radiofree.asia

Category: US Congress

  • Federal Workers Union Says Biden Right Not to Negotiate With GOP Over Debt Ceiling



    The largest union of federal workers in the U.S. urged Congress this week to raise the debt ceiling without mandating reductions in social spending, arguing that President Joe Biden is right to reject the GOP’s attempt to use the nation’s borrowing limit as leverage to force through devastating cuts.

    “The debt limit must be cleanly raised to avoid default and ensure the continuation of funding for the government and critical programs like Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits, and the U.S. military,” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), wrote in a letter sent to every member of Congress on Monday. “No negotiation that puts these programs or any aspect of federal employee compensation at risk should be considered.”

    Several House Republicans are threatening to block the lifting of the country’s borrowing cap—an arbitrary and arguably unconstitutional figure set by Congress—unless Democrats agree to slash government spending, including on vital social programs

    Notably, Capitol Hill’s deficit hawks oppose reducing the Pentagon’s ever-growing budget and rescinding former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy.

    The U.S. government’s outstanding debt officially hit the statutory limit of $31.4 trillion last Thursday, at which point the Treasury Department started repurposing federal funds.

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently told congressional leaders that “the use of extraordinary measures enables the government to meet its obligations for only a limited amount of time,” possibly through early June. She implored Congress to “act in a timely manner to increase or suspend the debt limit,” warning that “failure to meet the government’s obligations would cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability.”

    A 2011 debt ceiling standoff enabled the GOP to impose austerity and led to a historic downgrading of the U.S. government’s credit rating, but the country has never defaulted on its debt. Economists warn that doing so would likely trigger chaos in financial markets, resulting in millions of job losses and the elimination of $15 trillion in wealth.

    Aware that an economic calamity is at stake, many Republican lawmakers “have announced that they will not support an increase in the debt ceiling without concomitant reductions in spending, possibly in the form of reductions to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” Kelley wrote in the letter sent earlier this week.

    “The White House says it will not negotiate such an arrangement,” he added. “AFGE strongly supports the administration’s refusal to negotiate on this matter.”

    “No negotiation that puts these programs or any aspect of federal employee compensation at risk should be considered.”

    In a Wednesday speech from the floor of the upper chamber, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) criticized “the House GOP’s reckless approach to the debt ceiling” and challenged Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) “to level with the American people” on which popular programs his party wants to cut.

    “The debt ceiling is a subject of the highest consequence, and using it as a bargaining chip, using it as brinkmanship, as hostage-taking, as Republicans are trying to do is exceedingly dangerous,” said Schumer.

    “If the House of Representatives continues on [its] current course and allows the United States to default on its debt obligations, every single American is going to pay a terrible and expensive price,” Schumer continued. “The consequences of default are not some theoretical abstraction; if default happens, Americans will see the consequences in their daily lives.”

    “Interest rates will go soaring on everything from credit cards, and student loans, to cars, mortgages, and more,” he added. “That’s thousands of dollars for each American going right out the door, and it will happen through no fault of their own.”

    As many observers pointed out repeatedly in the wake of the midterm elections, Democrats had the power to prevent this high-risk game of brinkmanship altogether by raising the debt ceiling—or abolishing it completely—when they still controlled both chambers of Congress.

    Despite ample warnings from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups, conservative Democrats refused to take unilateral action during the lame-duck session.

    On Wednesday, Schumer pleaded with GOP lawmakers to simply raise the debt ceiling without demanding policy concessions in exchange.

    “I’d remind my Republican colleagues that they did it before when Trump was president three times; no Democratic obstruction or hostage-taking,” said Schumer. “We did it once together when Biden was president. And much of this debt comes from spending when Trump was president, voted on by a Republican House and a Republican Senate.”

    “It’s a bit of hypocrisy now to say that they can’t do it again, and they are holding it hostage and are playing a dangerous form of brinksmanship,” Schumer argued. “It shouldn’t matter who is president. It’s still bills we already incurred that must be paid for the good of all Americans.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • We Need Housing for People to Live In, Not for Corporations to Invest In



    Anyone who is active in our communities knows that housing insecurity and homelessness are rising fast, due in part to an ever-shrinking lot of affordable rentals and homes. Housing should be the rallying cry right now.

    There are a number of structural reasons for this housing crisis, and the most truly terrifying fact is that while housing becomes less and less affordable, there is no plan to make homes more available. At this time, we have far-right bomb throwers running one branch of government whose wish is to make those who live on SSI or Social Security even more unstable than they currently are. Every day we see these corporate shills threatening to cut or even eliminate entitlements that millions rely on for survival. And it seems that workforce housing is rapidly disappearing.

    One of the major problems that nobody is addressing is the huge number of rental properties and single-family homes that are being snatched up by nameless, faceless corporations in order to evict longstanding residents, slap a new coat of paint on the walls, maybe purchase a shiny new fridge, and double the rent to a new tenant. There seems to be no limit to the number of houses or apartments these huge corporations can own.

    According to The Wall Street Journal in 2021, 200 corporations are aggressively purchasing tens of thousands of homes, and even entire neighborhoods, and jacking up the rents. For example, a Blackrock creation called Invitation Homes merged with another outfit and as of 2021, this conglomerate owned 80,000 rental homes. In 2012, this outfit, also known as Treehouse Homes, went on a buying spree where they were purchasing $150 million dollars worth of homes every week—up to $10 billion.

    Some of these corporate acquisitions will be sold for well over market value. Often the smaller houses that might have been worker housing are considered tear-downs and will be replaced with a 4 or 5,000-square-foot monstrosity. Many others are used to create profit in the short-term rental market.

    While housing becomes less and less affordable, there is no plan to make homes more available… We desperately need a legal framework to make affordable housing possible.

    In my small town, a large corporation bought an apartment complex and is in the process of evicting a 90-year-old wheelchair-bound resident—in a town with a 0.7% vacancy rate. This resident just had his lease not renewed. The idea that you can evict long-term disabled tenants is just disgusting—but there is no law against it now. A local group is working on creating a law to prevent this type of corporate crime.

    If we lived in a country that actually valued its citizens, housing would be a priority. Since the Republicans remade so much of America under Ronald Reagan, there is no federal housing being built. No money for states to build housing. A housing crisis would be almost impossible to avoid in a country where real wages continue to stagnate, and in some years even decline, and there is no legal challenge to the huge corporations who dominate the industry. For-profit developers are who is building now, and in some instances need to put a couple of token affordable units into a large project, but frequently the affordable units are too expensive for many who need homes. And sometimes they even revert to market rates after a certain period.

    The amazing generation of people under 35 is speaking out about opportunity: many younger people will never have the chance to own a home. The stories are rampant: people who bid for a home get outbid by either the corporate buyers or by older people who have capital from having sold a home they were able to purchase when homes were far more affordable. People my age—in our 60’s—have owned homes that we bought for $100,000 or less and often when we sell them they go for 5-10 times that price. But young adults have none of those advantages.

    We desperately need a legal framework to make affordable housing possible. I am not a housing expert, or a lawyer. But some things are clear: corporate ownership of millions of units of housing has not been good for our country. Rent control is non-existent in the vast majority of towns and cities in the U.S. Homelessness has spiraled to numbers not seen ever before. The corporate ownership issue must be addressed nationally, but that does not seem to be an issue the Biden administration has been interested in tackling. There is a housing action plan put out in May 2022, but we haven’t seen any of that money go into housing in my part of New England.

    States could restrict number of houses used for short-term rentals, but federal intervention is needed in what I think is the biggest obstacle to bending the homelessness curve: limits to corporate ownership of housing. Unhoused people on our sidewalks, in shelters, in motels, in tents: this is our present and our future if we don’t see some real, urgent action to legally protect the vulnerable and house us all. Housing is a human need, not a speculative purchase.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Manchin-Romney Attack on Social Security Is ‘Last Thing We Need’: Sanders

    Progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday slammed right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s widely panned proposal to explore slashing Social Security benefits as part of a debt ceiling pact with Republicans.

    During a Wednesday interview with Fox Business at the ruling class’ annual gathering in Davos for the World Economic Forum, Manchin (W.Va.) suggested that members of both major U.S. political parties “work together” on solving the nation’s so-called “debt problem.” Although Manchin didn’t explicitly demand cuts to Social Security and expressed opposition to GOP calls for privatization, he singled out the program for intervention, saying that Congress “should be able to solidify it.”

    Given that Republicans are currently threatening to tank the global economy unless Democrats agree to reduce social spending, Manchin’s unilateral call for appeasement has set off alarm bells.

    What’s especially concerning to progressives is that the corporate-backed lawmaker is the co-author, alongside Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), of the TRUST Act, a bill that would enable Congress to create bipartisan “rescue” committees for the nation’s trust fund programs—including Social Security and Medicare—and give the panels 180 days to develop “legislation that restores solvency and otherwise improves each.” Measures put forth by the bipartisan committees would be fast-tracked for floor votes in both chambers of Congress, with no amendments allowed.

    Not only is Social Security legally incapable of adding to the federal deficit, but budget analysts have shown that the program is financially sound, requiring just a small increase in payroll tax revenue to ensure full benefits beyond 2035.

    “The last thing we need is another commission to propose cuts to Social Security and Medicare,” Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted Saturday.

    “The disastrous Bowles-Simpson ‘fiscal commission’ came very close to passing Congress some ten years ago. Bernie led the fight against it. It was a bad idea then, it is an even worse idea now.”

    “The last time we had one, it proposed cutting Social Security benefits for middle-class seniors by up to 35% and cutting tax rates for billionaires,” Sanders added, referring to the notorious 2010 Bowles-Simpson Commission, on which Manchin and Romney’s bill is based.

    Former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson (Wyo.), the Obama-appointed chairs of that commission, both endorsed the TRUST Act in 2021, calling it “important and vital.”

    Historically informed critics, by contrast, have condemned Manchin and Romney’s legislation as “a Trojan horse to cut seniors’ benefits.”

    Sanders’ staff director Warren Gunnels provided additional historical context on Saturday, linking to a 2012 essay in which the senator explained that in addition to seeking to cut wealthy households’ tax rates and current retirees’ Social Security benefits, the panel also proposed raising the retirement age to 69 years, slashing veterans’ benefits, increasing interest rates on student loans, and eliminating 450,000 federal jobs, among other harmful measures.

    On Wednesday, Manchin asserted that his and Romney’s bill could be used to secure a debt ceiling deal with House Republicans, many of whom have vowed to not lift the country’s borrowing cap—an arbitrary and arguably unconstitutional figure set by Congress—unless Democrats agree to shred vital social programs.

    The U.S. government’s outstanding debt officially hit the statutory limit of $31.4 trillion on Thursday, at which point the Treasury Department started repurposing federal funds.

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told congressional leaders last week that “the use of extraordinary measures enables the government to meet its obligations for only a limited amount of time,” possibly through early June. She implored Congress to “act in a timely manner to increase or suspend the debt limit,” warning that “failure to meet the government’s obligations would cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability.”

    Notably, Capitol Hill’s deficit hawks do not support reducing the Pentagon’s ever-expanding budget or hiking taxes on the rich to increase revenue. On the contrary, the first bill unveiled by House Republicans in the 118th Congress seeks to rescind most of the Inflation Reduction Act’s roughly $80 billion funding boost for the Internal Revenue Service—a move that would help wealthy households evade taxes and add an estimated $114 billion to the federal deficit.

    A 2011 debt ceiling standoff enabled the GOP to impose austerity and also resulted in a historic downgrading of the U.S. government’s credit rating, but the country has never defaulted on its debt. Economists warn that doing so would likely trigger chaos in financial markets, leading to millions of job losses and the erasure of $15 trillion in wealth.

    Knowing that a painful recession is at stake, “many leading Republican lawmakers are demanding that their new House majority use the debt limit as leverage to force the Biden administration to accept sweeping spending cuts that Democrats oppose, creating an impasse with no clear resolution at hand,” the Washington Post reported last week.

    Manchin claims to have spoken “briefly” with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) about the TRUST Act. Asked about the White House’s opposition to attaching any policy concessions to a debt ceiling agreement, Manchin said he believes the Biden administration will change its tune and negotiate with Republicans.

    Alex Lawson, the executive director of Social Security Works, told Common Dreams earlier this week that President Joe Biden should “reiterate his commitment to only signing a clean debt limit increase, and specifically rule out a closed-door commission designed to cut Social Security.”

    Lawson’s sentiment was echoed Saturday by Gunnels, who wrote on social media: “I’m old enough to remember that the disastrous Bowles-Simpson ‘fiscal commission’ came very close to passing Congress some ten years ago. Bernie led the fight against it. It was a bad idea then, it is an even worse idea now.”

    Rather than allowing a bipartisan commission to propose devastating cuts, Sanders argued, “we must instead expand Social Security.”

    Surveys have shown that U.S. voters are strongly opposed to cutting or privatizing Social Security and want Congress to expand the program. Last year, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) led the introduction of the Social Security Expansion Act, which would lift the cap on income that is subject to the Social Security payroll tax and boost the program’s annual benefits by $2,400.

    According to Data for Progress, 76% of likely voters—including 83% of Democrats, 73% of Republicans, and 73% of independents—support imposing, for the first time, payroll taxes on individuals with annual incomes above $400,000 per year to fund an expansion of Social Security benefits. Currently, only those making $147,000 or less are subject to the Social Security payroll tax.

  • ‘The GOP Is Irretrievably Broken’: House Adjourns After McCarthy Fails to Win Speakership



    This is a developing story… Please check back for possible updates…

    Update (6:45 pm ET):

    In a signal of what the U.S. House of Representatives could look for like the next two years, the chamber adjourned Tuesday evening after GOP Congressman Kevin McCarthy repeatedly failed to secure the 218 votes needed to become the next speaker due to a revolt by several far-right Republicans.

    During the third round of voting, the California Republican received only 202 votes. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla). joined with the 19 other Republicans who had backed Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in the second round, while Democrats maintained their support for Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).

    “Unfortunately, it’s the American people who will pay the price for House Republicans’ inability to govern.”

    “If Americans had any doubt that the GOP is irretrievably broken, today’s House speaker debacle confirms it,” Stand Up America founder and president Sean Eldridge said in a statement after the chamber adjourned until noon Wednesday.

    “Political arsonists control the House majority,” Eldridge added. “Whether they ultimately choose Kevin McCarthy or another extremist speaker of the House, the MAGA agenda will be the same: sow chaos, waste taxpayer dollars on sham investigations into President [Joe] Biden, and block progress on the pressing issues facing our nation. Unfortunately, it’s the American people who will pay the price for House Republicans’ inability to govern.”

    Recalling her warning from just after the November midterms about “Republicans in ruin,” Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) took the opportunity to contrast Democratic and GOP House leadership.

    “Thinking about how Democrats have delivered for the people time and again,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) similarly said. “Meanwhile, Republicans can’t even deliver for themselves.”

    Several other progressives in the chamber also piled on, such as Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), who tweeted that “this is embarrassing for McCarthy, and yet another display of Republican dysfunction.”

    “Based on what is going on today, their ability to govern and pass legislation on their own, I think is tenuous at best,” Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) told Politico. “When you bend everything to an ideological position, as opposed to the work of Congress, this is what you end up with.”

    Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) quipped that “Republicans want to run the country. They can’t even figure out who they want to run their party.”

    Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) tied Tuesday’s events to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, taking aim at ex-President Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, his former White House chief strategist.

    “This once-in-a-century humiliation of a party’s nominee for speaker is chickens coming home to roost for McCarthy, who whitewashed right-wing insurrectionism on the House floor,” said Raskin. “Nobody’s getting killed now, but the House GOP now sleeps in the bed they made with Trump and Bannon.”

    Many of the Republicans who voted for Jordan tend to align themselves with the twice-impeached former president—who in November announced his 2024 campaign, despite various legal issues. However, both Jordan and Trump urging them to back McCarthy was not effective.

    “Still not sworn in because the Republicans are having a hard time picking their leader,” Congressman-elect Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.) tweeted Tuesday. “This is a snapshot of how they’ll operate for the next two years.”

    Earlier:

    With several far-right allies of former President Donald Trump leading a charge to block U.S. House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become speaker of the chamber, the California Republican repeatedly fell short of the votes he needed to prevail on Tuesday.

    During both rounds of voting, McCarthy got only 203 votes from his fellow Republicans, several short of the 218 votes needed to win the leadership position. In the second round of voting, GOP Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio) received 19 votes.

    That came after Jordan secured just six votes in the first round, when 10 Republicans supported Rep. Andy Biggs (Ariz.) while Reps. Byron Donalds (Fla.) and Jim Banks (Ind.) as well as former Rep. Lee Zeldin (N.Y.) each received one vote.

    Defectors included outspoken backers of Trump—who urged members to support McCarthy—including GOP Reps. Lauren Boebert (Colo.) and Matt Gaetz (Fla.), who nominated Jordan for the second round even though the Ohio Republican had already spoken in support of McCarthy.

    For both rounds, every Democrat backed Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who ended up with more votes than McCarthy but did not win the majority needed for the speakership. Jeffries is expected to become the House minority leader.

    Leading up to the first vote, McCarthy agreed to some demands by his detractors, who include members of the House Freedom Caucus. He agreed to include in the House rules a stipulation that members can vote to unseat the speaker at any time, but refused to pledge to hold votes on some bills proposed by ultra-conservative members. He also did not pledge that the party’s political action committee would decline to fund primary challengers.

    No other members can be sworn in until the speaker is elected, and the House will not be able to proceed with any official business until the matter is resolved.

    The second round of voting began shortly after McCarthy lost the first round, with Jordan once again giving a nominating speech in support of the California lawmaker.

    Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) tweeted that McCarthy’s failure to win the leadership post shows “the rise of the extreme MAGA caucus [has] already had ramifications.”

    “House Republicans are showing the American people that they can’t govern,” said Lieu.

    Anticipating the revolt by some House Republicans, The Washington Post noted last week that “the last time a speaker election took more than one ballot was in 1923, when Speaker Frederick Gillett (R-Mass.) was reelected on the ninth ballot.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Faith Leaders Say Jan. 6 Committee Report Downplays Role of Christian Nationalism



    In an effort to fill in what they say are critical gaps in the U.S. House select committee’s report on the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, faith leaders are pushing the corporate media and the American public to confront the role Christian nationalism played in the insurrection, warning that ignoring the link could make similar violence more likely in the future.

    The committee’s report, released last week, laid out extensive evidence showing that former President Donald Trump was the driving force behind the attack aimed at stopping lawmakers from certifying the 2020 presidential election results, but mentioned Christian nationalism just once, despite the fact that many of the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol openly expressed Christian nationalist beliefs before, during, and after the attack.

    As Religion News Service reported last week, some Trump supporters who attempted to overthrow the government carried flags displaying a so-called “Jesus fish” painted red, white, and blue like the American flag along with the words “Proud American Christian.” Hundreds took part in what they called a “Jericho March” and prayed for the election results to be overturned the day before the insurrection, and some were heard chanting, “Christ is king” in Washington, D.C. on January 6.

    “The symbols of Christian nationalism were on full display not only on January 6 itself, but at numerous rallies leading up to the attack,” Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC), told Alicia Menendez on MSNBC on Wednesday.

    Christian Nationalism Conspicuously Absent From January 6 Report www.youtube.com

    The report, however, only noted that supporters of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who was in Washington on January 6 but has not been accused of breaching the Capitol, have “repeatedly promoted white supremacist and Christian nationalist beliefs.”

    The inclusion of just a single reference to Christian nationalism—the belief that the government should actively ensure that the U.S. is a Christian nation—was something faith leaders warned against earlier this year when they called on lawmakers to closely examine the role the belief system played in convincing thousands of people to storm the Capitol and continue to question the 2020 election results long after January 6.

    In June, Christians Against Christian Nationalism, a project of the BJC, wrote in a letter to the House committee that “Christian nationalism helped motivate and intensify the insurrection” and that lawmakers should “thoroughly investigate the role that Christian nationalism played in the attack.”

    “This seditious mob was motivated not just by loyalty to Trump, but by an unholy amalgamation of white supremacy and Christianity that has plagued our nation since its inception and is still with us today,” wrote Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), at the time.

    As Religion News Service reported last week, a spokesperson for committee member Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wy.) suggested weeks before the report was released that the congresswoman objected to focusing seriously on Christian nationalism, telling The Washington Post that Cheney “won’t sign onto any ‘narrative’ [that] suggests every American who believes God has blessed America is a white supremacist.”

    Lawmakers including Cheney, who leaves office next week, “fear that confronting Christian nationalism might be misconstrued as an attack on Christianity or Christians, and nothing could be further from the truth,” Tyler told MSNBC. “We are trying to draw attention to what Christian nationalism is… Christian nationalism turns Christianity’s gospel of love into a false idol of power. It turns John’s gospel teaching us that God so loved the world on its head, saying falsely that God has a special plan for the U.S. or that God loves the U.S. more than any other country, or that God has preordained election results.”

    Faith leaders are working to explain “why that’s not the case,” added Tyler, “because if we don’t confront Christian nationalism then we are leaving ourselves open to future attacks, like what we saw on January 6.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Electoral Count Act Reform Is Welcome—But Much More Is Needed to Save US Democracy



    Congress has approved a budget that includes essential reforms to the Electoral Count Act. The updates, which have broad bipartisan support, eliminate ambiguities in the electoral count process that former President Trump and his allies seized on as they tried to overturn the 2020 election. Anyone looking to undermine future election results will have fewer options, and that is a victory for our democracy.

    The passage comes on the heels of the January 6 committee’s release of its full report. The panel made news by making four criminal referrals for the former president. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, of all people, put it well in response: “The entire nation knows who is responsible for that day.”

    In the wake of the committee’s extraordinary work, an important remaining question is not who caused the insurrection but rather what caused the insurrection.

    First, let’s take a moment to appreciate the panel’s achievement. It made clear through riveting hearings and careful leaks that this was not just a rally that got out of control but a vigorously pursued plot to overthrow American democracy. The committee documented extraordinary crimes. We thought we knew it all, but it was gripping.

    Such congressional investigations once regularly commanded headlines. The most famously effective was the Senate Watergate committee in 1973. That — together with the Church Committee, which exposed wrongdoing by the FBI and CIA — dominated the news but also led to reforms, from the federal campaign finance laws to the establishment of the joint congressional intelligence committee.

    Reform sometimes follows scandal. And there has been no greater scandal than Donald Trump’s effort to block the peaceful transfer of power.

    But putting the blame squarely and exclusively on Donald Trump is not enough to protect our democracy. Trump did not start the myth of voter fraud — that has been a partisan staple for two decades now. His attempt to subvert the 2020 election exposed vulnerabilities in our legal and electoral systems. Most of them remain, waiting for a second Donald Trump to come along and exploit them again. Those weaknesses are what caused the January 6 insurrection. The committee’s work could have even longer-lasting benefits if its revelations help spur reform.

    It starts with fixing the Electoral Count Act. Trump’s loony reading of the creaky and outdated 19th-century law provided the foundation for his pressure campaign against Vice President Mike Pence. The newly passed reform makes clear that vice presidents have a merely ministerial role and makes it harder for members of Congress to object to duly cast electoral votes. These changes cement that the reading of the electoral votes is a ceremony, nothing more. They and other important fixes to the Electoral Count Act are included in the budget bill.

    That bill also includes federal funding to upgrade election infrastructure and keep election officials safe, though not nearly enough. We should never forget that Trump’s pressure campaign did not stop with Pence. Trump personally called state election officials, urging them — without any cogent rationale — to overturn his defeat. Trump’s counsel, Rudy Giuliani, falsely accused local election workers of fraud. As a result of Trump’s campaign against these public servants, election workers in several states were harassed, threatened, and chased from their homes. Going forward, Congress must act decisively to protect election officials in their homes and in their offices, providing a reliable source of funding for much-needed security.

    Other changes will require sustained pressure from the American people. National baseline standards for federal elections should be high on that list. For example, Trump’s team argued for the invalidation of Pennsylvania’s slate of electors, on the theory that state officials should not have complied with a state supreme court ruling requiring them to count mail votes received several days after the election but postmarked by Election Day. A spurious argument, but the silence of federal law on when and how mail ballots should be counted gave it unnecessary fuel. With 50 states conducting the election with almost 50 different procedures, close elections will lead to similar claims in the future.

    The Constitution unquestionably gives Congress the power to fix this problem. With every state playing by the same rules, there would be less room for allegations of impropriety.

    These are just the beginning of the necessary reforms. There should be guaranteed funding for states to conduct reliable post-election audits. Congress should fund state efforts to combat election-related disinformation and restore the protections of the Voting Rights Act to prevent racial discrimination in voting — Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election primarily targeted voters of color. The list goes on.

    The January 6 committee performed a vital service. It left us with indelible images. But now that its work is over, focusing solely on Trump himself would be a major mistake. Mending weak points in our election system should be a bipartisan priority. It starts with the Electoral Count Act, but I hope it will not end there.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Congress Decides Corporate Tax Cuts Are Too Expensive If It Means Also Helping Children



    Late Monday afternoon, Congressional leaders announced their long-awaited omnibus spending package which will fund the government through September 2023. The good news: the bill does not include needless corporate tax giveaways. The bad news: it also leaves out any expansion of the Child Tax Credit.

    Ultimately, the conservative position on the credit triumphed. The credit was not worth the cost if it cost, well anything.

    This fall, as lobbyists descended on the Hill to pressure Congress into passing a set of corporate tax breaks before the year’s end, some progressive activists and lawmakers settled on a strategy to make any potential tax package at least mildly palatable: Tax breaks for businesses must be paired with an extension of the Child Tax Credit enhancements that were enacted in 2021.

    Those enhancements increased the credit from $2,000 to $3,000 and to $3,600 for children under age 6, but more significantly, they removed limits on the refundable part of the credit, which helps families who most need it. Under permanent law (the credit that was in effect for years before and after 2021), the tax code actually states that certain families make too little money to receive the full credit. That is, a credit which is supposed to help children is denied to them if they are too poor. Last year, all children could receive the full credit if their family income was less than $150,000 (or less than $112,500 for most single parents). The 2021 credit enhancement also made the credit available to families in monthly installments to help match their normal household expenses rather than as a year-end lump sum.

    The results of the credit enhancements were dramatic and immediate. Child poverty was cut nearly in half. The 2021 credit pulled more people above the poverty line than SNAP and unemployment insurance combined. The enhanced credit was especially important for Black and Hispanic families. As a result of Congress’s failure to extend the credit enhancements, ITEP estimates that 45 percent of Black children and 42 percent of Hispanic children will not receive the full credit next year because the arbitrary limits on the refundable portion of the credit are in effect again.

    Given the enormous success of the 2021 credit, many progressive groups were at least open to an unsavory package of tax breaks for big businesses if lawmakers would in turn help children and families by enhancing the Child Tax Credit. The tax package pushed by corporate lobbyists included a deduction for “research” that was promoted by companies making frozen foods and casino games, an interest deduction that would encourage private equity funds to load up companies with debt, and a bonus depreciation break that would accomplish little aside from allowing big companies to save billions on their tax bills.

    Sen. Sherrod Brown framed the position of many progressives succinctly this September when he said, “No more tax breaks for big corporations and the wealthy unless the Child Tax Credit is with it. I’ll lay down in front of a bulldozer on that one.”

    Conservative lawmakers dutifully expressed their own position on the issue. Cutting child poverty was not worth it if it could even be theorized that rich people might end up slightly less rich. The White House, for its part, signaled that it could be flexible on the details of a CTC expansion that could be part of such a deal.

    But ultimately, the conservative position on the credit triumphed. The credit was not worth the cost if it cost, well anything. That included Republicans giving up their own package of corporate tax breaks. Perhaps they believe they can get a better deal next Congress with the House Republican majority. Let’s hope that Sen. Brown carries his promise into the new year.

    In the end, there should be few tears shed that the corporate lobbyists lost on this one. But there is a certain amount of ire that rises up inside one’s heart knowing the only thing that could kill Congress’ appetite for corporate tax breaks is a simple request that they boost the economic security of children and families as well.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Symbolic but Significant: Why the Decision to Investigate Abu Akleh’s Murder is Unprecedented

    The recent decision by the United States Department of Justice to open an investigation into the killing last May of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh is not a game-changer but important and worthy of reflection, nonetheless.

    Based on the long trajectory of US military and political support of Israel, and Washington’s constant shielding of Tel Aviv from any accountability for its illegal occupation of Palestine, one can confidently conclude that there will not be any actual investigation.

    A real investigation into the killing of Abu Akleh could open up a Pandora’s box of other findings pertaining to Israel’s many other illegal practices and violations of international – and even US – law. For example, the US investigators would have to look into the Israeli use of US-supplied weapons and munitions, which are used daily to suppress Palestinian protests, confiscate Palestinian land, impose military sieges on civilian areas and so on. The US Leahy Law specifically prohibits “the US Government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.”

    Moreover, an investigation would also mean accountability if it concludes that Abu Akleh, a US citizen, was deliberately killed by an Israeli soldier, as several human rights groups have already concluded.

    That, too, is implausible. In fact, one of the main pillars that define US-Israeli relationship is that the former serves the role of the protector of the latter at the international stage. Every Palestinian, Arab or international attempt at investigating Israeli crimes has decisively failed simply because Washington systematically blocked every potential investigation under the pretense that Israel is capable of investigating itself, alleging at times that any attempt to hold Israel accountable is a witch hunt that is tantamount to antisemitism.

    According to Axios, this was the gist of the official Israeli response to the US decision to open an investigation into the murder of the Palestinian journalist. “Our soldiers will not be investigated by the FBI or by any other foreign country or entity,” outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said, adding: “We will not abandon our soldiers to foreign investigations.”

    Though Lapid’s is the typical Israeli response, it is quite interesting – if not shocking – to see it used in a context involving an American investigation. Historically, such language was reserved for investigations by the United Nations Human Rights Council, and by international law judges, the likes of Richard Falk, Richard Goldstone and Michael Lynk. Time and again, such investigations were conducted or blocked without any Israeli cooperation and under intense American pressure.

    In 2003, the scope of Israeli intransigence and US blind support of Israel reached the point of pressuring the Belgian government to rewrite its own domestic laws to dismiss a war crimes case against late Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon.

    Moreover, despite relentless efforts by many US-based rights groups to investigate the murder of an American activist, Rachel Corrie, the US refused to even consider the case, relying instead on Israel’s own courts, which exonerated the Israeli soldier who drove a bulldozer over the body of 23-year-old Corrie in 2003, for simply urging him not to demolish a Palestinian home in Gaza.

    Worse still, in 2020, the US government went as far as sanctioning International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and other senior prosecution officials who were involved in the investigation of alleged US and Israeli war crimes in Afghanistan and Palestine.

    All of this in mind, one must then ask questions regarding the timing and the motives of the US investigation.

    Axios revealed that the decision to investigate the killing of Abu Akleh was “made before the November 1 elections in Israel, but the Justice Department officially notified the Israeli government three days after the elections.” In fact, the news was only revealed to the media on November 14, following both Israel and US elections on November 1 and 7, respectively.

    Officials in Washington were keen on communicating the point that the decision was not political, and neither was it linked to avoiding angering the pro-Israeli lobby in Washington days before the US elections nor to influencing the outcomes of Israel’s own elections. If that is the case, then why did the US wait until November 14 to leak the news? The delay suggests serious backdoor politics and massive Israeli pressure to dissuade the US from making the announcement public, thus making it impossible to reverse the decision.

    Knowing that a serious investigation will most likely not take place, the US decision must have been reasoned in advance to be a merely political one. Maybe symbolic and ultimately inconsequential, the unprecedented and determined US decision was predicated on solid reasoning:

    First, US President Joe Biden had a difficult experience managing the political shenanigans of then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his time as vice president in the Obama Administration (2009-2017). Now that Netanyahu is poised to return to the helm of Israeli politics, the Biden Administration is in urgent need of political leverage over Tel Aviv, with the hope of controlling the extremist tendencies of the Israeli leader and his government.

    Second, the failure of the Republican so-called ‘Red Wave’ from marginalizing Democrats as a sizable political and legislative force in the US Congress has further emboldened the Biden Administration to finally reveal the news about the investigation – that is if we are to believe that the decision was indeed made in advance.

    Third, the strong showing of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian candidates in the US Mid-term Elections – in both national and state legislative elections  –  further bolsters the progressive agenda within the Democratic Party. Even a symbolic decision to investigate the killing of a US citizen represents a watershed moment in the relationship between the Democratic Party establishment and its more progressive grassroots constituencies. In fact, re-elected Palestinian Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was very quick to respond to the news of the investigation, describing it as “the first step towards real accountability”.

    Though the US investigation of Abu Akleh’s murder is unlikely to result in any kind of justice, it is a very important moment in US-Israeli and US-Palestinian relationships. It simply means that, despite the entrenched and blind US support for Israel, there are margins in US policy that can still be exploited, if not to reverse US backing of Israel, at least to weaken the supposedly ‘unbreakable bond’ between the two countries.

    The post Symbolic but Significant: Why the Decision to Investigate Abu Akleh’s Murder is Unprecedented first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Biden’s Broken Promise to Avoid War with Russia May Kill Us All

    Attack on Kerch Strait Bridge linking Crimea and Russia Credit: Getty Images

    On March 11, 2022, President Biden reassured the American public and the world that the United States and its NATO allies were not at war with Russia. “We will not fight a war with Russia in Ukraine,” said Biden. “Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III, something we must strive to prevent.”

    It is widely acknowledged that U.S. and NATO officers are now fully involved in Ukraine’s operational war planning, aided by a broad range of U.S. intelligence gathering and analysis to exploit Russia’s military vulnerabilities, while Ukrainian forces are armed with U.S. and NATO weapons and trained up to the standards of other NATO countries.

    On October 5, Nikolay Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, recognized that Russia is now fighting NATO in Ukraine. Meanwhile, President Putin has reminded the world that Russia has nuclear weapons and is prepared to use them “when the very existence of the state is put under threat,” as Russia’s official nuclear weapons doctrine declared in June 2020.

    It seems likely that, under that doctrine, Russia’s leaders would interpret losing a war to the United States and NATO on their own borders as meeting the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.

    President Biden acknowledged on October 6 that Putin is “not joking” and that it would be difficult for Russia to use a “tactical” nuclear weapon “and not end up with Armageddon.” Biden assessed the danger of a full-scale nuclear war as higher than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

    Yet despite voicing the possibility of an existential threat to our survival, Biden was not issuing a public warning to the American people and the world, nor announcing any change in U.S. policy. Bizarrely, the president was instead discussing the prospect of nuclear war with his political party’s financial backers during an election fundraiser at the home of media mogul James Murdoch, with surprised corporate media reporters listening in.

    In an NPR report about the danger of nuclear war over Ukraine, Matthew Bunn, a nuclear weapons expert at Harvard University, estimated the chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon at 10 to 20 percent.

    How have we gone from ruling out direct U.S. and NATO involvement in the war to U.S. involvement in all aspects of the war except for the bleeding and dying, with an estimated 10 to 20 percent chance of nuclear war? Bunn made that estimate shortly before the sabotage of the Kerch Strait Bridge to Crimea. What odds will he project a few months from now if both sides keep matching each other’s escalations with further escalation?

    The irresolvable dilemma facing Western leaders is that this is a no-win situation. How can they militarily defeat Russia, when it possesses 6,000 nuclear warheads and its military doctrine explicitly states that it will use them before it will accept an existential military defeat?

    And yet that is what the intensifying Western role in Ukraine now explicitly aims to achieve. This leaves U.S. and NATO policy, and thus our very existence, hanging by a thin thread: the hope that Putin is bluffing, despite explicit warnings that he is not. CIA Director William Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and the director of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, have all warned that we should not take this danger lightly.

    The danger of relentless escalation toward Armageddon is what both sides faced throughout the Cold War, which is why, after the wake-up call of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, dangerous brinkmanship gave way to a framework of nuclear arms control agreements and safeguard mechanisms to prevent proxy wars and military alliances spiraling into a world-ending nuclear war. Even with those safeguards in place, there were still many close calls – but without them, we would probably not be here to write about it.

    Today, the situation is made more dangerous by the dismantling of those nuclear arms treaties and safeguards. It is also exacerbated, whether either side intends it or not, by the twelve-to-one imbalance between U.S. and Russian military spending, which leaves Russia with more limited conventional military options and a greater reliance on nuclear ones.

    But there have always been alternatives to the relentless escalation of this war by both sides that has brought us to this pass. In April, Western officials took a fateful step when they persuaded President Zelenskyy to abandon Turkish- and Israeli-brokered negotiations with Russia that had produced a promising 15-point framework for a ceasefire, a Russian withdrawal and a neutral future for Ukraine.

    That agreement would have required Western countries to provide security guarantees to Ukraine, but they refused to be party to it and instead promised Ukraine military support for a long war to try to decisively defeat Russia and recover all the territory Ukraine had lost since 2014.

    U.S. Defense Secretary Austin declared that the West’s goal in the war was now to “weaken” Russia to the point that it would no longer have the military power to invade Ukraine again. But if the United States and its allies ever came close to achieving that goal, Russia would surely see such a total military defeat as putting “the very existence of the state under threat,” triggering the use of nuclear weapons under its publicly stated nuclear doctrine.

    On May 23rd, the very day that Congress passed a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine, including $24 billion in new military spending, the contradictions and dangers of the new U.S.-NATO war policy in Ukraine finally spurred a critical response from The New York Times Editorial Board. A Times editorial, titled “The Ukraine War is Getting Complicated, and America Is Not Ready,” asked serious, probing questions about the new U.S. policy:

    “Is the United States, for example, trying to help bring an end to this conflict, through a settlement that would allow for a sovereign Ukraine and some kind of relationship between the United States and Russia? Or is the United States now trying to weaken Russia permanently? Has the administration’s goal shifted to destabilizing Putin or having him removed? Does the United States intend to hold Putin accountable as a war criminal? Or is the goal to try to avoid a wider war…? Without clarity on these questions, the White House…jeopardizes long-term peace and security on the European continent.”

    The NYT editors went on to voice what many have thought but few have dared to say in such a politicized media environment, that the goal of recovering all the territory Ukraine has lost since 2014 is not realistic, and that a war to do so will “inflict untold destruction on Ukraine.” They called on Biden to talk honestly with Zelenskyy about “how much more destruction Ukraine can sustain” and the “limit to how far the United States and NATO will confront Russia.”

    A week later, Biden replied to the Times in an Op-Ed titled “What America Will and Will Not Do in Ukraine.” He quoted Zelenskyy saying that the war “will only definitively end through diplomacy,” and wrote that the United States was sending weapons and ammunition so that Ukraine “can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”

    Biden wrote, “We do not seek a war between NATO and Russia.…the United States will not try to bring about [Putin’s] ouster in Moscow.” But he went on to pledge virtually unlimited U.S. support for Ukraine, and he did not answer the more difficult questions the Times asked about the U.S. endgame in Ukraine, the limits to U.S. involvement in the war or how much more devastation Ukraine could sustain.

    As the war escalates and the danger of nuclear war increases, these questions remain unanswered. Calls for a speedy end to the war echoed around the UN General Assembly in New York in September, where 66 countries, representing most of the world’s population, urgently called on all sides to restart peace talks.

    The greatest danger we face is that their calls will be ignored, and that the U.S. military-industrial complex’s overpaid minions will keep finding ways to incrementally turn up the pressure on Russia, calling its bluff and ignoring its “red lines” as they have since 1991, until they cross the most critical “red line” of all.

    If the world’s calls for peace are heard before it is too late and we survive this crisis, the United States and Russia must renew their commitments to arms control and nuclear disarmament, and negotiate how they and other nuclear armed states will destroy their weapons of mass destruction and accede to the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, so that we can finally lift this unthinkable and unacceptable danger hanging over our heads.

    The post Biden’s Broken Promise to Avoid War with Russia May Kill Us All first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The U.S. Is Leading the World Into the Abyss

    A few years after WW I, the poet T.S. Eliot opened his famous poem “The Wasteland” with these words: “April is the cruelest month … “  I think he may be wrong, for this October may be the cruelest month of all, followed by November.  Unprecedented.  You can hear the clicking and grating of spades if your antennae are attuned.

    We are on the brink of ominous events created by the U.S. war against Russia.  Yet so many people prefer to turn away and swallow the lies that the U.S. wants peace and not war and is the aggrieved party in the crisis.

    A friend of mine, who is constantly charging me with having turned right-wing because of my writing that accuses many traditional liberal/leftists of buying the national security state’s propaganda on the JFK assassination, “9/11,” Syria, Ukraine, Covid-19, censorship, the “New” Cold War, etc., and whose go-to news sources are The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, NPR, ABC, seems oblivious to the fact that right and left have become useless terms and that these media are all mouthpieces for the CIA and their intelligence allies in the new Cold War; that the so-called right and left are joined at the hip with their obsession with Pax Americana.

    There are no right and left anymore; there are only free and independent voices or those of the caged parrots repeating what they have been taught to say:

    “Polly wants a war!”  “Polly wants a war.”

    I am afraid that I will never convince this dear friend otherwise and I find that depressing.  Yet I know such views are shared by millions of others and that even if nuclear war breaks out their minds will not change.  Propaganda runs very, very deep into their psyches, and they desperately want to believe.  Hitler said it clearly in Mein Kampf:

    The masses … are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

    Hitler learned so much about “manufacturing consent” from his American teachers Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann, et al., who accomplished so much brainwashing of the American people.  They were all masters of the lie and millions continue to believe their followers.

    If nuclear weapons are again used (and everyone knows the only country to have used them), these believers will blame their use on Russia, even though Russia has made it very clear that it would only resort to such weapons if the country’s existence were threatened, while the U.S. continues affirming its right to preemptively use nuclear weapons when it so chooses.

    And even if nuclear weapons are not used, the recent sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines and the bombing of the Crimean Bridge, both clearly the work of U.S./NATO/Ukrainian forces, have raised the ante considerably.  The door to hell has just been opened wider, and I suspect not by accident, as the U.S. elections approach.

    In his recent television talk, Vladimir Putin made Russia’s nuclear position very clear, mentioning nuclear weapons only in the context of Western threats of using them, as Moon of Alabama reported.  Putin said:

    They [the U.S./NATO/Ukraine] have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail. I am referring not only to the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which poses a threat of a nuclear disaster, but also to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia.

    I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.

    The citizens of Russia can rest assured that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be defended – I repeat – by all the systems available to us. Those who are using nuclear blackmail against us should know that the wind rose can turn around.

    When the long-planned U.S. war against Russia, so obvious to anyone who sees past the propagandist headlines and studies the matter, soon explodes into full-scale open war for all to see in horror, as it will, these true believers will dig in their heels even more.  They will find new reasons to justify their faith, and it is akin to religious faith.  The infamous Rand Corporation’s 2019 report cited above, “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia,” cites the following as part of the war process, as summarized in the Strategic Culture article, but it will have no impact on the faithful believers:

    • Providing lethal military aid to Ukraine
    • Mobilizing European NATO members
    • Imposing deeper trade and economic sanctions
    • Increasing U.S. energy production for export to Europe
    • Expanding Europe’s import infrastructure to receive U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies

    I keep thinking of the U.S. false flag Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964 and how effective that was in convincing the gullible population and the complicit U.S. Congress – by a vote of 88 to 2 in the Senate and 414 to 0 in the House of Representatives (try to imagine such criminals) – that U.S. destroyers were innocently attacked by the North Vietnamese and that Lyndon Johnson should be given the authority to respond to repel “communist aggression,” which, of course, he did by bombing North Vietnam and sending 500,000 troops to savagely destroy Vietnam and Vietnamese nearly 9,000 miles from the United States.  Johnson simply lied to wage war and Biden is doing the same today.  But far too many people love their leaders’ lies because it allows them to secretly feel justified in the lies they themselves tell in personal matters.  And what may be true of the distant past, can’t be true today.

    In 1965, the folk singer Tom Paxton put Johnson’s lies to music with “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation“.  In those days, art was used as a weapon against U.S. propaganda.

    Today we can ask: Where have all the artists gone?

    We know that the U.S. has, for the time being, abandoned sending hundreds of thousands of troops into another country; now it is drones, air warfare, special forces, the CIA, mercenaries, terrorists, and intermediaries such as the Ukrainian conscripts, Azov Nazis, and NATO surrogates.  Such was the lesson of Vietnam when the draft led to massive protests and resistance.  Now war is waged less obviously and the propaganda is more extensive and constant as a result of digital media.

    There are many such examples of U.S. treachery, most notably the attacks of September 11, 2001, but such history is only open to those who take it upon themselves to investigate.

    Now there is the corrupt Ukrainian U.S. puppet government, which is nearly 6,000 miles from the United States, and must be defended from Russian “aggression,” just like the corrupt South Vietnamese U.S. puppet government was.

    To those who buy the mass media propaganda, I ask: Why is the U.S.A. always fighting to kill people so far from its shores?  Doesn’t it sound a bit odd that our wonderful leaders destroyed Libya, Vietnam, Serbia, the Philippines, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc., countries so far away, and now that Russia defends itself from U.S./NATO encroachment a few miles from its borders, it is accused of being the evil aggressors and Vladimir Putin called another Hitler like all the leaders of the countries we attacked?  Have you completely lost your ability to think?  Or do you, like little children, actually believe the disembodied newsreaders who deliver your prepackaged television propaganda?

    If I ask such an obvious question, does that make me a “right-winger”?

    If I state two facts: that Donald Trump – whom I consider despicable and part of the divide and conquer game as Biden’s flip side, and have said so – did not start a war against Russia and that Russia-gate was a Democratic propaganda stunt and is false, does that make me a right-winger?  My friend would say so. Do telling facts define your political allegiances, whether they be facts about Republicans or Democrats?

    No.  I will tell you what it makes me: A disgusted human being sickened by all the lies and people’s gullibility after decades of evidence that should have awakened them to the truth about all these politicians and the war against Russia underway.  I have lost patience with it.  For decades I have been writing about such propaganda to no avail.  Yes, those who tended to agree with me might have moved a little closer to my arguments, but the vast majority have not budged an iota.

    I wish it were different. It is my desire. Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan sage of the Americas, who knew what was up and what was down when he wrote Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World in 1998, said this about Desire:

    A man found Aladdin’s lamp lying around. Since he was a big reader, the man recognized it and rubbed it right away. The genie appeared, bowed deeply, and said, ‘At your service master. Your wish is my command. But there will be only one wish.

    Since he was a good boy, the man said, ‘I wish for my dead mother to be brought back.’

    The genie made a face. ‘I’m sorry, master, but that wish is impossible. Make another.’

    Since he was a nice guy, the man said, ‘I wish the world would stop spending money to kill people.’

    The genie swallowed. ‘Uhh … What did you say your mother’s name was?’

    The desire for peace and security is a universal dream.  Sometimes it is hidden in people’s hearts because they have swallowed the lies of the evil ones who wish to wage war against those who insist on security for their country, as Russians are demanding today.

    It is very frustrating to try to wake people out of their manufactured consent and the insouciance that follows as we are being led into the abyss.

    But I will not stop trying.  Galeano did not.  He left us these words of universal resistance:

    We shall be compatriots and contemporaries of all who have a yearning for justice and beauty, no matter where they were born or when they lived, because the borders of geography and time shall cease to exist.

    We must save the world before it is too late.

    The post The U.S. Is Leading the World Into the Abyss first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Stealth Plan for Medicare for All

    Those who say Congress is too corrupt to create a publicly funded system of universal health care are likely to be in for a surprise. Recent developments suggest that Americans may see Medicare for all within the next decade. However, since our system of privately funded elections inevitably leads to Congress putting profits over people, this is not likely to be a good thing.

    The death spiral of insurance costs

    Some advocates of a publicly funded universal health care system have predicted that its creation is inevitable because of the “death spiral” of insurance costs. This term refers to the fact that as costs of insurance rise, fewer people can afford it, leading to a new round of rising premiums and out-of-pocket costs. If this cycle were allowed to continue indefinitely, it would be only a matter of time before the medical insurance industry priced its product out of existence.

    In a rational world, this simple fact would lead Congress to do what every other industrialized nation has done; create a publicly funded system of universal health care either through a government-run system such as Medicare for All, or through a tightly regulated system of non-profit insurers that offer a defined benefit package specified by the government, as in Germany. Of course, politics in the US is rational only in the sense that it follows the logic of profits over people. The desires of the donor class come first, and the corporations of the Medical-Industrial Complex have lots of money to give.

    But if the insurance industry seems destined to price itself out of existence, how is Congress going to save its deep-pocketed friends?

    The Affordable Care Act is a bailout for a failing insurance industry

    Obamacare increased coverage primarily through 1) subsidizing private insurance purchased through the Exchange and 2) covering most of the costs of a huge expansion of Medicaid. Because most of the money didn’t come from employer profits or wages of average workers, this massive taxpayer subsidy of a private industry served to partially mask the fact that insurance costs are still exploding. Of course, as anyone with private insurance knows, it didn’t eliminate medical cost inflation. It just alleviated it enough to make people who have insurance complacent enough to not protest.

    Since the Affordable Care Act went into effect, many of its inadequacies have become obvious to even its most ardent supporters. As a result, progressives have built substantial support for a publicly financed system of universal health care in the last decade. Unfortunately, Wall Street has made enormous progress toward privatizing Medicare at the same time. If they succeed, we may end up with a tremendously expensive form of Medicare for All that has all the defects of private insurance. These include reduced provider choice, inflated billing, and inappropriate denials of care and payments that lead to delays in treatment that have been associated with increased morbidity and mortality.

    Privatized Medicare is a blatant giveaway to the medical insurance industry

    During the Trump Administration, the insurance industry-controlled Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation developed the Medicare Direct Contracting program.  This was a plan to give exorbitant sums to corporations to pay bills from doctors and hospitals, which traditional (government-run) Medicare does now with a 2% overhead. These contractors, the majority of which are investor-owned, are given a lump sum of money to cover medical bills and allowed to keep up to 40% as profit and overhead.  That’s why private equity funds are salivating to get at those profits by acquiring contracts and subbing out the work. It’s a straight-up wholesale transfer of tax money to the pockets of the wealthy, with the same perverse incentives as Medicare Advantage to maximize profits by denying care.

    But it gets worse. The pool of money contractors are given to pay providers is inflated by a method that essentially constitutes fraud. Called up-billing, it’s a trick developed by Medicare Advantage insurers to artificially elevate the acuity of their covered members. Under Medicare guidelines, this allows them to pay medical providers more for the same services. Since total payments determine the size of the pool of money from which they can extract their 40%, the more they pay out, the more they make.

    According to a recent report, this scam cost US taxpayers over $12 billion in 2020 alone in excess payments to insurers offering Medicare Advantage. Since MA covers only about 40% of the Medicare population and is limited to taking 15% in overhead and profits, the amount that taxpayers would be forced to fork over to Wall Street if all Medicare beneficiaries are transferred to the direct contracting program is staggering. The plan is for this to happen by 2030. That’s what makes addressing this problem so urgent.

    Loss of choice under the direct contracting plan

    One of the most outrageous provisions of the direct contracting scheme is that seniors and the disabled who have chosen to enroll in traditional Medicare are being forced into direct contracting entity without their informed consent. If they have seen any primary care provider in the previous two years who currently works for a direct contracting entity, they are automatically transferred.

    Most never realize this because the notifications are so difficult to understand. Even if you realize that your Medicare claims will now be handled by a for-profit corporation, your only way out is to switch doctors. Since a rapidly increasing majority of doctors now work for hospitals or corporations, it is going to become increasingly difficult to do so. In addition, independent medical providers receive financial incentives to participate. This is how CMS plans to meet its goal of forcing every beneficiary into one of these plans by 2030.

    Only Biden can prevent this scheme from completely privatizing Medicare

    The bottom line is this: Compared to Medicare Advantage insurers, these new contractors are able to increase the amount they skim off what taxpayers give them from 15% to 40% of an inflated pool of funds for doing a job that traditional Medicare does with 2% of payments based solely on services provided. No wonder almost all major insurers currently offering Medicare Advantage have applied to become contractors. Since the goal is 100% enrollment of Medicare patients, it’s clear that the rest will soon follow.

    Any program so profitable for Wall Street is sure to achieve bipartisan support, especially since this is the only way for the medical insurance industry to avoid the death spiral of insurance costs. That’s why Biden has embraced it with all the enthusiasm of any other politician in the pockets of Wall Street investors. His response to a campaign led by Physicians for a National Health Program was to change the name of the program from Medicare Direct Contracting to ACO-REACH, while keeping all the essential provisions of the original version intact.

    Biden will ultimately be responsible for the privatization of Medicare if we can’t get him to kill ACO-REACH, because the bill that created Obamacare barred Congress from challenging programs created by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. (While the Supreme Court could rule that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation lacks the power to create such a sweeping program without congressional approval, as it stripped the EPA of the power to regulate carbon emissions, the corporatist-dominated Court is, of course, unlikely to challenge a program that serves Wall Street interests).

    Since this scheme has been promoted by both Republican and Democratic administrations, the only way to stop it is to put pressure on members of Congress to speak out publicly against the program. We have to kill this thing by dragging it out into the sunlight, where taxpayers can see it and become appropriately outraged. If Congress can’t stop the program by direct action, they can certainly bring pressure to bear on Biden to do so.

    This may be one issue where public outrage will make a difference

    It may seem that trying to whip up outrage over government corruption is a quaint idea, but recent events have made this a prime time to make this a major issue. Biden, who has a long history of favoring Social Security privatization, recently received a great deal of negative attention for nominating a long-time champion of privatization to a position on the Social Security Advisory Board. Public awareness of the fact that he is promoting privatization of both programs may be more effective at stoking public anger than would either issue by itself. If you doubt it, consider the huge hit in popularity that George Bush took when he tried to privatize Social Security in 2005.

    It’s time to go out on the street and raise some hell. Call, write, and visit your members of Congress. Question them at appearances during the August recess. Write to your local paper. We have to apply maximum pressure on them to lean on Biden if we want to stop this travesty and save any chance of creating a publicly funded system of universal health care that will put people over profit.

    • First published at OpEd News

    The post The Stealth Plan for Medicare for All first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Tax Breaks Helping the Rich Get Richer

    An extraordinarily cruel pandemic has been extraordinarily good to the rich, especially the super-rich. New billionaires have been coined at the rate of one every 30 hours. For those already in the category, the dollars have risen faster than ever. In the first two years of Covid, the worth of the world’s over 2,000 billionaires went up by $3.78 trillion.

    To name just a couple of examples, Elon Musk went from $24.6 billion in March 2020 to $234 billion roughly two years later. The co-founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, merely doubled their wealth—to nearly $114 billion and $109 billion, respectively.

    While the ultra-rich were enjoying huge gains, the taxes they pay have been anything but. Those at the very top have been averaging federal income taxes of just 8.2 percent, “a lower rate than many ordinary Americans pay.” Congress has been a major helpmate, offering an array of tax giveaways that overwhelmingly favor people with money—from the mega-rich all the way down to the garden variety rich.

    One of the biggest breaks, heavy with irony, is the fact that taxes are higher on work income than they are on wealth income (e.g., income from capital gains and dividends). The maximum rate on long-term capital gains is only 20%, compared to 37% on earned income such as wages.

    Some of the irony comes straight from history. Over a generation ago, in the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the Republican icon Ronald Reagan equalized taxes on capital gains and other income. It was Democrat Bill Clinton who went back to the old way, cutting capital gains rates.

    There’s plenty of talk (most recently from President Biden) about bringing back equal taxes, but it hasn’t come close to happening. What’s close to happening instead is yet another handout to the retired rich.

    More than two years ago, on April 13, 2020, Daily News readers came across this headline: “The coronavirus stimulus was a bonanza for well-off retirees.” The story was about required distributions from retirement accounts being waived for a year, including, of course, the taxes that come with them. The 2020 move was a blip, a temporary bonanza; what’s now on deck, needing only Senate approval, is a permanent three-year pushback. Instead of starting at age 72, taxable required distributions wouldn’t begin until age 75.

    It’s the key provision in the Securing a Strong Retirement Act of 2022. Every Democrat in the House voted for it, the only nays coming from five Republicans. Daniel Hemel, a tax professor at the NYU School of Law, called it “a deeply cynical deficit-expanding giveaway to high-income taxpayers…Progressives and deficit hawks alike should say no to this gimmicky.”

    Tax lawyer Robert Lord spoke to the corruption of the 1974 law that first established retirement accounts: “What started out as a well-designed program to help ordinary Americans…has been transformed by the financial industry, the rich people they serve, and those carrying water for them in Congress. Today, IRAs and retirement plans…function primarily as vehicles to further enrich America’s wealthiest.”

    Figures compiled by the Tax Policy Center back up Lord’s claim: “[A]lmost 90% of tax breaks for retirement savings go to the highest-income 20% of U.S. households, a group that would save anyway.”

    Tax expert Len Burman also weighed in on the new Secure Act, calling it “regressive and a budget scam. It’s scored as revenue neutral, but it will cost billions in lost revenue outside the ‘budget window.’”

    In the end, it’s just another slap in the face to tax fairness. Only the particulars make it any different from all the other slaps that already litter the tax code. (There’s already one more in the making, a bipartisan Senate cryptocurrency bill that includes “a huge tax avoidance opportunity for those involved in the crypto business.”)

    Nothing is more subjective than taxes, and the conservative publisher Steve Forbes once offered his own special take: “The tax code is a monstrosity and there’s only one thing to do with it. Scrap it, kill it, drive a stake through its heart, bury it and hope it never rises again to terrorize the American people.”

    Few would have suspected that the tax code itself — over time and with constant help from Congress — would become one of the most generous friends the rich ever had.

    The post Tax Breaks Helping the Rich Get Richer first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • June 23 Oakland Protest Against Barbara Lee’s Vote for $40 billion to fund War in Ukraine.  Join Us.

    On Thursday June 23 people will gather outside Rep Barbara Lee’s office in Oakland at 11:30 am to protest her recent vote for $40 billion for the war in Ukraine. The demonstration is called in conjunction with the International Day of Action for Peace in Ukraine called by the Peace in Ukraine Coalition.  There will be a companion demonstration on the same day in at the Northampton, MA, office of Rep. Jimmy McGovern who also voted for the murderous $40 billion, and accompanied Pelosi in her recent visit to Ukraine.

    This massive funding package represents a clear escalation of the war in Ukraine by the government of the United States using the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder in a proxy war with Russia.  The funding pours fuel on the flames of that war.  It will prolong the war, resulting in thousands more Ukrainian and Russian deaths, at the very least.

    And this funding is one more step in escalating and widening the scope of the war – up to and including nuclear war.

    WHAT: Protest of Barbara Lee’s vote for $40 Billion for the War in Ukraine. This protest is in conjunction with a global day of action against the war, preceding the NATO summit in Madrid, called by the Peace in Ukraine Coalition.

    WHERE: 1 Kaiser Plaza, Oakland, California. (Barbara Lee’s Oakland Office)

    WHEN: Thursday, June 23rd at 11:30 am.

    WHO: Community and AntiWar activists and organizations including Code Pink, Democratic Socialists of American (DSA), East Bay Vets for Peace, Peace in Ukraine Coalition, United Against War & Militarism.

    Despite promising just two months ago to “work relentlessly toward de-escalation” of the war in Ukraine, California Congresswoman Barbara Lee voted in lockstep with every Democrat in Congress behind President Biden’s war policy.  This includes not only Barbara Lee but all the other self-styled progressives in Congress, including Bernie Sanders, AOC and the rest of the “Squad.”

    Barbara Lee because of her lone vote in opposing the two decade war in Afghanistan, is held up as an icon proving that there are progressive Democratic politicians who will vote for peace.  The promise held out by Lee and her Democratic colleagues that they could be a force for peace now lies in ruins.

    Why U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine must be opposed.

    One can look at the war in several ways.

    If it is a war between Russia and Ukraine, then it is no business of the United States.

    If one believes that it is a war by an idealistic to US to defend sovereignty and national borders, ask the people of Iraq if the US respects sovereignty – or the people of Afghanistan or Libya or Vietnam or Venezuela … the list goes on and on.

    If one believes that this is a war to defend democracy, then ask the Palestinians suffering under Apartheid imposed by Israel which is supported by the US government or the people of Saudi Arabia or the many other dictatorships around the world that the US has supported.

    No, this is a proxy war of the US against Russia being waged to the last Ukrainian.  If that has not been evident since the role of the US in backing the violent coup in 2014 against a duly elected Ukrainian President, then it is beyond doubt now with the declaration of Defense Secretary Austin that the goal of the US is to “weaken” Russia, the declaration of Joe Biden that Putin must not be allowed to govern and the declaration of Nancy Pelosi that the US must have total “victory” over Russia.  The Biden administration has chosen to confront another major nuclear weapons power, Russia – and that confrontation constitutes an existential threat to all of humanity.

    Ukraine now wages war only to improve its bargaining power at the inevitable negotiations which will end the conflict admitted David Arakhamia, who leads Ukraine’s negotiations with Russia and is one of Volodymyr Zelensky’s closest advisers. 200-500 Ukrainian soldiers dying each day with a total of 1000 dead or wounded daily, the latest numbers given by Ukraine, simply to improve a negotiating position is a highly immoral exercise.  Ukraine has now become essentially a puppet state at the mercy of the US for arms and aid.  It is naïve beyond belief to believe that Ukraine proceeds in this immoral fashion without approval of the US – or even perhaps coercion by the US to fight on so as to save face for its patron Biden.

    The Biden administration can stop the proxy war.  And we have the power to influence the Biden administration and the pols who support it.  It is our right and responsibility to exercise that power and stop this war.

    Who benefits from the war and who is damaged?

    Cui bono? Billions in funding for the war serves the interests of weapons manufacturers, military contractors, who pocket untold profits from the war in Ukraine.  Some of these dollars go to funding the endless proliferation of hawkish think tanks whose well paid employees show up as talking heads or op-ed writers in the mainstream media doing all in their power to convince us that “the other” is evil and that war is the answer.  These are media manikins and are ideologues driven by a desire for US world domination and therefore very dangerous

    At the same time funding cannot be found for the many problems we face in the US – homelessness, inadequately funded schools, crumbling infrastructure, failure to deal adequately with climate change and now even shortages of baby formula!  Inflation in the U.S. was already running at over 7% before the conflict began due to the tragically inadequate response to Covid-19 and out of control “quantitative easing”; i.e., printing money with abandon.  But the war and sanctions have worsened the inflation which is now running at over 8%.  The average American sees this daily at the gas station and supermarket where soaring prices are now the rule.

    Beyond that we must look to the entire world and especially the Global South both of which are suffering beyond belief from inflation and food shortages due to the US sanctions and the continuation of the war.  Led by India, China and nations representing the overwhelming majority of humanity, the world has refused to respect the illegal sanctions.  That leaves only the US and its European allies, former colonial powers, in supporting the US proxy war.  It is not Russia but the US that is isolated.

    • No weapons for war in Ukraine
    • No Proxy War with Russia
    • No to Nuclear War
    The post June 23 Oakland Protest Against Barbara Lee’s Vote for $40 billion to fund War in Ukraine.  Join Us. first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The UK’s amnesty proposal is an act of ‘political vandalism’, US Congress hears

    On 15 February, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the US Congress held a hearing on accountability for human rights abuses. It focused on the 30-year conflict in the north of Ireland. A panel of speakers discussed the UK’s plans for an amnesty from criminal prosecution for incidents that occurred during that conflict. That amnesty, if it becomes law, would apply to British military personnel as well as republican and loyalist paramilitaries.

    Chair of the commission, congressman Christopher Smith, opened the hearing saying the UK’s amnesty proposal ”violates the devolution agreement [1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA)]…as well as the 2014 Stormont House Agreement (SHA)…[that would] enable justice for the victims”. Smith then added the UK’s unilateral amnesty proposal:

    is profoundly unjust and cavalier, taking the peace in Northern Ireland for granted

    People with direct experience of the conflict and its impacts addressed this congressional hearing. And they were all united in their calls and resolve. They intend to stop the UK’s amnesty proposal from ever becoming law.

    There was a mechanism already in place

    Geraldine Finucane, wife of murdered human rights solicitor Pat Finucane, Mark Thompson from campaign group Relatives for Justice, and Alan McBride from the WAVE trauma centre addressed the hearing. Louise Mallinder, professor of law at Queens University Belfast and former chief constable Jon Boutcher, head of investigations unit Operation Kenova also spoke.

    Thompson said since the GFA, victims’ families have done everything to find out what happened to their loved ones. However, according to Thompson, the UK government has done everything to prevent:

    any scrutiny of their actions, using sovereignty as a shield whilst deceitfully engaging in, what for them are, pretend talks on finding resolution as they run down the clock. Hiding behind the use, or rather misuse, of public interest immunity gagging orders, national security clauses, and closed material procedures, otherwise known as secret courts, the UK government has managed to prevaricate and delay investigations, inquests civil actions, and ultimately deny justice

    Thompson believes the SHA, already in place to deal with the north’s past, “can deliver” and offers hope. But instead of using it, the UK government unilaterally “binned the Stormont House Agreement” in July 2021. This move, according to Thompson, was aimed at ending all forms of investigations and inquiries into the past. He described the UK’s action as “political vandalism” and “akin to that of a rogue state”.

    This false perception needs exposing

    Geraldine Finucane described the UK’s attempt to cover up the past as “arrogant”. But she also said, based on her late husband’s experience, it’s nothing new. She said in the past, whenever the British didn’t want to deal with what they’d been up to, they simply:

    changed the law…so that they were acting within the law

    She spoke about her husband’s work as a lawyer where he represented people who’d experienced:

    atrocious violations of their rights at the hands of the British state…[were] falsely accused, unlawfully detained, threatened, beaten, and sometimes killed by state agents

    As a result of his successful work, Finucane became a target of loyalist paramilitaries. They saw him “as partisan and thus as an enemy of the state”. There was also a false perception peddled about Finucane that he engaged in unlawful activity. This perception, according to Geraldine Finucane, was “fostered actively” by the British state forces such as MI5, the RUC Special Branch, and a covert British army unit.

    The amnesty means “your loved one didn’t matter”

    McBride’s wife died as a result of an IRA bombing on the Shankill Road in Belfast in 1993. He said the SHA had “widespread support” throughout the north. So this proposed amnesty, according to McBride, drives “a horse and cart through the Stormont House Agreement”. He says we need to get back to the SHA and “we need to oppose in whatever shape or form we can” these amnesty proposals.

    McBride added:

    an amnesty just sends out completely the wrong message to victims and survivors…that the death of your loved one didn’t matter. That those who murdered them – that they don’t matter either. And that needs to be absolutely opposed in all its various forms

    Covering up “the UK’s involvement in criminality and human rights violations”

    Moreover, Mallinder said (3:29:10):

    the sweeping unconditional amnesty…proposed by the UK government in July would be, I think, illegal, illegitimate, and more expansive in its legal effects than any amnesty granted in a post-conflict society in recent decades.

    She added:

    the UK’s proposals deviate sharply from this international best practice in terms of their motivations, their scope, their legal effects, and the conditionality of them

    Mallinder believes the “primary objective” of the amnesty seems to be about concealing:

    the UK’s involvement in criminality and human rights violations

    She added, it differs greatly from amnesties around the world because it has no limitations on what it would grant an amnesty for. The UK’s amnesty would apply to paramilitaries and to state actors. Mallinder said only 25% of amnesties around the globe since 1990 apply to state actors.

    Widespread opposition

    There’s widespread opposition to the UK’s amnesty proposal from political parties in the north as well as from victims support groups. Additionally, the Irish government made its opposition clear when it said the proposals could “re-traumatise” victims of the conflict. It’s essential we don’t allow that to happen.

    The victims’ families who spoke at this hearing appealed to US Congress members to use their influence with the UK and Irish governments to make sure these proposals never become law. Because should that happen, it would allow the UK to formally deny responsibility for its war crimes in Ireland, thereby committing yet another crime. But these families are resolute and determined to face these proposal down.

    Featured image via Louis Velazquez – Unsplash & Thames Tv – YouTube Screengrab

    By Peadar O'Cearnaigh

  • Memo to Congress: Diplomacy for Ukraine Is Spelled M-i-n-s-k

    Peace protest at the White House – Photo credit: iacenter.org

    While the Biden administration is sending more troops and weapons to inflame the Ukraine conflict and Congress is pouring more fuel on the fire, the American people are on a totally different track.

    A December 2021 poll found that a plurality of Americans in both political parties prefer to resolve differences over Ukraine through diplomacy. Another December poll found that a plurality of Americans (48 percent) would oppose going to war with Russia should it invade Ukraine, with only 27 percent favoring U.S. military involvement.

    The conservative Koch Institute, which commissioned that poll, concluded that “the United States has no vital interests at stake in Ukraine and continuing to take actions that increase the risk of a confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia is therefore not necessary for our security. After more than two decades of endless war abroad, it is not surprising there is wariness among the American people for yet another war that wouldn’t make us safer or more prosperous.”

    The most anti-war popular voice on the right is Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has been lashing out against the hawks in both parties, as have other anti-interventionist libertarians.

    On the left, the anti-war sentiment was in full force on February 5, when over 75 protests took place from Maine to Alaska. The protesters, including union activists, environmentalists, healthcare workers and students, denounced pouring even more money into the military when we have so many burning needs at home.

    You would think Congress would be echoing the public sentiment that a war with Russia is not in our national interest. Instead, taking our nation to war and supporting the gargantuan military budget seem to be the only issues that both parties agree on.

    Most Republicans in Congress are criticizing Biden for not being tough enough (or for focusing on Russia instead of China) and most Democrats are afraid to oppose a Democratic president or be smeared as Putin apologists (remember, Democrats spent four years under Trump demonizing Russia).

    Both parties have bills calling for draconian sanctions on Russia and expedited “lethal aid” to Ukraine. The Republicans are advocating for $450 million in new military shipments; the Democrats are one-upping them with a price tag of $500 million.

    Progressive Caucus leaders Pramila Jayapal and Barbara Lee have called for negotiations and de-escalation. But others in the Caucus–such as Reps. David Cicilline and Andy Levin–are co-sponsors of the dreadful anti-Russia bill, and Speaker Pelosi is fast-tracking the bill to expedite weapons shipments to Ukraine.

    But sending more weapons and imposing heavy-handed sanctions can only ratchet up the resurgent U.S. Cold War on Russia, with all its attendant costs to American society: lavish military spending displacing desperately needed social spending; geopolitical divisions undermining international cooperation for a better future; and, not least, increased risks of a nuclear war that could end life on Earth as we know it.

    For those looking for real solutions, we have good news.

    Negotiations regarding Ukraine are not limited to President Biden and Secretary Blinken’s failed efforts to browbeat the Russians. There is another already existing diplomatic track for peace in Ukraine, a well-established process called the Minsk Protocol, led by France and Germany and supervised by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

    The civil war in Eastern Ukraine broke out in early 2014, after the people of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine as the Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics, in response to the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev in February 2014. The post-coup government formed new “National Guard” units to assault the breakaway region, but the separatists fought back and held their territory, with some covert support from Russia. Diplomatic efforts were launched to resolve the conflict.

    The original Minsk Protocol was signed by the “Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine” (Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE) in September 2014. It reduced the violence, but failed to end the war. France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine also held a meeting in Normandy in June 2014 and this group became known as the “Normandy Contact Group” or the “Normandy Format.”

    All these parties continued to meet and negotiate, together with the leaders of the self-declared Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics in Eastern Ukraine, and they eventually signed the Minsk II agreement on February 12, 2015. The terms were similar to the original Minsk Protocol, but more detailed and with more buy-in from the DPR and LPR.

    The Minsk II agreement was unanimously approved by the U.N. Security Council in Resolution 2202 on February 17, 2015. The United States voted in favor of the resolution, and 57 Americans are currently serving as ceasefire monitors with the OSCE in Ukraine.

    The key elements of the 2015 Minsk II Agreement were:

    –           an immediate bilateral ceasefire between Ukrainian government forces and DPR and LPR forces;

    –           the withdrawal of heavy weapons from a 30-kilometer-wide buffer zone along the line of control between government and separatist forces;

    –           elections in the secessionist Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics, to be monitored by the OSCE; and,

    –           constitutional reforms to grant greater autonomy to the separatist-held areas within a reunified but less centralized Ukraine.

    The ceasefire and buffer zone have held well enough for seven years to prevent a return to full-scale civil war, but organizing elections in Donbas that both sides will recognize has proved more difficult.

    The DPR and LPR postponed elections several times between 2015 and 2018. They held primary elections in 2016 and, finally, a general election in November 2018. But neither Ukraine, the United States nor the European Union recognized the results, claiming the election was not conducted in compliance with the Minsk Protocol.

    For its part, Ukraine has not made the agreed-upon constitutional changes to grant greater autonomy to the separatist regions And the separatists have not allowed the central government to retake control of the international border between Donbas and Russia, as specified in the agreement.

    The Normandy Contact Group (France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine) for the Minsk Protocol has met periodically since 2014, and is meeting regularly throughout the current crisis, with its next meeting scheduled for February 10 in Berlin The OSCE’s 680 unarmed civilian monitors and 621 support staff in Ukraine have also continued their work throughout this crisis. Their latest report, issued February 1, documented a 65% decrease in ceasefire violations compared to two months ago.

    But increased U.S. military and diplomatic support since 2019 has encouraged President Zelensky to pull back from Ukraine’s commitments under the Minsk Protocol, and to reassert unconditional Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea and Donbas. This has raised credible fears of a new escalation of the civil war, and U.S. support for Zelensky’s more aggressive posture has undermined the existing Minsk-Normandy diplomatic process.

    Zelensky’s recent statement that “panic” in Western capitals is economically destabilizing Ukraine suggests that he may now be more aware of the pitfalls in the more confrontational path his government adopted, with U.S. encouragement.

    The current crisis should be a wake-up call to all involved that the Minsk-Normandy process remains the only viable framework for a peaceful resolution in Ukraine. It deserves full international support, including from U.S. Members of Congress, especially in light of broken promises on NATO expansion, the U.S. role in the 2014 coup, and now the panic over fears of a Russian invasion that Ukrainian officials say are overblown.

    On a separate, albeit related, diplomatic track, the United States and Russia must urgently address the breakdown in their bilateral relations. Instead of bravado and one upmanship, they must restore and build on previous disarmament agreements that they have cavalierly abandoned, placing the whole world in existential danger.

    Restoring U.S. support for the Minsk Protocol and the Normandy Format would also help to decouple Ukraine’s already thorny and complex internal problems from the larger geopolitical problem of NATO expansion, which must primarily be resolved by the United States, Russia and NATO.

    The United States and Russia must not use the people of Ukraine as pawns in a revived Cold War or as chips in their negotiations over NATO expansion. Ukrainians of all ethnicities deserve genuine support to resolve their differences and find a way to live together in one country – or to separate peacefully, as other people have been allowed to do in Ireland, Bangladesh, Slovakia and throughout the former U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia.

    In 2008, then-U.S. Ambassador to Moscow (now CIA Director) William Burns warned his government that dangling the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine could lead to civil war and present Russia with a crisis on its border in which it could be forced to intervene.

    In a cable published by WikiLeaks, Burns wrote, “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

    Since Burns’s warning in 2008, successive U.S. administrations have plunged headlong into the crisis he predicted. Members of Congress, especially members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, can play a leading role in restoring sanity to U.S. policy on Ukraine by championing a moratorium on Ukraine’s membership in NATO and a reinvigoration of the Minsk Protocol, which the Trump and Biden administrations have arrogantly tried to upstage and upend with weapons shipments, ultimatums and panic.

    OSCE monitoring reports on Ukraine are all headed with the critical message: “Facts Matter.” Members of Congress should embrace that simple principle and educate themselves about the Minsk-Normandy diplomacy. This process has maintained relative peace in Ukraine since 2015, and remains the U.N.-endorsed, internationally agreed-upon framework for a lasting resolution.

    If the U.S. government wants to play a constructive role in Ukraine, it should genuinely support this already existing framework for a solution to the crisis, and end the heavy-handed U.S. intervention that has only undermined and delayed its implementation. And our elected officials should start listening to their own constituents, who have absolutely no interest in going to war with Russia.

    The post Memo to Congress: Diplomacy for Ukraine Is Spelled M-i-n-s-k first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Combating Islamophobia Act: On Hate Crimes and “Irrational Fears”   

    The result of a vote, on December 14, in the US House of Representatives regarding the combating of Islamophobia, may possibly appear to be a positive sign of change, that Washington is finally confronting this socio-political evil. However, conclusions must not be too hasty.

    Disquietingly, Congress was nearly split on the vote. While 219 voted in favor of the resolution, 212 voted against it. What is so objectionable about the resolution, which was introduced by Rep. Ilhan Omar, that prompted a ‘nay’ vote by such a large number of American representatives?

    The resolution – ‘Combating International Islamophobia Act’ – merely called for establishing the position of a “Special Envoy for monitoring and combating Islamophobia”. Arguably, HR 5665 would have not passed were it not for the embarrassing episode last September, when Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado mouthed off such obscene and racist language, in which she suggested that Rep. Omar was a terrorist.

    “So the other night on the House floor was not my first jihad squad moment,” Boebert told a crowd during a campaign event in Staten Island. The other moment, according to Boebert, was when she met Ilhan Omar on an elevator. “What’s happening? I look to my left and there she is, Ilhan Omar, and I said, ‘Well she doesn’t have a backpack, we should be fine,’” suggesting that Omar was a potential bomber.

    The fact that Boebert would make such racist references publicly, while being aware of the particular cultural sensitivity that exists in her country at the moment, speaks volumes about the complete disregard that many Americans, whether in power, in the media or on the street, have towards their fellow US Muslim citizens.

    However, the disparaging and racist comments, thanks to the tireless efforts of numerous activists throughout the country, made enough impact that helped register a semi-official indictment of such despicable behavior. Of course, much more work would have to be done to convince the 212 objecting representatives that degrading and discriminating against their own people because of religion, culture or attire must not be tolerated.

    Whether HR 5665 would prove decisive in condemning Islamophobia or holding Islamophobes accountable, is a different story. Hence, we must not hesitate to confront the term itself, the misleading reference that what Muslims in the US and throughout the world are experiencing is some kind of a pathological phenomenon, that of fear, itself instigated, as some suggest, by Muslims themselves.

    Anti-Muslims are outright racists. Though Islam is a religion, in the mind of these racists, Islam is affiliated with brown and black-skinned people and, therefore, the hate of Islam and Muslims is part of the anti-black racism that continues to define many parts of the world, especially the US and Europe.

    Anti-Muslims are also capable of being criminals, as numbers have shown that the so-called Islamophobia has resulted in mass killing, as was the case in Canada, New Zealand and the UK.

    Less reported than these horrific massacres are thousands of incidents where Muslims are targeted because of their religion, cultural symbols and values.

    According to a report released by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) last July, hundreds of Anti-Muslim incidents have been reported throughout the country in the first half of 2021. These incidents range from hate crimes, hate speech, targeting mosques and Muslim children being bullied at school.

    The US is not the only Western country where Anti-Muslim bias and hate crimes are on the rise. Canada, too, which has witnessed the horrific January 2017 attack on the Islamic Cultural Center in Quebec – in which six Muslims were killed and 19 others wounded – is equally culpable.

    According to a report by the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) in September, Anti-Muslim incidents in Canada are growing exponentially. Fatema Abdalla, NCCM’s communication coordinator, described Anti-Muslim hate in Canada as “systemic”. “Not only is it growing, but it’s also evolving,” she told Global News, following the release of the report.

    Like in the US, Anti-Muslim hate is also fueled by politicians, but not just any politician. In 2015, for example, Canada’s then Prime Minister Stephen Harper pushed to establish a “barbaric cultural practices hotline” where Canadians would be able to call the police to report the ‘disturbing rituals’ of their neighbors. The reference was widely understood to be targeting Muslims, especially as equally disturbing Anti-Muslim measures were proposed, or enacted, in Canada during that period.

    Similarly, in the UK and the rest of Europe, Anti-Muslim bias and hate crimes were reported, based on extensive studies and research as well as experiences of ordinary Muslims on a daily basis.

    While the vote in Congress to ‘monitor and combat Islamophobia’ is a positive step, the urgency of the situation demands not just symbolic gestures, but the outright criminalization and prosecution of Anti-Muslim hate crimes.

    It is time that we stop perceiving ‘Islamophobes’ as people with irrational or, in the mind of some, rational, fear of Muslims – similar to ‘claustrophobia’, ‘arachnophobia’, or ‘agoraphobia’. Indeed, rarely do people in the latter categories gun down innocent people in the street to overcome their fears. Anti-Muslim hate is real and the racists behind it must be punished for their words and actions, as all racists surely deserve.

    The post The Combating Islamophobia Act: On Hate Crimes and “Irrational Fears”    first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump Thinks He’s Still President: What Is the Evidence?

    Donald Trump thinks he’s still president according to no more reliable a source than Rachel Maddow on her February 5th show. This was confirmed in May by Vanity Fair.  Right-wing conspiracy theorists echo this analysis as recently as this month. Left-liberals are smugly confident that Kamala Harris’s running mate is in the White House, snoozing in the presidential bedroom. Inquiring minds ask what is the evidence nearly a year into the alleged Biden presidency that there has been a change of guard in Washington?

    +The Obama-Biden union card check proposal was not on Mr. Trump’s political horizon, nor is it on that of the current occupant in the White House.

    +The current occupant is ramping up Trump’s unhinged Sino-phobic hallucinations, sanctioning 34 Chinese entities for development of “brain-control weaponry.” Not that the Chinese have been angels. In an egregious suppression of freedom of information, the inscrutable Orientals have made it more difficult for US spies to operate in their country.

    +The current occupant nominally withdrew US troops from Afghanistan as negotiated by Mr. Trump, presumably reducing overall military costs. Yet, he continues the Trump-trajectory of lavishing billions of dollars more on the military than even the Pentagon requests.

    +Given his priority to feed the war machine, the new occupant is having a hard time finding sufficient funds for Biden-promised student debt forgiveness. Ditto for making two years of community college tuition-free.

    + President Trump slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%; candidate Biden vowed to raise it to 28%; the current occupant proposed a further cut to 15%.

    Biden, while campaigning in 2019, pledged to wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he’s elected. And nothing has changed despite recent drama in the Senate over Build Back Better. Trump’s $4.5 trillion corporate-investor tax cut still appears secure.

    +Raising the federal minimum wage to $15-an-hour from $7.25, where it has languished since 2009, was a big selling point for the Biden campaign. Now it is on hold, while billionaire fortunes balloon, leaving the working class broke but woke under the current administration.

    +The Obama-Biden nuclear deal with Iran was gutted by Trump. The current occupant, contrary to Biden’s campaign utterances, has not returned to the conditions of the JCPOA. Rather, he has continued Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy against Iran.

    +Candidate Biden, calling for a foreign policy based on diplomacy, criticized Trump’s dangerous and erratic war mongering. Yet only a month after his inauguration, the new president capriciously bombed “Iranian-backed militias” in Syria who were fighting ISIS terrorists and posed no threat to the US.

    The new president went on to authorize further “air strikes” on “targets” around the world such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Now, the undiscriminating reader might think these are acts of war. But war, according to the “rules-based order” of the new occupant, is best understood as a conflict where US lives are lost rather than those of seemingly more expendable swarthy-skinned foreigners.

    +The Obama-Biden normalization of relations with Cuba and easing of restrictions were reversed by Trump. Presidential candidate Biden had signaled a return, but the current occupant has instead intensified the US hybrid war against Cuba.

    +Candidate Biden pledged to review Trump’s policy of US sanctions against a third of humanity. The presumptive intention of the review was to ameliorate the human suffering caused by these unilateral coercive measures. Sanctions are a form of collective punishment considered illegal under international law. Following the review, the current occupant has instead tightened the screws, more effectively weaponizing the COVID crisis against countries such as Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela, while adding Ethiopia and Cambodia to the growing list of those sanctioned.

    +Among Trump’s most ridiculous foreign policy stunts (and it’s a competitive field) was the recognition of Juan Guaidó as president of Venezuela in 2019. The then 35-year-old US security asset had never run for a nationwide office and was unknown to over 80% of the Venezuelans. Contrary to campaign trail inuendoes that Biden would dialogue with the democratically elected president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, the new guy in the White House has continued the embarrassing Guaidó charade.

    +The current White House occupant has also continued and expanded on some of the worse anti-immigrant policies of the xenophobe who preceded him. Asylum seekers from Haiti and Central America – fleeing conditions in large part created by US interventions in their countries – have been sent packing. Within a month of assuming the presidency, migrant detention facilities for children were employed, contradicting statements made by candidate Biden who had deplored locking kids in cages.

    +President Trump was a shameless global warming denier. Candidate Biden was a refreshing true believer, boldly calling for a ban on new oil and natural gas leasing on public land and water. But whoever is now in the Oval Office opened more than 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for fossil fuel drilling.

    Perhaps the strongest evidence that Trump is practically still in office is the political practice of his left-liberal detractors who solemnly promised to “first dump Trump, then battle Biden.” However, these left-liberals are still obsessing about dumping Trump. Instead of battling Biden, they are fanning the dying embers of the fear of another January 6 insurrection, giving the Democrats a pass.

    Of course, the Democrats occupy the executive branch along with holding majorities and both houses of Congress. Yet, despite campaign pledges and spin, the continuity from one administration to the next is overarching as the preceding quick review documented.

    The partisan infighting theatrics of the “dysfunctional Congress” is in part a distraction from an underlying bedrock bipartisan consensus. Congress is dysfunctional by design on matters of social welfare for working Americans. It is ruthlessly functional for matters of concern for the ruling elites, such as the military spending, bank bailouts, corporate welfare, and an expansive surveillance state.

    The Democrats offer an empty “we are not Trump” alternative. The bankrupt left-liberals no longer stand for substantial improvements to the living conditions of working people, a “peace dividend,” or respite from war without end. Instead, they use the scare tactic that they are the bulwark against a right popular insurgency; an insurgency fueled in the first place by the failure of the two-party system to speak to the material needs of its constituents.

    The post Trump Thinks He’s Still President: What Is the Evidence? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ten Contradictions That Plague Biden’s Democracy Summit

    Protest by students in Thailand. AP

    President Biden’s virtual Summit for Democracy on December 9-10 is part of a campaign to restore the United States’ standing in the world, which took such a beating under President Trump’s erratic foreign policies. Biden hopes to secure his place at the head of the “Free World” table by coming out as a champion for human rights and democratic practices worldwide.

    The greater possible value of this gathering of 111 countries is that it could instead serve as an “intervention,” or an opportunity for people and governments around the world to express their concerns about the flaws in U.S. democracy and the undemocratic way the United States deals with the rest of the world. Here are just a few issues that should be considered:

    (1)  The U.S. claims to be a leader in global democracy at a time when its own already deeply flawed democracy is crumbling, as evidenced by the shocking January 6 assault on the nation’s Capitol. On top of the systemic problem of a duopoly that keeps other political parties locked out and the obscene influence of money in politics, the U.S. electoral system is being further eroded by the increasing tendency to contest credible election results and widespread efforts to suppress voter participation (19 states have enacted 33 laws that make it more difficult for citizens to vote).

    A broad global ranking of countries by various measures of democracy puts the U.S. at # 33, while the U.S. government-funded Freedom House ranks the United States at # 61 in the world for political freedom and civil liberties, on a par with Mongolia, Panama and Romania.

    (2)  The unspoken U.S. agenda at this “summit” is to demonize and isolate China and Russia. But if we agree that democracies should be judged by how they treat their people, then why is the U.S. Congress failing to pass a bill to provide basic services like health care, child care, housing and education, which are guaranteed to most Chinese citizens for free or at minimal cost?

    And consider China’s extraordinary success in relieving poverty. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, “Every time I visit China, I am stunned by the speed of change and progress. You have created one of the most dynamic economies in the world, while helping more than 800 million people to lift themselves out of poverty – the greatest anti-poverty achievement in history.”

    China has also far surpassed the U.S. in dealing with the pandemic. Little wonder a Harvard University report found that over 90% of the Chinese people like their government. One would think that China’s extraordinary domestic achievements would make the Biden administration a bit more humble about its “one-size-fits-all” concept of democracy.

    (3)  The climate crisis and the pandemic are a wake-up call for global cooperation, but this Summit is transparently designed to exacerbate divisions. The Chinese and Russian ambassadors to Washington have publicly accused the United States of staging the summit to stoke ideological confrontation and divide the world into hostile camps, while China held a competing International Democracy Forum with 120 countries the weekend before the U.S. summit.

    Inviting the government of Taiwan to the U.S. summit further erodes the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, in which the United States acknowledged the One-China policy and agreed to cut back military installations on Taiwan.

    Also invited is the corrupt anti-Russian government installed by the 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine, which reportedly has half its military forces poised to invade the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine, who declared independence in response to the 2014 coup. The U.S. and NATO have so far supported this major escalation of a civil war that already killed 14,000 people.

    (4)  The U.S. and its Western allies—the self-anointed leaders of human rights—just happen to be the major suppliers of weapons and training to some of the world’s most vicious dictators. Despite its verbal commitment to human rights, the Biden administration and Congress recently approved a $650 million weapons deal for Saudi Arabia at a time when this repressive kingdom is bombing and starving the people of Yemen.

    Heck, the administration even uses U.S. tax dollars to “donate” weapons to dictators, like General Sisi in Egypt, who oversees a regime with thousands of political prisoners, many of whom have been tortured. Of course, these U.S. allies were not invited to the Democracy Summit—that would be too embarrassing.

    (5)  Perhaps someone should inform Biden that the right to survive is a basic human right. The right to food is recognized in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as part of the right to an adequate standard of living, and is enshrined in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

    So why is the U.S. imposing brutal sanctions on countries from Venezuela to North Korea that are causing inflation, scarcity, and malnutrition among children? Former UN special rapporteur Alfred de Zayas has blasted the United States for engaging in “economic warfare” and compared its illegal unilateral sanctions to medieval sieges. No country that purposely denies children the right to food and starves them to death can call itself a champion of democracy.

    (6)   Since the United States was defeated by the Taliban and withdrew its occupation forces from Afghanistan, it is acting as a very sore loser and reneging on basic international and humanitarian commitments. Certainly Taliban rule in Afghanistan is a setback for human rights, especially for women, but pulling the plug on Afghanistan’s economy is catastrophic for the entire nation.

    The United States is denying the new government access to billions of dollars in Afghanistan’s foreign currency reserves held in U.S. banks, causing a collapse in the banking system. Hundreds of thousands of public servants have not been paid. The UN is warning that millions of Afghans are at risk of starving to death this winter as the result of these coercive measures by the United States and its allies.

    (7)  It’s telling that the Biden administration had such a difficult time finding Middle Eastern countries to invite to the summit. The United States just spent 20 years and $8 trillion trying to impose its brand of democracy on the Middle East and Afghanistan, so you’d think it would have a few proteges to showcase.

    But no. In the end, they could only agree to invite the state of Israel, an apartheid regime that enforces Jewish supremacy over all the land it occupies, legally or otherwise. Embarrassed to have no Arab states attending, the Biden administration added Iraq, whose unstable government has been racked by corruption and sectarian divisions ever since the U.S. invasion in 2003. Its brutal security forces have killed over 600 demonstrators since huge anti-government protests began in 2019.

    (8)  What, pray tell, is democratic about the U.S. gulag at Guantánamo Bay? The U.S. Government opened the Guantanamo detention center in January 2002 as a way to circumvent the rule of law as it kidnapped and jailed people without trial after the crimes of September 11, 2001. Since then, 780 men have been detained there. Very few were charged with any crime or confirmed as combatants, but still they were tortured, held for years without charges, and never tried.

    This gross violation of human rights continues, with most of the 39 remaining detainees never even charged with a crime. Yet this country that has locked up hundreds of innocent men with no due process for up to 20 years still claims the authority to pass judgment on the legal processes of other countries, in particular on China’s efforts to cope with Islamist radicalism and terrorism among its Uighur minority.

    (9)  With the recent investigations into the March 2019 U.S. bombing in Syria that left 70 civilians dead and the drone strike that killed an Afghan family of ten in August 2021, the truth of massive civilian casualties in U.S. drone strikes and airstrikes is gradually emerging, as well as how these war crimes have perpetuated and fueled the “war on terror,” instead of winning or ending it.

    If this was a real democracy summit, whistleblowers like Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who have risked so much to expose the reality of U.S. war crimes to the world, would be honored guests at the summit instead of political prisoners in the American gulag.

    (10)  The United States picks and chooses countries as “democracies” on an entirely self-serving basis. But in the case of Venezuela, it has gone even farther and invited an imaginary U.S.-appointed “president” instead of the country’s actual government.

    The Trump administration anointed Juan Guaidó as “president” of Venezuela, and Biden invited him to the summit, but Guaidó is neither a president nor a democrat, and he boycotted parliamentary elections in 2020 and regional elections in 2021. But Guaido did come tops in one recent opinion poll, with the highest public disapproval of any opposition figure in Venezuela at 83%, and the lowest approval rating at 13%.

    Guaidó named himself “interim president” (without any legal mandate) in 2019, and launched a failed coup against the elected government of Venezuela. When all his U.S.-backed efforts to overthrow the government failed, Guaidó signed off on a mercenary invasion which failed even more spectacularly. The European Union no longer recognizes Guaido’s claim to the presidency, and his “interim foreign minister” recently resigned, accusing Guaidó of corruption.

    Conclusion

    Just as the people of Venezuela have not elected or appointed Juan Guaidó as their president, the people of the world have not elected or appointed the United States as the president or leader of all Earthlings.

    When the United States emerged from the Second World War as the strongest economic and military power in the world, its leaders had the wisdom not to claim such a role. Instead they brought the whole world together to form the United Nations, on the principles of sovereign equality, non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, a universal commitment to the peaceful resolution of disputes and a prohibition on the threat or use of force against each other.

    The United States enjoyed great wealth and international power under the UN system it devised. But in the post-Cold War era, power-hungry U.S. leaders came to see the UN Charter and the rule of international law as obstacles to their insatiable ambitions. They belatedly staked a claim to universal global leadership and dominance, relying on the threat and use of force that the UN Charter prohibits. The results have been catastrophic for millions of people in many countries, including Americans.

    Since the United States has invited its friends from around the world to this ”democracy summit,” maybe they can use the occasion to try to persuade their bomb-toting friend to recognize that its bid for unilateral global power has failed, and that it should instead make a real commitment to peace, cooperation and international democracy under the rules-based order of the UN Charter.

    The post Ten Contradictions That Plague Biden’s Democracy Summit first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Congress Loots the Treasury for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex

    Despite a disagreement over some amendments in the Senate, the United States Congress is poised to pass a $778 billion military budget bill for 2022. As they have been doing year after year, our elected officials are preparing to hand the lion’s share – over 65% – of federal discretionary spending to the U.S. war machine, even as they wring their hands over spending a mere quarter of that amount on the Build Back Better Act.

    The U.S. military’s incredible record of systematic failure—most recently its final trouncing by the Taliban after twenty years of death, destruction and lies in Afghanistan—cries out for a top-to-bottom review of its dominant role in U.S. foreign policy and a radical reassessment of its proper place in Congress’s budget priorities.

    Instead, year after year, members of Congress hand over the largest share of our nation’s resources to this corrupt institution, with minimal scrutiny and no apparent fear of accountability when it comes to their own reelection. Members of Congress still see it as a “safe” political call to carelessly whip out their rubber-stamps and vote for however many hundreds of billions in funding Pentagon and arms industry lobbyists have persuaded the Armed Services Committees they should cough up.

    Let’s make no mistake about this: Congress’s choice to keep investing in a massive, ineffective and absurdly expensive war machine has nothing to do with “national security” as most people understand it, or “defense” as the dictionary defines it.

    U.S. society does face critical threats to our security, including the climate crisis, systemic racism, erosion of voting rights, gun violence, grave inequalities and the corporate hijacking of political power. But one problem we fortunately do not have is the threat of attack or invasion by a rampant global aggressor or, in fact, by any other country at all.

    Maintaining a war machine that outspends the 12 or 13 next largest militaries in the world combined actually makes us less safe, as each new administration inherits the delusion that the United States’ overwhelmingly destructive military power can, and therefore should, be used to confront any perceived challenge to U.S. interests anywhere in the world—even when there is clearly no military solution and when many of the underlying problems were caused by past misapplications of U.S. military power in the first place.

    While the international challenges we face in this century require a genuine commitment to international cooperation and diplomacy, Congress allocates only $58 billion, less than 10 percent of the Pentagon budget, to the diplomatic corps of our government: the State Department even worse, both Democratic and Republican administrations keep filling top diplomatic posts with officials indoctrinated and steeped in policies of war and coercion, with scant experience and meager skills in the peaceful diplomacy we so desperately need.

    This only perpetuates a failed foreign policy based on false choices between economic sanctions that UN officials have compared to medieval sieges, coups that destabilize countries and regions for decades, and wars and bombing campaigns that kill millions of people and leave cities in rubble, like Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

    The end of the Cold War was a golden opportunity for the United States to reduce its forces and military budget to match its legitimate defense needs. The American public naturally expected and hoped for a “Peace Dividend,” and even veteran Pentagon officials told the Senate Budget Committee in 1991 that military spending could safely be cut by 50% over the next ten years.

    But no such cut happened. U.S. officials instead set out to exploit the post-Cold War “Power Dividend,” a huge military imbalance in favor of the United States, by developing rationales for using military force more freely and widely around the world. During the transition to the new Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright famously asked Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

    In 1999, as Secretary of State under President Clinton, Albright got her wish, running roughshod over the UN Charter with an illegal war to carve out an independent Kosovo from the ruins of Yugoslavia.

    The UN Charter clearly prohibits the threat or use of military force except in cases of self-defense or when the UN Security Council takes military action “to maintain or restore international peace and security.” This was neither. When U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Albright his government was “having trouble with our lawyers” over NATO’s illegal war plan, Albright crassly told him to “get new lawyers.”

    Twenty-two years later, Kosovo is the third-poorest country in Europe (after Moldova and post-coup Ukraine) and its independence is still not recognized by 96 countries. Hashim Thaçi, Albright’s hand-picked main ally in Kosovo and later its president, is awaiting trial in an international court at the Hague, charged with murdering at least 300 civilians under cover of NATO bombing in 1999 to extract and sell their internal organs on the international transplant market.

    Clinton and Albright’s gruesome and illegal war set the precedent for more illegal U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, with equally devastating and horrific results. But America’s failed wars have not led Congress or successive administrations to seriously rethink the U.S. decision to rely on illegal threats and uses of military force to project U.S. power all over the world, nor have they reined in the trillions of dollars invested in these imperial ambitions.

    Instead, in the upside-down world of institutionally corrupt U.S. politics, a generation of failed and pointlessly destructive wars have had the perverse effect of normalizing even more expensive military budgets than during the Cold War, and reducing congressional debate to questions of how many more of each useless weapons system they should force U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill for.

    It seems that no amount of killing, torture, mass destruction or lives ruined in the real world can shake the militaristic delusions of America’s political class, as long as the “Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex” (President Eisenhower’s original wording) is reaping the benefits.

    Today, most political and media references to the Military-Industrial Complex refer only to the arms industry as a self-serving corporate interest group on a par with Wall Street, Big Pharma or the fossil fuel industry. But in his Farewell Address, Eisenhower explicitly pointed to, not just the arms industry, but the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”

    Eisenhower was just as worried about the anti-democratic impact of the military as the arms industry. Weeks before his Farewell Address, he told his senior advisors, “God help this country when somebody sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” His fears have been realized in every subsequent presidency.

    According to Milton Eisenhower, the president’s brother, who helped him draft his Farewell Address, Ike also wanted to talk about the “revolving door.” Early drafts of his speech referred to “a permanent, war-based industry,” with “flag and general officers retiring at an early age to take positions in the war-based industrial complex, shaping its decisions and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust.” He wanted to warn that steps must be taken to “insure that the ‘merchants of death’ do not come to dictate national policy.”

    As Eisenhower feared, the careers of figures like Generals Austin and Mattis now span all branches of the corrupt MIC conglomerate: commanding invasion and occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; then donning suits and ties to sell weapons to new generals who served under them as majors and colonels; and finally re-emerging from the same revolving door as cabinet members at the apex of American politics and government.

    So why does the Pentagon brass get a free pass, even as Americans feel increasingly conflicted about the arms industry? After all, it is the military that actually uses all these weapons to kill people and wreak havoc in other countries.

    Even as it loses war after war overseas, the U.S. military has waged a far more successful one to burnish its image in the hearts and minds of Americans and win every budget battle in Washington.

    The complicity of Congress, the third leg of the stool in Eisenhower’s original formulation, turns the annual battle of the budget into the “cakewalk” that the war in Iraq was supposed to be, with no accountability for lost wars, war crimes, civilian massacres, cost overruns or the dysfunctional military leadership that presides over it all.

    There is no congressional debate over the economic impact on America or the geopolitical consequences for the world of uncritically rubber-stamping huge investments in powerful weapons that will sooner or later be used to kill our neighbors and smash their countries, as they have for the past 22 years and far too often throughout our history.

    If the public is ever to have any impact on this dysfunctional and deadly money-go-round, we must learn to see through the fog of propaganda that masks self-serving corruption behind red, white and blue bunting, and allows the military brass to cynically exploit the public’s natural respect for brave young men and women who are ready to risk their lives to defend our country. In the Crimean War, the Russians called British troops “lions led by donkeys.” That is an accurate description of today’s U.S. military.

    Sixty years after Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, exactly as he predicted, the “weight of this combination” of corrupt generals and admirals, the profitable “merchants of death” whose goods they peddle, and the Senators and Representatives who blindly entrust them with trillions of dollars of the public’s money, constitute the full flowering of President Eisenhower’s greatest fears for our country.

    Eisenhower concluded, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.” That clarion call echoes through the decades and should unite Americans in every form of democratic organizing and movement building, from elections to education and advocacy to mass protests, to finally reject and dispel the “unwarranted influence” of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex.

     

     

    The post How Congress Loots the Treasury for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Politics: We need a Transformation

    As if we needed any more evidence of the sorry state of our political system, the long-running battle over the ‘Build Back Better’ bill has provided it. As Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out, an early version of this bill included many proposals that would help Americans live with a sense of security. In addition, these proposals were strongly supported by the US population.

    Among these many items were negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to lower the obscenely high drug prices, universal Preschool for all 3- and 4-year olds, support for paid family and medical leave, and the expansion of Medicare to include dental care, hearing aids and glasses. Particularly popular with the public, the funding for this bill would come from taxes and legislative changes affecting the super wealthy who have benefited enormously from previous legislation (including gigantic bailouts) from Congress and the White House.

    The corporate media reported this version of the bill had a price tag of $3.5 trillion, but failed to emphasize that this cost was spread over a 10-year period, or $350 billion per year. Many politicians opposed this bill, claiming that the cost was too high.

    However, these same politicians didn’t bat an eye at giving about $715 billion a year or, assuming the same funding level, over $7 trillion for 10 years to the US military. It didn’t matter that the military has not passed an annual independent audit since Congress first mandated the audit for federal agencies in 1990. In addition, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the US spending on its military is greater than the sum of the next 11 nations combined and most of these countries are our allies.

    In 1957, General Douglas MacArthur, a leading US military figure during the 20th century and hardly a peacenik, explained the support for increasing military budgets:

    Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear … with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

    The situation is worse today than the one President Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address when he pointed out the dangers of the military-industrial complex. The media, universities and think tanks now are also part of this complex and provide even more lobbying clout.

    An investigation by Brown University researchers estimated that the cost of US global war on terror since 9/11 at $8 trillion with direct responsibility for about 900,000 deaths. Clearly this war has been counterproductive for the US image around the world. In addition, its illegal attacks have also caused enormous unnecessary devastation and loss of lives particularly in the Middle East. Making matters worse, these illegal interventions, particularly the war crimes committed against Iraq, had very little to do with direct US interests. What a waste of resources! The financial cost to the US would be even far higher if the US were required to pay reparations for the devastation its war crimes caused.

    Yet Congress continues to generously fund the Pentagon and to enrich the merchants of death while it is a miser to agencies that actually help the American public achieve the necessities of life. These necessities include housing, education, health care, food, etc. People living in much of Western Europe live much more secure lives having had these necessities for decades. Clearly our system of legalized bribery of politicians enriches the wealthy at the public’s expense.

    It is terrible that two recalcitrant Democratic senators have been able to eliminate many of the important items included in the previous version of the Act such that it now costs about $185 billion/year. It is possible that the bill’s costs will be further reduced as other provisions are stripped away. What is even worse is the role of partisan politics where not even one Republican senator will stand up for the security of their fellow Americans and support the Act. What happened to the idea of standing up for the public interest? Do they prefer to see the public continue to suffer rather than to allow the other party to claim success? This system of legalized bribery and intense partisanship is a system that dooms us to disaster.

    The post US Politics: We need a Transformation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Congress, Skulduggery and the Assange Case

    Is the imperium showing suspicions about its intended quarry?  It is hard to believe it, but the US House Intelligence Committee is on a mission of discovery.  Its subject: a Yahoo News report disclosing much material that was already in the public domain on the plot to kidnap or, failing that, poison Julian Assange.  Given that such ideas were aired by officials within the Central Intelligence Agency, this struck home.  On the Yahoo News “Skulduggery” podcast, Committee chairman and Democratic Representative Adam Schiff said, “We are seeking information about it now.”

    Making sure to put himself in the clear of having any knowledge of plans against Assange, Schiff claimed that the committee had sought a response from “the agencies” (the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) after the publication of the Yahoo News piece.  As to whether the agencies had responded, Schiff was not forthcoming.  “I can’t comment on what we’ve heard back yet.”

    This modest effort might show that Schiff is growing a conscience regarding the US case against the founder of WikiLeaks, centred on charges relating to espionage and computer intrusion.  If so, it is a bit late coming, given ample evidence that US intelligence services not only conducted surveillance on Assange while he was in the Ecuadorian embassy in London but contemplated his potential abduction and assassination.

    Had the dozing Schiff cast an eye on last year’s extradition hearings mounted by the US Justice Department in the UK, he would have been privy to the efforts of the Spanish private security firm UC Global, hired by US intelligence operatives, to conduct operations against Assange.  But such humble representatives should not be expected to keep abreast of the news, even as members of a House Intelligence Committee.

    For the rest of us who do, one of the former employees of the Spanish company gave testimony at the Old Bailey claiming that he had been asked to pilfer “a nappy of a baby which according to the company’s security personnel deployed at the embassy, regularly visited Mr Assange”.  As UC Global’s CEO David Morales, currently the subject of a criminal investigation in Spain, explained, “the Americans wanted to establish paternity”.  In December 2017, Assange’s lengthy stay at the embassy was proving so irritating that the “Americans … had even suggested that more extreme measures should be deployed against the ‘guest’ to put an end to the situation”.  One way of doing so would be staging an “accident” that “would allow persons to enter from outside the embassy and kidnap the asylee”.  Very School of the Americas, that.

    Congress has shown some gurgling interest in dropping the case against Assange.  House Resolution 1175, sponsored by then Democrat House Representative Tulsi Gabbard, expressed “the sense of the House of Representatives that newsgathering activities are protected under the First Amendment, and that the United States should drop all charges against and attempts to extradite Julian Assange.”  On the Republican side, former US Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin has also become a convert.  “I made a mistake some years ago, not supporting Julian Assange – thinking that he was a bad guy.”  Since then, she had “learned a lot”. “He deserves a pardon.”

    The phalanx of civil society groups is also urging US Attorney General Merrick Garland to stop the prosecution. On October 15, Garland received a letter signed by 25 organisations including the ACLU, PEN America and Human Rights Watch, raising the US intelligence efforts against Assange as imperilling the case.  “The Yahoo News story only heightens our concerns about the motivations behind this prosecution and about the dangerous precedent that is being set.”  As the joint signatories had stated in a previous letter in February, “News organizations frequently and necessarily publish classified information in order to inform the public of matters of profound significance.”

    Unfortunately, a good number of the US political classes remain vengefully eager.  Many Democrats will never forgive Assange for releasing the Podesta emails and compromising Hillary Clinton’s shoddy electoral campaign in 2016.  The former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo holds up the Republican line, having designated WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia”.

    And no one should forget that the current US President Joe Biden sought the head of WikiLeaks in a manner that was almost childishly enthusiastic while he was Vice President in the Obama administration.  “We are looking at that right now,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press in December 2010.  “The Justice department is taking a look at that.”  Assange exposed and therefore, we depose.  It took some of the more sober individuals in the Obama administration to throw cold water on the effort, arguing that any prosecution of WikiLeaks raised thorny First Amendment issues.  You go for this Australian’s scalp, then where do we stop?  The editorial staff of the New York Times?  The news foragers at the Washington Post?  The opportunities were endlessly dangerous.

    The US prosecution of Assange, centred on that First World War relic of suppression called the Espionage Act, is about to enter its next phase in what can only be described as torture via procedure.  (To date, Assange has been refused bail and left to languish in Belmarsh Prison.)  In the UK High Court, prosecutors are hoping to overturn the findings made by Judge Vanessa Baraitser in her January 4 ruling against extradition, impugning expert evidence on Assange’s mental health and the court’s assessment of it.  These grounds are almost criminally flimsy, but then again, so is this entire effort against this daring, revolutionary publisher.  Assange’s defence team will have much to work with, though Schiff and his colleagues may be asleep as matters unfold.

    The post Congress, Skulduggery and the Assange Case first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Racial Justice Vs. The Israel Lobby: When Being Pro-Palestine Becomes the New Normal  

    There is an unmistakable shift in American politics regarding Palestine and Israel, a change that is inspired by the way in which many Americans, especially the youth, view the Palestinian struggle and the Israeli occupation. While this shift is yet to translate into tangibly diminishing Israel’s stronghold over the US Congress, it promises to be of great consequence in the coming years.

    Recent events at the US House of Representatives clearly demonstrate this unprecedented reality. On September 21, Democratic lawmakers successfully rejected a caveat that proposes to give Israel $1 billion in military funding as part of a broader spending bill, after objections from several progressive Congress members. The money was specifically destined to fund the purchase of new batteries and interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

    Two days later, the funding of the Iron Dome was reintroduced and, this time, it has successfully, and overwhelmingly, passed with a vote of 420 to 9, despite passionate pleas by Palestinian-American Representative, Rashida Tlaib.

    In the second vote, only eight Democrats opposed the measure. The ninth opposing vote was cast by a member of the Republican party, Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

    Though she was one of the voices that blocked the funding measure on September 21, Democratic Representative, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, switched her vote at the very last minute to “present”, creating confusion and generating anger among her supporters.

    As for Massie, his defiance of the Republican consensus generated him the title of “Antisemite of the Week” by a notorious pro-Israel organization called ‘Stop Antisemitism’.

    Despite the outcome of the tussle, the fact that such an episode has even taken place in Congress was a historic event requiring much reflection. It means that speaking out against the Israeli occupation of Palestine is no longer taboo among elected US politicians.

    Once upon a time, speaking out against Israel in Congress generated a massive and well-organized backlash from the pro-Israeli lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that, in the past, ended promising political careers, even those of veteran politicians. A combination of media smear tactics, support of rivals and outright threats often sealed the fate of the few dissenting Congress members.

    While AIPAC and its sister organizations continue to follow the same old tactic, the overall strategy is hardly as effective as it once was. Members of the Squad, young Representatives who often speak out against Israel and in support of Palestine, were introduced to the 2019 Congress. With a few exceptions, they remained largely consistent in their position in support of Palestinian rights and, despite intense efforts by the Israeli lobby, they were all reelected in 2020. The historic lesson here is that being critical of Israel in the US Congress is no longer a guarantor of a decisive electoral defeat; on the contrary, in some instances, it is quite the opposite.

    The fact that 420 members of the House voted to provide Israel with additional funds – to be added to the annual funds of $3.8 billion – reflects the same unfortunate reality of old, that, thanks to the relentless biased corporate media coverage, most American constituencies continue to support Israel.

    However, the loosening grip of the lobby over the US Congress offers unique opportunities for the pro-Palestinian constituencies to finally place pressure on their Representatives, demanding accountability and balance. These opportunities are not only created by new, youthful voices in America’s democratic institutions, but by the rapidly shifting public opinion, as well.

    For decades, the vast majority of Americans supported Israel. The reasons behind this support varied, depending on the political framing as communicated by US officials and media. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, Tel Aviv was viewed as a stalwart ally of Washington against Communism. In later years, new narratives were fabricated to maintain Israel’s positive image in the eyes of ordinary Americans. The US so-called ‘war on terror’, declared in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, for example, positioned Israel as an American ally against ‘Islamic extremism’, painting resisting Palestinians as ‘terrorists’, thus giving the Israeli occupation of Palestine a moral facade.

    However, new factors have destabilized this paradigm. One is the fact that support for Israel has become a divisive issue in the US’ increasingly tumultuous and combative politics, where most Republicans support Israel and most Democrats don’t.

    Moreover, as racial justice has grown to become one of the most defining and emotive subjects in American politics, many Americans began seeing the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation from the prism of millions of Americans’ own fight for racial equality. The fact that the social media hashtag #PalestinianLivesMatter continues to trend daily alongside the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter speaks of a success story where communal solidarity and intersectionality have prevailed over selfish politics, where only money matters.

    Millions of young Americans now see the struggle in Palestine as integral to the anti-racist fight in America; no amount of pro-Israeli lobbying in Congress can possibly shift this unmistakable trend. There are plenty of numbers that attest to these claims. One of many examples is the University of Maryland’s public opinion poll in July, which showed that more than half of polled Americans disapproved of President Joe Biden’s handling of the Israeli war on Gaza in May 2021, believing that he could have done more to stop the Israeli aggression.

    Of course, courageous US politicians dared to speak out against Israel in the past. However, there is a marked difference between previous generations and the current one. In American politics today, there are politicians who are elected because of their strong stance for Palestine and, by deviating from their election promises, they risk the ire of the growing pro-Palestine constituency throughout the country. This changing reality is finally making it possible to nurture and sustain pro-Palestinian presence in US Congress.

    In other words, speaking out for Palestine in America is no longer a charitable and rare occurrence. As the future will surely reveal, it is the “politically correct” thing to do.

    The post Racial Justice Vs. The Israel Lobby: When Being Pro-Palestine Becomes the New Normal   first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Iron Dome: Don’t be deceived, US aid to Israel is not about saving lives

    Battles in the US Congress that erupted again this week, holding up an extra $1bn in military funding for Israel, underscored just how divorced from reality the conversation about US financial aid to Israel has become, even among many critics.

    For 48 hours last month, a small group of progressive Democrats in the US House of Representatives succeeded in sabotaging a measure to pick up the bill for Israel to replenish its Iron Dome interception missiles. The Iron Dome system was developed by Israel, with generous financial backing from successive US administrations, in the wake of the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Today, it ostensibly serves to protect Israel from short-range, largely improvised rockets fired intermittently out of Gaza.

    Supplies of the Iron Dome missiles, each of which cost at least $50,000, were depleted back in May, when Israel triggered widespread confrontations with Palestinians by intensifying its settlement of Palestinian neighbourhoods near Jerusalem’s Old City and violently raiding al-Aqsa Mosque. Palestinian militant groups fired large numbers of rockets out of Gaza, which has been blockaded by Israel for the past 15 years. Iron Dome intercepted the rockets before they could land in Israel.

    The group of progressive Democrats, known popularly as the Squad, scotched an initial move by their congressional leadership to include the $1bn assistance to Israel in US budget legislation. But the money for Iron Dome was quickly reintroduced as a stand-alone bill that passed overwhelmingly, with 420 votes in favour and nine against. Two representatives, one of them the prominent Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,  voted “present” – counting effectively as an abstention.

    This week, the furore moved to the Senate when Rand Paul, a strong Republican critic of US foreign aid, refused to nod through the bill and thereby give it unanimous assent. It will now need to go through a more complicated legislative process.

    The latest funding for Iron Dome comes in addition to the $3.8bn Israel receives annually from the US in military aid, which has made Israel the biggest recipient, by far, of such largesse. Putting the new tranche of Iron Dome aid into perspective, it is twice what Washington contributes annually to Nato’s budget.

    The previous administration, under former President Donald Trump, turned US funding for Nato into a big domestic controversy, arguing that the US was shouldering too much of the burden. But there has been barely a peep about the massive military bill the US is footing for Iron Dome.

    Debate stifled

    The Squad’s main achievement in launching its brief blocking move was to force out into the open the fact that the US is paying for Israel’s stockpile of missiles. Like the House leadership, the Israel lobby had hoped the money could be transferred quietly, without attracting attention.

    What little debate did ensue related to whether Israel really needs US military assistance. A few commentators asked why Washington was kitting out one of the richer countries on the planet with missiles in the midst of a pandemic that has hit the US economy hard.

    But the lobby quickly stifled a far more important debate about whether the US should be encouraging Israel’s use of Iron Dome at all. Instead, US funding for the interception missile system was presented as being motivated solely by a desire to save lives.

    In attacking Paul’s decision to block the bill, the biggest pro-Israel lobby group in Congress, AIPAC, argued this week that his move would “cost innocent lives, make war more likely, and embolden Iran-backed terrorists”.

    It was precisely the claim that the Iron Dome is defensive that appeared to push Ocasio-Cortez, usually seen as one of the few US politicians openly critical of Israel, into a corner, leading to her abstention.

    Images from the House floor showed her tearful and being given a hug by another representative after the vote. She later attributed her distress in part to how Iron Dome funding had a polarising effect at home, noting that the House bill was a “reckless” move to “rip our communities apart”.

    That was an apparent reference to factional tensions within the Democratic Party between, on one side, many Jewish voters who back what they see as Israel’s right to defend itself and, on the other, many Black and Hispanic voters who think it is wrong for the US to financially support Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

    Some saw her indecision as evidence of her ambitions to run for the Senate, where positions critical of Israel would be more likely to damage her prospects of success.

    Expiring in silence

    In Israel, and in Jewish communities beyond, the conversation about US support for Iron Dome is even more detached from reality. The nine US representatives who voted against were roundly castigated for willing the deaths of Israelis by voting to deny them protection from rockets fired from Gaza. In predictable fashion, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, called those who voted against “either ignorant or antisemitic”.

    But some liberals took the argument in a different, even more fanciful direction. They called the Squad “hypocrites” for voting against the $1bn funding, arguing that Iron Dome missiles not only save Israelis, but Palestinians too. One Haaretz commentator went so far as to claim that Palestinians were actually the main beneficiaries of the Iron Dome system, arguing: “The fact Israel has a defensive shield against rocket attacks makes a wide-scale military operation with thousands of – mainly Palestinian – casualties less likely.”

    Of course, there is the small question of whether Israel has indeed been “forced” into its attacks on Gaza. It is precisely its military superiority – paid for by the US – that has freed it to carry out those massive attacks, in which large numbers of Palestinians, including hundreds of children, are killed, rather than negotiate an end to its decades-long occupation.

    Just as in life, bullies resort to intimidation and violence because they feel no need to compromise. But even more to the point, Iron Dome is central to Israel’s efforts to keep Palestinians imprisoned in Gaza, entirely subjugated and stripped of any power to resist.

    With Israel patrolling tiny Gaza’s land borders and coast, sealing off the enclave from the rest of the world, Palestinians have few options to protest their slow starvation – or to gain attention for their plight. Israeli snipers have fired on Palestinians staging unarmed, mass protests at the fence caging them in, killing and wounding thousands. The Israeli navy fires on or sinks Palestinian boats, including fishing boats, in Gaza’s waters if they stray more than a few kilometres from the shore.

    Iron Dome, far from being defensive, is another weapon in Israel’s armoury to keep Palestinians subdued, impoverished, corralled and silent. For those claiming to want peace in Israel-Palestine, the extra funding for Iron Dome just made that prospect even less likely. As long as Palestinians can be made to slowly expire in silence – their plight ignored by the rest of the world – Israel is free to seize and colonise yet more of what was supposed to become a future Palestinian state.

    Systems of domination

    But there is another reason why Ocasio-Cortez should have voted against the Iron Dome resupply, rather than tearfully abstaining – and that is for all our sakes, not just the sake of Palestinians.

    The US foots the bill for Iron Dome, just as it does for most of Israel’s other weapons development, for self-interested reasons: because it helps its own war industries, as Washington seeks to maintain its military dominance globally.

    With western populations less willing to sacrifice their sons and daughters for the sake of modern wars, which seem less obviously related to defence and more transparently about the control of key resources, the Pentagon has worked overtime to reframe the public debate.

    It is hard to disguise its global domination industries as anything but offensive in nature. This is where Israel has played a critical role. Not only has Israel helped to develop weapons systems like Iron Dome, but – despite being a nuclear-armed, belligerent, occupying state – it has leveraged its image as a vulnerable refuge for the long-persecuted Jewish people. It has been able to make more plausible the case that these domination systems really are defensive.

    In recent decades, Israel has developed and tested drone technology to surveil and assassinate Palestinians, which has proved invaluable in the US and UK’s long-term occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Israel’s latest “swarm” technology – making drones even more lethal – may prove particularly attractive to the Pentagon.

    Israel has also been the ideal partner for the Pentagon in testing and refining the battlefield use of the new generation of F-35 fighter planes, the most expensivemilitary product in US history. Uniquely, Israel has been allowed to customise the jet, adapting its capabilities in new, unforeseen ways.

    Bowing to US hegemony

    The F-35’s ultimate role is to make sure major rival airforces, such as Russia’s and China’s, are elbowed out of the skies. And Israel has been at the forefront of developing and testing a variety of missile interception systems, such as Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow, which are intended to destroy incoming projectiles, from short-range rockets to long-range missiles.

    Last December, Israel announced it had successfully launched Iron Dome interception missiles for the first time from the sea. Reports noted that the US arms maker Raytheon and the US defence department were involved in the tests. That is because, behind the scenes, the US is not only paying for the development and testing of these systems; it is also guiding the uses to which they will be put. The Pentagon has bought two Iron Dome batteries, which, according to Israeli media, have been stationed in US military bases in the Gulf.

    The US has its own interception systems under development, and it is unclear which it will come to rely on most heavily. But what is evident is that Washington, Israel and their Gulf allies have Iran in their immediate sights. Any country that refuses to bow to US global hegemony could also be targeted.

    US interest in these missiles is not defensive. They are fundamental to its ability to neutralise the responses of rivals to either a US military attack, or more general moves by the US to dominate territory and control resources.

    Just as Palestinians have been besieged by Israel for 15 years, the US and Gulf states may hope one day to deal a knockout blow to Iran’s oil exports. Washington would be able to ignore current concerns that Tehran could retaliate by firing on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz or on hostile Middle Eastern capitals. If Iran’s missiles can be intercepted, it will be incapable of defending itself against increasing economic or military aggression from the US or its neighbours.

    Less safe world

    Following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan this summer, there has been plenty of naive talk that the US is seeking a diminished role in the world. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    Ultimately, the US is seeking global dominance at arm’s length – through a combination of long-range military power, cyber warfare, robotics and artificial intelligence – that it hopes will lift the restraints imposed by American casualties and domestic opposition.

    Israel’s playbook with regards to Palestinians is one that elites in Washington trust can be exported to other corners of the globe, and even outer space. Interception missiles lie at the heart of that strategic vision, as a way to neutralise and silence all resistance. This is why no one who cares about a less violent, exploitative and dangerous world should be indifferent to, or neutral on, congressional funding for Iron Dome.

    Missile interception systems are the face not of a more defensive, safer world, but of a far more nakedly hostile, aggressive one.

    • First published at Middle East Eye

    The post Iron Dome: Don’t be deceived, US aid to Israel is not about saving lives first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why Does Congress Fight Over Childcare But Not F-35s?

    Photo credit: Rise Up Times

    President Biden and the Democratic Congress are facing a crisis as the popular domestic agenda they ran on in the 2020 election is held hostage by two corporate Democratic Senators, fossil-fuel consigliere Joe Manchin and payday-lender favorite Kyrsten Sinema.

    But the very week before the Dems’ $350 billion-per-year domestic package hit this wall of corporate money-bags, all but 38 House Democrats voted to hand over more than double that amount to the Pentagon. Senator Manchin has hypocritically described the domestic spending bill as “fiscal insanity,” but he has voted for a much larger Pentagon budget every year since 2016.

    Real fiscal insanity is what Congress does year after year, taking most of its discretionary spending off the table and handing it over to the Pentagon before even considering the country’s urgent domestic needs. Maintaining this pattern, Congress just splashed out $12 billion for 85 more F-35 warplanes, 6 more than Trump bought last year, without debating the relative merits of buying more F-35s vs. investing $12 billion in education, healthcare, clean energy or fighting poverty.

    The 2022 military spending bill (NDAA or National Defense Authorization Act) that passed the House on September 23 would hand a whopping $740 billion to the Pentagon and $38 billion to other departments (mainly the Department of Energy for nuclear weapons), for a total of $778 billion in military spending, a $37 billion increase over this year’s military budget. The Senate will soon debate its version of this bill—but don’t expect too much of a debate there either, as most senators are “yes men” when it comes to feeding the war machine.

    Two House amendments to make modest cuts both failed: one by Rep. Sara Jacobs to strip $24 billion that was added to Biden’s budget request by the House Armed Services Committee; and another by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for an across-the-board 10% cut (with exceptions for military pay and healthcare).

    After adjusting for inflation, this enormous budget is comparable to the peak of Trump’s arms build-up in 2020, and is only 10% below the post-WWII record set by Bush II in 2008 under cover of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would give Joe Biden the dubious distinction of being the fourth post-Cold War U.S. president to militarily outspend every Cold War president, from Truman to Bush I.

    In effect, Biden and Congress are locking in the $100 billion per year arms build-up that Trump justified with his absurd claims that Obama’s record military spending had somehow depleted the military.

    As with Biden’s failure to quickly rejoin the JCPOA with Iran, the time to act on cutting the military budget and reinvesting in domestic priorities was in the first weeks and months of his administration. His inaction on these issues, like his deportation of thousands of desperate asylum seekers, suggests that he is happier to continue Trump’s ultra-hawkish policies than he will publicly admit.

    In 2019, the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland conducted a study in which it briefed ordinary Americans on the federal budget deficit and asked them how they would address it. The average respondent favored cutting the deficit by $376 billion, mainly by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, but also by cutting an average of $51 billion from the military budget.

    Even Republicans favored cutting $14 billion, while Democrats supported a much larger $100 billion cut. That would be more than the 10% cut in the failed Ocasio-Cortez Amendment, which garnered support from only 86 Democratic Reps and was opposed by 126 Dems and every Republican.

    Most of the Democrats who voted for amendments to reduce spending still voted to pass the bloated final bill. Only 38 Democrats were willing to vote against a $778 billion military spending bill that, once Veterans Affairs and other related expenses are included, would continue to consume over 60% of discretionary spending.

    “How’re you going to pay for it?” clearly applies only to “money for people,” never to “money for war.” Rational policy making would require exactly the opposite approach. Money invested in education, healthcare and green energy is an investment in the future, while money for war offers little or no return on investment except to weapons makers and Pentagon contractors, as was the case with the $2.26 trillion the United States wasted on death and destruction in Afghanistan.

    A study by the Political Economy Research Center at the University of Massachusetts found that military spending creates fewer jobs than almost any other form of government spending. It found that $1 billion invested in the military yields an average of 11,200 jobs, while the same amount invested in other areas yields: 26,700 jobs when invested in education; 17,200 in healthcare; 16,800 in the green economy; or 15,100 jobs in cash stimulus or welfare payments.

    It is tragic that the only form of Keynesian stimulus that is uncontested in Washington is the least productive for Americans, as well as the most destructive for the other countries where the weapons are used. These irrational priorities seem to make no political sense for Democratic Members of Congress, whose grassroots voters would cut military spending by an average of $100 billion per year based on the Maryland poll.

    So why is Congress so out of touch with the foreign policy desires of their constituents? It is well-documented that Members of Congress have more close contact with well-heeled campaign contributors and corporate lobbyists than with the working people who elect them, and that the “unwarranted influence” of Eisenhower’s infamous Military-Industrial Complex has become more entrenched and more insidious than ever, just as he feared.

    The Military-Industrial Complex exploits flaws in what is at best a weak, quasi-democratic political system to defy the will of the public and spend more public money on weapons and armed forces than the world’s next 13 military powers. This is especially tragic at a time when the wars of mass destruction that have served as a pretext for wasting these resources for 20 years may finally, thankfully, be coming to an end.

    The five largest U.S. arms manufacturers (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics) account for 40% of the arms industry’s federal campaign contributions, and they have collectively received $2.2 trillion in Pentagon contracts since 2001 in return for those contributions. Altogether, 54% of military spending ends up in the accounts of corporate military contractors, earning them $8 trillion since 2001.

    The House and Senate Armed Services Committees sit at the very center of the Military-Industrial Complex, and their senior members are the largest recipients of arms industry cash in Congress. So it is a dereliction of duty for their colleagues to rubber-stamp military spending bills on their say-so without serious, independent scrutiny.

    The corporate consolidation, dumbing down and corruption of U.S. media and the isolation of the Washington “bubble” from the real world also play a role in Congress’s foreign policy disconnect.

    There is another, little-discussed reason for the disconnect between what the public wants and how Congress votes, and that can be found in a fascinating 2004 study by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations titled “The Hall of Mirrors: Perceptions and Misperceptions in the Congressional Foreign Policy Process”

    The “Hall of Mirrors” study surprisingly found a broad consensus between the foreign policy views of lawmakers and the public, but that “in many cases Congress has voted in ways that are inconsistent with these consensus positions.”

    The authors made a counter-intuitive discovery about the views of congressional staffers. “Curiously, staffers whose views were at odds with the majority of their constituents showed a strong bias toward assuming, incorrectly, that their constituents agreed with them,” the study found, “while staffers whose views were actually in accord with their constituents more often than not assumed this was not the case.”

    This was particularly striking in the case of Democratic staffers, who were often convinced that their own liberal views placed them in a minority of the public when, in fact, most of their constituents shared the same views. Since congressional staffers are the primary advisors to members of Congress on legislative matters, these misperceptions play a unique role in Congress’s anti-democratic foreign policy.

    Overall, on nine important foreign policy issues, an average of only 38% of congressional staffers could correctly identify whether a majority of the public supported or opposed a range of different policies they were asked about.

    On the other side of the equation, the study found that “Americans’ assumptions about how their own member votes appear to be frequently incorrect … [I]n the absence of information, it appears that Americans tend to assume, often incorrectly, that their member is voting in ways that are consistent with how they would like their member to vote.”

    It is not always easy for a member of the public to find out whether their Representative votes as they would like or not. News reports rarely discuss or link to actual roll-call votes, even though the Internet and the Congressional Clerk’s office make it easier than ever to do so.

    Civil society and activist groups publish more detailed voting records. Govtrack.us lets constituents sign up for emailed notifications of every single roll-call vote in Congress. Progressive Punch tracks votes and rates Reps on how often they vote for “progressive” positions, while issues-related activist groups track and report on bills they support, as CODEPINK does at CODEPINK Congress. Open Secrets enables the public to track money in politics and see how beholden their Representatives are to different corporate sectors and interest groups.

    When Members of Congress come to Washington with little or no foreign policy experience, as many do, they must take the trouble to study hard from a wide range of sources, to seek foreign policy advice from outside the corrupt Military-Industrial Complex, which has brought us only endless war, and to listen to their constituents.

    The Hall of Mirrors study should be required reading for congressional staffers, and they should reflect on how they are personally and collectively prone to the misperceptions it revealed.

    Members of the public should beware of assuming that their Representatives vote the way they want them to, and instead make serious efforts to find out how they really vote. They should contact their offices regularly to make their voices heard, and work with issues-related civil society groups to hold them accountable for their votes on issues they care about.

    Looking forward to next year’s and future military budget fights, we must build a strong popular movement that rejects the flagrantly anti-democratic decision to transition from a brutal and bloody, self-perpetuating “war on terror” to an equally unnecessary and wasteful but even more dangerous arms race with Russia and China.

    As some in Congress continue to ask how we can afford to take care of our children or ensure future life on this planet, progressives in Congress must not only call for taxing the rich but cutting the Pentagon — and not just in tweets or rhetorical flourishes, but in real policy.

    While it may be too late to reverse course this year, they must stake out a line in the sand for next year’s military budget that reflects what the public desires and the world so desperately needs: to roll back the destructive, gargantuan war machine and to invest in healthcare and a livable climate, not bombs and F-35s.

    The post Why Does Congress Fight Over Childcare But Not F-35s? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • U.S. Congressional Support for More War spending and AUKUS Anti-China Pact Exposes Cynicism of Biden’s UN Speech Calling for More Diplomacy

    In the same week that Biden delivered a speech at the United Nations where he argued that force had to be “our tool of last resort, not our first,” and that “many of our greatest concerns cannot be solved or even addressed by the force of arms,” the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), that represented another record-breaking increase in Pentagon spending, was passed in the House of Representatives. The message, following that of the racist Theodore Roosevelt, is that if there is going to be dialog the U.S. is still going to “speak softly and carry a big stick” to keep the natives in line.

    The authorization to spend 780 billion dollars on the military, which included an increase of twenty-four billion dollars more than the Biden White House requested, came just a few days after Biden announced to the world that the U.S., United Kingdom and Australian governments (AUKUS) would collaborate to provide nuclear powered submarines for Australia. Without mentioning the real target of that dangerous escalation, the Chinese and the world understood that this was a message intended for them.

    So, no one listening to President Biden in that General Assembly gathering took the U.S. administration seriously. And certainly, those of who have been the victims of U.S. violence should not either. We know through painful experience that white supremacist, colonial hubris imprisons U.S. policy makers rendering them unable to change course away from their disastrous commitment to global full spectrum dominance.

    U.S. policy makers from both parties are gripped by the pathological belief that they can prevent further erosion of U.S. power and exercise global hegemony through military means. But continued reliance on military power to advance U.S. global hegemony creates a contradictory relationship with the public that makes militarism extremely vulnerable – potentially. Because, in order to allow the plunder of the people’s resources by corporations whose business is war, the consent, or at least acquiesce of the people is required.

    There is a complete disconnect between the Congress that continues to be able to muster up bipartisan support for war and the public that has increasingly grown weary of these adventures and their costs in terms of lives, resources, and U.S. prestige.

    The obvious commitment to military spending and military pacts like AUKUS and NATO is increasingly being questioned by the public. While Congress is on board to support these agreements and militarization as policies meant to intimidate China and Russia (as well as military interventions into the global South), a majority of the people from both parties are actually in opposition to continued war and militarization. Moreover, the failure to provide protections for the human needs of the people of the U.S., with the debate over a social infrastructure bill stalled in Congress, is only deepening the legitimation crisis.

    The sharpening contradictions between a public still reeling from consequences of covid and a Congress that, in its need to support the positions of its rich benefactors, will allow critical support for the working class like the eviction moratorium and emergency unemployment benefits to end, is creating a potentially explosive situation politically.

    War is, and has always been, a class issue. The poverty-conscripted U.S. army and the increasingly insecure and suffering civilian working classes are finding it almost impossible to embrace policies that have resulted in a staggering $8 trillion dollar rip-off of the people’s resources, thousands of U.S. lives lost and over a million lives of the targets of U.S. aggression during the twenty year-long phony war on terror.

    What does this mean for Black and poor people? The racist spectacle on the Texas border with cowboys whipping Black people primarily from Haiti and the systematic violation of Haitians’ right to seek asylum with the swift deportation of thousands was a metaphor for the real value of Black lives in the U.S. and globally.

    It also means more war on African and colonized peoples in the U.S.

    Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) highlighted the connections between the Pentagon’s massive budget, surplus weaponry, and widespread police violence in the U.S., as she argued for an amendment to the NDAA that would have ended the Department of Defense 1033 program, the program that transfers military-grade weapons from the Pentagon to federal, state, and local Law Enforcement Agencies across the country:

    “With police departments nationwide set to receive a massive influx of military equipment under the 1033 program following the Afghanistan war,” Pressley told The Intercept, “Congress must take decisive action before further lives are lost and more trauma is inflicted on our communities.”

    Her appeal was ignored.

    Contained in the 2022 NDAA that the House of Representatives approved on September 24th are resources to continue the 1033 program. The NDAA also contained resources to fund the vast global military command structures like AFRICOM on the African continent and the over eight hundred military bases across the planet.

    War, militarism, and subversion is central to the U.S. imperial project. It is not just against Black people. The U.S. is actively engaged in subversion of democracy in Nicaragua, continues the assault on Venezuela and the illegal embargo on Cuba, while imposing economic sanctions on over thirty nations.

    The diplomats in that great hall at the UN knew that Biden was lying about  U.S. diplomacy. And, like them, those of us at the receiving end of U.S. criminality have always understood that Biden had to lie because state violence is at the core of the settler and imperial projects like the U.S, and even more so when the colonial project becomes an empire. That is the reality we in the U.S. and the world face no matter who sits in the white peoples’ house and no matter what pretty words are read out at the United Nations General Assembly meetings.

    The post U.S. Congressional Support for More War spending and AUKUS Anti-China Pact Exposes Cynicism of Biden’s UN Speech Calling for More Diplomacy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Constitution Day 2021: It’s Time to Make America Free Again

    That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.

    — Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985

    The Constitution of the United States represents the classic solution to one of humankind’s greatest political problems: that is, how does a small group of states combine into a strong union without the states losing their individual powers and surrendering their control over local affairs?

    The fifty-five delegates who convened in Philadelphia during the sweltering summer of 1787 answered this question with a document that called for a federal plan of government, a system of separation of powers with checks and balances, and a procedure for orderly change to meet the needs and exigencies of future generations.

    In an ultimate sense, the Constitution confirmed the proposition that original power resided in the people —not, however, in the people as a whole but in their capacity as people of the several states.  To bring forth the requisite union, the people through the states would transfer some of their powers to the new federal government.  All powers not reserved by the people in explicit state constitutional limitations remained in the state governments.

    Although the Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787, the fear of the new federal government was so strong that a “bill of rights” was demanded and became an eventuality.

    Intended to protect the citizenry’s fundamental rights or “first liberties” against usurpation by the newly created federal government, the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments of the Constitution—is essentially a list of immunities from interference by the federal government.

    Unfortunately, although the Bill of Rights was adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

    “We the people” have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.

    The bogeyman’s names and faces have changed over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, a viral pandemic, and more to come), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called name of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.

    A recitation of the Bill of Rights—set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, vaccine mandates, travel lockdowns, and the like (all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, and the courts)—would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.

    What we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Sadly, most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.

    Here is what it means to live under the Constitution, post-9/11 and in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic.

    The First Amendment is supposed to protect the freedom to speak your mind, assemble and protest nonviolently without being bridled by the government. It also protects the freedom of the media, as well as the right to worship and pray without interference. In other words, Americans should not be silenced by the government. To the founders, all of America was a free speech zone.

    Despite the clear protections found in the First Amendment, the freedoms described therein are under constant assault. Increasingly, Americans are being arrested and charged with bogus “contempt of cop” charges such as “disrupting the peace” or “resisting arrest” for daring to film police officers engaged in harassment or abusive practices. Journalists are being prosecuted for reporting on whistleblowers. States are passing legislation to muzzle reporting on cruel and abusive corporate practices. Religious ministries are being fined for attempting to feed and house the homeless. Protesters are being tear-gassed, beaten, arrested and forced into “free speech zones.” And under the guise of “government speech,” the courts have reasoned that the government can discriminate freely against any First Amendment activity that takes place within a so-called government forum.

    The Second Amendment was intended to guarantee “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Essentially, this amendment was intended to give the citizenry the means to resist tyrannical government. Yet while gun ownership has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as an individual citizen right, Americans remain powerless to defend themselves against SWAT team raids and government agents armed to the teeth with military weapons better suited to the battlefield. As such, this amendment has been rendered nearly null and void.

    The Third Amendment reinforces the principle that civilian-elected officials are superior to the military by prohibiting the military from entering any citizen’s home without “the consent of the owner.” With the police increasingly training like the military, acting like the military, and posing as military forces—complete with heavily armed SWAT teams, military weapons, assault vehicles, etc.—it is clear that we now have what the founders feared most—a standing army on American soil.

    The Fourth Amendment prohibits government agents from conducting surveillance on you or touching you or invading you, unless they have some evidence that you’re up to something criminal. In other words, the Fourth Amendment ensures privacy and bodily integrity. Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment has suffered the greatest damage in recent years and has been all but eviscerated by an unwarranted expansion of police powers that include strip searches and even anal and vaginal searches of citizens, surveillance (corporate and otherwise) and intrusions justified in the name of fighting terrorism, as well as the outsourcing of otherwise illegal activities to private contractors.

    The Fifth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment work in tandem. These amendments supposedly ensure that you are innocent until proven guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you of your life, your liberty or your property without the right to an attorney and a fair trial before a civilian judge. However, in the new suspect society in which we live, where surveillance is the norm, these fundamental principles have been upended. Certainly, if the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.

    The Seventh Amendment guarantees citizens the right to a jury trial. Yet when the populace has no idea of what’s in the Constitution—civic education has virtually disappeared from most school curriculums—that inevitably translates to an ignorant jury incapable of distinguishing justice and the law from their own preconceived notions and fears. However, as a growing number of citizens are coming to realize, the power of the jury to nullify the government’s actions—and thereby help balance the scales of justice—is not to be underestimated. Jury nullification reminds the government that “we the people” retain the power to ultimately determine what laws are just.

    The Eighth Amendment is similar to the Sixth in that it is supposed to protect the rights of the accused and forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the Supreme Court’s determination that what constitutes “cruel and unusual” should be dependent on the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” leaves us with little protection in the face of a society lacking in morals altogether.

    The Ninth Amendment provides that other rights not enumerated in the Constitution are nonetheless retained by the people. Popular sovereignty—the belief that the power to govern flows upward from the people rather than downward from the rulers—is clearly evident in this amendment. However, it has since been turned on its head by a centralized federal government that sees itself as supreme and which continues to pass more and more laws that restrict our freedoms under the pretext that it has an “important government interest” in doing so.

    As for the Tenth Amendment’s reminder that the people and the states retain every authority that is not otherwise mentioned in the Constitution, that assurance of a system of government in which power is divided among local, state and national entities has long since been rendered moot by the centralized Washington, DC, power elite—the president, Congress and the courts.

    If there is any sense to be made from this recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual freedoms have been eviscerated so that the government’s powers could be expanded.

    Yet those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.

    It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.” As the Preamble proclaims:

    We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.

    In other words, we have the power to make and break the government. We are the masters and they are the servants. We the American people—the citizenry—are the arbiters and ultimate guardians of America’s welfare, defense, liberty, laws and prosperity.

    Still,  it’s hard to be a good citizen if you don’t know anything about your rights or how the government is supposed to operate.

    As the National Review rightly asks:

    How can Americans possibly make intelligent and informed political choices if they don’t understand the fundamental structure of their government? American citizens have the right to self-government, but it seems that we increasingly lack the capacity for it.

    Americans are constitutionally illiterate.

    Most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their basic rights. And our educational system does a poor job of teaching the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For instance, a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a little more than one-third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, while another one-third (35 percent) could not name a single one.

    A survey by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that only one out of a thousand adults could identify the five rights protected by the First Amendment. On the other hand, more than half (52%) of the respondents could name at least two of the characters in the animated Simpsons television family, and 20% could name all five. And although half could name none of the freedoms in the First Amendment, a majority (54%) could name at least one of the three judges on the TV program American Idol, 41% could name two and one-fourth could name all three.

    It gets worse.

    Many who responded to the survey had a strange conception of what was in the First Amendment. For example, 21% said the “right to own a pet” was listed someplace between “Congress shall make no law” and “redress of grievances.” Some 17% said that the First Amendment contained the “right to drive a car,” and 38% believed that “taking the Fifth” was part of the First Amendment.

    Teachers and school administrators do not fare much better. A study conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis found that one educator in five was unable to name any of the freedoms in the First Amendment.

    In fact, while some educators want students to learn about freedom, they do not necessarily want them to exercise their freedoms in school. As the researchers conclude, “Most educators think that students already have enough freedom, and that restrictions on freedom in the school are necessary. Many support filtering the internet, censoring T-shirts, disallowing student distribution of political or religious material, and conducting prior review of school newspapers.”

    Government leaders and politicians are also ill-informed. Although they take an oath to uphold, support and defend the Constitution against “enemies foreign and domestic,” their lack of education about our fundamental rights often causes them to be enemies of the Bill of Rights.

    So what’s the solution?

    Thomas Jefferson recognized that a citizenry educated on “their rights, interests, and duties”  is the only real assurance that freedom will survive.

    As Jefferson wrote in 1820:

    I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of our society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

    From the president on down, anyone taking public office should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. One way to ensure this would be to require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution and pass a thorough examination thereof before being allowed to take office.

    Some critics are advocating that students pass the United States citizenship exam in order to graduate from high school. Others recommend that it must be a prerequisite for attending college. I’d go so far as to argue that students should have to pass the citizenship exam before graduating from grade school.

    Here’s an idea to get educated and take a stand for freedom: anyone who signs up to become a member of The Rutherford Institute gets a wallet-sized Bill of Rights card and a Know Your Rights card. Use this card to teach your children the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.

    If this constitutional illiteracy is not remedied and soon, freedom in America will be doomed.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we have managed to keep the wolf at bay so far. Barely.

    Our national priorities need to be re-prioritized. For instance, some argue that we need to make America great again. I, for one, would prefer to make America free again.

    The post Constitution Day 2021: It’s Time to Make America Free Again first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How the Taliban surge exposed Pentagon’s lies

    A month ago, as the US army prepared to end the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan and hand over responsibility to local security forces it had armed and trained, maps showed small, relatively isolated pockets of Taliban control.

    At the weekend, the Islamist fighters marched unchallenged into Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, bringing almost the entire country under their thumb. US intelligence assessments that it would take the Taliban up to three months to capture Afghanistan’s capital proved wildly inaccurate.

    It took a few days.

    Foreign nationals were left scrambling to Kabul’s airport while American officials were hurriedly evacuated by helicopter, echoing the fall of Saigon in 1975, when US embassy staff were chased out of South Vietnam after years of a similarly failed war.

    On Sunday Afghan President Ashraf Ghani issued a statement that he had fled the country – reportedly in a helicopter stuffed with cash – to “avoid bloodshed“. But all the evidence indicates his corrupt security forces were never in a position to offer serious resistance to a Taliban takeover.

    Jumping ship

    The speed with which the Taliban have re-established their hold on a country that was supposedly being reconstructed as some kind of western-style liberal democracy is astonishing. Or, at least, it is to those who believed that US and British military commanders, western politicians and the mainstream media were being straight all this time.

    The real explanation for the Taliban’s “surprise” success is that western publics were being duped all along. The United States’ longest war was doomed from the start. The corrupt, entirely unrepresentative members of the Kabul elite were always going to jump ship as soon as Washington stopped pumping in troops and treasure.

    According to Forbes magazine, as much as $2 trillion was poured into Afghanistan over the past 20 years – or $300m a day. The truth is that western politicians and the media intentionally colluded in a fiction, selling yet another imperial “war” in a far-off land as a humanitarian intervention welcomed by the local population.

    As Daniel Davis, a former US army lieutenant colonel and critic of the war, observed at the weekend: “Since early 2002, the war in Afghanistan never had a chance of succeeding.”

    Nonetheless, many politicians and commentators are still sounding the same, tired tune, castigating the Biden administration for ‘betraying‘ Afghanistan, as if the US had any right to be there in the first place – or as if more years of US meddling could turn things around.

    Colonial chessboard

    No one should have been shocked by the almost-instant collapse of an Afghan government and its security services that had been foisted on the country by the US. But it seems some are still credulous enough – even after the catastrophic lies that justified “interventions” in Iraq, Libya and Syria – to believe western foreign policy is driven by the desire to assist poor countries rather than use them as pawns on a global, colonial chessboard.

    Afghans are no different from the rest of us. They don’t like outsiders ruling over them. They don’t like having political priorities imposed on them. And they don’t like dying in someone else’s power game.

    If the fall of Kabul proves anything, it is that the US never had any allies in Afghanistan outside of a tiny elite that saw the chance to enrich itself, protected by US and British firepower and given an alibi by western liberals who assumed their own simplistic discourse about identity politics was ripe for export.

    Yes, the Taliban will be bad news for Afghan women and girls – as well as men – who are concerned chiefly with maintaining personal freedom. But a tough conclusion western audiences may have to draw is that there are competing priorities for many Afghans who have suffered under decades of invasions and colonial interference.

    Just as in Iraq, large segments of the population appear to be ready to forgo freedom in return for a guarantee of communal stability and personal safety. That was something a US client regime, looking to divert aid into its own pockets, was never going to guarantee. While the US was in charge, many tens of thousands of Afghans were killed. We will never know the true figure because their lives were considered cheap. Millions more Afghans were forced into exile.

    Spoils of war

    Nothing about western intervention in Afghanistan has been as it was portrayed. Those deceptions long predate the invasion by the US and UK in 2001, supposedly to hunt down Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda fighters following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre.

    Seen now, the attack on Afghanistan looks more like scene-setting, and a rationalisation, for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq that soon followed. Both served the neoconservative agenda of increasing the US footprint in the Middle East and upping the pressure on Iran.

    The West has long pursued geostrategic interests in Afghanistan – given the country’s value as a trade route and its role as a buffer against enemies gaining access to the Arabian Gulf. In the 19th century, the British and Russian empires used Afghanistan as the central arena for their manoeuvring in the so-called  “Great Game“.

    Similar intrigues drove US-led efforts to expel the Soviet army after it invaded and occupied Afghanistan through the 1980s. Washington and Britain helped to finance, arm and train Islamist fighters, the mujahideen, that forced out the Red Army in 1989. The mujahideen went on to oust the country’s secular, communist government.

    After their victory against the Soviet army, the mujahideen leadership split, with some becoming little more than regional warlords. The country was plunged into a bloody civil war in which the mujahideen and warlords looted their way through the areas they conquered, often treating women and girls as the spoils of war.

    Despite Washington officials’ constant trumpeting of their concern at Taliban violations of women’s rights – in what became an additional pretext for continuing the occupation – the US had shown no desire to tackle such abuses when they were committed by its own mujahideen allies.

    Rule of the warlords

    The Taliban emerged in the 1990s from religious schools in neighbouring Pakistan as civil war raged in Afghanistan. They vowed to end the corruption and insecurity felt by Afghans under the rule of the warlords and mujahideen, and unify the country under Islamic law.

    They found support, especially in poor, rural areas that had suffered most from the bloodletting.

    The subsequent “liberation” of Afghanistan by US and British forces returned the country, outside a fortified Kabul, to an even more complex havoc. Afghans were variously exposed to violence from warlords, the Taliban, the US military and its local proxies.

    To much of the population, Hamid Karzai, a former mujahideen leader who became the first Afghan president installed by the US occupation regime, was just another plundering warlord – the strongest only because he was backed by US guns and warplanes.

    It was telling that five weeks ago, asked about the prospects of the Taliban returning to power, Biden stated that “the likelihood there’s going to be one unified government in Afghanistan controlling the whole country is highly unlikely.” Not only was he wrong, but his remarks suggested that Washington ultimately preferred to keep Afghanistan weak and divided between feuding strongmen.

    That was precisely the reason most Afghans wanted the US gone.

    Washington poured at least $88bn into training and arming a 300,000-strong Afghan army and police force that evaporated in Kabul – the government’s supposed stronghold – at the first sight of the Taliban. American taxpayers will be right to ask why such phenomenal sums were wasted on pointless military theatre rather than invested back home.

    The US military, private security contractors, and arms manufacturers fed at what became a bottomless trough – and in the process were ever more deeply invested in maintaining the fiction of a winnable war. An endless, futile occupation with no clear objective swelled their budgets and ensured the military-industrial complex grew ever richer and more powerful.

    Every indication is that the same war-industry juggernaut will simply change course now, playing up threats from China, Iran and Russia, to justify the continuation of budget increases that would otherwise be under threat.

    Missing in action

    The motive for US officials and corporations to conspire in the grand deception is clear. But what about the mainstream media, the self-declared “fourth estate” and the public’s supposed watchdog on abuses of state power? Why were they missing in action all this time?

    It is not as though they did not have the information needed to expose the Pentagon’s lies in Afghanistan, had they cared to. The clues were there, and even reported occasionally. But the media failed to sustain attention.

    As far back as 2009, as the US was preparing a pointless surge of troops to tackle the Taliban, Karl Eikenberry, then ambassador to Afghanistan, sent a cable to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that was leaked to the New York Times. He wrote that additional US forces would only “delay the day when Afghans will take over”. A decade later, the Washington Post published secret documents it called the Afghan Papers that highlighted the Pentagon’s systematic deceptions and lying. The subtitle was “At war with the truth”.

    Bob Crowley, an army colonel who had advised US military commanders in Afghanistan, observed: “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible.” The Post concluded that the US government had made every effort to “deliberately mislead the public”.

    John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction appointed by Congress in 2012, had long detailed the waste and corruption in Afghanistan and the dismal state of the Afghan forces. But these reports were ignored or quickly disappeared without trace, leaving the Pentagon free to peddle yet more lies.

    Cheerleading, not scrutinising

    In the summer, as he issued yet another report, Sopko made scathing comments about claims that lessons would be learnt: “Don’t believe what you’re told by the generals or the ambassadors or people in the administration saying we’re never going to do this again. That’s exactly what we said after Vietnam … Lo and behold, we did Iraq. And we did Afghanistan. We will do this again.”

    A good part of the reason the Pentagon can keep recycling its lies is because neither Congress or the media is holding it to account.

    The US media have performed no better. In fact, they have had their own incentives to cheerlead rather than scrutinise recent wars. Not least, they benefit from the drama of war, as more viewers tune in, allowing them to hike their advertising rates.

    The handful of companies that run the biggest TV channels, newspapers and websites in the US are also part of a network of transnational corporations whose relentless economic growth has been spurred on by the “war on terror” and the channelling of trillions of dollars from the public purse into corporate hands.

    The cosy ties between the US media and the military are evident too in the endless parade of former Pentagon officials and retired generals who sit in TV studios commenting as “independent experts” and analysts on US wars. Their failures in Iraq, Libya and Syria have not apparently dented their credibility.

    That rotten system was proudly on display again this week as the media uncritically shared the assessments of David Petraeus, the former US commander in Afghanistan. Although Petraeus shares an outsize chunk of responsibility for the past two decades of military failure and Pentagon deception, he called for the “might of the US military” to be restored for a final push against the Taliban.

    Were it still possible to hold US officials to account, the Taliban’s surge over the past few days would have silenced Petraeus and brought Washington’s huge war scam crashing down.

    Instead, the war industry will not even need to take a pause and regroup. They will carry on regardless, growing and prospering as though their defeat at the hands of the Taliban signifies nothing at all.

    • First published at Middle East Eye

    The post How the Taliban surge exposed Pentagon’s lies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What America’s social justice activists can learn from past movements for civil rights

    The challenging lesson from our history is that a deep well of strength and resilience are required for the long struggle to make equity and equality under the law a reality in the United States.

    This post was originally published on Real Progressives.

  • Authoritarians Drunk on Power: It Is Time to Recalibrate the Government

    The executive power in our government is not the only, perhaps not even the principal, object of my solicitude. The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.

    ― Thomas Jefferson, (Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville(

    It is time to recalibrate the government.

    For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

    By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

    We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

    We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

    This COVID-19 pandemic has provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.

    These kinds of crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.

    That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

    Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

    This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.

    “The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance,” concludes law professor William P. Marshall. “The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”

    Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom.

    There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.

    The fact that any individual—or branch of government—of any political persuasion is empowered to act like a dictator is danger enough.

    So what can we do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?

    It won’t be easy.

    We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority.

    This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

    We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.

    We are viewed as relatively expendable in the eyes of government: faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they seem to care about are power and control.

    We are being made to suffer countless abuses at the government’s hands.

    We have little protection against standing armies (domestic and military), invasive surveillance, marauding SWAT teams, an overwhelming government arsenal of assault vehicles and firepower, and a barrage of laws that criminalize everything from vegetable gardens to lemonade stands.

    In the name of national security, we’re being subjected to government agencies such as the NSA, FBI and others listening in on our phone calls, reading our mail, monitoring our emails, and carrying out warrantless “black bag” searches of our homes. Adding to the abuse, we have to deal with surveillance cameras mounted on street corners and in traffic lights, weather satellites co-opted for use as spy cameras from space, and thermal sensory imaging devices that can detect heat and movement through the walls of our homes.

    That doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways in which our Fourth Amendment rights are trampled upon by militarized police and SWAT teams empowered to act as laws unto themselves.

    In other words, freedom—or what’s left of it—is threatened from every direction.

    The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers are shooting unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—are being armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies are fleecing taxpayers. Government technicians are spying on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors are making a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

    In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.

    Nothing has changed, and nothing will change unless we insist on it.

    We have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.

    Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.

    Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.

    Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?

    As director James McTeighe observed about the tyrannical regime in V for Vendetta, “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”

    Clearly, our leaders have stopped listening to the American people.

    We are—and have been for some time—the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government—from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

    We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American. We are relatively expendable in the eyes of government—faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars.

    What will it take for the government to start listening to the people again?

    In V for Vendetta, as in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, it takes an act of terrorism for the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny: in Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.

    These acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.

    This way lies madness.

    Then again, this madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.

    How to do this? It’s not rocket science.

    There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.

    Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.

    Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.

    Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.

    That’s their job: make them do it.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.

    The police state does not discriminate. Eventually, we will all suffer the same fate.

    The post Authoritarians Drunk on Power: It Is Time to Recalibrate the Government first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • From BLM to Palestine: Only a Marriage of Movements can Counter a Marriage of Empires

    On this one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, I’m thinking about settler colonial nations who routinely spend great amounts of capital to militarily and politically repress indigenous and popular uprisings led by the most historically oppressed peoples of the world.

    The United States and Israel—two settler-colonial nation states whose drive to exterminate and replace indigenous peoples with settler colonists has led to unending repression and brutality for decades (in the case of Israel) and centuries (in the case of the United States). These two inherently genocidal projects also happen to be financially, materially, logistically and geopolitically intertwined. They depend on each other.

    As President Biden so aptly put it in his Congressional speech in 1986, “We look at the Middle East. I think it’s about time we stop, those of us who support, as most of us do, Israel in this body, for apologizing for our support for Israel. There’s no apology to be made. None. It is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.”

    Israel is described as “the most militarized nation in the world” by the Global Militarization Index. The US provides Israel $3.8 billion a year in cash and weapons, to make sure it is so. The marriage of these two settler empires makes it such that any US Congressional attempts to thwart Israel’s ongoing brutality against Palestinians are probably about as likely to be effective as Hamas’ rockets launched at Israel’s Iron Dome.

    The US also provides Israel massive state-sponsored propaganda, backed by incredibly powerful Israeli lobbying groups like AIPAC, to make sure this funding stays in place and is not ever ideologically challenged inside the United States or Israel. These lobbying groups picked up steam and recruited more right-wing backers during Trump’s tenure, enhanced by his extreme support of Zionism, Netanyahu, the relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and further funding for Israel’s settler colonial projects. But to be clear, US support for Israel is a bipartisan project, and it has been for decades. Even so-called progressive Democrats like Rep. Mondaire Jones of New York and Rep. Ro Khanna of California, have just signed onto an AIPAC letter, whose aim is to prevent any cuts in funding to Israel, in response to Minnesota Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum’s new bill, HR2590, designed to “block Israel from using U.S. military aid to demolish Palestinian homes, arrest Palestinian children, and annex Palestinian land.”

    AIPAC and its bipartisan allies have also, for decades, functioned to make sure that anyone who dares question “Israel’s right to self-defense” loses all political credibility, career opportunity, and is unilaterally smeared by Democrats and Republicans alike. From AP Press writers who get fired because they used to support Palestine in college, to US Congress members who joke about “the Benjamins,” criticizing Israel in any form has become a form of political suicide inside the United States. Recent attempts to criminalize anyone who supports the BDS movement have become clear violations of the First Amendment according to the ACLU, and yet, US states are moving ahead with these measures, despite legal challenges in the courts. Now that is one powerful international propaganda apparatus.

    So it is against this David-and-Goliath-style backdrop that we see the beginnings of the US-Israeli-military-public-relations façade beginning to crumble inside the realm of US public opinion, as decades of organizing work on behalf of Palestinian human rights begin to slowly trickle up into the halls of Congress. According to a new Gallup poll, there’s a “53 percent majority of Democrats favor pressuring Israel—a 10-point jump since 2018—and progressive figures are clearly betting that the broader electorate is more willing to hear critics out than ever before.”

    This is a significant shift, especially inside a country where both major parties’ unilateral support for Israel has gone unquestioned for decades. And in the last few weeks, we’ve also seen some of the most progressive US Congressional members take courageous stances on Palestinian human rights: Rashida Tlaib’s impassioned speech on the House floor, AOC’s reference to Israel as an “apartheid state,” Bernie’s “resolution of disapproval” and other attempts to block an increased $735 million in additional weapons package.

    These rhetorical shifts are tremendous acts of resistance inside the proverbial belly of the beast. And they certainly represent a broader shift in US public opinion, which we also see shifting internationally, given the massive Palestine solidarity protests throughout the United States, Europe and Australia, over the last few weeks. But make no mistake—these rhetorical shifts inside the US halls of power are not the same thing as fundamentally shifting US policy, which is deeply invested in maintaining and supporting its own economic, geo-political and military interests inside what UC Barbara Sociologist William I. Robinson calls the “global police state.” The following is an excerpt from Robinson’s book, Global Police State:

    The Occupied Palestinian Territory has been transformed into probably the most monitored, controlled, and militarized place on earth. It epitomizes the dream of every general, security expert and police officer to be able to exercise total bio-political control. In a situation where the local population enjoys no effective legal protections or privacy, they and their lands become a laboratory where the latest technologies of surveillance, control, and suppression are perfected and showcased, giving Israel an edge in the highly competitive global market. Labels such as ‘Combat Proven,’ ‘Tested in Gaza,’ and ‘Approved by the IDF’ (Israeli Defense Forces) on Israeli or foreign products greatly improves their marketability.

    These methods of control and repression fine tuned against the Palestinians have been exported by Israel to racist police in US inner cities, Brazilian security forces that patrol the impoverished residents of the Rio favelas, Colombian and Guatemalan military and paramilitary forces in their battles against social movements, Central Asian intelligence officers monitoring human rights activists and journalists, Chinese Army agents developing domestic systems of social control, and corporate clients and repressive states and police agencies the world over.

    Indeed, many Palestinian activists who have found solidarity with indigenous rights activists in the United States have noted, as recently as Standing Rock in 2016:

    Many of the law enforcement officers at Standing Rock have been trained in Israel. The weapons and tactics are identical. The use of high pressure water cannons, rubber bullets, rubber coated steel bullets, the use of attack dogs, and sound grenades are the same in both places.

    And over the last few years, Amnesty International and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), have published reports detailing how Israeli training of US police officers has resulted in systematic brutality. Amnesty International’s report cites “widespread constitutional violations, discriminatory enforcement and a culture of retaliation” within the Baltimore Police Department. JVP’s report went on to say, “Police brutality of the kind that led to the death of George Floyd is both deeply embedded in American policing and also reinforced by the exchange of the ‘best practices’ and expertise in counter-terrorism techniques taught to US law enforcement officials during their training in Israel. Thousands of these officials from across the US have been sent to Israel for training, and thousands more have participated in conferences and workshops with Israeli personnel.”

    The Middle East Monitor writes:

    George Floyd’s killing is the latest, but probably not the last, example of classic American policing to mirror Israel’s ‘best law enforcement practice.’ It is being put to deadly use on the streets of America. If black lives really do matter in 21st century America, then the ‘deadly exchange programmes’ with Israel should be brought to an end without delay.

    So this is the fundamental barrier for our movements trying to stop US aid to Israel. For decades, we’ve watched US Presidents offer Israel and Palestine peace deal after peace deal. We’ve seen an inordinate number of trips from Washington to Israel to host diplomatic talks about “two-state solutions.” Throughout all of these duplicitous negotiations, the US government has pretended to be an honest broker in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It is not. It never has been. It never will be. And while there may be much-welcomed symbolic efforts coming down the pike to pass resolutions condemning Israeli violence as a sort of symbolic offering to human rights groups, the United States will not cut off aid to Israel any time soon. Nor will it ever be able to broker an honest peace deal, as long as its geopolitical, economic and military interests are fundamentally tied to those of Israel.

    Both Israel and the United States are settler-colonial projects whose very existence is based on oppressing and replacing its indigenous peoples, as well as repressing popular resistance movements that emerge within their national borders. Both states now exist within a new global context described by Bill Robinson — a transnational capitalist project of building a global police state against ever-increasing popular uprisings. This is the current political moment in which we find ourselves. These well-intentioned measures from even the most progressive US Congress members are definitely worth celebrating for their rhetorical and symbolic progress. They are not, however, likely to become law, nor result in any fundamental reduction in military aid or support to Israel. We are going to need a lot more to break up the geopolitical marriage of these two capitalist, settler empires. Only relentless, intersectional and international solidarity movements against white supremacy, transnational capitalism, and settler colonialism have the power to do that.

    The post From BLM to Palestine: Only a Marriage of Movements can Counter a Marriage of Empires first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Erin McCarley.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.