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Category: United States

  • FIFA: The Beautiful Game Cannot Support Genocide And Repression

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

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

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

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

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

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

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

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

    This is not sustainable. It is not defensible.

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

    It chooses not to.

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

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

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

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

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

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

    This is not sustainable. It is not defensible.

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

    It chooses not to.

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

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Trump’s Fatal Move

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why Western Hegemony is Over

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    There are three scenarios.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Veterans Force NY County Sheriff to Take Down Israeli Flag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    *****

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

    The post Veterans Force NY County Sheriff to Take Down Israeli Flag first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • United States Backed Ethnic Cleansing Of Serbs

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

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

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

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

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

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

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

    “So Far, So Good…”

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

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

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

    Never Again?

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

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

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

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

    Israel Wages Genocide While Threatening Its Neighbors with Nuclear Weapons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Drone Attack on Russia’s Strategic Bombers Tempted Nuclear War

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

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

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

    The Pentagon Is Planning a Nuclear First-Strike Against China

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

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

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

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

    “The End Is Near”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Golden Rule Is Sailing Around San Francisco Bay

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

    Peace at Home, Peace Abroad!

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

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

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ECONOMIC TERROR AND THE TURBOCHUGGF*CK IN TEXAS

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

    —Noam Chomsky

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

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

    Exposing the Entrapocracy

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

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

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

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

    “Climate Homicide”

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Toxic Business Activism

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

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

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

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

    Promoting Climate Denial

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

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

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

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

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

    The Other DEI: Domestic Election Interference

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ECONOMIC TERROR AND THE TURBOCHUGGF*CK IN TEXAS

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

    —Noam Chomsky

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

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

    Exposing the Entrapocracy

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

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

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

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

    “Climate Homicide”

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Toxic Business Activism

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

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

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

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

    Promoting Climate Denial

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

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

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

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

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

    The Other DEI: Domestic Election Interference

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

    What follows is a revised and updated version of an essay from my 2020 book, Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.  

    “The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint…But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
    – C. S. Lewis, author’s preface, 1962, The Screwtape Letters

    American history can only accurately be described as the story of demonic possession, however you choose to understand that phrase. Maybe radical “evil” will suffice. But right from the start, the American colonizers were involved in massive killing because they considered themselves divinely blessed and guided, a chosen people whose mission would come to be called “manifest destiny.” Nothing stood in the way of this divine calling, which involved the need to enslave and kill millions of innocent people that continues down to today. “Others” have always been expendable since they have stood in the way of the imperial march ordained by the American god. This includes all the wars waged based on lies and false flag operations. It is not a secret, although many Americans, if they are even aware of it, prefer to see it as a series of aberrations carried out by “bad apples.” Or something from the past. Most know nothing about it, for they have never opened a history book.

    Our best writers and prophets have told us the truth: Thoreau, Twain, William James, MLK, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, et al.: we are a nation of killers of the innocent. We are conscienceless. We are brutal. We are in the grip of evil forces.

    The English writer D. H. Lawrence said it perfectly in 1923, “The American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.” It still hasn’t.

    When on August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States killed 200-300 thousand innocent Japanese civilians with atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they did so intentionally. It was an act of sinister state terrorism, unprecedented by the nature of the weapons but not by the slaughter. The American terror bombings of Japanese cities that preceded the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – led by the infamous Major General Curtis LeMay – were also intentionally aimed at Japanese civilians and killed hundreds of thousands of them.

    Is there an American artist’s painting of Tokyo destroyed by the firebombing to go next to Picasso’s Guernica, where estimates of the dead range between 800 and 1,600?

    In Tokyo alone, more than 100,000 Japanese civilians were burned to death by cluster bombs of napalm. All this killing was intentional. I repeat: Intentional. Is that not radical evil? Demonic? Only five Japanese cities were spared such bombing. Sixty-seven cities were fire-bombed.

    As a conclusion to such bombings, in August 1945, the atomic bombings were an intentional holocaust, not to end the war, as the historical record amply demonstrates, but to send a message to the Soviet Union that we could do to them what we did to the residents of Japan. President Truman made certain that the Japanese willingness to surrender in May 1945 was made unacceptable because he and his Secretary of State James Byrnes wanted to use the atomic bombs – “as quickly as possible to ‘show results’” in Byrnes’s words – to send a message to the Soviet Union.

    So “the Good War” was ended in the Pacific with the “good guys” killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians to make a point to the “bad guys,” who have been demonized ever since. Shortly after, in September 1945, the U.S War Department made plans to wipe out the U.S.’s ally, the Soviet Union, with a massive nuclear strike aimed at 66 major cities. Professor Michel Chossudovsky documents it here.

    Satan always wears the other’s face.

    Many Baby Boomers like to say they grew up with the bomb. They are lucky. They grew up. They got to be scared. They got to hide under their desks and wax nostalgic about it. Do you remember dog tags? Those 1950s and 1960s? The scary movies?

    The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who died under our bombs on August 6 and 9, 1945, didn’t get to grow up. They couldn’t hide. They just went under. To be accurate, we put them under. Or they were left to smolder for decades in pain and then die. But that it was necessary to save American lives is the lie. It’s always about American lives, as if the owners of the country actually cared about them. But to tender hearts and innocent minds, it’s a magic incantation. Poor us!

    Fat Man, Little Boy – how the names of those atomic bombs echo down the years to the now fat Americans who grew up in the 1950s and who think like little boys and girls about their country’s demonic nature. Innocence – it is wonderful! We are different now. “We are great because we are good,” that’s what Hillary Clinton told us. The Libyans can attest to that. We are exceptional, special. The 2020 election was said to prove that if we can defeat Mr. Pumpkin Head and restore America to its “core values,” all will be well.

    Now that they were restored with Biden’s support for the U.S. proxy war against Russia via Ukraine and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, delusional Trump 2024 voters might be learning that those core values are bipartisan. “We are great because we are good,” goes the mantra. We kill, therefore we are. There is a straight line from the nuclear bombing of Japan to the arrant U.S. support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

    Perhaps you think I am cynical. But understanding true evil is not child’s play. It seems beyond the grasp of most Americans who need their illusions. Evil is real. There is simply no way to understand the savage nature of American history without seeing its demonic nature. How else can we redeem ourselves at this late date, possessed as we are by delusions of our own God-blessed goodness?

    But so many Americans play at innocence. They excite themselves at the thought that with the next election, the nation will be “restored” to the right course. Of course, there never was a right course, unless might makes right, which has always been the way of America’s rulers. Today, as in 2016, Trump is viewed by so many as an aberration. He is far from it. He’s straight out of a Twain short story. He’s Vaudeville. He’s Melville’s confidence man. He’s us. Did it ever occur to those who are fixated on him that if those who own and run the country wanted him gone, he’d be gone in an instant? He can tweet and tweet idiotically, endlessly send out messages that he will contradict the next day or minute, but as long as he protects the super-rich, accepts Israel’s control of him, and allows the CIA-military-industrial complex to do its world-wide killing and looting of the treasury, he will be allowed to entertain and excite the public – to get them worked up in a lather in pseudo-debates. And to make this more entertaining, he will be opposed by the “sane” Democratic opposition, whose intentions are as benign as an assassin’s smile.

    Look back as far as you can to past U.S. presidents, the figureheads who “act under orders” (whose orders?), as did Ahab in his lust to kill the “evil” great white whale, and what do you see? You see servile killers in the grip of a sinister power. You see hyenas with polished faces. You see pasteboard masks. On the one occasion when one of these presidents dared to follow his conscience and rejected the devil’s pact that is the presidency’s killer-in-chief role, he – JFK – had his brains blown out in public view. An evil empire thrives on shedding blood, and it enforces its will through demonic messages.

    Resist, and there will be blood on the streets, blood on the tracks, blood in your face.

    Despite this, President Kennedy’s witness, his turn from cold warrior to an apostle of peace in the final year of his presidency, remains to inspire a ray of hope in these dark days. As recounted by James Douglass in his masterful JFK and the Unspeakable, Kennedy agreed to a meeting in May 1962 with a group of Quakers who had been demonstrating outside the While House for total disarmament. They urged him to move in that direction. Kennedy was sympathetic to their position. He said he wished it were easy to do so from the top down, but that he was being pressured by the Pentagon and others to never do that, although he had given a speech urging “a peace race” together with the Soviet Union. He told the Quakers it would have to come from below. According to the Quakers, JFK listened intently to their points, and before they left, said with a smile, “You believe in redemption, don’t you?” Soon Kennedy was shaken to his core by the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world teetered on the brink of extinction and his insane military and “intelligence” advisers urged him to wage a nuclear war. Not long after, he took a sharp top-down turn toward peace despite their fierce opposition, a turn so dramatic over the next year that it led to his martyrdom. And he knew it would. He knew it would when he gave his extraordinary American University Commencement Address on June 10, 1963.

    So hope is not all lost. There are great souls like JFK to inspire us. Their examples flash here and there. But to even begin to hope to change the future, a confrontation with our demonic past (and present) is first necessary, a descent into the dark truth that is terrifying in its implications. False innocence must be abandoned. Carl Jung, in “On the Psychology of the Unconscious,” addressed this with the words:

    It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses – and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware.

    How can one describe men who would intentionally slaughter so many innocent people?  American history is rife with such examples up to the present day. The native peoples, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, etc. – the list is very long. Savage wars are carried out by men and women who own and run the country, and who try to buy the souls of regular people to join them in their pact with the devil, to acquiesce to their ongoing wicked deeds. Such monstrous evil was never more evident than on August 6 and 9, 1945.

    Unless we enter into deep contemplation of the evil that was released into the world with those bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are lost in a living hell without escape. And we will pay. Nemesis always demands retribution, as the ancient Greeks said. We have gradually been accepting rule by those for whom the killing of innocents is child’s play, and we have been masquerading as innocent and good children for whom the truth is too much to bear. “Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one,” Screwtape, the devil, tells his nephew, Wormwood, a devil in training, “the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” That’s the road we’ve been traveling, as Trump’s second term is showing us, as he facilely and recklessly talks of nuclear war and makes moves that make it more likely.

    The projection of evil onto others works only so long. We must reclaim our shadows and withdraw our projections. Only the fate of the world depends on it.

    The post Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • From USSR & Russia and Islam, to Toronto to Antisemitic in the Eyes of the Overload

    Aug 03, 2025  Link to the Interview, ahead of the KYAQ.org 91.7 FM airing.

    Travel

    Oh, we did it, via Zoom, from Newport, Oregon, to Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We had to use the free version of Zoom (is anything free with digital gulag tools, since Zoom has our data, our recording, even the stuff we said off the recording mode?) which is 40 minutes max, and then we did another recording, so, that’s 30-30, Parts One and Parts Two. It’s in an MP4 format, which I will convert to an MP3 for the KYAQ FM radio show that will air sometime in October.

    Oh, he was daring to come onto my show since he has been so much more dignified in older shows.

    My idea of a 30-30 interview? Make that .30-30 caliber.

    Go here for a three-part book review, which gets under the chigger-infested skin of a world gone Israel Mad:

    (In this three-part series, Canadian author and journalist Eric Walberg reviews Dan Steinbock’s book, The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military, 2025. All three parts are published in this issue to provide continuity.)

    Baby steps?

    And we talked about this giant step forward FOR all of Jewish-Kind:

    The alarming details of Israel’s future ambitions

    Oh, Samson and Hannibal and David’s Sling and Pegasus and Esther Project, and alas, we are seeing a few stories about the 9/11 of Oct. 7:

    Reporting on the testimony, Israel’s Channel 7 reported that “At 5:20 a.m.” on October 7th, Shitrit said, “We were playing on the phone and suddenly a strange message came up from my deputy commander, .. and what he says on the radio is something like this: ‘I don’t know why, but an order was given that there would be no patrols in the (Gaza) fence until 9 a.m”.

    He went on to say, “And sure enough, an hour later, at 6:30, suddenly sirens”.

    The outlet reported that he said, “Every morning the platoon raises alert, and in his estimation, there are no mornings in which there are no patrols on the (Gaza) fence,” quoting him saying, “because you are in an operational battalion and that is part of the matter”.

    Eric and I discussed his Dissident Voice pieces, and this one, surely would put him in the dock if he was living in Germany or UK: “Israeli Jews’ Love of Genocide — Review of Peter Beinhart’s Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning” by Eric Walberg / May 17th, 2025.

    I think just saying the word “Jew” will get you in trouble, and saying that the Jews of Israel Love Genocide is certainly a death sentence. For Muslims. Walberg is Muslim.

    Reality: Dr. Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui,

    “I was forced to resign from my role as Senior EDI Advisor (Jan 2024) and then let go from my position as professor (Aug 2024) at Sheridan College for my advocacy on the genocide of Palestinians.

    While waiting for the arbitration date, I was advised by the union lawyer to “cool it” on my advocacy if I expect any positive outcome.

    I made it clear from the start that my only reason to fight this unfair dismissal was to get a formal apology and public acknowledgement of the college’s bias. I was told an apology would be expecting too much, but compensation a more likely reality.

    Over a year later, I’m still waiting for the date of arbitration.

    And in this time, the department I worked in has dissolved, the people involved in my case have moved on to better pastures. even the president has left. This institution that I’m waiting to receive accountability from has been totally refaced.

    AND the genocide has continued with even greater barbarity.

    I was expected to hold my tongue, suppress my conscience, lie in wait, all whilst the institution and people that harmed me not only continued to harm others, but be rewarded for it.

    The systems that oppress us are designed to silence us and the systems in place to protect us from them are designed to tire us.

    Clearly my advocacy never stopped.

    Because my moral conscience was a price I was not willing to pay for my career.

    Look, accountability is important, we should take every step to hold these institutions to task, but we must also understand that a fair and just outcome – in my case, being vindicated, compensated or reinstated is rare.

    The false hope we are asked to place into the systems that we know so well to be historically discriminating, all at the expense of our silence, is nothing but a tantalizing and delusive dangling carrot.

    Don’t fall for it.

    Maintain your integrity.

    Never stop speaking the truth.”

    Image

    [Dr. Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui is a globally recognized multiple award-winning public-speaker, media pundit, researcher, and a passionate social justice advocate. As well as being a professor of sociology, criminology, and criminal-psychology, she is currently directing one of Canada’s largest government-funded Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives at Colleges and Institutes Canada’s National EDI Knowledge Mobilization Centre hosted at Sheridan College. She is also leading a national study with Institute for Social Policy and Understanding in Washington, DC, that both quantifies and analyses in-depth the influence and impact of a right-wing extremist political group on U.S. institutions and American attitudes.

    As a postcolonial scholar, her intersectional research concentrates on the impacts of colonialism and imperialism on the lives of diasporic peoples in the West. Focusing in the areas of migration, race/ethnicity and ethno-religio identity, Dr. Ghaffar-Siddiqui’s doctoral research explored the ways in which Muslim communities in the West navigate their social worlds in a post 9/11 climate. Her previous research includes a qualitative analysis of South Asian people’s experiences of discrimination and healthcare seeking behaviours in traditionally colonial healthcare structures and settings in Ontario.]

    Eric and I did not get into Sabreena’s dismissal, which is basically hateful and Jewish-Inspired Klanadian version of 1984 a la 2025.

    We didn’t get into this blasphemy:

    By David Miller

    Zionist war criminals are being secretly hosted in Britain, with thousands arriving over the past several years, according to documents in the possession of Press TV.

    They are hosted by Zionist families in the UK, taken on tours to popular tourist sites, and welcomed into private homes — as reported on the now-deleted website of the “charity” involved that goes by the name ‘British Friends of Israel War Disabled’ (BFIWD):

    We did all the usual things, had an orientation tour of London, went to the theatre, visited Waddesdon Manor, went shopping, had a tour of the Houses of Parliament, visited the RAF museum and went bowling.

    Our host families fed and made our guests a part of their families and we all danced the night away at the final thank you and farewell party. No one who met our guests was not moved by their experiences and the atmosphere at the final party was electric. Each and every one of them touched our hearts.

    Fawning over genocidaires suggests that the risks to the UK extend beyond the visitors themselves to those who host them. There is something particularly disturbing about Zionists in the UK providing what is, in effect, material support for ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.

    *****

    Eric played good cop to my bad cop, which is funny coming from Walberg:

    … all of us pin our hopes on world mass opinion. None of the world leaders, apart from the Axis of Resistance can be counted on. Arab leaders loathe the pesky Palestinians almost as much as US-Israel does. It is only the revolting masses that stand between them and the Palestinians.

    He ends the third part of his Crescent International piece/book analysis this way:

    The first real sign that South African apartheid would be dismantled was when (Jewish) MP Harry Schwarz met with ANC’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi to sign the Mahlabatini Declaration of Faith in 1974, enshrined the principles of peaceful transition of power and equality for all, the first such agreement by black and white political leaders in South Africa.

    But it took another two decades of struggle until de Klerk opened bilateral discussions with Nelson Mandela in 1993 for a transition of policies and government.

    It seems we have reached that first stage today. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2006 to 2009, and Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian foreign minister from 2005 to 2006, met Pope Francis on October 17, 2024, to promote a peace plan that would see a Palestinian state existing alongside the state of Israel ‘on the basis of 1967 borders’ with a few territorial adjustments.

    Their plan calls for the city of Jerusalem to be the capital of both Israel and Palestine, with the Old City being ‘administered by a trusteeship of five states of which Israel and Palestine are part.’

    Ahh, the reality is that Israel is a necropolitical and necroschizophrenic society — Achille Mbembe: Necropolitics

    The economic and political management of human populations through their exposure to death has become a global phenomenon. Wars, genocides, refugee “crisis”, ecocide and contemporary processes of pauperization and precarization reveal how increasing masses of individuals are now governed through their direct and indirect exposure to death. In order to unpack those processes, Achille Mbembe came up with the notion of necropolitics, first in 2003 with an essay bearing the same name, and then in 2016, with the book Politiques de l’inimitié, translated and published in English in 2019, as Necropolitics.1 With this latter notion, Mbembe explores and radicalizes Foucault’s concept of biopolitics.

    In the last lecture of “Society must be Defended” and in the last chapter of The History of Sexuality (Vol.1), Foucault noticed how biopolitics, that is, the positive power over life can become a deadly form of power. It is not only a “calculated management of life” but also a “power to expose a whole population to death”.2 Drawing on the dramatic experiences of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes and on the global nuclear threat, Foucault highlighted how human masses are eliminated in the name of the protection and survival of a nation, a people and/or a class. Besides, he noted how racism has become the political tool that enables the biological division of the human species and the justification of the extermination of those considered inferior. Foucault insisted modern racism has developed with the “colonizing genocide”, so that the right to take life could be justified.3 Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito have explored these foucauldian observations with the notions of “homo saccer” and “thanatopolitics”, insisting respectively on the sovereign right to kill with impunity and the biological/pathological justifications of humans’ exterminations.4 Mbembe’s necropolitics offers a novel approach as it draws both on Foucault and a decolonial approach (often inspired in Frantz Fanon) and conceives of necropolitics as the political making of spaces and subjectivities in an in-between of life and death. The colony in general and the slavery plantation in particular have given birth to those necropolitical practices — fostered by white supremacy — that still continue today.

    The subjugation of life to the power of death

    Necropolitics entails the “subjugation of life to the power of death”. In “our contemporary world” — following Mbembe — various types of “weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjugated to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living-dead”.5 This production of “death-worlds” is carried on by three main factors I will define subsequently. On the one hand, necropolitics entails a necroeconomy. Modern capitalism would produce nowadays an excess of populations that could not be exploited anymore but require to be managed precisely through their exposure to deadly dangers and risks. The so-called “climate crisis” is maybe the most illustrative example of this necroeconomy, along with the current destruction of public/social goods and rights. On the other hand, necropolitics draws on the confinement of certain populations in particular spaces: campsites. Relying on Agamben’s insights, Mbembe holds that the camp-form (refugees, prisons, banlieues, suburbs, favelas) has become a prevailing way of governing unwanted populations. The latter are enclosed in precarious and militarized spaces so that they can be controlled, harassed and potentially killed. It is “a permanent condition of ‘living in pain’ ”.6

    The third and “key characteristic” of necropolitics is “to produce death in a large scale”. This aspect is developed, in particular, in a subpart untitled “Relation Without Desire” from the First Chapter “Exit From Democracy” of Necropolitics (2019). It is possible to explain this characteristic, highlighting seven traits that, according to my understanding, seem to underpin Mbembe’s account on the issue.

    1) State terror: The State persecutes, imprisons and eliminates certain populations so that political and social contestations can be neutralized. Those repressive tactics are operated not only by totalitarian regimes but also by contemporary liberal and illiberal countries.

    2) The shared use of violence: In many cases, the State does not have and willingly shares the monopoly of violence with other private actors (i.e., militias, paramilitary), increasing the circulation and use of weapons in society. The latter is therefore divided between “those who are protected (because armed) from those who are not”.7

    3) The “link of enmity”: According to Mbembe, in a society where the possession and nonpossessions of weapons define one’s social value, all social bonds are destroyed. The link of enmity normalizes therefore the “idea that power can be acquired and exercised only at the price of another’s life”.8

    4) War: “Coercion itself has become a market commodity”.9 Nowadays, war and terror have become modes of production on their own, and as such need to generate new military markets.10

    5) The predation of natural resources: In order to exploit valuable natural resources, populations are displaced and eliminated (i.e. indigenous people in the Amazon rain forest) though the active and hidden collaboration of the State, public forces, international corporations and criminal organizations.

    6) Different modes of killing: The exposure to death is multiple: tortures, mutilations, mass killings, high-tech elimination through “drone strikes” represent various modalities of necropolitical devices.

    7) Different moral justifications: According to Mbembe, atrocities are justified for various reasons such as the eradication of corruption, different types of “therapeutic liturgy”, “the desire for sacrifice”, “messianic eschatologies”, and even “modern discourses of utilitarianism, materialism, and consumerism”.11

    Necropolitics implies therefore a closed entrenchment of political, economic and military devices, oriented towards the eliminations of human populations. But along with this aspect, necropolitics is also deployed through “small doses” of death that structure the everyday life of individuals.12

    Less human than human

    Along with mass killings and exterminations, Mbembe argues that necropolitics implies a surveillance on individuals not so much for the purposes of discipline, but to extract from them a maximum of utility, such as in the case of sexual slavery.13 The instillation of those “small doses” of death in the daily existences of many individuals also comes from “unbounded social, economic, and symbolic violence” that destroy their bodies and the value of their social existence.14 Daily humiliations perpetrated by public forces on certain populations, the strategy of “small massacres” inflicted one day at a time, and the absence of basic social goods (e.g. sanitation, housing) bring about a kind of existence whose value “is the sort of death able to be inflicted upon it”.15 Under those circumstances, necropolitics consists

    in the power to manufacture an entire crowd of people who specifically live at the edge of life, or even on its outer edge — people for whom living means continually standing up to death …. This life is a superfluous one, therefore, whose price is so meager that it has no equivalence, whether market or — even less — human …. Nobody even bears the slightest feelings of responsibility or justice towards this sort of life or, rather, death. Necropolitical power proceeds by a sort of inversion between life and death, as if life was merely death’s medium.16

    Under everyday necropolitics, a mass of populations live under extreme precarious conditions and as such, can be exploited and eliminated “naturally”. Mbembe singles out racism as the main criteria that allow necropolitics to be performed and expand in society. Along with an “hydraulic racism” that defines institutional racism (State, law, administration), Mbembe pays attention to a so-called “nanoracism” that is deployed in everyday social relations, and is designed to stigmatize, to injure and to humiliate “those not considered to be one of us”.17 Taking into account current political, social and symbolic forms of violence that are deployed worldwide, Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics represents a relevant heuristic category for contemporary critical thought.

    Antonio Pele is an Associate Professor at the Law School of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.

    *****

    Next time I have Eric on we will discuss his books:

    He’s got gravitus and gastritis, which he attributes to the on-going genocide and horrific images of children and civilians being gunned down while lining up for so-called food aid.

    Canadian Eric Walberg is known worldwide as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia. A graduate of University of Toronto and Cambridge in economics, he has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s. He has lived in both the Soviet Union and Russia, and then Uzbekistan, as a UN adviser, writer, translator and lecturer. Presently a writer for the foremost Cairo newspaper, Al Ahram, he is also a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Global Research, Al-Jazeera and Turkish Weekly, and is a commentator on Voice of the Cape radio. His articles appear in Russian, German, Spanish and Arabic and are accessible at his website ericwalberg.com. Walberg was a moderator and speaker at the Leaders for Change Summit in Istanbul in 2011. His book, Postmodern Imperialism, is published in Chinese, Turkish and Russian.

    Check out Walberg here, over at Dissident Voice.

    Iron Dome missiles launched against rockets fired from Gaza, September 2024

    What are Israel’s Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow and Thaad missile defences?Part Two, [Go to the bottom of the Podcast and see the link for Part 2] Zooming with Eric Walberg — soon to be on Finding Fringe: Voices from the Edge.

    The post From USSR & Russia and Islam, to Toronto to Antisemitic in the Eyes of the Overload first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • No, Nuking Cities Did Not Save Lives

    It’s oddly encouraging that the New York Post had to bring up its kookiest right-wing propagandist on Friday to argue that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives. It’s almost as if the New York Times’ kookiest right-wing propagandist’s claiming that killing Palestinians is not genocide had to be one-upped by the Post. It’s even more encouraging that the Post felt obliged to expand the usual definition of “lives” to include the lives of Japanese people, claiming that nuking people saved not only U.S. lives but also Japanese lives — an argument it would have been very hard to find even being attempted during the early decades of this myth.

    But it isn’t true that claims that nukes saved lives or nukes ended the war are only made by fringe crackpots. Those claims may be fading out among serious historians, but they are basic accepted fact to the general public, even the most educated sections of the general public; so they continue popping up like zombies in books and articles whose authors seem to have no idea they’re even writing anything controversial, much less utterly debunked. (The Post calls it “one of the most controversial historical questions in American history.”)

    The argument in the Post (quoting an author named Richard Frank) is this:

    “Not only has no relevant document been recovered from the wartime period, but none of them,” he writes of Japan’s top leaders, “even as they faced potential death sentences in war-crimes trials, testified that Japan would have surrendered earlier upon an offer of modified terms, coupled to Soviet intervention or some other combination of events, excluding the use of atomic bombs.”

    Well here’s a relevant document. Weeks before the first bomb was dropped, on July 13, 1945, Japan had sent a telegram to the Soviet Union expressing its desire to surrender and end the war. The United States had broken Japan’s codes and read the telegram. Truman referred in his diary to “the telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” President Truman had already been informed through Swiss and Portuguese channels of Japanese peace overtures as early as three months before Hiroshima. Japan objected only to surrendering unconditionally and giving up its emperor, but the United States insisted on those terms until after the bombs fell, at which point it allowed Japan to keep its emperor. So, the desire to drop the bombs may have lengthened the war. The bombs did not shorten the war.

    It’s odd for the Post to build its case entirely on the absence of a certain type of testimony by proud Japanese defendants facing trials for their lives with zero motivation to admit that the Japanese government had been wanting to surrender, and for the Post to completely omit the testimony of all U.S. authorities.

    Defenders of nuking cities may now claim the nukes saved lives, but at the time the bombs were not even intended to do any such thing. The war ended six days after the second nuke, six days into the Russian invasion of Japan. But the war was going to end anyway, without either of those things. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that, “… certainly prior to 31 December, 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

    One dissenter who had expressed this same view to the Secretary of War and, by his own account, to President Truman, prior to the bombings was General Dwight Eisenhower. Under Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bard, prior to the bombings, urged that Japan be given a warning. Lewis Strauss, Advisor to the Secretary of the Navy, also prior to the bombings, recommended blowing up a forest rather than a city. General George Marshall apparently agreed with that idea. Atomic scientist Leo Szilard organized scientists to petition the president against using the bomb. Atomic scientist James Franck organized scientists who advocated treating atomic weapons as a civilian policy issue, not just a military decision. Another scientist, Joseph Rotblat, demanded an end to the Manhattan Project, and resigned when it was not ended. A poll of the U.S. scientists who had developed the bombs, taken prior to their use, found that 83% wanted a nuclear bomb publicly demonstrated prior to dropping one on Japan. The U.S. military kept that poll secret. General Douglas MacArthur held a press conference on August 6, 1945, prior to the bombing of Hiroshima, to announce that Japan was already beaten.

    The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William D. Leahy said angrily in 1949 that Truman had assured him only military targets would be nuked, not civilians. “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender,” Leahy said. Top military officials who said just after the war that the Japanese would have quickly surrendered without the nuclear bombings included General Douglas MacArthur, General Henry “Hap” Arnold, General Curtis LeMay, General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, Admiral Ernest King, Admiral Chester Nimitz, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, and Brigadier General Carter Clarke. As Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick summarize, seven of the United States’ eight five-star officers who received their final star in World War II or just after — Generals MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Arnold, and Admirals Leahy, King, Nimitz, and Halsey — in 1945 rejected the idea that the atomic bombs were needed to end the war. “Sadly, though, there is little evidence that they pressed their case with Truman before the fact.”

    On August 6, 1945, President Truman lied on the radio that a nuclear bomb had been dropped on an army base, rather than on a city. And he justified it, not as speeding the end of the war, but as revenge against Japanese offenses. “Mr. Truman was jubilant,” wrote Dorothy Day. We have to remember that in the U.S. media of the time, killing more Japanese people was decidedly preferable to killing fewer, and required no justification of supposedly saving lives or ending wars. Truman, the guy whose action is being defended and whose diary is being carefully ignored, made no such claims, as he was not doing restrospective propaganda.

    So, why then were the bombs dropped?

    Presidential advisor James Byrnes had told Truman that dropping the bombs would allow the United States to “dictate the terms of ending the war.” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote in his diary that Byrnes was “most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.” Truman wrote in his diary that the Soviets were preparing to march against Japan and “Fini Japs when that comes about.” The Soviet invasion was planned prior to the bombs, not decided by them. The United States had no plans to invade for months, and no plans on the scale to risk the numbers of lives that the Post will tell you were saved.

    Truman ordered the bombs dropped, one on Hiroshima on August 6th and another type of bomb, a plutonium bomb, which the military also wanted to test and demonstrate, on Nagasaki on August 9th. The Nagasaki bombing was moved up from the 11th to the 9th to decrease the likelihood of Japan surrendering first. Also on August 9th, the Soviets attacked the Japanese. During the next two weeks, the Soviets killed 84,000 Japanese while losing 12,000 of their own soldiers, and the United States continued bombing Japan with non-nuclear weapons — burning Japanese cities, as it had done to so much of Japan prior to August 6th that, when it had come time to pick two cities to nuke, there hadn’t been many left to choose from.

    Here’s what the Post claims was accomplished by killing a couple of hundred thousand people and commencing the age of apocalyptic nuclear danger:

    “The end of the war made unnecessary a US invasion that could have meant hundreds of thousands of American casualties; saved millions of Japanese lives that would have been lost in combat on the home islands and to starvation; cut short the brief Soviet invasion (that alone accounted for hundreds of thousands of Japanese deaths); and ended the agony that Imperial Japan brought to the region, especially a China that suffered perhaps 20 million casualties.”

    Notice that the Post feels obliged to blame (at the time it would have been credit) the Soviet invasion with killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese people, even while claiming, pace Truman, that it did not influence the Japanese decision to surrender. Notice also that the only alternative to the war ending after the nukes, in this view, would have been the war continuing for a great long time costing millions of Japanese lives. But the facts above do not bear this out. The 2025 propagandist is disagreeing with the consensus of the leaders of his beloved military in 1945.

    Why is he doing that?

    He concludes with his motivation: “This is why President Donald Trump’s vision of a Golden Dome to protect the U.S. from missile attack is so important, and why we need a robust nuclear force to deter our enemies.”

    Here is a different view of what World War II tells us about a Golden Dome.

    Here are things you can do to make the 80th anniversaries of the nuclear bombings without lying about them.

    The post No, Nuking Cities Did Not Save Lives first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • With 2026 World Cup Coming to US, FIFA Head Gianni Infantino Cozies up to Trump

    President Donald Trump presents Chelsea's Cole Palmer with the golden ball trophy after Chelsea won against Paris St Germain in the Club World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., Sunday, July 13, 2025. (Kevin Lamarque/Pool Photo via AP)

    Trump presents Chelsea’s Cole Palmer with the golden ball trophy after Chelsea defeats Paris St Germain in the Club World Cup final.
    A few weeks back, the FIFA Club World Cup concluded with Chelsea FC defeating Paris Saint-German. Flanked by FIFA president Gianni Infantino, Donald Trump, greeted by a chorus of boos from fans at MetLife Stadium, took to the field during the trophy ceremony, As Edge of Sports’ Dave Zirin reported, Infantino, “has been using the tournament to continue toadying up to Donald Trump, in advance of the North American–hosted World Cup, and to representatives of another future World Cup host, Saudi Arabia.”

    The 2026 World Cup will be held in Canada, Mexico and the United States. It will feature 48 teams (up from 32) and will consist of 102 matches. As FIFA expands its global footprint with a larger, more lucrative 2026 tournament in North America, the organization’s willingness to placate powerful leaders is raising questions about who really benefits.

    Kansas City, Missouri will be hosting six matches at Arrowhead Stadium. The following commentary World Cup is by Randy Gould, editor and chief reporter for the Kansas City-based Oread Daily email newsletter.

    “The World Cup is coming to Kansas City next year. It probably shouldn’t.  Daytime soccer in Kansas City in the summer won’t be all that much fun.

    “The heated world has arrived. We do not have any domed stadiums here, so if we are in the middle of summer heat in this new hot era, maybe the games could be rescheduled for like 3 AM!

    “I don’t know if people are noticing that sporting events are more and more often being canceled due to extreme heat.  Hmm, what should we take from that in regard to the soccer World Cup?

    “We should take from that exactly what Dave Zirin’s article headlined ‘FIFA Is Abusing Its Players to Keep Authoritarians Happy’ makes clear.  Gianni Infantino, and the rest of the top FIFA brass simply are unconcerned with the well being of the players.  They just do not care, despite the concerns raised by many players and others.”

    As Zirin reported, “By holding the Club World Cup in the extreme summer heat—in the offseason for most of the 32 clubs involved—FIFA demonstrated blatant disregard for the health of the players.”

    Zirin added: “FIFPRO, the global players union that represents more than 60,000 professional footballers worldwide, has long slammed FIFA for valuing petro-dictators’ bottom lines over the well-being of the athletes. Back in 2023, the union noted that the Club World Cup schedule ‘demonstrates a lack of consideration for the mental and physical health of participating players, as well as a disregard for their personal and family lives.’”

    Gould: “Infantino does care about cozying up to the rich and powerful.  He enjoys the company of authoritarian dictators.  He is more than happy to kiss Donald Trump’s ass time and time again.

    “Once again, the spectacle of global sport masks the brutal machinery of power, profit, and authoritarianism. In its relentless drive to court petro-tyrants and authoritarian strongmen, FIFA has once more revealed itself as not merely complicit in oppression — but actively enabling it.  Zirin’s piece exposes how football’s global governing body has sacrificed player safety, worker rights, and even basic human dignity on the altar of authoritarian appeasement and corporate greed.

    “Why would the world’s best soccer clubs even play in the FIFA Club World Cup? The answer is money.”

    Zirin points out that “The tournament total prize money pool has $1 billion in it, with $525 million doled out to clubs simply for participating and another $475 million allocated based on results. …. Manchester City, owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the Abu Dhabi United Group, reportedly walked off with nearly $52 million just for reaching the final 16 of the tournament. The winner of the tournament will nab a cool $125 million.”

    Gould: “Whether it’s the almost slave like conditions for stadium workers in Qatar, the gagging of political expression, or the weaponization of tournaments by regimes like Saudi Arabia,  Erdoğan’s Turkey, and Trump’s USA, FIFA continues to function as a de facto propaganda ministry for the world’s most repressive governments. While players are expected to shut up and entertain, their labor—and their bodies—is commoditized in service of soft power and profit, not solidarity or sport.

    “This is not just a sports story. It’s another chapter in the global assault on democracy, workers, and dissent — another instance of top-down structures silencing bottom-up voices. There is no area, no space these days that capital has not taken over. The same systems that crush unions, bulldoze Indigenous land, and surveil dissidents in the USA and numerous other States are draped in FIFA banners and presented to us as celebration.

    “Oh well, apparently the model of the 1936 Nazi Berlin Olympics has been seized upon by FIFA today.”

    The post With 2026 World Cup Coming to US, FIFA Head Gianni Infantino Cozies up to Trump first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Pro-Palestine Activists Target US-Backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation

    For days, pro-Palestine protesters in the Washington, DC metropolitan area have organized pickets and rallies to “confront” leaders of the now-infamous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. On July 25, dozens of protesters gathered outside of the home of GHF’s Interim Executive Director John Acree, banging pots and pans, holding signs that read “our tax $$$ could fund UNRWA and end genocide but Joe + Don choose to fund genocide.” Demonstrators wrote a message in chalk on the asphalt: “WAR CRIMINAL LIVES HERE GOOGLE GHF”.

    The post Pro-Palestine Activists Target US-Backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US Security Contractor: ‘I Saw Israel Commit War Crimes At Gaza Aid Sites’

    A former contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) says he saw Israeli soldiers commit war crimes at the aid distribution sites being run by the Israeli-backed American agency.

    In a series of interviews, former GHF employee and Green Beret Anthony Aguilar alleged that he saw Israeli soldiers use “indiscriminate” force against civilians at various Gaza aid sites.

    “My most frank assessment — I would say that they are criminal,” said Aguilar. “In my entire career, I have never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population.”

    The post US Security Contractor: ‘I Saw Israel Commit War Crimes At Gaza Aid Sites’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US, UK In Secret Talks With Ukrainian Officials To ‘Replace Zelensky’

    Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has revealed that US and British officials recently held a meeting in the Alps with top Ukrainian officials to discuss “replacing” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

    According to a statement made available to TASS, the meeting involved Andrey Yermak, head of the Ukrainian president’s office, Kirill Budanov, chief of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, and Valery Zaluzhny, the country’s ex-commander-in-chief who is now Ukraine’s ambassador to London..

    “The Americans and the British announced their decision to propose Zaluzhny to the Ukrainian presidency.

    The post US, UK In Secret Talks With Ukrainian Officials To ‘Replace Zelensky’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • It Shouldn’t Have Taken This Much For Mainstream Voices To Start Speaking Up About Gaza

    Israel’s top human rights group B’Tselem has finally declared that Israel is committing genocide, as has the Israel-based Physicians for Human Rights. The Israeli organizations join Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN human rights experts, and the overwhelming majority of leading authorities on the subject of genocide in their conclusion.

    The debate is over. The Israel apologists lost. And we are seeing this reflected in mainstream discourse.

    Pop megastar Ariana Grande has started speaking out in support of Gaza, telling her social media followers that “starving people to death is a red line.” This is a new threshold. Opposing Israel’s genocide is now the most mainstream as it has ever been.

    MSNBC just ran a piece explicitly titled “Israel is starving Gaza. And the U.S. is complicit.”, featuring a segment with the virulently pro-Israel Morning Joe slamming the mass atrocity. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, himself a former AIPAC employee, has done a 180 and is now raking Israel over the coals on the air for its deliberately engineered starvation campaign. The New York Times finally overcame its phobia of the g-word with an op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”

    We’re now seeing notoriously Zionist swamp monsters in the Democratic Party like Barack Obama, Hakeem Jeffries, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar changing their tune and attacking Netanyahu and Trump for their joint genocide project in Gaza, with increasingly forceful pushback from some on the right like Marjorie Taylor Greene as well.

    As western pundits, politicians, and celebrities suddenly pivot to denouncing Israel’s genocidal atrocities after two years of silence, it’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago, we were being told that saying “death to the IDF” is a hate crime.

    People who’ve been staring at this genocide from the beginning have been asking the entire time, what is it going to take? What will it take for our society to stop sleepwalking through inane trivialities and vapid distractions and start opposing the holocaust of our day?

    Raining military explosives on a giant concentration camp packed full of children wasn’t enough.

    Burning children alive wasn’t enough.

    Systematically destroying Gaza’s entire healthcare infrastructure — up to and including entering hospitals they’ve attacked and destroying individual pieces of medical equipment one by one — wasn’t enough.

    Killing more journalists than were killed in both World Wars, plus the US Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, the War in Afghanistan, and the ongoing war in Ukraine wasn’t enough.

    The systemic rape and torture of prisoners wasn’t enough.

    https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1949587236434931921

    IDF soldiers routinely sharing photos and videos of themselves mockingly dressing in the clothes of dead and displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead and displaced Palestinian children wasn’t enough.

    Israeli officials openly expressing genocidal intent for the people of Gaza wasn’t enough.

    The US president and Israeli prime minister openly declaring their goal of the complete ethnic cleansing of a Palestinian territory wasn’t enough.

    Field testing new weapons of war on Palestinians like they’re guinea pigs in a laboratory wasn’t enough.

    Leaving countless civilians to slowly suffocate or die of dehydration, trapped under the rubble of bombed buildings, wasn’t enough.

    Creating an AI system to ensure that suspected Hamas fighters are bombed when they’re at home with their children and naming it “Where’s Daddy?” wasn’t enough.

    Using Palestinians as human shields wasn’t enough.

    Burying injured civilians alive with bulldozers wasn’t enough.

    https://x.com/GozukaraFurkan/status/1949232008216887774

    The IDF admitting to running a popular Telegram channel called “72 Virgins,” which posted extremely gory and sadistic snuff films of people in Gaza being butchered by Israeli forces, wasn’t enough.

    IDF snipers routinely shooting children in the head and chest throughout the Gaza Strip wasn’t enough.

    The IDF flying drones, which play the sounds of crying babies at night in order to lure out hiding civilians to murder them, wasn’t enough.

    IDF troops telling the Israeli press that they’re being ordered to massacre starving civilians seeking food from aid sites wasn’t enough.

    Israeli snipers targeting different body parts of starving civilians on designated days — leg day, head day, genitals day, etc — wasn’t enough.

    Far right Israeli citizens setting up blockades to stop aid trucks from entering Gaza while they enjoyed parties and barbecues at the blockade sites wasn’t enough.

    https://x.com/mamoun_linda/status/1949190406211825696

    Using lies and propaganda to dismantle the aid system for bringing essential food and life-supporting supplies into Gaza, to replace it with a US/Israeli op where aid seekers are massacred every single day, wasn’t enough.

    Using siege warfare to starve Gaza for the previous 22 months deliberately wasn’t enough.

    But now that starvation has hit a critical point and deaths from malnutrition are skyrocketing, now that images of dead skeletal children are filling our screens, now that the damage to organs and brains from starvation will be irreversible in many cases — now it’s enough.

    That was the line, apparently. That’s what mainstream Western consciousness has decided is too much. Everything up until that line was fine, but now it’s not fine anymore.

    And the killing is still going on. The sudden awakening of conscience hasn’t translated into any material actions or changes at all yet. If it had come in October or November 2023, like it should have, we might be seeing that opposition translate into actually saving Gaza by now, but the light has only just been switched on. It’s not even guaranteed that those who are speaking up will continue to do so.

    https://x.com/d_boeckner/status/1949137485776265514

    I’m glad people are waking up to the cruel reality of this nightmare. I’m grateful to each and every influential voice who uses their platform to speak out, even at this late date. I truly am.

    But I also think we need to take a very hard, very uncomfortable look at ourselves as a society right now. If all those monstrous abuses were tolerable for us over these last two years, there’s something deeply and profoundly sick about our civilization.

    We are not living right. We are not thinking right. We are not feeling right. We are warped and twisted. The information we consume and the norms we’ve been conditioned to accept have corrupted our souls.

    We have been made into something bad. Something ugly. Something shameful. Something we need to do everything in our power to change.

    We need to rescue ourselves from what we have become. We need to transform, deeply and radically, into something that could never again allow something like this to occur.

    https://x.com/BlakPantherBabe/status/1949834226343293339

    The way things are clearly isn’t working. The mainstream worldview is clearly a lie. Everything we’ve been taught to believe about our society, our nation, our government, and our world was clearly false.

    We need to fight our way through the cognitive dissonance of recognizing that our entire way of looking at things as a collective has failed, and we need to find a new way of being.

    Otherwise, we’re going to keep being smashed in the face with increasingly horrifying reminders of what we have allowed ourselves to become.

    The lessons will repeat until they are learned.

    We had better start learning them.

    The post It Shouldn’t Have Taken This Much For Mainstream Voices To Start Speaking Up About Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • While the Neo-Nazi Group The Base Ramps up Recruitment, Trump’s FBI Looks the Other Way

    13 OCTOBER 2024 -- Neo-Nazis attending the Ultimate Trump Boat Parade in Jupiter, Florida, in support of Donald Trump for the 2024 US presidential election.
    Pre-2024 Election Pro-Trump Boat Parade

    Under Donald Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel, federal attention to tracking far‑right groups has reportedly waned, enabling neo-Nazi, militia and accelerationist groups to mobilize and recruit new members more openly and easily. One of the most active of these  groups is The Base, a violent paramilitary network that promotes accelerationism; a doctrine calling on followers to hasten the collapse of society through acts of terrorism.

    As the Guardian recently reported, “In its early history, part of what first piqued the interest of authorities was the Base’s courting of military veterans who could help drill its foot soldiers in a series of training camps across the US. Eventually implicated in an assassination plot, mass shootings and other actions in Europe, the Base went so far as to have a fortified compound and cell in Michigan, led by a US army dropout.”

    According to the Guardian, “Online evidence from its various accounts, several of which live on Russian servers to avoid censorship on American sites, shows the Base has real plans for a national gathering this summer where members intend to train in paramilitary drills as in years past.

    The Counter Extremism Project reported that in mid-February, Rinaldo Nazzaro, the leader of the The Base, “released a video on a Russian video streaming platform. … [that] was labeled as an interview for the Greek chapter of the neo-Nazi skinhead group Combat 18 earlier in the month.

    Nazzaro promoted The Base and accelerationism, claiming, ‘As conditions continue to deteriorate in our countries, we can potentially use that as an opportunity for us to gain power [in a specific geographic area].’

    Nazzaro also praised the Atomwaffen Division (AWD) and confirmed that former AWD members are currently in The Base. Nazzaro also claimed that a member of The Base had been present at the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, but that he attended as a member of a different organization. Nazzaro criticized white supremacists who were celebrating the 2024 election of Donald Trump, repeating that there was no political solution and stating that white people could only be saved via ‘extra-constitutional’ tactics. Nazzaro concluded by encouraging Europeans to contact him on several platforms and join The Base.

    Another post soliciting financial support, read: “The Base in [the] USA is preparing for an upcoming national training event. This one might be our most attended training event in [the] USA in a while. We could really use some financial support to help our members with travel expenses.”

    The post continued: “When you donate money to the Base, you’re investing in a White Defense Force that’s aiming to protect white people from political persecution and physical destruction.”

    The Guardian pointed out that “The Base … published a new photo of armed members claiming to be in the midwest, which follows a trend in 2025 of the group bragging about its unafraid American presence. As a sort of taunt to its enemies, on the day of Trump’s inauguration the Base released a photo of four members somewhere in Appalachia, in what was the largest number of American members in one photo in over a year

    “’The upcoming national training event indicates that the group is seeking to grow and is willing to take the risk of advertising it publicly in advance,” said Joshua Fisher-Birch, an analyst of far-right terrorism who has been following the Base’s movements for close to a decade. ‘The Base appears to be actively seeking to grow in the US.’”

    Fisher-Birch notes that while small in numbers,

    An event entails planning, coordination, travel and face-to-face meetings between different regional groups, indicating that they operate in an environment where they view the potential amount of risk as acceptable. The group has previously stated multiple times that being a member or training with them is a risky endeavor; however, planning a meetup, which they will inevitably use for propaganda purposes, is a different approach than even a year ago, when the group advertised regional activities.

    The Guardian reached out to the FBI for comment and a spokesperson said it only investigates people who have or are planning to commit a federal crime and pose “a threat to national security”.

    “Our focus is not on membership in particular groups but on criminal activity,” spokesperson said. “Membership in groups is not illegal in and of itself and is protected by the first amendment.”

    The resurgence of groups like The Base is no coincidence. It’s happening in a political climate where monitoring far-right extremism is being downplayed, defunded, or outright ignored. Trump’s FBI has de-prioritized domestic white supremacist threats, creating a vacuum that paramilitary groups are rushing to fill. By looking away, the administration has opened the door for extremists to recruit, organize, and train with alarming speed. The danger isn’t just that these groups are growing, it’s that they’re doing so with fewer obstacles than ever.

    The post While the Neo-Nazi Group The Base Ramps up Recruitment, Trump’s FBI Looks the Other Way first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Rethink Sanctions: They’re Killing As Many People As War Does

    Broad economic sanctions, most of which are imposed by the U.S. government, kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people each year — disproportionately children. This week the Lancet Global Health journal published an article that estimated that number at about 564,000 annually over a decade. This is comparable to the annual deaths around the world from armed conflict.

    Sanctions are becoming the preferred weapon of the United States and some allies — not because they are less destructive than military action, but more likely because the toll is less visible.

    The post Rethink Sanctions: They’re Killing As Many People As War Does appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • HIPS Journalists: Honorable Intelligent Persistent Sane: Abby Martin and Gaza and MIC

    And who wouldn’t want this journalist in the trenches fighting with you for truth?

    It was an honor to have her on my show, which airs July 30, 6 pm PST at KYAQ.org. Finding Fringe. DV gets the show early! Listen here.

    And, remember, Gaza now, but China in 2027, we will see blood. These fucking war lords and tech LGBTQ+ and straight/cis fucking devils want war with China.

    TWENTY TWENTY SEVEN — the year of the GOAT: The US is conducting intensive military exercises around the Pacific on a scale, intensity and tempo, not seen since the Cold War. In the meantime, frontline US and NATO troops are actively deploying and rehearsing war. Some top-level US officials have calendared 2027 as the date for war to start. Is the die already cast for war with China?

    Here, Abby Martin signed on to this petition, as I did, and this was 10 months (Jan 2023) before the most current Jewish State of Murdering Maiming Starving Polluting Poisoning Thieving Occupied Palestine GENOCIDE:

    DSA International Committee

    Open Letter to US Congressional Representatives marking our opposition to the US Innovation and Competition Act (USICA) January 25, 2022

    WASHINGTON, DC: The undersigned chapters and members of the Democratic Socialists of America and other allied organizations and individuals strongly condemn Congress’s use of industrial policy and other elements of the proposed US Innovation and Competition Act (USICA) to counter China as part of a new Cold War fueled by US imperialist interests, which further destabilizes geopolitical relations and jeopardizes efforts toward greater global cooperation on issues affecting everyone worldwide.

    We call on members of Congress to oppose this aggressive escalation and push back on the narratives that have fueled rising anti-Chinese sentiment in the US, marked by increased anti-Asian racism and violence. We oppose the USICA and other legislation that calls for increased military budgets, further militarization of the Asia Pacific region, and fosters anti-Chinese propaganda efforts, all based on nothing more than perceived threats to US geopolitical interests. Elected members of the US Congress have the duty to prioritize the needs and concerns of their working-class constituents instead of those of arms manufacturers and defense contractors who have fueled decades of endless war at the expense of genuine global cooperation and common prosperity for working-class people everywhere.

    We believe that US industrial policy should not be built upon imperialist ambitions that serve only to drag the world into a new Cold War. We believe that working people in the US and elsewhere deserve policies that invest in public works programs, climate resilience, infrastructure, healthcare, and more. The US Innovation and Competition Act is not created for those purposes; instead, it is overwhelmingly focused on preserving US global hegemony by fabricating narratives aimed at painting China as a threat and riling up global conflict in an effort to undermine an increasingly multipolar world. If enacted, the bill would ramp up interference in the sovereignty of nations throughout the world, establish an anti-Chinese federal bureaucracy, intensify the militarization of US global policies, and continue the legacy of US industrial policy being weaponized against socialist movements globally. This legislation will promote confrontation and conflict with China, escalate the potential for military conflict between nuclear powers, and hinder global cooperation needed to address critical issues like climate change.

    For these reasons, we strongly condemn the USICA and urge members of Congress to oppose the bill and call for an end to US policies that threaten hundreds of millions of people in the Asia Pacific region and could spiral into worldwide conflict.

    Abby Martin and I talked about the fact that this empire of chaos, terror, amnesia and in my words, empire of agnotology, is on crack and Ritalin. In a 24-hour news cycle, there are literally hundreds of stories on the WWW that would be of interest to journalists and educators like myself and hard-working media mavens like Abby.

    [Fifty Fucking Years Ago, published.]

    One My Lai Massacre (500 killed, dozens wounded, raped, maimed) every week in Gaza. Where is the outrage? Real time genocide, as they say, Cell Phone/Telegram/TikTok produced fucking genocide:

    Stop calling this “Netanyahu’s war” when the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis support the genocide. This is a fully radicalized society—that’s why Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions are necessary. on X, Abby Martin

    Michael Fakhri, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, has been warning of this — and argues there is an obligation to act:

    “We knew that Israel had intended to starve the Palestinians in Gaza since October 9, 2023 when Israel announced explicitly its plan to starve the Palestinians in Gaza. For 20 months, the governments of the world were on notice and had many opportunities to stop what’s happening. There are arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for the war crime of starvation against Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Gallant. In fact, the International Court of Justice itself in January, recognized there is famine and starvation in Gaza. That creates a mandatory obligation. Countries MUST act to stop starvation. So it creates a legal obligation for every country in the world to step in and end this starvation and famine in Gaza today. So what must happen now? Governments can [should] act through the General Assembly because the United States keeps exercising its veto at the Security Council. When that happens, the General Assembly has the authority to call upon peacekeepers to accompany humanitarian convoys into Gaza to protect the convoys and bring aid.”

    This below was Goddamn Five Months Ago:

    Abby was just in Bogota, for that fiasco: The Hague Group. Listen to her go off on those countries that didn’t even sign on, that is, in the interview above.

    She said that of all the folks she’s interviewed for her various platforms, but mostly Empire Files, the grassroots activists and organizers and on the ground folk she most closely aligns to. Or empathizes with, and/or valorizes with a small “v”. But Corbyn is her hero.

    Bring in the fucking navies, man, all those logistics personnel to get the food, meds, doctors/nurses, clean water, psychologists, media, tents and prefab homes to these people NOW!

    A CALL TO CONSCIENCE: AN APPEAL TO THE LEADERS OF THE WORLD

    The tragedy unfolding in Gaza is a test of our shared humanity. Entire families are being murdered. Children — even babies — have been killed. Others are wasting away from hunger. This appalling disregard for human life and dignity must end, for it is a violation of the most basic moral code.

    Malaysia calls on all world leaders to act with urgency. Every government that believes in international law, every nation that claims to value human life, must speak with one voice.

    In this regard, I urge all those with influence over Israel to find the courage to act decisively. I especially appeal to US President Donald Trump to use that influence to press for an immediate end to the killing, stop the indiscriminate bombings, and ensure that humanitarian aid reaches those in need without obstruction.

    This is the hour for moral leadership. This is the time to uphold the values we claim to defend.

    Malaysia stands ready to work with all nations—North and South, East and West—to bring relief to Gaza, and to restore the basic principles of humanity. Let us not be remembered as those who stood by. Let us be guided by our conscience, to answer suffering with compassion, and to pursue peace for the sake of our humanity.

    ANWAR IBRAHIM

    Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim delivers a speech.

    I’ve followed Project Censored for a time, having my various college students tap into that, those 25 most under-reported and de-platformed or just not covered stories annual recognition (in the mainstream press, that is).

    Project Censored

    She appeared in this flick:

    I gave her the honorific that she, like so many others, not only know what that leash is, but she and others just yank out the bloody peg holding truth back.

    “The U.S. military is the largest institutional polluter in the world. There is no corporation or industry that compares to the damage and devastation done by the U.S. war machine,” Martin told Watchdog host Lowkey.

    She’s got skin-kin-amigos-colleagues in the game — she did that documentary years ago, 2019. Gaza Fights For Freedom

    Yes indeed, her work with Telesur is what got Empire Files up and running, and the sanctions against Venezuela, that forced EF to go to a subscription basis.

    Abby Goes to Palestine

    Sources and Links

    Videos

    Podcasts

    Support Abby’s Work

    We did not get into the new documentary on the military industrial complex under the umbrella of US’s Military:

    She’s making the rounds now as the film is about to be final edited, cut, sound-enhanced and soon to be released:

     

    There’s emphasis on the carbon and polluting and poisoning footprint of the military, for sure. I want to get into other issues tied to the +Military Legal Retail Energy Oil Chemical Mining Education Surveillance Prison Policing Finance Banking Real Estate Entertainment PR Congressional Transportation Ag Pharma Medical COMPLEX.

    All the harms done not just through direct kinetic forces shooting and sniping, but the overall psychological harm, that collective consciousness of trauma, that epigenetic force of a military and the uniforms and badges and pips and medals and camo and flyovers and complete saturation of military mindset as well as the first hand, second hand and third hand damage wars do to entire generations and beyond.

    Forget about just the toxins and the depleted uranium and land mines. It’s the terror of those drones, or the threat of war, or the respective countries in USA’s and 14 Eyes’ gun sights having to spend time and resources and valuable human lifetimes to fend off the enemy, or the threat of war, or coup or sanctions.

    We need a Military Madness Offensive Weapons footprint calculator like we do for water (water footprint) or ecology (ecological footprint). Even those two standard bearers of sustainability education do not put in the PSYCHOLOGICAL and SOCIOLOGICAL harms done to places without water or those places with degraded and deadly water caused by industrial and post-industrial (data centers, AI, etc) for- profit endeavors.

    Do this for each part and paint smear on a B-2 bomber. Life Cycle Analysis/ Assessment of a coffee maker? Or the coffee that gets put into that Kureig? Oh, that is a fun experiment — where the coffee is grown, how, by whom, in which system of exploitation, which systems, who owns the finca, who works the finca, which Western company owns the brand, and then where the coffee fruit goes, or gets dried and then roasted, and then the criss-cross of all this raw product throughout the global chain, and then, packaging, transporation, marketing, middle men, and alas, in that Trader Joe’s as Trader Joe’s brand organice (is that beyond organic, or shade tree or frair trade or co-op locally owned coffee?)

    Check out this WordPress piece:

    Life Cycle Assessment of Espresso Machines

    Life Cycle Assessment of Espresso Machines

    Life Cycle Assessment of Espresso Machines

    Life Cycle Assessment of Coffee Production Ben Salinas December 18, 2008

    So, let’s do the same thing for just ONE US Mercenary product, hell, just a bloody set of boots, which ones, Timberline?

    [Belleville Boot Company and Rocky Boots were recently selected to supply the U.S. Army with about 36,700 pairs of newly-designed Jungle Combat Boots.]

    U.S. Army Boots Get an Upgrade | Incredible Polyurethane

    This system of destruction — the greatest polluter and enemy of the earth — relies on that complex +Military Legal Retail Energy Oil Chemical Mining Education Surveillance Prison Policing Finance Banking Real Estate Entertainment PR Congressional Transportation Ag Pharma Medical COMPLEX. And relies on the thousands of Boeing’s and GE’s and all the cool companies on planet earth who are hiring cool kiddos and youth and adults to do the bloody Faustian Bargain.

    Hell, in fact, some of those major Defense/Offensive Industries have parent and partner companies, so, at GE, for example, you can work on sustainability:

    15.5MW offshore wind turbine ...

    About GE Vernova

    GE Vernova Inc. (NYSE: GEV) is a purpose-built global energy company that includes Power, Wind, and Electrification segments and is supported by its accelerator businesses. Building on over 130 years of experience tackling the world’s challenges, GE Vernova is uniquely positioned to help lead the energy transition by continuing to electrify the world while simultaneously working to decarbonize it. GE Vernova helps customers power economies and deliver electricity that is vital to health, safety, security, and improved quality of life. GE Vernova is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., with approximately 75,000 employees across approximately 100 countries around the world. Supported by the Company’s purpose, The Energy to Change the World, GE Vernova technology helps deliver a more affordable, reliable, sustainable, and secure energy future.

     

    (Photo by Sebastien SALOM-GOMIS / AFP) (Photo by SEBASTIEN SALOM-GOMIS/AFP via Getty Images)

    So your brother is at the other division of GE:

    The General Electric GAU-8/A Avenger is ...

    (GE) has a history of involvement in the military and defense industry, including the production of weapons and military equipment. While GE Aerospace focuses on engines and related systems for aircraft, they also have a history of manufacturing weapons and weapon systems. GE produced the M134 Minigun and the GAU-8 Avenger cannon, among other systems. They also supplied components and systems for various military aircraft and naval platforms. GE has also been involved in the development of jet engines for military aircraft.

    We all get folded into this evil machine, this war machine, at every level, even all those community colleges with drone programs! Here, from California, where Abby and her family reside:

    City College of San Francisco (Link)
    Diablo Valley College (Link)
    Gavilan College (Link)
    Los Medanos College (Link)
    Mission College (Link)
    Ohlone College (Link)
    Santa Rosa Junior College (Link)
    Skyline College (Link)
    West Valley College (Link)

    Mt. San Antonio College (Link)

    Santa Ana College (Link)
    Coastline College (Link)
    Orange Coast College (Link)
    Cypress College (Link)
    Fullerton College (Link)

    In Israel, ‘Death to Arabs’ chants are common—but ‘Death to leftists’ is also heard. To ultranationalists, leftists are AIDS and Arabs are the common cold. You have to purge those tying your hands before carrying out the final solution — Abby Martin on X

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  • Animal Farm Amerika

    It was 80 years ago that George Orwell’s book Animal Farm was published. The last words of the book sum up what we have now been experiencing in Amerika:

    The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which. (Internet Archive, p 71)

    Orwell chose the pig to signify the smartest of animals, those who can learn quickly due to their high intelligence amongst the animal world. His reference to ‘Man’ was that of someone who is oppressive and tyrannical. Allow me to introduce you to Donald ‘The Trump’, ruler of Amerika.

    So, we have a contradiction to all that we, as little school kids and civics students, were taught. Instead of honoring the ‘Salt of the Earth’ which Orwell’s pigs represented, Donald ‘The Trump’s’ Amerika honors the ‘Man’ from the novel. Herding up the undocumented then shipping them out, nullifying the right to dissent AKA Protest, cutting away a Safety Net to help us pigs, cutting medical care, AKA Medicaid, along with funding for proper government to give tax breaks for a fraction of 1% of Amerikans, all done to create a Big Beautiful Amerika following the guidelines of Project 2025.

    The neighbor around our corner was out mowing her tiny lawn. She is a 50-something medical office worker who hollered this to my wife: “No one is going to lose their medical coverage, except those damn illegals. That is where the fraud is bankrupting us!” By her anger, one could see her in 1930’s Germany waving her finger at those ‘Damn Jews’, wishing them all away. In Donald ‘The Trump’s’ Amerika there have to be scapegoats to ease the pain of the corporate noose around her neck. When she or her family member needs an emergency operation and or a nursing home bed, who will be there to pay the $ hundreds of thousands? When her son’s young daughter needs food sustenance and there is no SNAP money to keep her nourished after he is out of work and his unemployment is terminated…

    Who else becomes the ‘Man’ in a new Amerika? Could it be the absentee landlord who keeps raising the already too-high rent? Or the cable TV provider that gets away with higher charges? Perhaps the private medical insurance company that pushes everyone into Medicare Advantage so as to NOT have to cover them properly. Maybe it’s the politicians who have the BEST health coverage our tax dollars pay for, and turn a blind eye (for decades) to us pigs in need.

    What the MAGA phenomenon should teach us is what Orwell meant by the end of his novel.

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  • How Not to Reform a University: Trump’s Harvard Obsession

    The messy scrap between the Trump administration and Harvard University was always more than a touch bizarre. On June 4, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation claiming that the university was “no longer a trustworthy steward of international student and exchange visitor programs.” It had not pursued the Student Exchange Visa Program (SEVP) in good faith and with transparency, nor adhered “to the relevant regulatory frameworks.” The university had failed to furnish the government with sufficient information “to identify and address misconduct”, thereby presenting “an unacceptable risk to our Nation’s security”.

    The nature of that misconduct lay in foreign students supposedly engaged in any number of scurrilous acts vaguely described as “known illegal activity”, “known dangerous and violent activity”, “known threats to other students or university personnel”, “known deprivation of rights of other classmates or university personnel”, and whether those activities “occurred on campus”. Harvard had failed to provide any useful data on the “disciplinary records” of such students. (The information on the three miscreants supplied in the lists was not just inadequate but useless.) Just to make Trump foam further, Harvard had “also developed extensive entanglements with foreign countries, including our adversaries” and flouted “the civil rights of students and faculty, triggering multiple Federal investigations.” While the proclamation avoids explicitly mentioning it, the throbbing subtext here is the caricatured concern that the university has not adequately addressed antisemitism.

    In various splenetic statements, the President has made no secret of his views on the university. On Truth Social, we find him berating the institution for “hiring almost all woke, Radical left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’”. The university was also hectored through April by the multi-agency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism to alter its governance processes, admissions and hiring policies, and academic programs. The administration demanded via an April 11 letter to Harvard’s president that a third party be hired to “audit” the views of students, faculty, and staff to satisfy government notions of “viewpoint diversity” that would also include the expulsion of specific students and the review of “faculty hires”.  Extraordinarily, the administration demanded that the audit “proceed on a department-by-department, field-by-field, or teaching-unit-by-teaching-unit basis as appropriate.” Harvard’s refusal to accede to such demands led to a freezing of over $2.2 billion in federal funding.

    On May 22, the Department of Homeland Security cancelled Harvard’s means of enrolling students through the SEVP program or employing J-1 non-immigrants under the Exchange Visitor Program (EVP). In its May 23 filing in the US District Court for Massachusetts, the university contended that such actions violated the First Amendment, the Due Process Clause, and the Administrative Procedure Act.  They were “in clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.”

    The June 4 proclamation proved to be another sledgehammer wielded by the executive, barring non-immigrants from pursuing “a course of study at Harvard University [under the SEVP program] or to participate in an exchange visitor program hosted by Harvard University”.  The university successfully secured a temporary restraining order on June 5, preventing the revocation from taking effect. On June 23, US District Judge Allison D. Burroughs granted the university’s request for a preliminary injunction, extending the temporary order. “The case,” wrote Burroughs, “is about core constitutional rights that must be safeguarded: freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of speech, each of which is a pillar of a functioning democracy and an essential hedge against authoritarianism.” The “misplaced efforts” by the government “to control a reputable academic institution and squelch diverse viewpoints seemingly because they are, in some instances, opposed to this Administration’s own views, threaten these rights.”

    On July 21, the parties again clashed, this time over the issue of restoring the funds frozen in federal research grants. Burroughs made no immediate decision on the matter but barely hid her scepticism about the government’s actions and inclinations. “If you can make decisions for reasons oriented around free speech,” she put to Justice Department senior attorney Michael Velchik, “the consequences are staggering to me.”

    Harvard’s attorney Steve Lehotsky also argued that the demands of the government impaired the university’s autonomy, going beyond even that of dealing with antisemitism. These included audits of viewpoint diversity among faculty and students, as well as changes to the admissions and hiring processes. The demands constituted “a blatant, unrepentant violation of the First Amendment.” The issue of withdrawing funding was also argued to be a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires an investigation, the holding of a hearing, and the release of findings before such a decision is made.

    Velchik, very much in the mood for sophistry, made less of the antisemitism issue than that of contractual interpretation. Under government contracts with institutions, language always existed that permitted the withdrawal of funding at any time.

    If Trump were serious about the MAGA brand, then attacking universities, notably those like Harvard, must count as an act of monumental self-harm. Such institutions are joined hip and all to the military-industrial-education complex, keeping America gorged with its complement of engineers, scientists, and imperial propagandists.

    Harvard has also shown itself willing to march to the music of the Israel lobby, which happily provides funds for the institution. The extent of that influence was made clear by a decision by the university’s own Kennedy School to deny a fellowship to Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, in early 2023. While the decision by the morally flabby dean, Douglas Elmendorf, was reversed following much outrage, the School had displayed its gaudy colours. Little wonder, given the presence of the Wexner Foundation, which is responsible for sponsoring the attendance of top-ranked Israeli generals and national security experts in a Master’s Degree program in public administration at the university.

    Trump is partially right to claim that universities and their governance structures are in need of a severe dusting down. But he has shown no interest in identifying the actual problem. How wonderful, yet unlikely, it would be to see actual reforms in university policies that demilitarize funding in favor of an enlightened curriculum that abhors war.

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  • Palestinians Fight for Survival is at the Forefront of a Worldwide Struggle against Global Fascism

    Q: How long did you teach mathematics at Cal State University, Northridge?

    David Klein:  I was there for a little more than three decades. Before that, I taught at UCLA and USC, and before that at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. There, I got into some trouble. I was arrested for taking over a U.S. Senator’s office along with half a dozen Quakers in protest of weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras. I also had a little run-in with the Ku Klux Klan and was sued by right-wing Central American students for bringing in speakers they didn’t like. They sued me for “mental anguish”. Of course, the suit was thrown out of court, but it was a distraction. So, when I got the position at CSUN, I was very happy to get a permanent position there.

    Q:  So “mental anguish” …. that’s a recurring theme of the critics.

    DK:  Yes, it’s one of their tools. Claiming to feel bad about what we talk about.

    Q:  How did you become interested in Israel-Palestine?

    DK:  Well, it was kind of gradual. When I was a kid, I was very pro-Israel. And then in college, I started to have doubts and talked to more people. And the more I learned, the more obvious it was that this was a settler colonial state that was engaged in pretty much what the United States did to the Native Americans. And then there was a real spike in my understanding and activity with the 2009  “Cast Lead” assault on Gaza by Israel. That really increased my activism. It was just a new level of outrage that I and many people felt.

    Q:  I understand you didn’t talk about politics in your mathematics classes, but that you were otherwise active. What did you do, and what attacks or censorship did you experience?

    DK: That’s right. I was careful not to bring it up in my classes since it didn’t really have direct relevance. But I was the faculty advisor for Students for Justice in Palestine and for the Student Green Party and a few other student groups. So, I created a webpage, a BDS resource webpage on the university server from my faculty webpage. Then, I wrote an open letter that was signed by many CSU faculty, administrators, and students to the chancellor of the entire CSU system, demanding that CSU end the study abroad program in Israel for a variety of reasons.

    That got some news coverage and brought a lot of attention to my website. So, that was the start of a lot of attacks.

    There were hundreds of calls to my university president that I be fired. There were some threats, some kind of death threats. There were some threats to the administration to withhold financial contributions. There was just lots of slander. Some of it came from the campus itself, but it was mostly outside from the Zionist Organization of America, a group called AMCHA, and other groups. And then there were some politicians who joined in the attacks. The local congressman, Brad Sherman, and a California assembly member, Bob Blumenfield, who later became a city council member.

    An Israeli-supported law firm pressured then Attorney General Kamala Harris to prosecute me. And they separately asked the Los Angeles City attorney to do that. But those requests came to nothing. Still, I was required to produce massive amounts of emails, anything regarding Israel-Palestine, and regarding logistical planning to bring in guest speakers Ilan Pappe and Norman Finkelstein. These threats and demands went on and on for a long time. And on my website, I  posted a page of the threats, the nasty comments, and the calls for my removal. They were signed by doctors and other professionals, but used really low-level language.  The ugliness that it brought out was amazing.

    Q: So you were part of organizing and hosting famous academics such as Norman Finkelstein and Ilan Pappe. How did those visits go, and what were the results?

    DK: The Norman Finkelstein visit lasted a week. He gave three lectures, and there was a group of us who wanted to hire him at CSUN after he lost tenure at DePaul University. And so that included 30 faculty members from various departments, including the science departments and social studies, social science departments, and a wide range. And it was going well. We got the approval of a department that wanted to hire him, the journalism department, and it went up to the top, and we were all set to go. And then, at the last minute, it was vetoed by the campus president. Norman asked me to write an article about the whole thing, which I did.

    The visit of Ilan Pappe came later in 2012.  We had to have campus police escorts because of the threats. But he was very persuasive and compelling. Both of these guests were. The students were very engaged and it went well.

    Q:  I know that there was a big campaign to prevent the tour by Ilan Pappe, but ultimately, the presidents of several CSU universities defended his right to speak. Is that correct?

    DK: Three of the campus presidents wrote a letter defending academic freedom. It was an open letter, but it went to the chancellor of the entire CSU system. The visits went smoothly logistically because of that. And it was pretty rare that campus presidents would stand up for academic freedom and freedom of speech for speakers like Ilan Pappe, who very strongly promotes Palestinian human rights.

    Q: You’ve been an active supporter of the cultural and academic boycott of Israel. Why do you think this is important?

    DK: It’s an important part of the general Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Academics and culture are very important within Israel. And so this particular aspect of BDS lends what we think is special leverage to isolate the Zionist state because of its actions. Israeli universities are deeply complicit in the persecution and genocide of Palestinians. Maya Wind’s new book, “Towers of Ivory and Steel”, documents that very clearly. Focusing on academics is very pertinent to what’s going on. And the cultural boycott has a very large impact. Everybody recognizes when a famous artist, a singer, or a musician refuses to go to Israel and states the reasons.

    Q: But critics of Israel and supporters of BDS are under attack. Do you think the censorship and attacks are the same as in the past? Or is it getting worse?

    DK:  It’s getting much worse. The accusation of anti-semitism has been weaponized. Students, teachers, and professors are facing frivolous lawsuits. Students are facing expulsions. Faculty are facing job loss. Both are facing arrests and deportations for opposing genocide because it might hurt the feelings of the killers. Zionist students and outside advocates of genocide claim to feel unsafe because of demonstrations against Israel’s genocide. And they call human rights activists “anti-semitic”.  Even the Jewish activists. And so it’s much more intense now than in the past. They were just sort of getting warmed up on people like me, and now they’ve really sharpened their knives.

    Q:  Do you have any strategy suggestions for campus activists who oppose the genocide happening in Gaza?

    DK: Yes. I think we would do well to be less defensive and go on the offense. Pleading academic freedom and denying that we’re anti-semites is not really going very far. I think we need to move in the direction of accusing the accusers. Israeli soldiers are intentionally killing babies and children, shooting boys in their testicles, torturing doctors to death, and more broadly, carrying out the extermination of the entire Palestinian people. These are the worst of the worst. And we need to point to them, not just defend ourselves from their empty accusations.

    By defining opposition to genocide as antisemitic, they’ve turned antisemitism into a virtue. Hitler could have only dreamed of this kind of linguistic transformation. And in this sense, the Zionists are the biggest antisemites on the planet. They’re the worst of humanity. So I think that the least vulnerable among us should take the lead, especially US-born tenured professors.

    And we should focus on where the real power is.  For K-12 schools, it is the school boards. But for almost all colleges and universities in the United States, whether they’re public or private, the board of trustees is the institution’s highest decision-making or governance body.

    Members of the board are typically very rich. They have a lot of political power within the country, not just in universities. To give one example, Miriam Adelson is on the USC Board of Trustees. Miriam Adelson was married to the late Sheldon Adelson. He was a very rich billionaire. Both of them are rich billionaires. And Miriam Adelson’s Foundation contributes $200 million each year to Israel. And she was one of the biggest Trump donors as well. So, there are a lot of university trustees like that. They come from weapons manufacturers, the oil and gas industry, and other major corporations. And they’re overwhelmingly Zionist.

    University presidents, who appear to be in charge of their campuses, serve at the pleasure of the boards and can be hired and fired at the whim of these boards of trustees. So the boards of trustees are the real power at universities. They are behind the persecution of opponents of genocide. The college presidents who do cave in to the Zionist censors should face no-confidence votes from their faculty senate on campus. But, there really hasn’t been enough focus on the boards of trustees. And I think that’s the next step. There are a number of people who are coming to the same conclusion on campuses and universities.

    A lot of research would be involved to find out who these people are, what their background is, expose them to the public, and show what they’re doing, and try to get them kicked out. Replace them with decent human beings. It’s like you’re either for genocide or against it. If you don’t care, that doesn’t say much good about you. So being anti genocide is the minimal criterion for human decency. After all, if they’re going after and attacking people who are trying to stop a genocide, that makes them horrible human beings, and they shouldn’t be in charge of anything.

    Q: Do you have any final comments?

    DK: I think the importance of the Palestinians’ fight for survival can hardly be overstated. Their struggle is not only for themselves, but it’s at the forefront of a worldwide struggle against global fascism. And that includes the climate catastrophe, because global fascism can only accelerate planetary suicide.

    David Klein is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). 

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  • News Wrap: Silicon Valley gets its way in US AI plan

    There are three names attached to the Trump administration’s newly published AI Action Plan. One is the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the other two are Silicon Valley luminaries. The first is David Sacks, a member of the so-called Paypal mafia, the group of hyper successful founders or early employees of the company….

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  • Trump unveils AI action plan, vows US will win race with China

    The Trump administration has released a new artificial intelligence blueprint that aims to loosen environmental rules and vastly expand AI exports to allies, in a bid to maintain the American edge over China in the critical technology. President Donald Trump marked the plan’s release on Wednesday (Thursday AEST) with a speech where he laid out…

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  • Silicon Valley Sociocide

    The rise of modern capitalism created and reflected the industrial technological revolution. The technology of the steam engine, coal, oil, and gas energy grids, and machinery, the railroads, automotive technology, and the telegram and telephone were all essential technological changes enabling the creation of the factory and industrial mass production. The new industrial technology shaped the nature of productive relations in the machine age, making possible both industrial production itself in the factory and the distribution of supplies and goods that sustained productive and market relations. Vast concentrations of capital and corporate power crystallized in the Robber Baron era of the late 19th century. This was an era of sociopathic accumulation that dehumanized and exploited workers, while creating gaping inequality. The labor unions that arose in its wake created a powerful corrective that also nurtured class solidarity and a sense of the common good.

    The shift to post-industrialism was associated with the rise of a powerful new set of capitalist elites and new corporate centers of production, finance, and communication. In the 21st century, Silicon Valley became the symbol of the new post-industrial high-tech world. It would become the showcase of the new high-tech companies, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, which were becoming the first trillion-dollar companies, led by tycoons such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Peter Thiel, all fabulously wealthy members of the Big Tech power elite. Silicon Valley introduced itself as a modern miracle, bringing unprecedented new productivity and prosperity that would benefit both owners and workers, and contribute to the betterment of the general population with magical new products such as the personal computer, the iPhone, and the new internet-based world of online culture and communication on social media. This new world revolutionized the economic and social spheres, while also having major uses and implications for politics and the military. Because billions of people globally now have iPhones or personal computers, with access to the new online universe of the internet and social media, Silicon Valley seemed to open up not only a transformative new economy for entrepreneurs and knowledge workers but a transformed, newly connected world of online social communication and relationships.

    This is not entirely an illusion. The online world does open up new social connections and political connections, with social media being a powerful new tool for the younger generation to build new friendships, communities, and politics. But Silicon Valley’s fantastic new array of electronic communications and online connections may also prove to be a gateway to weak social relations and ultimately the end of strong face-to-face social relationships, as well as democracy itself. We face a sociocidal transformation fueled by high tech, with Silicon Valley also proffering its own politics of authoritarianism. Sociocide is the process by which human connection is largely severed, and individuals are only concerned for themselves. A sociocidal society is one in which solidarity is nonexistent and meaningful human relationships are destroyed.

    Several sociocidal forces emerge directly from the economic restructuring created by huge Big Tech firms, especially the “Magnificent Seven,” whose individual worth now reaches into the trillions:  Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), and Tesla. One is the interest of these corporate high-tech elites, much like their corporate counterparts in other spheres, in eroding the face-to-face workplace and social ties that can challenge their power. In the workplace, that translates into the intensified attack on secure employment, unionism, and a collective physical workplace. The intent is to weaken the social relations of workers in the workplace – and more broadly, to subvert the solidarity and face-to-face connections of people throughout society that can challenge authoritarianism in both work and politics.

    Focusing first on the workplace, the Magnificent Seven play a special role here by creating and developing the technology – including the personal computer, iPhone, internet apps, AI, robots, and social media — that allows corporate elites to create a precariat of dispersed and contingent workers, increasingly separated from each other, while also replacing millions of workers and transferring their jobs to robots and other AI inventions.

    The most rapid replacement of workers by robots and AI is in high-skill jobs. Matt Sigelman, president of the Human Resources Institute, summarized his Institute’s widely circulated report on AI, saying, “There’s no question the workers who will be most impacted are those with college degrees, and those are the people who always thought they were safe.” He indicates that: “Companies in finance, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, have some of the highest percentages of their payrolls likely to be disrupted by generative A.I. Not far behind are tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Meta.”

    Tech workers, talented and highly trained, are developing the tools allowing their companies to eliminate many of their own jobs. Meanwhile, employers are also using robots to replace low-skill workers. The sociocidal tech impulse of Silicon Valley, as in other sectors, is embraced because of its profit-saving capacity. And the fastest way to increase profit is to reduce wages, usually by weakening relations among employees or busting unions.

    The Magnificent Seven have used their overwhelming economic power to directly undermine unions, the most effective form of worker social relations and organization. In January 2024, Elon Musk, now legendary for his anti-union and broader right-wing views, filed a lawsuit in federal courts to declare unconstitutional the National Labor Relations Board, which protects and regulates workers’ right to organize. In August 2024, just before his re-election, Trump joked with Musk about firing workers, complimenting Musk during a two-hour conversation on X for firing Tesla workers who wanted to strike. “They go on strike,” Trump said to Musk, “and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone.’” Trump then added, “You’re the Greatest!” The UAW filed labor charges against both Trump and Musk for the unfair labor practices that the two had celebrated; Musk’s Tesla had clashed with union activists for years, and the NLRB in 2021 had found that the non-union Tesla violated labor laws when it fired a union organizer.

    One of Musk’s Magnificent Seven compatriots, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, quickly joined in Trump and Musk’s union-busting party, filing a copycat suit to make the NLRB and unions unconstitutional. Here, we see the world’s two richest men, leaders of the High-Tech Robber Barons, exploiting economic size to reap the fruit of their technology’s economic power. They are seeking a revolutionary breakdown of workplace social relations, moving from the sociopathy of the first Gilded Age to the sociocide of today’s Gilded Age.

    The Magnificent Seven’s power undercuts workplace social relations and fiercely attacks union solidarity in the name of free-spirited libertarianism running rampant in Silicon Valley. The broader corporate success in drastically weakening unions is key to sociocide in the entire US labor force and has been achieved not only by the anti-union fervor of corporations since the New Deal but also by the zeal of the Republican Party from Reagan through Trump to make the destruction of labor solidarity and unions a top political priority.

    _________________________________________

    The above is an excerpt from Charles Derber’s most recent book, Bonfire: American Sociocide, Broken Relations, and the Quest for Democracy.

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