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Category: United States

  • What Kind Of ‘-ocracy’ Are We? The Choice Is Yours

    It’s time to choose your “–ocracy,” the one you think best fits a US society and system in free fall.  There are some choices to suggest.  We live not only in a plutocracy, it is also at the same time both a kakistocracy and a thanatocracy.  What it isn’t any longer is a democracy, and it hasn’t been one for some time now.  Our efforts should thus be directed at making it the kind of democracy it’s supposed to be.

    Let’s explain these terms so that you can make an informed choice.  In doing so, let’s start with plutocracy because it’s the one getting the most attention lately.

    The post What Kind Of ‘-ocracy’ Are We? The Choice Is Yours appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The New York Times Finally Stops Avoiding The G-Word

    The New York Times has published an op-ed by a genocide scholar who says that he resisted acknowledging the truth of what Israel is doing in Gaza for as long as he could, but can no longer deny the obvious.

    It’s an admission that may as well have come from The New York Times itself.

    In an article titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”, a Brown University professor of Holocaust and genocide studies named Omer Bartov argues that “Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza,” and denounces his fellow Holocaust scholars for failing to acknowledge reality.

    “My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” Bartov writes. “Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer, and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.”
    https://x.com/rcbregman/status/1945171514682114535

    And resist he did. In November 2023, Bartov wrote another op-ed for The New York Times saying, “As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening.”

    Apparently, he is seeing the proof now and has stopped resisting what has been clear from the very beginning. And it would seem the editors of the Gray Lady have ceased resisting as well.

    The New York Times, which has an extensively documented pro-Israel bias, has frenetically avoided the use of the g-word on its pages from the very beginning of the Gaza onslaught. Even in its opinion and analysis pieces the NYT Overton window has cut off at framing the issue as a complex matter of rigorous debate, with headlines like “Accused of Genocide, Israelis See Reversal of Reality. Palestinians See Justice.” and “The Bitter Fight Over the Meaning of ‘Genocide’” representing the closest thing to the pro-Palestinian side of the debate you’d see. During the same time, we’ve seen headlines like “From the Embers of an Old Genocide, a New One May Be Emerging” used in reference to Sudan.

    In an internal memo obtained by The Intercept last year, New York Times reporters were explicitly told to avoid the use of the word “genocide”, as well as terms like “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territory”.

    “‘Genocide’ has a specific definition in international law,” the memo reads. “In our own voice, we should generally use it only in the context of those legal parameters. We should also set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation, whether in quotations or not, unless they are making a substantive argument based on the legal definition.”
    https://x.com/AssalRad/status/1877181727447142846

    Earlier this year, the American Friends Service Committee cancelled its paid advertisement in The New York Times calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza, saying the outlet had wanted them to change the word “genocide” to “war” in order for their ad to be published.

    So there has been a significant change.

    To be clear, this analysis by Omer Bartov is not significant in and of itself. He is only joining the chorus of what has already been said by human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, United Nations human rights experts, and the overwhelming majority of leading authorities on the subject of genocide.

    What is significant is that even experts who’ve been resisting acknowledging the reality of the genocide in Gaza because of their bias toward Israel have stopped doing so, and that even the imperial media outlets most fiendishly devoted to running propaganda cover for that genocide have run out of room to hide.

    The Israel apologists have lost the argument. They might not know it yet, but they have. Public sentiment has turned irreversibly against them as people’s eyes are opened to the truth of what’s happening in Gaza, and more and more propagandists are choosing to rescue what’s left of their tattered credibility instead of going down with the sinking ship.

    Truth is slowly beginning to get a word in edgewise.

    Keep pushing. Keep fighting. Keep resisting.

    It’s working.

    The post The New York Times Finally Stops Avoiding The G-Word first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Militarization and Weaponization of Media Literacy: NATO Invades the Classroom

    During President Donald Trump’s second term, education has remained a central battleground in American politics. Republicans claim that classrooms have become hotbeds of “woke” indoctrination, accusing educators of promoting progressive agendas and tolerating antisemitism. In contrast, Democrats argue that conservatives are systematically defunding and dismantling public and higher education precisely because it teaches values like diversity, equity, and inclusion. While these partisan skirmishes dominate headlines, they obscure a much deeper and more enduring issue that encompasses all of these issues and more: the influence of corporate and military power on public education.

    For decades, scholars have warned that corporations have steadily infiltrated the classroom—not to promote critical thinking or democratic values, but to cultivate ideologies that reinforce capitalism, nationalism, and militarism. Critical media literacy educators, in particular, have drawn attention to the convergence of tech firms and military entities in education, offering so-called “free” digital tools that often serve as Trojan horses for data collection and ideological control.

    One striking example is the rise of programs like NewsGuard, which uses public fears over fake news to justify increased surveillance of students’ online activity. Relatedly, in 2018, the Atlantic Council partnered with Meta to perform “fact-checking” on platforms such as Facebook. In 2022, the US Marine Corps discussed developing media literacy training. It remains to be seen what training, if any, they will develop. However, what is known is that a large global player has entered the media literacy arena: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). While NATO presents its initiatives as supportive of media literacy and democratic education, these efforts appear to be oriented more toward reinforcing alignment with its strategic and political priorities than to fostering critical civic engagement.

    NATO was created in 1949, during the Cold War, as a military alliance to contain communism. Although the war officially ended in 1991, NATO has expanded both its mission and membership. Today, it encompasses more than thirty member nations and continues to frame itself as a global force for peace, democracy, and security. But this self-image masks real conflicts of interest.

    NATO is deeply intertwined with powerful nation-states and corporate actors. It routinely partners with defense contractors, tech firms, think tanks, and Western governments—all of which have a vested interest in maintaining specific political and economic systems. These relationships raise concerns when NATO extends its reach into education. Can a military alliance—closely linked to the defense industry and state propaganda—credibly serve as a neutral force in media education?

    In 2022, NATO associates collaborated with the US-based Center for Media Literacy (CML) to launch a media literacy initiative framed as a strategic defense against misinformation. The initiative included a report titled Building Resiliency: Media Literacy as a Strategic Defense Strategy for the Transatlantic, authored by CML’s Tessa Jolls. It was accompanied by a series of webinars featuring military personnel, policy experts, and academics.

    On the surface, the initiative appeared to promote digital literacy and civic engagement. But a closer look reveals a clear ideological agenda. Funded and organized by NATO, the initiative positioned media literacy not as a means of empowering students to think critically about how power shapes media, but as a defense strategy to protect NATO member states from so-called “hostile actors.” The curriculum emphasized surveillance, resilience, and behavior modification over reflection, analysis, and democratic dialogue.

    Throughout their webinars, NATO representatives described the media environment as a battlefield, frequently using other war metaphors such as “hostile information activities” and “cognitive warfare.” Panelists argued that citizens in NATO countries were targets of foreign disinformation campaigns—and that media literacy could serve as a tool to inoculate them against ideological threats.

    A critical review of NATO’s media literacy initiative reveals several troubling themes. First, it frames media literacy as a protectionist project rather than an educational one. Students are portrayed less as thinkers to be empowered and more as civilians to be monitored, molded, and managed. In this model, education becomes a form of top-down, preemptive defense, relying on expert guidance and military oversight rather than democratic participation.

    Second, the initiative advances a distinctly neoliberal worldview. It emphasizes individual responsibility over structural analysis. In other words, misinformation is treated as a user error, rather than the result of flawed systems, corporate algorithms, or media consolidation. This framing conveniently absolves powerful actors, including NATO and Big Tech, of their role in producing or amplifying disinformation.

    Third, the initiative promotes a contradictory definition of empowerment. While the report and webinars often use the language of “citizen empowerment,” they ultimately advocate for surveillance, censorship, and ideological conformity. Panelists call for NATO to “dominate” the information space, and some even propose systems to monitor students’ attitudes and online behaviors. Rather than encouraging students to question power—including NATO itself—this approach rewards obedience and penalizes dissent.

    Finally, the initiative erases the influence of corporate power. Although it criticizes authoritarian regimes and “hostile actors,” it fails to examine the role that Western corporations, particularly tech companies, play in shaping media environments. This oversight is especially problematic given that many of these corporations are NATO’s partners. By ignoring the political economy of media, the initiative offers an incomplete and ideologically skewed version of media literacy.

    NATO’s foray into media literacy education represents a new frontier in militarized pedagogy. While claiming to promote democracy and resilience, its initiative advances a narrow, protectionist, and neoliberal approach that prioritizes NATO’s geopolitical goals over student empowerment.

    This should raise red flags for educators, policymakers, and advocates. Media literacy is not a neutral practice. The organizations that design and fund media literacy programs inevitably shape the goals and methods of those programs. When a military alliance like NATO promotes media education, it brings with it a strategic interest in ideological control.

    Educators must ask: What kind of media literacy are we teaching—and whose interests does it serve? If the goal is to produce informed, critically thinking citizens capable of questioning power in all its forms, then NATO’s approach falls short. Instead of inviting students to explore complex media systems, it simplifies them into a binary struggle between “us” and “them,” encouraging loyalty over literacy.

    True media literacy must begin with transparency about who and what is behind the curriculum. It must empower students to question all forms of influence—governmental, corporate, and military alike. And it must resist the creeping presence of militarism in our classrooms. As educators, we must defend the right to question, not just the messages we see, but the institutions that shape them.

    This essay was originally published here:

    The Militarization and Weaponization of Media Literacy

     

    The post The Militarization and Weaponization of Media Literacy: NATO Invades the Classroom first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Wearables Trap: How the Government Plans to Monitor, Score, and Control You

    Bodily autonomy—the right to privacy and integrity over our own bodies—is rapidly vanishing.

    We are entering a new age of algorithmic, authoritarian control, where our thoughts, moods, and biology are monitored and judged by the state.

    This is the dark promise behind the newest campaign by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, to push for a future in which all Americans wear biometric health-tracking devices.

    Under the guise of public health and personal empowerment, this initiative is nothing less than the normalization of 24/7 bodily surveillance, ushering in a world where every step, heartbeat, and biological fluctuation is monitored not only by private companies but also by the government.

    In this emerging surveillance-industrial complex, health data becomes currency. Tech firms profit from hardware and app subscriptions, insurers profit from risk scoring, and government agencies profit from increased compliance and behavioral insight.

    This convergence of health, technology, and surveillance is not a new strategy—it’s just the next step in a long, familiar pattern of control.

    Surveillance has always arrived dressed as progress.

    Every new wave of surveillance technology—GPS trackers, red light cameras, facial recognition, Ring doorbells, Alexa smart speakers—has been sold to us as a tool of convenience, safety, or connection. But in time, each became a mechanism for tracking, monitoring, or controlling the public.

    What began as voluntary has become inescapable and mandatory.

    The moment we accepted the premise that privacy must be traded for convenience, we laid the groundwork for a society in which nowhere is beyond the government’s reach—not our homes, not our cars, not even our bodies.

    RFK Jr.’s wearable plan is just the latest iteration of this bait-and-switch: marketed as freedom, built as a cage.

    According to Kennedy’s plan, which has been promoted as part of a national campaign to “Make America Healthy Again,” wearable devices would track glucose levels, heart rate, activity, sleep, and more for every American.

    Participation may not be officially mandatory at the outset, but the implications are clear: get on board, or risk becoming a second-class citizen in a society driven by data compliance.

    What began as optional self-monitoring tools marketed by Big Tech is poised to become the newest tool in the surveillance arsenal of the police state.

    Devices like Fitbits, Apple Watches, glucose trackers, and smart rings collect astonishing amounts of intimate data—from stress and depression to heart irregularities and early signs of illness. When this data is shared across government databases, insurers, and health platforms, it becomes a potent tool not only for health analysis—but for control.

    Once symbols of personal wellness, these wearables are becoming digital cattle tags—badges of compliance tracked in real time and regulated by algorithm.

    And it won’t stop there.

    The body is fast becoming a battleground in the government’s expanding war on the inner realms.

    The infrastructure is already in place to profile and detain individuals based on perceived psychological “risks.” Now imagine a future in which your wearable data triggers a mental health flag. Elevated stress levels. Erratic sleep. A skipped appointment. A sudden drop in heart rate variability.

    In the eyes of the surveillance state, these could be red flags—justification for intervention, inquiry, or worse.

    RFK Jr.’s embrace of wearable tech is not a neutral innovation. It is an invitation to expand the government’s war on thought crimes, health noncompliance, and individual deviation.

    It shifts the presumption of innocence to a presumption of diagnosis. You are not well until the algorithm says you are.

    The government has already weaponized surveillance tools to silence dissent, flag political critics, and track behavior in real time. Now, with wearables, they gain a new weapon: access to the human body as a site of suspicion, deviance, and control.

    While government agencies pave the way for biometric control, it will be corporations—such as insurance companies, tech giants, and employers—who act as enforcers for the surveillance state.

    Wearables don’t just collect data. They sort it, interpret it, and feed it into systems that make high-stakes decisions about your life: whether you get insurance coverage, whether your rates go up, whether you qualify for employment or financial aid.

    As reported by ABC News, a JAMA article warns that insurers could easily use wearables to deny coverage or increase premiums based on personal health metrics, such as calorie intake, weight fluctuations, and blood pressure.

    It’s not a stretch to imagine this bleeding into workplace assessments, credit scores, or even social media rankings.

    Employers already offer discounts for “voluntary” wellness tracking and penalize nonparticipants. Insurers give incentives for healthy behavior—until they decide unhealthy behavior warrants punishment. Apps track not just steps, but mood, substance use, fertility, and sexual activity—feeding the ever-hungry data economy.

    We now face the quiet erosion of autonomy through the normalization of constant monitoring.

    We must ask: when surveillance becomes a condition of participation in modern life—such as employment, education, and healthcare—are we still free? Or have we become, as in every great dystopian warning, conditioned not to resist, but to comply?

    That’s the hidden cost of these technological conveniences: today’s wellness tracker is tomorrow’s corporate leash.

    Once health tracking becomes a de facto requirement for employment, insurance, or social participation, it will be impossible to “opt out” without penalty. Those who resist may be painted as irresponsible, unhealthy, or even dangerous.

    This is not merely an expansion of healthcare. It is the transformation of health into a mechanism of control—a Trojan horse for the surveillance state to claim ownership over the last private frontier: the human body.

    Once biometric data becomes currency in a health-driven surveillance economy, it’s only a matter of time before that data is used to determine whose lives are worth investing in—and whose are not.

    This isn’t a left or right issue.

    The conquest of physical space—our homes, cars, public squares—is nearly complete.

    What remains is the conquest of inner space: our biology, our genetics, our psychology, our emotions. As predictive algorithms grow more sophisticated, the government and its corporate partners will use them to assess risk, flag threats, and enforce compliance in real time.

    The goal is no longer simply to monitor behavior but to reshape it—to preempt dissent, deviance, or disease before it arises.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, now is the time to draw the line—before the body becomes just another piece of state property.

    The post The Wearables Trap: How the Government Plans to Monitor, Score, and Control You first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hungary Refuses To Finance US Weapons For Ukraine

    Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said on 14 July that Hungary will not participate in financing US weapons for Ukraine, even if Washington formally proposes the initiative to the EU.

    “I would like to emphasize that Hungarian money, Hungarian weapons, and Hungarian soldiers will not be sent to Ukraine. 

    Nothing will be sent there,” Szijjártó stated during a press conference in Budapest following a meeting with Moroccan Minister of Industry and Trade Ryad Mezzour.

    Despite this, he expressed support for US President Donald Trump’s so-called peace efforts, stating: “No one has done as much for peace in Ukraine as Trump.” 

    The post Hungary Refuses To Finance US Weapons For Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Europeans And The United States Against Russia

    Dmitri Trenin on the intermediate results of the “special diplomatic operation”

    The war will not end in 2025. It will not end after the end of hostilities in Ukraine.

    We need to realize that the current conflict is not about Ukraine as such.

    This is a proxy (so far) war of the West against Russia. And this confrontation itself is part of an ongoing world war, in which the West is fighting to maintain world hegemony. This will be a long war, and the United States, with or without Trump, will remain our adversary. At stake for us in this struggle is not the status of Ukraine, but the existence of Russia. 

    The post The Europeans And The United States Against Russia appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Tipping Point

    President Donald Trump thought he had gotten the deal terms and the cover story right, and also the prize for himself (the Nobel Peace Prize ).

    The deal was that under cover of an authorized leak to the press from Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Eldridge Colby, that the US was running out of ammunition for Israel’s war with Iran, for the Ukraine war with Russia, and for US military stocks at their DEFCON  levels,  Trump would pause ammunition deliveries to the regime in Kiev, and then persuade President Vladimir Putin to agree to an immediate ceasefire in exchange.

    That’s the ceasefire which, since February, Trump has been asking Putin to announce at a summit meeting between the two of them. That’s also the fourth ceasefire in the row which Trump has been counting as his personal achievements – between Pakistan and India on May 10; between Iran and Israel on June 23; and between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda on June 27.

    Only the scheme has failed.

    A Moscow source in a position to know explains: “The Russian calculus recognizes the tipping point [for US arms supplies to the Ukraine]. Until then the General Staff will grind away methodically, slowly. Then when the Western supplies run low, we will hit fast and hard. If you total the June attacks, the picture emerges clearly that Putin has chosen the Oreshnik option – without firing it yet  — over compromising on Trump’s terms. The outskirts of Kiev are burning like never before.”

    There are American exceptionalists who insist they thought of this before —  in 1943, in fact, when Walter Lippmann spelled out what has come to be called (by Ivy League professors) the “Lippmann Gap”.  This is no more nor less than the ancient maxim — don’t bite off more than you can chew. But in Lippmann’s verbulation:  “Foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power. I mean by a foreign commitment an obligation, outside the continental limits of the United States, which may in the last analysis have to be met by waging war. I mean by power the force which is necessary to prevent such a war or to win it if it cannot be prevented. In the term necessary power I include the military force which can be mobilized effectively within the domestic territory of the United States and also the reinforcements which can be obtained from dependable allies.”

    From the Russian point of view, the first two of Trump’s ceasefires have been clumsily concealed rescues for Pakistan and Israel; the Congo-Rwanda terms remain undecided; and the “necessary power” to reverse the defeat of the US, its “dependable allies”, and its proxies in the Ukraine has already been defeated. It won’t be Putin, however, to announce publicly that Trump has no “comfortable power in reserve”.

    That, however, was Putin’s private message to Trump in their telephone call on July 3. “Russia would strive to achieve its goals,” was the way Putin allowed his spokesman to disclose:  “namely the elimination of the well-known root causes that led to the current state of affairs, the bitter confrontation that we are seeing now. Russia will not back down from these goals.”

    This is the reason Trump later acknowledged: “[I] didn’t make any progress with him today at all.”   It’s also the reason Trump beat a retreat  from failure. “I’m very disappointed. Well, it’s not, I just think, I don’t think he’s [Putin] looking to stop. And that’s too bad. This, this fight, this isn’t me. This is Biden’s war.”

    Here are the pieces of the intelligence assessment assembled in Moscow which led to the escalation of drone and missile attacks on Kiev since last Thursday night.

    The first announcement came from the Pentagon on July 1. “The Pentagon has halted shipments of some air defense missiles and other precision munitions to Ukraine due to worries that U.S. weapons stockpiles have fallen too low.”   The sources were authorized to identify Elbridge Colby, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, “after a review of Pentagon munitions stockpiles”. “The Pentagon had been dividing munitions into categories of criticality since February, over concerns that the DOD was using too many air defense munitions in Yemen…Plans were in place to redirect key munitions, including artillery shells, tank shells, and air defense systems, back to the U.S. homeland or to Israel.”

    Source: https://www.politico.com/
    Note the timing, according to Politico’s “three people familiar with the issue…The initial decision to withhold some aid promised during the Biden administration came in early June, according to the people, but is only taking effect now as Ukraine is beating back some of the largest Russian barrages of missiles and drones at civilian targets in Kyiv and elsewhere. The people were granted anonymity to discuss current operations. The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.”

    Colby has been the brains behind the strategy of sequencing Trump’s wars according to the bite-off-and-chew rule.  But he has not been acting alone. He reports to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg,  a Jewish financier of Trump’s campaigns whose wealth has been accumulated in part from the US defence industry and from his one-time stake in Israel’s largest bank, Bank Leumi.

    The Colby-Feinberg idea was not to admit there was a “Lippmann gap”, but instead to persuade Trump the Israel war should take priority over the Ukraine war;   and that if that choice was made public, the Jewish lobby would prevail over the Ukraine lobby in supporting the president. Trump was also persuaded to acknowledge publicly there is a domestic shortfall of weapons, and in private get Putin to accept the ceasefire Trump had been promoting since their first telephone call on February 12.

    Trump dutifully announced at the NATO summit on June 25: “we’re going to see if we can make some [arms] available, they’re very hard to get. They [Ukraine] do want to have the anti-missile missiles, as they call them the Patriots,  and we’re going to see if we can make some available. You know, they’re very hard to get. We need them, too. We were supplying them to Israel and they’re very effective. 100 percent effective.  Hard to believe how effective. And they do want that more than any other thing, as you probably know.”

    Trump then tried with Putin on the telephone on July 3. He “once again raised the issue of ending the hostilities as soon as possible,” Putin’s spokesman Yury Ushakov confirmed  Trump’s ceasefire pitch in the Kremlin read-out.

    But Putin said no ceasefire now. “In turn, Vladimir Putin noted that we still continued the search for a political, negotiated solution to the conflict…the elimination of the well-known root causes that led to the current state of affairs…Russia will not back down from these goals.”

    “I’m not happy about that,” Trump said five hours later. “No, I didn’t make any progress with him today at all.”

    Another hour went by and Trump repeated:  “Yeah, very disappointed with the conversation I had today with President Putin, ’cause I don’t think he’s there. I don’t think he’s there.”

    In Moscow an official source noted: “He is not telling why Zelensky is not there, not signing on the terms.”

    Trump followed on the morning of July 4 in a telephone call with Vladimir Zelensky to discuss new Patriot missile and other arms deliveries to the Ukraine.

    Source: https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-press-gaggle-after-air-force-one-arrival-july-4-2025/ 

    After the call with Zelensky, Trump was uncharacteristically silent. Zelensky did all the talking instead. “We spoke about opportunities in air defence and agreed that we will work together to strengthen protection of our skies. We have also agreed to a meeting between our teams. We had a detailed conversation about defence industry capabilities and joint production. We are ready for direct projects with the United States and believe this is critically important for security, especially when it comes to drones and related technologies.”

    Source: https://www.kyivpost.com/post/55728 

    “We also touched on mutual procurement and investment,” Zelensky added — “we exchanged views on the diplomatic situation and joint work with the U.S. and other partners.”

    This was a reference to proposals from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to run down his remaining stocks of Patriot missiles and their radar and launch batteries; send them to Kiev; and buy more from the US.  The list of US arms shipments which have been halted reportedly include 155mm artillery rounds, Patriot air defence systems, Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, Stinger, AIM-7 and Hellfire missiles.

    As the Kremlin interpreted the call, there was no sign from Trump that he was asking or telling  Zelensky to accept any of the Russian terms which have been tabled in Istanbul.

    At the State Department, spokesman Tammy Bruce stumbled awkwardly over what to admit was the Feinberg-Colby plan which Trump had accepted, and what alternatives remained for the Ukraine. The decision-making had come from the Pentagon, not from State, Bruce claimed. She then read out from a prepared script quoting a White House press release and a statement from Colby.    “We don’t make decisions about the shipping of weapons,” Bruce said. “The DoD statement made clear that they have robust options as we continue to work to assist Ukraine when it comes to the options they might have from the DoD, and I don’t doubt that. So we should, I think, be cautious about judging the nature of what has just occurred, considering our commitment that remains for the country of Ukraine.”

    Left: State Department statement by Tammy Bruce. Right, Defense Department spokesman Sean Parnell reads out prepared script. For more on the gap between DoD and State, read this.  

    “A capability review is being conducted,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell read out, “to ensure US military aid aligns with our defense priorities, and we will not be providing any updates to specific quantities or types of munitions being provided to Ukraine, or the timelines associated with these transfers,” he said. “We see this as a common sense pragmatic step …to evaluate what munitions are sent and where. But we want to be very clear about this last point. Let it be known that our military has everything that it needs to conduct any mission anywhere, anytime, all around the world.”

    In fact, as Colby said, the “capability review” had already concluded and Feinberg had agreed with the White House in early June —  before Israel launched its war on Iran on June 13.   As the US and Israel fired far more ordnance at Iran than Colby and Feinberg had anticipated, they became nervous at the backlash this caused at State and National Security Council. “The Department of Defense continues,” Colby told the New York Post,  “to provide the President with robust options to continue military aid to Ukraine, consistent with his goal of bringing this tragic war to an end. At the same time, the Department is rigorously examining and adapting its approach to achieving this objective while also preserving US forces’ readiness for Administration defense priorities. Department of Defense leadership works as a cohesive and smoothly-running team under the leadership of Secretary of Defense Hegseth. This is yet another attempt to portray division that does not exist…America’s potential adversaries know all of this and are acting accordingly.”

    Putin has acknowledged publicly there has been no movement from Washington or Kiev towards the Russian end-of-war terms. “These [Russian, US-Ukrainian] are two absolutely opposing memorandums,” he told the press, “but that is precisely why talks are set up and held – to find ways to bring positions closer. The fact that they were diametrically opposed does not seem surprising to me, either. I would not like to go into details, as I believe it would be counterproductive – even harmful – to get ahead of the talks.”

    From Ushakov’s read-out of the July 3 call, it is clear Trump and Putin were unable to agree on a date for a new round of Istanbul negotiations. “The two presidents will naturally continue communicating and will have another conversation soon,” Ushakov reported.   This is Russian for don’t call me, I’ll call you.

    The General Staff then launched its largest air attack on Kiev since the war began, continuing the operation from the night of July 4 through the night of July 5. The majority of the weapons used were Russian and Iranian drones. According to Boris Rozhin, the leading military blogger in Moscow,  “it is not entirely clear how the supply of missiles for the Patriot air defence system — if the United States will allow them — will save Ukraine from the growing flow of  Gerans [and Gerberas ]. Shooting down the Geran heroes with Patriot missiles is absolutely pointless from an economic point of view.” July 4 Min 22:54.

    Oleg Tsarev, a leading Ukrainian opposition politician based in Crimea, commented “several thoughts about the termination of the United States’ supply of some weapons to Kiev. This is certainly great news, but we should not forget that, firstly, we are not talking about stopping the supply of all weapons, but only about some of the names, and secondly, the rear of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is the entire European Union, all Western countries, on which we do not strike.  And thirdly, Ukraine is largely holding the front with drones and electronic warfare, and with the supply of these components they have no problems and none is foreseen.”

    Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russian-drone-attack-triggers-fire-roof-apartment-block-officials-say-2025-07-03/ 

    Map of Russian air attacks on the evening of July 4 -- source: https://t.me/boris_rozhin/171383
    For the July 5 map, click: https://t.me/boris_rozhin/171467 

    The Moscow consensus now is to escalate westwards from the front on the ground, and by air attack on Kiev, and wait for Trump. “Either Trump agrees on fresh direct shipments, or he will pretend that indirect shipments are a compromise, or he will abandon Zelensky to his fate. So we talk peace and keep moving on all fronts, keep hitting everything military. It is fast reaching the point where even if there was no Israel sector, Iran sector, Yemen sector, the US cannot save Ukraine. The US and Europe certainly can’t defeat Russia. That’s the calculus.”

    The post Tipping Point first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Rise of the Prison State: Trump’s Push for Megaprisons Could Lock Us All Up

    America is rapidly becoming a nation of prisons.

    Having figured out how to parlay presidential authority in foreign affairs in order to sidestep the Constitution, President Trump is using his immigration enforcement powers to lock up—and lock down—the nation.

    Under the guise of national security and public safety, the Trump administration is engineering the largest federal expansion of incarceration and detention powers in U.S. history.

    At the center of this campaign is Alligator Alcatraz, a federal detention facility built in the Florida Everglades and hailed by the White House as a model for the future of federal incarceration. But this is more than a new prison—it is the architectural symbol of a carceral state being quietly constructed in plain sight.

    With over $170 billion allocated through Trump’s megabill, we are witnessing the creation of a vast, permanent enforcement infrastructure aimed at turning the American police state into a prison state.

    The scope of this expansion is staggering.

    The bill allocates $45 billion just to expand immigrant detention—making ICE the best-funded federal law enforcement agency in American history.

    Yet be warned: what begins with ICE rarely ends with ICE.

    Trump’s initial promise to crack down on “violent illegal criminals” has evolved into a sweeping mandate: a mass, quota-driven roundup campaign that detains anyone the administration deems a threat, regardless of legal status and at significant expense to the American taxpayer.

    Tellingly, the vast majority of those being detained have no criminal record. And like so many of the Trump administration’s grandiose plans, the math doesn’t add up.

    Just as Trump’s tariffs have failed to revive American manufacturing and instead raised consumer prices, this detention-state spending spree will cost taxpayers far more than it saves. It’s estimated that undocumented workers contribute an estimated $96 billion in federal, state and local taxes each year, and billions more in Social Security and Medicare taxes that they can never claim.

    Making matters worse, many of these detained immigrants are then exploited as a pool of cheap labor inside the very facilities where they’re held.

    The implications for Trump’s detention empire are chilling.

    At a time when the administration is promising mass deportations to appease anti-immigrant hardliners, it is simultaneously constructing a parallel economy in which detained migrants can be pressed into near-free labor to satisfy the needs of industries that depend on migrant work.

    What Trump is building isn’t just a prison state—it’s a forced labor regime, where confinement and exploitation go hand in hand. And it’s a high price to pay for a policy that creates more problems than it solves.

    As the enforcement dragnet expands, so does the definition of who qualifies as an enemy of the state—including legal U.S. residents arrested for their political views.

    The Trump administration is now pushing to review and revoke the citizenship of Americans it deems national security risks—targeting them for arrest, detention, and deportation.

    Unfortunately, the government’s definition of “national security threat” is so broad, vague, and unconstitutional that it could encompass anyone engaged in peaceful, nonviolent, constitutionally protected activities—including criticism of government policy or the policies of allied governments like Israel.

    In Trump’s prison state, no one is beyond the government’s reach.

    Critics of the post-9/11 security state—left, right, and libertarian alike—have long warned that the powers granted to fight terrorism and control immigration would eventually be turned inward, used against dissidents, protestors, and ordinary citizens.

    That moment has arrived.

    Yet Trump’s most vocal supporters remain dangerously convinced they have nothing to fear from this expanding enforcement machine. But history—and the Constitution—say otherwise.

    Our founders understood that unchecked government power, particularly in the name of public safety, poses the most significant threat to liberty. That’s why they enshrined rights like due process, trial by jury, and protection from unreasonable searches.

    Those safeguards are now being hollowed out.

    Trump’s detention expansion—like the mass surveillance programs before it—is not about making America safe. It’s about following the blueprints for authoritarian control in order to lock down the country.

    The government’s targets may be the vulnerable today—but the infrastructure is built for everyone: Trump’s administration is laying the legal groundwork for indefinite detention of citizens and noncitizens alike.

    This is not just about building prisons. It’s about dismantling the constitutional protections that make us free.

    A nation cannot remain free while operating as a security state. And a government that treats liberty as a threat will soon treat the people as enemies.

    This is not a partisan warning. It is a constitutional one.

    We are dangerously close to losing the constitutional guardrails that keep power in check.

    The very people who once warned against Big Government—the ones who decried the surveillance state, the IRS, and federal overreach—are now cheering for the most dangerous part of it: the unchecked power to surveil, detain, and disappear citizens without full due process.

    Limited government, not mass incarceration, is the backbone of liberty.

    The Founders warned that the greatest threat to liberty was not a foreign enemy, but domestic power left unchecked. That’s exactly what we’re up against now. A nation cannot claim to defend freedom while building a surveillance-fueled, prison-industrial empire.

    Trump’s prison state is not a defense of America. It’s the destruction of everything America was meant to defend.

    We can pursue justice without abandoning the Constitution. We can secure our borders and our communities without turning every American into a suspect and building a federal gulag.

    But we must act now.

    History has shown us where this road leads. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, once the machinery of tyranny is built, it rarely stays idle.

    If we continue down this path, cheering on bigger prisons, broader police powers, and unchecked executive authority—if we fail to reject the dangerous notion that more prisons, more power, and fewer rights will somehow make us safer—if we fail to restore the foundational limits that protect us from government overreach before those limits are gone for good—we may wake up to find that the prisons and concentration camps the police state is building won’t just hold others.

    One day, they may hold us all.

    The post The Rise of the Prison State: Trump’s Push for Megaprisons Could Lock Us All Up first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Fueling Genocide: Inside the Global Supply Chain that Delivers Jet Fuel to Israel’s Military

    Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza has been fueled by a surge in deliveries of military-grade jet fuel from U.S. providers. In this visual, we expose the companies and governments complicit in this supply chain, while highlighting grassroots efforts to track and disrupt this deadly cargo through direct action, boycott campaigns, and community resistance.

    The post Fueling Genocide: Inside the Global Supply Chain that Delivers Jet Fuel to Israel’s Military first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Greed: The Survival of a Primitive Emotion

    Congressional passage of Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” provides the latest evidence that human greed, despite its primitive nature, remains alive and well.

    Perhaps most noticeably, the legislation provides for over $3 trillion in tax cuts that disproportionately help the wealthy and their corporations. This largesse is facilitated by slashing over $1.4 trillion in healthcare and food assistance for low-income Americans and increasing the national debt by $3.3 trillion. Estimates reveal that at least 16 million Americans will lose health care coverage and 7 million people (including 2 million children) will lose food aid or have their food aid cut significantly. Meanwhile, according to the Yale Budget Lab, the nation’s top 0.1 percent―people with an annual income over $3.3 million―will receive tax cuts of $103,500 on average. Condemning the legislation, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops declared simply that it “takes from the poor to give to the wealthy.”

    Other measures in the legislation supporting the wealthy and their businesses at public expense include financial subsidies for coal, oil, and gas companies, the opening of opportunities for oil and gas corporations to drill on public lands (including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve), and the reduction of royalty fees for such fossil fuel drilling.

    Of course, this kind of class legislation and the greed that inspires it are nothing new. Throughout history, some people have amassed great fortunes, often with the assistance of governments and other powerful entities. Kings, princes, and their courtiers provided themselves with castles, vast landed estates, and other perquisites of wealth, while millions of their subjects lived in miserable huts and dug a few potatoes out of their fields in a desperate effort to survive. In later years, this situation was replicated to some extent as business titans garnered great wealth by exploiting workers in factories, mines, and fields.

    Although this pattern of economic inequality was viewed as immoral by every great religious and ethical system, it did have a brutal logic to it. After all, in these situations of overall scarcity, some people would be poor and some would surely die. By contrast, growing rich helped guarantee survival for oneself and one’s family.

    But with the advent of the industrial revolution, these tragic circumstances began to dissipate, for human beings increasingly possessed the knowledge, skills, and resources that had the potential to produce decent lives for everyone. Indeed, as science, technology, and factory output advanced and produced unprecedented abundance, there was no longer any morally justifiable basis for the existence of hunger, homelessness, and mass sickness.

    In these altered conditions, avarice has become increasingly irrational―the driving force behind irrational men like Donald Trump and his billionaire friends, who, even as millions of people live and die in poverty and misery, seek to wallow in great wealth.

    Gandhi put it concisely when he declared, decades ago: “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.”

    Fortunately, over the course of human history, humane thinkers, social movements, and political parties have worked to rein in untrammeled greed in the interest of a better life for all humanity. In recent centuries, they have recognized the fact that sharing the wealth is not only a moral stance, but a feasible one.

    Let’s hope, then, that despite this brazen and regressive move by the Trump administration to bolster economic privilege at the expense of human needs, the forces favoring human equality and compassion will ultimately prevail.

    The post Greed: The Survival of a Primitive Emotion first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • FIFA And IOC Must Ban The US And Israel From International Sporting Events

    The United States has become dangerous for members of the global community, and specifically for non-white/non-European people. The world is witnessing massive violations of human rights and the Constitution of the United States as masked agents using unmarked vehicles raid work places, homes, and places of public assembly to incarcerate and disappear Black, Brown, and Indigenous people and, in too many cases, denying them legal representation and basic information as to their whereabouts and wellbeing to their families and attorneys.

    Under the current U.S administration anyone suspected of residing in and/or visiting the United States with or without “proper” documentation, including U.S. citizens, are being harassed, questioned about their political beliefs and even detained without due process.

    The post FIFA And IOC Must Ban The US And Israel From International Sporting Events appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Faramarz Farbod in Conversation with Yves Engler on Canada, the US, and Imperialism

    Faramarz Farbod speaks with Yves Engler, a Canadian activist and author of 13 books, including most recently Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy and Stand on Guard for Whom? (A People’s History of Canadian Military). The conversation explores Canada’s role in the world, its relationship with US capitalism and imperialism, Canada’s policies toward Iran and Cuba, misperceptions of Canada in the US, and the concept of Canadianism.

    The post Faramarz Farbod in Conversation with Yves Engler on Canada, the US, and Imperialism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Inalienable Rights in an Age of Tyranny

    When a long train of abuses and usurpations… evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.

    —Declaration of Independence (1776)

    We are now struggling to emerge from the wreckage of a constitutional republic, transformed into a kleptocracy (government by thieves), collapsing into kakistocracy (government by the worst), and enforced by a police state algogracy (rule by algorithm).

    This week alone, the Trump administration is reportedly erecting protest barricades around the White House, Congress is advancing legislation that favors the wealthy, and President Trump is grandstanding at the opening of a detention center dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”

    Against such a backdrop of government-sponsored cruelty, corruption and shameless profiteering at taxpayer expense, what, to the average American, is freedom in an age when the government plays god—determining who is worthy of rights, who qualifies as a citizen, and who can be discarded without consequence?

    What are inalienable rights worth if they can be redefined, delayed, or revoked by executive order?

    Frederick Douglass posed a similar challenge more than 170 years ago when he asked, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”

    His question was a searing indictment not just of slavery but of a government that proclaimed liberty while denying it to millions—a hypocrisy that persists in a system still governed by institutions more committed to power than principle.

    Every branch of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—has, in one way or another, abandoned its duty to uphold the Constitution. And both parties have prioritized profit and political theater over justice and the rights of the governed.

    The founders of this nation believed our rights come from God, not government. That we are born free, not made free by bureaucrats or judges. That among these rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—none can be taken away without destroying the very idea of government by consent.

    And yet that is precisely what’s happening.

    We now live under a government that has become judge, jury, and executioner—writing its own laws, policing its own limits, and punishing those who object.

    This is not what it means to be free.

    When presidents rule by fiat, when agencies strip citizenship from naturalized Americans, when police act as both enforcers and executioners, and when courts rubber-stamp the erosion of basic protections, the distinction between a citizen and a subject begins to collapse.

    What do inalienable rights mean in a country where:

    • Your citizenship can be revoked based solely on the government’s say-so?
    • Your freedom can be extinguished by surveillance, asset seizure, or indefinite detention?
    • Your property can be taken, your speech censored, and your life extinguished without due process?
    • Your life can be ended without a trial, a warning, or a second thought, because the government views you as expendable?

    The answer is stark: they mean nothing—unless we defend them.

    When the government—whether president, Congress, court, or local bureaucrat—claims the right to determine who does and doesn’t deserve rights, then no one is safe. Individuals become faceless numbers. Human beings become statistics. Lives become expendable. Dignity becomes disposable.

    It is a slippery slope—justified in the name of national security, public safety, and the so-called greater good—that leads inevitably to totalitarianism.

    Unfortunately, we have been dancing with this devil for far too long, and now, the mask has come off.

    This is what authoritarianism looks like in America today.

    Imagine living in a country where government agents crash through doors to arrest citizens merely for criticizing government officials. Where police stop and search you on a whim. Where carrying anything that resembles a firearm might get you arrested—or killed. Where surveillance is constant, dissent is criminalized, and loyalty is enforced through fear.

    If you’re thinking this sounds like America today, you wouldn’t be far wrong.

    But this scenario isn’t new. It’s the same kind of tyranny that drove American colonists to sever ties with Great Britain nearly 250 years ago.

    Back then, American colonists lived under the shadow of an imperial power and an early police state that censored their speech, surveilled their movements, taxed their livelihoods, searched their homes without cause, quartered troops in their towns, and punished them for daring to demand liberty.

    It was only when the colonists finally got fed up with being silenced, censored, searched, frisked, threatened, and arrested that they finally revolted against the tyrant’s fetters.

    The Declaration of Independence—drafted by Thomas Jefferson and signed on July 4, 1776, by 56 men who risked everything—was their response. It was more than a list of grievances. It was a document seething with outrage over a government which had betrayed its citizens, a call to arms against a system that had ceased to represent the people and instead sought to dominate them.

    Labeled traitors, these men were charged with treason, a crime punishable by death, because they believed in a radical idea: that all people are created to be free. For some, their acts of rebellion would cost them their homes and their fortunes. For others, it would be the ultimate price—their lives.

    Yet even knowing the heavy price they might have to pay, these men dared to speak up. They understood that silence in the face of tyranny is complicity. So they stood together, pledging “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” to the cause of freedom.

    Even after they had won their independence from Great Britain, these new Americans worked to ensure that the rights they had risked their lives to secure would remain secure for future generations.

    The result: our Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

    The Constitution and Bill of Rights were meant to enshrine the liberties they fought for: due process, privacy, free speech, the right to bear arms, and limits on government power.

    Now, nearly two and a half centuries later, those freedoms hang by a thread.

    Imagine the shock and outrage these 56 men would feel were they to discover that almost 250 years later, the government they had risked their lives to create has been transformed into a militaristic police state in which exercising one’s freedoms—at a minimum, merely questioning a government agent—is often viewed as a flagrant act of defiance.

    In fact, had Jefferson and his compatriots written the Declaration of Independence today, they would almost certainly be labeled extremists, placed on government watchlists, targeted by surveillance, and prosecuted as domestic threats.

    Read the Declaration of Independence again, and you’ll see the grievances they laid at the feet of King George—unjust laws, militarized policing, surveillance, censorship, and the denial of due process—are the very abuses “we the people” suffer under today.

    Had Jefferson written the Declaration about the American police state in 2025, it might have read like a criminal indictment of the crimes perpetrated by a government that:

    Polices by fear and violence:

    Surveils and represses dissent:

    Strips away rights:

    Concentrates unchecked power in the executive:

    • bypassing Congress with executive orders, sidelining the courts, and ruling by decree;
    • weaponizing federal agencies to suppress opposition and silence critics;
    • treating constitutional limits as optional and the presidency as a personal fiefdom.

    These are not isolated abuses.

    They are the logical outcomes of a government that has turned against its people.

    They reveal a government that has claimed the god-like power to decide who gets rights—and who doesn’t. Who counts as a citizen—and who doesn’t. Who gets to live—and who becomes expendable.

    All along the spectrum of life—from the unborn child to the elderly—the government continues to treat individuals endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights as if they are criminals, subhumans, or enemies of the state.

    That is not freedom. It is tyranny.

    And it must be called by its true name.

    The truth is hard, but it must be said: the American police state has grown drunk on power, money, and its own authority.

    The irony is almost too painful to articulate.

    On the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—a document that rebuked government corruption, tyranny, and injustice—we find ourselves surrounded by its modern-day equivalents.

    This week’s spectacle—protest barricades, legislation to benefit the rich, and Trump’s appearance at Alligator Alcatraz, a.k.a. “Gator Gitmo”—shows how completely we have inverted the spirit of 1776.

    That a president would celebrate the Fourth of July while inaugurating a modern-day internment camp—far from the reach of the courts or the Constitution—speaks volumes about the state of our nation and the extent to which those in power now glorify the very forms of tyranny the Founders once rose up against.

    This is not law and order.

    This is political theater, carceral cruelty, and authoritarianism in plain sight.

    It is what happens when a nation that once prided itself on liberty now builds monuments to its own fear and domination.

    The spectacle doesn’t end with detention camps and barricades. It extends into commerce, corruption, and self-enrichment at the highest levels of power.

    President Trump is now marketing his own line of fragrances—a branding exercise so absurd it would be laughable if it weren’t a flagrant violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. His investments are booming. And all across his administration, top officials are shamelessly using public office to line their pockets, even as they push legislation to strip working-class Americans of the most basic benefits and protections, while claiming to be rooting out corruption and inefficiency.

    This is not governance. This is kleptocracy—and it is happening in plain sight.

    In the nearly 250 years since early Americans declared their independence from Great Britain, “we the people” have worked ourselves back under the tyrant’s thumb—only this time, the tyrant is one of our own making.

    The abuses they once suffered under an imperial power haven’t disappeared. They’ve evolved.

    We are being robbed blind by political grifters and corporate profiteers. We are being silenced by bureaucrats and blacklists. We are being watched by data miners and digital spies. We are being caged by militarized enforcers with no regard for the Constitution. And we are being ruled by presidents who govern not by law, but by executive decree.

    Given the fact that we are a relatively young nation, it hasn’t taken very long for an authoritarian regime to creep into power.

    Unfortunately, the bipartisan coup that laid siege to our nation did not happen overnight.

    The architecture of oppression—surveillance, militarism, censorship, propaganda—was built slowly, brick by brick, law by law, war by war.

    It snuck in under our radar, hiding behind the guise of national security, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on immigration, political correctness, hate crimes and a host of other official-sounding programs aimed at expanding the government’s power at the expense of individual freedoms.

    The building blocks for the bleak future we’re just now getting a foretaste of—police shootings of unarmed citizens, profit-driven prisons, weapons of compliance, a wall-to-wall surveillance state, pre-crime programs, a suspect society, school-to-prison pipelines, militarized police, overcriminalization, SWAT team raids, endless wars, etc.—were put in place by government officials we trusted to look out for our best interests.

    The result is an empire in decline and a citizenry under siege.

    But if history teaches us anything, it’s that the power of the people—when awakened—is stronger than any empire.

    For decades, the Constitution has been our shield against tyranny.

    But today, it’s under siege. And now we must be the shield.

    Surveillance is expanding. Peaceful dissent is being punished. Judges are being targeted. The presidency is issuing decrees and bypassing the rule of law.

    Every institution meant to check power is being tested—and in some cases, broken.

    This is the moment to stand in front of the Constitution and defend it.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the fight for freedom is never over. But neither is it lost—so long as we refuse to surrender, refuse to remain silent, and refuse to accept tyranny as the price of safety.

    It is time to remember who we are. To reclaim the Constitution. To resist the march toward authoritarianism. And to reassert—boldly and without apology—that our rights are not up for negotiation.

    The post Inalienable Rights in an Age of Tyranny first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Senate strikes AI regulation ban from Trump mega-bill

    The Republican-led US Senate voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to remove a 10-year federal moratorium on state regulation of artificial intelligence from President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax-cut and spending bill. Lawmakers voted 99-1 to strike the ban from the bill by adopting an amendment offered by Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn. The action came during a marathon…

    The post US Senate strikes AI regulation ban from Trump mega-bill appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Iran, Zionism, and the Limits of US Control: An Interview with Faramarz Farbod

    The post Iran, Zionism, and the Limits of US Control: An Interview with Faramarz Farbod first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What July 5th Taught Me that July 4th Never Did

    Growing up in Venezuela and now living in the United States, I’ve always felt caught between two independence days: July 4th and July 5th. Two celebrations. Two flags. Two very different ideas of what it means to be free.

    In the U.S., the Fourth of July comes with fireworks, parades, and an almost unquestioned belief in the righteousness of the revolution it commemorates. However, in Venezuela, July 5th evokes different thoughts. It is not just a break from colonial rule but the beginning of a long, unfinished struggle to define freedom on our own terms. It’s not something we inherited. It’s something we’re still fighting for.

    And now, from where I stand, I can’t help but see the contradictions. One country celebrates independence while denying it to others. The other fights for sovereignty while being punished for it.

    The story of Venezuela’s independence is part of a much longer, bloodier history. The entire region of Latin America and the Caribbean erupted into revolutionary movements more than two centuries ago, not out of ambition, but as a response to some of the worst atrocities in human history. Colonization, slavery, forced conversions to Catholicism, cultural erasure, and resource extraction didn’t just leave economic scars; they tore at the heart of our collective humanity. As Eduardo Galeano wrote, “Our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others.” Independence wasn’t a beginning; it was a resistance and a demand to reclaim everything that had been stolen, silenced, and buried.

    In Venezuela, the independence process was shaped by the ideas of the Enlightenment and the revolutions in France, the U.S., and Haiti. But Simón Bolívar, our “Liberator,” wanted something more than a flag or a change in rulers. He envisioned a republic built on justice, not just sovereignty. A society where slavery would be abolished, land would be redistributed, and governance would belong to the people. Speaking before the Congress of Angostura in 1819, Bolívar declared: “The most perfect system of government is that which produces the greatest possible amount of happiness, social security, and political stability.” This wasn’t about replacing a crown with a new president. It was about reimagining society itself, building a nation rooted in dignity, equality, and the well-being of all.

    It was a vision far ahead of its time. And it came at a devastating cost. Venezuela lost half of its population during the wars of independence. But as Bolívar said, the other half would have given its life, too, to make freedom real.

    Venezuela became free from Spain, but not from exploitation.

    After the discovery of oil beginning in the 1920s, the country became a new kind of colony, one shaped by foreign corporations and U.S. geopolitical interests. While oil profits filled the pockets of multinational companies and domestic elites, the majority of Venezuelans lived in poverty, with no access to healthcare, education, or housing.

    That began to change in 1998, when Hugo Chávez, invoking the legacy of Bolívar, won the presidency and launched what became known as the Bolivarian Revolution. He called on the people to reclaim democracy, not just through elections, but through participatory structures, economic justice, and sovereignty. For many who had long been shut out of the system, it was the first time they saw themselves reflected in their own government.

    It was transformative. And it was deeply threatening to the powers that had always treated Venezuela as a resource, not a republic.

    The Bolivarian Revolution was perceived as a threat to U.S. imperial interests from the outset. From the moment Hugo Chávez took office in 1999 and began redirecting Venezuela’s oil wealth toward social programs, land reform, and regional integration, the backlash began. He refused to follow the neoliberal script written in Washington, and for that, he was targeted.

    In 2002, the U.S. backed a coup attempt against Chávez, which briefly removed him from power before a massive popular uprising brought him back. But the attacks didn’t stop. Economic sabotage, disinformation campaigns, and diplomatic isolation escalated over the years.

    After he died in 2013, the campaign intensified. Under Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela was hit with the full spectrum of economic warfare: hundreds of unilateral coercive measures, the freezing of billions in international assets, restrictions on food and medicine imports, and open support for regime change—a war without bombs.

    This is daily life for Venezuelans. And yet, we’re told these policies are meant to help us. You don’t help people by starving them. You don’t “defend democracy” by trying to force another country to its knees.

    Here in the U.S., it’s easy to treat independence as something that was achieved once and for all in 1776. But if that were true, why is our country still trying to control the fate of others? Why do we claim to stand for freedom while undermining it abroad through sanctions, coups, and endless wars? And even more urgently: why are so many people in the U.S. still struggling just to survive?

    Empire comes at a cost, not only to the people we target, but to the people right here at home. While the U.S. government spends trillions on foreign wars and military bases, our communities are told there’s “not enough” for universal healthcare, housing, or public education. The same officials who lecture the world about freedom are the ones lining up to vote for the “Big Beautiful Bill,” a package that bankrolls war and delivers massive tax breaks to billionaires while dismantling the programs that keep people housed, fed, and alive.

    We’re told to celebrate freedom while immigrants are deported, unhoused people are criminalized, and Palestinian solidarity is silenced. We’re told we live in the greatest country on Earth, even as life expectancy drops and student debt skyrockets.

    So when I hear U.S. leaders talk about spreading democracy, I can’t help but ask: Whose democracy? Whose freedom?

    You can’t claim to support democracy and starve a population at the same time. You can’t celebrate independence while trying to overthrow other governments. And you can’t speak of justice if your policies enforce inequality on a global scale.

    As a Venezuelan-American, I’m proud of the history that Venezuela has fought for. And I want to be proud of the United States, the country I also call home. But that will only be possible when the U.S. chooses respect over domination, when it ends the sanctions, when it stops weaponizing aid, democracy, and freedom to serve its own economic interests.

    Venezuela’s July 5th is not about fireworks. It’s about survival, resistance, and the ongoing struggle to build a future rooted in dignity.

    So while the U.S. celebrates its independence this week, I hope more people take a moment to ask: What are we really celebrating? And at what cost?

    True independence isn’t about flags or anthems. It’s about the right to choose your own path without being punished for it. If we’re serious about “liberty and justice for all,” then we have to mean it. Not just here, but everywhere.

    Real freedom doesn’t come wrapped in patriotic speeches or military parades; it comes through struggle, sacrifice, and the refusal to bow to empire, no matter what form it takes. Whether in Venezuela or the United States, the fight for dignity continues. Eduardo Blanco captured this truth in Venezuela Heroica, when he wrote: “To restrain the passions of people when they’ve been pushed beyond reason is harder than stopping the sea itself.”

    And that’s exactly what we’re witnessing in every mobilization, every boycott, every refusal to accept injustice as normal.

    Borders, bullets, or decrees can’t contain the tides of liberation. Not in Venezuela. Not in Gaza. Not in the United States. Not anywhere.

    The post What July 5th Taught Me that July 4th Never Did first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • America’s Republicans’ Hatred of the Poor

    The budget-and-tax bill that President Trump has placed before America’s U.S. Senators and Representatives to pass by a majority in each of the two houses of Congress is a total repudiation of the first Republican U.S. President (and the only progressive Republican U.S. President), Abraham Lincoln, as will here be documented.

    The Republican Party was basically started by Lincoln, who (if he had lived) would have repudiated and condemned virtually all of his Republican successors. The assassination that killed him transformed his Party into its exact opposite, in the most important ways.

    Here is Lincoln speaking, so that the transformation wrought by that bullet is made clear by Lincoln himself, in his own time:

    It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

    Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

    Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class — neither work for others nor have others working for them.

    Lincoln was profoundly opposed to coerced labor, and he recognized that it can take many forms — not ONLY the form called ”slavery.” He also recognized that the few individuals who, as a group, own the most wealth and consequently hire a substantial percentage of the U.S. population, will possess, by their ability to hire and fire, enormous power, which might enable them to coerce their employees to accept unjustifiably low wages for their work. On this basis, he spoke publicly on the record as siding with the oppressed against their oppressors — even outside the context of merely slavery.

    The poor are the lowest class of workers, and Lincoln there was making explicitly clear that — directly opposed to today’s Republican Party, which makes policy on the basis of the principle that a person is worth only whatever his/her net worth is, and so a billionaire is worth as much as a thousand millionaires — a person’s worth has no necessary relationship to his/her wealth — none.

    Polling proves that vast majorities of the U.S. public detest Trump’s budget-and-tax priorities. Furthermore, an extraordinarily extensive Yale poll of nearly 5,000 Americans, published on June 27th, found that when respondents are informed of what is in Trump’s budget-and-tax bill, only 11% approve, 78% disapprove of it. Would it become law in a democracy? Of course not!

    Today’s Republican Party — this Party that Lincoln would consider an abomination — is the exact opposite of anything that would become law in any democracy. If Trump’s bill, or anything like it, becomes law in America, this will be announcing to the entire world that America is a dictatorship by its super-rich. Such a Government used to be called an “aristocracy.” At every election-time, America’s public are being asked to side with one group of billionaires (the Republicann ones) against another group of billionaires (the Democratic ones), instead of to side with themselves and the rest of the public, against all billionaires — the remarkably few individuals who actually control the U.S. Government. This applies both in national U.S. politics and in state U.S. politics, so that the billionaires have veto-power to prevent ANY candidate they don’t control, from even getting their Party’s nomination (much less winning the final campaign). It is the aristocratic type of dictatorship — and Lincoln condemned it.

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  • Operation Midnight Hammer: Were Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Damaged?

    The aftermath of Operation Midnight Hammer, a strike by the US Air Force on three nuclear facilities in Iran authorized by President Donald Trump on June 22, was raucous and triumphant. But that depended on what company you were keeping. The mission involved the bombing of the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, and the uranium-conversion facility in Isfahan.  The Israeli Air Force had already attacked the last two facilities, sparing Fordow for the singular weaponry available for the USAF.

    The Fordow site was of particular interest, located some eighty to a hundred metres underground and cocooned by protective concrete. For its purported destruction, B-2 Spirit stealth bombers were used to drop GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator “bunker buster” bombs. All in all, approximately 75 precision-guided weapons were used in the operation, along with 125 aircraft and a guided missile submarine.

    Trump was never going to be anything other than optimistic about the result. “Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images,” he blustered. “Obliteration is an accurate term!”

    At the Pentagon press conference following the attack, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bubbled with enthusiasm. “The order we received from our commander in chief was focused, it was powerful, and it was clear. We devastated the Iranian nuclear program.” The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, was confident that the facilities had been subjected to severe punishment. “Initial battle damage assessments indicate that all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction.” Adding to Caine’s remarks, Hegseth stated that, “The battle damage assessment is ongoing, but our initial assessment, as the Chairman said, is that all of our precision munitions struck where we wanted them to strike and had the desired effect.”

    Resort to satellite imagery was always going to take place, and Maxar Technologies willingly supplied the material. “A layer of grey-blue ash caused by the airstrikes [on Fordow] is seen across a large swathe of the area,” the company noted in a statement. “Additionally, several of the tunnel entrances that lead into the underground facility are blocked with dirt following the airstrikes.”

    The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, also added his voice to the merry chorus that the damage had been significant. “CIA can confirm that a body of credible intelligence indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted airstrikes.” The assessment included “new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”

    Israeli sources were also quick to stroke Trump’s already outsized ego. The Israel Atomic Energy Commission opined that the strikes, combined with Israel’s own efforts, had “set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.” IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir’s view was that the damage to the nuclear program was sufficient to have “set it back by years, I repeat, years.”

    The chief of the increasingly discredited International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, flirted with some initial speculation, but was mindful of necessary caveats. In a statement to an emergency meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors, he warned that, “At this time, no one, including the IAEA, is in a position to have fully assessed the underground damage at Fordow.” Cue the speculation: “Given the explosive payload utilised and extreme(ly) vibration-sensitive nature of centrifuges, very significant damage is expected to have occurred.”

    This was a parade begging to be rained on. CNN and The New York Times supplied it. Referring to preliminary classified findings in a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment running for five pages, the paper reported that the bombing of the three sites had “set back the country’s nuclear program by only a few months”. The strikes had sealed off the entrances to two of the facilities, but they were not successful in precipitating a collapse of the underground buildings. Sceptical expertise murmured through the report: to destroy the facility at Fordow would require “waves of airstrikes, with days or even weeks of pounding the same spots.”

    Then came the issue of the nuclear material in question, which Iran still retained control over. The fate of over 400 kg of uranium, which had been enriched to 60% purity, is unclear, as is the number of surviving or hidden centrifuges. Iran had already informed the IAEA on June 13 that “special measures” would be taken to protect nuclear materials and equipment under IAEA safeguards, a feature provided under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Any transfer of nuclear material from a safeguarded facility to another location, however, would have to be declared to the agency, something bound to be increasingly unlikely given the proposed suspension of cooperation with the IAEA by Iran’s parliament.

    After mulling over the attacks for a week, Grossi revisited the matter. The attacks on the facilities had caused severe, though “not total” damage. “Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there.” Tehran could, “in a matter of months,” have “a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium.” Iran still had the “industrial and technological” means to recommence the process.

    Efforts to question the thoroughness of Operation Midnight Hammer did not sit well with the Trump administration. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt worked herself into a state on any cautionary reporting, treating it as a libellous blemish. “The leaking of this alleged report is a clear attempt to demean President Trump and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” she fumed in a statement. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop 14 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets.”

    Hegseth similarly raged against the importance placed on the DIA report. In a press conference on June 26, he bemoaned the tendency of the press corps to “cheer against Trump so hard, it’s like in your DNA and in your blood”. The scribblers had to “cheer against the efficacy of these strikes” with “half-truths, spun information, leaked information”. Trump, for his part, returned to familiar ground, attacking any questioning narrative as “Fake News”. CNN, he seethed, had some of the dumbest anchors in the business. With malicious glee, he claimed knowledge of rumours that reporters from both CNN and The New York Times were going to be sacked for making up those “FAKE stories on the Iran Nuclear sites because they got it so wrong.”

    A postmodern nonsense has descended on the damage assessments regarding Iran’s nuclear program, leaving the way clear for overremunerated soothsayers. But there was nothing postmodern in the incalculable damage done to the law of nations, a body of acknowledged rules rendered brittle and breakable before the rapacious legislators of the jungle.

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  • What Comes Next Following The US-Israeli War On Iran?

    The fighting between Israel and Iran, sparked by an illegal and entirely unprovoked attack by Israel, has abated for the moment. After the United States did what Israeli Prime Minister hoped it would do and bombed Iran’s underground nuclear facilities, including the one at Fordow with bunker buster weapons, U.S. President Donald Trump told Israel to stop its attacks and reinforced that order when Israel sent dozens of bombers toward Iran shortly after the ceasefire was enacted, claiming a response to two Iranian missiles.

    The entire battle, fought on the basis of a fictional threat of Iran being close to acquiring a nuclear weapon, demonstrated how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can manipulate intelligence, politics, and ignorance in the U.S. to provoke American action.

    The post What Comes Next Following The US-Israeli War On Iran? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Mamdani’s Win in NYC Transforms America’s Mid-Term Political Contests

    A typical initial take on the totally unexpected landslide win, by the self-declared socialist Zohran Mamdani, of the Democratic nomination for (and thus almost certainly) the Mayoralty of NYC, was Eric Levitz’s June 25 Vox News article “What Democrats can (and can’t) learn from Zohran Mamdani’s triumph,” which said that

    Some on the left have suggested that Mamdani’s victory proves Democrats do not need to moderate their party’s image to compete for national power. This argument does not make much sense. To secure a Senate majority in 2026, Democrats will need to win multiple states that backed Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by double digits. And even if Democrats give up on winning Senate control next year and shoot for doing so in 2028, they will still need to win in states that voted for Trump all three times he was on the ballot.

    According to some political scientists, pollsters, and pundits, doing this will require Democrats to moderate their national reputation, since modern voters tend to judge candidates less by their own idiosyncratic positions than by their party’s general image. In this analysis, acquiring the power necessary for advancing even incremental progressive change federally requires the Democratic leadership to observe strict ideological discipline. So long as the party’s brand is toxic to the median voter in Ohio — who backed Trump every single time he’s been on the ballot — Democrats will have no prayer of passing ambitious federal legislation or confirming liberal Supreme Court justices.

    This theory could very well be wrong. But a socialist winning 43.5 percent of the vote in a Democratic primary in New York City does not tell us much about its validity one way or another.

    However, that was 43.5% of the voters in a four-candidate race, in which 36.4% went to the overwhelming favorite by ‘the experts’, Andrew Cuomo, 11.3% went to another candidate, and 4.3% went to the corruption-scandal-plagued current incumbent Mr. Adrienne Adams. So, even if Mr. Mamdani won’t receive the donations or endorsements of ANY of NYC’s billionaires and their media, New York City is going to have its first socialist and anti-Wall-Street Mayor in 2025, and all of those “political scientists,  pollsters,  and pundits” will be proven wrong; and here is why:

    All indicators are that currently Americans are very dissatisfied with both Parties; the public sentiment in favor of a new Third political Party to become formed is at an all-time-high; and the public’s polled trust in America’s institutions and especially in its governmental and media institutions is at an all-time low.

    Nonetheless the ‘experts’ overwhelmingly predict upon the basis of the assumptions that worked for them in the past. When voters have been asked by pollsters what their POLICY-preferences are, their answers are remarkably as they were in the past. However, this does NOT say anything about the public’s policy-PRIORITIES, which have recently changed RADICALLY. I have several times stated this, but it is the most-meaningful polling result so far this year, and is extremely relevant to the Mayoralty contest in NYC, so I shall repeat it again:

    On February 14, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling,” and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (those latter five being the functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut — but those 5 were the most-favored by the American public). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds. Furthermore, the U.S. Defense Department is the only Department of the federal Government so corrupt, so intensely corrupt, that it has never been audited.

    Trump is increasing the military and border security, and decreasing education, assistance to the poor, Medicaid, federal law enforcement, and even Social Security and Medicare (the latter two by laying off many of the people who staff those bureaucracies). This Government’s policy-priorities are like the public’s turned upside-down — in other words: are the REVERSE of the public’s — and therefore the U.S. Government right now is a perfect example of a dictatorship. One might say that this is so in only the Executive branch, but it’s not necessarily true: As always when one political faction (regardless whether it it is one Party or a coalition of Parties) has control over both the Executive and the Legislative branches of the Government — as now the case in the U.S. — these two branches (Executive and Legislative) function as one, and there then will even be a totalitarian dictatorship if they can get the Judicial branch or Supreme Court to call it “Constitutional.” Currently, the U.S. is slipping from a dictatorship towards a totalitarian dictatorship; but America has been a dictatorship ever since at least 1980. And that is a dictatorship by the super-rich.

    As the liberal (Democratic Party) wing of America’s aristocracy said, in the person of its Warren Buffett, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (He told this to the conservative Ben Stein, reporting in the aristocracy’s New York Times, under the headline “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning”.)

    To see the empirical evidences proving that there IS class-warfare in America, and that the billionaire-class is ruling this country and (behind the scenes) writing and executing its laws, click here. That’s the situation as it had been since at least 1980, but the current trend away from that is toward even more of a dictatorship (by the super-rich) in America.

    Between now and November 4 — the upcoming NYC Mayoralty election — there is plenty of time for a rip-roaring campaign that will either rip the Democrat to pieces, or else rip the Republican nominee to pieces. The likelihood that Mamdani will get ripped to pieces by the Republicans seems low to me because he is the son of academic Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Mira Nair. Click on those and you will see a personal background that explains his politics; and, so, the likelihood of scandal being found by Republican opposition researchers against him is just about as low as it can go, though freakish exceptions do exist to contradict any generality.

    The BIG issue in politics, which will be coming increasingly to the fore during all of the political contests throughout Trump’s second term, will be TRUST (honesty). Levitz’s article misses this fact entirely when he says “4) The odds of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez winning in 2028 look higher. Finally, it is easier to picture Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez winning the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential nomination today than it was yesterday.” She has been enough of a disappointment to progressive voters (such as on the the U.S.-funded Israeli genocide against Gazans, regarding which, she has continued to speak only in platitudes, knowing that she can climb her way up ONLY if she can get the Party’s billionaires to back her), as to make Levitz’s analogy of Cortez to Mamdani an unintended and false insult to Mamadani. So, Levitz’s comparing her to Mamdani is so very far off-base that Levitz’s throw there might as well have been into the stands, as to the baseman, trying to stop the base-runner.

    Mamdani’s win of the Democratic nomination will probably turn out to have been a major turning-point in American politics. The Democratic Party’s billionaires will have lots of difficulty dealing with it, and might even lose their grip-hold of the Party. All of them turning toward the Republican Party would end the hoax of their saying we have a democracy because we give you the choice: it’s between arsenic and cyanide. That’s what they’ve done to our ‘democracy’.

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  • NATO’s 5% Pledge: An Obscene Betrayal of Global Needs

    No to NATO protest at The Hague, June 22, 2025. Photo credit: Xinhua News

    At this week’s NATO summit in The Hague, leaders announced an alarming new goal: push military spending to 5% of nations’ GDP by 2035. Framed as a response to rising global threats, particularly from Russia and terrorism, the declaration was hailed as a historic step. But in truth, it represents a major step backward—away from addressing the urgent needs of people and the planet, and toward an arms race that will impoverish societies while enriching weapons contractors.

    This outrageous 5% spending target didn’t come out of nowhere—it’s the direct result of years of bullying by Donald Trump. During his first term, Trump repeatedly berated NATO members for not spending enough on their militaries, pressuring them to meet a 2% GDP threshold that was already controversial and so excessive that nine NATO countries still fall below that “target”.

    Now, with Trump back in the White House, NATO leaders are falling in line, setting a staggering 5% target that even the United States—already spending over $1 trillion a year on its military—doesn’t reach. This is not defense; it’s extortion on a global scale, pushed by a president who views diplomacy as a shakedown and war as good business.

    Countries across Europe and North America are already slashing public services, yet they are now expected to divert even more taxpayer money into war preparations. Currently, no NATO country spends more on the military than on health or education. But if they all meet the new 5% military spending goal, 21 of them would spend more on weapons than on schools.

    Spain was one of the few to reject this escalation, with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez making clear that his government would not sacrifice pensions and social programs to meet a militarized spending target. Other governments, including those of Belgium and Slovakia, quietly pushed back as well.

    Still, NATO leaders pressed on, cheered by Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who fawned over Donald Trump’s demand that Europe boost defense spending. Rutte even referred to Trump as “Daddy,” a comment that—while dismissed as a joke—spoke volumes about NATO’s subservience to U.S. militarism. Under Trump’s influence, the alliance is shedding even the pretense of being a defensive pact, embracing instead the language and logic of perpetual war.

    Just before NATO leaders were gathering at the Hague, protesters took to the streets under the banner “No to NATO.” And back in their home countries, civic groups are demanding a redirection of resources toward climate justice, healthcare, and peace. Polls show that majorities in the U.S. oppose increased military spending, but NATO is not accountable to the people. It’s accountable to political elites, arms manufacturers, and a Cold War logic that sees every global development through the lens of threat and domination.

    NATO’s expansion, both in terms of war spending and size (it has grown from 12 founding members to 32 countries today), has not brought peace. On the contrary. The alliance’s promise that Ukraine would one day join its ranks was one of the triggers for Russia’s brutal war, and instead of de-escalating, the alliance has doubled down with weapons, not diplomacy. In Gaza, Israel continues its U.S.-backed war with impunity, while NATO nations send more arms and offer no serious push for peace. Now the alliance wants to drain public coffers to sustain these wars indefinitely. NATO is also surrounding its adversaries, particularly Russia, with ever more bases and troops.

    All of this demands a radical rethink. As the world burns—literally—NATO is stocking up on kindling. When healthcare systems are crumbling, schools are underfunded, and blazing temperatures are making large swaths of the planet uninhabitable, the idea that governments should commit billions more to weapons and war is obscene. Real security doesn’t come from tanks and missiles—it comes from strong communities, global cooperation, and urgent action on our shared crises.

    We need to flip the script. That means cutting military budgets, withdrawing from endless wars, and beginning a serious conversation about dismantling NATO. The alliance, born of the Cold War, is now a stumbling block to global peace and an active participant in war-making. Its latest summit only reinforces that reality.

    This is not just about NATO’s budget—it’s about our future. Every euro or dollar spent on weapons is one not spent on confronting the climate crisis, lifting people out of poverty, or building a peaceful world. For the future of our planet, we must reject NATO and the war economy.

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  • Ruling from Houses of Clay: Regime Change for Washington and Tel Aviv

    “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” — The Book Of Proverbs, 16:18

    “CEASEFIRE IS IN EFFECT!” Trump shouts in upper case impotent rage into the pixel abyss.

    To bring about and sustain peace, the leaders of empires must surrender the illusion that they can maintain control of people and events in far-flung places. It is imperative, an empire’s elites let go of their domination compulsions and live by the principles inherent to compassion. Hopeless and risible fantasy, huh?

    Trump, who cannot quote a single line of scripture, hero to Christian evangelicals, might fall from his golf cart, stricken by a Paul On The Road to Damascus experience, and renounce his past behavior, defined by cruelty and greed, then call Bibi Netanyahu, and advise him to fall to his knees, as did King David, and repent and beg for forgiveness to The Creator for the massive amount of blood he has been responsible for spilling.

    According to scripture (hello, Ted Cruz): Jesus posited regarding John the Baptist: “For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist: but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he?” – Luke 7:28

    What is meant by the word, “least”?

    In Matthew 25:40: “The ‘least’ among us” is clarified: To wit, Jesus proclaims, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

    One must be willfully deaf and blind to not grasp that to avoid earthly life becoming Hell on Earth: empathy must reign; the outsider must be bestowed with kindness; the poor must be lifted up; the sick must be attended to; and those imprisoned should be granted compassion.

    Does any of the above sound like the policies of the current administration – whose most loyal supporters claim to be Christians? Yes, the mindset of Trump et al. is so at odds with the Gospel Of Jesus that a pentecost of derisive laughter should descend from Heaven that would shake the Earth and awaken the dead who would rise due to an apocalypse of hilarity.

    No photo description available.
    King David On His Knees: “Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God” — Psalm 51-14

    Yet another image arises: In Death’s Grand ballroom: The War Party’s dance of death with Christian Zionists proceeds as the capitalist media plays on.

    In 1 Samuel 15, the God of Israel orders the first King of Israel, Saul, to carry out a genocidal rampage on the Amalekites (a semi-nomadic people inhabiting the edges of southern Canaan).

    Old Testament Samuel said unto Saul, (1) “I am the one the Lord sent to anoint you king over his people Israel; so listen now to the message from the Lord. (2) This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. (3) Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”

    The unforgivable trespass committed by the Amalekites: A number of generations back, their ancestors had refused to be in alliance with the Israelites in their land-seizing, atrocity-inflicting wars to establish nationhood. Yet, later, King Saul was condemned by God, The Lord Of Hosts, for not slaughtering every person and all of the creatures within reach of his sword dwelling in Amalek. (Saul had spared The Amalekites’ King, Agag and a smattering of the land’s most valuable livestock.) Hence, Samuel, the prophet, channeling the command of the God Of Israelites, reported to Saul, due to his disobedience to a divine command, he must be dethroned.

    Let’s think this through, Samuel hears voices in his head insisting on mass murder. King Saul, unquestioningly, follows the directions proffered by the prophecy – but not to the very blood-drench letter, thus he is disgraced and loses his kingship.

    To say the least, this is a parcel of problematic mythos … if taken literally. And many in the present day Zionist state, evidence suggests, have done just that.

    George W. Bush also heard the voice of The Lord Of Host (FYI: Lord Of Hosts (Geta Yeserawit) translates from the original biblical era Amharic as: “Lord of Armies” thus places emphasis on the God of Israel’s role as a warrior).

    Donald Trump believes he was spared from assassination by a divine intervention and, thereby, has been called to fulfill a destiny of biblical scale.

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    John 1:29, where John the Baptist proclaims, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who [bombs] away the sin of the world!”

    Therefore, The Sermon On Mar Largo follows verily:

    The Sermon On Mar-a-Lago follows verily:

    Beat farm equipment into the weapons of war. Blessed are the war machine propagandists. The grifters will inherit the (nuclear-scorched) earth.

    Blessed are the sycophants who kiss The Donald’s Most High’s ass and call it holy communion. Blessed are those who pursue and prosecute powerless outsiders, for bullies are made in the image of dear leader, The Lord Of The Downward Punch.

    Blessed are the pussy-grabbers for they will sojourn into the Land Of Epstein and be granted earthly immunity. Blessed are the on-bended knee media for they will inherit a diminishing viewer share yet be not cursed with self-awareness.

    Blessed are those who hunger for the Holy Emperor Don’s approval and crave more and more for they will be seated at The Table Of Mendacity and eat and eat more of their own corruption and call it manna. Rejoice and revel in your spite, blood-lust, and war propaganda because your prophecy will be rewarded by high-dollar, donor-class funded think tanks.

    Do not think that Donald J. Christ has come to abolish the Law Of Profiteers. He has not come to abolish human folly but to bloat it into such grotesque form that those possessed of a mustard seed-size of righteousness will finally and at long last rise up and whose cry of outrage will shake the unholy air and restore the land to sanity.

    Speaking of the insanity of leadership:

    In the Book Of Daniel, the prophet Daniel, during a period of exile and Jewish captivity in Babylon interpreted a dream for Babylon’s King, Nebuchadnezzar, involving a tall, magnificent tree, its expansive bough capable of bestowing succor to man and beast. But a messenger from Heaven commands the tree cut down to a stump. Daniel, going all Jungian on Nebuchadnezzar’s royal ass, interprets the dream thus: The tree is a representation of Nebuchadnezzar insofar as both the reach of his kingdom and the massive extent of his pridefulness. The Angel Of God commands, Nebuchadnezzar will fall prey to madness.

    “He was driven away from people and ate grass like an ox. His body was drenched with the dew of heaven until this hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird” –Daniel 4:33.

    The symbol of the stump represents: The mad king will only recover when his humiliation, delivered by a power greater than his pride, causes him to repent thus cease attacking neighboring lands and slaughtering, deporting, imprisoning the inhabitant of the lands he occupies. The story goes, Nebuchadnezzar’s madness lasted seven years during which time he walked on all fours like a wild animal and grazed on grass in the manner of a bovine in the field.


    William Blake, Nebuchadnezzar, 1795

    It follows, only by their fall can the pride-bloated be lifted up. The splendor of empire will be reduced to a stump when it is built on the backs of the poor and watered in the blood of the innocent.

    The present day embodiment of power-maddened, pride-bloated leadership struts, preens and boasts his bombing campaign was a thing of glory to behold under heaven. One does not require an Old Testament seer nor angel dispatched from a wrath-gripped God to apprehend the astounding degree of folly evinced by Trump and the parallels to the hubristic actions of the Zionist state.

    In closing and in stark contrast, from The Book Of Proverbs:

    16:7: When a man’s ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him:

    8 Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues without right.

    9 A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps.

    10 A divine sentence is in the lips of the king: his mouth transgresseth not in judgment.

    11 A just weight and balance are the Lord’s: all the weights of the bag are his work.

    12 It is an abomination to kings to commit wickedness: for the throne is established by righteousness.

    13 Righteous lips are the delight of kings; and they love him that speaketh right.

    14 The wrath of a king is as messengers of death: but a wise man will pacify it.

    15 In the light of the king’s countenance is life; and his favour is as a cloud of the latter rain.

    16 How much better is it to get wisdom than gold! and to get understanding rather to be chosen than silver!

    17 The highway of the upright is to depart from evil: he that keepeth his way preserveth his soul.

    18 Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

    19 Better it is to be of an humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide the spoil with the proud.

    If the verses above were taken to heart, regime change of the mind would come to be, and, in Washington and Tel Aviv, the political ground would shake, its corrupt leadership would be deposed in disgrace and relegated to crawl on their bellies through the dust of history, and peace might become a possibility.

    O’ Ye of little faith…you have been proven right all too many times for your jaundiced opinion to be healed by a laying on the hands of faith alone. Yet, history reveals, overreaching tyrants find they are grasping a handful of dust.

    “How much more those who dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, who are crushed like the moth.” — Job 4:19

    Marc Chagall Daniel, 1956
    Marc Chagall, Daniel, 1956

    The post Ruling from Houses of Clay: Regime Change for Washington and Tel Aviv first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Ceasefire With Iran Reveals The Limits Of Israel’s Power

    Much of the current crop of commentary on Israel’s war of aggression on Iran has adopted the familiar tone of breathless admiration: praise for its targeting precision, the elegance of its intelligence-gathering, the almost clinical efficiency with which it eliminates not only combatants but scientists, technicians, and — under the now-naturalized euphemism — “sites and infrastructure.”

    Israel’s opening salvo in the war was, by most conventional metrics, effective. The Iranians, caught off guard, scrambled to recalibrate. Though they gradually recovered some measure of initiative, their response bore the marks of persistence and attrition rather than dominance.

    The post The Ceasefire With Iran Reveals The Limits Of Israel’s Power appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Tulsi Gabbard: Another Lesser Evilist Offering

    On 20 June 2025, Galloway spoke about his dream team for the next presidential race: “Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson, president and vice president of the United States of America.”

    He advised Gabbard to “resign if Trump joins the war and should make plain that she intends to run for president.” She hasn’t.

    Given the public rebukes of her by Donald Trump, speculation had emerged of her doing just that: resigning. However, Gabbard has instead attempted to win her way back into Trump’s good book.

    Two years ago, George Galloway, who served five-terms as a UK MP, and now hosts the popular Mother of all Talk Shows came across as a Gabbard fanboy,

    I have come to the view that the best possible president for the United States in 2024 is Tulsi Gabbard. I think she’s got the looks. I think she’s got style. I think she’s got the eloquence. And most of her politics, but by no means all, are as good as you’re going to get from anyone with a chance of winning the presidency of the United states. So there’s quite a few hedges and qualifications in there, but I have come to the view that Tulsi Gabbard for president is our best bet.

    Horrors that looks, sartorial, and eloquence should be enounced as foremost considerations — or even being considerations at all — for a political leader. A consideration not mentioned by Galloway was intelligence.

    When one scrutinizes Gabbard on her record, support for her would again be an appeal to lesser evilism. She may, however, be one of the best among so many regressivist politicians.

    Gabbard, in particular, comes to the fore on militarism and foreign affairs. What is part of her record here?

    Gabbard is regressivist on Palestine and Israel

    Gabbard seems not to realize that Palestine is state, unrecognized as such by the United States, that is under siege, occupation, theft of resources, and an ongoing genocide (sped up greatly since 7 October 2023). Moreover, Gabbard does not call what Israel has been carrying out since 7 October as a genocide.

    She focuses her ire on Hamas’s “evil” actions. In a 10 October 2023 interview on Fox News Tonight (hosted by Brian Kilmeade filling in for Tucker Carlson), Gabbard stated: “Israel has not only the right but the responsibility to defend itself against these terrorists who slaughtered innocent civilians.”

    On 10 October 2023, Gabbard posted on X: “Hamas is responsible for this war. They could end it now by surrendering, releasing hostages, and laying down their arms.” In other words, Gabbard denies Palestinians the inalienable right to resist occupation, an occupation that is rooted in killing, racism, humiliation, and brutality.

    Gabbard also rejected calls for a ceasefire, implying that she backs the continued Israeli military operations in Gaza. (The Tulsi Gabbard Show, Ep. 45)

    While Gabbard has never referred to Israel’s genocidal actions, she does make this accusation of Hamas. In an X post on 10 October 2023, she stated: “Hamas is a genocidal terrorist group. They must be defeated.”

    Gabbard took aim at those Democrats who are

    accusing Israel of committing a genocide. It it is the height of hypocrisy because they’re apologists and supporters of these Islamist Hamas terrorists who are calling for a genocide the extermination of all Jews not just in Israel but around the world and we’re seeing this being carried out by these violent mobs and threats and other things that are happening against Jewish people literally uh around the world.

    By Gabbard’s logic, she could be criticized as an apologist and supporter of these Israeli Zionist terrorists.

    Gabbard also opines, “This is not a ‘resistance’ movement. Hamas is a jihadist terrorist group funded by Iran, whose goal is the destruction of Israel.” (The Tulsi Gabbard Show, Ep. 45)

    She accuses Hamas of using human shields, but she does not criticize Israel using Palestinian children as human shields. Even the Zionist friendly BBC reports this.(“Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, knowing Israel will retaliate. They provoke war, then exploit the suffering for propaganda.” Cited by Deepseek as “Tulsi Gabbard on Israel-Palestine Conflict,” CNN, 7 May 2019.)

    Gabbard criticizes the ICERD Genocide Case (2024): “South Africa’s case at the ICJ is a propaganda stunt. Hamas is the real war criminal here.” (Twitter/X)

    Gabbard is regressivist on Iran

    Gabbard has called for regime change in Iran: “The Iranian people deserve freedom from this oppressive, theocratic dictatorship.” (Fox News, 2023)

    She was also against Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal: “The JCPOA gave Iran billions while allowing them to keep terror networks intact.” (CNN, 2019)

    Of course, all the talk about Iran and its purported nuclear weapons program has now had a wrench thrown into the works as the US launched an illegal and unannounced war on Iran. Gabbard fell into line behind Trump on this illegal attack (contrary to the UN Charter and without Congressional approval). The repercussions from that US attack will become clearer as time passes.

    Galloway’s Lesser Evilism

    Back to Galloway. Is this really, as Galloway claims about a future Tulsi Gabbard presidential candidacy: “As good as it is going to get”? Have pity on the world, if that is true.

    Can Gabbard represent the conscience of a nation? Surely there are better progressivist choices.

    Right away a courageous woman of integrity such as Medea Benjamin comes to mind.

    The post Tulsi Gabbard: Another Lesser Evilist Offering first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Unrelenting Bolivarian Resistance against Stubborn US Aggression


    On the eve of Venezuela’s presidential election on 29 July 2024, Guardian correspondents, Tiago Rogero (based in Rio de Janeiro) and Sam Jones (based in Madrid) predicted the vote “could end 25 years of socialist rule.” It did not. The following, 30 July, another group of Guardian correspondents gave prominent coverage to far-right wing Venezuelan politician Maria Corina Machado, quoting her claim that “Maduro’s exit was inevitable.” Yet, Nicolas Maduro was inaugurated as the re-elected president for the 2025-2031 term on 10 January 2025.

    The July 2024 presidential election was followed by the election for National Assembly deputies and all 24 governorships of Venezuela’s federal structure on 25 May 2025. Venezuela’s US-funded far-right opposition, led by Machado boycotted the vote. Corporate media outlets –including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, El País, the BBC, and others – framed their coverage by labelling the election “divisive” and extensively quoting Machado’s claim that “85% of the electorate did not obey the regime and said no.” In reality, she falsely portrayed the opposition’s boycott as a political victory, implying widespread voter rejection.

    Unlike the July 2024 presidential election –when the far-right factions instigated street violence resulting in 27 deaths at the hands of armed thugs, including two armed attacks on the presidential palace –, the 25 May 2025 legislative and gubernatorial elections (Venezuela’s 32nd electoral process), proceeded calmly and peacefully. However, the far-right’s boycott was never merely a peaceful protest against an election organized by a government they refuse to recognise. Their actions went far beyond that.

    On 28 May, Venezuela’s Interior Minister, Diosdado Cabello, reported the arrest of over 70 individuals of various nationalities (Venezuelan, Colombian, American, Argentine, Spanish, Ecuadorian, Serbian, Albanian and others). Several foreign-funded ‘NGOs’ appeared implicated in the plot. Authorities seized explosives, assault rifles, and other military equipment intended for attacks on foreign embassies, hospitals, emergency services, electricity substations, police stations, and high-profile political figures – particularly those from the opposition who participated in the election. The suspects had entered Venezuela via Colombia. Cabello also revealed that Venezuela’s armed forces had thwarted nearly 60 attacks on oil installations in the preceding ten days. Evidence indicated the terrorist group was led by Venezuela’s far-right leaders.

    This was not their first attempt. The government has also reported the arrest of mercenaries coming from Trinidad and Tobago with ties to a broader network trained in Ecuador – a country now reportedly a hub of cocaine exports. A glance at a map reveals Venezuela’s encirclement by US-aligned hostile forces: Guyana, Ecuador, Colombian narcotraffickers, and SOUTHCOM to its north and beyond.

    Machado’s boycott strategy backfired, fracturing her already divided coalition further when several former boycotters decided to stand as candidates and urged their supporters to vote. The result? Chavismo secured 253 of 285 for the National Assembly and 23 of 24 governorships, including the election of a governor for Guayana Esequiba –a territory Venezuela claims. The sole governorship not won by Chavismo, Cojedes, went to Alberto Galíndez, an opposition politician who recognises Maduro’s legitimacy and accepted the overall results. Moreover, Chavismo gained 1.3 million more votes than in the 2021 elections, demonstrating growing support. With this victory, President Maduro and the Bolivarian Revolution now hold not only the presidency until 2031, but also commanding majorities in the National Assembly and among governorships.

    The May 2025 election results marked a resounding triumph for the Bolivarian government and a stinging defeat for the Trump administration –particularly with the election of Chavista, Admiral Neil Villamizar as governor for Guayana Esequiba. On 23 May, the Guardian quoted Guyana’s president Irfaan Ali,  who denounced the election in this state as an “assault on Guyana’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Yet, the report conveniently omitted any mention of the 1966 Geneva Agreement, which underpins Venezuela’s claim.[2]

    In collusion with Guyana, the US has transformed Guyana into a military enclave, using it as a base for regular military provocations against Venezuela since 2021. Strangely, just one day after the election, on 26 May 2025, the Guardian wrote an exhaustively researched feature with stunning photographs –not on Venezuela’s election, but on…the Orinoco crocodile.

    Beyond their self-defeating abstentionism, Machado and the far-right further eroded their credibility by enthusiastically endorsing U.S. sanctions –effectively advocating for Venezuela’s economic strangulation – and cheering Trump’s brutal deportation policies targeting Latin Americans, especially Venezuelans whom he falsely labels as “government-controlled criminals.

    When asked whether she supported Trump’s deeply unpopular policy of deporting Latino and Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT prison –a facility notorious for torture– Machado replied “Absolutely!” –uncritically parroting Trump’s baseless claims.

    The record of Venezuela’s far-right opposition is simply appalling. Not only have they been heavily involved with Colombian narco-traffickers to carry out terrorist acts against their own country, but their leader, Juan Guaidó, even proclaimed himself “interim president” on a Caracas street in 2019. Worse still, this claim was recognized by the U.S.-led Collective West. They colluded with Western powers to facilitate the confiscation of Venezuelan assets—including gold, bank accounts, and property—in actions that amount to nothing less than high treason.

    With the backing of the Collective West, they prolonged the farce of the 2015 National Assembly’s legitimacy—where they once held a majority—long after its mandate expired in 2020. In fact, they still falsely claim legitimacy in 2025, five years after the end of their constitutional term, while continuing to pay monthly U.S. dollar “emoluments” to their obsolete lawmakers.

    Under the guise of a humanitarian effort to bring food by force across the Colombian border, they even attempted a military incursion with Colombian paramilitaries, aiming to seize control of a Venezuelan city and install a “provisional government” to be recognized by the U.S. and the Collective West.

    The Venezuelan opposition’s actions are indefensible. They have been linked to multiple assassination attempts against President Maduro, including plots to decapitate Venezuela’s political and military leadership using explosives. They organized a mercenary incursion aimed at violently overthrowing the Bolivarian government, with the explicit goal of assassinating Maduro and as many Bolivarian leaders as possible. They have enthusiastically supported the U.S. blockade’s economic asphyxiation—which remains in place—while sabotaging every election since 2013 through violent disruptions.

    Repeatedly, they have called on the military to revolt, urging the overthrow of Venezuela’s democratically elected governments (under both Chávez and Maduro). Their tactics include systematic infrastructure sabotage, consistently timed to coincide with elections. They have exacerbated U.S. sanctions by promoting hoarding, artificially inflating prices, and engineering shortages of basic goods—deliberately inflicting severe hardship on the population. Even worse, they manipulated Venezuela’s currency crisis through DolarToday, a platform that daily published inflated exchange rates to fuel hyperinflation.

    The opposition’s transgressions go even further. On multiple occasions they have enlisted the services of mercenary Erik Prince, even launching a crowdfunding campaign (Ya Casi Venezuela) to finance his proposed violent overthrow of President Maduro’s government. They are currently under FBI investigation for large-scale corruption, accused of embezzling nearly US$1 billion in humanitarian aid meant for Venezuelans abroad – of which mere 2% as properly allocated). Worse still, they have fraudulently managed over US$40 billion in Venezuelan assets through shady contracts with Miami-based firms, exchanging national resources for personal bribes. Their attempt to replicate the DolarToday scheme was swiftly  crushed by the government, which acted decisively to shut it down.

    This brazen subversion aligns with broader U.S. imperial ambitions. In a blatant reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine, SOUTHCOM commander Admiral Alvin Holsey declared before the Senate Armed Services Committee (13 February 2025) that the U.S. must prevail in the “strategic competition with China in the Western Hemisphere” and counter “Russia’s malign agenda” – naming Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua as their conduits. Thus Washington now openly frames its assault on Bolivarian Revolution as part of its geopolitical competition with China and Russia. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth underscored this stance on 6 June 2025, bluntly stating “We are preparing for war with China.”

    Yet, despite 12 years of relentless aggression since Comandante Chávez’s passing, the Venezuelan people have shown extraordinary resilience, defying predictions of inevitable collapse. The government’s response? Deepening democracy. Ahead of upcoming municipal and mayoral elections (27 July 2025), Venezuela is intensifying its participatory democracy model, empowering the comunas –grassroots, self-managed councils where communities directly decide and implement projects to improve their living standards: direct democracy.

    President Maduro has announced the “creation of the Communal Portfolio Fund of the national budget” that will directly allocate resources to projects developed by local communities. These funds will be managed through communal circuits, with spending priorities democratically decided by commune inhabitants themselves.

    In revealing interview (7 June 2025), Jesús Faría, PSUV Vice Minister of Productive Economy of the PSUV, emphasized the urgent need to accelerate the expansion of Communal direct democracy and consolidate people’s power. Faría made a critical observation: the PSUV must take the lead in advancing the commune system. With tens of thousands of grassroots organizations across Venezuela, the PSUV maintains a Gramscian hegemony –not by imposition but by organically articulating this vibrant social ecosystem into a cohesive for socialism. Its structural bonds with them enable it to harmonize and mobilize this rich social universe towards socialist construction.

    Thus, even as U.S. imperialism doubles down on its fanatical crusade to destroy the Bolivarian Revolution, Venezuela is fortifying its socialist foundations. By empowering communes, deepening participatory democracy, and strengthening the PSUV’s vanguard role, the revolution is building unshakable resilience—proving that people’s power, not imperial aggression, will shape Venezuela’s future.

    ENDNOTES:

    [1] If we take December 1999 as the start, of the Bolivarian Revolution is 25 years old; the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign was founded on 25 May 2005, thus making 20 years old. We pay homage to the Bolivarian process for keeping alive and fulfilling humanity’s dream of a better world.

    [2] On the details of the Venezuela-Guyana dispute.

    The post Unrelenting Bolivarian Resistance against Stubborn US Aggression first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Bombs Away

    “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier,” said President Trump as he addressed the American people shortly after announcing he was bombing Iran. I was too young to watch my political leaders spiral themselves into the war in Iraq – I was only old enough to be able to comprehend the final toll: one million Iraqis died because my country couldn’t help itself from another power grab in the Middle East. I can’t help but feel that the same thing is happening all over again.

    Myself, and countless other Americans, are ashamed at how many people have been killed in our name or with our tax dollars. The comfy politicians in Washington condescend to us — that our concern for human life actually goes against our own interests — as if Palestinians and Iranians do more to hurt Americans than the politicians and billionaires who gutted out industry, automated our jobs, privatized education, and cut social services. In our daily life, the people who actually hate us only become more obvious.

    Last week before it was absolutely clear that the US would formally enter the war, public opinion polls came out that a vast majority of Americans did not want the US to go to war. This was not the case in the lead up to the war in Iraq. Times and opinions have changed amongst the masses, but that didn’t seem to matter to anyone in the White House yesterday.

    In the aftermath of 9/11, our leaders were awfully good at convincing Americans that they needed revenge for what happened. Even if it wasn’t logical, even if it didn’t make sense — we invaded two countries that had nothing to do with 9/11. Revenge is often carried out in a blind rage, and I would say that characterized US actions in Iraq, given the barbaric nature of how the war was carried out, how many civilians died, and with a fallout that’s done very little for “strategic security interests”. I would say that it was a “blind rage” if its violence wasn’t so calculated — specifically to enrich a handful of Americans. It did succeed in that endeavor, and American families had their sons and daughters sent home in body bags so Haliburton’s stock could skyrocket. The Iraqi people, with unsolicited promises to be “liberated” from Saddam, got nothing but grief and trauma that continues twenty years later. It was perhaps hard to justify all of that to the public; American public opinion has changed a lot, and so has US-led warfare as a result of that shift.

    So, Donald Trump has made it obvious (in case it wasn’t before) that the consent of the governed doesn’t hold any weight in the United States of America. However, it’s still an interesting thing to examine in our current context. Despite a barrage of lies about nuclear weapons (like Saddam’s WMDs) and images of scary, oppressive mullahs (like the ‘dictator Saddam’) Americans still opposed a US war on Iran. If Americans were to leverage this public opinion against war in a meaningful way, by taking some sort of step past having a stance in their heads, what would it challenge? What would it look like? Will Americans oppose – at a large enough scale, US warfare that looks slightly different than it did in 2003?

    US warmaking is more subtle to the American public, but not less deadly to the countries we impose it on. Trump insisted in his address to the nation that he has no plans to keep attacking Iran as long as they “negotiate”. This is after Israel killed Iranian negotiators with US approval, and after Iran had made clear their terms of negotiating that the US just couldn’t accept. There’s no definition about what Iranian compliance would look like, setting the stage for further bombing campaigns whenever Trump decides. There might not be troops on the ground or a US military occupation, but a war they refuse to call one is still functionally a war. It still kills people. It still destabilizes countries.

    The US fights wars with money, private contractors, and “offensive support”. Only pouring into the streets to oppose sending troops to fight on behalf of Israel against Iran might not be the demand that becomes most pressing in the coming days and weeks. For example, will Americans oppose a war with Iran if it’s primarily conducted from the air?

    There’s also a large sector of the American public that still morally supports Israel’s military in one way or another, whether it be overtly or with silence on the subject. Some of them might also make up the large portion of society that opposes the US going to war. For the last two years, as Israel has carried out its genocide campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, the US has been building up Israel’s military, sending off billions of our tax dollars to make sure Israel was perfectly poised for the moment it decided to kill Iranians. Whether the public who opposes war with Iran likes it or not, their support for Israel as a military ally will directly contradict their opinion opposing war with Iran. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, if we want to put it simply.

    On the other side, Israel’s war crimes in Gaza also might have something to do with why opposition to the war on Iran is so prevalent. Because the back-up justification for attacking Iran, made by the ruling class, in case the nuke lies didn’t work, was portraying Iran’s leaders as scary, irrational, and evil boogeymen. The ruling class, decrying an evil Hitler-esque foreign leader in Iran, is now the boy crying wolf. We were told the same things about the leaders in Libya and Iraq to justify our country bombing of theirs. The result was Libyan, Iraqi, and to a lesser extent, American blood pooling in the streets. On top of that collective memory, we’ve seen our government entrench itself with Netanyahu — a commander of a military that’s killed countless Palestinians and a handful of Americans without any condemnation from our government. If there are murderous and unjust dictators in the Middle East, one of them is named Benjamin Netanyahu, and we are told he’s our greatest ally, and acting on behalf of Israel is acting in the best interest of Americans. Now, even if the US wanted the war on Iran all along, it appears to the world that Israel pulled us into the war – people do not like that, rightfully so.

    If Americans who are against the war can reject these new forms of hybrid warfare as much as they reject the traditional forms of warfare, and the sectors of the public still sympathetic to Israel see the blatant contradictions in front of their eyes — then perhaps this public opinion could mean something real. Furthermore, it’s been made clear that the American ruling class will not change course solely because the people they “serve” oppose what they are doing. They’ve also demonstrated that they are willing to jail and deport people who disagree with them and their foreign policy escapades. The genocide in Gaza has made it clear that Americans standing against the actions of their government do so at great personal risk. Do Americans disagree with US involvement in the war enough? Do they disagree to the point where they are willing to experience threats, jail time, repression, physical harm, or other forms of violence? In the case of a war that could turn nuclear with an untethered Israel and Trump Administration at the helm, I sincerely hope so. 

    The post Bombs Away first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Century of the Jew is Hot Hot Wars

    Binoy Kampmark | The Mandarin

    Dr Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He writes extensively for various publications, including CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, and Eureka Street. He is currently lecturing at the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University.

    I just interviewed Binoy two hours ago, USA time, 3 PM PST, Sunday, 8 am Australia time.

    It’s extraordinary. The reasoning that led up to the attack on Iran was remarkable because the language and the terminology used is very creepily reminiscent, in fact,of the kind of language that was used in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq by the US-led so-called Coalition of the Willing. And it featured for example uh the reasoning that supposedly a country has a certain capacity — either has the capacity or has the inventory —  of weapons of mass destruction um is an imminent threat let’s not forget the sexed up dossier as it was called then uh supposedly showing that Saddam Hussein’s army have the capacity to, building up this case, padding it up, and making the case that a preemptive attack was necessary, which, of course, is totally ludicrous. Article 2, paragraph 4, makes it very clear in the UN Charter that the use of force is really strictly rationed.

    You know, you cannot violate the sovereignty of states willy-nilly. There is, of course, that self-defense proviso in Article 51 and so on. But to preempt this in this way is remarkable because you have to demonstrate sovereignty. .. that there is this imminent sense of destruction, irreparable damage and so on, and Israel in no way managed in any of its assessments to demonstrate that to be the case.

    We talked about the growing Jewish Semitism, this attack on all humanity, and the disgusting lack of values Western Media have displayed, and Binoy attributes much of that lack of concern for Gazan Humanity, or Iranian Humanity, or Lebanese Humanity, to the GUILT of that so-called Holocaust.

    Using words like Israel + Rogue Nation; Israel + Genocide; Jewish State of Israel + Mass Murder; Judaism a la Israel + White Supremacy; Jews in Israel + Psychopaths; Judaism Now + DIseased — all those combinations and MORE will get your ass in jail or worse.

    But he and I talked for an hour, and that was before I scoured the mainstream news and Telegram channels to see the latest in the President of the USA’s declarations of murdering Iranians, in a much more overtly direct way, though everything about West Asia, the wars, the Jewish Supremacist State, all of the trillions given to Jews in Israel and all the other trillions extracted by Jews in and out of Israel from the global economies, it’s still directed by the Jewish State of Our White Man’s House.

    Here’s our Interview on a Podcast-Substack — Paulo’s.

    So Adolph Bibi and Himmler Trump, working on the Greater Israel.

    Patrick Henningsen sums up the Trump regime,

    His entire cabinet has been bought by a foreign lobby. This is a low point in American history, and this is probably the weakest president politically […] The irony of this is it’s a billionaire Donald Trump, supposedly a genius of business. He doesn’t need the money […] He just doesn’t have the courage to basically be America first. He’s stuck being Israel first.

    Fun stuff over at Postcards from the End:

    Jews funding Trump are Americans, though, so it’s misleading to call them a “foreign lobby.” Like everybody else, Henningsen can’t say “his entire cabinet has been bought by Jews.” Trump is not getting billions from Israel. Bought and blackmailed by domestic Jews, he’s sending tons of American taxpayers’ money to foreign Jews. These righteous genociders are getting a fantastic return, plus countless laughs, on their investment.

    Trump’s enabling of Albert Bourla’s Jewjabs was cheered by all prominent Jews, plus gadfly Ron Unz.

    Binoy and I didn’t get deep into the dementia of the West, of Australia, NZ, the other QueenDumb colonies, and especially the lobotomized AmeriKKKa, but in Australia, it’s the same playbook of PR spin, a la Hasbara, a la Edward Bernays on Growth Hormones and Steroids.

    Binoy is articulate and was willing to go into my house to discuss things, with my bombast and all: We attempted to humanize the suffering, the mass murdering, the maiming, but alas, historians and journalists and political scientists have to keep on keeping on.

    Unlike the New York Times:

    The criminality is advanced in its cancerous stage:

    Donald Trump has carried out direct US air strikes on Iran, bombing what he said were three major nuclear sites.

    “We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan”, Trump boasted, in a post on his website Truth Social on 21 June.

    “A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow”, he wrote.

    I am sure the Aussies like the Brits like the EuroTrashLandians are all celebrating:

    We are all stuck with this VP Vance and the Jews Running the Minyan in Trump’s Cabal:

    An hour after announcing that he had directly bombed Iran, Trump posted a jpeg of a US flag.

    So, Binoy and I talked about Iran and the Illegal invasion of Iran by the Dirty Demented Sicarios of Isra-Hell, but this was barely on our tongue tips before the 60 minute interview stopped:

    Greater Psychopathic Israel, and so, this sort of Substack will soon get me disappeared or violently handcuffed into the night:

    Facts:

    This strategy was itself based on Israel’s 1996 policy document A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. In this document Israel’s strategy for regional security included destabilizing and weakening key nations seen as threats. The document explicitly called for efforts to undermine and topple the regimes in Iraq and Syria. It proposed supporting internal opposition within Iraq to weaken Saddam Hussein’s regime, particularly due to concerns over Iraq’s military capabilities and potential weapons of mass destruction, while Syria was viewed as a major regional threat because of its alliance with Iran and its support for Hezbollah. Although not directly calling for military action, the strategy also outlined efforts to counter Iran’s growing regional influence, especially its nuclear ambitions. The overarching aim was to reshape the Middle East by destabilizing these nations to reduce the perceived threats to Israel’s security.

    Jews: [Former United States Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle was the “Study Group Leader,” but the final report included ideas from Douglas Feith, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks Jr., Jonathan Torop, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser, and IASPS president Robert Loewenberg.]

    *****

    I’ll let the interview stand here, and I’ll be interviewing Binoy with a more traditional Q & A format.

    Cheers, to Binoy, in his land’s dead of Winter.

  • How the US and Israel Used Rafael Grossi to Hijack the IAEA and Start a War on Iran

    IAEA Director General Grossi discusses Iran with former Israeli PM Bennett, June 3, 2022  (GPO)

    Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), allowed the IAEA to be used by the United States and Israel—an undeclared nuclear weapons state in long-term violation of IAEA rules—to manufacture a pretext for war on Iran, despite his agency’s own conclusion that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.

    On June 12, based on a damning report by Grossi, a slim majority of the IAEA Board of Governors voted to find Iran in non-compliance with its obligations as an IAEA member. Of the 35 countries represented on the Board, only 19 voted for the resolution, while 3 voted against it, 11 abstained and 2 did not vote.

    The United States contacted eight board member governments on June 10 to persuade them to either vote for the resolution or not to vote. Israeli officials said they saw the U.S. arm-twisting for the IAEA resolution as a significant signal of U.S. support for Israel’s war plans, revealing how much Israel valued the IAEA resolution as diplomatic cover for the war.

    The IAEA board meeting was timed for the final day of President Trump’s 60-day ultimatum to Iran to negotiate a new nuclear agreement. Even as the IAEA board voted, Israel was loading weapons, fuel and drop-tanks on its warplanes for the long flight to Iran and briefing its aircrews on their targets. The first Israeli air strikes hit Iran at 3 a.m. that night.

    On June 20, Iran filed a formal complaint against Director General Grossi with the UN Secretary General and the UN Security Council for undermining his agency’s impartiality, both by his failure to mention the illegality of Israel’s threats and uses of force against Iran in his public statements and by his singular focus on Iran’s alleged violations.

    The source of the IAEA investigation that led to this resolution was a 2018 Israeli intelligence report that its agents had identified three previously undisclosed sites in Iran where Iran had conducted uranium enrichment prior to 2003. In 2019, Grossi opened an investigation, and the IAEA eventually gained access to the sites and detected traces of enriched uranium.

    Despite the fateful consequences of his actions, Grossi has never explained publicly how the IAEA can be sure that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency or its Iranian collaborators, such as the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (or MEK), did not put the enriched uranium in those sites themselves, as Iranian officials have suggested.

    While the IAEA resolution that triggered this war dealt only with Iran’s enrichment activities prior to 2003, U.S. and Israeli politicians quickly pivoted to unsubstantiated claims that Iran was on the verge of making a nuclear weapon. U.S. intelligence agencies had previously reported that such a complex process would take up to three years, even before Israel and the United States began bombing and degrading Iran’s existing civilian nuclear facilities.

    The IAEA’s previous investigations into unreported nuclear activities in Iran were officially completed in December 2015, when IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano published its “Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues regarding Iran’s Nuclear Program.”

    The IAEA assessed that, while some of Iran’s past activities might have been relevant to nuclear weapons, they “did not advance beyond feasibility and scientific studies, and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities.” The IAEA “found no credible indications of the diversion of nuclear material in connection with the possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.”

    When Yukiya Amano died before the end of his term in 2019, Argentinian diplomat Rafael Grossi was appointed IAEA Director General. Grossi had served as Deputy Director General under Amano and, before that, as Chief of Staff under Director General Mohamed ElBaradei.

    The Israelis have a long record of fabricating false evidence about Iran’s nuclear activities, like the notorious “laptop documents” given to the CIA by the MEK in 2004 and believed to have been created by the Mossad. Douglas Frantz, who wrote a report on Iran’s nuclear program for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, revealed that the Mossad created a special unit in 2003 to provide secret briefings on Iran’s nuclear program, using “documents from inside Iran and elsewhere.”

    And yet Grossi collaborated with Israel to pursue its latest allegations. After several years of meetings in Israel and negotiations and inspections in Iran, he wrote his report to the IAEA Board of Governors and scheduled a board meeting to coincide with the planned start date for Israel’s war.

    Israel made its final war preparations in full view of the satellites and intelligence agencies of the western countries that drafted and voted for the resolution. It is no wonder that 13 countries abstained or did not vote, but it is tragic that more neutral countries could not find the wisdom and courage to vote against this insidious resolution.

    The official purpose of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, is “to promote the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear technologies.” Since 1965, all of its 180 member countries have been subject to IAEA safeguards to ensure that their nuclear programs are “not used in such a way as to further any military purpose.”

    The IAEA’s work is obviously compromised in dealing with countries that already have nuclear weapons. North Korea withdrew from the IAEA in 1994, and from all safeguards in 2009. The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China have IAEA safeguard agreements that are based only on “voluntary offers” for “selected” non-military sites. India has a 2009 safeguard agreement that requires it to keep its military and civilian nuclear programs separate, and Pakistan has 10 separate safeguard agreements, but only for civilian nuclear projects, the latest being from 2017 to cover two Chinese-built power stations.

    Israel, however, has only a limited 1975 safeguards agreement for a 1955 civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States. An addendum in 1977 extended the IAEA safeguards agreement indefinitely, even though the cooperation agreement with the U.S. that it covered expired four days later. So, by a parody of compliance that the United States and the IAEA have played along with for half a century, Israel has escaped the scrutiny of IAEA safeguards just as effectively as North Korea.

    Israel began working on a nuclear weapon in the 1950s, with substantial help from Western countries, including France, Britain and Argentina, and made its first weapons in 1966 or 1967. By 2015, when Iran signed the JCPOA nuclear agreement, former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in a leaked email that a nuclear weapon would be useless to Iran because “Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran.” Powell quoted former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asking, “What would we do with a nuclear weapon? Polish it?”

    In 2003, while Powell tried but failed to make a case for war on Iraq to the UN Security Council, President Bush smeared Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” based on their alleged pursuit of “weapons of mass destruction.” The Egyptian IAEA Director, Mohamed ElBaradei, repeatedly assured the Security Council that the IAEA could find no evidence that Iraq was developing a nuclear weapon.

    When the CIA produced a document that showed Iraq importing yellowcake uranium from Niger, just as Israel had secretly imported it from Argentina in the 1960s, the IAEA only took a few hours to recognize the document as a forgery, which ElBaradei immediately reported to the Security Council.

    Bush kept repeating the lie about yellowcake from Niger, and other flagrant lies about Iraq, and the United States invaded and destroyed Iraq based on his lies, a war crime of historic proportions. Most of the world knew that ElBaradei and the IAEA were right all along, and, in 2005, they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for exposing Bush’s lies, speaking truth to power and strengthening nuclear non-proliferation.

    In 2007, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies agreed with the IAEA’s finding that Iran, like Iraq, had no nuclear weapons program. As Bush wrote in his memoirs, “…after the NIE, how could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?” Even Bush couldn’t believe he would get away with recycling the same lies to destroy Iran as well as Iraq, and Trump is playing with fire by doing so now.

    ElBaradei wrote in his own memoir, The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times, that if Iran did do some preliminary research on nuclear weapons, it probably began during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, after the US and its allies helped Iraq to manufacture chemical weapons that killed up to 100,000 Iranians.

    The neocons who dominate U.S. post-Cold War foreign policy viewed the Nobel Prize winner ElBaradei as an obstacle to their regime change ambitions around the world, and conducted a covert campaign to find a more compliant new IAEA Director General when his term expired in 2009.

    After Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano was appointed as the new Director General, U.S. diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks revealed details of his extensive vetting by U.S. diplomats, who reported back to Washington that Amano “was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”

    After becoming IAEA Director General in 2019, Rafael Grossi not only continued the IAEA’s subservience to U.S. and Western interests and its practice of turning a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear weapons, but also ensured that the IAEA played a critical role in Israel’s march to war on Iran.

    Even as he publicly acknowledged that Iran had no nuclear weapons program and that diplomacy was the only way to resolve the West’s concerns about Iran, Grossi helped Israel to set the stage for war by reopening the IAEA’s investigation into Iran’s past activities. Then, on the very day that Israeli warplanes were being loaded with weapons to bomb Iran, he made sure that the IAEA Board of Governors passed a resolution to give Israel and the U.S. the pretext for war that they wanted.

    In his last year as IAEA Director, Mohamed ElBaradei faced a similar dilemma to the one that Grossi has faced since 2019. In 2008, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies gave the IAEA copies of documents that appeared to show Iran conducting four distinct types of nuclear weapons research.

    Whereas, in 2003, Bush’s yellowcake document from Niger was clearly a forgery, the IAEA could not establish whether the Israeli documents were authentic or not. So ElBaradei refused to act on them or to make them public, despite considerable political pressure, because, as he wrote in The Age of Deception, he knew the U.S. and Israel “wanted to create the impression that Iran presented an imminent threat, perhaps preparing the grounds for the use of force.” ElBaradei retired in 2009, and those allegations were among the “outstanding issues” that he left to be resolved by Yukiya Amano in 2015.

    If Rafael Grossi had exercised the same caution, impartiality and wisdom as Mohamed ElBaradei did in 2009, it is very possible that the United States and Israel would not be at war with Iran today.

    Mohamed ElBaradei wrote in a tweet on June 17, 2025, “To rely on force and not negotiations is a sure way to destroy the NPT and the nuclear non-proliferation regime (imperfect as it is), and sends a clear message to many countries that their “ultimate security” is to develop nuclear weapons!!!”

    Despite Grossi’s role in U.S.-Israeli war plans as IAEA Director General, or maybe because of it, he has been touted as a Western-backed candidate to succeed Antonio Guterres as UN Secretary General in 2026. That would be a disaster for the world. Fortunately, there are many more qualified candidates to lead the world out of the crisis that Rafael Grossi has helped the U.S. and Israel to plunge it into.

    Rafael Grossi should resign as IAEA Director before he further undermines nuclear non-proliferation and drags the world any closer to nuclear war. And he should also withdraw his name from consideration as a candidate for UN Secretary General.

    The post How the US and Israel Used Rafael Grossi to Hijack the IAEA and Start a War on Iran first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Lessons from Vieques: Resisting U.S. Militarism, Building Unity


    Around two years ago, I watched a puppet show, created by a group of eight to 16-year-olds at the summer camp where I worked, about the eviction of the U.S. Navy from the island of Vieques. After I conducted a few brief workshops reviewing the island’s history of military occupation and contamination, the campers immediately grasped the importance of the decades long struggle to evict the U.S. Navy, which they represented with a puppet of a venomous snake; on the other hand, they used the iconic native Puerto Rican frog, the coquí, to depict participants in the popular uprising against the U.S. military.

    This May marked 22 years since the US Navy was evicted from the island of Vieques. The story of Vieques should be understood by us organizers, just as it was by these campers through their puppet show, as we seek to build an anti-militarist climate movement that breaks down silos between supposedly separate organizing spaces. As we seek to build an anti-militarist climate movement and shape the global narratives in upcoming events, looking at Vieques’ past and present history is crucial.

    Vieques is an island off the coast of mainland Puerto Rico, a U.S. colony since 1898, in a state of limbo where Boricuas (Puerto Ricans) have U.S. citizenship but cannot vote, and at the same time, are unable to pursue self-determination through independence. Vieques was long exploited by wealthy landowners and the U.S. mainland’s economy for sugar production. In 1941, the Navy seized Vieques, with the goal of creating a colonial outpost in the Atlantic Ocean to mirror its base occupying Hawai’i, Pearl Harbor, in the Pacific. The island’s population of 10,000 was then forced to relocate to a small area of the island. Some wealthy landowners sold their land, while the U.S. government confiscated other plots of land for “public” use.

    For over 60 years, the U.S. Navy used Vieques as a bomb testing site, scorching the crust of the island by dropping around three million pounds of napalm, depleted uranium, and other toxic chemicals onto the land. Many of these bombs would then go on to be used on the people and soil of Palestine, itself a deadly testing ground for the U.S. war machine. Despite the extraordinary levels of chemical pollution, there was no hospital on the island. Additionally, the 1920 Jones Act restricted Puerto Rico to importing only U.S.-built, U.S.-owned, U.S.-operated, and U.S.-crewed cargo. This stranglehold continues to make any resources for the island extremely expensive.

    These were clear-cut conditions. The U.S. empire was poisoning the island and cutting it off from necessary goods, demonstrating Puerto Rico’s broader colonial status. In 1999, Daniel Sanes Rodriguez, a civilian employee of the naval base, was killed by an accidental off-target bomb. This was the spark of a protest movement made up of tens of thousands of people demanding the U.S. military leave the island. Protest tactics included encampments in the bomb range, graffiti, destruction of military property, and marches that included every sector of society, including religious leaders, fishers, environmental activists, students, and labor leaders. It also included leaders who were independence activists, statehood advocates, and advocates for commonwealth status.

    In 2001, President George Bush announced that the naval base would be closed. In May 2003, the U.S. Navy left the island and, ironically, converted the former base into a nature reserve. While the U.S. government has stalled for two decades in its promises of clean-up, this was a moment of victory. This monumental achievement was brought about by as wide an array of groups as the base impacted. By uniting in a popular struggle against U.S. militarism, the people of Vieques showed the world that the naval base had absolutely no business continuing to occupy their land. This moment was also considered a massive touchstone in the fight for a free and independent Puerto Rico.

    This isn’t to say that these tactics, this moment, or this rubric for what constitutes victory can be applied to every situation. But we can learn a lot about movement building and breaking out of what can appear to be separate organizing spaces. This was a win for independence, environmentalists, survival, and sovereignty. It’s pretty simple: wherever the U.S. war machine is active, the fight against it and for sovereignty is the fight for the land.

    So why isn’t this mirrored within the belly of the beast? Sometimes it is, in the examples of protests to stop the building of Cop City in Atlanta and in protests against the construction of new prisons. But when we discuss “the climate movement” and “the anti-war movement,” we must address why they’re institutionally separated through organizations, slogans, and targets. It’s no mystery – we can go down the list: funding, “pragmatism,” societal conditioning, greenwashing, internalized racism.

    With COP, the U.N. Climate Conference, less than six months away, it’s time to clarify our targets and identify the flashpoints of struggle. However toothless, co-opted, and irredeemable the annual “diplomatic” event is, with countries around the world cyclically refusing to take any meaningful action to address the climate crisis, it is also an event where the world’s climate movement plays a large role in shaping narratives, either in the conference itself or in people’s counter-conferences.

    We must call attention to  Puerto Rico – how it has been used for NATO training to continue escalation in the environmentally catastrophic Ukraine war, and how it has served the U.S.’s claim of Latin America and the Caribbean as its so-called backyard through its role in the U.S. Southern Command. Just as U.S. militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines has been used to claim the Asia-Pacific in its escalation against China. We must trace the deadly supply chain of the bombs tested on Vieques, which have since been used to decimate entire communities in  Palestine, destroying the local and global environment. And we must highlight the poisoning of the soil in Vieques, where residents are 27% more likely to be fighting cancer than the rest of Puerto Rico, and 280% more likely to be fighting lung cancer specifically. The same empire that poisoned Vieques now strangles Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela with sanctions, blocking their ability to address the climate crisis effectively. These sites of struggle for national sovereignty are just as much about our collective survival.

    This year, at COP and in every climate space, our only hope is to learn from and center the past and present struggle in Vieques and everywhere else bearing the brunt of U.S. militarism, to clearly understand where our enemies converge, and to act accordingly because one thing that we can learn from Vieques and from the eight to 16-year-old campers telling Vieques’ story is that it’s clear when something is a venomous snake.

    The post Lessons from Vieques: Resisting U.S. Militarism, Building Unity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Thanksgiving Challenge

    Sooner or later, all of us will have to face this question from a young child over Thanksgiving dinner:
    “Dad, Mom, Grandpa, Grandma – why did we have all those fights with other countries back then?”

    VIETNAM? “We fought them there so that we didn’t have to fight them on Wiltshire Boulevard!”

    CAMBODIA: “So that we didn’t have to fight them in Saigon!”

    LAOS? “So we that we didn’t have to fight them in Danang!”

    GRANADA? “So that we didn’t have to fight them in Saint Thomas!”

    NICARAGUA? “So that we didn’t have to fight them in El Paso!”

    EL SALVADOR? “So that we didn’t have to fight them in Nogales!”

    GAUTEMALA? “So that we didn’t have to fight them in Yuma!”

    HONDURAS? “So that St. Louis wouldn’t be ranked as the Murder Capital of North America!”

    All of CENTRAL AMERICA? “So that the indigenes are kept in peonage – providing law-abiding, tax-paying, God-fearing Americans with an abundance of nutritious bananas at a price they can afford!”

    COLOMBIA? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them in Peru or Ecuador!”

    LEBANON? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them in Dearborn!”

    IRAQ in 1990? “So that we wouldn’t have to walk to work or to school!”

    KOSOVO? “So that we didn’t have to fight them in Albania!”

    AFGHANISTAN? “So that we didn’t have to fight them in Washington, New York or MacLean!”

    WHY for 20 YEARS? “So that our generals could fight for honors over in Bagram rather than in the Pentagon!”

    IRAQ – the second time? “So that George W. Bush would stop fighting with his father!”

    LIBYA? “So that Barack Obama wouldn’t have to fight with Hillary!”

    SYRIA? “So that Barack Obama wouldn’t have to fight with Bibi Netanyahu!”

    SOMALIA? “So that we didn’t risk running out of places to train our soldiers and hone their counter-insurgency techniques in order to protect us from them!”

    YEMEN? “So that Crown Prince Mohammed bin-SALMAN would remain our loyal partner and keep inviting our Presidents to bashes in Riyadh with those terrific sword dances!”

    CONGO? “Because Barack Obama was enthralled by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness!”

    MALI? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight then in Niger!”

    NIGER? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them in Chad!”

    CHAD? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight then again in Burkina-Faso!”

    BURKINO-FASO? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them again back in MALI!”

    TUNISIA? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them in Algeria!”

    PANAMA? “So that we wouldn’t have to collar Noriega in South Beach!”

    CUBA: “AULD LANG SYNE!”

    VENEZUELA? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them in CITGO gas stations!”

    IRAN: “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them in Tel Aviv!”

    RUSSIA – in Ukraine? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them in the Fulda Gap!”

    NORDSTROM II PIPELINE?: “So that we wouldn’t be haunted by nightmares of Vladimir Putin and Olaf Schulz having a friendly plaudern in Deutsch in Kaliningrad over a beer at the Kropotkin on Teatralnaya!”

    CHINA? “So that we could twirl our index finger in the air shouting – USA! USA!!”

    Dad/Mom: Who is ‘THEM’? “I see that the pumpkin pie is ready. Let’s talk some more after dessert!”

    The post Thanksgiving Challenge first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.