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Category: United States

  • The Future of Our World by Noam Chomsky

    Noam Chomsky (95) famous dissident and father of modern linguistics, considered one of the world’s leading intellectuals, is recovering from a stroke he suffered at age 94 and now living with his wife in Brazil. According to a report in Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now d/d July 2, 2024, this past June Brazilian President Lula personally visited Chomsky, holding his hand, saying: “You are one of the most influential people of my life” personally witnessed by Vijay Prashad, co-author with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal (The New Press).

    Indeed, Noam Chomsky is established as one of the most influential intellectuals of the 21st century.

    A pre-stroke video interview with Chomsky conducted at the University of Arizona is extraordinarily contemporary and insightful with a powerful message: What Does the Future Hold Q&A With Noam Chomsky hosted by Lori Poloni-Staudinger, Dean of School of Behavioral Sciences and Professor, School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona.

    Chomsky joined the School of Behavioral Sciences in 2017 and taught “Consequences of Capitalism.”

    This article is a synopsis of some of Chomsky’s responses to questions, and it includes third-party supporting facts surrounding his statements about the two biggest risks to humanity’s continual existence.

    What Does the Future Hold?

    Question: geopolitics, unipolar versus multipolar

    Chomsky: First there are two crises that determine whether it is even appropriate to consider how geopolitics will look in the future: (1) threat of nuclear war (2) the climate crisis.

    “If the climate crisis is not dealt with in the next few years, human society is essentially finished. Everything else is moot unless these two crises are dealt with.”

    (This paragraph is not part of Chomsky’s answer) Regarding Chomsky’s warning, several key indicators of the climate crisis are flashing red, not green. For example, nine years ago 195 nations at the UN climate conference Paris ‘15 agreed to take measures to mitigate CO2 emissions to hold global warming to under 1.5°C pre-industrial. Yet, within only nine years of that agreement amongst 195 nations, according to Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), global temperatures exceeded 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial for the first time in human history for a 12-month period from February 2023 to January 2024 and now fast approaching danger zones. Obviously, nations of the world did not follow their own dictates, and if not them, who will?

    Paleoclimatology has evidence of what to expect if the “climate crisis,” as labeled by Chomsky, is not dealt with (The following paragraph is also not part of Chomsky’s answer): “While today’s CO2-driven climate change scenario is unprecedented in human history, similar circumstances existed in the geological record that give us an idea of what to expect in the way of global sea level rise, and the process that will get us there. About 3.2 million years ago, during the Pliocene epoch, CO2 levels were about 400 ppm (427 ppm today) and temperatures were 2-3°C above the “pre-industrial” temperatures of 1850-1880. At the same time, proxy data indicate global sea level was about 52 feet (within a 39-foot to 66-foot range) higher than today.” (Source: The Sleeping Giant Awakens, Climate Adaptation Center, May 21, 2024)

    Maybe that is why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) strongly suggests keeping temperatures ideally below 1.5°C and certainly not above 2.0°C pre-industrial.

    Chomsky on World Power: Currently the center of world power, whether unipolar or multipolar is very much in the news. This issue has roots going back to the end of WWII when the US established overwhelming worldwide power. But now the Ukraine war has the world very much divided with most of world outside of the EU, US and its allies calling for diplomatic settlement. But the US position is that the war must continue to severely weaken Russia.

    Consequently, Ukraine is dividing the world, and it shows up in the framework of unipolar versus multipolar. For example, the war has driven the EU away from independent status to firm control by the US. In turn the EU is headed towards industrial decline because of disruption of its natural trading partners, e.g., Russia is full of natural resources that the EU is lacking, which economist have always referred to as a “marriage made in heaven,” a natural trading relationship that has now been broken. (footnote: EU industrial production down 3.9% past 12 months)

    And the Ukrainian imbroglio is cutting off EU access to markets in China e.g., China has been an enormous market for German industrial products. Meanwhile, the US is insisting upon a unipolar framework of world order that wants not only the EU but the world to be incorporated within something like the NATO system. Under US pressure NATO has expanded its reach to the Indo-Pacific region, meaning NATO is now obligated to take part in the US conflict with China.

    Meantime, the rest of the world is trying to develop a multipolar world with several independent sectors of power.  The BRICS countries Brazil, Russia, India, China, Indonesia, South Africa, want an independent source of power of their own. They are 40% of world economy that’s independent of US sanctions and of the US dollar.

    These are developing conflicts over one raging issue and one developing issue. Ukraine is the raging issue; the developing issue is US conflict with China, which is developing its own projects in Eurasia, Africa, Middle East, South Africa, S9uth Asia, and Latin America.

    The US is determined to prevent China’s economic development throughout the world. The Biden administration has “virtually declared a kind of war with China” by demanding that Western allies refuse to permit China to carry out technological development.

    For example, the US insist others do not all0w China access to any technology that has any US parts in it. This includes everything, as for example, Netherlands has a world-class lithographic industry which produces critical parts for semi-conductors for the modern high-tech economy. Now, Netherlands must determine whether it’ll move to an independent course to sell to China, or not… the same is true for Samsung, South Korea, and Japan.

    The world is splintered along those lines as the framework for the foreseeable future.

    Question:  Will multinational corporations gain too much power and influence?

    Chomsky suggests looking at them right now… US based multinationals control about one-half of the world’s wealth. They are first or second in every domain like manufacturing and retail; no one else is close. It’s extraordinary power. Based upon GDP, the US has 20% of world GDP, but if you look at US multinationals it’s more like 50%. Multinationals have extraordinary power over domestic policy in both the US and in other capitalistic countries. So, how will multinationals react when told they cannot deal with a major market, like China?

    How does this develop over future years? The EU is going into a period of decline because of breaking relationships in trade and commercial business with the East. Yet, it’s not sure that the EU will stay subordinate to the US and willingly go into decline, or will the EU join the rest of the world and move into a more complex multipolar world and integrate with countries in the East? This is yet to be determined. For example, France’s President Emmanuel Macron (2017-) has been vilified and condemned for saying that after Russia is driven out of Ukraine, a way must be found to accommodate Russia within an international system, an initial crack in the US/EU relationship.

    Threat of nuclear war question: Russia suspended the START Nuclear Arms Treaty with the US and how important is this to the threat of nuclear war?

    Chomsky: It is very significant. It is the last remaining arms control treaty, the new START Treaty, Trump almost cancelled it. The treaty was due to expire in February when Biden took over in time to extend it, which he did.

    Keep in mind that the US was instrumental in creating a regime which somewhat mitigates the threat of nuclear war, which means “terminal war.” We talk much too casually about nuclear war. There can’t be a nuclear war. If there is, we’re finished. It’s why the Doomsday Clock is set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been.

    Starting with George W. Bush the US began dismantling arms control. Bush dismantled the ABM Treaty, a missile treaty very significantly part of the arms control system and an enormous threat to Russia. So, the dismantling allowed the US to set up installations right at the border of Russia. It’s a severe threat to Russia. And Russia has reacted.

    The Trump administration got rid of the INF Treaty, the Reagan-Gorbachev treaty of 1987 which ended short-range missiles in Europe. Those missiles are now back in place on the borders of Russia. Trump, to make it clear that we meant business, arranged missile launches right away upon breaking of the treaty.

    Trump destroyed the Open Skies Treaty which originated with Eisenhower stating that each side should share information about what the other side was doing to reduce the threat of misunderstanding.

    Only the new START Treaty remains. And Russia suspended it. START restricts the number of strategic weapons for each side. The treaty terminates in 2026, but it’s suspended by Russia anyway. So, in effect there are no agreed upon restraints to increasing nuclear weapons.

    Both sides already have way more nuclear weapons than necessary; One Trident nuclear submarine could destroy a couple hundred cities all over the world. And land based nuclear missile locations are known by both sides. So, if there is a threat, those would be hit immediately. Which means if there’s a threat, “you’d better send’em off, use’em or lose’em.” This obviously is a very touchy, extraordinarily risky situation because one mistake could amplify very quickly.

    The new START Treaty that’s been suspended by Russia did restrict the enormous excessive number of strategic weapons. So, we should be in negotiations right now to expand it, restore it, and reinstitute the treaties the US has dismantled, the INF Treaty, Reagan-Gorbachev treaty, ABM Treaty, Open Stars Treaty should all be brought back.

    Question: Will society muster the will for change for equity, prosperity, and sustainability?

    Chomsky: There is no answer. It’s up to the population to come to grips with issues and say we are not going to march to the precipice and fall over it. But it’s exactly what our leaders are telling us to do. Look at the environmental crisis. It is well understood that we may have enough time to control heating of the environment, destruction of habitat, destruction of the oceans which is going to lead to total catastrophe. It’s not like everybody will die all at once, but we’re going to reach irreversible tipping points that becomes just a steady decline. To know how serious it is, look at particular areas of the world.

    The Middle East region is one of the most rapidly heating regions of the world at rates twice as fast as the rest of the world. Projections by the end of the century at current trajectories show sea level in Mediterranean will rise about 10 feet.

    Look at a map where people live, it is indescribable. Around Southeast Asia and peasants in India are trying to survive temperatures in the 120s where less than 10% of population has air conditioning. This will cause huge migrations from areas of the world where life will become unlivable.

    Fossil fuel companies are so profitable that they’ve decided to quit any sustainable efforts in favor of letting profits run as fast and as far as possible. They’re opening new oil and gas fields that can produce another 30-40 years but at that point we’ll all be finished.

    We have the same issue with nuclear weapons as with the environment. If these two issues are not dealt with, in the not-too-distant future, it’ll be all over. The population needs to “have the will” to stop it.

    Question: How do we muster that will?

    Chomsky: Talk to neighbors, join community organizations, join activist’s groups, press Congress, get out into the streets if necessary. How have things happened in the past? For example, back in the 1960s small groups of women got together, forming consciousness-raising groups and it was 1975 (Sex Discrimination Act) that women were granted the right of persons peers under US domestic law, prior to that we’re still back in the age of the founding fathers when women were property  Look at the Civil Rights movement. Go back to the 1950s, Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat on a bus that was planned by an organized group of activists that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, big change… in 1960 a couple of black students in No. Carolina decided to sit in at a lunch counter segregated. Immediately arrested, and the next day another group came… later they became organized as SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinated Committee. Young people from the North started to join. Next freedom buses started running to Alabama to convince black farmers to cast a vote. It went on this way, building, until you got civil rights legislation in Washington.

    What’s happening right now as an example of what people can do? The Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, IRA. It’s mostly a climate change act. The only way you can get banks and fossil fuel companies to stop destroying the world is to bribe them. That’s basically our system. But IRA is not the substantial program that Biden presented. It is watered down. The original came out of Bernie Sander’s office. As for the background for that, young people, from the Sunrise Movement, were active and organizing and sat in on Congressional offices. AOC joined them. A bill came out of this, but Republican opposition cut back the original bill by nearly 100% They are a denialist party. They want to destroy the world in the interest of private profit.  The final IRA bill is nowhere near enough.

    Summation: Chomsky sees a world of turmoil trying to sort out whether unipolar or multipolar wins the day with the Ukrainian war serving as a catalyst to change. Meanwhile, the EU carries the brunt of its impact. Meantime, nuclear arms treaties have literally dissolved in the face of a tenuous situation along the Russia/EU borders with newly armed missiles pointed at Russia’s heartland. In the face of this touch-and-go Russia vs. the West potentially explosive scenario, the global climate system is under attack via excessive fossil fuel emissions cranking up global temperatures beyond what 195 countries agreed was a danger zone.

    Chomsky sees a nervous nuclear weapons-rattling high-risk world flanked by unmitigated deterioration of ecosystems that global warming steadily, assuredly takes down for the count, as global temperatures set new records. He calls for individuals to take action, do whatever necessary to change the trajectory of nuclear weaponry and climate change to save society. Chomsky offered several examples of small groups of people acting together, over time, turning into serious protests and ultimately positive legislation.

    AmThis article covers the first 34 minutes of a 52-minute video: Noam Chomsky: About the Future of Our World.

    “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” (Margaret Mead, Anthropologist)

    The post The Future of Our World by Noam Chomsky first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Voting for Genocide


    If Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Kuzinski were the candidates for the Republican and Democratic parties, which one would you vote for?

    Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both have more blood on their hands than either of these serial killers, and they promise to kill many more. Both of them supported the latest $20 billion to Israel, to keep the project to eradicate the people of Gaza on schedule. Voting for them means giving them permission and encouragement to keep the rivers of blood flowing, so I won’t do it. I might vote for Jill Stein or the Libertarian candidate, but I’m inclined not to play the game. It’s a personal choice — a symbolic one, you might contend.

    But so is yours, if you are voting for a major party candidate. Did you select either of them to be a candidate? Can you think of a better one? Of course you can. In fact, every one of you is probably a better candidate yourself. That’s why your vote is symbolic. You don’t win either way. And either way, your vote says to the party or candidate, “Your support for genocide is not going to keep me from voting for you.”

    What can we do about it? As Emma Goldman said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” That was a century ago, and it is more true today — with Citizens United solidifying corporate and special interest (e.g. AIPAC) control of our elections and our electeds — than it was then. Our only influence in government is with issues that have little interest for the powerful, such as women’s reproductive rights, other than to be used by the powerful to manipulate and deceive us into thinking that our vote makes a difference.

    As individuals, we must take responsibility for our participation in this rigged game. Are we willing to vote for one mass murderer over another just for the opportunity to play? Daddy, what did you do during the Great Genocide?

    Collectively, a voter strike might be in order. Vote None of the Above! Perhaps we need a new movement that defies the system rather than participating in it. Picket the polling stations and tell people not to vote, that doing so sends the message that they support genocide.

    I have no illusions how difficult it is to create a mass movement, especially one that seeks to wrest control from those who rule us. But genocide puts special obligations upon us. Individually, at the very least, our integrity is at stake. Are you actually going to participate — and be complicit — in genocide? We all have choices. Let your conscience decide. Make yourself and your descendants proud of you.

    The post Voting for Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why the Genocide Continues

    According to the New York Times, U.S. officials say there’s no excuse, on the warmakers’ own terms, for the genocide they are arming:

    “Israel has achieved all that it can militarily in Gaza, according to senior American officials, who say continued bombings are only increasing risks to civilians while the possibility of further weakening Hamas has diminished…. William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, is due in Qatar on Thursday. Brett McGurk, President Biden’s Middle East coordinator, has headed to Egypt and Qatar. Amos Hochstein, a senior White House adviser, landed in Lebanon. One of the messages the officials are expected to deliver is that there is little more Israel can accomplish against Hamas.”

    But there’s another message they’re delivering:

        the weapons will never stop flowing from the United States to Israel.

    According to opinion polls, the majority of U.S. voters want the weapons shipments to stop now and have wanted that for some time.

    But there’s another message many of them are delivering:

        OMG it’s so awesome how Kamala tells peace advocates to shut up, she and Walz bring joy to my life like like like like yeah you know?

    If Harris were to demand that Biden or Congress or the UN stop the weapons shipments, and were they to stop, I would start campaigning for Harris-Walz to take office in Washington. As long as that doesn’t happen, I’ll support Biden-Harris taking seats in the dock at The Hague.

    Unless of course somebody takes a notion to uphold U.S. laws and prosecute them here. Every weapons shipment violates the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, the Foreign Assistance Act, the Arms Export Control Act, the U.S. War Crimes Act, the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, and the Leahy Law. Just ask former Senator Leahy who says the U.S. government is making a mockery of the law that bears his name.

    Biden is still scheduled to be officially president for about as long as the Gulf War took from start to finish, about twice as long as the Spanish-American war, about three times the Falklands war, several times various U.S. wars in Latin America and around the globe, and several times what it took for the U.S. to overthrow the government of Afghanistan prior to failing to grasp the need to leave that place for decades.

    Biden’s remaining months are also longer than it has taken for polls to show dramatic turns of opinion against wars, commonly labeled “war fatigue” as though noticing the horror of the mass killing requires sleepiness rather than insight. But the “fatigue” has already been awakened.

    Of course, politicians also hear messages from war-profiting bribers of their campaigns, and from weapons-funded stink-tankers. The war machine has a great deal of inertia even when it has no excuse. Peace making has been bizarrely redefined as “anti-Semitism.” Opposition to genocide is now “terrorism.” And all the microphones have been gathered up in a big pile and placed in front of corporations peddling that BS.

    But too many people know better. Too many people grew up believing genocide was evil. We’ve been here before, and it didn’t work out well for the forever-war candidate. His losing worked out horribly for everyone, of course, but his winning would likely have done the same.

    We need an election in which people insist on not voting for war. We need an election in which people develop too much self-respect to give a flying F-35 what kind of tacos a candidate eats, which candidate you’d like a beer with, which you’d hire as a babysitter, which you’d vote for as prom king or queen.

    Why does the killing never end? Panem et circenses.

  • First published at Let’s Try Democracy.
    • The post Why the Genocide Continues first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Something’s Coming, We Don’t Know What It Is But It Is Going To Be Bad

    With a click, with a shock
    Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch
    Something’s coming, don’t know when but it’s soon . . .

    — “Something’s Coming,” West Side Story, lyrics by S. Sondheim, music by L. Bernstein.

    Shock should not be the word, but when World War III breaks fully loose many who are now sleeping will be shocked.  The war has already started, but its full fury and devastation are just around the corner.  When it does, Tony’s singular fate in West Side Story will be the fate of untold millions.

    It is a Greek tragedy brought on by the terrible hubris of the United States, its NATO accomplices, and the genocidal state of Israel and the Zionist terrorists who run it.

    Tony felt a miracle was due, but it didn’t come true for him except to briefly love Maria and then get killed as result of a false report, and only a miracle will now save the world from the cataclysm that is on the way, whether it is initiated by intent, a false report, an accident, or the game of nuclear chicken played once too often.

    Let us hope but not be naïve.  The signs all point in one direction.  The gun on the wall in the first act of this tragic play is primed to go off in the final one.  Every effort to avoid this terrible fate by seeking peace and not war has been rejected by the U.S. and its equally insane allies.  Every so-called red line laid down by Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinians, and their allies has been violated with impunity and blatant arrogance.  But impunity has its limits and the dark Furies of vengeance will have their day.

    “It is the dead, not the living,” said Antigone, “who make the longest demands.”  Their ghostly voices cry out to be avenged.

    I wish I were not compelled by conscience to write this, but it seems clearly evident to me that we stand on the edge of an abyss.  The fate of the world rests in the hands of leaders who are clearly psychotic and who harbor death wishes.  It’s not terribly complex.  Netanyahu and Biden are two of them.  Yes, like other mass killers, I think they love their children and give their dog biscuits to eat.  But yes, they also are so corrupted in their souls that they relish war and the sense of false power and prestige it brings them.  They gladly kill other people’s children.  They can defend themselves many times over, offer all kinds of excuses, but the facts speak otherwise.  This is hard for regular people to accept.

    The great American writer who lived in exile in France for so many years and who was born 100 years ago this month, James Baldwin, wrote an essay – “The Creative Process” – in which he addressed the issue of how becoming a normal member of society dulls one to the shadow side of personal and social truths.  He wrote:

    And, in the same way that to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one’s interior, uncharted chaos, so have we, as a nation, modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history.

    And lie and suppress we still do today.

    Imagine, if you will, that Mexico has invaded Texas with the full support of the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian governments.  Their weapons are supplied by these countries and their drone and missile attacks on the U.S. are coordinated by Russian technology.  The Seven Mile Bridge in Florida has been attacked.  The U.S. Mexican border is dotted with Russian troops on bases with nuclear missiles aimed at U.S. cities.

    It’s not hard to do.  That is a small analogy to what the U.S./NATO is doing to Russia.

    Do you think the United States would not respond with great force?

    Do you think it would not feel threatened with nuclear annihilation?

    How do you think it would respond?

    The U.S/NATO war against Russia via Ukraine is accelerating by the day.  The current Ukrainian invasion of Russia’s Kursk region has upped the ante dramatically.  After denying it knew in advance of this Ukrainian invasion of Russia, the demented U.S. President Joseph Biden said the other day when asked about the fighting in Kursk, “I’ve spoken with my staff on a regular basis probably every four or five hours for the last six or eight days. And it’s — it’s creating a real dilemma for Putin.  And we’ve been in direct contact — constant contact with — with the Ukrainians.”  Do you think Kamala Harris was kept in the dark?

    Now how do you think the Russians are going to respond?  How many red lines will they allow the U.S. to cross without massive retaliation?  And what kind of retaliation?

    Switch then to the Middle East where the Iranians and their allies are preparing to retaliate to Israel’s attacks on their soil. No one knows when but it seems soon.  Something is coming and it won’t be pretty.  Will it then ignite a massive war in the region with the U.S. and Israel pitted against the region?  Will nuclear weapons be used?  Will the wars in Ukraine/Russia and the Middle East join into what will be called WW III?

    While the U.S. continues to massively arm Israel, Russian is arming its ally Iran and likely training them in the use of those weapons as the U.S. is doing in Ukraine. The stage is set.  We enter the final act.

    Natanyahu wants and needs war to survive.  So he thinks.  Psychotic killers always do.

    The signs all point in one direction.  No one should be shocked if the worst comes to pass.

    “Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch.”

    If you have time.

    The post Something’s Coming, We Don’t Know What It Is But It Is Going To Be Bad first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US signs off on AUKUS tech trade reforms

    A licence-free environment for AUKUS technology transfer will come into effect next month after the three nations finalised legislative reforms that unlock billions of dollars in defence exports. The Biden Administration will on Friday morning (AEDT) formally certify legislation exempting Australia and the United Kingdom from US export control licensing requirements from September 1. The…

    The post US signs off on AUKUS tech trade reforms appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • CNN’s Fraudulent Analysis of Fraud in the Venezuelan Presidential Election

    In the quarter century of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, initiated by the election of Hugo Chávez and continued by his successor Nicolás Maduro, 31 national elections have been held. Invariably, the US-backed opposition claimed fraud in all but the two contests that they won. Equally unvaryingly has been the corporate press’s supporting and indeed embellishing of the claims of fraud as described below.

    Blackmailing the Venezuelan electorate

    The moment that Venezuela’s election authority (CNE in its Spanish initials) reported that incumbent Maduro had prevailed in the July 28 presidential contest over his nearest challenger, Edmundo González, howls of fraud were to be heard throughout the world’s corporate press. Just a few hours after the CNE announcement, CNN reported that the vote “was marked by accusations of fraud and counting irregularities.”

    The next day, CNN provided a backgrounder on “what you need to know” about the election. Leading off was the risible description “of a unified opposition movement that overcame their divisions.” Such a misrepresentation is indicative of a press that confounds the “Washington consensus” for the will of the Venezuelan people.

    In fact, there were nine candidates on the ballot besides Maduro; all of them were opposition. They were not unified and for good reason. In its meddling into the internal affairs of Venezuela, Washington has backed the far right in the opposition spectrum.

    The US-backed González ran on a platform of radically reorienting Venezuela’s foreign policy from support of the Palestinians to unconditional approval of the current campaign of genocide by Israel and the US. Domestically, he stood for an extreme neoliberal program of privatizing practically everything – schools, transportation, national oil company, housing, hospitals, food assistance. These were not stands that could possibly unify the opposition and certainly were not stands that would appeal to the vast majority of Venezuelans.

    So why would the US choose a completely unknown and inexperienced candidate running on an unpopular platform when they could have given the nod to a moderate opposition politician with far more political backing and experience? This is the elephant-in-the-room that CNN and the rest of the corporate press ignore.

    Left out of the media barrage against the government of Venezuela has been reporting on the context of the 930 unilateral coercive measures that Washington has levied on Venezuela with the explicit intention to asphyxiate the economy and cause the people to abandon the Bolivarian Revolution. The US banked on blackmailing Venezuela to vote out Maduro or continue to suffer what are euphemistically called “sanctions.”

    Battle of the bean counters

    Now that the election is over, followed by the predictable accusations of fraud, the corporate media has intensified its campaign to delegitimize the results. In particular, we analyze a CNN article that reports “after Venezuela’s contested presidential vote, experts say government results are a ‘statistical improbability.’”

    CNN casts doubt on the results of the Venezuelan presidential election based in part on a post published by the Quantitative Methods in Social Science program at Columbia University. The post cites the official results published by the CNE showing the votes for each candidate followed by their percentage of the total rounded to a single decimal place.

    Maduro            5,150,092        51.2%
    González          4,445,978        44.2%
    Others                 462,704           4.6%

    Total              10,058,774       100.0%

    Based on the CNE data, the post goes on to calculate the percentages vote for each candidate to seven decimal places:

    Maduro            5,150,092        51.1999971%
    González          4,445,978       44.1999989%
    Others                  462,704         4.6000039%

    Total               10,058,774      100.0000000%

    Then the post notes that using the original percentages (51.2, 44.2, and 4.5) to compute the votes for candidates results in fractional vote counts that do not match the original vote totals published by the CNE:

    Maduro            5,150,092.288             51.2000000%
    González          4,445,978.108             44.2000000%
    Others              462,704.604                  4.6000000%

    Total                10,058,774                 100.0000000%

    Of course, the counts don’t match but that is an artifact of the misuse of statistics by the post. For example, let’s apply the same method to the official results of the 2020 US presidential election, published by the US Federal Election Commission (FEC):

    Biden    81,268,924      51.31%
    Trump  74,216,154      46.86%
    Total  158,383,403    100.00%

    If you multiply the percentage given for Biden 51.31% times the total number of votes, (158,383,403), the result is 81,266,524, which is different from the total reported by the FEC above (81,268,924).  Perhaps CNN has uncovered and should be reporting on statistically significant evidence of fraud that was committed by the FEC in the 2020 presidential election?

    Nevertheless, the post concludes, referring to the discrepancy that they created: “If it is not evidence of fraud by itself I do not know what is.” Then the posts wildly speculates: “Anyhow, the image of the Chavista bosses fabricating the results with a napkin and their phone calculators seems to be as plausible as amusing.” The post continues: “That seems fishy… Can it be, that instead of calculating the percentages from the number of votes, someone decided the percentages and then calculated the number of votes?”

    So there you have it. The “Chavista bosses,” starting from their desired fabricated percentage results, computed candidate totals (using phone calculators on a napkin!), only to be exposed because their clumsily computed fabricated totals do not match their fabricated percentages!

    But what CNN is really doing is statistical arm waving. The supposed discrepancy that CNN exposes is nothing more than their misuse of statistics.

    The CNN article then goes on to provide additional dramatic and equally sketchy evidence for fraud, citing Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University who “ran a mathematical simulation with a probability model.” Gelman apparently concluded that “there is about a 1 in 100 million chance that this particular pattern will occur by chance.”

    Are they correct? The short answer is that CNN is trying to baffle us.

    There is a simple response that provides an easy (and highly probable) explanation of the results published by the Venezuelan CNE: the percentages were computed by dividing the reported vote totals for each candidate by the total number of votes cast, and then the result was rounded to one decimal place.

    This is the normal and standard practice. Voting percentages in elections aren’t usually published and displayed to seven decimal places.

    If the starting point is the observed vote totals, the percentages can be computed and then rounded to one decimal place as shown in the CNE report. This is nothing more than a simple case of rounding numbers for the purpose of displaying them in a readable form.

    Professor Gelman’s “dramatic” simulation only shows that rounding can have a significant impact on decimal calculations; not any evidence of fraud.

    In technical jargon, rounding X/N and then multiplying the result times N almost never equals N, unless N is a multiple of X.  If you randomly generate a million numbers and divide them each by their sum, it is extremely unlikely that any of the numbers is a factor of the sum. It says nothing about whether the proportion X/N is fabricated or not.

    In lay terms, Gelman is misleading readers by misapplying statistical modeling.

    Misuse of statistics

    The starting point for the post cited by CNN is the assumption that there are “strong allegations of fraud in the recent Venezuelan elections.”  The goal of exposing an imagined scenario of “Chavista bosses fabricating the results” as well as other political comments present in the post (comparing, for example, the supposed fraud in Venezuela to the US election deniers and January 6th), indicates that this “expert analysis” providing “strong evidence of fraud” had political motivations.  There may be other aspects of the election pointing to fraud, but none of the above does so.

    By falsely generating suspicions of fraud in the election, CNN heightens the risk of violence, extra-constitutional resolution of the crisis, and support for outside interference in the electoral process.  If you are looking for trustworthy, unbiased reporting and analysis of the Venezuelan election, stay away from CNN

    The post CNN’s Fraudulent Analysis of Fraud in the Venezuelan Presidential Election first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Bloody Eschatology: Israel and the next Big War

    The push towards an all-out war in the Middle East is moving out of its sleepwalking phase to that of conscious eschatological reckoning.  A blood filled, fiery Armageddon will reveal the forces of virtue, linking the evangelicals of the United States with the right-wing Jewish nationalists in Israel.  That appalling prospect is certainly not one to discount: the messianic are always a frightful bunch, thinking history and selectively pruned religions texts to be on their side.

    Each week now comes with some measure of sabotage, mutilation and disruption to prospects of peace.  In his July 24 address to the US Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined his crude Manichean vision in routine barking fashion.  In doing so, his intention, as Noa Landau pithily put it, was not to end the war in Gaza so much as prolong it.

    For Netanyahu, the strained chords of civilisational rhetoric are never far away.  He would like other powers to muck in, battling the fiends he calls an “axis of terror”.  Impediments to the Jewish state’s war efforts had to be rejected.  To impose them would see other countries of similar kidney shackled.  “If Israel’s hands are tied, America is next.  I’ll tell you what else is next: the ability of all democracies to fight terrorism will be imperilled.”

    Room was reserved to attack the International Criminal Court, whose chief prosecutor has sought warrants of arrest against himself and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and the presidents of notable US universities.  As for protesting students, they had chosen to “stand with evil.  They stand with Hamas.  They stand with rapists and murderers.”  With daring outrage, he blotted out any notion that Palestinian civilians were being butchered, despite a death toll in the densely populated strip hovering near 40,000.  Indeed, civilian deaths had been “practically none,” with Israel scrupulous in “getting civilians out of harm’s way, something people said we could never do”.

    With this blood crusted Weltanschauung, acts of destabilising mayhem are automatic.  Showing an utter contempt for Israeli hostages, let alone any humanity for the Palestinians they regard with expansive condescension, the Netanyahu government thought it wise to carry out two assassinations: that of Hamas’ political chief and chief negotiator Ismail Haniyeh, and Hezbollah’s top military chief Fuad Shukr, both killed within twenty-four hours in Beirut and Tehran respectively.

    The response to the assassinations in Israel was one of relish – at least for those of the Itamar Ben-Gvir school of thought.  As David Issacharoff, writing in Haaretz, described it, “Israel has become a Matryoshka doll of pyromaniacs.”  From his skewed vantage point as National Security Minister, assassinations are staple food for the state.  The killing of Hezbollah’s second in command, ostensibly for his alleged role in an attack on a Druze village in the Golan Heights, drew the gleeful response that “Every god has his day”.

    Despite certain Israeli media reports claiming an order from Netanyahu that ministers were to stay silent over Haniyeh’s killing, the enthusiasts were voluble in rapture.  Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, also of Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, expressed his glee on social media, claiming that “this is the right way to clean the world of this filth.”  There were to be “No more imaginary ‘peace’/surrender agreements, no more mercy for these sons of death.”

    Other cabinet ministers also joined the gloating chorus.  “Careful What You Wish For,” wrote Minister for the Diaspora Amichai Chikli over a video of Haniyeh in a conference hall while people chanted “Death to Israel.”  Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi resorted to biblical verse: “So may all your enemies perish, O Lord.”

    Despite no official confirmation of Israel’s role in the killing of the senior Hamas official, the Government Press Office posted, if only briefly, an image of Haniyeh which left no room for nuance: “Eliminated: Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas highest-ranking leader, was killed in a precise strike in Tehran, Iran.”

    The richly violent musings of Ben-Gvir and his circle of sanctified terror have even proven indigestible for some members of the war cabinet.  Defence Minister Gallant, not immune from the urge to dehumanise the residents of Gaza, accused his national security counterpart of being a “pyromaniac”.  On the X platform, he declared his opposition against “any negotiations to bring him into the war cabinet – it would allow him to implement his plans.”  The same Gallant, however, was also in celebratory mood about the assassinations.

    Even outside the war cabinet, the views of Ben-Gvir, not to mention his overall influence, travel with toxic rapture.  In the background, incandescently inspiring, is Rabbi Dov Lior, a figure of glowing nationalist fury. It was he who incited members of the Jewish Underground to conduct various terrorist attacks in the 1980s against Palestinians.  (The same group also unsuccessfully plotted to blow up the Dome on the Rock.)

    This, as former UK diplomat Alastair Crooke observes, is the State of Judea doing battle against the State of Israel.  He quotes Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, former Chief of Staff of the IDF, who sees such bloody eschatology as resting on a fundamental concept: “Jewish supremacy” or “Mein Kampf in reverse”.  For Rabbi Lior, the next big war cannot come soon enough, one, he anticipates, that is bound to feature Gog and Magog.

    The post Bloody Eschatology: Israel and the next Big War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Who Owns America?

    The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear… They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else… It’s called the American Dream, ’cause you have to be asleep to believe it.”

    — George Carlin

    Who owns America?

    Is it the government? The politicians? The corporations? The foreign investors? The American people?

    While the Deep State keeps the nation divided and distracted by a presidential election whose outcome is foregone (the police state’s stranglehold on power will ensure the continuation of endless wars and out-of-control spending, while disregarding the citizenry’s fundamental rights and the rule of law), America is literally being bought and sold right out from under us.

    Consider the facts.

    We’re losing more and more of our land every year to corporations and foreign interests. Foreign ownership of U.S. agricultural land has increased by 66% since 2010. In 2021, it was reported that foreign investors owned approximately 40 million acres of U.S. agricultural land, which is more than the entire state of Iowa. By 2022 that number had grown to 43.4 million acres. The rate at which U.S. farmland is being bought up by foreign interests grew by 2.2 million acres per year from 2015 to 2021. The number of U.S. farm acres owned by foreign entities grew more than 8% (3.4 million acres) in 2022.

    We’re losing more and more of our businesses every year to foreign corporations and interests. Although China owns a small fraction of foreign-owned U.S. land at 380,000 acres (less than the state of Rhode Island), Chinese companies and investors are also buying up major food companies, commercial and residential real estate, and other businesses. As RetailWire explains, “Currently, many brands started by early American pioneers now wave international flags. This revolution is a direct result of globalization.” The growing list of once-notable American brands that have been sold to foreign corporations includes: U.S. Steel (now Japanese-owned); General Electric (Chinese-owned); Budweiser (Belgium); Burger King (Canada); 7-Eleven (Japan); Jeep, Chrysler, and Dodge (Netherlands); and IBM (China).

    We’re digging ourselves deeper and deeper into debt, both as a nation and as a populace. Basically, the U.S. government is funding its existence with a credit card, spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford. The bulk of that debt has been amassed over the past two decades, thanks in large part to the fiscal shenanigans of four presidents, 10 sessions of Congress and two wars. The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) is more than $34 trillion and will grow another $19 trillion by 2033. Foreign ownership makes up 29% of the U.S. debt held by the public. Of that amount, reports the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, “52 percent was held by private foreign investors while foreign governments held the remaining 48 percent.”

    The Fourth Estate has been taken over by media conglomerates that prioritize profit over principle. Independent news agencies, which were supposed to act as bulwarks against government propaganda, have been subsumed by a global corporate takeover of newspapers, television and radio. Consequently, a handful of corporations now control most of the media industry and, thus, the information dished out to the public. Likewise, with Facebook and Google having appointed themselves the arbiters of disinformation, we now find ourselves grappling with new levels of corporate censorship by entities with a history of colluding with the government to keep the citizenry mindless, muzzled and in the dark.

    Most critically of all, however, the U.S. government, long ago sold to the highest bidders, has become little more than a shell company, a front for corporate interests. Nowhere is this state of affairs more evident than in the manufactured spectacle that is the presidential election. As for members of Congress, long before they’re elected, they are trained to dance to the tune of their wealthy benefactors, so much so that they spend two-thirds of their time in office raising money. As Reuters reports, “It also means that lawmakers often spend more time listening to the concerns of the wealthy than anyone else.”

    In the oligarchy that is the American police state, it clearly doesn’t matter who wins the White House, because they all work for the same boss: a Corporate State that has gone global.

    So much for living the American dream.

    “We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

    We’re being forced to shell out money for endless wars that are bleeding us dry; money for surveillance systems to track our movements; money to further militarize our already militarized police; money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts; money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply; and on and on.

    This is no way of life.

    It’s tempting to say that there’s little we can do about it, except that’s not quite accurate.

    There are a few things we can do (demand transparency, reject cronyism and graft, insist on fair pricing and honest accounting methods, call a halt to incentive-driven government programs that prioritize profits over people), but it will require that “we the people” stop playing politics and stand united against the politicians and corporate interests who have turned our government and economy into a pay-to-play exercise in fascism.

    Unfortunately, we’ve become so invested in identity politics that label us based on our political leanings that we’ve lost sight of the one label that unites us: we’re all Americans.

    The powers-that-be want us to adopt an “us versus them” mindset that keeps us powerless and divided. Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the only “us versus them” that matters is “we the people” against the Deep State.

    The post Who Owns America? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “What Did You Learn in School Today?”

    circa 1830: A slave auction in America. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)

    Through the centuries, the Republic that eventuated in North America has maintained a maximum of chutzpah and minimum of awareness in forging a creation myth that sees slavery and dispossession not as foundational but as inimical to the nation now known as the United States. But, of course, to confront the ugly reality would induce sleeplessness interrupted by haunted dreams, so far this unsteadiness has prevailed.
    — Dr. Gerald Horne1

    When an origin story is considered sacrosanct, any challenge to it is sacrilege.
    — Prof. Abby Reisman2

    In most areas of the United States, school will be starting up in a few weeks. This reminds me of the song “What Did You Learn in School Today?” which was written by Tom Paxton and then recorded and released by Pete Seeger in 1963. Paxton’s lyrics mock the misinformation and lies provided by the public school system. This prompted me to wonder what would happen if today’s school children returned home from school and responded to Paxton’s question.

    You’ll need to imagine that their teacher, (let’s call her, Ms Brown) is able to recast what follows in age appropriate language, a skill that lies far beyond my limited capacity and that he adopted a creative, critical thinking approach and not rote learning. Finally, how the precocious student conveys this information to parents might take the form of a jumbled response but we can hope the essential information is intact.

    Okay. How about something along the following lines: “What did you learn in school today?” We discussed the America Revolution in 1776 and Ms Brown said that when she was in school, she was taught that the American Revolution was about besieged colonists courageously standing up against British tyranny and it was all about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. She said the textbook authors characterized it as a glorious confirmation of American exceptionalism.

    One of countless celebratory examples that she was taught was from Joseph J. Ellis, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 (New York: Liveright 2021). According to Ellis and other myth-making historians, the greatest activity of this “Revolutionary generation” was their devotion to popular sovereignty and their “common sense of purpose.”3

    Ms Brown said that she later learned that this devotion excluded the majority of people in the new nation and that slavery existed in all 13 British colonies and had begun at least in 1619. And Africans weren’t the only ones aware of specious reasoning in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Hutchinson, the last colonial governor of Massachusetts, queried that if the rights were “absolutely inalienable” how could the delegates deprive so many Africans of “their right to liberty?”4 And this apparently included George Washington’s order for the genocidal attack on the Haudenosaunee nation in upstate New York where more than 40 villages were burned to the ground and all crops and winter provisions destroyed. Those not killed or captured fled to Canada. This event was, in truth, an example of the Founder’s “common purpose.”

    We learned that in 1700, roughly 75 percent of land in colonial New York state was owned by only 12 individuals. In Virginia, 1.7 million acres was held by seven individuals.5 In 1760, less than five hundred men in just five colonies controlled most of the shipping, banking, mining and manufacturing on the eastern seaboard and in1767 the richest 10 percent of Boston’s taxpayers had 66 percent of Boston’s taxable income while some 30 percent had no property at all.6 Ms Brown said that fifty-six of these propertied men later signed the Declaration of Independence.7

    Many of the Founders were not only slave holders but obsessive land speculators This included George Washington who began acquiring land in 1752, while still a teenager. He eventually owned more than 70,000 acres in what became seven states and the District of Colombia. Ms Brown smiled and said, “I cannot tell a lie. George Washington became the richest person in America.” We also learned that even before King George III issued his Proclamation forbidding settlements from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi, individuals and colonial land speculators were staking claims to millions of acres of and were eager to push forward into Indigenous land. Ms. Brown said that we must consider the possibility that Native dispossession and exclusion played a key role in creating the country through speculative capitalism.8 The patriotic fantasy or fig leaf for all of this was that America was destined by God to expand democracy and the Protestant ethos to the native inhabitants.

    Ms Brown said we should always look for other sources of information and rely on evidence. She learned from her own reading — outside of school — that there’s an entirely different view of the so-called Revolutionary War of 1776 and that it was actually part of a “counter-revolution,” a conservative movement that the “Founding Fathers” — Britain’s “revolting spawn” — fought to oust London. When the colonial elites broke with the Mother Country, the world’s first-ever apartheid state came into being.9 We learned that in the 1770s, the British Parliament was moving toward abolition and in 1773 there was the famous Somerset case in Britain in which Lord Mansfield banned slavery — calling it “odious” —within the country but not yet in the colonies. There was a real fear that Britain would soon cease to support slavery in the thirteen colonies. Simultaneously, Alexander Hamilton, another Founding Father, bought and sold slaves for his wife’s family, owned slaves himself and called Indigenous people “savages.”

    More specifically, Ms Brown told us that “…In November 1775, Lord Dunsmore in Virginia issued his famous — or infamous, in the view of the settlers — edict offering to free and arm Africans to squash an anti-colonial revolt, he entered a pre-existing maelstrom of insecurity about the fate of slavery and London’s intentions. And by speaking so bluntly, Dunsmore converted the moderates into radicals.” Indeed, another expert on the Colonial period says that Dunsmore’s edict “did more than any another measure to spur uncommitted white Americans into the camp of rebellion.”10 Our teacher said that many more Africans — some estimates run as high as 100,000 — allied with the Red Coats rather than with their masters. Of course there were risks for the Africans because if the Revolution succeeded they would be considered traitors and punished as such. It was a terrifying choice and their fears were justified because after the 1776-1783 Revolutionary War, tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people were returned to enslavement.

    We learned that in 1787, after the war, James Madison made sure that the Constitution guaranteed that the government would, in his words, “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” He was firmly against agrarian reform of any sort and opposed to anything akin to actual functioning democracy. Why? Because the majority — the poor and landless — might use the political power they were granted to force a redistribution of wealth.

    We learned that the British were jeopardizing numerous fortunes, not only based on slavery, but the slave trade. So, the war was necessary to protect the freedom of a small white elite to maintain slavery and further, not have any interference as they went ahead with dispossessing and exterminating indigenous people. In short, British colonialism was replaced with U.S. capitalist state colonialism.11

    Ms Brown said there was evidence strongly suggesting that the American Revolution was, in the words of historian William Hoagland, “The first chapter in an inter-imperial war between Great Britain and its dissident elite in North America.” We learned that the Euro-American elite ‘patriots” had only contempt and fear of actual democracy which they termed “The tyranny of the majority.” One historian pointed out that “The American state, even in its earliest incarnation was more concerned with limiting popular democracy than securing and expanding it.”12 He told us that the Declaration’s phrase “Life, liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” was changed in the Constitution to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property.”

    In support of this revisionist history, Ms Brown shared a few excerpts from Howard Zinn’s magisterial book, A People’s History of the United States, in which he cogently explains that over a relatively short period, the colonial elite were able to:

    … take over land, profits and power from the British empire. In the process they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new privileged leadership. When we look at the American Revolution in that way it was a work of genius.

    The Declaration of Independence was a wonderfully useful device because the language of liberty and equality could unite just enough whites to fight for the Revolution, without ending either slavery or inequality.

    …the rebellion against British rule allowed a certain group of the colonial elite to replace those loyal to England, give some benefits to small holders and leave poor white working people and tenant farmers in very much the same situation.13

    Finally, we considered that in 1776, nascent capitalists pulled off the ultimate coup and succeeded in “convincing the deluded and otherwise naive (to this very day) that this naked grab for land, slaves and power was somehow a great leap forward for humanity.”14

    Just before the bell rang, one kid in my class asked the teacher, “If what we’ve previously been taught about the American Revolution may not be true what else may not be true?” Ms Brown said that was a good question and we’d talk about it next week and also do some role playing.

    ENDNOTES:

    The post “What Did You Learn in School Today?” first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in the Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018) p.191. Dr. Horne is a national treasure and I concur with those who’ve described him as the preeminent radical historian of our era. I suspect this accounts for why so few people know of his indispensable work.
    2    Abby Reisman, “America as it actually was: Symposium confronts American myth, complexities of teaching 1777 in light of 1619. Penn GSE News, April 1 2022.
    3    Book Browse, “An Interview with Joseph J. Ellis.”
    4    Comment, in Woody Holton, ed. Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era: A Brief History With Documents, (Boston: Bedford, 2009) 6-7 in Horne, p.238. Here it should be noted that the Reconstruction period of 1865-1877 was the sole attempt to realize interracial democracy — what W.E.B. Du Bois termed “abolition democracy — and with it, the potential for economic democracy. The best account of Reconstruction’s remarkable achievements and its ultimate defeat at the hands of racial terrorism and the withdrawal of Federal support is Manisha Sinha’s new book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic (New York: Norton, 2024). Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut.
    5    Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2011), p.5
    6    Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. (New York: Harpers, 2008, 2011).
    7    Parenti, p.11.
    8    For more on this topic, see, Michael A. Blackman, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023); Colin Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); “The Founders and the Pursuit of Land,” The Lehrman Institute.
    9    Gerald Horne, The Counter Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. (New York: New York University Press, 2014), p.222 and 224. This section relies on Horne’s thoroughly documented Chapter Nine “Abolition in London” with its 147 footnotes.
    10    Ibid, p.224.
    11    For a semi-autobiographical piece on U.S. capitalist state colonialism toward Native-Americans, see, Gary OIson, “Decolonizing Our Minds, Including My Own, About U.S. Capitalist State Settler Colonialism,” Left Turn, Vol 3, No. 2, Fall 2021.
    12    William Hoagland, “Not Our Independence Day,” Interviewed by Jonah Waters, Jacobin, 07/04/2006.
    13    All quotations from Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States.
    14    William Pettigrew, “Commercialization,” in Joseph C. Miller, ed., <em>The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History</em>, 111-116 at 115.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “What Did You Learn in School Today?”

    circa 1830: A slave auction in America. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)

    Through the centuries, the Republic that eventuated in North America has maintained a maximum of chutzpah and minimum of awareness in forging a creation myth that sees slavery and dispossession not as foundational but as inimical to the nation now known as the United States. But, of course, to confront the ugly reality would induce sleeplessness interrupted by haunted dreams, so far this unsteadiness has prevailed.
    — Dr. Gerald Horne1

    When an origin story is considered sacrosanct, any challenge to it is sacrilege.
    — Prof. Abby Reisman2

    In most areas of the United States, school will be starting up in a few weeks. This reminds me of the song “What Did You Learn in School Today?” which was written by Tom Paxton and then recorded and released by Pete Seeger in 1963. Paxton’s lyrics mock the misinformation and lies provided by the public school system. This prompted me to wonder what would happen if today’s school children returned home from school and responded to Paxton’s question.

    You’ll need to imagine that their teacher, (let’s call her, Ms Brown) is able to recast what follows in age appropriate language, a skill that lies far beyond my limited capacity and that he adopted a creative, critical thinking approach and not rote learning. Finally, how the precocious student conveys this information to parents might take the form of a jumbled response but we can hope the essential information is intact.

    Okay. How about something along the following lines: “What did you learn in school today?” We discussed the America Revolution in 1776 and Ms Brown said that when she was in school, she was taught that the American Revolution was about besieged colonists courageously standing up against British tyranny and it was all about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. She said the textbook authors characterized it as a glorious confirmation of American exceptionalism.

    One of countless celebratory examples that she was taught was from Joseph J. Ellis, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 (New York: Liveright 2021). According to Ellis and other myth-making historians, the greatest activity of this “Revolutionary generation” was their devotion to popular sovereignty and their “common sense of purpose.”3

    Ms Brown said that she later learned that this devotion excluded the majority of people in the new nation and that slavery existed in all 13 British colonies and had begun at least in 1619. And Africans weren’t the only ones aware of specious reasoning in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Hutchinson, the last colonial governor of Massachusetts, queried that if the rights were “absolutely inalienable” how could the delegates deprive so many Africans of “their right to liberty?”4 And this apparently included George Washington’s order for the genocidal attack on the Haudenosaunee nation in upstate New York where more than 40 villages were burned to the ground and all crops and winter provisions destroyed. Those not killed or captured fled to Canada. This event was, in truth, an example of the Founder’s “common purpose.”

    We learned that in 1700, roughly 75 percent of land in colonial New York state was owned by only 12 individuals. In Virginia, 1.7 million acres was held by seven individuals.5 In 1760, less than five hundred men in just five colonies controlled most of the shipping, banking, mining and manufacturing on the eastern seaboard and in1767 the richest 10 percent of Boston’s taxpayers had 66 percent of Boston’s taxable income while some 30 percent had no property at all.6 Ms Brown said that fifty-six of these propertied men later signed the Declaration of Independence.7

    Many of the Founders were not only slave holders but obsessive land speculators This included George Washington who began acquiring land in 1752, while still a teenager. He eventually owned more than 70,000 acres in what became seven states and the District of Colombia. Ms Brown smiled and said, “I cannot tell a lie. George Washington became the richest person in America.” We also learned that even before King George III issued his Proclamation forbidding settlements from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi, individuals and colonial land speculators were staking claims to millions of acres of and were eager to push forward into Indigenous land. Ms. Brown said that we must consider the possibility that Native dispossession and exclusion played a key role in creating the country through speculative capitalism.8 The patriotic fantasy or fig leaf for all of this was that America was destined by God to expand democracy and the Protestant ethos to the native inhabitants.

    Ms Brown said we should always look for other sources of information and rely on evidence. She learned from her own reading — outside of school — that there’s an entirely different view of the so-called Revolutionary War of 1776 and that it was actually part of a “counter-revolution,” a conservative movement that the “Founding Fathers” — Britain’s “revolting spawn” — fought to oust London. When the colonial elites broke with the Mother Country, the world’s first-ever apartheid state came into being.9 We learned that in the 1770s, the British Parliament was moving toward abolition and in 1773 there was the famous Somerset case in Britain in which Lord Mansfield banned slavery — calling it “odious” —within the country but not yet in the colonies. There was a real fear that Britain would soon cease to support slavery in the thirteen colonies. Simultaneously, Alexander Hamilton, another Founding Father, bought and sold slaves for his wife’s family, owned slaves himself and called Indigenous people “savages.”

    More specifically, Ms Brown told us that “…In November 1775, Lord Dunsmore in Virginia issued his famous — or infamous, in the view of the settlers — edict offering to free and arm Africans to squash an anti-colonial revolt, he entered a pre-existing maelstrom of insecurity about the fate of slavery and London’s intentions. And by speaking so bluntly, Dunsmore converted the moderates into radicals.” Indeed, another expert on the Colonial period says that Dunsmore’s edict “did more than any another measure to spur uncommitted white Americans into the camp of rebellion.”10 Our teacher said that many more Africans — some estimates run as high as 100,000 — allied with the Red Coats rather than with their masters. Of course there were risks for the Africans because if the Revolution succeeded they would be considered traitors and punished as such. It was a terrifying choice and their fears were justified because after the 1776-1783 Revolutionary War, tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people were returned to enslavement.

    We learned that in 1787, after the war, James Madison made sure that the Constitution guaranteed that the government would, in his words, “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” He was firmly against agrarian reform of any sort and opposed to anything akin to actual functioning democracy. Why? Because the majority — the poor and landless — might use the political power they were granted to force a redistribution of wealth.

    We learned that the British were jeopardizing numerous fortunes, not only based on slavery, but the slave trade. So, the war was necessary to protect the freedom of a small white elite to maintain slavery and further, not have any interference as they went ahead with dispossessing and exterminating indigenous people. In short, British colonialism was replaced with U.S. capitalist state colonialism.11

    Ms Brown said there was evidence strongly suggesting that the American Revolution was, in the words of historian William Hoagland, “The first chapter in an inter-imperial war between Great Britain and its dissident elite in North America.” We learned that the Euro-American elite ‘patriots” had only contempt and fear of actual democracy which they termed “The tyranny of the majority.” One historian pointed out that “The American state, even in its earliest incarnation was more concerned with limiting popular democracy than securing and expanding it.”12 He told us that the Declaration’s phrase “Life, liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” was changed in the Constitution to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property.”

    In support of this revisionist history, Ms Brown shared a few excerpts from Howard Zinn’s magisterial book, A People’s History of the United States, in which he cogently explains that over a relatively short period, the colonial elite were able to:

    … take over land, profits and power from the British empire. In the process they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new privileged leadership. When we look at the American Revolution in that way it was a work of genius.

    The Declaration of Independence was a wonderfully useful device because the language of liberty and equality could unite just enough whites to fight for the Revolution, without ending either slavery or inequality.

    …the rebellion against British rule allowed a certain group of the colonial elite to replace those loyal to England, give some benefits to small holders and leave poor white working people and tenant farmers in very much the same situation.13

    Finally, we considered that in 1776, nascent capitalists pulled off the ultimate coup and succeeded in “convincing the deluded and otherwise naive (to this very day) that this naked grab for land, slaves and power was somehow a great leap forward for humanity.”14

    Just before the bell rang, one kid in my class asked the teacher, “If what we’ve previously been taught about the American Revolution may not be true what else may not be true?” Ms Brown said that was a good question and we’d talk about it next week and also do some role playing.

    ENDNOTES:

    The post “What Did You Learn in School Today?” first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in the Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018) p.191. Dr. Horne is a national treasure and I concur with those who’ve described him as the preeminent radical historian of our era. I suspect this accounts for why so few people know of his indispensable work.
    2    Abby Reisman, “America as it actually was: Symposium confronts American myth, complexities of teaching 1777 in light of 1619. Penn GSE News, April 1 2022.
    3    Book Browse, “An Interview with Joseph J. Ellis.”
    4    Comment, in Woody Holton, ed. Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era: A Brief History With Documents, (Boston: Bedford, 2009) 6-7 in Horne, p.238. Here it should be noted that the Reconstruction period of 1865-1877 was the sole attempt to realize interracial democracy — what W.E.B. Du Bois termed “abolition democracy — and with it, the potential for economic democracy. The best account of Reconstruction’s remarkable achievements and its ultimate defeat at the hands of racial terrorism and the withdrawal of Federal support is Manisha Sinha’s new book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic (New York: Norton, 2024). Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut.
    5    Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2011), p.5
    6    Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. (New York: Harpers, 2008, 2011).
    7    Parenti, p.11.
    8    For more on this topic, see, Michael A. Blackman, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023); Colin Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); “The Founders and the Pursuit of Land,” The Lehrman Institute.
    9    Gerald Horne, The Counter Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. (New York: New York University Press, 2014), p.222 and 224. This section relies on Horne’s thoroughly documented Chapter Nine “Abolition in London” with its 147 footnotes.
    10    Ibid, p.224.
    11    For a semi-autobiographical piece on U.S. capitalist state colonialism toward Native-Americans, see, Gary OIson, “Decolonizing Our Minds, Including My Own, About U.S. Capitalist State Settler Colonialism,” Left Turn, Vol 3, No. 2, Fall 2021.
    12    William Hoagland, “Not Our Independence Day,” Interviewed by Jonah Waters, Jacobin, 07/04/2006.
    13    All quotations from Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States.
    14    William Pettigrew, “Commercialization,” in Joseph C. Miller, ed., <em>The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History</em>, 111-116 at 115.

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  • Resisting AUKUS: The Paul Keating Formula

    From his own redoubt of critical inquiry, the former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating has made fighting the imperialising leprosy of the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the UK and the United States a matter of solemn duty.

    In March 15, 2023, he excoriated a Canberra press gallery seduced and tantalised by the prospect of nuclear-powered submarines, calling the Albanese government’s complicit arrangements with the US and UK to acquire such a capability “the worst international decision by an Australian Labor government since the former Labor leader, Billy Hughes, sought to introduce conscription to augment Australian forces in World War one.”

    His latest spray was launched in the aftermath of a touched-up AUKUS, much of it discussed in a letter by US President Joe Biden to the US House Speaker and President of the Senate.  The revised agreement between the three powers for Cooperation Related to Naval Nuclear Propulsion is intended to supersede the November 22, 2021 agreement between the three powers on the Exchange of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information (ENNPIA).

    The new agreement permits “the continued communication and exchange of NNPI, including certain RD, and would also expand the cooperation between the governments by enabling the transfer of naval nuclear propulsion plants of conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines, including component parts and spare parts thereof, and other related equipment.”  The new arrangements will also permit the sale of special nuclear material in the welded power units, along with other relevant “material as needed for such naval propulsion plants.”

    The contents of Biden’s letter irked Keating less than the spectacular show of servility shown by Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong on their visit to Annapolis for the latest AUSMIN talks.  In what has become a pattern of increasing subordination of Australian interests to the US Imperium, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken played happy hosts and must have been delighted by what they heard.

    The details that emerged from the conversations held between the four – details which rendered Keating passionately apoplectic – can only make those wishing for an independent Australian defence policy weep.  Words such as “Enhanced Force Posture Cooperation” were used to describe the intrusion of the US armed forces into every sphere of Australian defence: the domains of land, maritime, air, and space.

    Ongoing infrastructure investments at such Royal Australian Air Force Bases as Darwin and Tindal continue to take place, not to bolster Australian defence but fortify the country as a US forward defensive position.  To these can be added, as the Pentagon fact sheet reveals, “site surveys for potential upgrades at RAAF Bases Curtin, Learmonth, and Scherger.”

    The degree of subservience Canberra affords is guaranteed by increased numbers of US personnel to take place in rotational deployments.   These will include “frequent rotations of bombers, fighter aircraft, and Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Aircraft”.  Secret arrangements have also been made involving the disposal of nuclear propulsion plants that will feature in Australia’s nuclear powered submarine fleet, though it is unclear how broad that commitment is.

    The venomous icing on the cake – at least for AUKUS critics – comes in the form of an undisclosed “Understanding” that involves “additional related political commitments”.  The Australian Greens spokesperson on Defence, Senator David Shoebridge, rightly wonders “what has to be kept secret from the Australian public?  There are real concerns the secret understanding includes commitments binding us to the US in the event they go to war with China in return for getting nuclear submarines.”

    Marles has been stumblingly unforthcoming in that regard.  When asked what such “additional political commitments” were, he coldly replied that the agreement was “as we’ve done it.”  The rest was “misinformation” being spread by detractors of the alliance.

    It is precisely the nature of these undertakings, and what was made public at Annapolis, that paved the way for Keating’s hefty salvo on ABC’s 7.30.  The slavishness of the whole affair had made Keating “cringe”.  “This government has sold out to the United States.  They’ve fallen for the dinner on the White House lawn.”

    He proved unsparing about Washington’s intentions.  “What AUKUS is about in the American mind is turning [Australia into suckers], locking us up for 40 years with American bases all around … not Australian bases.”  It meant, quite simply, “in American terms, the military control of Australia.  I mean, what’s happened … is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States.”

    Having the US as an ally was itself problematic, largely because of its belligerent intentions.  “If we didn’t have an aggressive ally like the United States – aggressive to others in the region – there’d be nobody attacking Australia.  We are better left alone than we are being ‘protected’ by an aggressive power like the United States.”

    As for what Australian obligations to the US entailed, the former PM was in little doubt.  “What this is all about is the Chinese laying claim to Taiwan, and the Americans are going to say ‘no, no, we’re going to keep these Taiwanese people protected’, even though they’re sitting on Chinese real estate.”  Were Australia to intervene, the picture would rapidly change: an initial confrontation between Beijing and Washington over the island would eventually lead to the realisation that catastrophic loss would simply not be worth it, leaving Australia “the ones who have done all the offence.”

    As for Australia’s own means of self-defence against any adversary or enemy, Keating uttered the fundamental heresy long stomped on by the country’s political and intelligence establishment: Canberra could, if needed, go it alone.  “Australia is capable of defending itself.  There’s no way another state can invade a country like Australia with an armada of ships without it all failing.”  Australia did not “need to be basically a pair of shoes hanging out of Americans’ backside.”  With Keating’s savage rhetoric, and the possibility that AUKUS may collapse before the implosions of US domestic politics, improbable peace may break out.

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  • Look away from Israel’s crimes, they say, blame Iran

    They say Iran “masterminded” a Canadian student encampment and is “destabilizing” West Asia. But these crude ‘blame Iran’ claims are nothing more than pathetic attempts to legitimate genocidal Zionism.

    Recently, various commentators, politicians and Zionist groups promoted a deranged report Iran “masterminded” the student divestment encampment at McGill. Seeking to frame student opposition to their university’s complicity with Israel’s holocaust as Iranian interference, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Canada Proud, MP Kevin Vuong, senator Leo Housakos, conservative candidate Neil Oberman, influencer Yasmine Mohammed, journalist Sam Cooper, Hampstead mayor Jeremy Levi and others shared an Iran International report headlined “Iran masterminded anti-Israel protest in Canadian university”. Drawing from an analysis by an unnamed official at US cyber company XPOZ, the article claims large numbers of social media posts about the McGill encampment were in Farsi and may have come from Iranian government aligned accounts. A National Post article “Disinformation experts warn Iran, Russia and others encouraging anti-Israel protests in Canada” used the same data though it was slightly more circumspect in concluding Iran “masterminded” the encampment. It was shared by Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.

    As someone who went to the encampment regularly and has followed activism at McGill for a quarter century it’s hard to not laugh at the absurdity. In the lead up to the encampment several students went on a two-month hunger strike to pressure the university to divest and there were a number of large anti-genocide protests on campus during the last academic year. For a decade there have been referendums on Palestine and in November 78.7% of undergraduates called on the administration to sever ties with “any corporations, institutions or individuals complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.” It was the largest referendum turnout in the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) history.

    The broader context in which the encampment grew out of also demonstrates the silliness of the ‘blame Iran’ claim. The students who set up the McGill encampment were quite obviously mimicking the tactics of their US counterparts. And the tactic had little to do with social media. I doubt the reliability of the data quoted by Iran International and the National Post but even if lots of Farsi language Iranian government bots promoted the encampment what impact did this have on a physical occupation of a campus in Montreal?

    At a higher level of ‘blame Iran’ idiocy, foreign affairs minister Melanie Joly is claiming Iran is “destabilizing” the region. A statement she released on Sunday regarding rising tensions in the region concluded, “I reiterated our call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, for the immediate release of all hostages, and demand that Iran and its proxies refrain from destabilizing actions in the region.” On July 26 Canada, Australia and New Zealand released a joint statement with a similar formulation. It noted, “We condemn Iran’s attack against Israel of April 13-14, call on Iran to refrain from further destabilizing actions in the Middle East, and demand that Iran and its affiliated groups, including Hizballah, cease their attacks.”

    Canadian officials never refer to Israel as “destabilizing” the region even though that country has killed hundreds of thousands in Gaza and stolen ever more Palestinian land in the West Bank all the while repeatedly attacking Lebanon and Syria and assassinating the Palestinians’ main ceasefire negotiator in Iran.

    As part of its blame Iran nonsense, Ottawa has ignored Israel’s recent assassination of the Hamas leader in Tehran and top Hezbolah military commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut. But they will no doubt denounce Iran or Hezbollah when they respond.

    Four months ago, Ottawa remained silent when Israel damaged Canada’s embassy in Damascus while murdering eight Iranian officials at the country’s diplomatic compound. Then the Canadian government condemned Iran when it responded to Israel’s flagrant war crime.

    As part of this blame Iran mantra Ottawa recently joined the US in designating the 100,000-member Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organization. Listing the IRGC bolsters Israeli violence in the region.

    Canada continues to strengthen Israel as it commits horrific crime after horrific crime across the region. As death from illness and malnutrition grows due to 10 months of IOF barbarism in Gaza, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said it may be “justified and moral” to starve 2 million Palestinians but the world won’t let Israel do it. At the same time, Knesset members are openly debating the legitimacy of raping the 10,000 Palestinian hostages Israel holds in what a recent B’tselem report refers to as “torture camps”.

    But instead of focusing on Israel’s crimes we’re told to look away. At first, we were told Israel’s genocide was all Hamas’ fault. Now it’s Iran that is to blame.

    Israel and its supporters are like 4-year-olds caught with their hands in the cookie jar. It’s always someone else’s fault. Except this is not about a stolen sweet. This is about the world watching a genocide in real time and doing nothing about it.

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  • AUKUS Revamped: The Complete Militarisation of Australia

    There is much to loathe about the AUKUS security agreement between Canberra, Washington and London.  Of the three conspirators against stability in the Indo and Asia Pacific, one stands out as the shouldering platform, the sustaining force, the political and military stuffing.  But Australian propagandists and proselytisers of the US credo of power prefer to see it differently, repeatedly telling the good citizens down under that they are onto something truly special in being a military extension, the gargantuan annexe of another’s interests.  Give them nuclear powered submarines, let them feel special, and a false sense of security will follow.

    The August 2024 AUSMIN talks in Annapolis, Maryland, held between US Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and their Australian counterparts, Richard Marles (Minister of Defence) and Penny Wong (Foreign Minister) provided yet another occasion for this grim pantomime.  No one could be in doubt who the servitors were.

    The factsheet from the US Department of Defense on the meeting is worth noting for Washington’s military capture – no other word describes it – and Australia’s sycophantic accommodation.  As part of the “Enhanced Force Posture Cooperation,” the US and Australia are to advance “key priorities across an ambitious range of force posture cooperation efforts”.  This is merely a clumsy way of describing the deeper incorporation of Australia’s own military requirements into the US military complex “across land, maritime, air, and space domains, as well as the Combined Logistics, Sustainment, and Maintenance Enterprise”.  US military forces, in short, are to occupy every domain of Australia’s defence.

    The greedy and speedy US garrisoning of Australia is evident through ongoing “infrastructure investments at key Australian bases in the norther, including RAAF Bases Darwin and Tindal” and “site surveys for potential upgrades at RAAF Bases Curtin, Learmonth, and Scherger.”  Rotational deployments of US forces to Australia, “including frequent rotations of bombers, fighter aircraft, and Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Aircraft” are to increase in number.  As any student of US-Australian relations knows, rotation is the disingenuous term used to mask the presence of a permanently stationed force – occupation by another name.

    The public relations office has obviously been busy spiking the language with a sense of false equality: the finalising, for instance, by December 2024 of a Memorandum of Understanding on Co-Assembly for Guided Multiple Rocket Systems (GLMRS) – a “co-production”; finalising, by the same date, an MOU “on cooperative Production, Sustainment, and Follow-on Development of the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM)”; and institutionalising of “US cooperation with Australia’s Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) Enterprise”.  Everywhere we look, a sense of artificial cooperation under the cover of Washington’s heavy-handed dominance, be it cooperative activities for Integrated Air and Missile Defence, or the hypersonic weapons program, can be found.

    In this even more spectacular surrender of sovereignty and submission than previous undertakings, Canberra is promised second hand nuclear-powered toys in the form of Virginia Class submarines, something forever contingent on the wishes and whimsy of the US Congress.  But even this contingent state of affairs is sufficient for Australia to bury itself deeper in what has been announced as a revised AUKUS agreement.  More accurately, it constitutes a touch-up of the November 22, 2021 agreement between the three powers on the Exchange of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information (ENNPIA).

    The ENNPIA allows the AUKUS parties the means to communicate and exchange relevant Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information (NNPI), including officially Restricted Data (RD) as part of what is described as the “Optimal Pathway” for Australia’s needless acquisition of nuclear powered vessels.

    In his letter to the US House Speaker and President of the Senate, President Joe Biden explains the nature of the revision.  Less cumbersomely named than its predecessor, the new arrangements feature an Agreement between the three powers for Cooperation Related to Naval Nuclear Propulsion.  In superseding the ENNPIA, it “would permit the continued communication and exchange of NNPI, including certain RD, and would also expand the cooperation between the governments by enabling the transfer of naval nuclear propulsion plants of conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines, including component parts and spare parts thereof, and other related equipment.”

    The Agreement further permits the sale of special nuclear material in the welded power units, and other relevant “material as needed for such naval propulsion plants.”  Transferrable equipment would include that necessary for research, development, or design of naval propulsion plants.  The logistics of manufacture, development, design, manufacture, operation, maintenance, regulation and disposal of the plants is also covered.

    Tokenistic remarks about non-proliferation are then made in Biden’s letter.  The powers, for instance, commit themselves to “setting the highest nonproliferation standard” while protecting US classified information and intellectual property.  This standard is actually pitifully low: Australia has committed itself to proliferation not only by seeking to acquire submarine nuclear propulsion, but by subsidising the building of such submarines in US and UK shipyards.

    Marles, the persistently reliable spokesman for Australia’s wholesale capitulation to the US war machine, calls the document “the legal underpinning of our commitment to our international obligations so it’s a very significant step down the AUKUS path and again it’s another demonstration that we are making this happen.”

    Obligations is the operative word here, given that Australia is burdened by any number of undertakings, be it as a US military asset placed in harm’s way or becoming a radioactive storage dump for all the AUKUS submarine fleets.  Marles insists that the only nuclear waste that will end up on Australian soil will be that generated by Australia.  “That is the agreement that we reached with the UK and the US back in March of last year, and so all this is doing is providing for the legal underpinning of that.”

    Given that Australia has no standalone, permanent site to store high-level nuclear waste, even that undertaking is spurious.  Nor does the understanding prevent Australia from accepting the waste accruing from the fleets of all the navies.  Given the cringing servitude of Canberra, and the admission by the Australian government that they have made undisclosed “political commitments”, such an outcome cannot be ruled out.

    Always reliably waspish, former Australian Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating gave his assessment about the latest revelations of the AUSMIN talks.  “There’ll be an American force posture now in Australia, involving every domain.”  The Albanese government had “fallen for the dinner on the White House lawn.”  That, and much more besides.

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  • 21st Century Feudalism in Amerika

    If one views the classic 1993 Claude Berri film Germinal one can see what 19th century feudalism was all about. It took place in a mid-century Northern France mining region. Here in the USA we had John Sayle’s 1987 film Matawan, which portrayed the 1920 Matawan, West Virginia miner’s strike. Both films gave viewers a taste of how feudalism operates. Well, hang on gang because Amerika 2024 is fast approaching the evil of Capitalism on steroids.

    We have less than 10% of private sector workers here in unions, and about half of our states have what are called Right to Work laws. In a nutshell, this allows workers at a company to NOT join the union at that workplace, and still get ALL the benefits from collective bargaining agreements between the union and the company. Thus, you can refuse to join a union and still get ALL the benefits the union contract accomplishes. In 2018, the right-wing dominated Supreme Court allowed public sector AKA government workers to get the same benefits from union contracts WITHOUT having to join or pay union dues. Yes, the MAGA baseball cap should be MAFA (Make America Feudalist Again). Getting back to the private sector for a minute, just imagine that 90+ % of those workers don’t even have a union to represent them! So, the former cleaning lady we knew had a husband who was a highly skilled carpenter who worked at a local cabinet company — of course non-union. He and his three other cabinetmakers colleagues were really at the mercy of the owner, with no guarantee of sick days, paid vacations or health coverage paid by the company. The icing on the cake was when the owner decided to purchase new BMWs for himself, his wife, and their two kids — who were all on the books for great tax write-offs.

    In the winter of ’73, I was getting ready to finish my last year of college and was engaged to be married. I decided to look for a management trainee job and found one in the good old Sunday Times. My first day on the job, the sales manager of this linen supply company took me for a tour of the plant. First, we went into the humongous area where the dirty linens were washed and dried. This was mid January in a very cold and snowy Brooklyn, NY. That area of the plant had a number of massive dryers, which made that area heat up like one was in the subtropics. I looked at the workers and every single one of them was Afro American, the men dressed in white pants and shirts and the women looking honestly like the Aunt Jemima character from the pancake box. I was told later that these folks were non-union hourly waged employees. The sales manager, a sweaty, too fat for his tight suit Italian American like myself, leaned over to me as the terribly loud noises of the washers and dryers made it almost impossible to talk. He said, “Kid, the more we save the company the more we get in bonuses!” He then turned me over to the plant manager for more training.

    The next week, I was directed to spend it with a different delivery driver each day. I had to be there at 6 AM, and the truck garage was as cold and damp as the January winter would extend. I found out that these guys were actually in a union, but repeatedly each one of them told me how this was a ‘Sweetheart Union’ which did not do much for them. Sitting in an old truck that seemed to have arthritis, with a terrible heater and obviously balding tires I could see that point. These drivers did not just stop at a pickup at some bakery, butcher or supermarket, run in, drop off the new linens and run out with the old, dirty ones. No sir! I went in with each guy on each day and saw for myself how disgraceful this job was. We went into our first stop, a butcher in the Bronx. The owner said that he didn’t have time to have the dirty linens in a pile for pickup, so we had to go and find them. When we went down the dark, squeaky stairs to the basement, I could see a few sets of eyes peering at me in the darkness. The driver laughed. “They’re rats, they won’t bother you if you don’t go too close. Part of the job kid.” This seemed to be the same on just about every stop. We had to search for the linens just about every time. The rear or basement of these stores all looked like they needed an intensive cleaning.

    I quit the job after my third day on the trucks. Each driver told me how the company paid as little as possible in benefits and bonuses — and these guys had a union! Some union! The only caveat was that they could not get fired so easily because of the union. And, they got two or three major holidays off with pay. A one-week paid vacation and maybe a handful of paid sick days a year. They had to contribute towards their health coverage, and that insurance had high deductions, very high. When I found out what these guys were earning for the **** they had to go through, I couldn’t believe it! Driving a dinosaur in freezing cold weather with a terrible heater, or in the hot 90+ degree summer with NO AC, I really felt for these guys.

    Well, whenever the Amazons or Wal-Marts decide to squeeze their workers a bit more, that linen company in ’73 would look like Nirvana. How about the tens of millions of small businesses nationwide with no support at all for the workers? Do we have to continue to hope for the kindness of the bosses, and overlook the fleet of BMWs for family while many of us are treading the economic waters? You decide.

  • Image credit: AIER.
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  • US elites fail to sink Chinese swimmers

    US political and media elites tried but failed to sink the Chinese swimming team at the Paris Olympics.  The Chinese swimmers performed well despite the increased stress caused by media-induced rumors of “Chinese doping”. And now, the tables are being turned as the US anti-doping regime is coming under increasing scrutiny and criticism.

    The media manufactured cloud of suspicion

    Just a few months ago the NY Times and German ARD media ignited  the controversy with an “investigation” regarding an incident from December 2021. At that time, 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for a trace amount of the heart medication Trimetazadine (TMZ) during a swim meet for top swimmers from across the country.  The Chinese Anti Doping Agency investigated and learned that all the positively tested swimmers were staying at the same hotel and eating in the same dining room. The amount of TMZ detected was so low that in some cases it was detected one day, and not the next. Testing in the kitchen revealed that TMZ was on the counters and in the vent hood.

    The Chinese Anti Doping Agency (CHINADA) concluded that the athletes had been contaminated through food served in the dining room. They reported the facts to the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) and the international swimming federation (World Aquatics, formerly known as FINA) . Both organizations concurred with the conclusion that the athletes were innocent and should not be charged with an anti-doping rule violation.

    But the NY Times and ARD suggested something shady had occurred and the athletes may not have been innocent. They further suggested that  CHINADA and WADA may be in collusion and covering up mass doping.  .

    This story ignited a storm of accusations with the head of the US Anti Doping Agency (USADA), Travis Tygart, leading the pack.  Some prominent international swimmers have joined the fray with suggestions that the Chinese swimming accomplishments at the 2022 Tokyo Olympics were tainted, “not clean,” or based on cheating. The insinuations and suspicions continued into swimming competitions at the Paris Olympics. Many TV commentators at the Olympics referred to the insinuation one way or another. Media kept the suspicion alive by highlighting when a prominent international swimmer said anything about it. American champion swimmer Katie Ledecky said it was difficult to accept coming second behind a Chinese swimmer who might have doped. Legendary US swimmer Michael Phelps said any athlete guilty of doping should be banned forever – “one and done”.

    The US Congress got involved with Congressional representatives  to suspend or cancel US contributions to WADA. With the 2019 Rodchenkov Act, the US Congress has granted itself the power to arrest and penalize anyone in the world involved in “doping”.

    Paris 2024 Olympics

    Swimming at the 2024 Paris  Olympics is now over. The swimming powerhouses US  and Australia won the most medals with 28  and 18 respectively. But China did well, coming third with 12 swimming medals.  China’s Pan Zhanle was one of the superstars of the event, setting a new world record in the 100 m freestyle. He also anchored the Chinese relay team to their victory in the 4 x 100 meter medley relay, an event the US has dominated for 64 years.

    Chinese swimmers spoke about feeling additional stress and discomfort because of the accusations and rumors about doping. They were tested much more than any other team, with some 600 doping tests conducted leading into and during the games. There were zero violations.

    The superstar Pan Zhanle was not one of the swimmers who tested positive in 2021.

    So it was left to some critics to say his performance was not “humanly possible”.

    Tables are turned

    Chinese and other media are now pushing back and exposing the hypocrisy and double standards of the US anti-doping regime. Even the mainstream Newsweek magazine headlines “China turns the table on US doping accusations.”

    More significantly, on August 7 the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) publicly denounced USADA for having “allowed athletes who had doped, to compete  for years, in at least one case without ever publishing or sanctioning their anti-doping rule violations, in direct contravention of the World Anti-Doping Code and USADA’s own rules. The USADA scheme threatened the integrity of sporting competition, which the Code seeks to protect.”

    Other international organizations are also reacting negatively to the US efforts to be the global judge and jury. The International Olympic Committee has said that the US may lose hosting of future Olympic Games if the US undermines the global anti doping establishment.

    NY Times misleading information.

    The NY Times and Germany’s ARD launched and spurred this controversy with misleading reporting. A recent NYT article titled “A Doping Scandal” claims there is “a troubling pattern of positive doping tests in the Chinese swimming program.” Twelve members of the Chinese Olympic team tested positive in recent years for powerful performance-enhancing drugs but were cleared to keep competing.”  They insinuated malfeasance on the part of the Chinese swimmers, China Anti Doping Agency and World Anti Doping Agency.  By implication, the world swimming federation (World Aquatics) was also guilty.

    The NY Times claim that Trimetazidine is a “powerful performance-enhancing drug” is false. The medication is helpful for elderly individuals with weak hearts but does nothing for young athletes with healthy hearts.  As noted at SwimSwam magazine, “Dr. Benjamin Levine, a renowned sports cardiologist at UT Southwestern Medical School, says he doesn’t think it provides any benefit.”  If Western athletes doubt this or want to test it, Dr. Levine says they can imbibe RANOLAZINE which is very similar to TMZ and NOT PROHIBITED.

    The insinuation that dozens of Chinese swimmers from diverse parts of the country with different coaches were collectively imbibing a prohibited medication risking their careers and reputations does not pass the sniff test. Simple logic would indicate an accidental contamination of the food they were all eating, confirmed by the presence of the chemical in the dining room kitchen. That is what CHINADA, WADA and World Aquatics all determined. The commitment of Chinese swimmers to anti-doping and clean sport is confirmed by the renowned Australian swim coach Denis Cotterell.

    The need for thresholds

    This incident points to the need for there to be appropriate thresholds for determining a doping rule violation. Currently this is inconsistent. There are minimum levels for some chemicals and none for others. Modern test instruments can detect extremely small amounts – molecules – of a chemical. As a scientist at an official doping test laboratory said, “It is very dangerous to not have a minimum threshold because all sorts of chemicals are in the environment.”

    How did the TMZ get in the kitchen?

    A very important question remains unanswered: How did TMZ get into the hotel kitchen and the food that was being prepared for consumption by the Chinese athletes?

    There is a curious coincidence. During the same month, December 2021, the Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva – widely recognized as the best in the world – tested positive for a trace amount of TMZ when she was competing in the Russian Nationals in St. Peteresburg.  However  this was not reported by the Swedish laboratory until February,  just in time to disrupt the Beijing Winter Olympics.  Unlike the Chinese swimmers, Valieva was alone and unable to identify where the contamination seven weeks earlier came from. This one positive test for a trace amount of TMZ resulted in huge turmoil in Beijing, assumption of guilt contrary to common sense, and ultimately the destruction of Valieva’s international competitive career. Her suggestion there may have been sabotage was ignored. The NY Times thinks this case is “how it’s supposed to work.”

    Summary

    In Paris unlike Beijing in 2022, the accusations were a distraction but not totally disruptive. The fans in the swimming arena were respectful and appreciative of the Chinese athletes. Some international swimmers also  ignored the controversy and did the right thing. They congratulated the Chinese swimmers when they were victorious. Australian Kyle Chalmers congratulated Pan Zhanle.  American Caleb Dressel acknowledged the Chinese swimmers were the best that day they won the 4 x 100m medley.

    The attempt to torpedo the Chinese swimmers and undermine China’s international image did not succeed.

    The post US elites fail to sink Chinese swimmers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Nothing’s changed since 1948 except now Israel’s excuses don’t work

    The headline above, about yet another Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the tiny, besieged and utterly destroyed enclave of Gaza, was published in yesterday’s Middle East Eye.

    When I began studying Israeli history more than a quarter of a century ago, people claiming to be experts proffered plenty of excuses to explain why Israelis should not be held responsible for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes – what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe.

    1. I was told most Israelis were not involved and knew nothing of the war crimes carried out against the Palestinians during Israel’s establishment.

    2. I was told that those Israelis who did take part in war crimes, like Operation Broom to expel Palestinians from their homeland, did so only because they were traumatised by their experiences in Europe. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, these Israelis assumed that, were the Jewish people to survive, they had no alternative but to drive out the Palestinians en masse.

    3. From others, I was told that no ethnic cleansing had taken place. The Palestinians had simply fled at the first sign of conflict because they had no real historical attachment to the land.

    4. Or I was told that the Palestinians’ displacement was an unfortunate consequence of a violent war in which Israeli leaders had the best interests of Palestinians at heart. The Palestinians hadn’t left because of Israeli violence but because they has been ordered to do so by Arab leaders in the region. In fact, the story went, Israel had pleaded with many of the 750,000 refugees to come home afterwards, but those same Arab leaders stubbornly blocked their return.

    Every one of these claims was nonsense, directly contradicted by all the documentary evidence.

    That should be even clearer today, as Israel continues the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of the Palestinian people more than 75 years on.

    1. Every Israeli knows exactly what is going on in Gaza – after all, their children-soldiers keep posting videos online showing the latest crimes they have committed, from blowing up mosques and hospitals to shooting randomly into homes. Polls show all but a small minority of Israelis approve of the savagery that has killed many tens of thousands of Palestinians, including children. A third of them think Israel needs to go further in its barbarity.

    Today, Israeli TV shows host debates about how much pain soldiers should be allowed to inflict by raping their Palestinian captives. Don’t believe me? Watch this from Israel’s Channel 12:

    2. If the existential fears of Israelis and Jews still require the murder, rape and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians three-quarters of a century on from the Holocaust, then we need to treat that trauma as the problem – and refuse to indulge it any longer.

    3. The people of Gaza are fleeing their homes – or at least the small number who still have homes not bombed to ruins – not because they lack an attachment to Palestine. They are fleeing from one part of the cage Israel has created for them to another part of it for one reason alone: because all of them – men, women and children – are terrified of being slaughtered by an Israeli military, at best, indifferent to their suffering and their fate.

    4. No serious case can be made today that Israel is carrying out any of its crimes in Gaza – from bombing civilians to starving them – with regret, or that its leaders seek the best for the Palestinian population. Israel is on trial for genocide at the world’s highest court precisely because the judges there suspect it has the very worst intentions possible towards the Palestinian people.

    We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel. It was always a settler colonial project. And like other settler colonial projects – from the US and Australia to South Africa and Algeria – it always viewed the native people as inferior, as non-human, as animals, and was bent on their elimination.

    What is so obviously true today was true then too, at Israel’s birth. Israel was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin.

    We in the West abetted its crimes in 1948, and we’re still abetting them today. Nothing has changed, except the excuses no longer work.

    The post Nothing’s changed since 1948 except now Israel’s excuses don’t work first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Let’s Think About How to Build a More Peaceful World

    Although the current U.S. presidential campaign has focused almost entirely on domestic issues, Americans live on a planet engulfed in horrific wars, an escalating arms race, and repeated threats of nuclear annihilation. Amid this dangerous reality, shouldn’t we give some thought to how to build a more peaceful future?

    Back in 1945, toward the end of the most devastating war in history, the world’s badly battered nations, many of them in smoldering ruins, agreed to create the United Nations, with a mandate to “maintain international peace and security.”

    It was not only a relevant idea, but one that seemed to have a lot of potential. The new UN General Assembly would provide membership and a voice for the world’s far-flung nations, while the new UN Security Council would assume the responsibility for enforcing peace. Furthermore, the venerable International Court of Justice (better known as the World Court) would issue judgments on disputes among nations. And the International Criminal Court―created as an afterthought nearly four decades later―would try individuals for crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. It almost seemed as if a chaotic, ungovernable, and bloodthirsty pack of feuding nations had finally evolved into the long-standing dream of “One World.”

    But, as things turned out, the celebration was premature.

    The good news is that, in some ways, the new arrangement for global governance actually worked. UN action did, at times, prevent or end wars, reduce international conflict, and provide a forum for discussion and action by the world community. Thanks to UN decolonization policies, nearly all colonized peoples emerged from imperial subjugation to form new nations, assisted by international aid for economic and social development. A Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, set vastly-improved human rights standards for people around the world. UN entities swung into action to address new global challenges in connection with public health, poverty, and climate change.

    Even so, despite the benefits produced by the United Nations, this pioneering international organization sometimes fell short of expectations, particularly when it came to securing peace. Tragically, much international conflict persisted, bringing with it costly arms races, devastating wars, and massive destruction. To some degree, this persistent conflict reflected ancient hatreds that people proved unable to overcome and that unscrupulous demagogues worked successfully to inflame.

    But there were also structural reasons for ongoing international conflict. In a world without effective enforcement of international law, large, powerful nations could continue to lord it over smaller, weaker nations. Thus, the rulers of these large, powerful nations (plus a portion of their citizenry) were often reluctant to surrender this privileged status.

    Symptomatically, the five victorious great powers of 1945 (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China) insisted that their participation in the United Nations hinged upon their receiving permanent seats in the new UN Security Council, including a veto enabling them to block Security Council actions not to their liking. Over the ensuing decades, they used the veto hundreds of times to stymie UN efforts to maintain international peace and security.

    Similarly, the nine nuclear nations (including these five great powers) refused to sign the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which has been endorsed by the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations. Behind their resistance to creating a nuclear weapons-free world lies a belief that there is much to lose by giving up the status and power that nuclear weapons afford them.

    Of course, from the standpoint of building a peaceful world, this is a very short-sighted position, and the reckless behavior and nuclear arrogance of the powerful have led, at times, to massive opposition by peace and nuclear disarmament movements, as well as by many smaller, more peacefully-inclined nations.

    Thanks to this resistance and to a widespread desire for peace, possibilities do exist for overcoming UN paralysis on numerous matters of international security. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to abolish the Security Council veto outright, given the fact that, under the UN Charter, the five permanent members have the power to veto that action, as well. But Article 27(3) of the Charter does provide that nations party to a dispute before the Council must abstain from voting on that issue―a provision that provides a means to circumvent the veto. In addition, 124 UN nations have endorsed a proposal to scrap the veto in connection with genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass atrocities, while the UN General Assembly has previously used “Uniting for Peace” resolutions to act on peace and security issues when the Security Council has evaded its responsibility to do so.

    Global governance could also be improved through other measures. They include increasing the number of nations accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and securing wider ratification of the founding statute of the International Criminal Court (which has yet to be ratified by Russia, the United States, China, India, and other self-appointed guardians of the world’s future).

    It won’t be easy, of course, to replace the law of force with the force of law. Only this May, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court took a bold step toward strengthening international norms by announcing that he was seeking arrest warrants for top Israeli officials and Hamas commanders for crimes in and around Gaza. In response, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act,” legislation requiring the U.S. executive to impose sanctions on individuals connected with the ICC.

    Despite the nationalist backlash, however, the time has arrived to consider bolstering international institutions that can build a more peaceful world. And the current U.S. presidential campaign provides an appropriate place for raising this issue. After all, Americans, like the people of other lands, have a personal stake in ensuring human survival.

    The post Let’s Think About How to Build a More Peaceful World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • AUKUS tech trade reforms set for sign-off

    Australia and United States are poised to unlock billions of dollars in licence-free defence trade on within weeks after the US agreed to sign off on legislation enabling AUKUS technology transfer. Australia was notified of the Biden Administration’s intent to progress its reciprocal legislation at the Australia-US Ministerial Consultations (AUSMIN) in the US city of…

    The post AUKUS tech trade reforms set for sign-off appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • What next for Google after illegal monopoly ruling?

    On Tuesday, a US federal judge ruled Google has violated antitrust laws, saying the organisation is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. Google disputes the ruling. Its president of global affairs, Kent Walker, said “this decision recognises that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t…

    The post What next for Google after illegal monopoly ruling? appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • NATO Imperialist Insistence Will Continue to be Met with Global South Resistance

    This July, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) held its annual summit in Washington, DC, where they celebrated themselves for continuing to exist for 75 years, despite the growing opposition around the world to Western hegemony that the US, EU, and their military gang of thugs NATO carry out.

    Even after months of massive and consistent protests against the genocide in Gaza, it seems inconceivable that NATO would still gather to plan the next phase in maintaining Western imperialist hegemony over the world, but this is logical and necessary for their purposes because imperialism cannot continue to rule the world without the military might of the Western powers to enforce it.

    So, they had to meet to discuss the fire sale and privatization of a war-decimated Ukraine, as well as their next aggressive actions toward China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, the Sahel States in Africa, as well as their ability to meddle in Sudan, Chad, Congo, and other states on the Continent that have been resource-extraction and labor-exploitation playgrounds for global capitalists, protected by NATO and AFRICOM forces to keep the people opposed to them under control.

    But there is always a radical response to this deadly status quo. Several counter-summits were organized, and members of BAP participated at every level, in planning, delivering speeches, and participating in mobilizations as part of them. Our focus has for years been to recognize NATO not as a singular entity, but as part of the US/EU/NATO AXIS OF DOMINATION that must be opposed by all liberation- and peace-minded people, and we shared that focus with the people in these events. Our resistance work continues to hold to and advance this line, as we also continue to organize with oppressed people in our communities and around the world against the deadly manifestation of NATO and its US and EU imperialist masters.

    The post NATO Imperialist Insistence Will Continue to be Met with Global South Resistance first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Only a Failing US Empire Would Be So Blind as to Cheer Netanyahu and his Genocide

    There is only one country in the world right now, in the midst of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is guaranteed dozens of standing ovations from the vast majority of its elected representatives.

    That country is not Israel, where he has been a hugely divisive figure for many years. It is the United States.

    On Wednesday, Netanyahu was back-slapped, glad-handed, whooped and cheered as he slowly made his way – hailed at every step as a conquering hero – to the podium of the US Congress.

    This was the same Netanyahu who has overseen during the past 10 months the slaughter– so far – of some 40,000 Palestinians, around half of them women and children. More than 21,000 other children are reported missing, most of them likely dead under rubble.

    It was the same Netanyahu who levelled a strip of territory – originally home to 2.3 million Palestinians – that is expected to take 80 years to rebuild, at a cost of at least $50bn.

    It was the same Netanyahu who has destroyed every hospital and university in Gaza, and bombed almost all of its schools that were serving as shelters for families made homeless by other Israeli bombs.

    It was the same Netanyahu whose arrest is being sought by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, accused of using starvation as a weapon of war by imposing an aid blockade that has engineered a famine across Gaza.

    It was the same Netanyahu whose government was found last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to have been intensifying Israel’s apartheid rule over the Palestinian people in an act of long-term aggression.

    It was the same Netanyahu whose government is standing trial for committing what the ICJ, the world’s highest judicial body, has termed a “plausible genocide”.

    And yet, there was just one visible protester in the congressional chamber. Rashida Tlaib, the only US legislator of Palestinian heritage, sat silently grasping a small black sign. On one side it said: “War criminal”. On the other: “Guilty of genocide”.

    One person among hundreds mutely trying to point out that the emperor was naked.

    Cocooned from horror

    Indeed, the optics were stark.

    This looked less like a visit by a foreign leader than a decorated elder general being welcomed back to the Senate in ancient Rome, or a grey-haired British viceroy from India embraced in the motherland’s parliament, after brutally subduing the “barbarians” on the fringes of empire.

    This was a scene familiar from history books: of imperial brutality and colonial savagery, recast by the seat of the imperium as valour, honour, civilisation. And it looked every bit as absurd, and abhorrent, as it does when we look back on what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

    It was a reminder that, despite our self-serving claims of progress and humanitarianism, our world is not very different from the way it has been for thousands of years.

    It was a reminder that power elites like to celebrate the demonstration of their power, cocooned both from the horrors faced by those crushed by their might, and from the clamour of protest of those horrified by the infliction of so much suffering.

    It was a reminder that this is not a “war” between Israel and Hamas – let alone, as Netanyahu would have us believe, a battle for civilisation between the Judeo-Christian world and the Islamic world.

    This is a US imperial war – part of its military campaign for “global, full-spectrum dominance” – carried out by Washington’s most favoured client state.

    The genocide is fully a US genocide, armed by Washington, paid for by Washington, given diplomatic cover by Washington, and – as the scenes in Congress underlined – cheered on by Washington.

    Or as Netanyahu stated in a moment of unintentional candour to Congress: “Our enemies are your enemy, our fight is your fight, and our victory will be your victory.”

    Israel is Washington’s largest military outpost in the oil-rich Middle East. The Israeli army is the Pentagon’s main battalion in that strategically important region. And Netanyahu is the outpost’s commander in chief.

    What is vital to Washington elites is that the outpost is supported at all costs; that it doesn’t fall to the “barbarians”.

    Outpouring of lies

    There was another small moment of inadvertent truth amid Netanyahu’s outpouring of lies. The Israeli prime minister stated that what was happening in Gaza was “a clash between barbarism and civilisation”. He was not wrong.

    On the one side, there is the barbarism of the current joint Israeli-US genocide against the people of Gaza, a dramatic escalation of the 17-year Israeli siege of the enclave that preceded it, and the decades of belligerent rule under an Israeli system of apartheid before that.

    And on the other side, there are the embattled few desperately trying to safeguard the West’s professed values of “civilisation”, of international humanitarian law, of the protection of the weak and vulnerable, of the rights of children.

    The US Congress decisively showed where it stood: with barbarism.

    Netanyahu has become the most feted foreign leader in US history, invited to speak to Congress four times, surpassing even Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill.

    He is fully Washington’s creature. His savagery, his monstrousness is entirely made in America. As he implored his US handlers: “Give us the tools faster and we’ll finish the job faster.”

    Finish the job of genocide.

    Performative dissent

    Some Democrats preferred to stay away, including party power broker Nancy Pelosi. Instead, she met families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza – not, of course, Palestinian families whose loved ones in Gaza had been slaughtered by Israel.

    Vice President Kamala Harris explained her own absence as a scheduling conflict. She met the Israeli prime minister, as did President Joe Biden, on Thursday.

    Afterwards, she claimed to have pressed Netanyahu on the “dire” humanitarian situation in Gaza, but stressed too that Israel “had a right to defend itself” – a right that Israel specifically does not have, as the ICJ pointed out last week, because Israel is the one permanently violating the rights of the Palestinians through its prolonged occupation, apartheid rule and ethnic cleansing.

    But the dissent of Pelosi – and of Harris, if that is what it was – was purely performative. True, they have no personal love for Netanyahu, who has so closely allied himself and his government with the US Republican right and former president Donald Trump.

    But Netanyahu simply serves as an alibi. Both Pelosi and Harris are stalwart supporters of Israel – a state that, according to the ICJ’s judgment last week, decades ago instituted apartheid rule in the Palestinian territories, using an illegal occupation as cover to ethnically cleanse the population there.

    Their political agenda is not about ending the annihilation of the people of Gaza. It is acting as a safety valve for popular dissatisfaction among traditional Democratic voters shocked by the scenes from Gaza.

    It is to deceive them into imagining that behind closed doors, there is some sort of policy fight over Israel’s handling of the Palestinian issue. That voting Democrat will one day – one very distant day – lead to an undefined “peace”, a fabled “two-state solution” where Palestinian children won’t keep dying in the interests of preserving the security of Israel’s illegal settler-militias.

    US policy towards Israel has not changed in any meaningful sense for decades, whether the president has been red or blue, whether Trump has been in the White House or Barack Obama.

    And if Harris becomes president – admittedly, a big if – US arms and money will continue flowing to Israel, while Israel will get to decide if US aid to Gaza is ever allowed in.

    Why? Because Israel is the lynchpin in a US imperial project for global full-spectrum dominance. Because for Washington to change course on Israel, it would also have to do other unthinkable things.

    It would have to begin dismantling its 800 military bases around the planet, just as Israel was told by the ICJ last week to dismantle its many dozens of illegal settlements on Palestinian territory.

    The US would need to agree a shared global security architecture with China and Russia, rather than seek to bully and batter these great powers into submission with bloody proxy wars, such as the one in Ukraine.

    The coming fall

    Pelosi, remember, smeared students on US campuses protesting Israel’s plausible genocide in Gaza as being linked to Russia. She urged the FBI to investigate them for pressuring the Biden administration to support a ceasefire.

    Netanyahu, in his address to Congress, similarly demonised the demonstrators – in his case, by accusing them of being “useful idiots” of Israel’s main foe, Iran.

    Neither can afford to recognise that millions of ordinary people across the US think it is wrong to bomb and starve children – and to use a war with an unachievable aim as the cover story.

    Hamas cannot be “eliminated” through Israel’s current bout of horrifying violence for a very obvious reason: The group is a product, a symptom, of earlier bouts of horrifying Israeli violence.

    As even western counter-terrorism experts have had to concede, Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza are strengthening Hamas, not weakening it. Young men and boys who lose their family to Israeli bombs are Hamas’s most fervent new recruits.

    That’s why Netanyahu insisted Israel’s military offensive – the genocide – in Gaza could not end soon. He demanded weapons and money to keep his soldiers in the enclave indefinitely, in an operation he termed as “demilitarisation and deradicalisation”.

    Decoded, that means a continuing horror show for the Palestinians there, as they are forced to continue living and dying with an Israeli aid blockade, starvation, bombs and unmarked “kill zones”.

    It means, too, an indefinite risk of Israel’s war on Gaza spilling over into a regional war, and potentially a global one, as tripwires towards escalation continue to grow in number.

    The US Congress, however, is too blinded by championing its small fortressed state in the Middle East to think about such complexities. Its members roared “USA!” to their satrap from Israel, just as Roman senators once roared “Glory!” to generals whose victories they assumed would continue forever.

    The rulers of the Roman empire no more saw the coming fall than their modern counterparts in Washington can. But every empire falls. And its collapse becomes inevitable once its rulers lose all sense of how absurd and abhorrent they have become.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

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  • Political Pretence: The Democrats and the Palestinians

    The fact that the Democrats currently occupy the White House has done little to ruffle the equation of blood and gore in the Middle East, notably regarding the fate of the Palestinians.  The ongoing Israeli campaign of stunning ruthlessness against the Gaza unfortunates is certainly a worry for some Democratic strategists, if only because certain voters are finally expressing an opinion on the subject.  Israel, right or wrong, is no longer an entirely plausible proposition.

    In swing states such as Michigan, the cranky and disgruntled on the issue, certain given the potential role of Arab American voters, is not negligible.  In May, a published Arab American Institute (AAI) poll revealed that support for President Joe Biden among Arab Americans had collapsed to a mere 20%.  This was telling, given that Biden had won 60% of the same voting bloc in 2020.

    The potential consequence of that shift has not gone unnoticed among pro-Israeli voices keen to arrest any potential tide.  On the electoral battleground, Representative Jamaal Bowman can count himself as one of the first Democratic figures to lose a primary for his stance against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.  (It should be said that his stance on Israel has not always been a consistent one.)  Bowman had previously defeated the hawkish Eliot Engel in New York’s 16th congressional district in the Bronx and southern Westchester County, the latter known for his cosy relationship, not only with Israel but with weapons manufacturers.

    Last month, it was Bowman’s turn to taste defeat, a fate more or less assured by the muscular support offered by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to his centrist opponent George Latimer, which came to a stunning US$14 million.  The scandalously hefty spending in that primary made it the most expensive in the history of the House of Representatives.

    At the highest levels, the scene is set for the pudding of mawkish insincerity.  The presumptive Democratic nominee for the White House is certainly offering this in spades.  Kamala Harris’s comments on the slaughter in Gaza and Israel’s overall policy towards Palestinians suggest political moulding and shifting, a ploy intended to stave off electoral threat.  Votes are at hand, and Israel’s tenacious brutality is not going down well in certain parts of the constituency.  But the usual acknowedgments and doffing the cap to supporting Israel always follow.

    The Vice President persists in reasserting her “unwavering commitment” to Israel’s sacrosanct right to defend itself.  This is then coupled with the concern – as she expressed to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu – of “the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians”.  (Harris-speak suggests that innocent civilians will always die in the cause.)

    Cheap, calculated language follows.  “The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety – sometimes displaced for a second, third, or fourth time – we cannot look away in the face of these tragedies.  We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.”

    Eman Abdelhadi of the University of Chicago finds such sentiments from Harris parch dry, arguing that a lack of “an actual commitment to stop killing the children of Gaza” invalidates any claims to empathy.  “To be empathetic to someone that you’re shooting in the head is not exactly laudable.  We don’t need empathy from these people.  We need to stop providing the weapons and the money that is actively killing the people that they’re supposedly empathising with.”

    Within the Democrats, there is some movement of disgruntlement, though this is the sort that rarely rises above the gravitas of paper ceremony and gesture.  Thomas Kennedy, a figure who co-founded the Miami-Dade Democratic Progressive Caucus in early 2017, wrote for The Intercept earlier this year explaining why he had left the Democratic campaign in disgust. “I am submitting my resignation in large part because of the Biden administration’s inexcusable support of Israeli war crimes and the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza”.  He also adds another reason: “the DNC’s role in protecting President Joe Biden from a democratic process that could check that complicity.”

    A survey available from the Brookings Institution suggests that electoral tremors among Democratic voters regarding support for Israel’s ongoing campaign will be manageable.  Bowman’s remarks that Israel is responsible for genocide tend to figure among a mere 7% of Democratic candidates.  From the survey work done by the thinktank, 18% of the candidates took what was described as “a more moderate position, saying that the US should make support for Israel conditional and call for a ceasefire.”

    The survey continues to note “a divide in the Democratic party, but the anti-Israel candidates compose only 2% of the primary winners.  Outside the most extreme position, the party is split fairly evenly, with most candidates displaying sympathy for Israel, but hesitancy to voice full-throated unconditional support.”

    In this show of performative grief for the plight of Palestinians, the Democrats can feign concern while still continuing the military and political support Israel has become so accustomed to.  The result is one of theatre that does little to alter the catastrophe taking place in Gaza, leaving the political furniture virtually untouched.

    The post Political Pretence: The Democrats and the Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Ardent Pipe Dreams of American Voters

    To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.

    — Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh, Written in 1939 and published in 1946

    Voters in the U.S.A. live in fantasy and probably always will.  No matter how obvious it is that the U.S. is an oligarchy, not a democracy, the ardent pipe dreams of a new face in the White House go to their heads every four years.  It can only be explained by a combination of intellectual ignorance, the acceptance of propaganda, and the embrace of illusions.

    An analogy is apropos.  In the small town and vicinity where I live, there are about 10 pot shops where pipe dreams are dispensed.  As The Platters sang long ago, “when your heart’s on fire, you must realize smoke gets in your eyes.”  But few realize it.

    Smoke?  What smoke?

    Quadrennially, this love affair with the presidential candidates burns hot and heavy despite their records, as if they were heart throbs of stage and screen, straight from Broadway or Hollywood deeply concerned for the public’s welfare.

    Americans love actors, and the presidential candidates are, of course, actors, following the directions of the fat cats who produce their shows.  As the grand opening of election day approaches, the supine public is aroused to a fanatical frenzy of excitement from its years’-long sleep by a mass media that spews out drivel to deceive.  It could be said that what the media propagandists digest, the public eats.

    Smoke and mirrors never fail as the electorate’s favorite billionaire-backed candidates – at this point in 2024 Trump and Kamala Harris (but don’t count on it) – spew lie after lie and the mass media faithfully promote the show as if it were an actual contest between good and evil, a grand movie.  The acting is terrible, but the audience is so inflamed they can’t tell.

    “There are unconscious actors among them and involuntary actors; the genuine are always rare, especially genuine actors,” Friedrich Nietzsche told us long ago, alluding to far more than this crude political masquerade – to life itself – urging us to take a deep look at the games we play and love in our politicians because they confirm our illusions.

    In the 2020 election between Joseph Biden and Donald Trump, more than 158 million ballots were cast, a record number that was two-thirds of estimated eligible voters.  That was about seven percentage points higher than in 2016 when Trump and Hillary Clinton faced off.   Each election was supposed to be the most important in “your lifetime.”

    And as everyone knows, the country has gotten more prosperous, healthier and happier, and the world more peaceful, in those eight years of Republican and Democratic rule.

    One can expect more of the same smoke this year as the excitement, titillation, and political lies build to a November 4th crescendo.  Illusions die hard, or to be more accurate – they do not die.

    The Spectacle rolls on.

    Although it might sound uppity, unless people read books that explain how the political and economic system is constructed and how it operates, they have no hope of understanding why the presidential elections are musical chairs played to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy.  Podcasts and talks can be instructive when true, but they don’t stick like words on a page in a book that you have noted and can refer back to.

    But the vast majority of people will not read such books because many can’t read or are too lazy or distracted to take the time to switch off digital media and the mainstream corporate press.  It is only through slow meditative reading and study of the great analytic books about social structure, propaganda, history, capitalism, and political economy that a person can truly grasp the nature of the power elite’s domination of the U.S. government, the mass media, and the White House.  A soupçon of differences between contestants for the presidency – superficial makeup – is enough to have those caught in the spectacle get worked up into a hot lather of excitement for candidates chosen by the billionaires.  It is an aspect of the mania for celebrity culture.

    One cannot simply imbibe the daily mass media, listen to talking heads, or read books recommended and promoted by The New York Times or some prize committee such as the Booker or Pulitzer prizes. (see the NYT’s Best Sellers here – as if #5 could be as “best” as #1).  It is no secret that the reading public has been shrinking for years as literacy has waned dramatically.  This is not an accident as the internet, cell phones, and the online life have been pushed by the authorities at every level, including throughout the school system.  (I am not arguing that the voters saw through the electoral charade in the past because the level of cultural literacy was higher.)

    Today, a walk into any local library throughout the country will confirm the sad state of what even those who read books are reading.  The new fiction shelves are filled with books with candy-colored sensationalized covers that evoke bodice-ripping books of old now updated to sound more serious by telling stories of orphans on European trains during WW II, mysterious murders, separated twins, equally evil Nazis and Russians on the prowl, childhood trauma, unfaithful men, etc.  All seemingly NY Times bestsellers, together with the “non-fiction” books within which you would search a long time on the shelves to find a radical critique of the American political system and its propaganda arms.

    This issue of voting and literacy is connected to another key matter.  The American public as a whole does not much care to follow foreign policy and military issues.  That is an understatement.  Once the military draft was ended in January 1973, the public lost interest in who was being killed in America’s wars.  Let foreigners be damned was the unspoken assumption.  It was a stroke of genius by the military-industrial-political complex, for politics has always been about what’s in it for us, and when the military is voluntary and Americans are dying in smaller numbers, people are indifferent to the killing.

    When it comes to politics, the public’s focus is primarily on domestic issues, the economy, health care, taxes, etc., despite the fact that the entire economy is dependent on war and preparations for war and the U.S. has been at war continually for decades.  The U.S spends nearly $900 billion dollars annually on “defense” spending; this is more than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the U.K., Germany, France, South Korea, and Japan combined.

    As everyone knows:

    The U.S. is defending itself in Syria where its troops illegally occupy the oilfields in the northeast.

    It is defending itself helping Israel slaughter Palestinians and supporting an expanded Middle Eastern war.

    It is defending itself by attacking Russia via Ukraine and leading the world to nuclear war.

    It is defending itself by provoking China in the South China Sea.

    It is defending itself all over the world with special forces and military bases everywhere because everyone is out to get us.

    It is defending itself always far, far away from its own shores.

    Everyone knows that’s how it goes.

    But facetiousness aside, the voting public either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that the U.S.A. is a warfare state; it’s as simple as that.  Without waging wars, the U.S. economy, as presently constituted, would collapse.  It is an economy based on fantasy and fake money with a national debt over 35 trillion dollars that will never be repaid.  That’s another illusion.  But I am speaking of pipe dreams, am I not?    And whether they choose to be aware of it or not, the vast majority of Americans support this killing machine by their indifference and ignorance of its ramifications throughout the society and more importantly, its effects in death and destruction on the rest of the world.  But that’s how it goes as their focus is on the masked faces that face each other on the stage of the masquerade ball every four years.

    This charade is comical but accepted by so many, and as the Halloween season in a presidential election year in the U.S.A. approaches, it becomes most clear.  It’s always a trick until four years elapses and the next poisoned candy treat is offered.

    Get to the polls.  Your life depends on it!

    But there is a big price to be paid – a lesson always too late for the learning – for going to the masquerade ball.  Yet when smoke gets in your eyes . . . ah, such an exciting time it is!

    “Do you not know there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask?” warned Søren Kierkegaard. “Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it?”

    — Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life,  University bookshop Reitzel, Copenhagen, February 20, 1843

    The post The Ardent Pipe Dreams of American Voters first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Defence adopts a digital engineering practice

    Australia’s Defence department will adopt an increasingly data-driven approach to its engineering processes, taking inspiration from the US Department of Defense. The new approach, outlined in Defence’s first Digital Engineering Strategy, aims to boost industry collaboration and ensure “speed to capability” for hardware and software across the ADF. It includes a conceptual engineering model for…

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  • Open Letter to Israel: I Want My Country Back

    To: The State of Israel, AIPAC and the International Zionist Movement

    I write as an American citizen. You have stolen my country, and I want it back.

    I did not ask for my country to be complicit in the ongoing genocide and attempted eradication of the people of Gaza and Palestine. I do not want to be complicit in the genocide of anyone. I do not want this crime to stain the name of the United States of America whenever it is spoken for the next century and for all eternity, and to bring shame upon me and my descendants, and to all others who hold American citizenship.

    The American people are as yet only partially aware of this crime. This is because you have been very successful in exerting a powerful influence on the media, the government, and other pillars of American society. I’m not saying you have done anything illegal. You may have, but you clearly prefer to use legal means as much as possible. And it is possible. US law allows anyone with the necessary means to own media, and – within very broad limits – to control who gets elected to government office and who gets appointed to other public offices.

    For better or worse, this is the American way, and it can be made better or worse than it is. But you have abused and corrupted it. You have strangled the political process so that any candidate who criticizes Israel and opposes aid to Israel cannot be elected, because you control the funding as well as the funders in a system which depends entirely on private campaign funds, and where corporations and other wealthy associations are permitted to participate.

    You have also strangled academic freedom to debate or protest Israel on American campuses through control of funding, resulting in harassment and removal of faculty and punishment of students. You have hijacked American film, news organizations, and other media so that only the information and views that you permit are widely available to the public.

    You use such influence to pass laws at all levels, requiring allegiance to Israel in order to obtain licenses and permits. You apply censorship to social media to prevent free expression of views, information and opinion that might reflect negatively on Israel. You mobilize posting of libel and slander against persons and businesses that criticize Israel and defend Palestinians and their allies.

    Your job, and that of the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, and the global network of sayanim (collaborators) is to assure, by these and any other available means, that Israel dominates all narratives, all public policy and decision making, and that all actions in both the public and private sphere are to the benefit of Israel. You have been enormously successful in capturing almost unlimited military and financial support from the US government, in controlling U.S. government policy, and in shaping American minds to accept and support a massive civilian genocide, including starvation and infection of hundreds of thousands and ultimately probably millions of innocent people.

    How can this happen? The American people have spoken and protested in many ways and in large numbers, and polls show that, in spite of your manipulations of US society, a majority of Americans do not support continued aid to Israel, and want an immediate ceasefire. Members of Congress have been deluged with letters, phone calls and email messages.

    But part of the system of controlling our government includes your parallel organization of shadow “advisors” or “minders” whose job it is to remain in the face of our elected and appointed officials, and to “recommend” what to say and how to vote, and to provide draft legislation and public announcements that the official can introduce and promote on behalf of Israel. Otherwise, you will threaten to find someone to replace her/him in the next election cycle.

    I feel helpless appealing to my members of Congress for anything that you oppose, no matter how many of my fellow citizens might join me. But I now realize that my members of Congress feel the same way. They really don’t have a choice any more than I do. In effect, therefore, they are mere avatars for you and your allies. You are our government.

    What can I do about this? I’m not sure, but a start might be to require AIPAC and other actors on behalf of Israel to register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, like all other representatives of foreign governments. Israel is a foreign government, isn’t it? As I recall, that was last tried by Sen. J. William Fulbright’s committee in 1963, but when Lyndon B. Johnson came to the presidency by assassination that year, the option faded. But, of course, it’s never too late.

    Second, we can overturn Citizens United, by whatever legal means necessary, if possible. Even better, we can prohibit or severely curtail private financing of elections, overturning Citizens United in the process, but going beyond, to eliminate some of the most obvious sources of public corruption. We can also legislate greater protection for free speech and the press, punish use of private donations to deny free speech and other civil rights, and enact similar measures.

    The problem with all such remedies, of course, is how to get them passed by institutions that are already under your corrupt control. I’m not sure I have an answer for that, but someone else might. Because even genocide will not save Israel, which is not defeating – and cannot defeat – Hamas. Perhaps Hamas and its allies will liberate both Palestine and the United States.

    The post Open Letter to Israel: I Want My Country Back first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Even in Palestine, the Birds Shall Return

    Rula Halawani (Palestine), Untitled XII from the Negative Incursion series, 2002.

    On 26 July, senior United Nations (UN) officials briefed the UN Security Council about the terrible situation in Gaza. ‘More than two million people in Gaza remain trapped in an endless nightmare of death and destruction on a staggering scale’, said Deputy Commissioner-General Antonia De Meo of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Within Gaza, the UN officials wrote, 625,000 children are trapped, ‘their futures at risk’. The World Health Organisation has recorded ‘outbreaks of hepatitis A and myriad other preventable diseases’ and warns that it is ‘just a matter of time’ before a polio outbreak spreads amongst children. In early July, a letter in The Lancet from three scientists working in Canada, Palestine, and the United Kingdom suggested that if they applied a ‘conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza’.

    Two days before the UN Security Council meeting, on 24 July, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed both chambers of the US Congress. Two months before this appearance, the International Criminal Court (ICC) said it had ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ that Netanyahu bears ‘criminal responsibility for… war crimes and crimes against humanity’. This judgment was utterly set aside by elected US representatives, who welcomed Netanyahu as if he were a conquering hero. Netanyahu’s language was chilling: ‘give us the tools faster, and we’ll finish the job faster’. What is the ‘job’ that Netanyahu wants the Israeli military to finish? In January, the International Court of Justice reported a ‘plausible claim of genocidal acts’ by the Israeli army. So, is the ‘job’ that Israel wants to complete its genocide of the Palestinian people, accelerated by the increased provision of arms and funding by the US?

    Shurooq Amin (Kuwait), The Moving Dollhouse, 2016.

    Despite Netanyahu’s complaint that the US has not been sending sufficient weapons, in April the US government approved the sale of fifty F-15 bombers to Israel, worth $18 billion, and in early July said it would send nearly two thousand 500-pound bombs to be used in Gaza. Netanyahu wanted more then, and he wants more now. He wants to ‘finish the job’. This genocidal language is sanctified by the US government, whose representatives accompanied the call for mass murder with a standing ovation.

    Outside the halls of government, tens of thousands of people protested Netanyahu’s visit to Congress. They are part of the phalanx of young people who have been involved in a cycle of protests against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians and against the US government’s total support of the violence. Netanyahu called the protestors ‘Iran’s useful idiots’, a strange statement made by a foreign guest of the citizens who were exercising their democratic rights in their own country. The police used pepper spray and other forms of violence to contain the protests, which were peaceful and righteous.

    While Washington welcomed the accused war criminal, Beijing hosted representatives of fourteen Palestinian factions who came to discuss their differences and find a way to build political unity against the Israeli genocide and colonisation. Just before Netanyahu entered the Congressional chamber, the fourteen representatives posed for a photograph at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing. Their agreement, the Beijing Declaration, advanced their commitment to work together against the genocide and the occupation and recognised that their disunity has only helped Israel.

    Charles Khoury (Lebanon), Untitled, 2020.

    When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a range of national liberation movements, such as those in South Africa and Palestine, were enfeebled and forced to make significant concessions in order to end conflicts with their colonisers. After several false starts, the apartheid regime in South Africa joined the Multi-Party Negotiating Forum in April 1993, which was the site of concessions made by the liberation forces (undermined by the assassination of communist leader Chris Hani that same month and by attacks from the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging). The negotiated transfer of power through the interim constitution of November 1993 did not dismantle structures of white power in South Africa. Meanwhile, in 1993 and 1995, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) agreed to the Oslo Accords, in which the PLO recognised the state of Israel and agreed to build a state of Palestine in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. Edward Said called the Oslo Accords a ‘Palestinian Versailles’, a judgment that seemed harsh at the time but which, in retrospect, is accurate.

    Zaina El Said (Jordan), Ersin, 2017.

    Israel used the Oslo Accords to press its advantage, mainly by building illegal settlements across Palestinian land and by denying Palestinians the right to free passage through the three non-contiguous territories. In 1994, leading groups in the PLO created the Palestinian National Authority to bring the factions together in the new state project, but the groups that had rejected the Oslo Accords did not want to manage the occupation on Israel’s behalf. In January 2006, Hamas won the largest bloc in the Palestinian legislative elections, with 74 out of the 132 seats, and by June 2007 Fatah and Hamas broke relations and ended the attempt to build a new, post-Oslo Palestinian national project.

    In May 2006, from within Israel’s harsh prisons, five Palestinians who represented the five main factions drafted the Prisoners’ Document: Abdel Khaleq al-Natsh (Hamas), Abdel Raheem Malluh (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), Bassam al-Saadi (Islamic Jihad), Marwan Barghouti (Fatah), and Mustafa Badarneh (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine). These five factions include two left formations, two Islamist formations, and the main national liberation platform. The eighteen-point document called upon various groups (including Hamas and Islamic Jihad) to reactivate the PLO as their joint platform, accept the Palestinian Authority as the ‘nucleus of the future state’, and retain the right to resist the occupation. In June, all parties signed a second draft of the document. Despite attempts to create unity, including during the Israeli assault on Gaza known as Operation Summer Rains (June to November 2006), no such convergence was possible. The animosity between the Palestinian factions remained.

    Zhang Xiaogang (China), Blindfolded Dancer, 2016.

    This disunity has provided ample space for the Israeli occupation to deepen and for Palestinians to flounder without a central political project. Several attempts to bring Palestinian political groups into a serious dialogue have failed to provide any forward motion, including in Cairo in May 2011 and October 2017 and in Algiers in October 2022. Since last year, the Chinese government has worked with various regional states to invite the fourteen main Palestinian factions to Beijing for reconciliation talks. These factions are:

    1. Arab Liberation Front
    2. As-Sa’iqa
    3. Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
    4. Fatah
    5. Hamas
    6. Islamic Jihad Movement
    7. Palestinian Arab Front
    8. Palestinian Democratic Union
    9. Palestinian Liberation Front
    10. Palestinian National Initiative
    11. Palestinian People’s Party
    12. Palestinian Popular Struggle Front
    13. Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
    14. Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (General Command)

    The Beijing Declaration, repeating the formulations in the Prisoners’ Document, called for a Palestinian state to be established, for Palestinians’ right to resist the occupation to be respected, for Palestinian political groups to form an ‘interim national consensus government’, and for the PLO and its institutions to be strengthened in order to advance their role in the struggle against Israel. Though the declaration, of course, called for an immediate ceasefire and an end to settlement construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, its main focus was on political unity.

    Whether this Chinese-brokered process will yield results when Palestinians sit down with Israelis is to be seen. Yet it nonetheless marks an advance in this direction and a possible turning point in the collapse of a unified Palestinian project that began in the wake of the 1995 Oslo II agreement. The Beijing Declaration is diametrically opposed to the vehemence of Netanyahu’s speech in the US Congress: the latter genocidal and dangerous, the former seeks peace in a complex world.

    Halima Aziz (Palestine), Praying Palestinian Women, 2023.

    Fadwa Tuqan (1917–2003), one of Palestine’s most wondrous poets, wrote ‘The Deluge and the Tree’. The fall of the tree, beaten down by the deluge, was not its end but a new beginning.

    When the Tree rises up, the branches
    shall flourish green and fresh in the sun,
    the laughter of the Tree shall blossom
    beneath the sun
    and birds shall return.
    Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.
    The birds shall return.

    The assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (1962–2024) in Tehran (Iran) has made the situation deeply difficult, and will make it difficult for the birds to sing.

    Warmly,

    Vijay

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  • Here’s What the Media Isn’t Telling You About the Venezuelan Election

    “The media is lying to you about the Venezuelan election,” begins
    BreakThrough News reporter about what is undeniably another US-sponsored coup to try and overthrow the Venezuelan people’s desire as expressed through an election.

    The post Here’s What the Media Isn’t Telling You About the Venezuelan Election first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Chicago deal casts ‘dark shadow’ over PsiQuantum promise

    PsiQuantum’s plan to build a second quantum computer in Chicago just a year after Brisbane “casts a very dark shadow” over the investment of the Australian and Queensland governments, according to shadow science minister Paul Fletcher. The deal, part of a wider project to create a massive quantum computing campus in the US State of…

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  • The World Court has cleared the fog hiding western support for Israel’s crimes

    Don’t be fooled. The ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 19 July that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is unlawful is earth-shattering. Israel is a rogue state, according to the world’s highest court.

    For that reason, the judgment will be studiously ignored by the cabal of western states and their medias that for decades have so successfully run cover for Israel.

    Doubters need only watch the reception Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu receives during his visit to the United States this week.

    Even though he is currently being pursued for war crimes by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, the US Congress will give him a hero’s welcome when he addresses its representatives on Wednesday.

    The warm handshakes and standing ovations will be a reminder that Netanyahu has had the full backing of western powers throughout the nine-month slaughter of at least 16,000 Palestinian children in Gaza – with another 21,000 missing, most of them under rubble.

    The welcome will be a reminder that western capitals are fully on board with Israel’s levelling of Gaza and the starvation of its population – in what the same court concluded way back in January amounted to a “plausible genocide”.

    And it will serve as a heavy slap in the face to those like the World Court committed to international law – reminding them that the West and its most favoured client state believe they are untouchable.

    Western politicians and columnists will keep emphasising that the World Court is offering nothing more than an “advisory opinion” and one that is “non-binding”.

    What they won’t point out is that this opinion is the collective view of the world’s most eminent judges on international law, the people best positioned to rule on the occupation’s legality.

    And it is non-binding only because the western powers who control our international bodies plan to do nothing to implement a decision that doesn’t suit them.

    Nonetheless, the ruling will have dramatic consequences for Israel, and its western patrons, even if those consequences will take months, years or even decades to play out.

    ‘Top secret’ warning

    Last week’s judgment is separate from the case accepted in January by the ICJ that put Israel on trial for genocide in Gaza. A decision on that matter may still be many months away.

    This ruling was in response to a request from the United Nations General Assembly in December 2022 for advice on the legality of Israel’s 57-year occupation.

    That may sound more mundane a deliberation than the one on genocide, but the implications ultimately are likely to be every bit as profound.

    Those not familiar with international law may underestimate the importance of the World Court’s ruling if only because they had already assumed the occupation was illegal.

    But that is not how international law works. A belligerent occupation is permitted so long as it satisfies two conditions.

    First, it must be strictly military, designed to protect the security of the occupying state and safeguard the rights of the occupied people.

    And second, it must be a temporary measure – while negotiations are conducted to restore civilian rule and allow the occupied people self-determination.

    Astonishingly, it has taken 57 years for the world’s highest court to deliver a conclusion that should have been staring it – and everyone else – in the face all that time.

    The military nature of the occupation was subverted almost from the moment Israel occupied the Palestinian territories in June 1967.

    Within months, Israel had chosen to transfer Jewish civilians – mostly extreme religious nationalists – into the occupied Palestinian territories to help colonise them.

    Israel knew that this was a gross violation of international law because its own legal adviser warned it of as much in a “top secret” memo unearthed by the Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg some two decades ago.

    In a declaration enlarging on the ICJ’s reasoning, Court President Nawaf Salam specifically referenced the warnings of Theodor Meron, who was the Israeli foreign ministry’s legal expert at the time.

    In September 1967, his memo cautioned that any decision to establish civilian settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories “contravenes explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention”. Those provisions, he added, were “aimed at preventing colonization”.

    Nine days later, the Israeli government rode roughshod over Meron’s memo and assisted a group of young Israelis in setting up the first settlement at Kfar Etzion.

    Sham peace-making

    Today, hundreds of illegal settlements – many of them home to what amount to armed militias – control more than half of the West Bank and much of East Jerusalem.

    Rather than protecting the rights of Palestinians under occupation, as international law demands, the Israeli military assists Jewish settlers in terrorising the Palestinians. The aim is to drive them off their land.

    In the words of the Israeli government, the settlements are there to “Judaise” Palestinian territory. In the words of everyone else, they are there to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population.

    Which brings us to Israel’s second violation of the laws of occupation. In transferring hundreds of thousands of settlers into the occupied territories, Israel intentionally blocked any chance of a Palestinian state emerging.

    The settlements weren’t makeshift encampments. Some soon developed into small cities, such as Ariel and Maale Adumim, with shopping malls, parks, public pools, synagogues, factories, libraries, schools and colleges.

    There was nothing “temporary” about them. They were there to incrementally annex Palestinian territory under cover of an occupation that Washington and its European allies conspired to pretend was temporary.

    The whole Oslo process initiated in the early 1990s was a switch-and-bait exercise, or a “Palestinian Versailles”, as the Palestinian scholar Edward Said warned at the time.

    Israel was never serious about allowing the Palestinians meaningful statehood – a fact the then-Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, admitted shortly before he was killed by a far-right settler in 1995.

    Oslo’s sham peace-making was designed to buy more time for Israel to expand the settlements – while also binding the Palestinians into endless contractual obligations that were never reciprocated by Israel.

    In his incensed response to the court’s decision last week, Netanyahu gave the game away. He said: “The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], our historical homeland.”

    His is a bipartisan view in Israel. All the Jewish parties in the Israeli parliament take the same position.

    Last week they voted to reject any possibility of creating a Palestinian state on the grounds it would be an “existential threat” to Israel. Only a handful of legislators – all belonging to Israel’s Palestinian minority – dissented.

    Apartheid rule

    The World Court’s ruling is most significant in that it permanently blows apart western states’ cover story about Israel.

    The judges point out that Israel’s permanent occupation of the territories, and its transfer of Jewish settlers into them, has necessitated the development of two separate and distinct systems of laws.

    One is for the Jewish settlers, enshrining for them the rights enjoyed by Israelis. Palestinians, by contrast, must submit to the whims of an alien and belligerent military regime.

    There is a word for such an arrangement: apartheid.

    Over the past decade, a consensus had already emerged in the world’s human rights community – from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch – that Israel was an apartheid state.

    Now the world’s highest judicial body has declared that it agrees.

    Apartheid is a crime against humanity. This means that Israeli officials are war criminals, quite aside from the crimes they are currently committing in Gaza.

    That was why the Israeli media reported panic inside the Israeli government at the ICJ ruling.

    Officials fear that it will leave the International Criminal Court, its sister court, with no option but to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, as already requested by its chief prosecutor.

    It is also likely to strengthen the ICC’s resolve to prosecute more senior Israeli officials for crimes associated with Israel’s settlement programme.

    A former Israeli foreign ministry official told the Haaretz newspaper that the World Court ruling had punctured Israel’s claim to be a western-style state: “The democratic aura is no longer protecting us as it did before.”

    Acts of aggression

    The ICJ has concluded that Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians – as well as the ethnic cleansing policies implemented by its settler militias – are acts of aggression.

    The West’s depiction of a “conflict” between Israel and the Palestinians, with efforts to resolve this “dispute”, is wilfully muddled. Its depiction of Israel’s rampage in Gaza as a “war against Hamas” is a lie too, according to this ruling.

    The ICJ has effectively ridiculed the claim by Israel and its western allies that the occupation of Gaza ended when Israel pulled its soldiers to the perimeter fence and soon afterwards instituted a siege on the enclave by land, sea and air.

    Israel is judged to be fully responsible for the suffering of Palestinians before 7 October as well as after.

    It is Israel that has been permanently attacking the Palestinians – through its illegal occupation, its apartheid rule, its siege of Gaza, and its incremental annexation of territory that should comprise a Palestinian state.

    Palestinian violence is a response, not the inciting cause. It is the Palestinians who are the ones retaliating, the ones resisting, according to the judgment. The western political and media establishments have cause and effect back to front.

    There are further consequences to the ICJ’s ruling. You don’t compromise on apartheid. No one suggested meeting apartheid South Africa halfway.

    The racist foundations of such a state must be eradicated. Apartheid states must be reconstituted from scratch.

    The World Court demands that Israel not only pull its occupation forces out of the Palestinian territories and halt its settlement expansion but also dismantle the settlements in their entirety. The settlers must leave Palestine.

    The judges call too for “reparations” for the Palestinians for the enormous harm done to them by decades of occupation and apartheid.

    That includes allowing those Palestinians who have been ethnically cleansed since 1967 a right to return to their lands, and it requires Israel to pay large-scale financial compensation for the decades-long theft of key resources.

    Complicit in war crimes

    But the implications don’t just apply to Israel.

    In referring the case to the ICJ, the UN General Assembly requested the court advise on how its 192 member states should respond to its findings.

    If Israeli leaders are war criminals, then supporting them – as western capitals have been doing for decades – makes those states complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.

    For western powers, the ruling makes their continuing arms sales, diplomatic cover and the preferential trade status they give Israel collusion in the crime of prolonged occupation and apartheid.

    But there’s more. It also means that western states must not only stop harassing, and even jailing, those who seek to penalise Israel for its crimes – supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement – but should take up that very cause as their own.

    They are now under an implied legal obligation to join in such actions by imposing sanctions on Israel for being a rogue state.

    Already, Britain’s weaselly new Labour government has tried to shift attention away from the ruling and onto discursive terrain that better suits Israel.

    It responded with a statement that “the UK is strongly opposed to the expansion of illegal settlements and rising settler violence”.

    But as former British ambassador Craig Murray noted, that was not what the ICJ decided. “It is not the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements that is at issue. It is their existence,” he wrote.

    Similarly, the Biden administration bemoaned the court’s ruling. In an act of spectacular mental gymnastics, it argued that ending the occupation would “complicate efforts to resolve the conflict”.

    But as noted previously, according to the ICJ’s judgment, there is no “conflict” except in the self-serving imaginations of Israel and its patrons. There are occupation and apartheid – permanent acts of aggression by Israel towards the Palestinian people.

    Further, the US warned other states not to take “unilateral actions” against Israel, as the ICJ ruling obliges them to do. Washington claims such actions will “deepen divisions”. But a division – between the upholders of international law and lawbreakers such as Israel and Washington – is precisely what is needed.

    The World Court’s ruling upends decades of linguistic slippage by the West whose goal has been to move the ideological dial in favour of Israel’s incremental annexationist agenda.

    It is vitally important that activists, legal and human rights groups keep holding the feet of the British and US governments to the ICJ’s fire.

    The fog clears

    Israel’s supporters will take comfort from the fact that an earlier judgment from the World Court on Israel was roundly ignored by both Israel and its western patrons.

    Asked for an advisory opinion, the judges ruled in 2004 that, under cover of security claims, Israel was illegally annexing swaths of territory by building its 800km-long “separation wall” on Palestinian land.

    Israel did not dismantle the wall, though in response it did re-route parts of it and abandoned construction in other areas.

    But that two-decade-old ICJ ruling was much narrower than the present one. It was restricted to a specific Israeli policy rather than address the entirety of Israel’s rule over Palestinians. It did not impugn Israel’s political character, identifying it as an apartheid state. And there were few obvious implications in the ruling for Israel’s western patrons.

    And perhaps most importantly, Israeli officials were in no danger 20 years ago of being put in the dock by the International Criminal Court charged with war crimes, as they are now.

    The World Court decision tightens the legal noose around Israel’s neck, and makes it hard for the ICC to continue dragging its feet on issuing arrest warrants for Israeli officials.

    And that will put multinational corporations, banks and pension funds in an ever harder legal position if they continue to ignore their own complicity with Israel’s criminality.

    They may quickly find themselves paying a price with their customers too.

    Adidas could be one of the first victims of just such a backlash after it caved into Israeli pressure on 19 July to drop the Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid as the face of a new ad campaign – paradoxically, on the same day the World Court announced its ruling.

    There will also be ramifications for domestic courts in the West. It will be hard for judges to ignore the World Court’s opinion when their governments seek to punish Palestinian solidarity activists.

    Those promoting boycotts and sanctions on Israel, or trying to stop companies supplying Israel with weapons, are doing what, according to the World Court, western governments should be doing of their own accord.

    But, maybe most importantly of all, the ruling will decisively disrupt the West’s intentionally deceitful discourse about Israel.

    This ruling strips away the entire basis of the language western powers have been using about Israel. A reality that’s been turned upside down for decades by the West has been put firmly back on its feet by the World Court.

    The occupation – not just the settlements – is illegal.

    Israel is legally defined as an apartheid state, as South Africa was before it, and one engaged in a project of annexation and ethnic cleansing.

    The Palestinians are the victims, not Israel. It’s their security that needs protecting, not Israel’s. They are the ones who are owed financial assistance, in the form of reparations, not Israel.

    As a result, the West’s pretend peace-making stands starkly revealed for the sham it always was. Continuing with this kind of duplicity – as British leader Keir Starmer, for example, appears determined to do – will serve only to highlight the bad faith of those engaged in such exercises.

    On the flip side, western powers that help Israel continue its work of segregating, dispossessing and ethnic cleansing the Palestinians will be exposed as complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.

    Words have power. They are our route to understanding reality. And the World Court has just cleared away the fog. It has wiped clean the mist on the window.

    The West will do its level best once again to shroud Israel’s crimes. But the World Court has done the Palestinians and the rest of mankind a service in unmasking Israel for what it is: a rogue, criminal state.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

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  • The Country of the Rust Belt and the Broken Road

    José Clemente Orozco (Mexico), The Epic of American Civilisation, 1932–1934.

    In his inaugural presidential address on 20 January 2017, Donald Trump used a powerful phrase to describe the situation in the United States: ‘American carnage’. In 1941, seventy-six years before this speech, Henry Luce wrote an article in Life magazine about the ‘American century’ and the promise of US leadership to be ‘the dynamic centre of ever-widening spheres of enterprise’. During the period between these two proclamations, the United States went through an immense expansion known as the ‘Golden Age’ and then a remarkable decline.

    That theme of decline has returned in Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. ‘We will not let countries come in, take our jobs, and plunder our nation’, Trump declared at the Republican National Convention on 19 July in his speech to accept his party’s presidential nomination. Trump’s words echoed his inaugural address from 2017, in which he said, ‘We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon’.

    In seven decades, the United States’s self-image has fallen from the grandiose heights of an ‘American century’ to the bloodied present of ‘American carnage’. The ‘carnage’ that Trump identifies is not only in the economic domain; it defines the political arena. A failed assassination attempt against Trump comes alongside an open rebellion in the Democratic Party that ended with incumbent US President Joe Biden withdrawing from the presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement. By all accounts, Trump will be favoured to defeat any Democratic candidate at the polls in November, since he leads in a handful of key ‘swing states’ (which house a fifth of the US population).

    At the Republican convention, Trump tried to talk about unity, but this is a false language. The more US politicians talk about ‘bringing the country together’ or bipartisanship, the wider the divides tend to be between liberals and conservatives. What divides them is not policy as such, since the two parties both belong to the extreme centre that pledges to impose austerity on the masses while securing financial security for the dominant classes, but an attitude and orientation. A few domestic policies (important as they are, such as abortion rights) play a key role in allowing this difference of mood to emerge.

    Robert Gwathmey (USA), Sunny South, 1944.

    Reports and rumours filter out of US government documents that give a glimpse of the ongoing devastation of social life. Younger people find themselves at the mercy of precarious employment. Home foreclosures and evictions for those in the lower ends of the income bracket continue as sheriffs and debt-recovery paramilitaries scour the landscape for so-called delinquents. Personal debt has skyrocketed as ordinary people with inadequate means of earning a living turn to credit cards and the shady world of personal loan agencies to keep from starving. The Third Great Depression has made low-wage service workers with no benefits, most of whom are women, even more vulnerable. In earlier instances of economic depression, these women, with those jobs, stretched their invisible hearts across their families; now, even this love-fuelled glue is no longer available.

    Hector Hyppolite (Haiti), Marinéte pie chè che (MARinÉ I), 1944–1946.

    On 18 July, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its staff report on the United States, which showed that poverty rates in the country ‘increased by 4.6 percentage points in 2022 and the child poverty rate more than doubled’. This increase in child poverty is ‘directly attributed to the expiration of pandemic-era assistance’, the IMF wrote. No longer will any government in the United States, with its tanking economy and increasing military spending, provide access to basic conditions for survival for millions of families. One paragraph in the report struck me as particularly significant:

    The increased pressure on lower income households is becoming more visible in an upswing in delinquencies on revolving credit. Furthermore, worsening housing affordability has aggravated access to shelter, particularly for the young and lower income households. This is evident in the number of people experiencing homelessness, which has risen to the highest level since data began to be compiled in 2007.

    Swathes of the US landscape are now given over to desolation: abandoned factories make room for chimney swallows while old farmhouses become methamphetamine labs. There is sorrow in the broken rural dreams, the gap between the distress of farmers in Iowa not so far from the distress of peasants in Brazil, India, and South Africa. Those who had previously been employed in mass industrial production or in agriculture are no longer necessary to the cycles of capital accumulation in the United States. They have been rendered disposable.

    By the time that China developed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to enhance infrastructure around the world in 2013, the United States had slipped into its own rust belt and broken road reality.

    It is impossible for the US political class that is committed to this politics of austerity to control, let alone reverse, this downward spiral. Austerity policies cannibalise social life, razing everything that makes it possible for humans to live in the modern world. For decades, the parties of liberalism and conservatism have muted their historical traditions and become shadows of each other. Just as the water in a toilet rushes in a spiral and gets dragged into the sewer, the parties of the ruling class have dashed toward the extreme centre to champion austerity and to allow an obscene upward distribution of wealth in the name of spurring entrepreneurism and growth.

    Whether in Europe or in North America, today the extreme centre is increasingly losing its legitimacy amongst populations in the Global North stunted by malaise. Ugly proposals allegedly seeking to spur growth that would have sounded acceptable three decades ago – such as tax cuts and increased military spending – now have a hollowness to them. The political class has no effective answers for stagnant growth and decayed infrastructure. In the United States, Trump has hit upon a politically expedient way of talking about the country’s problems, but his own solutions – such as the idea that militarising borders and escalating trade wars will be able to magically create the investment needed to ‘make America great again’ – are, in fact, just as hollow as those of his rivals. Despite enacting a set of laws to encourage productive investment (such as the Inflation Reduction Act, Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors [CHIPS] and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act), the US government has failed to address an enormous gap in necessary fixed capital formation. Apart from debt, there are few other sources for investment in the country’s infrastructure. Even the US Federal Reserve Bank doubts the possibility that the US can easily delink its economy from that of booming China.

    Moisés Becerra (Honduras), Luchemos (Let’s Struggle), 1971.

    It is tempting to throw around words like ‘fascism’ to describe political tendencies such as those led by Trump and an assorted group of right-wing leaders in Europe. But the use of this term is not precise, since it ignores the fact that Trump and others make up a far right of a special kind, one that is reasonably comfortable with democratic institutions. This far right pierces neoliberal rhetoric by appealing to the anguish caused by the decline of their countries and by using patriotic language that arouses great feelings of nationalism amongst people who have felt ‘left out’ for at least a generation. Yet, rather than blame the project of neoliberalism for that national decline, the leaders of this far right of a special kind blame it on working-class immigrants and on new cultural forms that have emerged in their countries (particularly increasing social acceptance for gender and racial equality and sexual freedom). Since this far right has no new project to offer to the people to reverse this decline, it forges ahead with neoliberal policies with as much gusto as the extreme centre.

    Angelina Quic Ixtamer (Guatemala), Mayan Market, 2014.

    In 1942, the economist Joseph Schumpeter published Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Schumpeter argued that, over its history, capitalism has generated a series of business downturns when failed enterprises close. In the ashes of these crashes, Schumpeter said, a phoenix is born through ‘creative destruction’. However, even if ‘creative destruction’ eventually produces new lines of enterprise and therefore employment, the carnage it causes results in the possibility of a political turn to socialism. Though the march to socialism has not yet taken place in the United States, larger and larger numbers of young people are more and more attracted to this possibility.

    In 1968, the night before he was killed, Martin Luther King, Jr., said, ‘only when it is dark enough can you see the stars’. It now seems dark enough. Perhaps not in this election or the next one, or even the one after that, but soon the choices will narrow, the extreme centre – already illegitimate – will vanish, and new projects will germinate that will enhance the lives of the people instead of using the social wealth of the Global North to terrorise the world and enrich the few. We can see those stars. Hands are striving to reach them.

    Warmly,

    Vijay

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