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Category: United States

  • Assange’s Release: Exposing the Craven Media Stable

    The WikiLeaks project was always going to put various noses out of joint in the journalistic profession.  Soaked and blighted by sloth, easily bought, perennially envious, a good number of the Fourth Estate have always preferred to remain uncritical of power and sympathetic to its brutal exercise.  For those reasons, the views of Thomas Carlyle, quoting the opinion of Edward Burke in his May 1840 lecture that “there were Three Estates in Parliament; but in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all” seem quaintly misplaced, certainly in a modern context.

    The media response to the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from his scandalous captivity after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the US Espionage Act of 1917 provides a fascinating insight into a ghastly, craven and sycophantic tendency all too common among the plodding hacks.

    Take, for instance, any number of journalists working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, official national broadcaster and devotee of the safe middle line.  One, a breakfast news anchor for the network’s meandering twenty-four-hour service, has a rather blotted record of glee regarding the mistreatment of Assange over the years.

    Michael Rowland, torturously insipid and ponderously humourless, had expressed his inexpressible joy when the Ecuadorian government cut off Assange’s access to the Internet while confined to the country’s London embassy.  “A big gold star to Ecuador,” he chirped on March 28, 2018.  Andrew Fowler, another journalist and far more seasoned on the rise of WikiLeaks, reproached Rowland on Twitter, as the X platform was then called. “Why would silencing a fellow journalist be supported?”  For Rowland, the matter was as clear as day.  “That remains a disputed opinion, Andrew.  Publisher and activist yes. But you put yourself in a small camp calling him a journalist.”

    These points matter, because they go to the central libelling strategy of the US government’s prosecution so casually embraced by mainstream outlets.  In such a generated smokescreen, crimes can be concealed, and the revealers shown to be those of bad faith.  Labels can be used to partition truth, if not obscure it altogether: a publisher-activist is to be regarded more dimly than the establishment approved journalist.

    The point was rather well made by Antony Loewenstein, himself an independent journalist keen to ferret out the grainier details of abusive power.  When interviewed by none other than Rowland himself, he explained, with unflagging patience, the reasons why Assange and Wikileaks are so reviled by the orthodox scribblers of the Fourth Estate.  WikiLeaks, he stated with salience, had confronted power, not succumbed to it.

    Rowland could only reiterate the standard line that Assange had admitted guilt for a “very serious offence”, refusing to examine the reasons for doing so, or the implications of it.  Again, the vulgar line that Assange had “put US lives at risk” with the WikiLeaks disclosures was trotted out like an ill-fed nag. Again, Loewenstein had to remind Rowland that there was no evidence that any lives had been exposed to harm, a point made in several studies on the subject from the Pentagon to the Australian Defence Department.

    The tendency is pestilential.  While more guarded in his current iteration as a professor of journalism, Peter Greste, formerly a journalist for Al Jazeera, was previously dismissive in the Sydney Morning Herald of Assange’s contributions as he was brutally evicted from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.  “To be clear, Julian Assange is no journalist, and WikiLeaks is not a news organisation.”  An organisation boasting “the libertarian idea of radical transparency” was “a separate issue altogether from press freedom.”

    While approving the publishing activities centred on the release of the Collateral Murder video showing the killing of civilians including two Reuters journalists by Apache helicopters, and the release of the Afghanistan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs and “Cablegate”, Greste fell for the canard that the publisher did not redact names in documents to “protect the innocent” by dumping “them all onto his website, free for anybody to go through, regardless of their contents or their impact they might have had.”

    There is no mention of the decrypting key carelessly included in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy by its bumbling authors David Leigh and Luke Harding, or the fact that the website Cryptome was the first to publish the unredacted files ahead of WikiLeaks.  There is certainly no discussion of the extensive redacting efforts Assange had made, as many of his collaborators testify to, prior to the release in November 2010.

    Writing on June 25 in The Conversation, Greste displays the emetic plumage of someone who has done an about face.  “It is worth pausing for a moment to consider all Assange has been through, and to pop a bottle of champagne to celebrate his release,” he writes distastefully, also reflecting on his own carceral experiences in an Egyptian prison cell.  He also claims that the role of WikiLeaks, in checking “the awesome power that governments wield”, should be celebrated, while stating, weakly, that he never believed that Assange should “have been charged with espionage.”

    In such shifting views, we see wounded egos, cravenness, and the concerns about an estate whose walls had been breached by a usurping, industrious publisher.  By all means use the spoils from Assange and his leakers, even while snorting about how they were obtained.  Publish and write about them in the hope of getting a press award.  Never, however, admit that Assange is himself a journalist with more journalism awards than many have had hot dinners.  In this grotesque reality, we are now saddled with a terrifying precedent: the global application of a US espionage statute endangering journalists and publishers who would dare discuss and run material on Washington’s national security.

    The post Assange’s Release: Exposing the Craven Media Stable first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Myanmar’s civil war… will the U.S. escalate a proxy war against China?

    A civil war has been raging for three years, although the nation has always been gripped by inter-ethnic violence since independence in 1948 as a legacy of British colonialist abuse.

    KJ Noh is a seasoned political analyst and commentator on the Asia-Pacific region. He says the U.S. is already heavily involved in fanning the civil war in this Southeast Asian nation because Washington views it as a critical opportunity to destabilize China’s strategic interests.

    See this informative background article here.

    China has invested hugely in its southern neighbor with a 2,000-kilometer land border. Myanmar is a vital partner in Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative projects to boost global trade.

    This makes Myanmar a priority target for Washington to provoke and destabilize China.

    See this previous article on SCF which looks at recent calls by deep-state think-tanks in the US urging for more military intervention by Washington in Myanmar’s civil war.

    KJ Noh has written for Asia Times, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, and other alternative media outlets. He discusses how the U.S. has used Myanmar (formerly Burma) for decades as a launchpad for proxy wars against China’s interests, going back to the Korean War (1950-53).

    Western media, in hock to U.S. imperialist interests, have distorted the conflict in Myanmar as the fault of China’s alleged interference when, in reality, the opposite is true. It is Washington that has continually meddled in the internal affairs of Myanmar, including helping to precipitate a military coup in the country in February 2021.

    China is invested in creating a stable, peaceful neighbor. Beijing is trying to mediate a national settlement with all the parties. But as long as the U.S. keeps meddling in Myanmar, the conflict is liable to become protracted and much worse.

    The Western corporate-controlled media are portraying the civil war as a simplistic binary situation of “pro-democracy groups” versus a military junta backed by China. This is a gross misrepresentation. But such a distortion is usefully providing the US political cover for increasing its malign interference.

    KJ Noh says the U.S. is not interested in a peaceful, democratic Myanmar. It is only interested in exploiting the suffering of the people as a way to damage China.

    Peace is possible in Myanmar. But not while the U.S. continues gearing up to intervene with “humanitarian aid” (military aid) and self-serving media lies.

    Otherwise, Myanmar is shaping up to be another endless war for U.S. imperialism and America’s next proxy war against China.

    • K.J. Noh is a long time activist, writer, and teacher. He is a member of Veterans for Peace and works on global justice issues. He can be reached at: moc.liamgnull@84hon.j.k.

    • This interview first appeared in Strategic Culture Foundation

    The post Myanmar’s civil war… will the U.S. escalate a proxy war against China? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Venezuela Is Overcoming the US Blockade

    The future of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, a target of US imperial power since its inception in 1998, may be decided on July 28, the date of their presidential election.

    Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro and seven other presidential candidates pledged to abide by the choice of the electorate. Edmundo González, promoted by the US, and another candidate have not signed the pledge, consistent with the far right only accepting contest results where they win. Likewise, a bipartisan and bicameral resolution was introduced on June 18 to the US Congress not to recognize a “fraudulent” Maduro victory.

    This election is taking place in the context of US unilateral coercive measures. These so-called sanctions have amounted to an actual economic and financial blockade designed to cripple the economy and cause the people to renounce their government. Such outside interference by Washington is tantamount to electoral blackmail.

    Yet Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s deputy minister of foreign affairs for North America, is confident that the government party will win. He spoke on June 25 at a webinar organized by the Venezuela Solidarity Network.

    Ron explained that the Venezuelan people and government have achieved remarkable progress, resisting Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign. A tanking economy has now been reversed. By the end of 2023, Venezuela had recorded 11 quarters of consecutive growth after years of economic contraction.

    Instead of irrevocably crashing the economy, according to Ron, the US hybrid warfare against Venezuela exposed the US-backed opposition, who have called for sanctions against their own people and have even treasonously endorsed a US-backed military coup option.

    Economist Yosmer Arellán, who is associated with the Central Bank of Venezuela and has collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur on the impact of unilateral coercive measures, also addressed the webinar. Arellán spoke of the pain visited upon the Venezuelan people by the US sanctions.

    The economist explained that the economy was further impacted by the crash in oil prices, beginning in 2014, as well as by overcompliance with the economic coercive measures by third-parties fearful of US reprisals. Then Covid hit. During the height of the pandemic, even though Venezuela had the hard currency, US sanctions blocked the financial transactions necessary to buy vaccines. He likened such measures to “bombs dropped on our society.”

    In contrast, Venezuela’s economic situation is now looking comparatively bullish. On the same day as the webinar, President Maduro announced oil production had recovered to one million barrels a day. Earlier this month, the five millionth home was delivered as part of the Great Housing Mission social program.

    Arellán described what he called the three-step “virtuous formula” for recovering the economy. This is a model, he added, for the some one third of humanity being punished by US unilateral coercive measures.

    First came resistance in the face of the “extortion” of the unilateral coercive measures. Venezuela learned through trial and error how to do more with less. Out of necessity, the country began to wean itself from dependence on oil revenues which had fallen over 90%. Small and medium businesses were promoted. The private sector, despite being prone to oppose the socialist project, was also punished by the US measures. Today, big business is investing more in domestic productive capacity, according to Arellán.

    Second was halting the economic freefall and achieving economic stability. Two areas in particular were key: rationalizing the exchange rate of the Venezuelan bolivar in relation to the US dollar and taming runaway inflation. Monthly inflation got down to 1.2%, a previously unheard of low rate.

    Third has been the recovery stage, transforming the economy from one dependent on oil revenues to buy foreign goods to one that is now over 90% food sovereign. The economy is being diversified with the sober understanding that relief from the US imperialist hybrid war is unlikely in the near future.

    Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Ron further explained the political dimensions of the US sanctions, which were designed to reverse the sizable achievements of the Chávez years. The aim, he said, was to kill hope and blame socialism for the attacks of “predatory capitalism.” The Venezuelan state was robbed by the US and its allies: seizure of overseas assets; dispossession of  CITGO, the state-owned oil subsidiary in the US; and confiscation of gold reserves held abroad.

    The “perversity of sanctions,” according to Ron, is that they undermine the social functions of the state to support the welfare of the people. That is, they try to cripple the government in order to make socialism look bad.

    Ron gave the example of the 16% malnutrition rate when Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998. By 2011, the rate was reduced to only 3%. But with the US maximum pressure campaign, the rate shot up to 13% (still better than before the revolution but punishing nonetheless).

    Venezuela experienced record out migration. This emigration was not due, as claimed by the US, to political persecution but was precipitated by worsening economic prospects caused primarily by the US politically-motivated sanctions. But now, Ron explained, citizens are returning to Venezuela and a new vice-ministry to assist their return has been created.

    Washington tried to isolate Venezuela both financially and diplomatically. Four years ago the US and some 50 of its allies recognized the parallel government of “interim president” Juan Guaidó, who had never even run for national office in Venezuela. Today only the US, Israel, and a few others still fail to recognize the elected government.

    Meanwhile, Venezuela has forged significant new economic and political ties with Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran among others. Regional alliances with Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and some Caribbean states, such as ALBA, have been strengthened. Close cooperative relations have been reinforced with friendly governments in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, three of the four leading economies in Latin America.  And Venezuela is orienting toward the Global South, with the possibility of joining the expanded BRICS+ alliance of emerging economies looking increasingly likely.

    Indeed, far from being isolated, Ron noted, Venezuela has further integrated into an emerging multipolar world. Venezuela was just elected to a vice-presidency of the UN General Assembly.

    Ron credited current successes to the political will of a strong and unwavering leadership under President Maduro, which he characterized as a “collective leadership” encompassing many actors. This was coupled with organized “people power.” Both, he emphasized, were needed. Venezuela, he concluded, demonstrated the people’s willingness to face challenges and a government that did not give up on the battle for socialism.

    The post How Venezuela Is Overcoming the US Blockade first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Venezuela Is Overcoming the US Blockade

    The future of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, a target of US imperial power since its inception in 1998, may be decided on July 28, the date of their presidential election.

    Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro and seven other presidential candidates pledged to abide by the choice of the electorate. Edmundo González, promoted by the US, and another candidate have not signed the pledge, consistent with the far right only accepting contest results where they win. Likewise, a bipartisan and bicameral resolution was introduced on June 18 to the US Congress not to recognize a “fraudulent” Maduro victory.

    This election is taking place in the context of US unilateral coercive measures. These so-called sanctions have amounted to an actual economic and financial blockade designed to cripple the economy and cause the people to renounce their government. Such outside interference by Washington is tantamount to electoral blackmail.

    Yet Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s deputy minister of foreign affairs for North America, is confident that the government party will win. He spoke on June 25 at a webinar organized by the Venezuela Solidarity Network.

    Ron explained that the Venezuelan people and government have achieved remarkable progress, resisting Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign. A tanking economy has now been reversed. By the end of 2023, Venezuela had recorded 11 quarters of consecutive growth after years of economic contraction.

    Instead of irrevocably crashing the economy, according to Ron, the US hybrid warfare against Venezuela exposed the US-backed opposition, who have called for sanctions against their own people and have even treasonously endorsed a US-backed military coup option.

    Economist Yosmer Arellán, who is associated with the Central Bank of Venezuela and has collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur on the impact of unilateral coercive measures, also addressed the webinar. Arellán spoke of the pain visited upon the Venezuelan people by the US sanctions.

    The economist explained that the economy was further impacted by the crash in oil prices, beginning in 2014, as well as by overcompliance with the economic coercive measures by third-parties fearful of US reprisals. Then Covid hit. During the height of the pandemic, even though Venezuela had the hard currency, US sanctions blocked the financial transactions necessary to buy vaccines. He likened such measures to “bombs dropped on our society.”

    In contrast, Venezuela’s economic situation is now looking comparatively bullish. On the same day as the webinar, President Maduro announced oil production had recovered to one million barrels a day. Earlier this month, the five millionth home was delivered as part of the Great Housing Mission social program.

    Arellán described what he called the three-step “virtuous formula” for recovering the economy. This is a model, he added, for the some one third of humanity being punished by US unilateral coercive measures.

    First came resistance in the face of the “extortion” of the unilateral coercive measures. Venezuela learned through trial and error how to do more with less. Out of necessity, the country began to wean itself from dependence on oil revenues which had fallen over 90%. Small and medium businesses were promoted. The private sector, despite being prone to oppose the socialist project, was also punished by the US measures. Today, big business is investing more in domestic productive capacity, according to Arellán.

    Second was halting the economic freefall and achieving economic stability. Two areas in particular were key: rationalizing the exchange rate of the Venezuelan bolivar in relation to the US dollar and taming runaway inflation. Monthly inflation got down to 1.2%, a previously unheard of low rate.

    Third has been the recovery stage, transforming the economy from one dependent on oil revenues to buy foreign goods to one that is now over 90% food sovereign. The economy is being diversified with the sober understanding that relief from the US imperialist hybrid war is unlikely in the near future.

    Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Ron further explained the political dimensions of the US sanctions, which were designed to reverse the sizable achievements of the Chávez years. The aim, he said, was to kill hope and blame socialism for the attacks of “predatory capitalism.” The Venezuelan state was robbed by the US and its allies: seizure of overseas assets; dispossession of  CITGO, the state-owned oil subsidiary in the US; and confiscation of gold reserves held abroad.

    The “perversity of sanctions,” according to Ron, is that they undermine the social functions of the state to support the welfare of the people. That is, they try to cripple the government in order to make socialism look bad.

    Ron gave the example of the 16% malnutrition rate when Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998. By 2011, the rate was reduced to only 3%. But with the US maximum pressure campaign, the rate shot up to 13% (still better than before the revolution but punishing nonetheless).

    Venezuela experienced record out migration. This emigration was not due, as claimed by the US, to political persecution but was precipitated by worsening economic prospects caused primarily by the US politically-motivated sanctions. But now, Ron explained, citizens are returning to Venezuela and a new vice-ministry to assist their return has been created.

    Washington tried to isolate Venezuela both financially and diplomatically. Four years ago the US and some 50 of its allies recognized the parallel government of “interim president” Juan Guaidó, who had never even run for national office in Venezuela. Today only the US, Israel, and a few others still fail to recognize the elected government.

    Meanwhile, Venezuela has forged significant new economic and political ties with Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran among others. Regional alliances with Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and some Caribbean states, such as ALBA, have been strengthened. Close cooperative relations have been reinforced with friendly governments in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, three of the four leading economies in Latin America.  And Venezuela is orienting toward the Global South, with the possibility of joining the expanded BRICS+ alliance of emerging economies looking increasingly likely.

    Indeed, far from being isolated, Ron noted, Venezuela has further integrated into an emerging multipolar world. Venezuela was just elected to a vice-presidency of the UN General Assembly.

    Ron credited current successes to the political will of a strong and unwavering leadership under President Maduro, which he characterized as a “collective leadership” encompassing many actors. This was coupled with organized “people power.” Both, he emphasized, were needed. Venezuela, he concluded, demonstrated the people’s willingness to face challenges and a government that did not give up on the battle for socialism.

    The post How Venezuela Is Overcoming the US Blockade first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Gaza is Changing All of Us

    The images from Gaza are painful beyond measure. (Hadi Daoud APA images)

    I scroll through news and photos and videos daily.

    I check Whatsapp first thing in the morning for messages from friends in Gaza and send off a few to ask how they’re doing.

    They tolerate my stupid question. I’m not really asking, though, because I know they’re not okay.

    I just want to make sure they’re alive.

    To send them love. To tell them I’m thinking of them.

    I wonder if it’s for them or for me. I love and miss them and wish I never left Gaza because now I can’t get back since Israel is controlling the Egyptian border.

    I also check the resistance Telegram channels daily to see if they have posted new videos. Their epic bravery renews my optimism and sense of revolutionary determination.

    Most of the scenes on my scroll are painful beyond measure. The livestreamed atrocities I consume by day are processed in my dreams by night.

    Gaza doesn’t leave me.

    I’m not alone. Nearly all of my friends say the same and I see random people on social media losing their minds over what they’re witnessing.

    Most of them are ordinary citizens who’ve never been political. Their initiation into geopolitical order is genocide – headless, limbless, faceless Palestinian babies and children, with Israeli soldiers and civilians cheering it all on.

    Day in and day out.

    I watched a British soldier today scream at the world on social media, unable to contain his pain and disbelief at the unimaginable cruelty.

    The reel went on for several minutes. The soldier’s face turned red and his veins bulged and his eyes misted.

    How long?

    Gaza is changing all of us.

    How long will this go on?

    No protest, no resignation, no complaint to the International Court of Justice, no pressure seems to curtail Israel’s insatiable bloodlust and criminal war machine.

    Now the Israelis want to bomb Lebanon, threatening to turn Beirut into Gaza.

    If Israel were a person, they would be locked up in a maximum security prison for the world’s worst criminals.

    The creation of this settler colony was the biggest geopolitical blunder in modern history, threatening to drag the whole world into an inferno. Palestinians are already there, in the pits of Israel’s depravity, burning and dying and screaming for help.

    On my last trip to Gaza, I took over 60 pounds of food for just one family.

    A friend’s mother knew a woman who knew another woman who had three kids with phenylketonuria (PKU), a hereditary condition that makes children unable to metabolize phenylalanine, an amino acid found in most foods. Without a special diet low in phenylalanine, PKU will lead to mental disabilities, seizure disorders and other neurological conditions.

    Israel’s blockade of food to the strip made it impossible for the mother to find the food they needed, and giving her children regular bread was akin to slowly poisoning them. My friends in Egypt weren’t able to locate the special pasta and flour so I ordered it from a company in the US and hauled it in an overweight suitcase across the world, then across the border to Gaza.

    There, I delivered the goods through a friend traveling to Nuseirat, the area in central Gaza where the family was at the time. Later that day, the mother sent photos and videos of her children eating the pasta, smiling, grateful and gleeful.

    She had also baked them cookies from the special dough.

    I think about them often, for the supply I brought has surely run out by now.

    I wonder, too, if they survived the Nuseirat massacre on 8 June. Or were they among the 270 lives sacrificed to extract four Israeli captives?

    I wonder how many other people with PKU have been forced daily to choose between hunger or neurological poison.

    I think of little Zeina, a young friend I made.

    I fell in love with her and her family – one brother and loving parents. All of them kind and smart and close knit.

    But when it was time for me to leave, Zeina meekly took me aside when no one would notice. She was trembling slightly.

    “Can I go with you when you leave?” she pleaded.

    I don’t believe in lying to children, though the truth was hard to utter. The best I could do was promise to come back and assure her that this horror would end.

    Eventually, it will end.

    I don’t know how long she had waited for the right opportunity to take me aside, or if she had practiced how she would ask me. I think she believed there was a chance and I know she felt she was betraying her family because she later begged me not to tell her mom.

    There are hundreds of thousands of children like Zeina, traumatized in ways none of us can truly comprehend. Their brains are rewiring and their childhood no longer resembles childhood.

    Only the willfully ignorant and morally vacuous, which may well be one in the same, are untouched by this holocaust in real time.

    The rest of us are awake and enraged and mobilizing.

    Gaza has altered our collective DNA. We are united in our love and pain and resolve to resist and escalate until Palestine is liberated and these genocidal Zionists are held to account in the same manner Nazis were.

    • Article first published in The Electronic Intifada

    The post Gaza is Changing All of Us first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Did The West Provoke The Ukraine War? Sorry, That Question Has Been Cancelled

    Is it possible for an entire ‘mainstream’ media system – every newspaper, website, TV channel – to completely suppress one side of a crucial argument without anyone expressing outrage, or even noticing? Consider the following.

    In February 2022, Nigel Farage, former and future leader of the Reform UK party, tweeted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was:

    ‘A consequence of EU and NATO expansion, which came to a head in 2014. It made no sense to poke the Russian bear with a stick.’

    In a recent interview, the BBC reminded Farage of this comment. He responded:

    ‘Why did I say that? It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man [Putin] a reason to his Russian people to say they’re coming for us again, and to go to war.

    ‘We’ve provoked this war – of course it’s his fault – he’s used what we’ve done as an excuse.’

    The BBC quickly made this a major news story by publishing a front page, top headline piece by BBC journalist Becky Morton who cited, and repeated, high-level sources attacking Farage. Morton wrote:

    ‘Former Conservative Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who is not standing in the election, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Mr Farage was like a “pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar”.’

    And:

    ‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was echoing Mr Putin’s “vile justification” for the war and Labour branded him “unfit” for any political office.’

    Morton then repeated both criticisms:

    ‘Mr Wallace – who oversaw the UK’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – said Mr Farage “is a bit like that pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar” and often presents “very simplistic answers” to complex problems.’

    And:

    ‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was “echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine”.’

    Morton piled on the pain:

    ‘Labour defence spokesman John Healey said Mr Farage’s comments made him “unfit for any political office in our country, let alone leading a serious party in Parliament”.

    ‘Former Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson accused Mr Farage of “parroting the Kremlin Line” and “producing new excuses for the brutal, unprovoked attack”.’

    Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson are all, of course, influential, high-profile figures; compiling their criticisms in this way sent a powerful message to BBC readers. Remarkably, one might think – given the BBC’s supposed devotion to presenting ‘both sides’ of an argument – Morton offered no source of any kind in support of Farage’s argument.

    The BBC intensified its coverage by opening a ‘Live’ blog (reserved for top news stories, disasters and scandals) on the issue, titled:

    ‘Farage “won’t apologise” for Ukraine comments after Starmer and Sunak criticism’

    The BBC reported:

    ‘Keir Starmer has called Nigel Farage’s comments on Ukraine “disgraceful” as Rishi Sunak says they play into Putin’s hands’

    Again, nowhere in the ‘Live’ blog coverage did the BBC cite arguments in support of Farage’s argument. Is it because they don’t exist?

    In June 2022, Ramzy Baroud interviewed Noam Chomsky:

    ‘Chomsky told us that it “should be clear that the (Russian) invasion of Ukraine has no (moral) justification.” He compared it to the US invasion of Iraq, seeing it as an example of “supreme international crime.” With this moral question settled, Chomsky believes that the main “background” of this war, a factor that is missing in mainstream media coverage, is “NATO expansion.”

    ‘”This is not just my opinion,” said Chomsky, “it is the opinion of every high-level US official in the diplomatic services who has any familiarity with Russia and Eastern Europe. This goes back to George Kennan and, in the 1990s, Reagan’s ambassador Jack Matlock, including the current director of the CIA; in fact, just everybody who knows anything has been warning Washington that it is reckless and provocative to ignore Russia’s very clear and explicit red lines. That goes way before (Vladimir) Putin, it has nothing to do with him; (Mikhail) Gorbachev, all said the same thing. Ukraine and Georgia cannot join NATO, this is the geostrategic heartland of Russia.”’

    We know people are interested in Chomsky’s views on the Ukraine war because when we posted a comment from him on X it received 430,000 views and 7,000 likes (huge numbers by our standards).

    In 2022, John Pilger commented:

    ‘The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission.  I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.

    ‘In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.

    ‘In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.’

    Pilger added:

    ‘Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” – except one.

    ‘When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.’

    In May 2023, economist Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University wrote:

    ‘Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

    ‘Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion.’ (Our emphasis)

    Sachs has previously been presented as a credible source by the BBC on other issues. In 2007, Sachs gave five talks for the BBC’s Reith Lectures.

    The New Yorker magazine described political scientist Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago as ‘one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War’. Mearsheimer commented:

    ‘I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he [Putin] was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument…’

    There are numerous other credible sources, including Benjamin Abelow, author of How The West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022) and Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (Yale University Press, 2022). Journalist Ian Sinclair, author of The March That Shook Blair (Peace News, 2013), published a collection of material titled:

    ‘Testimony from US government and military officials, and other experts, on the role of NATO expansion in creating the conditions for the Russian invasion of Ukraine’

    Sinclair cited, for example, current CIA Director William Burns:

    ‘Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-nineties, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best and needlessly provocative at worst.’

    And George F. Kennan, a leading US Cold War diplomat:

    ‘…something of the highest importance is at stake here. And perhaps it is not too late to advance a view that, I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era’.

    We can understand why the BBC might want to cite Sunak, Starmer, Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson, but we can’t understand why it would ignore the counterarguments and sources cited above.

    It gets worse. A piece in the Daily Mail essentially repeated the BBC performance with endless vitriolic comments again cited from Sunak, Starmer, Cleverly, Healey, Robertson and several others. And again, no counterarguments.

    A Reuter’s report quoted Sunak and Healey but no counterarguments.

    ITV cited former prime minister Boris Johnson:

    ‘To try and spread the blame is morally repugnant and parroting Putin’s lies.’

    No counterarguments were allowed, other than from Farage himself. At a recent rally, he held up a front-page headline from the i newspaper in 2016, which read, tragicomically:

    ‘Boris blames EU for war in Ukraine’

    That about sums up the state of both Boris Johnson and UK politics generally.

    The Telegraph cited Cleverly and other high-profile sources attacking Farage:

    ‘Tobias Ellwood, the former Tory defence minister, told The Telegraph: “Churchill will be turning in his grave. Putin, already enjoying how Farage is disrupting British politics, will be delighted to hear this talk of appeasement entering our election debate.”

    ‘Lord West of Spithead, the former chief of the naval staff, said: “Anyone who gives any seeming excuse to president Putin and his disgraceful attack … is standing into danger as regards their views on world affairs.” James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “Just Farage echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine.”

    ‘Liam Fox, the former Tory defence secretary, told The Telegraph: “The West did not ‘provoke this war’ in Ukraine and it is shocking that Nigel Farage should say so.”’ (Daily Telegraph, ‘Farage: West provoked Russia to attack Ukraine’, 22 June 2024)

    Again, all alternative views were ignored as non-existent.

    In the Independent, journalist Tom Watling packed his article with comments from Sunak, Starmer and Wallace. Again, no counterarguments were allowed.

    The Guardian cited Sunak, Healey and Cleverly. Again, no counterarguments were included. (Peter Walker, ‘Nigel Farage claims Russia was provoked into Ukraine war’, The Guardian, 21 June 2024)

    With such limited resources, it is difficult for us to wade through all mentions of this story, but we will stick our necks out and suggest that it is quite possible that no sources supporting Farage’s argument have been cited in any UK national newspaper.

    By any rational accounting, this ‘mainstream’ coverage is actually a form of totalitarian propaganda. It has denied the British public the ability to even understand the criticisms. Most people reading these reports will simply not understand why Farage made the claim – it is a taboo subject in ‘mainstream’ coverage – and so they have no way of making sense of either his argument or the backlash. This is deep bias presented as ‘news’. It is fake news.

    And this suppression of honest journalism in relation to one of the most dangerous and devastating wars of our time, in which our own country is deeply involved, is happening in the run up to what is supposed to be a democratic election.

    None of the above is intended as a defence of Farage’s wider political stance. On the contrary, we agree with political journalist Peter Oborne:

    ‘Farage, a close ally of Donald Trump, who has supported Marine Le Pen in France and spoken at an AfD rally in Germany, fits naturally into the rancid politics of the far-right movements making ground across Europe and in the United States.’

    Farage and his far-right views have been endlessly platformed by the BBC.

    Needless to say, the Ukraine war is only one of many key issues that are off the agenda for our choice-as-no-choice political system. In a rare example of dissent, Owen Jones commented in the Guardian:

    ‘Is this a serious country or not? It is egregious enough that this general election campaign is so stripped of discussion about the defining issues facing us at home for the next half decade, whether that be public spending, the NHS or education. But it is especially shocking how quickly the butchery in Gaza – and the position of this imploding government and its successor – has been forgotten.’

    Jones noted:

    ‘On Thursday night’s BBC Question Time leaders’ special, there was not a single question or answer on Gaza.

    ‘Seriously? Clearly this is an issue that matters to many Britons.’

    Earlier this month, Professor Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London commented:

    ‘The most astonishing thing about the UK election campaign is not what the leaders and parties are saying, but what they are NOT saying

    ‘It beggars belief that the #climate is simply not an issue and – as far as I have heard – has not been addressed by either leader

    ‘Just criminal’

    It works like magic: two major political parties ostensibly representing the ‘left’ and ‘right’ of the political spectrum, but both actually serving the same establishment interests, naturally ignore issues that offend power. Establishment media can then also ignore these issues on the pretext that the party-political system covers the entire spectrum of thinkable thought, and that any ideas outside that ‘spectrum’ have no particular right to be heard at election time. Indeed, to venture beyond the carefully filtered bubble of party politics is seen as actually undemocratic. As one ITV journalist reported:

    ‘Outrage at Nigel Farage’s comments about the war in Ukraine has drawn criticism from all corners of British politics.’

    Not quite. They drew criticism from the select few corners of British politics that are allowed to exist in our ‘managed democracy’.

    The post Did The West Provoke The Ukraine War? Sorry, That Question Has Been Cancelled first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • NATO’s Endgame Appears to Be Nuclear War

    The world is at its most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Back then, however, the fear of total destruction consumed the public; today, few people seem even to be aware of this possibility.

    It is easily imaginable that nuclear war could break out between Russia (and perhaps China) and the West, yet politicians continue to escalate tensions, place hundreds of thousands of troops at “high readiness,” and attack military targets inside Russia, even while ordinary citizens blithely go on with their lives.

    The situation is without parallel in history.

    Consider the following facts. A hostile military alliance, now including even Sweden and Finland, is at the very borders of Russia. How are Russian leaders—whose country was almost destroyed by Western invasion twice in the twentieth century—supposed to react to this? How would Washington react if Mexico or Canada belonged to an enormous, expansionist, and highly belligerent anti-U.S. military alliance?

    As if expanding NATO to include Eastern Europe wasn’t provocative enough, Washington began to send billions of dollars’ worth of military aid to Ukraine in 2014, to “improve interoperability with NATO,” in the words of the Defense Department. Why this Western involvement in Ukraine, which, as Obama said while president, is “a core Russian interest but not an American one”? One reason was given by Senator Lindsey Graham in a recent moment of startling televised candor: Ukraine is “sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals… I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China.”

    As the Washington Post has reported, “Ukraine harbors some of the world’s largest reserves of titanium and iron ore, fields of untapped lithium and massive deposits of coal. Collectively, they are worth tens of trillions of dollars.” Ukraine also has colossal reserves of natural gas and oil, in addition to neon, nickel, beryllium, and other critical rare earth metals. For NATO’s leadership, Russia and, in particular, China can’t be permitted access to these resources. The war in Ukraine must, therefore, continue indefinitely, and negotiations with Russia mustn’t be pursued.

    Meanwhile, as Ukraine was being de facto integrated into NATO in the years before 2022, the United States put into operation an anti-ballistic-missile site in Romania in 2016. As Benjamin Abelow notes in How the West Brought War to Ukraine, the missile launchers that the ABM system uses can accommodate nuclear-tipped offensive weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missile. “Tomahawks,” he points out, “have a range of 1,500 miles, can strike Moscow and other targets deep inside Russia, and can carry hydrogen bomb warheads with selectable yields up to 150 kilotons, roughly ten times that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” Poland now boasts a similar ABM site.

    American assurances that these anti-missile bases are defensive in nature, to protect against an (incredibly unlikely) attack from Iran, can hardly reassure Russia, given the missile launchers’ capability to launch offensive weapons.

    In another bellicose move, the Trump administration in 2019 unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. Russia responded by proposing that the U.S. declare a moratorium on the deployment of short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, saying it wouldn’t deploy such missiles as long as NATO members didn’t. Washington dismissed these proposals, which upset some European leaders. “Has the absence of dialogue with Russia,” Emmanuel Macron said, “made the European continent any safer? I don’t think so.”

    The situation is especially dangerous given what experts call “warhead ambiguity.” As senior Russian military officers have said, “there will be no way to determine if an incoming ballistic missile is fitted with a nuclear or a conventional warhead, and so the military will see it as a nuclear attack” that warrants a nuclear retaliation. A possible misunderstanding could thus plunge the world into nuclear war.

    So now we’re more than two years into a proxy war with Russia that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and has seen Ukraine even more closely integrated into the structures of NATO than it was before. And the West continues to inch ever closer to the nuclear precipice. Ukraine has begun using U.S. missiles to strike Russian territory, including defensive (not only offensive) missile systems.

    This summer, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium will begin sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine; and Denmark and the Netherlands have said there will be no restrictions on the use of these planes to strike targets in Russia. F-16s are able to deliver nuclear weapons, and Russia has said the planes will be considered a nuclear threat.

    Bringing the world even closer to terminal crisis, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg states that 500,000 troops are at “high readiness,” and in the next five years, NATO allies will “acquire thousands of air defense and artillery systems, 850 modern aircraft—mostly 5th-generation F-35s—and also a lot of other high-end capabilities.” Macron has morphed into one of Europe’s most hawkish leaders, with plans to send military instructors to Ukraine very soon. At the same time, NATO is holding talks about taking more nuclear weapons out of storage and placing them on standby.

    Where all this is heading is unclear, but what’s obvious is that Western leaders are acting with reckless disregard for the future of humanity. Their bet is that Putin will never deploy nuclear weapons, despite his many threats to do so and recent Russian military drills to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. Given that Russian use of nuclear warheads might well precipitate a nuclear response by the West, the fate of humanity hangs on the restraint and rationality of one man, Putin—a figure who is constantly portrayed by Western media and politicians as an irrational, bloodthirsty monster. So the human species is supposed to place its hope for survival in someone we’re told is a madman, who leads a state that feels besieged by the most powerful military coalition in history, apparently committed to its demise.

    Maybe the madmen aren’t in the Russian government but rather in NATO governments?

    It is downright puzzling that millions of people aren’t protesting in the streets every day to deescalate the crisis and pull civilization back from the brink. Evidently the mass media have successfully fulfilled their function of manufacturing consent. But unless the Western public wakes up, the current crisis might not end as benignly as did the one in 1962.

    The post NATO’s Endgame Appears to Be Nuclear War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Release of Julian Assange: Plea Deals and Dark Legacies

    One of the longest sagas of political persecution is coming to its terminus.  That is, if you believe in final chapters.  Nothing about the fate of Julian Assange seems determinative.  His accusers and inquisitors will draw some delight at the plea deal reached between the WikiLeaks founder’s legal team and the US Department of Justice.  Others, such as former US Vice President, Mike Pence, thought it unjustifiably lenient.

    Alleged to have committed 18 offences, 17 novelly linked to the odious Espionage Act, the June 2020 superseding indictment against Assange was a frontal assault on the freedoms of publishing and discussing classified government information.  At this writing, Assange has arrived in Saipan, located in the US commonwealth territory of Northern Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific, to face a fresh indictment.  It was one of Assange’s conditions that he would not present himself in any court in the United States proper, where, with understandable suspicion, he might legally vanish.

    As correspondence between the US Department of Justice and US District Court Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona reveals, the “proximity of this federal US District Court to the defendant’s country of citizenship, Australia, to which we expect he will return at the conclusion of proceedings” was also a factor.

    Before the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, he will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC).  The felony carries a fine up to $10,000 and/or up to 10 years in prison, though Assange’s time in Belmarsh Prison, spent on remand for some 62 months, will meet the bar.

    The felony charge sheet alleges that Assange knowingly and unlawfully conspired with US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, then based at Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, to receive and obtain documents, writings and notes, including those of a secret nature, relating to national defence, wilfully communicated those documents from persons with lawful possession of or access to them to those not entitled to receive them, and do the same from persons unauthorised to possess such documents.

    Before turning to the grave implications of this single count and the plea deal, supporters of Assange, including his immediate family, associates and those who had worked with him and drunk from the same well of publishing, had every reason to feel a surreal sense of intoxication.  WikiLeaks announced Assange’s departure from London’s Belmarsh Prison on the morning of June 24 after a 1,901 day stint, his grant of bail by the High Court in London, and his release at Stansted Airport.  Wife Stella regularly updated followers about the course of flight VJ199.  In coverage posted of his arrival at the federal court house in Saipan, she pondered “how overloaded his senses must be, walking through the press scrum after years of sensory depravation and the four walls” of his Belmarsh cell.

    As for the plea deal itself, it is hard to fault it from the emotional and personal perspective of Assange and his family.  He was ailing and being subjected to a slow execution by judicial process.  It was also the one hook upon which the DOJ, and the Biden administration, might move on.  This being an election year in the US, the last thing President Biden wanted was a haunting reminder of this nasty saga of political persecution hovering over freedom land’s virtues.

    There was another, rather more sordid angle, and one that the DOJ had to have kept in mind in thinning the charge sheet: a proper Assange trial would have seen the murderous fantasies of the CIA regarding the publisher subject to scrutiny.  These included various possible measures: abduction, rendition, even assassination, points thoroughly explored in a Yahoo News contribution in September 2021.

    One of the authors of the piece, Zach Dorfman, posted a salient reminder as news of the plea deal filtered through that many officials during the Trump administration, even harsh critics of Assange, “thought [CIA Director Mike] Pompeo’s extraordinary rendition plots foolhardy in the extreme, and probably illegal.  They also – critically – thought it might harm Assange’s prosecution.”  Were Pompeo’s stratagems to come to light, “it would make the discovery process nightmarish for the prosecution, should Assange ever see trial.”

    From the perspective of publishers, journalists and scribblers keen to keep the powerful accountable, the plea must be seen as enormously troubling. It ultimately goes to the brutal exercise of US extraterritorial power against any publisher, irrespective of outlet and irrespective of nationality.  While the legal freight and prosecutorial heaviness of the charges was reduced dramatically (62 months seems sweetly less imposing than 175 years), the measure extracts a pound of flesh from the fourth estate.  It signals that the United States can and will seek out those who obtain and publish national security information that they would rather keep under wraps under spurious notions of “harm”.

    Assange’s conviction also shores up the crude narrative adopted from the moment WikiLeaks began publishing US national security and diplomatic files: such activities could not be seen as journalistic, despite their role in informing press commentary or exposing the venal side of power through leaks.

    From the lead prosecuting attorney Gordon Kromberg to such British judges as Vanessa Baraitser; from the national security commentariat lodged in the media stable to any number of politicians, including the late California Democrat Dianne Feinstein to the current President Joe Biden, Assange was not of the fourth estate and deserved his mobbing.  He gave the game away.  He pilfered and stole the secrets of empire.

    To that end, the plea deal makes a mockery of arguments and effusive declarations that the arrangement is somehow a victory for press freedom.  It suggests the opposite: that anyone publishing US national security information by a leaker or whistleblower is imperilled.  While the point was never tested in court, non-US publishers may be unable to avail themselves of the free speech protections of the First Amendment.  The Espionage Act, for the first time in history, has been given a global, tentacular reach, made a weapon against publishers outside the United States, paving the way for future prosecutions.

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  • Electing the Next Dictator: Ugly Truths You Won’t Hear from Trump or Biden

    No matter what carefully crafted sound bites and political spin get trotted out by Joe Biden and Donald Trump in advance of the 2024 presidential election, you can rest assured that none of the problems that continue to undermine our freedoms will be addressed in any credible, helpful way by either candidate, despite the dire state of our nation.

    Indeed, the 2024 elections will not do much to alter our present course towards a police state.

    Nor will the popularity contest for the new occupant of the White House significantly alter the day-to-day life of the average American greatly at all. Those life-changing decisions are made elsewhere, by nameless, unelected government officials who have turned bureaucracy into a full-time and profitable business.

    In the interest of liberty and truth, here are a few uncomfortable truths about life in the American police state that we will not be hearing from either of the two leading presidential candidates.

    1. The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.”

    2. By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.

    3. Republicans and Democrats like to act as if there’s a huge difference between them and their policies. However, they are not sworn enemies so much as they are partners in crime, united in a common goal, which is to maintain the status quo.

    4. Presidential elections merely serve to maintain the status quo. Once elected president, that person becomes part of the dictatorial continuum that is the American imperial presidency today.

    5. The U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on foreign aid programs it can’t afford, all the while the national debt continues to grow, our domestic infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached. What is going on? It’s obvious that a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy is running the country.

    6. 1984 has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

    7. When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals. In the current governmental climate, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can easily render you an “enemy of the state.”

    8. If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it. Americans only think they’re choosing the next president. In truth, however, they’re engaging in the illusion of participation culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting. It’s just another manufactured illusion conjured up in order to keep the populace compliant and convinced that their vote counts and that they still have some influence over the political process.

    9. More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the U.S. government has become a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.

    10. The government knows exactly which buttons to push in order to manipulate the populace and gain the public’s cooperation and compliance. This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding. This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.

    11. The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder. The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.

    12. Every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.

    13. “We the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law. While the First Amendment—which gives us a voice—is being muzzled, the Fourth Amendment—which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten, broken and spied on by government agents—is being disemboweled.

    14. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead. Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government’s vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.

    15. Private property means nothing if the government can take your home, car or money under the flimsiest of pretexts, whether it be asset forfeiture schemes, eminent domain or overdue property taxes.

    16. If there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off.

    17. From the moment they are born to the time they legally come of age, young people are now wards of the state.

    18. All you need to do in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

    19. The government is pushing us ever closer to a constitutional crisis.

    20. Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—continue to be choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

    These are not problems that can be glibly dismissed with a few well-chosen words, as most politicians are inclined to do.

    No matter which candidate wins this election, the citizenry and those who represent us need to own up to the fact that there can be no police state—no tyranny—no routine violations of our rights without our complicity and collusion—without our turning a blind eye, shrugging our shoulders, allowing ourselves to be distracted and our civic awareness diluted.

    Likewise, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, these problems will continue to plague our nation unless and until Americans wake up to the fact that we’re the only ones who can change things for the better and then do something about it. After all, the Constitution opens with those three vital words, “We the people.”

    There is no government without us—our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land.

    We are the government.

    The post Electing the Next Dictator: Ugly Truths You Won’t Hear from Trump or Biden first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Julian Assange Is Released from Prison: What Does it Mean?

    Lifesize bronze sculpture featuring (L-R) former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and former US soldier Chelsea Manning convicted of violations of the Espionage Act, on May 1, 2015 at Alexanderplatz square in Berlin. (AFP Photo / Tobias Schwarz) © AFP

    The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, will at long last taste freedom again. He should never have been imprisoned. Nevertheless, the release is conditional on his accepting to plead guilty to espionage in the United States — in the far-flung US territory of Saipan. There he is to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served. However, it is much longer that 62 months. Since Sweden ordered an arrest of Assange over rape allegations in 2010, Assange has found himself under some form of incarceration until his current release.

    There are some important takeaways from this gross dereliction of justice.

    One: The rape allegations, that continue to appear in lazy media, were false, and this was attested to by the two women in the case. The allegations were a political construction between Sweden acting on behalf of the US. The United Kingdom abetted the US’s scheming against Assange. No western nations stepped forward to criticize the treatment. Graciously, president  Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador offered asylum for Assange in Mexico.

    Why was Assange being targetted? Because WikiLeaks has released scads of classified US military documents on the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,  diplomatic cables, and the devastating video Collateral Murder. When US citizen Daniel Ellsberg released the “Pentagon Papers” for publication, he was charged with theft on top of espionage, but government chicanery caused it to end up in a mistrial. Whereas president Richard Nixon failed miserably against Ellsberg, Donald Trump and Joe Biden persevered and kept Assange under some form of lock-and-key.

    Two: Assange is not guilty. He is guilty of journalism, which is not a crime. He did not commit treason against the US. He is an Australian citizen and not a US citizen. He did not commit espionage. Assange is not a spy and neither was he a thief. He is a publisher, and when WikiLeaks published the leaks, Assange was doing what the New York Times did when they published the “Pentagon Papers.”

    Nonetheless, Assange is human. He has parents, a wife, and kids. Assange realizes that he was up against the state machinery of the US, UK, Sweden, and the collusion of Ecuador under president Lenin Moreno. Crucial was the unwillingness of pre-Albanese Australian administrations to fight for one of its citizens.

    If the Deep State in the US can have its own president assassinated without consequences, then it can easily have a single person put in some form of incarceration for as long as it intends.

    After years and years of incarceration — especially in the notorious Belmarsh prison, his health diminishing, missing his family — that Assange would have accepted the release terms of a rogue empire is completely understandable.

    Three: Justice is all too often not just. Justice delayed is justice denied goes the legal maxim. Unfortunately, Assange is not an isolated example. Edward Snowden cannot return stateside. Seeing what has happened to Assange reinforces that the US government will mete out injustice to him.

    Four: Monopoly media continues to evince that it is an organ of government and corporations. Why so? First, because they are instruments of power. Second, they found themselves all too often scooped by WikiLeaks on major stories.

    Five: The bad: this is a blow to freedom of speech and the right of the public to know what their government is doing.

    Six: More bad: it is too easy to demonize a hero, to torture a hero, and to do this even though there is a significant (although arguably not numerous enough) global movement in support of a hero.

    Seven: Even more bad: people must keep in mind the other heroes out there who brought corruption, war crimes, crimes against peace and humanity to the public consciousness and as a consequence face persecution, imprisonment, assassination, and whatever sordid punishments the machinery of rogue states can cook up. People like Daniel Ellsberg, William Binney, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, George Galloway, conscientious objectors, truth tellers, resistance fighters, among others.

    Eight: Assange is a hero. Heroes tend to be too loosely defined. Scoring a boatload of goals does not one a hero make, neither does crooning a hit song make one a hero, nor does attaining ultra wealth. Heroes are embued with a highly developed sense of morality and transcend themselves by working for the greater good of humanity and the world.

    Nine: It is a Pyrrhic victory for Empire. Yes, Assange was brought to the point of having to confess guilt, but who knows what Assange and WikiLeaks will do for exposing crimes of state from here on.

    Ten: Whatever Assange decides to do in the future, his decision is earned. He has already done so much for the people who want transparency and who want their governments held to account.

    The post Julian Assange Is Released from Prison: What Does it Mean? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Quibbling About Killing: Netanyahu’s Spat with Washington

    Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is unhappy.  Not so much with the Palestinians, whom he sees as terroristic, dispensable and a threat to Israeli security.  Not with the Persians, who, he swears, will never acquire a nuclear weapon capacity on his watch.  His recent lack of happiness has been directed against the fatty hand that feeds him and his country’s war making capabilities.

    On June 18, the Israeli PM released a video decrying Washington’s recent conduct towards his government in terms of military aid.  It was “inconceivable that in the past few months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel.”  Having claimed such an idea to be inconceivable, Netanyahu proceeded to conceive.  He stated that US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken had “assured” him “that the administration is working day and night to remove these bottlenecks. I certainly hope that’s the case.  It should be the case.”

    The release coincided with efforts made by President Joe Biden’s envoy, Amos Hochstein, to cool matters concerning Israel-Hezbollah hostilities, a matter that threatens to move beyond daily border skirmishes.  It was also a pointed reference to the halt in a single shipment of 2000 pound (900kg) bombs to Israel regarding concerns about massive civilian casualties over any planned IDF assault on Rafah.

    The White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was uncharacteristically unadorned in frankness.  “We genuinely do not know what he is talking about.”  Discussions between US and Israeli officials were continuing.  “There are no other pauses – none.”  It fell to the White House National Security Communications advisor, John Kirby, to field more substantive questions on the matter.

    On June 20, Kirby admitted to being perplexed and disappointed at Netanyahu’s remarks, “especially given that no other country is doing more to help Israel defend itself against the threat by Hamas”.  As he was at pains to point out, the US military industrial complex had enthusiastically furnished “material assistance to Israel” despite the pause on the provision of 2,000-pound bombs.  The notion “that we had somehow stopped helping Israel with their self-defense needs is absolutely not accurate”.  Netanyahu, in other words, was quibbling about the means of inflicting death, a matter of form over substance.

    Blinken confirmed as much, stating that the administration was “continuing to review one shipment that President Biden has talked about with regard to 2000-pound bombs because of our concerns about their use in densely populated areas like Rafah.”  All other matters were “moving as it normally would move.”

    These remarks are unequivocally true.  Annual military assistance to Israel from US coffers totals $3.8 billion.  In April, President Joe Biden approved the provision of $17 billion in additional assistance to Israel amidst the continued pummelling of Gaza and the starvation of its thinning population.  The Biden administration has also badgered Democratic lawmakers to give their blessing to the sale of 50 F-15 fighters to Israel in a contract amounting to $18 billion.  But this, according to accounts from Israel’s Channel 12 and the German paper Bild, has been less than satisfactory for Israel’s blood lusting prime minister.

    The disgruntled video precipitated much agitation among officials in the Biden administration.  In an Axios report, three, inevitably anonymised, offer their views.  One found it “hard to fathom” how the video “helps with deterrence.  There is nothing like telling Hezbollah that the US is withholding weapons from Israel, which is false, to make them feel emboldened.”

    The interviewed officials all admitted to Netanyahu’s inscrutability.  A half-plausible line was ventured: running up points on the domestic front ahead of a visit to Washington from Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant.  Not that the strategy was working for opposition leader, Yair Lapid, who found Netanyahu’s effort damaging in its reverberating potential.  From Moscow to Tokyo, “everyone is reaching the same conclusion: Israel is no longer the closest ally of the US.  This is the damage Netanyahu is causing us.”

    Kirby’s remarks deserve scrutiny on another level. For one, they suggest a rationale that would have done much in flattening Israeli egos.  “The president put fighter aircrafts up in the air in the middle of April to help shoot down several hundred drones and missiles, including ballistic missiles that were fired from Iran proper at Israel.”

    Here arises an important omission: the intervention by the US was part of a coordinated, choreographed plan enabling Iran to show force in response to the April 1 Israeli strike on its ambassadorial compound in Damascus while minimising the prospect of casualties.  Accordingly, Tehran and Washington found themselves in an odd, unacknowledged embrace that had one unintended consequence: revealing Israeli vulnerability.  No longer could Israel be seen to be self-sufficiently impregnable, its defences firmly holding against all adversaries.  In a perverse twist on that dilemma, a strong ally providing support is bound to be resented.  Nothing supplied will ever be, or can be, enough.

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  • Black Alliance for Peace Condemns US Black (Mis)Leaders for their Support of US Military Intervention and Occupation of Haiti

    The Haiti/Americas Team of the Black Alliance for Peace rebukes the US Black “misleadership” class for its support of the latest US invasion and occupation of Haiti. We condemn the participation of this class in discussions with the US security state and its promotion of imperialist foreign policy objectives aimed at undermining Haitian sovereignty and dignity.

    On March 29, 2024, US Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer led a meeting on Haiti policy with a selected group of “leaders of U.S.-based Black civil rights groups.” The White House’s Readout lists the participants as Reverend Al Sharpton of the National Action Network, Ron Daniels of the Institute of the Black World (IBW21), Marc Morial, President of the National Urban League, Derrick Johnson, President of the NAACP, and Jocelyn McCalla, Senior Policy Advisor for the Haitian-American Foundation for Democracy. Why would the U.S. National Security office sponsor a meeting about Haiti with these groups? The readout claims the U.S. is committed to “ensuring a better future for Haiti.” But the most significant aspect of the meeting was the need, according to the White House, to rally support for “the UN-authorized Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission to Haiti and lifting up Haitian-led solutions to the political impasse.”

    It seems that these Black misleaders huddling around the latrine of white power were given their marching orders to manufacture Black consent for continued US occupation and oppression of Haiti. Since that meeting, there has been a ramping up of US Black voices supposedly speaking on behalf of Haiti and Haitians. From Jesse Jackson to Al Sharpton, the main goal seems to be to rally the US Black community to support US foreign policy objectives, using Haiti as staging ground.

    Ron Daniels of IBW21 has been the most egregious, using the crisis in Haiti to raise funds for his organization, while propagating vile stereotypes about Haitian society and supporting US imperialism. In his recent “Haiti on Fire” articles, Daniels describes the country as a “virtual failed state” and a “narco-state” controlled by “vicious gangs,” calling for the Core Group to take the lead in Haiti, and claiming that only a US-ordered, Kenya-led mercenary mission can solve Haiti’s problems.

    By intent or ignorance, Daniels does not once mention the role of the US, France, and Canada in fomenting the crisis in Haiti, portraying it instead as a recent, self-inflicted problem caused by gangs and a few elites. Daniels does not acknowledge that this latest racist western media fascination with “gangs” only began in 2022 as the US was trying to keep its puppet Prime Minister, Ariel Henry, in power. What is most disturbing is that Daniels accepts that the Core Group, the foreign occupying force in Haiti, has legitimacy and has the right to take rule over Haiti. Never mind that Haitian people see the Core Group as a criminal, colonial entity. Daniels also celebrates the US-installed “Presidential Council” in Haiti, stating that this will lead to a “people-based democracy.” Someone should remind Daniels that there is no democracy under occupation.

    But we know that it was the US and Core Group – under the cover of pliant misleaders of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) – that handpicked the Haitian participants in the Presidential Council. We also know that all participants in this Council had to first agree to this illegal foreign military invasion of Haiti. In effect, Daniels is not only calling on the same white supremacist arsonists to put out the fire that they themselves lit in Haiti, he also supports another US-led military invasion and occupation of Haiti!

    BAP calls on those who support Haiti to not fall for the language of “solidarity” with Haiti when these Black hucksters of hegemony are using their platform and the language of “brotherhood” and “sisterhood, and a cynical co-optation of “Pan-Africanism” to help US imperialism snuff out Haitian sovereignty. We must remember that the crisis in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism.

    Ron Daniels and the IBW21, as well as these other Black misleaders, should be condemned for supporting US imperial policy against the First Black Republic in the modern world. These selected “Leaders of Civil Rights Groups” would do well to know that they are just the third group of Black faces that the US is instrumentalizing,  to invade Haiti, following the pattern set by the CARICOM countries and Kenya (which the U.S. is bribing with $300,000 to pretend to lead this disastrous mission). Are they wondering why the US, France, or Canada are refusing to lead the mission, or why they are only now involving them in the discussion? As we have said of the Kenyan government and the CARICOM governments providing armed mercenaries to kill Haitian people, this is Blackface imperialism.

    We would also like to point out to these Black “leaders” that this planned invasion of Haiti, though heralded as a “UN” mission, is actually not. It has the sanction of the UN Security Council, but the UN did not want to take responsibility for the mission because it would need to apply too much “robust use of force” on Haitian people.

    The Black Alliance for Peace continues to denounce US imperialism. But we especially condemn the Black faces of imperialism. We call on all those committed to a world without colonies to reject the Black faces of empire and their lies. Disband the Core Group! End the BINUH occupation! Stop all efforts to impose a new invasion on Haiti!

    Dump the Imperialists in Blackface! Solidarity with the resistance! Long live a free Haiti!

    The post Black Alliance for Peace Condemns US Black (Mis)Leaders for their Support of US Military Intervention and Occupation of Haiti first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • A Philippines-China Clash in the South China Sea


    Donald Trump was likeliest correct when he told a CNN reporter: “Your organization’s terrible. … You are fake news.”

    The bias is so blatantly obvious in the 20 June 2024 CNN headline: “‘Only pirates do this’: Philippines accuses China of using bladed weapons in major South China Sea escalation.” To adduce that it is a bias is simple. Consider that this current news story could have been titled: “Only imperialist lackeys do this: China accuses Philippines of hiding behind the US in its attempt to violate China’s ‘indisputable sovereignty’ in the South China Sea escalation.” That would provide a different perspective to consider in a headline. But it would still be biased. It is a bias because it does not dedicate itself to providing verifiable and relevant facts and background from all perspectives to allow readers to reach their own conclusions. Mind you, one of those seemingly biased headlines may have been accurate. This is because a person may well be biased to factual reporting whatever those facts reveal themselves to be. To strike a headline that does not prejudice the reader, consider: “Clash in the South China Sea between China and the Philippines.” Then consider the factuality of what is argued in an article as each side makes its case.

    Of primary consideration in the Philippines-China conflict is which country is supported by evidence in its claims of sovereignty over the shoal known as Ren’ai Jiao in China and Second Thomas Shoal in the West.

    CNN writes,

    In 2016, an international tribunal in The Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines’ claims in a landmark maritime dispute, which concluded that China has no legal basis to assert historic rights to the bulk of the South China Sea.

    But Beijing has ignored the ruling.

    What is conceded by CNN is that China has “historic rights to the bulk of the South China Sea.” What CNN asserts is that “historic rights” have no “legal basis.” Historic rights are nonetheless considered nebulous by some scholars. (see Justin D. Nankivell, “The Role of History and Law in the South China Sea and Arctic Ocean,” National Bureau of Asian Research, 7 August 2017. “… many states have different interpretive understandings of the authority of the law of the sea, which invariably lead to different strategic outcomes in foreign policy decision-making and maritime practice.” And Clive R. Symmons, “Historic Rights and the ‘Nine-Dash Line’ in Relation to UNCLOS in the Light of the Award in the Philippines v. China Arbitration (2016) concerning the Supposed Historic Claims of China in the South China Sea: Whatnow Remains of the Doctrine?” wherein it was acknowledged that clarification was needed for “… the meaning of various formerly interchangeably-used terms relating to historic maritime claims [as used in customary international law] : such as ‘historic rights’ [which now can be seen to have both a broad and narrow meaning, …,] p 27.)

    On 7 July 2016, I noted that China’s claim of sovereignty for the entirety of the South China Sea preceded the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. China claims its activities in the South China Sea date back to over 2,000 years ago having conferred sovereignty and maritime rights.

    China has been the first to discover, name and develop the group of islands in the South China Sea, which have been known as the Nanhai Islands in China. For centuries, the Chinese government had been the administrator of the islands by putting them under the administration of local governments, conducting military patrols and providing rescue services.The Nansha [Spratly] and Xisha [Paracel] Islands, occupied by Japan during World War II, were returned to China as part of the territories stolen from China. This has been clearly set out in international documents such as the Cairo Declaration and the Potsdam Proclamation. China sent government and military officials to recover the islands and deployed troops there.

    KJ Noh compellingly refuted the UNCLOS ruling in his article “Making a Mockery of International Law.”

    The key issue is over territorial sovereignty–who owns the islands…

    The Chinese claim these islands back to the 2nd century BCE, to the Han Dynasty. They claim constant usage, fishing, habitation, travel, mapping of the Islands, intensifying from the Ming Dynasty onwards, and produce historical documents to that effect.

    Other countries make other various historical claims: the Vietnamese claim usage from the 17th century onwards.

    The Philippines claim that the lands were terra nullius–uninhabited land–and therefore belong to them, as they fall within their maritime Exclusive Economic Zone of 200nm. They also claim that Tomas Cloma, a businessman and adventurer discovered, and then claimed for himself these islands in the 1956, before selling them to the Filipino Government for a single dollar.

    CNN writes, “What happens in the South China Sea has profound implications for the US, which has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines that dates back decades.”

    The US (which has not ratified UNCLOS) insists on China respecting international law and backed the Philippines seeking international arbitration. One wonders what the world would be like if the US insisted on Israel adhering to international law or, for that matter, that the US respect international law. The US rejected the 1986 World Court judgment against the US’s unlawful use of force in Nicaragua.

    Furthermore,

    It is farcical for Americans to push for purported liberation of lands for other peoples. Why? Because if one grouping of people is entitled to country status in a delimited territory, then that same principle must apply to all peoples in similar circumstances. The US would have to recognize Palestinian statehood in historical Palestine. The same would apply to the Kurds, the Kashmiris, the Basques in France and Spain, the Catalans in Spain, etc. National liberation can not be seriously considered as just a pick-and-choose principle among peoples seeking liberation in a homeland.

    Even worse, not only is it farcical, it is hypocritical for Americans. If Americans (and let’s be specific to certain Americans because here we are mainly discussing Americans derived from European migrants) are to be regarded as earnest and sincere in advocating the liberation of peoples elsewhere, then one should first look in one’s own backyard before calling for an overhaul of a neighbor’s backyard. To express fidelity with H.R. 6948, the US would have to turn over Puerto Rico to Puerto Ricans, Guam to the Chamorros, the Chagos archipelago to the Chagossians (yes, Britain lays claim, but the Chagossians were expelled at the request of the US military), and others.

    And let’s not forget the conquered islands of Hawai’i, 3860 km (2400 miles) from the US mainland. Or that the entirety of the country known as the USA is based on the genocide of the Original Peoples.

    *****

    There was a confrontation between Filipino forces and Chinese forces. The Philippines charge that the Chinese Coast Guard used bladed weapons appears to be corroborated by video footage. However, a snippet of video is hard to draw any pertinent conclusions from. What is required is a release of all the footage. Nonetheless, if China used excessive force compared to the Philippines and some Filipinos were subsequently injured, then China deserves some criticism for that.


    An undated photo of the amphibious BRP Sierra Madre the Philippines have used as an outpost in the South China Sea. (Getty Images/Jay Directo)

    CNN informs that the Philippine mission was to resupply its soldiers stationed on a beached World War II-era warship, BRP Sierra Madre, that asserts Manila’s territorial claims over the atoll. China holds that the vessel was illegally beached.

    “Let me stress that what directly led to this situation is the Philippines’ ignoring of China’s dissuasion and deliberate intrusion into the waters of Ren’ai Jiao which is part of China’s Nansha Qundao,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said.

    Lin asserts that China’s action was professional and restrained and aimed at stopping the illegal “resupply mission,” and that the China Coast Guard didn’t take direct measures against the Philippine personnel.

    “The Philippine operation was not for humanitarian supplies at all. The Philippine vessels carried not only construction materials but also smuggled weapons. They also intentionally rammed into Chinese vessels and splashed water and threw things on Chinese law-enforcement personnel,” said Lin. “These actions have obviously aggravated tensions at sea and seriously threatened the safety of Chinese personnel and ships.”

    US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the “United States stands with its ally the Philippines and condemns the escalatory and irresponsible actions” by China.

    That the US did not come to the aid of the Philippines, as per 1951 mutual defense treaty commitments, seems condemnatory of the US. “However,” said Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, “in practical terms, the Philippines itself would have to initiate a move to activate (it) before the US would intervene militarily.”

    A Global Times editorial scoffed at this.

    Washington is distorting the truth. The facts of this conflict are clear, and the China Coast Guard (CCG) has responded: the Philippines broke its promise by sending a supply ship and two inflatable boats to illegally enter the waters adjacent to the Ren’ai Jiao of China’s Nansha Islands on Monday, in an attempt to deliver supplies to its illegally grounded warship. What’s worse, the Philippine supply ship deliberately and dangerously approached and collided with normally sailing Chinese vessels. CCG took control measures in accordance with the law, including issuing warnings, intercepting, boarding and conducting inspections, and forcibly driving them away, actions which were reasonable, lawful, professional and standardized.

    There was indeed a physical confrontation. What the US — which supports the Israeli amped-up genocide in historical Palestine — thinks is obviated by its callous disregard for human life. Right or wrong will be determined by which country has the better claim to sovereignty over the South China Sea, its islands, and its islets.

    Lastly, it would be prudent if the Philippines more carefully considered who their friends really are.

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  • Is the Reign of the Dollar Coming to an End?

    Jiang Tiefeng (China), Stone Forest, 1979.

    In early June, a rumour began to circulate – which was widely reported in the Indian press as true – that the government of Saudi Arabia had allowed its petrodollar agreement with the United States to lapse. This agreement, made in 1974, is quite straight-forward and fulfills various needs of the US government: the US purchases oil from Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia uses that money to buy military equipment from US arms manufacturers while holding the income from the oil sales in US Treasury Bills and in the Western financial system. This arrangement to recycle oil profits into the US economy and the Western banking world is known as the petrodollar system.

    This non-exclusive arrangement between the two countries never required the Saudis to limit their oil sales to dollars or to recycle their oil profits exclusively in US Treasury Bills (of which it holds a considerable $135.9 billion) and Western banks. Indeed, the Saudis are free to sell oil in multiple currencies, such as the Euro, and participate in digital currency platforms such as mBridge, a trial initiative of the Bank of International Settlements and the central banks of China, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).  Nonetheless, the rumour that this decades-long petrodollar agreement had come to an end reflects the widespread expectation that a seismic shift in the financial system will overturn the rule of the Dollar-Wall Street regime. It was a false rumour, but it carried within it a truth about the possibilities of a post-dollar or de-dollarised world.

    Xu Lei (China), Map of the Mountains and Seas, 2003

    The invitation extended to six countries to join the BRICS bloc last August was a further indication that such a shift is underway. Among these countries are Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, although Saudi Arabia has yet to finalise its membership. With its expanded membership, BRICS would include the two countries with the largest and second largest gas reserves in the world (Russia and Iran, respectively) and the two countries that accounted for nearly a quarter of global oil production (Russia and Saudi Arabia, all figures as of 2022). The political opening between Iran and Saudi Arabia, brokered by Beijing in March 2023, as well as the signs that the US allies UAE and Saudi Arabia seek to diversify their political linkages, demonstrate the possible end of the petrodollar system. That was at the heart of the rumour in early June.

    However, this possibility should not be exaggerated, as the Dollar-Wall Street regime remains intact and significantly powerful. Data from the International Monetary Fund shows that, as of the last quarter of 2023, the US dollar accounted for 58.41% of allocated currency reserves, which is far more than the reserves held in euros (19.98%), Japanese yen (5.7%), British pound sterling (4.8%), and Chinese renminbi (short of 3%). Meanwhile, the US dollar remains the main invoicing currency in global trade, with 40% of international trade transactions in goods invoiced in dollars despite the fact that the US share of global trade is just 10%. While the dollar remains the key currency, it nonetheless faces challenges around the world, with the share of the US dollar in allocated currency reserves declining gradually but steadily over the last twenty years.

    Three factors are driving de-dollarisation: the US economy’s lack of strength and potential that began with the Third Great Depression in 2008; the aggressive use of illegal sanctions – especially financial sanctions – by the United States and its Global North allies against one quarter of the countries in the world; and the development and strengthening of relations between countries of the Global South, especially through platforms such as BRICS. In 2015, BRICS created the New Development Bank (NDB), also known as the BRICS Bank, to navigate a post-Dollar-Wall Street regime and to produce facilities to further development rather than austerity. The creation of these BRICS institutions and the increased use of local currencies to pay for cross-border trade created an expectation of hastened de-dollarisation. At the 2023 BRICS summit in Johannesburg, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva repeated the call to increase the use of local currencies and perhaps create a BRICS-denominated currency system.

    There has been a vibrant debate about de-dollarisation amongst those who have worked in the BRICS institutions and in the large countries that are interested in de-dollarisation, such as China, about its necessity, prospects, and the difficulties of finding new ways to hold currency reserves and invoice global trade. The most recent issue of the international journal Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横), a collaboration between Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Dongsheng, is dedicated to this topic. In the introduction to ‘The BRICS and De-Dollarisation: Opportunities and Challenges’ (volume 2, issue no. 1, May 2024), Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr., the first vice president of the NDB (2015–2017), summarises his considerable reflections on the importance of moving away from the Dollar-Wall Street regime and on the political and technical difficulties of such a transition. BRICS, he correctly asserts, is a diverse group of countries with very different political forces in charge of the different states. The political agendas of its members – even with the new mood in the Global South – are particularly diverse when it comes to economic theory, with many of the BRICS states remaining committed to neoliberal formulas while others seek new development models. One of the most important points raised by Nogueira is that the United States ‘will in all likelihood use all the many instruments at its disposal to struggle against any attempt to dethrone the dollar from its status as linchpin of the international monetary system’. These instruments would include sanctions and diplomatic threats, all of which would dampen the confidence of governments that have weaker political commitments and are not backed by popular movements committed to a new world order.

    Hung Liu, Sisters, 2000; Lithograph with chine collé on paper, 22 x 29 3/4 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of the Harry and Lea Gudelsky Foundation, Inc.; © Hung Liu

    De-dollarisation was moving at a very slow pace until 2022, when the Global North countries began to confiscate Russian assets held in the Dollar-Wall Street financial system and anxiety spread across many countries about the safety of their assets in the North American and European banks. Though this confiscation was not new (the United States has done this before to Cuba and Afghanistan, for instance), the scale and severity of these confiscations operated as a ‘confidence-destroying’ measure, as Nogueira puts it.

    Nogueira’s introduction is followed by three essays by leading Chinese analysts of the current shifts in the world order. In ‘What Is Driving the BRICS’ Debate on De-Dollarisation?’, Professor Ding Yifan (senior fellow at Beijing’s Taihe Institute) charts the reasons why many Global South countries now seek to trade in local currencies and to offload their reliance upon the Dollar-Wall Street regime. He emphasises two factors that put into question whether or not the dollar will be able to continue to serve as an anchor currency: first, the weakness of the US economy due to its reliance upon military spending over productive investment (the former of which accounts for 53.6% of total world military spending) and, second, the US’s history of breach of contract. At the close of his article, Ding reflects on the possibility of the Global South countries accepting the Chinese renminbi (RMB) as their reference currency, since China’s manufacturing capabilities make the RMB valuable as a way to buy Chinese goods.

    Yet, in his essay ‘China’s Foreign Exchange Reserves: Past and Present Security Challenges’, Professor Yu Yongding (member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) is cautious about the possibility of the RMB supplanting the dollar. For the RMB to become an international reserve currency, Yu argues, ‘China must fulfill a series of preconditions, including establishing a sound capital market (especially a deep and highly liquid treasury bond market), a flexible exchange rate regime, free cross-border capital flows, and long-term credit in the market’. This would mean that China would have to eschew its capital controls and begin to offer RMB treasury bonds for international buyers. RMB internationalisation, Yu argues, ‘is a goal worth pursuing’, but it is not something that can take place in the short run. ‘Distant water’, he writes poetically, ‘will not quench immediate thirst’.

    Xu De Qi (China), China Flower, 2007.

    So, where do we go from here? In his article ‘From De-Risking to De-Dollarisation: The BRICS Currency and the Future of the International Financial Order’, Professor Gao Bai, who teaches at Duke University in the United States, concurs that there is a pressing need to overcome the Dollar-Wall Street regime and that there is no easy way forward at this time. Local currency use has expanded – such as between Russia and China as well as between Russia and India – but such bilateral arrangements are insufficient. Increasingly, as a recent report from the World Gold Council shows, central banks around the world have been buying up gold for their reserves and thereby driving up its price (the spot price for gold is over $2,300 per ounce, far above the $1,200 per ounce price where it hovered in 2015). If no immediate currency is available to supplant the US dollar, Gao argues, then the Global South countries should establish a ‘reference value for settlements in their local currencies and an exchange platform to support such settlements. The great demand for such a valuation provides an opportunity for the creation of a BRICS currency’.

    The new issue of Wenhua Zongheng provides a clear and thoughtful assessment of the problems with the Dollar-Wall Street regime and the need for an alternative. The wide array of ideas that are on the table reflect the diversity of discussions taking place within policy circles around the world. We are keen to summarise these ideas and test their technical feasibility and their political viability.

    Irene Chou (China), The Universe Is My Mind, 2002.

    It is important to note that two of the BRICS countries have elected new governments this year. In India, the far-right government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi returns to power, but with a much-reduced mandate. Given that the Modi government has put forward a policy of ‘national interest’, it is likely that it will continue to play a role in the BRICS process and to use local currencies to buy goods such as Russian oil. Meanwhile, South Africa’s ruling alliance, led by the African National Congress (ANC), has formed a government with the right-wing Democratic Alliance, which is committed to US imperialism and is not keen on the BRICS agenda. With the likely entry of Nigeria into the BRICS bloc, BRICS’ centre of gravity on the African continent might shift northward.

    During the hard years of struggle against the apartheid government in South Africa, ANC member Lindiwe Mabuza (known as Sono Molefe) began to collect poems written by women in the ANC camps. Guerrilla fighters, teachers, nurses, and others sent in poems that she published in a volume called Malibongwe (‘Be Praised’), which referred to the 1956 Women’s March in Pretoria. In her introductory essay, Mabuza (1938–2021) wrote that in struggle ‘there is no romance’; there is ‘only pounding reality’. That phrase, ‘pounding reality’, merits reflection today. Nothing comes from nothing. You have to pound reality to make something, whether a new political opening in places such as India and South Africa or a new financial architecture beyond the Dollar-Wall Street regime.

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  • Mission Creep: How the Police State Acclimates Us to Being Modern-Day Slaves

    Like the proverbial boiling frogs, the government has been gradually acclimating us to the specter of a police state for years now: Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality.

    This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

    You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls. Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that only a militarized government can alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.

    It’s happening already.

    Yet we’re not just being acclimated to the trappings of a police state. We’re also being bullied into silence and subservience in the face of outright injustice and heavy-handed political correctness, while simultaneously being groomed into accepting government tyranny, corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude as societal norms.

    What exactly is going on?

    Whatever it is, this—the racial hypersensitivity without racial justice, the kowtowing to politically correct bullies with no regard for anyone else’s free speech rights, the violent blowback after years of government-sanctioned brutality, the mob mindset that is overwhelming the rights of the individual, the oppressive glowering of the Nanny State, the seemingly righteous indignation full of sound and fury that in the end signifies nothing, the partisan divide that grows more impassable with every passing day—is not leading us anywhere good.

    Certainly, it’s not leading to more freedom.

    This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding.

    It must be said: the various protests from both the Right and the Left in recent years have not helped. Inadvertently or intentionally, these protests have politicized what should never have been politicized: police brutality and the government’s ongoing assaults on our freedoms.

    We may be worse off now than we were before.

    Suddenly, no one seems to be talking about any of the egregious governmental abuses that are still wreaking havoc on our freedoms: police shootings of unarmed individuals, invasive surveillance, roadside blood draws, roadside strip searches, SWAT team raids gone awry, the military industrial complex’s costly wars, pork barrel spending, pre-crime laws, civil asset forfeiture, fusion centers, militarization, armed drones, smart policing carried out by AI robots, courts that march in lockstep with the police state, schools that function as indoctrination centers, bureaucrats that keep the Deep State in power.

    The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    How do you persuade a populace to embrace totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none?

    You persuade the people that the menace they face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.

    This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.

    It works the same way every time.

    Strangely enough, in the face of outright corruption and incompetency on the part of our elected officials, Americans in general remain relatively gullible, eager to be persuaded that the government headed up by their particular brand of political savior can solve the problems that plague us.

    We have relinquished control over the most intimate aspects of our lives to government officials who, while they may occupy seats of authority, are neither wiser, smarter, more in tune with our needs, more knowledgeable about our problems, nor more aware of what is really in our best interests.

    Yet having bought into the false notion that the government does indeed know what’s best for us and can ensure not only our safety but our happiness and will take care of us from cradle to grave—that is, from daycare centers to nursing homes—we have in actuality allowed ourselves to be bridled and turned into slaves at the bidding of a government that cares little for our freedoms or our happiness.

    The lesson is this: once a free people allows the government inroads into their freedoms or uses those same freedoms as bargaining chips for security, it quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny.

    Nor does it seem to matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm anymore. Indeed, the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government, whose priorities are to milk “we the people” of our hard-earned money (by way of taxes, fines and fees) and remain in control and in power.

    Modern government in general—ranging from the militarized police in SWAT team gear crashing through our doors to the rash of innocent citizens being gunned down by police to the invasive spying on everything we do—is acting illogically, even psychopathically. (The characteristics of a psychopath include a “lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions, among others.”)

    Indeed, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”

    We are walking a dangerous path right now.

    No matter who wins the presidential election come November, it’s a sure bet that the losers will be the American people.

    We have been saddled with a two-party system and fooled into believing that there’s a difference between the Republicans and Democrats, when, in fact, the two parties are exactly the same. As one commentator noted, both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty.

    Never forget, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that the lesser of two evils is still evil.

    The post Mission Creep: How the Police State Acclimates Us to Being Modern-Day Slaves first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Scandal at Trump-backer Epoch Times: Biden and U.S. Establishment Getting Desperate Over Election?

    With the U.S. presidential election only four months away, the incumbent Joe Biden White House and the Democrat Party are getting desperate. They can’t seem to close the gap in poll numbers showing Republican rival Donald Trump having a strong chance of regaining the presidency.

    Such is the political crisis in the United States from voter indifference to both candidates that anything could happen. With Trump threatening a “bloodbath” if he loses in November, the prospect of national chaos either way is looming.

    An increasingly frail Biden is calling on Hollywood A-listers to boost his flagging campaign. A recent $30 million fundraiser by Tinseltown big names including Julia Roberts and George Clooney warned of the “scariest” outcome if Trump were returned to the White House.

    What’s of concern to the political and media establishment – which largely votes Democrat – is that Trump’s popularity seems immune to damage from scandal and legal prosecutions for financial corruption. His fundraising is also set to grow more robustly after the Republican Congressional leaders put aside any misgivings to bless his campaign.

    The high stakes may explain the “big news” crackdown on alleged corruption by the chief financial executive at the conservative news outlet, The Epoch Times.

    Its Chief Financial Officer Weidong “Bill” Guan is in court this week facing federal charges for money laundering and bank fraud to the tune of $67 million. Guan denies the charges but if convicted he is facing a 20-30 year stretch in jail.

    The Epoch Times is a major supporter of “The Donald”. The weekly newspaper is published in 35 countries and 22 languages. It was founded 25 years ago and is affiliated with the Falun Gong movement, a secretive quasi-Buddhist religion that claims to have millions of followers in the U.S. and worldwide. The spiritual leader is China-born multimillionaire Li Hongzhi who lives in exile. Falun Gong is banned in China by the Chinese government which accuses it of cult practices and extortion of followers.

    Following the arrest of Bill Guan by U.S. authorities earlier this month, the Falun Gong leader wrote two articles for Epoch Times, denouncing shady practices and partisan politics. The newspaper has denied any wrongdoing and has suspended its chief financial officer pending the outcome of the fraud trial.

    The New York-based Epoch Times has been a useful proxy for U.S. governments since its foundation in 2000 following the exile of Li Hongzhi from China to the United States where “he found his American Dream”, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apart from its zany content which borders on superstition and sensationalism, the upside for the U.S. establishment is the publication is vehemently hostile towards the People’s Republic of China in its editorial line. It reflects the “anti-communist” views of the Falun Gong leader and in that way can be seen as a useful propaganda tool for Washington to drum up “anti-China” sentiments.

    However, during the last Trump administration, The Epoch Times adopted a stridently pro-Trump line. It ran stories popular among the MAGA movement such as the Covid-19 virus being a plot by the Chinese Communist Party to destroy the United States, as well as QAnon conspiracy claims about Satanic corruption among the U.S. establishment.

    When Trump lost in 2020 to Biden, the paper promoted the false claims that the election was “stolen” by Democrat-orchestrated voter fraud. Many Republican voters still believe that their man was cheated out of a second consecutive term by the deep state.

    Nailing its editorial colors to the Trump electoral mast was a profitable move for The Epoch Times. Under the stewardship of Bill Guan – a protégé of Falun Gong guru Li Hongzhi – the media group’s revenues skyrocketed from $4 million a year to over $120 million. The Department of Justice indictment alleges that Guan raked in the proceeds through fundraising online scams using cryptocurrency and personal identity theft.

    The association of Trump’s campaign with an alleged massive fraud operation run by a media group that can be easily painted as a weird cultist whack job seems to be the latest effort by the Democrat-supporting political establishment to tip the scales in favor of Biden.

    There has been widespread American corporate media coverage of the fraud scandal implicating The Epoch Times and its Falun Gong network. The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and CNBC, among others, have been having a field day on the subject.

    It appears odd that the U.S. establishment, which has indulged the Falun Gong movement and its anti-China news outlet for so many years, should abruptly ramp up negative coverage.

    But bear in mind that Biden’s campaign is in deep trouble. His administration’s embroilment in the Gaza genocide perpetrated by the Israeli regime has earned bitter recrimination from Democrat voters and students who would have normally voted for Biden.

    Another worry for the Democrat Party is Biden’s increasingly obvious physical and mental frailty. Even pro-Democrat media are openly commenting on how Biden’s mental health is failing as he stumbles from one public gaff or misstep to another. There is a sense of dread that when Trump and Biden go head to head in a live TV debate later this month, the incumbent president will be made look decrepit and unfit for office.

    The Democrat campaign is amplifying attention on Trump’s conviction for fraud over hush payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and his other forthcoming court trial over abuse of classified documents. It’s also talking up Trump’s dodgy financial accounts and business dealings as a former real estate magnate.

    The scandal at The Epoch Times and allegations of defrauding millions of Americans through money laundering comes at a time when the Biden campaign needs all the help it can get to pile the dirt on Trump.

    A legal crackdown on the newspaper’s financial dealings seems long overdue. Banks and tax authorities were flagging suspicious accounts from at least 2021, according to reports. Former employers of The Epoch Times have also commented publicly on the surprising delay in investigating the media outlet and its fundraising operations.

    It seems strange that federal indictments are being brought now with much-hyped media coverage if the case were assessed merely on legal concerns about finances.

    If the intensity of politics is factored though and the U.S. establishment’s fears that Trump might just pull off a spectacular reelection – with all the chaos that such a return to the White House will elicit – then digging up dirt using a money-laundering scandal makes perfect sense. Muzzling a pro-Trump media outlet is a bonus too.

    • First published in Strategic Culture Foundation

    The post Scandal at Trump-backer Epoch Times: Biden and U.S. Establishment Getting Desperate Over Election? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Scandal at Trump-backer Epoch Times: Biden and U.S. Establishment Getting Desperate Over Election?

    With the U.S. presidential election only four months away, the incumbent Joe Biden White House and the Democrat Party are getting desperate. They can’t seem to close the gap in poll numbers showing Republican rival Donald Trump having a strong chance of regaining the presidency.

    Such is the political crisis in the United States from voter indifference to both candidates that anything could happen. With Trump threatening a “bloodbath” if he loses in November, the prospect of national chaos either way is looming.

    An increasingly frail Biden is calling on Hollywood A-listers to boost his flagging campaign. A recent $30 million fundraiser by Tinseltown big names including Julia Roberts and George Clooney warned of the “scariest” outcome if Trump were returned to the White House.

    What’s of concern to the political and media establishment – which largely votes Democrat – is that Trump’s popularity seems immune to damage from scandal and legal prosecutions for financial corruption. His fundraising is also set to grow more robustly after the Republican Congressional leaders put aside any misgivings to bless his campaign.

    The high stakes may explain the “big news” crackdown on alleged corruption by the chief financial executive at the conservative news outlet, The Epoch Times.

    Its Chief Financial Officer Weidong “Bill” Guan is in court this week facing federal charges for money laundering and bank fraud to the tune of $67 million. Guan denies the charges but if convicted he is facing a 20-30 year stretch in jail.

    The Epoch Times is a major supporter of “The Donald”. The weekly newspaper is published in 35 countries and 22 languages. It was founded 25 years ago and is affiliated with the Falun Gong movement, a secretive quasi-Buddhist religion that claims to have millions of followers in the U.S. and worldwide. The spiritual leader is China-born multimillionaire Li Hongzhi who lives in exile. Falun Gong is banned in China by the Chinese government which accuses it of cult practices and extortion of followers.

    Following the arrest of Bill Guan by U.S. authorities earlier this month, the Falun Gong leader wrote two articles for Epoch Times, denouncing shady practices and partisan politics. The newspaper has denied any wrongdoing and has suspended its chief financial officer pending the outcome of the fraud trial.

    The New York-based Epoch Times has been a useful proxy for U.S. governments since its foundation in 2000 following the exile of Li Hongzhi from China to the United States where “he found his American Dream”, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apart from its zany content which borders on superstition and sensationalism, the upside for the U.S. establishment is the publication is vehemently hostile towards the People’s Republic of China in its editorial line. It reflects the “anti-communist” views of the Falun Gong leader and in that way can be seen as a useful propaganda tool for Washington to drum up “anti-China” sentiments.

    However, during the last Trump administration, The Epoch Times adopted a stridently pro-Trump line. It ran stories popular among the MAGA movement such as the Covid-19 virus being a plot by the Chinese Communist Party to destroy the United States, as well as QAnon conspiracy claims about Satanic corruption among the U.S. establishment.

    When Trump lost in 2020 to Biden, the paper promoted the false claims that the election was “stolen” by Democrat-orchestrated voter fraud. Many Republican voters still believe that their man was cheated out of a second consecutive term by the deep state.

    Nailing its editorial colors to the Trump electoral mast was a profitable move for The Epoch Times. Under the stewardship of Bill Guan – a protégé of Falun Gong guru Li Hongzhi – the media group’s revenues skyrocketed from $4 million a year to over $120 million. The Department of Justice indictment alleges that Guan raked in the proceeds through fundraising online scams using cryptocurrency and personal identity theft.

    The association of Trump’s campaign with an alleged massive fraud operation run by a media group that can be easily painted as a weird cultist whack job seems to be the latest effort by the Democrat-supporting political establishment to tip the scales in favor of Biden.

    There has been widespread American corporate media coverage of the fraud scandal implicating The Epoch Times and its Falun Gong network. The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and CNBC, among others, have been having a field day on the subject.

    It appears odd that the U.S. establishment, which has indulged the Falun Gong movement and its anti-China news outlet for so many years, should abruptly ramp up negative coverage.

    But bear in mind that Biden’s campaign is in deep trouble. His administration’s embroilment in the Gaza genocide perpetrated by the Israeli regime has earned bitter recrimination from Democrat voters and students who would have normally voted for Biden.

    Another worry for the Democrat Party is Biden’s increasingly obvious physical and mental frailty. Even pro-Democrat media are openly commenting on how Biden’s mental health is failing as he stumbles from one public gaff or misstep to another. There is a sense of dread that when Trump and Biden go head to head in a live TV debate later this month, the incumbent president will be made look decrepit and unfit for office.

    The Democrat campaign is amplifying attention on Trump’s conviction for fraud over hush payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and his other forthcoming court trial over abuse of classified documents. It’s also talking up Trump’s dodgy financial accounts and business dealings as a former real estate magnate.

    The scandal at The Epoch Times and allegations of defrauding millions of Americans through money laundering comes at a time when the Biden campaign needs all the help it can get to pile the dirt on Trump.

    A legal crackdown on the newspaper’s financial dealings seems long overdue. Banks and tax authorities were flagging suspicious accounts from at least 2021, according to reports. Former employers of The Epoch Times have also commented publicly on the surprising delay in investigating the media outlet and its fundraising operations.

    It seems strange that federal indictments are being brought now with much-hyped media coverage if the case were assessed merely on legal concerns about finances.

    If the intensity of politics is factored though and the U.S. establishment’s fears that Trump might just pull off a spectacular reelection – with all the chaos that such a return to the White House will elicit – then digging up dirt using a money-laundering scandal makes perfect sense. Muzzling a pro-Trump media outlet is a bonus too.

    • First published in Strategic Culture Foundation

    The post Scandal at Trump-backer Epoch Times: Biden and U.S. Establishment Getting Desperate Over Election? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Call for Alarm

    The unique post-World War II economic and military power of the United States prevented military and foreign policy errors from becoming overpowering disasters. Military adventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq upended America’s political system and wounded its psyche. Other than the 2001 attacks on American soil, physical destruction was foreign, appearing as images on television screens. Oil price rises, inflation, increasing debt to finance military costs, and social upheavals temporarily perturbed the US socioeconomic system. A powerful America overcame the impediments and continually extended its power until the Asian Tigers, a rejuvenated China, and progressive Latin leaders appeared on the global stage. America’s hegemony declined and the decline became confirmed by the Russian/Ukraine conflagration, Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and a subsequent attack on protesting students at the UCLA campus. No nation with unique power and in control of that power would have permitted these horrific happenings.

    The US is sliding into a mediocre existence. Heard that before? Hear it again. Four words describe those who have brought the United States to a sorrowful state ─ treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitor ─ harsh words that will be met with smiles, sneers, and derisions. They are correct words and backed by a long list of treacherous, treasonous, tyrannical, and traitorous actors in the American public. The description of the “tyranny in America” is not a repetitious overkill; it is a necessary refrain that punctuates the alarm ─ America is led by pseudo patriots who have betrayed its ideals and Americans must regain its inspiring freedom, liberty-loving, and peaceful aspirations.

    Domestic treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors

    Running for president of the USA are two traitors ─ Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

    Donald Trump is accused of provoking and aiding the Jan 6, 2021 attack on the US capitol and pursuing an insurrection against the US government. Treason.

    Donald Trump is accused of keeping US government top secrets in his home in locations where they could be revealed to others. He is guilty of violating US espionage laws. Treason.

    Donald Trump solicits Evangelical vote and financial assistance by supporting Israel, a foreign nation, in its genocide of the Palestinian people. Treachery.

    Joe Biden said, “Because even where we have some differences, my commitment to Israel, as you know, is ironclad. I think without Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world who’s secure. I think Israel is essential.” Besides the nonsensical statement that condemns Biden for not knowing that Israel is the only country in the world where Jews have continually suffered from fatal attacks, claim insecurity that seeks security, and exhibit excessive prejudice toward one another — Ashkenazi against Mizrahi, both against Yemeni and Falasha, and secular against ultra-orthodox — Biden admits he has failed to protect the most well-off Americans ─ Jewish citizens (from what??). Treachery.

    By having said, “My commitment to Israel, as you know, is ironclad,” Joe Biden betrayed US interests, which should have a flexible foreign policy. He has allied the US people with genocide. Traitor.

    Hunter Biden had financial dealings with adversaries of the US government. Joe Biden should have known his son’s arrangements and prevented accusations of influence peddling. Joe Biden is guilty of violating his oath of office. Treachery.
    Biden, similar to Trump, brought classified documents to his home and left them scattered in places open to revelation. Despite the Justice Department not pressing charges, Biden is guilty of violating US espionage laws. Treason.

    The US Justice Department (DOJ) indicted several Russians and Chinese who infiltrated America, gathered information, and lobbied for a foreign nation. The US Justice Department has not indicted one of tens of thousands of Israelis (could be one of hundreds of thousands), who have performed similar duties for Israel. Lobbying is only a small part of the damage to Americans done by these miscreant infiltrators, sent by Israel to foreign shores to do their mischief. From the almost one million Israelis living in the United States, hundreds of thousands may have become citizens, voted, and changed a highly contested election. In a coming election in Westchester, New York, Westchester Unites urged Jewish voters in the district  (not non-Jewish voters??) to request ballots so they could vote before the June 25 Democratic primary battle between New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who criticizes Israel, and challenger, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, an avid supporter of apartheid Israel’s genocide. Campaign organizers say they will spend up to $1 million to boost voter turnout.

    I’m not privy to the manipulations of the American public performed by the mass of Israeli infiltrators. One example is the declarations by Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. His contrived Amplify Israel Initiative “aims to breathe new life into the principles we’ve been committed to for decades, with an array of programs aimed at bolstering support for Israel and aligning Zionism with liberal ideology.” In clearer words, “influence every man, woman, and child that nationalist, militarist, oppressive, and apartheid Israel is a benevolent country.”

    Who is Rabbi Hirsch? Ammiel Hirsch went to high school in Israel, served as a tank commander in the IDF, and was formerly the director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, the Israeli arm of the North American Reform movement. In a response to a letter, in which 93 rabbinical and cantorial students harshly criticized Israeli actions in the hostilities between Israel and Hamas, Rabbi Hirsch wrote:

    For the record, the Reform movement is a Zionist movement. Every single branch of our movement — the synagogue arm (Union for Reform Judaism), the rabbinic union (Central Conference of American Rabbis), and our seminary (HUC-JIR) — every organization separately, and all together, are Zionist and committed ideologically and theologically to Israel.

    Why did Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, after receiving training in Israel, come to the United States to guide the Reform movement, which, in previous decades, had been against Zionism, and define it in Israel’s image? By not investigating the actions of multitudes of Israelis residing, the US Justice Department betrays the US people.

    In an espionage scandal involving Lawrence Franklin, a former United States Department of Defense employee, who passed classified documents to AIPAC officials, which disclosed secret United States policy towards Iran, Franklin pleaded guilty and, in January 2006, was sentenced to nearly 13 years of prison. He served ten months of house arrest. The DOJ dropped espionage charges against the AIPAC officials — Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. Reason (which was treason) — the Department claimed court rulings had made the case unwinnable and the trial would disclose classified information (which can apply to almost every trial for treason). Despite the previous espionage charges and knowledge that un-American AIPAC is a lobby for apartheid Israel, the DOJ has not indicted AIPAC for being an unregistered lobby and has permitted its cadre of Israel firsters to wander the halls of Congress and shake palms with dollar bills. Traitors.

    US representatives know that AIPAC lobbies for an apartheid Israel that is committing genocide and drags US citizens into accusations of aiding the genocide. Politicians accept contributions from individuals allied with AIPAC and vote in accordance with AIPAC’s preferences. The power of the contributions and fear that disregarding AIPAC poses a danger to remaining in office was highlighted in 1984. For voting to permit Boeing to sell AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia and for suggesting there were Palestinians and they had “rights,” AIPAC marked as undesirable the popular Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Charles Percy, who had always favored Israel. Paul Simon wrote in his autobiography that Bob Asher, an AIPAC board member, called him to run for Senator from Illinois. Simon unseated the admired and respected Charles Percy who was only 98% pure in his support for Israel. Treachery.

    The US government and local governments favor laws, such as the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which can suppress free speech and free actions that contend Israel’s genocidal policies, and H.R. 3016, Anti-Boycott Act, which “bars U.S. citizens from participating in boycotts of U.S. allies if those boycotts are promoted or imposed by foreign countries.” Federal and local governments tyrannize the US people. Tyranny.

    The Los Angeles (LA) Police Department stood by for hours before halting attacks on peaceful UCLA students and then arrested dozens of student protesters and not any of the vigilantes who represented a foreign power and attacked the students. The LA Police Department supported a group representing a foreign government and failed to protect American citizens. Treason.

    The House of Representatives has had numerous one-sided hearings on campus anti-Semitism that feature callous remarks against Jews from relatively few of the protestors. In none of the hearings has a Committee invited the student protestors to testify; maybe, because they might say, “These students do not represent the protestors. They are angry and frustrated individuals who see Israel identify itself as a Jewish state and note that a great number of American Jews approve of Israel and its genocide of the Palestinian people. They realistically equate Jews with the genocide.” The truth of these hearings is they are more concerned with fictional Jewish feelings than factual Palestinian lives. Let’s face it, these hearings are organized by Israel’s advocates who seek to prevent the US public from gaining awareness of the genocide and shift the protest arguments to a spurious charge of anti-Semitism in America. Elected officials adhere to a foreign nation’s request to stifle American citizens from exercising their right to protest and move dialogue from the horrific victimization of Gazans to an artificially created Jewish victimhood. College presidents committed a huge error by not responding to the committees’ fabricated charges of campus anti-Semitism with a simple statement, “There is no campus anti-Semitism and you are attempting to divert the impact of these demonstrations that criticize Israel policies into a false charge that indirectly enhances Israel’s image.” By representing a foreign power and censoring American students from their right to protest, these elected officials are guilty. Treason.

    Foreign policies exhibit the same treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors.

    North Vietnam
    President Lyndon Johnson’s reciting a dubious attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on the USS Maddox in international waters cajoled Americans into accepting an increased US military involvement in the Vietnamese civil war. Global strategists also mentioned the Domino Theory, where if one country falls to communism, then adjacent nations also become communist. A non-functioning Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty (SEATO) tied these fabrications into a call for action. Result was 58,148 uniformed Americans killed, 200,000 wounded, and 75,000 severely wounded. Ho Chi Minh’s followers won the war and none of the neighboring SEATO nations became communist. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the leading prophet of the Domino Theory, confessed, “I think we were wrong. I do not believe that Vietnam was that important to the communists. I don’t believe that its loss would have led – it didn’t lead – to Communist control of Asia.” Treachery.

    Six-day war
    During the 1967 war between Israel and its neighbors, Israeli torpedo boats and airplanes attacked the intelligence ship USS Liberty in international waters, killed 34, and wounded 171 American service personnel. President Johnson refused to respond to this assault, an insult to all Americans. Treason.

    Yom Kippur war
    In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, President Nixon’s administration supplied arms to Israel and reversed the course of the war. Arab nations responded with an oil embargo that caused huge inflation in the United States, punished the American consumer, and harmed the American economy. Treachery.

    Afghanistan-1980s
    President Ronald Reagan’s CIA covertly assisted Pakistan intelligence in providing financial and military assistance to Osama bin Laden during the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan. In effect, the US played an essential role in creating the al-Qaeda network. Treason.

    International Terrorism and 911
    After Ronald Reagan helped create and popularize Osama bin Laden, later presidents did not heed Osama bin Laden’s warnings. The arch-terrorist clarified his position in the infamous  Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the American people,” which has been conveniently sidetracked to ensure Americans do not get infected with terrorism germs. It should be titled, “How the United States made me a terrorist.” It is difficult to agree with bin Laden but his statements are not easily contended.

    You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern.

    Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.

    You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.

    William J. Clinton was president during the period that Bin Laden raged his fury at the United States. If Bill Clinton had considered some of bin Laden’s grievances his considerations might have prevented the later 9/11 attack on American soil. Treason.

    George W. Bush and American security officials permitted 19 co-conspirators to enter the country and take preparatory flying lessons in full view of authorities. His DOJ did not pursue information that connected the Saudi royal family with the bombers. Treason.

    Afghanistan-2001
    Without exhausting all means to have Osama bin Laden extradited from Afghanistan and knowing that the Taliban was not directly involved in the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in a military adventure that had no defined purpose and accomplished nothing. In a war that lasted 20 years, the United States had 2,459 military deaths and 20,769 American service members wounded in action. Twenty years of a useless war that only brought the Taliban back to power. Treachery.

    Iraq
    George W. Bush’s uncalled-for war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) is the best example of sacrificing U.S. lives to advance Israel’s interests. The cited reason ─ destroying Hussein’s weapons of destruction ─ whose evidence of developments the U.S. based on spurious intelligence and was a farce that no sensible person could believe. This “made for consumption” and fabricated story detracted from the real reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq — to prevent Iraq from becoming the central power in the Middle East and able to threaten Israel. Neocons succeeded in pressuring President George W. Bush to sacrifice American lives and, by military action, remove Saddam Hussein from power. Discarding the nonsensical assertion that Saddam Hussein, who had no nuclear material, no technology to develop a nuclear weapon, and no ICBMs to deliver a bomb, threatened the United States, and needed to be immediately stopped from turning bubble gum into a mighty weapon solicits a more acceptable reason for the U.S. attack on Iraq. The U.S. Department of Defense casualty website has the US military suffering 4,418 deaths and 31,994 wounded in action during the Iraq War. No coincidence that Iraq was a long-time adversary of Israel and it was in Israel’s interests to have Iraq become militarily impotent. Treason.

    Libya
    NATO declared it intervened in the 2011 Libyan Civil War “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.” President Barack Obama remarked, “Gaddafi declared that he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment.”

    Reuters report demonstrated significant differences between Gaddafi’s remarks and President Obama’s rendition: Gaddafi Tells Rebel City, Benghazi, ‘We Will Show No Mercy,’ March 17, 2011.

    Muammar Gaddafi told Libyan rebels on Thursday his armed forces were coming to their capital Benghazi tonight and would not show any mercy to fighters who resisted them. In a radio address, he told Benghazi residents that soldiers would search every house in the city and people who had no arms had no reason to fear. He also told his troops not to pursue any rebels who drop their guns and flee when government forces reach the city.

    Logic tells us that few Benghazi residents could even have guns to hide, and Gadhafi’s forces were too limited to carry out any large-scale purge.

    The U.S. vacillated, and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, convinced President Obama to join NATO in removing Gaddafi. NATO eliminated Gaddafi, Islamic extremists gained partial power, discarded armaments were shipped to al-Qaeda “look-alikes” throughout North Africa and soon the Jama’at Nusrat al Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) coalition, Boko Haram, and Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA) were creating havoc throughout North Africa. The US gained nothing in removing Gaddafi and created more Islamic extremist organizations with which to contend. Treachery.

    UN Vetoes

    As of December 18, 2023, the U.S. vetoed resolutions critical of Israel 45 times. Each time, the Secretary of State offered the excuse that the resolution would not advance the cause of peace, and each time vetoing the resolution did not advance the cause for peace. Why do Americans give deference to Israelis when Israel insults American leaders, uses Americans to die in wars that advance Israel’s interests, causes havoc that brings injury to U.S. relations with other nations,  and sucks money ($3.1 billion annually) from U.S. taxpayers to support its apartheid and oppressive policies?

    Some mentioned reasons, which have changed during the decades, are:

    • Israel was aligned with the US during the Cold War.
    • The US needs a Western-style pistol-packing mama in the Middle East.
    • Israel has an excellent intelligence-gathering network that shares information.
    • The two countries collaborate on the joint-development of sophisticated technologies.

    Pundits confuse support for Israel with support for this Israel. The United States, for military and geopolitical reasons, can support Israel, as it does Columbia, but there is no reason to support and assist this Israel in the destruction of the Palestinians. The Washington establishment and foreign policymakers have incorrectly calculated the tradeoffs between supporting this Israel in its denial of Palestinian rights and in satisfying the Palestinian cause.

    • Israel is no longer dependent on the United States and seeks its own alliances.
    • Israel will not scratch a finger to help the US in any conflict; just the opposite, it convinces the US to fight for Israel.
    • Israel intelligence provides the CIA with intelligence concerning nations that are adversarial to the US due to its close ties with Israel. No close ties, none of these adversaries, and no need for intelligence.
    • Israel has used US and Russian engineers for its technical achievements. No Israel, and the Russian and American engineers will go to work in Silicon Valley.

    Just for money and votes, U.S. politicians sell out their commitment to the American people, follow the dictates of a foreign nation, and make Americans party to the destruction of innocent people. TREASON!!

    Conclusion

    Americans have, at times echoed grievances against their government’s policies and demonstrated their despair, well, some Americans, a small minority of the US population. The rest of the population has been naïve, complacent, and manipulated. Due to America’s intrinsic wealth — natural resources, abundant farmland, temperate climate, rivers, valleys, streams, hard-working population, ocean barriers to foreign incursions —  the treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors temporarily slowed but did not stop the roaring engine. The roaring engine is beginning to sputter.

    America’s posture as the leading defender of democracy and human rights is hypocritical; its economic system is challenged; its united states are disunited; its pluralistic political system is an epic fantasy; its legislative bodies are divided; and its courts are agenda-seeking rather than law-abiding. Democracy recedes and polarization of citizens widens. Americans are increasingly divided in their aspirations and express increasing fears of one another. An almost self-sufficient economic system proceeds with debt financing imports, trade imbalances, and growth, an unruly situation that can continue until debt hits a financial wall and repaying the debt becomes intolerable.

    Hopefully, more Americans will take cognizance of the failed leadership, meet the challenges they pose, gather the resources, form the organizations, shout much louder, push much stronger, and succeed in disposing of the treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors that have made the Statue of Liberty weep.

    The words of Patrick Henry, “These are the times that try people’s souls,” are heard again in the cities and villages of a disunited United States of America.

    The post Call for Alarm first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Active Duty, Veterans, G.I. Rights Group Launch Campaign for Military Personnel

    As more members of the military and State Department resign over U.S. funding of the genocide in Gaza, a new campaign was launched this week to allow military personnel to directly contact their congressional representatives.

    Initiated by active-duty military members, veterans and G.I. rights groups, “Appeal for Redress v2,” is modeled after the 2006 Appeal for Redress conducted during the highly unpopular occupation of Iraq, to allow G.I.s to tell their representatives they are opposed to U.S. policy.

    Active duty service members are opposing U.S. funding of Israel’s genocide not only because it is immoral, but also because U.S. government employees violate several federal statutes every time weapons are shipped to Israel, as cited in this letter from Veterans For Peace to the U.S. State Department.

    James M. Branum, an attorney with the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild, said, “Too often lawmakers make war policies without hearing from the people who have to implement them.  This is what makes the Appeal for Redress v2 so important.”

    Senior Airman Juan Bettancourt, on active duty while seeking conscientious objector separation, said, “My proudest act of service has been championing Appeal for Redress v2, a campaign to empower fellow service members to securely voice their moral outrage about our government’s complicity in Israeli war crimes and genocidal onslaught in Gaza. Although our rights are limited by our oath, Appeal for Redress v2 allows service members to carve out a modicum of agency and dispel any apprehensions that may impede us from denouncing this unspeakable carnage. Our voice is a powerful instrument, and it is our responsibility to humanity and the principles we hold dear to speak up against these heinous acts and make it known to our elected officials that we will not stand by silently while genocide unfolds. We refuse to be complicit. These are my views, not those of the Department of Defense.”

    Army Sergeant Johnson said, “Throughout my Army career it has been reiterated to me time and time again to live and uphold Army values. I have been taught that honor and integrity are pivotal to being a soldier. It hurts me to my core that the same country that instilled these values in me would proudly support a genocide. It is our duty as service members to uphold Geneva conventions and international law. That is why I am pleading for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and for humanitarian aid to be distributed throughout the entire Gaza Strip. To Ignore these crimes against humanity would be to turn my back on all the values I’ve cultivated as a soldier. It is against my personal beliefs as a man and my obligation as an active duty soldier to be complicit in this genocide. Fellow service members, please join me in calling for an immediate ceasefire and for Israel and the US to adhere to international law. These are my views, not those of the Department of Defense.”

    Senior Airman Larry Hebert, also seeking conscientious objector status, said, “It is imperative that we uphold our personal and professional values and beliefs. There is no greater crime against humanity than genocide. No person, country, or institution should be supported unconditionally. This Appeal is within our rights as service members and we have a duty to exercise this right when our leaders commit violations of international and humanitarian law. You need to genuinely consider your actions now and reflect on how you’re contributing to the genocide. Are you helping or hurting the situation? There is no neutrality. By staying neutral, you hurt the oppressed. These are my views, not those of the Dept. of Defense.”

    Bill Galvin, Counseling Coordinator at the Center on Conscience & War, said, “We’ve had an increase in calls from military personnel asking about getting discharged as conscientious objectors. Almost all of them cite the carnage in Gaza as something that their conscience would not allow them to ignore. Some have expressed feeling complicit in the violence.”

    Kathleen Gilberd, executive director of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild, said, “Many service members have serious objections to the U.S. support for Israel’s carnage in Gaza. Though their rights are somewhat limited, military personnel can still speak out about their beliefs and  protest the travesty of this war. The Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild stands in support of these military dissenters and resisters.”

    Shiloh Emelein, USMC veteran and Operations Director of About Face: Veterans Against the War, said, “We know many young people join the military out of necessity to get their needs met. But they are not obligated to contribute to genocide and unjust, unlawful wars that go against their conscience.  You do have rights, you do have options to object, and there’s a large community of post-9/11 veterans ready to welcome you.”

    To increase the awareness of this campaign among members of the military, civilian supporters are encouraged to share it on social media and to ask peace and justice organizations to share it with their membership.

    The active-duty members listed in this release are available for comment by calling Bill Galvin, Center on Conscience and War, at  202-446-1461.

    The post Active Duty, Veterans, G.I. Rights Group Launch Campaign for Military Personnel first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • We Were Called “Terrorists” and Forcibly Ejected by Police from Congressional Baseball Game

    Palestinian American Moataz with 120+ family members killed in Gaza and other activists surrounded by police before getting ejected with flags at Congressional Baseball game in Washington DC/ Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

    During last week’s Congressional Baseball Game, dozens of us in the crowd conveyed  urgent messages to stop funding Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and to address the escalating climate crisis. We were met by hundreds of police from different jurisdictions who encircled us during the game, and at times followed us around. Activists with Climate Defiance announced their intention to disrupt the event in advance, and, once they stormed the field, they were plowed down by police officers and arrested.

    In our seats, we stood with signs, flags, some just wearing kuffiyehs, chanting “Free Palestine” and “Genocide is not a game.” Despite the legality and common practice of cheering and displaying signs at baseball games, we were swiftly ejected by swarms of police officers.

    The police officers, unsurprisingly, did nothing to address the egregious verbal abuse that was hurled at us. The verbal abuse included blatantly racist taunts and profanities. In one instance, an entire section of the crowd erupted in a “f*** you terrorists” chant and in another a “USA” chant echoed across the field in response. Meanwhile, others in the stadium freely displayed their political messages without facing any consequences.

    Our aim was to deliver a clear message to members of Congress, who were indulging in a game amid multiple crises they are responsible for through funding and inaction.

    Since October, they have allocated billions more to Israel, facilitating the genocide of over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza while also displacing and starving millions in Gaza.

    The Israeli State has also used white phosphorus and other weapons from the United States to destroy the local environment, facilitating the death of the local habitat. Each U.S. bomb tested, manufactured, transferred, and dropped exacerbates the climate crisis, intertwining Palestine’s plight with climate justice.

    Almost every congressperson who played that night voted to sanction the International Criminal Court after it issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu.

    The annual Congressional Baseball game is sponsored by a long list of companies profiting off of the Israeli and U.S. atrocities in Palestine, including: Boeing, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Caterpillar, Chevron, Amazon, Google.

    The baseball event is technically a fundraiser for groups like the Boys and Girls Club, Nationals Philanthropies, and the Washington Literacy Center. It is paradoxical that Congress raises trivial amounts for education while channeling billions of tax dollars into weapons shipments used to indiscriminately murder Palestinians.

    Activists across the U.S are demanding an end to all aid to Israel and a reinvestment of those funds into our community needs such as housing, healthcare, and education.

    It’s not a coincidence that while arms dealers are reaping historic highs in stock prices and earnings, members of Congress are lining their pockets with massive blood-soaked checks from Israeli lobbying groups. Particularly AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Council.

    While the majority of Americans want a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, our representatives use our tax to dollars to fuel their own profiteering from genocide.

    More bombs were dropped in the first 100 days of the US-Israel genocide in Gaza than in all of World War II combined.

    Our actions at the Congressional Baseball Game were driven by a profound sense of urgency and justice.

    The systematic murder and starvation of Palestinians by Israel cannot continue with our silent complicity. We must persist in demanding accountability from our  elected officials.   We demand that  funds from warfare be redirected to vital community needs.

    We stand in solidarity with Palestinians and all others who are  fighting for their lives and dignity. The struggle for justice in Palestine is not just their fight; it is a global cause that calls for our unwavering support and action.

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  • Adobe sued in US over ‘hidden’ exit fees

    US regulators have launched legal action against software giant Adobe for its deceptive cancelation policy that allegedly traps subscribers into continuing to pay for popular software products like Photoshop and Acrobat. The case against the software giant, as well as two of its most senior executives, was initiated by the Federal Trade Commission overnight, and…

    The post Adobe sued in US over ‘hidden’ exit fees appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

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  • The United States Is the Main Obstacle to Peace in Palestine

    U.S. Marines and IDF soldiers in joint maneuver Intrepid Maven, Feb. 28, 2023. Photo: US Marines

    On June 13, Hamas responded to persistent needling by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken over the U.S. proposal for a pause in the Israeli massacre in Gaza. The group said it has “dealt positively… with the latest proposal and all proposals to reach a cease-fire agreement.” Hamas added, by contrast, that, “while Blinken continues to talk about ‘Israel’s approval of the latest proposal, we have not heard any Israeli official voicing approval.”

    The full details of the U.S. proposal have yet to be made public, but the pause in Israeli attacks and release of hostages in the first phase would reportedly lead to further negotiations for a more lasting cease-fire and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in the second phase. But there is no guarantee that the second round of negotiations would succeed.

    As former Israeli Labor Party prime minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio on June 3rd, “How do you think [Gaza military commander] Sinwar will react when he is told: but be quick, because we still have to kill you, after you return all the hostages?”

    Meanwhile, as Hamas pointed out, Israel has not publicly accepted the terms of the latest U.S. cease-fire proposal, so it has only the word of U.S. officials that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has privately agreed to it. In public, Netanyahu still insists that he is committed to the complete destruction of Hamas and its governing authority in Gaza, and has actually stepped up Israel’s vicious attacks in central and southern Gaza.

    The basic disagreement that President Joe Biden and Secretary Blinken’s smoke and mirrors cannot hide is that Hamas, like every Palestinian, wants a real end to the genocide, while the Israeli and U.S. governments do not.

    Biden or Netanyahu could end the slaughter very quickly if they wanted to—Netanyahu by agreeing to a permanent cease-fire, or Biden by ending or suspending U.S. weapons deliveries to Israel. Israel could not carry out this war without U.S. military and diplomatic support. But Biden refuses to use his leverage, even though he has admitted in an interview that it was “reasonable” to conclude that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political benefit.

    The U.S. is still sending weapons to Israel to continue the massacre in violation of a cease-fire order by the International Court of Justice. Bipartisan U.S. leaders have invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress on July 24, even as the International Criminal Court reviews a request by its chief prosecutor for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes, crimes against humanity and murder.

    The United States seems determined to share Israel’s self-inflicted isolation from voices calling for peace from all over the world, including large majorities of countries in the UN General Assembly and Security Council.

    But perhaps this is appropriate, as the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for that isolation. By its decades of unconditional support for Israel, and by using its UN Security Council veto dozens of times to shield Israel from international accountability, the United States has enabled successive Israeli governments to pursue flagrantly criminal policies and to thumb their noses at the growing outrage of people and countries across the world.

    This pattern of U.S. support for Israel goes all the way back to its founding, when Zionist leaders in Palestine unleashed a well-planned operation to seize much more territory than the UN allocated to their new state in its partition plan, which the Palestinians and neighboring countries already firmly opposed.

    The massacres, the bulldozed villages and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 to a million people in the Nakba have been meticulously documented, despite an extraordinary propaganda campaign to persuade two generations of Israelis, Americans and Europeans that they never happened.

    The U.S. was the first country to grant Israel de facto recognition on May 14, 1948, and played a leading role in the 1949 UN votes to recognize the new state of Israel within its illegally seized borders. President Eisenhower had the wisdom to oppose Britain, France and Israel in their war to capture the Suez Canal in 1956, but Israel’s seizure of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 1967 persuaded U.S. leaders that it could be a valuable military ally in the Middle East.

    Unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s illegal occupation and annexation of more and more territory over the past 57 years has corrupted Israeli politics and encouraged increasingly extreme and racist Israeli governments to keep expanding their genocidal territorial ambitions. Netanyahu’s Likud party and government now fully embrace their Greater Israel plan to annex all of occupied Palestine and parts of other countries, wherever and whenever new opportunities for expansion present themselves.

    Israel’s de facto expansion has been facilitated by the United States’ monopoly over mediation between Israel and Palestine, which it has aggressively staked out and defended against the UN and other countries. The irreconcilable contradiction between the U.S.’s conflicting roles as Israel’s most powerful military ally and the principal mediator between Israel and Palestine is obvious to the whole world.

    But as we see even in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, the rest of the world and the UN have failed to break this U.S. monopoly and establish legitimate, impartial mediation by the UN or neutral countries that respect the lives of Palestinians and their human and civil rights.

    Qatar mediated a temporary cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in November 2023, but it has since been upstaged by U.S. moves to prolong the massacre through deceptive proposals, cynical posturing and Security Council vetoes. The U.S. consistently vetoes all but its own proposals on Israel and Palestine in the UN Security Council, even when its own proposals are deliberately meaningless, ineffective or counterproductive.

    The UN General Assembly is united in support of Palestine, voting almost unanimously year after year to demand an end to the Israeli occupation. A hundred and forty-four countries have recognized Palestine as a country, and only the U.S. veto denies it full UN membership. The Israeli genocide in Gaza has even shamed the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) into suspending their ingrained pro-Western bias and pursuing cases against Israel.

    One way that the nations of the world could come together to apply greater pressure on Israel to end its assault on Gaza would be a “Uniting for Peace” resolution in the UN General Assembly. This is a measure the General Assembly can take when the Security Council is prevented from acting to restore peace and security by the veto of a permanent member.

    Israel has demonstrated that it is prepared to ignore cease-fire resolutions by the General Assembly and the Security Council, and an order by the ICJ, but a Uniting for Peace resolution could impose penalties on Israel for its actions, such as an arms embargo or an economic boycott. If the United States still insists on continuing its complicity in Israel’s international crimes, the General Assembly could take action against the U.S. too.

    A General Assembly resolution would change the terms of the international debate and shift the focus back from Biden and Blinken’s diversionary tactics to the urgency of enforcing the lasting cease-fire that the whole world is calling for.

    It is time for the United Nations and neutral countries to push Israel’s U.S. partner in genocide to the side, and for legitimate international authorities and mediators to take responsibility for enforcing international law, ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine and bringing peace to the Middle East.

    The post The United States Is the Main Obstacle to Peace in Palestine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Why Modi’s India is Suddenly getting Washington’s Cold Shoulder

    Modi’s narrow re-election this month was greeted in the U.S. media with petulant satisfaction that Indian voters had “woken up”, as an oped piece in the New York Times put it.

    The Washington Post’s editorial board rebuked Modi with the headline: “In India, the voters have spoken. They do not want autocracy.”

    The Post editors went on to say that Modi “will lack a free hand for further repression of civil society, imprisonment of the opposition, infiltration and takeover of democratic institutions, and persecution of Muslims.”

    That is quite a withering rap sheet for a political leader who not so long ago was given the VIP treatment in Washington.

    Other U.S. media outlets also sounded smug that India’s legislative elections had returned a diminished majority for Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The “shock setback” for India’s strongman would mean that his Hindu nationalist politics would be restrained and he would have to govern during his third term with more moderation and compromise.

    The American media’s contempt for the 73-year-old Indian leader is a dramatic turnaround from how he was lionized by the same media only a year ago.

    Back in June 2023, Modi was feted by U.S. President Joe Biden with a privileged state dinner in the White House. The Indian premier was invited to address the Congress and the media were rhapsodic in their praise for his leadership.

    Back then, the Washington Post’s editors recommended “toasting” Modi’s India, which Biden duly did at the White House reception. Raising a glass, Biden said: “We believe in the dignity of every citizen, and it is in America’s DNA, and I believe in India’s DNA that the whole world – the whole world has a stake in our success, both of us, and maintaining our democracies.” With trademark stumbling words, Biden added: “[This] makes us appealing partners and enables us to expand democratic institutions across, around the world.”

    Modi may well wonder what happened over the past year. The Indian leader has gone from receiving the red carpet treatment to having the rug pulled from under his feet.

    The difference is explained by the changing geopolitical calculation for Washington, which is not to its liking.

    It is not that the Indian government under Modi has suddenly become a bad strongman who has taken to trashing democratic institutions and repressing minorities. Arguably, those tendencies have been associated with Modi since he first came to power in 2014.

    The United States had long been critical of Modi’s Hindu nationalism. For more than a decade, Modi was persona non-grata in Washington. At one stage, he was even banned from entering the country owing to allegations that he was fanning sectarian violence against Muslims and Christians in India.

    Washington’s view of Modi, however, began to warm up under the Trump administration because India was seen as a useful partner for the U.S. to counter China’s growing influence in the Asia-Pacific, a region which Washington renamed as the Indo-Pacific in part to inveigle India into its fold. To that end, the U.S. revived the Quad security alliance in 2017 with India, Japan and Australia.

    The Biden administration continued the courting of India and Modi who was re-elected in 2019 for his second term.

    Biden’s fawning over India culminated in the White House extravaganza for Modi last June when the U.S. media championed the “new heights” of U.S.-India relations. There were at the time residual complaints about India’s deteriorating democratic conditions under Modi, but such concerns were brushed aside by the sweep of media eulogizing, epitomized by Biden’s grandiloquent toasting of the U.S. and India as supposedly world-conquering democratic partners.

    It was discernible, though, that all the American charm and indulgence was setting India up for an ulterior purpose.

    In between the lines of effusive praise and celebration, the expected pay-off from India was that it would be a “bulwark” for U.S. interests against China and Russia.

    As a piece in CNN at the time of Modi’s visit last year in Washington asked: “Will India deliver after lavish U.S. attention?”

    The article noted with some prescience: “India and the U.S. may have different ambitions and visions for their ever-tightening relationship, and the possibility that Biden could end up being disappointed in the returns for his attention on Modi.”

    The Indian leader certainly did receive some major sweeteners while in the U.S. Several significant military manufacturing deals were signed such as General Electric sharing top-secret technology for fighter jet engines.

    Still, despite the zealous courting of New Delhi, over the following months, the Modi government appeared not to change its foreign policy dramatically to suit Washington’s bidding.

    India has had long-held strained relations with China over border disputes and regional rivalry. Nevertheless, Modi has been careful not to antagonize Beijing. Notably, India did not participate in recent security drills in the Asia-Pacific along with the U.S. and other partners.

    New Delhi has also maintained its strong support for the BRICS group that includes Russia, China, Brazil and other Global South nations advocating for a multipolar world not in hock to Western dominance.

    This traditional policy of non-alignment by India is not what Washington wants. It seems that Modi did not heed the memo given during his splendid Washington visit. He rebuffed the American expectation of steering India towards U.S. geopolitical objectives of toeing a tougher line against China and Russia.

    What seems to have intensified Washington’s exasperation with Modi is the worsening proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. After two and half years of conflict, President Vladimir Putin’s forces have gained a decisive upper hand over the NATO-backed Kiev regime. Hence, Biden and other NATO leaders have begun to desperately ramp up provocations against Moscow with recent permission for Ukraine to use Western long-range weapons to hit Russian territory.

    When Modi visited Washington last June, the West was (unrealistically) confident that the Ukrainian counteroffensive underway at the time would prove to be a damaging blow to Russian forces. Western predictions of overcoming Russian lines have waned from the cruel reality that Russian weapons and superior troops numbers have decimated the Ukrainian side.

    During Modi’s state trip last year, Washington’s focus was on getting India to act as a bulwark against China, not so much Russia. Modi has not delivered on either count, but the situation in Ukraine has cratered, from the NATO point of view.

    Commenting on U.S. priorities last June, Richard Rossow of the Washington-based think-tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said: “If the invasion went worse for Ukraine, or was destabilizing the region, the Biden administration might have chosen to reduce the intensity of engagement with India. But the United States has found that nominal support to Ukraine, with allies and partners, has been sufficient to blunt the Russian offensive…” (How wrong was that assessment!)

    Rossow continued his wrongheaded assessment: “Russia’s ineffective military campaign [in Ukraine] has also underscored the fact that China presents the only real state-led threat to global security, and the United States and India are steadily deepening their partnership bilaterally and through forums like the Quad to improve the likelihood of peace and tranquility in the region. So long as this strategic relationship continues to grow, it is unlikely that a U.S. administration will press India to take a hard line on Russia.”

    Washington and its NATO allies have got their expectations about Russia losing the conflict in Ukraine all badly wrong. Russia is winning decisively as the Ukrainian regime stumbles towards collapse.

    This is a double whammy for the Biden administration. China and Russia are stronger than ever, and India has given little in return for all the concessions it received from Washington.

    From the American viewpoint, India’s Modi has not delivered in the way he was expected to by Washington despite the latter’s fawning and concessions. New Delhi has remained committed to the BRICS multipolar group, it has not antagonized China and it has not succumbed to U.S. pressure to condemn Russia. Far from condemning Moscow, India has increased its imports of Russian oil and gas.

    Now with the U.S. and NATO’s reckless bet on Ukraine defeating Russia looking like a beaten docket, Washington’s disappointment with India is taking on an acrimonious tone.

    In one year, Modi’s India has gone from a geopolitical darling to a target of U.S. recrimination over alleged human rights violations and democratic backsliding. It is not so much that political conditions in India have degraded any further. It is Washington’s geopolitical calculations that have been upended. Hence the chagrined and increasingly abrasive attitude towards New Delhi from its erstwhile American partner.

    • First published in Strategic Culture Foundation

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  • Acting As If It Weren’t Really So

    Laughing on the bus/Playing Games with the faces/She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy/I said, Be careful his bowtie is really a camera.
    — America by Paul Simon, recorded by Simon and Garfunkel in their Bookends album, 1968

    Only people who listen to the chorus of reliable alternative media voices warning of the quickly growing threat of nuclear war have any sense of the nightmare that is approaching.  Even for them, however, and surely for most others, unreality reigns.  Reality has a tough time countering illusions.  For we are cataleptically slow-walking to WW III.  If it is very hard or impossible to imagine our own deaths, how much harder is it to imagine the deaths of hundreds of millions of others or more.

    In 1915, amid the insane slaughter of tens of millions during WW I that was a shocking embarrassment to the meliorist fantasy of the long-standing public consciousness, Freud wrote:

    It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death, and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are, in fact, still present as spectators. Hence the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that, at bottom, no one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing another way, that, in the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.

    The growing lunacy of the Biden administration’s provocations against Russia via Ukraine seem lost on so many.  The long-running and deep-seated demonization of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin by U.S. propagandists has sunk so deep into the Western mind that facts can’t descend that deep to counteract it. It is one of the greatest triumphs of U.S. government propaganda.

    A friend, a retired history professor at an elite university, recently told me that he can’t think of such matters as the growing threat of nuclear war if he wants to sleep at night, but anyway, he’s more concerned with the consequences of global warming.  Readers at publications where my numerous articles about the nuclear war risk have appeared – the worst since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 – have made many comments such as “nuclear weapons don’t exist,” that it’s all a hoax, that Putin is in cahoots with Biden in a game of fear mongering to promote a secret agenda, etc.  How can one respond to such denials of reality?

    The other day I met another friend who likes to talk about politics.  He is an intelligent and a caring man.  He was sporting a tee-shirt with a quote from George Washington and quickly started talking about his obsessive fear of Donald Trump and the possibility that he could be elected again.  I told him that I despised Trump but that Biden was a far greater threat right now.  He spoke highly of Biden, and when I responded that Biden has been a warmonger throughout his political career and, of course, in Ukraine, was instigating the use of nuclear weapons, and was in full support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, he looked at me as if I were saying something he had never heard before.  When I spoke of the 2014 U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine, he, a man in his sixties at least, said he was unaware of it, but in any case Biden supported our military as he did and that was good.  When I said Biden is mentally out of it and physically tottering, he emphatically denied it; said Biden was very sharp and fully engaged.  He said Trump was fat and a great danger and George Washington would agree.  I was at a loss for words.  The conversation ended.

    A third friend, just back from living overseas for a year, flew back east from California to visit old friends and relatives.  He told me this sad tale:

    There were experiences that troubled me very deeply during my visit that had nothing to do with all the death and final goodbyes I was immersed in.  My family I would say is pretty typical working class Democrat.  Liberal/progressive in social outlook.  Most are devout Catholics.  All are kind, generous very loving people.  What was troubling was that it was pretty much impossible to carry on a rational reasonably sane political conversation with all but a couple of them, as the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” symptoms were absolutely off the charts.  It was quite stunning actually.  It is almost as if Dementia-Joe isn’t even in office as they had no interest in discussing his many failings, because their entire focus was the orange haired clown.  If I had ten bucks for every time someone told me any one of the following NPR/PBS talking points I’d buy a nice meal for myself – (Trump will be a dictator if elected – Trump will prosecute his enemies if elected – Trump will destroy our democracy if he gets in – etc.)  Any and all attempts to question these narratives and talking points by bringing the behavior of the current administration into the conversation were met with befuddlement – as if people couldn’t believe that “I” wasn’t as terrified as they were by the “Trump-Monster” lurking in the shadows.

    So I guess I’m sharing these thoughts with you, Ed, because it feels like I’m dealing with several different kinds of loss right now.  The more obvious “loss” associated with the physical death of loved ones – but I’m also mourning the intellectual and psychological death of living loved ones who have somehow become completely untethered from the “material realities” I observe on planet earth.  They can repeat “talking points” but can’t explain the evidence or reason that needs to be attached to those talking points for them to be anything but propaganda. Physical death is a natural thing – something we will all face – but this intellectual and spiritual death I am witness to is perhaps even more painful and disconcerting for me.  How do we find our way forward when reason, rational debate, evidence, and real-world events are replaced with fear – and rather irrational fears at that?

    This intellectual and spiritual death that he describes is a widespread phenomenon.  It is not new, but COVID 19 with its lockdowns, lies, and dangerous “vaccines” dramatically intensified it.  It created vast gaps in interpersonal communication that were earlier exploited in the lead-up to the 2016 election and Trump’s surprising victory.  Families and friends stopped talking to each other.  The longstanding official propaganda apparatus went into overdrive.  Then in 2020 the normal human fear of death and chaos was fully digitized during the lockdowns.  Putin, Trump, the Chinese, sexual predators, viruses, space aliens, your next door neighbor, etc. – you name it – were all tossed into the mix that created fear and panic to replace the growing realization that the war on terror initiated by George W. Bush in 2001 was losing its power.  New terrors were created, censorship was reinforced, and here we are in 2024 in a country supporting Israeli genocide in Gaza and with a population blind to the growing threat of WW III and the use of nuclear weapons.

    The communication gap – what my friend aptly describes as “this intellectual and spiritual death” – is two-sided.  On one hand there is simple ignorance of what is really going on in the world, greatly aided by vast government/media propaganda. On the other, there is chosen ignorance or the wish to be deceived to maintain illusions.

    We are thinking reeds as Pascal called us, vulnerable feeling creatures afraid of death; we, who through the support of wars and violence of all sorts, care just enough to want to be deceived as to what we are doing by supporting wars that make so much blood that is inside other people get to the outside for the earth to drink since it is not our blood and we survive.

    I could, of course, quote liberally from truth tellers down through history who have said the same thing about self-deception with all its shades and nuances. Those quotations are endless.  Why bother?  At some very deep level in the recesses of their hearts, people know it’s true.  I could make a pretty essay here, be erudite and eloquent, and weave a web of wisdom from all those the world says were the great thinkers because they are now dead and can no longer detect hypocrisy.

    For the desire to be deceived and hypocrisy (Greek hypokrites, stage actor, a pretender) are kissing cousins. Grasping the theatrical nature of social life, the need to pretend, to act, to feel oneself part of a “meaningful” play explains a lot.  To stand outside consensus reality, outside the stage door, so to speak, is not very popular.   Despite the mass idiocy of the media’s daily barrage of lies and stupidities that pass for news on the front pages and newscasts of the corporate media, people want to believe them to feel they belong.

    Yet D. H. Lawrence’s point a century ago still applies: “The essential America soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.  It has never yet melted.”

    But this killer soul must be hidden behind a wall of deceptions as the U.S. warfare state ceaselessly wages wars all around the world.  It must be hidden behind feel good news stories about how Americans really care about others, but only others that they are officially allowed to care about.  Not Syrians, Yemenis, Russian speakers of the Donbass, Palestinians, et al.  The terrorist nature of decades upon decades of U.S. savagery and the indifference of so many Americans go hand-in-hand but escape notice in the corporate media that are propagandists. The major theme of these media is that the United States government is the great defender of freedom, peace, and democracy.  Every once in a while, a scapegoat, one rotten apple in the barrel, is offered up to show that all is not perfect in paradise.  Here or there a decent article appears to reinforce the illusion that the corporate media tell the truth.  But essentially it is one massive deception that is leading many people to accept a slow walk toward WW III.

    There’s a make-believe quality to this vast spectacle of violent power and false innocence that baffles the mind.  To see and hear the corporate masked media magicians’ daily reports is to enter a world of pure illusion that deserves only sardonic laughter but sadly captivates so many adult children desperate to believe.

    Here’s an anecdote about a very strange encounter, one I couldn’t make up.  A communication of some sort that also has a make-believe quality to it.  I’m not sure what the message is.

    I was recently meeting with a writer and researcher who has interviewed scores of people about the famous 1960s assassinations and other sensitive matters.  I only knew this person through internet communication, but he was passing my way and suggested that we meet, which we did at a local out-of-the-way cafe.  We were the only customers and we took our drinks out the back to a small table and chairs under a tree in the café’s large garden that bordered open land down to a river.  About 10 yards away a woman sat at a table, writing in a notebook that I took to be journaling of some sort.  The researcher and I talked very openly for more than two hours about our mutual work and what he had learned from many of his interviewees about the assassinations.  Neither of us paid any attention to the woman at the table – naively? – and our conversation naturally revolved around the parts played by intelligence agencies, the CIA, etc. in the assassinations of the Kennedys and MLK, Jr.  The woman sat and wrote.  Near the end of our two plus hours, my friend went inside the café, which had closed to new customers, to use the men’s room.  The woman called to me and said I hope you don’t mind but I overheard some of your conversation and my father worked for U.S. intelligence.  She then told us much more about him, where he went to college, etc. or at least what she said she knew because when growing up he didn’t tell her mother, her, or siblings any details about his decades of spying.  But when she attended his memorial service in Washington D.C., the place was filled with intelligence  operatives and she learned more about her father’s secretive life.  Then, out of the blue, it burst out of her how he was obsessed with the high school he attended, one she assured us we probably never heard of (we were in Massachusetts) – Regis High School, a Jesuit scholarship prep school for boys in NYC.  To say I was startled is an understatement, since I went to Regis myself, and the anomalous “coincidence” of this encounter in the back garden of an empty café spooked my friend as well.  The woman told us more about her father until we had to leave.

    I wondered if he wore a bowtie and if what just happened weren’t really so.

    The post Acting As If It Weren’t Really So first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel kills children, damages infrastructure in West Bank

    Mourners carry the body of Saqr Abed, an Islamic Jihad militant killed in a raid by Israeli forces in the village of Kafr Dan, near the West Bank city of Jenin, Wednesday, June 12, 2024.  (Mohammed Nasser APA images)

    A warning on 4 June from the UN human rights commissioner that “unprecedented bloodshed” in the occupied West Bank must come to an end has gone unheeded.

    The Israeli military, at times in collaboration with Israel’s Border Police and Israel’s domestic secret police Shin Bet, has continued to conduct deadly raids into the occupied West Bank, wreaking havoc to private Palestinian property and civilian infrastructure in the process.

    An Israeli military raid into Kafr Dan village west of Jenin in the northern West Bank killed six Palestinians earlier this week.

    The invading Israeli forces used Energa anti-tank rifle grenades against a home belonging to the Abed family, killing three, Saqr Aref Abed, Mustafa Allam Mirie and Ahmad Muhammad Abu Obeid.

    Others killed during the Israeli attack and confrontations in the village include Ayman Abu Fadalah, Muhammad Hazza Mirie and Ahmad Muhammad Samoudi, 17.

    On 11 June, Ahmad was with another child, allegedly carrying homemade explosive devices as they waited for Israeli armored vehicles to pass by on a road in the center of Kafr Dan.

    An Israeli sniper shot at the two children from a distance of 100 to 150 meters with six bullets, according to Defense for Children International – Palestine.

    One bullet hit Ahmad in his leg, and he collapsed and started pleading for help. The other child was able to flee though he was injured in the thigh.

    The Israeli sniper shot towards Ahmad again, striking him in his chest and head.

    An Israeli military vehicle then approached Ahmad, and the Israeli driver stepped out and shot the child three more times.

    The driver of the military vehicle remained near him for a few minutes as Israeli forces blocked a Palestinian ambulance from reaching Ahmad as he lay wounded on the ground.

    “Israeli forces shot Ahmad, waited until he fell to the ground, then shot him several more times, then blocked paramedics from reaching him until they were confident he bled out,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP.

    “The United States must stop sending weapons to the Israeli military that are used to kill Palestinian children without restraint, whether in Gaza or the West Bank.”

    Ahmad is the older brother of a 12-year-old boy who was shot, and later succumbed to his wounds, during an Israeli raid in Jenin in September 2022.

    Mahmoud Muhammad Samoudi had allegedly thrown stones at Israeli vehicles when Israeli forces opened fire at the group of youths he was a part of.

    Elsewhere on 10 June, Israeli occupation forces raided the village of Kafr Nimeh, west of Ramallah, and shot and killed four Palestinian men and injured others.

    Israeli armored vehicles invaded the Kafr Nimeh village, raided homes and commercial stores, confiscated surveillance cameras and set up a checkpoint at the village’s entrance.

    Israeli authorities had been pursuing two Palestinians suspected of setting fire to a vehicle and its trailer in the Sde Ephraim settlement “outpost” in the occupied West Bank overnight on 9 June.

    Sde Ephraim was established on a hilltop belonging to the nearby Palestinian village of Ras Karkar.

    While all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law and building them is a war crime, what Israel refers to as “outposts” are often built without even Israel’s permission and are considered illegal under Israeli law.

    The men killed were identified as Muhammad Raslan Abdo, Muhammad Jaber Abdo and Rashdi Samih Ataya, according to the Palestinian Authority civil affairs department, which did not name the fourth Palestinian who was killed.

    Local news sources named him as Wasim Bisam Zidan.

    Israeli forces had previously detained Muhammad Jaber Abdo for two decades, and he was released in 2022. He was a member of Hamas’ armed wing operating in the occupied West Bank.

    Israeli forces claimed to have found a makeshift sub-machine gun and other weapons in the vehicle.

    Israeli forces then barred Palestine Red Crescent Society medics from reaching and evacuating the injured for at least two hours.

    When one ambulance tried to reach, Israeli forces fired at it with live ammunition, puncturing its tires.

    Israeli forces also opened fire on Palestinians gathered in the area, injuring eight with live ammunition, including a child.

    Israel is now withholding the bodies of all four Palestinians its forces killed in Kafr Nimeh, UN monitoring group OCHA said. Israel withholds the remains of Palestinians killed during what it claims were attacks, intending to use them as bargaining chips in negotiations.

    A governorate-wide strike on Ramallah and al-Bireh was reportedly declared the next day, on 11 June, in mourning.

    Wreaking havoc on a refugee camp

    Israeli forces invaded the al-Faraa refugee camp in the foothills of the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank accompanied with military bulldozers in the late hours of 9 June. Israeli forces briefly withdrew from the camp at dawn the next day but stormed it later with large reinforcements.

    Israeli forces also invaded several other neighborhoods in nearby Tubas, before withdrawing completely on the afternoon of 10 June after a 16-hour operation, which saw armed Palestinians defend the camp from the Israeli invaders.

    Soldiers raided homes in the refugee camp and used them as sniper and observation points. Bulldozers partially damaged some homes.

    A 16-year-old Palestinian child, Mahmoud Ibrahim Nabrisi, was walking out of an alley that led to the refugee camp’s main square when he saw Israeli soldiers stationed in a community center for disabled people in the camp, according to a field investigation by DCIP.

    Mahmoud tried to warn people in the area of the presence of the Israeli forces. That’s when an Israeli sniper hiding behind a small hole in the building’s wall that the military created to observe and shoot from, fired at Mahmoud from a distance of 120 to 150 meters. Three bullets hit Mahmoud, one near his eye, one behind his ear and another in his leg.

    Palestinian youth transferred Mahmoud to an ambulance, which took him to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead.

    As has often been the case with Israeli military raids in the occupied West Bank, which include highly destructive attacks on infrastructure, Israeli bulldozers damaged sewage, electricity and water networks during their invasion of al-Faraa refugee camp. Israeli forces also destroyed and bulldozed the refugee camp’s main square and road.

    Israeli forces also surrounded the camp, preventing Palestinian residents from going in or leaving.

    Soldiers burned three houses, partially destroyed two and burned four vehicles and destroyed another during their invasion of the camp.

    Local media circulated pictures of a home in the camp after it was bombed by the Israeli army, as well as damaged and destroyed vehicles:

    The Israeli military’s widespread destruction of civilian and public infrastructures leads residents to believe that the Israeli army is taking revenge on the camp by destroying it, Wafa news agency reported.

    The Israeli military has conducted four major raids into the al-Faraa refugee camp since 7 October, killing 17 Palestinians, the news agency reported.

    “Unprecedented bloodshed”

    Earlier this month, the UN high commissioner for human rights Volker Türk said Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were “being subjected to day after day of unprecedented bloodshed.”

    More than 520 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, including at least 504 by Israeli forces, according to OCHA.

    Israeli settlers have killed at least 10 Palestinians, and another seven were killed by either Israeli army or settler fire.

    Of those killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, 132 were children.

    Israeli forces and settlers have injured over 5,200 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, at least 800 of them children. One third of all injuries were by live ammunition.

    Israeli forces and settlers have killed 51 Palestinian children since the beginning of the year, including two US citizens, according to documentation by DCIP.

    • This article was first published in The Electronic Intifada

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  • Reuters Reveals Secret U.S. Government Anti-China Operation to Increase Covid-19 Deaths in East Asia and Pacific

    On June 14, Reuters headlined: “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic: The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.”

    A June 15 Google-search of the headline “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic” produced virtually no publication of that Reuters news-report anywhere within the U.S. empire — U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, etc. The news-report was not published, for example, in the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, Guardian, Telegraph, and Daily Mail, nor CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR, PBS, Deutsche Welle, etc. That headline did briefly run on the websites of USA Today and Fox News, but never the news-report itself on that given site, and the link to the story no longer works at either USA Today or Fox News. There had been a link to that headlined story, but that news-report had not been published on either site. The only mainstream site in the U.S. empire that posted not only the headline but that also at their site the actual news-report, was Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on June 15. A Google-search of that headline four hours later on June 15 showed no better results. So, this extraordinarily important news-report remains as being news even the day after Reuters had published it on their news-feed. Suppression of a major news-story from a U.S. empire news-agency such as Reuters is highly extraordinary.

    That suppressed news-report — which should immediately have been splashed everywhere, because it was among the biggest news-stories anywhere on June 14 — opened:

    At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

    The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

    Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.

    This post, identified by Reuters, matched the messaging, timeframe and design of the U.S. military’s anti-vax propaganda campaign in the Philippines, former and current military officials say. Social media platform X also identified the account as fake and removed it.

    TRANSLATION FROM TAGALOG

    #ChinaIsTheVirus

    Do you want that? COVID came from China and vaccines came from China

    (Beneath the message is a picture of then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte saying: “China! Prioritize us first please. I’ll give you more islands, POGO and black sand.” POGO refers to Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators, online gambling companies that boomed during Duterte’s administration. Black sand refers to a type of mining.)

    “COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”

    RELATED

    Podcast: Pentagon’s anti-vax campaign

    After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

    The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.

    The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review, Reuters found.

    “I don’t think it’s defensible. I’m extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that.”

    Daniel Lucey, infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.

    The news-report also said:

    Then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte pleaded with citizens to get the COVID vaccine. “You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,” a masked Duterte said in this televised address in June 2021.

    When he addressed the vaccination issue, the Philippines had among the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia. Only 2.1 million of its 114 million citizens were fully vaccinated – far short of the government’s target of 70 million. By the time Duterte spoke, COVID cases exceeded 1.3 million, and almost 24,000 Filipinos had died from the virus. The difficulty in vaccinating the population contributed to the worst death rate in the region.

    COVID-19 deaths in the Philippines

    The pandemic hit the Philippines especially hard, and by November 2021, COVID had claimed the lives of 48,361 people there. …

    To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.

    “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” …

    In 2019, before COVID surfaced in full force, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper signed a secret order that later paved the way for the launch of the U.S. military propaganda campaign. The order elevated the Pentagon’s competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops against those adversaries. The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, even “outside of areas of active hostilities.”

    Esper, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. A State Department spokesperson referred questions to the Pentagon.

    The statement — “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” — means that the U.S. Government was placing a higher priority upon “dragging China through the mud” than on keeping covid-19 deaths down in the Assia-Pacific region. Especially in the Phillipines, which under Duarte’s Presidency was neutralist in the conflict between the U.S. Government and the Chinese Government, adding to the death-rate there was not a practical concern for the U.S. Government. In other words: the U.S. Government treats neutralist nations as-if they’re instead among its enemy-nations, to such an extent that even civilian deaths there that are caused by the U.S. Government, are of no practical (much less of ethical) concern. This operation by the U.S. Government was expected to increase deaths in that region (because the U.S. Government believed that vaccinations would reduce covid-19 deaths in its own and allied territories), but they were not concerned about that. They were interested only in “how we could drag China through the mud.” The possibily that deaths would increase deaths in and around Asia as a result of what they were doing, was of no concern to them. The extent to which the post-1945 U.S. Government is significantly different than was Hitler’s Government in Germany, is therefore an appropriate matter for public debate, though it’s not being debated anywhere in today’s U.S. empire. The major importance of this news-report from Reuters is that it importantly contributes to that debate; and, now, the further fact of its virtually complete black-out within the U.S. empire, displays the extent to which the U.S. empire will not tolerate the existence of any such public debate. Perhaps this fact is even more important than that extraordinary report from Reuters itself was.

    A reasonable conclusion from all of this is that America’s Government treats neutral countries as-if they are enemy countries. An associated aspect of this fact is that starting on June 11th the U.S. Government increased its secondary sanctions against Russia — the sanctions against businesses that trade with Russia — so as to punish them for that and thereby to limit such firms’ choices as to which countries they will be allowed by the U.S. Government to have commerce with. Secondary sanctions present non-U.S. targets (neutral countries and firms) with a choice: do business with the United States or with the sanctioned target, but not both. This is erecting a new “iron curtain,” of a specifically economic type, between the American empire — “The West” — and “The East.”

    The U.S. Government is, in effect, betting that to force neutrals to choose between “The West” and “the East,” “The West” will expand, instead of reduce, its empire. Whether, or the extent to which, the reverse might happen, was so much as even considered by “The West,” is not, as-of yet, publicly known.

    However, specifically as regards what was the topic in that Reuters news-report: to be concerned not at all about how the death-rates in the east-Asian region would be affected, but ONLY about “how we could drag China through the mud,” was — given the fact that the U.S. Government thought that to increase the vaccination-rates in that region would reduce the death-rates there — for the U.S. Government to intend to increase covid-19 deaths in the East-Asia & Pacific region. It was their intent, regardless of whether, or the extent to which, it was the result of what the U.S. Government did there.

    The post Reuters Reveals Secret U.S. Government Anti-China Operation to Increase Covid-19 Deaths in East Asia and Pacific first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible

    We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show.

    1. The “leader of the free world”, President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.

    And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies – Russia, China, Iran – without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?

    2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” – backed by weapons transfers – has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 per cent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.

    And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.

    We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence”, even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.

    We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.

    And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by antisemitism.

    3. Meanwhile, the same western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces. Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.

    And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of western military expansion eastwards, via Nato, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door – and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.

    We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.

    We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right – no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.

    In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.

    4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison. Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained – according to United Nations legal experts – in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the US seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.

    And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention – having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.

    The leaked documents Assange published show western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further western resource domination and their own enrichment – and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.

    We are supposed to believe that western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, Wikileaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)

    We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration – and in the CIA’s case, planned assassination – are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism. We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.

    5. The media claim to represent the interests of western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.

    We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.

    We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour. We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.

    We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.

     

    We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West – from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza – when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerations whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.

    We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.

    6. In western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.

    We are supposed to believe in a western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the US and UK the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns, and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.

    We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public – offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour – when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.

    We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.

    In the US, the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be in pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.

    In the UK, the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.

    All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.

    The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.

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  • Timely Lessons About Tyranny from the Father of the Constitution

    It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.

    — James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,  1785

    James Madison, often referred to as the “Father of the Constitution,” once predicted that the Bill of Rights would become mere “parchment barrier,” words on paper ignored by successive generations of Americans.

    How right he was.

    Although Madison initially felt that the inclusion of a bill of rights in the originally ratified Constitution was unnecessary to its success, Thomas Jefferson persuaded him that “a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, & what no just government should refuse, or rest on inferences.”

    The Bill of Rights drafted by Madison—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—was a document so revolutionary at the time that it would come to be viewed as the epitome of American liberty. The rights of the people reflected in those ten amendments encapsulated much of Madison’s views about government, the corrupting influence of power, and the need for safeguards against tyranny.

    Madison’s writings speak volumes to the present constitutional crisis in the country.

    Read them and weep.

    “The accumulation of all powers, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 47 (30 January 1788) Federalist (Dawson)/46 Full text at Wikisource

    “The people are the only legitimate fountain of power, and it is from them that the constitutional charter, under which the several branches of government hold their power, is derived.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 49 (2 February 1788)

    “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 51 (6 February 1788)

    “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” — James Madison, Speech, Constitutional Convention (29 June 1787), from Max Farrand’s Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Vol. I [1] (1911), p. 465

    “Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.” — James Madison, Letter to Thomas Jefferson (17 October 1788), as quoted in James Madison: The Writings, 1787-1790 Vol. 5 (1904)]

    “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” — James Madison to W.T. Barry, 4 August 1822, Writings 9:103-p-9

    “I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”— James Madison, Speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention on Control of the Military, June 16, 1788 in: History of the Virginia Federal Convention of 1788, vol. 1, p. 130 (H.B. Grigsby ed. 1890).

    In the years since the founders laid their lives on the line to pursue the dream of individual freedom and self-government, big government has grown bigger and the rights of the citizenry have grown smaller.

    However, there are certain principles—principles that every American should know—which undergird the American system of government and form the basis of our freedoms.

    The following seven principles are a good starting point for understanding what free government is really all about.

    First, the maxim that power corrupts is an absolute truth. Realizing this, those who drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights held one principle sacrosanct: a distrust of all who hold governmental power. As such, those who drafted our founding documents would see today’s government as an out-of-control, unmanageable beast.

    The second principle is that governments primarily exist to secure rights, an idea that is central to constitutionalism. The purpose of constitutionalism is to limit governmental power and ensure that the government performs its basic function: to preserve and protect our rights, especially our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and our civil liberties. Unfortunately, the government today has discarded this principle and now sees itself as our master, not our servant.

    The third principle revolves around the belief that no one is above the law, not even those who make the law. This is termed rule of law. Richard Nixon’s statement, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal,” would have been an anathema to the Framers of the Constitution.

    Fourth, separation of powers ensures that no single authority is entrusted with all the powers of government. The fact that the president today has dictatorial powers would have been considered an offense to every principle for which the Framers took their revolutionary stand.

    Fifth, a system of checks and balances, essential if a constitutional government is to succeed, strengthens the separation of powers and prevents legislative despotism. The Framers did not anticipate the emergence of presidential powers or the inordinate influence of corporate powers on governmental decision-making. Indeed, as recent academic studies now indicate, we are ruled by a monied oligarchy that serves itself and not “we the people.”

    Sixth, representation allows the people to have a voice in government by sending elected representatives to do their bidding while avoiding the need of each and every citizen to vote on every issue considered by government.

    Finally, federalism is yet another constitutional device to limit the power of government by dividing power and, thus, preventing tyranny. In America, the levels of government generally break down into federal, state and local branches (which further divide into counties and towns or cities). Because local and particular interests differ from place to place, such interests are better handled at a more intimate level by local governments, not a bureaucratic national government.

    These seven vital principles have been largely forgotten in recent years, obscured by the haze of a centralized government, a citizenry that no longer thinks analytically, and schools that don’t adequately teach our young people about their history and their rights.

    Yet here’s the rub: while Americans wander about in their brainwashed states, their “government of the people, by the people and for the people” has largely been taken away from them.

    The answer, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries: get un-brainwashed.

    Learn your rights.

    Stand up for the founding principles.

    Make your voice and your vote count for more than just political posturing.

    Never cease to vociferously protest the erosion of your freedoms at the local and national level.

    Most of all, do these things today.

    If we wait until the votes have all been counted or hang our hopes on our particular candidate to win and fix what’s wrong with the country, “we the people” will continue to lose.

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  • Israel is Dragging the World into Darkness

    Israel must be held accountable for the suffering it is inflicting on Gaza (Omar Ashtawy APA images)

    Israel does not belong in the modern world. It is the child of European colonialism and Europe’s genocidal anti-Semitism, imposed by force and fire and Western guilt on a land already inhabited by an indigenous people.

    Israel is a contemporary trespass of that old world’s colonial ethos that justified genocide, ethnic cleansing, wholesale plunder, endless theft and destruction of indigenous peoples in the name of settlement and divine entitlement of a superior group of humans.

    But the modern world has moved on with incremental moral evolution. It long ago repudiated, at least in principle, the racist and violent impulses that powered the genocidal colonial engines of old.

    One can hear Israel’s anachronistic nature in the rhetoric of its leaders and citizens. Benjamin Netanyahu points to America’s nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to justify Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

    Zionists, especially those in settler-colonial nations like the United States and Australia, love to remind us that these countries were founded on the genocide and ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples.

    And from these reminders come their accusations of double standards and hypocrisy. “You’re living on stolen land, why don’t you leave?” so their rhetoric goes.

    Implicit in their accusations is an admission of sameness with the violent and racist settler-colonial force that created the United States.

    In other words, while humanity has tried and continues to strive to prevent and right the wrongs of the past, Israel points to these base moments in human history, not in the context of “never again,” but as precedents it should be free to emulate.

    As we still today uncover mass graves in “Indian schools” where Indigenous children were ripped from their families and tortured to death in boarding schools, Israel demands the right to create more mass graves of Palestinians in the name of “self-defense.”

    While we engage in discourse to push for acknowledgement and reparations, much as the world did for European Jews, Israel demands an entitlement to ethnically cleanse indigenous Palestinians, steal their lands, plunder resources and raze their cities and farmlands.

    While we imagine and endeavor to create a post-colonial reality of revolutionary universalism, inclusion, equity and understanding, Israel demands the right to Jewish exclusivity and Jewish entitlement at the expense of non-Jews.

    Invoking American settler-colonialism to justify its own version of the same is no different than invoking America’s industrialized enslavement as a precedent to emulate.

    Rules-based order?

    Western governments have long touted their values as beacons of democracy and idealism toward which modernity must aim. How they love to lecture the world about law and rules-based order; about freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of this and that.

    But look how quickly they denounce, veto and attack any courts, human rights organizations and UN protocols when the institutions they helped create do not serve their imperial interests. Look how quickly they shut down speech and sic their police on their own citizens trying to exercise those freedoms.

    They do this because Israel is antithetical to democratic values. It is antithetical to human rights and the so-called rules-based order.

    The West must therefore choose between Israel and the ideals it claims to uphold. And thus far, it is choosing Israel.

    And in the process, it is dragging itself and the world into an abyss.

    Already, Indian commentators are talking about an “Israel-like” solution in Kashmir. The world is silent as Arab dictatorships like the UAE are arming genocidal militias in Sudan to take control of the country’s vast gold and uranium treasures.

    Israel is dragging the world into an infectious darkness that will spread across our planet unless it is stopped and held accountable for the holocaust it is committing in Gaza and now, it seems, in the West Bank as well.

    The “solution” is not at all complicated, contrary to pervasive Zionist propaganda.

    It is simply an adherence to accepted universal morality that rejects Jewish supremacy as it rejects all other forms of supremacy. This means equality of rights for all those who inhabit the land, a return of Palestinian refugees in a nation of its citizens founded on the principle of one-person-one-vote.

    • Article first published in The Electronic Intifada

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  • They’re Arresting the Wrong People Inside of Congress

    [Photo by: Celâl Güneş]

    I was arrested again inside of Congress for speaking out against US-backed genocide. Myself and others were brutally tackled and carried out of the room by Capitol Police. I was charged with “crowding, obstructing, or incommoding” for speaking out and holding a sign as the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense testified in Congress for more money for the endless US war machine.

    While they are arresting peace activists for exercising first amendment rights they are making plans to host Netanyahu- a war criminal with an actual arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court.

    For decades, people following CODEPINK’s lead have been protesting inside the halls of Congress. The year before October 7, there were a handful of us protesting the bloated military budgets and the US warmongering. I was arrested several times on my own, but since October, dozens of us have been arrested in Congress, hundreds in DC, and thousands across the US and the world for Palestine.

    The sustained energy and activism are the result of the 40,000+ thousands of Palestinians murdered, millions being starved and displaced, their land, water, and air poisoned, and neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, and refugee camps demolished.

    The real criminals are the ones we are protesting against–the ones literally sitting directly in front of us inside the hearing room–and should be the ones arrested, charged, and found guilty for the war criminals they are funding and supporting and the war crimes they are committing.

    Any of us speaking and acting out on the side of justice know we are taking risks. We see it as our duty as people in the US in solidarity with and inspired by the Palestinian people facing and resisting this horror.

    As I await my court date, I think of the people I spent the night with at the DC detention facility. Just this year, there have been 5 deaths inside the D.C. jail. The dozen or so women in there reminded me that poverty is a policy choice and our carceral, systemically racist state perpetuates harm and cycles of violence.

    According to the US Center for Palestinian Rights in Washington DC, for this year alone (before our additional billions of aid weresent), $15,596,311 to Israel’s weapons could instead fund 451,735 households with public housing, 1,322,199 children receiving free or low-cost healthcare, 41,490 elementary school teachers, 10,818,505 households with solar electricity produce, and 100,563 students with their loan debt canceled.

    The fight against US militarism is one where the climate, feminist, Indigenous, economic, and racial justice movements are all uniting around right now. And as it deepens and strengthens, we must become more organized as we escalate while we continue to make those in power uncomfortable.

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