radiofree.asia

Category: United States

  • A Step Towards Resolving a Long-standing Territorial Conflict or a Leap into the Abyss?

    A few days ago, Armenia and Azerbaijan published the text of the peace agreement, brokered by the United States. On paper, both sides pledged to respect each other’s territorial integrity and formally end the decades-long conflict. However, it remains a mystery, whether the countries will actually sign the agreement. Numerous mutual claims and disputes, the resolution of which cannot be expected in the near future, call into question the readiness for reconciliation demonstrated by Armenia and Azerbaijan. Moreover, the draft itself, as well as the additional agreements, raises many doubts about who would really benefit from a potential truce.

    Thus, one of a few agreements that was actually signed and entered into force, gives the United States an exclusive right to develop the Zangezur Corridor (a strategic transport route between Azerbaijan and the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic) for 99 years. As usual, when it comes to America’s interests, it rushes to actions. According to the White House, the project — which has already been branded it the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity — is expected to strengthen economic ties with the region and increase energy exports. At the same time, the United States has cemented its presence in the South Caucasus, which is also being presented as another triumph of Washington’s diplomacy.

    As for Baku and Yerevan – while the former is the primary beneficiary of the potential peace, the latter is relegated to the role of a bargaining chip. Azerbaijan gets the opportunity not only to legally strengthen its control over the territories it has gained, but also to become a key energy center in the South Caucasus. Moreover, one should not forget that restrictions on defense cooperation between Azerbaijan and the United States had also been lifted. The mere possibility of receiving weapons from the United States gives Azerbaijan more confidence and freedom of action, which leads to increased pressure on Armenia. Thus, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan has already repeatedly tried to force relevant amendments to the Armenian Constitution, insisting to do it as quickly as possible.

    It turns out that everyone, except Armenia, gains something. Trump receives the status of “peacemaker” and “noble tenant,” Aliyev – support from powerful patrons, while Nikol Pashinyan, Prime Minister of Armenia, is left with several problems which could lead to even greater weakening of the country’s geopolitical position. After losing Nagorno-Karabakh and failing to receive clear answers about the fate of political prisoners in Azerbaijan and the possibility of returning ethnic Armenians who fled hostilities in 2023, Armenia quickly lost its main negotiating tool, allowing the United States to take control of the Zangezur Corridor. In the future, this could lead to serious internal political instability and threaten the territorial integrity of Armenia.

    The post A Step Towards Resolving a Long-standing Territorial Conflict or a Leap into the Abyss? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump’s Assault Upon the United Nations is at Odds with U.S. Public Opinion

    If one examines Donald Trump’s approach to world affairs since his entry into American politics, it should come as no surprise that he has worked to undermine the United Nations.

    The United Nation is based on international cooperation, as well as on what the UN Charter calls “the equal rights … of nations large and small.” It seeks to end “the scourge of war” and to “promote social progress” for the people of the world.

    By contrast, Trump has advocated a nationalist path for the United States. Campaigning for the presidency in 2016, he proclaimed that “America First” would “be the major and overriding theme of my administration.” In his 2017 inaugural address, he promised: “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first.”

    Indeed, “America First” became his rallying cry as he championed an unusually aggressive nationalism. “You know what I am?” Trump asked a crowd in Houston. “I’m a nationalist, O.K.? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist!” Sometimes, his displays of superpatriotism―which appealed strongly to right-wing audiences―included hugging and kissing the American flag.

    Given this nationalist orientation, Trump turned during his first administration to dismantling key institutions of the United Nations and of the broader system of international law. He withdrew the U.S. government from the Paris Climate Agreement, the World Health Organization, the UN Human Rights Council, and the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). He also had the U.S. government vote against the Global Compact on Refugees, suspend funding for the UN Population Fund and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and impose sanctions on a key international agency, the International Criminal Court, which investigates and prosecutes perpetrators of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.

    Nevertheless, many of these Trump measures were reversed under the subsequent presidency of Joseph Biden, which saw the U.S. government rejoin and bolster most of the international organizations attacked by his predecessor.

    With Trump’s 2020 election to a second term, however, the U.S. government’s nationalist onslaught resumed. In January 2025, U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on her nomination to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, assailed the world organization, and promised to use her new post to promote Trump’s “America First” agenda. “Our tax dollars,” she argued, “should not be complicit in propping up entities that are counter to American interests.” Joining the attack, Senator Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the committee chair, sharply criticized the United Nations and called for a reevaluation of every UN agency to determine if its actions benefited the United States. If they didn’t, he said, “hold them accountable until the answer is a resounding yes.” He added that “the U.S. should seriously examine if further contributions and, indeed, participation in the UN is even beneficial to the American people.”

    Simultaneously, a new Trump administration steamroller began advancing upon UN entities and other international institutions viewed as out of line with his “America First” priorities. At his direction, the U.S. government withdrew from the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, refused to participate in the UN Relief and Works Agency, announced plans to withdraw from UNESCO, and imposed new sanctions on the International Criminal Court. In the UN Security Council, the U.S. government employed its veto power to block a June 2025 resolution demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and release of all hostages―a measure supported by the 14 other members of that UN entity.

    The Trump administration has also worked to cripple the United Nations by reducing its very meager income. In July 2025, rescissions legislation sponsored by the administration and passed by the Republican-controlled Congress pulled back some $1 billion in funding that U.S. legislation had allocated to the world organization in previous budgets. This action will have devastating effects on a broad variety of UN programs, including UNICEF, the UN Development Program, the UN Environment Program, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and the UN Fund for Victims of Torture.

    Moreover, the administration’s fiscal 2026 budget proposes ending UN Peacekeeping payments and pausing most other contributions to the United Nations. Although U.S. funding of the United Nations is actually quite minimal―for example, dues of only $820 million per year for the regular UN budget―the U.S. government has now compiled a debt of $1.5 billion (the highest debt of any nation) to the regular budget and another $1.3 billion to the separate UN Peacekeeping budget.

    The Trump administration’s hostility to the United Nations is sharply at odds with the American public’s attitude toward the world organization. For example, a Pew Research Center poll in late March 2025 found that 63 percent of U.S. respondents said that their country benefited from UN membership―up 3 percent from the previous spring. And 57 percent of Americans polled had a favorable view of the United Nations―up 5 percent since 2024.

    Furthermore, a University of Maryland public opinion survey in June 2025 found that 84 percent of Americans it polled wanted the U.S. government to work with the United Nations at current levels or more. This included 83 percent supporting UNICEF, 81 percent UN Peacekeeping, 81 percent the UN World Food Program, 79 percent the World Health Organization, and 73 percent the UN Environment Program.

    Nor was this strong backing for a global approach to global affairs a fluke. Even when it came to the International Criminal Court, an independent international entity that the U.S. government has never joined and that Trump had roundly denounced and twice ordered sanctioned, 62 percent of Americans surveyed expressed their approval of the organization.

    Trump’s “America First” approach can certainly stir up his hardcore followers. But most Americans recognize that life in the modern world requires moving beyond a narrow nationalism.

    The post Trump’s Assault Upon the United Nations is at Odds with U.S. Public Opinion first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Report On Human Rights Violations In The United States In 2024

    2024, as an election year in the United States, was a year of special concern that featured aggravating political strife and social division. Such a landscape offers an opportunity to review the state of human rights in the country in an intensive manner.

    Money controls U.S. politics, with partisan interests above voter rights. The total spending for the 2024 U.S. election cycle exceeded 15.9 billion U.S. dollars, once again setting a new record for the high cost of American political campaigns. Interest groups, operating in the “gray areas” beyond the effective reach of current U.S. campaign laws, used money to wantonly manipulate the fundamental logic and actual functioning of U.S. politics.

    The post The Report On Human Rights Violations In The United States In 2024 appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Pulling the Levers of Power: How the Trump Administration Hijacked Public Broadcasting

    On May 1, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” instructing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to cease nearly all federal funding for National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The order prohibited local public radio and television stations, and any other recipient of CPB funds, from using federal grants to purchase programming from these public media organizations and mandated a review of existing grants for compliance with the administration’s ideological priorities. The Trump administration’s attempt to cut public media funding is part of their “rescission” strategy—a process to roll back previously appropriated budgets.

    The House gave final approval on July 18, 2025, to the Trump administration’s plan to rescind approximately $9 billion in previously allocated funds. This measure included a $1.1 billion cut to the CPB, effectively eliminating all federal support for NPR, PBS, and their member stations. Following this, the CPB announced on August 1, 2025, that it would begin an orderly shutdown of its operations after the Senate-Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill excluded its funding for the first time in nearly sixty years. These actions are part of a broader initiative spearheaded by the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which aims to streamline the federal government, eliminate programs deemed unnecessary by the administration, and reduce bureaucratic inefficiency.

    While the administration claims its efforts are motivated by fiscal responsibility and safeguarding taxpayer dollars, critics argue that these moves are politically motivated attempts to silence dissent and reshape the media landscape to favor partisan narratives. Clayton Weimers, Executive Director of Reporters Without Borders USA, told Project Censored, “The administration frames the cuts as ‘efficiency cuts,’ but that is not necessarily the case. They frame it that way because they decided that’s a more palatable way to sell it to the American people. But at the end of the day, public media broadcasting costs the American taxpayer, on average, $1.60 per year, and the level of value that Americans get out of that $1.60 per year is tremendous.”

    The CPB, established in 1967 as a private nonprofit corporation, was specifically designed to insulate public broadcasting from political interference, with its charter expressly forbidding government control over broadcasting content while ensuring that over 70 percent of federal appropriations flow directly to more than 1,500 local affiliate stations rather than centralized bureaucracies.

    “It’s really important that people understand how public media is funded in this country,” Weimers shared with Project Censored. Local affiliates have the freedom to purchase programming from NPR and PBS that caters to their audiences’ preferences. He explained how Trump’s executive order essentially bans affiliate stations from buying this programming, thereby infringing on their First Amendment rights. Weimers emphasized that “it is up to the individual local independent stations what they want to show their audience on air, and they should make that decision based on what their audiences want to see and what their audience wants to hear, not based on what politicians in Washington think they ought to hear.” He challenged the Trump administration’s claim that public media is a biased tool of his political opponents, “Some of the editorial coverage might lean left and the audience might lean left, but it’s a complete mischaracterization. Public media in this country has over a thousand different broadcast, television, and radio stations. It’s not just any one thing. There isn’t one political line across all of public media.”

    Other voices in the media industry echo Weimers’s statements regarding the motivations behind the Trump administration’s CPB rescissions. Victor Pickard, Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, explained to Project Censored that public media was created to address gaps in commercial broadcasting and to ensure that all audiences, especially low-income communities and communities of color, would have access to high-quality, trusted content. Pickard warned that defunding public media will force communities to “learn that lesson once again” about the limitations of commercial broadcasting, which “will never provide all of the information and communication needs of a democratic society.”

    Lisa Graves, founder and Executive Director of True North Research, told Project Censored that the Trump administration’s cuts to the CPB are a systematic effort to undermine independent journalism, not address legitimate concerns about bias or fiscal policy. Graves explained that the targeting of NPR and PBS stems from coordinated and widespread disinformation and propaganda being perpetuated by the Trump administration. “These entities are important public investments that help bring national, international, as well as local news into our communities,” Graves told Project Censored. “The administration claims that there is political bias or partisan bias at these outlets, when in fact they are just covering the news. … The attack on public broadcasting is an attack on facts, truth, and journalistic independence. It has to be seen as such.”

    This strategy poses an Achilles’ heel: While the rhetoric employed by the Trump administration targets elite, national outlets, the most damaging impact will fall on the hyperlocal media infrastructure already struggling to survive. Many small-town, rural, and tribal affiliates rely on CPB funding and syndicated content from NPR and PBS to fill gaps in local coverage, provide educational programming, and serve communities with little to no other media access, otherwise known as news deserts. Eliminating this support could crater regional journalism ecosystems—leading to programming losses, station closures, and widespread layoffs that ripple down the media supply chain. In many conservative and underserved communities, where public broadcasting often remains the only consistent source of local and noncommercial news, the cuts could unintentionally harm the very constituencies that the defunding narrative claims to serve.

    Noting that public media receive only paltry funding from federal sources, Pickard called the defunding of the CPB a “tragic irony,” because it will “hurt individual stations, especially in rural and conservative areas in states such as Alaska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Texas.” He explained to Project Censored that some stations depend on CPB funding for 25–50 percent of their budgets and “will likely go under if federal subsidies are entirely cut, leaving news deserts in their wake.”

    The Trump administration frames these funding cuts as fiscal responsibility, but smaller local news outlets view them as politically motivated attacks and part of a campaign to delegitimize public media and the services they provide. NPR and three Colorado public radio stations filed a lawsuit alleging that the May executive order is “textbook retaliation and viewpoint-based discrimination” in violation of the First Amendment. PBS, along with Lakeland PBS in rural Minnesota, also filed a similar lawsuit, disputing claims of bias and asserting that the Constitution forbids the President from arbitrating content. These lawsuits suggest Trump has far exceeded the expansive powers of the presidency, usurping congressional prerogatives and eroding free speech rights.

    Seth Stern, Director of Advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, told Project Censored that the Trump administration has adopted what he calls a “throw-it-at-the-wall approach,” where they challenge the Constitution despite knowing most cases will fail on constitutional grounds. However, Stern explained that the strategy behind this approach is to find any legal opening the administration can exploit. “They are looking for the case they win, looking for the one instance where the courts give them an opening, and once they have that opening, they are going to barge through it.”

    The Trump administration has adopted a multifaceted strategy to politicize public media by portraying these institutions as adversaries rather than recognizing them as informational resources or allies. Through rhetorical attacks, the administration frames public media and their content as ideologically biased, financially irresponsible, and increasingly unnecessary. This approach is implemented through executive orders and policies that employ loaded language such as “woke propaganda,” citing questionable fiscal justifications like “cost efficiency,” downplaying societal value, and implementing disruptive measures that create instability for essential broadcasting programs, ultimately exploiting public media rather than leveraging its potential for effective public communication.

    Experts like Reporters Without Borders’ Weimers contend that the Trump administration has “shown a very strong disposition towards using whatever levers of power they have to punish those who oppose their agenda in any way.” Weimers emphasized to Project Censored that this targeting can affect public media outlets simply for “accurately reporting on what they’re doing.” The implications of these executive actions extend far beyond public media, he cautioned. “There is no reason that that would not also impact nonprofit media that publish content that the Trump administration does not like, even for-profit media.”

    Weimers warned of a troubling escalation, characterizing the Trump administration’s campaign against public media as “a slippery slope.” Once the government gains control over public media and broadcast licensees, he argued, “they are one step closer to getting their hands on the rest of the media as well.”

    Pickard told Project Censored that while the federal funding cuts will have a “chilling effect” on an already compromised media system, they also open the possibility of “building something entirely new out of the wreckage.” That wreckage is not merely financial—it is the collapse of a decades-old compact between government, media, and the public.

    But from that imminent destruction comes a rare opportunity to reimagine public media not as a government-funded institution vulnerable to political whims, but as a truly community-owned resource, insulated from both partisan interference and commercial pressures. Rebuilding cannot depend on Washington reversing course or a future administration restoring support. Instead, citizens must take action: establishing community-supported journalism cooperatives, developing hyperlocal news networks sustained by their audiences, and building media infrastructures accountable to neighbors rather than distant politicians or corporate shareholders. The Trump administration may have dismantled decades of public media investment, but it cannot destroy the fundamental human need for trustworthy, bipartisan information and community connection.

    Originally published on https://www.projectcensored.org/trump-admin-hijacked-public-broadcasting/

    The post Pulling the Levers of Power: How the Trump Administration Hijacked Public Broadcasting first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Pulling the Levers of Power: How the Trump Administration Hijacked Public Broadcasting

    On May 1, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” instructing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to cease nearly all federal funding for National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The order prohibited local public radio and television stations, and any other recipient of CPB funds, from using federal grants to purchase programming from these public media organizations and mandated a review of existing grants for compliance with the administration’s ideological priorities. The Trump administration’s attempt to cut public media funding is part of their “rescission” strategy—a process to roll back previously appropriated budgets.

    The House gave final approval on July 18, 2025, to the Trump administration’s plan to rescind approximately $9 billion in previously allocated funds. This measure included a $1.1 billion cut to the CPB, effectively eliminating all federal support for NPR, PBS, and their member stations. Following this, the CPB announced on August 1, 2025, that it would begin an orderly shutdown of its operations after the Senate-Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill excluded its funding for the first time in nearly sixty years. These actions are part of a broader initiative spearheaded by the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which aims to streamline the federal government, eliminate programs deemed unnecessary by the administration, and reduce bureaucratic inefficiency.

    While the administration claims its efforts are motivated by fiscal responsibility and safeguarding taxpayer dollars, critics argue that these moves are politically motivated attempts to silence dissent and reshape the media landscape to favor partisan narratives. Clayton Weimers, Executive Director of Reporters Without Borders USA, told Project Censored, “The administration frames the cuts as ‘efficiency cuts,’ but that is not necessarily the case. They frame it that way because they decided that’s a more palatable way to sell it to the American people. But at the end of the day, public media broadcasting costs the American taxpayer, on average, $1.60 per year, and the level of value that Americans get out of that $1.60 per year is tremendous.”

    The CPB, established in 1967 as a private nonprofit corporation, was specifically designed to insulate public broadcasting from political interference, with its charter expressly forbidding government control over broadcasting content while ensuring that over 70 percent of federal appropriations flow directly to more than 1,500 local affiliate stations rather than centralized bureaucracies.

    “It’s really important that people understand how public media is funded in this country,” Weimers shared with Project Censored. Local affiliates have the freedom to purchase programming from NPR and PBS that caters to their audiences’ preferences. He explained how Trump’s executive order essentially bans affiliate stations from buying this programming, thereby infringing on their First Amendment rights. Weimers emphasized that “it is up to the individual local independent stations what they want to show their audience on air, and they should make that decision based on what their audiences want to see and what their audience wants to hear, not based on what politicians in Washington think they ought to hear.” He challenged the Trump administration’s claim that public media is a biased tool of his political opponents, “Some of the editorial coverage might lean left and the audience might lean left, but it’s a complete mischaracterization. Public media in this country has over a thousand different broadcast, television, and radio stations. It’s not just any one thing. There isn’t one political line across all of public media.”

    Other voices in the media industry echo Weimers’s statements regarding the motivations behind the Trump administration’s CPB rescissions. Victor Pickard, Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, explained to Project Censored that public media was created to address gaps in commercial broadcasting and to ensure that all audiences, especially low-income communities and communities of color, would have access to high-quality, trusted content. Pickard warned that defunding public media will force communities to “learn that lesson once again” about the limitations of commercial broadcasting, which “will never provide all of the information and communication needs of a democratic society.”

    Lisa Graves, founder and Executive Director of True North Research, told Project Censored that the Trump administration’s cuts to the CPB are a systematic effort to undermine independent journalism, not address legitimate concerns about bias or fiscal policy. Graves explained that the targeting of NPR and PBS stems from coordinated and widespread disinformation and propaganda being perpetuated by the Trump administration. “These entities are important public investments that help bring national, international, as well as local news into our communities,” Graves told Project Censored. “The administration claims that there is political bias or partisan bias at these outlets, when in fact they are just covering the news. … The attack on public broadcasting is an attack on facts, truth, and journalistic independence. It has to be seen as such.”

    This strategy poses an Achilles’ heel: While the rhetoric employed by the Trump administration targets elite, national outlets, the most damaging impact will fall on the hyperlocal media infrastructure already struggling to survive. Many small-town, rural, and tribal affiliates rely on CPB funding and syndicated content from NPR and PBS to fill gaps in local coverage, provide educational programming, and serve communities with little to no other media access, otherwise known as news deserts. Eliminating this support could crater regional journalism ecosystems—leading to programming losses, station closures, and widespread layoffs that ripple down the media supply chain. In many conservative and underserved communities, where public broadcasting often remains the only consistent source of local and noncommercial news, the cuts could unintentionally harm the very constituencies that the defunding narrative claims to serve.

    Noting that public media receive only paltry funding from federal sources, Pickard called the defunding of the CPB a “tragic irony,” because it will “hurt individual stations, especially in rural and conservative areas in states such as Alaska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Texas.” He explained to Project Censored that some stations depend on CPB funding for 25–50 percent of their budgets and “will likely go under if federal subsidies are entirely cut, leaving news deserts in their wake.”

    The Trump administration frames these funding cuts as fiscal responsibility, but smaller local news outlets view them as politically motivated attacks and part of a campaign to delegitimize public media and the services they provide. NPR and three Colorado public radio stations filed a lawsuit alleging that the May executive order is “textbook retaliation and viewpoint-based discrimination” in violation of the First Amendment. PBS, along with Lakeland PBS in rural Minnesota, also filed a similar lawsuit, disputing claims of bias and asserting that the Constitution forbids the President from arbitrating content. These lawsuits suggest Trump has far exceeded the expansive powers of the presidency, usurping congressional prerogatives and eroding free speech rights.

    Seth Stern, Director of Advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, told Project Censored that the Trump administration has adopted what he calls a “throw-it-at-the-wall approach,” where they challenge the Constitution despite knowing most cases will fail on constitutional grounds. However, Stern explained that the strategy behind this approach is to find any legal opening the administration can exploit. “They are looking for the case they win, looking for the one instance where the courts give them an opening, and once they have that opening, they are going to barge through it.”

    The Trump administration has adopted a multifaceted strategy to politicize public media by portraying these institutions as adversaries rather than recognizing them as informational resources or allies. Through rhetorical attacks, the administration frames public media and their content as ideologically biased, financially irresponsible, and increasingly unnecessary. This approach is implemented through executive orders and policies that employ loaded language such as “woke propaganda,” citing questionable fiscal justifications like “cost efficiency,” downplaying societal value, and implementing disruptive measures that create instability for essential broadcasting programs, ultimately exploiting public media rather than leveraging its potential for effective public communication.

    Experts like Reporters Without Borders’ Weimers contend that the Trump administration has “shown a very strong disposition towards using whatever levers of power they have to punish those who oppose their agenda in any way.” Weimers emphasized to Project Censored that this targeting can affect public media outlets simply for “accurately reporting on what they’re doing.” The implications of these executive actions extend far beyond public media, he cautioned. “There is no reason that that would not also impact nonprofit media that publish content that the Trump administration does not like, even for-profit media.”

    Weimers warned of a troubling escalation, characterizing the Trump administration’s campaign against public media as “a slippery slope.” Once the government gains control over public media and broadcast licensees, he argued, “they are one step closer to getting their hands on the rest of the media as well.”

    Pickard told Project Censored that while the federal funding cuts will have a “chilling effect” on an already compromised media system, they also open the possibility of “building something entirely new out of the wreckage.” That wreckage is not merely financial—it is the collapse of a decades-old compact between government, media, and the public.

    But from that imminent destruction comes a rare opportunity to reimagine public media not as a government-funded institution vulnerable to political whims, but as a truly community-owned resource, insulated from both partisan interference and commercial pressures. Rebuilding cannot depend on Washington reversing course or a future administration restoring support. Instead, citizens must take action: establishing community-supported journalism cooperatives, developing hyperlocal news networks sustained by their audiences, and building media infrastructures accountable to neighbors rather than distant politicians or corporate shareholders. The Trump administration may have dismantled decades of public media investment, but it cannot destroy the fundamental human need for trustworthy, bipartisan information and community connection.

    Originally published on https://www.projectcensored.org/trump-admin-hijacked-public-broadcasting/

    The post Pulling the Levers of Power: How the Trump Administration Hijacked Public Broadcasting first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Human Rights Report on Venezuela Doesn’t Pass the Mirror Test

    The US State Department’s latest Human Rights Report condemns Venezuela for serious abuses. Weaponizing human rights, accusations are selectively applied to serve a destabilization campaign. In this article, a mirror is held up to Uncle Sam to see how well “America the beautiful” holds up to the same charges, while also exposing the role of sanctions, compliant NGOs, and military threats in Washington’s hybrid war on Venezuela.

    The carceral state

    The US report indicts Venezuela for “arbitrary or unlawful killings.” Meanwhile, in the land of the free, police killings hit a record high in 2024. Impunity is high with charges brought against offending officers in fewer than 3% of cases. The FBI itself admits that transparency is hampered.

    Prolonged solitary confinement, recognized as torturous, is widespread in US prisons and ICE detention centers, affecting over 122,000 people daily. A US Senate report on torture documented CIA abuses, yet meaningful accountability has failed. Hundreds of political prisoners languish in penitentiaries in the US and in Guantánamo, the majority of whom are people of color. Roughly 70% of local jail inmates are held in pretrial detention, often pressured with coercive plea deals, undermining equality before the law.

    The US has the largest prison population in the world (about 1.8 to 2 million) and an incarceration rate over 2.5 times greater than Venezuela’s. Even after release, about four million citizens remain disenfranchised due to felony convictions, disproportionately affecting Black communities.

    Freedom to protest

    Washington faults Venezuela for limiting freedom of expression. Yet, numerous US states have passed or considered anti-protest laws (e.g., “critical infrastructure” bills) that civil-liberties groups warn chill peaceful assembly.

    Reporters without Borders (RSF) observes, “the country is experiencing its first significant and prolonged decline in press freedom in modern history.” This accusation is particularly notable because RSF is strongly biased in support of the US and receives funding from the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy. Arrests and detentions of journalists surged in 2024; schoolbook bans spiked across 29 states. In April 2024, Congress reauthorized and expanded FISA §702, enabling warrantless surveillance according to legal scholars.

    As the US-based Black Alliance for Peace observes, “domestic repression in the US colonial/capitalist core is imperative to support the aggressive militarism abroad.”

    This coupling of domestic subjugation with the international is painfully evident with the US imperialist/Israeli zionist aggression abroad in Gaza, while pro-Palestine advocates are suppressed at home. Zionist curricula are being imposed at all levels of education; at least half of the US states now require so-called “Holocaust education.” Pro-Palestine faculty, students, and staff are being purged.

    Washington’s accusation of Venezuelan antisemitism cites President Nicolás Maduro calling Israel’s assault on Gaza “the most brutal genocide” since Hitler. Its charge of antisemitism conflates Venezuela’s political criticism of the zionist state with hatred of the Jewish religion. If “antisemitism” includes Muslim Arabs, US culpability is so blatant that it requires no additional documentation.

    Meanwhile, the US accuses Venezuela of failing to protect refugees and asylum seekers. This projection does not deserve any rebuttal other than to mention that the US has a documented history of family separation of migrants and deaths in custody.

    Likewise, the world’s rogue nation does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and similar institutions, while reproaching Caracas for attempting to “misuse international law.” If anything, the Maduro government has gone out of its way to defend international law with initiatives upholding the UN Charter.

    Social welfare

    The US report scolds Venezuela for a minimum wage “under the poverty line.” Yet, its own federal minimum wage has been $7.25/hour since 2009; insufficient to lift a full-time worker out of poverty.

    A UN special rapporteur for human rights estimated that sanctions – more properly “unilateral coercive measures” – by the US and allies have caused over 100,000 excess deaths in Venezuela. Yet purported human rights NGOs Amnesty International (AI), Human Rights Watch (HRC), and the Washington Office on Latin American (WOLA) omit this glaring human toll in their reports on human rights in Venezuela.

    Predictably, they make nearly identical evaluations of the Venezuelan human rights situation as does the US-dominated Organization of American States (OAS) and the US State Department itself.  Their reports (AI, HRW, WOLA, US, OAS) either ignore or, at best, make passing references to the sanctions. No mention is made of the illegality of sanctions under international law – they are a form of collective punishment.

    In other contexts, the NGOs have acknowledged the horrific human impact of sanctions. Regardless, they were in a panic that the Trump administration might ease sanctions over the Chevron license, thus rewarding bad behavior. For these soft power apparatchiks of the US imperial project, the pain endured by the Venezuelans is worth it. WOLA has been particularly vocal about counseling against direct US military intervention, when sanctions afford an equally lethal but less obvious form of coercion.

    Hybrid war on Venezuela

    In his first term, Donald Trump levied a $15m bounty on Maduro, framing the Venezuela government as a transnational criminal enterprise tied to terrorism. This lowered the potential threshold for extraordinary US measures. Joe Biden seamlessly upped the bounty to $25m, which Trump then doubled on August 7.

    Evidence-free allegations linking the Venezuelan president to the dismantled Tren de Aragua drug cartel, the fictitious Cartel of the Suns criminal organization, and the actual Sinaloa Cartel (which is in Mexico) were conveniently used to justify invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which is supposed to be a wartime measure. This is coupled with the designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and periodic threats of US military intervention.

    This is from the country that is the world’s biggest launderer of illicit drug money and the largest consumer of illicit drugs. Even US agencies recognize that very few of these US-bound drugs move through Venezuela.

    Most recently, the US deployed an additional 4,000 troops and warships to the Caribbean and around Latin America. Venezuela responded by mobilizing its navy in its territorial waters.

    Leading Venezuelan opposition politician María Corina Machado expressed her “immense gratitude” for the imperialist measures against her country. In contrast, thousands of her compatriots took the opposite stance and marched in protest. Venezuela-American Michelle Ellner calls the US policy “a green light for open-ended US military action abroad, bypassing congressional approval, sidestepping international law.”

    Weaponizing human rights for regime change

    Venezuela is caught in a hybrid war that is as deadly as if it were being bombed. Washington’s strangling of its economy, making wild accusations against its leaders, sponsoring opponents, and threatening armed interventions are all designed to provoke and destabilize. Venezuela’s response is best seen as self-defense against an immensely powerful foreign bully that exploits any weakness, imperfection, or lapse in vigilance.

    The US weaponizes human rights to overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. Its exaggerated or outright fabricated allegations are echoed by the “human rights industry.” Where problems exist, they must be viewed in the context of US economic warfare, which has strained Venezuelan institutions. North Americans genuinely concerned about Venezuelan human rights should be highly skeptical of corporate media reports and recognize the need to end US interference. Escalating provocations will only necessitate Venezuela’s greater defensiveness.

    The post US Human Rights Report on Venezuela Doesn’t Pass the Mirror Test first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Human Rights Report on Venezuela Doesn’t Pass the Mirror Test

    The US State Department’s latest Human Rights Report condemns Venezuela for serious abuses. Weaponizing human rights, accusations are selectively applied to serve a destabilization campaign. In this article, a mirror is held up to Uncle Sam to see how well “America the beautiful” holds up to the same charges, while also exposing the role of sanctions, compliant NGOs, and military threats in Washington’s hybrid war on Venezuela.

    The carceral state

    The US report indicts Venezuela for “arbitrary or unlawful killings.” Meanwhile, in the land of the free, police killings hit a record high in 2024. Impunity is high with charges brought against offending officers in fewer than 3% of cases. The FBI itself admits that transparency is hampered.

    Prolonged solitary confinement, recognized as torturous, is widespread in US prisons and ICE detention centers, affecting over 122,000 people daily. A US Senate report on torture documented CIA abuses, yet meaningful accountability has failed. Hundreds of political prisoners languish in penitentiaries in the US and in Guantánamo, the majority of whom are people of color. Roughly 70% of local jail inmates are held in pretrial detention, often pressured with coercive plea deals, undermining equality before the law.

    The US has the largest prison population in the world (about 1.8 to 2 million) and an incarceration rate over 2.5 times greater than Venezuela’s. Even after release, about four million citizens remain disenfranchised due to felony convictions, disproportionately affecting Black communities.

    Freedom to protest

    Washington faults Venezuela for limiting freedom of expression. Yet, numerous US states have passed or considered anti-protest laws (e.g., “critical infrastructure” bills) that civil-liberties groups warn chill peaceful assembly.

    Reporters without Borders (RSF) observes, “the country is experiencing its first significant and prolonged decline in press freedom in modern history.” This accusation is particularly notable because RSF is strongly biased in support of the US and receives funding from the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy. Arrests and detentions of journalists surged in 2024; schoolbook bans spiked across 29 states. In April 2024, Congress reauthorized and expanded FISA §702, enabling warrantless surveillance according to legal scholars.

    As the US-based Black Alliance for Peace observes, “domestic repression in the US colonial/capitalist core is imperative to support the aggressive militarism abroad.”

    This coupling of domestic subjugation with the international is painfully evident with the US imperialist/Israeli zionist aggression abroad in Gaza, while pro-Palestine advocates are suppressed at home. Zionist curricula are being imposed at all levels of education; at least half of the US states now require so-called “Holocaust education.” Pro-Palestine faculty, students, and staff are being purged.

    Washington’s accusation of Venezuelan antisemitism cites President Nicolás Maduro calling Israel’s assault on Gaza “the most brutal genocide” since Hitler. Its charge of antisemitism conflates Venezuela’s political criticism of the zionist state with hatred of the Jewish religion. If “antisemitism” includes Muslim Arabs, US culpability is so blatant that it requires no additional documentation.

    Meanwhile, the US accuses Venezuela of failing to protect refugees and asylum seekers. This projection does not deserve any rebuttal other than to mention that the US has a documented history of family separation of migrants and deaths in custody.

    Likewise, the world’s rogue nation does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and similar institutions, while reproaching Caracas for attempting to “misuse international law.” If anything, the Maduro government has gone out of its way to defend international law with initiatives upholding the UN Charter.

    Social welfare

    The US report scolds Venezuela for a minimum wage “under the poverty line.” Yet, its own federal minimum wage has been $7.25/hour since 2009; insufficient to lift a full-time worker out of poverty.

    A UN special rapporteur for human rights estimated that sanctions – more properly “unilateral coercive measures” – by the US and allies have caused over 100,000 excess deaths in Venezuela. Yet purported human rights NGOs Amnesty International (AI), Human Rights Watch (HRC), and the Washington Office on Latin American (WOLA) omit this glaring human toll in their reports on human rights in Venezuela.

    Predictably, they make nearly identical evaluations of the Venezuelan human rights situation as does the US-dominated Organization of American States (OAS) and the US State Department itself.  Their reports (AI, HRW, WOLA, US, OAS) either ignore or, at best, make passing references to the sanctions. No mention is made of the illegality of sanctions under international law – they are a form of collective punishment.

    In other contexts, the NGOs have acknowledged the horrific human impact of sanctions. Regardless, they were in a panic that the Trump administration might ease sanctions over the Chevron license, thus rewarding bad behavior. For these soft power apparatchiks of the US imperial project, the pain endured by the Venezuelans is worth it. WOLA has been particularly vocal about counseling against direct US military intervention, when sanctions afford an equally lethal but less obvious form of coercion.

    Hybrid war on Venezuela

    In his first term, Donald Trump levied a $15m bounty on Maduro, framing the Venezuela government as a transnational criminal enterprise tied to terrorism. This lowered the potential threshold for extraordinary US measures. Joe Biden seamlessly upped the bounty to $25m, which Trump then doubled on August 7.

    Evidence-free allegations linking the Venezuelan president to the dismantled Tren de Aragua drug cartel, the fictitious Cartel of the Suns criminal organization, and the actual Sinaloa Cartel (which is in Mexico) were conveniently used to justify invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which is supposed to be a wartime measure. This is coupled with the designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and periodic threats of US military intervention.

    This is from the country that is the world’s biggest launderer of illicit drug money and the largest consumer of illicit drugs. Even US agencies recognize that very few of these US-bound drugs move through Venezuela.

    Most recently, the US deployed an additional 4,000 troops and warships to the Caribbean and around Latin America. Venezuela responded by mobilizing its navy in its territorial waters.

    Leading Venezuelan opposition politician María Corina Machado expressed her “immense gratitude” for the imperialist measures against her country. In contrast, thousands of her compatriots took the opposite stance and marched in protest. Venezuela-American Michelle Ellner calls the US policy “a green light for open-ended US military action abroad, bypassing congressional approval, sidestepping international law.”

    Weaponizing human rights for regime change

    Venezuela is caught in a hybrid war that is as deadly as if it were being bombed. Washington’s strangling of its economy, making wild accusations against its leaders, sponsoring opponents, and threatening armed interventions are all designed to provoke and destabilize. Venezuela’s response is best seen as self-defense against an immensely powerful foreign bully that exploits any weakness, imperfection, or lapse in vigilance.

    The US weaponizes human rights to overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. Its exaggerated or outright fabricated allegations are echoed by the “human rights industry.” Where problems exist, they must be viewed in the context of US economic warfare, which has strained Venezuelan institutions. North Americans genuinely concerned about Venezuelan human rights should be highly skeptical of corporate media reports and recognize the need to end US interference. Escalating provocations will only necessitate Venezuela’s greater defensiveness.

    The post US Human Rights Report on Venezuela Doesn’t Pass the Mirror Test first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • UK agrees to drop ‘backdoor’ mandate for Apple

    US director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said on Monday the UK had agreed to drop its mandate for iPhone maker Apple to provide a “backdoor” that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens. Gabbard issued the statement on X, saying she had worked for months with Britain, along with…

    The post UK agrees to drop ‘backdoor’ mandate for Apple appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • America Meets Its Hidden Destiny

    Healthy societies revel in who they are. Unhealthy societies view themselves in terms of either an ignominious past, current enemies who endanger them, or internal elements degrading the true, virtuous nature of the commune and sapping its strength. The United States through most of its history was in the first category. Today, it is clearly in the second. Therein lies our national tragedy – and our precipitous slide into Fascism American style.

    This historic shift – with profound implications – has not been driven by tangible factors, originating within itself or externally, but strikingly by intangibles. The country has not experienced any traumatic shocks. No ruinous, humiliating wartime defeat and occupation. No economic crash. No civil war. No deeply rooted conflicts between Church and secular forces. Think of inter-war Europe: by comparison, the United States has been living in a benign environment. American exceptionalism.  Stresses and strains, yes – nothing, though, of the magnitude that could explain so drastic a transformation.

    YET, there is a pervasive feeling that things are not quite right, vague feelings of dread hover, that something awful may happen that we can neither anticipate, avert nor cope with, that America is ‘losing it.’ Free floating unease and apprehension. A United States that senses it is losing control, losing mastery of its environment and of itself, naturally will look for scapegoats. Why? Corrective action to straighten out what’s gone wrong requires constructive ideas, rigorous thinking, self-confidence. They don’t exist. Little is positive or constructive. Tearing down, destruction, perverting, corrupting predominate instead.1 The negative prevails. Let’s look at current scene – at public discourse, politics, the dominant themes, the level and type of citizen engagement.

    What marks the landscape are: emotions eclipsing thought, intellectual aridity, the erasure of all boundaries to words or actions, the triumph of crude willpower. The rapid success of the Trump-led MAGA movement in putting in place the building blocks for a quasi-fascist regime is stunning testimony to how potent are the forces of negativity, to how pathetically weak the resistance of institutions, of organized political opposition, of civil society.

    Instead of deliberate reflection, we round on “enemies” – abroad and at home.

    Abroad

    Today, there is near unanimity in the vilification of Russia cast as a reincarnate Soviet Union, in portraying China as a menace bent on supplanting the U.S. as a global hegemon by foul and illicit means, in denouncing Iran as fanatically dedicated in its attacks on American interests. Then, there are the Arab terrorists – an all-purpose label to be stuck on whichever groups in the Greater Middle East fight against American/Israeli domination and defy American dictation: inter alia Hezbollah, Hamas, ISIS, the Houthis, al-Shabab. Al-Qaeda, which authored the trauma and humiliation of 9/11, has lost its pride of place on the enemies list now that Washington has joined with its Syrian branch to topple Assad, head of Syria’s anti-Israel Arab nationalist government.

    They are the hostiles who we say are conniving to bring America low. They represent an unprecedentedly multi-pronged threat to the national interest, to American self-esteem. They are assailing us ruthlessly in ever domain – military security, commerce and finance, our moral authority, even the political integrity of our impeccably democratic system by campaigns to disrupt and manipulate its workings.

    These propositions enjoy the allegiance of almost the entire American political class. Nary a single influential member of the Congress (Sanders, Yes; AOC, No) disputes them – as evinced by endorsement of Trump’s arbitrary sanctions warfare despite a Constitutional stipulation that only Congress has the authority to impose sanctions, by drastic boosts in the Pentagon/Intelligence budgets, by sustained applause for the homicidal fanatic who has lured us into a genocidal campaign against Palestine’s Muslim Arabs, and by blanket support for war preparations against the PRC. Not a single MSM outlet submits this hard core of the nation’s foreign policy precepts to skeptical examination. The major think tanks supply endless justifications. The only debates focus on tactics and priorities. Moral considerations are banned by common – silent – consent.

    [Stroll along Washington’s think tank rows of Massachusetts Avenue and ‘K’ Street and an attentive ear hears one uninterrupted declamation issuing from the minds that shape and propel American thinking about the world.]

    Noticeably absent is the ideological component. In the Cold War, the historic contest between democratic capitalism and Communism overshadowed all else. In its place, we have the contrived effort to promote a specious – and mortal – combat between Democracy vs Autocracy. In the American camp are such paragons of democracy as Netanyahu, Bolsonaro, Zelensky, Bukele (el Salvador), Mohammed bin-Salman, the Gulf sheikhs, and Abu Mohammad al-Jalani – ex-al-Qaeda emir installed as President of Syria. Democrat Netanyahu bombed Democrat Jalani’s capital Damascus a week ago. If Washington does anything to calm that intramural ruckus, Trump no doubt would cite it as the capstone to his fabulous record as peacemaker to claim the Nobel Prize. Donald Trump is the lodestar for all of these faux democrats, the cynosure of Democratic values.

    American elites and the citizenry overall seem to have no inkling as how far the country’s standing in the world has fallen – that we are seen as moral hypocrites and bullies everywhere outside the Collective West (its political class, anyway). That our reputation as a model of enlightened government and generator of public goods is shattered beyond restoration.

    We are living in a fantasy world of our own imaginings that is only tenuously connected to reality. In that fictitious domain, fixed consensus exists in believing the most outlandish – and reckless – notions. So, we are mistreated to an extraordinary array of misconceptions about declared foes and what we can do to subdue them. Most dangerous of these unsupportable propositions are those that vastly exaggerate – indeed, misrepresent – the threat that they pose. Those articles of faith, in turn, evoke extraordinarily extreme actions and plans for war. In the former category, we find these gems: Putin’s ambition is to wash his boots in the English Channel; Russia will crumble under the stress of sanctions and defeat by Ukraine’s ‘liberation’ forces; Putin’s regime will be replaced by a West-friendly, oligarch-led sober version of the Yeltsin-era set-up; Russian weaponry is significantly inferior to American weaponry; Russia can be split away from China and/or China split away from Russia. China is weaker than it looks; Beijing can be coerced into yielding its claim to Taiwan as an integral part of China – an agreed principle dating back 50 years, abrogated unilaterally by Washington; the U.S. has the upper hand in any economic duel with the PRC; therefore, we can impose a Maginot line of technological deprivation that will put an end to China’s challenge to American global dominance. A prideful India will hamstring its growing economy by boycotting Russian energy supplies at Washington’s command; prideful Indians eagerly will sign up as Sepoy auxiliaries in the American campaign to yolk China. Unlimited, unqualified backing for Israel’s imperial ambitions serves American national interests; there is no reason to modify that judgment in the face of its genocide of the Palestinians – nor should it be modified in the face of its military aggressions in Lebanon, Syria and its unrelenting (successful) attempt to embroil the U.S. in an all-out war with Iran. The answer to Iran’s resistance to Israeli-American hegemony in the Middle East is regime change in Tehran. Airborne attacks will trigger a popular uprising. American precision weapons can destroy Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles, its centrifuges and related nuclear facilities. {They have not. They never reached the inner chamber where the centrifuges were located – according to the most astute, neutral scientific assessment. Anyway, the High Enriched Uranium (HEU) and most of the centrifuges probably had been removed beforehand. Claims to the contrary emanating from the White House, the National Intelligence Agency (Tulsi Gabbard) and the Pentagon (Pete Hegseth) are outright lies referencing no pertinent data. Closer to home, there is the convenient belief that America’s drug addiction problem will disappear if we could dam the flow of narcotics from Mexico.

    Our faith-based supposition is that the outcome of these intertwined projects will be a stronger, more secure United States; elimination or grave weakening of our enemies; and enhanced respect/influence round the world. The exact opposite has occurred.

    Actions to achieve that outcome match the extremity of ambition. Policy elites are monolingual – they know only the lexicon of coercion, especially military coercion. Diplomacy is a dirty word, negotiations abhorrent.  We dictate, we make demands, we intimidate, we set deadlines – we don’t discuss. We envision the outcome of a successful negotiation as resembling the Japanese surrender on the deck of the Missouri in Tokyo Bay. An unwitting parody of Tom Lehrer’s “Send In The Marines.” Failure – repeated, ignominious failure – is filtered out.

    The consequences have been dire: costly for American well-being, murderously destructive out there, disintegrating of those international institutions and accords, arduously accomplished, that have lent a modicum of order and stability to inter-state dealings, and portents of nuclear war.

    Let’s turn our attention to the last mentioned. Over the post-war years, the great powers came to the common conclusion that there was no such thing as victory in a nuclear war. Therefore, they bent to the task of controlling “The Bomb,” i.e. taking concrete measures to ensure that there could be no activation of nuclear weapons by miscalculation, technical error, or accident. Stability and control were the aims codified in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTB), the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and the follow-on Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty – all now abandoned or ignored by Washington.

    They were complemented by clear understanding that the ‘rules of the road” governing their rivalry called for extreme caution in avoiding conflictual situations involving the U.S., the USSR or – later – China. Proxy wars, yes, but with restrictions. There was only one episode of Russian and American forces exchanging fire. That occurred in occasional dog fights between jets over the Yalu River separating Korea and the PRC. (A famous participant was Ted Williams of baseball legend).

    Today, Washington leaders – civilian and military – have deviated from the path of prudence. Senior officials speak openly about the inevitability of a Sino-American war over a Taiwan Straits crisis. That scenario tops the list of the Pentagon’s strategic planning aims and purposes. Military budgets and force structures reflect it. A slew of articles and documents are emerging from government security bodies, affiliated think tanks (e.g. the Hudson Institute), institutes and Establishment journals like Foreign Affairs that analyze in minute details how that war could be conducted under diverse circumstances. Most often, the prospect of it escalating to the level of strategic nuclear exchanges is minimized. Some even talk about which side would have an advantage in the event.

    The hard truth is that any conflict that entails American munitions hitting China proper has something like a 90% chance of escalating to nuclear war; 95% if the scatterbrained psychopath is in the Oval Office.2 That should be the premise incorporated in any plan for war against China. The casual way that these ‘strategists’ contemplate great power combat testifies to the fact that once minds, and emotions, take up residence in a fanciful universe of their imagining the prospect grows of their divorcing totally from reality.

    [“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; if the bomb blast don’t get you, the fallout must” – pithy words of a renowned nuclear strategist]

    In regard to Iran, the United States has markedly increased the likelihood of its building a nuclear capability by giving up the international controls incorporated in the JPOA, by our implacable hostility and sanctions, and now by the heavy attack on Iran itself, an attack that has done little damage to Tehran’s nuclear capabilities while vastly strengthening incentives for it to go nuclear.

    Most alarming are the unprecedented American strikes against Russia proper. At this moment, and as has been the case for two years at least, serving officers physically in Ukraine play the critical role in the launching of a variety of missiles supplied by the U.S.: HIMARs, (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) and ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System). They provide the critical targeting Intelligence, they insert the codes that activate the weapons, and initiate the firing. Ukrainian military men do nothing more than “press the button.” In short, we are waging war against Russia – carrying out direct attacks. on Russian soil. Moreover, we have encouraged the British, the French and the Germans to do exactly the same – some employing American provided weapons whose use requires explicit approval from Washington. It is the Kremlin’s restraint that has prevented this provocation from leading to dangerous escalation – up until now.

    Set in this context, it should have been apparent that the Trump administration could not accept the humiliating defeat represented by a Ukraine settlement on any terms that met Russia’s core demands; nor could it engage seriously with Iran; nor could it consider reining in Israel; nor could it address China as an equal. No more than Biden or Trump in his first term.

    At Home

    The domestic scene offers a variation of this dismal reality. The Trump-led corps of suited militants and disciples are using coercive force of various kinds in random acts of destruction propelled by emotional drives for unfettered power, control and domination. The United States is being pushed down the path of Fascism American-style with stunning rapidity. Already, in critical respects we have ceased to be a Constitutional democracy.

    Daily, the Trump Falange takes truthless, arbitrary actions that defy the law and the Constitution, that shut down entire departments of government duly established by Congress, that suppress programs dedicated to preserve public health and other citizens’ services, that reject guarantees of due process at every level of government. The Bill of Rights is being gutted – the 1st and 4th Amendments already are null and void.  Trump cavalierly uses the Department of Justice as a weapon in vendettas against whomever he dislikes.

    These literally mindless assaults on state infrastructure put in place over more than a century are accompanied by attacks on scientific knowledge, on our most notable research institutions, on our universities. Trump and his henchman are literal “know-nothings” who indeed know nothing, and don’t want to know since knowledge is a constraint on the destructive impulse and the lust for absolute ‘freedom’ to do as they please. It follows that there is no tolerance for an official who speaks factual truth without first checking that it conforms to whatever wavelength the boss is on that day. Thus, Tulsi Gabbard is admonished that she will walk the plank unless she immediately contradicts herself on the “obliteration” of Iranian nuclear facilities. She, another D.C. careerist, obliges without hesitation. Both parties are pleased by the outcome. Thus, Erika McEntarfer – the poor woman who directed the Bureau of Labor Statistics – is kicked out unceremoniously because she innocently believed that arithmetic is politically uncontroversial. One party is pleased by the outcome.

    This rampage subjugates one institution after another like the German blitzkrieg overrunning hapless cities. In Congress, the Republicans are cowed into regimented automatons who resemble Prussian infantry or deputies to the old Supreme Soviet; the Democrats have reached the terminal point of their passive political suicide – comatose for so long that one barely notices their vanishing act; Barack Obama, who was the nation’s leader for 8 years, amuses himself  producing documentaries for Netflix while the country descends into perdition; the Supreme Court majority under John Roberts are a tacit, yet vital accomplice – rewriting the Constitution as suits them; the economic powerhouses – financial barons, business moguls, Silicon Valley buccaneers – are licking their chops at the feast spread before them by the Trump-Musk-Bessent pillage of the national economy; the MSM are shills or neutered; church denominations and civic society play mute or mumble sotto voce; Trump’s lucrative extortion-protection racket targeting blue chip law firms and Ivy League schools would make Vito Genovese blush; universities in particular are disgracing themselves in their abject surrender. The great debates at the highest reaches of our elite universities appear to be on whether to deal with Trump from a kneeling position or a supine position.

    A striking feature of this descent into unbridled autocracy, is that there is no ideological passion fueling it, no doctrine, no philosophy, no religious zeal. It is all about discharging emotions spawned in the depths of their roiled psyches. Just raw, crude tantrums committing flagrant acts of destruction and hurt. We must keep in mind that it is not only Trump. He has ignited and assembled a crew of wackos and misfits such a Robert Kennedy jr. who seemingly spends his waking hours devising ways to impair the health of Americans: cannibalizing the Center for Disease Control, slashing the National Institute of Health, restricting development and distribution of vaccines, suppressing scientific research at universities, demeaning those who actually know what they are talking about. Not surprisingly, this is someone who was diagnosed with worms in his brain and whose previous acts of civic behavior include strewing parts of a dismembered bear around Central Park in NYC Civilization has experienced nothing like this since the Dark Ages dropped the curtain on classical learning in the 6th and 7th centuries.

    [The Democrats, for their part, are equally non-ideological. They offer no coherent refutation of Trump’s amputations of the national government or his recission of every enlightened federal program initiated over the past 90 years. This tragic turn was foreshadowed by Bill Clinton’s public declaration in 1997 that “the era of big government is over,” and his promotion of the Bowles-Simpson Commission’s plan to cut deeply into Social Security and Medicare in his 2012 speech at the Democratic Convention renominating Barack Obama. Today, their message in opposition is nothing more than an anti-Trump screed.]

    Instead of ideology or doctrine we have a perverted Americanism. An artless blend of myth, doctored history and chauvinism, it has been inflated into an encompassing revelation that explains all, inspires all, justifies all. A one-size-fits-all creed cum faith that embraces every person, every circumstance, every act. Americanism acts as a Unified Field Theory of self-identity, collective enterprise, and the Republic’s enduring meaning. When one element is felt to be jeopardy, the integrity of the whole edifice becomes vulnerable. The drama of the American experience, our collective pageant of progress, used to be the great booster of morale and imparter of meaning. That tonic has lost much of its potency- in good part because it’s not the same country, and we no longer reign supreme in the world. So, crude attempts at restoration become the imperative for a shaky collective identity and impoverished individual self-esteem.  In the past, American mythology energized the country in ways that helped it to thrive.  Today, it is a dangerous hallucinogen that traps Americans in a time warp more and more distant from reality.

    [At the psychological level, this approach is understandable since it plays to the United States’ strength: overweening self-confidence coupled to military power – thereby perpetuating the national myths of being destined to remain the world’s No. 1 forever, and of being in a position to shape the world system according to American principles and interests. The tension for a nation so constituted encountering objective reality does not favor heightened self-awareness or a change in behavior. Today, there is no foreign policy debate whatsoever. In addition, our vassal governments in Europe and elsewhere either have a national interest in preserving the warped American view of the world (Israel, Poland) or have been so denatured over the decades that they are incapable 0f doing other than to follow Washington obediently – despite already having tumbled over a number of cliffs and staring at a potentially fatal abyss re. China and Russia]

    MAGA Dynamics

    To understand what forces are turbocharging the MAGA war on pre-Trump America, one must face squarely the abnormal elements in the movement’s make-up.

    A.      A cult-like movement such as MAGA can do without a god “but never without a devil.”3 For the neo-Fascist, the devil(s) on whom you focus your wrath is far more important than a prophet who offers a vision of a New Jerusalem or some other utopia. Just as the gratification of destruction eclipses any impulse to construct – other than restoration of some starry-eyed vision of an America that never existed.

    B.      There are Devils galore. Enemy states, clandestine networks of evil-doers at home and abroad, the racial “them,” and all who manipulate or facilitate them by not joining the paranoid crusade to purge those malignant forces. In a bizarre way so it is with the Palestinians whose tragic fate is to become the surrogate for all the above objects of scorn – permitting our complicity in their inhumane treatment. They are stand-ins for every social grouping that we – or some segment of us – hate, fear, despise, scapegoat. At once Islamo-terrorists, the Iranian mullahs, Russian saboteurs, Commies, drug cartels, illegal immigrants from inter alia Mexico, South America, Haiti, Afghanistan, Somalia, blacks, gays & transgenders, liberal elitists, abrasive feminists etc. etc. etc. All loom behind the Palestinian face in the mind’s eye of those in thrall to the demons of violent prejudice. When the mix of inchoate emotions reaches a critical mass, and demands discharge, they find a substitute for whatever fixates them. The unrecognized Palestinian becomes a blank canvas on which to paint the bête noir that obsesses you. In a bitter coda to this tale of depraved humanity, might there be vestigial bigots – in Europe and America – who in their twisted psyche project onto the anonymous Palestinian an image of “The Jew” – getting his comeuppance? For most, it is remarkable good fortune that the murderers and torturers are Jews – thus shielding them from stray pangs of conscience since we can congratulate ourselves on making up for the 2,000-years persecution of them.

    C. Displays of belligerence in word and deed tug on the emotional strings of those in the movement – even those who themselves lack the courage to act. Hence, the heroic savior is encouraged to raise the level of hostility and castigation of enemies in the rhetoric. He knows that “violence breeds fanaticism begets violence.”4

    D. The unspeakable has become the vernacular for Trump, his henchmen, his shock troops. Aggressive, hostile words – like violent deeds – nourish the lusts of the initiates while emboldening their prophet. Blind trust in the demagogic leader requires no collateral.

    E. In the light of the above, a fanatical mass movement can only intensify and reach new heights of extremity. It can be suppressed – but it cannot moderate. Once it reaches a certain threshold its own momentum will propel it to a climax of one sort or another – invariably a destructive climax.

    Conclusion

    Fascism or neo-Fascism does not emerge spontaneously from the depths like The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Conditions must be ripe, the ground prepared: combustible militants nursing their resentments must reach a critical mass, an inert populace must be numbed, a political class turned in on themselves, innate moral instincts sublimated, conventional norms of decency discredited. In this sense, Trump’s MAGA is the culmination of a degenerative process – not its cause.5

    We seem to have experienced a unique case of an auto-immune political cataclysm. The body politics’s instinctive mechanisms for reacting against (false) signs of a (fictitious) threatening invader become disoriented and begin to attack the host itself. A case of self-generated – if unintended – iatrogenic suicide. What was the perceived/felt threat catalyzing this process? 9/11 twenty-four years ago? There’s the puzzle.

    In truth, there are no tangible, overt threats to the American body politic which, by any reasonable measure, should cause such an extreme reaction. We must look elsewhere – into the minds and emotions of a disturbed society. One with a defective gyroscope. One where nihilism has blurred cultural and social reference marks, fostering a cult of selfishness – one of whose manifestations is the fashioning of fantasy worlds wherein delusional imaginings have no consequences – backing Trump as a sort of projected wish fulfillment – just as millions embark on a project of self -reinvention or play games of make-believe like ‘Fantasy Football.’ Those are the conditions that have generated the perversions, and the infirmities, that have led to the present perilous state-of-affairs.

    To be clear, we are not dealing with flaws of structure or procedure that could be remedied, mistaken policies that could be corrected, or sins that could be atoned. Rather, it is a pervasive corruption of our country’s societal software.

    If this interpretation is correct, there is little chance of a reversal or of rectifying the situation. Societies are incapable of close critical self-examination except, with great rarity, under the most extreme circumstances. A complete breakdown as Germany and Japan experienced in WW II. In those cases, it was made possible by the guiding hand of a relatively benevolent external party. We Americans are on our own – tragically, we are lacking the self-awareness to ward off disaster and to regenerate a measure of collective construction.

    Endnotes:

    The post America Meets Its Hidden Destiny first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    Nazism was a death cult. A very peculiar kind of death cult. For it reversed a Phoenix-like sequence by first announcing itself in grandiose construction projects, building autobahns, designing Albert Speer’s monumental public buildings as well as putting the Wehrmacht on steroids. Only then did it launch itself on the path of total destruction. First, the destruction of others; then the destruction of themselves and Germany. Throughout, its signature was the death head – Totenkopf – still seen as the emblem of Ukraine’s Azov units and among some Trumpite militants. Hitler’s own psyche entwined the drive for grandiose totems of power with intimations of self-annihilation. So, too, for many of his closest confidantes and fanatical followers. The Nazis are an extreme case both in the strength of their murderous impulses and in their readiness to enter into a danse macabre with Death.

    Aggressive cults dedicated to destruction without the suicidal element are more common.
    2    The other idea that has surfaced in academic strategic writing concerns nuclear warfighting. This hardy perennial has risen Phoenix-like from the critical dust several times. The latest iteration is set in the context of a conventional war between China and the United States. The analyst postulates that a “losing” China could revert to the use of Tactical Nuclear Weapons (TNWs). This scenario defies credibility on multiple counts.

    Above all, the idea that nuclear exchanges could be constrained below a certain (undefined) threshold is unrealistic in the light of what we know about human behavior. The absence of any rules means that confidence margins in the assessment of escalation probabilities are extremely wide. In addition, it is nearly impossible to imagine a situation whereby the United States military defeats Chinese forces to the point of making the country vulnerable to American occupation or dictation of terms (whatever they may be). A credible enforcement of submission to any specific diktat from Washington would have to entail either occupation or threat to strike cities. The Army that had its hands full pacifying Baghdad is in no position to rule 1.5 billion Chinese. As to the possible attack on high value targets, it could be deterred by the strategic nuclear capabilities that China would retain.

    Nuclear strategy is a bit like Marxism or Freudian analysis or market fundamentalist economics. A lot of superior minds deploy their talents to concoct ingenious elaborations of received Truth that spin exercises in impressive abstract logic – but their conclusions are only tangentially related to reality. Thus, reputations and careers can be made – and much mischief done.
    3    Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951, p. 85.
    4    Hoffer, p. 99.
    5    In 1968, Governor Ed Muskie, who was the frontrunner for the Democrats presidential nomination, saw his campaign collapse when he shed a tear in public in response to reports of how a critic had made slurs against his wife’s ethnicity. Similarly, Governor George Romney saw his candidacy for the Republican nomination falter after a remark that his earlier support for the Vietnam war had been due to a “brainwashing” by U.S. military and diplomatic officials in Saigon. Nowadays, the country elects – for the second time – a clownish Fascist psychopath who instigated, and pardoned, a violent assault on the Capitol. The United States manifestly is a degraded polity.

    [In Romney’s case, as Gene McCarthy quipped, a quick rinse would have sufficed]

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US-Russia Talks: the Choice Between Peace and Escalation

    Photo: AFP via Getty Images

    Donald Trump came into office promising to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Now, six months later, his high stakes meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska may have put the United States and Russia on a new path toward peace, or, if this initiative fails, could trigger an even more dangerous escalation, with warhawks in Congress already pushing for another $54.6 billion in weapons for Ukraine.

    After emerging from the meeting, Putin correctly framed the historical moment: “This was a very hard time for bilateral relations and, let’s be frank, they’ve fallen to the lowest point since the Cold War. I think that’s not benefiting our countries and the world as a whole. Sooner or later, we have to amend the situation to move on from confrontation to dialogue.”

    Trump said he will follow up by talking to NATO leaders and Zelenskyy, as if the U.S. is simply an innocent bystander trying to help. But in Ukraine, as in Palestine, Washington plays the “mediator” while pouring weapons, intelligence, and political cover into one side of the war. In Gaza, that has enabled genocide. In Ukraine, it could lead to nuclear war.

    Despite protests from Zelenskyy and European leaders, Trump was right to meet with Putin, not because they are friends, but because the United States and Russia are enemies, and because the war they are fighting to the last Ukrainian is the front line of a global conflict between the United States, Russia and China.

    In our book, War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, which we have now updated and revised to cover three years of war in Ukraine, we have detailed the U.S. role in expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders, its support for the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, its undermining of the Minsk II peace accord, and its rejection of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine after only two months of war in 2022.

    We doubt that Donald Trump fully grasps this history. Are his simplistic statements alternately blaming Russia and Ukraine, but never the United States, just a public façade for domestic consumption, or does he really believe America’s hands are clean?

    At their first meeting in Saudi Arabia on February 18, senior U.S. and Russian negotiators agreed on a three-step plan: first to restore U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations; then to negotiate peace in Ukraine; and finally to work on resolving the broader, underlying breakdown in relations between the United States and Russia. Trump and Putin’s decision to meet now was a recognition that they must address the deeper rift before they can achieve a stable and lasting peace in Ukraine.

    The stakes are high. Russia has been waging a war of attrition, concentrating on destroying Ukrainian forces and military equipment rather than on advancing quickly and seizing a lot more territory. It has still not occupied all of Donetsk province, which unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine in May 2014, and which Russia officially annexed before its invasion in February 2022.

    The failure of peace negotiations could lead to a more aggressive Russian war plan to seize territory much faster. Ukrainian forces are thinly spread out along much of its 700 mile front line, with as few as 100 soldiers often manning several miles of defenses. A major Russian offensive could lead to the collapse of the Ukrainian military or the fall of the Zelenskyy government.

    How would the U.S. and its Western allies respond to such major changes in the strategic picture? Zelenskyy’s European allies talk tough, but have always rejected sending their own troops to Ukraine, apart from small numbers of special operations forces and mercenaries.

    Putin addressed the Europeans in his remarks after the Summit:

    We expect that Kyiv and the European capitals will perceive [the negotiations] constructively, and that they won’t throw a wrench in the works, will not make any attempts to use some backroom dealings to conduct provocations to torpedo the nascent progress.

    Meanwhile, more U.S. and NATO troops are fighting from the relative safety of the joint Ukraine-NATO war headquarters at the U.S. military base in Wiesbaden in Germany, where they work with Ukrainian forces to plan operations, coordinate intelligence and target missile and drone strikes. If the war escalates further, Wiesbaden could become a target for Russian missile strikes, just as NATO missiles already target bases in Russia. How would the United States and Germany respond to Russian missile strikes on Wiesbaden?

    The U.S. and NATO’s official policy has always been to keep Ukraine fighting until it is in a stronger position to negotiate with Russia, as Joe Biden wrote in the New York Times in June 2022. But every time the U.S. and NATO prolong or escalate the war, they leave Ukraine in a weaker position, not a stronger one. The neutrality agreement that the U.S. and U.K. rejected in April 2022 included a Russian withdrawal from all the territory it had just occupied. But that was not good enough for Boris Johnson and Joe Biden, who instead promised a long war to weaken Russia.

    NATO military leaders believed that Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the fall of 2022 achieved the stronger position they were looking for, and General Milley went out on a limb to say publicly that Ukraine should “seize the moment” to negotiate. But Biden and Zelenskyy rejected his advice, and Ukraine’s failed offensive in 2023 squandered the moment they had failed to seize. No amount of deceptive propaganda can hide the reality that it has been downhill since then, and 69% of Ukrainians now want a negotiated peace, before their position gets even worse.

    So Trump went to Alaska with a weak hand, but one that will get weaker still if the war goes on. The European politicians urging Zelenskyy to cling to his maximalist demands want to look tough to their own people, but the keys to a stable and lasting peace are still Ukrainian neutrality, self determination for the people of all regions of Ukraine, and a genuine peace process that finally lays to rest the zombification of the Cold War.

    The whole world celebrated the end of the Cold War in 1991, but the people of the world are still waiting for the long-promised peace dividend that a generation of corrupt, war-mongering leaders have stolen from us.

    As negotiations progress, U.S. officials must be honest about the U.S. role in provoking this crisis. They must demonstrate that they are ready to listen to Russia’s concerns, take them seriously, and negotiate in good faith to achieve a stable and lasting agreement that delivers peace and security to all parties in the Ukraine war, and in the wider Cold War it is part of.

    The post US-Russia Talks: the Choice Between Peace and Escalation first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • What Lies Behind Trump’s Attacks Against Venezuela?

    As if President Trump intended to meet professional US mercenary Erik Prince halfway, US Attorney General Pam Bondi increased the existing US bounty on President Maduro—originally set at $15 million—from $25 million to $50 million for anyone providing “information leading to his arrest or conviction.”

    In late 2024, Prince, a professional mercenary, alongside Venezuela’s far right, promoted a plan to deploy a private army to Venezuela. He suggested that if the US raised the bounty on Maduro’s head to $100 million, targeting not only the president but also Diosdado Cabello and the entire government, they could “just sit back and wait for the magic to happen.” Prince and Venezuela’s far right even launched a crowdfunding campaign, Ya Casi Venezuela (“Almost There, Venezuela”), to collect the $100 million.

    In November 2024, Prince declared that after 10 January 2025 (Maduro’s inauguration day), key figures—including Diosdado Cabello (Interior Minister), Jorge Rodríguez (National Assembly President), Delcy Rodríguez (Vice President), Vladimir Padrino López (Defence Minister), Tarek William Saab (Attorney General), Cilia Flores (Maduro’s wife), and Nicolás Maduro himself—would become “criminal objectives” with no diplomatic protection. On 12 January 2025, Prince sent a message of support to opposition leader María Corina Machado, urging her to “Stay resolute.”

    Prince had pushed for the bounty to be raised to $100 million, but when the Biden administration ignored him, he secured backing from Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, who share his objectives. On 20 September 2024, Scott and Rubio introduced the Securing Timely Opportunities for Payment and Maximizing Awards for Detaining Unlawful Regime Officials Act of 2024 (the STOP Maduro Act), allocating $100 million—taken from seized Venezuelan assets—to fund Prince’s efforts to depose Maduro.

    The US charges against President Maduro are not only preposterous but entirely false and slanderous. He is accused of being one of the world’s largest drug traffickers, a threat to US national security, and the leader of the Cartel de los Soles, allegedly responsible for shipping hundreds of tons of cocaine into the US while collaborating with “narco-terrorists,” the Tren de Aragua gang, and Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, Yván Gil, dismissed Bondi’s “pathetic” bounty as “the most ridiculous smokescreen we have ever seen.”

    Despite persistent propaganda about the Cartel de los Soles, drug trafficking, and “narco-terrorism”—used to justify labelling Venezuela a “narco-state”—the US has never provided credible evidence to support these claims. The DEA itself reports that over 80% of cocaine entering the US comes via the Pacific, with only 7% passing through the Eastern Caribbean (see DEA maps; notably, Venezuela has no Pacific coastline). This confirms Colombia as the region’s true narco-state, while Venezuela is, at worst, a transit route. The US also falsely accuses Venezuela of money laundering, despite the country being almost entirely cut off from the international financial system. And Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, has just declared that Mexico has no evidence linking Venezuela’s Maduro to the Sinaloa cartel.

    Bondi’s bounty against Venezuela’s democratically elected president is part of a broader US strategy targeting Latin America, ostensibly centred on combating drug cartels but threatening far more drastic measures. The New York Times (08/08/25) revealed that Trump “secretly signed a directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels designated as terrorist organisations by his administration.” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded unequivocally: “The US will not send its military into Mexico. That is ruled out, absolutely ruled out.”

    This outrageous US aggression against a Latin American head of state must be condemned unreservedly. The “pathetic” $50 million bounty consciously incentivises unsavoury actors to launch militaristic, murderous ventures—such as the 2020 mercenary incursion into Venezuela contracted by Guaidó. It marks an escalation in US efforts to overthrow a democratically elected leader, weaponizing bounties to force regime change.

    Trump’s secret directive authorising military force against cartels—effectively threatening unilateral intervention in Latin America—must also be unequivocally rejected. While ostensibly targeting Mexico, the policy could easily be weaponised against governments the US seeks to topple, such as Venezuela, Cuba, or Nicaragua (or any other nation, for that matter).

    The Trump administration is clearly intent on intimidating—and, given the opportunity, militarily intervening against—Latin American governments it opposes, using the “war on drugs” as a pretext. Worse, Bondi could issue similar bounties against other regional leaders. The US mercenary industry is well-developed, and such bounties would inevitably attract takers, further destabilising the region.

    When we consider the US’s highly aggressive tariffs against Brazil alongside its hundreds of sanctions targeting Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, it becomes clear that Washington is testing a new cocktail of threats designed to force nations south of the Río Bravo into submission to US geopolitical demands. This is classic US behaviour—with one key difference under Trump: the abandonment of any pretence behind hollow justifications like ‘democracy’ or ‘human rights’, though such rhetoric still features in official statements.

    The true objective is to stifle multipolarity and prevent Latin America from participating in it, all while reinforcing US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere under the guise of Make America Great Again. In reality, this is simply the Monroe Doctrine repackaged—an attempt to sever Latin America’s trade and exchanges with China, or more precisely, to expel Chinese influence from the region entirely. The abject capitulation of Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino, who withdrew from the Belt and Road Initiative under Trump’s threats of a US military takeover of the Canal—despite the economic costs to his nation—stands as stark confirmation of this strategy.

    Trump’s objectives stand in direct opposition to what progressive movements and governments across Latin America have sought to build: a fairer world without social exclusion, with reduced inequality and poverty, where policies prioritise people over private interests, and where universal rights to education, healthcare, and housing are upheld—all within a framework of strong national sovereignty that has enabled the region to resist US imperialist bullying.

    This vision entails:

    · An end to US lawfare against President Maduro and all aggression toward Venezuela or any regional government;

    · No arbitrary US tariffs against Brazil or any other Latin American nation;

    · The cessation of US military threats—let alone interventions—in Mexico, Venezuela, or elsewhere in the region;

    · A Latin America free from US meddling in its internal affairs.

    The struggle, then, is not merely about resisting individual policies but defending the very principle of self-determination against a US administration intent on rolling back decades of regional progress.

    The post What Lies Behind Trump’s Attacks Against Venezuela? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump Said It: “There’s No Better Word Than Stupid.”

    For anyone who still thinks Donald Trump does not represent the interests of what is called “the deep state” but is actually the shallow or official U.S. state, it is time to think again. If he is not a figurehead for those alleged hidden forces, then he will agree to a Russia-Ukraine settlement on Russia’s fundamental terms – that is, a mutual security agreement that stipulates the pulling back of U.S./NATO forces encircling Russia, etc. – when he meets with Putin in Alaska this Friday. There will be no further delay.

    This, however, is extremely unlikely. Trump knows little but bullying and the use of the English language as a hammer. “I’m very highly educated,” he has said, without a scintilla of irony, “I know words, I know the best words. But there’s no better word than stupid.”

    On the latter assertion he is right: there is no better word than stupid when it’s applied correctly.

    During his campaign for the presidency, Trump used words more than fifty times to say that he would end the war in Ukraine “within twenty-four hours” of assuming the presidency. He could have accomplished this on day one by issuing an executive order (besides all those he did issue), stopping all military aide to Ukraine, but he didn’t. Seven months of game-playing have elapsed and the war goes on with Trump’s backing laced with doubletalk about how he is seeking peace in Ukraine, is a man of peace, is bringing all American troops back home, and of course he gave a grateful ah-shucks when his brother-in-genocide, Benjamin Netanyahu, showed him a letter nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

    He fully supports the destabilization of Russia, overtly or covertly, as have his predecessors, and this in incompatible with any deal Russia can agree to when he meets with Putin in Alaska.

    This past weekend, and starting up again late Tuesday in the more conservative corporate media, August 12 as I write, CNN, the NY Times, and the Washington Post, three prominent establishment media (organs of propaganda) published their usual reminders to all presidents that they are watching:

    CNN: “Trump-Putin summit in Alaska resembles a slow defeat for Ukraine”

    The New York Times: “After Almost Losing Trump, Putin Gets His Ideal Summit”

    Max Boot op ed, the Washington Post: “Putin is setting up Trump for another Munich”

    For these media know that the Russians are coming still, as they have been for nearly a century, so don’t swim too far out into the Atlantic or Pacific, for they are waiting with Jaws to seize you. They are red and ravenous and have huge teeth.

    Some claim these articles, and many more to come, are an example of how the “deep state” is pressuring Trump to continue to encircle Russia and degrade its military and economic strength (even try to oust Putin, as Biden said) despite Trump’s sincere desire to end the U.S./NATO war against Russia as a means to peaceful cooperation. This would assume Trump is radically different from every U.S. president in the last eighty years (with the exception of JFK in the last year of his presidency) whose policies were all malignantly opposed to the USSR and then Russia.

    In one respective way Trump is different, for he has stepped straight out of an updated version of a Twain bitter satire or Melville’s Confidence Man, a dangerous ignorant liar whose mask hides yet reveals the agenda he serves so faithfully. The man, after all, was a reality-television star and has long reveled in radical reversals of previous statements and intentions.

    For example, in his first term, he often talked of withdrawing from NATO but never did; NATO, in fact, expanded under his watch. He talked about ending the U.S./NATO support for Ukraine’s bombing of Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine, only to withdraw from the Minsk Accords and send military equipment to Ukraine to bomb those areas. A mimic of the severest neurotic, he reverses himself so often that it is obvious that it is a part of the strategic script he is performing. Confuse, confound, keep the audience is constant anticipation of the switch-back.

    It assumes as well that Trump’s support for Israel and its genocide of the Palestinians is somehow divorced from the U.S.’s overall geopolitical strategy throughout the Middle East, West Asia, Eastern Europe, Russia, and its desperate efforts throughout the world to counter the ascendancy of the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) as the U.S. debt skyrockets and its world dominance diminishes.

    Trump’s recent flim-flam plan is to pull a Richard Nixon Vietnamization hoax with NATOization of the war against Russia through Ukraine. I am convinced that the US/NATO war against Russia will not be ending unless NATO is dissolved, which Trump is not proposing. He only wishes to strengthen NATO with European money, not that of the US. NATO’s only current raison d’être is to destroy Russia as an independent country and create regime change there through multiple means. This has long been so. It is why the Obama administration engineered a coup d’ état in Ukraine in 2014. It is why NATO has existed for so long and has expanded. Open warfare in Ukraine is just one means among many they have used over the years. You can even “end” the overt war and continue the covert.

    If NATO is not dissolved, the undermining of Russia will continue under Trump, who may –  I emphasize “may” – recognize that the proxy war is lost on the battlefield, a fact obvious for years despite U.S. government and mainstream media propaganda to the contrary – propaganda so blatantly false that it raises questions about people’s gullibility, but not about the mainstream media’s lies. How many foreign leaders does such media need to call the new Hitler before people wise up?

    As the man said, “There’s no better word than stupid.”

    The post Trump Said It: “There’s No Better Word Than Stupid.” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The West is in panic as Israel’s plan for ‘full control’ of Gaza heralds a new Nakba

    [First published by Middle East Eye]

    If you thought Western capitals were finally losing patience with Israel’s engineering of a famine in Gaza nearly two years into the genocide, you may be disappointed.

    As ever, events have moved on – even if the extreme hunger and malnourishment of the two million people of Gaza have not abated.

    Western leaders are now expressing “outrage”, as the media call it, at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to “take full control” of Gaza and “occupy” it. At some point in the future, Israel is apparently ready to hand the enclave over to outside forces unconnected to the Palestinian people.

    The Israeli cabinet agreed last Friday on the first step: a takeover of Gaza City, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are huddled in the ruins, being starved to death. The city will be encircled, systematically depopulated and destroyed, with survivors presumably herded southwards to a “humanitarian city” – Israel’s new term for a concentration camp – where they will be penned up, awaiting death or expulsion.

    At the weekend, foreign ministers from the UK, Germany, Italy, Australia, and other Western nations issued a joint statement decrying the move, warning it would “aggravate the catastrophic humanitarian situation, endanger the lives of the hostages, and further risk the mass displacement of civilians”.

    Germany, Israel’s most fervent backer in Europe and its second-biggest arms supplier, is apparently so dismayed that it has vowed to “suspend” – that is, delay – weapons shipments that have helped Israel to murder and maim hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the past 22 months.

    Netanyahu is not likely to be too perturbed. Doubtless, Washington will step in and pick up any slack for its main client state in the oil-rich Middle East.

    Meanwhile, Netanyahu has once again shifted the West’s all-too-belated focus on the indisputable proof of Israel’s ongoing genocidal actions – evidenced by Gaza’s skeletal children – to an entirely different story.

    Now, the front pages are all about the Israeli prime minister’s strategy in launching another “ground operation”, how much pushback he is getting from his military commanders, what the implications will be for the Israelis still held captive in the enclave, whether the Israeli army is now overstretched, and whether Hamas can ever be “defeated” and the enclave “demilitarised”.

    We are returning once again to logistical analyses of the genocide – analyses whose premises ignore the genocide itself. Might that not be integral to Netanyahu’s strategy?

    Life and death

    It ought to be shocking that Germany has been provoked into stopping its arming of Israel – assuming it follows through – not because of months of images of Gaza’s skin-and-bones children that echo those from Auschwitz, but only because Israel has declared that it wants to “take control” of Gaza.

    It should be noted, of course, that Israel never stopped controlling Gaza and the rest of the Palestinian territories – in contravention of the fundamentals of international law, as the International Court of Justice ruled last year. Israel has had absolute control over the lives and deaths of Gaza’s people every day – bar one – since its occupation of the tiny coastal enclave many decades ago.

    On 7 October 2023, thousands of Palestinian fighters briefly broke out of the besieged prison camp they and their families had endured after Israel momentarily dropped its guard.

    Gaza has long been a prison that the Israeli military has illegally controlled by land, sea, and air, determining who could enter and leave. It kept Gaza’s economy throttled, and put the enclave’s population “on a diet” that saw rocketing malnourishment among its children long before the current starvation campaign.

    Trapped behind a highly militarised fence since the early 1990s, unable to access their own coastal waters, and with Israeli drones constantly surveilling them and raining down death from the air, the people of Gaza viewed it more as a modernised concentration camp.

    But Germany and the rest of the West were fine supporting all that. They have continued selling Israel arms, providing it with special trading status, and offering diplomatic cover.

    Only as Israel carries through to a logical conclusion its settler-colonial agenda of replacing the native Palestinian people with Jews, is it apparently time for the West to vent its rhetorical “outrage”.

    Two-state trickery

    Why the pushback now? In part, it is because Netanyahu is pulling the rug out from under their cherished, decades-long pretext for supporting Israel’s ever-greater criminality: the fabled two-state solution. Israel conspired in that trickery with the signing of the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s.

    The goal was never the realisation of a two-state solution. Rather, Oslo created a “diplomatic horizon” for “final status issues” – which, like the physical horizon, always remained equally distant, however much ostensible movement there was on the ground.

    Lisa Nandy, Britain’s culture secretary, peddled precisely this same deceit last week as she extolled the virtues of the two-state solution. She told Sky News: “Our message to the Palestinian people is very, very clear: There is hope on the horizon.”

    Every Palestinian understood her real message, which could be paraphrased as: “We’ve lied to you about a Palestinian state for decades, and we’ve allowed a genocide to unfold before the world’s eyes for the past two years. But hey, trust us this time. We’re on your side.”

    In truth, the promise of Palestinian statehood was always treated by the West as little more than a threat – and one directed at Palestinian leaders. Palestinian officials must be more obedient, quieter. They had to first prove their willingness to police Israel’s occupation on Israel’s behalf by repressing their own people.

    Hamas, of course, failed that test in Gaza. But Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the occupied West Bank, bent over backwards to reassure his examiners, casting as “sacred” his lightly armed security forces’ so-called “cooperation” with Israel. In reality, they are there to do its dirty work.

    Nonetheless, despite the PA’s endless good behaviour, Israel has continued to expel ordinary Palestinians from their land, then steal that land, which was supposed to form the basis of a Palestinian state, and hand it over to extremist Jewish settlers backed by the Israeli army.

    Former US President Barack Obama briefly and feebly tried to halt what the West misleadingly calls Jewish “settlement expansion” – in reality, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians – but rolled over at the first sign of intransigence from Netanyahu.

    Israel has stepped up the process of ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank even more aggressively over the past two years, while global attention has been on Gaza – with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz warning this week that settlers have been given “free rein”.

    A small window into the impunity granted to settlers as they wage their campaign of violence to depopulate Palestinian communities was highlighted at the weekend, when B’Tselem released footage of a Palestinian activist, Awdah Hathaleen, inadvertently filming his own killing.

    Extremist settler Yinon Levi was released on grounds of self-defence, even though the video shows him singling out Hathaleen from afar, taking aim, and shooting.

    Alibi gone

    It is noticeable that, having stopped making reference to Palestinian statehood for many years, Western leaders have revived their interest only now, as Israel is making a two-state solution unrealisable.

    That was graphically illustrated by footage broadcast this month by ITV. Shot from an aid plane, it showed the wholesale destruction of Gaza – its homes, schools, hospitals, universities, bakeries, shops, mosques, and churches gone.

    Gaza is in ruins. Its reconstruction will take decades. Occupied East Jerusalem and its holy sites were long ago seized and Judaised by Israel, with Western assent.

    Suddenly, Western capitals are noticing that the last remnants of the proposed Palestinian state are about to be swallowed whole by Israel, too. Germany recently warned Israel that it must not take “any further steps toward annexing the West Bank”.

    US President Donald Trump is on his own path. But this is the moment when other major Western powers – led by France, Britain, and Canada – have started threatening to recognise a Palestinian state, even as Israel has obliterated the possibility of such a state.

    Australia announced it would join them this week after its foreign minister, a few days earlier, said the quiet part out loud, warning: “There is a risk there will be no Palestine left to recognise if the international community doesn’t move to create that pathway to a two-state solution.”

    That is something they dare not countenance, because with it goes their alibi for supporting all these years the apartheid state of Israel, now deep into the final stages of a genocide in Gaza.

    That was why British Prime Minister Keir Starmer desperately switched tack recently. Instead of dangling recognition of Palestinian statehood as a carrot encouraging Palestinians to be more obedient – British policy for decades – he wielded it as a threat, and a largely hollow one, against Israel.

    He would recognise a Palestinian state if Israel refused to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza and proceeded with the West Bank’s annexation. In other words, Starmer backed recognising a state of Palestine, after Israel had gone ahead with its complete erasure.

    Extracting concessions

    Still, France and Britain’s recognition threat is not simply too late. It serves two other purposes.

    Firstly, it provides a new alibi for inaction. There are plenty of far more effective ways for the West to halt Israel’s genocide. Western capitals could embargo arms sales, stop intelligence sharing, impose economic sanctions, sever ties with Israeli institutions, expel Israeli ambassadors, and downgrade diplomatic relations. They are choosing to do none of those things.

    And secondly, recognition is designed to extract from the Palestinians “concessions” that will make them even more vulnerable to Israeli violence.

    According to France’s foreign affairs minister, Jean-Noel Barrot: “Recognising a State of Palestine today means standing with the Palestinians who have chosen non-violence, who have renounced terrorism, and are prepared to recognise Israel.”

    In other words, in the West’s view, the “good Palestinians” are those who recognise and lay down before the state committing genocide against them.

    The post The West is in panic as Israel’s plan for ‘full control’ of Gaza heralds a new Nakba first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Hidden Costs of the Big Data Surveillance Complex

    Unbeknownst to much of the public, Big Tech exacts heavy tolls on public health, the environment, and democracy. The detrimental combination of an unregulated tech sector, pronounced rise in cyberattacks and data theft, and widespread digital and media illiteracy—as noted in my previous Dispatch on Big Data’s surveillance complex—is exacerbated by legacy media’s failure to inform the public of these risks. While establishment news outlets cover major security breaches in Big Tech’s troves of personal identifiable information (PII) and their costs to individuals, businesses, and national security, this coverage fails to address the negative impacts of Big Tech on the full health of our political system, civic engagement, and ecosystems.

    Marietje Schaake, an AI Policy fellow at Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI Policy, argues that Big Tech’s unrestrained hand in all three branches of the government, the military, local and national elections, policing, workplace monitoring, and surveillance capitalism undermine American society in ways the public has failed to grasp. Indeed, little in the corporate press helps the public understand exactly how data centers—the facilities that process and store vast amounts of data—do more than endanger PII. Greenlit by the Trump administration, data centers accelerate ecosystem harms through their unmitigated appropriation of natural resources, including water, and the subsequent greenhouse gas emissions that increase ambient pollution and its attendant diseases.

    Adding insult to the public’s right to be informed, corporate news rarely sheds light on how an ethical, independent press serves the public good and functions to balance power in a democracy. A 2023 civics poll by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School found that only a quarter of respondents knew that press freedom is a constitutional right and a counterbalance to the powers of government and capitalism. The gutting of local news in favor of commercial interests has only accelerated this knowledge blackout.

    The demand for AI by corporatists, military AI venture capitalists, and consumers—and resultant demand for data centers—is outpacing utilities infrastructure, traditional power grid capabilities, and the renewable energy sector. Big Tech companies, such as Amazon and Meta, strain municipal water systems and regional power grids, reducing the capacity to operate all things residential and local. In Newton County, Georgia, for example, Meta’s $750 million data center, which sucks up ​​approximately 500,000 gallons of water a day, has contaminated local groundwater and caused taps in nearby homes to run dry. What’s more, the AI boom comes at a time when hot wars are flaring and global temperatures are soaring faster than scientists once predicted.

    Constant connectivity, algorithms, and AI-generated content delude individual internet and device users into believing that they’re well informed. However, the decline of civics awareness in the United States—compounded by rampant digital and media illiteracy, ubiquitous state and corporate surveillance, and lax news reporting—makes for an easily manipulated citizenry, asserts attorney and privacy expert, Heidi Boghosian. This is especially disconcerting given the creeping spread of authoritarianism, smackdown on civil liberties, and surging demand for AI everything.

    Open [but not transparent] AI

    While the companies that develop and deploy popular AI-powered tools lionize the wonders of their products and services, they keep hidden the unsustainable impacts on our world. To borrow from Cory Doctorow, the “enshittification” of the online economy traps consumers, vendors, and advertisers in “the organizing principle of US statecraft,” as well as by more mundane capitalist surveillance. Without government oversight or a Fourth Estate to compel these tech corporations to reveal their shadow side, much of the public is not only in the dark but in harm’s way.

    At the most basic level, consumers should know that OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, collects private data and chat inputs, regardless of whether users are logged in or not. Any time users visit or interact with ChatGPT, their log data (the Internet Protocol address, browser type and settings, date and time of the site visit, and interaction with the service), usage data (time zone, country, and type of device used), device details (device name and identifiers, operating system, and browser used), location information from the device’s GPS, and cookies, which store the user’s personal information, are saved. Most users have no idea that they can opt out.

    OpenAI claims it saves data only for “fine-tuning,” a process of enhancing the performance and capabilities of AI models, and for human review “to identify biases or harmful outputs.” OpenAI also claims not to use data for marketing and advertising purposes or to sell information to third parties without prior consent. Most users, however, are as oblivious to the means of consent as to the means of opting out. This is by design.

    In July, the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacated the Federal Trade Commission’s “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have made online unsubscribing easier. The ruling would have covered all forms of negative option marketing—programs that give sellers free rein to interpret customer inaction as “opting in,” consenting to subscriptions and unwittingly accruing charges. Director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, John Davisson, commented that the court’s decision was poorly reasoned, and only those with financial or career advancement motives would argue in favor of subscription traps.

    Even if OpenAI is actually protective of the private data it stores, it is not above disclosing user data to affiliates, law enforcement, and the government. Moreover, ChatGPT practices are noncompliant with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the global gold standard of data privacy protection. Although OpenAI says it strips PII and anonymizes data, its practice of “indefinite retention” does not comply with the GDPR’s stipulation for data storage limitations, nor does OpenAI sufficiently guarantee irreversible data de-identification.

    As science and tech reporter Will Knight wrote for Wired, “Once data is baked into an AI model today, extracting it from that model is a bit like trying to recover the eggs from a finished cake.” Whenever a tech company collects and keeps PII, there are security risks. The more data captured and stored by a company, the more likely it will be exposed to a system bug, hack, or breach, such as the ChatGPT breach in March 2023.

    OpenAI has said it will comply with the EU’s AI Code of Practice for General-Purpose AI, which aims to foster transparency, information sharing, and best practices for model and risk assessment among tech companies. Microsoft has said that it will likely sign on to compliance, too; while Meta, on the other hand, flatly refuses to comply, much like it refuses to abide by environmental regulations.

    To no one’s surprise, the EU code has already become politicized, and the White House has issued its own AI Action Plan to “remove red tape.” The plan also purports to remove “woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models,” eliminating such topics as diversity, equity, and inclusion and climate change. As Trump crusades against regulation and “bias,” the White House-allied Meta decries political concerns over compliance with the EU’s AI code. Meta’s claim is coincidental; British Courts, based on the United Kingdom’s GDPR obligations, ruled that anyone in a country covered by the GDPR has the right to request Meta to stop using their personal data for targeted advertising.

    Big Tech’s open secrets

    Information on the tech industry’s environmental and health impacts exists, attests artificial intelligence researcher Sasha Luccioni. The public is simply not being informed. This lack of transparency, warns Luccioni, portends significant environmental and health consequences. Too often, industry opaqueness is excused by insiders as “competition” to which they feel entitled, or blamed on the broad scope of artificial intelligence products and services—smart devices, recommender systems, internet searches, autonomous vehicles, machine learning, the list goes on. Allegedly, there’s too much variety to reasonably quantify consequences.

    Those consequences are quantifiable, though. While numbers vary and are on the ascent, there are at least 3,900 data centers in the United States and 10,000 worldwide. An average data center houses complex networking equipment, servers, and systems for cooling systems, lighting, security, and storage, all requiring copious rare earth minerals, water, and electricity to operate.

    The densest data center area exists in Northern Virginia, just outside the nation’s capital. “Data Center Alley,” also known as the “Data Center Capital of the World,” has the highest concentration of data centers not only in the United States but in the entire world, consuming millions of gallons of water every day. International hydrologist Newsha Ajami has documented how water shortages around the world are being worsened by Big Data. For tech companies, “water is an afterthought.”

    Powered by fossil fuels, these data centers pose serious public health implications. According to research in 2024, training one large language model (LLM) with 213 million parameters produced 626,155 pounds of CO2 emissions, “equivalent to the lifetime emissions of five cars, including fuel.” Stated another way, such AI training “can produce air pollutants equivalent to more than 10,000 round trips by car between Los Angeles and New York City.”

    Reasoning models generate more “thinking tokens” and use as much as 50 percent more energy than other AI models. Google and Microsoft search features purportedly use smaller models when possible, which, theoretically, can provide quick responses with less energy. It’s unclear when or if smaller models are actually invoked, and the bottom line, explained climate reporter Molly Taft, is that model providers are not informing consumers that speedier AI response times almost always equate to higher energy usage.

    Profits over people

    AI is rapidly becoming a public utility, profoundly shaping society, surmise Caltech’s Adam Wierman and Shaolei Ren of the University of California, Riverside. In the last few years, AI has outgrown its niche in the tech sector to become integral to digital economies, government, and security. AI has merged more closely with daily life, replacing human jobs and decision-making, and has thus created a reliance on services currently controlled by private corporations. Because other essential services such as water, electricity, and communications are treated as public utilities, there’s growing discussion about whether AI should be regulated under a similar public utility model.

    That said, data centers need power grids, most of which depend on fossil fuel-generated electricity that stresses national and global energy stores. Data centers also need backup generators for brownout and blackout periods. With limited clean, reliable backup options, despite the known environmental and health consequences of burning diesel, diesel generators remain the industry’s go-to.

    Whether the public realizes it or not, the environment and citizens are being polluted by the actions of private tech firms. Outputs from data centers inject dangerous fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides (NOx) into the air, immediately worsening cardiovascular conditions, asthma, cancer, and even cognitive decline, caution Wierman and Ren. Contrary to popular belief, air pollutants are not localized to their emission sources. And, although chemically different, carbon (CO2) is not contained by location either.

    Of great concern is that in “World Data Capital Virginia,” data centers are incentivized with tax breaks. Worse still, the (misleadingly named) Environmental Protection Agency plans to remove all limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, according to documents obtained by the New York Times. Thus, treating AI and data centers as public utilities presents a double-edged sword. Can a government that slashes regulations to provide more profit to industry while destroying its citizens’ health along with the natural world be trusted to fairly price and equitably distribute access to all? Would said government suddenly start protecting citizens’ privacy and sensitive data?

    The larger question, perhaps, asks if the US is truly a democracy. Or is it a technogarchy, or an AI-tocracy? The 2024 AI Global Surveillance (AIGS) Index ranked the United States first for its deployment of advanced AI surveillance tools that “monitor, track, and surveil citizens to accomplish a range of objectives— some lawful, others that violate human rights, and many of which fall into a murky middle ground,” the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reported.

    Surveillance has long been the purview of authoritarian regimes, but in so-called democracies such as the United States, the scale and intensity of AI use is leveraged both globally through military operations and domestically to target and surveil civilians. In cities such as Scarsdale, New York, and Norfolk, Virginia, citizens are beginning to speak out against the systems that are “immensely popular with politicians and law enforcement, even though they do real and palpable damage to the citizenry.”

    Furthermore, tracking civilians to “deter civil disobedience” has never been easier, evidenced in June by the rapid mobilization of boots on the ground amid the peaceful protests of ICE raids in Los Angeles. AI-powered surveillance acts as the government’s “digital scarecrow,” chilling the American tradition and First Amendment right to protest and the Fourth Estate’s right to report.

    The public is only just starting to become aware of algorithmic biases in AI training datasets and their prejudicial impact on predictive policing, or profiling, algorithms, and other analytic tools used by law enforcement. City street lights and traffic light cameras, facial recognition systems, video monitoring in and around business and government buildings, as well as smart speakers, smart toys, keyless entry locks, automobile intelligent dash displays, and insurance antitheft tracking systems are all embedded with algorithmic biases.

    Checking Big Tech’s unchecked power

    Given the level and surreptitiousness of surveillance, the media are doubly tasked with treading carefully to avoid being targeted and accurately informing the public’s perception of data collection and data centers. Reporting that glorifies techbros and AI is unscrupulous and antithetical to democracy: In an era where billionaire techbros and wanna-be-kings are wielding every available apparatus of government and capitalism to gatekeep information, the public needs an ethical press committed to seeking truth, reporting it, and critically covering how AI is shifting power.

    If people comprehend what’s at stake—their personal privacy and health, the environment, and democracy itself—they may be more inclined to make different decisions about their AI engagement and media consumption. An independent press that prioritizes public enlightenment means that citizens and consumers still have choices, starting with basic data privacy self-controls that resist AI surveillance and stand up for democratic self-governance.

    Just as a healthy environment, replete with clean air and water, has been declared a human right by the United Nations, privacy is enshrined in Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Although human rights are subject to national laws, water, air, and the internet know no national borders. It is, therefore, incumbent upon communities and the press to uphold these rights and to hold power to account.

    This spring, residents of Pittsylvania County, Virginia, did just that. Thanks to independent journalism and civic participation, residents pushed back against the corporate advertising meant to convince the county that the fossil fuels powering the region’s data centers are “clean.” Propagandistic campaigns were similarly applied in Memphis, Tennessee, where proponents of Elon Musk’s data center—which has the footprint of thirteen football fields—circulated fliers to residents of nearby, historically Black neighborhoods, proclaiming the super-polluting xAI has low emissions. “Colossus,” Musk’s name for what’s slated to be the world’s biggest supercomputer, powers xAI’s Hitler-loving chatbot Grok.

    The Southern Environmental Law Center exposed with satellite and thermal imagery how xAI, which neglected to obtain legally required air permits, brought in at least 35 portable methane gas turbines to help power Colossus. Tennessee reporter Ren Brabenec said that Memphis has become a sacrifice zone and expects the communities there to push back.

    Meanwhile, in Pittsylvania, Virginia, residents succeeded in halting the proposed expansion of data centers that would damage the region’s environment and public health. Elizabeth Putfark, attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, affirmed that communities, including local journalists, are a formidable force when acting in solidarity for the public welfare.

    Best practices

    Because AI surveillance is a threat to democracies everywhere, we must each take measures to counter “government use of AI for social control,” contends Abi Olvera, senior fellow with the Council on Strategic Risks. Harlo Holmes, director of digital security at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told Wired that consumers must make technology choices under the premise that they’re our “last line of defense.” Steps to building that last line of defense include digital and media literacies and digital hygiene, and at least a cursory understanding of how data is stored and its far-reaching impacts.

    Best defensive practices employed by media professionals can also serve as best practices for individuals. This means becoming familiar with laws and regulations, taking every precaution to protect personal information on the internet and during online communications, and engaging in responsible civic discourse. A free and democratic society is only as strong as its citizens’ abilities to make informed decisions, which, in turn, are only as strong as their media and digital literacy skills and the quality of information they consume.

    This essay first published here: https://www.projectcensored.org/hidden-costs-big-data-surveillance-complex/

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    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Pentagon Paves Way To Reclaim Ukraine-Bound Arms To US Stockpiles

    A memo written by the US Defense Department’s policy chief will allow US weapons and equipment earmarked for Ukraine to be diverted back into US stockpiles, CNN reported on 8 August.

    According to four people who have read the memo, the policy represents “a dramatic shift” that could see billions of dollars of weapons redirected to shore up dwindling US supplies.

    The memo was written last month by US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, but has become public ahead of US President Donald Trump’s planned meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The meeting is tentatively scheduled for next week.

    Items desired by Ukraine’s military that are in short supply in the US include interceptor missiles, Patriot air defense systems, and artillery ammunition.

    The post Pentagon Paves Way To Reclaim Ukraine-Bound Arms To US Stockpiles appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Trump’s Tariffs against Latin America


    President Donald Trump answers questions from reporters after signing an executive order about the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus, August 5, 2025

    Trump’s threat of imposing a crippling 50 per cent tariff on all Brazilian imports to the United States took everyone by surprise, especially, considering the US enjoys a trade surplus with the South American giant (surplus it has enjoyed since 2007). Lula made it clear that Brazil would reciprocate in kind.

    Trump tariffs against Brazil are in line with his overall policy of applying tariffs on all countries in the world. Under Trump US imperialism seeks to establish a global system that it suits itself such that it can impose or change any rule any time it wants and attack any country it dislikes.

    As with many other global institutions, Trump, following in the footsteps of previous US administrations, is prepared to run roughshod over World Trade Organisation rules that US imperialism itself was central in establishing in 1995.

    Thus, his attack on Mexico is not surprising either, country with which it has a substantial trade deficit caused by its southern neighbour’s incorporation into US supply chain arrangements ever since the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

    The US has had a trade deficit with Mexico ever since 1995, exactly one year after Nafta.

    To Trump’s chagrin, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has vigorously defended her country’s sovereignty and has skilfully navigated US provocations.

    To the charge of Mexico being a drug-trafficking hub, she has pointed out to US negotiators that the “the US itself harbours cartels, is the largest narcotic consumer market, exports the majority of armaments used by drug barons and hosts money-laundering banks.” She has also resolutely refused the deployment of US troops on Mexican soil.

    Back in January 2025, Trump threatened Colombia with sanctions and 25 per cent tariffs on all its exports to the US. When Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro did not allow US planes carrying deported Colombians in, refusing to receive them in military aircraft and handcuffed, Trump threatened to make the tariffs “extendable to 50 per cent [plus] exhaustive inspections of Colombian citizens and merchandise, and visa sanctions for Colombian officials” plus “sanctions on banking and other areas.”

    In response, Petro announced he would impose 50 per cent tariffs on US products entering the Colombian market. Furthermore, Petro, condemning the war on Gaza, argued that Colombia should break from Nato to avoid alliances involving militaries that “drop bombs on children.”

    By the end of July Trump announced 50 per cent tariffs on imports of copper but when he realised it would substantially increase costs for US manufacturers — making its price nose-dive by 22 points with US traders facing heavy losses — he was forced to abandon it. He amended the tariff to apply only on semi-manufactured products such as wire and tube, excluding refined copper (until January 2027). In 2024, Chile, Canada and Peru accounted for more than 90 per cent of US refined copper imports.

    On July 7, in a tweet Trump declared that Jair Bolsonaro was being witch-hunted by the Brazilian authorities. Bolsonaro is being tried for insurrection, coup plotting and his involvement in staging a January 6 Capitol assault-style riot against parliament and the judiciary buildings in Brasilia. Trump claimed Bolsonaro “is not guilty of anything, except having fought for the people.” Trump’s message sought to depict Bolsonaro as a political leader being politically persecuted, but nothing could, of course, be further from the truth.

    Lula’s immediate response was that the US president’s statements were an interference in Brazil’s internal affairs and demanded respect for Brazilian sovereignty: “The defence of democracy in Brazil is a matter for Brazilians.” And in a sharp barb, Lula added: “We do not accept interference or tutelage from anyone. We have solid and independent institutions. No-one is above the law. Especially those who attack freedom and the rule of law.”

    Trump’s attacks against Latin America are part and parcel of US imperialism’s efforts to destabilise governments it doesn’t like.

    Adding to the comprehensively tight sanctions regime being applied to Cuba and Venezuela and to a lesser extent to Nicaragua, Trump is now targeting Cuban and especially Venezuelan migrants, falsely presenting them as members of criminal organisations.

    And, in a human-trafficking operation run with far-right El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, Trump is sending hundreds of them to CECOT, El Salvador’s concentration camp.

    Reversing decades of US encouragement of migration aimed at weakening their governments, Trump has terminated the Temporary Protection Status (TPS) of hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans, Cubans and Venezuelans, a key component of the ICE campaign of terror against Latinos.

    The Trump administration, following from his Democrat and Republican predecessors, is seeking to expand its military presence in Latin America as much and as quickly as possible. It has deployed troops on Mexico’s southern border; Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa has succeeded in getting the constitution amended to allow the US to have military bases on the Galapagos islands; the US holds regular and massive joint military manoeuvres in Guyana (where it has at least one military base); and the US also has a number of military bases in Central America, Colombia, the Caribbean, Peru, and a new military base in Argentina.

    Though Trump’s tariffs on Latin America are chaotic and simplistic, they have a strategic objective: to slow down, reduce and if possible, eliminate altogether the drive to a multipolar world.

    In short, to stop China’s drive to foster a new geopolitics not determined by the weaponisation of the dollar, economic sanctions or military aggression. One in which relations are not dictated by coercive zero-sum games but by voluntary collaboration in mutually beneficial economic relationships.

    US imperialism (and the Trump government) find the ever-closer relationship and collaboration between the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) and China simply intolerable. US officials repeatedly argue that China’s trade relations and co-operation with Latin America represent an existential threat to the US.

    Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua have forged strong links with China and so has Brazil. Lula was presiding over the Brics summit in Rio de Janeiro when Trump launched the dig about fascist Bolsonaro.

    Claudia Sheinbaum attended as an observer and Mexico is rapidly developing links with China. In Peru China has built the port of Chancay (a Belt and Road initiative) — the largest deepwater port on the western coast of South America.

    Honduras has cut ties with Taiwan and recognised the People’s Republic of China and Colombia has joined the Brics.

    Furthermore, China is the main trading partner of South America and the second-largest trading partner of Central America. Trump has threatened all Brics countries with 100 per cent tariffs.

    The US Southern Command recognises that China’s trade with Latin America has gone “beyond raw materials and commodities to include traditional infrastructure (road, bridges, ports) and ‘new infrastructure’: electric vehicles, telecommunication, and renewable energy.”

    Benefits never offered by the US to countries in its “backyard.” This ever-closer relationship explains Trump’s aggression towards the countries mentioned, to browbeat them economically and politically into drawing away from China.

    A US success story is Panama, where President Jose Mulino’s capitulation to Trump’s threats to retake the Panama Canal by military means led him to accept Washington’s pressure to exit China’s Belt and Road Initiative, “one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived.”

    These contradictions are as a matter of course presented as the outcome of US-China rivalry, inevitable between these superpowers.

    However, such a framework is deceptive since the nature of the contradictions stems from two conceptions of how to organise the global economy.

    The US considers itself the “indispensable nation” which has always engaged in zero-sum games whose outcome produces winners (the US and its economically developed accomplices) and losers (the vast majority of humanity who reside in the global South).

    Trump’s tariffs intend to keep it that way, while Latin America’s orientation towards Asia, China and the Brics is correctly pushing in the opposite direction: to a fairer, multipolar world.

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  • FIFA: The Beautiful Game Cannot Support Genocide And Repression

    The Black Alliance for Peace North South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights delivered a message to FIFA’s President and Head of Human Rights regarding the ongoing and rapidly deteriorating human rights conditions in Palestine, as well as current conditions in the United States that BAP believes makes the United States a dangerous nation for citizens and residents of foreign nations to visit.

    In that communication we made the argument that because of the ongoing genocide and the role of the U.S. as a facilitator of that genocide, as well as the unsafe and hostile conditions in the U.S. that has compelled a number of nations to issue advisories against travel to the U.S., we called on FIFA to ban the United States and Israel from hosting and participating in international competition, and to relocate the 2025 World Cup from the United States.

    The post FIFA: The Beautiful Game Cannot Support Genocide And Repression appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • FIFA: The Beautiful Game Cannot Support Genocide And Repression

    The Black Alliance for Peace North South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights delivered a message to FIFA’s President and Head of Human Rights regarding the ongoing and rapidly deteriorating human rights conditions in Palestine, as well as current conditions in the United States that BAP believes makes the United States a dangerous nation for citizens and residents of foreign nations to visit.

    In that communication we made the argument that because of the ongoing genocide and the role of the U.S. as a facilitator of that genocide, as well as the unsafe and hostile conditions in the U.S. that has compelled a number of nations to issue advisories against travel to the U.S., we called on FIFA to ban the United States and Israel from hosting and participating in international competition, and to relocate the 2025 World Cup from the United States.

    The post FIFA: The Beautiful Game Cannot Support Genocide And Repression appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US: $1.6 Billion For Propaganda, Nothing For Infrastructure

    The United States has approved $1.6 billion to counter what it calls China’s “malign influence” abroad. The funding goes to foreign media outlets, NGOs, influencers, and think tanks that align with Washington’s preferred messaging.

    This is not defense spending. It is not humanitarian aid. It is a global messaging campaign, funded by taxpayers. The U.S. says it cannot afford healthcare, housing, or student debt relief.

    But it finds $1.6 billion to run media campaigns in Vietnam, Nigeria, and Colombia.

    This is not sustainable. It is not defensible.

    If the government can find this money for foreign propaganda, it can find the money for clean water in Flint, or housing in Los Angeles.

    It chooses not to.

    The post US: $1.6 Billion For Propaganda, Nothing For Infrastructure appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US: $1.6 Billion For Propaganda, Nothing For Infrastructure

    The United States has approved $1.6 billion to counter what it calls China’s “malign influence” abroad. The funding goes to foreign media outlets, NGOs, influencers, and think tanks that align with Washington’s preferred messaging.

    This is not defense spending. It is not humanitarian aid. It is a global messaging campaign, funded by taxpayers. The U.S. says it cannot afford healthcare, housing, or student debt relief.

    But it finds $1.6 billion to run media campaigns in Vietnam, Nigeria, and Colombia.

    This is not sustainable. It is not defensible.

    If the government can find this money for foreign propaganda, it can find the money for clean water in Flint, or housing in Los Angeles.

    It chooses not to.

    The post US: $1.6 Billion For Propaganda, Nothing For Infrastructure appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Trump’s Fatal Move

    The headline read, “Trump tells Israel to ‘finish the job’ against Hamas.” Unexplained by Triumphant is why the United States is involved with determining the fate of Hamas. Has Hamas injured any American or threatened U.S. hegemony? Does Hamas have long-range ballistic missiles, tipped with nuclear weapons, that can reach the U.S. mainland? Does Hamas have submarines that can move close to shore? They don’t even have rowboats. Outside Israel, Hamas is not a threat to anyone.

    Israel has murdered many Americans, including naval forces on the U.S.S. Liberty, has submarines that contain missiles tipped with nuclear weapons, and is a threat to everyone. Isn’t it clear that U.S. administrations have confused the issue and its contestants and behaved detrimental to American interests?

    Trump’s pronouncement, “Finish them off, ‘Big Tuna,’ and we’ll take their territory,” emanates from a Godfather mentality. The inhuman is trying to convince the world that he is in control of the gruesome operation and Israel operates under his command. Already classified as the worst U.S. president and as the tenth most worst person in history, Mr. Evil has now leaped to numero uno in the latter category, displacing Adolph Hitler to the 2nd spot. What is left for him to accomplish?

    U.S. authorities’ explain the unusual arrangement, where the U.S. supplies the arms and funds and Israel commits the mass murders, by declaring the two nations have shared values ─ an odd reason to conduct foreign relations. Odder is that Israel is fervently a Jewish nation, the United States is mostly a Christian nation, and Jews and Christians have several different values. The “values” are vaguely defined and are more appropriately defined by the shared joy both nations get from subduing and strangling defenseless peoples.

    Another reason, given by foreign policy experts, has genocidal Israel serving as the U.S. “attack dog,” keeping in check the Middle East nations, and assuring all are aligned with U.S. interests. History does not validate the thesis. Except for rare occasions, Israel has operated independently of U.S. interests, created difficulties for Uncle Sam with several Arab nations, drawn the U.S. into wars, and produced enemies for the “Red, White, and Blue.” Kept from public view is Israel’s role in constructing the number one enemy of the U.S. ─ Osama bin Laden.

    The arch-terrorist clarified his position in the infamous Osama bin Laden “Letter to the American people,” which has been conveniently sidetracked to ensure Americans do not get infected with terrorist germs. It is difficult to agree with bin Laden but his statements are not easily contended.

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

    If “shared values” and foreign policy decisions that favor Israel are no benefit to U.S. interests, what drives support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people? Common factors appearing in the U.S. and other nations are the myriad of pro-Israel Jewish groups who exercise media control, political funding, dual citizenship, promote the concept of a “special relationship,” and influence the cultural, social, educational, and political systems in all of the countries.

    Commentators go to great lengths to explain the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States, treating it as a unique affair, in which both benefit. This slogan is a hoax, which originated during World War II as a description of the relationship between embattled Great Britain and a still neutral United States. Somehow and somewhere, a clever someone adapted the World War II slogan, applied it to Israel, and managed to insert it in the everyday lexicon of several nations. Some examples:

    “The Netherlands maintains excellent relations with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and a constructive partnership through our development cooperation programme, while the special relationship with Israel allows for political openings.”

    “The minister met with Israeli Minister of Military Affairs Moshe Ya’alon in Berlin on Thursday. Ya’alon is on a two-day visit to Germany. ‘This is the first foreign guest I have the pleasure of welcoming here in my function as defense minister. It shows the special relationship between Germany and Israel,’ the German defense minister stated.”

    “Some members of the EU were against the deepening of relations with Israel without the progress in the Peace Process. The Czech plan did not materialize, yet, the ‘special relationship’ between the Czech Republic and the Jewish state remains strong.”

    Placing the words “special relationship” in government conversations, speeches, reports, articles, and documents so they become part of the everyday vocabulary of Europeans is a significant thrust of Israel’s public relations effort. The words seem harmless but they have a psychological impact.

    The “special relationship” that the U.S. has with Israel is lightly treated, exhibiting more humor than seriousness. The District of Columbia is “Israeli occupied territory” and “Israel is the U.S. 51st state.” Tine to get seriously serious. Examine one GIANT FACT ─ Israel’s supporters have key government officials in their pockets. Check two.

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio

    Norman Braman, billionaire car dealer and former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, is an ardent supporter of Israel and an ardent backer of Marco Rubio. Born to immigrant parents and becoming a billionaire in his native country didn’t interfere with Mr. Braman displaying first loyalty to Israel in a 2011 interview.

    We have to bring more – more American Jews to Israel. We don’t do a good enough job with that…. I’ve been a supporter of Birthright. It’s more than just taking Jews to Israel. We have to get back to what we said at the beginning of the program. We can’t ask someone what they can do for Israel. We have to explain to them what Israel has done for them. And if we are able to achieve that, then we will be successful in reversing this trend.

    From the New York Times, by Michael Barbaro and Steve Eder, May 9, 2015, “Billionaire Lifts Marco Rubio, Politically and Personally,”

    As Mr. Rubio has ascended in the ranks of Republican politics, Mr. Braman has emerged as a remarkable and unique patron. He has bankrolled Mr. Rubio’s campaigns. He has financed Mr. Rubio’s legislative agenda. And, at the same time, he has subsidized Mr. Rubio’s personal finances, as the rising politician and his wife grappled with heavy debt and big swings in their income.

    From 2019-2024, the American Israel Public Affairs (AIPAC) contributed $109,800 to Rubio’s campaigns.

    Elise Stefanik Representative (R – NY)
    From 2023-2024, AIPAC contributed a whopping $359,494 to Ms. Stefanik’s campaign.
    Additional major donors are:

    • Apollo Global Management, whose chief executive officer, Marc Rowan (est. net worth at $8.8 billion), is Chair of the Board of UJA-Federation of New York, Vice Chair of Darca, an Israeli educational network that operates 47 schools, and an Executive Committee member of the Civil Society Fellowship, a partnership of the infamous ADL and the Aspen Institute, designed to empower the next generation of community leaders and problem solvers.
    • NORPAC, “a Political action committee (PAC) working to strengthen the United States–Israel relationship.”
    • Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm, founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and “has emerged as one of the most active foreign investors in Israel.”
    • Paul Singer, founder and co-CEO of Elliott Management. “In 2016 Singer partnered with the Museum of the Bible to fund Passages Israel, a program to take college students to Israel. A longtime supporter of pro-Israel causes, Singer is a major funder of the conservative and pro-Israel think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).”

    Neither Ms. Stefanik nor Mr. Rubio have strong personal reasons to aggressively favor Israel. Elise Stefanik’s district is rural and has a slim number of Zionists. Marco Rubio’s Florida has a contingent of Zionist Jews, but Rubio’s public life was molded by his ties with Norman Braman before he entered statewide politics. These politicos have not received funds because they are pro-Israel, they have become pro-Israel in order to receive the funds. The arrangements have the smell of bribes for services rendered. Multiply the “bribes” by several hundred bribe masters and institutions and calculate the manipulation of the American political system by Israel’s supporters.

    The U.S. went bonkers over the revelation that, according to New York Magazine, about 3,000 ads were purchased by a Russian agency during the 2016 election at a cost of around $100,000. There are no investigations concerning Israeli massive interference in all U.S. elections from here to eternity.

    The Nation, in an article, “The Trump Campaign’s Collusion With Israel,” April 3/10, 2023
    While US media fixated on Russian interference in the 2016 election, an Israeli secret agent’s campaign to influence the outcome went unreported.

    …a recent multinational journalistic investigation revealed that Israel has become a world center for the export of election fraud, fake news, hacking of private e-mails, and disinformation. Connections were discovered between private intelligence firms and both Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the firm Cambridge Analytica, which illegally collected data from more than 87 million Facebook users for use in the 2016 presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

    Another revealing article in Jacobin, “Israel’s Meddling in US Politics Is Aggressive and Unceasing,” by Branko Marcetic 03.23.2024

    The real story of foreign election interference and a ‘quid pro quo’ in 2016 was about Israel…Two separate firms staffed by former Israeli Defense Forces officers — Psy-Group and Inspiration, the latter actually employed by a Trump-supporting Super PAC — presented candidate Trump with proposals for voter manipulation in swing states. One of Netanyahu’s political allies, billionaire Sheldon Adelson, poured more than $400 million into Trump’s campaign and those of his GOP allies before his death.

    If Israel’s supporters play key roles in subverting the interests of the Western nations and cajoling them into the unbelievable — aiding and abetting what has become the worst genocide in modern history, where induced suffering, deprivation, starvation, child killing are exercised with glee — then a plausible solution enters the cerebrum — contend the myriad of Jewish groups, expose and combat the media control, outdo the political funding, do away with dual citizenship, and halt the “special relationship.”

    Start with having anyone who favors Israel labelled a traitor to his/her native country, continue with having no relationship with any person, company, institution, and political figure who does not recognize the genocide, extend to mass protests of political officials and media who support Israel, propose legislation that denies dual citizenship, and expose the common factors that appear in several nations, including the “special relationship.”

    Ask church officials why they are not explosively active in condemning Israel and arousing their flocks to take action when Palestinian Christian communities face systemic violence and oppression at the hands of the Israeli government. The Denver Guardian reports,

    Christian clergy in Jerusalem are regularly spat on, harassed, and assaulted by right-wing Israelis, often under the watchful eye—and sometimes direct participation—of Israeli police. Church properties are vandalized with little, if any, consequences. Violent Israeli settlers, backed by the police, have illegally occupied church properties in the Old City and evicted the Palestinian Christian tenants. Palestinian Christian homes outside of the Old City are often bulldozed, without due process, to make way for excavations designed to draw in tourists, and Palestinian Christians living in the West Bank are often prevented from visiting Bethlehem due to Israeli-imposed military checkpoints and road closures. Attacks on Palestinian Christians and churches in the West Bank are also common.

    Trump has gone too far for too long in his brazen neglect for truth and reality, and for enabling apartheid Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians. The American people have gone too far for too long in permitting their nation to be coopted by a foreign power and used for the benefit of that foreign power. Israel’s supporters are a fifth column, a clandestine subversive organization working to further another nation’s military and political aims, destroying America’s constitutional values, and replacing them with Zionist criminal values. Criminals belong in jail and that is the proper place for Trump and all Zionists.

    The post Trump’s Fatal Move first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why Western Hegemony is Over

     The tariff truce between China and the United States is set to end in August. What do you forecast will happen after that? And what will happen to trade relations between China and the US for the rest of US President Donald Trump’s second term?

    The United States learned that it can’t impose its will on China. The rare earths threat by itself was enough to cause the US to reconsider. So, almost immediately after putting on the high tariffs, the US backed down. And both sides know that each has some chokeholds on the other. For that reason, we might expect the two sides to maintain certain limits on the trade frictions in the years ahead. There will be, therefore, some kind of agreement, but it won’t stick in the details, and frictions will continue to wax and wane, with neither side definitively imposing its will on the other. The basic reason is that both sides have a mutual gain from continued trade. I’m hopeful that a measure of rationality will therefore prevail.

    The biggest challenge, of course, is the behaviour of the US. The US started this trade war. This is not two sides fighting each other, but rather the US fighting China. We should remember that. The US needs to show some prudence at this point. I do suspect that there is a chastened view among many senior US officials. Trump himself is unpredictable. He has a very short attention span. Agreements with Trump don’t stick. So, I don’t foresee a quiet period, but I do foresee some limits to the competition because each side can do damage to the other and both sides have a strong reason to achieve some cooperation.

    Let me add one more point. From a long-term point of view, China certainly should not regard the US as a growth market for its exports. The US is going to restrict China’s exports to the US one way or another. The relationship will not be harmonious. The US will not be friendly to China, or trustworthy. China should just take care that it’s expanding its exports to other markets, and should not be overly focused on trying to break through to the US market, or even to Europe for that matter. The rapid growth of China’s exports will be with Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, west Asia, Central Asia, Latin America – not with the US and western Europe.

    What is your forecast for the US midterm elections, and will it be a tough battle for Trump? Can you comment on how divided the US is compared to before the election of Trump last year?

    I think that the Democrats will likely regain control of one or both houses of Congress, because in midterm elections that is generally the pattern.

    Even without getting deeply specific about the current context, the prevailing party that holds the White House almost always loses ground in the midterms, and the Republican majority in both houses of Congress is very small. Having said this, we should also understand that Trump is ruling mainly by executive decree, not by legislation. Even if the Democrats regain one or both houses of Congress, Trump will continue with his decrees.

    The US currently does not have a functioning constitutional system in my view. It is one-person rule by declarations of emergencies by Trump. The orders generally start with the statement: “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered”. This is a kind of soft dictatorship, not a constitutional system. The lower courts object, but the Supreme Court lets Trump have his way. The Congress is nearly moribund.

    Even if the Democrats regain some control of the House or the Senate, it won’t stop a lot of what Trump is doing. I should also add that while Americans are polarised, they generally dislike both political parties. Most Americans are unhappy about the direction of the country. They’re distrustful of the politicians. Our political institutions are not functioning properly and that’s why there’s a high level of distrust.

    Another point that I think is important to understand is that the swings between the Democrats and the Republicans do not change US foreign policy. [Former president Barack] Obama started the anti-China policies in his term. Then came Trump’s tariffs in his first term. Biden kept those Trump tariffs and had a hostile policy towards China. Now Trump is picking up where Biden left off. The deep state drives foreign policy, not public opinion or presidents.

    In sum, I don’t have much hope that some change in the midterm elections will change the direction of US politics very much. Even a change in the White House in four years is not likely to change US politics very much. Our problems are deep seated. Our institutional failings are deep. It’s going to take perhaps 20 years to work through this. This is not a Trump phenomenon by itself.

    What effect will the One Big Beautiful Bill have on the US economy?

    The One Big Beautiful Bill weakens the US in two ways. First, it adds to the already large budget deficits by making additional tax cuts that mainly benefit rich Americans and the corporate class. These tax cuts raise the budget deficit substantially and are partially offset by cuts in healthcare benefits for the poorest Americans. The bill, therefore, is dramatically unfair and unwise in its impacts on the deficit and inequality.

    Second, the legislation phases out some of the modest earlier US efforts towards low-carbon energy and modernisation of infrastructure. So, the legislation marks a US retreat from leadership on 21st-century technologies. Basically, the Trump administration is a gift to China, with Trump’s policies saying to China, “China should lead the way on climate safety, low-carbon energy, electric vehicles and all of the green and digital technologies that the world needs, while the US will ignore the future”.

    So, none of this is a big, beautiful bill. It is a mess that reflects the failures of the American political system.

    What are the implications of the fallout between billionaire Elon Musk and Trump?

    Trump doesn’t have long-term relations with any individual other than his immediate family. Trump falls out with everybody. Remember Steve Bannon? He was once Trump’s closest adviser. That came to an end quickly. Almost all Trump advisers get fired at one point or another. Trump is not a person with long-term loyalties to anybody.

    The individual feuds don’t mean very much. Breaking with Musk does not mean breaking with Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley put Trump back into the White House with enormous financial backing for Trump’s campaign. There are still tens of billions of dollars of government contracts going also to Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and other Big Tech operators.

    The basic relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington remains intact because the Pentagon believes that it needs AI and can’t pursue AI on its own. While Trump has cut support for EVs, including Tesla, the Pentagon will continue to rely on Musk’s SpaceX for many years to come. And the same is true of the Pentagon’s reliance on Big Tech’s AI capacities generally.

    You have mentioned in other interviews that Trump lacked a coherent strategy in foreign policy, including his handling of China. Why do you think this? And what do you see ahead for China-US relations?

    The most fundamental trend in the world economy is the rapid rise of the non-Western economies, led by China and including Russia, India, Southeast Asia and, in future decades, Africa. The US is flailing about trying to maintain its dominance in a world in which the emerging economies are rising rapidly. The US will not be able to prevent the emergence of multipolarity, but it will try. Trump will try one thing or another, but without success or coherence. Multipolarity has already arrived.

    The broad pattern of economic convergence – in which the emerging economies narrow or close the income gap with the high-income countries of the West – means that Western hegemony is over. This is leading to deep frustration, not only in the US political class but in Europe as well.

    China vastly outproduces the United States in advanced industrial goods, such as EVs, solar power, wind power, advanced nuclear power, batteries, low-cost 5G and many other key technologies. China incorporates AI into advanced manufacturing processes more than the US.

    Many European leaders feel that if they stick with the US against China and Russia, then maybe the Western hegemony will continue. This is delusional in my view, but nonetheless creates a lot of noise, friction and risks of conflict. None of it is a coherent strategy, however.

    The US has no strategy to stay ahead of China. In fact, the US can’t succeed in that. We hear a lot of US sabre-rattling against China, Russia and the BRICS countries. This is all dangerous. I think the heated rhetoric by itself can become a self-fulfilling prophecy of war. There are a lot of ignorant people in the US political leadership, and I worry very much about their naivety and delusions.

    This, in my view, is essentially the origin of the “trade war”. The US decided during 2010-2015 that China is now a threat to US primacy. The US has tried a lot of things to block China’s continued rise, including: a military build-up in East Asia; export restrictions on hi-tech goods, especially advanced chips; economic sanctions on key Chinese companies; investment restrictions by US companies, and ownership restrictions on Chinese companies in the US; high tariffs against China’s exports; and others. But none of this stops China’s rise. China’s development results from hard work, ingenuity, high rates of saving, high rates of investment, very effective long-term planning and a very skilled, very entrepreneurial generation of business leaders, especially young business leaders. Those fundamental strengths continue despite America’s anti-China policies.

    Trump’s policies are accelerating the move of top scientists to China. My overall view is that Trump is creating a lot of noise and some real dangers, but with no real strategy and no likelihood of success in holding back China’s rise. That’s a good thing. The rest of the world benefits from China’s economic success, including the US.

    In your last Open Questions interview, you talked about “the deep state”, a complex vested interest group in industry, the military and other spheres. Does the deep state want military conflict with China? And do foreign governments – such as China and Russia – believe in the existence of a deep state, which many dismiss as a conspiracy theory?

    The deep state means the permanent security system of the United States and its partners in Europe and in East Asia, including Japan, Korea and other places where the US has military bases and other security institutions. It includes the military, the CIA, the military contractors and the politicians who serve the military-industrial complex.

    Does such a deep state exist? Yes. The US has around 750 overseas military bases and many of them are in East Asia. The US has many major military contractors with hundreds of billions of dollars of annual business with the US government. The US fights overt and covert wars pretty much non-stop, some of which are proxy wars (in which the US arms and funds Ukraine to fight Russia), and sometimes open conflicts with heavy US involvement, as in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US has the extensive global networks of the CIA and other intelligence and covert institutions. All of this constitutes the deep state. Presidents come and go but the underlying foreign policy is consistent and set largely out of view of the public, and without any reference to public opinion.

    When Obama replaced [US president George] Bush Jr, and Trump replaced Obama, and Biden replaced Trump, and Trump replaced Biden, on the PR level there was alleged to be change, but in fact very little policy change occurred. For example, how much foreign policy change was there when Obama succeeded Bush Jr? Very little. Obama launched many wars, just as Bush had done. Obama’s team actively participated in the coup in Ukraine in 2014 that set the path for the Ukraine war. Obama went to war against Libya. Obama gave the CIA the order to overthrow the Syrian government. All of this was a continuation of the policies of the Bush period.

    Trump continued most of the same policies. Trump continued to build up the Ukraine military. The Trump administration dismissed the Minsk 2 agreement that could have prevented the escalation of the Ukraine war. There was not any major change between Obama and Trump.

    When Biden came in, their claim again was that there would be a new foreign policy, but it didn’t happen. What did Biden do with China? He continued Trump’s tariffs. He continued Trump’s hardline rhetoric. Biden absurdly divided the world between the so-called democracies and autocracies, which was an incredibly naive approach, as I said from the beginning.

    Biden escalated the Ukraine war. He rejected all attempts at peace negotiations, including the Istanbul process that could have ended the Ukraine war in 2022. When it came to the Middle East, Biden was complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide. So, Biden did very little different from Bush Jr, Obama and Trump before him.

    Now, Trump has returned. What’s the real difference? Trump is different in style, in his unpredictability, nastiness, self-dealing and endless flip-flops. Yet, in terms of basic foreign policy, Trump is not very different from his predecessors.

    This is the sense in which deep state means an ongoing consistency of the US security institutions that run American foreign policy. American foreign policy is not determined by public opinion, or Congress, or even the president in large part. Look instead to the CIA, the Pentagon and the other parts of the deep state.

    The deep state also determines the politics of US vassal states. Many observers consider Japan to be a US-occupied country, with Japan’s foreign policy basically subservient to the US. One can say the same about many other countries. Where the US has military bases, the host countries tend to act like occupied countries, bending their own foreign policy to that of the US.

    The US deep state is profoundly arrogant, thinking that it can have its way around the world. The US deep state thinks that it can dominate not only US allies, which is typically true, but also China, Russia, Iran, Brazil and others. When US arrogance becomes too strong, we face the danger of disaster. That’s what happened in Ukraine. The US thought that it could push Russia around to its will. It could not. The attempt to assert US power in Ukraine led to war.

    US arrogance deeply worries me. Trump certainly is not a strategist. There’s no long-term plan. The US is playing poker, but not very well or wisely. It often bluffs. The whole approach can lead to war.

    China is now drafting its economic policies for the next five years. You have advised many countries before. What is your advice to China in the face of this tension and the global tariff war?

    My main advice to China is look to the non-Western world for the strongest partnerships in trade, investment and diplomacy, at least for a while. The US-led alliance (US, Canada, Britain, EU, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand) is around 13 per cent of the world population. China is another 17 per cent. The remaining 70 per cent of the world – in Asia, Africa and Latin America – wants good and strong economic and diplomatic relations with China. That 70 per cent of the world population wants to modernise, and China provides the means for those countries to achieve rapid growth and modernisation. China is key to the global energy transition to zero-carbon energy, especially in the markets outside the US and Europe.

    The emerging and developing economies of Asia, Africa and Latin America will be the markets for China’s rapid export growth in the years ahead. China will play a vital global role in these economies in building advanced green and digital economies, using Chinese cutting-edge technologies.

    This will be a great win-win for the world because China will continue to grow rapidly while also empowering rapid growth throughout the emerging and developing nations. Sadly, in my view, the US will not play much of a role in that modernisation in the next generation. The US under Trump is withdrawing from green technologies, and from global responsibility.

    The US cannot compete with China for the global renewable energy market. The US can’t compete with China for the global digital connectivity market. The US can’t compete with China in fast rail or low-carbon ocean shipping. In all these sectors, Trump is handing world trade and leadership over to China.

    Regarding the US markets, China should certainly attempt to make a suitable trade deal with the US but China should not fret too much either way. The US is already a small part of China’s exports – perhaps around 10-12 per cent. That share of China’s exports will most likely decline further.

    I hope that I’m wrong and that the US regains some sense and rejoins the global effort for green transformation and re-establishes normal trade with China. Yet, I don’t think that’s going to happen for many years, and I don’t think that China can, or should, base its policies on a return to normal trade with the US.

    More specifically, I advocate expanding [China’s] Belt and Road Initiative. I advocate that China should deal with regional groups, including ASEAN, the African Union, the Arab League and the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC). China’s relations with these regional groups can be very strategic, as the regional groups can, and should, spur the interconnectivity of infrastructure among all the members of the group. For China, it will be easier to interact with regional plans rather than one country at a time.

    In fact, no individual state in ASEAN, or the Middle East, or Latin America can modernise on its own without strong links with its neighbours through trade, finance and infrastructure. With ASEAN, for example, there really is the need for an ASEAN-wide energy system, not separate energy systems for Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia etc. These countries need an interconnected power grid, and China will play a key role in achieving an ASEAN-wide grid. Therefore, China-ASEAN diplomacy is strongly win-win.

    I also believe that Hong Kong will have a huge and indeed unique leadership role in the global transformation. Hong Kong is vital for China’s growing links with ASEAN, the African Union, and beyond. The Greater Bay Area (GBA) combines Hong Kong’s world-class leadership in international finance, higher education and global management, with Shenzhen’s leadership in cutting-edge technologies, and the advanced manufacturing of Dongguan, Guangzhou and other GBA cities.

    Put these strengths together, and the GBA becomes the beating heart of the global green transformation, in zero-carbon energy, robotics, AI-based manufacturing, digital connectivity and much more. All of this will help to fuel China’s – and Hong Kong’s – rapid growth for the next generation.

    This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. How is the post-war world order changing and what will the new world order look like?

    There are three scenarios.

    One is that we create a truly multilateral world. For that, we need a United Nations 2.0. We need an upgraded international system in which all the major powers agree to invest in the international rule of law and peaceful resolution of conflicts. This will require an upgrade of the UN Security Council, and UN institutions more generally.

    I’d love to see a major UN campus in China, to help lead the green and digital transformation worldwide. I’d love to see China and India working together closely at the UN, including towards India’s seat in the UN Security Council. I’d like China to support the African Union to play a much larger role in global governance. I’d like to see China, Japan and Korea end the geopolitical divisions and form a strong alliance in northeast Asia. Most importantly in this scenario, the US and Europe accept the rising role of China, India and the rest of the non-Western world.

    A second scenario is that the Western world hunkers down. It goes protectionist and the US tries to divide the world into camps. This is perhaps the likely US strategy, but I think it is significantly worse for the US and the rest of the world than the first scenario. I think the US absolutely should abandon the idea of building competing camps.

    The third scenario is that we don’t have a global system at all, but rather increasing chaos from climate change, wars and geopolitical conflicts. This dire scenario is a real possibility.

    Any of these three trajectories is possible. We should be aiming for the first. The United States and Europe should take a deep breath, sigh and welcome the non-Western world into a shared global leadership. The major powers – the US, Europe, Russia, China, India – should agree to prevent confrontations.

    The US should stop NATO enlargement and should stop providing armaments to Taiwan. Such actions are provocative and lead to great-power conflicts that threaten the safety and security of the whole world.

    In short, the West should stop asking “Who is Number One?” and instead ask, “How can the whole world work together for the global common good?” In my experience, China, Russia and other nations would enthusiastically back such a global, cooperative effort that is based on mutual respect and mutual security.

    The post Why Western Hegemony is Over first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Veterans Force NY County Sheriff to Take Down Israeli Flag

    The flag of Israel represents the greatest human rights disaster in modern history, yet has flown proudly at the Broome County Correctional Facility by order of Sheriff Akshar. His dedication to Trump’s unconstitutional actions has also made Broome County one of the leading penal camps for immigrants in New York State.

    For over 600 days the Israeli flag flew over our county jail. It was a flagrant display of a Sheriff knowingly engaging in a divisive, illegal act in violation of New York State Public Building Law.

    New York State Law forbids a foreign flag from flying over public property. The actual wording of the law states, “It shall not be lawful to display the flag or emblem of any foreign country upon any state, county or municipal building; provided, however, that whenever any foreigner shall become the guest of the United States, the state or any city, upon public proclamation by the governor or mayor of such city, the flag of the country of which such public guest shall be a citizen may be displayed upon such public buildings.”

    Veterans For Peace notified Sheriff Akshar on July 29 that it would file a lawsuit if the Israeli flag was not taken down within 10 days. After 6 days he relented.

    Now that the flag is down, Sheriff Akshar and county officials need to apologize to the general public. The leader of the institution that is supposed to uphold the law and claim their jail is a “correctional facility” has demonstrated the opposite by making a mockery of the law and  betraying the public trust. Sheriff Akshar, with the permission of the Broome County Legislature, has turned citizens’ property into a shameful display of acceptance of an Israeli-United States genocide in Gaza.

    The Sheriff, with Broome County officials standing by, has also made the Broome County jail a gulag, a black hole for immigrant workers wanting to be part of the “American Dream”.

    Sheriff Akshar, the leading law enforcer in the county, has lost credibility by knowingly engaging in divisive, illegal conduct.  Given his partnership with ICE, an agency that willfully violates US Constitutional rights, Akshar has demonstrated his personal politics are more important than public service. He should be ashamed of his conduct and admonished for his actions.

    The first words of Sheriff Akshar in his media release following the removal of the Israeli flag showed the depth of his ignorance.

    The Sheriff said the attack of October 7, 2023 was “unprovoked”. He seems unaware that the people of Palestine have been murdered by the Israelis by the thousands for 77 years prior to October 7, 2023. Palestinian homes have been bulldozed, their olive trees cut down, their land given to Israeli immigrant settlers, their children sent to prison for years for throwing rocks at Israeli tanks. Israel’s system of apartheid has tormented the people of Palestine for decades. The “unprovoked” lie has been repeated over and over in the Western media. The Sheriff has been taught to believe as true the blatant lie of Israeli Zionists–and spread by “Christian” Zionists.

    Sheriff Fred Akshar needs to apologize to the people of Broome for 600 plus days of flying the flag of unspeakable human rights violations, the slaughter of tens of thousands of people–all celebrated with the flag of Israel.

    Might does not make right. Right makes might–the people of Broome County are right.

    *****

    Editor’s note: Gilroy and other activists spent weeks consulting with attorneys, finding plaintiffs for the suit and organizing demonstrations at the county jail before the flag came down.

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  • Trump’s Christian Nationalists’ Apocalyptic Dreams, Are America’s Nightmares

    AU-Christian-Nationalism-Cartoon-with-Logo.png

    Apocalyptic visions are no longer confined to conferences of far-right organizations, End Times novels, small fringe obscure churches, and on movie theater and television screens. These days they are finding a home embedded in the War Room at Donald Trump’s White House.

    The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 “calls for establishing a government that would be imbued with ‘biblical principles’ and run by a president who holds sweeping executive powers,” the Charles F. Kettering Foundation’s Maura Casey pointed out in an August 19, 2024 piece, headlined “Project 2025: The Blueprint for Christian Nationalist Regime Change.”

    Casey added: “Christian nationalism believes that the Christian Bible, as God’s infallible law, should be the basis of government and have primacy over public and private institutions. Its patriarchal view does not recognize gender equality or gay rights and sanctions discrimination based on religious beliefs.

    “Christian nationalist ideas are woven through the plans of Project 2025 and the pages of Mandate for Leadership. Its thousands of recommendations include specific executive orders to be repealed or implemented. Laws, regulations, departments, and whole agencies would be abolished. It portrays anyone who opposes its sweeping ambitions as being enemies of our republic.”

    The current administration is operationalizing Project 2025’s Christian nationalist agenda—not just planning it. Through executive orders, targeted staffing, institutional purges of diversity and transgender inclusion, and the formal elevation of faith into governance, policy is explicitly being shaped “along far-right theological lines.”

    A prime example is Mike Huckabee, tapped by Trump to be the U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Critics have labeled Huckabee’s rhetoric as extreme due to his references to apocalyptic prophecy.

    Prominent figures in the White House Faith Office, such as Paula White, also frame Trump’s presidency in divine terms—calling it “God-ordained” and tying it to a biblical mission of moral revival.

    Russell Vought, Project 2025 architect and OMB Director, comes from Wheaton College and openly supports Christian nationalist beliefs. While not explicitly apocalyptic, he asserts that America’s laws should flow from “God” and maintains that the U.S. is under divine mandate—a perspective common in End Times theology.

    While not every Trump appointee is an End‑Times literalist, those with close evangelical ties and roots, frame their public roles through an apocalyptic lens. This worldview doesn’t just inform their religious beliefs; it shapes policy urgency, moral absolutism, and a sense of divine sanction behind governance—hallmarks of the Christian nationalist agenda embedded in Project 2025.

    The post Trump’s Christian Nationalists’ Apocalyptic Dreams, Are America’s Nightmares first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • United States Backed Ethnic Cleansing Of Serbs

    August 4, 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Operation Storm. Little known outside the former Yugoslavia, the military campaign unleashed a genocidal cataclysm that violently expelled Croatia’s entire Serb population. Dubbed “the most efficient ethnic cleansing we’ve seen in the Balkans” by Swedish politician Carl Bildt, Croat forces rampaged UN-protected areas of the self-declared Serb Republic of Krajina, looting, burning, raping and murdering their way across the province. Up to 350,000 locals fled, many on foot, never to return. Meanwhile, thousands were summarily executed.

    As these hideous scenes unfolded, UN peacekeepers charged with protecting Krajina watched without intervening. Meanwhile, US officials strenuously denied the horrifying massacres and mass displacement amounted to ethnic cleansing, let alone war crimes.

    The post United States Backed Ethnic Cleansing Of Serbs appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Eighty years after the U.S. Bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki Are We on the Verge of Another Nuclear War?

    Eighty years ago, the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are now nine nuclear-armed nations, many in military confrontation with one another. It is quite remarkable that there has not been another nuclear war. How can this be explained?

    Some say the absence of another nuclear war proves that nuclear “deterrence” is working, and to some extent, that is true. These nations are rightfully afraid of a nuclear conflagration that could obliterate their societies and even destroy all life on planet Earth.  With escalating military confrontations today – even the possibility of a World War – how long can “deterrence” work?

    “So Far, So Good…”

    “So far, so good” is probably the faintly hopeful refrain heard from many who feel helpless to undo the nuclear danger. This is reminiscent of the cartoon of the man falling from the top of a building. As he passes each descending floor, he proclaims, “So far, so good….”

    In reality, a fair amount of luck has helped humanity avert nuclear catastrophe until now. We came very close during the “Cuban Missile Crisis.” A political officer on a Russian submarine that was out of communication and uncertain if a nuclear war had already begun, called off a missile launch at the last minute. Another Russian military technician, suspicious of an errant radar reading that appeared to show incoming US missiles, called off another imminent nuclear strike. It could just as easily have gone the other way.

    Many experts worry that it will be an accidental nuclear launch that ends us. This is all the more concerning as Artificial Intelligence is applied to nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, decreasing the decision-making time to split seconds, and removing human oversight. What could go wrong?

    Never Again?

    2025 also marks eighty years from the end of World War II and the defeat of the German fascists by Russia, the United States, and the European Allies. Eighty years since Russian and US troops liberated thousands of skeletal prisoners from German concentration camps, much to the horror of the world, which reacted with calls of “Never Again!”

    But wait, don’t we have concentration camps now in the U.S.? Isn’t that why ICE now has a larger budget than any branch of the military, and larger than the entire current Federal prison system? They are building concentration camps for undocumented workers, whom they demonize as “murderers,” “rapists,” “gang members,” and “terrorists.” The vast majority of immigrants who have already been violently taken from their jobs and families, imprisoned and deported, have no criminal records whatsoever, and are productive, respected members of their communities.

    Authoritarianism with distinct overtones of white supremacy is on the rise once again, while craven European politicians clamor for war with Russia and more military spending. What could go wrong?

    Israel, purportedly a safe haven for the persecuted Jewish people – a “land without a people for a people without a land” – is escalating its blatant genocide in Gaza. The images of intentionally starved Palestinian men, women, and children conjure images of emaciated prisoners – mostly Jews – in World War II concentration camps.

    Israel Wages Genocide While Threatening Its Neighbors with Nuclear Weapons

    Israel is also a nuclear power, although it has long been considered impolite to say so. The United States helped Israel gain nuclear technology and has helped to shield Israel from any nuclear accountability. Israel has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Its nuclear arsenal is not inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which the U.S. weaponized to support its rationale for war against Iraq, Syria, and Iran. The IAEA announced a resolution critical of Iran’s nuclear program on Thursday, June 12, the day before Israel’s attack on Iran. Coincidence? Probably not. Like so many other international bodies, the IAEA has been subverted to serve U.S. and Israeli war aims.

    Unlike Iran, Israel actually has nuclear weapons. Will they use them against Iran? The Israeli government of rightwing extremists has already shown us the depths of depravity they are willing to go. Furthermore, all their Arab neighbors know Israel is the only nuclear-armed nation in the Middle East.

    Daniel Ellsberg, author of The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, reminded us that “Nuclear weapons are used every day. They are like a gun you point at somebody’s head.”

    Aside from “luck,” it has been nuclear arms treaties that have held nuclear war in check. In recent years, however, the U.S. has shredded most of these treaties and missed many opportunities for peace:

    • Reagan rejected President Gorbachev’s offer for both countries to eliminate all their nuclear weapons if the U.S. would stop deployment of a “Star Wars” missile defense system in space.
    • President Clinton refused President Putin’s offer to cut our massive nuclear arsenals to 1,500 bombs and to call on all of the other nuclear-armed states to negotiate the elimination of all nuclear weapons, in exchange for the US not placing missile sites in Romania.
    • President George W. Bush walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and put a missile base in Romania. President Trump placed another missile base in Poland.
    • President Bush in 2008 and President Obama in 2014 blocked any discussion of Russian and Chinese proposals for a space weapons ban in the consensus-bound UN Committee for Disarmament in Geneva.
    • President Obama rejected President Putin’s offer to negotiate a treaty to ban cyber war.
    • President Trump pulled the US out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
    • President Trump withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal and placed sanctions on Iran.
    • From President Clinton through President Trump, the US has never ratified the 1992 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which Russia ratified.
      [Reference: Veterans For Peace Nuclear Posture Review.]

    Taken in their totality, these U.S. moves constitute an attempt to gain nuclear superiority, including the possibility of launching a first-strike nuclear attack. Pulling out of the ABM and INF treaties, in particular, indicates U.S. intentions to threaten Russia with nuclear war.

    Is it any wonder that Russia, faced with the prospect of the U.S./NATO troops and nuclear weapons systems stationed on its border with Ukraine, felt compelled to take military action? Now Russia is stuck in a bloody war that has been constantly escalated by the U.S., which has rejected multiple opportunities for peace talks since the war began. Russia asked for neutrality for Ukraine and respect for the rights of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking populations. Over one million casualties later (both sides), the bloody trench-and-drone war drags on, not because of Russian intransigence, but because of the aggressive U.S. policy of “full-spectrum dominance” in every corner of the globe.

    Drone Attack on Russia’s Strategic Bombers Tempted Nuclear War

    On June 1 of this year, a U.S.-supported Ukrainian drone attack on nuclear bombers in Russia almost triggered a nuclear war. According to a Russian general who spoke with former CIA geopolitical analyst Larry Johnson, the world was even closer to nuclear war than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Russian bombers were openly visible on the tarmac, in accordance with the New START Treaty, which is designed to prevent a nuclear-first strike by either Russia or the U.S. This last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia is due to expire this coming February. But it has already been drone-bombed.

    News Flash! President Trump just posted on his Truth Social account that he is sending two nuclear-armed submarines closer to Russia. Why? Because he didn’t like something that Russia’s Dmitri Medvedev said on social media. What? Trump is scoring pissing points by playing with nuclear weapons? A narcissistic psychopath has his hand on the nuclear button. This is all the more reason to push for an end to the president’s sole authority to launch a nuclear war.

    To round out this bleak report, we must at least mention that the U.S. is planning for war against China. The United States is openly planning to wage a war against China – some say as soon as 2027. Why? Because China’s remarkable revolution from extreme poverty to becoming a prosperous global powerhouse is something that the U.S. ruling class (or “deep state”) will not accept. So China will not be attacked because of its military aggression. Even as the U.S. wages perpetual war on multiple countries, China has not been at war with anybody in this century. U.S. complaints about Taiwan are nothing more than an excuse, a trigger for the war that U.S. leaders are determined to wage, at all costs.

    The Pentagon Is Planning a Nuclear First-Strike Against China

    The Pentagon has figured out that it cannot win a conventional war against China, however. It is planning to use nuclear weapons – an overwhelming first strike or possibly only “tactical nuclear weapons,” those cute little guys that are several times more powerful than what was dropped on Hiroshima.

    U.S. war planners recently asked Australia and Japan to declare what military resources they will bring to bear in a war against China. And get this… The U.S. held talks with Japan, of all nations, to discuss how they will coordinate their efforts after a nuclear strike on China. Among the issues they discussed were how to manage public opinion after a nuclear war.

    So if you think I am pointing the finger at the U.S. as the “bad guy” who is mostly responsible for the prospect of a civilization-ending nuclear war, then you are reading correctly. To put it bluntly, the problem is U.S. imperialism. The waning U.S. empire, desperate to maintain and expand its hegemony, is the elephant in the room. It is buttressed by a very large and powerful Military Industrial Complex (MIC), the one that President Eisenhower warned us about – now on steroids. Ray McGovern of Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a former CIA analyst himself, has expanded the MIC acronym to MICIMATT (Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Academia Think-Tanks). Yes, they are all complicit, not just with genocide in Palestine, but with militarizing and destroying the world. We peace-loving people have our work cut out for us. We are up against a lot.

    There is a lot of money to be made from war and militarism. And Politicians learn the advantages of justifying war and funding the war machine. The ever-growing Pentagon budget has ballooned to over One Trillion Dollars under Trump, money that will be redirected from the social security net that is being systematically shredded. Spending on nuclear weapons “modernization” alone will cost $100 billion in just the next year (from the budgets of the Pentagon and the Department of Energy).

    “The End Is Near”

    For decades, peace activists, scientists, and others have been warning us about the “growing danger of nuclear war.” Those sounding the nuclear alarm have been treated like the proverbial fanatic with the sign, “The End Is Near,” or like Chicken Little – “the sky is falling.” It is mostly by dumb luck, however, that we have not all perished in a nuclear Armageddon already. The guard rails have been removed, with the U.S. abrogation of nuclear arms deals. There are very few “adults in the room,” certainly not in the U.S., where Neocons who love Israel but hate Iran and Russia have seized the helm. It will take a miracle and a lot of activism to avoid utter disaster in the relatively near future.

    Many people are already experiencing disaster, what with wars, genocide, extreme poverty, starvation, and the climate crisis – the fruits of corporate greed and militarism. Many people also suffer from the poison of the entire nuclear cycle. There are 15,000 abandoned uranium mines in the western U.S., many of them on First Nations lands. Radiation contaminates the water, the air, the land, and the people, who suffer from many cancers and radiation-related diseases.

    The U.S. Exploded 67 Nuclear Bombs in the Marshall Islands

    Then there are the “downwinders” who suffer from the radiation of nuclear bomb testing. Or worse. The Marshall Islands were devastated by nuclear bomb testing. From 1946 to 1958, the U.S. detonated 67 nuclear bombs on this island nation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  To add insult to injury, their islands are now “sinking” from global warming and rising seas. Many Marshallese, unable to grow food on radiated land and unable to eat the fish from radiated waters, have been allowed to live in the U.S., without citizenship or security, and denied healthcare by many states. There is no cancer treatment facility in the Marshall Islands, and no VA facility for its many veterans of the U.S. military.

    We will end this disturbing nuclear tour on a positive note. It has to do with the Marshall Islands. In 1958, four Quaker peace activists bought a sailboat and announced to the world their intention to sail from Los Angeles 4,000 miles into the nuclear test zone in the Marshall Islands to stop U.S. nuclear testing. They were led by Albert Bigelow, a World War II Navy Commander who resigned his commission in protest of the U.S. nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    The Golden Rule Crew Tried to Stop U.S. Nuclear Testing

    Halfway through the voyage, when Bigelow and his intrepid crew pulled into Honolulu, they were arrested and thrown in jail, and the Coast Guard seized their boat, named Golden Rule. They never made it to the Marshall Islands. Still, they succeeded in bringing worldwide attention to the danger of radiation that was floating all over the globe, even getting into mothers’ milk. Opposition to nuclear testing led to the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1962, signed by President Kennedy and the leaders of Russia and the UK. The treaty banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in the water, and in space. Only underground tests were permitted.  These days, most nuclear testing is done using computer simulations.

    The remarkable saga of the Golden Rule continued. The 34-foot ketch was sold and sailed as a pleasure boat by several families to the South Pacific and the Caribbean. Somehow, in 2010, it was found in Humboldt Bay in northern California – a derelict boat that had sunk in a gale and had a big hole in its side.  Some locals dragged the beat-up boat onto the beach and planned to make a bonfire of it. When someone discovered the boat’s legacy, however, local members of Veterans For Peace rescued it and decided to restore it to its original glory.

    In June of 2015, after five years of dedicated volunteer labor by veterans, Quakers, and boat lovers, the Golden Rule splashed back into the waters of Humboldt Bay and began sailing up and down the west coast from British Columbia to Mexico (Ensenada), then to Hawai’i and all around the Hawaiian islands. Back to California, trucked to Minneapolis, sailed down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, to Cuba, and up the East Coast to Toronto and back to Chicago, a 12-month voyage with a total of 102 port stops.  At every stop, the Golden Rule and its crew were welcomed excitedly by local peace and environmental activists as well as by state and local officials. Nobody wants a nuclear war!

    The Golden Rule Is Sailing Around San Francisco Bay

    The historic Golden Rule ­peace boat sailed last week from its homeport in Humboldt Bay to San Francisco Bay, where it will spend the month of August educating the public about the “growing danger of nuclear war,” and the importance of supporting the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The Treaty, supported by an overwhelming majority of countries, went into force in January 2021. It prohibits nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possessing, stockpiling, using, or threatening to use nuclear weapons, or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory. It also prohibits them from assisting, encouraging, or inducing anyone to engage in any of these activities.

    Peace at Home, Peace Abroad!

    The Golden Rule is a national project of Veterans For Peace, a 40-year-old organization dedicated to exposing the true costs of war, restraining our government from intervening, overtly and covertly, in the internal affairs of other nations, and ridding the world of nuclear weapons. At its recent national convention, veterans from U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and recent deployments made a united call for opposition to the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and for resistance to racist ICE attacks in our communities. While calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons, the Golden Rule will be echoing these urgent cries for “Peace at Home, Peace Abroad.”

    The post Eighty years after the U.S. Bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki Are We on the Verge of Another Nuclear War? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ECONOMIC TERROR AND THE TURBOCHUGGF*CK IN TEXAS

    I don’t know what word in the English language—I can’t find one—that applies to people who are willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organized human life … so they can put a few more dollars into highly overstuffed pockets. The word ‘evil’ doesn’t begin to approach it.

    —Noam Chomsky

    Unlike other historical periods of extreme wealth inequality, the added fact that our planet’s life support systems are currently being pushed toward a breaking point adds a new level of horror to current governance by the elites. As Chomsky implies, we need new words to describe our daily and worsening situation.

    The short answer to Chomsky’s question is that these people, mostly oligarchs, are corporate economic terrorists, answering to no one as they are executing the suicide hijacking of the natural systems that pilot the planet Earth, in their quest to rule a now-burning planet of their own making. Operating mostly by stealth to keep fossil fuel king, their cumulative crimes over the last five decades amount to a mostly slow-motion, everyday reign of terror over the whole planet, punctuated by the turbo–charged, greenhouse gas-fueled, climate chaos of extreme weather events.

    Exposing the Entrapocracy

    Extreme weather terror, or turbochuggf*cks in the vernacular, is most recently evident in July 2025, in the human catastrophes caused by floods in Texas, New Mexico, and North Carolina, as well as in the heatwaves across Europe and around many other parts of the world that do not merit media coverage in the US. Increasing in number and intensity each year, such disasters are the sharp end of global warming, which is pushing the planet’s life support systems towards the brink of collapse. Crucial, but absent in most of the reporting of these disasters and climate change in general, is the role of the corporate-powered climate denial lobby in prolonging the shelf life of fossil fuels for decades beyond their sell-by date.

    The most profitable business in the history of the world has leveraged its vast wherewithal to assume political, judicial, and cultural control of those human systems necessary to prolong its own primacy, by completely normalizing this insanity. In the face of now long standing near total agreement amongst climate scientists that as a global community we simply need to stop using fossil fuels, the fossil fuel industry seized control of the invisible hand to throttle dissent, whilst slamming down its invisible foot harder on the accelerator of increasing fossil fuel production, driving the planet ever closer towards the climate precipice.

    Whilst mostly sticking to the shadows of their dark money universe, these corporate economic terrorists do have names, and they should be made to answer for their eco-cidal crimes. Best in Show corporate economic terrorist is Charles Koch, who pioneered in practice the now much-copied template for bending the US political system away from genuine democracy and towards authoritarianism, and, in his case, in favor of the bottom line of his personal economic agenda.

    Koch stands head and shoulders above his peers as a key organizer in terms of coordinating billionaire “solidarity,” not least enabling allegedly competing brands within the fossil fuel industry to work in unison, if not direct collusion, to use any means necessary to prop up the fossil fuel oligopoly’s monopoly on how the planet is powered. Acting like a protection racket, this entrapocracy ensures that the general public’s subsistence needs are largely dependent on an infrastructure specifically designed for the exclusive use of fossil fuels’ key products, keeping us, the global citizenry, largely entrapped, often against our better judgment, but nonetheless hooked.

    “Climate Homicide”

    The fatal “side effects” of unregulated capitalism are long known. Back in 1845, Friedrich Engels formulated the concept of “social murder,” defining it as an unnatural death that results from social, political or economic oppression, “whereby the class which at present holds social and political control … places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death,” precisely because of the unregulated dominating activities of the ruling class. Engels’s point wasn’t rhetorical. In 2022, a US worker was killed at work every ninety-six minutes, on average, according to records kept by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    Jason Hickel identifies a second era of horror unleashed on the Global South by corporate power mongers in the Global North as “colonialism 2.0.” Hickel calls the catastrophic harm to billions of people in poorer nations from the “excess emissions of a few rich nations” a “crime against humanity” and stresses that “we should have the clarity to call it that.”

    A joint study by the Harvard School of Public Health and three British universities in 2021 found that 1 in 5 global deaths, or around 8.7 million people per year, can be attributed to fine particulate fossil fuel pollution. These deaths are on top of those directly resulting from turbochuggf*ck weather events.

    In a 2024 journal article, published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review and covered by Common Dreams, David Arkush and Donald Braman describe the man-made climate crisis as not only “globally catastrophic” (as the fossil fuel industry has known for years) but also “climate homicide.” They point out that the oil majors have been “technically sophisticated enough to know that they could hide the harms they were generating from lay observers for decades, allowing them to earn trillions of dollars while researchers, activists, and regulators struggled to overcome the sophisticated disinformation and political influence campaigns these profits supported.”

    Further, Arkush and Braman contend that, “The case for [climate] homicide prosecutions is increasingly compelling. A steady growth in the information about what [Fossil Fuel Companies] knew and what they did with that knowledge is revealing a story of antisocial conduct generating lethal harm so extensive it may soon become unparalleled in human history.”

    Charles Koch inherited a fortune and then multiplied it many times over. Initially, in 1969, as a rookie CEO, he secured control of the Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota and refined the tariff-free, dirtiest of “garbage crudes” from the Canadian tar sands, to become the Koch cash cow for decades to come. Lee Fang described Koch Industries as a “pollution-based empire,” engaged in what George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison called the modern expression of capitalism’s essential DNA—colonial looting— which has made Koch the twenty-second richest man in the world today.

    Toxic Business Activism

    As if mirroring their extremely profitable and ever-expanding ventures of turning the world’s most toxic raw materials into sellable products, Charles Koch and his brother David pioneered an equally toxic form of business activism, which continues to push the planet to the brink of habitability and the US political system into authoritarianism.

    In a 1974 speech organized by the Institute for Human Studies, Charles Koch praised the infamous Powell Memo, which urged business activism, but noted that it did not go far enough. Recommending a radical corporate libertarian vision for the country, where government only exists to oversee the police and the military in their duties to protect the private property rights of the elites, Koch envisioned a world where any taxes on elites amounted to theft, where the progressive reforms of the twentieth century would be rolled back, and where all regulations against corporate activity would be abolished. We can call this Koch’s Project 1974, and, some fifty years later, many of Koch’s wishes are being fulfilled by the second Trump administration in the form of Project 2025, which, of course, Koch himself partly funded.

    The political machine he built to this end became known as the Kochtopus, for its multi-tentacled, democracy distorting, and unprecedented seizure of US politics. Call this Koch math, i.e., billionaires weaponizing what, for them, is chump change (the millions of dollars available from their tax evasion schemes) to secure billions of dollars in return in the form of further tax cuts, corporate perks, and government deregulation. Koch initiated donor summits in 2003, harnessing the undisciplined billionaire instinct of throwing money at causes and weaponizing its collective power in the form of what Theda Skocpol and her colleagues called a “donor consortia,” thus multiplying times over what good, old-fashioned, dirty oil money could buy in terms of actual political influence.

    Couching the defense of fossil fuel in the broader realm of the conservative tent of rabid market fundamentalism, the Kochtopus became a toxic ideological engineering pipeline, pedaling this capitrickalist free malarketry from ideas generated by paid-for-professors and taught in funded university programs across the country; refined into policy proposals in conservative think-tanks and deployed in the real world in “scripts” handed to paid-for-politicians; all of which were distilled and seeded as invasive species of dominant narratives in the corporate owned media. The Kochtopus’s reach was further and uniquely magnified by the addition of astroturf boots on the ground, facilitated by paid-for-organizers, often graduates from the above network, with budgets leftists and progressives could only dream of.

    Promoting Climate Denial

    We now know that Big Fossil Fuels’ own scientists predicted, with remarkable accuracy, turbochuggf*cks and climate breakdown as a result of global warming all the way back in the 1970s. Koch was certainly privy to this insider knowledge at the time. By 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen had testified before Congress, putting the world on notice that global warming was real and was happening.

    In response, Koch’s own Cato Institute hosted the world’s first climate denial conference in 1991, the details of which remained buried until Christopher Leonard revealed it in his 2019 book, Kochland. Fifteen years ahead of the Tea Party, Koch’s own free-market thought police, the fake populist Citizens for a Sound Economy, led the efforts to defeat the Clinton-Gore administration’s attempts to tax carbon. And the Kochtopus joined the industry-wide pushes to derail the Kyoto Protocol and to prevent Al Gore from becoming President in 2000.

    Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez document how, by the mid-2010s, the Koch effect operated on the scale of a national U.S. political party … but despite its massive size, the Koch network is a leveraging operation—not a separate third party—because it is intertwined with (although not subordinated to) the institutional GOP … the Koch network operates as a force field to the right of the Republican Party, exerting a strong gravitational pull on many GOP candidates and officeholders. The overall effect is to reset the range of issues and policy alternatives to which candidates and officeholders are responsive.

    In 2004, after Citizens for a Sound Economy underwent a rebranding, it emerged as Americans for Prosperity. During the Obama administration, the much expanded group bullied politicians, with the threat of primary challenges from the right, into taking a “climate pledge” that effectively flipped almost the entire Republican Party into the party of climate denial. By 2014, “only eight out of 278 Republicans in Congress were willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change was a reality.”

    If all this were not enough, Koch’s key cognizant pre-meditated climate crime is the massive expansion of Koch Industries into frack-f**cking the planet. Its Corpus Christi refinery in Texas, which had focused on light oil refining, was ideally positioned to capitalize on the fracked oil boom of the early 2010s. Despite the well-established and public climate science that recommended remaining fossil fuel reserves stay in the ground, Koch doubled down on fracking, confirming his intentions to stay the course. Around this same time, Koch began trying to whitewash his own image using the smallest of his small change, as the Kochtopus used its massive wherewithal to continue to bully the GOP and the country towards the authoritarianism that would be essential to defending his businesses in the 2020s.

    The Other DEI: Domestic Election Interference

    Americans for Prosperity gloated over the recent passage of Trump’s Big Abomination of an Abysmal Bill, praising how it “unleashes American Energy” by reducing regulations and increasing tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry, oblivious as ever to the economic terror guaranteed by this implementation of this Project 1974 “economic freedom über alles.”

    Koch has weaponized the template for the other DEI, domestic election interference, by billionaires. As Bill McKibben noted in 2016, the Koch Brothers may be “the most important unelected figures in American political history.” The strategies of political manipulation they pioneered have not only been adopted by conservative forces from The Federalist Society to AIPAC, but they also enabled the corporate coup d’état on full display at the 2024 Trump inauguration. The Koch brothers might have scoffed at Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw, but their concerted assault on the democratic process helped lay the groundwork for DOGE.

    In late 2024, Connor Gibson and Robert J. Brulle, joined what is now a chorus of journalists and researchers who have exposed the Koch brothers as leaders of climate denialism, if not the scam’s leading perpetrators; yet when I play the songs from my Kochtopus’s Garden recording at shows and ask who has heard of the Koch brothers, very few people raise their hands.

    Unable to let go, Charles Koch remains CEO of Koch Inc. Now aged 89, he’s likely to escape in death any punishment for his life of economic terrorism. In 2023, as an hors d’oeuvre for his undeclared plans for life after death, he bequeathed, tax-free, a record-breaking $5 billion to sustain the Kochtopus after his passing. For those inheriting the burning planet that is the Kochtopus’s Garden, documenting his crimes and stopping their daily recurrence is up to us—by dissent, by court cases, and by dismantling the corrupt, oligarchic political system Koch did so much to create.

    This article first appeared in https://www.projectcensored.org/economic-terror-turbochuggfck-in-texas/

    The post ECONOMIC TERROR AND THE TURBOCHUGGF*CK IN TEXAS first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ECONOMIC TERROR AND THE TURBOCHUGGF*CK IN TEXAS

    I don’t know what word in the English language—I can’t find one—that applies to people who are willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organized human life … so they can put a few more dollars into highly overstuffed pockets. The word ‘evil’ doesn’t begin to approach it.

    —Noam Chomsky

    Unlike other historical periods of extreme wealth inequality, the added fact that our planet’s life support systems are currently being pushed toward a breaking point adds a new level of horror to current governance by the elites. As Chomsky implies, we need new words to describe our daily and worsening situation.

    The short answer to Chomsky’s question is that these people, mostly oligarchs, are corporate economic terrorists, answering to no one as they are executing the suicide hijacking of the natural systems that pilot the planet Earth, in their quest to rule a now-burning planet of their own making. Operating mostly by stealth to keep fossil fuel king, their cumulative crimes over the last five decades amount to a mostly slow-motion, everyday reign of terror over the whole planet, punctuated by the turbo–charged, greenhouse gas-fueled, climate chaos of extreme weather events.

    Exposing the Entrapocracy

    Extreme weather terror, or turbochuggf*cks in the vernacular, is most recently evident in July 2025, in the human catastrophes caused by floods in Texas, New Mexico, and North Carolina, as well as in the heatwaves across Europe and around many other parts of the world that do not merit media coverage in the US. Increasing in number and intensity each year, such disasters are the sharp end of global warming, which is pushing the planet’s life support systems towards the brink of collapse. Crucial, but absent in most of the reporting of these disasters and climate change in general, is the role of the corporate-powered climate denial lobby in prolonging the shelf life of fossil fuels for decades beyond their sell-by date.

    The most profitable business in the history of the world has leveraged its vast wherewithal to assume political, judicial, and cultural control of those human systems necessary to prolong its own primacy, by completely normalizing this insanity. In the face of now long standing near total agreement amongst climate scientists that as a global community we simply need to stop using fossil fuels, the fossil fuel industry seized control of the invisible hand to throttle dissent, whilst slamming down its invisible foot harder on the accelerator of increasing fossil fuel production, driving the planet ever closer towards the climate precipice.

    Whilst mostly sticking to the shadows of their dark money universe, these corporate economic terrorists do have names, and they should be made to answer for their eco-cidal crimes. Best in Show corporate economic terrorist is Charles Koch, who pioneered in practice the now much-copied template for bending the US political system away from genuine democracy and towards authoritarianism, and, in his case, in favor of the bottom line of his personal economic agenda.

    Koch stands head and shoulders above his peers as a key organizer in terms of coordinating billionaire “solidarity,” not least enabling allegedly competing brands within the fossil fuel industry to work in unison, if not direct collusion, to use any means necessary to prop up the fossil fuel oligopoly’s monopoly on how the planet is powered. Acting like a protection racket, this entrapocracy ensures that the general public’s subsistence needs are largely dependent on an infrastructure specifically designed for the exclusive use of fossil fuels’ key products, keeping us, the global citizenry, largely entrapped, often against our better judgment, but nonetheless hooked.

    “Climate Homicide”

    The fatal “side effects” of unregulated capitalism are long known. Back in 1845, Friedrich Engels formulated the concept of “social murder,” defining it as an unnatural death that results from social, political or economic oppression, “whereby the class which at present holds social and political control … places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death,” precisely because of the unregulated dominating activities of the ruling class. Engels’s point wasn’t rhetorical. In 2022, a US worker was killed at work every ninety-six minutes, on average, according to records kept by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    Jason Hickel identifies a second era of horror unleashed on the Global South by corporate power mongers in the Global North as “colonialism 2.0.” Hickel calls the catastrophic harm to billions of people in poorer nations from the “excess emissions of a few rich nations” a “crime against humanity” and stresses that “we should have the clarity to call it that.”

    A joint study by the Harvard School of Public Health and three British universities in 2021 found that 1 in 5 global deaths, or around 8.7 million people per year, can be attributed to fine particulate fossil fuel pollution. These deaths are on top of those directly resulting from turbochuggf*ck weather events.

    In a 2024 journal article, published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review and covered by Common Dreams, David Arkush and Donald Braman describe the man-made climate crisis as not only “globally catastrophic” (as the fossil fuel industry has known for years) but also “climate homicide.” They point out that the oil majors have been “technically sophisticated enough to know that they could hide the harms they were generating from lay observers for decades, allowing them to earn trillions of dollars while researchers, activists, and regulators struggled to overcome the sophisticated disinformation and political influence campaigns these profits supported.”

    Further, Arkush and Braman contend that, “The case for [climate] homicide prosecutions is increasingly compelling. A steady growth in the information about what [Fossil Fuel Companies] knew and what they did with that knowledge is revealing a story of antisocial conduct generating lethal harm so extensive it may soon become unparalleled in human history.”

    Charles Koch inherited a fortune and then multiplied it many times over. Initially, in 1969, as a rookie CEO, he secured control of the Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota and refined the tariff-free, dirtiest of “garbage crudes” from the Canadian tar sands, to become the Koch cash cow for decades to come. Lee Fang described Koch Industries as a “pollution-based empire,” engaged in what George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison called the modern expression of capitalism’s essential DNA—colonial looting— which has made Koch the twenty-second richest man in the world today.

    Toxic Business Activism

    As if mirroring their extremely profitable and ever-expanding ventures of turning the world’s most toxic raw materials into sellable products, Charles Koch and his brother David pioneered an equally toxic form of business activism, which continues to push the planet to the brink of habitability and the US political system into authoritarianism.

    In a 1974 speech organized by the Institute for Human Studies, Charles Koch praised the infamous Powell Memo, which urged business activism, but noted that it did not go far enough. Recommending a radical corporate libertarian vision for the country, where government only exists to oversee the police and the military in their duties to protect the private property rights of the elites, Koch envisioned a world where any taxes on elites amounted to theft, where the progressive reforms of the twentieth century would be rolled back, and where all regulations against corporate activity would be abolished. We can call this Koch’s Project 1974, and, some fifty years later, many of Koch’s wishes are being fulfilled by the second Trump administration in the form of Project 2025, which, of course, Koch himself partly funded.

    The political machine he built to this end became known as the Kochtopus, for its multi-tentacled, democracy distorting, and unprecedented seizure of US politics. Call this Koch math, i.e., billionaires weaponizing what, for them, is chump change (the millions of dollars available from their tax evasion schemes) to secure billions of dollars in return in the form of further tax cuts, corporate perks, and government deregulation. Koch initiated donor summits in 2003, harnessing the undisciplined billionaire instinct of throwing money at causes and weaponizing its collective power in the form of what Theda Skocpol and her colleagues called a “donor consortia,” thus multiplying times over what good, old-fashioned, dirty oil money could buy in terms of actual political influence.

    Couching the defense of fossil fuel in the broader realm of the conservative tent of rabid market fundamentalism, the Kochtopus became a toxic ideological engineering pipeline, pedaling this capitrickalist free malarketry from ideas generated by paid-for-professors and taught in funded university programs across the country; refined into policy proposals in conservative think-tanks and deployed in the real world in “scripts” handed to paid-for-politicians; all of which were distilled and seeded as invasive species of dominant narratives in the corporate owned media. The Kochtopus’s reach was further and uniquely magnified by the addition of astroturf boots on the ground, facilitated by paid-for-organizers, often graduates from the above network, with budgets leftists and progressives could only dream of.

    Promoting Climate Denial

    We now know that Big Fossil Fuels’ own scientists predicted, with remarkable accuracy, turbochuggf*cks and climate breakdown as a result of global warming all the way back in the 1970s. Koch was certainly privy to this insider knowledge at the time. By 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen had testified before Congress, putting the world on notice that global warming was real and was happening.

    In response, Koch’s own Cato Institute hosted the world’s first climate denial conference in 1991, the details of which remained buried until Christopher Leonard revealed it in his 2019 book, Kochland. Fifteen years ahead of the Tea Party, Koch’s own free-market thought police, the fake populist Citizens for a Sound Economy, led the efforts to defeat the Clinton-Gore administration’s attempts to tax carbon. And the Kochtopus joined the industry-wide pushes to derail the Kyoto Protocol and to prevent Al Gore from becoming President in 2000.

    Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez document how, by the mid-2010s, the Koch effect operated on the scale of a national U.S. political party … but despite its massive size, the Koch network is a leveraging operation—not a separate third party—because it is intertwined with (although not subordinated to) the institutional GOP … the Koch network operates as a force field to the right of the Republican Party, exerting a strong gravitational pull on many GOP candidates and officeholders. The overall effect is to reset the range of issues and policy alternatives to which candidates and officeholders are responsive.

    In 2004, after Citizens for a Sound Economy underwent a rebranding, it emerged as Americans for Prosperity. During the Obama administration, the much expanded group bullied politicians, with the threat of primary challenges from the right, into taking a “climate pledge” that effectively flipped almost the entire Republican Party into the party of climate denial. By 2014, “only eight out of 278 Republicans in Congress were willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change was a reality.”

    If all this were not enough, Koch’s key cognizant pre-meditated climate crime is the massive expansion of Koch Industries into frack-f**cking the planet. Its Corpus Christi refinery in Texas, which had focused on light oil refining, was ideally positioned to capitalize on the fracked oil boom of the early 2010s. Despite the well-established and public climate science that recommended remaining fossil fuel reserves stay in the ground, Koch doubled down on fracking, confirming his intentions to stay the course. Around this same time, Koch began trying to whitewash his own image using the smallest of his small change, as the Kochtopus used its massive wherewithal to continue to bully the GOP and the country towards the authoritarianism that would be essential to defending his businesses in the 2020s.

    The Other DEI: Domestic Election Interference

    Americans for Prosperity gloated over the recent passage of Trump’s Big Abomination of an Abysmal Bill, praising how it “unleashes American Energy” by reducing regulations and increasing tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry, oblivious as ever to the economic terror guaranteed by this implementation of this Project 1974 “economic freedom über alles.”

    Koch has weaponized the template for the other DEI, domestic election interference, by billionaires. As Bill McKibben noted in 2016, the Koch Brothers may be “the most important unelected figures in American political history.” The strategies of political manipulation they pioneered have not only been adopted by conservative forces from The Federalist Society to AIPAC, but they also enabled the corporate coup d’état on full display at the 2024 Trump inauguration. The Koch brothers might have scoffed at Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw, but their concerted assault on the democratic process helped lay the groundwork for DOGE.

    In late 2024, Connor Gibson and Robert J. Brulle, joined what is now a chorus of journalists and researchers who have exposed the Koch brothers as leaders of climate denialism, if not the scam’s leading perpetrators; yet when I play the songs from my Kochtopus’s Garden recording at shows and ask who has heard of the Koch brothers, very few people raise their hands.

    Unable to let go, Charles Koch remains CEO of Koch Inc. Now aged 89, he’s likely to escape in death any punishment for his life of economic terrorism. In 2023, as an hors d’oeuvre for his undeclared plans for life after death, he bequeathed, tax-free, a record-breaking $5 billion to sustain the Kochtopus after his passing. For those inheriting the burning planet that is the Kochtopus’s Garden, documenting his crimes and stopping their daily recurrence is up to us—by dissent, by court cases, and by dismantling the corrupt, oligarchic political system Koch did so much to create.

    This article first appeared in https://www.projectcensored.org/economic-terror-turbochuggfck-in-texas/

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  • The Rabbi and the Robdozers – Heavy Machinery and Patriotic Demolition in the Service of Genocide

    Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv is a well-respected holy man in Israel with some devoted followers. He is a dayan, a judge in the rabbinical courts of Tel Aviv, dispensing wisdom in matters of religion and Jewish law. He’s also a reservist in the Sayeret Givati brigade of the IDF and is currently serving in Gaza. There, he has earned a degree of fame for his skills as an operator of the Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozer, the IDF’s tool of choice for the erasure of Palestinian homes. He claims to average more than 50 demolitions a week. According to Zarbiv, his unit has learned to ‘play the D9’ like a musical instrument.

    Rabbi Zarbiv is part of the wider effort to lay waste to Gaza and render it uninhabitable for Palestinians. His stated motives are religious; war, for him, is a harbinger of the coming of the messiah. But he is one of many directly or indirectly employed to demolish buildings in Gaza. The motivation for others is more straightforward: money, revenge, or, in a context where the demolition of Palestinians’ homes is seen as a service to one’s country, patriotic duty.

    Domicide is a key aspect of the genocide in Gaza. According to recent reports, around 92% of homes and 70% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been severely damaged or destroyed. Gaza has a population of over 2 million, and from the scale of the destruction, it appears that all houses are considered bases of resistance. If we put morality aside, as the IDF seems to have done, the scale of the flattening of Gaza is an impressive achievement, considered as an initial stage of population transfer. There is no access given to foreign journalists for a reason – Gaza is unrecognizable, and the destruction is wholesale. So, how do you transform such a vast area into a moonscape of concrete and ashes in under two years? Overwhelming air power certainly helps, but on the ground, two things have been particularly important: willing personnel, such as the good rabbi, and the right equipment.

    It takes certain modifications for a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer manufactured in the US to become an armored D9. Israel Aerospace Industries [IAI], which offers an ‘extensive range of innovative solutions’ in ground combat situations, is responsible for these. The Israeli armored version of the Cat D9 has a mounted machine gun, grenade launcher, and smoke projector. It is armoured to protect the operator and has, of course, been battle-tested over years of occupation. So familiar an asset is it that the D9 has its own affectionate nickname in IDF slang: the ‘Doobie’, or Teddy Bear in English. Rachel Corrie died underneath one. Together with excavators, wheel loaders, and other heavy machinery, it has been used for years in West Bank house demolitions. The D9 can not only demolish buildings but also create the new ‘corridors’ of Gaza and clear border security zones. It has hardly been reported in the West, but with the aid of such equipment, whole villages in southern Lebanon along the international border have recently been erased, Gaza style.

    In wartime, the Israeli economy has been strikingly robust. The assault on Gaza has been a boost to certain sectors, and it has been especially profitable for those with initiative who can hire or invest in large machinery. As well as utilizing its personnel for demolitions, the IDF has been shown to be outsourcing the destruction in Gaza. Lucrative work has been available for equipment operators. Owners of excavators can earn 5,000 shekels a day. Those who work as contractors with the Ministry of Defence are paid based on the number of houses demolished. This is war as a continuation of business by other means, as Brecht might have observed. Rabbi Zarbiv is merely the celebrity face of patriotic demolition. So many are working on the razing of Gaza that infrastructure projects in Israel are facing significant delays due to shortages of operators and equipment.

    But Zarbiv’s days could be numbered as a D9 specialist. Quite apart from the complaint lodged against him with the ICC for alleged war crimes, he could soon be redundant as a result of the recent introduction of the ‘Robdozer’, developed by IAI. This is a destroyer of homes that is unmanned and can be remotely operated, like a drone, from the air-conditioned comfort of an office. Future versions are envisioned to be fully autonomous. Genocide and destruction will be even easier than they are now. If pilots who drop bombs indiscriminately can be considered heroes in Israel’s militarized culture, so too can those who operate drones or bulldozers remotely, or those who program an autonomous D9 – no doubt according to the values of the ‘most moral army in the world.’ These advancements in remote-controlled technology represent another contribution to the ongoing disconnection of Israelis from the consequences of their wartime actions.

    The IDF has recently received another shipment of D9s after the Biden administration delayed delivery. Israelis take pride in their myth of the start-up nation. But besides having a thriving software and high-tech sector, Israel has invested significantly in heavy machinery, appropriately enough for an apartheid state that wants to control and shape the land it occupies. But it needs external help. In UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s recent report on Israel’s ‘economy of genocide’, Caterpillar Inc. is allocated its own paragraph. This year, the company signed a further multi-million-dollar contract with Israel.

    Punitive demolition has long been a part of the history of this conflict. As the Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd put it, bulldozers have been ‘undoing God’ for some time. What is new is the prominence of their role in this unprecedented destruction. New, too, is the amount of money being made in the process, not just by Israelis, but by international firms producing heavy machinery like Caterpillar and JCB. We are witnesses to the razing of entire cities, towns, and villages, to lives being shovelled aside like rubble, all to clear the way for the next phase of Zionism. Western companies and governments are providing the wherewithal.

    The post The Rabbi and the Robdozers – Heavy Machinery and Patriotic Demolition in the Service of Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Rabbi and the Robdozers – Heavy Machinery and Patriotic Demolition in the Service of Genocide

    Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv is a well-respected holy man in Israel with some devoted followers. He is a dayan, a judge in the rabbinical courts of Tel Aviv, dispensing wisdom in matters of religion and Jewish law. He’s also a reservist in the Sayeret Givati brigade of the IDF and is currently serving in Gaza. There, he has earned a degree of fame for his skills as an operator of the Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozer, the IDF’s tool of choice for the erasure of Palestinian homes. He claims to average more than 50 demolitions a week. According to Zarbiv, his unit has learned to ‘play the D9’ like a musical instrument.

    Rabbi Zarbiv is part of the wider effort to lay waste to Gaza and render it uninhabitable for Palestinians. His stated motives are religious; war, for him, is a harbinger of the coming of the messiah. But he is one of many directly or indirectly employed to demolish buildings in Gaza. The motivation for others is more straightforward: money, revenge, or, in a context where the demolition of Palestinians’ homes is seen as a service to one’s country, patriotic duty.

    Domicide is a key aspect of the genocide in Gaza. According to recent reports, around 92% of homes and 70% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been severely damaged or destroyed. Gaza has a population of over 2 million, and from the scale of the destruction, it appears that all houses are considered bases of resistance. If we put morality aside, as the IDF seems to have done, the scale of the flattening of Gaza is an impressive achievement, considered as an initial stage of population transfer. There is no access given to foreign journalists for a reason – Gaza is unrecognizable, and the destruction is wholesale. So, how do you transform such a vast area into a moonscape of concrete and ashes in under two years? Overwhelming air power certainly helps, but on the ground, two things have been particularly important: willing personnel, such as the good rabbi, and the right equipment.

    It takes certain modifications for a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer manufactured in the US to become an armored D9. Israel Aerospace Industries [IAI], which offers an ‘extensive range of innovative solutions’ in ground combat situations, is responsible for these. The Israeli armored version of the Cat D9 has a mounted machine gun, grenade launcher, and smoke projector. It is armoured to protect the operator and has, of course, been battle-tested over years of occupation. So familiar an asset is it that the D9 has its own affectionate nickname in IDF slang: the ‘Doobie’, or Teddy Bear in English. Rachel Corrie died underneath one. Together with excavators, wheel loaders, and other heavy machinery, it has been used for years in West Bank house demolitions. The D9 can not only demolish buildings but also create the new ‘corridors’ of Gaza and clear border security zones. It has hardly been reported in the West, but with the aid of such equipment, whole villages in southern Lebanon along the international border have recently been erased, Gaza style.

    In wartime, the Israeli economy has been strikingly robust. The assault on Gaza has been a boost to certain sectors, and it has been especially profitable for those with initiative who can hire or invest in large machinery. As well as utilizing its personnel for demolitions, the IDF has been shown to be outsourcing the destruction in Gaza. Lucrative work has been available for equipment operators. Owners of excavators can earn 5,000 shekels a day. Those who work as contractors with the Ministry of Defence are paid based on the number of houses demolished. This is war as a continuation of business by other means, as Brecht might have observed. Rabbi Zarbiv is merely the celebrity face of patriotic demolition. So many are working on the razing of Gaza that infrastructure projects in Israel are facing significant delays due to shortages of operators and equipment.

    But Zarbiv’s days could be numbered as a D9 specialist. Quite apart from the complaint lodged against him with the ICC for alleged war crimes, he could soon be redundant as a result of the recent introduction of the ‘Robdozer’, developed by IAI. This is a destroyer of homes that is unmanned and can be remotely operated, like a drone, from the air-conditioned comfort of an office. Future versions are envisioned to be fully autonomous. Genocide and destruction will be even easier than they are now. If pilots who drop bombs indiscriminately can be considered heroes in Israel’s militarized culture, so too can those who operate drones or bulldozers remotely, or those who program an autonomous D9 – no doubt according to the values of the ‘most moral army in the world.’ These advancements in remote-controlled technology represent another contribution to the ongoing disconnection of Israelis from the consequences of their wartime actions.

    The IDF has recently received another shipment of D9s after the Biden administration delayed delivery. Israelis take pride in their myth of the start-up nation. But besides having a thriving software and high-tech sector, Israel has invested significantly in heavy machinery, appropriately enough for an apartheid state that wants to control and shape the land it occupies. But it needs external help. In UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s recent report on Israel’s ‘economy of genocide’, Caterpillar Inc. is allocated its own paragraph. This year, the company signed a further multi-million-dollar contract with Israel.

    Punitive demolition has long been a part of the history of this conflict. As the Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd put it, bulldozers have been ‘undoing God’ for some time. What is new is the prominence of their role in this unprecedented destruction. New, too, is the amount of money being made in the process, not just by Israelis, but by international firms producing heavy machinery like Caterpillar and JCB. We are witnesses to the razing of entire cities, towns, and villages, to lives being shovelled aside like rubble, all to clear the way for the next phase of Zionism. Western companies and governments are providing the wherewithal.

    The post The Rabbi and the Robdozers – Heavy Machinery and Patriotic Demolition in the Service of Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.