This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Photograph Source: silviadinatale© – CC BY 2.0

Mexicans have heaped massive praise on their president, Claudia Sheinbaum, for her negotiations against an increasingly frenzied and unpredictable Donald Trump.  She drew hundreds of thousands to Mexico City’s central square — Zócalo — on March 9 to rally for national sovereigntyafter Trump agreed to delay U.S. import tariffs on the country. And she is admired worldwide as well.

Trump has credited Sheinbaum’s response to his demands on drug and migration controls as the reason for pushing back tariffs. But she also succeeded in delaying them by making it clear that they would impact U.S. companies, especially automobile manufacturers, that export from Mexico.

It’s clear that Trump’s flip-flopping and the delay of the tariffs till April 2 are primarily due to the intervention of the CEOs of the Big Three US auto manufacturers: General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler).

According to the New York Times, these executives told Trump that tariffs on cars and car parts from Canada and Mexico would wreck their profits by adding millions of dollars in costs. They also reportedly communicated that auto production in those countries support American jobs in parts manufacturing and at dealerships.

The situation is similar on the other side. It’s not merely a sense of patriotism that has motivated Mexican industry to back Sheinbaum in the fight to stop tariffs – their businesses also depend on those cross-border supply chains.

The post Trump’s April 2 Deadline for New Tariffs is a Distraction from Deeper North American Trade Challenges appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Manuel Perez-Rocha.

I get up at 7:55am precisely, make coffee, eat, and fart around until 9:00am, which is when my internet blocker goes on automatically, and I work until noon. After that, lunch, more farting around–and when I say that, what I mean is reading and looking at content and stuff like that, then I go to the gym and come back.

From 4:00pm onwards, mostly just finishing up whatever reading I need to do and thinking about dinner. I go grocery shopping and usually make dinner with my roommate. After that, watch a movie, game, nothing too exciting, but sometimes inevitably there’s wrinkles that you get in the schedule, and I’ll have to do a phone interview at 10:00am for example, and that’ll disturb things. When that happens, I try to be aware of my own difficulty with focusing on things if I know that I have an impending appointment and try to focus on something smaller.

You’ve written about rejection extensively, most recently about “The Rejection Plot” for The Paris Review. How and when did you decide that [your most recent] project, a collection of stories that was long-listed for a National Book Award, was going to be about rejection?

From the very beginning, way back in 2011, which is unusual for me. Usually it takes me one, if not several drafts to figure out what a story is trying to do or be about. These things tend to emerge organically out of the situation that I’m writing, but in this case, I just knew that I had the driving material to write that book. I had to sideline it for a long time because I was also working on Private Citizens at the time, so there was about a four-year period where I wasn’t really working on it at all. When I got back to it, I had about three different stories. And as is typical of me, a ton of random notes and scattered fragments that I didn’t really know how to organize.

I’ve said this in a lot of places now: I have this idea of approaching the subject from all different mediums, genres, and forms, but this eventually just got whittled down to the fiction parts of the book. And the non-fiction part ended up getting capped off into this Paris Review essay and another piece that’s coming out in Mixed Feelings.

The internet is often a distractive rabbit hole but you’ve utilized it to your advantage. Can you talk about writing the internet in fiction?

Yeah, it’s a chicken and egg question of whether I’m interested in this stuff and am able to adapt things that might otherwise be distracting into my own writing, or if it’s because that’s what’s in front of me. I try not to let myself be distracted during the day. I’m definitely only successful about 40% of the time, but part of being a writer is being adaptable, and if you know that you have bad habits of distraction that you’ve yet to fully resolve, then the next best thing is to figure out how to get the distraction to feed back into your writing. That’s just one of those virtues of adaptability, where that’s concerned.

It’s been eight years since your first book, Private Citizens came out. Did you move onto this project right after? How do you maintain momentum when you have a completed project and might feel stuck on what to do next?

I’m usually not stuck on what to do next because I’m the kind of writer who has 50 things on the back burner at any given point. Speaking of distraction, another form of procrastination that’s really common among writers is just working on other projects. For a while, I was working on four books at the same time around 2017. I was telling myself that as long as I was productive day in and day out, it didn’t matter if I was making progress on one project over another. What I wish I had known at the time is that if you let things draw out too long, you can lose interest in them. Your enthusiasm for the project can die on the vine as your priorities shift and as the circumstances that got you interested in the first place change.

I try to be a lot more focused now, but I’m always keeping notes files for other projects when ideas occur to me. For example, I have a book of criticism I’ve been working on for a while, and if I have a thought or idea that’s obviously literary criticism and not fiction, it’s not going to go in the notes file for my fiction project. It’s going to go somewhere else, so that by the time I actually finish what I’m working on and move on to the next thing, I have some pretty fertile soil to work with. I don’t tend to lose momentum for that reason, which is not, of course, to say that I’m a fast writer–I think that my track record makes that pretty obvious. Just a consistent one, I’ll say.

How do you decide whether a story is complete or if it’s better to put it aside and come back to it? Does it ever have to do with the current culture/zeitgeist?

If I feel like my enthusiasm or my drive to publish a piece is because I want to hit some on some sort of transient cultural theme or zeitgeisty subject, I’m going to be very suspicious of it. I think part of why it takes me so long to write things is because I want to be reassured that what I’m writing about is not just something that is only going to be relevant to people contemporaneously, within a short span of time. Fiction is the worst possible place to do that because it takes so long to publish. Even if you were ripping stories from the headlines and sending them back to the editor and getting them approved, if it’s a book, you’re still looking at another year and a half to publication. If that’s what you’re chasing, you’re rarely going to hit your target. I don’t really let what’s going on in the world dictate how ready a piece is, or use it as a yardstick for completion.

I think of finishing a piece as traversing a number of stages of doneness. You’d know this from taking my class, but I talk about hitting a first draft, which is the first complete version of a story, but you know that’s not really done. The concept for the story is still totally up in the air, but you can see it a little clearer. After that, you go through one or a couple of drafts, and usually hit several walls. At that point, it helps to get feedback from somebody that you know is going to tell you the truth and not just offer bland encouragement, but is actually going to try and help you improve the piece and is capable of doing so. For some people, that’s one or a handful of first readers. For other people, it’s workshops that they’ll sign up for, or writing groups that meet regularly. That helps a lot with getting a little bit of distance from the manuscript. That process reiterates a couple of times and you will hit a point where it’s not necessarily shelf-ready yet, but you think that it’s in a state where all of its virtues are pretty much legible. I’m not just gesturing at what I’m trying to do, it is substantially embodied in the text somehow. At that point, I would feel comfortable sending it out to an agent or editor, depending on what kind of project it is. And then the feedback is either rejection or acceptance.

Sometimes you may have misjudged in your haste to get something published and it takes 20, 30, 40 rejections for you to take a closer look at that project or step away from it for a little while. When that happens, that’s actually a good thing. It means that you have some kind of break on your impatience because your ego is always driving you to finish things and get bylines and have people read things, but it’s good to have a moderating influence.

Acceptances and rejections aren’t any measure of inherent merit. There’s plenty of good work that is publishable and that gets rejected for all kinds of reasons. There can be a bright side to this sort of institutional block that is forcing you to keep on returning to the work and seeing what can be improved. Then after that, the clock takes care of the rest. If you get a piece accepted, then you just have to work on it until time runs out. And when it does, then you’re done.

How did you first figure out how to make a living through writing?

Well, I didn’t until maybe 2017, and that was just for one year. After that, I was still making my money from teaching. So when people say, “Making a living off of writing,” what they usually mean is you’re making a living from a number of different writing adjacent activities, like teaching, editing, freelancing, or being involved in some literary organization. When thinking about making a living from writing, people usually imagine that you are talking about being paid for a book or for stories that you’re publishing and making a living that way, but I know maybe two people that that describes.

It is very much a feast or famine business. And it’s something that you inch your way into. You have a day job and you support yourself that way, and eventually you either get a few lucky windfalls that give you a bit more security to transition slowly out of that work, or you just start getting more steady gigs in the writing world that supplement and eventually supplant the old work.

You’ve started your own class, CRIT, for prose writers, of which I’m an alum. Can you speak about your experience with teaching and what you found lacking in other institutionally-backed classes?

I think one thing that is missing from typical creative writing curriculums–the ones that you see in universities–is pedagogy. By that, I mean a concerted and structured attempt to teach different subjects within writing. I think when I applied to the Iowa Writers Workshop online, they basically said that writing can’t be taught, and I feel a little differently about it. I think that there’s a good reason why there’s this perception that writing can’t be taught because it’s not the same as teaching multivariate calculus.

There are no hard and fast rules, there’s no pure knowledge. It’s just opinions, so you can see why an institution would want to avoid positioning themselves as pervading rigorous knowledge or education in that sense. But that doesn’t mean that writing can’t be taught. It just means that it needs to be taught in a different way. And I am somebody who thinks that about 40 percent of writing can be taught. To take an extreme case, you can learn the alphabet, that’s part of writing. You can learn grammar, and that’s a part of writing too.

And that continues up to a certain point, where you get to just fundamentals of craft, like the way that perspective works, or how to format dialogue, or what the purpose and uses of scene breaks are. It transitions into the much harder stuff that the writer needs to figure out for themselves. That dark matter, 60 percent of that cannot be taught. To me, that of course is the important stuff, but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try and cover the fundamentals either. A big part of CRIT, in addition to the conventional workshopping, is dedicated to trying to thrash out different elements of craft in process. In craft, there’s plot, dialogue, character, style, and so on.

Process is another thing that can be taught just by example. By discussing different ways that people go about getting writing done, establishing good writing habits, the mindset that has been useful for different writers to be productive. It’s worth talking about that stuff too. I’ve been in and taught for different writing programs since 2001 and I’ve never really had an experience where that kind of stuff was covered in any systematic way, so that’s what I wanted to do with CRIT. I make it very clear from the outset that it’s a kitchen sink approach, that anything that you disagree with on dogmatic grounds, you should disregard–that it’s all just food for thought to help the individual writer come up with their own attitudes and figure out what works for them. Because anybody that tells you that there are hard and fast rules for what constitutes good writing or how to make it is lying.

You’ve encouraged alums of the class to start their own writing groups, which I have with our cohort whom I love. Can you speak about your longstanding writing group and how that formed and evolved?

When I was in undergrad at Stanford, I took a fiction class with Adam Johnson, who was a Stegner fellow there at the time, and I really enjoyed it. I talked to my friend Alice Sola Kim, who lived on my floor, and told her to take it too. Through that, she met a couple of friends, a couple of whom decided to start their own writing group just because we wanted to keep on doing more outside of the classroom. So it was Jenny Zhang and Max Doty who decided to start the group and they just invited people that they thought would be fun to workshop with. We kept meeting pretty consistently every couple of weeks or so. I think I got invited in 2002 or 2003 and since then, we just kept on meeting.

Over the years, as people kept on moving away, there would be new people recruited. A lot of people moved away from the West coast, so it splintered into East and West coast factions–one in the Bay Area and one in New York. I credit this group with everything. There’s probably no way that I would’ve had the motivation on my own to keep on pursuing writing in such obscurity with so much failure without feeling like there was somebody reading it and somebody responding to it. And that’s all I needed at the beginning. We still meet on an as-needed basis now.

At that phase in your career, before you can get things published with any consistency, you just have to do whatever you can to keep morale up. That’s just one way to do that. I think that works for a lot of people who enjoy creating things in some kind of social context. But for those it doesn’t appeal to, there’s nothing wrong with lone-wolfing it either.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Minah Buchwald.

While it is a tragedy that Scott and Rubio were not able to learn this basic fact prior to being elected to the Senate, it is not surprising. In recent years, Florida has become a platform for Neoconservatives to practice political grandstanding rather than good politics. Instead of focusing on issues which truly matter to their constituents, imperialists like Scott and Rubio have been focused on proposing legislation like the Securing Timely Opportunities for Payment and Maximizing Awards for Detaining Unlawful Regime Officials (STOP MADURO) Act. The STOP MADURO Act proposes that the already preposterously-high fifteen-million dollar bounty for “information leading to the arrest of Nicolás Maduro” to one hundred million dollars. The bill alleges that Maduro and other government officials have been engaged in “conspiring to import cocaine” and using and conspiring to use “machine guns and destructive devices” to carry out “narco-terrorism”.

While many Neoconservatives in Washington have sought to act as judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to the conspiratorial claim that Maduro is Venezuela’s Pablo Escobar, many independent journalists have pointed out the obvious flaws in this narrative. According to The Grayzone, the myth that Venezuela is a narco-state has already been debunked by the Washington Office in Latin America (WOLA), a think tank in Washington that generally supports US regime change operations… less than 7% of total drug movement from South America transits from Venezuela”. The bill also claims that Maduro had a “narcoterrorism” partnership with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) for the past twenty years. This similarly dubious accusation has also been discredited as far back as 2019, with Venezuelanalysis reporting that “…FARC was involved in the drug trade only at its lowest levels, levying taxes on coca sales. Moreover, since the 2016 peace accords and FARC demobilization, coca crops in Colombia have reached record levels year after year, confirming that the guerrillas played no major role in the illicit trade.”

Rather than working on behalf of the people of Florida to address the state’s terrible healthcare system, rampant homelessness, and extreme income inequality, Sen. Scott, Sen. Rubio, and their ilk have chosen to put ideology over policy. Instead of making the American Dream an American reality, Neoconservatives in Washington have forever sought to strangle all nations who do not conform to the dogmatic doctrine of market fundamentalism with the binds of sanctions. Sanctions, such as those currently targeting Venezuela, have been shown to lead to the deaths of countless civilians; in Iraq, for example, The Transnational Institute reports that “two million Iraqis… died from sanctions, half of them children”. Similarly, in Cuba, Al Jazeera reports that “With restrictions on the import of food, it has contributed to malnutrition – especially among women and children – and water quality has suffered with chemicals and purifying equipment banned.” For the Neoconservatives, no price is too high to pay for spreading corporate oppression throughout the world.

Clearly, the foreign policy priorities of Senators Scott and Rubio are not in tune with basic morality let alone the wants and needs of their Floridian constituents. Therefore, it is not astonishing that both Rubio and Scott are diehard supporters of Israel’s murderous rampage in Gaza. Both Senators have joined together in making the Orwellian assertion that Israel is the “victim” of Palestine in the United Nations. Furthermore, Rubio has made clear his support for genocide in occupied Palestine saying “I don’t think there’s any way Israel can be expected to coexist or find some diplomatic off-ramp with these savages…. They have to be eradicated.”

In comparison to Senators Scott and Rubio, Venezuela has consistently supported Palestine in its struggle against colonialism. In fact, prior to his passing, President Chavez was one of the most popular leaders in the Arab world for his fearless support of Palestinian self-determination and his efforts to hold Israel accountable for its numerous crimes. To this day, Venezuela has continued to support Palestine in the United Nations by backing South Africa’s International Court of Justice case against Israel. In stark contrast to Scott and Rubio who have poisoned the well of discourse with their irrational and destructive support for Israel, Venezuela has constantly acted as a voice for the voiceless in occupied Palestine.

As they carry on waging legislative warfare on Venezuela’s sovereignty with dubious bills like the STOP MADURO Act, one must ask: are Scott and Rubio truly interested in representing their constituents, or merely the interests of the rich and powerful? If Senators Scott and Rubio have any self-respect, they will cease being pawns in a larger geopolitical game and will redirect their focus back on their constituents. Florida deserves leaders who are problem solvers, not ineffectual thorns in the side of foreign governments.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by J.D. Hester Hester.

Just as the US Forces, operating behind the United Nations banner in Korea, wantonly destroyed civilian infrastructure from 1951-1953 in order to deny Koreans access to their own country, the strategic aim of “peace”, in whatever form it is praised or promoted, is to deny enemies not only the control of the story line (the cliché “narrative” applies here) but also of the vocabulary to express their interests. Saturation bombing, the West’s tactic of choice, applies to language as well as to dropping high explosive as a means to silence the foe.

Deprived of the use of the terminology of peace, the defendants opposing Western aggression are forced to use the language of war. As a result, pleas to avoid or prevent war can be translated into belligerent intentions. The West has led the world in the development and proliferation of public deliberative bodies, electoral machinery and mass media. The constant praise and attention given to parliaments, congresses and legislative assemblies is not an expression of vital democratic processes or the active translation of popular will into government action. Instead the purpose of these bodies and the mechanisms for filling them with people is to create and maintain what are best understood as public language machines. Qualifications for membership, beyond certain demographic specifications, demonstrate potential capacity to produce and reproduce the systemic language output the surplus of which is deployed to overwhelm or occlude any other forms of expression.

This overproduction of verbiage and cant is often decried as a malfunction of deliberative assemblies. However that is an error. Just as a jury trial should not be confused with scientific fact-finding and assessment, the written product of deliberative assemblies is not the distillation of popular will.

The difference between philosophy and science, a relatively recent distinction, is that philosophy comprises exercises in how to respond to explanations (hierarchical verbal behaviour) while science comprises the exercises in verbalizing the non-verbal, sometimes known as facts or the real world, i.e. the empirical frontier. Philosophy was once subsumed by theology and science was nothing more than a more detailed articulation of the statements subsumed by philosophy, in turn subsumed by theology. So human experience at the empirical frontier was subsumed by religious categories and thus governed by those especially privileged and empowered to approve or disapprove the order in which those statements were subsumed. These approvals in turn were subsumed by theocratic explanations the termination of which was “god”.

For what has turned out to be a brief period, less than two hundred years, science comprised practices and explanations that largely dispensed with theological termini. Toward the end of the 20th century, that changed. Science was reintegrated into religion. Instead of science being the collective and individual activity of investigating the empirical frontier and producing statements and practices that facilitated the useful manipulation of the environment, Science became the system in which Truth was uttered through rituals and sacraments prescribed by largely inaccessible sacred texts. The trigger for this reversal of humanism and return to a sacerdotal system was the Manhattan Project. The largest single scientific research project in modern history, the Manhattan Project captured virtually every scholarly and technical faculty in the US to produce the greatest weapon of mass destruction ever invented. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the ultimate demonstration of Western nihilism. This gratuitous crucifixion of two entire cities not only raised the United States to the primacy of violence. It also demonstrated the culmination of Western imperialism. As Harvard professor Samuel Huntington concisely remarked in his notorious book Clash of Civilizations (1994):

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

The organization that produced these weapons and gave the United States the power of international extortion also destroyed what remained of independent science. At the same time the enormous – billions in today’s money—funds that built the fission bombs and later the thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs also began the rampant manipulation of living matter known as genetic engineering. Together these two technologies of future terror were wrapped in permanent secrecy. A new priesthood was created. Instead of doctors of divine theology ordained by bishops and ruled by an absolutist pope in Rome, this new sacerdotal class was ordained with security clearances, i.e. access to secrets and sacred oaths to keep them. The possession of superhuman destructive power was initially concealed by myths of wartime necessity. Until the 1970s, the pontiffs on the Potomac preached that such a horrible weapon would be sinful to use. They also did whatever was possible to prevent other nations from sharing this weaponry. Then the rhetoric of “peace” was applied once the Soviet Union had detonated its own atomic bombs, culminating with the Tsar Bomba. Disarmament and arms control were pursued by the US Government as a means of concealing the original intent of the weapons and the subsequent technological advances as well as impeding Soviet weapons development. Conveniently ignoring the acquisition of atomic bomb building capacity by the state that occupied Palestine after 1947, the US also successfully concealed the fact that its atomic bomb was built to destroy the Soviet Union (and eventually the People’s Republic of China). Despite the declassification of the Sandia oral history of US strategic policy—in which these objectives had been very clearly articulated—the “peace” screen has hidden the atomic core of US aggressive policy from most of the public, both in the US and abroad.

This concealment was an intentional product of the restructuring of Science as the cult of national war policy, euphemistically called “defence”. The complement to this restoration of religious control over the pursuit of scientific knowledge was the imposition of the private-public partnership known as the United Nations. Advertised as a “new and improved” version of the League of Nations formed after the Great War, this union of the victors from the Second World War was supposed to guard the world from future ravages of war. It initially comprised five bodies. The administration was vested in the Secretariat. The general powers were awarded to a representative General Assembly comprising all member-states on the principle of one state-one vote. The task of peacekeeping was vested in the Security Council selected by the General Assembly with each of the leading Allied powers (the US, UK, France, the USSR and Republic of China) endowed with a veto over any decision taken by the Security Council (and thus a check on potential majorities that might form in the General Assembly). In addition an Economic and Social Council was charged with social development issues and the Trusteeship Council was erected to deal with what the Charter called “non-self-governing territories”, i.e. countries still subject to League of Nations mandate or colonial rule. Quickly the Economic and Social Council and the Trusteeship Council were relegated to the backwaters of international diplomacy. The General Assembly was reduced to a debating society. In essence the Security Council and the international diplomatic corps employed by the Secretariat became the only functional organs of this great peacekeeping institution.

It did not take long before even the pretence of peacekeeping became a dead letter. The senior intergovernmental organization of the post-war era is itself party to the longest continuing war in modern history—the US invasion of the Republic of Korea in 1945, the civil war it triggered and the United Nations (US in cognito) forces, less the now defunct Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, against the people of Korea, since 1951 constituted as the People’s Democratic Republic (North) and the Republic of Korea (South). There has not been a single armed conflict since 1945 in which the United Nations, acting through the Security Council, has successfully prevented war or restored peace. On the contrary, the domination of the Security Council by the United States has assured that the so-called Blue Helmets have become the Trojan horses for the Western powers in every part of the world they were deployed. Their principal mission has been to prevent local populations from deciding their internal affairs in any way that might conflict with the interests of the United States, Great Britain or France.

How is it that such sacred trust as the world was told it could place in this great peacekeeping institution could be so consistently betrayed no sooner than the ink had dried in San Francisco? Surely the member-states, initially 45 and now 194, would object to such hypocrisy and aggressive exploitation of international organs. Wasn’t everyone agreed that the horrors of war, demonstrated in the carnage from the Oder to the Yalu between 1936 and 1945, were awful enough? After all the Kellogg-Briand Pact adopted in the interwar period as a cornerstone of international law has not been repudiated by any of the permanent members of the Security Council. Why do governments and peoples accept this regime of constant war against peoples and their human rights to peaceful development and self-determination?

There are major obstacles and they were built into the system, not accidentally but by virtue of the absolute command of destructive power held by the United States and its vassals. First of all there was the secret power of the atomic bomb and the US regime’s demonstrated willingness to use it against civilians en masse. Then there was the veto power bestowed upon three of the empires with the least interest in any change of the status quo. Although not formally part of the United Nations organization, the Bretton Woods accords created, under US control, the weapons of mass economic destruction known as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The Second World War had devastated most of the world’s industrial capacity and disrupted international trade. This left the US not only with its tools for financial manipulation. It created a global captive market for the only country whose industrial and agricultural capacity was untouched by the previous thirty years of violent havoc. Finally the destruction of state power in much of the world extended to both political and civil institutions. It gave the United States oligopoly in the market for consumer goods and information, including entertainment.

Although the Soviet Union had armed itself with powerful atomic weapons this was a purely defensive posture. As US experts knew the USSR would need at least 20 years to recover both in terms of population and economy to pre-war levels. When POTUS Harry Truman repudiated the Yalta agreements concluded by his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, he aggravated the conditions that would isolate the Soviet Union from the rest of the world. By refusing to recognize the People’s Republic of China, the US enforced the de facto blockade of most of Asia. This would be magnified by carpet-bombing Korea and Vietnam, instigating the murder of some one million Indonesians and the continuing slaughter of Congolese and other inhabitants of Central Africa. Cuba, still subject to a blockade the UN cannot end, is the only country that has been able to resist invasion by US/ UN troops or proxies.

So what does the United Nations really do, if it does not keep the peace?

As the pinnacle of international and intergovernmental diplomacy, the United Nations is the highest deliberative body on the planet. And there it is possible to see its true function. The United Nations is an institution created for distraction and denial. Within its chambers, talk of “peace” substitutes for peace. Its specialized agencies are staffed primarily by agents and assets of the US and its vassals, who owe their assignments and extensive diplomatic privileges to the patronage of the US and the corporations for which it stands. Instead of supporting member-states with the putative expertise available, these transnational bureaucrats apply the resources fed to the United Nations to manipulate national and local policies. Even the promise of appointments or the extension of membership privileges to the diplomatic corps of small and medium-sized states provides bribery or extortion at arm’s length for the corporate interests and foreign policies of the Allied permanent members. The absolute veto power prevents any serious initiative from the General Assembly from being carried into action even if adopted by large majorities in that house.

The “talk” of peace and peacekeeping is not only the inalienable prerogative of the paramount member. By virtue of the control US-based corporations hold over the global mass media, even that talk can erupt at will into a tsunami of “peace” and “reconciliation” or “human rights” or “free enterprise”. The subsequent flood drowns any alternative voices along with arguments and proposals that do not accord with the will of the US oligarchy. As recently as March of this year, a popular conservative journalist-commentator, Tucker Carlson, was told point blank by the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, that even his most open, vocal and visible acts of goodwill toward the owners of the US and NATO would not be heard. Just like the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China have no control over global mass media. There may be fans of genuine Russian vodka and millions may dine regularly on some version of Chinese cuisine. Yet none of this competes with Coca Cola and Levis. India may produce more films than Hollywood. Russian composers and authors may enjoy international fame. Everyone has heard of the Great Wall and has thousands of things stamped somewhere “Made in China”. Yet when peace is spoken in Moscow or Beijing it is still translated in the West as “not war”.

For decades the vast majority of UN member-states have demanded an end to the atrocities by which the occupation of Palestine is enforced through a settler-colonial state apparatus. Yet the onus for peace is placed not on those who monopolize not only armed force and the language of “peace”. Instead the language of “peace” is applied together with incarceration, torture, murder and mayhem against those who pray for peace itself. Intergovernmental instruments and diplomacy are used aggressively to suppress any peace not commensurate with abject surrender.

At least twenty million Soviet citizens died as a result of the West’s invasion of the Soviet Union by combined forces of Nazi Germany and occupied Ukraine. However the only deaths counted are the estimated six to seven million from Western Europe. The Western Allies in that massive slaughter regularly commemorate their Normandy invasion, only launched to deny the fruits of its unilateral defeat of the Wehrmacht. Until their viceroy, Boris Yeltsin, was replaced by the current President of the Russian Federation, this contempt and its underlying motives were ceremoniously concealed. Meanwhile the deliberative language machines have turned the invasion of the Soviet Union, known as Operation Barbarossa, into a boxing match between the Western devil and the Eastern devil. The Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS are honored today, e.g. in the Canadian parliament, as early heroes of the continuous battle against Russia. This is not hypocrisy or a mistake. Rather it is the admission of what “peace in our time” was intended to deliver. The some 20 million Chinese that were killed by the Japanese invasion, tolerated by the West in its morbid desire for the extermination of communists, do not count at all. Yet a fraction of the overall war deaths continues to justify the occupation of the Middle East by Euro-Americans. To begin the continuing body count in the Congo—well over ten million since Belgium withdrew (after assassinating its first prime minister)—would be pointless. “Peace” in Africa still means the size of the “piece” of Africa owned or controlled by Western corporations—the same corporations that also profited by the deaths in Eastern Europe from 1939 – 1945.

The United Nations is not useless as many are tempted to claim. On the contrary it has proven to be a very useful and highly profitable enterprise. By dominating international diplomatic language it diverts attention from the substance of diplomacy. As a cutout for covert military action and subversion, the United Nations diverts attention from the real belligerents in a world long dehydrated by war. Moreover, by its appropriation of the sacerdotal Science instituted since the Manhattan Project, the United Nations and its specialized agencies suppress genuine scientific investigation and the knowledge needed to remedy the illnesses caused by empires that refuse to die—or worse, that will only die by applying diversity, inclusion and equity to the graveyard to which their owners send people every day.

There is a place for true diplomacy in the world. Conflicts among peoples are just as natural as they are among individuals. Problems solved also expose or create new ones to investigate and solve. That is what science with a small “s” promises humans. In fact that is the essence of humanism. Every explanation implies an organization. Conversely every organization can be understood as an explanation. The United Nations is an organization based on the explanation whose regress is terminated with the atomic bomb. Nearly seventy years cannot alter the fact that an organization borne with the genetic code of atomic annihilation will reproduce death in every generation. If talk of “peace” is to be replaced by peaceful action then clearly a new explanation for international relations is necessary. The language machines created for perpetual war have to be abandoned and real human beings restored to their dignity which includes restoring their language and their voices.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

All that and more, including Venezuela’s threats to annex an oil-rich region of Guyana, which would worsen the refugee crisis on our southern border, is discussed in this week’s bonus episode. If you didn’t hear your question answered this week, look out for it next week as the Gaslit Nation Q&A continues! Thank you to everyone who supports the show – we could not make Gaslit Nation without you!

Under Stalin, in their quest to build a Soviet utopia, the Bolsheviks turned to eugenics. With the goal of breeding humans with apes, they aimed to successfully prove Darwin was right and that religion was indeed the "opium of the masses." Their human-ape hybrids would be engineered to be a super species—communally driven, designed with positive traits to build a flourishing communist society. Needless to say, the experiment failed, and many chimpanzees kidnapped from Africa died in the process.

Show Notes:

Nice Rats, Nasty Rats: Maybe It’s All in the Genes https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/health/nice-rats-nasty-rats-maybe-its-all-in-the-genes.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Kremlin says Putin is healthy, laughs off body double rumours https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kremlin-rejects-speculation-that-putin-is-ill-uses-body-doubles-2023-10-24/

Venezuela’s threats to annex most of Guyana draw international concern https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/07/venezuela-guyana-esequibo-map-border-dispute/

Weapons of Mass Distraction https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Weapons-of-Mass-Distraction-Foreign-State-Sponsored-Disinformation-in-the-Digital-Age.pdf

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

Today, 117 countries have announced a commitment to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. Powering up renewables is a tremendous development and one that 350.org has outlined as vital in keeping to a 1.5-degree temperature limit.

However, the non-binding Industry Transition Accelerator announced in the same speech as the triple renewable energy does not deliver meaningful steps towards reducing emissions and takes attention away from the need to phase out all fossil fuels, oil, coal, and gas.

Andreas Sieber, 350.org's Associate Director of Policy:

“The pledge by 117 countries to triple renewable energy by 2030 is a good start. We should see it as providing momentum, a means not an end, for landing the global target to triple renewable energy by 2030 in the negotiated outcome of COP28. Tripling renewables need to be part of a comprehensive energy package including a decision to phase out fossil fuels, phase in renewables, and support the transition with meaningful climate finance."

"It is crucial that the global renewable energy transition occurs at the scale and speed necessary and does not exclude wide parts of the Global South substantial support.”

“The COP28 President's voluntary oil and gas sector initiative unfortunately takes attention away from the need to reduce fossil fuel production and consumption drastically this decade: Rather than committing to reduce the combustion of fossil fuels – the primary driver of climate change – these corporations propose a reduction in "operationalemissions" occurring prior to the burning of oil and gas. This selective approach conveniently sidesteps addressing 80-90% of their overall emissions.”

Cansın Leylim Ilgaz, 350.org associate director of global campaigns

“We don’t have time to waste with more pledges and initiatives with fancy names. To shift the billions of dollars going from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and achieve an ambitious renewable energy target globally, we need a fast, fair, and equitable fossil fuel phase-out that does not rely on dangerous distractions. Cop28 must ensure we take the steps to ensure our collective future is one of shared prosperity by massively scaling up public finance for a just transition.”

Drue Slatter, Pacific Climate Warrior

"Over the last month, the Pacific Climate Warriors have powered up our communities to demand greater access to renewable energy, so this announcement carries great meaning for us. Today’s announcement gives us hope and resolve to continue our fight, but unless there is a formal agreement that puts Global South countries at the center, we will keep pushing and advocating for more. We still need a fossil fuel phase out and we must not transition from one broken system to another. Countries that are historically not responsible for the climate crisis are experiencing the worst climate impacts. We must push governments in rich countries to prioritize renewable energy resources to countries least responsible for the climate crisis and most vulnerable to its impacts."

Nicolò Wojewoda, 350.org's Europe Regional Director:

"UK and EU political support for a substantial renewable energy target cannot come at the expense of supporting an urgent phase out of fossil fuels. A meaningful transition requires us to do both, and the good news is, we can do both. There is enough funding we can unlock by redirecting subsidies from fossil fuels to powering up renewables, while also taxing the wealthy and the polluters, to accelerate that transition rapidly and equitably. European governments’ current funding choices make it clear who they’re siding with - fossil fuel giants headquartered in our regions, over communities in Europe and around the world who are ready to lead a transition to renewable energy for all."

Zaki Mamdoo, 350. org's Campaign Coordinator, StopEACOP:

“Prevention of the worst impacts of the climate crisis requires strong, global resolve to phase out fossil fuels and put an end to the ongoing exploitation and damage caused by projects like the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP). COP28 could be an opportune moment to take decisive action and develop the frameworks needed to deliver a just transition to Africa. Leaders from the continent need to elevate our demands for restorative justice, reparations, and debt cancellation, In order to enable Africa’s shift away from fossil fuels and pursuit of renewable energy alternatives capable of meeting the material needs of all our people.”

Click here to read 350.org's landmark report on financing and implementing a just global renewable energy target.

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

The post ‘Bread and Circuses’: Musk, Zuckerberg and the Art of Distraction appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

I think it’s probably best to try and define it by describing the experience from which the whole book started, which is that of speaking to artists, visiting artists in their studios. The thing that I would always come away with in my mind was the image of the studio wall. The studio wall that’s covered in images, fragments of text, objects on the shelves and so on. And thinking about how an artist relates to those images and objects and writings that don’t really fit a definition of research or of influence.

They’re doing something else, they’re kind of going to work on the artist, and they’re going to work in the work in some more mysterious fashion. And I wondered whether you could try to describe that relationship that an artist has with other images.

I’m interested in how an affinity compares with something like an influence.

I think they overlap. The interesting thing to me about an affinity is that it describes historically two kinds of relationships that seem not to sit comfortably alongside each other. “Affinity” names something organic or somehow natural, something that we’re not quite in control of, and on the other hand, it names a kind of formal relationship, even a legal relationship. “Affinity” is related to words in English like being affianced or fiancé and so on. It describes a kind of formalized relationship, and I liked the ambiguity of that because Whereas, I think we speak far too easily of influence in writing or in art or in any kind of cultural sphere. The reality, the experience for a writer or an artist, is never influence—it’s both more active and more passive than that word is capable of describing I think.

You write in the book there’s something magical somewhat about an affinity. It’s almost as though what’s unique about it is that it is tough to pin down or describe. Did writing criticism centered on something more magical present challenges, or are you comfortable in that less concrete space?

I suppose I had an idea originally that I could write a book that was entirely about my slightly stupid love for certain images, that I could somehow bypass the critical voice, the more informed or rational voice and produce a series of almost kind of dumb states of admiration. And I quite quickly realized that that was impossible. You can’t undo, you can’t unlearn, for me like 20 years or so of writing about art. And so the book is a kind of compromise.

Did you read Merve Emre’s piece in The New Yorker–a review of a new book by John Guillory–about critics who come from or currently work in academia versus what she sees as this kind of burgeoning alternative, basically pitting academic approaches to criticism against other types of expertise? I wouldn’t say it was critical of an academic approach, but it was interrogating its current value and its current state.

There seems to be an idea current, very, very recently in terms of how people are thinking about the condition of criticism and its relationship to the academic humanities. There’s an idea that the critical energy has moved outside of the academy or is at least kind of academic adjacent because it’s to be found among people who are part-time academics, who are adjunct teachers, who may still hope, but may also have given up on the hope, of having the kind of permanent academic position that used to be available to more critics and writers.

It seems to me, or at least it’s my experience, that that process is not recent at all. That was exactly my experience of a kind of flight from academia, from an academia that didn’t want me in the first place over 20 years ago, nearly a quarter of a century ago. And I suppose I have tried in a way to build a writing practice and a career of sorts using a lot of what I had learned as an academic writer in my 20s, not giving up on that kind of critique, but taking it somewhere else in terms of its voice, in terms of the texture of a critical writing that’s no longer working just within the boundaries of academic language. But also writing for, in a way, whoever would have me in terms of literary magazines, art magazines, and so on. So I agree in a sense with the point that’s being made at the moment in pieces like that, but I actually think it’s describing a process that is at least a quarter of a century long.

I saw that you are working on a book about education. Will that be related to these questions in some way?

I read these essays and polemics about the current state of education, of universities and humanities and arts in particular, but I think that I’m kind of temperamentally bored to tears by the idea of writing in that register. I’m in a way much more interested in writing something that starts from my own experience of what it meant to have a kind of fantasy about where a literary or artistic education might take you. So it’s a book I think that is partly a memoir and partly an effort to think about what that dream might entail now, but without writing a book about the state of the university. Other people do that brilliantly, but I would die of boredom, I think.

A lot of your writing grows out of memoir, and you also write critically. What would you call that genre if you had to label it?

The easy, kind of trite answer would have to be that I would call it essays, right?

Having written a book on the subject. I guess I always have loved those critics who seemed to allow enough of their own vulnerability onto the page. And Roland Barthes is the most obvious, who kind of hovers about in all three of these books that I think of as a kind of loose trilogy, Essayism, Suppose a Sentence, and Affinities. And I think it’s not necessarily about a kind of personal narrative, although in some of Barthes it definitely is. There’s the story of the loss of his mother, for example. But it’s more, I think, to do with the performance.

Allowing yourself to embody an emotional space for the time of writing–I could see how that would be a kind of performance. That makes sense to me. So, a lot of the essays in this book are on the shorter side, and the resonances are across essays, which is a mode with a long history. Would you say you’ve always had an ‘affinity’ for these shorter forms? Where does that come from you?

I guess so. It’s partly sort of a taste. In fact, just before we got started, I plucked off my shelf Hervé Guibert, who I’m about to start rereading for a conference. And this book, L’Image fantôme, which is written in essays that are sometimes half a page, a constellation of thoughts or of moments of apprehension of works of art, or in his case, photographs. I don’t think of them as fragments. They’re not fragments. They feel relatively formed. They’re not really aspiring to the more jagged relationship that the fragment has.

I suppose it also comes out of a writerly constraint, the constraint of temperament that I think in these quantities, I think in certain word counts. I think that’s partly temperamental, but it also comes from a kind of professional practice of writing to different lengths. I suppose I see in these three books in particular, more than most things I’ve done, a relationship with what I do as a writer of short reviews or short-ish essays. It feels as if there’s a kind of continuum between those.

I feel like Substack is a good form for this length.

It reminds me of blog era of the early 2000s. And I started as a freelance writer in that period. For about one afternoon, I considered starting a blog. Partly because exactly as you say, there was something about the length and the kind of format and the idea that you would have a different kind of readership online. And I really quickly, in a matter of hours, realized that nobody was paying me for this, and I just could not afford to have a blog. So it’s interesting that we’re now in this Substack era that offers a different model for that kind of online writing.

In what way is your writing, and this book in particular, reflective of an inattentive world? Or, on the flip side, in what way if any does your writing resist inattention?

I really like the exercise or the challenge of writing about one thing at a time. I love it when an artist or a gallery asks me to just focus on, say, one work. That feels very liberating to me. Some of the pieces in Affinities come precisely out of that kind of challenge. But there’s also a way of thinking that fetishizes sustained looking and attention in ways that I’m actually uncomfortable with.

I don’t want this book to feel like a simple defense of close looking or a simple defense of attention. In a way, I don’t believe in attention. I don’t think that these categories of attention and distraction really exist, certainly not in the kind of stark way that they’re opposed to each other routinely now, especially when we think about technology. I think that this language that we have for how we use, misuse, or rescue our attention is kind of pitiful and unhelpful and doesn’t really describe either the rigors or the pleasures of long sustained looking or the pleasures and rigors and excitements of being distracted and of moving quickly between experiences, between objects, between images.

Putting yourself in a meditative state of close concentration means precisely opening yourself to distraction. It’s just that the distraction is at a different level. It’s the distraction of your own passing thoughts, reflections, and so on. I suppose in the end, I just feel uncomfortable–not uncomfortable, but bored, I suppose, by the discourse on this. It doesn’t seem all that interesting to me.

What’s missing from this discourse is any real description of transition between moments of attention or between moments of looking or reading, seeing, thinking, and so on. And the transition is surely what’s interesting, the transition is thought. I think there is no real reason to suspect that thought is not happening, reflection is not happening in the transition from one brief, technologically mediated moment of attention and another. There’s no reason to believe that is less thoughtful, less reflective, less profound than the state of mind that looks and focuses and thinks about one thing in order to be able to think many other things.

I suppose maybe “affinity” in a way names this in-between, this movement. And I think that we ought to have a better vocabulary for thinking about what happens in time, what unfolds, whether we’re looking or concentrating at length or briefly.

I noticed that several of the artists with whom you feel an affinity work at some intersection of art and science or art and what in their time was a new technology. What do you think draws you to artists like these?

Good question. I hadn’t really thought about it until the book was finished, and I’d set these pieces and these artists and images alongside each other.

If you think about a figure like Jean Painlevé, the conditions for making his films are extraordinarily complex, and require a whole barrage of technology and really intricate setups, and the acquiring of the specimens and so on. And then at the heart of it, there’s something monstrous, really. Not just in terms of the creatures, the sea creatures themselves, but also something visually monstrous happens. It becomes abstract in a way, but the forms are also material. They’re matter in its most protean and uncontrollable state.

There is this combination of a kind of formality or rigor that in some cases is scientific. And then there’s this other quality, a visual quality or material bodily quality, that’s escaping and becoming inhuman, or abstract, or purely material or purely visual.

In the introduction to your latest book, you mention that you started it during lockdown. What effect did that have on your writing life, and why did this feel like a suitable project for that time?

In that kind of shut in, lockdown head space that many of us occupied a couple of years ago, I had an almost monkish notion, an almost ascetic idea that I could make a book out of images that were directly at hand, things that were on my bookshelves. I quickly realized that that was a sort of naive and also precious project. So I began to think instead about something that felt like it was reaching out a bit more, a bit further.

It’s taken much longer to come back to the world, and to come back to looking at art, putting myself in rooms, in galleries, and museums, and taking that time and being out in the world. It’s taken a lot longer than I imagined it would.

I want to ask about one of the book’s more personal essays, which focuses on your aunt, whose anxiety bordered on an obsession with security, and her photos reflect that mindset. In the essay, you draw similarities between yourself and your aunt. So, I was curious about whether a sort of obsessive attitude toward looking might either benefit your work or hem it in in some way.

I wrote a version of that piece almost a decade ago. And I wanted to write about the strangeness of the images themselves. The real peculiarity of photographing the boundaries of her property, photographing the interior of the house when she thought it had been invaded. And it is, I guess, a terribly sad story. But it’s also produced a body of work, a kind of practice.

And it struck me quite late in the process of writing that piece that I was absolutely looking at myself. I was looking at exactly the kind of anxious attention to the world that is completely necessary to writing. And that paradoxical combination of looking very closely at the things themselves, and at the same time locking yourself into a kind of mindset, an interior sort of prison, from which you look. This is really hard to describe.

For me, it was a realization that writing involves this kind of retreat in order to concentrate on the thing outside. And that suddenly felt like it was a peculiar, familial inheritance. And it made me feel suddenly that writing was a morbid and afflicted kind of activity. And at the same time, that I was extraordinarily fortunate to be able to turn, in my case, this familial, if it is familial, tendency toward a kind of morbid, anxious looking–to be able to turn that into language.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Maddie Crum.

Ron DeSantis officially launched his presidential campaign Wednesday, pitting the Florida governor against his former ally Donald Trump and at least five other Republicans in a fight for their party’s 2024 nomination. His formal announcement came in a Twitter audio stream hosted by the company’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, and was beset by technical problems. As governor of Florida, DeSantis has signed a slew of bills targeting reproductive rights, immigrant rights, the transgender community, and diversity programs in schools. He has also recently signed legislation to weaken the power of public sector unions. For more, we speak with Alphonso Mayfield, president of SEIU Florida Public Services Union. “People are hurting. … And instead of dealing with those issues directly, he’s punching down and focusing on the most marginalized aspects of our community and the people who are actually working and trying to create a better life for their families and their communities,” says Mayfield.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is calling for an American “divorce.”

She apparently sees herself as a modern-day John C. Calhoun, a demagogue who serves the interests of the white oligarch class and, in turn, receives their support, and the power and wealth that come with it.

She's started a secession propaganda campaign much like Calhoun and his buddies did when he left the White House as VP in 1833, the same year England outlawed slavery on British-territory plantations and talk of abolition in the US kicked into high gear.

It took Calhoun and his fellow traitors about 25 years to convince enough people in the South to go to war against America and try to replace our democracy with a fascist, race-based oligarchy.

But today—with electronic media providing instant communication and AR15s being much more efficient killing machines than the Confederacy had available—the heirs to Calhoun's sedition apparently think they can pull it off in a much shorter time.

Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie recently suggested the tipping point, the second American Civil War, will come when:

“[T]hirty to forty percent could agree that [the American government] was legitimate tyranny and it needed to be thrown off."

He then openly argued that American fascists should be sufficiently well-armed to take on the US Marines. Finishing that sentence, Massey—who tweeted a Christmas picture of his family (including his young children) each cradling an assault weapon—added:

“They [those trying to bring down the American government] need to have sufficient [fire]power without asking for extra permission. It should be right there and completely available to them in their living room in order to effect the change [of our form of government].”

Make no mistake about it: this is sedition. It's anti-American. It's pro-fascist.

Yesterday on my radio/TV program, Congressman Mark Pocan said Greene's comments were “almost treasonous."I'd drop the “almost.”

Greene even said out loud the part Republicans have been trying to not get caught saying for several decades now: she doesn't think Democrats should be allowed to vote if they live in Red states.

When a resolution came to the House floor last week condemning Putin's ally, Syrian dictator Assad, the only two “no"votes came from Greene and Massey.

Dictatorship good, democracy bad.

It's an old, old song for America that dates back to the 1840s.

Keep in mind that the Civil War wasn't just about slavery: it was primarily about preserving the wealth of the Southern oligarchs. While slavery was the source of their wealth, morbidly rich planters had so overtaken the political system of the South that it ceased to be anything close to a democracy—even for white people—by the 1840s.

That decade of the 1840s, in fact, was a key turning point for the effort to end democracy altogether in America. In just the ten years from 1840 to 1850, over 800,000 enslaved people were brought into the deep South.

Poor whites suddenly found themselves without work and pay generally collapsed across the region, while the plantation owner class became fabulously rich. It led to an internal abolition movement in the South, as white workers who didn't own slaves desperately tried to regain opportunities in the workplace.

As Southern abolitionist Hinton Helper wrote in his 1857 book The Impending Crisis of the South:

“The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters of the blacks, but they are also the oracle and arbiters of non-slaveholding whites, whose freedom is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetuated.”

The book became one of the biggest bestsellers in American history (even though you could go to prison for owning it in the South where it was banned), and sparked such a political crisis in 1860 that the House of Representatives was unable to elect a Speaker for almost two months. Sound familiar?

Abraham Lincoln didn't even advocate ending slavery until well into the Civil War: he was too busy fighting against Southern oligarchs who were hell-bent on ending democracy in America and replacing it with a white supremacist oligarchy. Lincoln's goal in responding militarily to Southern succession wasn't to free enslaved African Americans, it was to keep the country together and try to restore some semblance of democracy to the South.

On Aug. 22, 1862 (the Emancipation Proclamation would come exactly one month later), after more than a year of war, Lincoln wrote a letter to the New York Tribune pointing this out:

“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”

Here we are again, and once more the issue that's got working-class white people riled up is the intersection of economics end race.

Republicans pass laws against Critical Race Theory, teaching Black history, and complain about “woke"and “BLM,"but at its core it's all about distracting white people from their being ripped off by a white oligarchic class that promotes racial hatred to deflect anger from themselves.

As Marjorie Taylor Greene is essentially pointing out, just like in 1860.

The genesis of today's discontent began in the 1980s with the Reagan Revolution, as the Reagan/Bush administration opened America to “free trade"with the early stages of what became the World Trade Organization and negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which Bill Clinton signed on January 1, 1994.

Like the middle-class working white people in the South—who'd been about a third of that region's population prior to the 1840s when all those slaves were imported—the four decades since Reaganism began here have also seen the collapse of white working-class income and wealth.

When Reagan came into office in 1980 about two-thirds of white Americans were solidly in the middle class: today that number is around 45 percent and it requires two people working full time to pull even that off.

Meanwhile, the rich have gotten fabulously richer. Several of America's billionaires are today richer than any person has ever been in history. Richer than the pharaohs. Richer than the ancient kings of Europe. Rich enough to shoot themselves into outer space with their pocket change.

And where did that money come from? Just like the plantation owners in 1850, it came from rigging the system.

The past 42 years have seen over $50 trillion in wealth stolen from the homes and pockets of working-class people and deposited into the money bins of the morbidly rich through GOP tax-cut and union-busting policies.

In the past 42 years over 60,000 factories and 15 million well-paying union jobs have been shipped to Mexico and China, leaving working class whites (among others) literally out in the cold.

Just like in the 1850s, that's an explosive transition. And just like in the 1850s, it has brought out oligarch-funded political demagogues to tell white working-class people that their problems are all caused by Black people and their “woke"allies, and therefore the nation must divide itself.

Greene, Massey, and the rest of the sedition caucus in Congress are playing with fire. The people they're trying to crank up on behalf of America's rightwing oligarchs have already tried to murder the Governor of Michigan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the Vice President of the United States.

As The Washington Post's Philip Bump noted this week:

“Over the past decade, 96 percent of incidents in which extremists killed someone were committed by people motivated by right-wing ideologies.”

The number of people murdered for political purposes over the past 25 years by SDS or Antifa or other anti-fascist or “left wing"ideologues? Zero.

And in promoting bloodshed in 2023 America, the seditionists among us aren't even subtle. Last December 10^th, Greene told a Young Republican group in New York:

“I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that [January 6^th insurrection and effort to murder Vice President Pence], we would have won. Not to mention, it would've been armed."

\u201cMarjorie Taylor Greene\u2019s January 6th comments at last night\u2019s New York Young Republican Club Gala:\n\n\u201cI got to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would\u2019ve been armed.\u201d\u201d

— PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8 (@PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8) 1670799113

Pitting Americans against each other by race, geography, or even politics when simultaneously invoking bloodshed as a justified outcome is as anti-American as it gets.

It's why the 14^th Amendment says:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

If the seditionists within today's Republican Party had any goal other than to tear America apart and create an apartheid state run by and for the oligarchs who fund their campaigns and lifestyles, they'd be telling us about it right now. But are they?

Do they have anything to offer the working class of America?

So far, all we've heard is that they want to turn Social Security over to the New York banks and Medicare over to the big insurance companies. They're still fighting to keep the minimum wage at $7.25 an hour and deny union rights to workers.

Do they have anything to offer the women of America?

So far, all we've heard is that they want to send them to prison or administer lethal injection if they get an abortion.

How about climate change?

Republicans are still taking millions from the fossil fuel barons every year and denying climate change even exists, all while actively trying to sabotage any effort to move to a green economy.

Harmony between the races and the acceptance of our queer brothers and sisters?

Instead, they're doing everything they can to encourage hate and intolerance, up to and including codifying hate into law.

Or our children?

While America is now the only country in the world—in the entire world — where the leading cause of children's death is bullets, they instead want to “protect"our kids from books and drag queens. It would be funny if it didn't mean a child's body will be fatally torn apart by a bullet in America every 2 hours and 36 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for every day of this coming year.

The morbidly rich oligarchs who own the GOP—including their toadies on the Supreme Court—have no interest in doing anything about the crisis of the middle class, healthcare, climate change, women's rights, civil rights, or saving our children.

They're too busy making common cause with autocrats, oligarchs, and dictators around the world as they try to dismantle our democracy.

People like Greene and Massey don't just emerge out of nothing: there's a hand above these puppets, feeding their bellies and pulling their strings.

And as long as we ignore that hand and fight their phony “culture war"instead of raising taxes on billionaires and extending an absolute right to vote to all Americans, we're just helping them stuff another trillion dollars taken from working people into their money bins.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Thom Hartmann.

Fight for the Future director Evan Greer argued Wednesday that the battle over whether former President Donald Trump should be banned from major social media platforms like Facebook is "a huge distraction" from broader Big Tech conversations that are urgently needed.

"Discussions about online content moderation and what policies are needed to ensure human rights, free expression, and safety are some of the most important and consequential societal debates in human history," Greer said in a statement. "When we center these debates about specific moderation decisions, especially ones involving high-profile, wealthy, politically powerful individuals like Donald Trump, we are utterly missing the point."

Greer's comments came as free speech advocates and Trump critics faced off over Meta's decision to allow the twice-impeached former president back on Facebook and Instagram. Trump, who is now seeking the GOP's 2024 presidential nomination, was suspended from both platforms—and others—after his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol attack on January 6, 2021.

"We need to... instead focus on putting in place transformative policies based in human rights, and regulations that strike at the root of Big Tech giants' harm."

Meta global affairs president explained Wednesday that his accounts will be reinstated in the coming weeks "with new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses." The move was blasted by groups including Common Cause, Free Press, Media Matters for America, and the NAACP, while others—including some Trump adversaries—agreed with the ACLU that "this is the right call. Like it or not, President Trump is one of the country's leading political figures and the public has a strong interest in hearing his speech."

Greer, meanwhile, echoed some of the warnings from Big Tech experts two years ago, when tech giants began banning Trump—a serial liar who ultimately launched his own platform called Truth Social, which strongly resembles Twitter.

The digital rights advocate pointed out that Trump "doesn't need social media to spread his hateful ideas. He has access to the mainstream press, who religiously cover his every move. And he can afford to hire public relations firms, pay for advertising, and leverage his notoriety and influence to gain attention, something he has shown himself to be uniquely good at."

"The Donald Trumps of the world are not the people most impacted by deplatforming, censorship, and overreaching moderation," Greer stressed. "It is the most marginalized who are the most censored online. Arab and Muslim folks living outside the U.S. routinely have their posts erroneously censored and their accounts unjustly banned by hamfisted 'anti-terrorism' filters used by most of the largest platforms."

"LGBTQ content creators, sex workers, and sexual health educators face constant deplatforming, debanking, and demonetization," she continued. "Abortion rights organizations consistently encounter obstacles placing online ads, and have seen an uptick in unjust account suspensions and post removals in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade."

According to Greer:

By allowing the former president to remain the center of attention in world-changing debates about content regulation, free speech, and the harms of Big Tech, we're helping him accomplish his vile goals of silencing and oppressing the most vulnerable. We need to move past circular discussions over specific moderation decisions impacting high-profile elites, and instead focus on putting in place transformative policies based in human rights, and regulations that strike at the root of Big Tech giants' harm. Passing a privacy law would do way more to slow the viral spread of hateful content and disinformation than keeping Trump off of any specific platform. Enacting antitrust reforms would do far more to protect our democracy from Trump and his ilk than banning any one account.

Let's refuse to let Trump derail the conversations we need to have. Let's keep fighting for policies that lead not just to the type of internet we want to have, but the type of world we want to live in: a world where everyone has a voice, and decisions that impact our lives are made transparently and democratically, rather than in closed-door corporate meetings.

However, even modest legislation to rein in Big Tech seems unlikely in the second half of President Joe Biden's first term, with the U.S. House of Representatives now narrowly held by Republicans and after two years of Democrats controlling Congress but failing to advance relevant bills—which many critics largely blame on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

"Much of the water pollution from refineries is legal," EIP's report explains, "because EPA and the states have failed to set any limits on certain pollutants and have failed to update and modernize permit limits for other pollutants" despite the Clean Water Act's mandate that EPA does so. "But a portion of the problem is also illegal. As it turns out, EPA and state enforcement of existing permit limits for refineries is lax and rarely results in penalties for violations."

"Almost 83% of refineries (67 of 81) exceeded their permitted limits on water pollutants at least once between 2019 to 2021, according to EPA enforcement and compliance records," the report notes. "But only about a quarter of the refineries with violations (15 of the 67) were penalized during this period."

Other key findings of the report, titled Oil's Unchecked Outfalls, include:

• Wastewater discharged by 68% of the refineries examined (55 of 81) contributes to the "impairment" of downstream waterways—meaning they are too polluted to support aquatic life or allow for recreational uses like swimming or fishing.
• U.S. refineries are often old–averaging 74 years, but some dating back to the 1880s—and many have antiquated and inadequate pollution control systems. Most have also expanded over the last forty years, increasing both the volume and variety of pollutants they discharge. But EPA has not updated its standards for refineries since 1985.
• Two-thirds of the refineries examined by EIP (56 of 81) are located in areas where the percentage of low-income households within three miles exceeds the national average, and over half are located in areas where the percentage of people of color exceeds the national average.
• Sixty-seven refineries were flagged by EPA as violating permitted pollution limits 904 times between 2019 and 2021, including for dumping excessive amounts of cyanide, zinc, total suspended solids, ammonia, and oil and grease.

"Oil refineries are major sources of water pollution that have largely escaped public notice and accountability in the U.S., and too many release a witches' brew of contaminants to our rivers, lakes, and estuaries," EIP executive director Eric Schaeffer said in a statement. "This is because of lax federal standards based on wastewater treatment methods that are nearly forty years old."

"The Clean Water Act requires EPA to impose more stringent standards that reflect the advanced wastewater treatment methods available today," said Schaeffer, former director of civil enforcement at EPA. "After decades of neglect, EPA needs to comply with the law and set strong effluent limits for refineries that protect public health and environment. EPA and the states also need to start enforcing the limits that exist and penalizing polluters."

EIP identified which refineries are the top dischargers of key pollutants. When it comes to selenium, the Chevron El Segundo Refinery in California and the Motiva Port Arthur Refinery in Texas are the worst offenders, each dumping more than 12 pounds per day into local waterways. The Phillips 66 Wood River Refinery in Illinois and the BP Cherry Point Refinery in Washington pour out more nickel than any other facility in the country. El Segundo is also the biggest discharger of nitrogen, at 4,351 pounds per day, followed by the PBF Delaware City Refinery’s 3,283 pounds per day. For total dissolved solids, the worst offenders are the ExxonMobil Baytown Refinery (347,345 pounds per day) and the Valero Corpus Christi Bill Greehey Refinery (291,527 pounds per day), both in Texas.

EIP also documented the worst refineries for permit violations from 2019 to 2021. The Hunt Southland Refinery in Mississippi exceeded its permitted pollution limits 144 times during that time period but faced just two Clean Water Act enforcement actions totaling $85,500. The Phillips 66 Sweeny Refinery in Texas, meanwhile, ran up 44 violations but was hit with just a single $30,000 fine.

"After decades of neglect, EPA needs to comply with the law and set strong effluent limits for refineries that protect public health and environment. EPA and the states also need to start enforcing the limits that exist and penalizing polluters."

"EPA's national discharge limits for refineries apply to just ten pollutants, including ammonia, chromium, and oil and grease," states the report. "These skeletal standards do not begin to address the variety and volume of dangerous contaminants found in the wastewater from refining processes."

For example, the report documents that refineries are "a notable source" of toxic "forever chemicals" (PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), in part because they use firefighting foams that contain them. Even though PFAS have been linked to numerous adverse health impacts, EPA's newly released plan for regulating industrial discharges does not establish limits on these synthetic compounds in refinery wastewater.

"EPA's current rules for refineries are almost 40 years old, based on outdated treatment methods, and do not even apply to most of the pollutants that refineries discharge," says EIP's report. "EPA needs to waste no further time and move quickly to update these standards and impose the more stringent discharge limits the law requires."

"The states and the EPA also need to penalize permit violations more consistently so that refining companies have an economic incentive to clean up waterways," the report continues. "Currently, most violations by refineries are not penalized at all, and when they are, the amounts are paltry compared to the profitability of the industry. More stringent enforcement will provide a financial incentive for violators to update their pollution control systems and improve their operations to protect public health and the environment."

Bruze Reznick, executive director of Los Angeles Waterkeeper, lamented that "once again, the U.S. government has turned a blind eye while oil and gas companies pollute our environment, including our sensitive marine ecosystems, and disproportionately harm our frontline communities."

"We must now put the spotlight on oil refineries' essentially unregulated water pollution and demand that EPA fulfill its duty under the Clean Water Act by setting, updating, and actually enforcing discharge limits for these refineries," said Reznick.

He was echoed by Sejal Choksi-Chugh, executive director of San Francisco Baykeeper, who said that "it's high time for EPA to crack down on the toxic pollution from oil refineries that's threatening both wildlife and human health."

EIP researchers argued that "EPA's failure to require the cleanup of refinery wastewater is a part of a wider pattern."

"Most of the discharge limits in effect today for industries across the U.S. were established well before the end of the last century," the report points out. "According to the latest state water quality reports, about half of America's rivers, streams, and lakes, and a quarter of our estuaries are too polluted to support aquatic life, swimming, fishing, or to supply drinking water. The 1972 Clean Water Act promised to make all waters fishable and swimmable, but we are only halfway home to that goal more than fifty years later."

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

After an awkward run up, the FIFA World Cup is finally underway in Qatar—a country mired in scandal and run by a deeply corrupt organisation. Usually in the weeks leading up to soccer's showcase tournament, excitement is on the faces of people in every country represented. This World Cup feels different. The excitement has been subdued by allegation after allegation—ranging from 6,500 migrant workers dying during a ten year construction boom to Ecuador players being offered $7.4 million to throw the opening match. Evidently the bribe wasn't accepted as Ecuador ran out clear winners in the first opening World Cup game ever to end in defeat for the host nation. Additionally, LGBTQ supporters fear for their safety in a country where homosexuality is a crime, and perhaps the biggest concern for many fans is that they will now be forced to stay sober for a full 90 minutes after Qatar banned alcohol sales inside stadiums just two days before the opening game. This has led many to push for a boycott of games and to calls from many footballers and politicians alike to put pressure on the hosts to carry out deep reforms. Qataris seem perplexed by all the controversy, and maybe they are right to be so.

Another extremely valid complaint is that homosexuality is considered a crime in Qatar. Maybe FIFA should have required a law change before handing the World Cup to the country in the first place?

Many feel that a World Cup responsible for thousands of deaths should not be celebrated. It is difficult to disagree. We cannot pretend, though, that football is somehow an anomaly. Take the world's bestselling product: the American iPhone, made in China. Dozens of subsidiary workers have thrown themselves to their deaths since Qatar was handed the World Cup in 2010. The same phone—and all other smartphones—rely on cobalt for the batteries we replace every two years or sooner. Cobalt is mined in atrocious conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and around 40,000 of those miners are children as young as seven. They have no protective equipment and risk their lives on a daily basis so we can all use our smartphones to complain about working conditions at the World Cup in Qatar. It is known that in 2019, fourteen children lost their lives but the true number could be much higher. These kids are breathing in cobalt dust, which leads to asthma and scarring of the lungs. Not a single smartphone maker can guarantee that child labour is not used in their products, because the supply chains are too opaque. On the Indonesian island of Bangka, at least one worker was killed every week in 2012 in order to mine tin used in smartphone production. Who calls for boycotting of the smartphone? Out of sight, out of mind.

Another extremely valid complaint is that homosexuality is considered a crime in Qatar. Maybe FIFA should have required a law change before handing the World Cup to the country in the first place? This would have been a great bargaining chip. Where are those calling for a boycott of the World Cup when their own nations are selling weapons and crowd control equipment to these repressive autocracies? The UK taxpayer benefits to the tune of billions of dollars every year by supplying regimes in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and Oman. The same can be said of the US, who continue to supply Saudi Arabia with weapons—which they then use to bomb Yemen. American companies have been found to be supplying CCTV equipment to Iranian security forces, which they use to repress women. It seems the World Cup is an easier target.

For anyone who has seen the FIFA documentary on Netflix, corruption within FIFA is abundant, as it was between Qatar and the world governing body when they were awarded the world's biggest soccer tournament. A country of five million can never expect to host a World Cup by themselves, not least a country with no history of football. As a Welshman relishing the opening game against the USA and in a World Cup for the first time since 1958, the prospect of Wales actually hosting a World Cup by itself is absurd, despite Wales's larger population and long history of producing world-class players. The stadiums would become white elephants, as they will in Qatar. But is this corruption unusual in any way? Really? Consider that at COP27, a Saudi delegation stated, "We should not target sources of energy; we should focus on emissions. We should not mention fossil fuels." We shouldn't mention fossil fuels? The continued burning of fossil fuels is going to result in potentially billions of people losing their lives. And we shouldn't talk about them? In fact, in 30 years of COPs, no mention of leaving fossil fuels in the ground has ever been mentioned—not once. Could this be because the global fossil fuel industry has been reaping $1 trillion a year in pure profits for the past 50 years? If we can't talk about ending fossil fuel reliance even as it causes our planet to become uninhabitable in many parts, corruption in FIFA just doesn't seem such a bad thing, does it?

This article is not intended to excuse Qatar or FIFA from any wrongdoing. Qatar clearly has problems with human rights. They are clearly homophobic and they are clearly corrupt, as is FIFA. The aim here is to put things in perspective. If we could take just some of our energy and anger that we rightfully hold for the situation surrounding this World Cup and direct it instead to a system that has been exploiting workers and destroying ecosystems for thousands of years, then we could actually get somewhere. Football (soccer) fans are some of the most passionate people on the planet, and if they could become a little more interested in the real sources of power that continue to push us over a cliff face, we might be able to avoid climate and ecological collapse. As it is, just like Covid-19, just like the Ukraine war, the World Cup will just become another distraction from the real source of the planet's problems—a system built on never ending growth, whatever the cost.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Simon Whalley.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

The post The Real News Network and Project Censored present – “United States of Distraction: Fighting The Fake News Invasion” A Documentary Film (64 min) appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.