“Trump and Senate Republicans finally delivered a long-awaited return on investment to the billionaire backers that fund their party: an IRS Chief with extreme views on tax policy and no interest in reining in wealthy tax cheats or helping working families. It’s alarming that a nominee with so many clear-cut, publicly visible instances of potential fraud or corruption was able to get the votes of Senate Republicans to become the lead administrator of our country’s tax system,” said David Kass, ATF’s Executive Director. “Long—who once co-sponsored legislation to abolish the agency he now leads—is sending a clear signal to wealthy tax cheats everywhere that Trump’s IRS will serve the wealthy and well-connected at the expense of working and middle-class families. With Long at the helm, it becomes even more critical to stop Trump’s disastrous tax bill that cuts critical programs Americans depend on, like Medicaid and SNAP, to fund massive tax giveaways for billionaires.”

For more information on Billy Long’s tax positions, please see our recent report analyzing his positions on tax issues in Congress. The report examines his support for eliminating estate and federal income taxes in favor of a national sales tax—a policy that would raise consumer prices while giving substantial tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

“Tax cheats just received a huge gift. Billy Long has a clear history of working to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to skirt paying their fair share of taxes. He has even supported abolishing the very agency he has now been tasked to lead – the agency meant to take the lead in cracking down on tax evasion and ensuring that government is sufficiently resourced to serve the public interest. Wall Street may celebrate his confirmation as IRS Commissioner, but it is bad news for everyday people.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

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Former U.S. Rep. Billy Long of Missouri, whom President-elect Donald Trump has named his nominee to head the IRS, touts his expertise in tax matters.

He advertises his credential as a certified tax and business advisor, and he adds CTBA to his name on his X profile. That profile encourages people to message him to “save 40% on your taxes.”

But tax experts told ProPublica that they have never heard of CTBA as a credential in the tax profession. The designation is offered by a small Florida firm, Excel Empire, which was established just two years ago and only requires attendance at a three-day seminar. That is in stark contrast to the 150 credit hours and the rigorous exams required to become a certified public accountant, a standard certification for tax accountants.

In most tax cases, only lawyers, CPAs and enrolled agents — federally authorized tax practitioners — can represent taxpayers at the IRS.

“The cost of relying on tax advice from somebody that is solely focused on minimizing the tax liabilities that you have — as opposed to somebody that’s focused on both minimizing the tax liabilities and complying with the tax law — can be extraordinarily high if you are found to be in violation of the standards,” said Nathan Goldman, an associate professor of accounting at North Carolina State University.

Excel Empire’s three-day certification course has been advertised for as much as $30,000; its upcoming session is advertised at $4,997. Matthew Pearson, one of its founders, said this summer in a podcast that about 135 people have earned the CTBA designation, which the firm designed to help people without tax backgrounds to become advisors.

Nina Olson, a prominent taxpayer advocate, said that the modern tax industry has seen “a proliferation of different groups and entities that are providing tax advice” and that consumers have no way of knowing who is competent.

“It could just be that you’ve taken a very short course, and paid a large fee for that course, and that gives you the ability to put some initials after your name,” said Olson, who served as the IRS’ national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019. She is now executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, a Washington-based nonprofit that promotes fairness and access to justice in tax systems.

Tax experts said that Long’s years of experience as a real estate agent and as an auctioneer — before spending a dozen years in Congress — pales next to the deep experience in tax policy or management of the people who have held the job. For instance, the current IRS commissioner, Danny Werfel, previously served as acting IRS commissioner and held leadership roles at the Office of Management and Budget. He also worked in the private sector as a managing director at Boston Consulting Group.

Long’s experience in the tax world has been more narrowly focused. In the two years since he left Congress, he worked to bring in customers for at least two firms that marketed the employee retention credit — a pandemic-era benefit designed to support businesses that kept workers despite revenue losses or disruptions caused by COVID-19.

The credit also attracted fraud, eventually landing on the IRS’ “worst of the worst” list for tax scams. Two Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday announced an investigation into the firms, noting Long had neither a “background in tax preparation nor any credential as a licensed accountant, attorney or enrolled agent.”

Worth up to $28,000 per employee, the credit was available for the 2020 and 2021 tax years and has been widely used by both for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations across the country. However, the IRS raised significant concerns about aggressive promoters pushing ineligible businesses to file questionable claims. Red flags included inflated payroll numbers, claims for all quarters without proper eligibility or citing minor government orders that did not directly impact business operations.

The IRS says it has recovered over $1 billion from businesses that voluntarily reported improper claims. And it has launched hundreds of criminal investigations to try to recoup what it says could be billions of dollars more.

In a prepared statement in November, Werfel said businesses should review their claims and see if they were misled by firms marketing the tax credit.

“They should listen to trusted tax professionals, not promoters,” he said.

In a 2023 podcast discussing his work for the two firms, Long joked that he had a hat bearing the name of the credit glued to his head. He said his work marketing the tax credit had caused some clients to question their CPAs’ advice.

“Hey, this auctioneer, real estate broker, former congressman told me I’m going to get $1.2 million back,” he said. “Uh, you’re my CPA. Why didn’t you tell me that?” And he said the response of CPAs would be: “That’s a joke. That’s a fake deal. That’s not true. You’re going to have to pay all that money back. You’ll get audited.”

But he said the firms he worked for had never seen the IRS turn down one of their claims.

There is no evidence that either Excel Empire, Long or the firms that he worked for — Lifetime Advisors of Hudson, Wisconsin, and Commerce Terrace Consulting of Springfield, Missouri — engaged in wrongdoing. In the same 2023 podcast, Long emphasized he and his colleagues had helped only taxpayers who were entitled to the benefit.

Neither Long, Lifetime Advisors nor Commerce Terrace Consulting responded to requests for comment.

If Long is confirmed and succeeds Werfel, he’ll have the power to influence how Americans pay their taxes and how the federal government collects revenue. Trump has promised to end IRS “overstepping,” while Republicans have said that they would slash billions of dollars in funding passed under the Biden administration to modernize the IRS and enhance tax enforcement.

The IRS and the Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

During his time representing Southwest Missouri in Congress, Long pursued legislation to abolish the IRS and establish a national sales tax. Billionaire Elon Musk, a Trump advisor, recently asked on X if the agency’s budget should be “deleted.”

Like Long, members of Excel Empire suggest that accountants don’t feel it is their role to save their clients money because they prioritize compliance over planning and are too busy during tax season to discuss strategies. The company’s website claims the firm has saved taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

Edward Lyon, who is listed on Excel Empire’s website as chief tax planner and tax attorney, writes on his personal website that the seven most expensive words in the English language are “My CPA takes care of my taxes.”

Lyon elaborated on a podcast last year, noting that accountants “generally are rule followers,” but when it comes to lawyers, “we are trained to understand the rules but we’re trained to stretch the rules and bend the rules and poke at the rules and do an end run around the rules. It's a much more proactive focus.” Still, he has consistently emphasized that his company acts “legally, ethically and morally.”

The company’s co-founder, Pearson, once described Lyon on a podcast as the “preeminent proactive tax attorney in the country.” Lyon and Pearson declined to comment.

The Ohio Supreme Court suspended Lyon’s law license in 2005 for failing to meet registration and fee requirements on time, and he hasn’t regained it. He also does not appear to be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an investment advisor.

Despite this, Lyon says he has trained tens of thousands of tax and finance professionals. As the author of several books and a column, he claims to be one of the country’s most widely read tax strategists and commands speaking fees of $15,000 and first-class travel arrangements.

Lyon has also developed several tax certification programs. On the Excel Empire website, some officers, including Pearson, use a title created by Lyon: tax master.

Appearing on another podcast, Lyon discussed how small businesses can be used as tax shelters. As an example, he asked the host, Heather Wagenhals — who also carries the CTBA title — if she had a swimming pool at her home, where she records her show.

“I do,” Wagenhals said. “That’s why I picked this one.”

Lyon responded: “All right, so I’m gonna rock your world in five words, ready? On-premises employee athletic facility.”

“Oh my God!” Wagenhals said.

Lyon added: “It’s really there in the tax code, and nobody’s told you that.”

In another podcast, Pearson brags about firing an accountant who balked at his request for advice about how to use a new Corvette “to keep from paying taxes.”

Olson said that attitude was disturbing and that simplistic answers can create problems for taxpayers in IRS audits and in the courts. “A swimming pool in someone’s home, even if employees are working in the home and using it, still would require the court to look at the percentage of employee use versus personal use — and they would look really closely at that,” she said.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jeremy Kohler and Alex Mierjeski.

On January 31, the beginning of Tet, eighty-thousand Vietnamese troops issued Washington a formal eviction notice, attacking all the major cities and towns of colonial South Vietnam. Blasting through the walls of the U.S. Embassy compound, they killed two military police and holding off a helicopter assault for seven hours. Government employees arrived at work to find corpses twisted over the ornamental shrubbery and pools of blood in the white gravel rocks of the embassy garden.

They shelled the U.S. naval base at Camrahn Bay and threw open the jails in Quang Ngai city, setting thousands free. They marched nearly unresisted into the ancient capital of Hue and raised the Vietcong flag from its Citadel. They forced the U.S. to raze half the city to the ground at Ben Tre, which an American officer infamously justified on the grounds that, “We had to destroy the town to save it.”

After endless boasts of imminent victory, U.S. troops being home by Christmas, and the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, the Vietnamese Tet Offensive proved beyond all doubt that a U.S. military victory in Vietnam was not in the cards.

Wall Street turned against the war.

In March, LBJ discovered his Vietnam policy had left him no path to a second term. Though elected in a landslide in 1964, four years later his “Great Society” had turned to riot and left him a lonely prisoner of the White House. Wherever he went he was besieged by throngs of outraged students taunting him with “that horrible song” – “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” No matter how many speeches he canceled or how abruptly he changed his travel plans he could not avoid being “chased on all sides by a giant stampede.” The people were firing the president.

Support for escalation in Vietnam had evaporated. Worried that fulfilling General Westmoreland’s request for 206,000 more troops would leave Washington insufficiently protected against the threat of insurrection at home, a Council of Wise Men told a shocked Johnson to cut his losses and withdraw from the war before it tore the U.S. apart.

By then 150,000 Americans were dead or injured and much of Southeast Asia had been annihilated by a U.S. military machine that could do everything but stop. On March 31 Johnson went on nationwide TV to announce his forced retirement: “I shall not seek, and will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

Four days later Dr. King was assassinated for having publicly connected the dots between domestic racism and imperial war. A year to the day before he was shot he was widely condemned for a speech he gave before a crowd of three thousand at Riverside Church in New York City, where he did not mince words about the war:

“The peasants watched as we supported a ruthless dictatorship in South Vietnam which aligned itself with extortionist landlords and executed its political opponents. The peasants watched as we poisoned their water, bombed and machine-gunned their huts, annihilated their crops, and sent them wandering into the towns, where thousands of homeless children wandered the streets like animals, begging for food and selling their mothers and sisters to American soldiers. What do the peasants think as we test our weapons on them, as the Germans tested new medicines and tortures in Europe’s concentration camps? . . . .We have destroyed their land and crushed their only non-Communist revolutionary political force – the Unified Buddhist Church. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators!”

A year later he was in Memphis to help striking Memphis garbage workers. The night of April 3 an exhausted and dispirited King was already in his pajamas and ready for bed when he received a call from Reverend Ralph Abernathy at Mason Temple, informing him that two thousand people had braved tornado warnings and a driving rain to hear him speak. “I really think you should come down,” pleaded Abernathy. “The people want to hear you, not me. This is your crowd.”

Dr. King got dressed and went out into the stormy night.

In the blaze of lights at the podium, he appeared nervous. He told his audience that if he were at God’s side on the dawn of creation he would ask to see Moses liberating his people, Plato and Aristotle debating philosophy, Renaissance Europe, Luther tacking his ninety-five theses on the church door, Lincoln emancipating the slaves, and Roosevelt charting a path to the New Deal. But he would not dally in those times or places, he said, preferring to move on and experience just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, when masses around the world rose up to say: “We want to be free.”

Dr. King, abandoned by militants, vilified by the press, stalked by death and the FBI, felt deeply grateful to share in the freedom struggles that heaped his life with hardship.

With the crowd shouting its approval, he bellowed that he had been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land. Brushing aside prospects of premature death, he said that longevity had its place, but that on that night he was not worried about any thing, not fearing any man.

A burning passion in his eyes, his voice rising to a shattering crescendo, he declared his last will and testament: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

The next day as he was preparing to go out to dinner with friends a bullet exploded into his face, severed his spine, and brought him crashing abruptly down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

Reverend Abernathy bolted to his side, crying out to those in the parking lot below: “Oh my God, Martin’s been shot!”

Dr. King, a look of terror in his eyes, clutched uselessly at his throat. His head lay in an expanding pool of blood. Abernathy tried to comfort him. “This is Ralph, this is Ralph, don’t be afraid.” Reverend King, still conscious, his magnificent voice silenced forever, couldn’t answer. But Abernathy felt he was communicating through his eyes.

In King’s motel room, Reverend Billy Kyle repeatedly banged his head against the wall as he screamed into the phone for an operator. Dashing up sobbing from the parking lot, Andrew Young groped for a pulse, then screamed: “Oh my God, my God, it’s all over!”

Everywhere at once riots erupted and cities burned.

Three weeks after King’s assassination Columbia exploded in protest. President Grayson Kirk, alarmed at the growing youth rebellion, announced that in disturbing numbers young people rejected all forms of authority, which was just another way of saying that all forms of authority were increasingly recognized to have discredited themselves.

Hundreds of students promptly took over the university, hoisting red flags, establishing community government, and barricading themselves inside campus buildings.

They purloined documents from Kirk’s office showing that the university was secretly promoting classified war research and working to “clean up” the neighborhood by moving out its Black and Puerto Rican residents. Resurrecting the spirit of the Paris Commune, the students debated meaning and tactics, relaxed to Dylan and the Beatles, and celebrated romance. Two students even got married, escorted to the center of an applauding circle by a candlelight procession of fellow protestors.

Eight days into deadlocked negotiations a thousand blue collar police were turned loose on the defecting sons and daughters of the Ivy League. Attacking with clubs and brass knuckles, they rioted for three hours, smashing up furniture and beating everyone in sight while carrying out a bloody mass arrest.

One hundred and twenty charges of police brutality were filed against the police department, the most in its history. Echoing the recently assassinated Che Guevara, Tom Hayden called for “one, two, many Columbias” in romantic hopes of bringing the racist imperial state tumbling down.

Days after the start of the Columbia revolt, student radicals in Paris surged into the streets chorusing “all power to the imagination,” propelling France to the brink of cultural revolution and setting the mighty franc to trembling.

Spontaneously embracing and kissing in the streets, tens of thousands of students and workers marched joyously together through the capital, waving red flags and singing the Internationale. Demanding workers’ power, peasants’ power, and students’ power, they announced the end of cooperation with soulless mechanization and bureaucratic arrogance.

On The Night Of The Barricades the fiercest street fighting since Liberation (WWII) shook the Latin Quarter as thousands of students marched in protest, overturning cars and trucks. The police attacked, beating them with clubs and rifle butts, kicking the rebels unconscious and dragging them through tear-gas clotted streets by the hair.  The students fought back with Molotov cocktails, filling them with siphoned gas and pushing vehicles into the middle of the street to serve as barricades. When the police charged, the protesters torched the cars and retreated behind sturdier lines while building residents tossed down water and wet cloths to aid their youthful comrades fighting with cobblestones.

A veteran of the clash reported, “I never felt the gas. I was never more alive.”

In 1968, even Catholic pacifists were moved to a more aggressive style of protest. On May 17, what became known as the Catonsville Nine entered the Catonsville, Maryland draft board office and doused a pile of draft records with their blood, then set them on fire with soap chips and gasoline, a homemade napalm recipe gleaned from a Green Beret handbook. While waiting to be arrested, they prayed and watched the records burn.

At their trial they spoke of United Fruit Company keeping Central American land fallow while the campesinos starved. They told of the CIA overthrowing the elected government of Guatemala and replacing it with a reign of butchers worthy of Hitler. Father Daniel Berrigan told of his visit to Hanoi, of the merciless U.S. bombings, of the weaponry certified improved through tests on Vietnamese flesh and bone. He read a statement explaining how simple humanity required the destruction of the draft files:

“Our apologies good friends . . . for the fracture of good order . . . the burning of paper instead of children . . . the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house . . . We could not so help us God do otherwise for we are sick at heart . . . our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children.”

In early June U.S. support for Israeli savagery caused Sirhan Sirhan to temporarily lose his mind. He had been just three years old when a series of violent episodes near his Jerusalem home scarred him for life. A dynamite bomb hurled by Zionists blew up a line of Arab passengers waiting for a bus at the Damascus Gate; a sudden burst of gunfire caused an army truck to swerve around a barrier and kill his older brother before his eyes; a British soldier blown up almost on his doorstep left behind a severed leg in a church tower and a finger in Sirhan’s back yard.

Nineteen years later Sirhan was living in Pasadena when Israel bombed and napalmed Palestinian refugee camps, subjugating what remained of historic Palestine in the Six Day Land Grab (1967), a sequel to the driving out of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, among them Sirhan and his family.

With his people tasting another round of bitter injustice, Sirhan watched Senator Robert Kennedy wearing a yarmulke on television and promising to cut off U.S. aid to Arab states while sending fifty new Phantom jets to Israel. Shocked, angry, horrified, he fled the television set in tears, covering his ears with his hands.

He scribbled in his notebook: RFK must die.

At his trial for the assassination of Senator Kennedy, Sirhan testified to the assassination of an entire nation:

“Well, sir, when you move – when you move a whole country, sir, a whole people, bodily from their own homes, from their own land, from their own businesses, sir, outside their country, and introduce an alien people, sir, into Palestine – the Jews and the Zionists – that is completely wrong, sir, and it is unjust and the Palestinian Arabs didn’t do a thing, sir, to justify the way they were treated by the West.

“It affected me, sir, very deeply. I didn’t like it. Where is the justice involved, sir? Where is the love, sir, for fighting for the underdog? Israel is no underdog in the Middle East, sir. It’s those refugees that are underdogs. And because they have no way of fighting back, sir, the Jews, sir, the Zionists, just keep beating away at them. That burned the hell out of me.”

Nobody paid him the slightest attention.  In spite of Israel’s constant provocations and attacks, Jews were everywhere portrayed as heroic, avenging victims, Arabs as congenital terrorists, and Israel’s Six Day Land Grab as a glorious warding off of a second Holocaust. Facts were entirely irrelevant.

With hopes of a peace candidate now definitively crushed, all eyes turned to Chicago as the Democratic Party prepared to nominate Hubert Humphrey there as its candidate for the presidency. Eighty percent of Democratic voters had chosen to support either RFK or Eugene McCarthy in hopes of negotiating an end to the Vietnam slaughter. Faced with LBJ’s vice-president heading up the ticket, anti-war protesters vowed to lay siege to the city as a prelude to what they somehow imagined might become a revolution.

Protest was out of favor in the Windy City. In response to the nationwide riots that followed Dr. King’s assassination, the Chicago Tribune opined that “Here in Chicago we are not dealing with the colored population, but with a minority of criminal scum,” and urged Mayor Richard Daley not to be like the “spineless and indecisive mayors who muffed early riot control” in Newark (1967) and Los Angeles (1965). Daley obliged, ordering his police officers to “shoot to kill.”

Loathing “longhairs,” Daley refused to issue permits for protest marches, rallies, or sleeping in the parks. He ordered the city Ampitheatre fenced off with barbed wire, put all twelve thousand Chicago police on 12-hour shifts, and mobilized six thousand National Guard troops. He posted a thousand FBI agents around the city and placed six thousand U.S. Army troops outfitted with flamethrowers, bazookas, and bayonets around the suburbs. With police outnumbering protesters three or four to one, Tom Hayden told members of a New York audience to come to Chicago prepared to shed their blood.

As summer waned the Convention convened, and following days of dangerous cat-and-mouse games in the streets between police and protesters, a brownshirt riot ensued.

Shouting kill, kill, kill, a squadron of red-faced, blue-helmeted, club-wielding police charged out of a bus at full-speed and attacked a jeering crowd of onlookers outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel, beating, choking, kicking and macing everyone in their path, including medics sporting Red Cross armbands. Like maddened Samurai they mowed their victims down, charging again and again, leaving the battered bodies bleeding in the street. Loading them onto the ambulances, they beat them once more.

Eyes bulging with hate, they drove the crowd through the window of the Haymarket Lounge, jumping through the glass shards to upend tables and smash everything inside. They screamed “get the fuck out of here,” and “move your fucking ass,” beating even the startled patrons of the bar. Undeterred by the presence of live TV cameras, they rioted in clouds of tear gas for seventeen long minutes while the surrounding crowd chanted, “The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.”

Across the street in his hotel shower Hubert Humphrey was briefly overcome from the effects of the gas, which he never was from the horrors of Vietnam.

When televised images of the bloodshed reached the floor of the Democratic Convention, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff stepped to the rostrum to denounce the “Gestapo tactics” of the police. In an instant Chicago Mayor Daley was on his feet, waving his arms and screaming in protest: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker go home.”

As the ballots were being cast, footage of the police riot was beamed across the nation. Viewers saw Hubert Humphrey, irrepressible advocate of the politics of joy, nominated for president in a sea of blood.

Of course, all this was but child’s play compared to the unrestrained violence being inflicted on the slopes and dinks and zipperheads – otherwise known as the Vietnamese people – by the U.S. war machine in Vietnam. Two years later in Detroit, Vietnam Veterans gave chilling testimony as to the type of crimes being committed:

“ . . . they didn’t believe our body counts. So we had to cut off the right ear of everybody we killed to prove our body count.”

“ . . . we threw full C-ration cans at kids at the side of the road. Well, just for a joke, these guys would take a full can, and throw it as hard as they could at a kid’s head. I saw several kids’ heads split wide open.”

“The philosophy was that anybody running must be a Viet Cong; he must have something to hide or else he would stick around for the Americans, not taking into consideration that he was running from the Americans because they were continually shooting at him. So they shot down anybody who was running.”

“This was common policy. Kill anything you want to kill, any time you want to kill it – just don’t get caught.”

“ . . . the heads of the bodies were cut off and they were placed on stakes, jammed down on stakes, and were placed in the middle of the trails and a Cav patch was hammered into the top of his head, with Bravo Company’s ‘B’ written right on the patch.”

“I saw during my tour 20 deformed infants under the age of one . . . I thought it was congenital or something, from venereal disease, because they had flippers and things . . . it was common knowledge that Agent Orange was sprayed in the area.”

“Fugas is a jelly-like substance. It’s flammable . . . they explode the barrel over an area and this flaming, jelly-like substance lands on everything . . . people or animals or whatever.”

“You could take the wires of a jeep battery put it almost any place on their body, and you’re going to shock the hell out of the guy. The basic place you put it was the genitals.”

In other words, the conduct of the United States in Southeast Asia during the war years was nothing short of a complete disgrace. Washington dropped eight million tons of bombs and nearly four hundred thousand tons of napalm, leaving behind twenty-one million bomb craters. It killed over two million Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Laotians, wounded over three million more, and scattered fourteen million traumatized refugees throughout Indochina. It rained down eighteen million gallons of Agent Orange and other defoliants, creating forests bereft of trees, animals or birds, and cursing the war’s survivors with extraordinary rates of liver cancer, miscarriages, stillbirths, and birth defects. It left in its wake eighty-three thousand amputees, forty thousand people blinded or deaf, and hundreds of thousands of orphans, prostitutes, disabled, mentally ill, and drug addicts.

The total effect was nearly permanent, as journalist Donovan Webster discovered on a visit to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) in the mid-1990s.  There he saw a storage room stacked from floor to ceiling on all four sides with deformed fetuses, the final result of the Pentagon’s defoliation program begun three decades before. Some were double bodies fused together on a single torso, others had malformed faces, many had excess heads, fingers, and toes.

Donovan walked out of the storage room in shock.

In a nursery down the hall, a roomful of genetically-damaged orphans was overjoyed to meet the U.S. reporter come to visit them from overseas.

Sources:

 On Vietnam and the Tet Offensive:

Godfrey Hodgson, America In Our Time, (Vintage, 1976) p. 353-4; Frances Fitzgerald, Fire In The Lake – The Vietnamese and The Americans in Vietnam, (Vintage, 1972) p. 518-34; George McTurnan and John W. Lewis, The United States In Vietnam, (Delta, 1969) p. 371-3; Douglas Dowd, Blues For America, (Monthly Review, 1997) p. 153; Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 289; David Harris, Our War (Random House, 1996) p. 89; Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War, (Pantheon, 1985) p. 308-9; Edward Abbey, Confessions of a Barbarian, (Little, Brown, 1994) p. 214

On MLK and his assassination:

Steven B. Oates, Let The Trumpet Sound – The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harper and Row, 1982) p. 435, 483-6; PBS Documentary, 1968 – The Year That Shaped A Generation.

On the Columbia protests:

Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, (Bantam, 1987) p. 306-8; Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima To Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 304-5; Barbara and John Ehrenreich, Long March, Short Spring, The Student Uprising At Home and Abroad, (Monthly Review, 1969) p. 125-7, 145; Tom Hayden, Reunion, A Memoir, (Random House, 1978) p. 276-82

On the French student-worker protests:

Barbara and John Ehrenreich, Long March, Short Spring, The Student Uprising At Home and Abroad, (Monthly Review, 1969 p. 73-102 passim; PBS Documentary, 1968: The Year That Shaped A Generation

 On the Berrigan brothers and The Catonsville Nine:

Phillip Berrigan with Fred. A Wilcox, Fighting The Lamb’s War: Skirmishes With The American Empire, (Common Courage, 1996) p. 80, 93, 96, 101-5; Daniel Berrigan, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Beacon, 1970) p. vii; William M. Kunstler with Sheila Isenberg, My Life As A Radical Lawyer, (Carol Publishing Group, 1994) p. 190.

On Sirhan Sirhan and RFK:

Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection – What Price Peace? (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1978) p. 242-3

Note: A slightly different version of Sirhan’s mental collapse comes from the late Alexander Cockburn, who says Sirhan was driven over the edge from reading an account of the Phantom jets to Israel written by Andrew Kopkind in the Nation. See Jeffrey St. Clair, “Roaming Charges: the Return of Assassination Politics,” Counterpunch, August 12, 2016

On Sirhan Sirhan directly quoted from his trial:

Godfrey Jansen, Why Robert Kennedy Was Killed, (Third Press, 1970) frontispiece.

For an honest account of the Six Day War:

Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995).

On Mayor Daley and protest at the 1968 Democratic Convention:

Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, (Bantam, 1987) p. 320-6, Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir, (Random House, 1988) p. 297

On the Chicago police riots:

Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 332-4; David Farber, Chicago, (University of Chicago, 1988) p. 200-1, 249; Daniel Walker, Rights In Conflict, (E. P. Dutton,  1968) p. 255-65; Mike Royko, Boss, (Signet, 1971) p. 188-9; Mark L. Levine et al, eds. The Tales of Hoffman (Bantam, 1970); p. 124; Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima To Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 297

On Vietnam Veterans’ testimony about war atrocities:

Vietnam Veterans Against The War, The Winter Soldier Investigation (Beacon, 1972) p. 5-114 passim

On statistics of the overall damage done by the Vietnam War:

Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar – Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race, (St. Martin’s 1989) p. 44; Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm – Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (South End, 1979), p. 7-9

On the long-lasting effects of the defoliation campaign in Vietnam:

Donovan Webster, Aftermath – The Remnants of War (Pantheon, 1996) p. 214-17

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Michael K. Smith.

Speakers at a Palestine solidarity rally in Auckland’s Takutai Square today hailed the strong stance of Ireland over Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza – in contrast to a weak New Zealand position – while two blocks away in Te Komititanga Square (Britomart) hundreds of revellers were celebrating St Patrick’s Day.

“The Irish have been strong supporters of Palestine because of their experience of British settler colonialism,” Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) secretary Neil Scott told the cheering protest crowd.

“The Great Potato Famine starting in 1845 killed a million Irish and caused two million more to flee and become refugees around the world.

• READ MORE: Israel’s war on Gaza live: Children, women killed in Deir el-Balah attack

“They celebrate today like Palestinians will celebrate here in Aotearoa and in Palestine once the vicious murderous yoke of Zionist domination is taken from their necks.”

The Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach), Leo Varadkar, has been in the United States for the past week and had a direct message for US President Joe Biden when they met yesterday.

While he was complimentary about Biden and his administration, Varadkar also told the US president about Dublin’s wish for an immediate ceasefire.

“You know my view that we need to have a ceasefire as soon as possible to get food and medicine in and the hostages out,” he told reporters after the meeting.

Permanent ceasefire call
While Varadkar has called for a permanent ceasefire, Biden wants a temporary one of at least six weeks as part of a hostage deal.

This exchange followed a plea in an RTÉ interview by former Irish president Mary Robinson, speaking urgently as chair of The Elders group of former statespeople.

She said: “We need a ceasefire and we need the opening up of Gaza with every avenue . . . for aid to get in.”

Acknowledging Ireland’s initiatives over Gaza, including strong speeches by Irish MEPs in the European Parliament, PSNA’s Scott spoke about today’s rally being part of Israeli Apartheid Week called by the global BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement.

“Back in the day, NZ voted for the Apartheid Convention, so we have obligations under that law. But to date – nothing.

“So who has written reports and documented Israeli apartheid? Here are some of the reports overtime,” he said, citing at least seven global reports damning Israeli apartheid.

Two of the first reports mentioned were from Israeli NGOs, the 2020 Yesh Din report entitled “The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the crime of apartheid” and B’Tselem the following year with “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid”.

The most recent reports have come in 2022 from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the UN Human Rights Council report of the special rapporteur.

“Report after report. Report after report . . .”, said Scott.

“To date, our successive [NZ] governments have refused to condemn Israeli apartheid – a crime against humanity.”

He condemned officials at the Auckland office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) for refusing on Friday to accept a Palestinian solidarity deputation and statement for Chief Executive Chris Seed and Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters.

Terror business network
Another speaker, Billy Hania, an Aotearoa Palestinian advocate, talked about the importance of supporting the BDS movement and boycotts, which had been vitally important in ending apartheid in South Africa, and he cited several Israeli companies and affiliates operating in New Zealand.

“The list goes on. When the government acts on behalf of business that causes death and harm to our people in Palestine,” he said.

“It’s a terror network of politics and business and that must be opposed.

“You must be vocal and it’s okay to say that we live here on a land that has been colonised and we support with our money and taxes a government that condones terrorism.

“And that’s how it is. You should not be ashamed of saying that or scared of saying that because these are the facts.

“When we invest in an Israeli company in our Super Fund that rains white phosphorus up to the minute it burns our children to the bone, that is terror.”

12 killed in attack
Al Jazeera reports that Israeli attacks on Deir el-Balah in central Gaza have killed at least 12 people and wounded many more, including children, according to videos and witnesses.

Meanwhile, 13 aid trucks have arrived safely in Jabaliya and Gaza City, the first convoys carrying food and supplies to have travelled from the south to the north of the enclave without incident in four months.

At least 31,645 Palestinians have been killed and 73,676 wounded by Israeli attacks in Gaza since October 7, the Palestinian Health Ministry has reported.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

In my decades of doing what I do, I’ve encountered so many folks patently unwilling to accept that their beloved Land of the Free is capable of the horrendous criminality it openly perpetrates as policy. (Such a cultic mindset, of course, is partly responsible for such blind trust vis-a-vis the “pandemic.”)

With all this in mind, I’ll continue sharing evidence to highlight that the leaders of God’s Country are just as craven as any of its official enemies (read: all those labeled “the next Hitler”). For starters, here’s a dam good example…

It is informative to note that of the 185 Nazis indicted at Nuremberg, only 24 were singled out for the death penalty. That their crimes merited capital punishment in the eyes of the Tribunal can serve as a measuring stick when we review similar crimes committed by the good [sic] guys.

Among those two dozen executed Nazis was the German High Commissioner in Holland who ordered the opening of Dutch dikes to slow the advance of Allied troops. Roughly 500,000 acres were flooded and the result was mass starvation.

Surely, this type of tactic is solely the domain of the uncivilized and depraved… right?

Meanwhile, the United States Air Force (USAF) — fresh from fighting the forces of evil during the Good [sic] War — bombed the Toksan Dam (among others) during the Korean War in order to flood North Korea’s rice farms.

Here’s how the good [sic] guys at the USAF justified the same tactics that the Nuremberg Tribunal saw worthy of the death penalty less than a decade earlier:

“To the Communists, the smashing of the dams meant primarily the destruction of their chief sustenance — rice. The Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning that the loss of this staple food commodity has for an Asian — starvation and slow death.”

Since U.S. General Douglas MacArthur had already ordered the USAF to “destroy every means of communication, every installation, factory, city, and village” south of the Yalu River boundary with China, the lethal dam busting should’ve come as no surprise.

And it “worked.”

Estimates vary but somewhere between 1.2 and 3 million North Korean civilians were killed — via one good [sic] guy method or another.

This dam-busting/people-starving technique, culled from the wartime strategy of one of Hitler’s 24 best and brightest men, continued right on into Vietnam — with orders coming directly from the top, you might say.

In a now-declassified memorandum dated April 15, 1969, God’s favorite evangelist Billy Graham, having just returned from “meeting missionaries” in Bangkok, gave his approval to a U.S. proposal that could potentially drown thousands and starve many more.

The holy [sic] man urged President Richard Nixon to blow up dikes “which could overnight destroy the economy of North Vietnam.”

With or without Rev. Graham’s heavenly sanction, the U.S. bombing of dikes in South Vietnam was already a common and uncontroversial tactic employed by the good [sic] guys.

FYI: Dam-busting by the U.S. never stopped — as demonstrated by the 2017 bombing of the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates River in Syria.

Of course, you’re free to justify such war crimes in your patriotic mind. But, if you do so, you also surrender all claims of the U.S. being The Home of the Brave.

Here’s a better idea:  Never trust your government — or the banks and corporations that own it.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

There was a time in my life when I would be at 99 percent of the protests that took place in NYC. People wanted me there because they liked me, of course, but also because I took and posted epic photos that (we told ourselves) advanced the cause.

This tale connects to the cause of animal rights. Here’s the scene from January 2014:

I stood with about eight other “activists” in front of a midtown building that housed hundreds of businesses — including the offices of Air France/KLM. We chose this location because, at the time, Air France/KLM was the only airline that participated in shipping primates to be used in lab experiments. A despicable, heinous practice.

We had props like stuffed monkeys in cages and fake blood spilled on the sidewalk. That said, there were no Air France/KLM markings on the building so passersby had no idea why we were there. The few who stopped to ask required a 10-minute dissertation to get them up to speed. This old Facebook event page offers some of the details of the pressure campaign.

In this particular instance, we were proving our dedication [sic] by standing in our spot, chanting — just a few days after a significant snowstorm. The plows had created massive piles of snow but that did not deter such brave souls as us. In fact, we caused enough of a ruckus that the building’s head of security came out to confront us.

This dude was clearly an ex-cop. He tried accusing us of a laundry list of transgressions but was wrong on every count. I finally pointed out that yes, there was a violation happening: The security bro was smoking next to a sign that warned people not to smoke within a certain distance from the entrance. The big shot threatened to call the cops and left.

Then it happened…

Billy Joel emerged from the building. Even in his winter coat and hat, he was recognizable. A large SUV pulled up for him and the driver came out to lend a hand.

Billy was taking the longest time to find a way past the mountains of snow to get into his car and was getting himself into a frustrated, New York state of mind. Meanwhile, the other “activists” didn’t notice him and continued chanting at well… a random building.

“Their suffering! (point at building) Your fault!”

“Their deaths! (point at building) Your fault!”

The Piano Man stopped and gazed at us with a look of wonder as his driver approached. “Grab my arm,” he said to the musical millionaire, “and we’ll cross right here.”

As I snapped a photo, Billy Joel replied to the driver: “Whatever, man, just get me the hell away from the crazies.”

Postscript: I’ve deleted so many of my “activist” photos over the years and now have ZERO photographic proof of this particular story. So, you’re just gonna have to trust my honesty. But damn, I wish I could see Billy Joel again and declare: “You may be right.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..