats from the right wing are on the rise; threats against Pelosi in particular have been common among the right for many years. Over the past year, federal agencies have tracked a sharp uptick in political violence, the vast majority of which comes from the right.
Republicans have repeatedly refused to condemn this violence — and in some cases, they have also celebrated it. For instance, they have uplifted Kyle Rittenhouse, the man who traveled across state lines and shot three people, killing two of them, who were participating in protests for the Movement for Black Lives in 2020; after his trial last year, Republican politicians floated the idea of hiring Rittenhouse as an intern and he was given a speaking slot at a prominent conservative conference.
As far right militants were violently breaking into the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the Secret Service received news of a threat waged against Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York), one of the top Democrats in Congress — and evidently waited over an hour to pass it on to Capitol Police.
In a report published on Tuesday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) says that the Secret Service received a voicemail with a shooting threat against Schumer at around 4 pm D.C. time, forwarded by an editor for far right publication Newsmax. Documents obtained by CREW show that the Secret Service held onto this information for over an hour before sending it to Capitol Police, despite evidence that the agency saw the message shortly after it was received.
This was a crucial time during the attack, when minutes mattered. Around that time, the Donald Trump militants were roaming the halls of the Capitol and had breached the Senate floor and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-California) office. Just about 15 minutes after the voicemail was sent, Trump posted a video to Twitter repeating the lies about the election that had served as inspiration for the attack to begin with.
Schumer and Pelosi had already been transported to a secure location at around 2 pm — but, as previous evidence has shown, several prominent politicians, like then-Vice President Mike Pence, had already suffered extremely close calls at that point. Extra information on threats was also crucial as officials hesitated to send in reinforcements.
CREW previously uncovered that the Secret Service had also sat on a threat to Pelosi. In the days leading up to the attack, an account on Parler had made threats toward Pelosi and Biden, placing Pelosi’s name on a list of “enemies” and saying on January 2, 2021, that “Biden will die shortly after being elected.”
According to internal emails obtained by CREW, the Secret Service was aware of these threats as early as January 4. Despite this, the agency didn’t send these messages to Capitol Police until January 6 at 5:55 pm, at which point much of the mob had been cleared out.
The Secret Service has faced scrutiny for other actions related to January 6. Earlier this year, The Intercept uncovered that the agency had deleted a swath of text messages between January 5 and 6, 2021, that could have answered lawmakers’ and the public’s questions about key decisions made that day, like why agents had wanted to remove Pence from the Capitol before he had completed his duties in certifying the results of the election.
Other top government agencies also had knowledge of the attack ahead of time, but declined to act. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security had been warned about the threat to the Capitol and members of Congress, but neither agency prepared a threat assessment, leaving the agencies thoroughly unprepared to handle the violence that the Trump militants would unleash.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The Communist party will this week confirm Xi as China’s most powerful leader since Mao. What will his extended term of office mean for the country and for its neighbour Taiwan?
This week in Beijing, Xi Jinping will preside over one of his country’s great shows of political theatre and seal a long-planned political triumph, consolidating his power and extending his rule.
The Chinese Communist party is poised to formally hand Xi another five years as party boss, and therefore leader of the country, at a summit that will also move his allies into key roles and elevate the status of his writings on power and government.
A vote on the long-awaited — and some say direly needed — bill to ban members of Congress from being able to trade individual stocks will likely be delayed until at least after the midterm election in November, sources within House Democratic leadership say, drawing frustration from advocates who have been pushing for the bill to come to a vote for months.
According to Punchbowl News, some sources say that there is “very little chance” that the bill, kept secret by Democratic leadership for months and released this week, will come to a vote before the election.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) has said that it’s likely the bill will not come to a vote this week, missing the estimated time frame for a vote that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) set in a press conference last week. Hoyer is under fire for indicating that he is opposed to the proposal in recent meetings.
Proponents of the legislation have been urging House leaders to bring the bill to a vote since members began introducing their own versions of the proposal early this year. But Democrats had delayed progress on the legislation, despite rare bipartisan support for the proposal, and had even kept the contents of the proposal hidden from lawmakers advocating for the bill until this week.
Now that the text of the legislation has been released, Democratic leaders are facing criticism yet again over elements of the bill that ethics experts say make the bill both overly broad and too weak in its enforcement, either dooming the legislation from the start or making it effectively useless.
In its current form, the bill would ban not only members of Congress but also Supreme Court justices and high-level congressional and executive officials from trading stocks, covering a wider swath of officials than most proposals introduced by lawmakers throughout this year.
Ethics experts say that the judiciary and executive branches should also be barred from trading individual stocks, as the practice brings up potential conflicts of interest. But Project on Government Oversight Senior Ethics Fellow Walter Shaub pointed out on Twitter that including such officials in the ban would be a “poison pill” for the bill, risking Republican opposition and likely dooming its chances in the Senate.
Meanwhile, government watchdogs are also taking issue with the meat of the bill: the mechanism by which government officials would hand off control over their stock portfolios.
The bill would require lawmakers to either divest from their stocks or place them into a blind trust — but the blind trust wouldn’t have to follow existing rules for a blind trust, allowing lawmakers to create a “fake” blind trust like the one used by former President Donald Trump, Shaub said on Twitter.
“Pelosi’s bill would eliminate all of these requirements by authorizing each ethics office to allow anything they want and call it a blind trust. Literally anything,” Shaub wrote in a Twitter thread railing against the bill on Tuesday. With no rules for what qualifies as a blind trust, experts say that lawmakers could essentially still trade stocks, but do so even more secretively than before.
“There’s plenty of reason to be concerned about throwing out the current strict uniform standard for blind trusts across the government,” Shaub continued. “For one thing, the House and Senate ethics committees are notoriously loose. They’ve spent the last ten years not enforcing the STOCK Act.”
Proponents of the stock ban have suggested that Democratic leaders may have purposefully introduced a bill that is far from what other lawmakers have proposed because they oppose it.
Pelosi, whose husband is a prolific stock trader, has previously expressed her opposition to the proposal. Hoyer indicated in meetings recently that he is intending on voting against the bill when it comes to the floor. And House Administration Committee Chair Zoe Lofgren (D-California), who wrote the bill, had reportedly cooled on the idea after the committee held a hearing on it earlier this year.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Proponents of legislation that would ban members of Congress from trading stocks are say that Democratic party leaders are stalling on the bill.
Though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) claimed last week that lawmakers are finally ready to bring a bill to ban Congress from trading stocks to a vote by the end of this month, proponents of the ban are skeptical that that is the case, according to interviews with the lawmakers.
As Insider reports, key advocates of the proposal in the House like Representatives Abigail Spanberger (D-Virginia), Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Illinois) and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) say that, even though lawmakers have been negotiating the bill for months, the details of a potential ban are still not being discussed.
Democratic leadership, meanwhile, has not been clueing lead advocates in on their plans for the legislation — and some lawmakers think that Democratic leaders could be delaying because they’re personally against the plan, with people like Pelosi and her husband personally profiting greatly from stock trading.
As a New York Times report revealed last week, members of Congress regularly make stock trades in companies that their committees oversee, potentially representing conflicts of interest. According to the report, nearly a fifth of Congress has reported making such a trade between 2019 and 2021.
Last Wednesday, Pelosi said that lawmakers “believe we have a product that we can bring to the floor this month. But in a briefing with the Committee on House Administration on Thursday on the bill, advocates were presented with no legislative text, according to two Democratic sources, but just a framework on the bill. Lawmakers on the committee have been claiming that bill text is ready for months, but no such thing has emerged.
“We have not heard exactly what’s happening,” Jayapal told Insider. “I can’t say I’m confident.”
Spanberger has speculated that Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) are simply trying to put the bill off long enough until efforts to pass it fizzle out. “I think that they’re trying to run out the clock,” she said in May.
The delay isn’t due to a lack of energy or ideas for the proposal; there have been multiple stock ban bills introduced by members from both sides of the aisle over the past year, with rare bipartisan support for the ban. Those bills all have some form of ban on members’ ability to trade individual stocks. Some include variations on whether their families should also be banned, while others allow lawmakers to keep the stocks in a blind trust or require officials to divest from them entirely.
One roadblock to progress on the proposal in the House may be the House Administration Committee, which is drafting the bill. After the committee held a hearing on the idea earlier this year, committee chair Zoe Lofgren (D-California) was cool to the proposal. Republicans on the committee also said that they are opposed to the idea.
According to Insider, Spanberger sought a meeting with Lofgren after the April hearing, and found a wide disconnect between lawmakers in terms of their understanding of the bill. “It was very clear that some of the members just were on different planets talking about this issue,” said Spanberger. “Like, ‘Oh, am I going to have to sell my house?’”
Even if lawmakers are successful in urging Pelosi and Democratic leaders to make progress on the proposal, Senate Democrats are saying that they won’t propose a stock ban until after the midterm election, according to Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), frustrating Senate advocates.
“There is no reason that we should not have a stock trading bill on the floor and vote on it,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) told Insider last week. “Every day that we delay on passing meaningful restrictions on stock trading among members of Congress is a day that further erodes the credibility of this body.”
Indeed, as the proposal has been delayed, advocates and watchdog groups have grown increasingly frustrated, saying that a stock ban is crucial to restoring public confidence in lawmakers. As long as lawmakers are allowed to trade stocks, they say, the public will question whether or not they’re using insider information to get out ahead; after all, Congress beat the market last year.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Step right this way!
Roll up, roll up for the Mystery Tour
Roll up, roll up for the Mystery Tour— The Beatles, “Magical Mystery Tour,” 1967
Recently, the Wicked Witch of Ice Cream, octogenarian Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, took an officially unscheduled trip to Taiwan that caused quite a stir. Beyond the official Chinese Government’s objections, Pelosi’s weird visitation also included the non-endorsements of both the U.S. State Department and the Biden administration. So, what was The Nancy doing in Taipei, besides possibly checking in upon some “family” investments on the American taxpayer’s dime? Several angles suggest themselves concerning this transparently symbolic, and officially unsanctioned, Pelosi excursion to Taiwan.
Firstly, one could say that Pelosi tip-toed through the Taipei-lips — except, of course, for that extravagant military escort that absolutely contradicted the notion that this was not an “official” state visit. One wonders if these opposite optical effects of Pelosi’s Taiwan touchdown were more a case of strategic confusion than so-called “Strategic Ambiguity”? In any case, the Chinese had bluffed (a bluff amplified by western corporate media, itching for an incident) that they might interdict the Speaker’s armada, yet wisely let it pass unmolested. I am not a China expert, but suspect that the Chinese view Pelosi’s Taipei trip-sy as a case of “Grandma being off her rocker,” as much as anything else Indeed, the video of Pelosi gingerly navigating the steep steps of the Air Force Jumbo Jet while clutching almost desperately the stair rails may have caused a chuckle or two in Beijing, or even — who knows? — concern that she would lose her grip; after all, hadn’t the elderly Biden just famously fallen off his bike (or was that Biden’s stunt double, instead?)? Whatever mysterious, or even intentionally incoherent, message the United States was “unofficially” sending to Beijing, “We the People” certainly did not send our most nimble actress in this case. It really seems like elder abuse is becoming a standard feature of the American political scene these increasingly senescent days…
Now, to digress just a bit: it seems that any parody sketch of The Nancy’s Taiwandering “mystery trip” should feature Pelosi formally inviting Taiwan into both the NATO alliance and the European Union. During this astonishing World-hysterical announcement, Pelosi would start gyrating her arms in the bizarre fashion she displayed at the last State of the Union address (I believe Madame Speaker was acting as High Priestess of “burn pits” at this moment, or: the weird drugs were just beginning to kick in…). Unfortunately, this skit would not reach the status of high comedy unless we could also summon the image of comedian president Zelensky parachuting down to straddle Pelosi’s padded shoulders, firing wildly from his fingertips in all directions while imploringly scolding all and sundry for “More Money and More Weapons!” Ukraine, of course, is a Western welfare/warfare basket case; that Zelensky: “He’s a real live action figure hero, folks!”
Nevertheless, however Pelosi’s lost trip to Taiwan can be parodied, it could just be the case that it simply signifies a NATOOTANi shift away from Ukraine to Taiwan. Naturally, this makes no geo-strategic sense whatsoever, but neither does the AmericaNATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. While still compulsively spinning an ever-thinning (and always delusional) narrative of ultimate Ukrainian victory, the Blue-and-Yellow Press of the West appears to be catching on, by dribs and drabs, to the fact that Ukraine and the Zelensky regime are a lost cause.
Indeed, the recent NATO conference in Madrid re-shuffled the deck of the TransAtlantican organization’s priorities. One would have assumed, in 2022, that Ukraine would have topped that list, but “No!”, or at least “nyet!” Instead, apparently, Ukraine has fallen from high greasy grace, and it is the “rise of China” that rules the NATO-centric roost. NATO’s playing the “China Card” these days, so they not-necessarily-so-ambiguously tip-toed out old grandma Pelosi to Taiwan to symbolize this shift of geopolitical grift. How this grifty shift, which was originally trotted out under Barack O’Bushma’s regime as the “pivot to Asia” one decade ago like a Show Horse, will work out for Paul Pelosi Jr’s significant investment in newly designated Enemy #1, or China, remains to be seen. Paul Jr’s probably not a particularly brave or inspiring figure; after all, where was the accompanying son when his Mom was clinging for dear life to an Air Force jet stairwell rail? Perhaps this explains why Paul Jr was left off the “official” Pelosi entourage list?
Pelosi’s frivolous foray to Taipei also underscores the utter vanity and inefficacy of recent American diplomatic efforts. While Biden’s agenda flops like a fish out of water at Home, his foreign policy flounders and blunders Abroad. Seriously: What’s wrong with these people? Too much Paxlovid in the brain’s blood? Well, maybe another booster of “Partial Immunity Shot” will cut through that “long haul brain fog?”
Officially, Pelosi’s tip-toe to Taipei did not accomplish much beyond irritating the Chinese Communist Party. Benjamin Franklin, perhaps, had a roll-in-the-grave over this colossal waste of “Time and Money”; George Washington, whatever his many faults, who so presciently warned a nascent United States against “foreign entanglements,” likewise.
Foreign mis-entangling has been amply demonstrated by top U.S. officials traveling to “foreign” places this Summer (like the tone-deaf tourists most of them are), not least by Pelosi’s “mystery trip” to Taiwan (“Step right up!” — and she could only most gingerly, clingingly: “Where’s Paul?”). “Falling” Joe Biden’s recent travel to Jeddah (not Riyadh), Saudi Arabia, for example, revealed a domestically hamstrung President “fist-bumping” a figure that he had consistently labeled a “pariah”; which is to say, the Saudi Crown Prince, MbS, aka “More Bone Saw.” Biden ostensibly went to “KSA” for more oil production from “The Kingdom.” In the event, Biden the Ineffectual, secured no such assurance. Biden was more mocked than anything else in Jeddah, or, put in another way: Mr Biden never got remotely close to the mystery orb that Trump had touched. It almost goes without saying that going to Saudi Arabia to beg for more oil totally contradicts the whole Biden — or is that the WEF? — “Green Agenda” thing, but, “Hey, who’s counting?” Biden’s like the second coming of MAGA, or: “Make America Gaffe Again,” Biden.
In brief, Saudi Arabia, recipient of untold billions in U$ military aid and other assistance over the decades, straight-up snubbed the President of the United States. Even that awkward PR “fist-bump” merely served to uncomfortably recall the emphatic “elbow-bump” (and “pre-Covid”, no less!) between Russia’s Putin and Saudi’s Mohammed bin Salman at the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires in 2018, which also featured another noticeably snubbed American president, or J Biden’s immediate predecessor, Donald J Trump, wandering aimlessly around in the background…
A more telling contrast with Biden’s inconclusive — or even “failed” — Saudi trip can be easily seen in this Summer’s summit in Tehran, Iran, where Russia’s Putin and Turkey’s Erdogan met amiably with Iranian leaders, their hosts. I’m not sure what deals were struck in Tehran, but one wonders if a rehabilitated neo-con hack like David Frum might be inspired to brand Russia-Turkey-Iran a new “Axis of Evil”? Of course, Frum would have to include China, too, and, as if on cue, China’s Xi Jinping is slated to visit Riyadh any day now. Clearly, the Chinese leader’s trip to Saudi Arabia, if it happens, will be diplomatic dynamite. Can anyone say –Ka-blam! — “Thucydides Trap”?
Beyond mere appearances, or the decorativeness of World leaders, like “MAGA”-Joe Biden’s recent “mystery trip” to the KSA, the Big Issue at play is Saudi Arabia’s willingness to trade oil with China in yuan, and not USD. This is an actual “game changer,” and potentially a World War maker. This developing arrangement would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, as Saudi Arabia is the lynchpin of the Petro-Dollar system, which in turn anchors American global hegemony: indeed, the entire TransAtlantican financial extractive wealth system of the last half century, built upon the exploitations of the previous 4 Centuries…
Given the obviously messy fore-or-back ground, like a melting down Ice Cream Cone: What, oh what, is a slip-sliding Leviathan to do? Just to speculate a bit, but something tells me, like a back-pocket thought, that an American invasion of Saudi Arabia is a better bet than China attacking Taiwan anytime soon. Sounds outlandish, but when the USD is threatened, the Death Star (Pentagon) tends to swing into “Action!” Just ask Iraq or Libya (or Smedley Butler). “Falling” Joe Biden did manage to re-commit the United States to the Middle East, that fossil fuel rich part of Eurasia, while in Jeddah, whatever an American “re-commitment” might mean. Given the recent American track record in the Middle East…well: One imagines that anything is possible.
In any event, Xi’s trip to Riyadh (if it even happens…), and the American reaction to it, will be well worth watching. Certainly, his visit would have vastly greater significance than Pelosi’s silly sally to Taipei, which was far more farce than show of force. Symbolically, clinging to an American Air Force jet stairwell rail, was “Mama Bear” Pelosi a white-knuckling image of the Collective West’s ever-losing grasp on the “Great Game” of global hegemony: a pictorial video symbolic of an Occidental hegemon finally “losing its grip” after so many centuries at the helm? Is Uncle Sam finally losing his World-dominating bona fides, his USD, just in time for the new paradigm?
The post Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan Strike Force first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
(President Biden, Speaker Pelosi, Sec of State Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and White House aide Tara Write)
Biden: Let me bring this small meeting to order. We are all here. And this is a new White House Aide, Tara Write, who will provide visuals if we need them. The purpose of this meeting is… by gosh what is the purpose of this meeting?
(Sullivan and Blinken raise their eyebrows, glance at one another.)
Nancy, what is the agenda?
Pelosi: It is, it is…it has slipped my mind.
Jake Sullivan: (Eagerly raising his hand). The purpose is to do a postmortem on Speaker Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan.
Pelosi: (Irritated): I knew that!
(Mumbling under her breath). Smarty pants.
And for your information, the trip was a great success.
I had the support of every Democrat in the Congress – even the progressives. Ro Khanna tweeted support for the trip – and you can’t get much more progressive than that.
And it is not the first time that I delivered this crowd. Remember the $40 billion with military aid to Ukraine? I got every Democrat in the House on board – again including all the progressives, The Squad, Jayapal, Khanna, Bernie’s former campaign manager -even Barbara Lee, a real icon. And she even went to Ukraine with me to boost our proxy war – I mean our stand for freedom and democracy.
Biden: With all due respect, Nancy, that’s nothing to brag about. They’re pushovers. We got all the Dems in the Senate on that $40 billion for war, er, I mean democracy. Schumer says he didn’t have to lift a finger. Bernie came running. Another pushover – no spine, just like in 2016 and 2020.
And, Nancy, you should not be so quick to boast. You had 57 Republicans vote against that $40 billion. That’s a lot of Congressional Reps for the FBI to investigate. But don’t worry; we’re already on it. And the 11 GOP Senators who opposed it are also on our list.
Sullivan: Sir, don’t you think we should evaluate the success of the trip?
It was a great success in my opinion and we have to give you credit for thinking it up. The ploy of having Speaker Pelosi play the good cop and you the bad cop was brilliant, sir.
You gave the Panda a good poke in the eye.
Biden: Thanks, Jake. You are just the kind of man who will be a Secretary of State some day.
Pelosi: Could we get onto my trip to Taiwan, Puleeze?
Tara Write (the aide): May I put something on our screens? There it is – and also projected on the big screen in front of us. As you can see it is a map of East Asia.
Let’s look South and then North of Taiwan along the coast of China.
Looking South of Taiwan we see Southeast Asia, the home to the 10 nations of ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations – almost 700 million people, roughly the population of the US and EU combined. Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. We need them as allies for our proxy war against China in Taiwan.
The day after Speaker Pelosi landed, they issued a statement from the ASEAN Foreign Ministers meeting reiterating the One China policy, an idea that we must stamp out, and calling for peace and stability. That was before China’s response so it is pretty clear that the statement was aimed at the Speaker’s visit. That is a setback for us.
The Deputy PM of Singapore and PM was quite blunt on the matter, saying on August 15 in response to a question about the Speaker’s visit:
“ We are not an ally to America – we conduct our own foreign policy based on our own vital and core interests in a principled manner. We have always upheld our one-China policy and we oppose Taiwanese independence..”
That seems to capture a lot of sentiment among ASEAN nations.
Next let’s look north of Taiwan. We see three major countries, North Korea, South Korea and Japan. We rely on South Korea and Japan to be our allies against China in our proxy war in Taiwan. The newly elected South Korean President refused to meet with Speaker Pelosi as did the Foreign Minister. Then the following week the same FM went on to meet with the Chinese FM in Qingdao. That is adding insult to insult to insult. This was followed on August 13 by a demonstration of at least 10,000 in Seoul calling for an end to the US-South Korea military alliance and expulsion of US troops!
Going farther North we see Japan – and here we have our most reliable ally. But the new PM Kishida is not the hawk that the late PM Abe was. And east of Japan is mainland Russia and immediately north of it is Russia’s Sakhalin and Kuril islands – and Russia is, of course, an ally of China.
In short, we do not have a good situation in East Asia for our proxy war in Taiwan. The East Asians are not the patsies that the Europeans have turned out to be with the Ukraine proxy.
And a sober analysis would say that Speaker Pelosi’s visit did not help the situation. We look like the trouble maker in East Asia.
Pelosi: Who is this young woman? She is speaking out of turn. She should stick to her maps and keep quiet.
Biden: Absolutely. Who hired this woman?
Sullivan: I cannot tell a lie. Blinken did.
Blinken: That is a big fat lie – Jake did.
Pelosi: Who cares? This whole sorry episode was Joe’s idea and I am the one looking like the idiot. I’ve been had.
(Storms out of the room.)
Biden: Jake and Tony, we cannot ignore this. Take care of it. Tell the press to stop mentioning the Pelosi visit.
Blinken: I have taken care of it, boss. The NYT was already on it even before I called. They know what is expected of them.
Biden: Good. We don’t want this played up any more before November.
This meeting is over.
(He gets up, starts to leave, pauses, bends over to smell Tara’s hair.
She winces.
He exits and wanders off with a distorted smile on his face.)
The post Biden, Pelosi: Postmortem on Taiwan Trip first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Much of the world held its breath as Nancy Pelosi circled around the Philippines to sneak into Taiwan late in the evening on August 2nd, 2022. The fear was that Pelosi’s trip would initiate a broader war between China and the United States. Taiwan is China’s “red line.” This was no secret to Pelosi or the Biden administration. China had sent numerous warnings from a variety of channels in the days leading up the trip.
While Pelosi entered and left Taiwan unscathed, her stunt placed already fragile U.S.-China relations in their worst condition yet. As expected, China took decisive measures in response to the U.S.’s latest and perhaps most provocative violation of the One-China policy to date. The People’s Liberation Army conducted three days of military exercises surrounding Taiwan island beginning August 4th, 2022 . China also reduced ties with the United States in eight key areas such as climate change and defense coordination . These measures were derided by National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby as an attempt to “change the status quo ” and “provocative” in nature.
The post For the American Empire, Hypocrisy and War Go Hand in Hand appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
Less than 100 days before the world’s leaders meet in Egypt to tackle the climate crisis, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s incendiary trip to Taiwan leaves climate cooperation between the U.S. and China in tatters.
It was only last year, in 2021, that U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry and China Special Envoy for Climate Change Xie Zhenhua issued a joint statement to strengthen the Paris Agreement by adopting “long-term strategies aimed at net zero GHG emissions” to keep the world’s temperature below 2 degrees Celsius, with the goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.
Such collaboration is urgently needed if the world is to thwart rising sea levels, drought, famine and extreme weather — flash floods to suffocating heat waves — because China and the United States are the world’s largest carbon emitters, responsible for 40 percent of greenhouse gasses baking the earth.
The post US-China Climate Talks In Tatters appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
Wang Bingxiu of the Shuanglang Farmer Painting Club (Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, China), Untitled, 2018.
As the US legislative leader Nancy Pelosi swept into Taipei, people around the world held their breath. Her visit was an act of provocation. In December 1978, the US government – following a United Nations General Assembly decision in 1971 – recognised the People’s Republic of China, setting aside its previous treaty obligations to Taiwan. Despite this, US President Jimmy Carter signed the Taiwan Relations Act (1979), which allowed US officials to maintain intimate contact with Taiwan, including through the sale of weapons. This decision is noteworthy as Taiwan was under martial law from 1949 to 1987, requiring a regular weapons supplier.
Pelosi’s journey to Taipei was part of the US’s ongoing provocation of China. This campaign includes former President Barack Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’, former President Donald Trump’s ‘trade war’, the creation of security partnerships, the Quad and AUKUS, and the gradual transformation of NATO into an instrument against China. This agenda continues with President Joe Biden’s assessment that China must be weakened since it is the ‘only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge’ to the US-dominated world system.
China did not use its military power to prevent Pelosi and other US congressional leaders from travelling to Taipei. But, when they left, the Chinese government announced that it would halt eight key areas of cooperation with the US, including cancelling military exchanges and suspending civil cooperation on a range of issues, such as climate change. That is what Pelosi’s trip accomplished: more confrontation, less cooperation.
Indeed, anyone who stands for greater cooperation with China is vilified in the Western media as well as in Western-allied media from the Global South as an ‘agent’ of China or a promoter of ‘disinformation’. I responded to some of these allegations in South Africa’s The Sunday Times on 7 August 2022. The remainder of this newsletter reproduces that article.
Ghazi Ahmet (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China), Muqam, 1984.
A new kind of madness is seeping into global political discourse, a poisonous fog that suffocates reason. This fog, which has long marinated in old, ugly ideas of white supremacy and Western superiority, is clouding our ideas of humanity. The general malady that ensues is a deep suspicion and hatred of China, not just of its current leadership or even the Chinese political system, but hatred of the entire country and of Chinese civilisation – hatred of just about anything to do with China.
This madness has made it impossible to have an adult conversation about China. Words and phrases such as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘genocide’ are thrown around with no care to ascertain facts. China is a country of 1.4 billion people, an ancient civilisation that suffered, as much of the Global South did, a century of humiliation, in this case from the British-inflicted Opium Wars (which began in 1839) until the 1949 Chinese Revolution, when leader Mao Zedong deliberately announced that the Chinese people had stood up. Since then, Chinese society has been deeply transformed by utilising its social wealth to address the age-old problems of hunger, illiteracy, despondency, and patriarchy. As with all social experiments, there have been great problems, but these are to be expected from any collective human action. Rather than seeing China for both its successes and contradictions, this madness of our times seeks to reduce China to an Orientalist caricature – an authoritarian state with a genocidal agenda that seeks global domination.
This madness has a definite point of origin in the United States, whose ruling elites are greatly threatened by the advances of the Chinese people – particularly in robotics, telecommunications, high-speed rail, and computer technology. These advances pose an existential threat to the advantages long enjoyed by Western corporations, who have benefited from centuries of colonialism and the straitjacket of intellectual property laws. Fear of its own fragility and the integration of Europe into Eurasian economic developments has led the West to launch an information war against China.
This ideological tidal wave is overwhelming our ability to have serious, balanced conversations about China’s role in the world. Western countries with a long history of brutal colonialism in Africa, for instance, now regularly decry what they call Chinese colonialism in Africa without any acknowledgment of their own past or the entrenched French and US military presence across the continent. Accusations of ‘genocide’ are always directed at the darker peoples of the world – whether in Darfur or in Xinjiang – but never at the US, whose illegal war on Iraq alone resulted in the deaths of over a million people. The International Criminal Court, steeped in Eurocentrism, indicts one African leader after another for crimes against humanity but has never indicted a Western leader for their endless wars of aggression.
Dedron (Tibet Autonomous Region, China), Untitled, 2013.
The fog of this New Cold War is enveloping us today. Recently, in the Daily Maverick and the Mail & Guardian, I was accused of promoting ‘Chinese and Russian propaganda’ and having close links to the Chinese party-state. What is the basis of these claims?
Firstly, elements in Western intelligence attempt to brand any dissent against the Western assault on China as disinformation and propaganda. For instance, my December 2021 report from Uganda debunked the false claim that a Chinese loan to the country sought to take over its only international airport as part of a malicious ‘debt trap project’ – a narrative that has also been repeatedly debunked by leading US scholars. Through conversations with Ugandan government officials and public statements by Minister of Finance Matia Kasaija, I found, however, that the deal was poorly understood by the state but that there was no question of the seizure of Entebbe International Airport. Despite the fact that Bloomberg’s entire story on this loan was built on a lie, they were not tarred with the slur of ‘carrying water for Washington’. That is the power of the information war.
Secondly, there is a claim about my alleged links to the Chinese Communist Party based on the simple fact that I engage with Chinese intellectuals and have an unpaid post at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University, a prominent think tank based in Beijing. Yet, many of the South African publications that have made these outrageous claims are principally funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Soros took the name of his foundation from Karl Popper’s book, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), in which Popper developed the principle of ‘unlimited tolerance’. Popper argued for maximum dialogue and that opinions against one’s own should be countered ‘by rational argument’. Where are the rational arguments here, in a smear campaign that says dialogue with Chinese intellectuals is somehow off-limits but conversation with US government officials is perfectly acceptable? What level of civilisational apartheid is being produced here, where liberals in South Africa are promoting a ‘clash of civilisations’ rather than a ‘dialogue between civilisations’?
Countries in the Global South can learn a great deal from China’s experiments with socialism. Its eradication of extreme poverty during the pandemic – an accomplishment celebrated by the United Nations – can teach us how to tackle similar obstinate facts in our own countries (which is why Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research produced a detailed study about the techniques that China employed to achieve this feat). No country in the world is perfect, and none is above criticism. But to develop a paranoid attitude towards one country and to attempt to isolate it is socially dangerous. Walls need to be knocked down, not built up. The US is provoking a conflict due to its own anxieties about China’s economic advances: we should not be drawn in as useful idiots. We need to have an adult conversation about China, not one imposed upon us by powerful interests that are not our own.
Yang Guangqi of the Shuanglang Farmer Painting Club (Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, China), Untitled, 2018.
My article in The Sunday Times does not address all the issues that swirl around the US-China conflict. However, it is an invitation to a dialogue. If you have any thoughts on these issues, please email me.
The post Can We Please Have an Adult Conversation about China? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Despite earnest counsel from many quarters against going to Taiwan, including threatening warnings of dire consequences from Beijing, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, insisted on making the trip. She landed in Taipei in pitch-black conditions near midnight on Tuesday.
Her plane landed on the little-used Songshan Airport close to the Taipei city center. The runway and other lights on the ground were lowered just in case.
Her flight path from Malaysia took an exaggerated circular route over Indonesia and then around the east coast of the Philippines and landed in Taipei from the east. Thus she completely avoided China’s airspace over the South China Sea and the Chinese coastline.
Her flight took significantly longer than if she had simply flown directly by line of sight from Kuala Lumpur to Taipei.
The post What Has ‘Champion Of Democracy’ Wrought? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
When Nancy Pelosi made her ‘woke’ flight to Taiwan the U.S. seemed to hope for a Chinese military reaction to it. It positioned an aircraft carrier and two amphibious landing ships in the region. It also shipped additional fighter planes to Japan and South Korea.
Chinese and international commentators drew up potential scenarios for a clash like a forced diversion of Pelosi’s plane. However, the Chinese government kept its calm. The reintegration of Taiwan into China is not an urgent matter. It had planned for longer term measures designed to press the pro-independence government in Taiwan into obedience.
Chinese military exercises will now be held around the island without regard for what Taipei claims as its borders.
The post How Pelosi’s Visit Hurts Taiwan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
In February this year I was asked by friends – who mistook my interest in war and foreign policy for expertise – whether Vladimir Putin would invade Ukraine. No, I told them. This build-up was just posturing, precisely as there had been for years by that stage.
Yet, quite soon after this I woke up to see that Russian armoured columns were streaming into Ukraine. And that centrist and Tory Russophobes and hawks were claiming that they were right all along to hype the threat of Russia. A first to be sure, though more by luck than judgement. A broken clock is right twice day after all.
Add to this unpredictability the fact that anti-war voices are attacked by the powerful, and we’re faced with a dangerous climate.
What is clear is that, since February 2022, much has changed in terms of the rivalry between the Great Powers. Today, anything could happen – and US speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan on 2 August seems to highlight this.
Only minutes after Pelosi landed, China announced it would start live fire drills close to Taiwan, which it historically claims as its own territory.
As NPR points out, the US plays both sides:
By law, the U.S. is obligated to provide Taiwan with weapons and services. But the U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity” keeps open the question of whether it would intervene in the case of a military invasion by China.
Yet in these conflicted times, where assumptions – including my own – have been up-ended, it’s hard to even guess at the future.
Meanwhile in the UK, the few prominent voices for peace are mocked by the self appointed ‘adults in the room’:
This is beyond reprehensible. What is it about the far left and the far right that makes them such push overs when it comes to Russia and other autocracies? Is it stupidity, is it a blind hatred of western liberal democracy? Either way.. know it when you see it and fight it. https://t.co/PNMLw7XDL0
— Tim Farron (@timfarron) August 3, 2022
This being despite none other than Tony Blair, whose politics closely align with Farron’s, making almost identical arguments:
Wild that the people tearing their own hair out about Jeremy Corbyn calling for a negotiated peace in Ukraine were utterly silent about Blair saying the same thing. https://t.co/KbpxK0VsKy
— Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives (@darren_cullen) August 4, 2022
It also ignores the fact that Blair himself has a long history of taking pro-Putin positions:
A periodic reminder that the former Labour leader with actual connections to Putin is Tony Blair, not Jeremy Corbyn. pic.twitter.com/6bDnBtD7u4
— Marl Karx (@BareLeft) August 3, 2022
The potential for an escalation with China can’t be ignored. This is a historical moment, as Ukraine shows, when events can run away from us. The West’s large-scale material support of Ukraine suggests that it might be hard to do the same in Taiwan if it were invaded in terms of resources – and we can’t predict if the US and UK will open up a proxy war on that front too.
Given these tensions, prominent voices for peace are more important than ever. However, they are coming under increasing pressure from both out-and-out hawks and misguided centrists who are more concerned with attacking the Left than ending wars.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/MC3 Scott Pittman/U.S. Navy, cropped to 770 x 403, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
By Joe Glenton
