On Monday, June 16, Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) introduced legislation, a War Powers Resolution, to prevent President Trump from using military force against Iran without Congressional authorization. This will force all Senators to go on record supporting or opposing the following: “Congress hereby directs the President to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces for hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran or any part of its government or military, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force against Iran.”

Sen. Kaine, a longtime advocate for exerting congressional authority over war, blasted Israel for jeopardizing planned U.S.-Iran diplomacy. “The American people have no interest in another forever war,” he wrote.

When Israel launched a surprise military strike on Iran last week, it did more than risk igniting a catastrophic regional war. It also exposed long-simmering tensions in Washington—between entrenched bipartisan, pro-Israel hawks and a growing current of lawmakers (and voters) unwilling to be dragged into another Middle East disaster.

“This is not our war,” declared Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a Republican and one of the House’s most consistent antiwar voices. “Israel doesn’t need U.S. taxpayers’ money for defense if it already has enough to start offensive wars. I vote not to fund this war of aggression.” On social media, he polled followers on whether the U.S. should give Israel weapons to attack Iran. After 126,000 votes (and 2.5 million views), the answer was unequivocal: 85% said no.

For decades, questioning U.S. support for Israel has been a third rail in Congress. But Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran—coming just as the sixth round of sensitive U.S.-Iran nuclear talks were set to take place in Oman—sparked rare and unusually direct criticism from across the political spectrum. Progressive members, already furious over Israel’s war on Gaza, were quick to condemn the new offensive. But they weren’t alone.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) called Israel’s strike “reckless” and “escalatory,” and warned that Prime Minister Netanyahu is trying to drag the U.S. into a broader war. Rep. Chuy García (D-IL) called Israel’s actions “diplomatic sabotage” and said, “the U.S. must stop supplying offensive weapons to Israel, which also continue to be used against Gaza, & urgently recommit to negotiations.”

Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) was even more blunt. “The war criminal Netanyahu wants to ignite an endless regional war & drag the U.S. into it. Any politician who tries to help him betrays us all.”

More striking, however, were the critiques from moderate Democrats and some Republicans.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned that strikes “threaten not only the lives of innocent civilians but the stability of the entire Middle East and the safety of American citizens and forces.”

Some pro-Israel Democrats are feeling comfortable speaking out on this conflict because it fits their anti-Trump critique. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) said: “We are at this crisis today because President Trump foolishly walked away from President Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement under which Iran had agreed to dismantle much of its nuclear program and to open its facilities to international inspections, putting more eyes on the ground. The United States should now lead the international community towards a diplomatic solution to avoid a wider war.”

Adding to this diverse chorus of opposition are some Republicans from the party’s non-interventionist wing. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) declared, “War with Iran is not in America’s interest. It would destabilize the region, cost countless lives, and drain our resources for generations.” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) lamented that “some members of Congress and U.S. Senators seem giddy about the prospects of a bigger war.”

And in a rare show of agreement with progressive critics, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) blasted the hawks in both parties. “We’ve been told for the past 20 years that Iran is on the verge of developing a nuclear bomb any day now. The same story. Everyone I know is tired of U.S. intervention and regime change in foreign countries. Everyone I know wants us to fix our own problems here at home, not bomb other countries.”

Of course, many in Congress rushed to support Israel. Senate Republican leader John Thune said, “Israel has determined that it must take decisive action to defend the Israeli people.” Democratic Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) voiced full support for the strike and urged the U.S. to provide Israel “whatever is necessary—military, intelligence, weaponry.” The most crass was Senator Lindsey Graham, who posted: “Game on. Pray for Israel.”

But these crude pro-war responses, once guaranteed to go unchallenged, are now being met with resistance–and not just from activists. With public opinion shifting sharply–especially among younger voters, progressives, and “America First-ers” – the political calculus on unconditional support for Israel is changing. In the wake of Israel’s disastrous war in Gaza and its widening regional provocations, members of Congress are being forced to choose: follow the AIPAC money and the old playbook–or listen to their constituents.

If the American people continue to raise their voices, the tide in Washington could turn away from support for a war with Iran that could plunge the region into deeper chaos while offering no relief for the suffering people of Gaza. We could finally see an end to decades of disastrous unconditional support for Israel and knee-jerk support for catastrophic wars.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin.

This will touch on something that is unusual about how I use programming languages in general. The common practice in the industry is one that involves very slow feedback loops, these things we call compile-test cycles: edit, compile, test. I tend to use programming languages that are much more interactive. This is the family of programming languages that come down to us from the communities of LISP and SmallTalk, primarily. In these languages, you’re engaged in a conversation with the computer — your program is running the whole time, you’re modifying it while it’s running, and you can inspect the state within the program to see what’s happening.

This is particularly good for exploratory programming, but also for art making. I can have a sketch running that is using a generative system I’ve created to produce some kind of visual effect. I could think, “What if this parameter were slightly different?” and instead of building a bespoke control panel to do that, I can execute a tiny snippet of code inside my editor that changes what’s happening in the program, so I’m still working in the same medium and I don’t need to switch to a different tool.

I might start with a blank canvas with a loop running that is redrawing something, but it doesn’t know what it’s redrawing yet. Then I will gradually add elements, and those elements may have some innate structure. They may be drawn from nature in some way. Often, in my work, I will start with some natural system I found intriguing, and I’ll think, “What would have to happen geometrically to create a thing that has a form like that?” Then I’ll try to build a system where I’m planting the seed, but the growth happens within the simulation.

I also do a lot of work that is inspired by different periods of art. Maybe there will be something Bauhaus-inspired; I’ll look at a pattern Kandinsky drew by hand and think, “What if I wanted an infinite number of those that were all as good as the one he did by hand? What would I need to tell the computer for it to know [how to do that]?” In that sense, my artwork is often at that meta level. I’m less interested in the single-object output than I am interested in the underlying system that makes things of that nature possible.

Your background is traditionally technical. How has that influenced your identity or your sense of aesthetics as an artist?

I don’t regard scientists and artists as fundamentally different kinds of people. In fact, I regard them as more alike than they are different.

The sort of division you see among people in modern American culture is, to me, a cultural artifact; it’s just an accident of education. I would say the same thing about athletics. The jocks versus geeks division is an entirely synthetic thing that arose in post-1950s America and spread in a diseased way to other parts of the world. There’s nothing about being good at using your nervous system to move your body through space that would make you bad at using your nervous system to reason about geometry.

Based on some early tests that show an aptitude or a proficiency, we’ve narrowly focused people into what we think is going to be the box in which they will perform, when we should be spending more time cultivating what people are innately and immediately good at but also filling in the rest of the profile. So if you’re somebody who finds mathematics easy but is intimidated by the idea of drawing classes, then you should be doing that. These things are all aspects of humanity, and it’s a mistake to leave any of them behind.

In your 2019 ClojuTRE talk on computational creativity, you gave a brief survey of historical definitions of creativity. After absorbing all of those, where do you net out? What grand unified theory of creativity do you subscribe to?

I think it’s the fundamental aspect that makes us human beings. Creative problem-solving is the thing that we do better [than any other species]. Communication is the other thing that we do better, which allows us to do creative problem-solving in groups. If you want to know why we’ve spread over the entire world and lived in every kind of ecosystem successfully, it’s because we’ve been able to creatively solve problems along the way. Without that, I don’t think we’re really people. Leaving aside your creative drives as an individual is a mistake, because it’s leaving aside your birthright as a human.

A question in the AI discourse right now is whether AI will ever be able to create the way a human does. Large language models can create reasonable facsimiles of mediocre writing and drawing, but that sort of path-breaking creative synthesis still seems to be uniquely human. As someone who has been in this field for a long time, what do you think is coming in terms of the influence of AI?

To touch on the first part of what you said, about mediocrity: when you have a big statistical model that is essentially taking the sum and then the average of the internet, whether it’s in words or pictures, then you can expect the output to be [average] by definition. Now, you can steer these models to get you somewhat surprising outputs, and that’s cool. I have some friends who train their own models and build complex workflows to come up with things that are very nice in terms of the outputs they achieve. For me, mostly, if I’m using a prompt to an LLM to generate an image, I can get an output that looks okay to good, because I word good and I have enough taste to pick the images that I think are okay. But after I’ve done that, I don’t feel like I’ve done anything, because I don’t feel like there’s any of me in the output.

I think a lot of where our good stuff comes from is actually from how the act of making the art changes us as individuals. Ages ago, I went to art school at night while I was doing a startup in Silicon Valley. I’d been a lifelong musician, and playing music my whole life meant that I heard everything differently. When I hear the leaves rustling, I hear the rhythm of the leaves rolling along the ground. When I hear the whistle on my kettle, I know what pitch it is. So I thought, “I’ll go to art school, and maybe it will change the way I see.” And of course it did. There’s no way you can learn to draw in charcoal and capture light and shadow without it changing the way you see everything for the rest of your life.

What if we take away the need to do any of those things to produce those outputs? Then we get an entire generation of people who do not transform themselves into having a higher level of perception. What does that do for our ability to discriminate between what is just AI slop and what is actually something amazing and beautiful? It’s leaving behind part of our birthright as humans, to outsource some of the best stuff we have going to the machines, even if the machines can do it.

Also, the more stuff there is, the more sifting has to be done to find the good stuff. Making a machine for the unlimited production of mediocre junk means that the signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse all the time, and I dislike this vigorously.

On the other hand, I think these technologies can become the components of amazing engineering solutions later on. An example of this, not in the artistic context, is that I took some LLMs and I attached them to a query apparatus for WikiData, the database version of Wikipedia. I was able to use the LLM to get the data into the system from natural language. Then I do a query against this fact database, and then I take the series of dry facts that it returns and have it reformatted as nice, flowing prose. So I get something that you can get into and out of with human language that doesn’t hallucinate any details, and this is actually immediately useful.

I think many things of that nature are coming. Artistic tools where the trained model is more like a paintbrush and less like an outsourced cheap artist are going to be extremely powerful. In cinema, I think we’ll see the cost of making movies drop to one-one-hundredth of the time and one-one-hundredth of the cost using these kinds of tools, because CGI is such an important part of film production already. In this sense, when the good tools come out of it, you will see actual artists be able to do more and better.

Have you been able to find a balance between the things you do to pay the bills and the things you do to satisfy an artistic impulse? Do you find the same amount of creativity and joy in your work at Applied Sciences as you do in the art you make?

Here, I have to start by saying that I’m in a position of ridiculous privilege. I came of age at a time when the things I liked to do for fun were among the most lucrative things you could do for a living.

Throughout my career, I have been able to work on only things I’m interested in and be paid very well for them, both on the science and programming side and also on the art side. Obviously, I make more money from the tech stuff than the art stuff. But in years when I’m more active, like in 2020, I made enough that I could have made a living in Berlin just from the art side. This is possible. It’s difficult and it requires a lot of luck, but it is possible. So I’m in the weird position where I don’t have to choose between the things I love and the things that pay the bills because everything I get paid for is also something I love. And I recognize the tremendous privilege of that statement.

What do you think it takes to do that, beyond luck? Are there things a person can do to be more likely to have that kind of outcome?

Having a very active daily practice, and never letting it get away from you, is incredibly important. Björk has a fantastic quote about not letting yourself get gummed up and only releasing something every seven years because it puts you out of the flow of creating: “Don’t hold your breath for five or seven years and not release anything, and then you’ve just got clogged up with way too much stuff… You lose contact to the part of you, your subconscious, that’s writing songs all the time, and the part of you that’s showing it to the world… That’s more important, to sustain that flow, than to wait until things are perfect.”

Whatever it is that you do, you have to really do it. If you have a choice between doing it for three hours on Sunday or doing it for 15 minutes a day for the rest of the week, do it 15 minutes a day, because what you do every day is what your brain is working on when you’re not paying attention. Your subconscious is making progress on the things you do constantly. There’s a bowdlerization of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that gets quoted a lot, which is that excellence is just a function of habit. It’s what you do repeatedly. Lean into it. Do the work.

And — this is the bad news, because many programmers or artists are not necessarily interested in standing up on a chair and shouting about themselves in public—if you do beautiful work and nobody sees it, you’re not going to have a good career. You have to find a way to surface what you’re doing.

If it were five to 10 years ago, I would say to get a Twitter account, communicate with the kinds of people who are interested in the kind of thing you do, post all of this work that you’re doing as your daily practice, and you will be noticed. Today, it’s a more complicated situation. Some arsonists have set fire to Twitter and it’s now full of smoke and dead bodies, so very few people you would want to find your work will go to that place. I think we’re in an interregnum where there isn’t a good public space to demonstrate excellence for most arts. But it is important that you find a way to do that, or you will likely go unnoticed.

I also wanted to ask you about your time AT&T Research, formerly Bell Labs. Bell Labs has a mythical place in tech lore. It was a hotbed of innovation and a Schelling point for practically every computer science pioneer you’ve ever heard of. Did that still penetrate the company’s DNA when you were there?

It was definitely a unique environment. First, as in any such situation, it was the people. You had a large concentration of brilliant people all in one place. That’s always a good thing.

The facility where I worked, the Claude Shannon Lab, was in a leafy suburb in New Jersey. We would go down to eat in the cafeteria, and there were floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and we would see deer outside. In my wing, the people in the other offices were Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of C++, and David Korn, who created KornShell. I used to ride in his minivan from downtown Manhattan, because there were a bunch of us who preferred to live in the city. So the vibe had mostly to do with the people, and then the facility itself being the perfect leafy campus environment, but tuned for grown-ups — well, eternally Peter Pan grown-ups.

We did some great work there, even though when I worked there it was after the heyday. Unix was invented around the time I was born, so I missed out on all those great things. But I know most of those people because I was very young when I got started in the industry, and they weren’t dead yet. Some of them are still walking around. So I have all the stories, I’m happy to report. The vibe, I think, was still similar, but obviously the level of work, while good, wasn’t as world-shaking as it was earlier in the 20th century.

Why do you think that was? Was it a function of something changing in the way the work was supported?

There were a couple of things. One is that the way research was supported changed. Here we come back to that idea of patronage. Both artists and scientists have in common that they do their best work when they are left alone and allowed to chase their own curiosity and their own aesthetics and their own feelings. The appetite and the surplus to allow that has decreased year on year since the middle of the 20th century.

There was a period where this was really celebrated, and it was considered a good use of funds to have people do things that may pay you back nothing but also may give you a whole different world. You would fund it with some faith in the fact that if the people are talented enough, something good will come out of it.

After the Reagan–Thatcher revolution, that became less of a thing. Ideologically, everything shifted to this idea that you should have a return-on-investment angle on what happens. And because you can’t predict the outcome of research, it is effectively impossible to have a return on investment attitude towards it.

A great example of this is the iPhone. The capacitive touch display was invented 25 years before that at Bell Labs by somebody who was just chasing their own interest. If that person hadn’t had the opportunity to plant those seeds, then Apple could not have reaped the benefits later. Right now, I feel like we’ve really shifted towards reaping, and left sowing to be somebody else’s problem. This will continue to harm us in the future, because if we keep doing basically the same things over and over again, we won’t have any new seed corn.

There are certainly little pockets where that focus on something other than ROI still exists. But I agree. It feels like everyone recognizes the value of something like Bell Labs, yet very few people have the risk appetite or long-term thinking to fund that anymore.

It’s not just the absence of a Bell Labs sort of thing. There are other social opportunities available that are not followed. For example, I was talking to some people who will remain nameless but who are very high in an organization that makes a popular search engine and browser. I wanted them to fund some improvements to a text editor called Emacs that I’ve been using for nearly 40 years. With a good team working on it and with some actual financial support, a lot could be improved. Around half of their employees use Emacs, so it seemed like it would even pay them back, in some sense. But they told me that the most their enormous, many-billions-a-year company could possibly [contribute] was funding for some student [project].

This kind of thing is insane. These are public goods that they consume, but they don’t see it as their responsibility to help support that commons. This is a problem with open-source software in general — it is insufficiently supported. It’s shared infrastructure, and shared infrastructure requires shared support.

If you could reshape the way the internet has evolved, where would you start?

I would try to prioritize [changing] some of the infantilizing drives of current products. It is very fashionable at the moment to believe that if a person can’t use something immediately on first seeing it, then it should be thrown away, because people are stupid and have no patience. This is a prevalent way of thinking about user interfaces. But if you look at the user interface of the violin, it’s terrible for quite a while. You have to put in some effort before you can do anything useful with the violin. But then you can do something that you simply cannot do with a tiny children’s xylophone. There are effects you can achieve if you’re willing to put in the work.

I feel like there’s a large area to explore of slightly more difficult things that have a higher ceiling. I believe you should raise the floor as much as you can, but you shouldn’t do it by lowering the ceiling.

I would like to make it more possible for people to, for example, automate things on their own; end user programming is the technical term for this. In a system like HyperCard, this was very effective. People could build systems to run their entire business inside of this very cool piece of software that you ran on a Macintosh. I don’t see a modern thing that is as good. There’s more we can do to democratize the programmatic aspects of owning a computer so that people have more power as individuals.

There have to be these open-box systems where you can play with the parts. Otherwise, you’re strictly a consumer. On Instagram, that’s exactly how I feel. I post my artwork there, but that’s the limit of what I can do. Someone else has decided the limits of my world. And I resent that.

At the end of your talk on creative computation, you give some recommendations for programmers who want to get in touch with their creative side: take an art course, meditate, take psychedelic mushrooms. I assume those recommendations still hold, but what else would you recommend to anybody who wants to connect with their creativity?

The important thing, and I tried to stress it in that talk, is that you can approach things as a reasoning and reasonable agent who is putting one fact in front of another and trying to be very orderly and systematic. That is an important way of being. But there’s another way of approaching things, which is to open yourself up to your own intuition and to feel your way through things. That’s no less important a way of being. You have to have both to be a complete human being. So whether a person is a programmer who isn’t as in touch with their intuition, or they’re an artist who is not as in touch with their ability to be analytical, I feel that whichever side you’re coming from, you should be trying to fill in the part at which you are the weakest so that you can be a more complete person.

For a lot of people, getting in touch with the intuitive side also has to do with the body itself, because many people are very disembodied. So, going to a yoga class, taking up meditation, doing things that allow you to realize that you are an embodied creature, and then starting to listen to how your body is feeling. Having a daily practice of checking in with yourself can automatically and immediately start to open you up to being able to do creative things. If you combine that with the daily practice of journaling or drawing or something else that allows you to focus those feelings and externalize them in some way, very quickly you’ll discover you have an artistic side you never knew was there.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Rebecca Hiscott.

Today, the point that Marx made in his 1865 address to the First International Working Men’s Association is largely lost on the trade unions and even with many self-styled Marxists. The distinction between the goal of “a fair day’s wage” and the goal of eliminating exploitation– the wage system embedded in capitalism– is lost before a common, but unfocused revulsion to the exploding growth of inequality. It is one thing to deplore the growth of inequality, it is quite another to establish what would replace the logic of unfettered accumulation.

Marx offered no guidelines for a “fair wage”. Indeed, his analysis of capitalism made no significant use of the concept of fairness. Instead, he made the concept of exploitation central to his political economy. He used the concept in two ways: First, he employed “exploitation” in the popular sense of “taking advantage of” — the sense that the capitalist takes advantage of the worker. “Exploitation of man by man” was a nascent concept, arriving in discourse with the expansion of mass industrial employment and borrowed from an earlier, morally-neutral usage regarding the exploitation of non-humans. Its etymology, in that sense, arises in the late eighteenth century.

Marx also uses the word in a more rigorous sense: as a description of the interaction of the worker and the capitalist in the process of commodity production. Even more rigorously, it appears in political economic tracts like Capital as a ratio between the axiomatic concepts of surplus value and variable capital.

As a worker-friendly concept, exploitation is most readily grasped by workers in the basic industries, especially in extractive and raw-material industries. Historically, an early twentieth century coal miner– bringing the tools of extraction with him, responsible for his own safety while risking a more likely death than a war-time soldier, and accepting the “privilege” of going into a cold, damp hole to dig coal for someone else’s profit– intuitively understood exploitation. A reflective miner would recoil from the fact that ownership of a property could somehow– apart from any other consideration– confer to someone the right to profit from a commodity that someone else had faced mortal danger to extract from the earth. What is a “fair day’s wage” in such a circumstance?

Organically, from its intuitive understanding by workers, and theoretically, from class-partisan intellectuals like Marx and Engels, as well as their rivals like Bakunin, exploitation became the central idea behind anti-capitalism and socialism.

Today, most workers’ connection to the exploitation relation appears far removed from the direct relation of a coal miner to the coal face and to the owner of the coal mine. The immediacy of labor and labor’s product in extraction is often of many removes in service-sector or white-collar jobs. Moreover, the division of labor blurs the contribution of the individual’s efforts to the final product.

Well into the twentieth century, “labor exploitation” fell out of the lexicon of the left, especially in the more advanced capitalist countries, where Marx thought that it would be of most use. Left thinkers, as well as Marxists, rightly attended to the colonial question, focusing on the struggle for independence and sovereignty; they were discouraged by the tendency for class-collaboration in many leading working-class organizations; Communist Parties correctly felt a primary duty to defend the gains of the socialist and socialist-oriented countries; and the fight for peace was always a paramount concern.

Exploitation was attacked from the academy. The Humanist “Marxist” school trivialized the exploitation nexus to a species of the broad, amorphous concept of alienation. The Analytical “Marxist” school congratulated itself by proving that given an inequality of assets, a community of exchange-oriented actors would produce and reproduce inequality of assets, a proof altogether irrelevant to the concept of exploitation, which the school promised to clarify. Both schools influenced a retreat from Marxism in the university, followed by a stampede after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Liberal and social-democratic theory revisits the “fair day’s wage” with the explosion of income inequality and wealth inequality of the last decades of the twentieth century that was too impossible to ignore. But what is a “fair wage”? What level of income or wealth distribution is just, fair, socially responsible, or socially beneficial? The questions are largely unanswerable, if not incoherent.

Thanks to the empirical, long-term study of inequality shared in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, we learn that capitalism’s historical tendency has been to always produce and reproduce income and wealth inequality, a conclusion sobering to those who hope to refashion capitalism into an egalitarian system and making a “fair wage” even more elusive. Piketty’s work offers no clue to what could constitute a “fair wage.”

Others point to the productivity-pay gap that emerged in the 1970s, where wage growth and productivity took entirely different courses at the expense of wage gains. Researchers who perceptively point to this gap as contributing to the growth of inequality often harken back to the immediate postwar era, when productivity growth and wage growth were somewhat in step, when the gains of productivity were “shared” between capital and labor. But what is magical about sharing? Why shouldn’t labor get 75% or 85% of the gain? Or all of the gain? Is maintaining existing inequalities the optimal social goal for the working class?

Where the concept of a “fair wage” offers more questions than answers, Marx’s concept of exploitation suggests a uniquely coherent and direct answer to the persistent and intensifying growth of income and wealth: eliminate labor exploitation! Abolish the wage system!

Thus, the return to the discussion of exploitation is urgent. And that is why a serious and clarifying account of exploitation today is so welcome.

*****

Jack Rasmus takes a step toward that end in a carefully argued, important paper, “Labor Exploitation in the Era of the Neoliberal Policy Regime.” I have followed Rasmus’s work for many years, especially admiring his respect for the tool of historical inquiry and his scrupulous research, interpretation, and careful use of “official” data. On the other hand, I thought that his work failed to fully consider the Marxist tradition, unduly drawn to engaging with the pettifoggery of academic “Marxists.”

However, his new work proves that assessment to be mistaken. Indeed, his latest work reflects an admirable reading of Marx’s political economy and offers an important tool in the struggle to end the wage system.

Rasmus understands that we are in a distinct era of capitalism, forced by the failure of the prior “policy regime” and typified by several features: intensified global penetration of capital and trade expansion (“globalization”), a massively growing role for financial innovation and notional profits (“financialization”), and most significantly, the restoration and expansion of the rate of profit (“the intensification of labor exploitation in both Absolute and Relative value terms that has occurred from the 1980s to the present”).

It should be noted that Rasmus does not discuss why a new “policy regime” became necessary in the 1970s. Both the stagflation that proved intractable to the reigning Keynesian paradigm and the attack on the US profit rate by foreign competition (see Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, NLR, 229) necessitated a sea change in the direction of capitalism.

I might add that while so-called globalization was an important feature of “the neoliberal policy regime,” the 2007-2009 economic crisis has diminished the growth of global trade. Indeed, its decline has fostered the rise of economic nationalism, the latest wrinkle on the “neoliberal policy regime.”

Rasmus carefully and methodically documents and explicates the intensification of labor exploitation in commodity production (what he calls “primary exploitation”) over the last fifty years. He recognizes the important and growing role of the state in enabling this intensification. This is, of course, the process that Lenin foresaw with the fusing of the state and monopoly capitalism– a process associated in Marxist-Leninist theory with the rise of state-monopoly capitalism. Today’s advanced capitalist states fully embrace the goal of defending and advancing the profitability (‘health’) of monopoly corporations (‘a rising tide lifts all boats’), including intensifying labor exploitation.

Just how that intensification is accomplished is the subject of Rasmus’s paper.

*****

Rasmus is aware that Marx expressed the exploitation nexus in terms of labor value. He avoids the scholasticism that side-tracks academically trained economists who obsess over the price/value relationship — the so-called transformation problem. Value– specifically a labor theory of value —  is central to Marx because it explains how commodities can command different, non-arbitrary exchange values and how the different proportionalities between the exchange values of commodities are determined. That is the problem Marx sets forth in the first pages of Capital, and value — as embodied labor — is the answer that he gives.

Using labor value as his theoretical primitive enables Rasmus to discuss exploitation in Marx’s framework of absolute and relative surplus value– exploitation by extending the working day or intensifying the production process. While Rasmus offers a persuasive argument that his use of “official” data couched in prices can legitimately be translated into values, it is unnecessary for his thesis. The relations are preserved because the proportionalities are, in general, preserved. It is a reasonable and adequate assumption that prices and values run in parallel, though a weaker claim than that prices can be derived from values.

Methodological considerations aside, Rasmus sets out to show — and succeeds in showing — that exploitation has accelerated in the “neoliberal” era in terms of both relative and absolute surplus value:

Capitalism’s Neoliberal era has witnessed a significant intensification and expansion of total exploitation compared to the pre-Neoliberal era. Under Neoliberal Capitalism both the workday (Absolute Surplus Value extraction) has been extended while, at the same time, the productivity of labor has greatly increased (Relative Surplus Value extraction) in terms of both the intensity and the mass of relative surplus value extracted.

Regarding Absolute Surplus Value, he demonstrates:

[I]t is true the work day was reduced during the first two thirds of the 20th century—by strong unions, union contract terms, and to some extent from government disincentives to extend the work day as a result of the passage of wages and hours legislation. But that trend and scenario toward a shorter work day was halted and rolled back starting in the late 1970s and the neoliberal era. The length of the Work Day has risen—not continued to decline—for full time workers under the Neoliberal Economic Regime.

Through a careful combing and analysis of government data, as well as original arguments, Rasmus shows how capital has succeeded in extending the workday. His discussion of changes in mandatory overtime, in temporary employment, in involuntary part-time employment, in paid leave, in changing work culture, in job classifications, in work from home, internships, and other practices form a persuasive argument for the existence of a trend of the lengthening of the average workday.

Similarly, Relative Labor Exploitation has accelerated in the “Neoliberal” era, according to Rasmus:

Rising productivity is a key marker for growing exploitation of Labor. If real wages have not risen since the late 1970s but productivity has—and has risen at an even faster rate in recent decades—then the value reflected in business revenues and profits of the increased output from that productivity has accrued almost totally to Capital.

In this regard, the numbers are widely recognized and non-controversial. Labor productivity has grown significantly, while wages have essentially stagnated. Rasmus tells us that it is even worse than it looks:

So, wages have risen only about one-sixth of the productivity increase.  But perhaps only half of that total 13% real hourly wage increase went to the top 5% of the production & nonsupervisory worker group, according to EPI 10 (Economic Policy Institute, February 2020). That means for the median wage production worker, the share of productivity gain was likely 10% or less. The median wage and below production worker consequently received a very small share in wages from productivity over the forty years since 1979. It virtually all accrued to Capital…

According to the US Labor Department, there were 106 million production & nonsupervisory workers at year end 2019—out of the approximately 150 million total nonfarm labor force at that time. Had they entered the labor force around 1982-84, they would have experienced no real wage increase over the four decades.

Rasmus notes that the US maintained the same share of global manufacturing production through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, but doing it with six million fewer workers. This, of course, meant a rising rate of exploitation and a greater share of surplus value for the capitalists. Though the job losses struck especially hard at an important section of the manufacturing working class relegated to unemployment, the remaining workers lost further from concessionary bargaining promoted by a business-union leadership. Thus, they were unable to secure any of the gains accrued by rising productivity. They experienced a higher rate of exploitation.

*****

Demonstrating that labor exploitation has increased in the last 45-50 years in terms of absolute and relative surplus value does not, according to Rasmus, close the book on labor exploitation. Drawing on a suggestive quote in Volume III of Capital, he develops an original theory of “secondary exploitation.” Marx writes:

That the working-class is also swindled in this form [usury, commerce], and to an enormous extent, is self-evident… This is secondary exploitation, which runs parallel to the primary exploitation taking place in the production process itself. Capital, Volume III, p. 609

Rasmus explains secondary exploitation this way: “Secondary Exploitation (SE) is not a question of value being created in exchange relations. It’s about capitalists reclaiming part of what they paid initially in wages. It’s about how capitalists maximize Total Exploitation by manipulating exchange relations as well as production relations.”

To be clear, Marx is not using the technical sense of “exploitation” here, but the popular sense. However, the fact that the worker has “earned” a measure of value and that capitalists can wrest some of it away in various ways is exploitation and important and worthy of study.

Here, however, Rasmus digresses, reverting back to the price form in his explanation of secondary exploitation. He seems to assume, without elaboration, that systemic “taking advantage of workers” outside of the production process must be explained in terms of prices and not values. He also seems to believe that all means of secondary exploitation must be within the exchange nexus. And he seems to believe that all secondary exploitation must be systemic. It is not clear why these assumptions should be made.

These methodological questions, however, bear little relevance to his fresh and original insights on secondary exploitation. Rasmus presents five mechanisms for capital to “claw back” from the working people the variable capital captured by the class in the value-producing process: credit, monopolistic price gouging, wage theft, deferred or social wages, and taxes. Importantly, Rasmus connects much of this exploitation to the active intervention of the state on behalf of capital.

Credit: Allowing workers to acquire commodities through deferred payment is not a sympathetic act by the capitalist, but a method of furthering accumulation in an environment where demand is restricted by the inequalities of income and wealth. The capitalist extracts additional value from the worker through interest charges. Additional value is “swindled” from the worker through the credit mechanism. Rasmus points out that interest-bearing loans to working people have expanded from $10 trillion-plus in 2013 to $17 trillion-plus in 2024, with dramatically higher interest rates in the last few years.

Monopolistic price gouging: Rasmus is fully aware that when prices go up, they are the result of decisions by capitalists to secure more revenue– that action is not to benefit society, not to help the workers, but to secure more for investors. Insofar as they succeed, their gains are at the expense of workers– a form of secondary exploitation.

Our current run of inflation is the result of a cycle of price increases to capture more of the consumers’ (in the end, the workers’) value and to catch up with competitors. But the impression must not be left unchallenged that this price gouging is painlessly left to the capitalist at his or her whim or that it is without risk. The impression must not be left, as it was in the 1960s with Sweezy/Baran, Gillman, and others, that monopoly concentration meant a sharp decline in the power of competition to retard and even thwart monopoly power to do as it liked. That lesson was sharply brought home in the 1970s with humbling of the US big three automakers and the US electronics industry. Monopoly and competition play a dialectical role in disciplining price behavior around labor values.

Wage theft: While theft is not exploitation, when it is common, frequent, and rarely sanctioned, it resembles exploitation more than theft! Rasmus provides an impressible list of common ruses:

The methods [of wage theft] have included capitalists not paying the required minimum wage; not paying overtime wage rates as provided in Federal and state laws; not paying workers for the actual hours they work; paying them by the day or job instead of by the hour; forcing workers to pay their managers for a job; supervisors stealing workers’ cash tips; making illegal deductions from workers’ paychecks; deducting their pay for breaks they didn’t take or for damages to company goods; supervisors arranging pay ‘kickbacks’ for themselves from workers’ pay; firing workers and not paying them for their last day worked; failing to give proper 60-day notice of a plant closing and then not paying workers as required by law; denying workers access to guaranteed benefits like workers’ compensation when injured; refusing to make contributions to pension and health plans on behalf of workers and then pocketing the savings; and, not least, general payroll fraud.

Deferred or Social wages: Rasmus shows how the government mechanisms that are meant to socially meet needs are skewed to draw more from workers proportionally while benefiting them less proportionally. He has in mind retirement, health care, and welfare programs that politicians persistently demand more sacrifices from working people to fund, while restricting their ability to draw the benefits through various tests of eligibility.

Taxes: Rasmus reminds us that the dominant political forces espousing the “Neoliberal policy regime” have dramatically increased the tax burden on workers:

Since the advent of Neoliberalism, the total tax burden has shifted from capitalists, their corporations, businesses, and investors to working class families.

In the post-World War II era the payroll tax has more than doubled as a share of total federal tax revenues, to around 45% by 2020. During the same period, the share of taxes paid by corporations has fallen from more than 20% to less than 10%. The federal individual income tax as a percent of total federal government revenues has remained around 40-45%. However, within that 40-45%, another shift in the burden has been occurring—from capital incomes to earned wage incomes…

Not just Trump, but every president since 2001 the US capitalist State has been engaged in a massive tax cutting program mostly benefiting capital incomes. The total tax cuts have amounted to at least $17 trillion since 2001: Starting with George W. Bush’s 2001-03 tax cuts which cut taxes $3.8 trillion (80% of which accrued to Capital incomes), through Obama’s 2009 tax cuts and his extension of Bush’s cuts in 2008 for another two years and again for another 10 years in 2013 (all of which cost another $6 trillion), through Trump’s massive 2017 tax cuts that cost $4.5 trillion, and Biden’s 2021-22 tax legislation that added another $2 trillion at minimum—the US Capitalist state has reduced taxes by at least $17 trillion!

Reducing capital’s taxes, as a proportion of tax revenue, increases future national obligations– national debt– that will ultimately be paid by working-class taxes. Or, if that proves unfeasible, it will be met by a reduction of social spending, which reduces social benefits for workers. Either way, the working class faces secondary exploitation through ruling-class tax policy.

Interestingly, Rasmus acknowledges that the state plays a big role in what he deems “secondary exploitation.” Yet, he also suggests that the proper province of secondary exploitation is in the bounds of exchange relations. This seeming anomaly can be avoided if we understand the increasing role of the state in engaging, broadly speaking, in the arena of exchange, as well as regulation. It is precisely this profound and broad engagement that many twentieth-century Marxists explained as state-monopoly capitalism.

*****

Jack Rasmus’s contribution is most welcome because it argues that returning to the fundamentals– the concept of exploitation– can be a fruitful way of looking at contemporary capitalism. It establishes a firm material base for an anti-capitalist politics that addresses the interests of working people as a class, the broadest of classes.

Further, the theory of exploitation unites people as workers, but allows for the various ways and degrees of their exploitation. And it links the material interests of the protagonists in the class struggle to the many forms of social oppression and their contradictory interests in promoting or ending those oppressions: the capitalist sows oppressive divisions to gain exploitative advantage; the worker disavows oppressive divisions to achieve the unity necessary to defeat exploitation. That is, exploitation motivates the capitalist to divide people around nationality, race, sex, culture, social practices, and language. Ending exploitation motivates the worker to refuse these divisions.

In an age where capitalism owns a decided, powerful advantage because of the splintering of the left into numerous causes and where capitalism elevates individual identity to a place superseding class, the common goal of eliminating exploitation is a powerful unifying force.

Today’s left has too often interpreted anti-imperialism as simply the struggle for national sovereignty, rather than through the lens of exploitation. Consequently, the dynamics of class struggle within national borders is often missed.

Of course, for Lenin and his followers, an advanced stage of capitalism — monopoly capitalism — was the life form of imperialism. And its beating heart was exploitation.

The vital tool that Marx, Engels, and Lenin brought to the struggle for workers’ emancipation was the theory of exploitation.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est /Pro patria mori
(It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country”)

– Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est“

Yes, it seems fitting that I am writing these words on November 11, Veterans Day in the U.S. and Remembrance Day in Commonwealth countries, a day that began as Armistice Day to celebrate the ending of World War I, the “war to end all wars.”

That phrase has become a sardonic joke in the century that has followed as wars have piled up upon wars to create a permanent condition, and the censorship and propaganda that became acute with WW I have been exacerbated a hundredfold today. The number of dead soldiers and civilians in the century since numbs a mind intent on counting numbers, as courage, love, and innocence wails from skeletons sleeping deep in dirt everywhere. The minds of the living are ravished at the thought of so much death.

Almost a year ago I reviewed a film – Four Died Trying – about four American men who were assassinated by the U.S. government because they opposed the wars upon which their country had come to rely: President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. I wrote of this documentary film, directed by John Kirby and produced by Libby Handros, that it was powerful, riveting, and masterful, the opening 58 minute prologue to a film series meant to be released at intervals over a few years. This prologue was released at the end of 2023 to great applause.
I wrote of it:

Today we are living the consequences of the CIA/national security state’s 1960s takeover of the country. Their message then and now: We, the national security state, rule, we have the guns, the media, and the power to dominate you. We control the stories you are meant to hear. If you get uppity, well-known, and dare challenge us, we will buy you off, denigrate you, or, if neither works, we will kill you. You are helpless, they reiterate endlessly. Bang. Bang. Bang.

But they lie, and this series of films, beginning with its first installment, will tell you why. It will show why understanding the past is essential for transforming the present. It will profoundly inspire you to see and hear these four bold and courageous men refuse to back down to the evil forces that shot them down. It will open your eyes to the parallel spiritual paths they walked and the similarity of the messages they talked about – peace, justice, racism, colonialism, human rights, and the need for economic equality – not just in the U.S.A. but across the world, for the fate of all people was then, and is now, linked to the need to transform the U.S. warfare state into a country of peace and human reconciliation, just as these four men radically underwent deep transformations in the last year of their brief lives.

This 58 minute prologue touches on many of themes that will follow in the months ahead. Season One will be divided into chapters that cover the four assassinations together with background material covering “the world as it was” in the 1950s with its Cold War propaganda, McCarthyism, the rise of the military-industrial complex, the CIA, red-baiting, and the ever present fear of nuclear war. Season Two will be devoted to the government and media coverups, citizen investigations, and the intelligence agencies’ and their media mouthpieces’ mind control operations aimed at the American people that continue today.

Then in March of this year I wrote about the second film in the series, The World As It Was, that explores the very disturbing history of the 1950s in the U.S.A., a decade that lay the foundation of fear upon which the horrors of the 1960s were built, and from which we now are reaping the flowers of evil that have sprung up everywhere we look because the evils of those decades have never been adequately addressed.

But I was hopeful that if enough people got see to see these illuminating and brilliantly done films, built on more than one hundred and twenty interviews over six years with key historical figures, including many family members of the four men, change was possible because more people would demand accountability. That the movies were also entertaining, despite their profoundly serious content, boded well for their reaching a wide audience.

Just recently, I was again asked by the filmmakers, as were others, to preview the third film, Jack Joins the Revolution, about John F. Kennedy, from his youth to the hope he inspired when he entered politics in 1947 until his death on November 22, 1963 and the shock and despair that overtook the nation and the world. This third film matched the brilliance of the first two, but I did wonder why there had been a lapse of more than six months between this one and the previous.

It seemed to me that this was the perfect time for these films to be released in quick succession to have a profound effect.

But having watched this third film, I discovered to my great surprise that it has not been released, nor, even more shockingly, has the second one that I previewed eight months ago. Why?  I do not know, but it is very odd, to put it mildly. I do know that by not releasing them now a significant opportunity is being lost. These films would be of great help to the country, because they depict what a truly populist presidency looks like and the malign forces that oppose him.  But alas, for reasons that are hard to fathom, the films are being suppressed by someone.  We can only hope that the filmmakers will be successful in their efforts to free the films in time for them to be of value at this crucial moment in our history.

It is well known that JFK was a naval war hero in WW II, but less well known that his war experience turned him fiercely against war, that to end all wars was a fundamental theme of his for the rest of his life.

Jack Joins the Revolution explores this and reminds the viewer that Kennedy was well acquainted with death, having almost died eight times before he was assassinated, something he knew was coming. He was courageous in the extreme. Thus my earlier reference to Veterans Day, for JFK was a veteran of exceptional courage who not only saved his comrades when their PT boat was sunk by the Japanese in the south Pacific, but tried to the end to save his country and the world from the madness of the endless wars that have followed his death at the hands of the CIA and the U.S. warfare state.

This film clearly shows why he became such an obstacle to the imperial war machine and the CIA that to this very day have a huge stake in suppressing the truth about the man. If the film (and the others) is not released, these forces will have been successful. It will be another posthumous assassination.

For what is most striking about this episode is the light it sheds on John Kennedy’s forceful, long-standing anti-colonial and anti-imperial convictions for which he was attacked by politicians of both parties. It is suggested, and I think rightly, that this grew out of his Irish roots, for Ireland’s long fight for independence from British colonial occupation was dear to his heart and also a fundamental inspiration in the following decades for anti-colonial freedom fighters everywhere. It still is.

To listen to the film’s clips of his speeches on these topics is a revelation for those unfamiliar, not only with his radical views for a politician, but to his passionate eloquence that is sorely missing today. Attacking the policies of support for dictators and the coups against foreign leaders under the Eisenhower administration and the CIA led by Allen Dulles, JFK called for freedom and independence for people’s everywhere and the end of colonialism supported by the U.S. and other nations. Algeria, Iran, Cuba, Latin America, Africa – it’s a long list.

Even before he became president, in 1957, then Senator Kennedy gave a speech in the U.S. Senate that sent shock waves throughout Washington, D.C. and around the world. He came out in support of Algerian independence from France and African liberation generally, and against colonial imperialism.

As chair of the Senate’s African Subcommittee in 1959, he urged sympathy for African and Asian independence movements as part of American foreign policy. He believed that continued support of colonial policies would only end in more bloodshed because the voices of independence would not be denied, nor should they be.

That speech caused an international uproar, and in the U.S.A. Kennedy was harshly criticized by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even members of the Democratic party, such as Adlai Stevenson and Dean Acheson. But it was applauded in Africa and the Third World.

Yet JFK continued throughout his 1960 presidential campaign to raise his voice against colonialism throughout the world and for free and independent African nations. Such views were anathema to the foreign policy establishment, including the CIA and the burgeoning military industrial complex that President Eisenhower belatedly warned against in his Farewell Address, delivered nine months after approving the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in March 1960; this juxtaposition revealed the hold the Pentagon and CIA had and has on sitting presidents, as the pressure for war became structurally systematized and Kennedy was removed through a public execution for al the world to see.

Many voices speak to this and other issues in the film: Oliver Stone, James W. Douglass, RFK, Jr., Robert Dallek, Monica Wiesak, his niece Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Peter Dale Scott, James Galbraith, his nephew Stephen Smith, David Talbot, Peter Janney, and others.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaks about the 1953 U.S. coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossaddegh of Iran and of the approximately 72 CIA-led known coups the United States engineered between 1947 and 1989; author Stephen Schlesinger of the Dulles brothers’ work for the United Fruit Company and their subsequent involvement in the 1954 coup d’état against the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz who was instituting land reform that threatened United Fruit’s hold on so much of the country. In both cases, and many others, the U.S. supported vicious dictators and decades of terrible bloodshed and civil wars. We see a clip of JFK himself condemn the U.S. support of the Cuban dictator Batista, who was finally overthrow by Fidel Castro and his rebel compatriots, the Cuban Revolution that Kennedy understood and sympathized with.

All this just leading up to Kennedy’s presidency, which will be covered in the next film.

Watching this riveting documentary, one cannot but be deeply impressed with a side of John Kennedy few know – his hatred of oppression, colonialism, imperialism, war, and his love of freedom for all people. One comes away from the film knowing full well why the CIA had branded him an arch-enemy even before he took office, and then when in office he rattled their cage so much more in the cause of peace.

And one is left asking: why then has this film (and its predecessor about the right-wing witch hunt and crackdown on dissent in the 1950s) not been released to the public at a time when nothing could be more timely?

It is a very strange kind of executive action, considering the brilliance and importance of these films for today – this very moment in history.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

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Maylia Sotelo arrived in a black Cadillac. It pulled down an alley by the Fox River, which cuts through the city of Green Bay, Wisconsin. On that Tuesday evening in November 2022, she stepped out of a rear door and into another car. Maylia was 15 years old and slight, with a soft, girlish face and large, upturned eyes. For $50, she sold a man five “blues,” round pills stamped with “M30” that passed for Percocet. Narcotics investigators from the Brown County Drug Task Force were listening over a wire and, within minutes, their informant turned over his buy. Like every fake Percocet the task force seized that year, the pills were actually fentanyl. The officers, though, decided to let Maylia leave.

Maylia was comfortable around the business of drugs. Her childhood home had been a hangout for users and dealers; hollowed-out pens littered the floors, and strange men let themselves in at all hours. She had grown up with three older sisters, who had all been kicked out or left because of their mother’s violence. It fell to Maylia to protect Maliasyn, two years younger, from their mom’s unpredictable delusions. She would lose herself in uppers and opioids, start yelling out of nowhere or cry uncontrollably. Sometimes, she locked the girls in the house for days.

Before Maylia sold blues, she sold weed. She had been smoking since fifth grade. The first time she tried weed, she found herself laughing at nothing. “Why would I sit here being sad and sober when I can be high and happy?” she thought. She hated staying home, so after class, she took Maliasyn to a trap house where teens smoked blunts on the first floor and adults met in the bedrooms upstairs. The guys there, a couple of years older, were dropping out of school to sell weed. When Maylia was 13, she started dealing, too, because everyone was doing it.

By the start of her sophomore year at West High School, blues had overtaken bud in popularity. Across the city, boys blared songs about popping percs (“Yeah, just popped a 30, yeah, a 30 / It could change your life or it could ruin it, that’s the dirty”), and blue circle emojis with an “M” dominated Snapchat and Facebook. Maylia didn’t use percs. Like everyone at West, she knew they were fake, but nobody talked about what that meant. Instead of the oxycodone in Percocet, the pills contained filler and fentanyl, an opioid 50 times stronger than heroin.

Two days after the drug task force confirmed that Maylia was selling fentanyl, she arranged through a friend to buy a bulk order of blues from a man she’d never met. The city was facing a dry spell, so instead of her typical hundred-pill order from her usual source, she asked the man for a thousand. When her friend delivered the percs, she poured them onto a tray in her lap and pushed each chalky pill with a key, counting them one by one. She texted her customers: “Back in motion.” The next day, she caught a ride to an apartment complex and sold a pill to a teenager named Jack McDonough.

Early the following week, Maylia told Maliasyn that she’d be home soon, put on her “Sesame Street” slides and settled into the passenger seat of a friend’s Audi Q5. He drove her to Culver’s for a strawberry milkshake and then to Taco Bell for a sale. When they parked, lights flashed in the rearview mirror. Drug task force agents in unmarked cars rushed in and Maylia was handcuffed. “I don’t think you can do that,” she said quietly, as an officer went to pat her down. “I’m a minor.”

Agents took Maylia to a juvenile detention center in Fond du Lac, an hour south of Green Bay, and booked her on drug charges. Since she had no criminal history, the prosecutor and a county caseworker began negotiating with Maylia’s attorney. They presented a consent decree, the juvenile justice equivalent of a deferred prosecution agreement, which proposed that Maylia could be released to her father, whom she barely knew, placed on an ankle monitor, and required to satisfy certain conditions, like attending therapy or substance abuse counseling. If Maylia complied for six months, her charges could be dropped. After Christmas, while her dad was preparing his home, the county moved her into the less restrictive setting of shelter care, a coed house for kids.

In early January, a month after the arrest, a police officer arrived looking for Maylia. She was in the shower, getting ready for a hearing where she expected to be let out. Instead of taking her to court, the officer drove her to jail. There, he told her that she was under arrest for first-degree reckless homicide. Jack McDonough had died of an overdose.

Maylia would be the first juvenile in Wisconsin charged with homicide for providing the fentanyl that led to a death. In a country flooded with the drug, at a time when teens were dying from opioids at record rates, far outpacing plans to help them, she would be treated as an adult by a justice system that has no clear guidelines for how to handle the kids who are selling.

Jack McDonough first tried blues a year earlier, at the age of 17. With his girlfriend, he learned to crush the pill on a swatch of tinfoil, run a lighter underneath it and inhale the smoke through a straw. Calm blanketed them, muting their anxiety. Sometimes, it triggered a surge of confidence, a feeling that anything was doable. More often, it let them drift into nothingness, a fuzzy space between wakefulness and sleep. “We thought we were doing Percocets,” his girlfriend told me. “I didn’t even really know what a perc was.” At first, they smoked the pills a few times each week, sitting in Jack’s car between classes at Southwest High. Within a couple months, they needed one a day or they’d be sick — vomiting, legs shaking, unable to sleep. “I told Jack that I’m pretty sure it’s not even real percs, I’m pretty sure it’s fentanyl, and he was like, ‘What? No. I’m not doing fentanyl.’”

Until recently, opioids almost exclusively claimed the lives of adults. Since COVID-19 began, though, the rate of overdose deaths among teenagers has rocketed, more than doubling in three years. It’s not that more teens are using drugs, but that fentanyl has made the supply deadlier than ever. Many know or discover that the pills on the street are tainted but don’t want to stop — until they can’t. In a matter of weeks or a couple of months, they’ve become addicted. Today, over 300,000 kids under 18 are estimated to have an opioid-use disorder.

As fentanyl has rapidly entered the world of adolescents, the major institutions that touch teens’ lives have been unprepared to manage the fallout. Few doctors are offering the recommended medication, most schools are ill-equipped to help, and the justice system is treating children as criminals. Parents don’t know what to look for: the straws, the ash marks, the weight loss, the nausea of withdrawals. Teens are on their own. With nowhere to turn, each week, 22 high-school-aged kids — a classroom’s worth — are dying from overdose.

Jack’s parents had separated when he was an infant, and he’d grown up with his mom, Carrie, who owned a small house in De Pere, a suburb of Green Bay, and worked in sales at a truck maintenance supply company. He saw his father on weekends and holidays and in the summer. Carrie is warm and effusive, a self-labeled “helicopter parent,” with a deadpan sense of humor. Jack preferred body comedy, jump-scaring anyone he could. If he wanted to learn karate, Carrie booked him classes; if he wanted to swim with friends, she drove them to the water park. Together, the two worked out, volunteered to walk rescue dogs, went shopping, talked through plays he could run on his basketball team. After Carrie remarried when Jack was 11, he continued to confide in her about his insecurities and offered updates on his various crushes.

By high school, Jack was a gangly 6 foot 3, and he preferred duck hunting to sitting in class. At Southwest, 4 miles from Maylia’s school, he kept falling behind. He had trouble believing in himself: He told his mom he thought he was too slow. She would stay up late helping him with homework or she’d do it for him when he gave up. With his friend Mason, he liked to break down old cars just to fix them back up. The two clicked “like Buzz and Woody,” Mason told me. They would wrestle in public, but “behind closed doors, he was like a teddy bear.”

The winter he started smoking percs, Jack cut out most of his friends. In early 2022, he began buying from a young dealer who went by Speakers, and soon he was introduced to other teens who were selling. Within a couple months, he dropped 15 pounds. Carrie worried he was bulimic. She would press her ear against the bathroom door, listening for hints of purging. He’d always been sweet and respectful, but that semester, he started disobeying her, becoming hostile out of nowhere. On weekends, he racked up speeding tickets and broke curfew; Carrie and her husband, Ryan, clamped a wheel lock on his car. On weekdays, he retreated to his room after school and went to bed at sundown. Carrie had no idea, but he often video-chatted with his girlfriend so the two could smoke percs at the same time.

Carrie booked him a therapy appointment, but the first slot she could get was a few months out. She told his school counselor that she thought he was using drugs but says she was brushed off. Carrie couldn’t prove anything — the drug tests she randomly gave Jack kept coming back negative. Others, though, knew what was going on. A classmate texted saying that he had lost two friends and didn’t want to see Jack die, too. “1 perk can’t kill you lmao, you’d have to smoke like 10 perks to even think abt overdosing,” Jack replied. “It just gets you high, for like an hour.” Mason also worried, and he sometimes probed Jack, who swung from denial to regret. “He knew he was addicted,” Mason said. “He knew it was hurting the people around him. He also knew he couldn’t stop on his own.”

In April of 2022, Carrie got a call from Tracy Liska, a police officer assigned to Southwest. Jack had been caught going door to door, pretending to fundraise for St. John’s Homeless Shelter — a place Maylia’s mom sometimes stayed. Liska had heard rumors that kids at school were using fake Percocet, which she knew was probably fentanyl, but she couldn’t search them unless she had reason to believe they had pills on them. Jack was “attached at the hip” to his girlfriend, “so in love,” Liska told me, and kids said she was using. When Carrie arrived at her office, stammering that something wasn’t right with Jack, Liska told her that a classmate was calling him a “perkhead.” Back home, Carrie took Jack’s phone and started scrolling. She found streams of texts setting up deals to buy “erks” and photos and videos of Jack smoking them.

Carrie didn’t know that the gold-standard treatment for teens addicted to opioids is buprenorphine, a long-acting opioid that strips away withdrawal symptoms and cravings and protects against overdose. Each year, on average, only 372 kids between the ages of 12 and 17 are getting the drug, according to the best national data. Most pediatricians aren’t trained in addiction and don’t feel comfortable prescribing the medication, and many clinics are afraid of the liability that comes with treating minors. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that only 39 rehabs in the country offer buprenorphine to those under 18. Carrie called the most comprehensive national resource hotline in the country, run by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; it pointed her to Libertas, one of the only centers for adolescents in Green Bay. But when she reached Libertas, which doesn’t offer buprenorphine to kids, it had closed its inpatient program for teens.

After five days of calls to every rehab she could find, Carrie heard back from a residential facility in Minnesota, a Hazelden Betty Ford clinic. For the first time, it seemed like she’d found a solution. Before Jack left home, he wrote to his girlfriend’s mom to say that her daughter needed help. “We chose the wrong road to walk, and it is worse than I thought,” he texted. “I need you to make sure you keep her away from these kinds of drugs no matter what the case is. I can’t lose her to addiction, she is going to tell you that she hates you and tell you things to make you feel terrible about yourself and your job as a parent. But what I feel for her is real love and I wouldn’t be saying this if I didn’t care.” To his mom, he scribbled, “I’m trying to do better to be a better son. I hope you can forgive me for everything.”

The same spring that Jack entered rehab, Maylia was introduced to blues by her older sister Marianna. Since leaving home at the age of 13, Marianna had been bouncing between relatives and a boyfriend, between a local shelter and the back seat of a car. She’d sold weed to support herself, and then she’d leveled up to percs. She’d climbed so high that some considered her Green Bay’s biggest dealer.

Maylia was captivated by her sister — she was “self-made and self-paid.” Marianna could buy at $3 a pill and sell at $20. At 18, she owned a midnight blue Mercedes Benz and an apartment on Imperial Lane, the main stretch in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. She had decorated it with silver-studded couches and filled it with a collection of Nike sneakers and Louis Vuitton purses. With their mom caught up in her own addiction, Marianna took the girls in. Often, when she crisscrossed the city selling, Maylia sat shotgun, looking out for cops. She took photos of her sister, draped in long, neon-orange wigs, smirking next to 4-foot stacks of cash. Sometimes, they flashed fans of bills together.

In August of 2022, Marianna was arrested for dealing fentanyl and held in Brown County Jail. Maylia and Maliasyn went to stay with their grandmother, a manager at Family Dollar, who they said rarely stocked the kitchen. Soon, Maylia’s phone would not stop ringing. Marianna’s clients were asking if she had any idea where they could buy blues. “Money kept calling,” Maylia said. “It was calling me.”

Through Marianna’s contacts, Maylia bought a hundred pills for $500. She could double her money in a day. In the mornings before school, she tucked a handful of pills in her panties and another handful in her purse. Customers came to her. The 19-year-olds told the 18-year-olds, who told the 17-year-olds, and then the kids she had known as infants. Maylia was a good student with a quiet, observant demeanor. She didn’t like to sell on campus. Sometimes, classmates begged. The stink, like burnt popcorn, hung in the girls’ bathroom. Kids walked the hallways scratching their faces.

The only experience Maylia enjoyed more than smoking weed was surprising Maliasyn with a gift and seeing the look on her face. “Sometimes, I just wished that everything, everybody around us, would disappear, and it could just be me and my sister,” she said. Maylia hid packets of ramen and goldfish and hot Cheetos around their bedroom; she bought Maliasyn pink low-top Nike Dunks and brought home a PlayStation a customer had traded for blues. She promised she’d stop selling once she’d saved $3,000 for a car, which she couldn’t yet buy because she wasn’t old enough to drive. Maliaysn reminded her to be smooth and slow down. Instead, she kept going. “Her name was ringing in the streets,” a competing dealer told me. Maylia loved being one of the only girls in the game. For as long as she could remember, people had called her Princess. Now they called her Hollywood, for her big curly wigs, thick feline lashes and how little interest she showed in the kids at school.

Maylia knew that people were overdosing, but she didn’t realize that a tiny amount of fentanyl could kill: 2 milligrams, which, if poured on a penny, would only cover Abraham Lincoln’s ear. On Dec. 1, 2022, just after the informant bought from Maylia, a customer told her that his girlfriend died from pills and he didn’t want to use anymore. Maylia sent her condolences, adding: “im glad you thinkin smarter.” Two days later, she saw Jack’s girlfriend’s Facebook story announcing that Jack had died. She’d hung out with his girlfriend once and messaged right away. “I’m so sorry for your loss mami keep your head up ,” she wrote. “Can I asked what happened?”

Jack had returned to Green Bay that fall. He’d spent 24 days at Hazelden, where he told staff that he didn’t have a problem. This wasn’t unusual. Jack’s counselor attributed his resistance to “significant shame and fear” and predicted that Jack would open up. He never did. The counselor noted in his file that Jack had a moderate Percocet disorder but made no mention of fentanyl. Nor did a doctor prescribe buprenorphine or explain the importance of the medication to Carrie. (Though Hazelden was given a medical release form, a spokesperson said it would not comment on Jack’s care for confidentiality reasons.)

In May, Jack was discharged to his dad, who had moved to Arizona. Carrie begged him to stay there and start over, but once Jack turned 18, he came back, moving in with his grandparents. Mason saw Jack once, in late November, and he could tell that he was still using. He told Jack he wouldn’t speak to him until he stopped.

On Dec. 2, Jack went to his girlfriend’s house and logged into her Facebook. He ordered a pill from Maylia. It was the first time he had bought from her. At 9 p.m., he took an Uber home, changed into his pajamas and kissed his grandmother goodnight. “Mmm you should smoke wimme mamita ,” he texted his girlfriend hours later. The next morning, when his grandparents couldn’t open his bedroom door, they called the police. Officers found him sitting cross-legged in bed, unresponsive.

It wasn’t until Carrie arrived at her parents’ house that morning that she realized Jack was using fentanyl. She had always thought he was smoking real Percocet, which was terrifying enough. But as she tried to keep breathing, she noticed that the officers weren’t touching Jack’s belongings, as if any contact could kill. She had no idea that all the fake Percocet in town now contained fentanyl. Tracy Liska, the police officer at Southwest, hadn’t told her. (Liska says she must have mentioned fentanyl, though she didn’t note this in her reports.) The Drug Enforcement Administration was claiming that 60% of all fentanyl-laced pills it analyzed were potentially lethal, but the person on the federal government hotline hadn’t warned her, either. Hazelden hadn’t tested Jack’s urine for fentanyl or told Carrie that Percocet bought on the street was often contaminated with the drug. “You think you’ve talked to the police, doctors, teachers,” she said. “I didn’t fathom that it would be fentanyl.”

Aaron Hanson, the De Pere detective assigned to investigate Jack’s death, was the first person in a position of authority who seemed to care about Jack and want to do something for him. He checked in often, keeping Carrie apprised of what he was uncovering. After Jack’s autopsy confirmed that the cause of death was fentanyl intoxication, Hanson told her that the state would be pursuing a homicide charge. The term “homicide” didn’t seem to fit — she pictured a person shooting a gun or wielding a knife — but she was relieved to hear that a dealer would be taken off the streets. In early January of 2023, Hanson let her know that the seller was a 15-year-old girl. She would be charged as an adult. Carrie had imagined an older man with clout, maybe a warehouse full of drugs. “How could this happen? Any of it?” she wondered. She also thought, “Put her away.”

Over the past 15 years, as the number of opioid overdoses has risen sharply, leaders in law enforcement have promoted homicide charges as a key component of the nation’s response. The goal, they say, is to send a message that dealing drugs comes with great risk. Prosecutions have soared in the 30 states with the statutes on the books. Wisconsin is one of the most aggressive. Its counties filed nearly 400 cases between 2019 and 2023. The charges often attach to friends or relatives or partners who use with the person who overdosed rather than people who deal in any significant quantity. Even when the charges fall on habitual drug sellers, they rarely reach high-level operators. With each step up the distribution ladder, causation is tougher to prove, so the typical investigation ends with the person who delivered the drugs. These sellers, like Maylia, tend to have no control over whether the pills are cut with fentanyl or, if they are, whether it’s a fatal dose.

When the person who provides the drug is a teen and the charge is homicide, most states allow or require the accused to be treated as an adult. These laws are a legacy of the 1990s tough-on-crime era, when criminologists and politicians warned of “super-predators” and an imminent “bloodbath” from teen violence. The prediction never materialized, but almost every state passed laws that made it easier to transfer minors into the adult system. In at least 31 states, a child charged with certain serious crimes, like rape or homicide, must be tried in adult criminal court, according to recent research by Juvenile Law Center. Eight additional states allow prosecutors to choose whether to file in juvenile or criminal court. (In some, like Wisconsin, defendants can request to be tried in the juvenile system.) In 2019, the last year for which there is data, an estimated 53,000 juveniles were charged in adult criminal courts because judges, prosecutors or state law transferred them there.

Once the homicide charge was filed against Maylia, under the law, she morphed from dealer to killer, then from juvenile to adult. In Wisconsin, anyone older than 9 charged with homicide — whether it’s violent or drug-induced — is automatically sent to adult criminal court. When the officer picked up Maylia at shelter care with a warrant for her arrest, he drove her to Brown County Jail.

“This is big-boy jail,” Maylia thought as she walked into the booking room, where adults sat on benches. It’s where Marianna was. Brown County Jail had no designated area for girls, so Maylia was led down a dark hallway into an adult section, where men in orange jumpsuits were housed. There, she was held in a separate cell with another girl. Instead of the board game marathons, arts and crafts afternoons and school days she’d grown used to in juvenile detention, Maylia got a deck of cards, permission to walk laps, and an hour or two of classes.

In February of 2023, Trisha Fritz, the attorney assigned to Maylia by the public defenders’ office, asked the judge to move the homicide case to juvenile court. She knew chances were slim, but in criminal court, Maylia would be subject to the same sentencing guidelines as adults, which are focused on retribution and deterrence; she could face up to 40 years in prison. The goal of most juvenile courts, by contrast, is to balance public safety with rehabilitation and the best interests of the child. In a juvenile correctional facility, teens get clinical counseling, skills classes, education and, through their participation, the chance to earn their return to the community.

The juvenile system is notoriously erratic, but there’s little question that a judge there would take into account the circumstances of Maylia’s childhood and whether child protective services had intervened. Before Maylia turned 1, CPS documented that her mother overdosed on cocaine and Adderall with seven children in her home. When she was 5, a caller told the agency that Maylia’s mom was “high as a kite” and her boyfriend was violent. The next year, a mandated reporter alerted CPS that there was “absolutely no food in the home” and that the kids witnessed their mother using heroin. When she was 7, there was a substantiated finding that a man “opened his pants, pulled out his penis and masturbated” in front of one of Maylia’s sisters. That same year, a woman overdosed on crack in the house; a social worker wrote that Maylia’s mom “would not call rescue or the police because [she] did not want her children removed.” An elementary school employee reported that Maylia missed half the school year. After Maylia turned 8, CPS noted that her mom allegedly started hitting her.

When social workers came to the front door, Maylia’s mom ignored them. She told the girls to lay down and be quiet. When the agency called, she let the phone ring to voicemail. (Maylia’s mom could not be reached for comment.) During Maylia’s childhood, 20 referrals were made to CPS. The agency’s policy directed staff to note when they tried to make contact with a parent, but there was no requirement to do anything more. CPS could only identify a “maltreater” if staff interviewed that person or found other evidence, like a police report. Workers kept noting that Maylia’s mom had “referrals in all areas of child protection; sexual abuse to her children allegations, neglect, homelessness, drinking, drug history, relationship issues,” but she refused to meet with them. Going no further, staff closed case after case.

When Maylia was 14, child protection workers saw that her mother was hallucinating, revealing a “detachment from reality,” and they decided that the girls should no longer be under her care. The agency, though, offered no assistance with counseling or school. Maylia and Maliasyn began shuttling between the homes of their older sisters and their grandmother. Imani Hollie, a former Brown County public defender who represented Maylia when CPS finally got involved, told me that she’d seen the agency fail to protect kids in all sorts of extreme situations, but Maylia’s case stood out. Social workers had ignored her needs since she was an infant, and when the state did act, it sent her directly to criminal court. “Everyone,” Hollie said, “wanted to back away and treat her as an adult, rather than, ‘This is a child who is in the system, who has lived through horrendous allegations, and who went 14 years without any intervention.’”

As Fritz was preparing for a hearing on moving Maylia’s homicide case to juvenile court, she was struck by two pages in the narcotics investigation report. The Brown County Drug Task Force had learned that Maylia was selling fentanyl three days before she sold to Jack, but they didn’t arrest her. They could have requested a search warrant for her phone. They could have continued surveilling her or notified child protective services. They could have brought her in for dealing. Why, instead, did they let a minor continue handling a potentially lethal substance?

The drug task force, like most law enforcement agencies, has no internal guidelines governing interactions with suspects under the age of 18. In a series of cases referred to as the Miller trilogy, named after the 2012 Miller v. Alabama decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that children are different in the eyes of the law. Relying on brain science and psychological research, it found that children “have limited ‘control over their own environment’ and lack the ability to extricate themselves from horrific, crime-producing settings.” They are more impulsive, more easily pressured, less capable of assessing consequences and more capable of change than adults. These rulings have led the country through major reforms in the juvenile justice system, particularly when it comes to sentencing. But they have not led to much change in law enforcement.

Nicholas Ronsman, who was 27 and a first-year narcotics investigator on the drug task force, had no issue treating a 15-year-old as he would an adult. He learned about Maylia when he asked an informant for a list of dealers along with their prices for blues; whoever charged the least, he reasoned, had the largest supply. The informant knew the girl by her Facebook name, and she was offering the best prices. Ronsman passed her profile page to an intel analyst, who found that it belonged to Maylia. “At first I was like, ‘She’s 15, she can’t be that big of a player,’” Ronsman told me. “But then I look at her family, her sister Marianna.”

Ronsman had worked Marianna’s case. His team had confiscated $11,329 and about 8,400 fake Percocet pills at her grandmother’s place while Maylia and Maliasyn were there. (Soon after, they seized $27,200 more from another apartment.) The drug task force has a protocol to report to CPS whenever they encounter minors who are living in a house with narcotics, but the officers never did. (“We were not aware of any kids in the house,” Matthew Ronk, the director of the task force, told me. Probation agents found the drugs, so when they called for task force assistance, he said, his officers saw no need to do their own room-to-room search.) By the time Maylia’s name came to Ronsman, she was no longer just a child deserving of safety but a suspect. “We figured, ‘Hey, she probably learned from her sister, she’s got to learn from somewhere.’ So that was my mindset: She’s 15, but she’s got connections, she probably might be a legitimate, larger target.”

Once the informant completed the buy, Ronsman believed that if he arrested Maylia, a juvenile intake worker would likely release her and she’d go back to selling. “The goal of juvenile justice isn’t to put juveniles in prison, which it shouldn’t be. It’s obviously to get them help,” he told me. “So, from my experience with selling a controlled substance, they would have let her out.” As a narcotics investigator, he is a mandatory reporter, but he didn’t think connecting her with social workers was the answer, either. “If I called CPS and they go talk to her, and she says, ‘No, I’m not selling fentanyl, blah blah blah,’ would that do anything? Who knows? Also, it would have interfered with any investigation.”

In the summer of 2023, six months after Maylia’s arrest, she was shuttled from jail to Brown County Circuit Court for her transfer hearing. Carrie sat in the gallery with Ryan and her parents. Ronsman took the stand. He testified that in a shoebox in Maylia’s bedroom, his team had found 775 pills and $3,976. He said he had gone through Maylia’s text messages and found that the average age of the customers he could identify was 18. When Wendy Lemkuil, the prosecutor, asked if Maylia was the largest known fentanyl dealer in Brown County schools, he said that she was.

Fritz cross-examined him. Ronsman had documented two instances in which Maylia had sold at West High School. “Yeah,” he said. She wanted to know how he would explain his decision to do nothing when he first discovered that Maylia was selling.

“So, fentanyl is dangerous?” she asked Ronsman in court.

“Correct,” he said.

“And the drug task force had information that Ms. Sotelo sold five fentanyl pills to somebody Nov. 29 of 2022, correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“And did not arrest her?”

“That’s correct.”

“Why?”

“It’s our common policy and procedure in the Brown County Drug Task Force to build a case, to show that there is a habit of selling drugs and that they just didn’t sell drugs one time.”

At first, Carrie thought she must have misheard. She noticed her body shaking, and Ronsman’s low-pitched voice — “build a case” — repeated in her head. She couldn’t comprehend that the officers knew Maylia was selling fentanyl days before Jack died and did not arrest her. The police department had been the first institution that appeared to believe that Jack’s life mattered. Jack’s school counselor had dismissed Carrie’s concerns, the local clinics were no help, the staff at Hazelden hadn’t provided guidance. The police had made it seem like this investigation was for Jack. Now she realized that he didn’t mean anything to the officers: He wasn’t a person to them but a piece of evidence to be used against Maylia.

After each hearing, Maylia turned on the news and watched herself in handcuffs. The anchors parroted the prosecutor’s language, calling her “the largest dealer of fentanyl in Brown County schools.” She wasn’t the largest — she knew bigger — and she hated any insinuation that she was malicious or uncaring. Still, she started to grasp how she came across to others. Maylia had never paid attention to the news before, and now she kept seeing segments on fentanyl, hearing there was an epidemic. She had assumed that only a mixture of many drugs could kill, but kids were dying from a single fake Percocet. “Before, it was like, ‘I’m doing drugs, they’re doing drugs, everybody does drugs,’” she told me.

Often, Maylia spoke about herself as if she were split in two. There was a former Maylia, who was rash and inattentive, and a present Maylia, who had insight. The first Maylia, as she saw it, had been so self-deluded or naive that she let herself believe that she wasn’t causing harm: Her buyers would find percs even if she wasn’t the one selling. She started off thinking she was helping Maliasyn and was soon seduced by the money. “I thought for a long time that the way out of this labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small self-sufficient world in a back corner,” she wrote in her journal. That version of Maylia hadn’t even considered the consequences for Marianna. “I don’t know why it didn’t click for me that she’d just got indicted,” she told me.

When the former Maylia got to jail, she blamed everyone around her. Her mother, who left her to fend for herself. The customer who snitched. Even Jack, who came back to Green Bay and decided to use. She couldn’t understand why he kept smoking percs after he’d had the chance to get sober. Maylia couldn’t blame Marianna — they carried the same unspoken memories, like veterans from the same squad. Each day on her way to class, Maylia passed Marianna, who was waiting in her cell. Behind glass, she curled her fingers into a heart and mouthed, “I miss you.” Maylia marveled at how pretty she looked.

The other Maylia, the one in the present, blamed herself and felt disgusted. When the judge quickly rejected her request to move the homicide case to juvenile court, she accepted that she would be going to prison, but she no longer saw herself as a victim. After Marianna was sentenced to eight years in federal prison, Maylia wasn’t outraged, either. It was a long time, she thought, but it could have been worse. She rarely brought up the violence in her home, and when she talked about it at all, she downplayed it. Her mom didn’t “strangle” Marianna, she just “grabbed her by the neck.” Her sisters always said that their mother was an addict, and while she didn’t think that was wrong, she hated when they said it. “She was just — she didn’t know how to be a mother.” Maylia wrote in her journal that while her upbringing had affected her decision-making, she could determine her own future. “I contributed to creating my current experience,” she wrote. “I can now make conscious choices which will bring the changes I want!”

Part of this shift came from reading; for the first time in her life, she could count on three meals a day, which allowed her to relax. She was attending Bible study and devouring books — Joyce Meyer’s “Battlefield of the Mind,” Oprah Winfrey’s “What Happened to You?” At night, she took notes on trauma’s effects on the brain and how to break a “generational curse.”

It was the stories of fellow inmates that transformed her perspective on addiction. She had always tried to keep distance from her customers, but in jail, many were incarcerated with her. She watched one teenager beg her mother to allow her back into her home — the pitch of her voice rising, banging the phone around, yelling she’d stop using — and get nowhere. She’d hear adults say that the first thing they planned to do when they got out was get high. She had previously thought that using was a choice; now she understood that the opioids were in control. She watched a 17-year-old girl try to sleep through withdrawals, too weak to stand to shower, peeing herself. Another had been found facedown in a snowbank, near dead. Often, she thought about Jack and how she wished she could tell him what she’d seen and what she’d learned. She hated that she had fed her customers’ darkest impulses. Many had childhoods similar to hers: parents with addiction, abuse in the home, the shame of abandonment. “They just took a different way out.”

In the 15 years before Maylia’s case, only one juvenile in Wisconsin had been charged in criminal court with drug-induced homicide — in that instance, the drug was heroin. Once the district attorney in Brown County charged Maylia, though, prosecutors across the state began to do the same. In Fond du Lac, after an 18-year-old overdosed on fentanyl, the district attorney brought homicide charges against three boys under 18, all in the adult system. (Two pleaded no contest, and the third is trying to raise money for a lawyer to represent him at trial.) In Rock County, south of Madison, a 15-year-old was charged in criminal court. He admitted to a detective that he delivered two percs to a boy who later died from fentanyl intoxication. The detective showed up at his house after a school police officer noticed him crying. “It’s all my fucking — it’s all my fault,” he told the officer. “I wish I would have never done that.” He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 19 months in prison.

It’s impossible to know how many teens in the country are being charged with drug-induced homicide. There is no national database, many states do not aggregate cases, and when prosecutors file in juvenile court, the records are sealed. As a result, there’s been almost no scrutiny of how these laws are used against kids, said Katie McCreedy, a Northeastern University doctoral researcher who studies these charges. “How can young people in media stories be simultaneously assumed to know nothing about how deadly the drugs are and also held accountable for homicide?”

Both drug-induced homicide charges and transfer laws have been presented as tools to deter crime, but there’s no clear evidence that either work. In fact, many scholars argue that drug-induced homicide prosecutions may lead to more overdose deaths, as they can reduce the chances that a witness will call 911. Most criminologists agree that charging and sentencing juveniles as adults has not been shown to reduce recidivism. A series of large-scale studies found that minors prosecuted in criminal court are more likely to be rearrested than similar offenders in the juvenile system; also, Black kids are disproportionately charged in criminal court. As adolescents continue to sell fentanyl, police and prosecutors are faced with the choice of whether to consider minors as the Supreme Court has cast them — kids who can’t compute consequences the way adults can — or as killers, subject to adult sentences.

States and counties play a major role in this calculation. In recent years, as pharmaceutical money from opioid settlements has been distributed, they have been charged with investing in evidence-based solutions. According to public records, Wisconsin has earmarked only a tiny percentage of funding for treating minors. Brown County has funneled most of its spending to the sheriff’s office. In addition to paying for fentanyl test strips and Narcan, a nasal spray that delivers an overdose-reversal drug, the county decided to hire two “overdose investigators” for the drug task force. Their mandate is to pursue all fatal overdoses as homicides.

In May of 2024, Maylia pled no contest to first-degree reckless homicide. She was convinced she’d lose her appeal to send the case to the juvenile system, and she was ready to stop fighting. She was also impatient to get to a facility where she could spend time outside. It had been more than a year.

Two months later, Maylia was driven to the courtroom for sentencing. Carrie had been unable to sleep for days. Her best guess was that she was panicked that the case was ending. At least there was purpose in showing up to each hearing. It was a way of keeping Jack alive.

In court, Lemkuil, the prosecutor, kept returning to what Maylia ought to have known. “Maylia had a crystal ball of what could happen to her if she delivered drugs just like her sister did,” she said. She asked the judge for 10 years of initial confinement, followed by 10 years of extended supervision. Fritz referred to Miller v. Alabama. The judge, seemingly unaware of the case, asked her to repeat the name. She explained how the court’s language reminded her of Maylia, who had an underdeveloped sense of responsibility and received almost no parenting. Fritz asked the judge for extended probation or a maximum sentence of five years of confinement.

For the first time in the 19-month-long case, Maylia spoke in court. In jail, her friends had coached her to appear remorseful but not to cry, because no one likes self-pity. Within seconds, she couldn’t stop herself. Sitting with her hands shackled in her lap, she choked on her words. Fritz held Maylia’s written testimony close to her face so she could read. She wasn’t asking for sympathy, she said, “because I know I’m not the one who deserves it. I am speaking today to assure you that I will do everything and anything to change.” She added, “I understand the seriousness of what I have done, and I understand that there will be consequences for my actions, and I will accept those.”

At the start of the investigation, Carrie wanted retribution, and she thought she knew what justice meant. She wasn’t so sure anymore. When she addressed the court, she talked about Jack, how loyal and opinionated he was, how she had dedicated her life to him, and how that life was now meaningless, devoid of a future. She called out the drug task force for continuing to allow Maylia to deal when investigators knew she was selling fentanyl. Ronsman, who was watching from the gallery, raised his eyebrows. He understood the impulse to play Monday morning quarterback but, he thought, he wouldn’t have done anything differently given what he knew at the time. Carrie continued: “I do believe that you, Maylia, are responsible for Jack’s death.” At the front of the courtroom, she forced herself to look at Maylia. “However, I also believe that you are deserving of forgiveness. I do forgive you, Maylia.”

The judge said that considering how much Maylia was selling, she was bound to kill at some point. He was disturbed by the photos of money on her phone. “In one of them, it’s almost like someone is bathing in the cash,” he said. Yes, she was young, but he needed to keep in mind “the substantial negative impact of drug trafficking on the community.” Young users in particular, he added, “don’t really have any idea what they’re doing or what they’re getting into when they start using.” He sentenced Maylia to 10 years in prison and 10 years of extended supervision.

That evening, Carrie leaned into the corner of her living room couch next to Ryan, facing the door to Jack’s bedroom, which remained almost exactly as he had left it. She had been hoping for some epiphany, for a grand finale, but there was none. She was struck by Maylia’s voice — she sounded like a little kid, not like the girl in the flashy photos she’d posted on social media. During the hearing, Carrie had watched Maylia’s mom on the opposite side of the gallery. She kept tossing her headband in the air, spitting loudly into napkins and walking up and down the aisle in a blue suit, fur-lined snow boots and a hard hat on an 83-degree day.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Carrie said to Ryan, holding her face in her hand.

“A homicide case?”

“Well, that, of course, but I’ve never been exposed to that, I guess, that lifestyle. A child who grew up in a drug-trafficking home.”

Ryan didn’t see a reason to wish for a shorter sentence. Maylia would just be released back into the same circumstances. “This is where the problem was in the first place,” he said.

“But it’s what she knows, you know?” Carrie replied. All kids want to come home. “Look at Jack.”

She could trace the progression of her grief through the hearings in the case. How the anger had overwhelmed her at first, how she’d blamed herself for not doing more, how she had stopped wanting to live, how she had lost her trust in the police. Now she noticed a new sensation. She felt strangely protective of Maylia, and she couldn’t quite figure out why. How could CPS ignore what was happening in that home? She kept picturing Maylia’s limp face in the brief moment when they had looked at each other during the hearing.

“Maybe this is part of it,” she said. “I lost my son, my only child. And here is Maylia, who didn’t have a mother. So, it’s like, I’m childless, she’s motherless, and we’re in this situation together, but against each other.”

Lizzie Presser interviewed scores of pediatricians, addiction specialists, counselors, teachers, lawyers, law enforcement officers, parents of kids with addiction, and teenagers in recovery. She reported from Baltimore, Denver, Monterey, California, and Green Bay, Wisconsin. She spent a week shadowing health care providers and meeting their patients. To reconstruct Maylia Sotelo’s path into the criminal justice system, she drew from hundreds of pages of child protective services and police records, court transcripts and statements, Maylia’s text messages, journals and letters, and interviews with Maylia, her sisters, people she met in jail, and those who had seen conditions in her home. (Her grandmother did not provide a comment.) To reconstruct Jack McDonough’s life, Presser drew from extensive medical records, school reports and emails, text messages, and interviews with his mother, other relatives, friends and girlfriend. Through public records requests, Presser established the timeline of the investigation into Jack’s death and the scope of drug-induced homicide charges brought against teens in Wisconsin.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lizzie Presser.

Rasmus is the rare university-educated purveyor who knows where to look, looks critically, and clearly synthesizes the data to draw broad and useful conclusions for working people. For a philosophically-trained skeptic and self-styled Historical Materialist, I have grown to trust Rasmus’s digest of the meaning of arcane, jargon-filled, often-misleading government reports.

Of course, we have had earlier times when similar data were available. For over three decades, Labor Research Associates — a group of Communist and left researchers — published a comprehensive Labor Factbook every two years that addressed “labor trends,” the “social and labor conditions” of the period, “people’s health,” the “trade unions,” “civil liberties and rights,” “political affairs,” and “Canadian labor developments.” This comprehensive book armed working people who cared to advance the cause of workers with a cache of ammunition in the class war. We don’t have Labor Factbook, but we are lucky to have Jack Rasmus’s report.

What does his report tell us?

● Despite $10 trillion in stimulus since the pandemic, the US economy has only produced an anemic recovery: GDP of 1.9% (2022), 2.5% (2023), and 2.2% (2024, to date).

● And the US worker fared even worse: “…with regard to wages, the American worker has not benefited at all from the $10 billion-plus fiscal-monetary stimulus. Real Weekly Earnings are flat to contracting. And take-home pay’s even less.”

● The great US job creation machine that US politicians celebrate is not performing so well: “It is important to also note that the vast majority of the net new jobs created have been part-time, temp, gig and contractor jobs. In the past 12 months, full-time jobs in the labor force [have] fallen by 458,000, while part-time jobs have risen by 514,000.”

Typical of an election year, official reports grab headlines, exaggerating job gains, only to be corrected later: “The jobs reports over the past year are revealing as well. They continually reported monthly job gains of around 240,000. But the Labor Department just did its annual revisions and found that for the period March 2023 thru March 2024 it over-estimated no fewer than 818,000 jobs!” [The September 6 employment report downgraded June and July’s job growth by a further 86,000 jobs!]

“The Wall St. Journal further reported that up to a million workers have left the labor force due to disability from Covid and long Covid-related illnesses. Neither of those statistics [is] factored into the government’s unemployment rate figures.”

● For working-class citizens, debt has been a paradoxical life-saver, supplementing slack wage growth. But it continues to grow at a dangerous pace and with increasingly unsustainable interest rates: “The last quarter century of poor-wage increases has been offset to a degree by the availability of cheap credit with which to make consumer purchases in lieu of wage gains and decently paying jobs. Actually, that trend goes back even further to the early 1980s at least.”

“Household US debt is at a record level. Mortgage debt is about $13 trillion. Total household debt is more than $18 trillion, of which credit-card debt is now about $1 trillion, auto debt $1.5 trillion, student debt $1.7 trillion (or more if private loans are counted), medical debt about $.2 trillion, and the rest installment-type debt of various [kinds].

American households carry probably the highest load of any advanced economy, estimated at 54% of median family-household disposable income. And that’s rising.

Debt and interest payments have implications for workers’ actual disposable income and purchasing power. For one thing, interest is not considered in the CPI or PCE inflation indexes and thus their adjustment to real wages. As just one example: median family-mortgage costs since 2020 have risen 114%. However, again, that’s not included in the price indexes. Home prices have risen 47% and rents have followed. But workers pay a mortgage to the bank, not an amortized monthly payment to the house builder.

One should perhaps think of workers’ household debt as business claims on future wages not yet paid. Debt payments continue into the future for purchases made in the present, and thus subtract from future wages paid.”

Since Rasmus penned his report, the Census Bureau released its report on household incomes. While there was an uptick in 2023, median household income adjusted for inflation remains below the levels of 2018, explaining why poll respondents (and voters) are feeling insecure about the economy. In fact, household incomes have only increased around 15% over the last twenty-three years– hardly a reason for a victory lap by the last four administrations… or the capitalist system!

● Rasmus brings a necessary sobriety to the discussion of the state of the organized trade union movement in the US. While there are many exciting developments, the goal of building a formidable force to advance the interests of working people remains far off: “Since 2020 union membership has declined. There were 10.8% of the labor force in unions in 2020. There are 10.0% at end of 2023, which is about half of what it was in the early 1980s. Unions have not participated in the recovery since Covid, in other words, at least in terms of membership. Still only 6% or 7.4 million workers of the private-sector labor force is unionized, even when polls and surveys in the past four years show a rise from 48% to 70% today in the non-organized who want a union.”

“Recently the Teamsters union under new leadership made significant gains in restoring union contract language, especially in terms of limits on temp work and two-tier wage and benefit structures. The Auto workers made some gains as well. But most of the private-sector unionization has languished. And over the past year it has not changed much.

About half of all Union members today are in public-sector unions. It has been difficult for Capital and corporations to offshore jobs, displace workers with technology, destroy traditional defined-benefit pension plans, or otherwise weaken or get rid of workers’ unions. The same might be said for Transport workers, whose employment is also not easily offshored but is subject to displacement by technology nonetheless. But overall, union membership has clearly continued to stagnate over the past year, as it has since 2020.”

Rasmus’s candid conclusion: “The foregoing accumulation of data and statistics on wages, jobs, debt and unionization in America this Labor Day 2024 contradicts much of the hype, happy talk, and selective cherry picking of data by mainstream media and economists. That hype is picked up and peddled by politicians and pollsters alike.”

*****

And speaking of politicians…

A recent Jacobin piece stands as a sterling example of torturing facts and logic to build the case that Democratic Party politicians got the “stop the genocide” message at the Party’s national convention. Waleed Shahid writes that “the Uncommitted movement didn’t win every immediate demand…” in his article Why the Uncommitted Movement Was a Success at the DNC. The Uncommitted Movement didn’t win any demand — immediate or otherwise — at the DNC!

It takes some skill and determination to recast a near totally effective effort to stifle the voice of pro-peace and pro-justice participants and protesters into “not just a fleeting victory — it is the beginning of a strategic shift in how the Democratic Party grapples with its own contradictions.” Sad to say, it takes a twisted perception to see “victory” and “a strategic shift” while convention-goers derisively and dismissively stroll past demonstrators reciting the names of civilians murdered by the Israeli military.

Shahid attempts the impossible in likening the 2024 Democratic Convention to the 1964 Convention, when brave civil rights activists shamed the Democratic Party before television cameras and journalists into negotiating with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (See this sharp comparative account in Black Agenda Report). There was neither shame nor negotiations in 2024.

Like Democratic operatives before him, Shahid scolds those expecting more from Democrats to– in the future– “out-organize” the Neanderthals controlling the party. In other words, force them to do the right thing!

When one finds a credible political party to support, it should not be one that must be coerced to support justice.

*****

It is a commonplace on the soft left to advocate a broad coalition or united front to address the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and North America. Building on the ineffectiveness of the long-ruling centrist parties, the French RN, Germany’s AfD, the US’s Trump, and a host of other populist movements have mounted significant electoral campaigns. The knee-jerk left reaction is to advocate a broad popular front of all the oppositional parties or movements, a tactic modeled crudely and inappropriately on the Communist International’s anti-fascist tactic.

Most recently, the French left conceded to an electoral “popular front” with the ruling president, Emmanuel Macron’s party and other parties in opposition to Marine Le Pen’s RN. To the surprise of many, the left won the most votes and should have — by tradition — organized a new government. But President Macron “betrayed” popular-front values and appointed a center-right career politician, hostile to the left, as prime minister. To add insult to injury, Macron consulted with Le Pen for approval of his appointment.

Consequently, despite commanding the largest vote, the popular front is in a less favorable position and the right is in a more favorable position than before the electoral “victory” (see, for example, David Broder’s Jacobin article for more).

This move by Macron should sober those who glibly call for a popular front as the answer to every alarm, every hyperbole regarding the populist right.

Because of this gross misapplication of the united-front tactic, I can enjoy an I-told-you-so-moment. I wrote in late June: “The interesting question would be whether Macron’s party would return the favor and support this effort in a second round against RN. I doubt they would. Bourgeois ‘solidarity’ only goes so far.” Where the left selflessly threw its support behind Macron’s party where it needed to win, Macron through his deal with Le Pen, threw the left under the bus!

Hollow victories, indeed.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

• Special counsel Jack Smith filed a narrowed indictment against Donald Trump in his 2020 election case after Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.
• President Joe Biden’s top Middle East adviser held talks in Doha with senior Qatari leaders today, focusing on efforts to finalize a cease-fire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas.
• The UN’s top weather agency issued a stark warning this week about climate change endangering lives and livelihoods in South Pacific island nations.
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed senior Biden administration officials pressured Facebook to censor certain COVID-19 content during the pandemic.
• California’s ‘Closing the Digital Divide’ task force discussed proposed legislation that could soon ban students from using phones and social media in the state’s schools.

The post Special counsel Jack Smith files narrowed indictment against Donald Trump in 2020 election case – August 27, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

The physical organisation of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapour bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his situation are equally unfavourable. His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak even to helplessness for purposes of manly resistance…

— Macaulay (1841)

Chhayanaut, the premier cultural institution of the country, employs what one scholar of fascism, Roger Griffin, has termed palingenesis, “a framing device to emphasise cultural and national renewal” (Zac Gershbergh and Sean Illing. The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media and Perilous Persuasion, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2022), p 126).  Gershberg and Illing cite D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the modern medium of the cinema for a mass audience: the Lost Cause of a heroic South, reinvigorated by the Ku Klux Klan.

“Pakistan’s rulers, since its inception in 1947, tried to use religion to rupture the plural cultural identity of Muslim Bengalis; this was reflected in their onslaught on Bangla language and culture,” announces the Chhayanaut website. We will see below that this does not fact-check. “Chhayanaut created a landmark national tradition by launching the celebration of Bengali seasons. The musical welcome on the first dawn of Baisakh [the opening month of the Bengali year] under the banyan tree in Ramna, begun in 1967, brought back the Bengali new year into the consciousness of city dwellers. Thus, Chhayanaut has become a partner in the glory of the Bengali passage that began with a cultural renaissance and led to the war for independence. During the liberation war, Chhayanaut singers organised performances to inspire freedom fighters and refugees. After independence, Chhayanaut has been involved in seeking creative ways to broaden and intensify the practice of music and, more broadly, the celebration of Bangla culture…Chhayanaut believes the nation will find its path to development through this cultural renaissance (italics added).” In fact, the “Bengali calendar” issued from the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar. “Celebrations of Pahela Baishakh started from Akbar’s reign (1556 – 1605).”

Needless to add, Bengali consciousness played no role in these celebrations. An imperial edict, for purposes of tax collection, constituted the new calendar: such top-down, supine payment of taxes prompted the expression for Asians as a whole: “born taxpayers”: “The nascent absolutist states of Europe had to struggle long and hard before they established fiscal absolutism; of the Asian populations it can fairly be said, in the light of their 2,000-year-old histories, that they were “born taxpayers” (S. E. Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p 1303)”.

According to a former student, Chhayanaut begins its Victory Day musical at precisely 3:45 pm – when the Pakistan army surrendered to the Indian army on December 16 1971. Apart from the singing and dancing, “Chhayanaut has a dress code for people who want to sit in the audience. The audience must wear something in green or red”, the colours of the flag — reminding one of the indoctrination scene in Stalag 17 (1953).

Whatever their goals, their one achievement stands out: subordinating the individual to the group. And this group, far from including all Bengalis actually excludes most: the illiterate, and their taste in music and dance. When the author questioned three exponents of Bengali culture, they were unanimous in condemning the movie item dances of Naila Nayem, a sex symbol in Bangladesh (pictured). “Indecency” must be ruled out, commented one of the trio. The puritanism of the Bengali middle class appears unclothed.

We are not surprised: the imperative of cohesion trumps all others. As history has shown, the boot-in-the-face is a Freudian need of the herd:

Since a group is in no doubt as to what constitutes truth or error, and is conscious, moreover, of its own great strength, it is as intolerant as it is obedient to authority. It respects force and can only be slightly influenced by kindness, which it regards merely as a form of weakness. What it demands of its heroes is strength, or even violence. It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters. Fundamentally it is entirely conservative, and it has a deep aversion from all innovations and advances and an unbounded respect for tradition…

And so Chhayanaut believes “that if people come together in singing songs of loving the motherland and its people, those divisions will dissolve. Chhayanaut believes that Bangalees can be united once again through culture…Chhayanaut hopes that their new initiative to bring people together in the spirit of patriotism will be successful (italics supplied).”

Patriotism: the last refuge?

The Soft Power

Chhayanaut promotes the arts on behalf of the ruling party. Its founders earned their nationalist spurs by singing songs – discouraged by the Pakistan government before and during the second Indo-Pak war over Kashmir –  by Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nobel laureate, on his hundredth birth anniversary, a lot like  the Boston Symphony Orchestra not playing Beethoven on the eve of the Great War. By cocking a snook at the authorities of a country founded on Islamic unity, Chhayanaut’s defiance earned merit for heroic anti-Islamism.

Which brings us to Rabindranath Tagore and his songs.

The songs of Nobel-Prize-winning Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) — one of which constitutes the national anthem of Bangladesh — betrays the elitism of our nationalism. Demotic Bengali is sharply different from hieratic Bengali — the latter only spoken by the uber-elite, the self-consciously nationalist. Education is the national cosmetic, concealing all wrinkles of the particular. Rabindranath belongs among the educated.

Rabindranath Tagore symbolised anti-Islamism, Bengalism and pan-Bengalism, all of which makes him a prophet-like personality in the salons of Dhaka, Bangladesh. None of this would have been possible but for the Nobel Prize in literature. Sanjida Khatun observes that his protean output “has made Tagore songs an essential part of life of the Bengalis who sing them in happiness, in distress, and at work”. The mythology around Rabindranath’s songs suggests a less innocent explanation.

Ian Jack, writing on the god-man’s hundred-and-fiftieth birth anniversary, observes: “Then again, love of literature can slide into fetishism, and from there, obscenity. When Tagore died in 1941, the huge crowd around his funeral cortege plucked hairs from his head. At the cremation pyre, mourners burst through the cordon before the body had been completely consumed by fire, searching for bones and keepsakes.” That’s not love of literature; that’s love of divinity. And godmen tend to proliferate in the “mystical” Orient: recall the Beatles’ guru, Maharishi Maheshi Yogi, father of Transcendental Meditation (TM), in whose dishonour a disillusioned John Lennon composed Sexy Sadie.  His genuflecting devotees must be reciting mantras to avert a similar fate for god-man Tagore (although a highly popular lampoon of one of the guru’s songs by Roddur Roy on YouTube manages to shock and amuse) .

Art has long been co-opted here for the purpose of propaganda. After the division of Bengal in 1905, the Hindu Bengali elite agitated for restored unity. One of these agitators was Rabindranath Tagore. He composed Banglar mati Banglar jal (“The soil of Bengal, the water of Bengal”). Dwijendralal wrote Banga amar janani amar (“Bengal is my land and my mother”); Atulprasad wrote Balo balo balo sabe (“Say, say, say everyone”). “Among others who contributed to the nationalistic movement was Mukundas, whose jatras [village plays], Desher Gan (patriotic song) and Matrpuja (Worship of the Mother), motivated the Bangalis to fight for their rights and against the despotic rule of the English.” These worked: As Percival Spear remarks, “It had been shown that the despised bourgeois might on occasion get a popular backing” (A History of India, Volume 2 (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990), p 177).

“Bande Mataram” (“Hail to Thee Mother”) became the Congress’s national anthem, its words taken from Anandamath, a popular  – and “virulently anti-Muslim” – Bengali novel by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, and its music composed by Rabindranath Tagore (the observation on the nature of the novel comes from Ian Stephens, Pakistan: Old Country/New Nation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p 86).

Chaterjee’s slogans – bande mataram, matribhumi (motherland), janmabhumi (birth land), swaraj (self rule), mantra, and so on – were used by militant Hindu nationalists, mostly from Bengal, and many of these words continue to resonate powerfully in Bangladesh today. Moderate leaders of the Indian National Congress did not take immediately to Chaterjee’s Hindu nationalist slogans, but were won over by their appeal to the youth during the swadeshi movement. Fuller, the Lieutenant-Governor of East Bengal and Assam, forbade the chanting of bande mataram in public.  Congress’s continued emphasis on aspects of militant Hindu nationalism – such as the replacement of Urdu by Hindi, and the singing of bande mataram in schools and on public occasions –  was resented by Muslims (Hugh Tinker, South Asia: A Short History (London: Pall Mall Press, 1966), pp 195, 220).

“Mother-goddess-worshipping Bengali Hindus believed that partition was nothing less than the vivisection of their ‘mother province’, and mass protest rallies before and after Bengal’s division on October 16, 1905, attracted millions of people theretofore untouched by politics of any variety,” according to the Britannica. The swadeshi movement, as it was known, inspired terrorists who believed it a sacred duty to offer human sacrifices to the goddess Kali (Spear, p 176). What in actuality had been a purely administrative measure served to catapult national consciousness among the Hindu Bengalis. However, British officials made it clear that one consequence of the partition would be to give Muslims of Bengal a province where they would be dominant: it was a forerunner of Pakistan (Tinker, p 195). According to the Banglapedia article on the swadeshi movement, “The Swadeshi movement indirectly alienated the general Muslim public from national politics. They followed a separate course that culminated in the formation of the Muslim League (1906) in Dacca.” During the first meeting of the Muslim League, convened in Dacca in December 1906, the Agha Khan’s deputation issued a call “to protect and advance the political rights and interests of Mussalmans of India.” Other resolutions moved at the meeting expressed Muslim “loyalty to the British government,” support for the Bengal partition, and condemnation of the boycott movement.

Thus, an all-too-frequently heard Bengali song here goes: “The queen of all countries is my birth land (janmabhumi)”. The land figures prominently in the superabundance of deshattobodhok — patriotic — songs. “O the land of my country, my head touches you/You have commingled with my body….” Again: “You [martyrs] will be the beacon for the new swadesh….” While bhumi unequivocally means land, desh is more ambiguous: it can mean village or country. Since the transition from the former to the latter is far from complete, the word attempts to transfer emotions from the particular to the general, from the concrete to the abstract, mirroring inadequately the (far more successful) transition from pays to patrie, from Gesselschaft to Gemeinschaft (Finer, pp 143-4). The pejorative chasha (literally, farmer, but connotes the gauche, the uncultivated) tars all rural inhabitants (and even more in its stronger version, chasha-bhusha), and thereby the entire country, with the same brush. Patriotic songs may be seen as an heroic effort at restoration of self-esteem through imagined restoration of the physical unity of the two Bengals.  The portability of song makes it a potent cultural artefact: emigres sing and hear these jingoistic songs in their new countries (typically America, Canada or Australia) where faux nationalism survives in the first generation, fortunately endowed with considerable human capital, the highly literate and numerate. The less fortunate are exhorted to love the motherland (matribhumi/janmabhumi) instead of voting with their feet. A single Youtube video, for instance, plays fifteen chauvinistic lays.

Mother, hail!…

Though seventy million voices through thy mouth sonorous shout,

Though twice seventy million hands hold trenchant sword-blades out,

Yet with all this power now,

Mother, wherefore powerless thou?

According to Bengali writer Nirad C. Chaudhury, “It was not the liberal political thought of the organisers of the Indian National Congress, but the Hindu revivalism of the last quarter of the nineteenth century — a movement which previously had been wholly confined to the field of religion — which was the driving force behind the anti-partition agitation of 1905 and subsequent years.” (Bande Mattaram lines, and Chaudhury, quoted, Tinker, pp 192-3). Rabindranath must be regarded as a pioneer of pan-Bengalism, and the successful reunion of Bengal as our Anschluss.

After Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League came to power in 1996, the state comfortably — and permanently — ensconced Chhayanaut headquarters in a tony part of town, “in recognition of it’s (sic) significant contributions for [the] last four decades to the Bangali cultural development”. “Virtually, the Chhayanaut operates unofficially as the apex body in the realm of music and dance.” The organisation, and others like it, provide psychic ammo for the government’s more muscular anti-Islamism – the soft power behind the hard power.

Death by a Thousand Mudras

The hard power went on display when, in 2021, Sheikh Hasina’s government invited Narendra Modi to the hundredth birth anniversary of her father Sheikh Mujib, the pater patriae and fifty years of national independence, announced by said pater on 26 March, 1971. The Islamist group, Hefazat–e-Islami, asked the government to cancel the invitation, thereby ‘showing respect to the sentiment of [the[ majority [of] people in Bangladesh”. In a written statement, they labeled Modi, not inaccurately, as ‘anti-Muslim and a butcher of Gujarat”. Members of the ruling party, and, predictably enough, its student wing, the Chatra League, attacked worshippers at the national mosque on 26 March after the Friday prayer to stymie the planned protest, leading to a nationwide fracas the next two days. At least fourteen Hefazat members were shot dead by police. “The Bangladeshi authorities must conduct prompt, thorough, impartial, and independent investigations into the death of at least 14 protesters across the country between 26 and 28 March,” insisted Amnesty International, “and respect the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, said 11 human rights organisations in a joint statement today. The organisations also called on the international community to urge Bangladeshi authorities to put an end to the practice of torturing and forcibly disappearing opposition activists.”

The Bangladesh Nrityashilpi Sangstha, “a welfare organisation of dance artistes” established in 1978, similarly serves up propaganda as dance. According to noted dance-teacher and impresario Laila Hassan: “It [Bangladesh Nrityashilpi Sangstha] believes that dance not only provides entertainment, it also speaks about the life, society, and culture of the country and its people, and that the liberation war and the country’s history and tradition can be presented through it”.

The Bulbul Lalitakala Academy serves a similar function: in addition to ministering to Terpsichore, the academy “plays a pivotal role in the cultural field through its regular observances of shaheed dibash [literally, “martyr’s day”, February 21, when young people were gunned down in a language protest in 1952] and independence day and celebrations of pahela baishakh and the spring festival….” On February 1 2024, a mega cultural event across the nation commemorated the shaheed dibash. The chief of the government-run cultural organisation, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy mused: ‘We need culture-friendly political parties in the country in order to further the nation”. “Over 300 troupes are staging street plays at 21 venues in eight divisions at the festival,” announced the newspaper. “Twenty eight Dhaka-based troupes will stage plays at the Central Shaheed Minar till February 7.”

Gershberg and Illing note how the proto-fascist D’Aunzia, Commandante of Fiume and the first Il Duce, “established music as the state’s central purpose” (p 134). The authors quote Robert A. Paxton: fascism is “full of exciting political festival and clever publicity techniques” as well as “the propagandist manipulation of public opinion [to] replace debate about complicated issues” (p 136).  Song-and-dance takes the place of tepid discussions of inflation and the current account deficit – although inflation eats away at the welfare of the poor. Hardly noticed, the Left Democratic Alliance, a group of left-leaning parties, held a protest rally on 20 March accusing the government of sponsoring “syndicates” that manipulate prices: “They said that the Awami League government had failed to control the price hike of essential commodities which increased sufferings of the common people of the country.”  Not surprisingly, the only party to use the F-word is the socialist Jatiya Samajtantrk Dal (JSD) who observe “anti-fascism democracy day” on March 18 when several members were killed by the private army of Sheikh Mujb in 1974.

In the article “Dance Groups” of the Banglapedia, the writer observes, “Dance as an art form was seldom practised by Muslims before Gauhar Jamil set up a dance institution called Shilpakala Bhaban in 1948. After partition in 1947, despite the conservative tradition of the Bavgali (sic) society, a number of performers…contributed to removing old ways of thinking and entertainment.” The article on Bulbul Lalitakala Academy mentions “conservative Bengali Muslims”; and Chayyanaut “encountered many obstacles from [the] government of the time, because music and dance, especially of secular genre, were not much in consistence with the ideology of the Pakistani regime”. (Never mind that Ayub Khan removed Islam from the constitution (Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia, A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p 58) and passed the Muslim Family Law Ordinance, that the government set up the East Pakistan Film Development Corporation in 1957, that the Iranian singer Googoosh appeared regularly on TV in West Pakistan in the ‘60s, that the dance program Nritter Tale Tale aired every week, as the author recalls….) However, the article on “Classical Dance” observes: “…it appears that, like other classical dances, Kathak developed in the courtyards of Hindu temples and got a fresh lease of life under the patronage of the Mughal rulers”. The Britannnica concurs: Kathak, born of the marriage of Hindu and Muslim cultures, flourished in North India under Mughal influence.

“Classical Dance” also states: “During British rule, Indian classical dancing was patronised by the ruling classes, such as, rajas, maharajas, nawabs and zamindars as well as by British high officials who held ‘nautches’ in their private chambers.” And Bulbul Chowdhury, according to the same encyclopaedia, succeeded with dance precisely “by showing that dance was part of the Muslim-Mughal tradition”.  Disinformation, or, not to put too fine a point on it, lying, conduces to incoherence. Another article in the Banglapedia observes that Khaleda Manzoor-e Khuda, a regular singer on Dacca Radio from 1951 to 1955, sang Tagore songs. “At that time as a Rabindra singer she was popularly known as Khaleda Fency Khanam.”

In an interview with the author, Benazir Salam, an expert in Indian classical dance with an MA from Rabindra Bharati, Kolkata and a teacher of dance at Dhaka University, observed of Kathak that it developed under Muslim rule, and, precisely for that reason, Chhayanaut allows its performance only at festivals, and relegates it to the tail-end.

The Men of Words, the Women of Song

We would do well to tarry a while and take note of Erich Hoffer on the subject, which will recur: “It is the deep-seated craving of the man of words for an exalted status which makes him oversensitive to any humiliation imposed on the class or community (racial, lingual or religious) to which he belongs however loosely. It was Napoleon’s humiliation of the Germans, particularly the Prussians, which drove Fichte and the German intellectuals to call on the German masses to unite into a mighty nation which would dominate Europe (The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Perennial Classics, 2002), p 138)”. Hoffer uses the expression “the unwanted self” (p12). Macaulay’s attitude seems to have penetrated generations of this Delta, so much so that in Sheikh Mujb’s battle cry Joy Bangla  [Long live Bengal/Bengali language] they feel wanted again.

Hoffer explains the intelligentsia’s solid support for the despotic dynasty of Bangladesh: During the upheavals of 2018, when student thugs of the ruling party beat up harmless child protesters demanding safer roads, Mehdi Hasan went head to head with a former Harvard professor, Gawhar Rizvi, who shamelessly defended every criminality perpetrated by the government; this author has spoken with men (and women) of words, and found the same resistance to criticism. When a bridge opened recently, the men and women of words and song galvanised themselves to create musical paeans to the dynasty (click here for the album Bangladesh: Despotic Dynasty, pictures taken by the author of the images of the ruling family plastered throughout the capital, a superb example of persuasive advertising designed to perpetuate our founding myth of the Father of the Nation). Intellectuals, “ a herd of independent minds”, in Chomsky’s words, appease our collective self-loathing by glorifying and exonerating thuggery.

In all fairness, it must be conceded that Bangladeshis are not uniquely prone to assuaging collective self-loathing through megaprojects: According to development economists Hla Myint and Anne O. Krueger, less developed countries’ resentment of developed economies stem, not only from measurable differences in income, but from less rational factors such as a reaction against the colonial past and their complex drives to achieve parity. “Thus, it is not uncommon to find their governments using a considerable proportion of their resources in prestige projects, ranging from steel mills, hydroelectric dams, universities, and defence expenditure to international athletics. These symbols of modernization may contribute a nationally shared satisfaction and pride but may or may not contribute to an increase in the measurable national income.” A picture of the Aswan Dam accompanies their article.

Peace is War

In 1928, Arthur Ponsonby, a British Member of Parliament, published his tell-all book on British propaganda which he called Falsehood in War-time: Containing An Assortment Of Lies Circulated Throughout The Nations During The Great War. In time of war, he observes with acerbity, “the stimulus of indignation, horror, and hatred must be assiduously and continuously pumped into the public mind by means of ‘propaganda’.

“A good deal depends on the quality of the lie. You must have intellectual lies for intellectual people and crude lies for popular consumption….

“Perhaps nothing did more to impress the public mind – and this is true in all countries – than the assistance given in propaganda by intellectuals and literary notables.” In short, the men of words.

The items italicised by the present author could be supplemented with and at all times. In Bangladesh today, the intelligentsia provides the context for a mindset suitable to a wartime situation: Fifty-two years after the third Indo-Pak war, seventy-two after Ekushey February Pakistan is still the enemy, and Islamists are fair game. George Orwell appreciated well the need for a state of permanent hostility against a fictive enemy to keep the citizenry loyal to the Party – a world  dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. Emmanuel Goldstein, however, stars in the daily Two-Minute Hate – the equivalent of the propaganda by scribes, terpsichores and thespians in our country against the minuscule mullahs.

“He [Goldstein] was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were—in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less.” How like the Islamsts of Bangladesh he sounds.

As Gershberg and Illing observe: “Fascism also promulgates the myth of sinister internal enemies that are simultaneously weak and devious (p 126)”.

“Nothing to report,” the lieutenant said with contempt. 

“The Governor was at me again today,” the chief complained.

“Liquor?”

“No, a priest.”

“The last was shot weeks ago.”

“He doesn’t think so.”

“In the world of Graham Greene’s 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory,” muses a reviewer, “it’s a bad time to be a Catholic.” In the 2020s Bangladesh, it’s a bad time to be an Islamist, or even quasi-Islamist. (The quoted lines are from Vintage Books, London, 2002, p 32).

In 2017, Hafez (an Islamic scholar, not his real name) was, along with other religious students at Dhaka University dorms, beaten within an inch of their lives for being alleged Islamists. This routine torture of perceived “traitors” finally resulted two years later in the murder of Abrar Fahad, a straight-A student at the elite Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) by his classmates who beat him for hours for his Facebook post criticising the prime minister: automatically, this made him an enemy, an Islamist (the BBC report leaves something to be desired: the murderous students belonged to the student wing of the ruling Awami League, the Bangladesh Chatra League (BCL), not the youth wing as reported; this is significant.). The second event caused a firestorm, the first, that of Hafez, went ignored: it’s open season on Islamists.

A highly abridged interview of Hafez conducted by this author several weeks ago appears below (this sort of news, being par for the course, hardly travels; hence, the delay in interviewing Hafez. Indeed, had Abrar Fahad not been an engineering student of elite stock, his murder, like that of the tailor, Biswajit Das (pictured), though highly publicised on TV channels and newspapers in his blood-stained shirt, vainly warding blows from the ruling party student thugs,  might as well have been invisible. For the author’s observations on this selective attention, please click on What George Floyd’s Death Means – Or Should Mean – In Bangladesh ).

2017 August 13 11:30 pm 

Interrogations begin –  he’s forced to talk. It’s all pre-planned: the hall president and sidekicks are present

“Got him, Bhai [brother].”

Hafeez kneeled, salaamed.

The president is on the bed. The president’s room is on the 2nd floor; Hafez’s on the 5th floor

“Do you do Shibir [Islamist student wing of the main Islamist party]?”

Hafez is astounded. “No, Bhaiya [brother], I don’t.”

(Louder) “Do you do Shibir? Why do you do Shibir?”

“Bhaiya, I don’t.”

Slapping begins.

A friend who was an Islamic scholar, and similarly attired, is later brought in.

Heavier beating, kicking, ensue. A wooden stick is produced: they start hitting him on the back. Rods and water pipes are brought out from inside the president’s room. The hall secretary hits him on the thigh, right above the knee with pipes. The slaps are mostly on the eyes, ears and front face.

“Confess; we can burst your nose. Hey, who’s good at bursting noses?”

Bestiality of the above variety stems from nationalism, as documented by John Keane: “At the heart of nationalism – and among the most peculiar feature of its ‘grammar’ – is its simultaneous treatment of the Other as everything and nothing. The Other is seen as the knife at the throat of the nation. Nationalists are panicky and driven by friend-foe calculations; they suffer from a judgement disorder that convinces them that the Other nation lives at its own expense (Civil Society, (London: Polity Press, 1998), p. 96).” “…sinister internal enemies that are simultaneously weak and devious,” according to Gershberg and Illing.

A characteristic of collectivist organisations involves the use of children, such as the Chatra League of the ruling party. Interest in the child, and youth in general, arose in the early twentieth century, with such innocent bodies as the Boy Scouts.  But it was followed by the “much more sinister and deliberately exploitative youth organisations of the totalitarian states of the 1920s and 1930s”, according to J.M. Roberts (Twentieth Century: A History of the World, 1901 to the Present (London: Penguin, 1999, p 642). “Young Pioneers in the USSR, the Hitler Youth in Germany, the balilla, Picolli Italiani and Figli della Lupa in Italy.”  These countries vigorously excluded the Boy Scouts. The post-war youth market and culture never emerged in the east, where Mao’s Red Guards wreaked havoc in the 1960s. “Young Stalinists worshipped Stalin as an individual,” observes Richard Vinen. “Teenagers swelled the ranks of the party’s youth organisations….” They formed the most committed warriors against imperialism. “Astonishing as it seems in retrospect, the period when communist rule in Eastern Europe was at its most brutal was also the period during which many intelligent and well-meaning individuals thought it was a good thing” (A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century (Da Capo Press, 2001), p 339, 344). Astonishing, indeed, except to someone domiciled in Bangladesh today.  And Chhayanaut works its spell on children.

A Disappearing Act

When all eyes — those of the young and the old — are focussed on events several decades ago, thanks to Chhayanaut and the men of words, contemporary evils, as noted by Robert Paxton, such as the hounding of the Chief Justice, or the burning alive of innocent bystanders, enforced disappearances, state thuggery, extrajudicial killings, rapes by student politicians, appear remote and ephemeral. The stimulus of indignation, horror, and hatred is assiduously and continuously pumped into the public mind by means of “propaganda” — by the government and its handmaidens, the intelligentsia, “the men of words”, “the women of song and dance”.

Dhaka University, the quondam Oxford of the East, where alleged Islamists, as we have seen, receive considerable corporal suffering,  earns the infamy of “concentration camp” , from the victims of its illustrious sons, mindful, no doubt, of the spirit of learning, albeit delivered, not in lectures, but in more tactile form. “It (Chhayanaut) believes that our celebration of fraternity and creativity under the broad rubric of an inclusive humanist culture will triumph, leaving behind religious bigotry, fundamentalism and xenophobia.” Read: getting rid of the Islamists, “simultaneously devious and weak”, by whatever means available to the state.

“Against this, there are other competing conceptions of art that are never fully suppressed, such as the archaic view that places art in the same general sphere of activity as ritual (a view with which I acknowledge considerable sympathy), and the conception of art as a vehicle of moral uplift or social progress, as is common in totalitarian societies where the creation of art becomes co-opted for the purpose of propaganda (for which, by contrast, I avow a proportional antipathy).” Most of us would go along with Justin E. H. Smith in his aptly-titled book Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp 22-23); we share his conceptions of art, and our sympathies lie with him. The Russian love story, “Boy meets tractor”, finds a creepy analogy: “Men and women meet bridge”.

The conception of Muslim civilisation as hopelessly philistine, if not proto-Khomeinist, persists in Bangladesh (as elsewhere). The following from Ronald Segal’s Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora would come as a shock to teenagers and adults alike: “Female slaves were required in considerable numbers, for a variety of purposes. Some were musicians, singers and dancers – neither the status nor the style of a great house could do without a sitara, or chamber-orchestra – reciters and even composers of poetry. There were celebrated schools in Baghdad, Cordoba, and Medina that supplied tuition and training in both musical and literary skills. Such slaves were highly prized and costly (London: Atlantic Books, 2002, p 38).”

Show Me the Money

The above description of our cultural hanky panky may not appear more than children on a playful rampage, or inmates running the asylum (not counting the dead and disappeared for now). But the twang of the sitar and the thump of the tabla conceal the tinkle of coins and the thud of dosh. Gunnar Myrdal observed of South Asia in The Challenge of World Poverty: A World Anti-Poverty Programme in Outline: “…changes of government, or even of form of government, occur high over the heads of the masses of  people and mainly imply merely a shift of the groups of persons in the upper strata who monopolise power (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p 212).” The transition from East Pakistan to Bangladesh, from military rule to democracy, occasioned changes of personnel at the top.

Albert Reynolds’ figures tell a disquieting story: “For countries at the early stages of development, primary education has the lowest unit costs and highest rates of economic return….Most South Asian governments (backed by self-interested elites) invested disproportionately in higher education: India had one of the highest growth rates in Asia for university students and the lowest for primary enrollments. In the 1970s, Bangladesh and Pakistan were increasing spending on higher education at the expense of primary schools, whose share in Bangladesh fell from 60 percent in 1973 to 44 percent in 1981 (One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945 (New York: W.W.Norton and Co., 2000), p 302, 307, emphases added).” We see these statistics clearly bearing out Myrdal’s observation regarding elite-churning.

For what prevails in the political economy of Bangladesh is an oligarchy in cahoots with the ruling party; the Center for Policy Dialogue, a think tank, went on record as saying: “The current practice of recruiting Board of Directors [to state-owned commercial banks, or SCBs] on political grounds has to be discontinued. Studies have shown that financial reporting fraud in banks is more likely if the Board of Directors is dominated by insiders”. The level of non-performing loans (NPLs) has increased steadily since 2008, when the current government returned to power: between 2008 and 2018, the level of dud loans soared 297%. Syed Yusuf Saadat, research associate of the think-tank, observed, “In 2017, a single business group gained control of more than seven private banks.” The IMF observed that “important and connected borrowers default because they can”.

The case study of Islami Bank provides a detailed picture, not only of the government’s anti-Islamism, but also the paw-in-the-public-till syndrome that promotes loyalty to the dynasty. “Established in 1983 as Bangladesh’s first bank run on Islamic principles, Islami thrived by handling a large share of remittances from emigrant workers and by lending to the booming garment industry. Its troubles stem from its links with Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, which allied with Pakistan during the war of succession of 1971.” One of the first acts by the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, on coming to power in 2009 was to try “war criminals” in kangaroo courts. “Leading figures from the Jamaat were sentenced to imprisonment or hanging.” Then came the asset-seizure. In 2017, the prime minister sent government intelligence operatives to oust senior executives and put in place her cronies: a boardroom coup. The cronies swiftly turned a healthy bank sick.

While Chhayanaut greets the new Bengali year under a banyan, and grandmothers in the vernacular, its members and devotees don colour-coded sarees (white with a red border for Baisakh, yellow for Falgun, blue for Ashar, red and gold for Victory Day), hog watered rice rural-style, sing Tagore in soirees…the wonga wends its way….

As Don Fabrizio’s nephew observes in Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. D’you understand (trans. Archibald Colquhoun, (New York:Random House, 1960), p 40)?”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Iftekhar Sayeed.

Janine Jackson interviewed Groundwork Collaborative’s Rakeen Mabud about greedflation for the February 9, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: If you buy groceries, you know that prices are high. And if you read the paper, you’ve probably heard that prices are high because of, well, “inflation,” and “shocks to the supply chain,” and other language you understand, but don’t quite understand.

One article told me that

economists see pandemic-related spending meant to stabilize the economy as a factor, along with war-impacted supply chains and steps taken by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates

—all of which may be true, but still doesn’t really help me see why four sticks of butter now cost $8.

Not to mention that the same piece talks matter of factly about “upward pressure on wages,” which sounds like people who need to buy butter are getting paid more, but I’m pretty sure the language is telling me I’m supposed to be against it.

How do we interpret corporate news media’s coverage of prices? What aren’t they talking about?

Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Rakeen Mabud.

Rakeen Mabud: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be back.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1/19/24)

JJ: I want to say, the piece that I’m citing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette isn’t a bad piece. It’s just what passes for media explanation of what is a truly meaningful reality. People are really having trouble buying diapers, and buying food. And so to have journalists saying, “Well, it’s because of the blahdy blahdy blahdy blah that you couldn’t possibly understand”—the unclarity of it is galling to me, and it’s politically stultifying. I’m supposed to get mad at inflation, per se?

That’s the kind of informational void that Groundwork Collaborative’s work is intervening in. So let me just ask you to talk about what you find when you look into, for example, high grocery store prices right now.

RM: Yeah, this is a great question, and I love the fact that you’re focusing on the experiences of people, because that’s how we all experience the economy and, frankly, that’s how the economy is made, right, through our actions, through our demand, through our spending. And so it is really important to hone in on what’s going on to people on the ground, as we’re thinking about these big, amorphous concepts like inflation.

And the reality is, as you point out, prices are sky high for people around the country, and folks are really struggling. Grocery prices, obviously, are particularly worth digging into, because there’s a real salience of food prices in everybody’s lives. We all go to the grocery store on a weekly or maybe biweekly basis, and buy groceries to feed ourselves, and feed our families.

And my colleagues at the Groundwork Collaborative, Liz Pancotti, Bharat Ramamurti and Clara Wilson, recently authored a report that really digs into what’s going on with grocery prices. And what they find is that grocery price increases have outpaced overall inflation, and families are now paying 25% more for groceries than they were prior to this pandemic, compared to 19% of overall inflation. So there’s this gap between what folks are paying at the till, and what inflation would suggest.

And this is particularly hitting folks who are on the lower income end of the income distribution harder. In 2022, people in the bottom quintile of the income spectrum spent 25% of their income on groceries, while those in the highest quintile spent just under 3.5%.

And this is a trend that we see across the board with essentials. Because if something is essential, you have to buy it. If you earn less money, a bigger proportion of your income is going to go towards those essentials. And so that means that when you see inflation and, frankly, corporate profiteering, which I’ll get into in a second, showing up in spaces for essential goods, it’s always the people who are most vulnerable who are hit the hardest.

It’s wonderful that you’re really focusing in on groceries. And I think one thing to note, just to zoom out a little bit from grocery prices in particular, is that an underexplored topic still, I think, in the discussions around inflation is the role of corporate profit margins. Because the fact remains that corporate profit margins have remained high and even grown, even as labor costs have stabilized, input costs—the costs of things that are used to produce goods—have come down, and supply chain snarls have started to ease.

And in a different paper by two other of my colleagues, Lindsay Owens and Liz Pancotti, they find that from April to September of 2023, so that’s very recently, corporate profits drove 53% of inflation. When you compare that to the 40 years prior to the pandemic, profits drove just 11% of price growth.

There are a lot of explanations out there of what’s causing inflation, but it’s very important to focus on the role of big companies using the cover of inflation to jack up prices. And they continue to do that, even as their own costs are coming down.

JJ: And I want to say, you can illustrate that point with just data, as these works from Groundwork Collaborative do, but at the same time, you also have, as the kids say, receipts—in other words, earnings calls where CEOs are saying it out loud: Their situation in terms of supply chain, in terms of Covid and whatever, they’re using that as an opportunity to keep prices high.

Other Words (1/31/24)

RM: Yes, absolutely. So let’s talk about another essential good, which is diapers. And I think diapers are really a good example, because it illustrates what’s going on right now, and ties together the idea of corporate profiteering, but also this idea that, as scholars Isabella Weber and Evan Wasner put out there, about tacit collusion and implicit collusion. So let’s unpack that. What does that all mean?

So what they write about is that inflationary environments, when prices are rising across the board, it means that companies, especially those that are in a really concentrated market, can raise their prices, precisely because they know that their competitor is going to do the exact same thing. So if you are one of three big companies, and you know that your competitors are also going to raise prices, there’s no reason for you not to raise prices.

And that logic also applies in the reverse. So when costs are coming down, if you know that your competitors are going to keep their prices high, you’re also going to keep your prices high, which is I think why we’re seeing, even as input costs come down, prices are staying high, and people are still paying more than they should be, given the cost of input.

So diapers, right? Diapers, I think, is the perfect example for this. It’s a super, super concentrated market. Proctor & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark control about 70% of the domestic market, and diaper prices have increased by more than 30% since 2019, from about $16–$17 to nearly $22.

The main thing that goes into producing diapers is wood pulp. It’s also the main input into toilet paper, paper towels, basically paper products that we use around the house. The wholesale wood pulp prices really skyrocketed, by 87% between January 2021 and January 2023.

But in 2023, between January and December of 2023, [wood pulp] prices declined by 25%, but diaper prices have remained high. So what’s going on here?

And to your point, the executives at Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble are not hiding the ball. P&G CFO said on their October 2023 earnings call that high prices were a big driver of the reason that they could expand their profit margins, and that 33% of their profits in the previous quarter were driven by lower input costs. And during their July 2023 earnings call, the company predicted $800 million in windfall profits because of declining input costs.

Same thing on the other side, on Kimberly-Clark’s side; their CEO said in October that the company “finally saw inflection in the cost environment.” And he admitted that he believes the company has a lot of opportunity to “expand margins over time,” despite what they’re “doing on the revenue side and also on the cost side.” So despite large input cost decline, the CEO thinks that the company has priced appropriately, and didn’t anticipate a new price deflation.

So diapers, I think, is a really clear example of how these big corporations are exercising their corporate power in a moment where things are a little murky for consumers. We don’t know, necessarily; we don’t have all the data at our fingertips, or the time, frankly, to figure out: Is the box of diapers more expensive for sensible reasons or not? And these big companies are taking advantage of both the information asymmetry, and the particular inflationary environment we’re living in.

JJ: And you don’t have a choice. You’ve got to buy the diapers. You can try to puzzle out why it costs more than it cost a year ago, or six months ago, but you still have to buy them. And that’s the thing.

I want to draw you out on something, because I see articles—it’s not that media are not ever saying “greedflation,” or that they’re completely ignoring the idea that corporations might be keeping prices high to profit, although it’s still not shaping the dialogue in the way that you would hope. But I do see articles that put “corporate profiteering” in scare quotes, as if it’s not a real thing; it’s just an accusation. And I wonder, what do we call “profiteering,” and how does it differ from capitalism doing its capitalism thing?

Rakeen Mabud: “The truth of the matter is there are vested interests for folks to want to vilify workers, to want to vilify big public investments.”

RM: This is a question that I’ve gotten over the years, as we’ve done this work. It is not necessarily a bad thing for companies to be making a profit. That’s OK. Companies exist to make a profit. What we’re talking about here is really profits above and beyond what they should be making: excess profits, windfall profits, and companies making these profits on the backs of consumers.

The example that I always go back to is just the classic price-gouging example. If you are in the middle of a hurricane or a disaster relief situation, and you are a person who sells bottles of water, or gallon jugs of water—if you jack the prices up because you know that people are going to need that water, because there’s no safe tap water to drink, that’s price-gouging, and that is illegal.

And yet that happens across our economy all the time. And we’ve seen that in particular over the last couple of years, as we’ve experienced the pandemic and have gone through these series of crises. And yet we don’t point it out.

And I think part of the reason this idea is not taken seriously, again, there’s a couple of reasons. The first is that it doesn’t accord with the traditional story of where inflation comes from. The traditional story of where inflation comes from is, workers are super greedy, they’re asking for higher wages. And so we end up with higher wages, which push up prices, which force people to ask for higher wages. And you end up with what economists call a wage-price spiral.

The other factor in the traditional story about where inflation comes from is, too much public investment flooding the economy is just going to jack up prices.

And the reality of the situation is that wasn’t the case here. We have seen historic public investment, and inflation’s come down. We have seen a strong labor market. We haven’t had to put millions of people out of work in order to bring prices down.

And so the textbook story of how inflation works is not really holding water in the moment. It’s not according with literally the reality that we’re seeing in the data.

And the truth of the matter is there are vested interests for folks to want to vilify workers, to want to vilify big public investments, and to continue to perpetuate an environment where big corporations can hold power and hold money and earn windfall profits on the backs of consumers. So I think it’s really important to know that this is a narrative that’s new, and it’s a narrative that is challenging for the dominant stories about how inflation works.

Wall Street Journal (12/2/23)

But the reason it has made a toehold, and I think more than a toehold at this point—I mean, even the Wall Street Journal in December had a headline that said, “Outsize Profits Help Drive Inflation. Now Consumers Are Pushing Back.” The reason it’s gotten its feet on the ground is because of the experience of people across the economy, this is exactly how people are experiencing the economy, and it’s the truth of the matter.

And I think that is really what certainly my work is always trying to do, is let’s get to how people are experiencing the economy and speak to their concerns, because people know what’s up. You don’t need to tell them that big companies are exploiting them. They are very willing to believe it, because it’s how they’ve interacted with the economy for years.

JJ: I have to say, the idea that there’s an abstraction that I’m supposed to pay obeisance to, and it’s going to keep wages down and public investment down, but somehow I’m still supposed to be for it, is kind of strange to me, the idea that I’m supposed to be so opposed to inflation that I’m supposed to be against higher wages for workers, and I’m supposed to be against more public investment. It just shows how far we’ve gone in fealty to an abstraction, essentially, in terms of economic understanding. I find it very odd to have folks saying, “Oh, I don’t want upward pressure on wages, because somehow that’s going to be bad for me ultimately down the road.” It seems to me a kind of distortion of our understanding of the way an economy should work, and who it should serve.

RM: Right, I mean, we are the economy. That’s what we’re always saying at Groundwork, that we are the people, the regular people are the people who are the economy, and it’s our wellbeing that reflects whether the economy is doing well.

And I also think it’s important in conversations about inflation, I think; we pay attention to prices and cost of living and affordability in a moment of crisis. But the truth of the matter is that the high prices that people have been feeling in their household budget long predate this particular inflationary moment: the cost of childcare, the cost of healthcare, the cost of housing, the cost of education. All of these things go beyond what we’re experiencing in this particular moment. They have been burdens on people for decades.

And there are also structural factors that are perpetuating these burdens. So I think housing costs are a really good example. Housing costs are up about 21%, and we have this longstanding shortage of affordable and high-quality housing in this country. There have been instances, over the course of the last couple of years, where we’ve seen big home builders and landlords celebrating inflation as a way to restrict housing supply. Literally had a home builder say, “We could build a thousand more houses, but we’re not going to, because it’s going to help us restrict supply, and therefore jack up the prices of the homes we can build.” We’ve also seen landlords really celebrating inflation as a way to skim a little bit more off the top by raising rent a little bit higher.

So all of that is certainly happening, but we also need to pay attention to broader macroeconomic forces in perpetuating this housing crisis. So one of the best ways, kind of a no-brainer, of addressing a housing supply shortage is to build more houses. But the Federal Reserve, since we last spoke, has embarked on an interest rate–hiking rampage. What does that do? Sky-high interest rates crush new housing construction, because it stymies private investment, and it pushes potential buyers, because of high mortgage rates, back into the rental market, which pushes rents up.

So the Federal Reserve says, “We’re raising interest rates through this theory and this channel that we think works,” which, by the way doesn’t, because again, as I mentioned, we haven’t necessarily seen mass unemployment in order to bring down prices. But they’re saying, we’re trying to bring down prices, guys; we’re trying to bring down prices by raising interest rates. But really what they’re doing is making the problem worse, and they’re perpetuating this cost-of-living crisis that long predates the pandemic.

And so it’s really important, I think, to also call out big institutional actors, like Chair Powell, to lower rates immediately, given that it’s clear from the data that his rate hikes hadn’t had the intended effect, and are actually making the problem worse.

Groundwork Collaborative (2/24)

JJ: One of the latest reports from Groundwork is called “What’s Driving the Rise in Grocery Prices–and What the Government Can Do About It.” So let me ask you, finally, and it’s a lot, but what can government do about the problems that we’re talking about?

RM: I think, actually, we’re living in an exciting time when it comes to an expansiveness in the policy tools that folks are thinking about and using in order to bring down prices. We’re not in your 1970s inflationary world, where we’re just hoping that the Federal Reserve does its job and hoping for the best. They’ve sort of been discredited, and, again, time to bring down interest rates.

But we’ve seen President Biden and his administration really taking the issue of profiteering seriously. I mean, just last month, he said to any corporation that has not brought their prices back down, even as inflation has come down, even as supply chains have been rebuilt, it’s time to stop the price-gouging. To have that come from the president, to call out the big corporate actors who are taking advantage of people and lining their coffers, is remarkable.

And I think it’s not just words, right? The administration has taken some really early actions promoting competition in really concentrated markets—like meat packing, a sector that is really driving grocery-price inflation right now.

Agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are going hard after junk fees. Those are the sort of, when you check into a hotel, it says resort fee, this fee, that fee, and you never really know what you’re paying for. And the truth is, you’re just paying for these companies to get richer, right? So that in banking, overdraft fees, the CFPB has been going hard after junk fees.

The FTC and the DoJ are aggressively using their authority to crack down on the concentration that allows these companies to get away with jacking prices up on consumers.

And so I think what we need to see is a continuation of that. Look at anti-competitive mergers, especially throughout the food industry, but other industries where they’re producing essentials, to make sure that these environments that facilitate and breed both profiteering and tacit collusion are not allowed to be created.  Finalize regulations that improve fairness, competition and resiliency in supply chains.

And then the last policy idea here was—it feels a little bit unrelated, but it’s actually one and the same—we have a big opportunity to tackle the full problem of high prices coming up, because many of the provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the 2017 Trump tax cuts, are expiring at the end of 2025. And one of the best ways to tax excess profits is simply to raise the corporate tax rate. That’s it. It’s a pretty easy policy, and one that people understand and can get behind.

JJ: Thank you very much. We’ve been speaking with Rakeen Mabud, chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative, online at GroundworkCollaborative.org. Thank you so much, Rakeen Mabud, for speaking with us this week on CounterSpin.

RM: Thank you so much for having me. It was such a pleasure.

The post ‘It’s Important to Focus on Big Companies Using the Cover of Inflation to Jack Up Prices’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

We have passed the sixty year mark on the first of the four assasinations that reshaped US political history. JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK: the list reads like the better hopes (in Malcolm and Martin, the radical best hopes), of a couple of generations. Not a single one has been solved to the satisfacation of the serious scholar or the non-credulous observer. That, alone, should tell us something about the nature of our political system.

At the root, or at the beginning in any case, is Jack Kennedy, Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. What connects the last 3 names? There is, or may be, the heart of the puzzle.

Author Danny Fingeroth is himself an interesting case, mostly a scholar of mainstream comics history and biographer of Marvel Comic founder, genius and/or pop culture huckster Stan Lee. Not to mention a sort of impresario of public comic events himself. Fingeroth may be best qualified to write about Jack Ruby from a fresh angle: the Yiddish-speaking, Chicago Jewish home boy, ringleader of strip clubs and related venues in Dallas, inevitably in close contact with the mob.

None of this is exactly new, to put it mildly. But Fingeroth has a keen sense for the types who came out of lower-class, semi-assimilated Jewish families in the first half of the twentieth century. The kind that spoke Yiddish when they wanted to keep secrets among themselves, maybe went to religioius services now and then, especially if they had pious parents or sought respectability for themselves. But also the kind that could feel victimized, at the drop of the hat, even when wheeling and dealing as pimps or gamblers, checked regularly for venereal disease thanks to their relentless exploitation of women generations younger than themselves.They were, in their own minds, still Jews in an anti-Semitic world.

The first interesting thing about Jack Ruby (nee Rubenstein) is that his best friend from youth happened to be Barney Ross, the Jewish boxer champ who insisted on being anti-racist even when fighting Blacks, and who won battles in the Pacific Theater through his extreme bravery. The two of them came from the same milieu, with personal opportunities shaped by their distinctly second-generation Jewish conceptions of themselves. Too bad John Garfield never got to make that biopic of Barney Ross that he envisioned. A fictional Jack Ruby could have been played by one of those leftwing actor-friends of Garfield in Method Actor glory before the Blacklist. Garfield’s real-life secretary, another blacklist victim (and television writer, under a pseudonym) could have chosen Ruby’s film-fictional pal, and with Garfield’s Hollywood cred, even gotten the supporting actor accepted by the studio.

The second interesting thing plunges us right into Dallas in the years before the Kennedy Assassination. Having bounced around on the fringes of sleazy entertainment and organized crime, Ruby found a way to make a good living and make himself his own kind of bigshot, even tough guy. He played cards and played the ponies while “dating” (in the Donald Trump fashion) a long succession of women, hardly ever one at a time, drinking heavily, sometimes getting into fist fights over personal insults.

He wanted to be recognized, even famous. This is biographer Fingeroth’s strongest argument for Ruby having no deep attachments to politics, liberalism or anything else that would cause him to plot against Lee Harvey Oswald. Or, according to Fingeroth, even to “plot.” Psychologically agitated by events, Ruby apparently sauntered through the most heavily guarded hallway in the US, at the crucial moment, and plugged Oswald before the eyes of the cameras.

It didn’t wash at the time and it doesn’t wash now. Speaking to the Warren Commission, Ruby insisted “I am being used as a scapegoat…I have been used for a purpose and there will be a certain tragic happening if you don’t take my testimony and somehow vindicate me.” He then added, cryptically, “there was no conspiracy,” although he repeatedly and improbably suggested that LBJ, by this time the president, was somehow involved in Kennedy’s death. (p.233)

The Warren Commission, stacked with notables like CIA chief Allen Dulles, was not about to go further down this or any related road. By sticking to the depoliticized, individualistic version of events, it successfully set the standard for federal investigators of the MLK and RFK assassinations to follow. Malcolm’s purported killers, arrested shortly after his death, were released decades later, vindicated: the evidence had never been convincing, except to those who wanted to close the case.

True, Jack Ruby had a brief (or was it brief?) link to anti-Castro conspirators. The failed Bay of Pigs crowd, with its CIA links, appears only as a passing mention in these pages, and the author may well be right, even if as he notes, Ruby wanted to help them somehow. Jack Ruby was, more than anything else, an unstable seeker after fame or infamy, a Jew seeing conspiracies against Jews but also against the high-placed friends of Jews, practically everywhere.

Successfully defending Ruby from a guilty verdict and the death penalty, civil liberties lawyer William Kunstler explored and exploited the notion that Ruby was just crazy. Somehow, in Ruby’s mind, the assassination would have transformed Oswald and other Jewish members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee into imagined agents of a grand Jewish conspiracy, prompting a vast pogrom in the US. Thus, he had heroically halted a pogrom-to-be and besides, and had spared Jackie Kennedy the agony of coming back to Texas to testify against Oswald. Or was it that Ruby had only proved personally, as he sometimes suggested after the shooting, that Jews could be tough?

Danny Fingeroth closes with the thought that conspiracies abound but almost no one has come up with a single, convincing cause. National Archives releases of documents, decades later, seem to have added nothing important. The strip club district of Dallas is gone (Ruby’s own sleazy club became, for a time, a Dallas police gym). Bob Dylan seems to have spent an inordinate amount of time and energy ruminating the case in general and Ruby in particular, to no particular end. For that matter, who remembers the Dead Kennedys’ music anymore?

Perhaps Dylan was actually thinking about Ruby as an emblematic American Jew. It makes as much sense as any theory, if the Jewishness is placed in its proper context of lower-class hustlers of the 1920s-50s on the other side of the law. That some Jewish families had relatives in both the Communist Party and the mob also makes sense: outsiders figuring what to do, and making plans to do it for themselves and, presumably, to others, for their own benefit. If the leg-breakers have been replaced by their grandsons, the hedge-fund managers, is the world a better place? Some of us, anyway, still miss the Jewish American Communists badly.

The post The Jack Ruby File appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Buhle.

We have passed the sixty year mark on the first of the four assasinations that reshaped US political history. JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK: the list reads like the better hopes (in Malcolm and Martin, the radical best hopes), of a couple of generations. Not a single one has been solved to the satisfacation of the serious scholar or the non-credulous observer. That, alone, should tell us something about the nature of our political system.

At the root, or at the beginning in any case, is Jack Kennedy, Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. What connects the last 3 names? There is, or may be, the heart of the puzzle.

Author Danny Fingeroth is himself an interesting case, mostly a scholar of mainstream comics history and biographer of Marvel Comic founder, genius and/or pop culture huckster Stan Lee. Not to mention a sort of impresario of public comic events himself. Fingeroth may be best qualified to write about Jack Ruby from a fresh angle: the Yiddish-speaking, Chicago Jewish home boy, ringleader of strip clubs and related venues in Dallas, inevitably in close contact with the mob.

None of this is exactly new, to put it mildly. But Fingeroth has a keen sense for the types who came out of lower-class, semi-assimilated Jewish families in the first half of the twentieth century. The kind that spoke Yiddish when they wanted to keep secrets among themselves, maybe went to religioius services now and then, especially if they had pious parents or sought respectability for themselves. But also the kind that could feel victimized, at the drop of the hat, even when wheeling and dealing as pimps or gamblers, checked regularly for venereal disease thanks to their relentless exploitation of women generations younger than themselves.They were, in their own minds, still Jews in an anti-Semitic world.

The first interesting thing about Jack Ruby (nee Rubenstein) is that his best friend from youth happened to be Barney Ross, the Jewish boxer champ who insisted on being anti-racist even when fighting Blacks, and who won battles in the Pacific Theater through his extreme bravery. The two of them came from the same milieu, with personal opportunities shaped by their distinctly second-generation Jewish conceptions of themselves. Too bad John Garfield never got to make that biopic of Barney Ross that he envisioned. A fictional Jack Ruby could have been played by one of those leftwing actor-friends of Garfield in Method Actor glory before the Blacklist. Garfield’s real-life secretary, another blacklist victim (and television writer, under a pseudonym) could have chosen Ruby’s film-fictional pal, and with Garfield’s Hollywood cred, even gotten the supporting actor accepted by the studio.

The second interesting thing plunges us right into Dallas in the years before the Kennedy Assassination. Having bounced around on the fringes of sleazy entertainment and organized crime, Ruby found a way to make a good living and make himself his own kind of bigshot, even tough guy. He played cards and played the ponies while “dating” (in the Donald Trump fashion) a long succession of women, hardly ever one at a time, drinking heavily, sometimes getting into fist fights over personal insults.

He wanted to be recognized, even famous. This is biographer Fingeroth’s strongest argument for Ruby having no deep attachments to politics, liberalism or anything else that would cause him to plot against Lee Harvey Oswald. Or, according to Fingeroth, even to “plot.” Psychologically agitated by events, Ruby apparently sauntered through the most heavily guarded hallway in the US, at the crucial moment, and plugged Oswald before the eyes of the cameras.

It didn’t wash at the time and it doesn’t wash now. Speaking to the Warren Commission, Ruby insisted “I am being used as a scapegoat…I have been used for a purpose and there will be a certain tragic happening if you don’t take my testimony and somehow vindicate me.” He then added, cryptically, “there was no conspiracy,” although he repeatedly and improbably suggested that LBJ, by this time the president, was somehow involved in Kennedy’s death. (p.233)

The Warren Commission, stacked with notables like CIA chief Allen Dulles, was not about to go further down this or any related road. By sticking to the depoliticized, individualistic version of events, it successfully set the standard for federal investigators of the MLK and RFK assassinations to follow. Malcolm’s purported killers, arrested shortly after his death, were released decades later, vindicated: the evidence had never been convincing, except to those who wanted to close the case.

True, Jack Ruby had a brief (or was it brief?) link to anti-Castro conspirators. The failed Bay of Pigs crowd, with its CIA links, appears only as a passing mention in these pages, and the author may well be right, even if as he notes, Ruby wanted to help them somehow. Jack Ruby was, more than anything else, an unstable seeker after fame or infamy, a Jew seeing conspiracies against Jews but also against the high-placed friends of Jews, practically everywhere.

Successfully defending Ruby from a guilty verdict and the death penalty, civil liberties lawyer William Kunstler explored and exploited the notion that Ruby was just crazy. Somehow, in Ruby’s mind, the assassination would have transformed Oswald and other Jewish members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee into imagined agents of a grand Jewish conspiracy, prompting a vast pogrom in the US. Thus, he had heroically halted a pogrom-to-be and besides, and had spared Jackie Kennedy the agony of coming back to Texas to testify against Oswald. Or was it that Ruby had only proved personally, as he sometimes suggested after the shooting, that Jews could be tough?

Danny Fingeroth closes with the thought that conspiracies abound but almost no one has come up with a single, convincing cause. National Archives releases of documents, decades later, seem to have added nothing important. The strip club district of Dallas is gone (Ruby’s own sleazy club became, for a time, a Dallas police gym). Bob Dylan seems to have spent an inordinate amount of time and energy ruminating the case in general and Ruby in particular, to no particular end. For that matter, who remembers the Dead Kennedys’ music anymore?

Perhaps Dylan was actually thinking about Ruby as an emblematic American Jew. It makes as much sense as any theory, if the Jewishness is placed in its proper context of lower-class hustlers of the 1920s-50s on the other side of the law. That some Jewish families had relatives in both the Communist Party and the mob also makes sense: outsiders figuring what to do, and making plans to do it for themselves and, presumably, to others, for their own benefit. If the leg-breakers have been replaced by their grandsons, the hedge-fund managers, is the world a better place? Some of us, anyway, still miss the Jewish American Communists badly.

The post The Jack Ruby File appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Buhle.

Ian Millhiser, senior correspondent for Vox, called the denial a “big victory for Trump.”

Legal expert, George Conway, denying that this was a win for Trump, theorized that the Circuit Court will hear the appeal and decide “within days” by early January and the trial will go ahead in timely fashion, so there is no need for SCOTUS to take now. (Conway, a founder of the Lincoln Project, won the landmark 1997 Supreme Court immunity case that forced Bill Clinton to sit for a deposition in a lawsuit brought by Paula Jones.)

Who is right? While Honig is correct that the DOJ has a general policy prohibiting prosecutors from investigating during an election, he’s blowing hot air. I believe Conway is right about the reason for SCOTUS’s denial.

The DOJ policy prohibits prosecutors from selecting “the timing of any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.” (Any action likely to raise an issue or the perception of an issue under this policy provision requires consultation with and must be approved by the Public Integrity Section.)

However, according to ProPublica, the DOJ apparently issued (via an email) an exception in late 2020 that permits public investigation where “the integrity of any component of the federal government is implicated by election offenses within the scope of the policy including but not limited to misconduct by federal officials or employees administering an aspect of the voting process through the United States Postal Service, the Department of Defense or any other federal department or agency.”

Nonetheless, it is unclear whether this exception would apply now to Smith’s prosecution of Trump (as a former federal official) or whether it remains in effect.

In any case, the Supreme Court would likely agree that resolution of Trump’s immunity claim is an urgent matter (for the very reason that it could affect the outcome of the case and the presidential election).

But the Court, as is its general policy, prefers to stay out of the fray as long as possible and let the lower courts do the preliminary analyses. Where the appellate court can still timely rule, SCOTUS doesn’t need to and should not. In other words, the issue is not quite ripe for SCOTUS review.

And the D.C. Circuit Court is clearly moving rapidly, having set a January 9th date for oral arguments, which will be live-streamed here.

The post Why Did SCOTUS Deny Jack Smith’s Expedited Petition for Review? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jennifer Van Bergen.

I had a separate studio space in L.A., which was kind of cool and different because I’ve always worked out of my house. There’s always been obstacles. When I was out there, the obstacle was having to share the space and schedule my time around another person. There was something that was nice about having a separate space as a destination, one that made me say, “I’m going here to work on music.” It focused me in a way that was new and different.

Since we got our house here in Richmond and I’ve been able to get a home studio set up again and it’s been great. So, you know, I make some coffee and go out to the little backhouse that I’ve set up as my studio. It’s nice being back in that way of working. It’s definitely different. Now my real struggle is finding the right times to work on things. That’s definitely changed now that my son Calder is back in school.

Are you being very intentional with your time? Some artists treat their work like any other job, sitting down every day at the same time, in the same place, “clocking in.” Is that something you do?

I’m not so strict about it. I’m not scheduling out “this is when I work on this” or “this is when I work on that.” But the nature of being, at least in this moment, a self-managed artist means that the studio is my studio, it’s my creative space, but it’s also my office. I might have a series of emails I need to answer, I might have some tour prep I need to do, or I’ve got to get a bunch of stems together or reprogram synth sounds for the shows we have coming up. Or it’ll be a lull, one where I don’t have any busy-body work to do, and I can just open up a new Ableton session and see what happens.

So, it’s nice. There’s this whole spectrum of all things Wild Nothing. This is just my space to do it all. It was interesting when I was trying to finish this record because that was the focus of my attention. I would have to go clock-in: I have all these vocals to record, I need to get it to the mixer in a week.

Do you find those kinds of deadlines helpful?

Yeah, absolutely. I don’t find them helpful at first. I start every project with no deadlines, just giving myself total freedom and taking as much time as I need to find the thing that ties these songs together. For a very long time, I’m just throwing everything against the wall, writing songs, starting little ideas.

The beginning—for most people and it’s definitely true for me—is the most experimental phase. I’m trying different kinds of music and seeing what sticks. I’ll eventually find myself with four or five songs that tell me what the rest of the project will be. Then, from there, deadlines become very helpful. Because otherwise I’ll tinker forever.

And the nice thing about setting your own deadlines is you can cheat—it’s fine. But I still need them.

Just the idea that they’re there, even if you know they can be broken, is helpful.

Yeah, it pushes you to finish things. That’s so often the hardest part in any creative endeavor: just getting to the place where you feel like you can say it’s done. Because the nature of creativity is that something can be done whenever you say it’s done. You can keep working on something indefinitely. That’s what those deadlines are for, just to say: this is where it is now. If I feel mostly happy with it, I can call it a day.

Speaking of the record: I wouldn’t call it a concept record, but parenthood comes up a lot throughout these songs. Your son even appears on the closing track. Whether it’s in your songwriting or even in the space you’re making or the time you have, how has becoming a father shifted things?

On a practical level, it’s shifted my sense of time and my sense of scheduling and my sense of organization around creativity and creating. But on a larger level, what impacted this record in particular was the really abrupt lifestyle shift…the perspective shift on what’s important to me, both as a person and someone who makes things. More specifically…I don’t know, I think it brought about a new optimism and a new acceptance of earnestness.

There are still moments on this record that try not to take themselves too seriously, that try to have a sense of humor and dip into playful cynicism, but for the most part my tendencies have shifted towards openness. I think it’s also made me come to terms with a lot of the insecurities I’ve had throughout the course of my adult and creative life. Viewing that through the lens of bringing a person into the world has just made me want things to be good for him.

It’s funny, I was very surprised at how much I started thinking about death. Okay, this is going to sound very bleak, but truly: bringing a new life into the world, having a child, it really put things into perspective for me. Suddenly my life seemed a lot shorter and I was like, “Oh, shit. I need to be grateful for this time and how I use it.”

I also just got out of therapy, by the way, so if my answers are getting overly-existential that might be why. [laughs]

How old is Calder now?

He’s three and a half.

Has he listened to much of your music? Does he have an understanding of you as a musician?

He does and it’s really cool. It’s really fun because it’s totally out-of-context. We’ve showed him videos of me playing live, which is something he hasn’t really fully comprehended. He thinks it’s cool but doesn’t quite understand it.

But it’s more so that I was playing these songs around the house, listening to mixes and stuff, and he was around. He knows the song he’s on. He calls it “The Calder Song.” He’ll say, “I wanna listen to ‘Calder Song’!” There’s another song on the record called “Dial Tone” that, for whatever reason, he calls “Daddy’s Song.” He’ll always be requesting to hear these songs, but it’s also funny, too, because he’s a three year old and has no filter. There are some songs I’ll play him and he’ll say, “I don’t like this song. I want to listen to ‘Calder Song.’” Fair enough.

You’ve got time capsules for him he’ll be able to plug into whenever. That’s a luxury a lot of parents don’t necessarily have.

I’ve always thought of my records as time capsules in some sense—not so much for other people, though that may be the case, but really for me. I cannot disassociate certain records from certain times in my life, what I was going through emotionally or where I was geographically. That’s already been a gift to me.

So I do think about that. Who knows how long it will take for him to even have an interest in digging into that stuff. But it is an interesting position to be in as a parent; to have all these things I’ve made exist in a very public way. He will have access to them, regardless of whether or not I choose to show them to him.

You produced Hold on your own. You also produced Molly Burch’s latest record, Daydreamer. The definition of a producer can vary depending on who defines it. What’s it mean to you?

I’ll take the case with Molly’s record first, because I think that’s more of a cut-and-dry situation. I feel like my role with that record as a producer was in the traditional sense. She had a bunch of songs written but they were very bare-bones: her, a piano, and a drum machine. Super-duper blank slate in terms of how she wanted them to sound. That was very fun for me to work on because I was given these blank canvases where the melodies were in place, the choruses were in place, and the bones were so good. So it was really just my job to create new arrangements.

I spent a lot of time working on her record by myself. We started working on it remotely, so I was taking the demos she sent me, stripping them of everything, and then rebuilding them from the ground floor. Then I’d start sending her ideas back, getting a sense of what she liked, what she didn’t like. Eventually we went into a studio and recorded it all as we hoped it would be. In that sense, my role as a producer was building the arrangements. But it was also a taste thing, deciding how to best dress these songs.

The same is true of my own record. I self-produced it because I recorded a large portion of it entirely by myself. When I did go in and bring in some players, I did work with an engineer—this guy Adrian Olsen, an engineer in Richmond who’s incredibly talented in his own right as a producer, mixer, and engineer—to help execute the sounds I had in my head.

I do think people have different definitions of what a music producer is. It runs from a Rick Rubin sitting-in-the-room, like, “This is dope.” [laughs] He does more than that, I’m sure. Let me not publicly roast Rick Rubin.

And then there are people I’ve worked with in the past who handle every aspect of the record: engineering, mixing, just someone who’s incredibly technically minded and making decisions every step of the way. And I don’t consider myself a mixer, for what it’s worth.

When you work in that context with Molly—or like you did on a few of the tracks from Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee—are you consciously trying to plug into another artist’s vision? Or are you bringing your own style and voice to their project?

For me, it’s a little of both. When I do work with other people, I’m trying to be conscious of what their vision is, what it is they’re hoping to accomplish, and what sounds they want to use to convey their ideas.

But I’m also equally aware that if they’ve gotten in touch with me, there’s something innate about what I do that must be appealing to them. So I still try and work within my wheelhouse to get them to wherever it is they’re looking to go.

With something like “Be Sweet” that was a song we wrote without any intention of either one of us using it. As we started building it, we started having a lot of fun with it. Eventually, Michelle was like, “I want to use this. I want this to be a Japanese Breakfast song.” And now I listen to that song and hear a lot of myself in it, which is fun and rewarding.

More than in the past, Hold sounds like you’re looking to rise to the sonic maximalism of some of your influences. I’m wondering if you’re seeing that final product early on in your process. Do you ever sit down and say, “I’m going to try and write a Peter Gabriel song”? Or is just that exploratory phase and then eventually you get to the same realm?

I think I do both. I have a handful of tricks I’ll reach for when I have writer’s block or want to start something new. Sometimes I just get lucky and I can old school chase the muse. Those moments are few and far between, but they’re really wonderful when they happen.

A lot of times I have to set some boundaries for the task to start something new. Sometimes it starts by being very frank and deliberate—almost creating a challenge for myself, like: “I want to write this kind of song.” Or I’ll have a song I’m obsessed with and try to dissect what it is I like about that song. Then I’ll start by emulating it with the understanding that, because it’s me, I won’t really be able to do it as well as I might hope. Which is a good thing. I think a lot of successful things start with trying to rip something off and then you go off on tangents because you can’t help it.

All of those methods got put to use on Hold. There are some songs that started with very direct influences and other ones that were born out of feeling, which would allow me to start writing even if I didn’t have a super-specific reference point.

A parameter or a limitation or a challenge can be helpful because it takes some of the pressure off. It’s just a lark, I’m just playing around.

Yeah, and it feels weird because I think sometimes—and I would imagine maybe other people feel this way, too, sometimes—as a creative person you can almost feel guilty when an idea isn’t just born out of the ether. When you have to work for it or make an exercise out of it. Sometimes your gut is saying it’s a lesser expression. But I don’t think that that’s true. As someone who is now a career artist—which is weird to think, because I don’t feel that way, I don’t feel that old, I don’t feel like I’ve been making music for that long, but I kind of have—that becomes part of it. The process of writing music is as much part of the expression as anything else. Giving myself writing exercises is more fun than trying to chase the muse.

At this point, is there a distinct voice you aim for with Wild Nothing? Or is Wild Nothing, creatively speaking, synonymous with Jack Tatum?

I think it’s grown more synonymous with me as a person. There are still creative tendencies, musically, that I haven’t allowed myself to explore within the confines of Wild Nothing. But I think, largely speaking, Wild Nothing feels like an honest representation of my taste and what I want to do as a songwriter.

I do struggle with it sometimes, honestly. I’ve always filtered my music through the lens of eighties production techniques that I like. Sometimes you become a bit limited by what you put out in the world and sometimes I worry people see me for doing this one thing or framing my music in a certain way when the truth is that it’s very much a choice. I’m thinking of how to talk about it without coming across as being defensive about something I have no real need to be defensive about.

This record to me feels like a real-deal expression of where I’m at, even more so than some of my earlier stuff, honestly. Lyrically and emotionally, there was a lot of stuff early on that was very forthcoming and very earnest, but musically speaking that was the period of my life where I was the most focused on trying to do something else, trying to be something else, trying very hard to do a certain kind of thing. Whereas now I’m very okay with bouncing around a little bit and following a whim.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Kevin M. Kearney.

Audaciously, and with grinding ignorance, she persists in her rather grisly attempts to kill the central assumptions of international refugee protection, flawed as they might be, elevating the role of the sovereign state to that of tormenter and high judge. In doing so Braverman shows herself to believe in the ultimate prerogative of the state to be decisively cruel rather than consistently humane. The result is a tyrant’s feast, bound to make a good impression in every country keen to seal off their borders from those seeking sanctuary.

In her speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Braverman came up with a novel reading on how the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 has been applied of late. In her mind, there had been “an interpretive shift” towards generosity in awarding refugee status when, conspicuously, the opposite is true. She was particularly irked by those irritating judges who had endorsed “something more akin to a definition of ‘discrimination’”. All in all, “uncontrolled and illegal migration” posed “an existential challenge for the political and cultural institutions of the West.”

Lip service is paid to the rights of asylum seekers, though not much. She shows a keen fondness for the term “illegal migrants” such as those who made their way to the Italian island of Lampedusa, proceeding to sleep on the streets, pilfer food and clash with police. “Where individuals are being persecuted, it is right we offer sanctuary,” she conceded. “But we will not be able to sustain an asylum system if in effect, simply being gay, or a woman, or fearful of discrimination in your own country of origin, is sufficient to qualify for protection.”

Trust Braverman to turn universal human rights into a matter of gender or sexual politics. She further teases out the battle lines by attacking the “misguided dogma of multiculturalism” that “makes no demands of the incomer to integrate”. Such a failure had happened because “it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it.”

A quick read of the definition of “refugee” in the Convention stipulates a number of considerations: “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particularly social group or political opinion”; that the person is outside their country of nationality and unwilling to “avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”

In 2022, a mere 1.5% of the 74,751 asylum claims lodged in the UK cited sexual orientation in their applications. The countries most prominently featured as points of origin for the applicants were Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria. It remains unclear how many were accepted as a direct result of mentioning sexual orientation, but these numbers hardly constitute a radical shift.

The UNHCR was unimpressed by the Home Secretary’s AEI show, though hampered by the language of moderation. “The need is not for reform, or more restrictive interpretation, but for stronger and more consistent application of the convention and its underlying principle of responsibility-sharing.” The body suggested that expediting the backlog of asylum claims in the UK might be one way of approaching it, something Braverman has failed, rather spectacularly, to do.

The Refugee Convention has provided fine sport for abuse and blackening for over two decades, its critics always bleating about the fact that the circumstances of its remit had changed. A list of Australian Prime Ministers (John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abott, just to name a few) would surely have to top the league, always taking issue with a document regarded as creaky and unfit to deal with the arrival of “unlawful non-citizens”. From the implementation of the Pacific Solution to the creation of such odious categories as Temporary Protection Visas, the protective principles of the Convention became effigies to a system that was being forcibly retired.

In Britain, New Labour’s Tony Blair, always emphasising the New over Labour, never tired of haranguing his party, and constituents, about the reforms he was making to a number of policy platforms, with processing refugees being foremost among them. During his election drive in 2001, Blair claimed that, “The UK is taking the lead in arguing for reform, not of the convention’s values, but of how it operates.” At the time, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, Nick Hardwick, gasped. “The Geneva Convention on Refugees has saved millions of lives worldwide.”

Blair’s Home Secretary, Jack Straw, had already set the mould for Braverman in his promise in 2000 to initiate a “complete revision” of the Refugee Convention, one that would see “a two-tier system to cut the flow of asylum seekers” coming into the UK.

At home, Braverman has made a royal mess of things. Keeping up with an obsession nurtured by the Johnson government, she has persisted in trying to outsource and defer the responsibility for processing asylum claims to third countries. The favourite choice remains distant Rwanda, a country unfathomably praised for its outstanding “modernising” credentials.

While the government scored a legal victory in the High Court in December 2022, which saw nothing questionable about undertakings made by Kigali in the Memorandum of Understanding and Notes Verbales (NV) about how asylum claims would be processed, the Court of Appeal thought otherwise. On June 29 this year, a majority of the Court decided to give Rwanda’s human rights record a stern, rough comb over, finding it wanting on the prohibition against torture outlined in Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls, felt that “there were substantial grounds for thinking that asylum seekers sent to Rwanda under the MEDP [Migration and Economic Development Partnership]” at the date the decisions were made by the secretary in July 2022 “faced real risks of article 3 [European Convention on Human Rights] mistreatment.” Such a conclusion was inevitable after consulting “the historical record described by the UNHCR, the significant concerns of the UNHCR itself, and the factual realities of the current asylum process itself.”

Lord Justice Underhill underlined the lower court’s own admission that the Rwandan government was “intolerant of dissent; that there are restrictions on the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of the press and freedom of speech; and that political opponents have been detained in unofficial detention centres and have been subjected to torture and Article 3 ill-treatment short of torture.”

As a result, Braverman finds herself at sea, struggling to find a port, or centre, to park her own, brittle dogmas. In July, she told the House of Commons that she disagreed “fundamentally” with the view of the court “that Rwanda is not a safe place for refugees”. She went on to say that her government took their “international obligations very seriously and we are satisfied that the provisions of the Illegal Migration Bill comply with the refugee convention. The fundamental principle remains, however, that those in need of protection should claim asylum at the earliest opportunity and in the first safe country they reach.”

And that, ultimately, is the rub: domestic politics vaulted by individual ambition. When considering the stuffing in such speeches, the international audience is less important than those listening at home. Braverman is likely to have her eyes on the prime ministerial prize, having failed to secure the Conservative leadership last summer. A troubled Tory MP, speaking to the BBC on condition of anonymity, had some advice for UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: best get rid of the Home Secretary as soon as possible lest it “reflects poorly on him”. It’s a bit late for that.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The post Jack the Wolf: A Great Abstract Painter’s Children’s Story appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Carrier.

Photograph Source: Tiomax80 – CC BY 2.0

At the end of May, just before Pride Month in the US began, Uganda enacted a law allowing for the death penalty for LGTBQ+ people. Uganda, already one of the 66 nations to criminalize LGTBQ+ people, became the 12th nation to set capital punishment for sexual and gender minorities. The US provides weapons and military assistance to 10 of those 12 countries, including Uganda.* Overall, the US provides weapons and military assistance to more than 85% of the nations that treat LGTBQ+ people as criminals. As the White House, State Department and the Pentagon celebrated Pride Month, the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the US’ militarized foreign policy were exposed, a foreign policy that prioritizes the transactional needs of its overseas empire and weapons sales over human rights.

That the US says one thing and does another is no surprise. Two years ago, by cross-referencing the State Department-funded Freedom House’s list of “not free” nations with those nations receiving US arms sales and military assistance, I found that 74% of the countries listed by Freedom House received weapons, military aid and training from the Pentagon. Others, such as Stephen Semler, Rich Whitney and David Swanson, have documented this relationship with dictators, military regimes, monarchies and autocracies. Of course, US partnerships with non-democratic and human rights-violating regimes were a foundation of the Cold War’s realpolitik policies.

US military support extends beyond non-democratic governments to countries perhaps defined as democracies, but that are, in reality, mass and systemic human rights violators. According to Front Line Defenders, of the 401 human rights workers murdered in 2022, 70% of them were killed in just five nations – Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Honduras and the Philippines – all considered democracies and all recipients of US weapons and military assistance. Colombia, which accounted for 46% of human rights worker deaths in 2022, has received hundreds of millions of dollars of US military support annually, going back to the 1990s, even as Colombia’s human rights violations have been evident for decades.

A review of the 66 nations that criminalize LGTBQ+ people shows 57 have received US weapons deliveries and military assistance in the last two years. This knowledge that 85% of the nations that oppress, jail and kill LGTBQ+ people have a military partnership with the US aligns systemically and historically with what we know about the reality of US foreign policy, despite insistent US assertions of a steadfast commitment to freedom, equality and human rights.

The Department of State proudly works to promote and protect the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons around the world. We strongly oppose the “otherization” of LGBTQI+ persons to justify authoritarian power grabs and attacks on institutions of democracy globally. Democracies are stronger when they celebrate the full rights and value of all persons, without discrimination.

~ US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, June 1, 2023

Uganda joins Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen with the death penalty for its LGTBQ+ population. Of those countries, only Afghanistan and Iran do not receive US weapons or military assistance. If not for that Taliban victory in 2021, Iran would be the only nation with capital punishment for its LGTBQ+ people not on the Pentagon payroll. In the last two years, however, neighboring Pakistan was provided nearly $25 million in military assistance while accepting deliveries of hundreds of millions of dollars of US weapons.

Support for these anti-LGTBQ+ nations with the death penalty ranges from tens of millions to hundreds of billions of dollars. Mauritania, the smallest American vassal, received $1.5 million in weapons in the last two years. It is provided an annual $1 million stipend from the Pentagon and had 2,300 soldiers trained by American soldiers and contractors in 2021. Saudi Arabia, the largest US vassal, has hundreds of billions in weapons contracts with the US and sends its soldiers and airmen to the US to train. While Saudi Arabia doesn’t receive direct military assistance in the form other nations do, since 2015, the US has provided logistical, supply and intelligence support to allow the Saudis to wage their brutal and genocidal war in Yemen. That war keeps the internationally recognized government of Yemen in power – a government that has execution for LGTBQ+ people on its books.

Somalia, a country US troops have been in and out of my entire adult life, has a government protected by the US that authorizes the death penalty – to be fair, the insurgent al-Shabaab movement the Somali government is battling also threatens LGTBQ+ people with death. Nigeria, fighting a reactionary religious insurgency as well, has several states with the death penalty. Nigeria received more than $200 million in US weapons over the last two years and $58 million in military assistance over the previous five years. Last year, the Biden Administration authorized $1 billion in attack helicopters for Nigeria. Brunei, which I visited as a Marine during a port call in 2001, received more than $20 million in weapons over the last two years. Although not as much as the Saudis, the Qataris and UAE benefit from massive American weapons sales, including the most modern American F-35 and F-15 fighters. Qatar hosts the largest US air base in the Middle East, while UAE ports in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman are indispensable to US Navy operations.

Over the last two years, Uganda has received nearly $20 million in weapons from the US while taking in almost $85 million in military aid during the previous five years. Until 2019, the US trained several thousand Ugandan troops annually (data post-2019 may be incomplete or unreported). The US used thousands of Ugandan mercenaries and contractors in its wars; I clearly remember them in Iraq. Ugandan troops have been on the same side of the war as the US in Somalia for many years and have been integral. According to The Intercept and American University, the US has two bases in Uganda, one in Entebbe and one near Kampala. In compensation for participation in the US Global War on Terror and to support the larger US Africa Command mission, the US, through successive administrations, has deliberately ignored and failed to act on Uganda’s human rights abuses.

In 2014, in reaction to proposed anti-LGTBQ+ legislation in Uganda, President Obama announced cuts to economic and policing aid and canceled a planned military exercise. Regardless, in 2015, Uganda received $43.5 million in Pentagon aid and then $104 million in 2016. During those last two years in office, the Obama Administration also delivered $7 million worth of weapons and trained 7,000 Ugandan soldiers. Issues with Uganda and human rights continued, including the Ugandan military massacre of 160 civilians in 2016. According to the Congressional Research Service, Uganda received nearly $400 million in US military aid from 2011-2018 despite its well-known human rights violations.

President Biden pledged to cut off aid to countries that violate LGTBQ+ rights. His administration has warned Uganda about its human rights policies and laws, including in the immediate wake of Uganda’s enactment of the death penalty. However, in the month since the announcement of the death penalty, there have only been simple statements by the White House and the State Department and some nebulous visa restrictions.

The hypocrisy and dishonesty are galling. President Biden is famous for saying, “Show me where your money goes and I’ll show you your priorities.” The US’ priorities are empowering oppressive governments to preserve US hegemony, fortifying the Pentagon’s proxies and maximizing weapons sales. Fulfilling promises and commitments to protect human rights gets in the way of such things.

*Unless otherwise noted, data on arms sales, military assistance, and foreign training comes from the Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Matthew Hoh.

The post Birds of a Feather: Trump and Airman Jack Teixeira appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

As we have noted before, a systemic feature of state-corporate media is propaganda by omission. Missing out salient facts, informed commentary and context about the machinations of government and big business means that the public is less able to:

1. Understand the world around us;
2. Challenge state-corporate power; and
3. Bring about the fundamental changes in society that have never been more necessary.

Current examples are legion, as we will see in the selection that follows.

1. Journalists Pushing For Less Transparency

Last week, 21-year-old US airman Jack Texeira was arrested following, as BBC News put it: ‘[a] leak of highly classified military documents about the Ukraine war and other national security issues.’

Former UK diplomat Craig Murray pointed to a disturbing aspect of the case, namely, that Texeira was:

‘tracked down by UK secret service front Bellingcat in conjunction with the New York Times and in parallel with the Washington Post, not to help him escape or help him publish or tell people his motives, but to help the state arrest him.’

Bellingcat has been examined by, among others, Kit Klarenberg of the Grayzone who reported that the supposedly ‘independent, open-source investigations’ website has ‘accepted enormous sums from Western intelligence contractors’.

As for the New York Times and Washington Post, US journalist Glenn Greenwald noted:

‘It is indescribably shocking and sickening that the nation’s two largest media outlets were the ones who did the FBI’s work and hunted for the leaker and outed him.’

Almost as bad, he said, was that rather than press the government during a Pentagon press conference about the content of the leaked documents, journalists actually pushed for greater clampdowns on security leaks.

Murray added:

‘I am not at all surprised by Bellingcat, which is plainly a spook organisation. I hope this enables more people to see through them. But the behaviour of the New York Times and Washington Post is truly shocking. They now see their mission as to serve the security state, not public knowledge.’

He also observed that, over the past week or so, ‘nothing has been published [from the leaked material] that does not serve US propaganda narratives.’

Very little, if anything, has been reliably presented about Texeira’s motives in releasing these state documents. Murray warned readers to be sceptical of attempts to portray him as simply a ‘rampant Trump supporter’ or ‘inadequate jock’ trying ‘to boast to fellow gaming nerds.’

Murray concluded:

‘We should remain suspicious of attempts to characterise him: I am acutely aware of media portrayals of Julian Assange which are entirely untrue.’

2.  Cancelling Julian Assange

April 11 marked four years since Julian Assange, co-founder of WikiLeaks, was forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and imprisoned in the high security Belmarsh prison. He and his lawyers have been fighting the prolonged threat of extradition to the US, where he would likely spend the rest of his life in a ‘Supermax’ prison. His ‘crime’ has been to expose the nefarious activities, including serious war crimes, of the US and its allies.

As Alex Nunns, author and former speechwriter for Jeremy Corbyn, noted:

‘Probably the world’s most significant and famous journalist has been in prison for four years today for his work – not in Egypt or China or Russia, but in Britain, a country that lectures others on free speech. His imprisonment is entirely political. He should be free.’

Media Lens has documented the grotesque smears and mischaracterisations of Assange over many years, not least by the Guardian, as well as the dearth of coverage of his plight and what that means for real journalism, freedom of speech and democracy.

In a piece for international media organisation Peoples Dispatch, political writer Amish R M summarised key facts that state-corporate media have buried about Assange. These include:

• The CIA plan to kidnap and assassinate Assange in London.
• The US prosecution is based on fabricated testimony from a repeat offender, currently serving a prison sentence for sexual abuse crimes in Iceland, and described as a ‘sociopath’ by court-ordered psychologists.
• The US spied on Assange while he was in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Earlier this month, Reporters Without Borders Secretary-General Christophe Deloire and Director of Operations Rebecca Vincent were barred access to visit Assange in Belmarsh prison, despite receiving confirmation that a visit would be permitted.

In a sane world, with responsible national media outlets, the above facts would be headline news. Both BBC and ITV News at Ten would devote significant coverage to Assange’s plight and there would be extensive follow-up reporting and commentary on the parlous consequences for journalism and society. Instead, there is virtual silence.

But there is space to document the plight of Russian journalists who contradict the Kremlin’s narratives. What about journalists in this country who might try to contradict the narratives of the White House and Downing Street? Have they, in fact, already been ‘purged’ from so-called ‘mainstream’ media outlets: the word used by John Pilger to describe his treatment by the Guardian? Where is the outrage about the dumping of dissenting voices in the ‘free’ western media?

BBC News would rather direct attention to: ‘The talk-show hosts telling Russians what to believe.’ Of course, you would never see a major feature by the famously ‘impartial’ BBC News on: ‘The talk-show hosts telling Britons what to believe’ on the war in Ukraine, or anything else for that matter.

Australian writer Caitlin Johnstone describes Assange as ‘the greatest journalist of all time’. She wrote recently:

‘Assange began his journalism career by revolutionizing source protection for the digital age, then proceeded to break some of the biggest stories of the century. There’s no one who can hold a candle to him, living or dead.

‘And now he’s in a maximum security prison, solely and exclusively because he was better at doing the best kind of journalism than anyone else in the world. That is the kind of civilization you live in. The kind that imprisons the best journalist of all time for doing journalism.’

3.  Nord Stream: ‘It May Be In No One’s Interest To Reveal More’

We have previously written about the blanket of silence over attempts to get to the truth of the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines that supplied Russian gas to Germany. US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s report pointing to the US as the most likely perpetrator of this terrorist act have been blanked, or summarily dismissed, by state-corporate media.

Following Seymour’s report, US officials released an assessment based on ‘new intelligence’, faithfully relayed by the media, that a ‘pro-Ukrainian group’ carried out the pipeline attack. Der Spiegel then carried a news report, echoed in coverage around the world, claiming that divers used a German chartered yacht to sabotage the pipelines. There was a modicum of scepticism; journalists are not totally inept or subservient to state narratives.

But media coverage still steered clear of examining the most likely explanation of US involvement; not least given that President Joe Biden had boasted in February 2022 that the US would ‘bring an end to it [Nord Stream]’ if Russia invaded Ukraine. As Reuters reported:

‘”If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the … border of Ukraine again, then there will be … no longer a Nord Stream 2. We, we will bring an end to it,’ Biden said. Asked how, given the project is in German control, Biden said: “I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.”’

Glenn Greenwald observed recently:

‘The NYT — after feeding the public several bullshit versions about who blew up Nord Stream (an environmentally devastating act of industrial terrorism) — now announces: “it may be in no one’s interest to reveal more.”

‘Maybe there’s a clue in the article’s last 2 paragraphs?’

Here are those last two paragraphs in question:

‘And naming a Western nation or operatives could trigger deep mistrust when the West is struggling to maintain a united front [over the war in Ukraine].

‘“Is there any interest from the authorities to come out and say who did this? There are strategic reasons for not revealing who did it,” said Jens Wenzel Kristoffersen, a Danish naval commander and military expert at the University of Copenhagen. “As long as they don’t come out with anything substantial, then we are left in the dark on all this — as it should be.”’

The NYT even emphasised the point in its tweet highlighting their article:

‘Intelligence leaks surrounding who blew up most of the Russian-backed Nord Stream pipelines last September have provided more questions than answers. It may be in no one’s interest to reveal more.’

So, if you still harbour the illusion that ‘mainstream’ journalism can be relied upon to report the truth to the public, rather than covering it up, you may have to reconsider what even the ‘best’ news media, including the NYT, the BBC and the Guardian, do routinely.

4. Propaganda Operations That Remain Hidden

One of the central tenets of western political ideology is that ‘we’ have free access to information, and that only ‘the other side’ does propaganda, a dirty word that we are not supposed to discuss; except, when it does get mentioned in polite company, it is termed ‘counter-disinformation’. In other words, it is information that is intended to ‘counter’ the ‘misleading’ narratives spun by ‘official enemies’.

Last month, the UK government announced ‘emergency funding’ of £4.1 million ‘to fight Russian disinformation’. The press release stated that this large sum would help the BBC World Service continue to bring:

‘independent, impartial and accurate news to people in Ukraine and Russia in the face of increased propaganda from the Russian state.’

Of course, we are expected to swallow the myth that we in the West already enjoy ‘independent, impartial and accurate news’ from the BBC.

But, as John McEvoy and Mark Curtis of the Declassified UK website recently highlighted:

‘Britain’s media routinely takes information from private groups countering Russian and other disinformation without saying these organisations are funded by the UK government and directed by people linked to the UK or US foreign policy establishment.’

The same authors reported earlier this month that the UK Foreign Office has given over £25 million since January 2018 to organisations targeting ‘disinformation’. Four of these organisations are directed by former members of the British and US foreign policy establishment and are focused overwhelmingly on ‘official enemies’.

McEvoy and Curtis observed:

‘These organisations tend to focus on Russian war crimes and information operations, particularly in Ukraine, while failing to conduct comparable investigations into Britain, the US or NATO.

‘Much of these groups’ research is thus unidirectional, presenting malign information operations as the sole domain of enemies identified by the UK government. The impact is likely to be one-sided information entering the public news arena.’

Indeed, unsuspecting members of the public will have no idea that analysis from supposedly ‘independent’ experts commenting on the war in Ukraine often comes from Foreign Office-funded organisations.

In particular, Declassified UK noted of two such organisations:

• 25 Guardian and Observer articles referenced the Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab, none of which mention its funding by the UK and US governments.
• The Centre for Information Resilience were referenced 29 times in the UK media, with only one article mentioning its UK government funding.

Also buried by state-corporate media is the extent and nature of the UK’s global militarism since 1945. Curtis reported earlier this year that:

‘Britain has deployed its armed forces for combat over 80 times in 47 countries since the end of the Second World War, in episodes ranging from brutal colonial wars and covert operations to efforts to prop up favoured governments or to deter civil unrest.’

Faithful consumers of British media over this period, right up to the present day, are meant to believe that successive UK governments have been acting out of benign intent in such foreign ‘interventions’. To unearth the reality requires digging deeper and further than the tightly-restricted domain overseen by state-corporate media.

Concluding Remarks

The above sections are but a taste of the systematic blanking, sidelining and even smearing of those who present facts and perspectives that challenge state-corporate policies and pronouncements. In an era of volatile international tensions, threat of nuclear conflict, class warfare against the majority of the population, inhumanity towards refugees, and the overarching spectre of the climate crisis, the propaganda system needs to be exposed and replaced by genuine public-interest media.

Do you think electing establishment stooge Sir Keir Starmer is a solution to any of this? Or do you see that his promotion by establishment media, not least the Guardian, is how the establishment seeks to perpetuate its own interests?

Alex Nunns, mentioned earlier, recently noted that when Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader it ‘gave the Labour right the fright of their lives’. Nunns explained:

‘Suddenly the right saw the left as an existential threat. Whatever electoral benefits there were to having the left in the tent were outweighed by the risk of the Labour right permanently losing the party they saw as their property.’

Starmer and his supporters in the party are determined to ensure that the prospects of a left-wing Labour leadership are permanently crushed. Banning Corbyn from standing for Labour in the next General Election is:

‘about sending a message, first to the left, and second to the establishment, that they have nothing to fear from a tamed Labour Party. They want to prove that the insurgent, radical leftism that Corbyn represented will never be repeated.’

In this very real sense, the current Labour Party is part of the established interests that are determined to suppress grassroots opposition to endless war, class exploitation and the steps required to avert the worst of the onrushing climate catastrophe.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

Update (3:00 pm):

Jack Teixeira, the Air National Guard member suspected of leaking hundreds of classified Pentagon documents to members of an online forum, was arrested Thursday in Dighton, Massachusetts after The New York Times reported on his alleged identity.

CNN aired footage of Teixeira, who was known as "OG" in the online chat group, being apprehended by the FBI.

In a press briefing, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed that Teixeira had been arrested "in connection with an investigation into alleged unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission of classified national defense information."

Earlier:

The person behind a leak of hundreds of classified Pentagon documents related to the war in Ukraine is reportedly a racist young gun enthusiast who spent several months sharing the information with members of an online forum on Discord, a platform that's popular in the gaming community, according to interviews The Washington Post and investigative journalism collective Bellingcat conducted with another member of the forum.

The New York Times reported Thursday that the alleged leaker's name is Jack Teixeira and that he served as a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Teixeira is reportedly 21 years old.

Aric Toler of Bellingcat interviewed a teenage member of the private Discord server that Teixeira frequented, known as "Thug Shaker Central," on Sunday, and the Post published a report based on the source's story on Wednesday, a week after the Times first reported that the documents had been leaked.

The teenage member said Teixeira was in his early-to-mid 20s and was seen as a leader of the forum, where he was known as OG. The Post viewed a video of the man identified as OG at a shooting range, where he yelled "a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera" before firing several rounds of ammunition at a target. The newspaper reported it had verified details shared by the teenage source with other members of Thug Shaker Central.

The members did not confirm to the Times that Teixeira and OG were one and the same, but the newspaper reported that "a trail of digital evidence compiled by the Times leads to Airman Teixeira."

According to the teenage member, OG worked at an unnamed "military base" where he was one of thousands of entry- and low-level government employees who had access to classified documents like the ones he allegedly shared with about 25 members of Thug Shaker Central.

OG told the other members that he worked in a secure facility on the base where cellphones and other electronic devices were prohibited to prevent leaks.

The teenage member told the Post that OG frequently knew about major news events before they happened, saying, "Only someone with this kind of high clearance" would have that information.

Late last year, Teixeira began sharing several documents per week on the server, annotating some to translate abbreviations used in the intelligence community, such as "NOFORN" for information that could not be shared with foreign nationals.

The group contained people from "just about every walk of life," according to the teenage member, including people from Asia and South America as well as Ukrainian and Russian citizens. The source told the Post that members from the "Eastern Bloc and those post-Soviet countries" showed interest in the documents.

The classified documents included charts of battlefields in Ukraine, which has been under attack by Russian forces since Russia's invasion in February 2022, and "highly classified satellite images of the aftermath of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian electrical facilities," according to the Post. OG also shared documents that showed the possible path of North Korean ballistic nuclear missiles that could reach the U.S. and photographs of the object that the Biden administration identified as a Chinese spy balloon in February.

OG reportedly "had a dark view of the government" and spoke frequently with other members of the Discord server about "government overreach" and his opposition to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The teenage member was adamant, however, that Teixeira did not leak the documents as a political act.

"I would definitely not call him a whistleblower. I would not call OG a whistleblower in the slightest," he told the Post, adding that OG "seemed very confused and lost as to what to do" when he spoke to him following the Times' reporting on the leaks.

Shortly before the Timesreported on the documents on April 6, OG logged into the Discord server and was "frantic, which is unusual for him," the member said.

Josh Marshall, founder of Talking Points Memo, expressed skepticism about OG's identity.

"If he is [who he claims to be] there seem to be so many breadcrumbs it's hard to believe everyone involved won't be arrested in a matter of days," he tweeted.

On Thursday, CNNreported that the Pentagon has begun limiting access to highly classified documents, which roughly 1.25 million federal employees and contractors have previously had clearance to access.

Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, a spokesperson for the Pentagon, told News Nation on Wednesday that the federal government is considering "mitigation measures in terms of what we can do to prevent potential additional unauthorized leaks."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

On December 15, the night that the Biden administration released some of the remaining JFK files while withholding others with another half-assed excuse, Tucker Carlson, the most-watched cable news television host, delivered a monologue about the JFK assassination.  It garnered a great deal of attention.

Although I don’t watch Carlson’s television show, I received messages from many friends and colleagues, people I highly respect, about his monologue’s great significance, so I watched that episode. And then I watched it many more times.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a man whom I hold in the highest esteem, tweeted that it was “the most courageous newscast in 60 years.  The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered.”

While I completely agree with his second sentence, I was underwhelmed by Carlson’s words, to put it mildly.  I thought it was clearly “a limited hangout,” as described by the former CIA agent Victor Marchetti:

Spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting, sometimes even volunteering, some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.

Or listens carefully.

Carlson surely said some things that were true, and, as my friends and many others have insisted, he was the first mainstream corporate journalist to say that “the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president.”

But “involved” is a word worthy of a lawyer, a public relations expert, or the CIA itself because it can mean something significant or nothing.  Or a little of both.  It is a weasel word.

And the source for Carlson’s claim was an anonymous source, someone who he said “had access” to the JFK files that were never released.  We know, of course, that when the New York Times and its ilk cite “anonymous sources,” claiming that they have told them this or that, this raises eyebrows. Or should.  Anyone who closely follows that paper’s claims knows that it is a CIA conduit, but now, those who know this are embracing Tucker Carlson as if he were the prophet of truth, as if a Rupert Murdock-owned Fox TV host who is paid many millions of dollars, has become the Julian Assange of corporate journalism.

In a 2010 radio interview, Mr. Carlson said, “ I am 100 % his bitch.  Whatever Mr. Murdoch says, I do.”

The obvious question is: Why would Fox News allow Carlson to say now what many hear as shocking news about the JFK assassination?

So let me run down exactly what Carlson did say.

For five minutes of the 7:28 minute monologue, he said things that are obviously true: that Jack Ruby killed Oswald and that the claim that both acted alone is weird and beyond any odds; that the Warren Commission was shoddy; that the CIA weaponized the term “conspiracy theory” in 1967 according to Lance De Haven-Smith’s book Conspiracy Theory in America; that the CIA’s brainwashing specialist psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West visited Jack Ruby in jail and declared him insane, contrary to all other assessments of Ruby’s mental state; and that the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that there was probably a conspiracy in the president’s assassination.

All of this is true but not news to those knowledgeable about the assassination.  Nevertheless, it was perhaps news to Carlson’s audience and therefore good to hear on a corporate news site.

But then, the next few minutes – the key part of his report, the part that drew all the attention – got tricky.

Carlson said that just that day – December 15, 2022 – when all the JFK documents were due to be released but many were withheld, “we spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents.”  Who would have such access, and how, is left unaddressed, but it is implied that it is a CIA source, but maybe not.  It is strange to say the least.

Carlson then said he asked this person, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy?”  And the answer was “I believe they were involved.”  Carlson goes on to say, “And the answer we received was unequivocal.  Yes, the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president.”

Note the words “hand,” “believe,” “involved,” and then “unequivocal.”

“Hand” can mean many things and is very vague.  For example, in front of his wife, a man tells his friend, “I had a hand in preparing Christmas dinner.”  To which his wife, laughing, replies, “Yes, he did, he put the napkins on the table.”

To “believe” something is very different from knowing it, as Dr. Martin Schotz, one of the most perceptive JFK assassination researchers, has written in his book, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy

On Belief Versus Knowledge

It is so important to understand that one of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.

And the American people are more than willing to be held in this state because to know the truth — as opposed to only believe the truth — is to face an awful terror and to be no longer able to evade responsibility. It is precisely in moving from belief to knowledge that the citizen moves from irresponsibility to responsibility, from helplessness and hopelessness to action, with the ultimate aim of being empowered and confident in one’s rational powers.

“Involved,” like the word “hand,” can mean many things; it is vague, slippery, not definitive, and is used by tabloid gossip columnists to suggest scandals that may or not be true.

“Unequivocal” does not accurately describe the source’s statement, which was: “I believe.” That is, unless you take someone’s belief as evidence of the truth, or you wish to make it sound so.

Note that nowhere in Carlson’s report does he or his alleged source say clearly and definitively that the CIA/National Security State murdered President Kennedy, for which there has long been overwhelming evidence.  Such beating-around-the-bush is quite common and tantalizes the audience to think the next explosive revelation will be dispositive.  Yet no release of documents is needed to confirm that the CIA killed Kennedy, as if the national security state would allow itself to be pinned for the murder.

Waiting for the documents is like waiting for Godot; and to promote some hidden smoking gun, some great revelation is to engage in a pseudo-debate without end.  It is to do the killers’ bidding for them.  And it is quite common. There are many well-known “dissident” writers who continue to claim that there is not enough evidence to conclude that the CIA/national security state killed the president.  And this is so for those who question the official story.  Furthermore, there are many more pundits who maintain that Oswald did the deed alone, as the Warren Report concluded and the mainstream corporate media trumpet.  This group is led by Noam Chomsky, whose acolytes bow to their master’s ignorant conclusions.

Maybe we’ll know the truth in 2063.

While it is true that some people change dramatically, Tucker Carlson, the Fox Television celebrity, would be a very unlikely candidate.  He defended Eliot Abrams and praised Oliver North; supported the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; went to Nicaragua to support those Contras; smeared the great journalist Gary Webb while defending the CIA; supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq; and much more.  Alan MacLeod chronicled all this in February of this year for those who have known nothing of Carlson’s past, including his father’s work as a U.S. intelligence operative as director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the body that oversees government-funded media, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio and TV Martí and Voice of America – all U.S. propaganda outlets.

Now we are being asked to accept that Carlson is out to show how the CIA is “involved” in the murder of JFK.  Why would so many fall for such rhetoric?

No doubt any crumb of national news coverage about the CIA and the assassination by a major corporate player elicits an enthusiastic response from those who have tried for many years to tell the truth about JFK’s murder.  One’s first response is excitement. But such reactions need to tempered by sober analyses of exactly what has been said, which is what I am doing here. I, too, wish it were a breakthrough but think it is more of the same. Much ado about nothing. A way to continue to foster uncertainty, not knowledge, about the crime.

I see it as a game of false binaries in the same way the Democrats and Republicans are portrayed as mortal enemies.  Yes, there are some differences, but all-in-all they are one party, the War Party, who agree on the essential tenets of U.S. imperial policy. They both represent the interests of the upper classes and are financed by them. They both work within the same frame of reference. They both support what Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst, rightly calls the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT).

If one asks a dedicated believer in the truthfulness of the New York Times Corporation or NPR, for example, what they think of Tucker Carlson, they will generally dismiss him with disdain as a right-wing charlatan. This, of course, works in reverse if you ask Carlson’s followers what they think of the Times or NPR. Yet for those who think outside the frame – and they are all non-mainstream – a different picture emerges. But sometimes they are taken in by those whose equivocations are extremely lawyerly but appeal to what they wish to hear. This is exactly what a “limited hangout” is. Snagged by some actual truths, they bite on the bait of nuances that don’t mean what they think they do.

Left vs. right, Fox TV  vs. the New York Times, NPR, etc.: Just as Carlson’s father Dick Carlson ran the CIA-created U.S. overseas radio propaganda under Reagan and George H. W. Bush, so too the present head of National Public Radio, John Lansing, did the same under Barack Obama. See my piece, Will NPR Now Change its Name to National Propaganda Radio. Birds of a feather disguised as hawks and sparrows in a game meant to confuse and create scrambled brains.

Lastly, let me mention an odd “coincidence.” On December 6 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., nine days before the partial JFK files release and Tucker Carlson’s monologue, the Mary Ferrell Foundation, an organization devoted to JFK research, gave a presentation showcasing what was advertised as explosive new information about the Kennedy assassination. The key presenter was Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and prominent JFK assassination researcher who has sued the CIA for documents involving Lee Harvey Oswald and CIA operative George Joannides.

On November 22 Morley had published an article titled “Yes, There is a JFK Smoking Gun.” It was subtitled: It will be found in 44 CIA documents that are still “Denied in Full.” The documents he was referring to allegedly concern contacts between Oswald and Joannides in the summer and fall of 1963 in New Orleans and in Mexico City. “They [the CIA] were running a psychological warfare operation, authorized in June 1963, that followed Oswald from New Orleans to Mexico City later that year,” wrote Morley.

Well, the “smoking gun” documents were not released on Dec 15, although on November 20 and then again at The National Press Club on December 6, Morley spoke of them as proving his point about the CIA’s involvement with Oswald, which has been obvious for a long time.  Although he said he hadn’t seen these key documents but was awaiting their release, he added that even if they were not released that will still prove him correct.  In other words, with this bit of legerdemain, he was saying: What I don’t know, and may not soon not know, supports what I’m claiming even though I don’t know it.  And even if the files were released, he writes, “As for the conspiracy question, the massive withholding of documents makes it premature to draw any conclusions. The undisclosed Oswald operation was not necessarily part of a conspiracy. It might indicate CIA incompetence, not complicity. Again, only the CIA knows for sure.” So the smoking gun is not a smoking gun and the waters of uncertainty roll on and on into the receding future.

CIA incompetence, not complicity. Of course. It ain’t necessarily so. Or it is, or might be, or isn’t.

Morley is one of  many who still cannot say that the CIA killed the president. Tucker Carlson can speak of its “involvement” just like Morley. We need more information, more files, etc. But even if we get them, we still won’t know.  Maybe by 2063.

My question for Tucker Carlson: Who was your anonymous source? And did your source see the documents that were never disclosed? What specific documents are you referring to? And do they prove that the CIA killed Kennedy or just suggest “involvement”?

Finally, as I said before, even as there has long been a mountain of evidence for the CIA’s murder of JFK (and RFK as well, although that is never mentioned), many prominent people continue to play as if there is not.  Listen to this video interview between Chris Hedges and former CIA officer John Kiriakou.  It is all about the nefarious deeds of the CIA.  Right toward the end of the interview (see minutes 32:30-33:19), Hedges says, “So I have to ask [since he has to answer] this question since I know Oliver Stone is convinced the CIA killed JFK … I’ve never seen any evidence that backs it up …”  and they both share a mocking laugh at Stone as if he were the village idiot when he knows more about the JFK assassination than the two of them put together, and Kiriakou says he too has not seen such evidence. It’s a disgusting but typical display of arrogance and a “limited hangout.” Criticize the CIA only to make sure you whitewash them for one of their greatest achievements: the murder of President John F. Kennedy. This is straight from Chomsky’s playbook.

Beware double-talkers and the games they play. They come in different flavors.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

On December 15, the night that the Biden administration released some of the remaining JFK files while withholding others with another half-assed excuse, Tucker Carlson, the most-watched cable news television host, delivered a monologue about the JFK assassination.  It garnered a great deal of attention.

Although I don’t watch Carlson’s television show, I received messages from many friends and colleagues, people I highly respect, about his monologue’s great significance, so I watched that episode. And then I watched it many more times.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a man whom I hold in the highest esteem, tweeted that it was “the most courageous newscast in 60 years.  The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered.”

While I completely agree with his second sentence, I was underwhelmed by Carlson’s words, to put it mildly.  I thought it was clearly “a limited hangout,” as described by the former CIA agent Victor Marchetti:

Spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting, sometimes even volunteering, some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.

Or listens carefully.

Carlson surely said some things that were true, and, as my friends and many others have insisted, he was the first mainstream corporate journalist to say that “the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president.”

But “involved” is a word worthy of a lawyer, a public relations expert, or the CIA itself because it can mean something significant or nothing.  Or a little of both.  It is a weasel word.

And the source for Carlson’s claim was an anonymous source, someone who he said “had access” to the JFK files that were never released.  We know, of course, that when the New York Times and its ilk cite “anonymous sources,” claiming that they have told them this or that, this raises eyebrows. Or should.  Anyone who closely follows that paper’s claims knows that it is a CIA conduit, but now, those who know this are embracing Tucker Carlson as if he were the prophet of truth, as if a Rupert Murdock-owned Fox TV host who is paid many millions of dollars, has become the Julian Assange of corporate journalism.

In a 2010 radio interview, Mr. Carlson said, “ I am 100 % his bitch.  Whatever Mr. Murdoch says, I do.”

The obvious question is: Why would Fox News allow Carlson to say now what many hear as shocking news about the JFK assassination?

So let me run down exactly what Carlson did say.

For five minutes of the 7:28 minute monologue, he said things that are obviously true: that Jack Ruby killed Oswald and that the claim that both acted alone is weird and beyond any odds; that the Warren Commission was shoddy; that the CIA weaponized the term “conspiracy theory” in 1967 according to Lance De Haven-Smith’s book Conspiracy Theory in America; that the CIA’s brainwashing specialist psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West visited Jack Ruby in jail and declared him insane, contrary to all other assessments of Ruby’s mental state; and that the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that there was probably a conspiracy in the president’s assassination.

All of this is true but not news to those knowledgeable about the assassination.  Nevertheless, it was perhaps news to Carlson’s audience and therefore good to hear on a corporate news site.

But then, the next few minutes – the key part of his report, the part that drew all the attention – got tricky.

Carlson said that just that day – December 15, 2022 – when all the JFK documents were due to be released but many were withheld, “we spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents.”  Who would have such access, and how, is left unaddressed, but it is implied that it is a CIA source, but maybe not.  It is strange to say the least.

Carlson then said he asked this person, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy?”  And the answer was “I believe they were involved.”  Carlson goes on to say, “And the answer we received was unequivocal.  Yes, the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president.”

Note the words “hand,” “believe,” “involved,” and then “unequivocal.”

“Hand” can mean many things and is very vague.  For example, in front of his wife, a man tells his friend, “I had a hand in preparing Christmas dinner.”  To which his wife, laughing, replies, “Yes, he did, he put the napkins on the table.”

To “believe” something is very different from knowing it, as Dr. Martin Schotz, one of the most perceptive JFK assassination researchers, has written in his book, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy

On Belief Versus Knowledge

It is so important to understand that one of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.

And the American people are more than willing to be held in this state because to know the truth — as opposed to only believe the truth — is to face an awful terror and to be no longer able to evade responsibility. It is precisely in moving from belief to knowledge that the citizen moves from irresponsibility to responsibility, from helplessness and hopelessness to action, with the ultimate aim of being empowered and confident in one’s rational powers.

“Involved,” like the word “hand,” can mean many things; it is vague, slippery, not definitive, and is used by tabloid gossip columnists to suggest scandals that may or not be true.

“Unequivocal” does not accurately describe the source’s statement, which was: “I believe.” That is, unless you take someone’s belief as evidence of the truth, or you wish to make it sound so.

Note that nowhere in Carlson’s report does he or his alleged source say clearly and definitively that the CIA/National Security State murdered President Kennedy, for which there has long been overwhelming evidence.  Such beating-around-the-bush is quite common and tantalizes the audience to think the next explosive revelation will be dispositive.  Yet no release of documents is needed to confirm that the CIA killed Kennedy, as if the national security state would allow itself to be pinned for the murder.

Waiting for the documents is like waiting for Godot; and to promote some hidden smoking gun, some great revelation is to engage in a pseudo-debate without end.  It is to do the killers’ bidding for them.  And it is quite common. There are many well-known “dissident” writers who continue to claim that there is not enough evidence to conclude that the CIA/national security state killed the president.  And this is so for those who question the official story.  Furthermore, there are many more pundits who maintain that Oswald did the deed alone, as the Warren Report concluded and the mainstream corporate media trumpet.  This group is led by Noam Chomsky, whose acolytes bow to their master’s ignorant conclusions.

Maybe we’ll know the truth in 2063.

While it is true that some people change dramatically, Tucker Carlson, the Fox Television celebrity, would be a very unlikely candidate.  He defended Eliot Abrams and praised Oliver North; supported the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; went to Nicaragua to support those Contras; smeared the great journalist Gary Webb while defending the CIA; supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq; and much more.  Alan MacLeod chronicled all this in February of this year for those who have known nothing of Carlson’s past, including his father’s work as a U.S. intelligence operative as director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the body that oversees government-funded media, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio and TV Martí and Voice of America – all U.S. propaganda outlets.

Now we are being asked to accept that Carlson is out to show how the CIA is “involved” in the murder of JFK.  Why would so many fall for such rhetoric?

No doubt any crumb of national news coverage about the CIA and the assassination by a major corporate player elicits an enthusiastic response from those who have tried for many years to tell the truth about JFK’s murder.  One’s first response is excitement. But such reactions need to tempered by sober analyses of exactly what has been said, which is what I am doing here. I, too, wish it were a breakthrough but think it is more of the same. Much ado about nothing. A way to continue to foster uncertainty, not knowledge, about the crime.

I see it as a game of false binaries in the same way the Democrats and Republicans are portrayed as mortal enemies.  Yes, there are some differences, but all-in-all they are one party, the War Party, who agree on the essential tenets of U.S. imperial policy. They both represent the interests of the upper classes and are financed by them. They both work within the same frame of reference. They both support what Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst, rightly calls the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT).

If one asks a dedicated believer in the truthfulness of the New York Times Corporation or NPR, for example, what they think of Tucker Carlson, they will generally dismiss him with disdain as a right-wing charlatan. This, of course, works in reverse if you ask Carlson’s followers what they think of the Times or NPR. Yet for those who think outside the frame – and they are all non-mainstream – a different picture emerges. But sometimes they are taken in by those whose equivocations are extremely lawyerly but appeal to what they wish to hear. This is exactly what a “limited hangout” is. Snagged by some actual truths, they bite on the bait of nuances that don’t mean what they think they do.

Left vs. right, Fox TV  vs. the New York Times, NPR, etc.: Just as Carlson’s father Dick Carlson ran the CIA-created U.S. overseas radio propaganda under Reagan and George H. W. Bush, so too the present head of National Public Radio, John Lansing, did the same under Barack Obama. See my piece, Will NPR Now Change its Name to National Propaganda Radio. Birds of a feather disguised as hawks and sparrows in a game meant to confuse and create scrambled brains.

Lastly, let me mention an odd “coincidence.” On December 6 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., nine days before the partial JFK files release and Tucker Carlson’s monologue, the Mary Ferrell Foundation, an organization devoted to JFK research, gave a presentation showcasing what was advertised as explosive new information about the Kennedy assassination. The key presenter was Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and prominent JFK assassination researcher who has sued the CIA for documents involving Lee Harvey Oswald and CIA operative George Joannides.

On November 22 Morley had published an article titled “Yes, There is a JFK Smoking Gun.” It was subtitled: It will be found in 44 CIA documents that are still “Denied in Full.” The documents he was referring to allegedly concern contacts between Oswald and Joannides in the summer and fall of 1963 in New Orleans and in Mexico City. “They [the CIA] were running a psychological warfare operation, authorized in June 1963, that followed Oswald from New Orleans to Mexico City later that year,” wrote Morley.

Well, the “smoking gun” documents were not released on Dec 15, although on November 20 and then again at The National Press Club on December 6, Morley spoke of them as proving his point about the CIA’s involvement with Oswald, which has been obvious for a long time.  Although he said he hadn’t seen these key documents but was awaiting their release, he added that even if they were not released that will still prove him correct.  In other words, with this bit of legerdemain, he was saying: What I don’t know, and may not soon not know, supports what I’m claiming even though I don’t know it.  And even if the files were released, he writes, “As for the conspiracy question, the massive withholding of documents makes it premature to draw any conclusions. The undisclosed Oswald operation was not necessarily part of a conspiracy. It might indicate CIA incompetence, not complicity. Again, only the CIA knows for sure.” So the smoking gun is not a smoking gun and the waters of uncertainty roll on and on into the receding future.

CIA incompetence, not complicity. Of course. It ain’t necessarily so. Or it is, or might be, or isn’t.

Morley is one of  many who still cannot say that the CIA killed the president. Tucker Carlson can speak of its “involvement” just like Morley. We need more information, more files, etc. But even if we get them, we still won’t know.  Maybe by 2063.

My question for Tucker Carlson: Who was your anonymous source? And did your source see the documents that were never disclosed? What specific documents are you referring to? And do they prove that the CIA killed Kennedy or just suggest “involvement”?

Finally, as I said before, even as there has long been a mountain of evidence for the CIA’s murder of JFK (and RFK as well, although that is never mentioned), many prominent people continue to play as if there is not.  Listen to this video interview between Chris Hedges and former CIA officer John Kiriakou.  It is all about the nefarious deeds of the CIA.  Right toward the end of the interview (see minutes 32:30-33:19), Hedges says, “So I have to ask [since he has to answer] this question since I know Oliver Stone is convinced the CIA killed JFK … I’ve never seen any evidence that backs it up …”  and they both share a mocking laugh at Stone as if he were the village idiot when he knows more about the JFK assassination than the two of them put together, and Kiriakou says he too has not seen such evidence. It’s a disgusting but typical display of arrogance and a “limited hangout.” Criticize the CIA only to make sure you whitewash them for one of their greatest achievements: the murder of President John F. Kennedy. This is straight from Chomsky’s playbook.

Beware double-talkers and the games they play. They come in different flavors.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

Jack Smith, the prosecutor named as special counsel to oversee investigations related to former President Donald Trump, at The Hague on Nov. 10, 2020.

Photo: Peter Dejong/AP

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Will Jack Smith give Trump the kid-glove treatment that other high-ranking officials have so long enjoyed?

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by James Risen.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

A Texas-based real estate tech company is facing a new barrage of questions about whether its software is helping landlords coordinate rental pricing in violation of antitrust laws.

Seventeen Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter Monday to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission asking the agencies to investigate RealPage’s rent-setting software. In an Oct. 15 story, ProPublica detailed how RealPage’s pricing algorithm uses competitor data to suggest new prices daily for available apartments.

In the letter, Reps. Jesús “Chuy” García and Jan Schakowsky, both from Illinois, and other Democratic leaders said that if big property managers and RealPage formed a cartel to artificially inflate rents and decrease the supply of apartments, they could face “potential criminal prosecution.”

The representatives noted that RealPage became dominant in the industry after it purchased its largest competitor in 2017. The Justice Department reviewed the merger but allowed it to proceed.

“Our constituents cannot afford to have anticompetitive — and potentially per se illegal — practices drive up prices for essential goods and services at a time when a full-time, minimum-wage salary does not provide a worker enough money to rent a two-bedroom apartment in any city across this country,” they said.

A major driver of inflation, median U.S. asking rents grew year-over-year by as much as 18% this spring, before the growth rate slowed this fall, according to a study by real estate firm Redfin. This came, the representatives noted, after the 10 biggest publicly traded apartment companies saw profits rise by more than 50% last year, to almost $5 billion.

The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission did not respond to requests for comment.

The House letter adds to growing legal and regulatory pressure on RealPage. U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown recently sent a similar request to the FTC calling for a review of the company’s practices. Last month, renters filed a lawsuit in San Diego alleging the company facilitated collusion among nine of the nation’s biggest property managers. Two more lawsuits have been filed since then. All of them seek class action status.

One suit filed Friday on behalf of two Seattle renters alleges a broad pattern of collusive behavior by RealPage and a group of 10 large property managers.

It says that in addition to using RealPage software to inflate rents in downtown Seattle, property managers had employees call competitors regularly seeking detailed nonpublic information on what they were charging — which the employees would change their prices to match. The lawsuit quoted what it said was a former employee of Greystar, the country’s largest property management firm.

“You’d call up the competition in the area,” the former employee said, according to the lawsuit. “Sometimes there’d be a list of 10 people to call. Sometimes just one. You’d ask what they are charging for their apartments. Then you’d literally change the prices right there on RealPage. Manually bump it up.

“It was price-fixing,” the employee continued, according to the lawsuit. “What else can you call it when you’re literally calling your competition and changing your rate based on what they say?”

The lawsuit quoted another former Greystar employee who described making similar calls in Seattle. The worker said someone from another property manager would call looking for pricing information two or three times a day, and added, “If somebody called me looking for numbers, I’d tell them and then turn around and say, ‘now it’s your turn. What are your numbers?’”

The lawsuit said that publicly available data showed that advertised rates for the properties offered by the defendants in the suit in the Seattle area were “consistently higher” than those of nondefendants.

Greystar and nine other firms named in the lawsuit did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

ProPublica found RealPage’s pricing software to be widely used in downtown Seattle, where rents have climbed steeply in recent years. In one neighborhood, ProPublica found, 70% of apartments were overseen by just 10 property managers, every single one of which used RealPage’s pricing software.

Another lawsuit, filed by the same group of lawyers earlier this month in U.S. District Court in Seattle, accused RealPage of helping landlords engage in anti-competitive behavior in the student housing market.

That lawsuit alleges that a University of Washington student paid higher rent prices because of collusion between landlords using RealPage’s software.

The lawsuit names as defendants some of the largest real estate firms in the world, including Greystar and Cushman & Wakefield. It accuses them of artificially inflating rent in such college towns as Seattle; Eugene, Oregon; Tucson, Arizona; Salt Lake City, Utah; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Columbus, Ohio; and Gainesville, Florida.

A spokesperson for Cushman & Wakefield, which also owns another firm named in the lawsuit, declined to comment.

In response to the San Diego lawsuit alleging collusion, a RealPage representative said the company “strongly denies the allegations and will vigorously defend against the lawsuit.” RealPage has said that the company “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.” RealPage did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new lawsuits and congressional letter.

RealPage said previously that its revenue management software prioritizes a property’s own internal supply and demand dynamics over such external factors as competitors’ rents. In an earlier statement, the company said its software helps eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing involving phone surveys of competitor prices.

RealPage’s software uses an algorithm to churn through a trove of data to suggest rent prices. The software uses not only information about the apartment being priced and the property where it is located, but also private data on what nearby competitors are charging in rents. The software considers actual rents paid to those rivals, not just what they are advertising, the company told ProPublica.

ProPublica’s investigation found that the software’s design and reach have raised questions among experts about whether it is helping the country’s biggest landlords indirectly coordinate pricing — potentially in violation of federal law.

Six other firms named in the student housing lawsuit did not immediately respond to requests for comment. One could not be reached.

The lawsuit alleges that before property managers began using RealPage’s software in around 2009, the student housing market in the U.S. was competitive, with landlords offering concessions and giveaways as incentives. It says that RealPage called such maneuvers leaving “money on the table.”

With the software, landlords in the highly concentrated market for student housing found they could set a “top tier price,” the lawsuit says. It adds that the company claims to have a comprehensive data set that includes key performance indicators for nearly 1,000 universities. YieldStar Student, pricing software tailored for student housing, served more than 50 clients as of 2019, the company claimed, according to the suit.

Clients submit detailed internal data on the rent they are charging for each unit to RealPage, the lawsuit says, citing the company. The company’s software recommends a price for each unit, it says, giving landlords “the courage to charge an inflated price by the implicit assurance that all of their competitors were doing the same.”

ProPublica reported previously that RealPage said its software helped its clients outperform the market by 3 to 7%.

The lawsuit said the collusion among property managers using the software eliminated the need for discounts or lower rent prices even at the start of the school year — traditionally a time when competition for student renters is the fiercest.

“Even if some beds remained empty, the monopoly rents RealPage helped extract from the rented units justified the unrented units,” the lawsuit says.

Once RealPage was widely adopted by student housing purveyors, the lawsuit says, landlords shifted “from the previous competitive ‘market share over price’ strategy to a new collusive ‘price over volume’ strategy.”

Pushing price over volume “is characteristic of a cartelized market,” the lawsuit says.

The new strategy increased prices regardless of market conditions and asked landlords to tolerate some unrented units, the lawsuit says — an approach that would fail in a competitive market.

“In the market RealPage and Lessors created, each Lessor had mutual assurances that other Lessors would also keep prices high, leaving students with no choice but to pay what Lessors demanded,” the lawsuit says.

One study of 2017-2018 data by RealPage and defendant Campus Advantage found one 576-bed complex outperformed its market by 14.1%, despite a “negative” occupancy change year over year, the lawsuit says. It adds: “RealPage advised property owners and potential clients, ‘If you want to outperform the market term after term, focus less on occupancy and more on strategic lease pricing.’”

In a statement emailed to ProPublica, Campus Advantage said it “strongly disagrees with the unsubstantiated allegations in the lawsuit and intends to vigorously defend against the claims. Campus Advantage is proud of its track record creating successful communities.”

The lawsuit says the defendants had an opportunity to conspire through RealPage’s User Group Forum, which is composed of clients who want to work together to help the company improve its products, as well as at other RealPage functions and industry trade association gatherings.

RealPage advisors would also be in regular contact with landlords “to keep them up to date on their competitors,” the lawsuit alleges.

RealPage’s actions were not widely known, the lawsuit says. “Only after the recent publication in October 2022 of an article in ProPublica was there a comprehensive presentation of the full scope of the confidential services that RealPage provides to its clients in the real estate industry,” it says.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Heather Vogell.

The first African American to be President of United in the airline’s 94-year history, Mr. Hart stepped into his current role in May 2020 just months after the COVID-19 pandemic caused a global lockdown. An attorney by training, Mr Hart oversees United’s global operations. Additionally, he leads the airline’s external-facing functions, which include the government affairs, regulatory, corporate communications, market and community innovation, legal, global community engagement, and environmental sustainability teams. He is also responsible for United’s business-critical functions, including the corporate real estate, human resources, and labor relations teams. He previously served as United’s executive vice president and chief administrative officer.

“I have long been a supporter and admirer of the powerful work of the Innocence Project, so it is an honor and a privilege to join the Board of Directors,” said Mr. Hart. “I am eager to contribute my time and energy to advancing their work correcting wrongful convictions and creating a fairer and more accurate legal system.”

“Brett Hart is a pioneer who has broken barriers throughout his career,” said Innocence Project’s Executive Director Christina Swarns. “His life’s work reflects a strong commitment to justice and fairness and echoes our mission of creating more equitable systems of justice for everyone.”

At United, Mr. Hart has made a commitment to promoting a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). He leads the airline’s partnership with historically Black colleges and universities. Just days after becoming United’s president, and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, he spoke candidly at a town hall about racism in America and his personal experience as a Black man and a father to young sons. Under his stewardship, United has emerged as an industry leader in DEI. For example, the airline has set a goal of training more than 5,000 pilots by 2030, 50 percent of whom will be women or people of color at United’s Aviate Academy.

Prior to joining United in 2010, Mr. Hart spent six years at the Sara Lee Corporation, rising to become executive vice president, general counsel, and corporate counsel. Mr. Hart also previously served as a special assistant to the general counsel at the U.S. Department of Treasury in Washington, D.C. While in private practice at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, Mr. Hart worked with author and attorney Scott Turow on death penalty cases.

“It is an honor to welcome Brett Hart to the Innocence Project Board of Directors,” said Innocence Project Board Chair Jack Taylor. “His background as a highly successful leader in corporate America who also has first-hand experience litigating death penalty cases makes him uniquely well-suited to make important contributions to the work and mission of our organization.” 

Mr. Hart currently holds board positions at the Obama Foundation Inclusion Council, University of Chicago Board of Trustees, and the President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Before receiving his Juris Doctor from the University of Chicago Law School, he earned his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and English from the University of Michigan.

The post Brett Hart, President of United Airlines, Joins Innocence Project Board of Directors appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by Justin Chan.

The CEO of Iron Mountain Inc. told Wall Street analysts at a September 20 investor event that the high levels of inflation of the past several years had helped the company increase its margins — and that for that reason he had long been “doing my inflation dance praying for inflation.”

The comment is an unusually candid admission of a dirty secret in the business world: corporations use inflation as a pretext to hike prices. “Corporations are using those increasing costs – of materials, components and labor – as excuses to increase their prices even higher, resulting in bigger profits,” Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Clinton, recently argued. Corporate profits are now at their highest level since 1950.

William Meaney, now CEO of Iron Mountain, photographed in Los Angeles in 2009.

Photo: Jamie Rector/Bloomberg via Getty Images

After-tax corporate profits are currently at their highest rate in 72 years.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.

"The longer Big Oil's predatory pricing scheme persists, the graver the cost to American consumers and the country's economic health."

Accountable.US acknowledges that the cost of oil plays an important role in determining the price of retail gas. But to understand why prices at the pump have outpaced the escalating cost of crude and why, when the cost of crude has fallen temporarily during the last 12 weeks, savings have very slowly—and only partially—been passed on to consumers, the group says look no further than fossil fuel corporations' desire to maximize profit margins.

"For months, oil and gas companies have price gouged consumers, squeezing record-breaking profits out of Americans and forcing many into dire financial straits," Jordan Schreiber, director of Energy and Environment at Accountable.US, said in a statement.

"When the price of crude oil increased, consumers were immediately forced to shoulder the high cost and more," said Schreiber. "Now, as crude oil prices fall, the industry needlessly drags its feet by lowering gas prices at a significantly slower rate than when they increased."

In its report, Accountable.US contrasted fluctuations in oil spot prices and retail gas prices.

When the cost of crude has risen, Big Oil has been quick to lift gas prices.

Sometimes, price hikes at the pump have closely resembled changes in the crude market. For instance, a 3.73% increase in oil spot prices from April 29 to May 6 was mirrored by a 3.34% increase in retail gas prices from May 2 to May 9.

In other cases, price hikes at the pump have exceeded climbing oil costs, such as when a 2.64% uptick in the price of crude from May 27 to June 3 was accompanied by a 5.29% increase in the price of gas from May 30 to June 6.

Meanwhile, when the cost of crude has fallen, Big Oil has been slow to act—if at all—and gas prices have continued to soar.

A 1.12% decrease in oil spot prices from April 22 to April 29 was accompanied by a 1.76% increase in retail gas prices from April 25 to May 2. An even more egregious example occurred when the cost of crude declined by 1.58% from May 6 to May 13 and the price of gas surged by 3.68% from May 9 to May 16.

Even when the industry has lowered retail gas prices, it has failed to do so at a rate commensurate with the falling cost of crude.

A 3.3% decline in oil spot prices from June 10 to June 17 yielded a 0.8% decrease in prices at the pump from June 13 to June 20. A week later, a 7.37% decrease in the cost of crude was accompanied by just a 1.72% drop in the price of gas. A 6.89% fall in the cost of oil from July 1 to July 8 was accompanied by a 2.56% decline in gas prices.

"Our analysis demonstrates that corporate greed drives artificially high prices at the pump," said Schreiber. "The longer Big Oil's predatory pricing scheme persists, the graver the cost to American consumers and the country's economic health."

In March, congressional Democrats led by Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) introduced the bicameral Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax.

According to polling data released soon after the legislation was unveiled, 80% of U.S. voters—including 73% of Republicans—support the measure, which would hit large fossil fuel companies with a per-barrel tax equal to 50% of the difference between the current price of a barrel of oil and the average price per barrel between 2015 and 2019. An estimated $45 billion in annual revenue would be redistributed to U.S. households in the form of quarterly rebates.

Dozens of progressive advocacy groups and lawmakers have been urging President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to support the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax, which Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has said can help Democrats avoid "big losses" in November's crucial midterms.

But Khanna and Whitehouse's proposal faces long odds given the GOP's desire to capitalize on voters' mounting anger at the state of the economy. Not only is it unlikely that at least 10 Senate Republicans would support advancing debate on the bill, as required due to the filibuster, but it remains unclear whether right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) would vote for it.

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

In the wake of new federal data showing that U.S. inflation rose again in May after decelerating slightly the previous month, progressive lawmakers, economists, and union leaders on Friday tried to hammer home their argument that corporate profiteering is a major driver of the price hikes that are eroding workers' modest wage gains and heightening economic pain nationwide.

"While families are feeling the sting of soaring energy costs, oil and gas companies are cheering the nearly $100 billion in profits they've already made this year off families' pain at the pump," said Dr. Rakeen Mabud, chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative.

"The same corporations that are making record profits while busting workers' unions are raising prices on working families."

"It's past time for Congress to pass an excess profits tax to stop the outrageous war profiteering by Big Oil," Mabud added, referring to the benefits the U.S. fossil fuel industry has reaped from Russia's assault on Ukraine.

The narrative that corporate greed is one of the key culprits behind inflation, which is now at a 40-year high, resonates greatly with the U.S. public, according to recent survey data. A poll conducted last month by Data for Progress showed that 71% of all U.S. voters blame corporate profit-seeking for rising inflation.

But despite the argument's popularity—and alignment with data showing that record-high corporate profits are a disproportionate contributor to inflation—the Biden administration has been increasingly hesitant to deploy it in recent months even as inflationary pressures persist and businesses' net incomes grow exponentially in some sectors.

During an event hosted by The New York Times on Thursday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen outright rejected the notion that corporate greed is to blame for inflation, saying, "Demand and supply is largely driving inflation."

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, meanwhile, has openly suggested that wage increases are part of the problem, telling reporters during a press conference last month that the country needs to "get wages down" in order to tackle inflation.

While progressive economists have acknowledged that a number of factors, from supply chain issues caused by the pandemic to the war in Ukraine, are pushing inflation to levels not seen in decades, they have nevertheless maintained that corporate profiteering is a significant culprit.

"Corporations are using inflation as an excuse to raise their prices, hurting workers and consumers while they enjoy record profits," Robert Reich, the former secretary of the U.S. Labor Department, wrote last month. "Prices are surging—but let's be clear: corporations are not raising prices simply because of the increasing costs of supplies and labor. They could easily absorb these higher costs, but instead they are passing them on to consumers and even raising prices higher than those cost increases."

Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, echoed Reich on Friday.

"Make no mistake: the same corporations that are making record profits while busting workers' unions are raising prices on working families," Henry wrote on Twitter. "If our nation's leaders are serious about addressing inflation, they'll hold these big corporations accountable for their price gouging."

In recent weeks, as inflation numbers have remained stubbornly high and corporate executives have continued boasting about their profits, congressional Democrats have put forth several proposals aimed at combating price gouging and reining in excess profits via taxation.

Led by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in the House and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a group of Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced legislation in March that would hit large and highly profitable oil companies with "a per-barrel tax equal to 50% of the difference between the current price of a barrel of oil and the pre-pandemic average price per barrel between 2015 and 2019."

While the White House has signaled it would be willing to support a windfall profits tax on Big Oil, Democrats' bill has not received a vote in the House or Senate.

Last month, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) along with Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) unveiled a measure that would empower federal regulators to crack down on corporate price gouging. Warren has specifically called out the meat industry for its pricing practices throughout the pandemic.

"Giant corporations are using inflation as a cover story to jack up prices and pad profits," Warren tweeted Friday. "Let's pass my bill to crack down on corporate price gouging. And let's pass our windfall profits tax on Big Oil, which includes rebate checks for Americans struggling with gas prices."

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

The post The ‘Head Shot’: The Cases of Marilyn Mosby, Kwame Brown and Jack Evans Show the Dark Side of a Scary Prosecutorial Tool appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Pete Tucker.

With NATO countries recommitting themselves to the alliance and passing sweeping sanctions against Russia as punishment for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, is this the dawn of a new Cold War? We speak with foreign policy expert William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute, who warns that hawks in Washington are pushing for a massive increase in the U.S. military budget, which is already a record-high $800 billion a year. “There’s a danger that not only will this be a war in Ukraine, but the U.S. will use it as an excuse for a more aggressive policy around the world, arguing that it’s to counter Russia or China or Iran, or whoever the enemy of the moment is.” Hartung also speaks about the Saudi-led war in Yemen, where U.S. support has allowed the conflict to rage for years, killing about 400,000 people. Unlike in Ukraine, where the U.S. has more limited leverage, the Biden administration could “end that killing tomorrow,” Hartung says.

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

The post It’s Kerouac Time Again: Jack Meets Joe McCarthy  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jonah Raskin.

The EMTV News editorial decision to run the two stories [about the court cases involving Australian hotel businessman Jamie Pang] was based on two important points in our line of work:

Impartiality and Objectivity.

Impartiality cannot be achieved by the measure of words in a story, it is achieved by:

• Avoiding bias towards one point of view
• Avoiding omission of relevant facts
• Avoiding misleading emphasis

All of which are stated in the EMTV News and Current Affairs Manual 2019 in section 17.5 under standard operations of the television code.

• READ MORE: Background and other EMTV reports

By running the stories, the team was accused of bias.

We fail to see the areas of bias in our stories, especially because we presented more than one point of view in both stories.

The information presented was based on facts and in avoiding any misleading emphasis; we delivered objective television news packages that were fully impartial in the code and conduct of journalism.

Objective stories
Overall, both stories were objective stories where two or more opinions were looked at closely in each story.

To be clear, in television news objectivity is achieved by taking a rational but sceptical approach to ALL points of view.

In this case, Jamie Pang’s arrest, conviction and charges were looked at, as well as his community and social activities:

• Pang was arrested – Fact
• Pang was convicted, charged and fined for having firearms and munitions in his possession – Fact
• Pang was acquitted by a sound and proper court of justice in the PNG judicial system, from charges relating to methamphetamine – Fact
• Being acquitted by a sound and proper court of justice in the PNG judicial system, makes Pang a free man from drug charges – Fact
• Pang is heavily involved in social and community works – Fact
• Pang was rearrested and detained – Fact

All these factual points were documented in one story.

It is important to understand, that in objective writing, the opinion of the interviewees are their own. However, [how] it is perceived by the our viewers is up to them to weigh [up] and decide.

Objective [news] stories are often mistaken as opinion pieces.

They are not the same.

An opinion piece is a commentary on one point of view.

Journalism independence
As journalists we cannot be servants of sectional interests. It is our duty to speak to both “saints” and “sinners”. It is our democratic right to report on the good, bad and the ugly aspects of any story.

There are no instances of perceived impartiality in our reporting which display a lack of objectivity.

And a lack of objectivity leaves room for personal bias which is not acceptable in the journalism code of ethics.

The failure of the interim EMTV CEO, Lesieli Vete, to understand how a newsroom operates and a newsroom’s code of conduct led to the suspension of head of news Sincha Dimara.

Vete’s failure to try to understand the newsroom’s points of objectivity and impartiality in the stories led to her issuing of the statement portraying the newsroom as biased and in support of meth by sympathising with Pang’s employees and friends.

Vete’s statement served the purpose of explaining the leaked memo and portraying a bad picture of her newsroom.

Her statement lacked objectivity and impartiality because a written standpoint of the newsroom’s reasons for airing stories in the coverage of the Pang story were not included in her statement.

Suppression of media freedom
Vete’s questioning of our stance on running the story, and not showing any interest in learning nor understanding the way it was put together, led to further suppression of freedom of speech; direct and daily intimidation of senior and junior staff; micromanagement of staff whereabouts and activities; and direct and indirect threats of termination on staff.

The immense pressure to put a [news] bulletin together while being highly and closely monitored took a direct and serious toll on newsroom staff morale.

This created conditions that were suffocating to work under. A walk off was imminent.

We are making a stand now in solidarity against bullying and ill treatment of newsroom staff in the absence of news managers.

This is the third time we are experiencing a suppression of our right to freedom of speech, and we want it to stop once and for all.

After the suspension of Sincha Dimara, EMTV’s deputy news editor Jack Lapauve Jr is now the most senior news manager and he was with the walk out. He posted this commentary on his Facebook page and it is republished here with his permission.

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