radiofree.asia

Category: US Congress

  • Fund Care Not Killing

    As Americans prepare their taxes for Tax Day on April 15, remember that the U.S. government continues to spend the citizen’s money to fund mass violence against Palestinians. What could the U.S. fund instead of more weapons to Israel? In collaboration with our partners, U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights-Action (USCPRA), we updated our visual series, Fund Care Not Killing, to show that the $17.9 billion in military funding that U.S. lawmakers sent to Israel to fuel genocide in 2024 could have been used to fund housing, healthcare, education, and solar electricity for millions of Americans instead.



    th=”50%”>

    Despite support from over 60% of Americans to halt military funding to Israel, the U.S. continues to aid and abet Israel’s genocide against Palestinians with the American people’s tax dollars. In February, the Trump administration approved an additional $8 billion in arms sales to Israel to fuel its genocidal campaign in Gaza.

    While Senator Bernie Sanders attempted to block the sale, it was rejected by the majority of the U.S. Senate.

    It is important to continue to push U.S. Congress members to represent the will of the American people. If you are an American citizen or resident, you can take action by emailing your members of Congress to call for an arms embargo on Israel. USCPRA’s site, NotMyTaxDollars.org, has more graphics and posters you can use to tell Americans how much of their tax money is spent fueling Israeli violence.

    The post Fund Care Not Killing first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Financial Coup: How the Deep State Is Using Manufactured Crises to Seize Power

    What we’re witnessing is the calculated use of emergency powers to concentrate power in the hands of the president, enrich the Deep State, and dismantle what remains of economic and constitutional safeguards.

    Nearly 250 years after our nation’s founders rebelled over abused property rights, Americans are once again being subjected to taxation without any real representation, all the while the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little concern for the plight of its citizens.

    Nothing has changed for the better with Donald Trump. Indeed, it’s getting worse by the day.

    Having inherited one of the strongest economies in the world, President Trump—whose credentials as a businessman include multiple failed business ventures, bankruptcies, and a mountain of debt and unpaid bills—has managed to singlehandedly torch the economy with his misguided tariffs and self-serving schemes, which are being carried out without any oversight or checks from Congress.

    Yet it is Congress, not the president, that holds the authority to control government spending.

    This is spelled out in the Appropriations Clause, found in Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution, which establishes a rule of law about how the monies paid to the government by the taxpayers are to be governed, and in the Taxing and Spending Clause of Article I, Section 8, Clause 1. In a nutshell, Congress is in charge of accounting for those funds and authorizing how those funds are spent (or not spent).

    The founders intended this regulatory power, referred to as the “power of the purse” (to determine what funds can be spent and what funds can be withheld) to serve as a potent check on any government agency that exceeds its authority, especially the executive branch.

    As law professor Zachary Price observes, “Given how strong this check is, it may not be surprising that presidents have sought ways to get around it.”

    Yet while past presidents have sought to expand their authority under the guise of national emergency declarations, Trump has taken this executive overreach to unprecedented extremes.

    Price explains how various presidents from Obama to Biden to Trump have attempted to subvert that same congressional power to press their own agendas, whether by funding the Affordable Care Act, advancing student debt, or as in Trump’s case, by dismantling and defunding agencies funded by Congress.

    Executive orders and national emergencies have become a favored tool by which presidents attempt to govern unilaterally. As the Brennan Center reports, presidents have access to 150 such emergency powers, which essentially allow them to become limited dictators with greatly enhanced powers upon declaration of an emergency.

    Because the National Emergencies Act does not actually define what constitutes an emergency, presidents have an incredible amount of room to wreak constitutional mischief on the citizenry.

    While presidents on both sides of the aisle have abused these powers, Trump is attempting to test the limits of these emergency powers by declaring a national emergency anytime he wants to sidestep Congress and quickly impose his will on the nation.

    Trump’s liberal use of emergency powers to sidestep the rule of law underscores the danger they pose to our constitutional system of checks and balances.

    Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has used his presidential emergency powers in a multitude of ways in order to mount brazen power grabs thinly disguised as concerns for national security, thereby allowing him to justify tapping into the nation’s natural resources, rounding up and deporting vast numbers of migrants (both documented and undocumented), and imposing duties and tariffs against longtime allies and trade partners.

    Thus far, the Republican-controlled Congress, which has the power to terminate an emergency with a two-thirds vote, has done nothing to rein in Trump’s dictatorial tendencies.

    These unchecked powers aren’t just a threat to the balance of government—they have immediate, devastating consequences for the economy and working Americans.

    Economists fear the ramifications of Trump’s latest national emergency, which he claims will usher in “the golden age of America” through the imposition of heavy tariffs on foreign nations, could push the U.S. and the rest of the world into a major recession by inciting a global trade-war, isolating America economically from the rest of the world, and flat-lining businesses that had expected to boom.

    Fears of a recession are growing stronger by the hour.

    In addition to sabotaging the economy, laying off tens of thousands of federal employees and dismantling those parts of government which serve the interests of working-class Americans, as well as its aging, disabled and homeless populations, Trump and his cabal of billionaire buddies are dismantling the few remaining checks on public and private corruption—fueling corporate greed at every turn.

    This is how the man who promised to drain the swamp continues to mire us in the swamp.

    Meanwhile, taxpayers—whose retirement savings have taken a nosedive—are expected to foot the bill to the tune of tens of millions of dollars for Trump’s frequent golf trips to his own golf courses (he’s also charging exorbitant rates to Secret Service to stay at his properties while protecting him), his multimillion-dollar photo ops at the Super Bowl and the Daytona 500, his desire to redo the White House gardens and build a $100 million ballroom, and his latest demand for a costly military parade in honor of his 79th birthday.

    While President Trump may talk a good game about his plans for making America richer, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the only person he’s making richer—at taxpayer expense—is himself.

    This fiscal insanity, coupled with Trump’s imperialistic and tyrannical ambitions, echoes the very abuses that drove America’s founders to rebel against King George III.

    In other words, the government is still robbing us blind.

    Trump hasn’t reined in the government’s greed—he’s just been using a different playbook to get the same result: beg, borrow or steal, the government wants more of our hard-earned dollars any way it can get it.

    Indeed, Trump, the self-proclaimed “debt king,” has presided over one of the most reckless expansions of government spending in modern history while posturing as a fiscal conservative.

    This isn’t governance. It’s looting—by legislation, debt, and design.

    We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

    This is financial tyranny.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if you have no choice, no voice, and no real say over how your money is used, you’re not free.

    You’re being ruled.

    The post A Financial Coup: How the Deep State Is Using Manufactured Crises to Seize Power first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Bloody Eschatology: Israel and the next Big War

    The push towards an all-out war in the Middle East is moving out of its sleepwalking phase to that of conscious eschatological reckoning.  A blood filled, fiery Armageddon will reveal the forces of virtue, linking the evangelicals of the United States with the right-wing Jewish nationalists in Israel.  That appalling prospect is certainly not one to discount: the messianic are always a frightful bunch, thinking history and selectively pruned religions texts to be on their side.

    Each week now comes with some measure of sabotage, mutilation and disruption to prospects of peace.  In his July 24 address to the US Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined his crude Manichean vision in routine barking fashion.  In doing so, his intention, as Noa Landau pithily put it, was not to end the war in Gaza so much as prolong it.

    For Netanyahu, the strained chords of civilisational rhetoric are never far away.  He would like other powers to muck in, battling the fiends he calls an “axis of terror”.  Impediments to the Jewish state’s war efforts had to be rejected.  To impose them would see other countries of similar kidney shackled.  “If Israel’s hands are tied, America is next.  I’ll tell you what else is next: the ability of all democracies to fight terrorism will be imperilled.”

    Room was reserved to attack the International Criminal Court, whose chief prosecutor has sought warrants of arrest against himself and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and the presidents of notable US universities.  As for protesting students, they had chosen to “stand with evil.  They stand with Hamas.  They stand with rapists and murderers.”  With daring outrage, he blotted out any notion that Palestinian civilians were being butchered, despite a death toll in the densely populated strip hovering near 40,000.  Indeed, civilian deaths had been “practically none,” with Israel scrupulous in “getting civilians out of harm’s way, something people said we could never do”.

    With this blood crusted Weltanschauung, acts of destabilising mayhem are automatic.  Showing an utter contempt for Israeli hostages, let alone any humanity for the Palestinians they regard with expansive condescension, the Netanyahu government thought it wise to carry out two assassinations: that of Hamas’ political chief and chief negotiator Ismail Haniyeh, and Hezbollah’s top military chief Fuad Shukr, both killed within twenty-four hours in Beirut and Tehran respectively.

    The response to the assassinations in Israel was one of relish – at least for those of the Itamar Ben-Gvir school of thought.  As David Issacharoff, writing in Haaretz, described it, “Israel has become a Matryoshka doll of pyromaniacs.”  From his skewed vantage point as National Security Minister, assassinations are staple food for the state.  The killing of Hezbollah’s second in command, ostensibly for his alleged role in an attack on a Druze village in the Golan Heights, drew the gleeful response that “Every god has his day”.

    Despite certain Israeli media reports claiming an order from Netanyahu that ministers were to stay silent over Haniyeh’s killing, the enthusiasts were voluble in rapture.  Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, also of Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, expressed his glee on social media, claiming that “this is the right way to clean the world of this filth.”  There were to be “No more imaginary ‘peace’/surrender agreements, no more mercy for these sons of death.”

    Other cabinet ministers also joined the gloating chorus.  “Careful What You Wish For,” wrote Minister for the Diaspora Amichai Chikli over a video of Haniyeh in a conference hall while people chanted “Death to Israel.”  Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi resorted to biblical verse: “So may all your enemies perish, O Lord.”

    Despite no official confirmation of Israel’s role in the killing of the senior Hamas official, the Government Press Office posted, if only briefly, an image of Haniyeh which left no room for nuance: “Eliminated: Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas highest-ranking leader, was killed in a precise strike in Tehran, Iran.”

    The richly violent musings of Ben-Gvir and his circle of sanctified terror have even proven indigestible for some members of the war cabinet.  Defence Minister Gallant, not immune from the urge to dehumanise the residents of Gaza, accused his national security counterpart of being a “pyromaniac”.  On the X platform, he declared his opposition against “any negotiations to bring him into the war cabinet – it would allow him to implement his plans.”  The same Gallant, however, was also in celebratory mood about the assassinations.

    Even outside the war cabinet, the views of Ben-Gvir, not to mention his overall influence, travel with toxic rapture.  In the background, incandescently inspiring, is Rabbi Dov Lior, a figure of glowing nationalist fury. It was he who incited members of the Jewish Underground to conduct various terrorist attacks in the 1980s against Palestinians.  (The same group also unsuccessfully plotted to blow up the Dome on the Rock.)

    This, as former UK diplomat Alastair Crooke observes, is the State of Judea doing battle against the State of Israel.  He quotes Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, former Chief of Staff of the IDF, who sees such bloody eschatology as resting on a fundamental concept: “Jewish supremacy” or “Mein Kampf in reverse”.  For Rabbi Lior, the next big war cannot come soon enough, one, he anticipates, that is bound to feature Gog and Magog.

    The post Bloody Eschatology: Israel and the next Big War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Only a Failing US Empire Would Be So Blind as to Cheer Netanyahu and his Genocide

    There is only one country in the world right now, in the midst of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is guaranteed dozens of standing ovations from the vast majority of its elected representatives.

    That country is not Israel, where he has been a hugely divisive figure for many years. It is the United States.

    On Wednesday, Netanyahu was back-slapped, glad-handed, whooped and cheered as he slowly made his way – hailed at every step as a conquering hero – to the podium of the US Congress.

    This was the same Netanyahu who has overseen during the past 10 months the slaughter– so far – of some 40,000 Palestinians, around half of them women and children. More than 21,000 other children are reported missing, most of them likely dead under rubble.

    It was the same Netanyahu who levelled a strip of territory – originally home to 2.3 million Palestinians – that is expected to take 80 years to rebuild, at a cost of at least $50bn.

    It was the same Netanyahu who has destroyed every hospital and university in Gaza, and bombed almost all of its schools that were serving as shelters for families made homeless by other Israeli bombs.

    It was the same Netanyahu whose arrest is being sought by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, accused of using starvation as a weapon of war by imposing an aid blockade that has engineered a famine across Gaza.

    It was the same Netanyahu whose government was found last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to have been intensifying Israel’s apartheid rule over the Palestinian people in an act of long-term aggression.

    It was the same Netanyahu whose government is standing trial for committing what the ICJ, the world’s highest judicial body, has termed a “plausible genocide”.

    And yet, there was just one visible protester in the congressional chamber. Rashida Tlaib, the only US legislator of Palestinian heritage, sat silently grasping a small black sign. On one side it said: “War criminal”. On the other: “Guilty of genocide”.

    One person among hundreds mutely trying to point out that the emperor was naked.

    Cocooned from horror

    Indeed, the optics were stark.

    This looked less like a visit by a foreign leader than a decorated elder general being welcomed back to the Senate in ancient Rome, or a grey-haired British viceroy from India embraced in the motherland’s parliament, after brutally subduing the “barbarians” on the fringes of empire.

    This was a scene familiar from history books: of imperial brutality and colonial savagery, recast by the seat of the imperium as valour, honour, civilisation. And it looked every bit as absurd, and abhorrent, as it does when we look back on what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

    It was a reminder that, despite our self-serving claims of progress and humanitarianism, our world is not very different from the way it has been for thousands of years.

    It was a reminder that power elites like to celebrate the demonstration of their power, cocooned both from the horrors faced by those crushed by their might, and from the clamour of protest of those horrified by the infliction of so much suffering.

    It was a reminder that this is not a “war” between Israel and Hamas – let alone, as Netanyahu would have us believe, a battle for civilisation between the Judeo-Christian world and the Islamic world.

    This is a US imperial war – part of its military campaign for “global, full-spectrum dominance” – carried out by Washington’s most favoured client state.

    The genocide is fully a US genocide, armed by Washington, paid for by Washington, given diplomatic cover by Washington, and – as the scenes in Congress underlined – cheered on by Washington.

    Or as Netanyahu stated in a moment of unintentional candour to Congress: “Our enemies are your enemy, our fight is your fight, and our victory will be your victory.”

    Israel is Washington’s largest military outpost in the oil-rich Middle East. The Israeli army is the Pentagon’s main battalion in that strategically important region. And Netanyahu is the outpost’s commander in chief.

    What is vital to Washington elites is that the outpost is supported at all costs; that it doesn’t fall to the “barbarians”.

    Outpouring of lies

    There was another small moment of inadvertent truth amid Netanyahu’s outpouring of lies. The Israeli prime minister stated that what was happening in Gaza was “a clash between barbarism and civilisation”. He was not wrong.

    On the one side, there is the barbarism of the current joint Israeli-US genocide against the people of Gaza, a dramatic escalation of the 17-year Israeli siege of the enclave that preceded it, and the decades of belligerent rule under an Israeli system of apartheid before that.

    And on the other side, there are the embattled few desperately trying to safeguard the West’s professed values of “civilisation”, of international humanitarian law, of the protection of the weak and vulnerable, of the rights of children.

    The US Congress decisively showed where it stood: with barbarism.

    Netanyahu has become the most feted foreign leader in US history, invited to speak to Congress four times, surpassing even Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill.

    He is fully Washington’s creature. His savagery, his monstrousness is entirely made in America. As he implored his US handlers: “Give us the tools faster and we’ll finish the job faster.”

    Finish the job of genocide.

    Performative dissent

    Some Democrats preferred to stay away, including party power broker Nancy Pelosi. Instead, she met families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza – not, of course, Palestinian families whose loved ones in Gaza had been slaughtered by Israel.

    Vice President Kamala Harris explained her own absence as a scheduling conflict. She met the Israeli prime minister, as did President Joe Biden, on Thursday.

    Afterwards, she claimed to have pressed Netanyahu on the “dire” humanitarian situation in Gaza, but stressed too that Israel “had a right to defend itself” – a right that Israel specifically does not have, as the ICJ pointed out last week, because Israel is the one permanently violating the rights of the Palestinians through its prolonged occupation, apartheid rule and ethnic cleansing.

    But the dissent of Pelosi – and of Harris, if that is what it was – was purely performative. True, they have no personal love for Netanyahu, who has so closely allied himself and his government with the US Republican right and former president Donald Trump.

    But Netanyahu simply serves as an alibi. Both Pelosi and Harris are stalwart supporters of Israel – a state that, according to the ICJ’s judgment last week, decades ago instituted apartheid rule in the Palestinian territories, using an illegal occupation as cover to ethnically cleanse the population there.

    Their political agenda is not about ending the annihilation of the people of Gaza. It is acting as a safety valve for popular dissatisfaction among traditional Democratic voters shocked by the scenes from Gaza.

    It is to deceive them into imagining that behind closed doors, there is some sort of policy fight over Israel’s handling of the Palestinian issue. That voting Democrat will one day – one very distant day – lead to an undefined “peace”, a fabled “two-state solution” where Palestinian children won’t keep dying in the interests of preserving the security of Israel’s illegal settler-militias.

    US policy towards Israel has not changed in any meaningful sense for decades, whether the president has been red or blue, whether Trump has been in the White House or Barack Obama.

    And if Harris becomes president – admittedly, a big if – US arms and money will continue flowing to Israel, while Israel will get to decide if US aid to Gaza is ever allowed in.

    Why? Because Israel is the lynchpin in a US imperial project for global full-spectrum dominance. Because for Washington to change course on Israel, it would also have to do other unthinkable things.

    It would have to begin dismantling its 800 military bases around the planet, just as Israel was told by the ICJ last week to dismantle its many dozens of illegal settlements on Palestinian territory.

    The US would need to agree a shared global security architecture with China and Russia, rather than seek to bully and batter these great powers into submission with bloody proxy wars, such as the one in Ukraine.

    The coming fall

    Pelosi, remember, smeared students on US campuses protesting Israel’s plausible genocide in Gaza as being linked to Russia. She urged the FBI to investigate them for pressuring the Biden administration to support a ceasefire.

    Netanyahu, in his address to Congress, similarly demonised the demonstrators – in his case, by accusing them of being “useful idiots” of Israel’s main foe, Iran.

    Neither can afford to recognise that millions of ordinary people across the US think it is wrong to bomb and starve children – and to use a war with an unachievable aim as the cover story.

    Hamas cannot be “eliminated” through Israel’s current bout of horrifying violence for a very obvious reason: The group is a product, a symptom, of earlier bouts of horrifying Israeli violence.

    As even western counter-terrorism experts have had to concede, Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza are strengthening Hamas, not weakening it. Young men and boys who lose their family to Israeli bombs are Hamas’s most fervent new recruits.

    That’s why Netanyahu insisted Israel’s military offensive – the genocide – in Gaza could not end soon. He demanded weapons and money to keep his soldiers in the enclave indefinitely, in an operation he termed as “demilitarisation and deradicalisation”.

    Decoded, that means a continuing horror show for the Palestinians there, as they are forced to continue living and dying with an Israeli aid blockade, starvation, bombs and unmarked “kill zones”.

    It means, too, an indefinite risk of Israel’s war on Gaza spilling over into a regional war, and potentially a global one, as tripwires towards escalation continue to grow in number.

    The US Congress, however, is too blinded by championing its small fortressed state in the Middle East to think about such complexities. Its members roared “USA!” to their satrap from Israel, just as Roman senators once roared “Glory!” to generals whose victories they assumed would continue forever.

    The rulers of the Roman empire no more saw the coming fall than their modern counterparts in Washington can. But every empire falls. And its collapse becomes inevitable once its rulers lose all sense of how absurd and abhorrent they have become.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Only a Failing US Empire Would Be So Blind as to Cheer Netanyahu and his Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Political Pretence: The Democrats and the Palestinians

    The fact that the Democrats currently occupy the White House has done little to ruffle the equation of blood and gore in the Middle East, notably regarding the fate of the Palestinians.  The ongoing Israeli campaign of stunning ruthlessness against the Gaza unfortunates is certainly a worry for some Democratic strategists, if only because certain voters are finally expressing an opinion on the subject.  Israel, right or wrong, is no longer an entirely plausible proposition.

    In swing states such as Michigan, the cranky and disgruntled on the issue, certain given the potential role of Arab American voters, is not negligible.  In May, a published Arab American Institute (AAI) poll revealed that support for President Joe Biden among Arab Americans had collapsed to a mere 20%.  This was telling, given that Biden had won 60% of the same voting bloc in 2020.

    The potential consequence of that shift has not gone unnoticed among pro-Israeli voices keen to arrest any potential tide.  On the electoral battleground, Representative Jamaal Bowman can count himself as one of the first Democratic figures to lose a primary for his stance against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.  (It should be said that his stance on Israel has not always been a consistent one.)  Bowman had previously defeated the hawkish Eliot Engel in New York’s 16th congressional district in the Bronx and southern Westchester County, the latter known for his cosy relationship, not only with Israel but with weapons manufacturers.

    Last month, it was Bowman’s turn to taste defeat, a fate more or less assured by the muscular support offered by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to his centrist opponent George Latimer, which came to a stunning US$14 million.  The scandalously hefty spending in that primary made it the most expensive in the history of the House of Representatives.

    At the highest levels, the scene is set for the pudding of mawkish insincerity.  The presumptive Democratic nominee for the White House is certainly offering this in spades.  Kamala Harris’s comments on the slaughter in Gaza and Israel’s overall policy towards Palestinians suggest political moulding and shifting, a ploy intended to stave off electoral threat.  Votes are at hand, and Israel’s tenacious brutality is not going down well in certain parts of the constituency.  But the usual acknowedgments and doffing the cap to supporting Israel always follow.

    The Vice President persists in reasserting her “unwavering commitment” to Israel’s sacrosanct right to defend itself.  This is then coupled with the concern – as she expressed to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu – of “the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians”.  (Harris-speak suggests that innocent civilians will always die in the cause.)

    Cheap, calculated language follows.  “The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety – sometimes displaced for a second, third, or fourth time – we cannot look away in the face of these tragedies.  We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.”

    Eman Abdelhadi of the University of Chicago finds such sentiments from Harris parch dry, arguing that a lack of “an actual commitment to stop killing the children of Gaza” invalidates any claims to empathy.  “To be empathetic to someone that you’re shooting in the head is not exactly laudable.  We don’t need empathy from these people.  We need to stop providing the weapons and the money that is actively killing the people that they’re supposedly empathising with.”

    Within the Democrats, there is some movement of disgruntlement, though this is the sort that rarely rises above the gravitas of paper ceremony and gesture.  Thomas Kennedy, a figure who co-founded the Miami-Dade Democratic Progressive Caucus in early 2017, wrote for The Intercept earlier this year explaining why he had left the Democratic campaign in disgust. “I am submitting my resignation in large part because of the Biden administration’s inexcusable support of Israeli war crimes and the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza”.  He also adds another reason: “the DNC’s role in protecting President Joe Biden from a democratic process that could check that complicity.”

    A survey available from the Brookings Institution suggests that electoral tremors among Democratic voters regarding support for Israel’s ongoing campaign will be manageable.  Bowman’s remarks that Israel is responsible for genocide tend to figure among a mere 7% of Democratic candidates.  From the survey work done by the thinktank, 18% of the candidates took what was described as “a more moderate position, saying that the US should make support for Israel conditional and call for a ceasefire.”

    The survey continues to note “a divide in the Democratic party, but the anti-Israel candidates compose only 2% of the primary winners.  Outside the most extreme position, the party is split fairly evenly, with most candidates displaying sympathy for Israel, but hesitancy to voice full-throated unconditional support.”

    In this show of performative grief for the plight of Palestinians, the Democrats can feign concern while still continuing the military and political support Israel has become so accustomed to.  The result is one of theatre that does little to alter the catastrophe taking place in Gaza, leaving the political furniture virtually untouched.

    The post Political Pretence: The Democrats and the Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Open Letter to Israel: I Want My Country Back

    To: The State of Israel, AIPAC and the International Zionist Movement

    I write as an American citizen. You have stolen my country, and I want it back.

    I did not ask for my country to be complicit in the ongoing genocide and attempted eradication of the people of Gaza and Palestine. I do not want to be complicit in the genocide of anyone. I do not want this crime to stain the name of the United States of America whenever it is spoken for the next century and for all eternity, and to bring shame upon me and my descendants, and to all others who hold American citizenship.

    The American people are as yet only partially aware of this crime. This is because you have been very successful in exerting a powerful influence on the media, the government, and other pillars of American society. I’m not saying you have done anything illegal. You may have, but you clearly prefer to use legal means as much as possible. And it is possible. US law allows anyone with the necessary means to own media, and – within very broad limits – to control who gets elected to government office and who gets appointed to other public offices.

    For better or worse, this is the American way, and it can be made better or worse than it is. But you have abused and corrupted it. You have strangled the political process so that any candidate who criticizes Israel and opposes aid to Israel cannot be elected, because you control the funding as well as the funders in a system which depends entirely on private campaign funds, and where corporations and other wealthy associations are permitted to participate.

    You have also strangled academic freedom to debate or protest Israel on American campuses through control of funding, resulting in harassment and removal of faculty and punishment of students. You have hijacked American film, news organizations, and other media so that only the information and views that you permit are widely available to the public.

    You use such influence to pass laws at all levels, requiring allegiance to Israel in order to obtain licenses and permits. You apply censorship to social media to prevent free expression of views, information and opinion that might reflect negatively on Israel. You mobilize posting of libel and slander against persons and businesses that criticize Israel and defend Palestinians and their allies.

    Your job, and that of the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, and the global network of sayanim (collaborators) is to assure, by these and any other available means, that Israel dominates all narratives, all public policy and decision making, and that all actions in both the public and private sphere are to the benefit of Israel. You have been enormously successful in capturing almost unlimited military and financial support from the US government, in controlling U.S. government policy, and in shaping American minds to accept and support a massive civilian genocide, including starvation and infection of hundreds of thousands and ultimately probably millions of innocent people.

    How can this happen? The American people have spoken and protested in many ways and in large numbers, and polls show that, in spite of your manipulations of US society, a majority of Americans do not support continued aid to Israel, and want an immediate ceasefire. Members of Congress have been deluged with letters, phone calls and email messages.

    But part of the system of controlling our government includes your parallel organization of shadow “advisors” or “minders” whose job it is to remain in the face of our elected and appointed officials, and to “recommend” what to say and how to vote, and to provide draft legislation and public announcements that the official can introduce and promote on behalf of Israel. Otherwise, you will threaten to find someone to replace her/him in the next election cycle.

    I feel helpless appealing to my members of Congress for anything that you oppose, no matter how many of my fellow citizens might join me. But I now realize that my members of Congress feel the same way. They really don’t have a choice any more than I do. In effect, therefore, they are mere avatars for you and your allies. You are our government.

    What can I do about this? I’m not sure, but a start might be to require AIPAC and other actors on behalf of Israel to register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, like all other representatives of foreign governments. Israel is a foreign government, isn’t it? As I recall, that was last tried by Sen. J. William Fulbright’s committee in 1963, but when Lyndon B. Johnson came to the presidency by assassination that year, the option faded. But, of course, it’s never too late.

    Second, we can overturn Citizens United, by whatever legal means necessary, if possible. Even better, we can prohibit or severely curtail private financing of elections, overturning Citizens United in the process, but going beyond, to eliminate some of the most obvious sources of public corruption. We can also legislate greater protection for free speech and the press, punish use of private donations to deny free speech and other civil rights, and enact similar measures.

    The problem with all such remedies, of course, is how to get them passed by institutions that are already under your corrupt control. I’m not sure I have an answer for that, but someone else might. Because even genocide will not save Israel, which is not defeating – and cannot defeat – Hamas. Perhaps Hamas and its allies will liberate both Palestine and the United States.

    The post Open Letter to Israel: I Want My Country Back first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Standing Ovation

    There’s no mention of their duty to the people in the oath of office that members of Congress take. It says they will support and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Maybe, in some regard, defending the Constitution would mean doing their job: representing the people that elected them. But today, the architect of the genocide against the Palestinian people walked in and out of the “people’s house” to a standing ovation. He was given more time with our lawmakers than any of us will ever get in our lifetime and he used it to insist he was a good man that was commanding a moral army — insisting they have not killed anyone who did not deserve to have their life ended in the blink of an eye.

    There are one thousand indications that our government has no obligation to us. This moment was just one — but it was one I will never let slip my mind. These people are no different than the settlers that gather in lawn chairs, eat popcorn, and cheer when the Israeli military drops bombs on apartment complexes in Gaza. For as long as they’ve been in office, they’ve had a front row seat to the carnage and all they do is gawk and cheer from the sidelines. Every once in a while, someone they are supposed to work for pesters them about their complacency and we are swatted away like flies.

    The majority opinion in the United States is against continued support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. Stories come out every week that push the needle further. Last week, the story of Muhammad Bhar surfaced and was circulated around the world. Muhammad was my age, 24, and had Down Syndrome. The Israeli military raided his home and let their dog attack him, tearing his arm to shreds. They separated him from his family, and left him in a room all by himself. They ordered his family to leave the house and left Muhammad to die — alone, bleeding, and scared. His family found Muhammad starting to decompose in the room the soldiers left him in. He still had a tourniquet on his arm from when theried to stop the bleeding. And they just left him there, like he was nothing.

    The Israeli military confirmed this story days later and Netanyahu gets a round of applause for his courage and leadership. They don’t even feel the need to lie to the world about their atrocities anymore — letting babies suffocate to death in incubators months ago was the litmus test for what the United States would let slide. Ordering an attack dog on a man with Down Syndrome and locking him in a room to die without his loved ones there to console him wasn’t the red line — because there will never be one.

    They gave a standing ovation.

    If a man like Benjamin Netanyahu had walked through their home and mangled their children’s bodies so much that they could never forget the way they looked afterward — I wonder if they would still applaud. I wonder if the screams of their family members burning alive in tents would potentially interrupt the thought that told them to clap, the thought that told them to give the man a standing ovation for his perfectly executed slaughter of thousands of human beings.

    Some part of me still wanted to believe that these people may still be completely misled — that perhaps they don’t know about the 15,000 children that have been killed. Maybe they haven’t seen what I’ve seen — the little girl with her face falling off, the boy with a missing head, the child with no legs, the mother unwilling to wash her children’s blood off her hands because it is all that is left of them. Maybe they haven’t seen it at all. As thunderous applause rang out for the murderer, there were thousands of people outside trying to signal to the millions of people in Palestine that their turmoil isn’t being ignored. They were pepper sprayed, beaten, and arrested by cops that were trained in Israel.

    When I saw the video of the standing ovation, something sunk in me — this is where I was born. This is where both of my parents were born. I have no nation to be loyal to but a nation tripping over themselves to kill my friends’ families. There is bloodlust in the US Congress — and bloodlust seems like the only thing they are loyal to. If there are “enemies” foreign and domestic, I fear they view us as the latter.

    I clap for my friends at their comedy shows. I clap for people after they finish a speech at a community event. I sometimes clap when the plane lands, if someone else does it first. To clap for an executioner of children, mothers, fathers and friends — how much did they sell their souls for?

    [Muhammad Bhar |Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un]

    • This article was originally published on Danaka’s Substack, Proof That I’m Alive. You can subscribe here!

    The post A Standing Ovation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Standing Ovation

    There’s no mention of their duty to the people in the oath of office that members of Congress take. It says they will support and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Maybe, in some regard, defending the Constitution would mean doing their job: representing the people that elected them. But today, the architect of the genocide against the Palestinian people walked in and out of the “people’s house” to a standing ovation. He was given more time with our lawmakers than any of us will ever get in our lifetime and he used it to insist he was a good man that was commanding a moral army — insisting they have not killed anyone who did not deserve to have their life ended in the blink of an eye.

    There are one thousand indications that our government has no obligation to us. This moment was just one — but it was one I will never let slip my mind. These people are no different than the settlers that gather in lawn chairs, eat popcorn, and cheer when the Israeli military drops bombs on apartment complexes in Gaza. For as long as they’ve been in office, they’ve had a front row seat to the carnage and all they do is gawk and cheer from the sidelines. Every once in a while, someone they are supposed to work for pesters them about their complacency and we are swatted away like flies.

    The majority opinion in the United States is against continued support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. Stories come out every week that push the needle further. Last week, the story of Muhammad Bhar surfaced and was circulated around the world. Muhammad was my age, 24, and had Down Syndrome. The Israeli military raided his home and let their dog attack him, tearing his arm to shreds. They separated him from his family, and left him in a room all by himself. They ordered his family to leave the house and left Muhammad to die — alone, bleeding, and scared. His family found Muhammad starting to decompose in the room the soldiers left him in. He still had a tourniquet on his arm from when theried to stop the bleeding. And they just left him there, like he was nothing.

    The Israeli military confirmed this story days later and Netanyahu gets a round of applause for his courage and leadership. They don’t even feel the need to lie to the world about their atrocities anymore — letting babies suffocate to death in incubators months ago was the litmus test for what the United States would let slide. Ordering an attack dog on a man with Down Syndrome and locking him in a room to die without his loved ones there to console him wasn’t the red line — because there will never be one.

    They gave a standing ovation.

    If a man like Benjamin Netanyahu had walked through their home and mangled their children’s bodies so much that they could never forget the way they looked afterward — I wonder if they would still applaud. I wonder if the screams of their family members burning alive in tents would potentially interrupt the thought that told them to clap, the thought that told them to give the man a standing ovation for his perfectly executed slaughter of thousands of human beings.

    Some part of me still wanted to believe that these people may still be completely misled — that perhaps they don’t know about the 15,000 children that have been killed. Maybe they haven’t seen what I’ve seen — the little girl with her face falling off, the boy with a missing head, the child with no legs, the mother unwilling to wash her children’s blood off her hands because it is all that is left of them. Maybe they haven’t seen it at all. As thunderous applause rang out for the murderer, there were thousands of people outside trying to signal to the millions of people in Palestine that their turmoil isn’t being ignored. They were pepper sprayed, beaten, and arrested by cops that were trained in Israel.

    When I saw the video of the standing ovation, something sunk in me — this is where I was born. This is where both of my parents were born. I have no nation to be loyal to but a nation tripping over themselves to kill my friends’ families. There is bloodlust in the US Congress — and bloodlust seems like the only thing they are loyal to. If there are “enemies” foreign and domestic, I fear they view us as the latter.

    I clap for my friends at their comedy shows. I clap for people after they finish a speech at a community event. I sometimes clap when the plane lands, if someone else does it first. To clap for an executioner of children, mothers, fathers and friends — how much did they sell their souls for?

    [Muhammad Bhar |Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un]

    • This article was originally published on Danaka’s Substack, Proof That I’m Alive. You can subscribe here!

    The post A Standing Ovation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Labour’s Parker critical of weak NZ response to ICJ ruling against Israel over Gaza

    By David Robie

    Former New Zealand attorney-general David Parker spoke on day 295 of Israel’ genocidal war on Gaza in Auckland today, condemning the National-led government’s inaction over the ongoing crisis.

    Responding to the recent International Court of Justice’s landmark advisory ruling that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem — Occupied Palestine — was illegal and must end as soon as possible, Parker said he was disappointed in New Zealand’s “equivocal” response.

    He also called on the government to recognise the state of Palestine, along with some 145 countries around the world that have already done so.

    Parker described the enthusiastic response to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the US Congress this week — at a time when the International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor is seeking an arrest warrant accusing him of war crimes — “shameful”.

    “I was appalled at the reception that Netanyahu was given in America . . .”

    Cries of “shame” from the crowd greeted his words.

    “. . . I agree that was shameful.

    Applauding of Netanyahu ‘appalling’
    “It was appalling that he was lauded the way that he was by the American parliament.

    “It is a shame that the New Zealand government does not recognise Palestine.

    “The Labour Party has called for the recognition of Palestine.”

    The ICJ advisory judgment also ruled that Israel was an apartheid state.

    This case was separate from the genocide one brought by South Africa against Israel in January which is still before the court.

    A large banner at the rally illustrated the massive global support for Palestine statehood, with a map showing the main countries that have not supported recognition to be the white English-speaking settler colonial nations such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States.

    The map banner at today's Auckland rally showing NZ among a minority
    The map banner at today’s Auckland rally showing NZ among a minority of US-led countries that have failed so far to recognise Palestinian statehood. At least 145 countries – an overwhelming majority of United Nations members – have already recognised Palestine. Image: David Robie/APR

    Among the speakers were two Palestinian teenagers, Lujain Al-Badry, who spoke of the litany of the latest Israeli massacres in Gaza — but she also highlighted the “forgotten” atrocities by illegal settlers and the military in the West Bank — and the other a poet who spoke passionately of the constant evictions of Palestinians from their own homes and land.

    More than 700 Israelis have illegally settled on Palestinian land since the territory was occupied during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war in defiance of repeated UN resolutions declaring the settlements unlawful.

    Lujain Al-Badry, 14, spoke of the latest Israeli massacres
    Lujain Al-Badry, 14, spoke of the latest Israeli massacres in Gaza and of the “forgotten” atrocities by illegal settlers in the West Bank at today’s rally. Image: David Robie/APR

    Irish activist and trade unionist Joe Carolan, just back from a visit to Ireland, spoke of the political drift to the right in France and other European Union countries and reminded the crowd that support for the Palestinian cause and against colonialism was “liberation for all”.

    The crowd marched around the block to protest outside the US consulate in Auckland, calling on Washington to end its support and funding for the Israeli genocide.

    At least 39,324 Palestinians have been killed and 90,830 others wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza since October 7, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

    Protesters at today's Auckland rally calling for an immediate ceasefire
    Protesters at today’s Auckland rally calling for an immediate ceasefire in Israel’s nine-month war on Gaza. Image: David Robie/APR

    The Surafend massacre
    Meanwhile, an RNZ podcast released at the weekend has revealed new insights into what has been described as the worst New Zealand military atrocity — the Surafend massacre during the First World War in Palestine in 1918.

    According to the new season RNZ’s Black Sheep podcast, New Zealand and Australian soldiers “murdered upwards of 40 Arab civilians in a Palestinian village” in December 2018.

    “But,” continued the podcast report, “more than 100 years later, we still don’t know exactly who did it, or why.

    “We investigate what one military historian describes as ‘by far the worst war crime ever committed by New Zealand military personnel’ — The Surafend massacre — and other allegations of war crimes against Anzacs in the Middle East and North Africa.”

    Dr David Robie is editor and publisher of Asia Pacific Report.

    Watermelon protest placards at today's pro-Palestinian rally
    Watermelon protest placards at today’s pro-Palestinian rally in downtown Auckland. Image: David Robie/APR

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The World Court has cleared the fog hiding western support for Israel’s crimes

    Don’t be fooled. The ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 19 July that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is unlawful is earth-shattering. Israel is a rogue state, according to the world’s highest court.

    For that reason, the judgment will be studiously ignored by the cabal of western states and their medias that for decades have so successfully run cover for Israel.

    Doubters need only watch the reception Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu receives during his visit to the United States this week.

    Even though he is currently being pursued for war crimes by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, the US Congress will give him a hero’s welcome when he addresses its representatives on Wednesday.

    The warm handshakes and standing ovations will be a reminder that Netanyahu has had the full backing of western powers throughout the nine-month slaughter of at least 16,000 Palestinian children in Gaza – with another 21,000 missing, most of them under rubble.

    The welcome will be a reminder that western capitals are fully on board with Israel’s levelling of Gaza and the starvation of its population – in what the same court concluded way back in January amounted to a “plausible genocide”.

    And it will serve as a heavy slap in the face to those like the World Court committed to international law – reminding them that the West and its most favoured client state believe they are untouchable.

    Western politicians and columnists will keep emphasising that the World Court is offering nothing more than an “advisory opinion” and one that is “non-binding”.

    What they won’t point out is that this opinion is the collective view of the world’s most eminent judges on international law, the people best positioned to rule on the occupation’s legality.

    And it is non-binding only because the western powers who control our international bodies plan to do nothing to implement a decision that doesn’t suit them.

    Nonetheless, the ruling will have dramatic consequences for Israel, and its western patrons, even if those consequences will take months, years or even decades to play out.

    ‘Top secret’ warning

    Last week’s judgment is separate from the case accepted in January by the ICJ that put Israel on trial for genocide in Gaza. A decision on that matter may still be many months away.

    This ruling was in response to a request from the United Nations General Assembly in December 2022 for advice on the legality of Israel’s 57-year occupation.

    That may sound more mundane a deliberation than the one on genocide, but the implications ultimately are likely to be every bit as profound.

    Those not familiar with international law may underestimate the importance of the World Court’s ruling if only because they had already assumed the occupation was illegal.

    But that is not how international law works. A belligerent occupation is permitted so long as it satisfies two conditions.

    First, it must be strictly military, designed to protect the security of the occupying state and safeguard the rights of the occupied people.

    And second, it must be a temporary measure – while negotiations are conducted to restore civilian rule and allow the occupied people self-determination.

    Astonishingly, it has taken 57 years for the world’s highest court to deliver a conclusion that should have been staring it – and everyone else – in the face all that time.

    The military nature of the occupation was subverted almost from the moment Israel occupied the Palestinian territories in June 1967.

    Within months, Israel had chosen to transfer Jewish civilians – mostly extreme religious nationalists – into the occupied Palestinian territories to help colonise them.

    Israel knew that this was a gross violation of international law because its own legal adviser warned it of as much in a “top secret” memo unearthed by the Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg some two decades ago.

    In a declaration enlarging on the ICJ’s reasoning, Court President Nawaf Salam specifically referenced the warnings of Theodor Meron, who was the Israeli foreign ministry’s legal expert at the time.

    In September 1967, his memo cautioned that any decision to establish civilian settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories “contravenes explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention”. Those provisions, he added, were “aimed at preventing colonization”.

    Nine days later, the Israeli government rode roughshod over Meron’s memo and assisted a group of young Israelis in setting up the first settlement at Kfar Etzion.

    Sham peace-making

    Today, hundreds of illegal settlements – many of them home to what amount to armed militias – control more than half of the West Bank and much of East Jerusalem.

    Rather than protecting the rights of Palestinians under occupation, as international law demands, the Israeli military assists Jewish settlers in terrorising the Palestinians. The aim is to drive them off their land.

    In the words of the Israeli government, the settlements are there to “Judaise” Palestinian territory. In the words of everyone else, they are there to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population.

    Which brings us to Israel’s second violation of the laws of occupation. In transferring hundreds of thousands of settlers into the occupied territories, Israel intentionally blocked any chance of a Palestinian state emerging.

    The settlements weren’t makeshift encampments. Some soon developed into small cities, such as Ariel and Maale Adumim, with shopping malls, parks, public pools, synagogues, factories, libraries, schools and colleges.

    There was nothing “temporary” about them. They were there to incrementally annex Palestinian territory under cover of an occupation that Washington and its European allies conspired to pretend was temporary.

    The whole Oslo process initiated in the early 1990s was a switch-and-bait exercise, or a “Palestinian Versailles”, as the Palestinian scholar Edward Said warned at the time.

    Israel was never serious about allowing the Palestinians meaningful statehood – a fact the then-Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, admitted shortly before he was killed by a far-right settler in 1995.

    Oslo’s sham peace-making was designed to buy more time for Israel to expand the settlements – while also binding the Palestinians into endless contractual obligations that were never reciprocated by Israel.

    In his incensed response to the court’s decision last week, Netanyahu gave the game away. He said: “The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], our historical homeland.”

    His is a bipartisan view in Israel. All the Jewish parties in the Israeli parliament take the same position.

    Last week they voted to reject any possibility of creating a Palestinian state on the grounds it would be an “existential threat” to Israel. Only a handful of legislators – all belonging to Israel’s Palestinian minority – dissented.

    Apartheid rule

    The World Court’s ruling is most significant in that it permanently blows apart western states’ cover story about Israel.

    The judges point out that Israel’s permanent occupation of the territories, and its transfer of Jewish settlers into them, has necessitated the development of two separate and distinct systems of laws.

    One is for the Jewish settlers, enshrining for them the rights enjoyed by Israelis. Palestinians, by contrast, must submit to the whims of an alien and belligerent military regime.

    There is a word for such an arrangement: apartheid.

    Over the past decade, a consensus had already emerged in the world’s human rights community – from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch – that Israel was an apartheid state.

    Now the world’s highest judicial body has declared that it agrees.

    Apartheid is a crime against humanity. This means that Israeli officials are war criminals, quite aside from the crimes they are currently committing in Gaza.

    That was why the Israeli media reported panic inside the Israeli government at the ICJ ruling.

    Officials fear that it will leave the International Criminal Court, its sister court, with no option but to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, as already requested by its chief prosecutor.

    It is also likely to strengthen the ICC’s resolve to prosecute more senior Israeli officials for crimes associated with Israel’s settlement programme.

    A former Israeli foreign ministry official told the Haaretz newspaper that the World Court ruling had punctured Israel’s claim to be a western-style state: “The democratic aura is no longer protecting us as it did before.”

    Acts of aggression

    The ICJ has concluded that Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians – as well as the ethnic cleansing policies implemented by its settler militias – are acts of aggression.

    The West’s depiction of a “conflict” between Israel and the Palestinians, with efforts to resolve this “dispute”, is wilfully muddled. Its depiction of Israel’s rampage in Gaza as a “war against Hamas” is a lie too, according to this ruling.

    The ICJ has effectively ridiculed the claim by Israel and its western allies that the occupation of Gaza ended when Israel pulled its soldiers to the perimeter fence and soon afterwards instituted a siege on the enclave by land, sea and air.

    Israel is judged to be fully responsible for the suffering of Palestinians before 7 October as well as after.

    It is Israel that has been permanently attacking the Palestinians – through its illegal occupation, its apartheid rule, its siege of Gaza, and its incremental annexation of territory that should comprise a Palestinian state.

    Palestinian violence is a response, not the inciting cause. It is the Palestinians who are the ones retaliating, the ones resisting, according to the judgment. The western political and media establishments have cause and effect back to front.

    There are further consequences to the ICJ’s ruling. You don’t compromise on apartheid. No one suggested meeting apartheid South Africa halfway.

    The racist foundations of such a state must be eradicated. Apartheid states must be reconstituted from scratch.

    The World Court demands that Israel not only pull its occupation forces out of the Palestinian territories and halt its settlement expansion but also dismantle the settlements in their entirety. The settlers must leave Palestine.

    The judges call too for “reparations” for the Palestinians for the enormous harm done to them by decades of occupation and apartheid.

    That includes allowing those Palestinians who have been ethnically cleansed since 1967 a right to return to their lands, and it requires Israel to pay large-scale financial compensation for the decades-long theft of key resources.

    Complicit in war crimes

    But the implications don’t just apply to Israel.

    In referring the case to the ICJ, the UN General Assembly requested the court advise on how its 192 member states should respond to its findings.

    If Israeli leaders are war criminals, then supporting them – as western capitals have been doing for decades – makes those states complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.

    For western powers, the ruling makes their continuing arms sales, diplomatic cover and the preferential trade status they give Israel collusion in the crime of prolonged occupation and apartheid.

    But there’s more. It also means that western states must not only stop harassing, and even jailing, those who seek to penalise Israel for its crimes – supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement – but should take up that very cause as their own.

    They are now under an implied legal obligation to join in such actions by imposing sanctions on Israel for being a rogue state.

    Already, Britain’s weaselly new Labour government has tried to shift attention away from the ruling and onto discursive terrain that better suits Israel.

    It responded with a statement that “the UK is strongly opposed to the expansion of illegal settlements and rising settler violence”.

    But as former British ambassador Craig Murray noted, that was not what the ICJ decided. “It is not the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements that is at issue. It is their existence,” he wrote.

    Similarly, the Biden administration bemoaned the court’s ruling. In an act of spectacular mental gymnastics, it argued that ending the occupation would “complicate efforts to resolve the conflict”.

    But as noted previously, according to the ICJ’s judgment, there is no “conflict” except in the self-serving imaginations of Israel and its patrons. There are occupation and apartheid – permanent acts of aggression by Israel towards the Palestinian people.

    Further, the US warned other states not to take “unilateral actions” against Israel, as the ICJ ruling obliges them to do. Washington claims such actions will “deepen divisions”. But a division – between the upholders of international law and lawbreakers such as Israel and Washington – is precisely what is needed.

    The World Court’s ruling upends decades of linguistic slippage by the West whose goal has been to move the ideological dial in favour of Israel’s incremental annexationist agenda.

    It is vitally important that activists, legal and human rights groups keep holding the feet of the British and US governments to the ICJ’s fire.

    The fog clears

    Israel’s supporters will take comfort from the fact that an earlier judgment from the World Court on Israel was roundly ignored by both Israel and its western patrons.

    Asked for an advisory opinion, the judges ruled in 2004 that, under cover of security claims, Israel was illegally annexing swaths of territory by building its 800km-long “separation wall” on Palestinian land.

    Israel did not dismantle the wall, though in response it did re-route parts of it and abandoned construction in other areas.

    But that two-decade-old ICJ ruling was much narrower than the present one. It was restricted to a specific Israeli policy rather than address the entirety of Israel’s rule over Palestinians. It did not impugn Israel’s political character, identifying it as an apartheid state. And there were few obvious implications in the ruling for Israel’s western patrons.

    And perhaps most importantly, Israeli officials were in no danger 20 years ago of being put in the dock by the International Criminal Court charged with war crimes, as they are now.

    The World Court decision tightens the legal noose around Israel’s neck, and makes it hard for the ICC to continue dragging its feet on issuing arrest warrants for Israeli officials.

    And that will put multinational corporations, banks and pension funds in an ever harder legal position if they continue to ignore their own complicity with Israel’s criminality.

    They may quickly find themselves paying a price with their customers too.

    Adidas could be one of the first victims of just such a backlash after it caved into Israeli pressure on 19 July to drop the Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid as the face of a new ad campaign – paradoxically, on the same day the World Court announced its ruling.

    There will also be ramifications for domestic courts in the West. It will be hard for judges to ignore the World Court’s opinion when their governments seek to punish Palestinian solidarity activists.

    Those promoting boycotts and sanctions on Israel, or trying to stop companies supplying Israel with weapons, are doing what, according to the World Court, western governments should be doing of their own accord.

    But, maybe most importantly of all, the ruling will decisively disrupt the West’s intentionally deceitful discourse about Israel.

    This ruling strips away the entire basis of the language western powers have been using about Israel. A reality that’s been turned upside down for decades by the West has been put firmly back on its feet by the World Court.

    The occupation – not just the settlements – is illegal.

    Israel is legally defined as an apartheid state, as South Africa was before it, and one engaged in a project of annexation and ethnic cleansing.

    The Palestinians are the victims, not Israel. It’s their security that needs protecting, not Israel’s. They are the ones who are owed financial assistance, in the form of reparations, not Israel.

    As a result, the West’s pretend peace-making stands starkly revealed for the sham it always was. Continuing with this kind of duplicity – as British leader Keir Starmer, for example, appears determined to do – will serve only to highlight the bad faith of those engaged in such exercises.

    On the flip side, western powers that help Israel continue its work of segregating, dispossessing and ethnic cleansing the Palestinians will be exposed as complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.

    Words have power. They are our route to understanding reality. And the World Court has just cleared away the fog. It has wiped clean the mist on the window.

    The West will do its level best once again to shroud Israel’s crimes. But the World Court has done the Palestinians and the rest of mankind a service in unmasking Israel for what it is: a rogue, criminal state.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post The World Court has cleared the fog hiding western support for Israel’s crimes first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Polio virus detected in Gaza as Israel attacks Khan Younis

    Palestinians walk along a street covered with stagnant wastewater near tents sheltering displaced people in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, 22 July. Omar Ashtawy APA images)

    As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington, where he will deliver a speech to Congress on Wednesday, the Israeli military massacred Palestinians throughout Gaza and forced a new wave of mass displacement in the south of the territory.

    The World Health Organization meanwhile warned that there was a high risk of the polio virus spreading within and beyond Gaza due to the public health crisis borne of Israel’s destruction and siege.

    The highly infectious virus, mainly affecting children under the age of 5, “can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis,” according to Reuters.

    “There is a high risk of spreading of the circulating vaccine-derived polio virus in Gaza, not only because of the detection but because of the very dire situation with the water sanitation,” Ayadil Saparbekov, an official with WHO, said on Tuesday.

    “It may also spill over internationally, at a very high point,” Saparbekov added.

    WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday that “no paralytic cases have been detected” so far in Gaza. Prior to Israel’s current offensive, “polio vaccination rates in Gaza were optimal,” he added.

    He warned, however, that the “decimation of the health system” in the territory, as well as the “lack of security, access obstruction, constant population displacement, shortages of medical supplies, poor quality of water and weakened sanitation are increasing the risk of vaccine-preventable diseases, including polio.”

    A group of Israeli public health professors called for a ceasefire to allow for a “multi-pronged, coordinated and comprehensive” response to stop the disease from spreading, with babies in Gaza and Israel who have not completed their vaccinations at greatest risk.

    The detection of remnants of the polio virus in sewage samples tested in Gaza is only the latest indicator of the severe deterioration of public health conditions in the territory.

    The catastrophic situation is a predictable if not intentional outcome of Israel’s actions in Gaza. In an op-ed published in Ynet in November, Giora Eiland, a former Israeli military operations chief and head of the National Security Council who is currently serving as an adviser to defense minister Yoav Gallant, called for the deprivation of life essentials in Gaza as a means of biological warfare.

    The official death toll in Gaza since 7 October surpassed 39,000 this week, including 16,000 children, though the actual number is likely much higher.

    Thousands of Palestinians remain missing in the rubble or in the streets, or their deaths as a result of secondary mortality such as hunger, thirst and disease resulting from Israel’s military campaign are not reflected in the fatality count.

    In a letter published by The Lancet earlier this month, three public health experts conservatively projected “that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”

    Death and displacement in Khan Younis

    Israeli tanks rolled back into Khan Younis on Monday and at least 70 Palestinians were killed and 200 injured in artillery shelling and airstrikes in the eastern areas of the southern Gaza district.

    Israel had ordered nearly half a million Palestinians in parts of Khan Younis to leave the area, “forcing residents to flee under fire,” Reuters reported. One survivor told the news agency that the situation was “like doomsday” with many “dead and wounded on the roads.”

    Nasser Medical Complex, the largest hospital in southern Gaza, struggled to cope with the influx of casualties, warning of dire conditions at the facility and issuing an urgent appeal for blood donations.

    The new Israeli orders encompassed part of the so-called “safe zone” that the military had unilaterally declared in al-Mawasi, a coastal area west of Khan Younis where some 1.7 million people displaced from other areas of Gaza are currently concentrated.

    The new evacuation orders showed the “safe zone” to now be around 50 square kilometers, down from just under 59 square kilometers, reducing the area by some 15 percent.

    “As of 22 July, nearly 83 percent of the Gaza Strip has been placed under evacuation orders or designated as ‘no-go zones’ by the Israeli military,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated.

    The office added that the “frequent evacuation orders and relentless hostilities continue to further devastate Gaza’s health system and make it increasingly difficult for repeatedly displaced populations to access essential services, particularly people suffering from chronic diseases.”

    Only 60 dialysis machines are available to more than 1,500 patients requiring kidney dialysis in Gaza. “As a result, patients are undertaking only two dialysis sessions of two hours per week, instead of the required treatment of three four-hour sessions a week,” the UN office said.

    Meanwhile, only eight partially functioning hospitals and four field hospitals are currently “providing maternal services with more than 500,000 women in reproductive age lacking access to antenatal and postnatal care, family planning and management of sexually transmitted infections,” the UN office added.

    Israel tightens vise on Gaza’s north

    The UN Human Rights Office condemned the latest displacement of Palestinians in Khan Younis, saying that the new evacuation order “was issued in the context of ongoing attacks … and gave no time for civilians to know from which areas they were required to leave or where they should go.”

    “The evacuation order also covered parts of Salah al-Din Road, which has been one of two main routes vital for the transport and distribution of aid,” the UN office added, “raising concerns that delivery and provision of desperately needed humanitarian assistance will be further reduced or prevented.”

    The office said that the supposed “safe zone” in al-Mawasi “has little or no infrastructure to support the masses of civilians who have been already displaced there” and has been repeatedly subjected to Israeli artillery fire and airstrikes.

    The Israeli military killed at least 90 Palestinians in al-Mawasi on 13 July, in one of the single deadliest incidents in Gaza since October, while claiming to target Hamas’ military chief Muhammad Deif.

    Israel launched a ground offensive in Khan Younis earlier this year, ordering residents out of the area and wreaking widespread destruction. At that time, many people fled Khan Younis to Rafah, which came under evacuation orders in early May.

    Meanwhile, “the Israeli military is escalating its targeting of all aspects and basic elements of life in the Gaza [City] and North Gaza governorates, in an attempt to render them uninhabitable and force their citizens to evacuate to the southern governorates,” the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said on Saturday.

    The group added that on Saturday morning, “the Israeli army opened fire on several women who were cooking and filling water containers in their home” in the Zarqa neighborhood in northern Gaza, killing 28-year-old Noura al-Sabbagh and injuring several others, one critically.

    Earlier in the month, on 2 July, 10 Palestinians including a child and a disabled person were killed by Israeli artillery fire while they gathered to fill water containers in al-Zaytoun, south of Gaza City.

    And in late June, three Palestinians were killed when Israel attacked a group of vendors in downtown Gaza City, according to the Euro-Med Monitor.

    Journalist killed, UN vehicles hit by live fire

    Also on Monday, an Israeli airstrike hit a tent used by journalists in the grounds of Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, killing one and injuring two others. The deadly strike brought the number of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza since 7 October to 163, according to the government media office in the territory.

    On Tuesday, two UN-marked vehicles were hit with live fire while waiting at a holding point near a checkpoint in Gaza, causing no casualties.

    “They were en route to reunite five children, including a baby, with their father,” said Adele Khodr, a regional director with the UN children’s fund.

    “This is the second shooting incident involving UNICEF cars on humanitarian duty in the past 12 weeks and on both occasions, the humanitarian consequences could have been severe, for both our teams and the children they serve,” Khodr added.

    On Sunday, Israeli forces opened fire toward a UN convoy heading to Gaza City in the north, piercing a UN-marked armored vehicle carrying UNRWA spokesperson Louise Wateridge five times while it was stopped at a checkpoint, causing no casualties.

    More than 200 UN staff members are among the at least 278 aid workers killed in Gaza since October.

    On Monday, a bill declaring UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, to be a terrorist organization passed a first reading in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.

    Two other bills aimed at preventing UNRWA’s ability to conduct its work already passed the first of three votes required by the Knesset before being enshrined in law.

    Israel has long sought to shut down the agency, which provides government-like services to millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

    Several donor countries halted funding to UNRWA in late January after Israel made unsubstantiated allegations that a handful of its staff in Gaza were involved in the 7 October attack led by Hamas.

    Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, warned at the time that countries defunding UNRWA could be doing so in violation of the Genocide Convention.

    Yemen

    While some countries have defunded UNRWA, the organization with the largest humanitarian footprint in Gaza, groups in Yemen and Lebanon upped the pressure on Israel in their support for the Palestinian people and resistance.

    On Sunday, Israel said that it had shot down a missile fired from Yemen, where Ansarullah, the resistance group also known as the Houthis, said it had fired several projectiles toward the port city of Eilat.

    Israel bombed the Yemeni port of al-Hudayda on Saturday, killing six people, all of them reportedly civilians, and injuring dozens more, after a drone launched by Ansarullah on Friday hit a building in Tel Aviv, killing one.

    Breaching Israel’s air defenses and hitting the heart of Tel Aviv marks a major achievement for the Yemeni armed forces and a severe failure for Israel. It served as a reminder that if a drone fired from some 1,400 miles away could target Israel’s economic capital undetected, then the capabilities of Lebanese resistance group Hizballah are likely to be far more lethal.

    The exchange of attacks represents an escalation in the regional spillover from Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.

    For months, Ansarullah has maintained a maritime blockade disrupting global trade to pressure Israel to end the genocide in Gaza.

    The US had launched strikes on Yemen in response to the Red Sea blockade but the Israeli attack represents the first direct hit by Tel Aviv in response to Ansar Allah.

    The Yemeni strike on Tel Aviv comes after Hizballah pledged to ramp up military deterrence against Israel.

    During a speech marking the annual Shia commemoration of Ashura, Hasan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hizballah, threatened to strike areas deeper in Israel than it has previously reached.

    “If Israeli tanks come to Lebanon, they will not only have a shortage in tanks but will never have any tanks left,” Nasrallah said.

    Following days of deadly strikes in southern Lebanon, Nasrallah said that Hizballah, which has so far carefully calibrated its response to avoid a full military confrontation with Israel, would respond more forcefully than it has in the past if the attacks continued.

    “The resistance missiles will target new Israeli settlements that were not targeted before,” he said.

    UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was “deeply concerned about the risk of further escalation in the region and continues to urge all to exercise utmost restraint,” the office of his special envoy for Yemen stated after the exchange of fire between Israel and Ansarullah.

    But Amal Saad, an expert on Hizballah, observed that the Houthis – as Ansarullah are also known – “are not constrained in the same way other actors in the Resistance Axis are, nor do they subscribe to the same rules of engagement or red lines as Iran or Hizballah.”

    “Their retaliation will potentially target non-military sites in Israel, mirroring Israel’s targeting of civilian infrastructure today,” she said on Saturday.

    Israeli captives declared dead

    On Monday, Israel declared dead two Israelis, including a Polish dual national, who were taken captive during Hamas’ military operation on 7 October and held in Gaza ever since.

    Israeli media reported that bombing by Israel is their most likely cause of death.

    Some 120 captives are believed to remain in Gaza after around 100 were released during a week-long truce and prisoner exchange in November.

    Around one-third of the captives remaining in Gaza have been declared dead by Israel in absentia.

    Netanyahu met with the families of Israelis being held in Gaza while in Washington on Monday, telling them that “the conditions to get them back are ripening, for the simple reason that we are applying very, very strong pressure, very strong, on Hamas.”

    According to The Times of Israel, “Netanyahu indicated that he would like more time to squeeze Hamas further in order to improve Israel’s negotiating position.”

    That should be understood as Netanyahu wanting more time to massacre Palestinian civilians in the absence of a battlefield victory in order to maximize pressure on Hamas, which seeks guarantees that a truce and exchange of captives would lead to a permanent ceasefire – conditions that the Israeli prime minister rejects.

    Mati Dancyg, the son of one of the Israeli men declared dead in absentia on Monday, said that his father Alex “didn’t just die – he died for the sake of [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s government of destruction.”

    Dancyg accused Netanyahu of sabotaging “any chance for a deal” in order “to save his rotten government,” adding that the “sacrificing of the hostages out of political motives is a much, much greater failure than the failure of 7 October.”

    Noa Argamani – an Israeli woman who was freed by the Israeli military along with three other captives in a raid that killed at least 274 Palestinians – told Netanyahu during a meeting on Monday that those remaining in Gaza “must be brought home as quickly as possible, before it is too late.”

    She reportedly told the Israeli prime minister that “the hardest moment I had in captivity was when I listened to the radio and heard you say the war will be long.”

    “I thought, ‘I won’t get out of here.’ It was a breaking point for me,” she said, according to Israeli media.

    While Netanyahu is expected to meet US President Joe Biden this week, and a delegation from Tel Aviv is due to arrive in Cairo to resume talks on Wednesday evening, a senior Hamas official said that the Israeli prime minister “is still stalling and he is sending delegations only to calm the anger of Israeli captives’ families.”

    • Article first published in the Electronic Intifada

    The post Polio virus detected in Gaza as Israel attacks Khan Younis first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Venezuela Is Overcoming the US Blockade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Venezuela Is Overcoming the US Blockade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • They’re Arresting the Wrong People Inside of Congress

    [Photo by: Celâl Güneş]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The post They’re Arresting the Wrong People Inside of Congress first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Congress Makes Downpayment on World War III

    The US Congress authorized a $95 billion military aid package for continuing the wars in Ukraine and Gaza as well as for war preparations against China. This represents, in effect, a downpayment on World War III. US President Joe Biden, reading from a playbook that could well have been scripted by George Orwell, announced: “it’s a good day for world peace.” And in order to dispel any doubt, he added, “for real.”

    Biden proclaimed: “It’s going to make the world safer.” In fact, the bipartisan authorization, passed on April 23, could nudge the doomsday clock a little closer to midnight.

    Lest there be any confusion about what the head of the US empire means by making the world safer, Biden explains: “it continues America’s leadership in the world.”

    US leadership is the crux of the matter. That is, at a time of increasingly challenged US hegemony, the official US strategy is still global “full spectrum dominance.” No longer does the empire justify itself as leading the crusade against communism, or even against what it considered “terrorism,” or its “war on drugs.” Today, the official national security doctrine is naked “great power competition.”

    Continuing the Orwellian theme, the US president backed up his claim about US world leadership, saying, “everyone knows it.”  This was not reflected in the UN General Assembly vote on an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, where the US side was trounced by an overwhelming 153 in favor. Besides the US and Israel, only eight others voted against and a mere 23 abstained.  On any number of issues, the majority of the world’s population opposes the US.

    Biden’s boast that “Ukraine has regained over half the territory that Russia took from them” is not particularly reflected by the Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, which concluded that the current deadlock “plays to Russia’s strategic military advantages and is increasingly shifting the momentum in Moscow’s favor.”

    Hailing the “brave Ukrainians,” Biden overlooks that 650,000 Ukrainian men of fighting age have fled the country.

    Diminishing prospects for a decisive US/NATO victory in Ukraine have precipitated a particularly dangerous response from Washington, which rejects a negotiated settlement. The current administration’s plan is not to pull for peace but to push for more war. This is spun as a strategy “to stop Putin from drawing the United States into a war.” Yet it is the US, which is doing its part feeding the conflict by giving yet more armaments to the military effort.

    The expansion of NATO, contrary to earlier US assurances not to advance east, is hailed in Biden’s speech. Yet, this march of NATO toward the Russian border is the very cause that Russian President Putin gave for his country’s incursion into Ukraine. This abundantly articulated Russian “redline” should be well known in Washington.

    Yet, Biden in his speech goes on to ominously raise NATO’s Article Five for mutual defense which declares “an attack on one is an attack on all.” This is plainly a taunt for a war with another nuclear power. Veterans for Peace antiwar activist and author Dee Knight calls the military aid package “an open-ended commitment to the NATO war against Russia.”

    In yet another spin on reality, Biden condemns “a brutal campaign” that has “killed tens of thousands” and “bombed hospitals.” If you think he is referring to Israel’s US-enabled war on Gaza, guess again.

    Biden is not about to call a halt on the genocide of the Palestinians, though he could. In 1982, for instance, Israel bombed civilians. Then US President Ronald Reagan called his counterpart in Tel Aviv and told him to stop what he explicitly called a “holocaust.”

    Twenty minutes later Israel ordered cessation of its bombardment. In contrast, The New York Times reports that a member of Israel’s war cabinet predicts the current war may last “a year, a decade or a generation.”

    “My commitment to Israel, I want to make clear again, is ironclad,” says the US politician who is by far the “biggest recipient in history of donations from pro-Israeli groups.”

    The aid package schizophrenically commits tax-payer dollars to both lethal weapons and humanitarian aid for “the innocent people of Gaza, who are suffering badly.” No recognition is given to what is obvious – that an immediate and permanent ceasefire is the first step for relieving the suffering.

    War may not be good for most of humanity, but it is bonanza for US military contractors. As Biden brags, the weapons are “made by American companies here in America…in other words, we’re helping Ukraine while at the same time investing in our own industrial base.” That is, our own merchants of death are making a killing.

    Biden has over-performed in his promise to make sure the weapons shipments “start right away.” Without legal pre-authorization, the US has supplied both Ukraine and Israel with proscribed weaponry.

    Most of the funds, according to economist Jack Rasmus, are for weapons that have already been delivered or from military stocks that are in the process of being shipped. “Only $13.8 billion of the $61 billion is for weapons Ukraine doesn’t already have!” In a tweet embarrassing to the US-backed war effort and subsequently deleted, CBS News suggested only about 30% of US military aid for Ukraine ever reaches the front lines, in part due to pervasive corruption.

    “Everything we do,” the US president explains is, “setting the conditions for an enduring peace.” The question his proclamation raises is what does this vision of a militarily imposed pax Americana look like?

    Is it Haiti, where under Yankee benevolence they do not even have a government and even the disgraced appointed prime minister just resigned? Or is it Libya, where a US-led colonial coalition overthrew a major force for African unity and replaced it with military factions allowing slaves to be openly bartered on the streets? Or is it Afghanistan, where the US engineered the overthrow of a socialist government that stood for women’s emancipation, occupied the land for two decades, and then withdrew leaving a humanitarian disaster?

    In short, the Biden’s promise of “enduring peace” looks a lot like chaos and “endless war.” “History will remember this moment,” he predicts. And well it may.

    The post US Congress Makes Downpayment on World War III first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Political Winds Offer Favorable Support For Tibet

    Political Winds Offer Favorable Support For Tibet

    Image: archivenet

    With the Congressional ink still drying on the sign-off of billions of arms to be shipped to Israel and Ukraine, endorsing, sustaining; and enabling slaughter and misery. A weary and understandable cynicism and disillusionment can set in. Government and trust has become an oxymoron.

    Politics though, like a flag, changes course according to the prevailing winds, so that sometimes, a positive and supportive outcome materializes. Most recently the Senate passed the Resolve Tibet Act which affirms to:

    A bill which affirms, in accordance with US policy, the conflict between Tibet and China is unresolved; and that Tibet’s legal status remains to be determined in accordance with international law.

    Furthermore the bill defines Tibet to include the so-called T.A.R and the Tibetan areas Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu & Yunnan provinces (in truth the historic and legitimate Tibetan regions of U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo).

    It also states that the office of U.S. Special Co-ordinator for Tibetan Issues shall work with other U.S agencies to counter disinformation about Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, including disinformation about Tibet’s history and institutions. The bill also authorizes the office to take other actions to counter such disinformation.

    Political Winds Offer Favorable Support For Tibet

    Image: archivenet

    This is a welcome and long overdue expression of support for Tibet’s people and their just cause for national freedom. It should be recognized as such and worked with to ensure the maximum possible benefit can be realized to assist the struggle waged by Tibetans. It is, in the main, a resounding declaration of support for Tibet, its right to freedom, recognition of historic sovereignty and human rights for Tibetans. Bravo to all those who made this happen.

    Of course it is not without flaw, and we note in Section Three of the bill, that it states:

    “..the Tibetan people are a people entitled to the right of self-determination under international law,” Source: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/138/text

    On the surface that appears reasonable and in strong solidarity, which on one level it is. However, it fails to define which form of ‘self-determination’ the bill refers to, which we’d hope Tibetans will seek clarity on. This is because within international law ‘internal self-determination’ is the right of the people of a state to govern themselves without outside interference. Whereas ‘External self-determination’ is the right of peoples to determine their own political status and to be free of alien domination, including formation of their own independent state. Which of these conditions would the people of occupied Tibet, and their exiled fellow Tibetans desire most?

    Political Winds Offer Favorable Support For Tibet

    Image: @tibettruth

    To the occasional voice that dismisses this bill as self-serving posturing from the political establishment. Does this demonstration of solidarity from the Congress and Administration serve (with respect to China) the current strategic and political interests of the United States? Of course – such is realpolitik. Have Tibetans been extended support previously, only to be betrayed and abandoned by the USA? Indeed, most notably by the withdrawal support for the Tibetan resistance after Nixon’s outreach to China.

    But those realities should not be a reason to reject the opportunities and much needed assistance these policy developments offer to Tibetans who are tirelessly seeking to secure greater support and exposure for Tibet.

    This post was originally published on Digital Activism In Support Of Tibetan Independence.

  • We Have Met the Enemy and they are Other Democrats

    Photo courtesy of Ross Rowley

    The Israeli government is like the bad friend who only calls to ask for money or favors. For 75 years, Jewish supremacists beguiled our nation into believing their problems were America’s problems too. By using the tragedy of the Holocaust, they captured our sympathies and eventually played us for suckers — now democrats are angry.

    Not all, but a growing number are once they find out the 260 billion dollars U.S. taxpayers have given the Israeli government since WWll is money down the rathole when measured next to their broken promises, outright lies and deplorable treatment of Palestinians. No wonder these dems are trying to put the kibosh on Israeli funding after learning that Israelis along with their apologists, have done everything they could for decades to surreptitiously steer U.S. foreign policy toward a favorable view of Israel. Netanyahu, the Israeli imperial wizard of deception, made this abundantly clear in his infamous 2001 comment “ America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way.”

    Biden, who sometimes resembles an ineffectual palace eunuch more than a wise king, confirms this every time he shakes a finger at Israeli leaders during their incursions or implores them to be more careful with their two and five-thousand pound bombs while they’re ethnically cleansing. His reluctance to call Netanyahu out for the genocidal slaughter in Gaza is beyond disappointing and embarrassing.

    dwhat can these democrats do when so many others only give lip service to a ceasefire? Congress hasn’t been much help — so far, less than 60 members have called for one. At a grassroots level, groups typically on the front lines in fights for equal rights and fair play like liberal artists, musicians, feminists and Jews are noticeably absent.

    In early February this year, the Minneapolis City Counsel passed a ceasefire resolution after Jewish and Democratic Party mayor Jacob Frey vetoed it because he believed the proposal was “one-sided.” One might wonder what the other side of an unstopped genocidal war would be. According to the StarTribune “Frey said he is open to signing a “truly unifying ceasefire resolution,” but noted his office has not drafted its own version yet. He told reporters the veto was “not an easy decision” and that he made it after listening to “people in my family, my extended Jewish community, and people throughout the city.” There was no mention of him talking with Palestinians.

    Just before the resolution passed, thirty-four Minnesota rabbis signed a statement supporting the mayor’s veto. To date, this city counsel resolution has the strongest language in the country because it calls for the U.S. to stop military funding to Israel. One of the signatories was a Senior Rabbi I wanted to interview for a local anti-war newsletter, but she turned me down a couple months ago. That makes five refusals from rabbis in less than a year.

    Even those progressive artists who do publicly support a ceasefire can get wish-washy about it later. One recently qualified his online ceasefire statement with a call for lowering rhetorical tones and suggested that the U.S. facilitate discussions between Israel and surrounding Arab countries. Turning down the volume is one thing, but why anyone would still believe that an inveterate liar such as Netanyahu or his murderous gang of sociological mutants should be trusted again is beyond me. If there ever is an agreement, it would have to come with enforceable, ironclad guarantees from the outside.

    Then there was a luminary folk singer/songwriter who shared a green room with Bob Dylan who soon removed his ceasefire post and replaced it with a flower. He later posted the words to a lullaby-like song he wrote about poets, artists and doctors parachuting into war zones. When I commented on his FB page about the futility of airdropping poets and artists who have yet to condemn the Israeli government, he removed the post and blocked me.

    One can only imagine the impact Bob Dylan might have if he called for sanctions and a ceasefire, but that might be too much to expect. According to a two-year old NWC/FORBES report, he has 70 cars, 15 mansions, 3 yachts, over 180 luxury watches and a nuclear bunker. Maybe he became one of the people he warned us about. On the other hand, Taylor Swift went to a comedy club last December that was raising money for Gazans. Bless her 1.1 billion dollar heart.

    It can be especially irksome when artists with long histories of showing sympathy to Native Americans don’t use their personas and platforms to publicly damn the US for supporting the genocidal Israeli government. Perhaps that’s understandable given all the whispers about Zionist Jews holding so many purse strings in the arts and entertainment business. It might seem prudent then for artists to focus on fairness issues concerning women and the LGBT community instead of the beleaguered Palestinians After all — a show of support for Palestinians may reduce audience sizes or wreck chances for an audition, gig or a place on the arts-grants-gravy-train.

    Artist Frank Big Bear combines early dreams from his childhood on the White Earth Reservation along with tribal and urban imagery in personal storytelling narratives told largely through surrealistic and cubistic traditions. He also drove a cab in Minneapolis for over thirty years to support his family.

    I think maybe people are starting to speak out more about what’s happening in Gaza around the country — maybe not on my Facebook page, because most of them are democrats who voted for Biden. I still speak out on Facebook knowing that I might be blacklisted because of Jewish influences in the art market and other institutions. I know I was kinda ignored by museums and institutions that supported native art around the country before the war in Gaza, especially for shows and grants. I guess you have to play the game by their rules and be popular and know the juries. It was difficult for me to play the game when I was younger because I was raising six children and had a full time job. I didn’t have the money or time to fly around the country and promote my work. I had to rely on and trust art dealers who are not exactly trustworthy. But getting back to why some people are not saying anything, I think it’s because they’re afraid of losing their jobs which would devastate their livelihood, especially in this economy.

    — Frank Big Bear

    Feminists too have been slow to join the call for a ceasefire and ending support for Israel. Member of the European Parliament and Irish firebrand Clare Daly recently voiced a call for the United Nations to look into how war affects women: Particularly in Gaza where “70% of the victims are women and children” and those giving birth still go without anesthetics or professional help and use tent scraps sometimes to mop up postpartum bleeding. She went on at length about the horrific, war-related traumas mothers and kids experience and ended her talk with a scathing rebuke to feminists who have not shown any solidarity with Gazan women “that’s not feminism, that’s an abomination and I don’t know if God will forgive them, but I and millions of others certainly won’t.”

    Meanwhile, the chatter classes drone on about how the Israel/Palestine dilemma is unsolvable, too complicated or how they have sympathy for both sides or feel so emotionally torn they can’t bring themselves to take a stand — perhaps they need some new material.

    The post We Have Met the Enemy and they are Other Democrats first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel Is Assaulting Hospitals in Gaza with Full U.S. Support

    Many decades ago in Chicago, my favorite of several part-time student jobs was operating the “old-style” telephone switchboard at a small hospital called Forkosh Memorial. The console of coils and plugs included a mirror so operators could keep an eye on the hospital entrance, which on weekends and evenings was also monitored by an elderly, unarmed security guard named Frank. He sat at a classroom style desk near the entrance with a ledger book. Over the course of four years, on weekends and evenings, “security” at the hospital generally consisted solely of Frank and me. Fortunately, nothing much ever happened. The possibility of an attack, invasion or raid never occurred to us. The notion of an aerial bombardment was unimaginable, like something out of “War of the Worlds” or some other sci-fi fantasy.

    Now, tragically, hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank have been attacked, invaded, bombed and destroyed. News of additional Israeli attacks is being reported on a daily basis. Last week, Democracy Now! interviewed Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist and eye surgeon who recently returned from a humanitarian surgical mission at the European Hospital in Khan Yunis in Gaza. Dr. Khan spoke of bombings taking place every few hours resulting in a constant influx of mass casualties. The majority of patients he treated were children from age 2 to 17. He saw horrific eye injuries, shattered faces, shrapnel wounds, abdominal injuries, limbs severed above the bone, and traumas caused by drone launched laser guided missiles. Amid the overcrowding and chaos, health care workers tended to patients while lacking basic equipment, including anesthesia. Patients lay on the ground in unsterile conditions, vulnerable to infection and disease. Most of them also suffered from severe hunger.

    Normally, a child who undergoes an amputation faces as many as twelve additional surgeries.  Khan wondered who would do the follow-up care for these children, some of whom have no surviving relatives?

    He also noted sniper fire prevented doctors from going to work. “They’ve killed health care workers, nurses, paramedics; ambulances have been bombed. This has all been systematic,” Khan explained. “Now there are 10,000 to 15,000 bodies decomposing. It’s the rainy season right now in Gaza so all the rainwater mixes with the decomposing bodies and that bacteria mixes with the drinking water supply and you get further disease.”

    According to Khan, Israeli forces have kidnapped forty to forty-five doctors, specifically targeting specialists and hospital administrators. Three health care professional organizations have issued a statement  expressing deep concern that the Israeli military has abducted and unlawfully detained Dr. Khaled al-Serr, a surgeon at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza.

    On February 19, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described conditions in the Nasser hospital after Israel ordered evacuation of Palestinians from the complex. “There are still more than 180 patients and 15 doctors and nurses inside Nasser,” he said. “The hospital is still experiencing an acute shortage of food, basic medical supplies, and oxygen. There is no tap water and no electricity, except a backup generator maintaining some lifesaving machines.”

    Eight years ago, in October of 2015, the United States military destroyed Afghanistan’s Kunduz hospital, run by Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). For more than an hour, a C-130 transport plane repeatedly fired incendiary devices at the hospital’s emergency room and intensive care unit, killing 42 people. Thirty-seven additional people were injured. “Our patients burned in their beds,” read the MSF’s in-depth report. “Our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building.”

    The horrific attack outraged war resisters and human rights groups. I remember joining a group of activists in upstate NY who assembled outside a hospital emergency room with a banner proclaiming “To bomb this site would be a war crime.”

    In 2009, on a smaller, yet still horrific scale, I witnessed an Israeli onslaught in Gaza called “Operation Cast Lead.” In the emergency room of the Al Shifa hospital, Dr. Saeed Abuhassan, an orthopedic surgeon, described experiences similar to  Khan’s. This surgeon grew up in Chicago, very close to the neighborhood where I lived. I asked him what he would want me to tell our neighbors back home. He listed a litany of horrors and then he stopped.  “No,” he said. “First, you must tell them that U.S. taxpayer money paid for all of these weapons.”

    Taxpayer money feeds the bloated, swollen Pentagon budget. U.S. Senators, last week, cowed by AIPAC, decided to send Israel an additional $14.1 billion to boost military spending. Only three Senators voted against the bill.

    From Palestine, Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American human rights attorney, wrote on X:: “The scary part is not that Israel is planning the forcible transfer of the Palestinians it hasn’t slaughtered, but that the so-called ‘civilized world’ is allowing it to happen. The ramifications of this coordinated evil will haunt its collaborators for generations to come.”

    At Forkosh Hospital in the 1970s, I had a mirror to see what was happening behind my back, but everyone on earth can see, directly, the horror of U.S. support for a genocidal event happening on our watch.  Gravely distorted versions of what occurred on October 7th, cannot – even if believed – justify the scale of the horrors being reported in Gaza and the West Bank each day.

    The U.S. government continues enthusiastically to bankroll Israel’s systemic and inhumane destruction of Gaza. U.S. advisors make feeble attempts to suggest Israel should pause or at least try to be more precise in their attacks. In its quest for hegemonic superiority, the United States tears into ever tinier shreds whatever remains of a commitment to human rights, equality and human dignity.

    What kept Forkosh Hospital secure, decades ago, was a social contract that presumed safety for a small hospital serving the local population.

    If we can’t find the morality to stop supplying weapons for ongoing Israeli onslaughts against Gaza and its places of healing, we may find we have created a world in which no-one can count on upholding basic human rights. We may be creating intergenerational wounds of hatred and sorrow from which there will never, ever be any safe place to heal.

     Smoke rising after an Israeli air strike on Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, on January 3, 2024
    Photo Credit:  Shutterstock

     Palestinian Red Crescent first aid waiting to receive bodies from Al-Najjar Hospital in the city of Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, on January 10, 2024
    Photo Credit: Shutterstock

    • A version of this article first appeared on The Progressive website.

    The post Israel Is Assaulting Hospitals in Gaza with Full U.S. Support first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Erasing Gaza

    In the words of the UN Chief Antonio Guterres, the US-Israel assault has created “a graveyard for children” in Gaza, a tiny sliver of land that is home to several generations of impoverished refugees, half of whom are children. Gazans arguably make up one of the most vulnerable populations globally. They live in the “largest open-air prison” or the “largest concentration camp” in the world. Since 2007, Gazans have been subjected to a cruel siege by Israel, with cooperation from Egypt, and support from the US, which has led to unbearable conditions of life. As early as 2012, the UN warned that Gaza would become “uninhabitable” by the year 2020 with 60% of its households already “either food insecure or vulnerable to food insecurity” in 2012 “even when taking into account the UN  food distributions to almost 1.1 million people.” The UN said Gaza was “kept alive through external funding and the illegal tunnel economy.” Since the siege began, Israel has militarily assaulted Gaza at least six times killing thousands, injuring many thousands more, and destroying homes and critical infrastructure in what it cynically calls “mowing the lawn.”

    As bad as the conditions had been pre-October 7, they are now unimaginably worse. Between 7 October and 23 December, the US-Israeli assault killed 28,091 Palestinians (11,023 of whom are infants and children, 5,683 women, and 25,741 civilians) and injured 54,311. The dead include 95 journalists and 226 healthcare staff. By now 1.9 million Gazans of a total population of 2.2 million have been displaced.

    Human Rights Watch has accused Israel of using the starvation of civilians as a weapon of war. The Israeli forces, it said, are “depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.” Israel bombed “Gaza’s last operational wheat mill on November 15” ensuring that “locally produced flour will be unavailable in Gaza for the foreseeable future.” The “decimation of road networks,” the destruction of “Bakeries and grain mills … agriculture, water and sanitation facilities,” and the “sustained bombardment, coupled with fuel and water shortages, alongside the displacement of more than 1.6 million people to southern Gaza, has made farming nearly impossible.”  The report states that “agricultural land, including orchards, greenhouses, and farmland in northern Gaza, has been razed,” and that “livestock in the north are facing starvation due to the shortage of fodder and water, and that crops are increasingly abandoned and damaged due to lack of fuel to pump irrigation water.” Another report by 23 UN and NGOs has found that the entire population of Gaza faces an imminent risk of famine if present genocidal policies continue, with 576,600 persons at catastrophic or starvation levels. “It is a situation where pretty much everybody in Gaza is hungry,” said the World Food Program economist.

    At least 369,000 Gazans are suffering from infectious diseases under rapidly declining health conditions. “We are all sick,” the Times quoted Samah al-Farra “a 46-year-old mother of 10 struggling to care for her family in a camp housing displaced Palestinians in Rafah, in southern Gaza. ‘All of my kids have a high fever and a stomach virus.’” At the time of the gravest healthcare need, according to the World Health Organization, just 9 out of 36 health facilities in Gaza are operating, and only partially. At the same time, there are “no functional hospitals left in the north.”

    The deliberate destruction of Gaza’s health system amounts to a slow and more painful death sentence for the tens of thousands of injured whose minimal urgent care needs cannot be met.

    The US-Israel genocidal assault on Gaza reveals much about the US political system and the ‘rules-based international order” as well. For example, a poll in mid-December showed that 68% of North Americans, three-quarters of Democrats, and half of Republicans support a ceasefire. Contrast those numbers with not only the refusal of the Biden administration to support a truce but the fact that as of 21 December only 62 members of Congress (11.6%) had joined a call for a ceasefire. The persistence of a wide split between the political elites and the public is a clear indication of political dysfunctionality in the US despite ongoing protests including the largest pro-Palestine demonstration in US history on November 4. There remains a slight window of opportunity to influence policy as the 2024 elections approach and polls indicate that the Biden administration is losing public support on this issue. Reportedly “there was some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause: that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel” and against the Biden administration. A growing public opposition may be all we have in constraining Washington from pursuing a wider regional war on behalf of Israel.

    It is important to note that the US as the chief enabler of Israel can stop this genocide. Instead, it continues to give full military, diplomatic, ideological, technological, and economic support to Israel. For example, The Times of Israel reports that “244 US transport planes and 20 ships have delivered more than 10,000 tons of armaments and military equipment to Israel since the start of the war.”

    Furthermore, investigations by several mainstream US news establishments like the New York Times and CNN show that in the first month of its assault on Gaza Israel used mostly US-manufactured 2000-pound bunker-buster bombs. These heavy munitions “can cause high casualty events and can have a lethal fragmentation radius – an area of exposure to injury or death around the target – of up to 365 meters (about 1,198 feet), or the equivalent of 58 soccer fields in area.” According to CNN’s analysis: “Satellite imagery from those early days of the war reveals more than 500 impact craters over 12 meters (40 feet) in diameter, consistent with those left behind by 2,000-pound bombs. Those are four times heavier than the largest bombs the United States dropped on ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, during the war against the extremist group there.” CNN quotes John Chappell, “advocacy and legal fellow at CIVIC, a DC-based group focused on minimizing civilian harm in conflict” stating that “The use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area as densely populated as Gaza means it will take decades for communities to recover.”

    Crucially, the US also shields Israel from global initiatives at the UN Security Council that aim at halting its consistent and gross violations of international humanitarian laws and the UNSC resolutions, including those calling for an immediate ceasefire.

    The most recent example of the latter occurred on 22 December. The US abstained from voting on a UNSC resolution (13-0-2) that called for aid access and temporary pauses in Israel’s bombing of Gaza. For 5 days, the US delayed the vote on an earlier draft, a tactic aimed at giving Israel more time, and vetoed an amendment calling for a complete ceasefire and the establishment of a robust UN inspection mechanism in Gaza. The hollowed-out and meaningless resolution that was passed is another triumph for the US obstructionism in support of Israeli genocide albeit in the form of an abstention; earlier the US twice vetoed resolutions calling for immediate ceasefire and the release of all hostages.

    The last time the US blocked a UNSC resolution calling for a ceasefire and the release of all hostages was on 7 December. The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter (a rare Article akin to a global “panic button” to trigger a UNSC vote) and urged the UNSC to act on the war in Gaza. The UN Chief referred to the situation in Gaza as “apocalyptic” and stated that he believes Gaza’s humanitarian system and civil order are at risk of “complete collapse.” The US not only vetoed the resolution but on that same day approved the sale and immediate delivery of 14,000 tank shells to Israel without congressional approval, displaying its dedication to protecting Israeli terror.

    Less mentioned in the news is the US vote on 19 December against a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly affirming the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. The vote count was 172-4-10. The other three countries that joined the US to reject the resolution were Israel, Micronesia, and Nauru. Affirming the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination is the very heart of a just resolution of the Question of Palestine. US rejectionism ensures the continuation of Israel’s colonization, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, occupation, siege, and genocide, as well as Palestinian resistance to oppression and rightlessness.

    Of course, the dominant view in the US equates Palestinian resistance with terrorism motivated by hatred of Jews. Such a view can only persist in the absence of historical context. To ensure that absence, corporate media rarely feature Palestinian voices. Propaganda often works not by spin alone; omission is a crucial part of manipulating public opinion. Omitting context has allowed the US and Israel to weaponize the October 7 Hamas attack to mobilize public support for the genocide and ethnic cleansing they are committing in Gaza, ostensibly in response to October 7. This is reminiscent of how the US hijacked the 9/11 attacks to silence dissent and push through its ruinous and criminal post-9/11 wars. Public opposition eventually emerged in the longer term to those 9/11 wars of choice.

    The ongoing genocide in Gaza is no different although the shift in public opinion in the US has been much swifter this time as compared to the post-9/11 period. As mentioned above, by now most people in the US favor a ceasefire. Additionally, polls found that “more people ages 18-29 sympathized with Palestinians than with Israelis in the current conflict … 28 percent expressed more sympathy with Palestinians vs. 20 percent for Israelis.” There have been massive pro-Palestinian protests globally and huge ones in the US, including unprecedented ones by staff at the State Department and the White House. The Israeli Jews on the other hand have taken a super hawkish position on the use of force in Gaza. Polls found that just 1.8% believed Israel was using too much firepower in Gaza. That is a remarkable figure indeed and a sign of the general moral decline of Israeli society.

    We might therefore say that to contextualize is to act radically because the understanding that necessarily accompanies contextualization undermines the dehumanizing and racialized language used to justify atrocities against the Palestinians: such as calling the Palestinians terrorists, human animals, and antisemitic Nazis.

    What, then, is the missing context for understanding what has been taking place in Palestine? To answer, we can begin by asking “What are the Palestinians struggling against?” and “What are the Palestinians fighting for?”

    The Palestinians struggle against a US-backed Zionist colonizing state of Israel itself allied with several reactionary Arab client states of the US. They fight not just against Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing, occupation, siege, theft of their lands, and colonization, but against US imperialism. Israel is a component of the US empire and serves its interests in this region by opposing radical Arab nationalism. The Palestinians fight for a free Palestine with equal rights for all its inhabitants, including Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze, the non-religious, and others. Because they cannot free themselves unless they defeat the forces of imperialism and reaction arrayed against them in the region, their liberation necessarily entails the possibility of liberation for all the peoples in the region.

    In the broadest sense, the struggle for a free Palestine is a struggle for the liberation of all the peoples of that region from imperialism and domination. The proper context to view this is therefore a confrontation between imperialist domination and the people’s movements for liberation. A sub-context of this confrontation is that between the Palestinians and the Zionist colonizing state of Israel. The latter is bent on completing its ethnic cleansing of historical Palestine and uses every opportunity to advance its incomplete project of settler colonialism until it achieves its final goal of conquering what it calls Greater Israel which includes the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The goal of Zionism is to take as much land of historical Palestine with as few Palestinians as possible. The Zionist colonizing state has waged a war on the Palestinians since 1948, not October 7.

    October 7 provided Israel with another opportunity to further its ethnic cleansing objectives in Gaza. On the night that Israel killed 250 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured another 500 just in the 24 hours over Christmas eve, Benjamin Netanyahu, the right-wing prime minister of Israel, announced “the three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza”: “We must destroy Hamas, demilitarize Gaza and deradicalize the whole of Palestinian society.” These are impossible objectives. Hamas is a resistance group. Even if all its members are killed, its ideology remains as one form of resistance to Israeli genocide, colonization, and oppression. It’s dialectical, stupid! Repression generates resistance. Plus, the ongoing genocide will surely further radicalize the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank too, making Hamas more popular, not less, regardless of whether Israel can declare victory in Gaza. Even putting the latter point aside, the goal of deradicalizing the Palestinians essentially means turning Palestinians into Zionists. That is even more absurd than the goal of eradicating Hamas. No wonder the Israeli army Chief of Staff said on the same day that “achieving war’s goals ‘will take months.’” By the time Israel is done, there will be no structures left for any Gazans to come back to while many tens of thousands more will have died due to the spread of infectious diseases, hunger, despair, and hardships of disruptions and displacements, if not from US-made bombs.

    The genocidal actions of Israel in Gaza are consistent with a leaked document produced by Israel’s intelligence ministry 6 days after the bombing of Gaza began, titled ‘Options for a policy regarding Gaza’s civilian population’ that recommended the ethnic cleansing of Gaza with its population expelled into “tent cities” in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula before constructing cities in a “resettled area” in the north of Sinai to house them. So far Egypt has refused to cooperate.

    But the Egyptian intransigence may not have stopped Israel from its forced mass displacement plans. According to an Israeli daily newspaper report published in early December, Netanyahu plans in secret to “thin out” the population of Gaza. He has “instructed Ron Dermer, his minister of strategic planning and a close aide, to have a plan for the ‘day after’ in Gaza and, if necessary, one that ‘enables a mass escape [of Palestinians] to European and African countries’ by opening sea routes out of the strip.” The report said that “Netanyahu sees this as a strategic goal.”

    Indeed, the UN expert warned on 22 December that Israel is working to expel the civilian population of Gaza. Paula Gaviria Betancur, Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons (IDPs), said: “As evacuation orders and military operations continue to expand and civilians are subjected to relentless attacks on a daily basis, the only logical conclusion is that Israel’s military operation in Gaza aims to deport the majority of the civilian population en masse.”

    It’s worth noting that Israeli Jews are overwhelmingly supportive of ethnically cleansing Gaza. A Direct Survey poll published on December 21 in Israel included the following question: “To what degree do you support encouraging the voluntary emigration of Gaza Strip residents?” The response was as follows: “68% support it strongly,” “15% are quite supportive,” “8% don’t really support it,” and “9% don’t support it at all.” That is, 83% favor what is euphemistically called “voluntary emigration” but is ethnic cleansing and a war crime.

    The deafening din of Zionist propaganda in the US has drowned two essential truisms about the Question of Palestine:

    1)     The Palestinians are not fighting Israel because they hate Jews. They are fighting against their dispossession, occupation, and erasure and for liberation from oppression, domination, colonization, and imperialism.

    2)     The source of the problem isn’t the Palestinian resistance, in whatever form, but the US imperialist domination of the region in alliance with the racist Zionist colonizing state of Israel and a coterie of reactionary Arab states.

    “The historical contextualization would undermine the dominant dehumanizing Zionist narrative and open pathways for crucial solidarity work towards a free, democratic, equal, and inclusive Palestine from the river to the sea.”

    The post Erasing Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Leftist Democrats invoke human rights law in scrutiny of Israel military aid

    Congressional progressives say proposed $14.3bn breaches 1997 Leahy act as assault on Gaza has overwhelmingly harmed civilians

    Leftwing Democrats in Congress have invoked a landmark law barring assistance to security forces of governments deemed guilty of human rights abuses to challenge the Biden administration’s emergency military aid program for Israel.

    Members of the Democratic party’s progressive wing say the $14.3bn package pledged by the White House after the 7 October attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,400 Israelis breaches the Leahy Act because Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza has overwhelmingly harmed civilians. An estimated 9,000 people have been killed in Gaza so far, among them 3,700 children, according to the Gaza health ministry, run by Hamas.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • “Not Of This World”: UFO Hearings in Washington

    In an historic event, the US Congress Oversight Committee, have been talking about UFOs. Except they don’t call them UFOs anymore, it’s too specific I suppose: the more ambiguous UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) is preferred. Whatever term is used, the hearing represents a powerful sign of the extraordinary times we live in, times of revelation, when people will no longer be silenced, truth buried.

    The hearing may lift the stigma of reporting sightings of UFOs/UAPs, among personnel in the armed forces (of all nations), and is a major step in revealing the level of official deceit surrounding the topic.

    While it may seem irrelevant to our daily lives, acknowledging the existence of UFOs/people from other planets is crucial to understanding ourselves and our place in the solar system. It would potentially change everything, including the way we live, the values we hold the systems we build.

    David Grusch, a former US intelligence officer turned whistleblower, has courageously declared what many have been saying for decades, that the US (and others) Government has been covering up evidence of UFOs for many years. Anna Paulina Luna, a member of the committee from Florida (who encountered a UFO in 2018), said “it is unacceptable to continue to gaslight Americans [and others] into thinking this is not happening.”

    In addition to David Grusch, the committee heard from retired US navy commander David Fravor and a former US navy pilot, Ryan Graves.

    Fravor described that in 2004 he and another pilot had seen “a smooth, seamless oval-shaped object hovering over the water before it rapidly climbed about 12,000 feet in the air. It then accelerated and disappeared. It was detected roughly 60 miles away less than a minute later…..What we experienced was well beyond the material science…. that we have currently or that we’re going to have in the next 10 to 20 years”

    Graves recounted that in 2014 his squadron began seeing UFOs, which he described as “dark grey or black cubes … inside of a clear sphere, where the apex or tips of the cubes were touching the inside of that sphere.” He said there was no acknowledgement or ways or reporting such incidents, which he stated were “not rare or isolated but routine…..if everyone could see the sensor and video data I witnessed, our national conversation would change.”

    Evidence

    The evidence supporting the existence of UFOs is overwhelming and, to any open-minded person, indisputable. Space-craft of varying sizes and shapes, are routinely seen throughout the world, individually or in groups, sometimes dozens of craft together, and filmed or photographed by all manner of people, some in uniform, many not.

    They are able to move at terrific speed, stop suddenly or glide gracefully, manoeuvre in seemingly impossible ways. They are clearly not “of this world”, are without question “real” and have been present on Earth for eons.

    In addition to direct sightings, various other signs testify to their presence. The crop circles which appear every spring, mainly in fields in southern England. Complex, inexplicable designs, which become more intricate and expansive every year; spirals of light seen in the sky and light patterns recorded on buildings all over the world since 1997.

    Undeniable evidence it seems, and yet so successful has the duplicitous message of denial been, that statements about UFOs are still regarded as controversial.

    For decades lies have been promulgated relentlessly by governments, not only to hide the facts, but to create a totally false, reductive image of UFOs and their occupants. A cynical narrative adopted and obediently voiced by science fiction writers/film-makers and the media. It states that humanity is alone in the Universe, that sightings of UFOs are always explainable and can therefore be dismissed or ignored, and that extraterrestrial life, if it exists, is just like humanity – violent, selfish and exploitative, and is therefore a threat to us.

    All nonsense; deceit, lies and more lies. Constructed by politicians and religious leaders, who know the truth, in order to perpetuate injustice, maintain control and create fear of the unknown; paranoia and hate of “the other” multiplied tenfold.

    Groundbreaking

    A pivotal voice in revealing the reality and nature of UFO phenomena was George Adamski (1891-1965). He wrote two groundbreaking books: Flying Saucers have Landed, co-written with Desmond Leslie, who explained that spaceships – mostly from “Mars and Venus” – had been visiting Earth for millennia, and listed sightings going back to the 16C. Then came Inside The Spaceships, another remarkable book, in which Adamski records, visiting a huge “cigar shaped Mothership”.

    On board he met extraordinary people and had a number of illuminating discussions with a highly evolved being who sought to share His wisdom with humanity. The “Master”, as Adamski calls him, makes clear that among all the planets of the solar system, only Earth humanity has not learned to live peacefully; “we do not kill our fellow man, even in self defence… Since we have learned that life is all-inclusive and that we are that life, we know that we can do nothing without hurting ourselves.”

    He repeatedly explained that all life is interconnected: “A great fallacy which has grown on the people of Earth… is the custom of dividing into many parts that which should never be divided. We of other worlds have no such divisions but realise the relationship and the interdependence of all things.” He stressed that the space people are deeply concerned about the threat humanity poses, to itself, the planet and the stability of the solar system.

    Someone who worked with Adamski was British writer/artist Benjamin Creme. He explained that the mission of the UFOs is wholly benevolent. “They come to aid”, in particular to clean up some of the pollution, specifically nuclear pollution (that we cannot even measure), that humanity discharges daily into the atmosphere.

    Consistent with the view of Dr. Meade Layne, an American academic and early ufology researcher, Creme explains that the physical body of the space people and their spacecraft is composed of etheric matter, not dense physical like us. Science currently recognizes and can measure three states of physical matter – dense, liquid and gasous, but above these (according to esoteric science) exist four more levels, finer, subtler, but still physical. These are the etheric planes of matter, and all physical forms (including ours) have an etheric counterpart.

    Without etheric vision the UFOs and the space people remain invisible – unless they choose to be seen. Then they simply alter the vibrational rate of their bodies and/or their spaceships, to the point where they come within  our range of vision.

    Unity, unity, unity

    Reports of other unexplained happenings, in addition to increased UFO sightings, have reached unprecedented levels in recent years. From the list of UFO accounts, one specific type appears of particular interest. Seen throughout the world hundreds of times, it looks like a star, but behaves like a spacecraft. It changes shape and color, pulsates and moves in the heavens, appears and disappears.

    It is, according to Benjamin Creme, a sign arranged to stimulate a debate, a herald, that the Teacher for this time, Maitreya, is here in the world. Consistent with the ‘master’ Adamski met, Maitreya teaches that humanity is one, that unity is the natural order of things, and that sharing is key to solving our problems.

    All is connected, not just within our planet, but the solar system and indeed the Universe; and the creation of unity is, as a wise One once said, “The underlying purpose of life.” The myth of separation needs to be shattered. Separation between people and nations feeds distrust, inflames hate, and triggers wars. We are one group/family called humanity; there is no division between us, the land upon which we live and That which is beyond thought and time.

    When we grasp this essential fact then everything will change. New, just socio-economic systems will be designed based on this reality, true democratic forms of governance will be able to emerge, and fundamental change, so desperately needed if we are to save the planet can begin.

    The sightings of UFOs and the unexplained happenings are signs of the times, transitional times of great importance, conflict and opportunity. The purpose of such signs is multi-faceted: to clean up some of our pollution; to prompt a re-evaluation of the destructive way we are living; to alert man to the presence of Maitreya in our midst, and among other things, to say loudly and clearly, separation is an illusion.

    Their message, and the message of The Wise throughout the ages is one of love, of unity and brotherhood, tolerance and compassion. If we are to eradicate war, poverty and injustice we must reject anything and everything that feeds division.  This is the first and fundamental step; cast out completely those politicians/corporate voices who poison global life with their divisive hateful rhetoric; learn to share and live peacefully as brothers and sisters – or face the unimaginable.

    Governments know well the truth, but in an attempt to maintain control of the populous, to perpetuate fear and social injustice and to promote ideologies of division and greed, have kept it hidden.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Congressmen angry that Bikini islanders’ nuclear trust fund may have been ‘squandered’

    By Giff Johnson, Editor, Marshall Islands Journal and RNZ Pacific correspondent

    Following widespread media coverage of the collapse of what was a more than US$70 million trust fund for Bikini islanders displaced by American nuclear weapons testing, the United States Congress has demanded answers from the Interior Department about the status of the trust fund.

    Four leading members of the US Congress put the Interior Department on notice last Friday that Congress is focused on accountability of Interior’s decision to discontinue oversight of the Bikini Resettlement Trust Fund.

    In their three-page letter, the chairmen and the ranking members of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and the House Committee on Natural Resources — which both have oversight on US funding to the Marshall Islands — wrote to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland with questions about what has happened to the Bikinians’ trust fund.

    It was initially capitalised by the US Congress in 1982 and again in 1988 for a total investment of just under US$110m.

    Protests in Majuro
    The Congressional letter is the first official US action on the Bikini Resettlement Trust Fund and follows several demonstrations in Majuro over the past six weeks by members of the Bikini community angered by the current lack of money to support their community.

    The letter notes that on November 16, 2017, Interior accepted Kili/Bikini/Ejit Mayor Anderson Jibas and the local council’s request for a “rescript” or change in the system of oversight of the Resettlement Trust Fund.

    As of September 30, 2016, the fund had $71 million in it, the last audit available of the fund.

    “Since then (2017), local officials have purportedly depleted the fund,” the four Senate and House leaders wrote to Haaland.

    “Indeed, media reports suggest that the fund may have been squandered in ways that not only lack transparency and accountability, but also lack fidelity to the fund’s original intent.

    “If true, that is a major breach of public trust not only for the people of Bikini Atoll, for whom the fund was established, but also for the American taxpayers whose dollars established and endowed the fund.”

    They refer to multiple media reports about the demise of the Resettlement Trust Fund, including in the Marshall Islands Journal, The New York Times, Marianas Variety and Honolulu Civil Beat.

    No audits since 2016
    The Resettlement Trust Fund was audited annually since inception in the 1980s. But there have been no audits released since 2016 during the tenure of current Mayor Jibas.

    The lack of funds in the Resettlement Trust Fund only became evident in January when the local government was unable to pay workers and provide other benefits routinely provided for the displaced islanders.

    Since January, no salaries or quarterly nuclear compensation payments have been made, leaving Bikinians largely destitute and now facing dozens of collection lawsuits from local banks due to delinquent loan payments.

    Bikini women load their belongings onto a waiting US Navy vessel in March 1946
    Bikini women load their belongings onto a waiting US Navy vessel in March 1946 as they prepare to depart to Rongerik, an uninhabited atoll where they spent two years. Image: US Navy Archives

    ‘Fund is in jeopardy’
    The letter from Energy Chairman Senator Joe Manchin and ranking member Senator John Barrasso, and Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman and ranking member Raul Grijalva says American lawmakers “have a duty to oversee the management of taxpayer dollars appropriated for the resettlement and rehabilitation of Bikini Atoll”.

    The letter also repeatedly makes the point that the money in the trust fund was only to rehabilitate and resettle Bikini Atoll, with projects on Kili or Ejit islands limited to only $2 million per year, subject to the Interior Secretary’s prior approval.

    “Regrettably, the continued viability of the fund to serve its express purpose now appears to be in jeopardy,” the US elected leaders said.

    The US leaders are demanding that Haaland explain why the Interior Department walked away from its long-standing oversight role with the trust fund in late 2017.

    Specifically they want to know if the Office of the Solicitor approved the decision by then-Assistant Secretary Doug Domenech to accept the KBE Local Government’s rescript “as a valid amendment to the 1988 amended resettlement trust fund agreement.’

    They also suggest Interior’s 2017 decision has ramifications for US legal liability.

    Key questions
    “Does the department believe that the 2017 rescript supersedes the 1988 amended resettlement trust fund agreement in its entirety?” they ask.

    “If so, does the department disclaim that Congress’s 1988 appropriation to the fund fully satisfied the obligation of the United States to provide funds to assist in the resettlement and rehabilitation of Bikini Atoll by the people of Bikini Atoll?

    “And does that waive any rights or reopen any potential legal liabilities for nuclear claims that were previously settled?”

    They also want to know if KBE Local Government provided a copy of its annual budget, as promised, since 2017.

    The letter winds up wanting to know what Interior is “doing to ensure that trust funds related to the Marshall Islands are managed transparently and accountably moving forward?”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    The "Baker" underwater nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll in 1946.
    The Baker underwater nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Dozens of World War II vessels were used as targets for this weapons test, and now lie on the atoll’s lagoon floor. Image: US Navy Archives

  • How Corporate America Subverts Reform to Boost Profits



    One measure of corporate power’s dominance is its 24/7 relentless, profit-driven capacity to strike back and prevail over reforms or other efforts designed to give the people voice and fairness.

    Here are some examples that should give us pause in touting civic victories:

    A few years ago, during lunch with the formidable, creative Brian Lamb—founder of C-SPAN—I asked whether, after decades of blanket coverage of Congressional sessions, accessible to millions of people, Congress was an improved institution. After all, as Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote: “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” His reply: “No.” Such is the ever-growing grip of corporate lobbyists directly on and inside Congress, compared to the unorganized sovereign people back home.

    The massive government investment in developing important pharmaceuticals over the decades, followed by free giveaways of these discoveries to drug companies, was supposed to reduce the corporate cost of discovering and testing new medicines and thereby reduce what companies like Pfizer, Merck and Eli Lilly would charge patients. No way—Americans, who paid for these discoveries, are charged record-high prices for pharmaceuticals—higher than in any other country in the world.

    To add insult to injury, American drug firms exported production of many of these medicines to China and India for importing back to the U.S. for a greater profit than might come from U.S. production. One result—the national security nightmare of our country not producing any antibiotics here at home!

    During the second Bush Administration, Congress cut the tax rate sharply to induce U.S. companies to bring home tens of billions of stored dollars in return for businesses promising to invest this money in productive enterprise and wage gains. Result—a double-cross. Instead, the companies bought back their own stock, pumped up executive compensation, and funded mergers.

    Years ago, Congress passed legislation allowing business corporations to deduct up to ten percent of their taxable income for charitable contributions. The lawmakers thought this would unleash large sums of money to help the needy in addition to educational and civic initiatives.

    Result: Only a tiny number of major corporations exceed the one percent level of charitable donations. Hugely profitable companies give to charitable activities at a fraction of one percent. Apple is one of them, headed by CEO Tim Cook who makes $833 A MINUTE!

    The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) does not require companies to disclose their percentage of charitable contributions. Institutional and individual shareholders should introduce resolutions to compel the top brass to do so. Such resolutions should win a majority of votes and open the door to the shame and embarrassment of stingy companies. In such a “soft area,” this may be enough to spring tens of billions of dollars for “good works.” Wake up perpetrators of “good works!” All you have to lose is your perennial red ink.

    President Bill Clinton produced another unintended boomerang when in 1993, he got through Congress a revenue rule prohibiting deductibility for any corporate boss who received annual compensation above $1 million a year. However, the rule came with a giant “loophole.” As Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies wrote in a report you should read: “So-called ‘performance’ pay, including stock options and certain bonuses, would be exempted from the deductibility cap.”

    Result: Executive compensation via deviously calculated stock options and bonuses skyrocketed, and, combined with a Reaganite elimination of SEC restrictions over stock buybacks in 1982, led to the gigantic waste of trillions of dollars of corporate profits poured (shareholder money) into unproductive stock buybacks.

    Corporate bosses have a personal interest in stock buybacks. As Steve Clifford showed in his book The CEO Pay Machine: How It Trashes America and How to Stop It, the bosses developed metrics for raising their pay that just happened to coincide with the stock buyback and stock option racket.

    The emergence of the Pentagon-developed Internet was supposed to even a playing field between the haves and the have-nots by making access, retrieval, and transfer of knowledge and informed advocacy virtually free. It was supposed to give power to the people.

    Result: Addictive trivia to the masses, information overload, and the rise of the Wardens of the Internet Gulag – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and the rest of these unregulated control freaks who distribute your personal information anywhere in the world for big profits.

    Then, of course, there is the old standby—Regulatory Capture. First comes reforms for the people after years of striving to create health, safety, and economic regulatory agencies to impose some ‘law and order’ on the out-of-control corporate bandits and greed hounds. Then come the rebounds. Corporate lobbyists, campaign cashiers, and the placement of corporatists to run federal agencies. These corporate operatives work to put the agencies to sleep or to actually turn them against the people directly through this internal sabotage. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) are two such examples.

    Congress has even let the drug and medical device companies fund the FDA’s drug approval regulatory apparatus. What’s that saying about ‘not biting the hand that feeds you’?

    Knowing about this second, third, and fourth strike capability by big business may sensitize citizen groups and advocates to demand that the Democratic Party, at least, be alert and forceful in rolling back these anti-people travesties when they achieve majority status on Capitol Hill. Rhetoric is useless.

    To date, the Dems have rarely done so even for such giveaways as Trump’s 2017 huge tax cut for the rich and powerful, which the Democrats had opposed. Taking over the House in 2019, some Dems led by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman, Richard Neal (D-MA) openly said they were not going to move to repeal and use the monies for good purposes.

    Persistent Democracy does take work, doesn’t it? Oh people!

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • ‘Like a war zone’: Congress hears of China’s abuses in Xinjiang ‘re-education camps’

    Two women tell of witnessing or experiencing torture and brainwashing, as Republicans and Democrats vow to document ‘genocide’

    Two women who say they experienced and escaped Chinese “re-education camps” have provided first-hand testimony to members of the US Congress, giving harrowing detail while imploring Americans not to look away from what the US has declared a continuing genocide of Muslim ethnic minorities.

    Testifying before a special House committee at the beginning of Ramadan, Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uyghur woman, said that during her nearly three years in internment camps and police stations, prisoners were subjected to 11 hours of “brainwashing education” each day. It included singing patriotic songs and praising the Chinese government before and after meals.

    Continue reading…

  • Reckless Capitalist Banks Rescued by Government Socialism – Again!



    Once again, government socialism—ultimately backed by taxpayers—is saving reckless midsized banks and their depositors. Silicon Valley Bank (S.V.B) and Signature Bank in New York greedily mismanaged their risk levels and had to be closed down. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), in return, to avoid a bank panic and a run on other midsized banks went over its $250,000 insurance cap per account and guaranteed all deposits—no matter how large, which are owned by the rich and corporations—in those banks.

    Permitting such imprudent risk-taking flows directly from the Trump-GOP Congressional weakening of regulations in 2018, which was supported by dozens of Democrats, led by bank toady Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.). That bipartisan deregulation provided a filibuster-proof passage by the Senate.

    The other culprit is the Federal Reserve. Its very fast interest rate hikes reduced the asset value of those two banks’ holdings in long-term Treasury bonds, which reduced their capital reserves. With the “What, me worry?” snooze of the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, SVB had little supervision from state regulatory examiners and compliance enforcers.

    Actually, big depositors sniffed the shakiness of these two banks and acted ahead of the regulatory cops with mass withdrawals that sealed the fate of SVB. Imagine, SVB was giving out bonuses hours before its collapse. For this cluelessness, the bank’s CEO, Gregory Becker, took home about eleven million dollars in pay last year.

    All this was predicted by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.). Warren, in particular, specifically opposed the 2018 Congressional lifting of stronger liquidity and capital requirements along with regular stress tests for banks with assets over $50 billion. Trump’s law allowed the absence of these safeguards to cover banks with assets up to $250 billion. Such de-regulation covered SVB and Signature.

    Signature Bank had former House Banking Committee Chair Barney Frank on its board of directors. His name is on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was passed following the 2008 Wall Street collapse. Even Mr. Frank was clueless about what Signature’s CEO Joseph DePaolo was mismanaging. (DePaulo was paid $8.6 million last year.)

    Of course, the underfunded FDIC doesn’t have enough money to make good all the large depositors in these two banks. So, it is increasing the fees charged to all banks for such government insurance. The banks will find ways to pass these surchargers on to their customers.

    Other midsized banks may be shaky as more major depositors pull out and put their money into mega-giant banks like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup, which are universally viewed as “too big to fail.” The smaller businesses harmed by these closed banks are now on their own. No corporate socialism is as yet saving them.

    One of the provisions of the Dodd-Frank law was to require federal agencies to rein in bank executives’ pay that incentivizes recklessness and even fraud, as Public Citizen noted. Yet after 13 years, PC declared: “a hodgepodge of federal agencies—the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Federal Reserve, the National Credit Union Administration, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Securities and Exchange Commission—that is supposed to finalize the rule has so far failed to do so.”

    Defying mandates of Congress, often riddled with waivers from Capitol Hill, is routine for federal agencies. They know that when it comes to law and order for profiteering corporations, Congress is spineless. Have you heard of any resignations or firings from these sleepy regulatory agencies? Of course not. They continue to raise the ante for corporate socialist rescue even beyond their legal authority. For example, where does the FDIC get the authority to guarantee all the deposits in the failed banks when the Congressional limit is strictly $250,000 per account?

    Some people will remember Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson telling the Washington Post that there were “no authorities” for massive bank bailouts—think Citigroup in 2008 during a private weekend meeting in Washington, DC— but, he said, “someone had to do it.”

    Meanwhile, the American people remain fearful but silent over the safety of their bank deposits. They heard Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen tell Congress that the banking system “remains sound.” Some remember that’s what her predecessor said in the spring of 2008 about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the safest investments after Treasury bonds. By the fall, both of these giants had collapsed taking millions of trusting shareholders down with them.

    Finally, all those brilliant economists at the Federal Reserve surely must know that when midsize banks lose almost 20% on the value of their 10-year Treasuries, due to the very fast interest rate hikes by Jerome Powell’s Fed, trouble is on the horizon. Why didn’t they anticipate this outcome and do some foreseeing and forestalling? Nah, why worry, didn’t you know that the Fed prints money?

    Or maybe the Federal Reserve (its budget comes from bank fees, not the Congress), couldn’t see beyond fighting inflation, something it did not take seriously in time over a year and a half ago. More than a few outside economists repeatedly gave the Fed fair warning. But then the Fed, hardly ever criticized by the mainstream press, was listening to its brilliant economists.

    Stay tuned. This rollercoaster ride is not over yet.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Warren Demands Probe Into Bank Failures, Urges Biden to Fire Powell



    Sen. Elizabeth Warren this weekend called on federal officials to investigate the causes of recent bank failures and urged President Joe Biden to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom she has criticized for intensifying financial deregulation and imposing job- and wage-destroying interest rate hikes.

    Asked on Sunday by Chuck Todd of NBC‘s “Meet the Press” about the possibility of Powell imposing yet another interest rate hike despite ongoing market turmoil, Warren (D-Mass.) said, “I’ve been in the camp for a long time that these extraordinary rate increases that he has taken on, these extreme rate increases, are something that he should not be doing.”

    Powell “has a dual mandate,” said Warren. “Yes, he is responsible for dealing with inflation, but he is also responsible for employment. And what Chair Powell is trying to do, and he has said fairly explicitly, is that they are trying to, in effect, slow down the economy so that, this is by the Fed’s own estimate, two million people will lose their jobs. And I believe that is not what the chair of the Federal Reserve should be doing.”

    Since the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted international supply chains—rendered fragile by decades of neoliberal globalization—powerful corporations in highly consolidated industries have taken advantage of these and other crises such as the bird flu outbreak to justify profit-boosting price hikes that far outpace the increased costs of doing business.

    “Raising interest rates doesn’t do anything to solve” a cost-of-living crisis driven primarily by “price gouging, supply chain kinks, [and] the war in Ukraine,” Warren said Sunday. “All it does is put millions of people out of work.”

    “Jay Powell… has had two jobs. One is to deal with monetary policy, one is to deal with regulation. He has failed at both.”

    Powell, an ex-investment banker, was first appointed by then-President Donald Trump in 2018 and reappointed by Biden in 2021. Warren noted that she opposed Powell’s nomination in both cases “because of his views on regulation and what he was already doing to weaken regulation.”

    “But I think he’s failing in both jobs, both as the oversight and manager of these big banks, which is his job, and also what he’s doing with inflation,” said Warren.

    Asked by Todd if Biden should fire Powell, Warren said: “My views on Jay Powell are well-known at this point. He has had two jobs. One is to deal with monetary policy, one is to deal with regulation. He has failed at both.”

    “Would you advise President Biden to replace him?” Todd inquired.

    “I don’t think he should be Chairman of the Federal Reserve,” the Massachusetts Democrat responded. “I have said it as publicly as I know how to say it. I’ve said it to everyone.”

    Meanwhile, in a Saturday letter, Warren asked Richard Delmar, Tyler Smith, and Mark Bialek—respectively the deputy inspector general of the Treasury Department, acting inspector general of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and inspector general of the Fed’s board of governors—to “immediately open a thorough, independent investigation of the causes of the bank management and regulatory and supervisory problems that resulted in this month’s failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank (Signature) and deliver preliminary results within 30 days.”

    Until the Treasury Department, the Fed, and the FDIC “intervened to guarantee billions of dollars of deposits,” the second- and third-biggest bank failures in U.S. history “threatened economic contagion and severe damage to the banking and financial systems,” Warren noted. “The bank’s executives, who took unnecessary risks or failed to hedge against entirely foreseeable threats, must be held accountable for these failures.”

    “But this mismanagement was allowed to occur because of a series of failures by lawmakers and regulators,” Warren continued.

    In 2018, several Democrats joined Republicans in approving Sen. Mike Crapo’s (R-Idaho) Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which weakened the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Crapo’s deregulatory measure, signed into law by Trump, loosened federal oversight of banks with between $50 billion and $250 billion in assets—a category that includes SVB and Signature.

    “As officials sought to develop a plan responding to SVB’s failure, Chair Powell muzzled regulators from any public mention of the regulatory failures that occurred under his watch.”

    Moreover, the Fed under Powell’s leadership “initiated key regulatory rollbacks,” Warren wrote Saturday, echoing criticisms that she and financial industry watchdogs voiced earlier in the week. “And the banks’ supervisors—particularly the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which oversaw SVB—missed or ignored key signals about their impending failure.”

    It is “critical that your investigation be completely independent and free of influence from the bank executives or regulators that were responsible for action that led to these bank failures,” Warren stressed. “I am particularly concerned that you avoid any interference from Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who bears direct responsibility for—and has a long record of failure involving—regulatory and supervisory matters involving these two banks.”

    “I have already asked Chair Powell to recuse himself from the Fed’s internal investigation of this matter, but he has not yet responded to this request,” wrote Warren. The progressive lawmaker said “this silence is troubling” in light of recent reporting that “as officials sought to develop a plan responding to SVB’s failure, Chair Powell muzzled regulators from any public mention of the regulatory failures that occurred under his watch.”

    “Bank regulators and Congress must move quickly to close the gaps that allowed these bank failures to happen, and your investigation will provide us important insight as we take steps to do so,” added Warren, who has introduced legislation to repeal a vital provision of the Trump-era bank deregulation law enacted five years ago with bipartisan support.

    In appearances on three Sunday morning talk shows, Warren doubled down on her demands for an independent investigation into recent bank failures, stronger financial regulations, and punishing those responsible.

    After lawmakers from both parties helped Trump fulfill his campaign promise to weaken federal oversight of the banking system, Powell “took a flamethrower to the regulations, saying, ‘I’m doing this because Congress let me do it,’” Warren told ABC‘s “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl. “And what happened was exactly what we should have predicted, and that is the banks, these big, multi-billion-dollar banks, loaded up on risk; they boosted their short-term profits; they gave themselves huge bonuses and big salaries; and they exploded their banks.”

    “When you explode a bank, you ought to be banned from banking forever.”

    “When you explode a bank, you ought to be banned from banking forever,” said Warren, who acknowledged that criminal charges could be coming. “The Department of Justice has opened an investigation. I think that’s appropriate for them to do. We’ll see where the facts take them. But we’ve got to take a close look at this.”

    Not only did former SVB chief executive officer Greg Becker, who lobbied aggressively for the 2018 bank deregulation law, sell millions of dollars of shares as recently as late last month, but until federal regulators took control of the failed bank on March 10, he was on the board of directors at the San Francisco Fed—the institution responsible for overseeing SVB.

    On Saturday, Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont announced that he plans to introduce legislation “to end this conflict of interest by banning big bank CEOs from serving on Fed boards.”

    “We’ve got to say overall that we can’t keep repeating this approach of weakening the regulation over the banks, then stepping in when these giant banks get into trouble,” Warren said Sunday, arguing for stronger federal oversight to prevent the need for bailouts.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Let’s Be Clear: Social Security Is Not Adding a Penny to US Debt



    The narrative that Social Security eats up government revenue, driving the federal debt upward, is deeply entrenched in the Republican Party’s psyche. Former-Vice President Mike Pence insinuated such February during a private meeting with business leaders when promoting the age-old Republican wish to privatize Social Security. So maybe Social Security won’t be off the table, as GOP leaders earlier promised, as the current debate over the debt ceiling unfolds.

    The public has favored shoring up Social Security with more taxes. But, also, concern over federal deficits has increased among both Republican-leaners and Democratic-leaners. Concern over deficits translates into concern over the debt. Consequently, debunking the myth Social Security feeds the debt seems an inherent requirement in gaining support for progressive proposals to reform Social Security. That, in addition to outlining how cutting benefits unduly inflicts harm within the aging population.

    Now consider all those misleading charts. Those charts showing Social Security the top spender of federal monies surely don’t help foster favorable public opinion or keep the GOP benefit-cutting hatchet in the sheath. Nor do stories like that February 9 on PBS Newshour when a segment on Medicare and Social Security closed with this on the screen: “Almost a third of federal spending this fiscal year is expected to go toward Medicare and Social Security.” PBS Newshour (which I support and watch regularly) is not alone, of course; the spending attributed to Social Security and other social programs is a recurrent theme during this debt-ceiling news cycle. Even the Treasury Department on one website has, at the time of this writing, a bar chart with Social Security the top bar consuming 19 percent of all spending.

    Busting the debt myth can start with a report from the Government Accountability Office where stated how for years the Social Security program “built up reserves” from revenue collected that “were invested in federal government securities, reducing the amount that must be borrowed from the public,” including from other countries, to cover federal deficits. (By law surplus funds in Social Security have to be invested in government securities.)

    Surpluses were possible, of course, given Social Security is largely funded by its separate payroll tax. Not totally by general revenue as likely some surmise, or haven’t considered questioning, from those typical charts on federal spending.

    And, relatedly, not enough is made of this fact: Today, Social Security (formally, the “Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance [OASI] Trust Fund”) actually owns more U.S. debt, $2.7 trillion in Treasury securities, than the top two foreign governments, Japan with securities valuing $1.1 trillion and China with under $1 trillion.

    It is true Social Security’s dedicated revenue in 2021 was not alone sufficient to cover benefits paid, as detailed in a recent report by the Social Security Board of Trustees. Although, it was sufficient in the preceding year with additional securities purchased then. But in 2021, the government had to reconcile payment for OASI-owned federal securities cashed in to cover that year’s shortfall. Put differently, installment payments on the loan from Social Security came due. This, admittedly, entailed some additional spending of general revenue. But not in sums making the program a major debt maker, particularly not relative to the deficit amounts caused by tax cuts during the Trump administration.

    As outlined in the Trustees’ report (Table II.B1, page 7), $838.2 billion from Social Security’s separate payroll tax covered 84 percent of the $1,001.9 billion in operational costs during 2021. The other revenue sources were the routine interest paid on securities owned, the income tax on Social Security benefits, and $59.1 billion collected from the liquidation of some securities—a liquidation representing a small percent of the 2021 deficit. Granted, the deficit grew in 2021 to nearly $3,000 billion partly from Covid spending, but even if using for illustrative purposes the 2019 deficit amount of around $1,000 billion, the $59.1 billion would only have represented 6 percent of that deficit.

    Shortfalls are now predicted to happen regularly each year whereby reserves (that is, owned securities) in the OASI trust likely will be depleted by 2034 if no reforms. Then only an estimated 77 percent of benefits due would be payable. But annual payments on securities cashed in isn’t á priori a dominant driver of deficits and debt, as the preceding paragraph reveals.

    Aside from erroneously blaming Social Security for deficits swelling the debt, there is also a related and persistent argument that cutting benefits via raising the retirement age to 70 is necessary to control expenditures given the increasing life expectancy over the decades. But issues around life expectancy, ironically, actually contribute to disproportionate harm incurred by raising the retirement age again. Yes again, since a 1983 law increased the age from 65 to eventually 67.

    Research has shown those of lesser means have experienced smaller improvements in mortality over the years. Conceivably, as life expectancy declined during the Covid-19 pandemic, this discrepancy was magnified. In any case, what is known according to the Congressional Research Service is raising the retirement age to reduce costs “would [because of their lower overall life expectancy] affect low earners disproportionately (i.e., reductions in their lifetime Social Security benefits would be considerably larger than for high earners).” By the way, privatization of Social Security would also disproportionately harm the well-being in retirement years of those with lesser means.

    Research by the Social Security Administration also revealed that a sizable portion of those retiring before the full retirement age had health problems impairing the ability to work. And these early retirees more likely worked in physically demanding blue-collar occupations. This and other studies led the Congressional Research Service to observe that “early retirees who have work-related health impairment…would be disadvantaged” by an increased retirement age, which worth noting they also were by the earlier increase legislated in 1983.

    Cutting benefits, in general, subverts the intended purpose of Social Security. And justification for cutting benefits is partly based upon the faulty claim Social Security continually increases the debt, ignoring most expenditures on the program do not entail general revenue. If only charts on federal spending demarcated expenditures on programs by revenue type. The one on general revenue only would show a percentage attributed to Social Security considerably less than advertised in the all-inclusive charts today.

    Essentially, the Social Security program has not contributed in any markedly way to the totality of deficits and associated debt. Rather, paradoxically, the program has historically loaned the government monies to cover the debt and, thereby, help pay for other federal programs. So, don’t blame Social Security for the sum of existing debt today accumulated over the years.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Sanders Warns of ‘Primary Care Cliff’ as Federal Funds for Local Clinics Set to Expire



    Sen. Bernie Sanders warned Monday that without swift congressional action, the $5.8 billion in federal funding relied on each year by community health centers around the United States will expire on September 30, resulting in a devastating “primary care cliff.”

    “Congress can and must avoid” such a scenario, says a statement from the Vermont Independent’s office.

    Sanders announced that the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee he chairs is scheduled to hold a hearing this Thursday at 10:00 am ET titled, “Community Health Centers: Saving Lives, Saving Money.”

    Millions of people in the U.S. currently receive lifesaving services from community health centers in thousands of neighborhoods nationwide.

    “In America today, community health centers are providing cost-effective primary medical care, dental care, mental health counseling, and low-cost prescription drugs to 30 million people regardless of a person’s bank account or insurance status,” said Sanders.

    “Not only do these health centers save lives and ease human suffering,” Sanders continued. “They save Medicare, Medicaid, and our entire healthcare system billions of dollars each year because they avoid the need to go to expensive emergency rooms and hospitals.”

    “In the midst of a broken and dysfunctional healthcare system, I will be doing everything I can to expand community health centers so that every American has access to the primary care that they need and deserve,” he added.

    According to the senator’s office:

    Nearly 100 million Americans live in a primary care desert, nearly 70 million live in a dental care desert, and some 158 million Americans—nearly half the country’s population—live in a mental healthcare desert. Today, 85 million people are uninsured or under-insured, over 500,000 people go bankrupt each year because of medically related debt, and more than 68,000 people die each year because they cannot afford the healthcare they desperately need. Expanding community health centers will begin to address this urgent crisis.

    The following individuals are scheduled to testify at the hearing: Amanda Pears Kelly, chief executive officer of Advocates for Community Health and executive director of the Association of Clinicians for the Underserved; Ben Harvey, chief executive officer of Indiana Primary Health Care Association; Robert Nocon, assistant professor at Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine; Sue Veer, president and chief executive officer of Carolina Health Centers; and Jessica Farb, managing director at the Government Accountability Office.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • To Prevent More ‘Catastrophic Derailments,’ Rail Workers Outline Plan for Immediate Reforms



    Three weeks after the lives of East Palestine, Ohio residents were upended by a fiery wreck involving a Norfolk Southern-owned train overloaded with hazardous materials, rail union leaders on Friday implored federal regulators and lawmakers to “focus on the primary reasons for the derailment and take immediate action to prevent future disasters.”

    In a statement, Railroad Workers United (RWU) pointed to the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) newly published preliminary report on the February 3 crash and subsequent burnoff of vinyl chloride and other carcinogenic chemicals, which suggests that an overheated wheel bearing likely caused the train to derail. The inter-union alliance of rail workers also cited NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy, who said Thursday at a press conference: “This was 100% preventable. We call things accidents—there is no accident. Every single event that we investigate is preventable.”

    RWU, which has previously highlighted how industry-led deregulation and Wall Street-backed policies such as “precision-scheduled railroading” have made the U.S. rail system more dangerous, said Friday that “Class 1 freight rail carriers, including Norfolk Southern, have prioritized profits over safety, cutting maintenance, equipment inspections, and personnel in all crafts while increasing the average train size to three miles or more.”

    In the words of RWU co-chair Gabe Christenson: “Railroad workers experience firsthand every day the dangers inherent in this style of railroading. It has impacted their safety and health, state of mind, and lives on and off the job.”

    “Limits on train lengths and weights are necessary to prevent catastrophic derailments.”

    Jason Doering, general secretary of RWU, echoed Christenson’s message, saying: “Every day we go to work, we have serious concerns about preventing accidents like the one that occurred in Ohio. As locomotive engineers, conductors, signal maintainers, car inspectors, track workers, dispatchers, machinists, and electricians, we experience the reality that our jobs are becoming increasingly dangerous due to insufficient staffing, inadequate maintenance, and a lack of oversight and inspection.”

    “We recognize,” Doering added, “that limits on train lengths and weights are necessary to prevent catastrophic derailments.”

    One week ago, RWU made the case for nationalization, arguing that the U.S. “can no longer afford private ownership of the railroads; the general welfare demands that they be brought under public ownership.”

    In the absence of such sweeping transformation, which remains far-off given the current state of the beleaguered U.S. labor movement, the alliance on Friday demanded that federal agencies and Congress move quickly to “rein in” Norfolk Southern and other profit-maximizing rail corporations that have fought regulations, laid off workers, and purchased billions of dollars in stock rather than investing in employees and safety upgrades.

    Specifically, RWU called on regulators and lawmakers to:

    • Ensure sufficient staffing to do the job properly, efficiently, and safely, with all trains operating with a minimum of a two-person crew;
    • Cap train length and weight at a reasonable level to mitigate the increased likelihood of breakdowns, train separations, and derailments;
    • Implement adequate and proper maintenance and inspections of locomotives and rail cars, tracks and signals, wayside detectors, and other infrastructure; and
    • Standardize ample training and time off without the harassment of draconian attendance policies.

    Of these measures, only a proposed rule to require two-person crews—described by RWU as loophole-ridden—was included in the blueprint the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) unveiled Tuesday to hold rail companies accountable and protect the well-being of workers and fenceline communities.

    The DOT also encouraged rail carriers to voluntarily provide sick leave. Norfolk Southern—facing intense scrutiny and backlash amid the ongoing East Palestine disaster—agreed Wednesday to provide up to a week of paid sick leave per year to roughly 3,000 track maintenance workers.

    But because the Biden administration and Congress recently imposed a contract without paid sick leave on rail workers who were threatening to strike, the vast majority still lack this basic lifesaving benefit, as do millions of private sector workers in other industries who are also awaiting legislation to address the issue.

    Characterizing the DOT’s plan as inadequate, RWU said Tuesday that “rank-and-file railroad workers can diagnose and fix the problems” and urged U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to enact “some of our solutions.”

    RWU treasurer Hugh Sawyer reiterated that call on Friday.

    “We demand that the railroad be run safely, efficiently, and professionally, and not as some ‘cash cow’ for Wall Street investors and billionaires,” said Sawyer. “Much of what is wrong with the rail industry today can be fixed easily and quickly by acting on what is outlined above. We demand action NOW.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • New Campaign Aims to Fight Off GOP Threats to Social Security and Medicare



    A coalition of progressive advocacy groups on Monday launched a campaign urging every member of Congress to pledge to “never vote to cut Social Security or Medicare under any circumstances,” an effort that comes as House Republicans are weighing attacks on the two programs as part of their sweeping austerity spree.

    Led by Social Security Works and More Perfect Union, the new campaign highlights the massive stakes of the ongoing showdown over the U.S. debt ceiling, which House Republicans have said they will refuse to raise unless congressional Democrats and the Biden White House agree to major federal spending cuts—including damaging changes to Social Security and Medicare.

    “To be clear, the debt ceiling legislation is not about new spending; it’s about paying our bills,” the progressive groups said Monday. “Failure to raise the debt limit will not only wreck the nation’s economy; it will wreck the economy of the whole world.”

    In a launch video for their campaign, the progressive coalition includes footage of Republican lawmakers expressing support for raising the retirement age—a move that would cut Social Security spending across the board—and falsely blaming “entitlements” for the ballooning national debt as Congress hurtles toward another round of debt ceiling brinkmanship.

    “Democrats were elected on the promise that they would defend Social Security against Republican attacks,” said Alex Lawson, the executive director of Social Security Works. “Now is the moment of the truth. Democrats must refuse to cut Social Security. And they must refuse to create a mechanism—such as a closed-door commission—to cut Social Security down the road.”

    The campaign was launched ahead of President Joe Biden’s planned Wednesday meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who has joined the far-right flank of his caucus in pushing for federal spending cuts as a condition for raising the borrowing limit.

    In a Sunday appearance on “Face the Nation,” McCarthy suggested that he won’t insist on cuts to Social Security or Medicare in talks with the president, saying, “Let’s take those off the table.”

    But the Republican leader went on to say that while Biden has expressed opposition to including Social Security or Medicare changes in any debt ceiling legislation, “we’ve got to make sure we strengthen those.” When pressed, McCarthy declined to elaborate on what he meant by “strengthen.”

    In response to McCarthy’s comments, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said that McCarthy’s “slip—and his evasiveness after—is the latest giveaway that House Republicans have been telling the truth over the last year as they reiterate time and again that they want to cut Medicare and Social Security.”

    “For years, congressional Republicans have advocated for slashing earned benefits using Washington code words like ‘strengthen,’ when their policies would privatize Medicare and Social Security, raise the retirement age, or cut benefits,” Bates added. “It’s like saying, ‘You’re not being laid off—we just want to make a change.’ House Republicans refuse to raise revenue from the wealthy, but insist they will ‘strengthen’ earned benefits programs. You do the math. They have—they just won’t show you.”

    While many congressional Democrats have publicly said they would join the White House in opposing any proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, at least one lawmaker—Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—has floated the possibility of cutting a deal with the GOP on the programs, an idea adamantly rejected by the progressive groups behind the new pressure campaign.

    “It is critical for the Democrats to stay united and stand their ground against this latest effort to gut Social Security and Medicare,” said Faiz Shakir, executive editor at More Perfect Union.

    On their new website, the progressive groups will keep a running tally of the lawmakers who have taken the pledge to oppose Social Security and Medicare cuts, as well as those who are “equivocating” or outright “refusing” to make the promise.

    “The only way that Democrats can win this game of chicken is if they stay united and do not blink,” the groups said. “Standing with the overwhelming majority of the American people against all cuts to Social Security and Medicare should be the easiest promise any politician can make, so let’s make them promise.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.