The exact cause of the Democrats’ catastrophic loss last night was, of course, no one thing. The leader of the incumbent party, Joe Biden, was deeply unpopular, with disapproval ratings of 56% on the eve of the election. The public felt inflation had eaten away at modest income gains. And, of course, shadowy billionaires spread false narratives and juiced social media.
Everyone is going to have their own reasons in the coming days—no doubt many based on their own priors and grievances. But one reason why the Harris campaign was bogged down from the outset, I will argue, was its moral and strategic refusal to break from the White House’s deeply unpopular position on arming and funding an ongoing genocide.
Not because the issue itself was dispositive, but because it played a central role in alienating the democratic base and compelling Harris to find votes elsewhere–a disastrous choice which appears to have lowered turnout and sowed cynicism.
As much as the pollsters and consultants in charge of Democratic campaigns may dislike the so-called “base,” the base remains an important part of social media reach, campaign volunteers, and canvassers—the evangelical core of any campaign. For Biden, when his campaign was terminal last summer, this element wasalmost entirelygone, and indeed, this fact was one of the motivating factors pushing to drive him out. But Harris—at least initially—made up a lot of ground in this regard, mostly through better vibes and slightly more sophisticated HR empathy-speak.
But feigned concern and vibes can only go so far. As the honeymoon of “brat summer” gave way to a codified campaign theme, it was clear not only was Gaza going to be ignored entirely as an issue—and the death machine would churn on without pause—but Team Harris would be leaning into a strategy of attempting to woo so-called “disaffected Republicans.” She made the centerpiece of her campaign Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick Cheney, the former vice president of George W Bush. To the Savvy Commentators this made sense—obviously, winning over fence-sitting Republicans was the right call. And few in our media questioned whether this strategy had any downsides.
Feigned concern and vibes can only go so far.
But, of course, it did. Going to the center has costs; it’s not a perpetual vote-getting machine. A campaign that embraces conservative themes and personalities, even while throwing out progressive policies here and there, is bound to alienate voters for whom politics isn’t just a platform for endless triangulation.
To be clear: The costs could have been worth it. The votes gained from sounding like 2012 Mitt Romney may be greater than those lost to non-voting or third-party voting among the base. But this calculus was never shown. The campaign and its major PAC allies driving the strategy, namely Anita Dunn and pollster David Shor, never had to show the math on how this gambit made sense. It was simply assumed to be true, obvious, and inevitable.
It wasn’t until there were two weeks left in the election that the New York Timeseven entertained the idea that, perhaps, a campaign theme built around the progeny of a deeply unpopular war criminal who, herself, had negative favorables, was not the free real estate Dunn & Co. made it out to be. “As Vice President Kamala Harris makes a broad play to the political center,” the Times would hand-wring, “some Democrats worry that she is going too far in her bid to win over moderates who are skeptical of former President Donald J. Trump. In private—and increasingly in public as Election Day fast approaches—they say she risks chilling Democratic enthusiasm by alienating progressives and working-class voters.”
It would be very convenient for me if what I ideologically supported—in this case, ending a genocide—also happened to be what was electorally advantageous for the campaign. The moral thing and the politically useful thing are not, of course, inherently aligned. But the inverse is also true: There’s no law of nature that says tacking right, and doubling down on a deeply unpopular and morally ruinous Gaza strategy, is the smart and savvy thing to do. The burden ought to have been on those running a $1.8 billion campaign to show how their approach made sense, but they never bothered doing this. It was just dogma—dogma few ever questioned.
One can’t really bank on activist energy, youth turnout, and base-mobilizing when those involved—while canvassing together, or running phone banks at each others apartments, or getting drinks afterwards—have to awkwardly address the fact of genocide and their candidate’s support for it.
But there’s a cruel reality behind the decision to track right: The campaign, once it hitched its wagon to Biden’s policy of unqualified support for genocide in Gaza, really had no other choice. In 2020, the Biden campaign tentatively rode the progressive wave of the George Floyd protests, anger about Trump’s racist border policies, COVID activism, and anti-war protests against Saudi Arabia’s destruction of Yemen to energize the Democratic Party base to defeat Trump. It was, in retrospect, mostly lip service, and certainly no one at the time thought Biden a firebrand progressive. But the broader theme of the campaign was that everyone would have a seat at the table, even if the plate would most likely end up being empty.
Harris made no such pretensions, because any strategy that played to similar themes would have had to address the elephant in the room: the Democratic Party’s “ironclad” support for Israel’s elimination of a people in whole or in part. And this simply would not have worked. One can’t really bank on activist energy, youth turnout, and base-mobilizing when those involved—while canvassing together, or running phone banks at each others apartments, or getting drinks afterwards—have to awkwardly address the fact of genocide and their candidate’s support for it. This isn’t to say there was no activist or youth energy in the campaign—clearly there was. But those in charge quickly decided against making this their central theme and vote-gathering strategy, given the uncomfortable questions that would naturally arise from campaigning in these spaces. So Liz Cheney and her negative-2 favorables it was.
Countless pro-Democratic Party pundits tried to warn Harris. Polls were commissioned. The Uncommitted Movement very politely, and well within the bounds of loyal party politics, begged Harris to change course. But she refused. The risk, to her, was worth sticking to the unshakable commitment to “eliminating Hamas” no matter how many dead Palestinian children it required, or the degree to which images and reports of these dead children would fuel cynicism and create an opening for Trump to win.
To the extent grassroots energy was maintained, and the awkward fact of Gaza didn’t ruin the vibes more than it ought to have, this was made possible by an elaborate responsibility-avoidance PR regime of compartmentalization built up over months by the Biden campaign and a compliant media. Key to this compartmentalization were supposed “ceasefire talks” that the White House and campaign were allegedly “working tirelessly to secure,” but could never, alas, get across the finish line. Liberals were also soothed by the vaguely true-sounding refrain that Trump “would be worse for Gaza.” Turning every party advocate into a dead-eyed trolley problem expert triaging which genocide was morally preferable may have made cold logical sense, but it was hardly an inspiring message. Making it less compelling was that, by and large, it was not a position emanating from Palestinians themselves, as virtually every major Palestinian organization and the sole Palestinian-American in Congress, Rashida Tlaib, refused to endorse Harris.
But to an unmovable contingent of liberals—motivated by a combination of self-delusion and genuine and understandable fear of a second Trump term—it didn’t matter. They just wanted not to think about Gaza. It didn’t matter that the White House could simply assert a ceasefire whenever it wished, and the whole basis for the supposed “negotiations” was equal parts fictitious and internally inconsistent. These pat lines mostly worked.
Mostly. Aside from foreclosing on a progressive track that tapped into the base and emphasized turnout over converting fence-sitting Republicans, the fact of genocide in Gaza continued angering and alienating many voters not fooled by the “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire” PR regime and patronizing I See You, I Hear You rhetoric from Harris. Further research is needed to measure the exact extent this bitterness, this enthusiasm-suppressing support for genocide played a role in losing potential Demcoratic voters, but one thing is clear: It rotted the campaign from the beginning, made going right more or less inevitable, and loomed over every brat summer selfie, phone bank interaction, and water cooler conversation. In late July when Harris took over the Biden campaign, she could have chosen to break from the White House, she could have chosen to follow international and US law, she could have chosen progressive energy and greater support from the base, she could have chosen life. Instead she chose genocide. And this was the inevitable outcome.
I fear that by the time I go to bed democracy in the United States will be imperilled by a man, the nature of which the Founding Fathers could never envisage when creating the protective elements of the constitution.
The risks will not be to Americans alone. The world will become a different place with Donald J Trump once again becoming president.
My trepidation is tempered only by the fact that no-one can be sure he has the numbers to gain sufficient votes in the electoral college that those same founding fathers devised as a power-sharing devise between federal and state governments. They could not have foreseen how it could become the means by which a fraction of voters could determine their country’s future.
Or perhaps that is contributing to my disquiet. No-one has been able to give me the comfort of predicting a win by Kamala Harris.
In fact, none of the smart money has been ready to call it one way or the other.
The New Zealand Herald’s business editor at large, Liam Dann, predicted a Trump win the other day but his reasoning was more visceral than analytical:
Trump provides an altogether more satisfying prescription for change. He allows them to vent their anger. He taps into the rage bubbling beneath America’s polite and friendly exterior. He provides an outlet for frustration, which is much simpler than opponents to his left can offer.
That’s why he might well win. Momentum seems to be going his way.
He is a master salesman and he is selling into a market that is disillusioned with the vague promises they’ve been hearing from mainstream politicians for generations.
Heightened anxiety
Few others — including his brother Corin, who is in the US covering the election for Radio New Zealand — have been willing to make the call and today dawned no clearer.
That may be one reason for my heightened anxiety . . . the lack of certainty one way or the other.
All of our major media outlets have had staff in the States for the election (most with some support from the US government) and each has tried to tap into the “mood of the people”, particularly in the swing states. Each has done a professional job, but it has been no easy task and, to be honest, I have no idea what the real thinking of the electorate might be.
One of my waking nightmares is that the electorate isn’t thinking at all. In which case, Liam Dann’s reading of the entrails might be as good a guide as any.
I have attempted to cope with the avalanche of reportage, analysis and outright punditry from CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. I have tried to get a more detached view from the BBC, Guardian, and (God help me) Daily Mail. I have made my head hurt playing with The Economist’s poll prediction models.
I am no closer to predicting a winner than anyone else.
However, I do know what scares me.
If Donald Trump takes up residence in the White House again, the word “freedom” will lose its true meaning and become a captured phrase ring-fencing what the victor and his followers want.
Validating disinformation
“Media freedom” will validate disinformation and make truth harder to find. News organisations that seek to hold Trump and a compliant Congress to account will be demonised, perhaps penalised.
As president again, Trump could rend American society to a point where it may take decades for the wound to heal and leave residual feelings that will last even longer. That will certainly be the case if he attempts to subvert the democratic process to extend power beyond his finite term.
I worry for the rest of the world, trying to contend with erratic foreign policies that put the established order in peril and place the freedom of countries like Ukraine in jeopardy. I dread the way in which his policies could empower despots like Vladimir Putin. By definition, as a world power, the United States’ actions affect all of us — and Trump’s influence will be pervasive.
You may think my fears could be allayed by the possibility that he will not return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Were Kamala Harris facing any other candidate, that would certainly be the case. However, Donald Trump is not any other candidate and he has demonstrated an intense dislike of losing.
I am alarmed by the possibility that, if he fails to get the required 270 electoral votes, Donald Trump could again cry “voter fraud” and light the touch paper offered to him by the likes of the Proud Boys. They had a practice run on January 6, 2021. If there is a next time, it could well be worse.
Sometimes, my wife accuses me of unjustified optimism. When I think of the Americans I have met and those I know well, I recall that the vast majority of them have had a reasonable amount of common sense. Some have had it in abundance. I can only hope that across that nation common sense prevails today.
I am more than a little worried, however, that on this occasion my wife might be right.
Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes the website knightlyviews.com where this commentary — written before the election results started coming in — was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
The editorial, published on Saturday, was only the Times’ latest attack on the former president in the run-up to the election, but the searing indictment was all the more brutal for its brevity.
“You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.”
The dismissal of Trump by The Times was in contrast to two other major US newspapers, both owned by billionaires — The Washington Post and the LA Times — which last month controversially refused to make an editorial call.
“You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead.” The brief editorial in The New York Times on Saturday, Image: NYT screenshot APR
The criteria for winning a presidential debate is very simple: the candidate who fumbles less, makes less mistakes, avoids too many verbal gaffes, etc., who is able to present a rosy picture for the future, and, who believes in people’s “ambition, the aspirations, [and] the dreams,” is the winner — provided all bullshitting is done with a serious face.
However, it’s entirely a different matter whether that person has any genuine solutions to the problems majority of the people face.
Exactly eight years ago, first time in US history of 240 years, a woman had a chance to reach the highest office — Hillary Clinton won popular votes by almost 3 million votes, but that rare opportunity was snatched away by the Electoral College. The victory went to Donald Trump, a slowly evolving fascist. It is to be remembered that Clinton was not that woman progressives have been waiting for.
This time, another woman, Kamala Harris, is in the race for presidency. Her opponent is none other than Trump. Harris was not in the competition but got her opportunity when the Democratic establishment realized, after the Biden/Trump debate, that the horse they have been trying to steady for three and a half years cannot any more stand on its own, and could give up any moment.
Thus, Joe Biden was pushed aside with a tribute that he left the race for a second term out of patriotic duty. Everyone knows that almost no one gives up power, whether s/he is an authoritarian or a “democrat,” without a rough push.
Kamala is the in-girl
Kamala is the in-girl — so many love and support her, not only most of the Democrats but also some prominent Republicans! Within 36 hours of Biden’s decision not to run, and his nominating of Harris as his successor, Harris campaign raised $100 million that jumped to $310 in less than two weeks, with new donors contributing two-thirds of the amount. By September 6, the number had nearly doubled to $615 million. Andrew Byrnes, a tech policy strategist and Harris fundraiser, said the amount he raised for Kamala in one week was double the amount he raised for Biden in a whole year.
Trump is no match for Harris in fundraising despite the fact that his campaign received $100 million from Miriam Adelson who likes Trump so much that she said “Book of Trump”1 should be added to the Bible, i.e. the Old Testament. Trump allied PAC also got $150 million from Timothy Mellon. Trump’s equally nasty buddy Elon Musk has contributed $76 million.
Trump is the best thing that has happened to the Democratic Party. Most Democrats never tire of ridiculing him. This enables them and the Democrat-leaning news media to keep their supporters busy in Trump’s antics and eccentricities and thus saves the party from answering hard questions.
MSNBC is also known as MSDNC or Democratic National Committee mouthpiece. MSNBC is a cheerleader for the Democrats. Biden and Harris regularly watch MSNBC’s Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. “A Jacobin analysis of six months of its Gaza coverage reveals an unflagging role cheering on Israel’s genocide.”
Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder and billionaire, is backing Kamala because he wants to get rid of Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Billionaire Mark Cuban endorsed Harris too for the same reason: dump Khan.
She is an accomplished leader, a fierce advocate of abortion rights, and the strongest candidate to lead our country forward.
Ron Conway, a billionaire, has asked tech community to join hands to salvage “our democracy” by getting behind Kamala, whom he has known “for decades” to prevent Trump’s reentry into White House. Conway says she is an “advocate for the tech ecosystem since the day we met.”
Melinda French Gates ($13 million), Reed Hastings (Netflix), George Soros and Alex Soros, Vinod Khosla, Jeffrey Katzenberg (former president of Walt Disney Studios), Bill Gates ($50 million), and other billionaires numbering 81 (or more) have joined the Kamala bandwagon, whereas, Trump has 52 billionaires with him.
Billionaires’ bribes count. Harris, who was with Biden’s plan of raising capital gains tax from 23.8% to 44.6%, opted for 33%, instead.
“Her election is the best way to support the continued strength, security, and reliability of our democracy and economy. … [She] ensure[s] American businesses can compete and win in the global market. … she will strive to give every American the opportunity to pursue the American dream.”
These billionaire and multimillionaire business people have nothing to do with democracy. The main thrust of the letter is US “businesses can compete and win in the global market,” under Harris, that is, the US government either diplomatically or through military force opens up foreign markets for them like US Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open up for business in 1853. The other fallacy is that Kamala will try to provide people with “the opportunity to pursue the American dream.”
Many US presidents, have warned about the increasing corporate power and its harmful effect on country. Thomas Jefferson had hoped in 1816 to “crush” the corporate power which was challenging government and defying laws. Instead the corporations crushed the government power and as journalist and novelist Theodore Dreiser puts it, “the corporations are the government.” (China is a capitalist country but the government controls the capitalists; this is anathema to the US; it wants China to go the US way.)
Women are elated with Harris entering the race for two main reasons: one is that someone from their gender has a chance to win and the other is Harris’ support for abortion. Sadly, most of these women have no Palestinian and Lebanese women and children on their mind.
Porn actors, some of them, are spending over $100,000 in seven swing states in support of Harris because they fear Trump presidency and Project 2025 will ban the porn industry. Harris should thank them but should ask them to stop violence and degradation of women in many of their videos.
Jeff Bridges extended his support to Kamala who is “just so certainly our girl.” He proudly proclaimed: “I’m white, I’m a dude, and I’m for Harris.” Bridges was a part of White Dudes for Harris Zoom call; over 180,000 joined in and raised about $4 million for her campaign. The invitation to join in was based on: “Are you a white guy who believes in science, human rights, and democracy?”
There have been several similar events: such as Latinas for Harris; White Women: Answer the Call; the Black Women Zoom; Caribbean-Americans for Harris; South Asian Women for Harris; Disabled Voters for Harris; Black Men for Harris; Win With Black Women; and South Asian Men for Harris.
Salman Rushdie, an author, joined the South Asian Men for Harris virtual meet and declared he’s in for Harris “1,000 per cent.”3 One could understand Rushdie’s worry as a writer because if Trump wins and turns dictator, of which there are great chances, then he and his ministers, like Elon Musk, won’t tolerate any kind of criticism. The Kamala government would let them write in small publications and press which have limited reach and do not disturb or threaten the ruling class and the system.
Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift is for Kamala too because “She is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”
Billionaire Swift resides in her own bubble and is unaware that, until now the US has been led by calm leaders, but most people have achieved nothing but decline.
In 1982, when the Forbes 400 list was initiated, one could join the list with $100 million ($300 million in today’s money). There were only 13 billionaires then. Today, you need eleven times that amount or $3.3 billion to be one of 400 wealthy in US. So, 400 billionaires made it to the list but 415 individuals couldn’t make it, including Oprah Winfrey who has $3 billion, less than the required $3.3 billion.
What about the rest of the people? A whopping 37% of people in US have less than $400 in savings!
Singer-songwriter Beyonce joined Kamala at a rally in Houston to extend her support. Many celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eminem, Bruce Springsteen, Patti LaBelle, Jennifer Lopez, Jamie Lee Curtis, George Clooney,4 and Sarah Jessica Parker (who is voting for Kamala for 31 things, including “For our military, past and currently serving” but not for peace or ceasefire in Gaza).
Dick Cheney, the Vice President in George W. Bush regime and one of the major architects of the Iraq War, a Republican, has also announced that he’ll vote for Kamala Harris.
“He [Trump] tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.” “He can never be trusted with power again.”
“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our constitution.” “That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice-President Kamala Harris.”
Liz Cheney, a Republican and Dick Cheney’s daughter, supports Harris too, and joined her campaign events thrice in early October. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , the progressive supporters and Democrats like Harris, are campaigning for her but have not been invited to appear with Harris, as yet.
Trump called Dick Cheney (whose approval rating, when he left office, was mere 13%) a “King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars,” and blasted both father- daughter duo on his TruthSocial account.
“… Her father, Dick, was a leader of our ridiculous journey into the Middle East, where Trillions of Dollars were spent, millions of people were killed – and for what? NOTHING! Well, today, these two fools, because the Republican Party no longer wants them, endorsed the most Liberal Senator in U.S. Senate, further Left than even Pocahontas or Crazy Bernie Sanders – Lyin’ Kamala Harris. What a pathetic couple that is, both suffering gravely from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Good Luck to them both!!!”
Trump is correct about Dick Cheney. He was George H.W. Bush’s Defense Secretary when US went to war against Iraq and destroyed that country. Dick Cheney was Vice President of Bush Jr., when US devastated Afghanistan in 2001, and again went to war against Iraq, in 2003.
238 staffers from four previous Republican governments and many more, including John Negroponte, one of the criminal minds of US imperialism, endorsed Kamala. Barbara Pierce Bush (daughter of former Republican president George W. Bush) is supporting Kamala with the hope the US moves “forward and protect women’s rights.”
Why so many wealthy and powerful people have gotten behind Kamala? The reasons, as we have seen vary, but the most important one is that Kamala will maintain the statue quo. She’s not going to make any drastic changes, but just the cosmetic type.
On the other hand, many rich, and not very rich, in the ruling class are scared of Trump’s unpredictable nature. The wealthy class may benefit much more under Trump than under Harris. In 2017, Trump lowered the corporate tax rate from (Obama government’s) 35% to 21% and corporations benefited a lot. (Biden raised it to 28% and not the 35% it used to be during his vice presidency.)
Trump may concentrate on domestic issues rather than waging foreign wars; but, then if something triggers him, or he is incited by his aides, or perceives a threat from foreign leader(s), then he may go unhinged.
Biden praised Liz Cheney’s “courage” to appear with Harris. “I admire her. Her dad and I worked together a long, long time.” Biden, like Cheneys, loves violence and war. Republicans and Democrats working together can screw the people within and without the US. It becomes so much easier to wage a war against “foreign enemy” when both parties are working together.
Trump will probably do within the US, what the US has been doing to the world for several decades. He will unleash the army on his opponents and critics. Here is Trump:
During the presidential debate in September 2024, Trump falsely charged Haitians residing in Springfield, Ohio, of “eating the dogs … the cats … the pets of the people that live there.”
On October 27, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made racist fun of Latino people by saying “These Latinos, they love making babies,” he called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” and repeated the lie about Haitians eating pets.
Donald Trump and his team, it seems, is striving to lose the election. Despite that, the polls show a tight race between Trump and Harris.
“I understand why young Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan think too many people have died — I get that, but…” “Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded by civilians, they’ll force you to kill civilians, if you want to defend yourself.”
Harris is very popular, was able to amass great amount of money, got lot of support but somehow the polls — which may be wrong , as often happens — are not favoring her. Who knows, as investigative reporter Dave Lindorff points out, Harris could win if she gets “secret women’s vote” in rural Pennsylvania similar to what happened in Kansas in 2022 regarding the banning of abortion referendum. Julia Roberts encouraged women to exercise their right to choose, within the privacy of the election booth:
This is an election where voters will decide between possible drastic changes that result in fascism, versus, maintaining the unjust pro-war inegalitarian status quo.
However, those who are fed up with the two main lesser and greater evils, there are two other candidates to choose from who are anti-war and pro-common people: Jill Stein of Green Party and Claudia De la Cruz of Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL).6
1 Miriam Adelson wrote in her paper Israel Hayom: “Would it be too much to pray for a day when the Bible gets a ‘Book of Trump,’ much like it has a ‘Book of Esther’ celebrating the deliverance of the Jews from ancient Persia? “Until that is decided, let us, at least, sit back and marvel at this time of miracles for Israel, for the United States, and for the whole world.”
2 In June 2024, Kamala Harris joined by Sandberg screened Sandberg’s documentary Screams Before Silence at the White House. The film was about alleged rapes by Hamas members — a long debunked theory. See Briahna Joy Gray’s detailed expose about the entire issue.
3 Once accepted by US mainstream, which Rushdie has been, he toned down or ignored the crimes of the US, and its ally, Israel. There was a time when Rushdie was for the Palestinian cause; he interviewed Professor Edward Said, the most prominent Palestinian in the Western world then. Last year, Rushdie repeated the Western line of argument labeling Hamas “as a “terrorist organization.” One should have asked Rushdie as to how the occupied people should fight their occupiers.
4 In March 2012, George Clooney was arrested in Washington DC while protesting in front of Sudan’s embassy for violence in South Sudan. He then boasted: “We are the antigenocide paparazzi.” But nowadays Clooney is careful what he says: “I’m very careful not to use words like genocide, occupation, colonialism, open-air prisons — despite believing they do accurately describe what’s happening in Gaza. Those put a target on your back. I also don’t use the word unprovoked. A lot of people say October 7 was “unprovoked.” Well, it’s a massive chicken-and-egg situation, this back-and-forth. Also, I didn’t know the word cease-fire would be such a problem! I would hope we don’t want wars!”
It’s a tragic sign of the times when little introductory narrative is needed to set the near-apocalyptic scene that exists in Gaza today. The world watches from a distance as Israel’s onslaught continues and the civilian death toll escalates to unimaginable levels. Now, the nightmare that Palestinian survivors are currently enduring is about to take on another dimension.
The prediction made one year ago of a man-made famine is about to be realised, though in truth, Gazans have suffered food insecurity for decades. Despite a heavy dependency on international agencies for humanitarian assistance, access to food and safe water supplies has repeatedly been denied due to blockades imposed by Israel. As is the trend in such crises, women and children are particularly affected by malnutrition. Anaemia and other manifestations of nutrient deficiency have led to adverse effects on maternal and foetal health. Miscarriage and birth defect rates are high. Suboptimal nutritional status also impairs immune function and the ability of mother and child to recover from disease.
This dire baseline has only amplified the number of civilian losses caused by violence. The proportion of deaths in Gaza attributed to trauma-related injury versus that from malnutrition is hard to define; in many cases, it’s part of the same story. Malnutrition significantly affects the ability to recover from internal injuries, limb loss, and surgery, thereby increasing the risk of infection, sepsis and death.
Obtaining accurate quantitative information on injury, disease and deaths is essential. It draws global attention, and allows humanitarian organisations to focus their resources. The tricky bit of course is that over- or under-inflation of rates can occur for political gain. Regardless, even Israeli officials admit that the Palestinian Ministry of Health are the only governmental body actively collating decent morbidity and mortality data. There are pro-Israel lobbyists who are still quick to dismiss those figures, citing that a third of the 38,000 deaths declared earlier this summer were unverifiable. However, the reality of real-time assessment in this war zone is that many of the dead are still buried under rubble. Formal ID is impossible: collected statistics unavoidably include household losses reported by family members. Any remaining deniers of data coming out of Gaza should consider satellite image analysis performed by the City University of New York and Oregon State University. Almost 100,000 buildings had been destroyed in the first two months of the current crisis, most of which were in densely populated residential areas. The World Health Organisation and United Nations have also found mortality rates quoted by the Palestinian Ministry of Health to be reliable during earlier critical periods in Gaza’s history.
Malnutrition prevalence from (neutral) aid agency field and clinic data also paints a progressively disturbing picture. In March, nutrition monitoring by UNICEF and others highlighted that around 1 in 20 children attending health centres and in shelters were at a life-threatening stage of severe wasting. In addition, over 30 percent of children under 2 years of age were classified as acutely malnourished; double that of three months earlier. By June, major nutritional concerns were no longer primarily restricted to the north. Almost 3,000 children in southern Gaza were in need of intervention to manage the effects of moderate to severe malnutrition, yet were prevented from attending clinics due to ongoing conflict. Spring and late summer saw some alleviation of food insecurity, as more convoys were able to cross the border and distribute supplies. Then September marked the month with the lowest cross-border transfer and distribution of food and bottled water.
The UN continues to monitor the situation closely. Is Gaza now ‘officially’ in famine? To meet the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) definition, at least 20 percent of the population should have significant lack of access to food; acute malnutrition prevalence should be at least 30 percent; and mortality should be at or above 2 deaths per 10,000 people daily. At the time of writing, forty-three thousand are dead. The vast majority of the surviving population are now displaced, and one in five are facing “catastrophic levels of denied access to nutrition” (another IPC classification). Three-quarters of all crop fields have been destroyed. Access to food and safe water supplies, medical care and the availability of proper sanitation continues to be impossible in most situations. As the UN have stressed, Gaza sits on the very brink of famine. Without an immediate ceasefire, this will be a forgone conclusion.
Western publics are being subjected to a campaign of psychological warfare, where genocide is classed as ‘self-defence’ and opposition to it ‘terrorism’. Jonathan Cook reports as the world marked the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists at the weekend.
ANALYSIS:By Jonathan Cook
Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking.
They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity – if they covered them at all – with a “Hamas claims” or “Gaza family members allege”. Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.
Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.
For a year, the networks’ most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.
That is why Western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on October 7, 2023, as intensely as they have a year of greater horrors in Gaza — in what the World Court has judged to be a “plausible” genocide by Israel.
That is why the media have immersed their audiences in the agonies of the families of some 250 Israelis — civilians taken hostage and soldiers taken captive — as much as they have the agonies of 2.3 million Palestinians bombed and starved to death week after week, month after month.
That is why audiences have been subjected to gaslighting narratives that frame Gaza’s destruction as a “humanitarian crisis” rather than the canvas on which Israel is erasing all the known rules of war.
Western media’s human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians. Image: www.jonathan-cook.net
While foreign correspondents sit obediently in their hotel rooms, Palestinian journalists have been picked off one by one — in the greatest massacre of journalists in history.
Israel is now repeating that process in Lebanon. On the night of October 24, it struck a residence in south Lebanon where three journalists were staying. All were killed.
In an indication of how deliberate and cynical Israel’s actions are, it put its military’s crosshairs on six Al Jazeera reporters last month, smearing them as “terrorists” working for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are reportedly the last surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, which Israel has sealed off while it carries out the so-called “General’s Plan”.
Israel wants no one reporting its final push to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by starving out the 400,000 Palestinians still there and executing anyone who remains as a “terrorist”.
These six join a long list of professionals defamed by Israel in the interests of advancing its genocide — from doctors and aid workers to UN peacekeepers.
Sympathy for Israel Perhaps the nadir of Israel’s domestication of foreign journalists was reached last month in a report by CNN. Back in February whistleblowing staff there revealed that the network’s executives have been actively obscuring Israeli atrocities to portray Israel in a more sympathetic light.
In a story whose framing should have been unthinkable — but sadly was all too predictable — CNN reported on the psychological trauma some Israeli soldiers are suffering from time spent in Gaza, in some cases leading to suicide.
Committing a genocide can be bad for your mental health, it seems. Or as CNN explained, its interviews “provide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society”.
In its lengthy piece, titled “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him”, the atrocities the soldiers admit committing are little more than the backdrop as CNN finds yet another angle on Israeli suffering. Israeli soldiers are the real victims — even as they perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinian people.
One bulldozer driver, Guy Zaken, told CNN he could not sleep and had become vegetarian because of the “very, very difficult things” he had seen and had to do in Gaza.
What things? Zaken had earlier told a hearing of the Israeli Parliament that his unit’s job was to drive over many hundreds of Palestinians, some of them alive.
CNN reported: “Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza.”
Doubtless some Nazi concentration camp guards committed suicide in the 1940s after witnessing the horrors there — because they were responsible for them. Only in some weird parallel news universe, would their “psychological burden” be the story.
After a huge online backlash, CNN amended an editor’s note at the start of the article that originally read: “This story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting.”
Readers, it was assumed, would find the suicide of Israeli soldiers upsetting, but apparently not the revelation that those soldiers were routinely driving over Palestinians so that, as Zaken explained, “everything squirts out”.
Banned from Gaza Finally, a year into Israel’s genocidal war, now rapidly spreading into Lebanon, some voices are being raised very belatedly to demand the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza.
This week — in a move presumably designed, as November’s elections loom, to ingratiate themselves with voters angry at the party’s complicity in genocide — dozens of Democratic members of the US Congress wrote to President Joe Biden asking him to pressure Israel to give journalists “unimpeded access” to the enclave.
Don’t hold your breath.
Western media have done very little themselves to protest their exclusion from Gaza over the past year — for a number of reasons.
Given the utterly indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment, major outlets have not wanted their journalists getting hit by a 2000lb bomb for being in the wrong place.
That may in part be out of concern for their welfare. But there are likely to be more cynical concerns.
Having foreign journalists in Gaza blown up or executed by snipers would drag media organisations into direct confrontation with Israel and its well-oiled lobby machine.
The response would be entirely predictable, insinuating that the journalists died because they were colluding with “the terrorists” or that they were being used as “human shields” — the excuse Israel has rolled out time and again to justify its targeting of doctors in Gaza and UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.
But there’s a bigger problem. The establishment media have not wanted to be in a position where their journalists are so close to the “action” that they are in danger of providing a clearer picture of Israel’s war crimes and its genocide.
The media’s current distance from the crime scene offers them plausible deniability as they both-sides every Israeli atrocity.
In previous conflicts, western reporters have served as witnesses, assisting in the prosecution of foreign leaders for war crimes. That happened in the wars that attended the break-up of Yugoslavia, and will doubtless happen once again if Russian President Valdimir Putin is ever delivered to The Hague.
But those journalistic testimonies were harnessed to put the West’s enemies behind bars, not its closest ally.
The media do not want their reporters to become chief witnesses for the prosecution in the future trials of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, at the International Criminal Court. The ICC’s Prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking arrest warrants for them both.
After all, any such testimony from journalists would not stop at Israel’s door. They would implicate Western capitals too, and put establishment media organisations on a collision course with their own governments.
The Western media does not see its job as holding power to account when the West is the one committing the crimes.
Censoring Palestinians Journalist whistleblowers have gradually been coming forward to explain how establishment news organisations — including the BBC and the supposedly liberal Guardian — are sidelining Palestinian voices and minimising the genocide.
An investigation by Novara Media recently revealed mounting unhappiness in parts of The Guardian newsroom at its double standards on Israel and Palestine.
Its editors recently censored a commentary by preeminent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa after she insisted on being allowed to refer to the slaughter in Gaza as “the holocaust of our times”.
Senior Guardian columnists such as Jonathan Freedland made much during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour party that Jews, and Jews alone, had the right to define and name their own oppression.
That right, however, does not appear to extend to Palestinians.
As staff who spoke to Novara noted, The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, The Observer, had no problem opening its pages to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson to smear as a “blood libel” any reporting of the provable fact that Israel has killed many, many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.
One veteran journalist there said: “Is The Guardian more worried about the reaction to what is said about Israel than Palestine? Absolutely.”
Another staff member admitted it would be inconceivable for the paper to be seen censoring a Jewish writer. But censoring a Palestinian one is fine, it seems.
Other journalists report being under “suffocating control” from senior editors, and say this pressure exists “only if you’re publishing something critical of Israel”.
According to staff there, the word “genocide” is all but banned in the paper except in coverage of the International Court of Justice, whose judges ruled nine months ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing genocide. Things have got far worse since.
Whistleblowing journalists Similarly, “Sara”, a whistleblower who recently resigned from the BBC newsroom and spoke of her experiences to Al Jazeera’s Listening Post, said Palestinians and their supporters were routinely kept off air or subjected to humiliating and insensitive lines of questioning.
Some producers have reportedly grown increasingly reluctant to bring on air vulnerable Palestinians, some of whom have lost family members in Gaza, because of concerns about the effect on their mental health from the aggressive interrogations they were being subjected to from anchors.
According to Sara, BBC vetting of potential guests overwhelmingly targets Palestinians, as well as those sympathetic to their cause and human rights organisations. Background checks are rarely done of Israelis or Jewish guests.
She added that a search showing that a guest had used the word “Zionism” — Israel’s state ideology — in a social media post could be enough to get them disqualified from a programme.
Even officials from one of the biggest rights group in the world, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, became persona non grata at the BBC for their criticisms of Israel, even though the corporation had previously relied on their reports in covering Ukraine and other global conflicts.
Israeli guests, by contrast, “were given free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback”, including lies about Hamas burning or beheading babies and committing mass rape.
An email cited by Al Jazeera from more than 20 BBC journalists sent last February to Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, warned that the corporation’s coverage risked “aiding and abetting genocide through story suppression”.
Upside-down values These biases have been only too evident in the BBC’s coverage, first of Gaza and now, as media interest wanes in the genocide, of Lebanon.
Headlines — the mood music of journalism, and the only part of a story many of the audience read — have been uniformly dire.
For example, Netanyahu’s threats of a Gaza-style genocide against the Lebanese people last month if they did not overthrow their leaders were soft-soaped by the BBC headline: “Netanyahu’s appeal to Lebanese people falls on deaf ears in Beirut.”
Reasonable readers would have wrongly inferred both that Netanyahu was trying to do the Lebanese people a favour (by preparing to murder them), and that they were being ungrateful in not taking up his offer.
It has been the same story everywhere in the establishment media. In another extraordinary, revealing moment, Kay Burley of Sky News announced last month the deaths of four Israeli soldiers from a Hezbollah drone strike on a military base inside Israel.
With a solemnity usually reserved for the passing of a member of the British royal family, she slowly named the four soldiers, with a photo of each shown on screen. She stressed twice that all four were only 19 years old.
Sky News seemed not to understand that these were not British soldiers, and that there was no reason for a British audience to be especially disturbed by their deaths. Soldiers are killed in wars all the time — it is an occupational hazard.
And further, if Israel considered them old enough to fight in Gaza and Lebanon, then they were old enough to die too without their age being treated as particularly noteworthy.
But more significantly still, Israel’s Golani Brigade to which these soldiers belonged has been centrally involved in the slaughter of Palestinians over the past year. Its troops have been responsible for many of the tens of thousands of children killed and maimed in Gaza.
Each of the four soldiers was far, far less deserving of Burley’s sympathy and concern than the thousands of children who have been slaughtered at the hands of their brigade. Those children are almost never named and their pictures are rarely shown, not least because their injuries are usually too horrifying to be seen.
It was yet more evidence of the upside-down world the establishment media has been trying to normalise for its audiences.
It is why statistics from the United States, where the coverage of Gaza and Lebanon may be even more unhinged, show faith in the media is at rock bottom. Fewer than one in three respondents — 31 percent — said they still had a “great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media”.
Crushing dissent Israel is the one dictating the coverage of its genocide. First by murdering the Palestinian journalists reporting it on the ground, and then by making sure house-trained foreign correspondents stay well clear of the slaughter, out of harm’s way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
And as ever, Israel has been able to rely on the complicity of its Western patrons in crushing dissent at home.
Last week, a British investigative journalist, Asa Winstanley, an outspoken critic of Israel and its lobbyists in the UK, had his home in London raided at dawn by counter-terrorism police.
Though the police have not arrested or charged him — at least not yet — they snatched his electronic devices. He was warned that he is being investigated for “encouragement of terrorism” in his social media posts.
Police told Middle East Eye that his devices had been seized as part of an investigation into suspected terrorism offences of “support for a proscribed organisation” and “dissemination of terrorist documents”.
The police can act only because of Britain’s draconian, anti-speech Terrorism Act.
Section 12, for example, makes the expression of an opinion that could be interpreted as sympathetic to armed Palestinian resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation — a right enshrined in international law but sweepingly dismissed as “terrorism” in the West — itself a terrorism offence.
Those journalists who haven’t been house-trained in the establishment media, as well as solidarity activists, must now chart a treacherous path across intentionally ill-defined legal terrain when talking about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Winstanley is not the first journalist to be accused of falling foul of the Terrorism Act. In recent weeks, Richard Medhurst, a freelance journalist, was arrested at Heathrow airport on his return from a trip abroad. Another journalist-activist, Sarah Wilkinson, was briefly arrested after her home was ransacked by police.
Their electronic devices were seized too.
Meanwhile, Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, which seeks to disrupt the UK’s supply of weapons to Israel’s genocide, has been charged over speeches he has made against the genocide.
It now appears that all these actions are part of a specific police campaign targeting journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists: “Operation Incessantness”.
The message this clumsy title is presumably supposed to convey is that the British state is coming after anyone who speaks out too loudly against the British government’s continuing arming and complicity in Israel’s genocide.
Notably, the establishment media have failed to cover this latest assault on journalism and the role of a free press — supposedly the very things they are there to protect.
The raid on Winstanley’s home and the arrests are intended to intimidate others, including independent journalists, into silence for fear of the consequences of speaking up.
This has nothing to do with terrorism. Rather, it is terrorism by the British state.
Once again the world is being turned upside down.
Echoes from history The West is waging a campaign of psychological warfare on its populations: it is gaslighting and disorientating them, classing genocide as “self-defence” and opposition to it a form of “terrorism”.
This is an expansion of the persecution suffered by Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who spent years locked up in London’s Belmarsh high-security prison.
His unprecedented journalism — revealing the darkest secrets of Western states — was redefined as espionage. His “offence” was revealing that Britain and the US had committed systematic war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, on the back of that precedent, the British state is coming after journalists simply for embarrassing it.
Late last month I attended a meeting in Bristol against the genocide in Gaza at which the main speaker was physically absent after the British state failed to issue him an entry visa.
The missing guest — he had to join us by zoom — was Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, who was locked up for decades as a terrorist before becoming the first leader of post-apartheid South Africa and a feted, international statesman.
Mandla Mandela was until recently a member of the South African Parliament.
A Home Office spokesperson told Middle East Eye that the UK only issued visas “to those who we want to welcome to our country”.
Media reports suggest Britain was determined to exclude Mandela because, like his grandfather, he views the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid as intimately linked to the earlier struggle against South Africa’s apartheid.
The echoes from history are apparently entirely lost on officials: the UK is once again associating the Mandela family with terrorism. Before it was to protect South Africa’s apartheid regime. Now it is to protect Israel’s even worse apartheid and genocidal regime.
The world is indeed turned on its head. And the West’s supposedly “free media” is playing a critical role in trying to make our upside-down world seem normal.
That can only be achieved by failing to report the Gaza genocide as a genocide. Instead, Western journalists are serving as little more than stenographers. Their job: to take dictation from Israel.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
For one moment I was concerned I might not make the deadline for this latest, Labour budget-themed instalment of Swindon’s Sunday Sermon. You can just imagine the queues out there, now a pint of San Miguel only costs a bargain £6.49, rather than an extortionate £6.50.
What an offer. Buy 649 pints of beer and get your 650th pint for free! By the time you’ve made your way through that lot you’ll be too shitfaced to realise you are three-and-a-half grand poorer and searching for a liver transplant on the dark web.
I kind of get the increase in tobacco price. If you need to sell a fucking lung to buy a pack of ciggies, you may as well give up.
Labour: a £2.50 tax hike every time Reeves said ‘working people’
The first Labour economic statement since 2010 was the Budget that saw the second largest increase in taxes in UK history.
The surprise ‘£22 billion black hole’, which Keir Starmer once thought was a new ride at Alton Towers for him to try on yet another freebie family day out, has been stuffed to its very core with around £40 billion worth of tax hikes.
Interestingly enough, the £40 billion figure worked out at around £2.50 for each time chancellor Rachel Reeves and one of her virtually unknown colleagues blurted out the words “working people”, over the space of an eight-hour news cycle. Roughly.
Why on earth are these freeloading red stains on the fabric of society given the opportunity to define what a working person is or isn’t?
May I remind you, they are millionaires, multi-millionaires, landlords, non-executive directors, bankers, and economists dictating to you what an honest day’s work should look like.
Thoroughly dishonest
Thoroughly dishonest Reeves is never backwards in coming forwards when it comes to talking about her time, coining-it-in as an economist.
Following three junior positions with the Bank of England — where one of her former colleagues described her as “fucking useless”, according to some malignant right-wing gossipy blog site — Reeves claims she moved to the Bank of Scotland to work as an economist.
But this claim was untrue. Reeves worked in some “mundane support department”, so say more than one of her former HBOS colleagues.
So let me get this right. A “fucking useless” liar that’s spent a career predicting the state of the economy as accurately as I tend to predict the calories in a slice of chocolate cake, wants you to trust her with your money because she helped Dave in IT get Windows 2005 installed on his PC?
Despite the promise of “change”, this was a typical capitalist economy budget.
Why does this Labour Party government expect small businesses to pick up an eye-watering £25 billion tab, while not having anything to say about Google and Amazon picking and choosing what they do or don’t pay in tax?
I’ll tell you exactly why Labour backtracked on hiking the Digital Services tax, introduced in 2020, from 2% to 10%.
Sound the freebie klaxon
Now is a very good time to sound the freebie claxon.
Let’s go back to August last year when then-shadow secretary of state Jonathan Reynolds and Rachel Reeves called for an increase in the tax to 10%, claiming the extra income would be used to fund a tax cut for small businesses.
Google’s charm offensive was just too much for the gluttonous Labour Party. Reynolds, his senior parliamentary assistant — also known as his wife — and Starmer’s political director all attended the Glastonbury festival as esteemed guests of the streaming platform YouTube, which is owned by Google. This generous little ‘no strings attached’ package, which included accommodation and ‘hospitality’, was worth £3,377.
And you thought Oasis ticket prices were a bit steep? Who even is Reynolds? The bloke looks like a haunted pencil, not a secretary of state.
Anyway, the Glastonbury festival came to an end, and within just one day reports emerged of Labour’s Digital Services tax hike being scrapped.
Reynolds wasn’t the only beneficiary of Google’s blatant bribery.
Keir Starmer himself was treated to a £380 dinner at the World Economic Forum gathering, and Lucy Powell’s political adviser, Labour’s executive director of policy, and the party’s head of domestic policy all accepted tickets and transport to, and ‘hospitality’ at, the Brit Awards, which Powell put through the register of members interests at £1,170.
Not in the service of us
In total, openDemocracy estimated the Labour Party pocketed around £10,000 worth of freebies in exchange for the axing of a policy that was worth around £3 billion to the British public.
The Labour Party isn’t “at the service of working people”, it is a puppet of the corporate elite that refuses to take on vested interests, such as the big tech corporations which have already had it ridiculously easy under successive Tory administrations.
Tax them Starmer. For the love of god, just fucking tax them.
Funnily enough, that £3 billion loss to the British public might even be enough to give the country with a bit of a Nazi problem and the stand-up comedian president that “£3 billion a year, as long as it takes”, that chancellor Reeves announced during her economic statement.
Incredible isn’t it? Reeves demands nearly all government departments slash their budgets by 2% next year, while throwing at least £15 billion over the next parliament into a proxy war that even the most dimwitted of Starmerites realise is an obscene and unnecessary waste of your cash.
In keeping with Tory tradition, Britain’s first woman chancellor confirmed that Labour WILL introduce the Tory changes to the disgraceful and demeaning Work Capability Assessment, making disabled people the primary target for her attempt to slash the welfare bill by £3.4 billion.
I mean, why bother hassling Bezos for a bit more tax when you can force sick and disabled British people into unsuitable, low paid work, which can and will have devastating consequences on their physical and mental health?
Labour: steal £3bn from disabled people to send to Ukraine
The Labour manifesto, as unambitious and ambiguous as it was, made absolutely no mention whatsoever of stealing £3 billion from some of Britain’s most vulnerable people and sending it to Ukraine to fight someone else’s war.
The only foreign aid budget that needs slashing is the kind of aid that not only kills and maims human beings, but also leaves Britain entirely complicit in a foreign state’s aggression. This is not a brush that a majority of us wish to be tarred by.
This first budget from the Labour government in fourteen years could be thrown in with a majority of the previous fourteen budgets and barely anyone would blink an eye, because while the name of the party in charge of the country may well be different, the rancid and corrupt neoliberal ideology remains the same.
This story was co-published with In These Times on November 1, 2024.
Disclosure: As 501(c)(3) nonprofits, The Real News Network and In These Times do not support or oppose any candidate for public office.
I went home to say goodbye to my grandpa for the last time.
His body may still be alive when we make it back to California for Christmas, and I may get to see him again. But the bulk of his self, body and mind, will be gone. When it comes to the jovial, hilarious, folksy, loving, complicated man I’ve always known, this last trip home was goodbye.
Having experienced both, I can say that losing someone all at once feels very different than watching parts of them gradually disappear. Alzheimer’s is one of nature’s cruelest causes of death for human beings, and losing a loved one to it comes with a unique mix of expected tortures and unexpected blessings.
Alzheimer’s is one of nature’s cruelest causes of death for human beings, and losing a loved one to it comes with a unique mix of expected tortures and unexpected blessings.
I got to be with him on his 85th birthday, to sit with him, and my sister, and our parents. My brothers got to be with him that week too. He still remembered us and loved us as he always has. I got to tell him how much I love him and how lucky I am to have him as a grandpa, and how I wouldn’t be who I am without him. I am so damn grateful for that. It’s a lot worse when you don’t get the chance to say what’s in your heart and spend the rest of your life regretting it.
And yet, I knew what I was saying wouldn’t stick. He wouldn’t remember those last days together like I would, and do, but it was still him there, with us, in the present of those moments. And he was happy to be with us — tired, eroding, but happy. And I was happy to be with him. I couldn’t get caught up dropping pennies down a well, hoping the things we were saying to him would reach some deeper core of his memory, and risk missing the genuine, luminous smile rippling over his face again and again as we sat there talking and listening.
These were small blessings amid an altogether devastating time for our family. And I am grateful for every second we shared together. Sitting on the bed that had been moved to the living room, I was torturously aware of how precious and fleeting and final every one of those seconds was as they passed, and I didn’t take a single one for granted.
That is also why, over the course of those last two days, I became so volcanically, quietly enraged about the fact that so much of our time was consumed by repeatedly talking about Fox News, One America News (OAN) and Donald Trump.
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin visits “Fox & Friends” on Oct. 10, 2024. The Supreme Court approved Youngkin’s effort to purge thousands of voters from Virginia’s rolls shortly before the general election to root out alleged “noncitizens.” John Lamparski/Getty Images
The content of those conversations is for the family’s ears only — I won’t get into specifics here. I want to honor Gramps and celebrate the beautiful life he’s lived, to show him nothing but respect and love and support in this most vulnerable stage of his life, not reduce him to the disease that’s killing him or the things it makes him say. Suffice it to say that, as the hours passed away over those two days of conversation, reflection, laughter, and silence, rehashing the same roundabout discussion concerning the fate of the country and the only “news” channels telling the “truth,” I got to see up close how the right-wing fear machine preys on the human brain, especially when its defenses are down.
No short-term memory, no connection to the world outside his home that wasn’t filtered through a screen. A lot of love for the people he knows, a lot of fear about the future his grand- and great-grandchildren will have to face. I saw in my dying grandpa, sitting on that armchair, right-wing media’s ideal viewer.
You know those Bill Murray-coded movies where an old guy redeems his failures and stumbles as a father by loving the hell out of his grandkids and having a blast with them in his golden years? We lived it, and the real thing is so much better than the movies. To me, this oak of a man — a man who grew up dirt poor in segregated Charlotte, N.C., before hitchhiking cross country to California at age 14, becoming a father when he was still just a kid himself, making a lot of mistakes and leaving a lot of wounds — will always be the folksy charmer, joker and storyteller who would corral all his grandsons in the summer, the white ones and the brown ones alike, and take us to different theme parks and waterparks all over Southern California. Those will always be some of the best memories of my life.
I got to see up close how the right-wing fear machine preys on the human brain, especially when its defenses are down.
Gramps was always there. Always at basketball games and birthday parties, always encouraging us and being our biggest cheerleader, next to our parents. He’s a constant, warm presence in my memories from home for a reason, and I see so much of his imprint on the person I am and the life I have today. He has always been a wonderful, loving, funny and often brutally honest grandpa. We forged a strong sense of who we are and where we come from through Gramps and his stories. Any gifts I have as a storyteller, I inherited from Gramps. And when he does take his final rest, his stories and his memory will live on in us, and it will forever be a blessing.
My mom always jokingly said that we are “southern-fried Mexicans,” and we’re proud of it — I still love eating scrapple with eggs and salsa. And Gramps was our living connection to those family roots in poor white North Carolina, where he was born at the tail end of the Depression. Everything and everyone else before that were still just black-and-white photographs and stories of stories in our child minds. But Gramps was walking, talking history; his stories and tall tales of when he was our age captivated us. From the story about getting kicked off a city bus after defiantly giving up his seat to a tired, elderly Black woman, to our favorite yarn about the deadly “whip snake,” a folklore beast of the southern wild that would supposedly put its tail in its mouth to form itself into a wheel, roll towards its prey at top speed, and then use the same tail to whip them to death. We believed in the whip snake for an embarrassingly long time, probably because we just loved hearing Gramps tell the story. On this last trip, my sister MacKenna and I asked him where the story came from before saying our goodbyes. Was it part of some deep regional lore? A family fable passed down through the generations? “No,” he laughed. “I must have just made that shit up in my head.”
People are complicated, life is complicated. Gramps is too. And he’s lived a hell of a life: Growing up with parents who couldn’t read and twelve siblings; working his first job shagging balls at the golf course of a local country club when he was six, to later cutting trees in the Bayou with his brothers to make way for the phone lines, to working at a steel mill in California before making a career in real estate; meeting my grandma, Jeannie, getting married when he was 17, raising my mom, Regina, and my uncles Mark and Evan, getting divorced, remarrying years later to Mary, a truly lovely and loving woman, then losing her to cancer; playing and loving golf throughout his life; bragging about his grandkids to anyone who would listen; helplessly watching the 2008 crash and the Recession hit his family so hard and wipe away so much of the world and industry he knew; seeing his siblings and former wives and best friends pass away one by one as old age and increasingly severe health ailments ate away at his independence and freedom of movement like termites.
I’ve always known that people can have many different reasons for supporting Trump, and that Trump supporters can come in many different forms, because I have them in my own family. I never believed that the Trump phenomenon could be explained away by reducing it to the most caricaturesque qualities and racist, sexist, xenophobic, authoritarian tendencies of the true-believing “deplorables.” Gramps, the man I know and love, the man you’ve been reading about here, is a Trump supporter. My dad, Jesus, a Mexican immigrant and U.S. citizen who lost everything in the Great Recession, including the house we grew up in, voted for Trump in 2016.
I never believed that the Trump phenomenon could be explained away by reducing it to the most caricaturesque qualities.
Gramps used to be a Democrat until Reagan, and his politics, as long as I’ve known him, have always been a mixture of mainstream Republican Party and Fox News views, love and pride and concern for his family and country, and a personal philosophy of live and let live, work hard, have a good time, don’t be an asshole, and enjoy people. (Gramps loves talking to people, which is what made him such a great realtor, and he is also a gigantic flirt by nature.) But the Trump effect has been slowly reshaping his worldview for a while. And I use the word “worldview” deliberately — how he sees the world at large from his physical and social life-world in Southern California — because I have noticed a direct correlation between his heightened fear of the outside world and the state of the country, his drift towards Trump’s fascist politics, and the eight-year process of his life-world shrinking down to the one living room he’s in now.
A protester outside the NewsCorp building in Manhattan, where Fox News is based, on March 12, 2024. Activist groups held weekly protests here to draw attention to the company’s xenophobic rhetoric. Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
“Good god,” Adams said, and he thought, There are millions of them down there. … What would it be like to have the earth open and millions of humans, imprisoned subsurface for fifteen years, believing in a radioactive waste above, with missiles and bacteria and rubble and warring armies — the demesne system would sustain a death blow and the great park over which he flappled twice daily would become a densely populated civilization once more, not quite as before the war, but close enough. Roads would reappear. Cities.
And — ultimately there would be another war.
That was the rationale. The masses had egged their leaders on to war in both Wes-Dem and Pac-Peop. But once the masses were out of the way, stuffed down below into antiseptic tanks, the ruling elite of both East and West were free to conclude a deal …
—Philip K. Dick, The Penultimate Truth (1964)
Even as a diehard fan of Philip K. Dick’s novels, I admit I was disappointed in The Penultimate Truth when I first read it around eight years ago. The writing is still gorgeous, biting, acidic, and the characters are still fascinating and morosely thought-provoking. But the basic plot, the whole Plato-infused Cold War allegory, felt way too heavy-handed for me.
“In the future,” the back of the book reads, “most of humanity lives in massive underground bunkers, producing weapons for the nuclear war they’ve fled. Constantly bombarded by patriotic propaganda, the citizens of these industrial anthills believe they are waiting for the day when the war will be over and they can return above ground. But when Nick St. James, president of one anthill, makes an unauthorized trip to the surface, what he finds is more shocking than anything he could imagine.”
Spoiler alert: What Nick finds is that the war ended years ago and that he and his fellow anthill-dwellers have been lied to by “the ruling elite of both East and West,” kept underground, fearful, working diligently week after week, year after year, to produce robots and munitions to fight a war above ground that they never see with their own eyes. Carefully curated and fabricated depictions of the world on fire above are fed to people in their bunker worlds below on giant TV screens. “Everyone … [gazed] at the floor-to-ceiling windscreen. This was their window — their sole window — on the above world, and they took rather seriously what was received on its giant surface.”
Maybe in the pre-Internet days of manufactured consent, I thought, when cable TV was the dominant medium, Dick’s allegory would have more reality-explaining power. But our twenty-first-century world is too open, information is too freely accessible, and the real is too hard to hide from people to imagine the kind of control The Penultimate Truth’s villains have on their subterranean subjects. Not only have our surveilling, whistleblower-persecuting government and Big Tech oligarchs proven me wrong about that, but I also failed to grasp how Dick’s allegory would become even more sinisterly relevant 60 years later in a hyper-digitalized, techno-feudal society. By their own willful accord and through political manipulation and technological conditioning, people in the digital age have sequestered themselves in their own virtual underground anthills, enveloped in distinct, preferentially curated, and increasingly incompatible visions and experiences of reality.
“Everyone … [gazed] at the floor-to-ceiling windscreen. This was their window—their sole window—on the above world, and they took rather seriously what was received on its giant surface.”
I was there in the virtual anthill with Gramps, seeing what he sees, seeing what the world outside his window looks like through the Dickian TV screen that only plays two channels: FOX News and OAN. It was very different from the world I see. Immigrants, the “trans agenda,” “radical left lunatics,” secularism — all are hastening the demise of America from within, and all are pieces in a larger country-destroying plot orchestrated by Democrats and “woke-agenda”-pushing elites. I’m betting you know someone who lives in that same anthill. And you may be living in another one yourself, a different one. When you, like me, look to screens to access the world beyond the physical realm of your daily life-world, depending on what apps you use, what accounts you follow, what channels you watch, what sites you trust, what podcasts you listen to, etc., you may be seeing and imagining a fundamentally different world to the one the person sitting next to you on the bus sees.
What Dick understood 60 years ago, and what I think a lot of us who are not on the right need to remember in this perilous moment, is that people’s politics can and always do flow downstream from their perception of the world they believe they’re living in. That has always been true about us. It’s as true now as it was when people supported Red Scare McCarthyism or the Stalinist purges; when people in Germany supported the Nazis’ genocide back then or people in Israel support the Zionists’ genocide today; when people across this ever-expanding settler nation supported the enslavement of Black people and the extermination of Indigenous populations living on this land while it was all happening in front of them; when people believed their neighbors were witches and supported their executions. The darkest sides and most inhumane capabilities of human politics tend to come out when they seem like the natural, necessary, permissible, and accomplishable solution that will ostensibly address a real crisis people are feeling in their daily life-worlds, and that will eradicate an evil that a critical mass of people believe to be real and believe to be the source of that crisis.
Supporters watch and cheer as former President Donald Trump speaks at an evening rally on Sept. 18, 2024 in Uniondale, New York. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
That has always been the missing piece, in my opinion, when it comes to our pundits’ collective attempts to understand how this or that group of people could be driven to embrace Trump ever since the joke and the nightmare both became reality eight years ago. For certain sections of Trump’s base, the hateful ideology and manifestly fascist sides of MAGA are what attracts them, but that’s not what has drawn in so many other people who genuinely believe they’re not inclined or susceptible to fascist politics. The desire for fascist politics and the acceptance of fascist “solutions” to society’s ills develops and seeps in over time. It follows from people becoming convinced that it’s the obvious and necessary response to the right-wing presentation of reality that’s recycled on their screens over and over, hardening into the contact lens through which someone like my grandpa squintingly, fearfully observes the world beyond their daily physical sight and social connections. The same lens through which Trump and his promises appear to be the obvious and necessary answer to the crumbling world that Trump depicts at his rallies and that right-wing media and right-wing-preferenced newsfeeds redepict day after day.
What I have observed firsthand with Gramps for years, and what I suspect is true for many, many people like him, is that the worldview-defining capacity of the Trumpian lens increases dramatically the more people’s physical and social life-worlds shrink and they become more dependent on that lens to be “their window — their sole window — on the above world.” This is not a new phenomenon: American capitalist society is always pushing us in antisocial directions, making us feel more alienated from one another, and people’s social life-worlds have been shrinking for decades. (Robert Putnam’s analysis in Bowling Alone still remains one of the starkest reminders of this.) But these trends went into hyperdrive when Covid hit: People have gotten older and sicker and, thus, more fearful and resentful, their physical and social life-worlds have gotten smaller, and two years of social distancing and quarantine conditions provided a unique historic opportunity to have more of their connections to and perceptions of the outside world mediated through screens.
But I also saw within him an ongoing struggle between this world-swallowing darkness and the lights that temporarily bring him back: direct social contact with people he loves and trusts, love from his family, memories of happiness.
Those changes weren’t temporary and they didn’t simply reverse when the decision was made for us that COVID was “over” — they have lingered. Trump and the right-wing media machine have seized upon this situation and exploited it masterfully, and in their dark vision for what needs to come next, they have provided false hope to a lot of broken people who want one thing above all else on the other side: to return to a time when they recall feeling whole.
Gramps will never see that hope realized, but he will die believing it’s still coming.
I want to be very clear: I know my sick grandpa is a unique example, and I’m not saying everyone who supports Trump and watches right-wing media will end up like him. But he is the ideal subject, the perfect captive audience, the model for the right’s ideal world-viewer that Trump and right-wing media are pushing their followers to become more like. And more of us are closer to being where he is than we care to acknowledge.
But I also saw within him, and I experienced sitting in that small living room he’s now stuck in, an ongoing struggle between this world-swallowing darkness and the lights that temporarily bring him back: direct social contact with people he loves and trusts, love from his family, memories of happiness, and all manner of interpersonal interactions that can counteract the media-amplified sense of doom and remind him that people are mostly good and that your fellow man is no less human than you and not something to be feared. That struggle is playing out on a national, history-defining scale right now, and the only thing more frightening than the view of the world as seen through the Trumpian lens is the prospect of a society ruled and supported by enough people who believe it’s all true and that the obvious and necessary solution is just around the corner.
Paulo Paulino Guajajara looks down and off to one side, the Amazon forest lush and dense behind him.
His voice thickens; he clears his throat.
“My mother, she’s unwell. She told me to stop doing this work,” he says, and presses the heel of his hand against his eye to stop a tear.
He looks into the camera:
I told her I’m not scared, that she should let me fight. Because I have a son. And he will need the forest.
Paulo, an Indigenous Amazon Guardian, was shot dead five years ago today (1 November 2019) in the forest he loved – the Arariboia Indigenous Territory, in the Amazon’s north-east.
Paulo Paulino Guajajara
I was on the other side of the camera when he spoke of his mother’s fears. He wanted the world to know his people, his land, were under threat. He knew illegal loggers were paying gunmen to kill Guardians like him, but he continued to track them, leaving his infant son, wife, and his mother at home.
The Guardians are Guajajara people who protect Indigenous land. They confront illegal loggers, force them to leave, then destroy their camps. They do it to protect their families and for the Awá people, their neighbours who share the territory and some of whom shun all outside contact.
Paulo admired the Awá. They are completely self sufficient in their forest, but cannot survive without it.
Paulo and I met in 2017 when we recorded his video. In 2019 I went on a Guardian patrol as a researcher with Survival International, the global movement for Indigenous and tribal peoples’ rights.
It was on that journey, deep in the rainforest, that Paulo and I became friends – and he asked me to call him by his Guardian name, Lobo (‘Wolf’ in English). The group assigns a name that reflects a Guardian’s personality and his place. It binds them together, protects their anonymity.
The Guardians gathered in a clearing to prepare for our patrol. They brought several motorbikes and a quad bike. About 15 men chatted casually as they honed their machetes, checked motorbike chains and calculated how much petrol to take.
They wrapped and stowed a big piece of meat – food for the journey. One man drew a map in the earth with a stick and pointed to the illegal logging camp – the object of our patrol. Well-worn bulletproof vests were distributed, then we got on the bikes and headed into the forest.
A wooly hat that will stay with me forever
Lobo was quiet and focused, pitching in with an easy smile. He insisted I travel with him and his cousin on the more comfortable quad bike.
As we rode dirt trails into the thickening forest, he taught me words in Tenetehar, his Indigenous language. He pointed and said, ‘foot’, ‘hand’, ‘elbow’. I repeated, worked to get my mouth around the unfamiliar syllables.
Later, I proudly spoke the words he’d taught me, and the Guardians guffawed. I was saying, ‘blue foot’, ‘fat elbow’, ‘laughing hand’. Lobo just grinned.
We gathered around a fire that night, kept small to prevent detection. The meat was cooked, and Lobo offered it to me on a skewer. He drew his machete, elegantly ran it down the meat’s edge, and urged me to pull away a thin, sinewy slice. It was a welcome treat, dipped in crunchy cassava farinha.
Lobo admired a woolly hat I’d brought from London, so I gave it to him. He cut eye holes and wore it pulled down over his face to keep his identity secret and protect him from the hired assassins. The group spread out and settled on the cold forest floor, wrapped in darkness and sound – the buzz of cicadas and trills of crickets, descants over the rumbling bass line of amorous bullfrogs.
Invading their territory
The next day we travelled on foot. The Guardians inspected every snapped twig – evidence loggers were nearby. They examined tire tracks, noting their age and direction of travel. Tension rose as we got closer.
We passed a pile of stacked logs and arrived at the camp – an oval-shaped clearing where blue and black tarps sheltered cooking and seating areas.
But the loggers had fled. We ate their breakfast – eggs and a pot of pumpkin they’d left cooking on their fire. And when we discovered a barrel of fresh water, Lobo insisted that I be the first to bathe.
He was angry though, disgusted at the loggers’ intrusion, the theft of trees, the destruction of the forest. And he was frustrated they’d escaped. “I want to burn and destroy this camp,” Lobo said, holding his lighter to a tarpaulin’s edge. “We don’t want anything of theirs in our territory.”
One of six
Lobo was out hunting when he was ambushed – shot and killed. Beside him, his friend and fellow Guardian Tainaky Tenetehar was also hit. The impact bent Tainaky over in pain. Straining with every part of his body, he straightened up and ran as blood poured from his right shoulder. Lobo lay dead on the forest floor, still wearing the hat that could not protect him.
Lobo was the sixth Guardian killed by loggers in the Arariboia forest.
News of his death went round the world.
Despite that, none of the killers have been caught or tried. And on this fifth anniversary of his killing, everything Lobo sought to protect is in greater peril – particularly the uncontacted Awá.
They are among more than 150 uncontacted Indigenous Peoples around the world – the most self-sufficient and most vulnerable peoples on the planet. Survival International is fighting to stop miners, loggers, ranchers, other extractive industries, and criminals stealing their territory and resources.
The loggers are still there, while Brazil’s government fails the Awá by not upholding its own and international laws which require their land be protected for their exclusive use.
Justice for Paulo Paulino Guajajara
When I think of Paulo Paulino Guajajara, I remember his easy laugh, the grin that spread slowly across his face. He always carried a pen drive loaded with his tunes. That smile grew ever wider when his favourite came on: Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”. He would close his eyes and hum along.
Lobo once said, “Even if they kill me, I won’t stop fighting.”
His fight continues; for there is a little boy growing up without his marvellous father. And he still needs the forest.
Sarah Shenker is a senior researcher and advocacy officer with Survival International which fights alongside Indigenous People for their lands and human rights. Survival supports the work of the Guardians and has campaigned for the Awá’s rights since the 1970s.
An overwhelming white majority of baseball fans skeptically approached Jackie Robinson’s entrance on their well-kept baseball fields. After watching Jackie’s dazzling performances, the fans begged for tickets and attendance at Brooklyn Dodgers games soared. The racism that barred black baseball players from performing on the national stage subsided, or did it; did black ballplayers mean money and did earning bucks come ahead of racial exclusion? If Robinson was just a good player and not a superstar and crowd drawer, would the major league baseball fields have opened themselves to the marginalized black hitters? Recent events in the Women National Basketball Association (WNBA), founded on April 24, 1996 and struggling for survival from day one, revealed that Jackie Robinson only reduced the appearance of racism; a stash of cash always smashes the illusion.
Reports had Caitlin Clark, considered the college all-time greatest female basketball player and “rookie of the year” with the Indiana Fever, leaving the WNBA for the European League. Who better to ask about this sensational occurrence than political commentator, Bill Maher.
The comedian turned talk show host indicated that Clark was a victim of racism. After showing a clip of Caitlin Clark body checked by an opponent, Maher said, “We also have a racial element to this. We can’t deny that.” He followed the remark with, “Women are catty. The league is very lesbian and she’s not, and there’s race,” he said. “There’s a lot going on.”
Those words don’t proceed from logical arguments — body checks by a few aggressive players against rookie stars are not unique and appear in all sports. Holding an entire league responsible for the actions of a few hyperactive players is conspiratorial. Describing women as “catty,” and the league as “lesbian” and racial are examples of illiberal bigotry. The WBNA has predominantly black players, similar to the NBA . In the sport of ping pong, Chinese people are superior. In the sport of basketball, black people are superior.
Another comment attributed to Maher, which I have not been able to verify on any video, is, “Women’s basketball got on my radar — like everybody’s — because of Caitlin Clark,” he explained. “And the other girls and the league are delighted for her success. … I’m joking of course. They f—king hate her.”
This type of comment, that Caitlin Clark inspired many in the white world to become interested in the WBNA, which other commentators have stated, proves that Jackie Robinson’s exploits only reduced the appearance of racism. Caitlin Clark may be an excellent player but she is seventh in scoring and tied for fourth in overall efficiency in the league’s statistics. Just as the NBA is the same NBA without rookie of the year, Victor Wembanyama, the WNBA is the same WNBA without rookie of the year, Caitlin Clark. The white majority became interested in the WNBA when their great white hope entered the courts to battle black players. In the fortuitous moments, they learned that the WNBA league housed exciting basketball and entertaining basketball handlers, something their prejudice prevented them from knowing. Television and streaming services quickly observed the money flow and the WNBA, previously a sidetracked oddity of mostly black women hoopsters, became a sports rage. The next time, Maher charges others with racism, he should look in the mirror.
The rumor that started the crass statements has been body checked. ESPN announcer, Ryan Ruocco, reports, “We talked to Caitlin Clark earlier today. She said she almost definitely will not play basketball this offseason. So it is likely we will not see her play again until April.”
The decades apart racisms exhibited in the sports arenas are not isolated cases. They demonstrate that Americans look inwards and have a lack of unawareness that racisms, of many forms, are imprinted in their psyches. When the agenda of a controlling institution changes — financial, political, social, or economic — and the particular racism impedes the agenda, then Americans are told to change their attitude; an imprint is relieved.
By excessive attention to a genocide committed almost 100 years ago in a Western nation to Western people, a controlling institution has imprinted its racist attitude in the minds of Americans. The agenda assures that the World War II genocide is given consistent recognition, and the genocide by western oriented people in an Arab country does not register. Racism, as shown by Bill Maher’s remarks and attitude, is a significant factor that guides the genocide of the Palestinian people.
America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.
The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.
Normally mild-mannered individuals caught up in the throes of this disease have been transformed into belligerent zealots, while others inclined to pacifism have taken to stockpiling weapons and practicing defensive drills.
This plague on our nation—one that has been spreading like wildfire—is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live.
Everywhere you turn, those on both the left- and right-wing are fomenting distrust and division. You can’t escape it.
We’re being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of extremists, fear of conformists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government, fear of those on the Right, fear of those on the Left… The list goes on and on.
The strategy is simple yet effective: the best way to control a populace is through fear and discord.
Confound them, distract them with mindless news chatter and entertainment, pit them against one another by turning minor disagreements into major skirmishes, and tie them up in knots over matters lacking in national significance.
Most importantly, divide the people into factions, persuade them to see each other as the enemy and keep them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.
This is how free people enslave themselves and allow tyrants to prevail.
This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes.
All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.
Turn on the TV or flip open the newspaper on any given day, and you will find yourself accosted by reports of government corruption, corporate malfeasance, militarized police and marauding SWAT teams.
America has already entered a new phase, one in which children are arrested in schools, military veterans are forcibly detained by government agents because of their so-called “anti-government” views, and law-abiding Americans are having their movements tracked, their financial transactions documented, and their communications monitored.
These threats are not to be underestimated.
Yet even more dangerous than these violations of our basic rights is the language in which they are couched: the language of fear. It is a language spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure.
This language of fear has given rise to a politics of fear whose only aim is to distract and divide us. In this way, we have been discouraged from thinking analytically and believing that we have any part to play in solving the problems before us. Instead, we have been conditioned to point the finger at the other Person or vote for this Politician or support this Group, because they are the ones who will fix it. Except that they can’t and won’t fix the problems plaguing our communities.
Nevertheless, fear remains the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government.
The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence, disease, illegal immigration, and so-called domestic extremism have been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.
An atmosphere of fear permeates modern America. However, with crime at an all-time low, is such fear rational?
Statistics show that you are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack. You are 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane. You are 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack. You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack. You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocating in bed than from a terrorist attack. And you are 9 more times likely to choke to death in your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack.
Indeed, those living in the American police state are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist. Thus, the government’s endless jabbering about terrorism amounts to little more than propaganda—the propaganda of fear—a tactic used to terrorize, cower and control the population.
In turn, the government’s stranglehold on power and extreme paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats has resulted in a populace that is increasingly viewed as the government’s enemies.
Why else would the government feel the need to monitor our communications, track our movements, criminalize our every action, treat us like suspects, and strip us of any means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons?
So far, these tactics—terrorizing the citizenry over the government’s paranoia and overblown fears while treating them like criminals—are working to transform the way “we the people” view ourselves and our role in this nation.
Indeed, fear and paranoia have become hallmarks of the modern American experience, impacting how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.
The American people have been reduced to what commentator Dan Sanchez refers to as “herd-minded hundreds of millions [who] will stampede to the State for security, bleating to please, please be shorn of their remaining liberties.”
I am not terrified of the terrorists; i.e., I am not, myself, terrorized. Rather, I am terrified of the terrorized; terrified of the bovine masses who are so easily manipulated by terrorists, governments, and the terror-amplifying media into allowing our country to slip toward totalitarianism and total war…
I do not irrationally and disproportionately fear Muslim bomb-wielding jihadists or white, gun-toting nutcases. But I rationally and proportionately fear those who do, and the regimes such terror empowers. History demonstrates that governments are capable of mass murder and enslavement far beyond what rogue militants can muster. Industrial-scale terrorists are the ones who wear ties, chevrons, and badges. But such terrorists are a powerless few without the supine acquiescence of the terrorized many. There is nothing to fear but the fearful themselves…
Stop swallowing the overblown scaremongering of the government and its corporate media cronies. Stop letting them use hysteria over small menaces to drive you into the arms of tyranny, which is the greatest menace of all.
As history makes clear, fear and government paranoia lead to fascist, totalitarian regimes.
It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. Fear prevents us from thinking. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.
A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled.
The following, derived by from John T. Flynn’s 1944 treatise on fascism As We Go Marching are a few of the necessary ingredients for a fascist state:
The government is managed by a powerful leader (even if he or she assumes office by way of the electoral process). This is the fascistic leadership principle (or father figure).
The government assumes it is not restrained in its power. This is authoritarianism, which eventually evolves into totalitarianism.
The government ostensibly operates under a capitalist system while being undergirded by an immense bureaucracy.
The government through its politicians emits powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
The government has an obsession with national security while constantly invoking terrifying internal and external enemies.
The government establishes a domestic and invasive surveillance system and develops a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the citizenry.
The government and its various agencies (federal, state, and local) develop an obsession with crime and punishment. This is overcriminalization.
The government becomes increasingly centralized while aligning closely with corporate powers to control all aspects of the country’s social, economic, military, and governmental structures.
The government uses militarism as a center point of its economic and taxing structure.
The government is increasingly imperialistic in order to maintain the military-industrial corporate forces.
The parallels to modern America are impossible to ignore.
“Every industry is regulated. Every profession is classified and organized. Every good or service is taxed. Endless debt accumulation is preserved. Immense doesn’t begin to describe the bureaucracy. Military preparedness never stops, and war with some evil foreign foe, remains a daily prospect,” writes economist Jeffrey Tucker. “It’s incorrect to call fascism either right wing or left wing. It is both and neither… fascism does not seek to overthrow institutions like commercial establishments, family, religious centers, and civic traditions. It seeks to control them… it preserves most of what people hold dear but promises to improve economic, social, and cultural life through unifying their operations under government control.”
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. In times of “crisis,” expediency is upheld as the central principle—that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights and criminalize virtually every form of behavior.
We are at a critical crossroads in American history.
All of which begs the question what we will give up in order to perpetuate the illusions of safety and security.
As we once again find ourselves faced with the prospect of voting for the lesser of two evils, “we the people” have a decision to make: do we simply participate in the collapse of the American republic as it degenerates toward a totalitarian regime, or do we take a stand and reject the pathetic excuse for government that is being fobbed off on us?
There is no easy answer, but one thing is true: the lesser of two evils is still evil.
Footage of Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa swaying along to the siva dance as she sat beside Britain’s King Charles III encapsulated a palpable national pride, well deserved on delivering such a high-profile gathering.
Getting down to the business of dissecting the meeting outcomes — in the leaders’ statement and Samoa communiqué — there are several issues that are significant for the Pacific island members of this post-colonial club.
As expected, climate change features prominently in the text, with more than 30 mentions including three that refer to the “climate crisis”. This will resonate highly for Pacific members, as will the support for COP 31 in 2026 to be jointly hosted by Australia and the Pacific.
Samoa’s Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa opening CHOGM 2024. Video: Talamua Media
One of the glaring contradictions of this joint COP bid is illustrated by the lack of any call to end fossil fuel extraction in the final outcomes.
Tuvalu, Fiji and Vanuatu used the CHOGM to launch the latest Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative report, with a focus on Australia’s coal and gas mining. This reflects the diversity of Commonwealth membership, which includes some states whose economies remain reliant on fossil fuel extractive industries.
As highlighted ahead of CHOGM, this multilateral gave the 56 members a chance to consider positions to take to COP 29 next month in Baku, Azerbaijan. The communiqué from the leaders highlights the importance of increased ambition when it comes to climate finance at COP 29, and particularly to address the needs of developing countries.
Another drawcard
That speaks to all the Pacific island nations and gives the region’s negotiators another drawcard on the international stage.
Then came the unexpected, Papua New Guinea made a surprise announcement that it will not attend the global conference in Baku next month. Speaking at the Commonwealth Ministerial Meeting on Small States, PNG’s Foreign Affairs Minister Justin Tkatchenko framed this decision as a stand on behalf of small island nations as a protest against “empty promises and inaction.”
As promised, a major output of this meeting was the Apia Commonwealth Ocean Declaration for One Resilient Common Future. This is the first oceans-focused declaration by the Commonwealth of Nations, and is somewhat belated given 49 of its 56 member states have ocean borders.
The declaration has positions familiar to Pacific policymakers and activists, including the recognition of national maritime boundaries despite the impacts of climate change and the need to reduce emissions from global shipping. A noticeable omission is any reference to deep-sea mining, which is also a faultline within the Pacific collective.
The text relating to reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery required extensive negotiation among the leaders, Australia’s ABC reported. While this issue has been driven by African and Caribbean states, it is one that touches the Pacific as well.
‘Blackbirding’ reparative justice
South Sea Islander “blackbirding” is one of the colonial practices that will be considered within the context of reparative justice. During the period many tens-of-thousands of Pacific Islanders were indentured to Australia’s cane fields, Fiji’s coconut plantations and elsewhere.
The trade to Queensland and New South Wales lasted from 1847 to 1904, while those destinations were British colonies until 1901. Indeed, the so-called “sugar slaves” were a way of getting cheap labour once Britain officially abolished slavery in 1834.
The next secretary-general of the Commonwealth will be Ghana’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey. Questions have been raised about the quality of her predecessor Patricia Scotland’s leadership for some time and the change will hopefully go some way in alleviating concerns.
Notably, the CHOGM has selected another woman to lead its secretariat. This is an important endorsement of female leadership among member countries where women are often dramatically underrepresented at national levels.
While it received little or no fanfare, the Commonwealth has also released its revised Commonwealth Principles on Freedom of Expression and the Role of the Media in Good Governance. This is a welcome contribution, given the threats to media freedom in the Pacific and elsewhere. It reflects a longstanding commitment by the Commonwealth to supporting democratic resilience among its members.
These principles do not come with any enforcement mechanism behind them, and the most that can be done is to encourage or exhort adherence. However, they provide another potential buffer against attempts to curtail their remit for publishers, journalists, and bloggers in Commonwealth countries.
The outcomes reveal both progress and persistent challenges for Pacific island nations. While Apia’s Commonwealth Ocean Declaration emphasises oceanic issues, its lack of provisions on deep-sea mining exposes intra-Commonwealth tensions. The change in leadership offers a pivotal opportunity to prioritise equity and actionable commitments.
Ultimately, the success of this gathering will depend on translating discussions into concrete actions that address the urgent needs of Pacific communities facing an uncertain future.
But as the guests waved farewell, the question of what the Commonwealth really means for its Pacific members remains until leaders meet in two years time in Antigua and Barbuda, a small island state in the Caribbean.
Tess Newton Cain is a principal consultant at Sustineo P/L and adjunct associate professor at the Griffith Asia Institute. She is a former lecturer at the University of the South Pacific and has more than 25 years of experience working in the Pacific Islands region. Republished with the permission of BenarNews.
In September 2022, Chris Kaba was shot and killed by a Metropolitan police officer, Martyn Blake. At the start of last week, a jury deemed Martyn Blake not guilty of murder.
The jury’s decision marked the end of an embargo on information about Chris Kaba’s life and media outlets jumped at the opportunity to brand Chris as a ‘violent criminal’, quickly abandoning his previous identity as a 24-year-old father to be and deeply beloved family member.
This new narrative suggested that Chris deserved to be shot because of his past, despite police not knowing who Chris was until after he was killed.
Chris Kaba’s past does not mean he deserved to be killed. The purpose of the police is not to kill.
Trying to rationalise the police violence that ended his life only serves to exacerbate the racialised violence that Black, Asian, and Mixed Heritage communities experience every single day:
Narratives, especially those driven by the corporate media, can perpetuate racism and further traumatise Black, Asian, and Mixed Heritage people. In the summer, we witnessed first-hand what happens when a government and media consistently promote racist narratives as serious violent actions were carried out against migrants and racially minoritised people.
This week marks yet another crossroads for the government, policing, and media: they can either further entrench institutional racism and continue the systematic harm against Black, Asian, and Mixed Heritage people, or seriously commit to ending institutional racism.
Action for Race Equality encourages the new government to break the cycle and take the necessary steps to eradicate racism and reform policing.
Infamous psychiatrist Simon Wessely, involved in a history of institutional harm towards people living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS), has set his sights on another marginalised patient community. This time, it’s transgender kids via the NHS. Needless to say, we can’t let him get away with it.
Simon Wessely: appointment to an NHS gender services board
The NHS has appointed psychiatrist Simon Wessely as chair of the new Children and Young People’s Gender Dysphoria Research Oversight Board.
Essentially, this is set to oversee the development and redesign of the NHS’s gender services for young people.
Significantly, a core part of this revolves around a puberty blocker study. On taking office, health secretary Wes Streeting upheld the previous Tory government’s temporary ban on these. It implemented this under emergency powers – but without consulting a single LGBTQ+ group. Ostensibly then, this study will invariably feed into the NHS’s approach to services and access to gender-affirming medications for trans kids.
However, it’s Wessely’s role as chair of the board that should send alarm bells ringing on this most of all. That’s because he’s repeatedly punched down on marginalised patient groups. So now, it’s the trans community in the firing line.
Psychologiser promoted far above his station
In a truly scathing, powerful, and unflinching piece for Trans Safety Network, disabled activist and researcher Rhi Belle pulls apart Simon Wessely’s hellish history of harm.
If you needed an example of someone in the UK’s elite medical establishment promoted far above his station, look no further than Wessely.
He already sits/has sat in a number of high profile decision-making positions. For a short run-down, this includes/has included:
The Tory-Lib Dem coalition government gave him a knighthood for services to military healthcare in 2013.
King’s College London (KCL) awarded Simon Wessely the first regius professor in psychiatry. Essentially, this is a special title bestowed by a monarch.
Theresa May’s government tasking him with the 2018 review of the Mental Health Act.
Reappointment in 2020 to the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) – which chooses who heads up inquiries.
Not to mention that elite medical bodies have lavished him with multiple awards and memberships. But this is all just the tip of the iceberg – there’s plenty more influential medical roles where all those came from.
What did he do to get himself atop these lofty roles at the heart of government and NHS policy decisions? Quite frankly, not anything good.
Punching down for a past-time
The Canary has detailed some of this previously. There’s few, if any names that send one particular chronic illness community’s spines tingling more than Simon Wessely.
Specifically, Wessely has encouraged the psychologisation of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). For the uninitiated, this has meant decades of gaslighting, neglect, and abuse of ME patients. It led to flawed study after flawed study, bunk treatment, after bunk treatment.
Crucially, this is to the point where the NHS has actively dismissed – and routinely harmed – people living with the devastating disease. Worse yet, Wessely’s work on this and his biopsychosocial (BPS) model has been – and is still – at the heart of hospitals mistreating severe ME and other chronically ill patients.
The recent inquiry of 27-year-old Maeve Boothby O’Neill has brought this to the fore. Maeve died of ME, after a litany of catastrophic NHS failures, rooted in Wessely’s very psychologisation of this serious and life-threatening chronic illness.
In particular, Wessely was involved the notorious PACE trial.
It was a study, part-funded by the UK government, into treatment for ME. It found that people could recover from the disease by having cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). In other words, people living with a very-real, viral-based illness should just ‘think themselves better’. Essentially, the trial pushed the notion that the disease was part-psychosomatic or ‘made up’ by patients.
While Wessely wasn’t among the principal investigators, he supported and shaped the study in a number of critical ways. For one, his previous research on ME influenced the way in which the scientists carried out the study. On top of this, he was also directly involved. In particular, he sat as a centre manager for one of the trial centres, and was on the PACE Trial Management Group. The trial credited the group as one of the authors of the study.
Perhaps most significantly, Wessely was central to pushing out the PACE trial through the media.
But more than this, we’ve also underscored how this psychologisation is Wessely writ large.
Belle delves even deeper into all this for the Trans Safety Network. They dredged up a play-by-play of Simon Wessely’s past preying on marginalised patient groups.
Significantly, in one telling paragraph, they hone in on his role restricting ME patients access to welfare benefits. Here was where another notorious name came into it. Specifically, Belle wrote that:
In 1993, Wessely wrote to Mansel Aylward who at the time was the Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Social Security (DSS), now the DWP, complaining that ME would be listed under ‘other neurological disorders’ in the handbook of disabilities for Disability Living Allowance (DLA).
Notably, they highlighted passages of his letter to Aylward that read:
I believe that the Department is making an error if it accepts the partisan views put forward by pressure groups as a basis for making medical decisions. I also believe that it is a decision that the department will regret, since it seems likely the result will be an ever increasing stream of claims for permanent benefits in people who might otherwise have had a chance of recovery.
The Canary recently highlighted how the government looks set to draw on Aylward’s biopsychosocial model of disability in a new DWP work programme.
Meanwhile, DWP boss Liz Kendall has announced a separate, but similarly named scheme the government plans to role out. This involves putting job advisors on mental health wards in NHS hospitals. Why is this relevant? Well, Wessely cropped up here too – because it was the hospital he heads up that’s already done this.
It’s therefore evident that Wessely’s influence is still shaping chronically ill and disabled people’s access to benefits. On top of this, his school of thought is aiding the DWP in its campaign to push them back to work – even at detriment to their health.
In short then, he’s made a career of psychologising physical conditions, trivialising psychological ones, while simultaneously abetting the DWP in its crusade to deny patients of either their vital social security benefits. And to do this, his bullshit has rested on a whole lot of ableism, misogyny, and classism to boot.
Simon Wessely is NOT suitable for this role
So, the Trans Safety Network is right to worry that Simon Wessely likely got this latest gig as a result of all this.
Not content with wrecking the lives of countless people living with chronic health conditions, he has now turned his attention to the trans community.
Belle poignantly summed up the danger of a someone with a known history of psychologising and dismissing patients chairing this new board:
In Trans Safety Network’s opinion, there is a danger of Simon Wessely claiming that being trans is a form of socially contagious psychosomatic illness. The danger with this would be framing parental and clinical doubt as being in a child’s best interest. In trans and gender diverse youth, disbelief of this sort is linked to abusive conversion practices, such as cutting children and young people off from external support networks or otherwise attempting to suppress gender exploration.
That is, the implications for more unconscionable conversion therapy are crystal clear:
Cass stated that her recommendations should not be considered as advocating for conversion therapy – but they were.
This is a warning signal that framing trans identity as a kind of “psychogenic” condition will likely be used to justify the use of such CT “treatments”. https://t.co/nCYgELFyFr
People from the ME community on X rightly underscored how this is a call for intersectional solidarity:
I haven’t been able to read all of this yet but it looks very thorough and so far accurate. Clearly shows how important intersectionality is re trans and ME/chronic illness/didabled communities is. I was really upset to see Wessley involved in trans healthcare. https://t.co/3mGPhYCM38
Because ultimately, wherever Simon Wessely is concerned patient harm invariably follows. So, as Belle and others noted, we must all watch his appointment with vigilance – and stand together against him in the likely event he turns his psychosomatic leanings towards trans people now too. Put simply: we can’t let trans children be his next victims.
The Biden administration has approved the deployment of 1,000 CIA-trained private mercenaries as part of a joint U.S.-Israeli plan to turn Gaza’s apocalyptic rubblescape into a high-tech dystopia.
Starting with Al-Atatra, a village in the northwestern Gaza Strip, the plan calls to build what the Israeli daily Ynet calls “humanitarian bubbles” – turning the remains of villages and neighborhoods into tiny concentration camps cut off from their environs and surrounded and controlled by mercenaries.
These mercenaries will be hired by the CIA. “The plan, approved by White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, calls for the Israeli military to clear out pockets of Palestinian resistance. … 48 hours after stamping out resistance, they plan to erect separation walls around the neighborhood, forcing its residents, and no one else, to enter and exit using biometric identification under the CIA contractors’ control. Those who do not accept the biometric regime would be refused humanitarian aid.” In other words: they will starve to death. The Gazans who do accept “the biometric regime” won’t be starved to death. Biometrics includes fingerprinting but also other physical — and also behavioral — measurements of an individual who is being kept under surveillance.
The company at the forefront of this plan is called Global Development Company, described in its promotional materials as an “Uber for war zones.” Israeli-American businessman Moti Kahana owns it and employs several top Israeli and American military intelligence officials, including retired U.S. Navy Captain Michael Durnan, retired U.S. Special Forces captain Justin Sapp, former Israeli military intelligence division head Yossi Kuperwasser, and former Israeli military chief intelligence officer David Tzur.
Kahana has played a key role in the dirty war against Syria in the 2010s and worked with the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army [the “FSA,” which the U.S. Government under Obama hired to help overthrow and replace the Russia-and-Iran-supported President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad; and Dan Cohen’s FSA link is to an article in Britain’s Independent heroizing Kahana, headlining him as “Israeli man starts ‘Good Samaritan’ charity to get injured Syrian women and children to Israel for medical help.” That article opens with a video in which he speaks as a “philanthropist.”]
… GDC has also been involved in Ukraine, where it collaborated with the Zionist organization, the American Joint Distribution Committee, to operate a refugee camp in Romania near its border with Ukraine. …
Kahana’s Gaza plan has been in the works since at least February 2024. He presented the plan to establish these electronic cantons – what Jewish News referred to as “gated communities” – to the White House, State Department, and Defense Department, as well as Netanyahu. U.S. officials did not respond. While the Israeli military had agreed, the Israeli prime minister shot it down. “What’s the rush?” he quipped. …
However, as Hamas has maintained its civil control throughout Gaza and Israel has failed to defeat armed resistance groups, the Netanyahu government is relying on the U.S. to do its bidding. …
While the [original version of the] proposal called for the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia to assume civilian control over the Gaza Strip, that has failed to materialize, prompting the United States to approve deployment of CIA contractors.
In other words: finally, Netanyahu, too, approved the plan.
The meticulous plan, seen by Jewish News, envisages the creation of “gated communities” in a safe space in the Strip and biometric recognition put in place for civilian recipients of aid. Those who did not pass the biometric tests would not have received aid. The gated communities are described as a Secure Humanitarian Logistics Corridor which, the plan states, “once established, can process and securely deliver humanitarian assistance from other sources across Gaza”.
In other words: the plan is as Cohen describes it, but employs euphemistic phrasings to deceive fools into believing that Kahana, his GDC, and his concentration camps for cooperative Gazan survivors, are “humanitarian,” and “gated communities,” such as that phrase is used in America to refer to protected oases of peace amidst a surrounding environment of war — like saying, “We’ll protect you Gazans.”
Cohen’s article didn’t mention the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department’s Defense Forensics & Biometrics Agency (DFBA), but this federal Agency (which he does link to without mentioning it) was, in fact, established by President Obama in 2012, and is crucially involved in what Kahana’s GDC is doing in Gaza. In 2016, DFBA’s “Overview” stated: “Biometrics and forensics are critical to identifying known and unknown individuals by matching them with automated records (such as for access control) or with anonymous samples (such as crime scene investigations).” In other words: the surviving Gazans will be tracked not by a number that is tattoed onto their arms like was done at Auschwitz to prisoners who weren’t immediately sent to their deaths, but instead tracked by the person’s “biometrics.” So: Israel’s Jews use Hitler’s — the original form of — nazism, but against different people, and with modern technology.
Furthermore: their propaganda is far more sophisticated than Joseph Goebbels’s was.
The link that Cohen provides to DFBA is to its current promotional video, their latest “Overview.”
It makes clear that DFBA is being used by the federal Government not ONLY in order to control the surviving Gazans, but ALSO in order to control the American people, as well as to extend the American empire throughout the world.
In other words: Yesterday it was the Jews who were the target; today it is the surviving Gazans who are, and also an increasing percentage of Americans are (targeted by our own Government); and, in the future, this system is to become expanded to everyone.
Cohen’s article also (at the word “worked”) linked to (but unfortunately out of context) a self-promotional youtube by and for Kahana himself, that appears to have been intended by him to promote himself to both Russians and Syrians, as being a magnanimous israeli philanthropist who rescues victims of his hated Assad, because he cares so much about the Syrian people.
We are already well beyond George Orwell’s prophetic novel 1984. This is the reality of today’s U.S. empire.
On October 24 was posted to X an exposé by James Li, of the top people at the U.S. magazine the Atlantic, which opens, “Jeffrey Goldberg, Atlantic‘s Editor-in-Chief who compared Trump to Hitler, was an IDF prison guard at a facility known for torture and sex abuse. He also pushed the false Saddam-Al-Qaeda link that led to the Iraq War and keeps pushing for war in the Middle East.” And the magazine’s owner is Steve Jobs’s deeply neoconservative widow, and she pitches her propaganda to Democratic Party voters, to keep them backing her candidates.
On October 15, ZeroHedge headlined “US Threatens Israel With Arms Embargo As Evidence Of War Crimes Becomes Impossible to Deny.” This is how successful U.S. politicians win votes from their suckers. Biden publicly threatens Israel at the same time as he privately authorizes — and arms to the teeth — what it is doing that he publicly condemns. Both of America’s political Parties are fully complicit in this deceit — this genocide.
In February 2017, as Donald Trump took office, The Washington Postadopted the first slogan in its 140-year history: “Democracy Dies in Darkness”.
How ironic, then, that it should now be helping to extinguish the flame of American democracy by refusing to endorse a candidate for the forthcoming presidential election.
This decision, and a similar one by the second of America’s big three newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, disgraces journalism, disgraces the papers’ own heritage and represents an abandonment of civic responsibility at a moment when United States faces its most consequential presidential election since the Civil War.
At stake is whether the United States remains a functioning democracy or descends into a corrupt plutocracy led by a convicted criminal who has already incited violence to overturn a presidential election and has shown contempt for the conventions on which democracy rests.
Everyone should cancel their Washington Post subscription after Bezos copped out on a presidential endorsement. It is shameful how far a once great newspaper has fallen. I cancelled today.
Why did they do it? Why would two of the Western world’s finest newspapers take such a recklessly irresponsible decision?
It cannot be on the basis of any rational assessment of the respective fitness for office of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
It also cannot be on the basis of their own reporting and analysis of the candidates, where the lies and threats issued by Trump have been fearlessly recorded. In this context, the decision to not endorse a candidate is a betrayal of their own editorial staff. The Post’s editor-at-large, Robert Kagan, resigned in protest at the paper’s decision not to endorse Harris.
This leaves, in my view, a combination of cowardice and greed as the only feasible explanation. Both newspapers are owned by billionaire American businessmen: The Post by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, and the LA Times by Patrick Soon-Shiong, who made his billions through biotechnology.
Bezos bought The Post in 2013 through his private investment company Nash Holdings, and Soon-Shiong bought the LA Times in 2018 through his investment firm Nant Capital. Both run the personal risk of suffering financially should a Trump presidency turn out to be hostile towards them.
During the election campaign, Trump has made many threats of retaliation against those in the media who oppose him. He has indicated that if he regains the White House, he will exact vengeance on news outlets that anger him, toss reporters in jail and strip major television networks of their broadcast licenses as retribution for coverage he doesn’t like.
Trump threatens to jail political opponents. Video: CBS News
Logic would suggest that in the face of these threats, the media would do all in their power to oppose a Trump presidency, if not out of respect for democracy and free speech then at least in the interests of self-preservation. But fear and greed are among the most powerful of human impulses.
The purchase of these two giants of the American press by wealthy businessmen is a consequence of the financial pressures exerted on the professional mass media by the internet and social media.
Bezos was welcomed with open arms by the Graham family, which had owned The Post for four generations. But the paper faced unsustainable financial losses arising from the loss of advertising to the internet.
At first he was seen not just by the Grahams but by the executive editor, Marty Baron, as a saviour. He injected large sums of money into the paper, enabling it to regain much of the prestige and journalistic capacity it had lost.
Baron, in his book Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post, was full of praise for Bezos’s financial commitment to the paper, and for his courage in the face of Trumpian hostility. During Trump’s presidency, the paper kept a log of his lies, tallying them up at 30,573 over the four years.
Against this history, the paper’s abdication of its responsibilities now is explicable only by reference to a loss of heart by Bezos.
At the LA Times, the ownership of the Otis-Chandler families also spanned four generations, but the impact of the internet took a savage toll there as well. Between 2000 and 2018 its ownership passed through three hands, ending up with Soon-Shiong.
Both newspapers reached the zenith of their journalistic accomplishments during the last three decades of the 20th century, winning Pulitzer Prices and, in the case of The Post, becoming globally famous for its coverage of the Watergate scandal.
This, in the days when American democracy was functioning according to convention, led to the resignation of Richard Nixon as president.
The two reporters responsible for this coverage, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, issued a statement about the decision to not endorse a candidate:
Marty Baron, who was a ferociously tough editor, posted on X: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.”
Now, of the big three, only The New York Times is prepared to endorse a candidate for next month’s election. It has endorsed Harris, saying of Trump: “It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States.”
Why does it matter? It matters because in democracies the media are the means by which voters learn not just about facts but about the informed opinion of those who, by virtue of access and close acquaintance, are well placed to make assessments of candidates between whom those voters are to choose. It is a core function of the media in democratic societies.
Their failure is symptomatic of the malaise into which American democracy has sunk.
In 2018, two professors of government at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, published a book, How Democracies Die. It was both reflective and prophetic. Noting that the United States was now more polarised than at any time since the Civil War, they wrote:
America is no longer a democratic model. A country whose president attacks the press, threatens to lock up his rival, and declares he might not accept the election results cannot credibly defend democracy. Both potential and existing autocrats are likely to be emboldened with Trump in the White House.
Symbolically, that The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times should have gone dark at this moment is reminiscent of the remark made in 1914 by Britain’s foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey:
The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
I don’t know if you have noticed, but Keir Starmer and his Labour Party are struggling to get to grips with the transition from opposition to government.
For example, a vast majority of Keir Starmer’s stupendous assemblage of freebies (bribes) landed at his feet during his tenure as leader of its majesty’s official opposition.
The only people that were highlighting these blatantly obvious attempts to purchase direct access to influence to power were the likes of openDemocracy, who revealed Keir Starmer had taken more freebies than all Labour leaders combined since 1997.
The Canary — and some two-bit Swindonian blogger — whose name escapes me at this moment in time — was screaming it from the rooftops back in August 2023 when people thought the Tories were the problem, rather than the rancid neoliberal ideology that embraces corporate monopoly power.
Glad I got that off my chest.
Starmer: getting away with whatever he can
Put simply, what Starmer and Labour could get away with in opposition, from blatant bribes to pledges they never intended to deliver on, won’t be as easy to get away with now they are in government.
Starmer’s rock-bottom, diabolical personal approval ratings haven’t happened by chance. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a new government so desperate to be taken seriously by the electorate while simultaneously doing everything within their power to prove they cannot and must not be trusted to deliver the bold and radical changes that are so desperately needed by millions of ordinary people across the country.
Look at the business with Labour activists turning up in the United States to apparently campaign for Kamala Harris.
Labour claim these activists went entirely on their own accord, and while the media and many online will focus on whether this is the truth of the matter or not, very few people seem to realise the purpose of this visit is going to be very little in the way of knocking on doors for the Democrats and a whole lot more about opening doors for the Labour Party and the huge number of American corporations that stand to benefit from Labour’s ‘Blairism on steroids’ privatisation fetish.
Liars beget liars
Do you remember that cheating, racist thug – disgraced former prime minister Boris Johnson? Of course you do.
The proven liar Johnson spent the best part of five decades meticulously preparing for a job that he believed was his rightful entitlement. Within three years of benefiting from a pro-Brexit vote, he was finished.
The proven liar Starmer had the best part of five years to ‘forensically’ prepare for a job that he believed was his rightful entitlement. Within three months of benefiting from an anti-Tory vote, his personal approval ratings hit rock bottom, and his government feels just as detested as the inept and corrupt horror show that they’ve just replaced.
But Johnson isn’t the only Tory leader that Starmer is keen to emulate, as we discovered during the prime minister’s trip to Samoa for a meeting of Commonwealth leaders.
Reparations: a game of spot the difference
When asked about the longstanding issue of reparations, Starmer said we cannot “change our history”, and we should “look forwards, not backwards”.
Nice work Mr Starmer, particularly during Black History Month.
Just over a year ago, then-prime minister Rishi Sunak was asked by Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy if he would “commit to reparatory justice”, for Britain’s historical role in the slave trade.
The Atlantic slave trade saw millions of Africans enslaved, forced to work, and invariably murdered, especially on plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas, for centuries from around the year 1500. The British government and the monarchy were prominent participants in the trade, to our eternal shame.
We cannot change our history, prime minister, but we can go a bloody long way to ensure the world knows how ashamed we are of our ancestors, and that should be in the form of financial recognition of the legacy of slavery, via reparations.
Here’s the bit when we find out why successive British prime ministers have refused to get the cheque book out and even attempt to begin to put right the many wrongs that were committed over a three-hundred-year period.
Estimates for reparations from campaigners and academics have ranged from a conservative £205 billion to nearly£19 trillion.
Hello, is that Klarna? I have some reparations I need to spread the cost of.
Has Keir Starmer considered Klarna? Maybe the prime minister could give Zilch a call and see if they’ll stretch to a £19 trillion reparations credit line? He’ll only need to find a mere £4.75 trillion up front, and the rest can be repaid over three easy repayments.
Just think, how many pensioners would Keir Starmer need to freeze to cover that one? I’m not sure even the permanently generous Lord Alli is going to find that sort of loose change down the back of his sofa.
I went to school in the 1980’s and 1990’s, like many of you that are reading this now. I honestly don’t remember talking about Britain being the world’s leading slave-trading nation in exactly the same way I don’t remember us talking about Britain’s role in the Irish Potato Famine, nor did our curriculum teach us anything about the history of Britain’s shameful colonialism.
Maybe this has changed? I haven’t had children at school for a few years so I honestly couldn’t say, but I do know that we need to be more accepting of the unspeakable crimes committed by our ancestors in the name of British colonialism.
History will repeat itself
I’ve no doubt that in a couple of hundred years from now there will be numerous academics and political leaders apologising for Britain’s leading role in the West’s genocide of Gaza, and the people vilified for speaking the truth now, will be hailed as the visionaries who tried to make the world a safer place.
That is, of course, based on us not setting our own planet ablaze in the meantime.
And with a spineless, warmongering waste of DNA in the shape of Keir Starmer in charge of the country — but still behaving like an opposition party with limited accountability — this could well be sooner rather than later.
It is apparently not much of an exaggeration to say that Israel’s attack on Iran fizzled. Some targets were hit and at least two Iranian soldiers were killed, but the ineffectiveness of the operation was probably due to several factors:
Israel just doesn’t have the weaponry. Most of its missiles don’t have the distance, and those that do, just barely so. That’s true for a lot of its drones, too, and they are too easily detected and don’t have the carrying power.
The US didn’t aid, in particular with refueling manned aircraft. It’s just as well. It would have been a good way to lose both pilots and aircraft.
Most of the nations geographically in between Israel and Iran would not permit overflights from either Israel or the US. Iran told these nations that they prefer to remain on good terms with them, and that they would consider it an act of war to lend their airspace to Israeli operations.
Iranian antiaircraft systems were apparently quite effective.
Other factors may have been involved. It is possible that cooler heads prevailed in the Israeli and US militaries, for example, but we may never know, or at least not soon. Nevertheless, the main reason that Israel did not cause more damage appears not to be a question of intention, but of capability. There’s no question that Israel was hoping for an escalation that would widen the war and force the US to enter on Israel’s side. That appears to have been avoided. Iran will have to respond, but unlike Israel, neither Iran nor the US wants escalation. Iran’s response will therefore be measured, and they will declare the matter settled.
The Netanyahu government now finds itself squarely in check, though not yet checkmated. Nevertheless, the best it can do now is probably a stalemate. This is not good in the short run for Gaza and the Palestinians, nor for Lebanon, but it’s also not good for Israel, whose population is emigrating, whose economy is tanking, and which is generally a pariah throughout the world. Its decades of building its image as glamorous, progressive and a technological powerhouse is gone. It is now the redoubt of religious fanatics and criminals that even much of the international Jewish community is loathe to support. Its current mainstay is the international network of influence peddlers such as AIPAC, whose power has not dwindled in the US and other western governments, due to its ability to enrich the military industrial complex and to control the elective processes in these governments. With the loss of a wider base in the Jewish community, however, that power is likely to decline.
Ever since Wes Streeting announced Labour’s new NHS public consultation on Monday, I’ve had questions buzzing away in the back of my mind.
The new NHS public consultation
In case you’ve missed the news about this, the new Labour Party government unveiled something earlier this week.
It wasn’t a shedload of investment into the NHS.
It wasn’t a plan for a shedload of investment into the NHS either.
No, it was a new NHS public consultation, to advise the government on what they thought should be done to improve things in the NHS.
Wes Streeting has said that he wants everyone to contribute, and there’s a press release on the government’s own website which says:
Health Secretary calls on entire nation to shape the government’s plans to overhaul the NHS.
Various media outlets dutifully printed articles about this, and we saw an entirely predictable response from the mainstream media. If you’re a Canary reader, I’m sure you’ll find this as frustrating as I do.
Media coverage entirely lacking
The “politically progressive” outlets, most of which have been huge apologists when Starmer has dropped various pledges, have covered the new NHS public consultation favourably; giving our new government both headlines and grace, neither of which they necessarily deserve.
More conservative media outlets have immediately leapt to attack the project, by identifying submissions from the public which are rude or inappropriate, and don’t take the NHS public consultation seriously. None of the mainstream media outlets, from what I can see, are asking the questions which actually need to be asked:
“Why didn’t the Labour party conduct this consultation before the General Election, if it was necessary? After all, they’ve had years to do so”.
“If it had to happen when they were in power, then why didn’t they launch the consultation as soon as they entered Number 10 Downing Street?”
And crucially…
“We already know what the public thinks about the NHS, because numerous polls have been conducted in recent years. Why aren’t Labour examining the knowledge available, and then taking swift action to fix things?”
Labour laying cover for itself?
Horribly, I have suspicions about why they are delaying taking action. I don’t have any actual evidence for my suspicions; they’re simply the result of campaigning for the NHS for almost ten years, and observing the actions of politicians. I’ve watched leaders dither, deflect, distract and blame others more times than I can count, and I confess it’s made me a bit cynical.
I suspect the new Labour government has decided to conduct this huge, lengthy NHS public consultation now (which will only conclude in the New Year), because it will provide cover for them over the coming colder months as the pressures in the NHS rise.
As the demands from the public, the patients, and the staff mount up (as they tend to do, during the winter), these demands can be countered by the Labour government.
“We’re already taking action”, I imagine they will say. “We wanted you to feel heard! Click here! Contribute!”. And as the ambulance bays fill and the A&E waits rise, we won’t see the emergency action we need. Instead we’ll be delivered updates about the number of people who have gone to the website and added their thoughts.
It provides the perfect distraction technique, politically, and sometimes projects like this can actually be used to point the finger back at anyone who dares to question their plan. Those complaining about a lack of action may find that *they* are blamed; for not respecting the democratic process which the new government is attempting to enact.
The NHS public consultation must deliver
The biggest question in my mind, the loudest one, the one which I find myself returning to again and again, is how transparent this NHS public consultation will be.
How will Labour measure the opinions that are being offered to them?
How will they weigh them up?
How will they then present this information back to us?
After all, if our new government truly is committed to running an NHS public consultation to deliver the changes that the public wants, then we need to see what the public is saying, and we need to know that Starmer and Streeting are sticking to delivering those things.
The public was told that a Labour government meant change, and this change needs to extend beyond their policy commitments and whatever budgetary announcements they might make in the autumn budget and beyond.
The public deserves to know that this new government respects them, is honest with them, and if they’re going to run an NHS public consultation, that they deliver what the public truly wants.
In the lead up to the inauguration of President Prabowo Subianto last Sunday, Indonesia established five “Vulnerable Area Buffer Infantry Battalions” in key regions across West Papua — a move described by Indonesian Army Chief-of-Staff Maruli Simanjuntak as a “strategic initiative” by the new leader.
The battalions are based in the Keerom, Sarmi, Boven Digoel, Merauke and Sorong regencies, and their aim is to “enhance security” in Papua, and also to strengthen Indonesia’s military presence in response to long-standing unrest and conflict, partly related to independence movements and local resistance.
According to Armed Forces chief General Agus Subiyanto, “the main goal of the new battalions is to assist the government in accelerating development and improving the prosperity of the Papuan people”.
However, this raises concerns about further militarisation and repression of a region already plagued by long-running violence and human rights abuses in the context of the movement for a free and independent West Papua.
Thousands of Indonesian soldiers have been stationed in areas impacted by violence, including Star Mountain, Nduga, Yahukimo, Maybrat, Intan Jaya, Puncak and Puncak Jaya.
As a result, the situation in West Papua is becoming increasingly difficult for indigenous people.
Extrajudicial killings in Papua go unreported or are only vaguely known about internationally. Those who are aware of these either disregard them or accept them as an “unavoidable consequence” of civil unrest in what Indonesia refers to as its most eastern provinces — the “troubled regions”.
Why do the United Nations, Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) and the international community stay silent?
While the Indonesian government frames this move as a strategy to enhance security and promote development, it risks exacerbating long-standing tensions in a region with deep-seated conflicts over autonomy and independence and the impacts of extractive industries and agribusiness on West Papuan people and their environment.
Exploitative land theft
The Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice, in collaboration with various international and Indonesian human and environmental rights organisations, presented testimony at the public hearings of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) at Queen Mary University of London, in June.
The tribunal heard testimonies relating to a range of violations by Indonesia. A key issue, highlighted was the theft of indigenous Papuan land by the Indonesian government and foreign corporations in connection to extractive industries such as mining, logging and palm oil plantations.
The appropriation of traditional lands without the consent of the Papuan people violates their right to land and self-determination, leading to environmental degradation, loss of livelihood, and displacement of Indigenous communities.
The tribunal’s judgment underscores how the influx of non-Papuan settlers and the Indonesian government’s policies have led to the marginalisation of Papuan culture and identity. The demographic shift due to transmigration programmes has significantly reduced the proportion of Indigenous Papuans in their own land.
Moreover, a rise in militarisation in West Papua has often led to heightened repression, with potential human rights violations, forced displacement and further marginalisation of the indigenous communities.
The decision to station additional military forces in West Papua, especially in conflict-prone areas like Nduga, Yahukimo and Intan Jaya, reflects a continuation of Indonesia’s militarised approach to governance in the region.
Indonesian security forces . . . “the main goal of the new battalions is to assist the government in accelerating development and improving the prosperity of the Papuan people,” says Armed Forces chief General Agus Subiyanto. Image: Antara
Security pact
The Indonesia-Papua New Guinea Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA) was signed by the two countries in 2010 but only came into effect this year after the PNG Parliament ratified it in late February.
Indonesia ratified the pact in 2012.
As reported by Asia Pacific Report, PNG’s Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko and Indonesia’s ambassador to PNG, Andriana Supandy, said the DCA enabled an enhancement of military operations between the two countries, with a specific focus on strengthening patrols along the PNG-West Papua border.
This will have a significant impact on civilian communities in the areas of conflict and along the border. Indigenous people in particular, are facing the threat of military takeovers of their lands and traditional border lines.
Under the DCA, the joint militaries plan to employ technology, including military drones, to monitor and manage local residents’ every move along the border.
Human rights
Prabowo, Defence Minister prior to being elected President, has a controversial track record on human rights — especially in the 1990s, during Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor.
His involvement in military operations in West Papua adds to fears that the new battalions may be used for oppressive measures, including crackdowns on dissent and pro-independence movements.
As indigenous communities continue to be marginalised, their calls for self-determination and independence may grow louder, risking further conflict in the region.
Without substantial changes in the Indonesian government’s approach to West Papua, including addressing human rights abuses and engaging in meaningful dialogue with indigenous leaders, the future of West Papuans remains uncertain and fraught with challenges.
With ongoing military operations often accused of targeting indigenous populations, the likelihood of further human rights violations, such as extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions, and forced displacement, remains high.
Displacement
Military operations in West Papua frequently result in the displacement of indigenous Papuans, as they flee conflict zones.
The presence of more battalions could drive more communities from their homes, deepening the humanitarian crisis in the region. Indigenous peoples, who rely on their land for survival, face disruption of their traditional livelihoods and rising poverty.
The Indonesian government launched the Damai Cartenz military operation on April 5, 2018, and it is still in place in the conflict zones of Yahukimo, Pegunungan Bintang, Nduga and Intan Jaya.
Since then, according to a September 24 Human Rights Monitor update, more than 79,867 West Papuans remain internally displaced.
The displacement, killings, shootings, abuses, tortures and deaths are merely the tip of the iceberg of what truly occurs within the tightly-controlled military operational zones across West Papua, according to Benny Wenda, a UK-based leader of the United Liberation Movement of West Papua (ULMWP).
The international community, particularly the United Nations and the Pacific Islands Forum have been criticised for remaining largely silent on the matter. Responding to the August 31 PIF communique reaffirming its 2019 call for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights visit to West Papua, Wenda said:
“[N]ow is the time for Indonesia to finally let the world see what is happening in our land. They cannot hide their dirty secret any longer.”
Increased global attention and intervention is crucial in addressing the humanitarian crisis, preventing further escalations and supporting the rights and well-being of the West Papuans.
Without meaningful dialogue, the long-term consequences for the indigenous population may be severe, risking further violence and unrest in the region.
As Prabowo was sworn in, Wenda restated the ULMWP’s demand for an internationally-mediated referendum on independence, saying: “The continued violation of our self-determination is the root cause of the West Papua conflict.”
Ali Mirin is a West Papuan academic from the Kimyal tribe of the highlands bordering the Star Mountain region of Papua New Guinea. He is a contributor to Asia Pacific Report and Green Left in Australia.
With Keir Starmer off to Samoa for a meeting, the Labour Party and Tory deputies faced off at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). The results were a vomit-inducing spectacle around a certain Charles Windsor.
A PMQs king Charles “Love in”
We say ‘face off’, but as Angela Rayner literally said:
Mr Speaker, I’m loving this love-in
One moment that was particularly revealing for those who view Labour and Tory as largely now two sides of the same coin was Oliver Dowden singing ludicrous praise for king Charles:
I’d like to turn to somebody I hope we can all agree is a hard working person, his majesty the King
I will agree with my right honourable friend, the King does a tremendous job
The monarchy is a toxic symbol of unearned privilege and hierarchy that functions to legitimise those same anti-meritocratic tendencies in the Tory party.
To name a few of those tendencies: advancing private healthcare, maintaining private education, and overseeing hundreds of thousands if not millions in unearned inheritance. 60% of private wealth is inherited. And here’s Labour ‘working-class hero’ Rayner agreeing whole-heartedly with Dowden.
To say Charles earns the £350m tax free grant from the public purse he gets every year through “hard work” is an insult to every brickie, sparkie, and engineer in the country. And some form of royal payment has been going on since 1760. Before then it was even worse. The monarch actually fully owned the assets of the Crown Estate, instead of the blurring private-public ownership we have now, where the monarchy transfers net profits to the Treasury.
Not to mention Charles receives £28m per year from estates that the Dutchy of Lancaster oversees. And he is a serial landlord. This is passive, unearned income from owning personal assets – far from “hard working”. As the Guardianreports:
Taking into account the many rental properties, the farmland, commercial rentals and the grand mansions, Charles has inherited an estate worth between £250m and £390m, according to valuation experts.
The ‘work’ Charles actually does is largely ceremonial and symbolic, hardly ‘earning’ hundreds of millions per year.
That said, the monarchy does have the very real power to veto laws, as revealed in 2013.
Instead of the current arrangement, the head of state should be elected to oversee circumstances such as parliamentary transitions.
Islands Business journalist Nic Maclellan is back there for the first time since the rioting began on May 13 and RNZ Pacific asked for his first impressions.
Nic Maclellan: Day by day, things are very calm. It’s been a beautiful weekend, and there were people at the beach in the southern suburbs of Nouméa. People are going about their daily business. And on the surface, you don’t really notice that there’s been months of clashes between Kanak protesters and French security forces.
But every now and then, you stumble across a site that reminds you that this crisis is still, in many ways, unresolved. As you leave Tontouta Airport, the main gateway to the islands, for example, the airport buildings are surrounded by razor wire.
The French High Commission, which has a very high grill, is also topped with razor wire. It’s little things like that that remind you, that despite the removal of barricades which have dotted both Noumea and the main island for months, there are still underlying tensions that are unresolved.
And all of this comes at a time of enormous economic crisis, with key industries like tourism and nickel badly affected by months of dispute. Thousands of people either lost their jobs, or on part-time employment, and uncertainty about what capacity the French government brings from Paris to resolve long standing problems.
Don Wiseman: Well, New Caledonia is looking for a lot of money in grant form. Is it going to get it?
NMac: With, people I’ve spoken to in the last few days and with statements from major political parties, there’s enormous concern that political leaders in France don’t understand the depth of the crisis here; political, cultural, economic. President Macron, after losing the European Parliament elections, then seeing significant problems during the National Assembly elections that he called the snap votes, finds that there’s no governing majority in the French Parliament.
It took 51 days to appoint a new prime minister, another few weeks to appoint a government, and although France’s Overseas Minister Francois Noel Buffet visited last week, made a number of pledges, which were welcomed, there was sharp criticism, particularly from anti-independence leaders, from the so called loyalists, that France hadn’t recognised the enormity of what’s happened, and to translate that into financial commitments.
The Congress of New Caledonia passed a bipartisan, or all party proposal, for significant funding over the next five years, amounting to almost 4 billion euros, a vast sum, but money required to rebuild shattered economic institutions and restore public institutions that were damaged during months of riots and arson, is not there.
France faces, in Metropolitan France, a major fiscal crisis. The current Prime Minister Michel Barnier announced they cut $250 million out of funding for overseas territories. There’s a lot of work going on across the political spectrum, from politicians in New Caledonia, trying to make Paris understand that this is significant.
DW: Does Paris understand what happened in New Caledonia back in the 1980s?
NMac: Some do. I think there’s a real problem, though, that there’s a consistency of French policy that is reluctant to engage with France’s responsibilities as what the United Nations calls it, “administering power of a non-self-governing territory”.
You know, it’s a French colony. The Noumea Accord said that there should be a transition towards a new political status, and that situation is unresolved. Just this morning (Tuesday), I attended the session of the Congress of New Caledonia, which voted in majority that the provincial elections should be delayed until late next year, late 2025.
The aim would be to give time for the French State and both supporters and opponents of independence to meet to talk out a new political statute to replace the 1998 Noumea Accord. However, it’s clear from different perspectives that have been expressed in the Congress that there’s not a meeting of minds about the way forward. And key independence parties in the umbrella coalition, the FLNKS make it clear that they only see a comprehensive agreement possible if there’s a pathway forward towards sovereignty, even with a period of inter-dependence with France and over time to be negotiated.
The loyalists believe that that’s not a priority, that economic reconstruction is the priority, and a talk of sovereignty at this time is inappropriate. So, there’s a long way to go before the French can bring people together around the negotiating table, and that will play out in coming weeks.
DW: The new Overseas Minister seems to have taken a very conciliatory approach. That must be helpful.
NMac: For months and months, the FLNKS said that they were willing to discuss electoral reforms, opening up the voting rolls for the local political institutions to more French nationals, particularly New Caledonian-born citizens, but that it had to be part of a comprehensive, overarching agreement.
The very fact that President Macron tried to force key independence parties, particularly the largest, Union Caledoniénne, to the negotiating table by unilaterally trying to push through changes to these voting rules triggered the crisis that began on the 13th of May.
After five months of terrible destruction of schools, of hospitals, thousands of people, literally leaving New Caledonia, Macron has realised that you can’t push this through by force. As you say, Overseas Minister Buffet had a more conciliatory tone. He reconfirmed that the controversial reforms to the electoral laws have been abandoned. Doesn’t mean they won’t come back up in discussions in the future, but we’re back at square one in many ways, and yet there’s been five months of really terrible conflict between supporters and opponents of independence.
The fact that this is unresolved is shown by the reality that the French High Commissioner has announced that the overnight curfew is extended until early November, that the French police and security forces that have been deployed here, more than 6000 gendarmes, riot squads backed by armoured cars, helicopters and more, will be held until at least the end of the year.
This crisis is unresolved, and I think as Pacific leaders arrive this week, they’ll have to look beyond the surface calm to realise that there are many issues that still have to play out in the months to come.
DW: So with this Forum visit, how free will these people be to move around to make their own assessments?
NMac: I sense that there’s a tension between the government of New Caledonia and the French authorities about the purpose of this visit. In the past, French diplomats have suggested that the Forum is welcome to come, to condemn violence, to address the question of reconstruction and so on.
But I sense a reluctance to address issues around France’s responsibility for decolonisation, at the same time, key members of the delegation, such as Prime Minister Manele of Solomon Islands, Prime Minister Rabuka, have strong contacts through the Melanesian Spearhead Group, with members of the FLNKS and the broader political networks here. To that extent, there’ll be informal as well as formal dialogue. As the Forum members hit the ground after a long delay to their mission.
DW: There have been in the past, Forum groups that have gone to investigate various situations, and they’ve tended to take a very superficial view of everything that’s going on.
NMac: I think there are examples where the Forum missions have been very important. For example, in 2021 at the time of the third referendum on self-determination, the one rushed through by the French State in the middle of the covid pandemic, a delegation led by Ratu Inoke Kubuabola, a former Fiji Foreign Minister, with then Secretary-General of the Forum, Henry Puna, they wrote a very strong report criticising the legitimacy and credibility of that vote, because the vast majority of independence supporters, particularly indigenous Kanaks, didn’t turn out for the vote.
France claims it’s a strong no vote, but the Forum report, which most people haven’t read, actually questions the legitimacy of this politically. The very fact that four prime ministers are coming, not diplomats, not ministers, not just officials, but four prime ministers of Forum member countries, shows that this is an important moment for regional engagement.
Right from the beginning of the crisis, the then chair of the Forum, Mark Brown, who’ll be on the delegation, talked about the need for the Forum to create a neutral space for dialogue, for talanoa, to resolve long standing differences.
The very presence of them, although it hasn’t had much publicity here so far, will be a sign that this is not an internal matter for France, but in fact a matter of regional and international attention.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Against the backdrop of a seemingly endless genocide with absolute impunity provided from Israel’s Western partners, it can feel like the fight is hopeless as fatigue sets in. Fatigue is human, and arguably it is what our governments are counting on as they drag their feet in opposing the murder and brutalisation of an entire population – indiscriminate of guilt, age, or gender.
We have to prepare for this fatigue and restore our energies both individually and collectively if we want to realise an end to arm sales and an unconditional ceasefire, especially when Lebanon is now facing the same threat of destruction and Israel’s attempts to plunge the West into an unjust war across the Middle East.
An ‘Assembly for Palestine’
In Warrington, we organised an ‘Assembly for Palestine’ where we openly invited those in our community to gather in our grief and anger over one-year into this horrific aggression. Our language and how we communicate ourselves matters and it must mirror the true extent of Western involvement, and how we organise ourselves must require a long-term framework of activism to ensure we are consistently advocating for our brothers and sisters in Palestine.
As Matt Kennard of Declassified UK states on X, following Declassified UK revealing the surge under Starmer in US special ops flights to Israel using our UK base in Cyprus:
We are not complicit in the genocide. We are participants. The shame should never leave us.
It is a damning indictment of our political class that we are left so devoid of representatives who are prepared to speak to the conscience of their constituents, instead choosing to tow the lines of power and party over basic principles of humanity and international law.
Just as the silence of our leaders can breed silence amongst the masses, courageous voices have the power to breed courage and confidence amongst passers by and those they meet. It is through our own dogged determination that others will seek to understand, with more joining the movement as time goes on.
What we have to say is worth taking responsibility for.
Collectively we can make ourselves heard
Lee Hunter, brigade secretary for the Fire Brigades Union for Merseyside and acting regional chair for the North West, stated:
The dehumanisation of the Palestinian people by Israel has been ongoing since well before October 2023. They have been left without a voice. Assemblies are a way of us collectively being that voice for them.
I have been imploring people not to look away when we are faced with what is happening, as horrific as the images are. Instead we must use the anger and upset that we feel and turn it into a positive force to speak out against the inactions of our elected leaders.
One voice may be lost in the crowd, but collectively we can make ourselves heard and speak for the Palestinian people.
Following initial speeches, those in attendance at the Assembly for Palestine were split into four groups, each sat in a circle.
We then invited discussion on the lessons learned from other actions seen across the world. This prompted a passionate and informed discussion, from those in our Muslim community and from those who have spoken and fought for Palestine for decades through their activism, such as with the Stop The War Coalition.
An ‘uplifting’ Assembly for Palestine
Jacqui, who attended, spoke to her direct connections to Palestine and the Nakba of 1948, when her Palestinian-Christian family were forcibly displaced from their homes, walking mile upon mile to find safety and shelter.
As a child of a Christian-Palestinian woman displaced in the Nakba, it fills me with immense sadness that history is repeating itself. I know how painful it was for my family then, so I can only imagine what it’s like for the people of Gaza today.
What I have found heartwarming though is how so many have got behind Palestinians over the past year, seeing the protests and the flag being waved. The Assembly for Palestine in Warrington was uplifting, seeing people of all ages and backgrounds coming together for a common cause.
I am excited to see how we join together and plan events to keep our voices heard!
These discussions led to identifying the biggest issues that we needed to confront in our communities. These were the systematic and deliberate dehumanisation of Palestinians, the lack of education around the history of Palestine, fatigue, and finally the feeling of being powerless.
This enabled further conversation about how we could combat this, with ideas put forward to have a ‘Fair for Palestine’, celebrating the culture and educating communities on the rich and diverse history of Palestine. This would seek to combat the efforts to dehumanise and demonise Palestinians and their resistance.
It was also decided that more effort should be put into informing and educating people so that they can understand the conflict through their own eyes, rather than through the biased reporting of mainstream media.
This will be carried forward as a stand in our town centre, every week, for people to approach and encourage dialogue. It is only through embracing the difficult conversations that we can make progress in breaking through the normalisation of western aggression in the Middle East spanning decades.
People have the power. So, focus it.
The assembly also provided the means of identifying individual strengths, with the ability to coordinate letters to MPs and other leaders amongst a group of volunteers who aren’t active on social media. This ensures that energy is maintained, with maximum impact on MPs’ inboxes as a result of a coordinated campaign.
In addition to this, we also agreed that we should focus on a fixed, visual, and interactive protest in our town centre and look to work with other networks for Palestine to fortify the resistance against Israel’s onslaught and to highlight the importance of international law for global peace.
The people have power, and if we organise assemblies in our hometowns we help people find and focus that power.
At a time when many seek to divide our communities, we must come together to realise the kind of world we need to see.
Look. I know you few remaining Keir Starmer loyalists (think of a fly’s close relationship with a turd) don’t want to talk about their ennobled no-balls, all-cuts leader and the freebie furore.
So the best thing you can try to do is get your own fucking column in some shit Tory rag, like the Daily Mirror, and write a piece on why you are coming round to the idea of Keir Starmer’s latest plans to shackle heavily-pregnant Green voters to lampposts, upside-down outside Israel’s embassy, for retweeting Al Jazeera.
Okay, you’ve got me there. No such plan exists, or at least not the upside-down bit.
That’s what they don’t know
While a feeble attempt at demagoguery from a political opportunist may float the boats of the easily swayed and hard of thinking, it does absolutely sweet Fanny Adams for me.
Just so we can all try and move on from the morally questionable gift hoarding we witnessed from the junket king Starmer, I do think we need an answer as to why Starmer and his family met up with Taylor Swift at the Wembley concert, after the government granted her a blue-light escort to the venue, which is usually reserved for royalty and politicians?
Every Starmer scandal does have a tendency to leave an overwhelmingly bitter taste in the mouth. He was elected as ‘Mr Rules’, yet he has bent the rules to the point of where he ended up the biggest freebie hoarder that parliament has seen over the past five years.
Granted, Ms Swift is a globally recognised artist, despite me not being able to name just one of her hits, and her security requirements are likely to be somewhat different to the average pop star.
But she isn’t royalty, to her credit, and her politics are unknown to me — although her bodyguard does serve for the Israeli terrorist forces.
So why the special treatment for Swift, and why did the Starmer family personally benefit?
Jealousy, you say? Honestly, I would rather stick my head in a Ninja air fryer on 200c for twenty minutes than have to meet Keir Starmer for two minutes.
Make the cuts up as they go
We are rapidly approaching the Labour Party government’s first budget, and while you will get lots of Labour-sympathetic noises from Starmer’s friends in the media, you’ll get absolutely none of that hogwash from me.
Surprisingly, some cabinet members, including Angela Rayner, have told Starver and Thieves that their planned widespread cuts are a fucking stupid idea. Okay, I doubt the deputy leader that used to identify as a socialist used those exact words, but you get my drift.
Another stupid idea was leaked to the Financial Times on Thursday evening.
Labour’s attempt at running the Department for Work and Pensions is beginning to make the Tories stewardship almost look competent and fair.
Who in their right mind wants to be a greater danger to the poor, disabled and vulnerable than Iain Duncan Smith? You may answer that question with the name Liz Kendall, but I did make a point of saying “who in their right mind”.
If you’re not having an ‘anti-obesity jab’ whacked in your arse you’ll be watching DWP approved job coaches marauding around hospitals, looking to force patients with mental health issues into work. “Vote Labour for change”, they said.
Can’t stop, won’t stop cutting
We fucking warned you, folks.
What next? Bring out your dead and see if they’re good for 16 hours a week at Home Bargains? What about patients in a coma? Lazy sods could at least ask Deliveroo if they’ve got any hours going spare.
I must point out, DWP boss Kendall, whose department have seen through the cuts to the pensioners Winter Fuel Allowance — in an attempt to plug an apparent £22 billion black hole — made sure the public purse was more than £3,600 lighter, to generously cover her own utility bills over the last three years.
There ain’t no hypocrisy like Labour Party hypocrisy. The double standards are sickening.
Indeed, eleven of Starmer’s self-serving, unpopular cabinet have claimed tens of thousands of pounds in expenses to cover their utility bills, including Angela Rayner and chancellor Reeves, while voting to cut the Winter Fuel Allowance.
It’s like we dozed off in 2010 and woke up in 2010. We are staring down the barrel of the austerity gun, and detestable Labour have pulled the trigger before they have even managed to get their grubby feet under the table.
Got this milk snatcher in their minds
I suppose I should really send my belated birthday wishes to Margaret Thatcher. She would’ve been 99 years old this year, but thankfully she has been gone for the past 13 years.
But her warped ideology has found a new lease of life in Keir Starmer’s Toryfied Labour government under the stewardship of Reeves, Kendall, Streeting, and the preposterous holey bucket of inadequacy, David Lammy.
Just think how proud ‘Maggie’ would’ve been of you, Sir Keir, the next time Baroness Whatsername isn’t free for a private audience in the leaders office. Hold that thought, and don’t forget to make sure the door is locked.
We’ve now experienced more than one hundred days of a Starmer government, one hundred and eight to be exact. Have we gone forwards or backwards? I didn’t think it could possibly be any worse than the decade-plus madness we’ve been through under the Tories. I was wrong.
There are no bold reforms, it’s just more of the same free market fuckwittery that ensures the rich continue to build their personal wealth off of the backs of your hard work.
Britain doesn’t need to deny disabled people of a pitiful social security system, nor does it need to take money away from pensioners that have no idea how to navigate their way around a complex, bureaucratic DWP. These are Labour’s ideological choices, not political necessities.
Cut it off, cut it off (hoo-hoo-hoo)
Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said to Al Jazeera:
It’s easily the worst start to a government’s time in office in living memory – and it wasn’t as if Labour were that popular anyway.
I’m old enough to remember the general election of 2017, back when the Labour Party and its fully-costed policies were popular with the electorate. But the elite were never going to allow us a prime minister that unashamedly positioned the needs of the people ahead of the greed of the rich and powerful.
How much worse can it get for this horrendous betrayal of a Labour government before it even begins to get any better? My best guess is it won’t be any time soon.
This story was originally published by In These Times on Oct. 16, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
“State racism in the name of workers’ interests.” That’s not the only response to the perennial question “What is fascism?” — but it is a compelling one. Now that mass deportation — starting with the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio — has joined sealed borders and “drill, baby, drill” as keystones of the Republican Party platform, it’s undeniable that the GOP’s much-ballyhooed effort to rebrand as the “party of workers” is inseparable from its assault on the rights and safety of immigrants. While the Trump campaign has run on protective tariffs, and some MAGA Republicans have praised the antitrust work of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, the GOP’s core pitch remains simpler and more powerful: assuaging the fears of the “American worker” by ramping up terror against their “non- American” peers.
As Teamsters President Sean O’Brien’s dismal appearance at the Republican National Convention confirmed, not everyone in the labor movement carries antibodies against the chauvinist virus. Some of Trump’s cheerleaders have drawn explicitly on this heritage of “pro-worker” racism, which, as historian Gabriel Winant has traced, has deep roots in Springfield itself. A recent Newsweek op-ed — the title of which, “Springfield Is Emblematic of America’s Immigration Death Spiral,” wouldn’t be out of place in the white supremacist outlet Stormfront—references AFL-CIO founder Samuel Gompers linking, in 1924, the collapse of fair wages for U.S. workers with the rising supply of low-cost migrant labor. Ignoring the real history of U.S. labor struggles — in which immigrant and racialized workers were most often at the vanguard — the article goes on to discuss corporations’ gleeful certainty that “the Haitians they’ve hired won’t ever complain about their pay nor attempt to unionize.”
Gompers — himself a Jewish immigrant from London’s East End — was a strong backer of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and coauthored the wildly racist 1902 pamphlet, “Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion. Meat vs. Rice. American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism. Which Shall Survive?” Trump’s much-derided debate lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are “eating the dogs” and cats of Springfield is a grotesque descendant of Gompers’ slander of Chinese workers: “As to their morality, they have no standard by which a Caucasian might judge them.”
Now that mass deportation — starting with the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio — has joined sealed borders and “drill, baby, drill” as keystones of the Republican Party platform, it’s undeniable that the GOP’s much-ballyhooed effort to rebrand as the “party of workers” is inseparable from its assault on the rights and safety of immigrants.
Now, almost 150 years later, workerist Sinophobia still pays dividends, as vice presidential nominee JD Vance made clear at the Republican convention. Promising to “commit to the working man” and claiming that Trump is “not in the pocket of big business” (Project 2025 would like a word), Vance anchored his speech in the claim that Joe Biden had allowed “our country” to be “flooded with cheap Chinese goods” and “cheap foreign labor.”
This reactionary framing of “worker” versus “migrant” is aimed less at the factory floor than at what politics reporter Eric Levitz has bitingly termed “the tyranny of the unwoke white swing voter.” The principal function of this discourse — in which, as historian David Roediger observes, “the accent will always fall on ‘white,’ and the mumbling on ‘working class’” — is ventriloquizing workers to preempt any demands for justice, redistribution and an improved social wage. More importantly, it provides a mass electoral base for the retrenchment of capital amid global economic slowdown and increasing volatility instigated by climate disaster and war.
The ability to provide a popular base for pro-business policies was at the heart of fascism’s rise to power during the interwar years. That attitude explains why, at least initially, fascism was welcomed by pioneering neoliberal thinkers like Ludwig von Mises. As different factions of capital vied for increasing portions of a diminishing pie, and authoritarian liberal governments failed to garner popular legitimacy, fascists promised a fix for a weakened state and beleaguered capital alike. Or, as W.E.B. Du Bois put it in 1935 — describing the North’s collusion in defeating Reconstruction and consolidating what poet Amiri Baraka called “racial fascism” in the South — it’s a “counterrevolution of property.”
The conundrum in the 1920s and 1930s was how to mobilize the masses in defense of domestic capital as the world market fragmented and war loomed. Then, as now, support was more reliant on a dejected middle class than struggling proletarians, despite rhetoric describing “native” workers or “producers.”
As economics and political commentator Jamie Merchant argues in his recent book, Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline, there are uncanny echoes of the compounding global crises that set the stage for fascism, even as today’s ascendant authoritarians aren’t identical to the ultra-nationalist mass movements of a century ago. “As growth slows,” Merchant writes of our own moment, “it increasingly becomes a zero-sum affair, with the gains of the few only coming at the expense of the many, and in a capitalist economy this means sacrificing the livelihood of the vast majority to the need for continuing profitability.” The materialist kernel of today’s “Great Moving-Right Show” lies in a planetary crisis of profitability and the disintegration of the neoliberal Washington consensus.
The ability to provide a popular base for pro-business policies was at the heart of fascism’s rise to power during the interwar years.
While billionaires, multinational corporations and financial institutions are still betting on “progressive neoliberalism” to shore up the system, a capitalist bloc—ranging from venture capitalists like Peter Thiel to dry-cleaning chain owners — has lined up behind the Trump-Vance ticket. Meanwhile, a growing U.S. consensus, straddling capitalist interests and the national security establishment, has met the fallout from free trade with an increasingly belligerent stance toward China — and not just from rightist reactionaries. Continuing a watchword of the Trump presidency, the Biden administration first imposed 100% tariffs on Chinese electrical vehicles and is now banning car-related software and hardware originating in China, in an attempt to stave off what the U.S. auto industry calls an “extinction-level event.”
This trend toward economic nationalism has also manifested in continued support, including among liberals, for increasing levels of domestic fossil fuel extraction. When Vice President Kamala Harris recently reaffirmed her refusal to ban fracking, she boasted, “we have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over-rely on foreign oil.” And, in the same answer in which she attacked Trump’s climate denialism and celebrated the support of the United Auto Workers, Harris declared the Biden administration had broken records for domestic gas production, explicitly linking this energy strategy to boosting U.S. manufacturing and opening up more auto plants.
A Republican Party whose raison d’être has long been the demolition of workers’ rights and social welfare might today pose as the nemesis of “Wall Street barons,” but it’s still the vehicle for an oligarchic project to eliminate all regulatory obstacles to the accumulation of private wealth. Trump’s unguarded praise for Elon Musk laying off Tesla workers is just the tip of the iceberg, while Project 2025’s plans to undermine the recent advances made by the National Labor Relations Board signal the larger right-wing plans that lie below.
Once migration is cast as a “problem,” it always redounds to the benefit of the far Right, which need not deliver “solutions” as long as it diverts social malaise away from structures and toward scapegoats.
As Democrats declare themselves the “real” made-in-the-USA party, they may easily lampoon Trump “the scab” and Vance the venture capitalist. But they seem both unwilling and incapable of truly fighting the economic chauvinism that fuels the MAGA brand. The Democrats, like their centrist European counterparts, have adopted the doomed tactic of talking tough on “illegal” migration as a way to undercut more vicious forms of xenophobia. But once migration is cast as a “problem,” it always redounds to the benefit of the far Right, which need not deliver “solutions” as long as it diverts social malaise away from structures and toward scapegoats.
Democrats may defend their record of large-scale deportations as a kinder, lesser evil, but they are deluded if they think this represents an antidote to Republicans’ electoral rallying cry of “mass deportation now.” All chauvinist invocations of the “American worker” that treat Haitian workers — or Mexican or Chinese or Salvadoran workers — as second-class ultimately play into a zero-sum politics that, however much it rants about Wall Street, will always give capitalists a pass, even letting them pose as friends of “the working man.”
In a world of shrinking growth, accelerating inequality, climate crisis and war, economic nationalism will always boost the far Right, in or out of office.
There are currently two news stories doing the rounds that are concerning to disabled people. Firstly is, of course, the assisted dying bill that’s gaining more and more traction. The second is the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWPs) Get Britain Working plan, of which the latest idea to drop is putting work coaches in mental health hospitals.
These stories can and should be talked about in their own right. But it’s also important that we see them side by side.
Assisted dying: we don’t live in a perfect world
Today, we see the first reading of Kim Leadbeater MP’s Private Members’ Bill on assisted dying in the House of Commons. The cause has been heavily championed by Esther Ranzten who is herself terminally ill, and who Starmer has said he promised would make his bill happen. Which is ironic when he’s ignoring an untold amount of disabled people who are demanding reforms in benefits and care.
Feelings on assisted dying are complicated and it’s far too nuanced to simply say “everyone should get to end their life if they’re dying”.
My belief is that in a perfect world, everyone should have the right to choose how they want to die. But when disabled people don’t even have the right to live with dignity how are we expected to trust this won’t be forced on us?
Whilst those who want this bill pushed through are claiming it would only apply to terminally ill people, worryingly many MPs are already calling for the net to be widened and it to also be offered to those with chronic conditions. This is a slippery slope the likes of which we’ve seen with MAiD in Canada where disabled and poor people have been pressured into ending their lives as they can’t afford to live.
DWP: Get Britain Working
And so we come to the DWP’s plans to Get Britain Working again. As my brilliant Canary colleague Hannah Sharland reported, there are currently plans to put job coaches into mental health wards.
I don’t know about you but the last thing I wanted, fresh from my suicide attempt at 20, was to be reminded that I’m a burden on taxpayers and need to stop worrying about my mental health and go take my place as a cog in the capitalist machine.
The BBC reported that Kendall:
indicated some people will lose their benefits, saying the “benefit system can have a real impact on whether you incentivise or disincentivise work”
Back in September however, Wes ‘Ozemprick’ Streeting expressed concern that many may turn to assisted dying as they felt like a burden to their families.
He told the FT Weekend Festival:
I do not think that palliative care, end-of-life care in this country is in a condition yet where we are giving people the freedom to choose, without being coerced by the lack of support available.
This is one of the concerns of a coalition of disabled organisations who have today sent a briefing to MPs ahead of the vote. The briefing outlines the need for safeguarding against abuse, proper scrutiny of the Bill and fixing services, including palliative care, so that terminally ill people have a genuine choice at the end of life.
We need assistance to live
We already live in a country where an untold amount of disabled people have ended their lives or died due to neglect after being denied support or having their benefits cut; where when six in 10 Covid-19 deaths in England are disabled people, non-disabled people cared more about whether they could go to the pub; where in the year 2021/22 over 14,200 disability hate crimes were reported to the police.
All the while pervasive media coverage paints us as scroungers, fraudsters, and burdens on society. Where stories around the DWP are used as clickbait to generate ad revenue for greedy media moguls.
I also think a big part of the argument is this worry of being a “burden”, which comes from the media and DWP narrative of disability and sick people – so, we’re made to believe that we’re forcing or tying down our families who want to care for us.
As someone who is helping to care for dying relatives, I understand the pain of watching loved ones slip away. But with disabled people struggling to live, it’s hard to see how this bill wouldn’t be used to force disabled people into ending their lives – and we shouldn’t let the powerful emotions of grief stop us from seeing that.
At the end of the day, everyone should be able to have dignity in dying. But they need to be allowed dignity in life first – something disabled people don’t currently have.
“Why is the Biden administration helping migrants and not hurricane victims?” You’ve no doubt heard this line, or some version of it, from your Facebook Uncle over the past two weeks. “Why is the government spending money on food stamps for drug addicts and not taking care of homeless vets?”
Rhetorical questions like these, drenched in faux-populist concern for the “average American,” have always been crowd-pleasers in conservative media and online circles, but their popular appeal is growing as climate chaos accelerates acute disasters and exposes the broken liberal state of the world’s ostensibly wealthiest country. As bridges fail, trains derail, disaster responses struggle to keep up, and infrastructure continues to erode, the very same forces that seek to gut the social state will turn to these failures—some real, some imagined—and exploit them to show how the priorities of liberalism are “anti-white” and anti-rural.
None of it makes any sense; it’s draped in transparent cynicism and hypocrisy. But this doesn’t matter. What matters is that this line works, and liberals have failed to sufficiently build a media and political system that can counter it—a problem that will only get worse as climate chaos exposes the United States’ uniquely poor infrastructure and social welfare system.
This talking point has become a full-blown Trump campaign focus in the last few weeks before the election. As dual hurricanes, Helene and Milton, destroyed much of the southeastern coast of the United States, Republicans didn’t even wait for the dead to be named and counted before exploiting the tragedy to attack immigrant communities. “A lot of the money that was supposed to go to Georgia and supposed to go to North Carolina and all of the others is going and has gone already,” former President Donald Trump told a crowd last Friday. “It’s been gone for people that came into the country illegally.”
“Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you! It is happening right in front of your eyes. And FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason,” Elon Musk insisted on Twitter.
“There’s a bucket of money in FEMA that’s gone to illegal aliens and that’s somehow separate than the bucket of money that should by right go to American citizens,” JD Vance told Fox News’s Fox & Friends last week.
None of these claims, of course, are true. It’s simply a variation on an increasingly popular GOP attack line: feigning social welfare concerns for True Americans while claiming sinister minority groups or immigrants are soaking up free government cash. The most recent “Appalachian hurricane victims are left to die while migrants live high on the hog” meme comes after a similar lie, since debunked, was spread by Republicans last year, this time pitting “homeless vets” against migrants supposedly getting free housing.
Thus far, liberals’ response to this line of attack—which we’ll call The Sudden, Selective Social Democrat Republican—has been to feign incredulity and fact check. Incredulity and fact checking are fine, and the White House was smart to quickly put up a website debunking the most outlandish of the lies, but not before they went viral and created a contagious thought meme that permeated online to millions of Americans.
So how can liberals and leftists counter this seemingly effective talking point? A useful place to start would be to not point out Republican hypocrisy for its own sake, but orient this hypocrisy in contrast to a liberal vision of a more egalitarian, social welfare worldview for everyone—poor whites and poor migrants alike.
Republican hypocrisy, make no mistake, is galling and worth noting.
Trump, while president, sought to cut $271 million for FEMA disaster relief and redirect the money to “cracking down” on border enforcement. The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025— which Trump and his running mate Vance have championed, despite efforts to distance themselves from it—explicitly seeks to gut FEMA response capacity. As Ali Velshi documents at MSNBC, the authors of the Heritage foundation’s blueprint call for ““Privatizing … the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Flood Insurance Program, reforming FEMA emergency spending to shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government, eliminating most of DHS’s grant programs.” The blueprint also says the federal government’s cost-sharing for disaster response should be reduced, which would be particularly burdensome for poor states.
The groups right-wing demagogues like Trump and Vance claim are being harmed by liberals shoveling money to immigrants are the exact same groups these demagogues routinely seek to cut services and support for.
The groups right-wing demagogues like Trump and Vance claim are being harmed by liberals shoveling money to immigrants are the exact same groups these demagogues routinely seek to cut services and support for. They’re the exact same groups the corporate-funded think tanks that will take over and run Trump’s policy priorities have spent decades disempowering, endangering, and polluting.
But it can’t all be hypocrisy gotchas. While it may feel good to point out what naked phonies Trump and Co. are, doing so is no substitute for politics. There’s a fairly competent and well-funded center-left media industry that can do the work of pointing out both that Republicans are lying, and that they are totally full-of-shit, small, austerity-driven hypocrites.
The next part––the hard part––is where liberals have more or less given up. Tales of widespread FEMA neglect are false. But Democrats countering Trump’s dark nativist vision with the politics of social welfare is a dream that more or less died when the Sanders campaign fizzled out in early Spring 2020. From de-industrialization to free trade ideology to sunsetting COVID-19 aid, Democratic leadership, with some exceptions, has proudly adopted the mantle of On Your Own politics, embracing austerity and free market dog-eat-dog capitalism. Add to this Democrats’ almost wholesale concession on the racist premises of immigration panic, and the ability to credibly combat The Sudden, Selective Social Democrat Republican becomes that much more difficult. From a messaging standpoint, Democrats’ defense of the Department of Homeland Security’s meager support for migrants is unconvincing when these same Democrats consistently frame migrants as little more than a burden on civilized society.
Misdirecting populist anger toward vulnerable populations is, of course, not new. Peasant uprisings in 1848 Europe sometimes turned their ire away from the aristocrats and focused it on local Jewish communities. In his excellent book Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, historian Christopher Clark recites dozens of examples of local clergy and petit bourgeois redirecting popular anger towards the “other.” In revolutionary Galecia, he illustrates one example: prominent Polish-Armenian priest Karol Antoniewicz told the angry masses that the chief culprit for their ills was “the Jews” who, “like spiders, had wrapped the poor peasants in their web of immoral behaviour.” Antisemitic pogroms followed throughout central Europe, while the landed gentry watched in comfort and amusement from afar.
But we can look to more recent examples to elucidate this point. Ronald Regean rose to popularity reciting a made-up story about a “welfare queen,” a Chicago woman who supposedly had “80 names,” “30 addresses,” and $150,000 a year in income from public coffers. And during his speeches throughout the South, while campaigning for the presidency in the 1970s, he made up an equally fictional “strapping young buck” using food stamps to “buy a T-Bone steak,” while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.”
Using immigrant scapegoats to channel justified—and sometimes unjustified—popular anger is as old as popular anger and immigrants.
To an extent there’s only so much liberal-left messaging can do. Conservative media is sprawling, well-funded, and exists in its own alternative universe. They’ll use brain-dead fascistic claptrap to divide and conquer Americans no matter how economically populist Democrats become.
But working to create a genuine social safety net, openly campaigning on universal, non-means-tested programs like single-payer healthcare and free higher education for all, would combat the image—not altogether unfounded—that Democrats are increasingly the party of only the highly educated and professional. Democrats have lost large swaths of the white working and middle class, and, increasingly, working and middle-class minorities. This is the logical outcome of (1) an overt pivot to Wall Street and neoliberal ideology (self-inflicted), and (2) the fact that Republicans just got better at exploiting racism (out of Democrats’ control).
To combat fake populism requires not just hypocrisy dunks or fact checks—both of which are fine and true as far as they go—but a vision of actual populism, of a government that fights for and with the working class, whether they be migrants or born in the US, Black or white, rural or urban. These divisions are artificial constructs of class control, ones gleefully used by billionaire-funded Republicans. Liberals should work to erode them with a broad message of collective social welfare. This, more than any front-row-kid “fact check” or whining to the media refs, would inculcate Democrats from charges of abandoning disaffected working-class voters.
There are other issues I would prefer to write about; all are affected by the Middle East crisis.
Economics
Economics is a “dismal science” that has a postulate ─ all money is debt. This postulate leads to the realization that the capitalist economy grows and survives with mounting debt and only the government can carry the debt burden. Debt forces the government to manage the economy and a more managed economy continually develops. U.S. Middle East policy generates constant wars, promotes an arms race, and is partly responsible for the continually increasing debt and managed economy.
Foreign Policy
Establishing hegemony by making the world recognize American exceptionalism, regardless of opponents are killed in the process, defines U.S. foreign policy. This one-sided and arrogant policy aligns with Israel’s modus operandi. It has been historical, counterproductive in several adventures, is doomed to failure in the present crisis, and will continue to harm the American people.
Politics
Extravagant divisions in the electorate and political system demonstrate a lack of comprehension of the political system by government officials and political strategists. Israel’s supporters take advantage of the mayhem in the political system and influence politicians and voters.
Media
Knowledge leading to capable decisions has not accompanied the rapid expansion in communications. Money talks and media squawks. Media is a convenient means of controlling and manipulating minds. Israel supporters are adept in using the media to manipulate the American public.
The Middle East crisis, engineered by Israel and the United States, overrides all other issues. It is unfathomable, an artificial construct that is incomprehensible. The issue can be resolved in one minute of time ─ stop the oppression of the Palestinians and grant them equal rights. Instead, deliberate destructions of the Palestinian community and of those who attempt to aid the Palestinians are the avenues of resolution. A spillover into greater destruction of other peoples, including the perpetrators of the genocide, is predicted. Get rid of everyone and the world’s problems will vanish.
The unending crises are a mystery and unraveling the mystery has become more of a detective story than an academic pursuit. Why is there a genocide, why is it supported, and can it be stopped? Historians, foreign policy experts, journalists, political commentators, and wise old men have not provided adequate answers to the questions. There is more to committing genocide than power politics.
At 10:54 PM, October 6, 2024, the world population was 8,226,477,186. Take a guess and estimate that 1.5 billion have sufficient awareness (not knowledge) of the Middle East crisis to attach themselves to a side in the crisis. Only a portion of inhabitants of the western world and India would favor the Israeli aggressive tactics; maybe 100 million in India and 200 million in the western world, compared to 1.2 billion in the rest of the Arab, African, Latin American, Central and Southeast Asia, and China worlds.
Take a more rigid perspective on what is definitely a genocide ─ no mistake in characterizing the violence against the Palestinians by that term. How does the number of those who know it is a genocide and still favor Israel compare with those who view it as a genocide and want it stopped? My guess is that a small clique of 7 million Zionist Jews (the Christian Zionists may favor Israel but do not influence others) actively influence 100 million people to favor their cause, and a billion of the world’s population react in horror to the genocide. A small clique of 7 million people are moving the world to enormous destruction and one billion remain powerless to prevent it. How can that be?
The mystery deepens with the revelation that this scenario has no reason. The argument that Jews, who are the wealthiest group in almost all western nations and occupy positions of prestige and importance in much greater portion than others, fear attack and need a land for themselves falls flat. In the land called Israel, only a small portion of the Jewish population can gain excessive wealth and dominance, while all live in constant fear of attack and animosity from much of the universe.
A one-state Israel, where all ethnicities live together and have equal rights can function as any democratic state. The Israeli Palestinians and Druze have been good citizens. Palestinians in all parts of the world — Chile, United States, Germany, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon — have pursued activities that benefitted their adopted nations. If the Jews in the one-state followed a similar pattern of dominance that Jews in the western world exhibit, then a greater portion of Israeli Jews will achieve enhanced prosperity in the expanded economy. The one-state might benefit the lesser advantaged Israeli Jews.
Let’s clarify nonsense. Jews can live almost any place throughout the western world and not be oppressed or subjected to violent anti-Jewish attacks. In 2020, Mexico had a population of 126,799,054 and a Jewish population of 58,876 people, 0.05 percent, and an infinitesimal part of the Mexican citizenry. On Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024, Claudia Sheinbaum, one of the relatively few Jews in Mexico, was sworn in as president without incident. Worshippers of contrived anti-Semitism statistics, please explain that happening. There are few cases of physical attacks against Jews, and the ADL promotes the U.S. as a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Compare Jewish life in the United States with the centuries of life of African Americans, who live at the economic margin, are subjected to periodic police attacks that take their lives, and do not consider establishing a land of their own. Anti-Semitism is trivial compared to the discrimination that severely disrupts the lives of other Americans. Let’s not confuse anti-Jewish feeling, due to Jewish support of the genocide of the Palestinian people, with arbitrary prejudice against Jews.
Why is there a genocide?
Israeli murderous rampages lack compassion for Palestinian suffering, show no sympathy for the killed and no remorse for even “accidental” killings. Calculated dehumanization of the civilized, educated, endurable, and heroic Palestinian people certifies the inhumanity and criminal bent of the Zionist Jews.
Israel’s genocidal reaction to Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, a day that will be pressed forever in the American conscience, was unnecessary. The preferred strategy for a responsible military that values life is to reinforce the border, which could easily be made impenetrable. Using Mossad’s network of informers, infiltrators, and military drone and satellite surveillance, the Israeli military has mapped locations and movements of Hamas’ military leaders and fighting wing. Selective targets for drone and commando raids could have disrupted Hamas’ fighting capability. After crippling Hamas, the military could have developed a strategy that totally immobilizes Hamas and minimizes civilian casualties.
Israeli tank battalions could have surrounded schools, apartment buildings, hospital and refugee centers before broadcasting evacuation and surrender orders. After evacuation, which saves civilian lives, the tanks could have probed or shelled buildings they claimed harvested Hamas. No armed brigades surrounded buildings, no evacuation advisories occurred, and no Hamas operatives have been shown to be present in the wreckage. Just the opposite has happened; the Gazans have been told to flee and then have been shot by snipers. Doctors are shocked at the casualties and reports that have an unusual number of children shot in the head. Whole extended families of 30-70 people have been killed without warning. Israel is fighting an army that has no antitank guns, no heavy weapons, and just a few cadres still willing to fight. There is no Hamas army and there is no real war.
The Gaza campaign is not a military campaign; it is an excuse for a deliberate genocide. It has nothing to do with political and military strategies that are developed from able and astute minds. It comes from these minds — depraved, egocentric, inhuman, and criminal bent.
These criminal bent cannot distinguish between right and wrong, are trained to attach themselves to a unique tribe, and emotionally detach themselves from others. The criminal mind drives a great portion of the Israel community. This was shown in an interview by Christine Amanpour with an Israeli woman whose daughter was kidnapped by Hamas. The woman tells Christine Amanpour that “October 7 was a catastrophe for the whole world. Hamas is terrorist and terrorizing its own people. The world thanks us for fighting for them. Hamas is seeking to eliminate us and the free world.”
It is obvious the woman is reciting a script prepared by the Israeli propaganda machine. She does not concentrate on the travails of her daughter and displays a mind trained to attach itself to a unique tribe and emotionally detach itself from others. Only Israelis matter, and the world should recognize that damage to Israelis is damage to the entire word. Israelis are rescuing all of us. Hamas and its slingshots are “seeking to eliminate nuclear armed Israel and the free world.”
Here is the difference between terrorist Hamas that terrorizes its own people and benevolent Israel.
Image Courtesy of CNN Gaza before October 7
Image courtesy of Reuters Gaza after October 7
Terrorist Hamas has terrorized the population by constructing housing, schools, universities, hospitals, sports arenas, and given Gazans the tools to live, while Israel did all it could to disrupt their lives. Benevolent Israel has no compunction in destroying housing, schools, universities, hospitals, and tools that terrorist Hamas has given its people to survive the continuous onslaught against them.
It’s Gresham’s law ─ bad money drives out good money ─ applied to human existence — bad people drive out good people; in this case, the worst constantly replacing the less worst. There are many Israelis, even settlers, who want to cooperate with the Palestinians, but the plurality that gained government control permits and encourages robbery and murder of Palestinians. The settlers take advantage of the opportunities.
The genocide proceeds from a criminal bent leadership that organizes criminal activities, which is rationalized. Provoke the Palestinians to respond to an attack and then accuse them of attacking ─ a favorite and successful trickster investment by the Zionist Jews, which has given them huge dividends. The Zionists expect those robbed and harmed will seek justice, from within and from without. Way to stop that is to get rid of them. With no them, there is nothing to worry about. There is no resurrection.
Why are nations and groups supporting the genocide?
All those who support the genocide of the Palestinian people are inflicted with the criminal bent plus gene — might makes right and anyone who does not recognize your might has no right to live. Bill Maher, a political comedian who posed as a human rights advocate, revealed how the American conscience reflects the Zionist conscience. In an HBO episode, Maher exclaimed, “The State of Israel is here to stay and the Palestinians will need to get used to it.” At other times, he defended Israel’s war on the Gazans and defended his positions with,
History is brutal, and humans are not good people, and, I would submit that Israel did not steal anybody’s land. This is another thing I’ve heard the last couple of weeks, words like ‘occupiers’ and ‘colonizers’ and ‘apartheid,’ which I don’t think people understand the history there. The Jews have been in that area of the world since about 1200 BC, way before the first Muslim or Arab walked the earth. Other people do not understand the history there.
Bill Maher is considered a political satirist with a large following. He must have been satirizing when stating, “The Jews have been in that area of the world since about 1200 BC, way before the first Muslim or Arab walked the earth.” Any existing Neanderthals to claim the land? Where have the Palestinians prevented Israel’s existence? If they did, how did Israel get so strong? Aren’t the Zionist Jews attempting to prevent Palestinian existence? Aren’t the Palestinians here to stay and shouldn’t the Jews get over it? Maher follows the usual Zionist scheme ─ attribute to the adversary the iniquities and guilt of the Zionists.
The United States, beginning with the landing of the Pilgrims, and Israel, beginning with the landing of the Zionists, follow identical patterns of history. Both obtained assistance from the indigenous people and then obliterated them. Continuous wars, always in defense, never compromising, always killing mercilessly, and each convinced of their exceptionalism categorize the Israelis and Americans ─ partners in crime against humanity, willing accomplices to genocide.
Can the genocide be stopped?
Rays of hope indicate nations will take a firm stand against the genocide and rally support for the Palestinians.
China has taken an active role in promoting a ceasefire.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the United Nations General Assembly it should recommend use of force if the UN Security Council fails to stop Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Lebanon.
Russia has shown sympathy for the Palestinian cause but is unable to act while being tied up in Ukraine.
France’s President Macron has asked all nations to stop sending arms to Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s response to President Macron’s plea revealed his lack of responsible executive behavior in international relations, his twisted mind, escape from reality, and superior attitude.
As Israel fights the forces of barbarism led by Iran, all civilized countries should be standing firmly by Israel’s side….Yet President Macron and some other Western leaders are now calling for an arms embargo against Israel. Shame on them.
Let me tell you this, Israel will win with or without their support, but their shame will continue long after the war is won.
Spain, Norway and Ireland have recognized Palestine statehood. Spain announced it would join South Africa’s genocide case before the International Court of Justice against Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Response from Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz repeated Netanyahu’s’ obsessive behavior, the twisted mind, the escape from reality, and the superior attitude. In an X message, addressed to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón, Katz wrote,
Hamas thanks you for your service….Khamenei, Sinwar, and deputy PM Yolanda Diaz (Spain’s deputy PM) call for the elimination of Israel and for the establishment of an Islamic Palestinian terror state from the river to the sea….Sanchez, when you don’t fire your deputy and declare recognition of a Palestinian state — you are a partner to incitement to the genocide of Jews and to war crimes.
Iran has entered the hostilities and defiantly said it will not back down. Does Iran have a power that allows its defiance?
The minds and authorities that gave us genocide of the Native Americans, slavery, and genocide of the Palestinians cannot be changed. There is little hope that revolutions in the United States and Israel will occur and correct the situation. Where are the Obamas? Unfortunately, Israel, together with its supplicating ally, the mighty U.S., feels comfortable. It has destroyed its antagonists. Hamas is impotent, Hezbollah is in disarray, with Netanyahu boasting that “Lebanon could face destruction like Gaza,” a confession that destruction of Gaza and not Hamas guides Israel’s military actions. Iran awaits an attack that Defense Minister Gallant describes as “deadly, precise and, above all, surprising. They will not understand what happened and how it happened. They will see the results.”
The rays of hope that indicate nations will take a firm stand against the genocide and rally support for the Palestinians is blocked by the knowledge that all will burn. The world is trapped. Israel has nuclear weapons and will not hesitate to use them, knowing that by its small size and close location to other nations, opponents realize that radioactive fallout from atomic bombs falling on Tel Aviv will jeopardize surrounding nations. The military option is not plausible.
Israel has always posed the crisis as “it’s us or them,” another departure from reality that is used to justify its criminal behavior. “Us” refers to, “They intend to destroy us”(Israel.)” “Them “refers to, “We destroy them before we are destroyed.” Nobody has shown the power or proclivity to have it “us.” Battle maps show Arab nations with large arrows thrusting huge armies to batter Israel. Where are any of them?
With Israel having atomic weapons and a mentality that will use them, stopping the genocide by military means predicts it will be “us” and “them,” where “us” are the peace loving people of the world and them are all the Israelis — Jews, Muslims and Christians. Israel has the world in a “lose-lose” situation and will never accept a “win-win” situation. This leaves little room to maneuver and ability to save the Palestinians. Social isolation and economic deprivation, including sanctions of the criminal nation, are paths to forcing the issue. They are long and difficult and have not proven effective in past genocides.
The solution to stopping Israel’s massacre of the Palestinians lies with the Israelis and Jews around the world. Israel’s genocidal policies have generated internal detractors, social unrest, political divides, an economic decline, and military disagreements. All combat is neutralized by “us” or “them,” supplied by the constant war against the Palestinians, which demands absolute loyalty to the state that is shielding its Jews from another Holocaust. This steady stream of propaganda is similar to the manner in which the Nazi state convinced a plurality of Germans to support the Nazis until the end. It’s a toss up as to who better fits the image of Nazism ─ Deutschland or Zionistland?
The “us” or “them,” reinforced by a population that has been nurtured on a daily cereal of holocaust and enjoys being a victim, explains the bewildering Israeli Jewish position on blithely, and it is blithely, committing genocide. The real Jews, those in the Western world, who understand Judaism and the struggles of their immigrant ancestors, have been thrust into a battle to rescue Judaism and the Palestinians.
As mentioned before, Jews live well and peacefully everywhere, except in Israel. If their sleep is disturbed, it is because of Israel and its partners in crime. The anti-defamation League (ADL), better named the Defamation League, is a business; it exists to find anti-Jewish expressions and the more it can manufacture, the more successful it is as a business. The Israel Lobby is a conspiratorial lobbying arm of the Israeli government, reaching deeply into media, DC “Think Tanks,” government agencies, religious institutions, cultural institutions, and households, providing an invisible army of millions, many born in Israel and sent by Israel to corrode the political system, influence the electoral system, and delude the central nervous systems. Defeating the anti-Judaism branches of the anti-Jewish Zionist extremists is a challenge that is met by numbers, dollars, resources, energy, demonstrations, public relations, media advertisements and strategic thinking, which translates to being one step ahead of the most conniving, lying, cheating, and deceiving assortment of killers the world now sees. In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.
It has eluded us now;
Tomorrow, we will run a little faster,
Stretch our arms a little longer.
Boats against the current,
Borne back ceaselessly into the Past.
I genuinely didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I saw a new opinion poll putting the recently-routed Tories just one percentage point behind Keir Starmer’s deeply-disliked Labour Party government.
How can this be?
Despite Labour’s steadfast commitment to gifting the Tories with seemingly endless opportunities to land a hefty blow on Starmer’s glass chin, the Tories attempt at opposition has been incredibly ineffective, as is often the case when a new leader is being chosen following a humiliating defeat.
So what are the Tories doing that’s put them within a Rizla paper of the new Labour government with the undeserved whopping majority?
In short, nothing. They’re not interested in opposing Keir Starmer because they are far too busy opposing each other.
Keir Starmer is the reason the Tories find themselves just one percentage point behind Labour.
The opinion polls are a Keir Starmer problem
If we go back to Swindon’s Sunday Sermon in the Canary on 1 September, I said:
The greatest threat to Keir Starmer’s leadership is Keir Starmer. It’s not the Tories. It is not Farage. The Lib Dems are as threatening to the Labour prime minister as a hungry vegan is to a bowl of pan-fried offal.
And I absolutely stand by that because the Tories lurching further to the hard-right under Badenoch or Jenrick pose absolutely no threat to a right-of-centre Labour Party
It doesn’t matter which of the Tory headbangers claim victory. The Conservatives will replace them within two, maybe three years with a more electable candidate to go up against Keir Starmer, assuming he actually lasts a full term himself.
The Tories are selecting a candidate that makes them feel better about themselves, not a candidate that stands any realistic chance of appealing to the same not-so-hard-right-Tories that helped Starmer fluke his way into power, just three months ago.
We have entered the age of ineffective oppositions and unaccountable politicians, far-right MPs and a never ending conveyor belt of corruption and sleaze, and then there’s that ridiculous twat Jenrick wanting to raise the Star of David flag at every British port.
Starmer is arrogant enough to believe that he is the reason the public voted for the Labour Party, back in July, but the truth of the matter has been revealed by pollsters YouGov.
Labour’s tanking polling continues
A whopping 55% of the Labour vote (that’s more than half, Reform voters), voted Labour because they wanted to get the Tories out of office.
Just 13% of those questioned voted for Starmer’s Labour based on policy, although I do wonder how many of that 13% could name and describe three pre-election policies that stand firm today?
But the best answer was saved for last, because just ONE PERCENT voted for the Labour Party due to Keir Starmer. That’s one voter in every one hundred voters.
Starmer’s own personal approval ratings have hit rock bottom. Even the much-maligned Rishi Sunak and the kangaroo gonad-eating GB News hatemonger Nigel Farage have higher approval ratings than Keir Starmer — a man that has a face that looks like a dropped pasty at the best of times.
Tragically, at least for an entirely unrepentant Starmer and his sidekicks, the polls just keep on coming, much like the ocean of freebies that flow into the leaders office from hedge funds and pro-Israel lobbyists.
This time, as the Canary reported, YouGov askedLabour voters what they thought of other political parties, and while some 9% had a favourable opinion of Reform UK and 55% thought well of the Liberal Democrats, it only turned out that the Green Party have a higher net approval rating than the Labour Party, with Labour voters!
Little by little, support for the Labour government is beginning to crumble.
Never particularly popular
It is so easy to forget, they never were a particularly popular choice, securing a massive majority with considerably fewer votes than Labour picked up under Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and even Labour’s ‘worst election defeat since 1935’, just two years later.
The rot began to set in within days of Labour taking power. We didn’t even get the chance to sing a line of Things Can Only Get Better before Kid Starver and Rachel Thieves created a £22 billion black hole and opted to kill thousands of elderly British people instead of telling the comedy guy Zelensky exactly where to shove his short-range air defence missile systems.
But the freebie scandal was a huge slap around the face for ‘Mr Rules’, Keir Starmer.
The British electorate are a ridiculously tolerant bunch. Just look at how long we put up with Thatcher, New Labour, and the fourteen years of Tory rule that is already being buried under an avalanche of Labour sleaze and corruption.
Starmer is destroying what’s left of Labour
Just six months before taking power, Starmer said:
No more VIP fast lanes. No more kickbacks for colleagues. No more revolving doors between government and the companies they regulate. I will restore standards in public life with a total crackdown on cronyism.
Keir Starmer is a shameless, fraudulent liar. He cannot and must not be trusted to put the interests of the British people before the interests of the Israeli state.
The gift-hoarding scandal merely reinforced what the public already believes. Trust and confidence in government are as low as they have ever been with fewer voters believing politicians would put national interest before self-interest.
When you combine Starmer’s deeply troublesome personal approval ratings and virtually zero trust in the politicians we elect to represent us in parliament, you can understand why many politicos still think a hard-right Tory candidate has a chance of defeating Starmer in five years time.
And should that happen, it will be down to one man and one man alone.
Published in the Christchurch Star newspaper yesterday — this was the advert rejected last week by Stuff, New Zealand’s major news website, by an editorial management which apparently thinks pro-Israel sympathies are more important than the industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and Lebanon.
Stuff told the Palestinian Solidarity Movement Aotearoa (PSNA) on Thursday last week it would not print this full-page “genocide in their own words” advertisement which had been booked and paid to go in all Stuff newspapers this week.
Stuff gave no “official” reason for banning the advert about Israel’s war in Gaza aside from saying they would not do so “while the ongoing conflict is developing”.
It seems that for Stuff, pro-Israel sympathies are more important that Palestinian realities.
It’s worth pointing out that Stuff has, over many years, printed full page advertisements from a Christian Zionist, Pastor Nigel Woodley, from Hastings.
Woodley’s advertisements have been full of the most egregious, fanciful, misinformation and anti-Palestinian racism.
Our advertisement on the other hand is 100 percent factual and speaks truth to power – demanding the New Zealand government hold Israel to account for its war crimes and 76-years of brutal military occupation of Palestine.
(@Dan_Wyke) 
