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Category: United States

  • The Public Way Underestimate How Much “Their” Government Lies

    In America, lying by the Government is routine because the Government represents not the public but only the wealthiest billionaires who provide most of the money that funds political campaigns. Any candidate who doesn’t represent the megadonor won’t get their money and will therefore be defeated by one who DOES represent the billionaires and NOT the public. Consequently, the winningest political candidates are the best liars, who (get all lof the billionaire money that they need in order to) deceive the most voters the most — and who fulfill on their public campaign promises to the voters the least, and fulfill on their private promises to their billionaire donors the most. This fully explains what the U.S. Government actually does, which is corruption, NOT democracy.

    Though some of the billionaires are Republicans, and some are Democrats, the most important political issues aren’t actually the Republicans-versus-Democrats issues, but instead are the-billionaires-versus-the-public issues, such as is demonstrated in these examples:

    On February 14, the AP had headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling,” and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.

    On March 5, the Jeff-Bezos-owned Washington Post headlined “GOP must cut Medicaid or Medicare to achieve budget goals, CBO finds: The nonpartisan bookkeeper said there’s no other way to cut $1.5 trillion from the budget over the next decade.” Though the CBO is ‘nonpartisan’ as between the Democratic and Republican Parties, it is (since both are) entirely beholden to America’s billionaires; and, so, that term there is deceptive. What that ‘news’-report is reporting is that the sense of Congress (even including Democrats there) is that a way needs to be found to cut $1.5T from ‘Medicare or Medicaid” (which, since only Medicaid, health care to the poor, is ‘discretionary’, Medicare is not) means cutting Medicaid over the next ten years.

    On March 8, ABC News and Yahoo News headlined “DOGE is searching through Social Security payments looking for fraud.”

    On March 31st, Business Insider and Yahoo News headlined “5 takeaways from Elon Musk’s 100-minute town hall about DOGE and America: ‘It’s costing me a lot to be in this job’,” and reported:

    Elon Musk spoke for roughly 100 minutes on Sunday at a town hall in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he was campaigning for Brad Schimel, a conservative judge running in the state’s upcoming Supreme Court election.

    The session evolved into a freewheeling discussion on Musk’s thoughts about the future of the US and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, as he fielded questions from supporters and bashed Democratic leaders.

    Musk said little about concrete plans for DOGE but gave attendees a glimpse at what he thinks should be cut.

    Here are the top five takeaways from Musk’s town hall.

    Musk gave two attendees $1 million for their support

    Musk said the checks would be made to “spokespersons” at the event, amid concerns that his $1 million lottery would violate Wisconsin state law.

    Musk, who started the event wearing a cheesehead hat, kicked off the talk by handing giant $1 million checks to two supporters.

    Musk had originally offered Wisconsin voters $100 each to sign a petition opposing “activist judges,” and they’d be entered to win a $1 million lottery prize.

    But amid concerns the giveaway would violate state law, Musk later said the payment would be compensation for the winners to be spokespeople at the event.

    Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul, tried to block the $1 million lottery, but the state’s Supreme Court declined on Sunday to hear his case.

    Musk’s high-profile campaign stop underscores the importance of the judicial election, set for April 1, for Republicans.

    Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has a 4-3 liberal majority, and one of its left-leaning judges, Ann Walsh Bradley, is set to retire — paving the way for a realignment of the state’s ideological future. The vote is also being hyped as a litmus test for sentiment on the Trump administration’s actions in the last few months.

    On April 2, the New York Times headlined “Liberal Wins Wisconsin Court Race, Despite Musk’s Millions,” and reported that “Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate for a pivotal seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, overcame $25 million in spending from Elon Musk to defeat her conservative opponent. … With over 70 percent of the vote counted on Tuesday evening, Judge Crawford held a lead of roughly 10 points.” So, the candidate of Democratic Party billionaires (such as George Soros) defeated the candidate of Reublican Party billionaires (such as Elon Musk).

    The billionaires control corporate America, and — via their corporations, both profit and nonprofit — they own, and advertise in their media, their corporations; and hire, to write their ‘news’ stories, the reporters that are the best ones to get their candidates elected to public offices. (Other reporters won’t be able to stay long in their media — they’ll fail, just like the candidates the billionaires don’t like will fail.)

    The inevitable result is that because the candidates are constantly lying to the public, the public are constantly being disappointed in the Government. And, since the public aren’t intelligent enough to recognize that the source of all this constant corruption and lying is the billionaires-control over the Government and the press, the public don’t blame the billionaires but instead “the Republicans” or “the Democrats” or “the minorities” or “the immigrants” or whatever. So, they never learn, but instead just stick with whatever their prejudices happen to be. And, of course, the Government officials, and the billionaires who made them so, are publicly calling this “democracy” and privately laughing at it, because they’re in perfect positions to know that it’s just another lie. The problem isn’t that they don’t respect the public, but that they don’t serve the public. In a democracy, the public officials serve the public even if they don’t respect them. It’s their job — regardless of what they think of the public. But in an aristocracy or other kind of dictatorship, serving the public isn’t a Government official’s job. And that’s the way it is in this country — and they need to lie about that, too.

    The post The Public Way Underestimate How Much “Their” Government Lies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Bullying in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland)

    United States vice president JD Vance traveled to Kalaallit Nunaat (colonial designation: Greenland) to join his wife. He issued a statement that speaks much to the imperialist mindset of the Trump administration:

    I’m going to visit some of our guardians in the Space Force on the northwest coast of Greenland and also just check out what is going on with the security there of Greenland. As you know, it is really important: a lot of other countries have threatened Greenland and threatened to use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States, to threaten Canada and of course to threaten the people of Greenland, so we’re going to check out how things are going there. So speaking for President Trump, we want to reinvigorate the security of the people of Greenland because we think it is important to protecting the security of the entire world. Unfortunately, leaders in both America and in Denmark I think ignored Greenland for far too long. That has been bad for Greenland. That has also been bad for the security of the entire world. We think we can take things in a different direction, so I am going to go check it out.

    Vance says a lot of other countries have threatened Greenland (and Canada and the US). Trump points to Russia and China as threats to Greenland, without any evidence to back it up. It comes across clearly as blatant fearmongering, conjuring up a boogeyman and presenting the US as coming to the rescue.

    Do Greenlanders feel afraid? If Canadians are afraid, it is about the threats the US made against Canadian sovereignty. A poll reveals that Canadians feel angry (57%), betrayed (37%), and anxious (29%) toward the Trump administration.

    However, it is just silly to think Russia and China would risk world opprobrium to take over the world’s largest island, and for what? Resources and commodities that they can get by trading?

    But there is a country that threatens Greenland.

    Trump said to Greenland,

    We strongly support your right to determine your own future. And if you choose, to welcome you into the United States of America. We need Greenland for national security and even international security. We’re working with everybody involved to try and get it. But we need it really for international world security. And I think we are going to get it; one way or the other we are going to get it. [people can be heard laughing and booing] We will keep you safe. We will make you rich …

    Trump is clearly speaking out both sides of his mouth, saying he respects Greenlanders right to self-determination and then making threatening comments that the US “one way or the other we are going to get it.”

    Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen complained that the US is putting “unacceptable pressure” on Greenland and Denmark. During a DR broadcast, she stated, “It is pressure that we will resist.”

    Former Greenland prime minister Múte Egede realizes that the US dream to annex, own, and control Greenland is serious and calls upon allied countries to declare their support for Greenland.

    Jens-Frederik Nielsen who was sworn in as the prime minister of Greenland on Friday, 28 March responded to Trump: “President Trump says that the United States is getting Greenland. Let me be clear: the United States won’t get that. We do not belong to anyone else. We determine our own future.”

    On Saturday, 29 March, Trump responded about the potential use of force to take over Greenland: “I never take military force off the table. But I think there is a good chance that we could do it without military force.”

    Vance and Trump Criticize Denmark

    Vance criticized Denmark: “Denmark has not kept pace and devoted the resources necessary to keep this base, to keep our troops, and in my view, to keep the people of Greenland safe from a lot of very aggressive incursions from Russia, from China and other nations.” Trump echoes that sentiment, saying that the waters around Greenland have “Chinese and Russian ships all over the place” and that the US will handle the situation.

    Has anyone heard of any “very aggressive incursions” by Russia, China and other nations (presumably US-designated enemies, such as Iran and North Korea) into Greenland?

    Trump doubles down: “We need Greenland, very importantly, for international security. We have to have Greenland. It’s not a question of, ‘Do you think we can do without it?’ We can’t.”

    What Does US Investment and Security Look Like for Its Colonies?

    “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance said. “You have underinvested in the people of Greenland, and you have underinvested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful land mass filled with incredible people.”

    Does the US do right by its overseas territories? What about US investment in overseas territories it has previously annexed? About Puerto Rico, Ben Norton wrote, “Poverty is rising in one of the world’s oldest colonies: In Puerto Rico, 41.7% of people, including 57.6% of children, live in poverty. This is nearly four times the US rate. And Puerto Rican workers are getting poorer even while unemployment falls.” The US 2020 Census revealed that Guam has a poverty rate (20.2%) twice that of the US mainland. The same 2020 census indicated, “The percentage of families in poverty for the U.S. Virgin Islands showed a slight increase from 18.3% in 2009 to 18.6% in 2019. The same census reported a decrease for families in poverty in American Samoa; poverty declined to 50.7% in 2019 from 54.4% in 2009. Is this what Greenlanders can look forward to? In comparison, in 2023, the poverty rate in Greenland was 17.4%, as calculated at below 60% of the median equivalized income,1 which is slightly above the EU average of 16.2%. However, the poverty rate in recent years has been on the rise in Greenland.

    And what has US security meant for Puerto Ricans? From 1941 until 2001 the US Navy and US Marine Corps carried out bombing drills on nearby Vieques Island. Starting in 1999, protests drew attention to US militarism in its colonies. The departure of the US Navy “left the island peppered with remnants of undetonated bombs, PFAS chemicals, uranium, mercury, napalm and more. All of which are toxic materials known to have serious effects on human health along with generational impacts on the health of island youth.”

    For Hawaiians? After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the island of Kaho’olawe (known as the Pacific’s Battered Bullseye) became a bombing range for the US until president George HW Bush ordered it shut down in 1990. The bombing was massive, designed to simulate the effects of a nuclear detonation. Huge 500-ton TNT charges created shock waves, vapor clouds, and sent rock and soil high into the sky, and destroyed the island’s only fresh-water aquifer.

    For Micronesians? There is the ignominy of the 67 nuclear tests by the the United States in the Marshall Islands carried out between 1946 and 1958 with its concomitant fallout of radiation and the forced migration of tens of thousands of Marshall Islanders.

    Even Greenland has been affected by the use of nuclear weapons by the US. In 1968, a B-52 bomber carrying four 1.1-megaton bombs crashed on the ice 19 kilometers (12 miles) from Thule, killing one crew member and leaking radioactive plutonium into Greenland’s waters. Reports of cancer and other illnesses surfaced among Danish and Kalaallit Thule Air Base workers.2

    The Pentagon made a risible attempt at concealing the nuclear blunder at that time, even to the extent of one official stating: “I don’t know of any missing bomb, but we have not positively identified what I think you are looking for.”

    Many people, including former Thule Air Base workers and Danish parliamentarians, state that an unexploded American hydrogen bomb also disappeared — serial number 78252. Niels-Jørgen Nehring, head of the state-sponsored DUPI [Danish Institute of International Affairs now called the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)], gave credence to the claim that a lost bomb remained off Thule.

    The US Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Base) led to the forced relocation of the Inughuit. Obedient to US dictate, colonial Danish authorities illegally exiled 650 Inuit in May 1953 from Uummannaq, Pituffik, and neighboring locales to a tent community about 100 kilometers (62 miles) north in Qaanaaq, away from their ancestral lands. “They were given four days to abandon a home that had been theirs for almost 4,000 years. They have never been allowed back,” wrote Jørgen Dragsdahl.3 The ethnic cleansing from Thule Air Base was a precursor to the subsequent ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Ilois from the erstwhile pristine coral atoll, Diego Garcia, in the Chagos archipelago by British and American governments to construct one of the largest US military bases outside the US.4

    Insultingly, Greenlanders are also required to clean up the mess left by US military installations. Then US secretary of state Colin Powell rejected US responsibility, saying it had been transferred to Greenland where it would stay.

    What do Greenlanders Want?

    Polling results from 29 January 2025 indicate that 85% of Greenlanders do not want to exchange their present status to become a part of the US. Six percent wish to join the US and 9% are unsure. However, on the question of Greenland independence, if a referendum were held, 56%  would vote in favor, 28% would vote no, and 7% didn’t know how they would vote.

    The US Track Record

    The US has a track record. Trump and his chosen team are operating straight out of the CIA playbook. They will lie and cheat in order to steal the homeland of the Kalaallit. The US has done this many times already. The Chagossians were shipped to Mauritius. The Chamorro continue to strive for self-determination. Palauans finally achieved it, at least partially, by agreeing to a Compact of Free Association with the US which allows the US to operate military bases in Palau and make decisions concerning external security. The Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown in a US corporate coup. Indeed, the continental US is established through the genocide of the Indigenous nations that had inhabited the landmass for millennia before Europeans reached its shores.

    As well, the US has a track record in Greenland. And as the current tariff war adduces, no ally (except, it seems, Israel) can feel secure in its relationship with the US.

    ENDNOTES:

    The post US Bullying in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    The OECD explains this jargon as: “People are classified as poor when their equivalised disposable household income is less than 50% of the median in each country.
    2    See Erik Erngaard, Grønland: I Tusinde År (Lademan Forlagsaktieselskab, 1973), 227.
    3    Jørgen Dragsdahl, “The Danish dilemma,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September/October 2001.
    4    See Charles Judson Harwood Jr., “Diego Garcia: The ‘criminal question’ doctrine,” updated 16 June 2006). See also John Pilger’s documentary Stealing a Nation.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The United States of Tyranny: America Is Becoming a Constitution-Free Zone

    It’s no joke: America is becoming a Constitution-free zone.

    Little by little, our rights are being whittled down in the name of national security.

    Where do you draw the line?

    How much tyranny will Americans tolerate in the name of national security?

    At what point does this slippery slope of power grabs lead to dictatorship?

    Will we let border police trample on the rights of everyone they encounter, including legal residents and citizens? Turn a blind eye when men, women and children are forcibly detained by gangs of plainclothes agents and made to disappear? Will we accept a national ID card that enables the government to target individuals and groups it deems undesirable? Will we tolerate AI-powered surveillance cameras and drones that track us more effectively than they protect us? Will we censor ourselves, fearing that any expression of dissent will mark us as anti-government?

    Will we abandon the constitutional principles our founders fought for? This is the bargain the police state demands of us.

    Take immigration, for example.

    President Trump wants us to believe that the nation’s security is so threatened by illegal immigrants that we should tolerate roving bands of ICE and border patrol agents disregarding the Constitution at every turn.

    But these government agents aren’t just disregarding it—they’re trampling it with the blessing of the man who swore to “preserve, protect and defend” that very same Constitution.

    First Amendment rights to free speech, assembly, and protest. Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Fifth Amendment guarantees of due process. Sixth Amendment protections ensuring a right to legal counsel. Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishments. Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection under the law.

    All of these and more are being imperiously swept aside in the Trump Administration’s pursuit of an America “for Americans and Americans only.”

    Trump has invoked wartime powers under the Alien Enemies Act to justify the expulsion of illegal immigrants, whom Trump has likened to terrorists, killers, criminals, and enemies of the state.

    However, with national security being used as a pretext to strip away rights on a larger scale than just criminals, the individuals targeted by the Trump Administration’s overreach represent a broader cross-section of American society: immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who live and work in the mainland of the United States. (It is estimated that undocumented immigrants paid nearly $97 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022, contributing $59.4 billion to the federal government, including payments for federal income tax and federal social insurance such as Social Security, Medicare and Unemployment Insurance. In other words, they are paying for entitlement programs for which they do not receive benefits.)

    Individuals whose visas allow them to legally reside in the U.S. are also being rounded up and made to disappear without due process.

    The reports of how these round-ups are being carried out—with ambushes on city streets, in broad daylight, at the hands of masked, plainclothes officers, and without any charges being levied, court hearings or defense attorneys notified—are beyond chilling.

    Some are being targeted based on their nationality. Some are being racially profiled. Some are being classified as criminal based solely on the fact that they have tattoos. Some, like Abrego Garcia, are being mistakenly snatched up and deported to private prisons in foreign countries, beyond the physical reach of U.S. courts.

    As Garcia’s attorney warned, the Trump Administration seems to have adopted the mindset that “the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”

    And then there are the scientists, doctors, academics and students who are being rounded up because at some point they voiced their concerns about the mounting death toll in Palestine.

    With the Trump Administration now equating even the perception of antisemitism as terrorism, that puts anyone in the government crosshairs who even dares to suggest that the killing of civilian women and children in Palestine is wrong.

    For example, Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk wrote an op-ed calling for the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel. That’s all it took for her to be placed on the government’s enemies list, stripped of her visa without warning or notice, surrounded on the street by a small army of masked agents, and whisked out of state to a detention center 1500 miles away without any family or friend knowing her whereabouts.

    These arbitrary roundups and deportations are not just violations of the Fifth Amendment’s due process protections. They also trample the First Amendment’s right to free speech and assembly, particularly for those who speak out against government policies.

    These actions are not limited to just immigrants or perceived enemies—they extend to anyone daring to challenge the status quo. Whether it’s activists, academics, or everyday citizens, being targeted for political expression is an assault on the very essence of free speech.

    In this way, these round-ups represent the beginning of the slippery slope, leading not just to arbitrary detentions and the expansion of private prisons as an extension of the police state but to an eventual authoritarian regime where dissent is suppressed, and constitutional rights are discarded.

    This is not just happening at the southern border.

    These round-ups are increasingly occurring in cities like New York, Boston, and northern Virginia, with many U.S. citizens also being swept up in warrantless searches, surveillance, and overreach from federal and local law enforcement.

    Where once the nation’s border constituted a thin line, it is becoming an ever-thickening zone dominated by authoritarianism and an utter disregard for the rule of law.

    This zone impacts millions of Americans who have never been near a border—citizens who live in everyday places, like urban and suburban areas, yet are subject to government overreach.

    As journalist Todd Miller explains, that expanding border region now extends “100 miles inland around the United States—along the 2,000-mile southern border, the 4,000-mile northern border and both coasts… This ‘border’ region now covers places where two-thirds of the US population (197.4 million people) live… The ‘border’ has by now devoured the full states of Maine and Florida and much of Michigan.”

    Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, or 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

    In this authoritarian reshaping of America, no one is safe, not even in their own homes.

    The government’s ever-expanding, Constitution-free zone translates to greater numbers of Americans being subject to warrantless searches, ID checkpoints, transportation checks, and even surveillance on private property far beyond the boundaries of the borderlands.

    From facial recognition software to mass data collection, surveillance technology is being used to monitor immigrants and ordinary citizens alike who are not suspected of any crime.

    With Trump considering plans to turn a portion of the southern border into an expansive military installation policed by active-duty troops, we’re going to see even more of these assaults on our freedoms. As Trump promised after Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was arrested because of his anti-war activism, “This is the first arrest of many to come.”

    Miller explains:

    “In these vast domains, Homeland Security authorities can institute roving patrols with broad, extra-constitutional powers backed by national security, immigration enforcement and drug interdiction mandates. There, the Border Patrol can set up traffic checkpoints and fly surveillance drones overhead with high-powered cameras and radar that can track your movements. Within twenty-five miles of the international boundary, CBP [Customs and Border Protection] agents can enter a person’s private property without a warrant.”

    Across the nation, local police forces are becoming militarized extensions of federal agencies like CBP and DHS, routinely receiving federal funds and training to act as armed enforcers of national security policies. By the time you add the military into that equation, you’ve got all the necessary ingredients for martial law.

    The CBP, with its more than 60,000 Customs and Border Protection employees, supplemented by the National Guard and the U.S. military, is an arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a national police force imbued with all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies.

    Just about every nefarious deed, tactic or thuggish policy advanced by the government today can be traced back to the DHS, its police state mindset, and the billions of dollars it distributes to local police agencies in the form of grants to transform them into extensions of the military.

    As Miller points out, the government has turned the nation’s expanding border regions into “a ripe place to experiment with tearing apart the Constitution, a place where not just undocumented border-crossers, but millions of borderland residents have become the targets of continual surveillance.”

    In much the same way that police across the country have been schooled in the art of sidestepping the Constitution, border agents have nearly unlimited discretion to stop, search, interrogate and arrest anyone they “suspect,” based on arbitrary factors such as:

    • Driving an unusual vehicle.
    • Passengers appearing “suspicious.”
    • Having a dusty or modified car.
    • Avoiding eye contact or looking too long at an officer.

    These arbitrary and broad criteria make it easy for any citizen to be targeted without just cause, turning everyday travel into a potential confrontation with law enforcement. In other words, anything goes when it comes to the police state’s justifications for undermining our rights.

    These troubling developments at the borders are just one part of a broader erosion of constitutional rights that has been underway for decades in the name of national security.

    When we look back at history, we see a consistent pattern of political power grabbing in the name of national security. From the Alien and Sedition Acts to the War on Terror, the price of security is always paid by our freedoms—and each step we take brings us closer to a system where those in power determine the limits of our liberty by using national security as an excuse to curtail fundamental freedoms.

    Fast-forward to the present, and Donald Trump capitalized on this historical pattern by claiming that the only way to keep America safe from dangerous immigrants was to build an expensive border wall, expand the reach of border patrol, and enlist the military to “assist” with border control.

    Continuing this trend, Joe Biden sent thousands of active-duty troops to the southern border, in anticipation of more than 10,000 illegal crossings per day—reinforcing the military presence and fortifying the unchecked power at the border.

    And now Trump is doubling down on everything he and his predecessors have done to fortify this unchecked power.

    This pattern of exploiting national security fears for authoritarian control has continued into the present day with Trump’s immigration crisis becoming a pretext for greater control, a strategy to stoke fear and justify authoritarianism.

    Yet despite the propaganda coming from the White House, the looming problem is not so much that the U.S. is being invaded by hostile forces at the border, but rather that the U.S. Constitution is under assault from within by a power-hungry cabal at the highest levels of power.

    Before long, the only Americans qualified to live freely in Trump’s America will be those who march in lockstep with the Deep State’s dictates, and even absolute compliance is no guarantee of safety.

    It used to be that the Constitution was our only reliable safety net, but that is being systematically dismantled.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government is now the greatest threat to our safety, and there’s no border wall big enough to protect us from these ruffians in our midst.

    The answer to this growing tyranny begins with us—“We the people.”

    The Constitution should not be negotiable. Freedom is not negotiable.

    You want to make America great again? Start by making America free again.

    The post The United States of Tyranny: America Is Becoming a Constitution-Free Zone first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Veterans For Peace Delegation Visits Nicaragua

    Image by Gerry Condon

    In a powerful demonstration of international solidarity, seven members of Veterans For Peace (VFP) visited Nicaragua in mid-to-late March as an official VFP delegation. Veterans from five U.S. states flew to Nicaragua on March 19 for a week-long visit to community clinics, regional colleges, vocational schools, youth groups and mayors in several Nicaraguan cities, including the capital Managua, Matagalpa, Masaya and Ciudad Sandino. The veterans were most impressed to learn that Nicaragua, the third poorest country in the western hemisphere, is providing free, high quality healthcare and education for all its people.

    Delegation participants were VFP vice president Joshua Shurley, VFP Board member Gerry Condon, VFP Communications Director Chris Smiley, At-Large member Alvin Glatkowski, and Daniel Shea, Douglas Ryder and Michael Kramer, presidents of their respective VFP chapters in Portland, Oregon; Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina, and Northern New Jersey.

    The Veterans For Peace delegation had a wonderful exchange with the Juventud Sandinista youth group, young women and men who are dedicated to continuing the Nicaragua’s unique revolution.

    One of the most striking aspects of the trip was the delegation’s visit to a Casa Materna maternity and birthing center in Matagalpa. Nicaragua has reduced maternal mortality rates by 80% since 2007. These centers reflect the government’s dedication to ensuring that every Nicaraguan mother and child has access to life-saving healthcare.

    “What a difference it makes when a government prioritizes the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable,” said Joshua Shurley, vice president of Veterans For Peace. “And what a contrast to the U.S., where things are moving in exactly the opposite direction.”

    Nicaragua Withstands U.S. Sanctions and Hybrid Warfare

    Nicaragua’s achievements are all the more impressive given the brutal economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. Nicaragua’s resilience in the face of this economic warfare is partly a result of its focus on “food sovereignty,” as 90% of the food that Nicaraguans eat is grown in Nicaragua. Also notable is Nicaragua’s commitment to sustainable energy. Over 70% of Nicaragua’s energy needs are met by wind, solar, geothermal and hydroelectric.

    Nicaragua has a long history of resisting U.S. imperialism. The delegation was able to visit the home of Nicaragua’s national hero, Augusto Cesar Sandino, who led an army in the 1920s that kicked out the U.S. Marines. Sandino is the namesake of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and the Sandinista Popular Army (EPS), which overthrew the U.S.-backed dictator Somoza in 1979 and fought the U.S.-backed “Contras” throughout the 1980s.

    The Veterans For Peace delegation traveled to sites in Masaya where brutal violence occurred during the U.S.-backed attempted coup in 2018. Western media portrayed these events as a Nicaraguan government crackdown on peaceful protesters. However, the delegation heard a different story from Masaya residents: the so-called “peaceful protesters” were actually violent mobs, a key element of hybrid warfare (aka “color revolution”) funded through shadowy arms of the U.S. intelligence sector.

    “U.S. imperialism has not yet given up on undermining and overthrowing the Sandinista revolution,” said VFP Board member Gerry Condon. “Our job as peace-loving veterans is to tell the truth about the remarkable achievements of the Nicaraguan people.”

    Nicaragua is Ranked Sixth in the World in Gender Equality

    The veterans were highly impressed by Nicaragua’s deep commitment to achieving gender equality. The Nicaraguan Constitution dictates that half of all political parties’ candidates for political office must be women. If a mayor is a man, the vice-mayor must be a woman, and vice versa. The same goes for every government ministry. At the highest level, Nicaragua now has a co-presidency that is filled by a man and a woman. Nicaragua is rated First in gender equality in the Americas, and Sixth in the world.

    As the U.S. continues to grapple with the mounting challenges of authoritarianism, mass deportations, and the dismantling of social services, the Veterans For Peace visit to Nicaragua underscores that solidarity between peoples of different nations can help break through the disinformation promoted by powerful interests and reveal how the struggles of ordinary people are interconnected.

    “We have some serious problems at home in the U.S. – even veterans’ healthcare is under attack,” said Douglas Ryder, a veteran of the U.S. war in Vietnam. “We can learn a lot from Nicaragua’s commitment to take care of all its people, beginning with those most in need.”

    The post Veterans For Peace Delegation Visits Nicaragua first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Secrecy and Virtue Signalling: Another View of Signalgate

    There has been a fascinating, near unanimous condemnation among the cognoscenti about the seemingly careless addition of Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic to the chat chain of Signal by US National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. Condemnation of the error spans the spectrum from clownish to dangerous. There has been virtually nothing on the importance of such leaks of national security information and the importance they serve in informing the public about what those in power are really up to.

    Rather than appreciate the fact that there was a journalist there to receive information on military operations that might raise a host of concerns (legitimate targeting and the laws of war come to mind), there was a chill of terror coursing through the commentariat and Congress that military secrets and strategy had been compromised. Goldberg himself initially disbelieved it. “I didn’t think it could be real.” He also professed that some messages would not be made public given the risks they posed, conceding that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s communications to the group “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the US would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

    This seemingly principled stance ignores the bread-and-butter importance of investigative reporting and activist publishing, which so often relies on classified material received via accident or design. Normally, the one receiving the message is condemned. In this case, Golberg objected to being the recipient, claiming moral high ground in reporting the security lapse. Certain messages of the “Houthi PC small group channel” were only published by The Atlantic to throw cold water on stubborn claims by the White House that classified details had not been shared.

    The supposed diligence on Goldberg’s part to fuss about the cavalier attitude to national security shown by the Trump administration reveals the feeble compromise the Fourth Estate has reached with the national security state. Could it be that WikiLeaks was, like the ghost of Banquo, at this Signal’s feast? Last year’s conviction of the organisation’s founding publisher, Julian Assange, on one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC), might have exerted some force over Goldberg’s considerations. Having been added to the communication chain in error, the defence material could well have imperilled him, with First Amendment considerations on that subject untested.

    As for what the messages revealed, along with the importance of their disclosure, things become clear. Waltz reveals that the killing of a Houthi official necessitated the destruction of a civilian building. “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.” Vance replies: “Excellent.”

    As Turse reminds us in The Intercept, this conforms to the practices all too frequently used when bombing the Houthis in Yemen. The United States offered extensive support to the Saudi-led bombing campaign against the Shia group, one that precipitated one of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises. That particular aerial campaign rarely heeded specific targeting, laying waste to vital infrastructure and health facilities. Anthropologist Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, also noted in remarks to The Intercept that fifty-three people have perished in the latest US airstrikes, among them five children. “These are just the latest deaths in a long track record of US killing in Yemen, and the research shows that US airstrikes in many countries have a history of killing and traumatizing innocent civilians and wreaking havoc on people’s lives and livelihoods.”

    The appearance of Hillary Clinton in the debate on Signalgate confirmed the importance of such leaks, and why they are treated with pathological loathing. “We’re all shocked – shocked!” she screeched in The New York Times. “What’s worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.” As a person with a hatred of open publishing outlets such as WikiLeaks (her own careless side to security was exposed by the organisation’s publication of emails sent from a private server while she was Secretary of State), the mania is almost understandable.

    Other countries, notably members of the Five Eyes alliance system, are also voicing concern that their valuable secrets are at risk if shared with the Trump administration. Again, the focus there is less on the accountability of officials than the cast iron virtues of secrecy. “When mistakes happen, and sensitive intelligence leaks, lessons must be learned to prevent that from recurring,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stated gravely in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “It’s a serious, serious issue, and all lessons must be taken.”

    Former chief of Canada’s intelligence agency, Richard Fadden, was even more explicit: “Canada needs to think about what this means in practical terms: is the United States prepared to protect our secrets, as we are bound to protect theirs?”

    Signalgate jolted the national security state. Rather than being treated as a valuable revelation about the latest US bombing strategy in Yemen, the obsession has been on keeping a lid on such matters. For the sake of accountability and the public interest, let us hope that the lid on this administration’s activities remains insecure.

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  • NATO: More Militarism, No Defence against US Expansionists

    If you believe Donald Trump might invade, you should be calling for Canada to withdraw from NATO. The alliance won’t defend Canada, has enabled US interference, and gobbles up resources.

    During a recent meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, US President Donald Trump questioned the border and Canadian sovereignty. He said, “if you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the U.S. … somebody did it a long time ago, many many decades ago, and (it) makes no sense.” Trump also repeatedly said Canada should be a US state, noting “to be honest with you, Canada only works as a state.”

    Sitting next to the US president, Rutte stayed silent. A bit later Trump suggested Rutte might assist him in taking part of NATO member Denmark, noting “I’m sitting with a man who could be very instrumental. You know Mark, we need that for international security.” Rutte replied, “when it comes to Greenland yes or not joining the U.S. I would leave that outside for me this discussion because I don’t want to drag NATO in that.”

    Rutte doesn’t seem to want to commit even rhetorically to defending alliance members’ sovereignty. Even if Rutte had interrupted Trump and told the US president his comments were inappropriate, the idea that NATO would defend Canada from a US invasion is ridiculous. Latvia and Estonia will not send troops to repel a US invasion. Nor will France or the UK.

    Will Canada send troops to defend Greenland if Trump takes it from NATO member Denmark? Does anyone think that would that be a good idea?

    Article 5 of the NATO Charter is not clear on what collective defence entails. It says an attack against one member “shall be considered an attack against them all.” But it doesn’t stipulate what the response should be, noting only that each member state must take “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.” Article 5 has only ever been invoked after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US.

    In the past NATO has undercut Canadian sovereignty. Unbeknownst to most Canadians, NATO was employed by Washington to topple a government in Ottawa. When Prime Minister John Diefenbaker didn’t provide unconditional support during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, US President John F. Kennedy used NATO as part of a multifaceted effort to precipitate the downfall of his minority Conservative government. On January 3, 1963, the outgoing commander of NATO, US General Lauris Norstad, came to Ottawa on an unplanned visit in which he claimed Canada would not be fulfilling her commitments to the alliance if the country did not acquire nuclear warheads. It was part of a series of moves by the Kennedy administration to weaken Diefenbaker, which led to the fall of his government. During the subsequent election campaign, Kennedy’s top pollster, Lou Harris, helped longtime external affairs official Lester Pearson defeat Diefenbaker.

    NATO continues to undercut Canadian sovereignty. It’s used to justify purchasing expensive offensive kit (think F-35s and surface combatant warships) that are a drag on resources. The alliance also undermines Canadian defence since it promotes a forward military posture. In recent years, Canada has participated in NATO maritime operations in the Baltic and Black seas. In 2018, Canada took charge of NATO Mission Iraq. About 200 Canadian troops were deployed there.

    For the past eight years Canada has led a NATO battlegroup in Latvia. About 700 Canadian soldiers are stationed on Russia’s border. There are also Canadian troops elsewhere in Eastern Europe as part of NATO aligned deployments.

    NATO has entangled Canada in, what former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson labelled, a “proxy war” that has devastated Ukraine. Ottawa has donated over $4 billion in military assistance and $6 billion in other types of assistance in a bid to continue the fight until the last Ukrainian. While Russian violence is condemnable, NATO provoked the war through its interventionist, antidemocratic, moves.

    When NATO promoted Ukraine’s accession to the alliance in 2008, most Ukrainians opposed joining. Subsequently, NATO countries supported the ouster of elected President Viktor Yanukovych who passed legislation codifying Ukrainian neutrality. As John Mearsheimer warned in 2015, NATO was “leading Ukraine down the primrose path and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.”

    Pro-NATO commentators generally ignore the alliance’s provocations. They oppose Donald Trump’s — who often says the quiet part out loud — bid to end the conflict in Ukraine. Simultaneously they’ve been upended by Trump’s crass attacks on Canada and have suddenly become wary of US power. While they’ve begun criticizing Canada’s military dependence on the US, they continue to support militarism and imperialism.

    In a sign of the crisis faced by militarists, the opinion section of last Saturday’s Globe and Mail published a long article headlined “WANTED: NEW ALLIES: Successive Canadian governments have leveraged our close relationship with Washington to get the most out of our low defence spending. This long-standing approach cannot continue.” Next to it, the paper published Thomas Homer Dixon’s “If you want peace, prepare for war” and a column by a Royal Military College professor headlined “Canada needs to develop its own nuclear program”.

    The militarists/imperialists can’t see an option outside of militarism and global hierarchy. Their calls to establish a NATO without the US is an excuse for more militarism and prolonging the conflict in Ukraine. It would do little to protect Canada.

    While there may be an argument for developing a guerrilla type defence structure, membership in NATO undercuts this country’s moral standing. Canada’s best defence against an invasion is making sure hundreds of millions of people in the US and elsewhere know this country is not their enemy.

    Image credit: GHY International

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  • The Real Outrage in Yemen

    Members of the Fifteenth Street Meeting of Friends and the New York Catholic Worker gather for a weekly vigil against the bombing of Yemen in New York City on February 3, 2024

    Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried out more than 100 attacks on shipping vessels linked to Israel and its allies since October 2023. The Houthis say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and have recently resumed the campaign following the failed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

    The new round of U.S. airstrikes has damaged critical ports and roads which UNICEF describes as “lifelines for food and medicine,” and killed at least twenty-five civilians, including four children, in the first week alone. Of the thirty-eight recorded strikes, twenty-one hit non-military, civilian targets, including a medical storage facility, a medical center, a school, a wedding hall, residential areas, a cotton gin facility, a health office, Bedouin tents, and Al Eiman University. The Houthis claim that at least fifty-seven people have died in total.

    Earlier this week, it was revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other high-level Trump Administration officials had discussed real-time planning around these strikes in a group chat on Signal, a commercial messaging app. During the past week, Congressional Democrats including U.S. Senator Schumer and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries expressed outrage over the Trump Administration’s recklessness, with Jeffries saying that what has happened “shocks the conscience.”

    President Trump commented that there was “no harm done” in the administration’s use of Signal chats, “because the attack was unbelievably successful.” But the Democrats appear more shocked and outraged by the disclosure of highly secret war plans over Signal than by the actual nature of the attacks, which have killed innocent people, including children.

    In fact, U.S. elected officials have seldom commented on the agony Yemen’s children endure as they face starvation and disease. Nor has there been discussion of the inherent illegality of the United States’s bombing campaign against an impoverished country in defense of Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians.

    As commentator Mohamad Bazzi writes in The Guardian, “Anyone interested in real accountability for U.S. policy-making should see this as a far bigger scandal than the one currently unfolding in Washington over the leaked Signal chat.”

    *****
    On Saturday, March 29, participants in the Yemen vigil will distribute flyers with the headline “Yemen in the Crosshairs” that warn of an alarming buildup of U.S. Air Force B2 Spirit stealth bombers landing at the U.S. base on Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. According to the publication Army Recognition, two aircraft have already landed at Diego Garcia, and two others are currently en route, in a move that may indicate further strikes against Yemen. The B2 Spirit bombers are “uniquely capable of carrying the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a 30,000-pound bomb designed to destroy hardened and deeply buried targets …. This unusual movement of stealth bombers may indicate preparations for potential strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen or serve as a deterrent message to Iran.”

    The Yemen vigil flyer points out that multiple Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs can use their GPS precision guidance system to “layer in” multiple warheads on a precise location, with each “digging” more deeply than the one before it to achieve deeper penetration. “This is considered particularly critical to achieving U.S. and broader Western Bloc objectives of neutralizing the Ansarullah Coalition’s military strength,” reports Military Watch Magazine, “as key Yemeni military and industrial targets are fortified deeply underground.”

    Despite the efforts of peace activists across the country, a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable causes—and the Democratic Representatives in the Senate and the House from New York don’t seem to care.

  • A version of this article first appeared on The Progressive.
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  • Mineral Deal Gives the US Total Control over Ukraine’s Future

    This is posted on Sebastian Sas’ important YouTube Channel with no less than 120,000 subscribers. His succinct analysis is based on an article published by the NED, EU and NATO-supported Ukraine-based newspaper, European Pravda.

    I hope you are half as shocked as Sas — and I — are. Because, remember that this war, this destruction of Ukraine has been caused by the Russia-NATO conflict — that is, by the Obama administration’s regime change in Kiev in 2014, the US-led NATO’s expansion and the US/Western pumping of arms into Ukraine.

    Now, Ukraine is destined to be paying for generations ahead and give away its natural resources to an extent that makes it impossible to see it as a sovereign state in the future. The Trump Regime’s proposal is in colonial-slave style — also meant to undermine the European Union’s plans…

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  • How the USA Became Wedded to Zionist Israel

    There are many contrasts between the 35th president, John F. Kennedy, and the 45th and 47th president, Donald J. Trump. One extreme example is regarding U.S. policy toward Israel.

    JFK and Israel/Palestine

    Unknown to many people today, JFK supported Palestinian rights and sought a sustainable peace in the region.

    In 1960, when JFK was campaigning to be president, he spoke at the convention of the Zionists of America. In his speech, Kennedy was complimentary about Israel but frankly said, “I cannot believe that Israel has any real desire to remain indefinitely a garrison state surrounded by fear and hate.” That warning, issued when Israel had only existed for 12 years, was ignored.

    Kennedy did not just issue warnings. To the chagrin of the Israelis, JFK established friendly relations with Egypt’s President Nasser. The Kennedy administration provided loans and aid to Egypt.

    The JFK administration supported UN resolution 194 which called for the right of return for Palestinian refugees driven out of their homeland. Although Israel committed to abide by UN resolutions when it was admitted to the United Nations in 1949, the Israelis reneged on this commitment and were hostile to the resolution. The day before JFK was assassinated, the New York Times reported (p 19), “Israel Dissents as U.N. Group Backs U.S. on Arab Refugees” and “U.S. Stand Angers Israel.”  The second item begins, “Premier Levi Eshkol expressed extreme distaste today for the United States’ position in the Palestinian-refugee debate.”

    John Kennedy’s brother Robert was Attorney General and headed the Department of Justice. For two years, up until the end of 1963, the DOJ made increasingly strict demands that the American Zionist Council (AZC)  register as agents of a foreign country. In response, the AZC stalled, delayed, and created the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

    The most intense disagreement between Tel Aviv and Washington was regarding the nuclear site under construction at Dimona. JFK was intent on stopping the expansion of countries which possessed nuclear weapons. Although Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion said the nuclear site was for peaceful purposes, JFK insisted that the US needed to inspect and confirm this. The inspection deadline was December 1963.

    In each of these four areas of contention, US policy changed dramatically after JFK was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson became president. Dimona was never properly inspected, and LBJ did not object to Israeli acquisition of nuclear weapons. The demand that the American Zionist Council register as an agent of a foreign country was dropped. Over time, the US withdrew their support of UN resolution 194, and LBJ was hostile to Nasser and ended US loans and support. Details of this process are described in this article and this book.

    Israel Policy since JFK and Today

    USS Liberty

    With few exceptions, US policy has been subservient to Israel’s wants ever since JFK.  An extreme low point was the treachery of President Johnson in covering up the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty during the June 1967 “Six Day War”. News about the Israeli killing and injuring of over 200 US sailors was suppressed for decades.

    Now we are in a new extreme low point. In his first presidency, Trump flouted international law and longstanding US policy by moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The significant move was driven by mega donor Sheldon Adelson who wanted it announced on Trump’s first day in office.  Another prime concern of Adelson was to torpedo the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. Trump responded as expected and withdrew the US from the agreement, effectively killing it.

    Now President Trump’s administration is trampling on the right to free speech and aggressively suppressing critics of Israel. This repression on behalf of Israel was taking place under Biden but has escalated dramatically. Authorities have imprisoned a perfectly legal resident, Mahmoud Khalil. They have forced Columbia University to punish students without just cause and to impose obvious restrictions and prohibitions on speech and opinion. Why did they do this? It appears to follow the wishes of megadonor Miriam Adelson. She is president and chief funder of the Maccabee Task Force, which has campaigned on these issues for months.

    As reported at Responsible Statecraft, “Adelson’s support for the administration’s campaign to stifle criticism of Israel on college campuses isn’t a new focus but her alignment with the levers of state powers to implement her vision are unprecedented. In fact, tax documents reveal that she is directly overseeing a social media campaign targeting Khalil and Columbia University.”

    In addition to suppressing free speech and punishing critics of Israel, the Trump administration has bombed and attacked They are doing this despite the fact that Yemen did NOT threaten U.S. ships in the region. The Houthi government only threatened Israeli ships after Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire and prevented food and other necessary humanitarian aid into Gaza. Israel, with U.S. support,  is blatantly defying the International Court of Justice which ordered Israel to “Maintain open the Rafah crossing for unhindered provision at scale of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance” and “Immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Israel is in violation of this order and the US is complicit by providing most of the weapons.

    President Trump, who campaigned and won election on the pledge to STOP needless wars, has started a new war with Yemen which is of no benefit to the US but serves the interests of Netanyahu’s Israel.  Will he authorize attacks on Iran, in further subservience to Bibi?

    Corruption of the political process

    When Jewish donors to JFK’s 1960 campaign suggested they should determine his Mideast policy, JFK was shocked and definitively said NO.  As reported by Seymour Hersh in “The Samson Option”, Kennedy talked with a friend who described what happened: “As an American citizen he (JFK) was outraged to have a zionist group come to him and say, ‘We know your campaign is in trouble. We’re willing to pay your bills if you’ll let us have control of your Middle East policy.” At that time, JFK vowed to change the US electoral system to prevent this corruption if he got elected.  As president, he tried,but faced big hurdles and did not succeed.

    Ever since JFK’s death, pro-Israel forces have had undue influence on U.S. policy.  If the International Court of Justice decides that Israel is committing genocide, as seems likely, the U.S. will be the primary collaborator in the war crimes. The US is increasingly alone in supporting the zionist state as it practices apartheid within Israel, theft of land in the West Bank, and massacres in Gaza including attacks on hospitals, schools, and UN facilities. Fourteen countries now support South Africa’s charges of genocide against Israel.

    Under Democratic President Joe Biden, U.S. policy to Israel was unwaveringly obsequious. Despite 70% of Democratic Party voters wanting the U.S. to get a ceasefire in Gaza, the Biden/Blinken team refused to do this.  The Democratic Party leaders zionist ideology combined with zionist financial influence superseded their party members’ wishes. Netanyahu ignored Biden’s “red lines” with impunity.

    Republican  President Trump has taken this to a new level. His zionist donors determine his Israel policy. To protect Israel, Trump issued an executive order which weaponizes antisemitism. Universities are being compelled to implement a new definition of antisemitism which conflates criticism of Israel with ethnic discrimination.  Trump’s campaign to “Make America Great Again” has evolved into “Miriam Adelson Gets All”.

    It is a remarkable descent from the days when JFK did what was best for the U.S. as well as being best for Palestinians and non-zionist Jews.

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  • CODEPINK Statement Regarding The Recent Defamation of Peace Activists and Unconstitutional Attacks on Students

    Trump Administration allies, along with their bipartisan co-conspirators in Congress, are actively undermining and rendering useless the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This week alone, they have repeatedly defamed our women’s peace organization, claiming we are funded by or take orders from foreign governments or groups like Hamas. The false accusations, given under oath, that claim CODEPINK and other organizations are funded by a foreign government are laying the groundwork for shutting down civil society organizations – and not just ours. CODEPINK is in Congress every single day, calling for peace, elevating the popular demands of the American people, and educating the public on war and militarism. Because we are loud and effective, they are attacking and trying to silence us with smears and intimidation. We do not believe they will stop at us.

    These attacks come as the Trump administration target students who’ve spoken out against the genocide in Gaza. Secretary Rubio and President Trump are extrajudicially revoking student visas and attempting to deport any student they wish, without any due process. Their crime? Disagreeing with the U.S. government’s support for genocide. Students are being kidnapped by masked officers in broad daylight – that should sound the alarm for every American who might openly disagree with President Trump.

    These gestapo-like tactics and McCarthyist smears of peace organizations are leading the country down a dark path of unchecked fascism and dictatorship. Between the intimidation of peace groups and blatant attacks on students,every person in the U.S. should stand against this repression – or prepare to face it themselves down the line. Individuals may not like CODEPINK or our messaging around Palestine or China, but that doesn’t exclude them from repression if they let the Trump Administration set this precedent. If they disagree with him on anything at all, they may face the same smears and repression we have. After the groundwork is laid, it’s only a matter of time.

    To be clear: CODEPINK is not funded by any foreign government. Protesting war and genocide is not supporting terrorism. Not only are they lying, they are defying the U.S. Constitution to muzzle the burgeoning student movement.

    The slanderous statements made by elected officials can have immediate and dangerous consequences for those being lied about, as well as their friends and family. It appears that the United States government is not only committed to waging war abroad, but it is also intent on waging war domestically against U.S. citizens and non-citizens, both of which are also protected by the Constitution.

    It is not a coincidence that both Senator Cotton and Secretary Rubio referred to peace activists and students as “lunatics” – they have clearly received their talking points. However, what is actual lunacy is how those elected to serve the American people are ignoring the fact that a majority of Americans do now want wars or war crimes being carried out in our name.

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  • The US Occupation of Greenland Began Last Night

    Preserve this video of street-boy demeanor Trump Regime arrogance. It can be interpreted as an indeed creative declaration of war on Denmark/Greenland.

    Listen carefully to the end. It will be historic. Interestingly, if you can not see it embedded here from my homepage (see below). But just click this link to see it on YouTube.

    Vice-president JD Vance’s 59 seconds speech about the “fun” in Greenland that he wants to join in marks the beginning of an occupation of Greenland by that US, which Denmark’s governments since 1948 have blindly been submissive to, supported politically and militarily no matter its illegal interventions and wars, CIA worldwide, regime changes, 650 foreign bases, mass killings, genocide, country-destruction, NATO militarism and economic exploitation.

    In sum, the most violent and war-addicted country on earth for more than half a century.

    He invents a series of “threats” from many other countries against Greenland (and the US…). He scolds Copenhagen for having ignored Greenland’s security for far too long, and he twice elevates Greenland to a world security issue and insists that only the US can make it secure and thereby secure “the entire world.”

    For equally long, some of us argued – warned – that the US was not that good – and Russia and China were not that bad. That our world was not a black-and-white world. But that was too much of an intellectual challenge. Over time, facts, analyses, conflict analysis, objective threat analyses based upon decent intelligence as well as national and international law, the UN, diplomacy – not to mention peace-making – were treated as petty issues and thrown overboard.

    The Danish foreign policy kakistocracy has finally entered a situation in which they will feel what it means to be blind friends of the Evil Empire and opportunistically never prepare for the obvious: That that empire would ruthlessly pursue only its own interests and humiliate its friends (except Israel) and treat them like dirt. It allegedly gave them “protection”…

    Like the rest of Europe, Denmark will now face two Cold Wars for decades ahead – one with Russia and one with the US – and in best Frederiksen-Leyden-Kallas-style, militarise itself to death. You don’t have to be a prophet to see that, like “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

    The tragedy – which is now also Sweden’s and Finland’s – is that it could all have been avoided.

    By independent, free thinking and research, by listening and prudent decision-makers, not servants listening only to His Master’s Voice.

    Europe will now be dragged down with the decline and fall of the US/Western world. What? Oh yes, the Trump Regime will not get away with all its crystal-clear extremist imperialism, its megalomania and delusional ways: It will meet increasing worldwide resistance and fall – “one way or the other” as Trump said about getting Greenland.

    I fear the price to be paid with Trump in his undoubtedly golden bunker fiddling with the red button when he hears someone say, Mr President, it is all over. It’s all over.

    Do you?

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  • The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World Affairs

    The Left and Right take the same reality-based view of the world but respond to it in different moral terms. Liberals, on the other hand, live in an alternate universe – of pure make-believe.

    Sometimes it helps to pare things back to their essentials, especially when complexity is being exploited not to illuminate but to confuse. So here is my short, complete idiot’s guide to world affairs:

    There are two reality-based understandings of what we call “world affairs”, or sometimes “foreign news”.

    1. The first sees the United States as the beating heart of a highly militarised, global empire – the strongest ever known, with more than 800 military bases around the world. The US has divided the world into, on the one hand, “democracies” and “moderate states” that do its bidding and, on the other, “dictatorships” and “terror regimes” that won’t or can’t submit to its dictates.

    The former are allies that reap some of the benefits of belonging to the empire, while the latter are presented as a threat to world peace. They must be constantly intimidated, contained, sanctioned and occasionally attacked.

    The goal of organising the world this way is the control of global resources, chiefly oil. Western publics thereby enjoy limited privileges that come at the cost of deprivation for those outside the empire. These privileges are intended to keep the US empire’s publics docile and loyal. At the same time, the empire allows members of its elite to amass vast wealth from the exploitation of the world’s resources – wealth so vast that most people are incapable of grasping the extent of it.

    This worldview is generally consistent with what is termed a left-wing disposition. It sees the existing system as a bad thing that needs to be ended.

    2. The second worldview agrees with all of the above, except it thinks this is a the best system possible in the circumstances and must be preserved at all costs. This outlook is generally consistent with what is termed a right-wing, or conservative, disposition.

    In other words, these two groups see things in largely the same way but respond to the same reality differently.

    The second group, the conservatives, want to keep the world divided, justifying this to themselves on various grounds they usually refer to as “pragmatism”. In essence, they believe it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and it’s important that we remain the top dog. At some level this outlook rests on a barely concealed racist conceit, often that white or Christian peoples are civilisationally better than other peoples and that, were the world to be organised differently, chaos and barbarism would ensue.

    The first group, the Left, want to end the division of the world into two camps, “them” and “us”, arguing that this is dangerous. This empire’s logic justifies pumping money that could be spent improving the quality of ordinary people’s lives, and securing the future of the planet, into the arms industries. It reinforces the logic of the West’s war machine that relies on fomenting a permanent climate of fear. In such a febrile political climate, people are easily manipulated into backing wars or the oppression of other, usually brown peoples. The empire’s division of the world rationalises racism, selfishness and violence, and prevents cooperation. It is inherently unsustainable. And in an age of nuclear weapons, it risks driving us into a confrontation that will quickly end life on the planet.

    Of course, not everyone’s outlook fits into these two categories that see the world as it is. There are also liberals who don’t understand much of this. They live in a world of make-believe, an unreality manufactured for them, both by western politicians dependent on a billionaire donor class and a western media owned by billionaires deeply invested in maintaining a divided world that keeps them fabulously rich.

    What we call “politics” is chiefly a pantomime in which the West’s wealth elite work hard to maintain the illusion for liberals that the empire is a force for good, that the suffering of brown people is a necessary short-term sacrifice if history is to continue on its progression towards a perfect capitalist liberal democracy that will benefit everyone, and that in this regard the West’s wars producing even more suffering for brown people are actually “humanitarian”.

    In simple terms, conservatives support the permanent oppression of brown people because they fear them, rightly understanding they will never agree to their oppression. Liberals, on the other hand, support what they assume is the temporary oppression of brown people because they think that oppression is beneficial: it eventually purges brown people of their defective ideological and cultural habits, leading them to see things our way.

    If it feels like too many of your friends and neighbours are indifferent to a genocide that has been live-streamed for a year a half, that is probably because, at heart, they are – whether they identify as conservatives or liberals.

    The post The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World Affairs first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Making Our Rights Disappear: The Authoritarian War on Due Process

    If Trump can disappear them, he can disappear you.

    —Robert Reich

    The war on due process is here.

    No trials. No hearings. No rights. Just indefinite detention and secret deportations.

    This is the fate that awaits every one of us, not just immigrants (legal or otherwise), if the government’s war on the Constitution remains unchecked.

    More than two decades after the U.S. government in its post-9/11 frenzy transported individuals, some of whom had not been charged let alone convicted of a crime, to CIA black sites (secret detention centers located outside the U.S. authorized to torture detainees) as a means of sidestepping legal protocols, the Trump Administration is using extraordinary rendition to make those on its so-called “enemies list” disappear.

    The first round of arrests and deportations to a mega-prison in El Salvador supposedly targeted members of the infamous Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

    Carried out with little evidence and without court hearings or due process, these roundups reportedly may also have swept up individuals with no apparent connection to gang activity apart from common tattoos (firearms, trains, dice, roses, tigers and jaguars) and other circumstantial evidence.

    In a particularly Kafkaesque explanation for why some of the Venezuelan migrants who have no criminal records were targeted for arrest and deportation, government lawyers argued in court that their lack of a criminal record is in itself cause for concern.

    In other words, the government is prepared to preemptively arrest and make people disappear, without any regard for legal protocols or due process, based solely on the president’s claim that they could at some point in the future pose a threat to national security.

    This takes pre-crime and preemptive arrests to a whole new sinister level of potential abuses.

    Are you starting to sense how quickly this could go off the rails?

    This is how democracies collapse. This is how rights disappear overnight.

    As lawyers challenging the government’s overreach warned, “If the President can designate any group as enemy aliens under the Act, and that designation is unreviewable, then there is no limit on who can be sent to a Salvadoran prison, or any limit on how long they will remain there.”

    Also among those in danger of being made to disappear without any legal record or due process are individuals who have not been charged with or convicted of any crimes.

    The most egregious of these incidents involve college students, scientists and doctors, all of them legal permanent residents of the U.S. who, while never having been charged with a crime, are accused of threatening national security by taking part in anti-war protests over the growing death toll in Gaza as a result of the Israeli-Hamas war, or sympathizing with the Palestinians, or being associated with someone who might sympathize with the Palestinians.

    When merely exercising one’s right to criticize the government in word, deed or thought is equated to an act of domestic terrorism, we are all in trouble.

    The mass arrests and roundups thus far have been so haphazard that there is a very real likelihood that innocent individuals have also been swept up and deported.

    American citizens could very well be next in line for this kind of treatment.

    This is the danger of allowing any president to use expansive wartime powers to bypass the Constitution’s prohibitions against government overreach and abuse: suddenly, everything that challenges the government’s authority becomes a national security threat and every dispute a national emergency.

    Through his use of executive orders, proclamations and so-called national emergencies, President Trump has essentially declared war on the rule of law.

    Make no mistake: while immigrants, illegal and legal alike, have largely been the first victims of the Trump administration’s efforts to circumvent the Constitution in order to make them disappear, it’s our very freedoms that are being made to disappear.

    At the heart of these freedoms is the right of habeas corpus.

    Translated as “you should have the body,” habeas corpus requires the government to either charge a person or let him go free.

    While the Constitution allows the writ of habeas corpus to be suspended in cases of rebellion or invasion when public safety is imperiled, the Trump Administration’s efforts to keep the nation in a permanent state of emergency in order to justify its power grabs leaves “we the people” subject to the kinds of arbitrary mass round-ups, arrests and deportations that have been favored by despots and dictators.

    This is usually where the self-righteous defenders of Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional tactics insist that the protections of the Constitution only apply to U.S. citizens.

    They are wrong.

    At a minimum, as the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed, the rights enshrined in the first ten amendments to the Constitution apply to all people in the United States, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status. Those rights include free speech, peaceful protest and criticism of the government, assembly, religious freedom, equal protection under the law, due process, legal representation, privacy, among others.

    Then again, what good are rights if the government doesn’t respect them?

    What good are rights if the president is empowered to nullify them whenever he wants?

    For that matter, what good is a government that betrays its own citizens?

    History has shown us that when governments operate without checks and balances, tyranny follows. The question is not whether mass arrests and indefinite detentions could be expanded to American citizens—it’s how long before they are.

    If we allow the erosion of due process, if we accept that a president can unilaterally decide who is a threat without oversight, then we have already lost the freedoms that define us as a nation.

    We must demand accountability. We must challenge policies that violate constitutional protections. We must support organizations fighting for civil liberties, educate ourselves on our rights, and refuse to be silenced by fear. Because when the government starts making people disappear, the only way to stop it is by making our voices impossible to ignore.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, freedom does not die in a single act of repression—it dies when the people surrender their rights in exchange for false security.

    The Constitution can’t protect us if we don’t protect it.

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  • Trump’s Star Wars Revival: The Golden Dome Antimissile Fantasy

    Bad ideas do not necessarily die; they retire to museums of failure and folly, awaiting to be revived by the next proponent who should know better. The Iron Dome shield vision of US President Donald Trump, intended to intercept and destroy incoming missiles and other malicious aerial objects, seems much like a previous dotty one advanced by President Ronald Reagan, known rather blandly as the Strategic Defense Initiative.

    In its current iteration, it is inspired by the Israeli “Iron Dome” multilayered defensive shield, a matter that raised an immediate problem, given the trademark ownership of the name by the Israeli firm Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. Given the current administration’s obsession with all things golden, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has dubbed this revived endeavour “Golden Dome for America”. The renaming was noted in a February 24 amendment to request for information from industry. Much sniggering is surely in order at, not only the name itself, but the stumbling.

    Reagan, even as he began suffering amnesiac decline, believed that the United States could be protected by a shield against any attack by Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. The technology intended for that endeavour, much of it requiring a space component, was thin on research and non-existent in development. The envisaged use of laser weapons from space and terrestrial components drew much derision: the President had evidently been too engrossed by the Star Wars films of George Lucas.

    The source for this latest initiative (“deploying and maintaining a next-generation missile defense shield”) is an executive order signed on January 27 titled “The Iron Dome for America”. (That was before the metallurgical change of name.) The order asserts from the outset that “The threat of attack by ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles and other advanced aerial attacks remains the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.” It acknowledges Reagan’s SDI but strikes a note of disappointment at its cancellation “before its goal could be realized.” Progress on such a system since the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 had been confined to “limited homeland defense” efforts that “remained only to stay ahead of rogue-nation threats and accidental or unauthorized missile launches.”

    The Secretary of Defense is also directed, within 60 days, to submit to Trump “a reference architecture, capabilities-based requirements, and an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield.” Such a shield would defend the US from “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles and the other next-generation attacks from peer, near-peer and rogue adversaries.” Among some of the plans are the accelerated deployment of a hypersonic and ballistic tracking space sensor layer; development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors and the development and deployment of capabilities that will neutralise missile assaults “prior to launch and in the boost phase”.

    The original SDI was heavy on the intended development and use of energy weapons, lasers being foremost among them. But even after four decades, US technological prowess remains unable to deploy such weapons of sufficient power and accuracy to eliminate drones or missiles. The Israelis claim to have overcome this problem with their Iron Beam high energy laser weapon system, which should see deployment later this year. For that reason, Lockheed Martin has partnered with Israeli firm Rafael to bring that technology into the US arsenal.

    To date, Steven J. Morani, currently discharging duties as undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, has given little away about the herculean labours that have been set. “Consistent with protecting the homeland and per President Trump’s [executive order],” he told the McAleese Defense Programs Conference in Washington earlier this month, “we’re working with the industrial base and [through] supply chain challenges associated with standing up the Golden Dome.” He admitted that this was “like the monster systems engineering problem” made even more difficult by being “the monster integration problem”.

    The list of demerits to Golden Dome are many, and Morani alludes to them. For one, the Israeli Iron Dome operates across much smaller territory, not a continent. The sheer scale of any defence shield to protect such a vast swathe of land would be, not merely from a practical point but a budgetary one, absurd. A space-based interceptor system, a point that echoes Reagan’s Star Wars fantasy, would require thousands of units to successfully intercept one hefty ballistic missile. Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute has offered a calculation: a system of 1,900 satellites would cost somewhere between US$11 and US$27 billion to develop, build and launch.

    A study for Defence and Peace Economics published this year goes further. The authors argue that, even if the US had appropriate ballistic missile defence technology and a sufficient number of interceptors to be distributed in a two-layer defence with an efficiency return of 90%, 8 times more would have to be spent than the attacker for a bill between US$60 and US$500 billion. If it was assumed that individual interceptor effectiveness was a mere 50%, and the system could not discriminate against decoys, the cost would be 70 times more, with a staggering bill of US$430 billion to US$5.3 trillion.

    The most telling flaw in Golden Dome is one long identified, certainly by the more sober members of the establishment, in the annals of defence. “The fundamental problem with any plan for a national missile defense system against nuclear attack,” writes Xiaodon Liang in an Arms Control Association issues brief, “is that cost-exchange ratios favor the offense and US adversaries can always choose to build up or diversify their strategic forces to overwhelm a potential shield.” As Liang goes on to remark, the missile shield fantasy defies a cardinal rule of strategic competition: “the enemy always gets a vote.”

    Monster system; monstrous integration issues. Confusion with the name and trademark problems. Strategically misguided, even foolish. Golden Dome, it would seem, is already being steadied for a swallow dive.

    The post Trump’s Star Wars Revival: The Golden Dome Antimissile Fantasy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Nobody Saves the World

    Who will save the Palestinians from genocide? Nobody.
    Who will save Americans from moral, political, economic, and social decay? Nobody.

    Uncontrolled criminals prance around Gaza and West Bank neighborhoods, shooting whom they want, destroying what they don’t want, stealing whatever pleases them. The locals can’t interfere and the authorities have been told to protect the criminals from harm. Alarmed citizens in foreign neighborhoods organize to halt the criminality and are accused of illegal activity against the criminals, who are portrayed as victims. The appointed U.S. representative to the United Nations, previously a New York congressional representative, designates students who fought courageously to halt the genocide of the Palestinian people as anti-Semites. Some students are arrested for deportation, while the serial killers continue their “benevolent” activity of depopulating the earth. Is this science fiction of a dystopian world; no this is the reality of our dystopian world.

    A contradiction tells the true story.
    The students demonstrating against the obvious genocide of the Palestinian people, in which Israel, who claims to represent the Jewish people, is the perpetrator, are accused of anti-Semitism, of falsely labelling the Jewish community of being involved in the genocide, and supposedly, preventing some Jews from attending class. Nothing specific in these accusations and no names mentioned. If there have been anti-Jewish occurrences, they have been few and not alarming. Miscreants among the student protestors are incidental and are not representative of the mass of protestors.

    The contradiction occurs from the guardians against ant-Semitism asserting you cannot accuse all Jews of genocide because of the genocide tactics of Israel, and they accuse the protestors of being “Hamas managed” because a few of the student protestors may incline to favor Hamas. Adding to the contradiction is that labelling an organization, which notable and credible persons consider a “resistance organization,” and has never committed a terrorist action against the United States, is arbitrary and not a considered action. Not allowing people to express thoughts that do not violate laws or harm the American people is not thoughtful guidance; it is thought control, a perversion of the U.S. constitution. Giving more importance to a few Jews who could not attend class (Is this true?) rather than giving attention to the genocide of a population is demented.

    We realize the enormous problem the Palestinians have to survive the onslaught; we do not realize that this is a problem, a punishing and challenging problem, but is not the problem. The problem is the Zionist Israelis and their followers, who arm the murderers, steer the masses to accept criminally insane activities, determine our present, and command our future. Who are they and why do we have them determine our lives?

    If, at the end of the 19th century, a Jewish person was asked, “What does it means to be a Jew?” most would have stumbled over the question. At that time, a preponderance of Jews considered themselves “secular,” an expression that meant they did not want to be Christians or atheists. These Jews were mostly humanists, “a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism or other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good” – American Humanist Association. Beneath the cloudy skies, there were reform Jews, Reconstructionist Jews, conservative Jews, orthodox Jews, ultra-orthodox Jews, and people who called themselves Jews by heritage. Zionist Jews made its entrance upon a disparate crew of worshippers and non-worshippers.

    Unlike other Jews who had interpretative connections to Judaism and positive reasons for expressing their alliance with Judaism, the Zionists had no connection to Judaism’s doctrines and an entirely negative approach. Their outlook that the Jews were a people who needed to be united in a nation, were subjected to cruel anti-Semitism that had no vindication, and only they knew the path to Nirvana did not agree with knowledge and attitudes of the 19th century Jewish community.

    A people is “a body of persons that are united by a common culture, tradition, or sense of kinship, that typically have common language, institutions, and beliefs, and that often constitute a politically organized group.” The late 18th century Jews, who lived in different countries, spoke different languages, and had different customs and histories did not fit the description. At the end of the 19th century, life was not perfect for European Jews (nor for anyone else), but they had made tremendous economic, social, and political gains, and the trend continued positive. With Jews represented in educational institutions and government positions, becoming well known in all cultural representations — music, art, theatre, and writing — and managing to become successful wage earners in many avenues of employment, the Zionist case that “Jews could never satisfactorily integrate into western nations” became more dubious with each passing day.

    Despite a century of repetition and recitation, little evidence exists of extensive deadly attacks on Jews in the late 19th century, during the era of incipient Zionism. A few isolated groups in France and Germany accused Jews of attempting to dominate the economy and culture. Due to these reason, some attacks occurred early in the century in Germany (Hep-Hep riots). Other happenings, which related to exaggeration of acts by Jews and the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, occurred later in Russia. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, an English-language reference work on the history and culture of Eastern Europe Jewry, prepared by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and published by Yale University Press in 2008, relates,

    Anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire before 1881 was a rare event, confined largely to the rapidly expanding Black Sea entrepot of Odessa. The first Odessa pogrom, in 1821, was linked to the outbreak of the Greek War for Independence, during which the Jews were accused of sympathizing with the Ottoman authorities. Although the pogrom of 1871 was occasioned in part by a rumor that Jews had vandalized the Greek community’s church, many non-Greeks participated, as they had done during earlier disorders in 1859.

    The pogroms of 1881 and 1882, which occurred in waves throughout the southwestern provinces of the Russian Empire, were the first to assume the nature of a mass movement. Violence was largely directed against the property of Jews rather than their persons The total number of fatalities is disputed but may have been as few as 50, half of them pogromshchiki who were killed when troops opened fire on rioting mobs.

    In all of Europe, from what I have been able to confirm, less than 100 Jews were killed and possibly a few thousand were injured in anti-Jewish riots during the 100 years of the 19th century that witnessed the establishment of political Zionism. For context, compare those figures to two other atrocities during that time, which may be exaggerated and are rarely mentioned.

    Circassia, Caucasus 1864-1867, 400,000-1,500,000 perished or deported.
    Armenians, Turkiye, 1894-1896, 100,000 Armenians killed in Hamidian Massacres.

    The Zionist game plan in the late 1800s made no sense. Why would Western Jews, whose principal problem was verbal abuse from a few detractors, want to leave industrial nations and go to an unknown place and deprived area that had nothing to offer, except prevention by the local authorities and animosity by the local inhabitants? The East European Jews lived in difficult surroundings but had an escape route ─ from 1881 to 1914, more than 2.5 million Jews migrated from Eastern Europe. Of these, about two million reached the United States, 300,000 went to other overseas countries, and approximately 350,000 chose Western Europe.

    During the time that 2.5 million East European Jews migrated to Western nation, only 30,000 of them travelled to Palestine and 15,000 returned. It would take a century, if possible, to accommodate millions of new arrivals to Palestine. If the Zionists wanted to relive pressure on East European Jews, why didn’t they finance immigration to the United States? They’ll say that history proved them correct. Seems so, but not so; fortuitous events and plain luck enabled their agenda.

    From its beginnings to start of World War I, Zionism proved a stagnant adventure. During that period, about 80,000 Jews came to Palestine, not all of whom were Zionists, many being adventurists, utopian Socialists, and some seeking opportunities. By 1918, only about 60,000 remained. World War I conveniently destroyed the Ottoman Empire, and the mysterious Balfour Declaration revived the Zionist adventure. In addition, the League of Nations’ certification of the British Mandate in Palestine prevented the formation of a national Palestinian governing body and provided opportunities for English speaking European Jews to work in the British administration. Suddenly, there was no longer an impediment for Jews to enter Palestine. They came with the blessings of a Balfour Declaration that certified their validity and protection by his Majesty’s forces. From 1918-1922, approximately 24,000 Jews arrived in Palestine.

    The year 1924 was more fortuitous for the Zionists. The US Immigration Act closed the doors to mass Jewish immigration from East European nations and this Act steered Jews to Palestine. By 1931, Palestine housed 175,000 Jews. Did they arrive as Zionists or to seek an improved economic situation from their depressed surroundings? In the 1930’s, and until the end of World War II, Nazi persecutions of the Jews drove more than 60,000 German Jews to immigrate to Palestine (about 280.000 German and Austrian Jews migrated to other places, with about 125,000 managing to come to the to the United States).

    Revelations of the Holocaust and plight of Jewish refugees after World War II gained worldwide sympathy for the Zionist cause and propelled more immigrants to Palestine. The Cold War provided the most decisive benefit for Zionism ─ the Soviet Union support for an Israeli state drove the United States to compete for Zionist attention. Votes from both nations and a few bribes provided a narrow passage of United Nations Declaration 181 and established the Zionist state, one of the darkest days in world history.

    The rest is history, and that history is one of constant attacks on Palestinians, expropriation of their lands, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, oppression, battles between Israel and its adversaries, which Israel always won and from which it was able to expand its initial territory and dominate the original inhabitants of the Levant; not a proud outcome for Theodore Herzl, who, in his 1903 novel, Altneuland,

    ….did not foresee any conflict between Jews and Arabs. One of the main characters in Altneuland is a Haifa engineer, Reshid Bey, who is one of the leaders of the “New Society.” He is very grateful to his Jewish neighbors for improving the economic condition of Palestine and sees no cause for conflict. All non-Jews have equal rights, and an attempt by a fanatical rabbi to disenfranchise the non-Jewish citizens of their rights fails in the election which is the center of the main political plot of the novel.[

    The Zionist assumptions that the Jews were a people who needed to be united in a nation, were subjected to cruel anti-Semitism that had no vindication, and that only they knew the path to Nirvana have proven to be paranoid, diabolical, and senseless.

    A new people

    The Middle East and North African Jews who came to Israel were Arabs; the Ashkenazi were European; the Beta Israel were Ethiopians; and the Yemenites were from the Arabian Peninsula. Israel replaced the different languages, dialects, music, cultures, and heritage of these ethnicities with unique and uniform characteristics, and created a new people, the Israeli Jew, who spoke a new language, modern Hebrew. Reshef, Yael. Revival of Hebrew: Grammatical Structure and Lexicon, Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, (2013) reveals.

    While Modern Hebrew is largely based on Mishnaic and Biblical Hebrew, as well as Sephardi and Ashkenazi liturgical and literary tradition from the Medieval and Haskalah (18th century Jewish enlightenment) eras, and retains its Semitic character in its morphology and in much of its syntax, the consensus among scholars is that Modern Hebrew represents a fundamentally new linguistic system, not directly continuing any previous linguistic state, being a koine language (dialect) of the same language, based on historical layers of Hebrew, as well as incorporating foreign elements, mainly those introduced during the most critical revival period between 1880 and 1920, as well as new elements created by speakers through natural linguistic evolution.

    Destruction of centuries-old Jewish history and life in Tunisia, Iraq, Libya, and Egypt accompanied the creation of a new people. The Zionists, who complained about the persecution of Jews, wiped out Jewish history, determined who was Jewish, and required all Jews to shed much of their ancestral characteristics before they could integrate into the Israel community. The significance of the construction of a new Jew, in contrast to the reconstruction of an ancient Jew, has been given scant attention. The shaping of a new Jewish mind from a central educational source has distorted a population that previously had no central control and can no longer control individual destiny.

    Jews were the principal victims of the Nazi regime, and the Zionists have consistently publicized atrocities committed upon the Jews by their Nazi executions. The same Zionists, in their attempts to dominate the Palestinians, have adopted the Third Reich tactics they exposed and condemned. The evils of Nazism — separation of ethnicities, virulent nationalism, irredentism, constant warfare, racist laws, killing of opposition, punitive measures after an attack, ethnic cleansing, indoctrination of the young, and genocide are in the Zionist handbook and have been conveniently brushed away by Israel’s propaganda artists. The atrocities committed by the Nazi regime have earned their followers the adjectives of deranged and insane. Atrocities by the Israeli regime and its worldwide followers are lightly treated and tacitly supported by western nations and peoples. No epithets to their violent actions are applied. If this is a state that the Jews desire, a state built on oppression of other people, theft of their lands, and now an intentional genocide, then the Jews cannot escape the enmity of the world.

    Conclusion

    The real problem, which devours the Palestinians, is a Zionist movement that is irrational and demented. The ferocity and sadistic war against the Gazan people is the most cruel and unnecessary action against a people during modern times. Only the demented would follow up that war by reinvigorating it at a more escalated scale. We can understand the mentality that dictates the sadism by regarding expressions from Zionist leaders, a few of dozens. No rational leader or normal person would utter these disgusting words.

    “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” —Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, New York Times, Feb. 28, 1994.

    “The Palestinians are like crocodiles.” —Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Jerusalem Post, August 30, 2000.

    “They are beasts walking on two legs.” —Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in a speech to the Knesset, New Statesman, June 25, 1982.

    “We shall use the ultimate force until Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.” —Deputy Prime Minister Rafael Eitan.

    “[When we build settlements] Arabs will only be able to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” —Deputy Prime Minister Rafael Eitan

    “We shall reduce the Palestinians to a community of woodcutters and waiters.” —Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, 1960, The Arabs in Israel.

    “There is a huge gap between us and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience.” —President Moshe Katsav, Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001.

    Trying to talk honestly, operate fairly, and cooperate with the irrational and demented is an almost impossible task. Talk of two-states, one state, and relieving the genocide goes nowhere. Even the academic analysis that indicates this is settler colonialism, of which there are elements, does not lead anywhere and may lead astray ─ the Western nations, to whom the Palestinians appeal, are not likely to admit to participation in settler colonialism. Best not to antagonize them. Settler colonialists need a reason for their voyages — free land, ample resources, and colonial protection. Palestine did not provide any of these ingredients for the original settlers. Palestine only provided Palestinians, waiting to be destroyed.

    The complacent world does not realize the immensity of the problem. Political, social, and economic life has been skewed by a control that dominates information and thought. The Ill equipped and easily manipulated are elected to highest political offices, partisan politics rules, and economic divide grows. Those, who have much, gain more; those who gain more dictate more. Defeat of Zionism is an international priority and can be done if the populations prioritize. If not ─ Nobody Saves the World. The demented command the future.

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  • Chaos under Heaven: South Korea’s Deepening Political Debacle

    US Elites want South Korea to be a “dictatorship for democracy”

    Morse Tan, a high ranking former US State Dept. official, recently let the cat out of the bag on the US ruling elite position on South Korea’s Martial Law.  He declared that “Yoon declared Martial Law to preserve South Korea’s Democracy.”  Having previously labeled South Korea a model democracy, this is a No-Scotsman-move taken to absurdity.

    Now, Tan is not a current US government official, but he is an indicator of what the US national security state is thinking, in particular, what its neocon wing is thinking.  Tan also recently claimed that “the impeachment against Yoon is an insurrection” led by opposition party leader Lee Jae Myung “who wants to turn the country over to the Chinese communists”.

    As absurd and conspiratorial as these allegations sound, these are actually finely-tuned and well-honed Washington-CPAC talking points about Chinese threats and interference in Korea, and they are echoed endlessly, if histrionically by US flag-waving foot soldiers at South Korean protests and on Youtube.  These anti-China messages were also repeated in German State TV ARD’s documentary “Staatskrise im Schatten von China und Nordkorea” (State Crisis in the Shadow of China and North Korea), released to its German public television website on Feb 25th. The documentary claimed that China had hacked South Korea’s legislative election to put the opposition DP party into power, who are now taking their orders from North Korea and China to impeach YoonThere is clearly a highly convergent and disciplined campaign of anti-China propaganda around the impeachment. ARD has removed its documentary, but the damage has clearly been done.

    It’s impossible not to highlight the absurdity of Tan’s statement–“Yoon declared martial law (i.e. military dictatorship) to preserve democracy”.  And as a foreign national, Tan is breaking South Korean law by directly participating in domestic Korean politics.  But the free reign he is given, and the lack of disavowal or reprimand from the State Department–if only for his own safety–is very revealing.

    Tan’s position in the state department was Ambassador at Large.  These are powerful, Viceroy-type postings: they represent US policy and US interests on a (grand) strategic level. Consider other Ambassadors-at-Large: Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge,  Paul Nitze, Paul Bremer III, StrobeTalbott, Robert Gallucci. These are not individuals given to improvising and airing idiosyncratic personal opinions. As a former state Viceroy, with the enduring prestige and power of state connections, the platforms that Tan has been given to expound his views signal that he is expressing the direction of official doctrine, reflected both in Tan’s public statements, state media talking points, and the coordinated erasure of counterviewpoints.

    Strategic Unambiguity: What the US wants

    US policy on South Korea’s dictatorship/martial law is analogous to its policy on Taiwan: Strategic “ambiguity” in language, concrete support and escalation in actions. The “ambiguity” serves to pretextually mask war preparations against China. Of course, there is nothing ambiguous about the strategy, other than the desire for a fig leaf of plausible deniability.

    What the US wants from Korea is that which is strategically most advantageous for the US: a right wing Korean client regime to do the bidding of the US: escalate and prepare for war with China. This is a war that it has been envisioning since the early 2000’s and which was institutionalized by Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”. In fact, the reason Yoon was selected, elected, and lionized as South Korea’s president is because he was a walking neocon fulfillment list for this war.

    As these war preparations accelerate and intensify, a South Korean military dictatorship with the US in control of the South Korean military is the easiest and most advantageous configuration to enact these plans. The US will settle for a client-plutocratic democratic state, but dictatorship has actually been the historical norm since South Korea was created by the US.  Given the tight timelines involved, it is also possible for this configuration to be instituted again:  this project of war is urgent and time-bound–US natsec heavyweights have calendared 2025 and 2027 (“the Minihan” & “Davidson windows”) as the propitious date range to trigger war with China.

    Easy-peasy political proxy

    South Korea offers two key strategic advantages. First, geographically and historically, Korea has always been the on ramp and bridgehead for invasion into China. War with China has always started from the Korean peninsula or Taiwan island, usually as interlinked pairs. Second, South Korea has the world’s 3rd largest standing army–including reservists, 3.6 Million troops–,larger than the militaries of China and Russia combined. The US gets operational control over these troops immediately if there is war. War with China is thus most compatible and convenient with a South Korean dictatorship.

    There is very strong circumstantial evidence that the US knew beforehand about Yoon’s Martial Law declaration, due to the length and intricacy of the preparation and the aggressive military nature of the operation-which would have required coordination and communication with US forces in Korea. At the very least, they would have been aware. And regardless, they would have benefitted, geostrategically.

    Sworn testimony shows that Yoon’s gambit was to trigger war with North Korea (through drone attacks, missile attacks, shelling, false flag assassinations of opposition) to justify declaring Martial Law.  Only poor execution, North Korean forbearance, and rapid citizen mobilization prevented the seamless rollout of this military coup. Evidence has come out that Yoon was preparing repeated coups. Historically, all military coups on the southern peninsula have been greenlighted by the US.

    On that point, Morse Tan is the Nancy Pelosi of Korea: he functions like a Track II US envoy–cheerleading for a right-wing South Korean military coup, with just the slightest hint of plausible deniability.

    Note the dead radio silence out of Washington throughout this whole process: silence during the Martial Law declaration, silence after the rejection of Martial Law, silence after the impeachment, and silence throughout.  Not a word of critique or condemnation. Note also the deafening hush of the mainstream corporate media.

    Meanwhile, the fissures in SK society are approaching civil war.

    Institutional Civil War, Governmental chaos

    There is already intergovernmental war: on March 22 the CIO (Corruption Investigation Office, similar to the US Inspector General) raided the Prosecutor’s Office (similar to the Attorney General) for corruption, just days after the Prosecutor’s Office raided the CIO for evidence of warrant shopping on Yoon’s impeachment. This would be like the Inspector General raiding the Attorney General after the Attorney General raided the Inspector General.

    Yoon has been released from custody on a technicality (“counting hours, not days”) despite being indicted for insurrection. His co-conspirators are still incarcerated, but the ringleader is free, highlighting the absurdity of the ruling. The prosecutor’s office, ostensibly committed to prosecuting Yoon, did not even bother to file an appeal. The prosecutor’s office is considered to be Yoon’s private army–Yoon was the former prosecutor general of Korea, and he promised to create a “Republic of Prosecutors”.  That much he has been successful on.

    The Return of the Zombie

    Han Duck Soo, the impeached South Korean Prime minister (and former acting president) has just had his impeachment reversed yesterday, and is now acting president again.

    The constitutional court found that Han had violated the constitution (by refusing to appoint already approved justices to the Constitutional Court to rule on the impeachment issue) but they reinstated him anyway.  Never mind the irony that the court could have lacked standing to try his case if he had been successful in disabling the court. Han had also been tasked with appointing an independent counsel to investigate Yoon (to avoid the conflicts of interest that have appeared with the prosecutor’s office), but he had declined, leading to the current debacle of suspect loyalties and suspicious/delayed/tampered/sabotaged legal processes. One Constitutional Court justice claimed that the current political chaos was directly related to Han’s malfeasance and non-cooperation in these matters and found for impeachment–but she was a tiny minority of one in the ruling.

    The Constitutional Court’s ruling on Han Duck Soo was already problematic in that it was out of sequence. The fact that they ruled first before Yoon’s case, and ruled against impeachment is an ominous signal. Two other high officials, Kim Seong-hun, and Lee Kwang-woo (of the presidential security service), indicted for impeding Yoon’s arrest, have recently also had their arrest warrants rejected.  These are powerful figures who are now at large, with huge axes to grind. The trends are not in favor of impartial justice or peaceful resolution.

    Washington’s Dirty Hand

    The delayed impeachment ruling of Yoon itself is widely thought to be due to Washington’s pressure: it has been one month since the testimony was completed, but still there has been no ruling. This is abnormally long for what is an open-and-shut case: there is no doubt that Yoon declared Martial Law (he is on television declaring it!), and there is no doubt that he used extra-constitutional means–military force–to implement it and to try to prevent its rescission. But it’s widely considered that the ruling is delayed so that Lee Jae Myung’s appeal ruling (due on 3/26) will be decided before the Constitutional court’s ruling on Yoon is made public.

    This is because Lee Jae Myung, the opposition DP party chair, would be the leading candidate for president if the impeachment of Yoon triggers a snap election (in 60 days). He is currently 20+ points ahead of any other potential candidate by polling. The presidency would be his to take under normal circumstances.

    However, if Lee’s guilt is sustained by the appellate court, he would be stripped of all political rights for a decade, and the opposition DP would lose its strongest candidate.  Washington does not want Lee Jae Myung as president, because it’s understood that he would balance with China against the US, and de-escalate the coming war on China. Hence the delay. Opposition party representative Park Sun-won has verified that the US is exerting pressure through diplomatic channels to align the impeachment date as close to Lee Jae Myung’s sentencing as possible.

    On the Brink of Explosion

    South Korea is now a tinderbox on the brink.

    One million protestors hit the streets over the weekend, demanding the Constitutional court deliver its verdict immediately. Some of these protestors had been previously protesting in the snow for weeks, demanding justice.  From the right, there has been open aggression by right wing counter-impeachment protesters, paid up or pumped up with “anti-communist” fervor by religious leaders and the ruling party, repeating ARD and CPAC tropes on “Chinese communist intervention”. These shock troops have destroyed and rampaged through Seoul’s Western District Courthouse, assaulted opposition party politicians, as well as attacked Chinese tourists as “spies”. The right have openly spoken of reconstituting the North West Youth league–the genocidal red-baiting death squads of the Korean war.

    And so, it seems the American flag-waving beatings will continue until the anti-communist morale improves in the country.  Regardless of the rulings to come, South Korea’s destiny is precarious: more potential turbulence, more violence, even potential civil war. Certainly more twists and turns. If the constitutional court acquits Yoon, there will be mass popular protests in the millions: Yoon will be incapable of ruling and is likely to declare Martial Law again, if only to save his bacon (he is facing insurrection charges). Recent news has revealed that Yoon had plans to declare Martial Law multiple times.

    On the other hand, if the constitutional court successfully impeaches Yoon, the ruling party and its followers will pull out all the stops: street violence and a Maidan-type insurrection by the right wing cannot be ruled out.  The quiet acquiescence of the right as was the case after the Park Geun Hye impeachment is unlikely, given the heated propaganda allegations and the polarized ideology.

    So, South Korea is facing risky outcomes either way. The forces acting on this small country are immense. Whether Koreans get a clear diamond or spontaneous combustion from the immense pressure remains to be seen.

    There is a tiny, narrow path that would relieve pressure and facilitate a more peaceful outcome. If the US removes its finger from the scale in South Korean affairs–and disavows the US-flag-waving right that it is stoking and supporting–a single word of reprimand would deflate the South Korean rightwing like a sharp pin to a blow up doll.

    But that would take a geostrategic shift–a downshifting and downsizing dreams of US Hegemony, and a turn towards peace and win-win.

    Is the US capable of this? Or will it continue its dangerous ways? The fate of the peninsula–and possibly the planet–lies in the balance.

    The post Chaos under Heaven: South Korea’s Deepening Political Debacle first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump-Witkoff: “We can’t accept any democracy in Gaza.” #2

    This is a continuation of my article yesterday “Trump/Witkoff: ‘We can’t accept any democracy in Gaza.‘”

    In order to keep that article brief, I didn’t there go into the lies about history that Trump/Witkoff expressed, which they got from their Zionist (racist-fascist-imperialist-pro-Jewish, or “nazi”-Jewish for short) friends and acquaintances, which includes many of Trump’s political megadonors to whom Trump owes his 2014 electoral victory, and so Trump/Witkoff share those mega-billionaires’ values, which are Biblical values and therefore support Israel against the Palestinians and so make impossible any successful negotiation by them of the disagreements between Israel and Palestine. This continuation of the article will deal specifically with those historical lies, which Trump/Witkoff believe to be truths and show no interest whatsoever in re-examining the falsehoods that they believe from the Bible and from Israeli propaganda:

    Today (March 23rd) Larry C. Johnson addressed those historical falsehoods that Trump/Witkoff and other Zionists think to be true, and here is the opening of that article, which does such a good job of pointing them out so that there’s no need for me to do so, and I shall therefore merely comment here about it, after presenting its opening:

    *****

    Tucker Carlson’s Interview with Steve Witkoff Reveals Surprising Ignorance

    23 March 2025 by Larry C. Johnson

    I have recorded a video for Counter Currents on Tucker’s blockbuster interview with Trump’s “peace” emissary, Steve Witkoff. My editor is in a different time zone, so it may not go up until Monday. However, I do have some comments about what we have learned about Mr. Witkoff. For starters, he comes across as a descent, honorable guy. And, I am sure he is a smart lawyer who knows the real estate business in New York City and is a strong supporter of Donald Trump.

    However, he revealed a surprising depth of ignorance about the situation in Gaza and the war in Ukraine. I was shocked. One of the first bombshells to drop was his confession that he has not met with or talked to anyone from Hamas. All of his “diplomacy” with the Palestinians is via a Qatari cutout. If you are not talking to both sides and trying to establish your credibility, you cannot be an honest broker.

    Witkoff also admits that he was shown a Zionist propaganda film about October 7, which he claims shows evidence of multiple rapes of Israeli women by Hamas. We know, thanks to Max Blumenthal and the folks at the GreyZone, that there is no evidence to support this claim. [Actually, Wikipedia’s article “Hamas baby beheading hoax” is far better-documented and more informative about that “hoax” Trump/Witkoff still don’t even know is a hoax, though Alice Speri of “The Intercept” had first raised serious doubts as to its veracity on 12 October 2023, the day after the Israeli lie was asserted by Netanyahu and seconded by Biden; so, is Tulsi Gabbard actually failing at her job of writing and presenting the Daily Intelligence Brief to President Trump? How could Trump/Witkoff NOT know it was a hoax?] Witkoff makes no effort to hide his disdain for Hamas and accuses them falsely of using children as suicide bombers. Let me remind you of my earlier article, The Hard Facts About Palestinian Terrorism Debunk the Western Narrative. Here are some key highlights:

    While Israel and the West repeatedly and incessantly insist that Hamas is nothing more than one of the most deadly, formidable terrorist groups in the world, the data collected and published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs debunks that narrative. The claim against Hamas is false. You don’t have to take my word for it, I am going to show you the data. The following tables and spreadsheets contain data collected by Israel between 27 September 2000 and 26 April 2024. [Israel continues to update the figures at the website linked above.]

    As an aside, Israel does not include the casualties suffered as a result of the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas. Israel calls it, Swords of Iron. In contrast to the meticulous list of the name of every dead Israeli and foreign victim, who allegedly died at the hands of Palestinians, the Swords of Iron data does not name the victims, especially the 40 children that Israeli officials insist were killed by Hamas. I find that curious, to say the least.

    *****

    Larry Johnson’s closing paragraph opens with “Steve Witkoff is an intelligent man and is capable of learning new facts. But I fear that he is blinded by his own Zionist prejudices and will convince Trump to continue to support Israel’s campaign of genocide.” But how can “an intelligent man” believe the garbage he does? Especially if “he is blinded by his own Zionist prejudices” — which he so obviously IS? He CERTAINLY is NOT a person who ought to be negotiating between Israel (which he loves) and Hamas (which he hates). He is CLEARLY an ADVOCATE for Israel, AGAINST Hamas.

    Not only is Witkoff obviously stupid, but so too is Trump, for hiring such people in the first place. Their level of intelligence is scandalously low. That is dangerous for America, and for the entire world. The billionaires’ corruption of the U.S. Government has reached  such a nadir, so that everyone has good and sound reason to be afraid. America’s billionaire-ocracy (or aristocracy) have handed the White House off from one corrupt fool, Biden, to another corrupt fool, Trump.

    The post Trump-Witkoff: “We can’t accept any democracy in Gaza.” #2 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Revolution?

    I wonder how many people reading these words know the significance of April 19 to US Americans, and others, to all of us worldwide who value democracy and justice for all.

    What is April 19? It’s the 250th anniversary of the beginnings of the US American Revolution. On that day in 1775, in Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts, farmers and other working people stood their ground against redcoat British troops doing the bidding of King George III. It was the day of “the shot heard round the world” which eventually led to a victory in 1781 over the mighty British Empire after six years of war.

    It also led to the expansion of European American settlement across the continent in the decades afterwards, a process which nearly wiped out the Indigenous peoples who have lived here for thousands of years. Estimates are that 90% or more were killed either by disease or violent military action to force the survivors onto reservations so that the Europeans could take the land and the resources underneath it.

    Like so much else about this country, this 250th anniversary of the beginnings of what became the United States is a decidedly mixed bag.

    On balance, though, I see value to connecting the political uprising against the Trumpists with the uprising by revolutionary European Americans 250 years ago. Not by coincidence the success of this revolution was followed by the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Bolivar-led South American Revolution and eventually, in the USA, the Civil War that led to the end of the legal enslavement of African people. It led to the success of the women’s suffrage movement over 100 years ago, the rise of trade unionism, the Black Freedom movement in the 60’s which forced an end to Jim Crow segregation, the rise of Indigenous resistance and societal leadership, the LGBTQ movement, an environmental protection movement and more.

    Trump and his supporters want to take us backwards at least 90 years, to the time before the rise of industrial unionism and the CIO in the 30s and the existence of programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Their agenda is truly and profoundly un-American, and the mushrooming popular resistance movement should begin saying that loudly and clearly. We, our broadly based movement of movements in all its political, racial, gender, age and other diversity, are the “next one up” in the never-ending struggle toward a more just, peaceful and ecologically-connected world.

    Revolution or Reform?

    As is the case with any authentic mass movement that has a chance of winning, there are differing views on a range of topics, even as we are united on many, many issues and a generally progressive worldview.

    One very big one is whether what we are striving for should be viewed as defense of, as well as needed reforms to, the existing institutions of society or whether what we must be about should be viewed as revolutionary in its ambitions.

    For myself it’s the latter.

    A few days ago longtime progressive author and activist Michael Albert wrote about this issue of “reform or revolution.” He explored what his experiences have taught him about the difference between them. He called for a resistance movement today which had the maturity to appreciate that we need to develop a way of working so that all of us can join together in this existential battle for the future. Here’s how he summed up his main thoughts: “So, a reform and/or revolution bottom line: No to reformism. Yes to sustained reform struggles. No to mindless revolutionary posturing. Yes to wise, visionary long term commitment. As resistance grows and as views proliferate, stay together. We need each other.”

    Several years ago I wrote a book with the title, 21st Century Revolution: Through Higher Love, Racial Justice and Democratic Cooperation. In it I laid out what I saw as necessary to bring about the changes needed. As I concluded the book I quoted these words of a longtime friend and fighter for justice, the late Fr. Paul Mayer: “What history is calling for is nothing less than the creation of new human being. We must literally reinvent ourselves through the alchemy of the Spirit or perish. We are being divinely summoned to climb another rung on the evolutionary ladder, to another level of human consciousness.”

    In the end, it all comes down to the personal, how each one of us does the best we can, as lovingly as we can, as resolutely as we can, as clearly as we can, day after day, to help create a world for our children and grandchildren and the seven generations coming after us very different than the one we are living through right now. We cannot let them down.

    The post Revolution? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Film On Gaza Solidarity Encampments Launched Amid Crackdown On Activism

    A new documentary chronicling the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University will premier at the CPH:DOX Film Festival in Copenhagen on March 25, 2025. “The Encampments,” a film produced by BreakThrough News and Watermelon Pictures, “challenges the dominant media narrative by revealing the true spirit of the encampments—what it felt like to be there, the emotions that fueled the students, and what motivated their drastic action,” said directors Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman.

    The film was produced by nonprofit media organization BreakThrough News, Grammy-award winning musician Macklemore, and Watermelon Pictures, a production company focusing on Palestinian-centered films.

    The post Film On Gaza Solidarity Encampments Launched Amid Crackdown On Activism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • A Few Thoughts on Political Identity, Morality and Ukraine

    In the United States, for more than a hundred years, the ruling class interests tirelessly propagated anti-communism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy.

    — Michael Parenti, “Left Anticommunism”

    I will argue below that the liberal Russia-phobic meltdown over Ukraine is because allowing a truthful dialogue would reveal that it was a proxy war against Russia, provoked by the United States. This, in turn, would risk a political identity crisis among those for whom belief in “The Russia Threat” has been a touchstone of their political identity. What are the consequences when one’s deepest political beliefs are exposed as not just deeply flawed but morally wrong? What if one concludes or even suspects that they’ve been complicit in sending over one million Ukrainian soldiers — human beings — to their needless deaths? What if the 80-year narrative about a Russian invasion of Europe never had any basis in fact and that remains true today? Why are the real reasons that European leaders went along with Biden and now seek to sabotage peace in Ukraine? What if one discovers that NATO was an extension of US imperialism? If the “Russian threat” is called into question by the evidence, what else is one forced to rethink about the United States, one’s political identity and past behavior? What happens when it’s no longer possible for one to claim the moral high ground? I wrote the essay (abridged here) some five years ago and I’m reposting it because I believe it has special salience today.

    To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. — Charles Taylor

    In the early 1980s, which now seems a few lifetimes ago, I began offering a college seminar course titled “The Politics of Personal Identity,” quickly dubbed “POPI” by students. It was designed as a capstone course and limited to twelve seniors. Most of the identity groupings around today were addressed in readings, films and guest speakers. During the final weeks of the course, each student was responsible for giving a 45-minute oral presentation: “Who Am I? What Do I Believe? Why Do I Believe It?” This was followed by a lengthy period of questioning from the other seminar members and myself. Each of our guest speakers gave presentations on this topic and I presented my own on the last day of class. Germane to this was an exploration one’s political beliefs and their consequences was the critical component of the course and in what follows below.

    Before exploring identities like race, gender, class, ethnicity and others, we attempted to establish a framework by including the work of Canadian philosopher and political activist Charles Taylor and specifically, his pioneering ideas on the politics of identity. [Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).]

    For Taylor, “Selfhood and the good, or in another way, selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes. We are selves only in that certain issues matter to us. What I am as a self, my identity, is essentially defined by the way things have significance for me… We are selves only in that we move in a certain space of questions, as we seek and find an orientation to the good.” By his light, “Who I am” is most crucially this space of moral orientation “within which my most defining relations are lived out.”

    Taylor goes on, “My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame within which I can attempt to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.” [Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (1989).]

    And this isn’t just a strong preference or attachment. It means that people are saying that if they were to lose this commitment or identification, “they would be at sea, as it were, they wouldn’t know anymore, for an important range of questions, what the significance of things was for them.”

    There is a sense of the ‘self’ that conveys to these beings of requisite depth to their identity or those who at the very least are struggling to find one. Others, who we judge as shallow, also have commitments but we see them as conventional and not the result of deep searching. And, as Taylor notes, those without any framework at all are pathologically amoral.

    We also read some work by the character actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, including this passage about how to act in a morally responsible way:

    My daily obligation was, first and foremost, to learn how to make a correct and careful study of the world. If I didn’t know what the world was like, how could I know what action to take? And so it turns out that morality insists upon accuracy — painstakingly steady and researched. (Wallace Shawn, Appendix to Aunt Dan & Lemon (1987).

    Shawn’s prescriptive obligation to study how the world works is especially difficult given that Americans are the most heavily propagandized citizens in the word. In any event, I hoped that Shawn’s words would resonate with the students, most of whom had also taken my intro course: International Politics: How the World Works, the bookend course to POPI. I was gratified that virtually all of the seminar participants made the connection and often referenced the intro course. (Note: I’m painfully aware of the immense difference between an intro course with two sessions for fourteen weeks to examine a subject versus the forced, frustrated and episodic nature of most exchanges about politics on Facebook and elsewhere.)

    And further, one cannot be a self strictly on one’s own. For starters, who did I interact with that helped me achieve self-realization? Who are those around me right now who contribute to my self-understanding? Beyond the standard sources, how widely have I searched? Is there evidence to support my conclusions — in this case about the USSR/Russia — or am I relying only on tradition, feelings and the accepted authorities? How has the “community” or culture within which I identify, affected my moral stands? Finally, it’s virtually impossible to have a sense of who/where I am without some grasp of how we got there. This can be painful and tempting to avoid, especially as one advances in age and possible regrets loom. Taylor asks us to consider what type of life is worth living? “E.g., what would a rich meaningful life, as against an empty one, or what would constitute an honorable life or the like?”

    In sum, my argument was that there’s a virtually seamless web connecting knowing ourselves, knowing how the world works, and knowing that something needs to be done — starting with oneself. Uncertainty, deliberation and experimentation about the specific course of action don’t detract from the wisdom found in the Asian proverb “To know and not to act is not to know.”

    Change is scary. My cautionary note to younger folks was that the older one gets the harder it is to rethink one’s political identity and question beliefs in which one has a considerable material and especially, psychic investment. Too many people adopt conventional liberal views and behavior in hopes this will stave off the gnawing feeling that something is seriously wrong.

    The post A Few Thoughts on Political Identity, Morality and Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Olson.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Trump’s Policy toward Latin America

    During his first term, President Donald Trump exerted a “maximum pressure” campaign against perceived U.S. adversaries in Latin America and elsewhere. Among other hardline policies, he levelled crippling sanctions against Venezuela—leading, ironically, to a mass exodus of Venezuelans to the United States—and reversed former President Barack Obama’s rapprochement with Cuba. But just how committed is Trump to fighting communism in Latin America at this particular moment—in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua? Today, it’s anyone’s guess.

    Trump’s recent threats against Panama, Canada, and Greenland, on top of his clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, take the spotlight off the “real enemies,” as usually defined by Washington. In that sense, Trump’s foreign policy actions in the first two months of his second administration are a far cry from his first, when regime change was the unmistakable goal.

    In sharp contrast to the rhetoric of his first administration, in his March 4 address to the Joint Session of Congress Trump made no reference to Nicolás Maduro, Miguel Díaz-Canel, or Daniel Ortega. It’s even unclear whether Trump will pursue the use of international sanctions, which he ratcheted up against Venezuela and Cuba in his first government. So far, Trump has indicated that his use of “tariffs as punishment” may be preferable to international sanctions, which, as one insider stated, the president “worries are causing countries to move away from the U.S. dollar.”

    Unlike Trump’s policies on immigration, trans rights, and taxation, his Latin American policy is plagued by vacillations and uncertainties, a sign of his deepening reliance on a transactional approach to foreign policy. The anti-communist hardliners in and outside of the Republican party are not pleased.

    The Venezuelan Pendulum

    Take Venezuela as an example. The Venezuelan opposition led by María Corina Machado had all the reason to be upbeat when Trump won in November and then chose Latin America hawk Marco Rubio as Secretary of State.

    “Sadly, Venezuela is governed by a narco-trafficking organization,” Rubio declared at his confirmation hearing, in which his appointment was unanimously ratified. He then said that “the Biden administration got played” when it negotiated with Maduro in late- 2022 and issued a license to Chevron, which is “providing billions of dollars into the regimes’ coffers.” With regard to Cuba, Rubio issued an ominous warning: “The moment of truth is arriving, Cuba is literally collapsing.”

    Events in Syria added to the euphoria on the right. Just days before Trump’s inauguration, Machado told the Financial Times, “Don’t you think [the generals supporting Maduro] look in the mirror and see the generals which Assad left behind?”

    But then came the friendly encounter between Trump’s envoy for special missions Richard Grenell and Maduro in Caracas in late January, when Maduro agreed to turn over six U.S. prisoners in Venezuela and facilitate the return of Venezuelan immigrants from the United States. Days later, the Biden-approved license with Chevron for exploiting Venezuelan oil, constituting a quarter of the nation’s total oil production, was allowed to roll over. At the same time, Grenell declared that Trump “does not want to make changes to the [Maduro] regime.”

    To complicate matters further, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would cancel Biden’s extension of Temporary Protected Status for over 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants, on grounds that “there are notable improvements in several areas such as the economy, public health, and crime that allow for these nationals to be safely returned to their home country.”

    These developments did not sit well with the Miami hawks and the Venezuelan opposition. Notorious Miami Herald journalist Andres Oppenheimer put it forcefully: “The handshake of Grenell and Maduro fell like a bucket of cold water on many sectors of the Venezuelan opposition… and was like a legitimation of the Maduro government.” Oppenheimer went on to point out that although the Trump government denied it had cut a deal with Maduro, “many suspicions have been raised and will not dissipate until Trump clarifies the matter.”

    After Grenell’s trip to Venezuela, the issue of the renewal of Chevron’s license took surprising twists and turns. In a video conversation on February 26, Donald Trump Jr. told María Corina Machado that just an hour before, his father had tweeted that Chevron’s license would be discontinued. Following a burst of laughter, a delighted Machado directed remarks at Trump Sr.: “Look, Mr. President, Venezuela is the biggest opportunity in this continent, for you, for the American people, and for all the people in our continent.” Machado appeared to be attempting to replicate the deal between Zelensky and Trump involving Ukraine’s mineral resources.

    But simultaneously, Mauricio Claver-Carone, the State’s Department’s Special Envoy for Latin America, told Oppenheimer that the license granted Chevron was “permanent” and automatically renewed every six months. Then, just one week later, Trump reversed his position again. Axios reported that the latest decision was due to pressure from three Florida GOP House members who threatened to withhold votes for Trump’s budget deal. Trump allegedly acknowledged this privately, telling insiders: “They’re going crazy and I need their votes.”

    Trumpism’s Internal Strains

    Trump’s threats against world leaders come straight out of his 1987 book The Art of the Deal. For some loyalists, the strategy is working like magic. Trump’s approach can be summarized as “attack and negotiate.” “My style of deal-making is quite simple,” he states in the book. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing… to get what I’m after.”

    This is precisely what happened when Trump announced plans to “reclaim” the Panama Canal, prompting a Hong Kong-based firm to reveal plans to sell the operation of two Panamanian ports to a consortium that includes BlackRock. Not surprisingly, Trump took credit for the deal.

    A similar scenario played out in the case of Colombia, in which President Gustavo Petro yielded on U.S. deportation flights to avert trade retaliations. For the same reasons, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum began sending 10,000 troops to the northern border to combat irregular crossings and then, on March 6, asked Trump by phone: “’How can we continue to collaborate if the U.S. is doing something that hurts the Mexican people?” In response, Trump temporarily suspended the implementation of 25 percent tariffs on Mexican goods.

    In The Art of the Deal, Trump boasts about this strategy of bluffing, such as when he told the New Jersey Licensing Commission that he was “more than willing to walk away from Atlantic City if the regulatory process proved to be too difficult or too time-consuming.” Similarly, Trump has repeatedly stated that the United States does not need Venezuelan oil. In fact, global oil volatility and the possibility that other nations will gain access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves are matters of great concern to Washington.

    The “Art of the Deal” approach to foreign policy exemplifies Trump’s pragmatic tendency. The Maduro government and some on the left welcome the pragmatism because it leaves open the possibility of concessions by Venezuela in return for the lifting of sanctions. Venezuelan government spokespeople, at least publicly, give Trump the benefit of the doubt by attributing his annulment of Chevron’s license and other adverse decisions to pressure from Miami’s far right. The Wall Street Journal reported that several U.S. businesspeople who traveled to Caracas and “met with Maduro and his inner circle say the Venezuelans were convinced that Trump would… engage with Maduro much like he had with the leaders of North Korea and Russia.”

    But this optimism overlooks the contrasting currents within Trumpism. Although the convergences are currently greater than the differences, priorities within the MAGA movement sometimes clash. On the one hand, right-wing populism spotlights the issue of immigration, anti-“wokism,” and opposition to foreign aid, all designed to appeal beyond the Republican Party’s traditional upper and upper-middle class base of support. On the other hand, the conventional far right calls for nothing short of regime change and destabilization actions against Venezuela and Cuba. While progressives have sharply different views on Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, the far-right hawks currently define all three governments as “leftist” and, in the recent words of Rubio, “enemies of humanity.”

    Maduro’s agreement to collaborate on the repatriation of immigrants in return for the renewal of the Chevron license exemplifies the conflicting priorities within Trumpism. For the anti-left far right, the alleged deal was a “betrayal” of principles by Washington, while for the right-wing populists it was a victory for Trump, especially given the enormity of Venezuela’s immigrant population.

    Another example of clashing priorities upheld by the two currents is the Trump administration’s decision to cut foreign aid programs to a bare minimum. In his recent address to Congress, Trump denounced an $8 million allotment to an LGBTQ+ program in an African nation “nobody has heard of,” and other alleged woke programs. Even Florida’s hawk senator Rick Scott has questioned the effectiveness of foreign aid, saying: “Let’s see: the Castro regime still controls Cuba, Venezuela just stole another election, Ortega is getting stronger in Nicaragua.” Scott’s statement reflects Trump’s transactional thinking regarding the Venezuelan opposition: too many dollars for regime-change attempts that turned out to be fiascos.

    In contrast, hawk champion Oppenheimer published an opinion piece in the Miami Herald titled “Trump’s Foreign Aid Cuts are a Boon for Dictators in China, Venezuela and Cuba.”

    The issue of U.S. aid has also produced infighting from an unexpected source: within the Venezuelan right-wing opposition. Miami-based investigative journalist Patricia Poleo, a long-time opponent of Hugo Chávez and Maduro, has accused Juan Guaidó and his interim government of pocketing millions, if not billions, granted them by the U.S. government. Poleo, now a U.S. citizen, claims that the FBI is investigating Guaidó for mishandling the money.

    The influence of the anti-leftist component of Trumpism can’t be overstated. Trump has become the leading inspiration of what has been called the new “Reactionary International,” which is committed to combatting the Left around the world. Furthermore, the hawks who have expressed interest in toppling the Maduro government (which the populist current is not at all opposed to either)—including Rubio, Elon Musk, Claver-Carone, and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz—populate Trump’s circle of advisors.

    It is not surprising that during the honeymoon phase of Trump’s presidency, a populist wish list would receive considerable attention. But the annexation of the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland is unrealizable, as is the conversion of Gaza into a Riviera of the Middle East. His tariff scheme is not far behind. Furthermore, while his use of intimidation has helped him gain concessions, the effectiveness of this bargaining tactic is limited—threats lose power when endlessly repeated. Finally, Trump’s unfulfilled promises to lower food prices and achieve other economic feats will inevitably add to the disillusionment of his supporters.

    Trump loathes losing and, in the face of declining popularity, he is likely to turn to more realistic goals that can count on bipartisan support in addition to endorsement from the commercial media. In this scenario, the three governments in the hemisphere perceived to be U.S. adversaries are likely targets. Short of U.S. boots on the ground—which would not garner popular support—military or non-military action cannot be discarded against Venezuela, Cuba, or Nicaragua, or, perhaps, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua.

    The post Trump’s Policy toward Latin America first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Miriam Adelson Exemplifies the Supreme Court’s Rulings that Political Corruption Is Protected by the 1st Amendment

    Here is a case that so richly displays the thorough-going corruptness of the U.S. Government so that to document it in its structural details — as will be done here — is to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the U.S. is, in fact, a dictatorship (controlled by a Deep State consisting not of its bureaucracy but of its billionaires), not at all a democracy, regardless of what the U.S. Constitution says; and it also displays how flagrantly our Constitution is routinely being violated by this Government, which, consequently, now must be seriously doubted as to this Government’s very legitimacy:

    Donald Trump as President is doing the work of his third-biggest political donor the Israeli-American thirty-billionaire Miriam Adelson, who demands Governmental punishment of students who protest against — or even just privately oppose — the Israel-U.S. ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

    While Israel provides the troops, America (under both Biden and now Trump) provides the weapons, ammunition, and satellite intelligence, that together are producing the slaughter in, and ethnic cleansing of, Gaza; and Adelson wants it to continue so as to eliminate completely (via extermination and/or expulsion) the people who live there. Students in America who have joined public demonstrations against this ethnic-cleansing are called by Adelson and her hired agent, Trump, “anti-Semites” and supporters of “terrorists” for opposing it. Here’s how this is playing out today:

    On March 19, the Wall Street Journal headlined “Columbia Is Nearing Agreement to Give Trump What He Wants: The school faces a deadline to yield to administration demands in negotiations over federal funding,” and reported that, in order to get Trump “to restore $400 million in federal funding,” Columbia University will punish enough the students who opposed the ethnic-cleansing of Gaza.

    The U.S. Government’s poster-boy of this ‘anti-Semitism’ and support of ‘terrorists’ is the Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, whom Adelson-Trump and their Administration, have in detention awaiting forced expulsion from the United States. On March 11, CNN headlined “Who is Mahmoud Khalil? Palestinian activist detained by ICE over Columbia University protests” and reported that, “‘As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other,’ he told CNN last spring when he was one of the negotiators representing student demonstrators during talks with Columbia University’s administration.” Here is the 2-minute video of him being arrested while his wife cries “I don’t know what to do!” and the federal agents refuse to identify themselves, as they drive her husband away in an unmarked car. Trump wants Khalil to be flown out of the country as soon as possible.

    Also on March 19, City Journal, of the right-wing, rabidly “corporationist” (as Mussolini proudly described himself) Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which had been set up and maintained by Ronald Reagan’s CIA chief Bill Casey and some billionaires, headlined “Who Are the Shadowy Figures Defending Mahmoud Khalil? The accused Hamas sympathizer is shrouded in mystery—and so are his supporters.” In the fascist world, not merely freedom of speech and of the press cannot be tolerated, but also freedom-of-association (which the Supreme Court accepts as being protected in order for the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment to be meaningful — even billionaires need freedom-of-association) cannot be tolerated — and this is today’s U.S.A. Whereas during the long period of U.S. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and of the Senator Joseph R. McCarthy witch-hunts against communists, freedom-of-association did not exist in the United States, it started to exist in order to protect businessmen, in Roberts v. United States Jaycees (1984), and then further in order to protect discrimination against homosexuals, in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000). But now, freedom-of-association likewise might, yet again, no longer exist in the U.S.

    Also on March 19, Politico made public another case, which, in some ways, is even more extreme than that of Khalil, especially against freedom-of-association. It headlined “Badar Khan Suri, a fellow at Georgetown, says he is being punished because of the suspected views of his wife, a U.S. citizen with Palestinian heritage. Masked immigration agents arrested a Georgetown University fellow and told him his visa had been revoked, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.” The Departments of State and of Homeland Security were involved in this action. The article says that Dr. Suri has no criminal record, and that “Suri is a postdoctoral fellow at the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which is part of the [Georgetown] university’s School of Foreign Service. According to his court petition and a university directory, he is teaching a class this semester on ‘Majoritarianism and Minority Rights in South Asia.’ Suri has a Ph.D. in peace and conflict studies from a university in India.” Suri has been removed from his home and his wife in Virginia, and — en-route to a detention facility in Texas — is reported to be at “an Immigration and Customs Enforcement ‘staging’ center at the Alexandria, Louisiana, airport,” ultimately to be flown back to India. This is like, if the totalitarian-minded long-time and founding chief of the ‘Justice’ Department’s FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, were now the President of the United States (which, fortunately, he never was) — he, too, routinely violated the Constitution and broke the law that he was supposedly enforcing.

    Here is how the U.S. Supreme Court itself has produced these and other such results — blatant and increasingly routine violations of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment (among others) (as a therefore treasonous — anti-U.S.-Constitution — Supreme Court):

    The Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo ruling said that the existing political-campaign-expenditure ceiling imposed “direct and substantial restraints on the quantity of political speech” and so the Court invalidated three expenditure limitations as violating the First Amendment. In other words: they said that money is “speech” — the more spending of it in politics, the better (although the First Amendment says nothing about the “quantity” of “political speech” — the Supreme Court there invented that concern, though the Founders never expressed it) — and so any limitations on campaign-spending would violate the First Amendment’s free-speech clause. (The Court’s ruling even included the brazenly stupid falsehood: “The quantity of communication by the contributor does not increase perceptibly with the size of his contribution, since the expression rests solely on the undifferentiated, symbolic act of contributing.” So, a million-dollar contribution is merely “symbolic.”) The overall limitations on expenditures by federal candidates and their committees were therefore struck down by the Court, as being inconsistent with (their lie-based interpretation of) freedom-of-speech. Thus (despite their lie that all of this is merely “symbolic” — which they knew wasn’t at all true), people who donate more to politicians should have a bigger say in who wins office than people who can’t. This ruling — granting the rich person a bigger say in ‘our’ government than the poor person has — is widely considered to have opened the floodgates for corruption to control the U.S. Government.

    The Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling said that the anti-corruption interest is not sufficient to displace the speech in question from Citizens United, and that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” This ruling — based on that blatant lie by the U.S. Supreme Court — is widely considered to be the death-knell for any hope of democracy in the United States, because it opened the floodgates for corruption to rule the U.S. Government at the other end — this time, not at the candidates-end (like Buckley) but at the donors-end (the Citizens United donors-group), by the ruling’s alleging that a “corporation” is a “person,” whose free-speech right can be expressed by its political-campaign donations, without any legal limit (the more that corporations donate to political campaigns, the better, according to the U.S. Supreme Court).

    This leaves American politics in a perfectly libertarian (or “neoliberal”) condition, such that property (a person’s net worth — wealth) reigns (on a one-dollar-one-vote basis); persons (one-person-one-vote) really don’t rule in America, because the super-rich need only to donate enough to the most-corrupt candidates so as to defeat any honest political competitor (i.e., any candidate who actually intends to fulfill on his/her public campaign-promises to the voters). Only the campaign-promises (usually made in private) to the mega-donors will be actuated as governmental policies once the winner is in office. And the scientific findings unanimously CONFIRM that at least ever since 1980, this is the way it is, in the United States.

    And once this is the way it is, the public (the voters, the consumers, the workers — the public, as opposed to the OWNERS of corporations — and especially the billionaires who control the corporations) are, in any situation that involves their personal rights as against the corporate owners, actually powerless, because the super-rich now control the Government and can always far outspend (on lawyers and anything else) any one of them (any non-rich person). This is NOT “equal justice under law.” Or, as one of the mega-billionaires himself said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (There are only around a thousand billionaires in the U.S., and they rule over the entire population of 340 million.) That statement, made in 2006, is by now, very clearly an understatement: the billionaires have already won. The U.S. Constitution already means only what America’s super-rich WANT it to mean. If you want it to mean something else than what they want it to mean, then you will need to be able to outspend them to achieve that in the actual Government. (And the billionaires control almost all of the ‘nonprofits’ that advertise they represent “the public interest”; so, if what you want is inconsistent with what the billionaires want, then you won’t get any help from them to make that case.) This is the present reality, and only a Second American Revolution might be able to restore some democracy here, because, right now, we don’t have any — none, at all, in the United States of America. This is a proven fact — proven many times over. Anyone who continues to refer to the U.S. as being a “democracy” is either a fool or a liar. And America isn’t a dictatorship by “the bureaucrats,” nor by “the Democrats,” nor by “the Republicans” — it is being done by the billionaires, ones such as Adelson on the Republican Party side, and ones such as Soros on the Democratic Party side, who are collectively puppet-masters for the entire corrupt political show, which show elicits anger from the public against the puppets, instead of against the puppeteers, who fund and run the show.

    On March 19, Dawn News in Pakistan headlined “Mahmoud Khalil Wins Legal Battle Over Deportation” and reported that a judge ruled that Khalil’s case must be heard by a court, not result in his immediate deportation, and that a court in New Jersey must consider whether his rights of free speech and due proces have been violated by Trump. No timeline was set for a ruling, and so Khalil might continue in prison in Louisiana for a long time while his appeal moves forward in the courts.

    On the night of March 20, ABC News headlined “Judge blocks deportation of Georgetown fellow detained by immigration authorities” and reported that Badar Khan Suri’s lawyers had filed suit against the U.S. by saying that “the Trump administration appeared to be targeting the Georgetown University fellow due to his wife’s identity as a Palestinian and her constitutionally protected speech.” So, now, the judge is requiring Trump’s people to justify their action.

    Therefore, even if these and other similar cases might produce ultimate wins for the victims, their cases could produce long terms in prison while the courts consider them. If, at the end of these cases, Trump loses, there is still the question of whether Trump will do what judges order him to do. Of course, if he won’t, then congressional Democrats might try to impeach and remove him. At that point, it will be again Democratic Party billionaires versus Republican Party billionaires. What could be more serious would be if the result would be a Constitutional crisis: a contest of wills between the Executive and the Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. That would be a much better, more substantive, outcome. It could produce the necessary Second American Revolution, if the American public decide to make it so. Leaving such matters only to the billionaires to settle, needs to stop at some point, because, otherwise, America will simply continue to rot. The more that the billionaires continue to succeed against the public, the more that the country itself will continue to rot.

    The post How Miriam Adelson Exemplifies the Supreme Court’s Rulings that Political Corruption Is Protected by the 1st Amendment first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Tragedy of Syria


    It is cruelly fitting that one of the acknowledged cradles of civilization is now a showroom for the cruelties, irrationalities, and injustices of the modern capitalist world.

    At various times, Syria was part of the lands that were widely admired for their enlightened governance, tolerance, and economic development.

    Today, Syria is a wasteland, divided into parcels, and occupied by alien forces that show no regard for the country’s legacy or the unity and well-being of its people.

    After four hundred years of reasonably stable, tolerant, and peaceable existence under Ottoman rule, the people of the country now known as Syria experienced the heavy hand of European imperialism. With the Sykes-Picot agreement, Syria became the “responsibility” of France after World War I, existing essentially as a French colony with its artificial boundaries established by European powers.

    Understandably, the colonial subjects resisted. As it always does, the anti-colonial struggle provided the impetus for consolidating a nation in a space where a country never existed. As with the seminal anti-colonial victory in what is now the US, the fight against the French was an essential condition to the forging of the Syrian nation-state. Nation-building emerges from and advances from the struggle against domination, for independence.

    But it was not a sufficient condition. After World War II, when France proved unable to maintain its colonies, the new Syria had to fulfill other difficult conditions of nation-building. Decolonization left the scars of oppression– social, political, and economic backwardness.

    Without independent political organizations and well-established institutions, the military– made up of anti-colonial fighters, tribal militias, even former French collaborators– served as a unifying force. Politics was conducted through the often-violent clash of military factions. Countering this chaos was the impact of Arab nationalist and Arab socialist secular trends emerging throughout the Middle East. Ba’athism and Nasserism were two progressive influences tempering Islamic fundamentalism, tribalism, and the complacency of feudal and primitive capitalist economies.

    Concurrent with aid from the Soviet Union and the guarantee of Syrian sovereignty against imperialist aggression, the alliance of the military, the Ba’ath Party, and the Communist Party consolidated and took a leftward turn, strengthening their hand against the backward elements. This progressive development in the energy-rich Middle East did not go unnoticed by the United States and its then-designated local police agents: Israel and Iran.

    In the ensuing years, Syria continued to struggle for national unity, agrarian reform, and modernization under the 30-year presidency of Hafez Al-Assad. Assad brought a measure of stability and peace, while imperialism encouraged and materially supported the Muslim Brotherhood and other fundamentalists to undermine these secular developments.

    Typically, European and US ideologues railed against the fragile state, condemning its failure to embrace modern capitalist institutions while these same ideologues were encouraging feudal jihadists to rebel against secularism.

    With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the death of the elder Assad, the tenuous progress of Syria, its independence, and its unity were weakened. Under the leadership of the younger, less visionary Bashir al-Assad, without any powerful allies, and with active and determined plotters in Washington, the future of Syria was in doubt. Assad’s flirtation with market economics and privatization brought his regime no respite from imperialist machinations.

    In 2011, protests against Assad’s rule were co-opted by foreign security services. Through the auspices of the CIA, through its vast network of ready and willing jihadists, and armed with weapons shipped from the overthrown government of Libya, a brutal proxy war was launched. Neo-Ottoman Turkey threw its own jihadists into the fight. And the US armed and unleashed Kurdish nationalists to further pressure the Assad government and serve US interests.

    What the mainstream media called “a Revolution and the Syrian Civil War” was, in fact, a conflict of proxies and of foreign intervention. In response to Turkish and US meddling and to the arrival of hordes of foreign jihadists, Hezbollah militias and Iranian and Russian forces came to the assistance of the weak Assad government forestalling the chaos that follows forcible regime change.

    As the war reached somewhat of a stalemate, Assad stood in Damascus, ruling the little that was left of the country’s infrastructure, housing, economy, and territorial integrity. US Marines occupied a portion of Syria with its oil resources. Kurds ruled in another part of the country under US protection. The US’s NATO ally, Turkey– hostile to the Kurds– ruled in another part of Syria, supporting their favored brand of head-chopping jihadists. Israel took advantage of weakened foes and occupied a large slice of Syria nearer to Damascus, while destroying all Syrian military assets in Southern Syria.

    If this reverse of nation-building, this nation-degrading process seems familiar, it should. It resembles all too well the willful, post-Cold War, systematic destruction of fragile states constructed around multiple ethnicities and enjoying a measure of national independence. Without the international leverage of a socialist bloc, led by the powerful Soviet Union, the imperialist bloc disposed of contrarian states like Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya, usually by fomenting ethnic strife or supporting elite demands. Failing states throughout Africa and Asia bear similar scars, inflicted by great powers bent on strengthening their spheres of interest, as France attempts in sub-Saharan Africa.

    In late 2024, Turkey unleashed its own stable of radical, fundamentalist head-choppers, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, against the Assad regime from its lair in Idlib province. The demoralized, spent forces of Assad’s military were swiftly overwhelmed. Despite designation as a “terrorist group” by the UN (and the US), HTS was heralded by most of the US and European mainstream media as victorious freedom fighters. Reporters flocked to Damascus– after staying far away for years, while reporting from Beirut and the US embassy– to “prove” the evil of the Assad regime. Easily duped by local opportunists, much of the reportage collapsed as facts and evidence came forward.

    Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of HTS anointed himself the new Syrian head of state, adopted a proper Western suit, shaved his beard, and pronounced a new era of peace and harmony, while outlawing political parties, postponing a new constitution, and cancelling elections until far off in the future. Such is the new Syrian Democracy.

    But public relations cannot restrain the blood lust of the fundamentalist head-choppers. In 2025, HTS elements began a vengeance campaign against Baa’ath cadre, former military leaders, and religious “infidels,” killing and attacking civilians in Alawite and Christian villages.

    Understandably, a new resistance is emerging. Bizarrely, EU authorities blame the massacres on those resisting HTS.

    No doubt at the urging of its foreign sponsors (especially the US), HTS and the Kurds were herded into a cooperative agreement in March that includes the merging of its “military institutions” — a move that hopes to strengthen their hand against future Syrian resistance and present an image of unity to the rest of the world. The Kurds give the US greater influence at the expense of the Turks.

    The last pages of the Syrian tragedy are yet to be written.

    There are lessons to be learned.

    The post-Soviet era has emboldened a ruthless, cruel imperialism. Without the threat of Soviet power to present a counterforce, the US, NATO, and other powers are free to impose their will on other states, including taking their own rivalries to the brink of World War. Few remember that the then-real threat of Soviet intervention, stopped the Israelis from passing beyond the Golan Heights and marching to Damascus during the Six Day War– a principled act of international solidarity.

    As a corollary, it is impossible to fail to note that there are no similar counterbalancing forces today. There have been no political, economic, or military powers demonstrably committed to a principled defense of weaker states threatened by imperialist aggression since the Cuban and Soviet defense of Angola and the defeat of South African apartheid aggression in the 1980s.

    That reality is not only a tribute to the socialist internationalism of the past, but a sobering message to those on the left who interpret the realignment of great powers– the so-called tendency to multipolarity– as a new kind of anti-imperialism. The experience of Syria– left on its own to defend its integrity and sovereignty against the agents of backwardness and great-power interests– speaks to the impotence of the so-called BRICS block. Issuing protests, resolutions, and condemnations is no substitute for action or material aid. Russian support, once so vital to Assad’s defense, failed to rise against HTS and is now offered shamelessly to its former foe.

    Capitalist alliances around spheres of influence or temporary common interests are far removed from principled anti-imperialism, a stance only possible apart from the logic of capitalist competition. Anti-imperialism is a principle, not a self-interested calculation.

    The post The Tragedy of Syria first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Final Hours of Jessie Hoffman

    Three hours before he was to be murdered by the State of Louisiana, Jessie Hoffman greeted me with a strong handshake and an embrace.  He stared deep into my eyes and thanked me for coming.  We discussed his son, also named Jessie, and how proud he has made his dad.

    Also visiting were three of the many lawyers who had been fighting for his life, Cecelia Trenticosta Kappel of the Loyola Center for Social Justice, Samantha Bosalavage Pourciau of the Promise of Justice Initiative, and Sarah Ottinger, who had been representing Jessie Hoffman for 19 years.  I was there to witness the murder of Mr. Hoffman if Louisiana reversed its course and allowed one of the legal team to remain through the whole process.

    Already in the room when we arrived was Rev. Reimoku Gregory Smith, a Buddhist priest Hoffman chose to accompany him.  Jessie is a practicing Buddhist and has been a leader among those in prison for decades.  Reverend Reimoku was in long black robes.  He was serene and almost glowing in kindness.

    We sat around a big wooden conference table that had the logo of the State of Louisiana carved into the middle of it.  Uniformed officers from the Louisiana State Penitentiary sat in opposite ends of the room.  There were two big pictures on the walls – one of Elijah on a flaming chariot and one of Daniel in the lion’s den.

    The room in which Louisiana planned to murder Jessie Hoffman was steps away.

    Jessie Hoffman is about six feet tall and muscular.  He was wearing a black t-shirt that said Life Row in white letters on it – the name that its 50 plus occupants prefer to call what the outside world calls death row.  He has been fasting for days and mostly sits quietly with his arms on the wooden table, staring intently at whoever was talking to him.

    Jessie was holding his favorite book, THE HEART OF THE BUDDHA’S TEACHING: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy and Liberation by Thich Nhat Hanh.  Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese Buddhist Zen Master, author, poet and peacemaker who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

    Jessie asked Reverend Reimoku to read his favorite passage from the book to us.  It was called the Four Immeasurable Minds: Loving-Kindness, Compassion, Joy and Equanimity.  He read and reflected as we took in these words together.  Jessie occasionally closed his eyes.

    Louisiana was scheduled to murder Jessie Hoffman by first immobilizing him by tying down his arms, hands, legs and torso on a crucifix-like platform. Then, once he was helpless to resist, they would cover his face with an industrial-grade respirator and pump his lungs full of poison high-grade nitrogen gas.  Nitrogen gas causes death by depriving the body of oxygen, essentially causing suffocation in a phenomenon known as hypoxia.  This method is so horrible all but two states have stopped using nitrogen gas on animals declaring it inhumane.  The United Nations Commissioner on Human Rights has condemned the use of nitrogen gas in executions saying its use could amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment in violation of international human rights law.

    Jessie Hoffman was to be murdered by Louisiana because he had as a teenager, after years of shocking physical, sexual and psychological abuse, committed a horrible murder in 1996.

    Now the Louisiana Governor claimed it was necessary for the state to respond to this murder by itself murdering Jessie Hoffman to “prioritize victims over criminals.”

    Yet the actual family members of the victim of Jessie’s murder were not asking Louisiana to murder him.

    The victim’s sister-in-law specifically asked Louisiana not to murder Jessie Hoffman, saying “Executing Jessie Hoffman is not justice in my name, it is the opposite.”

    The victim’s husband refused to attend the state execution and said he is now “indifferent to the death penalty vs life in prison without parole.” He also stated another reason for not attending was that he was “just not really feeling like I need to watch another human being die.”

    Years before, Jessie Hoffman wrote a statement apologizing to the victims.  Louisiana refused to deliver it to the family.

    Jessie and the victim’s sister-in-law tried to talk by zoom so Jessie could apologize to her directly but Louisiana would not allow it.

    As our visit continued, another long-time lawyer arrived.  Caroline Tillman, who has been working to save Jessie Hoffman from state murder for 22 years, came directly from federal court in New Orleans.  Teams of lawyers tried to stop the state murder of Jessie Hoffman, filing in several state and federal courts.  Only the U.S. Supreme Court had not been heard from yet.

    More prayers were said.  The letter from the sister-in-law asking that the state murder not go forward was read aloud.  More prayers.  More than 250 faith leaders had recently signed letters asking Louisiana not to revive the practice of state murder with nitrogen gas.

    With less than an hour to go before the scheduled murder of Jessie Hoffman, the Warden came in and politely but firmly terminated the lawyers’ visit.  He refused permission to allow any lawyer to stay and witness the murder of Jessie Hoffman. Only Reverend Reimoku was allowed to remain.

    After the lawyers were escorted out, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to stop the murder of Mr. Hoffman by a vote of 5-4, one vote short of the 5 votes needed for a stay.

    The murder of Jessie Hoffman by Louisiana could now begin.

    John Simmerman, a journalist with nola.com, was one of two media witnesses allowed to view the execution of Jessie Hoffman.  He reports that at 6:21 the ultra-high-grade nitrogen was pumped into the immobilized Mr. Hoffman.  His breathing became uneven. His chest rose.  He made a jerking motion. His body shook.  His fingers twitched. He pulled at the table. His hands clenched. His breathing slowed. His head moved inside the mask.  He jerked slightly around 6:27 and stopped moving.  Louisiana officials reported the poison gas was pumped into Jessie Hoffman for 19 minutes until he was pronounced dead.  The last view of Jessie Hoffman with his face now uncovered showed “his head was tilted back, teeth exposed in a grimace.”

    The murder of Jessie Hoffman by Louisiana was now complete.

    Samantha Pourciau, who was with Jessie Hoffman on his final day on earth, said: “Tonight, while many in our state cannot afford groceries, the state used countless resources to kill one man. The governor cannot cloak this in fighting for victims, because today we learned that this is not, in fact, what this family wants. This is what the governor wants. This has been in service of no one, but the bloodlust of our state government.”

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  • What It Means to Weaponize the Government

    President Trump’s declaration of war as a justification for using wartime powers to sidestep constitutional protections is indeed a war, but it is a war waged by the president against dissent, against due process, and against the very foundations of our constitutional republic.

    This is what it means to weaponize the government.

    When the government turns its power against its own people—through surveillance, retaliation, censorship, and intimidation—it ceases to serve the public and instead becomes a weapon of oppression.

    According to the Political Dictionary:

    The term ‘weaponize’ refers to the strategic manipulation or transformation of information, institutions, or social issues into tools for gaining political advantage. This could involve exploiting existing laws, harnessing social media algorithms for disinformation campaigns, or turning otherwise neutral or benign elements of governance into divisive issues for the purpose of delegitimizing opponents or rallying a base.

    Time and again, leaders have stretched—or outright shattered—the limits of power, weaponizing government power through unjust laws, surveillance, or outright suppression.

    Each power grab is a step toward the erosion of liberty.

    John Adams used the Alien and Sedition Acts to prosecute journalists and political opponents.

    Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, allowing the military to detain individuals without trail and suppressing Confederate sympathizers and political dissenters.

    Under Woodrow Wilson, the Espionage and Sedition Acts were used to crack down on anti-war activists, socialists, and labor organizers, including Eugene V. Debs, who spoke out against World War I.

    Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that led to the internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, based on suspicions of disloyalty, despite little to no evidence.

    Richard Nixon harnessed the power of the FBI, CIA, and IRS, to harass, spy on and sabotage his political opponents and perceived enemies.

    Spanning numerous presidential administrations, from FDR to Nixon, the FBI’s covert intelligence program COINTELPRO was used to infiltrate, discredit and disrupt civil rights leaders, anti-war activists, and other political dissidents.

    In a bid to fight so-called disinformation, Biden pressured social media companies to censor and suppress individuals expressing views perceived as conspiratorial or extremist, especially as they related to COVID-19.

    And then there’s Donald Trump, who is setting new records for how far he’s willing to go to retaliate against his perceived enemies and sidestep the rule of law.

    Indeed, Ken Hughes, an investigative journalist who spent two decades listening to Richard Nixon’s Secret White House Tapes, has concluded that Nixon’s abuses of presidential power—which included weaponizing the government to “sabotage Vietnam peace talks to damage the Democrats’ 1968 presidential campaign, to time his withdrawal from Vietnam to help his 1972 reelection campaign, and to spring former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa from prison in return for the union’s political support”—pale beside Trump’s abuses.

    Trump, who once vowed to end government overreach and the weaponization of the federal government, now openly uses its full force against his critics, dismantling democratic norms, consolidating power in ways that defy the Constitution, and directing an all-out weaponization of the federal government against his perceived enemies, which translates to anyone who dares to oppose him.

    If Trump were just a petty blowhard, that would be one thing.

    Unfortunately, having populated his administration with individuals more loyal to him than to the Constitution, Trump is getting drunk on power.

    The danger is not so much Trump as it is his enablers-to-abuse, the many minions within his administration and beyond who are eager to carry out unlawful orders, defy the courts, ignore Congress’ mandate, trample rights, and butcher the Constitution, all in the so-called name of putting America first.

    If this keeps up, America, once looked upon as a bastion of freedom and economic opportunity, will be the last place anyone ever thinks of when they hear the words freedom, justice and equality.

    Every action taken by the Trump administration in defiance of the rule of law—whether or not that action is motivated by a legitimate concern for national security—pushes us that much closer to the complete dismantling of our constitutional republic.

    Don’t be so carried away by fear-inducing tales of rapists and foreign invaders and corruption that you let the government get away with murder… the painful execution of our rights.

    That way lies tyranny.

    You can see the pattern forming already.

    When anti-war protesters are made to disappear—snatched up late at night by plain-clothes men who refuse to identify themselves and then transported thousands of miles away, to a private prison in a state more favorable to dubious detentions—we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

    When Venezuelan migrants are rounded up and deported out of the country, heads shaven and in chains, without any due process—without being identified, without being charged formally with a crime, without getting a chance to plead their innocence against those charges and, if found guilty, then convicted—we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

    When major law firms are barred from interacting with federal agencies or entering federal buildings—an outright attempt to chill First Amendment activity and hamstring businesses that challenge government overreach—we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

    When huge swaths of our nation’s history (including the Constitution and Bill of Rights) are being erased from websites, government buildings, archives, educational curriculum—in the so-called name of combatting discrimination—we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

    When Trump administration sycophants from the vice president on down are openly deriding and defying the courts while proclaiming the imperial supremacy of their exalted leader, we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

    When the president of the United States threatens other nations militarily, talks openly about seizing foreign lands, stirs up international tensions, and rattles the war drums, we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

    Trump, adept at twisting facts and spinning lies, is working hard to insist that these end-runs around the rule of law are for our safety.

    Don’t believe him. Words are cheap.

    More importantly, don’t trust him. Bind him down with the chains of the Constitution.

    The only real protection we have against tyranny is the rule of law, provided that you have a populace and a system of government that holds the rule of law as inviolable.

    That is our real power: the extent to which we hold fast to the Constitution and demand that the government and its agents do so, as well.

    The moment that we relent in that commitment—the moment that we look the other way and let first a few encroachments slide, then ever more and more—is the moment that the Constitution loses its power to protect us against tyranny.

    That is what is unfolding right now.

    This is the devil’s bargain that we are being asked to enter into with Trump: empty promises and a one-way street to a dictatorship in exchange for our freedoms.

    Watch out.

    When any politician claims to be saving you money by imposing tariffs that ramp up inflation and cutting government programs aimed at educating the masses, feeding the hungry, and helping the poor, disabled and elderly, all the while spending taxpayer money on his own lavish lifestyle and self-serving government programs, you’d better beware. Your hard-earned dollars will be next in line to be seized, spent and squandered.

    When any politician suggests that you relinquish your freedoms—of speech, assembly, due process, association, etc.—in exchange for promises of greater security, you’d better beware. Your freedoms will be next on the chopping block.

    When any politician persuades you to look the other way while innocent individuals are rounded up alongside suspected criminals just because they look a certain way or talk a certain way or belong to a particular demographic, you’d better beware. Your right to due process will be next.

    When any politician comes up with a vast array of reasons why he doesn’t need to obey court rulings—because they were issued verbally, because his power trumps that of the courts, because he doesn’t need to follow the law outside America’s borders—you’d better beware. This shifty reasoning for breaking the law could be used against you next.

    There can be no doubt about the nature of what is taking place right now.

    This is war.

    President Trump’s justification for defying the courts and doing whatever he wants in pursuit of his political agenda (arresting protesters, carrying out mass arrests and deportations, muzzling critics, seizing funds, dismantling agencies, usurping congressional powers) is that “this is war.”

    Here’s the thing, though: Trump may be using his war powers as commander-in-chief to bypass the Constitution at every turn, but the only war being waged is a war against the Constitution and the rule of law and the American people.

    Congress, which has the sole power to declare war under Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, has yet to do so. And still Trump is using the emergency wartime powers of the presidency to sidestep accountability and due process.

    In ruling after ruling, the courts, which have the judicial power to rein in overreach and misconduct, are repeatedly declaring unconstitutional the Trump administration’s steady dismantling of the government and refusal to stay within the purview of his official powers. And still Trump is unilaterally hacking away at the very foundations of our system of government.

    If the president refuses to be held accountable, if he insists that his power is supreme, if he abuses the power of his office to wreak havoc and revenge, if he reduces our republic to rubble and tramples over the Constitution and disregards the rule of law, he is aligning himself with every despot, dictator and tyrant to have walked the earth.

    We’ve been here before. We know how this story ends.

    It takes time and effort and a willingness on the part of “we the people” to look beyond our differences and stand united in opposition to oppression, but when we do that, freedom prevails in the end.

    Next year will be the 250th anniversary of the birth of this country, when America’s founders declared their independence from King George’s tyranny. What’s just as important, however, is what came before that: the small steps of rebellion, resistance and outrage that said, “enough is enough.”

    What we are now experiencing is a civil war, devised and instigated in part by the Deep State.

    The objective: compliance and control.

    The strategy: destabilize the economy, polarize the populace, escalate racial and political tensions, intensify the use of violence, and then, when all hell breaks loose, clamp down on the nation for the good of the people and the security of the nation.

    The outcome for this particular conflict is already foregone: the Deep State wins.

    The Deep State wins by ensuring that we are censored, silenced, muzzled, gagged, zoned out, caged in and shut down. It wins by monitoring our speech and activities for any sign of “extremist” activity. It wins by ensuring that we are estranged from each other and kept at a distance from those who are supposed to represent us. It wins by saddling us with taxation without representation and a government without the consent of the governed.

    It wins by terminating the Constitution (or rewriting the Constitution).

    So where does that leave us?

    “We” may have contributed to our downfall through our inaction and gullibility, but we are also the only hope for a free future.

    After all, the Constitution begins with those three beautiful words, “We the people.”

    Those three words were intended as a reminder to future generations that there is no government without us: our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land.

    When we forget that, when we allow the “Me” of a self-absorbed, narcissistic, politically polarizing culture to override our civic duties as citizens to collectively stand up to tyranny and make the government play by the rules of the Constitution, that is when tyranny rises and freedom falls

    Remember, there is power in numbers.

    Not the kinds of numbers that Trump likes to spout about landslide victories and electoral mandates, but the most powerful numbers of all: the sheer, overwhelming mass of humanity that is “we the people” of these United States of America.

    If there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it rests with us.

    Ultimately, that’s what the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution is all about: it affirms that “we the people” have all the power, and what powers we do not explicitly give to the federal government or the states, we retain. We may appoint government representatives to act in our stead, but we never relinquish that power altogether.

    That’s where Trump and his Deep State handlers get it wrong. Speaking through him and his administration, they claim that this dismantling of the federal government is a bid to return power to local communities and state governments, but it’s not their government to dismantle, nor is it their power to return.

    We are the government, and we are the power, and it’s time “we the people” reminded the government and its henchmen of that important fact.

    The power still lies with us.

    We must resist every attempt to erode our freedoms, demand accountability, and uphold the Constitution—before it’s too late.

    It’s time to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.

    Nullify everything the government does that flies in the face of the Constitution.

    Flood your representatives’ phone lines, inboxes and townhall meetings with your discontent.

    Protest everything that tramples on the Constitution.

    Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree.

    Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc.

    Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it.

    If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it.

    Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it. That’s their job: make them do it.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.

    The post What It Means to Weaponize the Government first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • This Is Trump’s Genocide Now

    This is Trump’s genocide. Trump is just as culpable for what happens in Gaza as Netanyahu. Just as guilty as Biden was during the last administration.

    Trump signed off on the reignition of the Gaza holocaust. He spent weeks sabotaging the ceasefire and then gave the thumbs up to the resumption of the genocide. He did this while bombing Yemen and threatening war with Iran for Israel.

    I don’t know why Trump has done these things. Maybe it’s all for the Adelson cash. Maybe Epstein recorded him doing something unsavory with a minor during their long association and gave it to Israeli intelligence for blackmail purposes. Maybe he owed somebody a favor for bailing him out of his business failures in the past. Maybe he’s just a psychopath who enjoys murdering children. I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he did it, and he is responsible for his actions.

    Trump supporters will justify literally anything their president does using whatever excuses they need to, but they are only revealing how completely empty and unprincipled their political faction is. They are unthinking worshippers of power who go along with whatever the president tells them to. By continuing to support Trump even as he continues Biden’s legacy of mass murder in the middle east, they are proving themselves to be mindless stormtroopers for the empire in full view of the entire world.

    You can still support Trump if you hate immigrants and LGBTQ people and want lower taxes for the obscenely wealthy, but there is no legitimate reason to support him on antiwar or anti-establishment grounds. He’s just another evil Republican mass murderer president.

    *****

    Republicans in 2002: We need more authoritarianism and more wars in the middle east. Anyone who disagrees is a terrorist supporter.

    Republicans in 2025: We need more authoritarianism and more wars in the middle east. Anyone who disagrees is a terrorist supporter, and antisemite.

    *****

    By the way has anyone checked on the western Zionist Jews? How are their feelings feeling today? Are they feeling nice feelings or bad feelings? Are their feelings feeling safe or unsafe? We need wall to wall news coverage of this supremely urgent issue; no time to cover any other story.

    *****

    I write so much about the fake “antisemitism crisis” not only because it’s being used to destroy civil rights throughout the western world, but because it’s one of the most dark and disturbing things I’ve ever witnessed.

    It’s been so intensely creepy watching all of western society mobilize around a complete and utter fiction in order to stomp out all criticism of a foreign state. It’s about as dystopian a thing as you can possibly imagine, all these pundits and politicians pretending to believe that Jewish safety is seriously being threatened by an epidemic of antisemitism which must be aggressively silenced by any means necessary. All to shut down opposition to the worst inclinations of a genocidal apartheid state and the complicity of our own western governments with its crimes.

    And we’re all expected to treat this scam seriously. Anyone who says the emperor has no clothes and calls this mass deception what it is gets tarred with the “antisemite” label and treated as further evidence that we’re all a hair’s breadth from seeing Jews rounded up onto trains again if we don’t all hurry up and shut down anti-genocide protests on university campuses. They’re not just acting out a fraudulent melodrama staged to rob us of our rights, they’re demanding that we participate in it by pretending it’s not what it plainly is.

    It’s not just tyranny, it’s tyranny that orders people to clap along with it. It’s such a disgusting, evil thing to do to people. Such psychologically dominating abusive behavior. The more you look at it, the creepier it gets.

    *****

    The anti-imperialist left is what MAGA and right wing “populism” pretend to be. We ACTUALLY oppose the empire’s warmongering — not only when Democrats are in power. We ACTUALLY want to defeat the deep state — we don’t applaud billionaire Pentagon contractors like Elon Musk taking power. We ACTUALLY oppose the establishment order — because the establishment order is capitalist. We ACTUALLY stand up to the powerful — we don’t offload half the blame onto immigrants and marginalized groups.

    The anti-imperialist left is also what liberals pretend to be. We ACTUALLY support the working class. We ACTUALLY stand up for the little guy. We ACTUALLY want justice and equality. We ACTUALLY support civil rights. We ACTUALLY oppose tyranny.

    Everything the human heart longs for lies in the death of capitalism, militarism and empire, and yet both of the dominant western political factions of our day support continuing all of these things. This is because westerners spend their entire lives marinating in power-serving propaganda which herds them into these two mainstream political factions to ensure that they will pose no meaningful challenges to our rulers. All political energy is funneled into movements and parties which are set up to maintain the status quo while pretending to support the people, with the illusion of political freedom sustained by a false two-party dichotomy in which both factions serve the same ruling power structure.

    Of course, what mainstream liberalism and right wing “populism” have to offer that anti-imperialist socialism does not is the ability to win major elections with successful candidates. This is because generations of imperial psyops have gone into stomping out the anti-imperialist left in the western world, and because only candidates which uphold the status quo are ever allowed to get close to winning an election. This doesn’t mean mainstream liberalism or right wing “populism” are the answer, it just means our prison warden isn’t going to hand us the keys to the exit door.

    At some point we’re going to have to rise up and use the power of our numbers to force the urgently needed changes we long to see in our world. Everything in our society is set up to prevent this from ever happening. That’s all the two mainstream political factions are designed to do. That’s why they both have phony “populist” elements within them which purport to be leading a brave revolutionary charge against the establishment, while herding everyone into support for the two status quo political parties. And that’s why the anti-imperialist left is everything they pretend to be.

    The post This Is Trump’s Genocide Now first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Release of the Epstein Files

    View Epstein files here (redacted on steroids!)

    The post Release of the Epstein Files first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Israel Doesn’t Care about the Captives

    What excuses has Israel given for renewing the genocide:

    1. Israel says it is trying to force Hamas to release the captives in Gaza.

    Yet, as we know from those already released, the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza only increases the chances the captives will be killed. There is no plausible scenario in which dropping US-supplied 2,000lb bombs across Gaza makes any Israeli held in the enclave safer or brings them home sooner.

    In any case, there was a known and easy way for Israel to get the last of the captives back. They were due to be freed in the second phase of the ceasefire agreement, already well past its implementation date. But weeks ago Israel decided to tear up the agreement it had signed and impose new terms in which the rest of the captives would have to be returned – and without Israel either ceasing its fire or withdrawing from the enclave, as it had agreed to do.

    What Israel’s return to genocide shows is that the Israeli government would rather kill the remaining captives – vaporising them with Trump’s latest shipment of 2,000lb bombs – than either make a concession to secure their release or place any limitation on its ability to slaughter the people of Gaza.

    2. Israel claims Hamas was re-arming and planning a new attack.

    As ever, Israel is inverting the truth. It was Israel that was re-armed by the Trump administration with the bombs now tearing apart Gaza’s children. Hamas – isolated from the outside world – had no obvious route to re-arming.

    And as for plans for another October 7, both Hamas and the world were shocked its fighters managed to break out of the tiny, besieged territory of Gaza the first time. Hamas assumed it would be a suicide mission. It succeeded only because Israel had grown so complacent in its 17-year siege of the enclave, it imagined the 2.3 million people there were permanently entombed.

    Israel’s assumption was the Palestinians would never manage to find a way out of the giant concentration camp Israel had built for them. Israel will not likely drop its guard again any time soon.

    In other words, Israel is flat-out lying about its reasons for renewing the slaughter. It is lying as it has done over and over again, throughout the past 18 months.

    Israel always intended to reboot the genocide as soon as the Trump administration had been able to take credit for negotiating the ceasefire. Then they could work together to concoct a new set of pretexts – based on lies about who was violating the ceasefire – to justify why more of Gaza’s children needed to be murdered.

    Certainly, Joe Biden and his officials must be put on trial in the Hague for the first 15 months of the genocide. But it is Trump and his administration that are responsible for every Palestinian death from here on out.

    The post Israel Doesn’t Care about the Captives first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • I Resigned 22 Years Ago from the US Government over the Bush War on Iraq

    Two years ago, on March 19, 2003, I resigned from the US Department of State. I was the Deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in UlaanBaatar, Mongolia and the third U.S. government employee to resign in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. I resigned on the day the Bush administration began the 10-year U.S. war on Iraq, March 19, 2003.

    Twenty-two years later, I don’t regret my decision one bit.

    President Bush, like the presidents before and after him, lied. His specific lie was about the reason for the U.S. to attack and kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

    In 2003, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell’s lie was about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction when international weapons inspectors were very clear in their statements that after their exhaustive investigation there were no weapons of mass destruction.

    Instead, Bush was following the advisors who wrote the guidebook Project for the New American Century which called for the overthrow of seven countries in the Middle East, and Iraq was the first to be overthrown.

    The names of the authors of this war on the world, the “War on Terror,” still live in infamy: Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pearlman, Douglas Feith and of course, Vice President Dick Cheney.

    Bush had already lied about the reason to send U.S. military into Afghanistan. Instead of mounting an international police dragnet for the leaders of al Qaeda that planned and executed the events of 9/11, the Bush administration wanted to have a platform next to Iran from which to conduct a war on Iran.  But, the small, underfunded, poorly-trained Taliban kept the U.S. military and the highly trained and poorly motivated Afghan Army on the run for the 20 years that the U.S. was in Afghanistan.

    I was a part of the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in December 2001.  Our small group of diplomats realized very quickly that going after al Qaida was not the main objective of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.   The focus of U.S. policies and funding in 2002 was elsewhere…and it turned out to be in overthrowing Sadam Hussein in Iraq.

    If I had one more resignation….no, two more resignations

    One Resignation over Biden’s Complicity in the Genocide of Gaza

    In the next twenty-two years there have been numerous times I felt that if I had still been in the U.S. government, I would have resigned.

    President Joe Biden’s complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza which began in October 2023 deserved resignation…and 14 U.S. government employees have resigned over the weapons and encouragement the Biden administration gave to the Israeli government in the genocide of Gaza with over 60,000 Palestinians killed and tens of thousands still under the rubble by the time Biden left office, with no attempt at getting the Israeli government to stop the killings.

    And, let’s not forget the Obama-Biden complicity in the U.S. orchestrated events in Ukraine that, including the 2014 right wing, nationalist overthrow of the government and broken promises to Russia that Ukraine would not become a part of NATO that led to the terrible war between Ukraine and Russia and the fueling of that war by the Biden administration with weapons and total lack of any attempt to bring an end to the dangerous conflict.

    Another resignation over Trump’s Actions Domestically and Internationally-Project 2025

    And right now, another resignation would be coming from me if I were still in the U.S. government.

    Four Presidential administrations after I resigned-Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump- another roadmap for domestic and international lawbreaking and chaos is guiding a President: Project 2025.

    While Trump, like Bush before him, disavowed knowledge of any plan cooked up by advisors, Trump is playing into the hands of those with an agenda that will haunt him, an agenda much more wide-ranging than the one Bush allowed to happen.

    The rails are off for the destruction of the U.S. government with massive firings of civil servants.  Reasonable government reform and downsizing has become government destruction led by unelected Elon Musk, the world’s richest person who has some of the largest government contracts (many of which have been under investigation) leading a team of very young technology mavericks who have no knowledge of the government and are taking over the computer information of the entire U.S. government firing tens of thousands of employees with a keystroke.

    Trump is emboldened by the lack of Congressional outrage and now is threatening to invade Panama and Greenland and is bullying Canada about becoming a state of the United States, to which the Canadian public and officials have rightly responded with a hockey warning to Trump “Elbows up!”

    Shamefully, the “peace” candidate Trump humiliated and bullied Ukrainian president Zelensky in the White house in a meeting over the sale of Ukrainian minerals to pay the U.S. for its weapons in its war with Russia.

    While the “peace candidate” Trump’s go-to-envoy, billionaire real estate investor, Steve Witkoff did hammer out of much needed ceasefire in the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the ceasefire has now ended in an Israeli two-week blockade of Gaza of food, water, shelter and electricity and continuation of massive bombing of Gaza and $12 billion more from the U.S. in killer weapons.  As the ceasefire came into effect, Trump, true to his style, told the world that Palestinians need to leave Gaza so it can be built back into something “wonderful”…. but without them.

    And, don’t get me started on the kowtowing by government agencies, universities and corporations to Trump on the elimination of DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as his henchmen to erase women, minorities, disabled and gender in his white, male, nationalist agenda seemingly spearheaded by the very unqualified (on every level) Secretary of Offensive Pete Hegseth.

    So many issues…. and opportunities for resignation and resistance.

    From Resignation to Resistance

    I resigned two decades ago from criminal U.S. policies and now I am in my 22nd year of resistance to criminal policies of successive administrations.

    Working with many, many organizations on the local (Hawaii Peace and Justice, World Can’t Wait, Students and Faculty for Palestine, Hawaii For Palestine: Under the Olive Tree), national (CODEPINK: Women For Peace, Veterans For Peace,  Shut Down Drone Warfare) and international levels (International Peace Bureau, NO to NATO, No to War, World Beyond War, Women Cross DMZ, Pacific Peace Network, Ban Killer Drones) has given me outlets for protest and, very importantly, being with others who are deeply concerned about U.S. administration actions here in our own country and around the world.

    You Must Resist

    If you are not yet resisting, please join the millions who are on the streets, in Congress, at town hall meetings, writing emails and calling to end the assault on our country and the world. I have put links to many of the organizations with which I work. Please join us!!!

    The post I Resigned 22 Years Ago from the US Government over the Bush War on Iraq first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Dealing with Government Repression, 2025

    The attempted deportation of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, met with dramatic and widespread resistance, is one of the first, high profile, specifically targeted repressive acts by the Trump regime, but it won’t be the last. There is no question about their intention to create a permanently repressive and dictatorial government, a government of, by and for the overwhelmingly white and male billionaire elite and those sucking up to them for their own personal gain.

    Fortunately, this is not a popular government. Polls taken a few days ago by CNN, Reuters and Quinnipiac put Trump’s favorable ratings at an average of 44% and unfavorable ratings at 53%. On the economy CNN has him at 44-56%.

    Trump’s declining popular support and the rise over the last 40 days of a powerful, visible, resistance movement that shows every sign that it will continue to grow and expand (April 5!) is part of why Trump spoke at the Justice Department two days ago.

    His speech made clear the Trump intention to use the FBI, other federal agencies and the courts to try to silence those who oppose him. In the words of a Reuters story, “Trump has moved swiftly to exert control over the Justice Department (DOJ) since returning to office, challenging a decades-old tradition that the top U.S. law enforcement agency operates with a degree of independence from the White House.”

    The Brennan Center for Justice released an analysis in late January of what Project 2025 put forward as far as how the DOJ should function under a Trump regime. Here is some of what they said:

    Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, spent much of her Senate confirmation hearing attempting to allay concerns about the weaponization of the Justice Department, but she avoided direct questions about Trump’s pledge to prosecute specific adversaries. Trump has already signed two executive orders tasking the attorney general to conduct investigations into the previous administration. The politicization of the DOJ could occur in multiple ways.

    While not explicitly outlined in Project 2025, removing barriers between the DOJ and the White House could allow the president to exert more control over individual prosecutors and investigators as they evaluate cases and choose whom to prosecute. The president campaigned on the promise of investigating and prosecuting those he perceived to be his rivals. Political appointees like the attorney general could be removed if they refuse to pursue politically motivated investigations…

    The White House could assert more direct political influence on DOJ operations by removing expert civil servants, including people with decades of experience as prosecutors and investigators who have served under administrations of both parties. They could be replaced with ideological loyalists who lack key institutional knowledge that is essential for the daily operation of many law enforcement agencies. Indeed, dismissals and transfers of top justice department officials has already begun…

    The relationship between the White House and the Justice Department envisioned by the authors of Project 2025 would breed a culture of impunity. Although the document does not touch on pardons, by bringing the DOJ under its close control, the White House could order officials to turn a blind eye to criminal behavior committed by friends of the administration. The combination of the promise of pardons and the presidential immunity granted by the Supreme Court increases this risk.

    Successful Resistance

    There are a number of things which are essential to successful resistance to government repression. When I say “successful” I don’t mean that there won’t be casualties on our side, people behind bars, some for months or years, or people physically attacked and injured or worse, or job losses or greater economic hardship. It is clear that under a Trump/MAGA regime this is all likely to some degree.

    Several things which can lessen all of those negatives are these:

    -good legal representation in court. It is good to see the way that many lawyers and progressive legal organizations are stepping up to challenge, in most cases successfully, the Trump executive orders issued so far;

    -a loving community of support. This can be within an organization, within the local area where we live, via social media or other forms of communication, and/or just within a family. We all need to do our best to help foster and strengthen these necessary support networks;

    -broad community support when repression happens. If people and groups that are attacked, in whatever way, are not seen as, or do not come to be known as, honest and genuine human beings trying to be a positive force, it is going to be hard to rally and manifest the breadth of support probably necessary. Indeed, if we are such people already, attacks on us can immediately or over time serve to undercut support for the repressors, strengthen our movement of movements.

    I was a defendant in two major political trials during the Vietnam War, one in Harrisburg, Pa. and one in Rochester, NY. Because of the successful integration in both cases of good legal representation with effective community organizing leading to widespread and visible popular support, the Nixon Administration lost in the Harrisburg case and did poorly in the Rochester one. Though eight of us charged with six felonies were convicted there, a jury’s “recommendation of leniency” in sentencing and broad support within the Rochester community led to sentences of from one year to a year and a half. Prior to trial we fully expected to spend 5-10 years in prison because of what we had been caught doing overnight inside a federal building: destroying Selective Service files for young men about to be sent to Vietnam, finding incriminating documents within the (J. Edgar Hoover) FBI office and disrupting the offices of the US Attorney.

    It is truly a lesson of history: politically smart and legally strong responses to attempted efforts to harass or jail us can immediately or over time serve to undercut support for the repressive government and strengthen our movement of movements. Si, se puede!

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