The shift to post-industrialism was associated with the rise of a powerful new set of capitalist elites and new corporate centers of production, finance, and communication. In the 21st century, Silicon Valley became the symbol of the new post-industrial high-tech world. It would become the showcase of the new high-tech companies, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, which were becoming the first trillion-dollar companies, led by tycoons such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Peter Thiel, all fabulously wealthy members of the Big Tech power elite. Silicon Valley introduced itself as a modern miracle, bringing unprecedented new productivity and prosperity that would benefit both owners and workers, and contribute to the betterment of the general population with magical new products such as the personal computer, the iPhone, and the new internet-based world of online culture and communication on social media. This new world revolutionized the economic and social spheres, while also having major uses and implications for politics and the military. Because billions of people globally now have iPhones or personal computers, with access to the new online universe of the internet and social media, Silicon Valley seemed to open up not only a transformative new economy for entrepreneurs and knowledge workers but a transformed, newly connected world of online social communication and relationships.

This is not entirely an illusion. The online world does open up new social connections and political connections, with social media being a powerful new tool for the younger generation to build new friendships, communities, and politics. But Silicon Valley’s fantastic new array of electronic communications and online connections may also prove to be a gateway to weak social relations and ultimately the end of strong face-to-face social relationships, as well as democracy itself. We face a sociocidal transformation fueled by high tech, with Silicon Valley also proffering its own politics of authoritarianism. Sociocide is the process by which human connection is largely severed, and individuals are only concerned for themselves. A sociocidal society is one in which solidarity is nonexistent and meaningful human relationships are destroyed.

Several sociocidal forces emerge directly from the economic restructuring created by huge Big Tech firms, especially the “Magnificent Seven,” whose individual worth now reaches into the trillions:  Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), and Tesla. One is the interest of these corporate high-tech elites, much like their corporate counterparts in other spheres, in eroding the face-to-face workplace and social ties that can challenge their power. In the workplace, that translates into the intensified attack on secure employment, unionism, and a collective physical workplace. The intent is to weaken the social relations of workers in the workplace – and more broadly, to subvert the solidarity and face-to-face connections of people throughout society that can challenge authoritarianism in both work and politics.

Focusing first on the workplace, the Magnificent Seven play a special role here by creating and developing the technology – including the personal computer, iPhone, internet apps, AI, robots, and social media — that allows corporate elites to create a precariat of dispersed and contingent workers, increasingly separated from each other, while also replacing millions of workers and transferring their jobs to robots and other AI inventions.

The most rapid replacement of workers by robots and AI is in high-skill jobs. Matt Sigelman, president of the Human Resources Institute, summarized his Institute’s widely circulated report on AI, saying, “There’s no question the workers who will be most impacted are those with college degrees, and those are the people who always thought they were safe.” He indicates that: “Companies in finance, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, have some of the highest percentages of their payrolls likely to be disrupted by generative A.I. Not far behind are tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Meta.”

Tech workers, talented and highly trained, are developing the tools allowing their companies to eliminate many of their own jobs. Meanwhile, employers are also using robots to replace low-skill workers. The sociocidal tech impulse of Silicon Valley, as in other sectors, is embraced because of its profit-saving capacity. And the fastest way to increase profit is to reduce wages, usually by weakening relations among employees or busting unions.

The Magnificent Seven have used their overwhelming economic power to directly undermine unions, the most effective form of worker social relations and organization. In January 2024, Elon Musk, now legendary for his anti-union and broader right-wing views, filed a lawsuit in federal courts to declare unconstitutional the National Labor Relations Board, which protects and regulates workers’ right to organize. In August 2024, just before his re-election, Trump joked with Musk about firing workers, complimenting Musk during a two-hour conversation on X for firing Tesla workers who wanted to strike. “They go on strike,” Trump said to Musk, “and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone.’” Trump then added, “You’re the Greatest!” The UAW filed labor charges against both Trump and Musk for the unfair labor practices that the two had celebrated; Musk’s Tesla had clashed with union activists for years, and the NLRB in 2021 had found that the non-union Tesla violated labor laws when it fired a union organizer.

One of Musk’s Magnificent Seven compatriots, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, quickly joined in Trump and Musk’s union-busting party, filing a copycat suit to make the NLRB and unions unconstitutional. Here, we see the world’s two richest men, leaders of the High-Tech Robber Barons, exploiting economic size to reap the fruit of their technology’s economic power. They are seeking a revolutionary breakdown of workplace social relations, moving from the sociopathy of the first Gilded Age to the sociocide of today’s Gilded Age.

The Magnificent Seven’s power undercuts workplace social relations and fiercely attacks union solidarity in the name of free-spirited libertarianism running rampant in Silicon Valley. The broader corporate success in drastically weakening unions is key to sociocide in the entire US labor force and has been achieved not only by the anti-union fervor of corporations since the New Deal but also by the zeal of the Republican Party from Reagan through Trump to make the destruction of labor solidarity and unions a top political priority.

_________________________________________

The above is an excerpt from Charles Derber’s most recent book, Bonfire: American Sociocide, Broken Relations, and the Quest for Democracy.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Charles Derber.

Ukraine’s Air Force says Russia launched its largest aerial attack overnight since its 2022 full-scale invasion, firing a record 741 drones and missiles, most of them targeting the city of Lutsk in western Ukraine. The barrage prompted Poland to activate its air defenses and scramble fighter jets. Russia’s attack came after President Trump on Tuesday sharply criticized Vladimir Putin in his latest in a series of U-turns on Ukraine policy. We speak with Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, on the latest developments. Trump is “learning that it’s actually not that easy,” he says. “And it’s not that easy because Vladimir Putin is not interested in a peace deal.”

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

President Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House for a second straight day Tuesday, as Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, claimed Israel and Hamas were nearing a breakthrough on a ceasefire agreement. Israeli media are reporting Netanyahu is under “extreme” pressure to reach a 60-day ceasefire deal, but Netanyahu’s “interests and the interests of his government remain to make this a perpetual, ongoing war,” says Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy. The U.S.-Israeli proposal would see 10 living Israeli hostages released, along with the bodies of deceased hostages, in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. Hamas negotiators are also seeking the withdrawal of Israeli forces, guarantees for an end to the war, the resumption of humanitarian aid shipments overseen by the U.N. and the International Committee of the Red Cross, and an end to the operations of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

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

How can a cat be alive and dead at the same time?

I love how science has rediscovered religion. Leaving aside the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, the universe itself is conscious. In the beginning was consciousness — inner light. Then there was outer light, etc. Mind you it took billions of years, but what’s that in divine reckoning? Religion was the first ‘science’, followed by astrology. Now both despised. How times have changed.

The scientific method, induction, deduction, math/physics, Darwin are all latecomers, though Darwin marks the beginning of the return to metaphysics. His theory was turned into a mindless, machine-like Nature, to be deconstructed, dissected (gruesomely for billions of guinea pigs), but a careful reading shows he was not so scientistic as the Darwinian Establishment that followed him. He admitted we’ll never understand the peacock. Beauty.

Henri Bergson started from there and developed a more lively ‘creative evolution‘ which was more or less politely ignored by science, though the Nobel committee awarded him the prize for literature in 1927, ‘in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented.’ For a conscious being to exist is to change, to mature, i.e. to go on creating oneself endlessly. Realizing that, Bergson asked: Is it the same for existence in general? Nature is the epitome of creative change, leading to a dazzling, even outrageous variety and beauty.

Is beauty the end goal of a divine process that started with pure consciousness? We bemoan species extinction (rightly as we are here as stewards of Nature), but already 99% of species over time have gone extinct, replaced by others, better adapted to the changing environment (at least until humans starting wiping them out like a house on fire).

I’m okay with the idea of antimatter, dark matter, dark energy, quantum theory, being in two places at the same time, time slowing down the faster you go, everyone ‘marching to their own tune’, but I could never get a grip on multiverses, Schrodinger’s cat being alive and dead at the same time. I’d given up until today, finishing The Mindight Library (2020) by Matt Haig.

Who was that? Oh, just someone I knew in another life.

It starts with Nora’s countdown to her decision to commit suicide. Everything she wanted or tried to do seemed to lead to failure and when she backed out of her marriage, was fired and then her cat died (outside in the rain by the road, retrieved and buried by Ash) and when no one answered her texts/ phone – all this in a dank flat in dreary Bedford, she swallowed sleeping pills and passed out. Nora enters a twilight zone, a library run by her high-school librarian Mrs Elm, a soulmate that had seen her through parental death and her own depressive state.

Mrs Elm gives her The Book of Regrets, Nora’s own missed opportunities in life, roads not taken, and Nora begins her adventures, seeking out her one ‘true’ happy, successful life journey, which she can try out, as each missed opportunity represents an alternate universe in what science now insists is a multiverse, though no one really understands what that means.

Haig seems to, and puts meat on Schrodinger’s bones. Nora wants a live where she took better care of Voltaire, her rescue kitty, so it would live longer. Suddenly she’s lying in bed again, awake, calling for Volts, finally finding him under the bed, cold and dead. He’s still dead! Not the life she wants, so she’s spirited back to the library to try again.

Mrs Elm explains that Volts had a weak heart and no doubt knew its time was near, asked to go out and die alone in peace, i.e., it wasn’t her fault. ‘Some regrets,’ the prim librarian tells Nora, ‘are a load of bullshit. The only way to learn that is to live.’ So one regret down, many to go. In another alt-life, Voltaire, aka Schrodinger’s Cat, is still alive, a healthy Siamese.

The novel really just describes Nora’s last minutes before death as an out-of-body event, a fact that is well-documented. There are many instances of people who have experienced a near- or after-death experience (NDE), an alternate reality, where they could choose to stay or return to the ‘real’ world (though that would be painful).

Coppola’s Youth without Youth (1976) is based on Mircea Eliade’s eponymous novel explaining time, consciousness, and the fantastic foundations of reality. Protagonist Dominic manages to live a few alternate realities after lightning gave him a new life. This is also a take on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. I like Haig’s variation on this theme because, well, consciousness is enough of a miracle for me.

So the original Voltaire is dead in one universe and alive in another. Nora standing up her fiance turns out to have been a very wise decision, as were all but one of her alt-lives, where she is happily married to Ash, but …

You are the library card

I won’t ruin the plot for you, but I don’t think it’s a spoiler alert to say she felt each time it was like she had joined the movie halfway. And the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective. The bluebird of happiness is actually you-know-where. Most/all of these alternate lives turned out to be what others thought Nora should do, not her ‘root life’, making her lose any sense of who she was.

I’ve been doing this sort of musing for a few years now, as I get closer to the end. I like the pro-activeness of The Book of Regrets. You work through each of your alternate universes in your mind, fantasizing happier alt-lives, realizing they wouldn’t ‘be me’, that I wouldn’t be who I am if, say, I had become a musician, or sportsman, or teacher. Probably no books written, no extreme travels, near deaths, polyglot/ polymath (even if half-assed).

I don’t know if these alt-lives exist in some multiverse, with angels and djinn from them occasionally making a visit ‘here’, but like much of science, they are useful constructs to help explain the mystery of consciousness, the mind. You don’t exist because of the library; this library exists because of you. This is just your brain translating something significant. I remember the sense of a new beginning after a near-death experience. I wasn’t in a library, but when I recovered, I had my blank library book to write in, and I’m slowly burning up my Book of Regrets. That’s freedom.

In old age, you must learn to travel, have adventures in you mind. You are only limited by your imagination. You don’t need booze or drugs like in your salad days. The real world experience is too much work and so often disappointing. Your time is short, precious.

Suicide comes a poor second. Nora thinks she wants to die, but you don’t go to death. Death comes to you. You are the library card. So long as there are still books on the shelves, you are never trapped. Every book is a possible escape. That’s what NDEs are all about. Coming back from one is like getting the only book left in your library, one with blank pages. Mrs Elm: That’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Walberg.

Yesterday, after releasing a joint statement with France and Canada threatening “concrete actions” if Israel did not allow aid into Gaza, the UK government suspended talks on its upgraded free trade deal, summoned the Israeli ambassador, and imposed new sanctions on settlers in the occupied West Bank. While this might appear substantial for the goal of isolating the zionist state, it amounts to little more than face-saving measures.

In his speech announcing these measures, Lammy couldn’t even bear to say these words without condemning the October 7th operation and maintaining Israel’s right to commit genocide. We can’t fall for these empty measures, even if they appear to be a positive push toward some justice. In reality, they are a distraction and feign action from a government supporting Israel accelerates its genocidal attacks. Each day, as Israel commits new massacres with American weapons, it is using the RAF Akrotiri, a British military base on Cyprus to conduct surveillance flights and facilitate weapons transfers.

The government’s suspension of negotiations on its free trade agreement is misleading. This is not the existing free trade agreement in place between Britain and Israel, but a future plan to deepen relations. Known as the 2030 Roadmap, this was initiated under the previous Conservative government in 2022, and the Labour government continued them immediately after entering government in July 2024. Stopping these negotiations is a good first step, but they must end their current free trade agreement if Lammy’s words are worth their salt.

The sanctions on a handful of people and companies in the occupied West Bank might be a generally positive step. But at a closer look, these measures are only on three people, two outposts, and two organisations. All of the 700,000 settlers occupying the West Bank in their 150 settlements and 129 outposts are illegal under international law. These very narrow sanctions then give wider justification for the illegal occupation of the West Bank, scapegoating a handful of “extreme” characters but not contending with the occupation itself. Last year, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is illegal. Once again, Britain is ignoring international law, just as it does in refusing to hand over surveillance data on Gaza to the International Criminal Court.

Britain’s recent moves should rightly be compared with the United States, which has formed the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’, a private company of US military veteran mercenaries to run an aid distribution operation, better described as a trojan horse to occupy Gaza. As Israel accelerates its genocide in Gaza, the US and Britain are attempting to conceal their role in the violence. We might see these as necessary measures for Israel to be committing what many are referring to as the final stage in the genocide.

Over the past few days, the Starmer government’s statements have given us the illusion of a change in course towards Israel. In five of the past six days, Britain has flown a surveillance flight over Gaza for Israel.

Britain has made no material change in its policy of arming Israel, providing surveillance information, and using its military base on Cyprus for weapons shipments. Therefore, not only are these statements hollow and vacuous, but they are a pernicious and sly attempt to divert attention from Britain’s role as it directly participates in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

On Sunday (May 18), Britain sent an A400M Atlas plane to Israel from RAF Akrotiri, its military base on Cyprus. This aircraft can carry up to 37 tonnes of cargo, including weapons and soldiers. Two hours later, it sent a surveillance flight over Gaza. These operations have been purposefully concealed from public knowledge, but this is clearly shifting. The only reason we know about these flights is because of the work of Matt Kennard, Declassified UK, and Genocide-Free Cyprus, amongst other groups. There clearly is mounting pressure as a result of the revelations of Britain’s direct role in Israel’s genocide, and perhaps we must recognise has a role in Lammy’s face-saving attempts.

Last week, the UK government defended its continued provision of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel, pointing to the need for “national security.” In court, they claimed “no genocide has occurred or is occurring,” that Israel is not “deliberately targeting civilian women or children.” Britain is defending Israel legally, diplomatically, and militarily. No statement can change that fact.

Israel stopped all aid trucks from entering Gaza on March 2. It has taken more than 11 weeks for the government to take any action at all. Every day, the Israeli occupation commits heinous massacres. They are even bragging that “the world won’t stop us.” And so far, they’re right.

In the face of this, we cannot despair. Palestinians in Gaza remain steadfast each day, for the 18 months of this escalation in the genocide that has been ongoing for more than 77 years. Smotrich, ‘Israeli Finance Minister’, says the “world won’t stop us”. Our leaders bought by zionism will certainly not, but the people will. We must continue our demands for a full arms embargo, an end to British surveillance flights, and the total liberation of Palestine.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Nuvpreet Kalra.

We speak with foreign policy analyst Matt Duss about increasingly fraught relations between the United States and Ukraine, which have undergone a seismic shift under the second Trump administration. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is meeting with President Trump at the White House on Friday and is expected to sign an agreement giving the U.S. access to his country’s rare earth minerals, which are key components in mobile phones and other advanced technology. It’s unclear what, if anything, Ukraine will get in return, even as Trump pushes Kyiv to reach a deal with Moscow to end the war that began in February 2022 when Russian forces invaded Ukraine. Trump is simultaneously moving to restore relations with Russia and lift its international isolation. Duss says the throughline in Trump’s thinking, from Ukraine to Gaza and elsewhere, is that “great powers” like the United States “make the decisions, and less powerful countries, less powerful communities and peoples simply have to live with the consequences.”

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

Top diplomats from the United States and Russia met in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to discuss ending the war in Ukraine and improving relations between Washington and Moscow. The Riyadh summit represents a monumental shift in U.S. policy after the Biden administration led an international effort to isolate Russia over its invasion and gave tens of billions in military aid to Kyiv. Participants included U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not invited to attend and has said he won’t recognize a peace deal negotiated without his country. European leaders have also been sidelined. For more on these developments, we host a discussion between economist Jeffrey Sachs and foreign policy analyst Matt Duss.

“This is a war that never should have happened,” says Sachs, who faults “U.S. provocations” like the expansion of NATO for laying the groundwork for Russia’s invasion in 2022. In holding these talks directly with Russia, “the Trump administration, for the first time, is telling the truth about the fundamental causes of this war,” adds Sachs.

Duss says that while the U.S. has played a major role in the conflict, “Vladimir Putin is the one who chose to invade Ukraine.” He also emphasizes that Ukrainians themselves have agency and have been key players in events since the end of the Cold War, including their current defense against Russia. “It’s not just a story of unending U.S. villainy.”

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

After Biden’s major foreign policy address Monday at the State Department, we go to Jerusalem and get an analysis of Biden’s foreign policy decisions in Israel and Palestine from Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. “There’s simply no question at this point that the laws of war have been egregiously violated,” he says of the Israeli military’s genocidal conduct against Palestinians in Gaza. “When it comes to America’s friends and allies, he has a different standard.”

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

I started writing Mouthful on the Upper West Side around when I was working on a remake of Annie Hall starring 89 year-olds. That experience changed my life. And I became best friends with a 94 year old until he passed at 99 last year.

Then, I was making these TV shows to tell bigger and better stories about older people and then the pandemic hits. It was just me and I had Central Park to myself. I was going on jogs around Central Park topless or as my girlfriend likes to correct me, “shirtless.” But the energy felt topless. I was topless, which was a big deal for me. I was listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. I was dictating poems, and thoughts into my phone while running around. That became how I wrote for two or three years.

I’m not trying to write funny poems, but I do think, naturally, when I write I am seeking, or I’m using humor as my Trojan horse to make my poems and poetry accessible. I wanted Mouthful to be entertaining. There’s very few poetry books where I love every single poem, but there are like five, or six I’m obsessed with, and I’ll buy, you know, spend whatever, just for [those five or six] poems. When I was performing, over the past few years, a lot of people would come up and we would get a lot of people who are not into poetry and they would come up to me after, and they would say, “I don’t like poetry, but I love whatever you just did.”

A lot of your work really encapsulates the zaniness of New York, whether it’s interpersonally, or your interactions with other people. Would you say that this poetry collection is very New York City?

The cool answer is yeah, but really my inspiration was the freedom of being on the Upper West Side. I was living with my friend and his family and his teenagers. And my best friend who was 99 was living nearby. I was going to Zabar’s. I was very much in the world of Nora Ephorn. I just got dumped in March of 2020, I was watching a lot of rom coms and Sex in the City. I just discovered Drake and he was new to me. I don’t feel a disconnect to anything in New York. And I think that speaks to where Dream Baby [Press] likes to throw readings.

What is the significance of the Teddy Bear book cover?

I’ve been obsessed with Paddington Bear, for you know, since I knew of him, but I didn’t really understand the power of Paddington until the first film. I love the way he interacts with the world. I think it’s so sweet. And it’s constantly illuminating people’s lives. I love the story of Paddington that the author was inspired by the kids who came on the Kindertransport. And it’s a loaded background. In the movie, they modeled his movements off of Buster Keaton. And I’m obsessed with Buster Keaton. There’s a real sense of sweetness.

I didn’t even have an alternative cover. I lived next to The Strand on the Upper West Side and another used bookstore. I would stare at the covers and I was like, what do I want to see? I love the idea of a bear staring back at you.

Do you think desire is an intrinsically messy ordeal?

Yes. Because there’s a lot of desires that I think a lot of people have, that they really wish they didn’t have. And desire is so interesting in this book since so much of it is about battling shame. I think you can’t control your desire and that leads to a lot of great things, but it also puts a lot of people in a lot of funky situations they probably wish they didn’t get in. It also leads to a lot of humor, not just sexually, but with desire I have a complicated relationship with food. And I think that’s a desire that really dictates people’s lives. Control and desire are forces constantly at war with one another.

What were the trials and tribulations of publishing independently?

The concept of doing it independently was so exciting, because so much of my inspiration comes from the ethos of punk. And I was so inspired by zine culture. And all I read was punk biographies, from 2018 to 2023, and punk adjacent biographies. When I was learning about punk in college, it was just musicians, picking up cameras and making films even though they didn’t know how or they weren’t technologically trained, and filmmakers picking up musical instruments and figuring it out. I just love that ethos. And I wanted to do that. I thought it would be important for me to learn, especially with putting out other people’s books to have an understanding of what works and how to do it. And that we should start with mine since if I’m going to fuck anybody’s book up it should be mine.

I started from zero, learning about paper textures, and learning about paper stock and paper weight, and binding and margins. Even on some bestsellers [books], the words are in the margins, the gutter of the book and I hated that. When you don’t have a ton of money, it’s not like you can just hire a bunch of people to do it. I had a lot of really good friends who stepped in and helped me get it over the line. It’s trial and error and it just takes time. Time was on my side because I have a job. I don’t need to sell my poetry book to pay the rent. It really is like learning a new language, trying to explain that you want to “normal paper texture,” which is really 70 pound interior eggshell natural paper stock. All of this to just get to a normal looking piece of paper.

And then, what’s marketing? What is Dream Baby? What is the Dream Baby version of marketing? We’ve done so many crazy readings, but what is my version of a book launch party? Working through that took months to put together. I really love just putting on a show and creating memorable experiences for people.

As it pertains to poetry, there’s a lot of literary gatekeeping in terms of accessibility and in certain sectors of poetry it’s super academic…did you feel you needed to break that?

Totally. Part of me felt rejected, but also, I entered a world where I had no credentials. Nobody knew who I was. I was just like, I’m gonna start taking writing poetry seriously. My friends, they’re just not into poetry, they don’t go to readings. Whether or not I like the poetry, I do. It’s good for me to hear what is happening. In the outside world, there’s a stereotypical idea of poetry. It’s intellectual, it’s obtuse. The average person does not want to engage with poetry.

I thought there was space to make poetry and poetry readings more fun and more exciting. A big inspiration of mine is also Vaudeville, and I really love a variety show where you don’t know what you’re going to get. My version of poetry or my definition is so loose. If you look at some of the writer’s we’ve worked with, some are accomplished serious writers, but also people who make memes or who have a really strong voice on Twitter. I have such a loose definition on what I think poetry is and I see it everywhere. You know, there’s competition, you’re competing with social media and Netflix and streaming. How can we create live shows that get people out of their houses?

There’s this perception that poetry isn’t entertaining. Even with your book launch, you were able to present it in a super theatrical way. In your head, how do you imagine yourself reciting poetry? Is it a concert every time like you’re Drake?

Literally, with less grace. I very much picture our shows. I want the same energy as a rock or punk show. It’s kind of a circus. Somebody described it as an underground circus. You don’t know what you’re going to get. It’s loud, it’s fun. I want my poetry to be entertaining, right? I feel so grateful for all the amazing things that have happened with Dream Baby and it’s because we’re really, really prioritizing putting on a good show, entertaining people. But again, my definition of poetry is loose. I love Richard Brautigan and Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. I love lyrics as poetry. I love Drake. Lyrics are a huge inspiration and so are rom coms.

Is Mouthful your concept album?

Definitely. All the poems work together thematically. Jemima [Kirke] said something so beautiful. She said this whole book is working through shame for me. I could not have written it six years ago. This whole book is working through it and owning it like sexual desires, and my body and going back to my childhood, looking at how my desires have evolved and manifested.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Maria Santa Poggi.

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated far-right Florida Congressmember Matt Gaetz to serve as his attorney general. The selection of Gaetz, a staunch Trump loyalist, appears to signify Trump’s intent to weaponize the Department of Justice to target political enemies. Gaetz has “no appreciable law enforcement experience,” says Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the federal government for access to a DOJ investigation into allegations that Gaetz was involved in the sex trafficking of an underage girl. That investigation was not made public, and no federal charges were filed, but the House Ethics Committee launched its own inquiry into Gaetz, the status of which is now up in the air after Gaetz resigned on Wednesday. If approved as attorney general, Gaetz is likely to “take an ax to the nonpartisan functioning of the Justice Department,” warns Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox. “His chief qualification … is his willingness to do whatever Donald Trump needs to be done.” We also discuss the status of various other legal issues swirling around Trump and his supporters, including the Justice Department probes into Trump, the potential pardoning of January 6 insurrectionists and if Trump will abuse the presidential power of recess appointments when he takes office.

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

Statement of Common Cause President & CEO Virginia Kase Solomón

The nomination of Rep. Matt Gaetz to serve as Attorney General represents a serious threat to the fair and equal enforcement of the law in our nation. Gaetz is wholly unqualified for the post in addition to being an election denier and far-right extremist. This move is both shocking and alarming. Matt Gaetz’s record proves he has no place in any position within the Department of Justice, an institution dedicated to upholding the rule of law. We call on every Senator to put country before party and reject this nomination.

Rep. Gaetz has consistently worked against democracy and accountability. On January 6th, he supported efforts to overturn the 2020 election and has since continued to shield those who attempted to subvert our democratic processes. His anti-voter agenda includes pushing legislation that would strip eligible voters from the rolls, even threatening government shutdowns to enforce voter suppression.

Beyond that, his rhetoric and actions reveal a troubling history of encouraging violence against racial justice protesters and promoting dangerous white supremacist ideologies. This is not a candidate who values equality, justice, or the rights of all Americans.

The role of Attorney General is to uphold civil and voting rights protections and ensure fair justice for all. This nomination marks the first major pro-democracy struggle of Trump’s second administration. Senate Republicans must demonstrate their commitment to democracy and the rule of law by rejecting this extreme nomination.

Matt Gaetz is one of the most extreme and unsuitable choices for this role, and Senate confirmation is not assured. We call on Senators from both parties to stand with the American people and protect our democratic institutions by ensuring Matt Gaetz never reaches this role.

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

Noam Chomsky Interviewed by Matt Kennard

September 1, 2024. Novara Media.

This content originally appeared on chomsky.info: The Noam Chomsky Website and was authored by anthony.

I’ve always been a lover of music, since I was a little guy. [It was] probably a typical progression for guys in America with a similar cultural background and age range: from Guns ‘N Roses to Nirvana to Green Day.

I was quick to dig deeper as a preteen. It was hard to do that too, to figure out where to go. I didn’t have an older sibling. I did find punk when I was 14 or 15, local scene stuff. From there it was just like, “This is my spot.” I love every bit of it. I love the immediacy, and the fact that anyone can do it, and that you can meet the people doing it. It just was so different.

Do you remember the first time that you thought that you might be a musician, rather than just a listener of music?

I was probably 13. I just had a buddy who had a guitar, and I got a bass, and we just tried to write songs. It must’ve felt impossible at that point. It was really once I was maybe 14 or 15, when I saw other kids a little older than me actually being in bands, that it clicked as a possibility.

I needed to try one way or another, even without the knowledge of how to do it. I just really wanted to try it, to make music, because it was my favorite thing.

I ask because, with some arts, I don’t feel like I can engage as “just” a fan. I was wondering if you always had that feeling about music.

Yeah, I guess [in music] it feels more attainable to let your personality coast you into being the thing, rather than [for] a sculptor or a writer where maybe you have to really put in the work and learn the craft. Music has a door open more for hucksters, in a good way. Someone can just show up, and because they want it bad enough, they can just become it.

People are connecting with you, hopefully on an emotional or personality level, but that doesn’t mean you have to know how to play scales or whatever, right? I mean, maybe you need to find someone else who does, but you can work together, which is nice.

I guess some people like dazzling craft by itself. There’s some people who love that in every medium, but that’s not what I gravitate towards: feats of strength or dexterity.

You have in the past talked, perhaps in a tongue-in-cheek way, about music being like a hobby for you. Has this perception been freeing in any way?

Hobby feels like maybe not a perfect word for it, but it shows that here’s a thing I really love, but I’m not dependent upon it to keep the electricity on. That is such a nice feeling, to have a thing outside the realm of, “I need to do this to survive.”

It’s just great to have a thing you’re passionate about. I am lucky that we have people that listen to us. It’s clearly not just for me. I’m purposely sharing this stuff with the world so that people can react to it. The best part is knowing we can just choose what to do, and hopefully that is its own reward.

You guys don’t put out albums all that often. How do you know it’s time to put something out?

Once we have enough stuff, and once it feels like there’s a coherence to it. We’d love to put out a record every six months if we were that hardworking, but we’re not.

You want to still sound like yourself, but you don’t want to copy yourself. It’s like that finding that sweet spot: it’s clearly recognizable as us, but it’s not a rehashing of exactly what we did before. It can just take a while to get enough quality material. We’re pretty strong critics of ourselves. We’ll work on a thing and sometimes it’s just not good enough, and that’s okay. We can just forget about it and move on to the next thing.

Maybe even if you’re attached to something, it eventually doesn’t serve the larger work. And so you’ve got to be the critic. You’ve got to let that one go.

I feel like anything that I’ve put out there, for the most part I’m pleased with on some level still. Certain things you can tell: I [hadn’t] experienced the world enough yet. Or maybe it was a little bit of a hack-y idea that felt really novel to me at the time.

But generally I just try to keep track of all my ideas. 90% of them are terrible, but it takes a day or a week or so to realize that. I’m pretty ruthless with myself, but I try to keep it all, and then if something sticks, it feels like, “Okay, we might have something to work with here.” It’s definitely good to not be afraid to remove things, or cut away a safety net or something. [As a writer, yourself,] I’m sure you have things you could do that would be a crowd pleaser on some level, but you’d be dying inside if you did it.

Yeah, those rhetorical tricks. I refer to it as cuteness, and I try to not do it anymore.

Yeah, I’ve been in that position. Maybe you dabble a little bit with cute, and then everyone likes it and then you feel even worse. You’re like, “Oh.”

The worst.

Or people pay attention to that more than what you think is the real, good meat that you’re serving.

It makes you want to pull a Lou Reed, and put out some deeply unapproachable shit like Metal Machine Music.

You also don’t want to just be reacting against what you think is cute either. You don’t want to fall into that trap.

You shouldn’t be thinking for the audience.

It’s tricky because you are writing for an audience. I keep them in mind, but I have to approve of [the work] myself, too. It has to feel good. If I have to choose between an audience loving it, or me loving it, I will go with me every time. It’s just such a good feeling to feel like you nailed it.

How does songwriting work for you?

It’s about the idea or the sentiment at first. Those are what I try to collect. Maybe it’s a title that feels like it’s going to be something. When we’re working on music, I try to figure out what feels like it goes well, or will be a good pairing as far as sentiment and sound.

It’s a really fun exercise, because sometimes I have a great idea that just doesn’t have a musical home. Something that this feels abstract or weird, and then you hear the music and I’m like, “Oh. No, this has to be this.” That’s one of the most satisfying parts of writing songs, I think—matching the words to the music.

What’s your day-to-day engagement like with music? On the days that you’re not with the band, do you work on music by yourself?

I’m always coming up with ideas and stockpiling them and culling them and weeding out and deleting them. But we work furiously once there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. As I’m sure you know, once you’ve got half, the other half comes quicker. Whereas when you’re just starting, it feels like, “Where do I even begin,” sometimes? It takes a while to get that first half. And then once we have that light, we just work extra hard. We really try to pull things together.

A lot of the recent songs cover what I refer to as grownup bullshit: the debt cycle, and choosing where to live, and divorce. Those aren’t youthful preoccupations necessarily.

No, not at all.

I’d love to hear more about the relationship between getting older and the topics that you take on.

I’m always trying to write about things that I feel strongly about in that moment—strong in the sense of concern or fear or resentment or anger. If something’s sending me warning signs in a way that I feel off about it, or frustrated, or ashamed, it’s always going to be about where I’m at age-wise.

I’m in many ways following a traditional American life of college, job, kid, getting older. I can’t help but write about those experiences as they come. Before, I wrote a bunch about being in a workplace in an office because that was really just jarring and a terrible feeling. But I’ve been working from home for nine years now or something, so that’s not really affecting me much. It’s just other stuff.

I want to write to my peers and in a sincere way, and hopefully things that everyone else isn’t talking about, even though I think they should. That’s the most fun part. I love to be a little shocking, but in the non-cheapest way possible. I want to just say something that’s so real that it shocks rather than so offensive that it shocks.

A lot of stuff is weirdly taboo, and I am interested in discussing that just it makes me uncomfortable, too. If you’re talking about divorce, or going bald, or criticizing someone’s parenting—these are things you just cannot talk about, and to me that’s more exciting than anything else. It is fun to be annoying or provocative, but I want to do it in a way that feels earned rather than just cheap.

I really like that. To be provocative from the perspective of an adult with an adult’s lived experience is more challenging because you know more.

Yeah, it’s fun. It’s almost like you feel better about it when you’re done writing. It’s not a dirty secret anymore or a shame that you’re harboring. Even just by calling it by its name, it’s less powerful is how it feels to me sometimes.

If I feel bad about going bald and I sing about it, then it’s like this no longer has any power. Who cares? It became funny. It’s not something that can control you in the same way.

Yeah, I was going to say you control the story. Money is one of those things that used to be more taboo, and now a lot more people are talking about it or taking it on as a topic.

Do you think that’s a younger generational thing, or is it your peers, too? Because I feel like I’ve noticed the youth, people in their 20s or whatever, are keenly attuned to talking about to demanding money in a way that my generation of punks never would.

Because it used to be called selling out before.

I guess it’s like we don’t exist where selling out can exist. Now, there’s punk bands who do a Taco Bell commercial and everyone’s like, “Oh, that’s really good.”

I can see it both ways. People should be paid for their art or whatever, but I love just doing it for the sake of doing it, writing stuff because you need to do it, not because you feel entitled to the pay that should be associated with it.

It used to be a lot easier to get paid in general. Outside of art, it was the easy way, to go ahead and achieve your middle class existence. It was punk to not be paid money.

Yeah, the jobs paid you more somehow, right? It wasn’t so predatorial. There was some luxury in having a house [where you could say] “Oh, we all pay $175 a month in rent.” That does not exist anymore, so I wouldn’t hold anyone to that same 1996 standard. But it’s also cool when people do hold themselves to that, who are just like would rather die than take corporate money for a thing. You don’t have to, in my book, but that’s cool if you do.

I would be too preoccupied with precariousness. I have always preferred to have a job that is not my identity.

No, totally. Because then you have the freedom to create your own identity without having to sweat it so hard, right? The moment you’re writing for the purpose of getting in The New Yorker or something, it’s probably terrible compared to what you do elsewhere.

Do you get burned out? Creatively or in any other way?

Sometimes. But I guess I don’t work frequently enough. I mean, playing shows and stuff can be a little tiring, and I say that as someone who doesn’t play a lot of shows. I don’t know how people in my peer group go on the road for three months. It sounds truly like psychological, physical torture to be eating rest stop food every day and never having any privacy. You’re always just with people, but you’re bored most of the time. Props to the people who have the ability to withstand that. Because if I’m out longer than four or five days, it’s just like, “Oh, I miss the comforts of home.”

In your day-to-day, what is a restorative or recharging ritual for you?

I play a ton of tennis, actually. That’s the best thing because your brain isn’t thinking about anything for an hour. You’re just truly not thinking about anything besides hitting a ball. Also you get better at it just by virtue of doing it. Which is true about everything, but it’s nice to witness improvement and just have that time away from being creative.

You send out a regular newsletter of record reviews. What is the role of criticism in your own art?

I love turning people on to stuff that they didn’t know about. That’s just the best feeling to me. I feel like I’m finally providing use to the world when I’m giving good recommendations to people who are open for them. That’s always fun.

I also love trying to make a point about something. If I find something unappealing, I love to try to explain that. It’s what I like to read from other people. I like people who have their own opinions and are not afraid to share them, even if I disagree. I try to find a good balance just wanting to be readable and hopefully relatable and fun. I just love writing.

People always ask me about this, and I feel like you probably get comments about it as well. What is the role of humor in your work?

I feel like maybe we have a similar mindset where it’s a nice way to put [humor] throughout heavier stuff. Not in a way of lessening the blow, but just adding that contrast can make it more vivid if you’re discussing something that is dead serious.

Because life is full of stupid funniness too, right? It’s useful to throw something in that might be unexpected or funny.

Even when something is devastating or infuriating, it can also have an absurdity about it.

Also, I’m always joking around with my friends. It’s like how we talk to each other, and so that’s going to be my most natural way of communicating in art, too.

Yeah. You might have a persona in your art. I feel like all of us do in some capacity. But it can’t be totally divorced from who you are, right?

Yeah. It’s more fun to bring out the strength of who I am. I feel like with your work, every sentence is very easy to read. It’s not incredible words that we have to go to the dictionary to feel what’s being said, or metaphors that don’t make any sense unless you know a third fact about a secret thing. You can just pick up your book and know what you’re trying to convey, and that’s really how I try to write, too. Simplistically as far as the words used, and then hopefully in a fresh combination.

I definitely get the sense of immediacy from your work. It doesn’t place me at a distance as the listener. Once I hear the lyrics, I can chuckle where it’s appropriate.

Have you ever tried to write more abstractly?

Yeah, but it doesn’t interest me.

It feels terrible, right? It just feels like the phoniest thing. I almost don’t like people who write like that. Then just from my own experience, I’m like, This feels so fake, but that’s just me. I’m sure for some people it’s their truth.

I’m not interested in creating distance.

I feel very similarly. Even if the situations we’re talking about are very specific to us, I’d want it to be relatable, because probably the emotions underneath them are pretty universal.

I think specificity creates universality. It actually brings the audience closer.

Oh, totally. I don’t know how you approach the fact that we’re all on our phones and on social media and stuff. It’s almost too typical to write about, but it feels so real, so I want to acknowledge what life is really like for us now. We’re not waiting by the telephone for our friend to call. That’s what you would do in 1982.

Nowadays, it’s totally different. I want to explain that without being lame about it. It’s not fun to type out the word Instagram in anything, and that word has never been in a lyric of mine. But it’s so much a part of our lives that it feels like it should be. How do you approach that? Wanting to be cool and write good stuff, but also wanting to acknowledge the world we live in?

I think people always say you shouldn’t date yourself, or you should make sure that your material transcends time. But these things have a place in our art, and I think it’s a part of the absurdity you were talking about earlier.

I wonder how history will treat us in this moment. I can think about Iggy Pop writing about TV Eye, and at the time maybe it was just as lame as writing about Instagram now. Where it’s like, “Yeah, we are on TV. We watch TV, big deal. We know this.” But now you hear it and you’re like, “Oh, man, that’s so cool the way he discussed that thing in 1974.”

I’m wondering what the future will think about this era, and so I want to try to replicate that as truthfully as possible, and then hope it seems cool. You know what I mean?

Yeah. We’ll have some unfathomable technologies in the future and people will be like, “This is how they used to reckon with the new frontier of surveillance.”

I’m sure our work will be quaint compared to what happens 40 years from now when everyone’s micro-chipped and minority reporting through the air and stuff, and we’re just here talking about looking at a device still.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Niina Pollari.

Janine Jackson interviewed Media Matters’ Matt Gertz about Trump’s guilty verdict for the June 7, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

AP (5/31/24)

Janine Jackson: A Manhattan criminal court found Donald Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records. This ruling is clearly not the be-all, end-all of a legal redressing of Trump’s myriad crimes; he’s already been found liable in a civil trial for sexual abuse and defamation, and he’s facing another three trials for mishandling classified documents, conspiring to unlawfully change the outcome of the 2020 election, and encouraging the violent January 6, 2021, rampage at the US Capitol.

But commentary from much of the news media—where we learn about what’s happening, what it means, and what we might do about it—is platforming the idea that this might be a disputable issue, that has to do with personal feelings about this particular man. You could joke, “Tell me you’re moving the goalposts without telling me you’re moving the goalposts.” But there are real-world stakes here, and the contortions media are going through to make a convicted felon who boasts of his crimes one side of a reasonable debate is telling us something about Trump and his followers, sure, but it’s also telling us something about news media.

Matt Gertz is senior fellow at Media Matters for America; he’s been working on this issue, and he joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Matt Gertz.

Matt Gertz: Thanks so much for having me.

JJ: There seems to be an overarching conversation here, which is that if a legal process convicts someone you like, it must be a political—meaning partisan—action, only aimed at silencing a political opponent. I’m not sure that everyone advancing that idea right now is thinking, really, about the implications, that if you decide the law is just whatever you do or don’t like…. Is murder a crime? What if you like the person who did it, you know?

I want to talk through the specifics and the examples that Media Matters has been putting out, because concrete examples show us that we’re not just giving sweeping characterizations. But I just wanted to ask you, first, for your general response to the effort from some media to say that these crimes aren’t really crimes, it’s really just a political hit job. Are you surprised at all by that response?

Matt Gertz: “A good practice for the press would be to explain to their readers and to their viewers that what is coming from the right is totally false, that they are creating these conspiracy theories and this theory of politicized persecution for their own benefit.”

MG: Not really. I think that what we’ve seen over the last nine years, since Trump’s rise began, is that the mainstream press has a big problem coming out and being forthright about Donald Trump’s actions in cases where the right has rallied around him.

And at this point, what we see when we monitor the right-wing media, when we look at what Republicans are saying, is that they are four-square behind him. They are not only denying that he committed the crimes that he was convicted of; they are saying that he is the real victim here, that this is a politicized prosecution, and that now the only recourse is for Republicans to start throwing their own political opponents in jail.

Given the volume and the inflammatory nature of these claims that are coming from the right, I think a good practice for the press would be to explain to their readers and to their viewers that what is coming from the right is totally false, that they are creating these conspiracy theories and this theory of politicized persecution for their own benefit. But instead, what we tend to see is a lot of he-said, she-said coverage, in which there is a certain amount of credence being given to these claims, and that just lets them infest the public discourse in a way that is both unhelpful and, I think, in the longer term dangerous.

JJ: Let’s talk about a couple of the particular counter-narratives that we’re seeing now from right-wing media, to address them. One of them is that the charges against Trump are unprecedented, “nothing like this has ever happened before”; that’s one of the popular ideas, along with the idea that the jury and the judge are somehow tainted in some way. What are you seeing there?

MG: What’s unprecedented, obviously, is that a former president has been repeatedly charged with and, in this case, convicted of crimes. It’s also unprecedented for so many of a former president’s closest associates to be charged with and convicted of crimes, but that is also the case here.

What the right has needed to do, to deal with the fact that often Republican prosecutors and Republican investigators are finding all of this Republican criminality, is they’ve created this vast conspiracy theory, this idea of a “deep-state” plot to get to Donald Trump and everyone associated with him. The reality is much simpler: There are a lot of criminals around Donald Trump because he is an incredibly shady person.

And so what we’ve seen is a full-throttle, round-the-clock effort to try to undermine and delegitimize every aspect of, not only this prosecution, but the two federal probes and the one in Georgia that you alluded to earlier. In this case, that involves attacking not only the New York jury, not only the New York prosecutor, but also the judge, and really every aspect of this case. They leave no stone unturned in their efforts to defend Donald Trump.

CNN (4/7/24)

JJ: I can’t think of a time where someone would say, “Let me tell you what the child of the judge does, and therefore….” It just feels like untested waters that, I guess, I just wish journalists would step up to do more.

MG: I think that’s absolutely right. We really are in uncharted territory; when you see attacks coming in on particular jurors, which we saw early in the trial, and then the excuse-making after the fact that because the trial was in New York City, there was no way Donald Trump could get a fair trial. I mean, you’re really in pretty dangerous territory there.

I will note, by the way, that the claims that Donald Trump could not get a fair trial in New York City came almost immediately after the very same people were bragging about how many people were coming to Donald Trump’s rally in New York, and how he was going to make a real play at winning the state in the 2024 presidential election. You kind of have to pick a lane on that one, but I guess they feel like they can get away with it, because no one will call them on it.

JJ: And hypocrisy is apparently no longer a thing.

I just want to give you a chance to name some names. There are some particular actors and particular outlets that are in this business, and I know that Media Matters does work, not just doing broad, sweeping things, but actually giving examples of particular people, and I think that’s the value. You know, we’re not saying, “The right wing does this.” We’re saying, there are particular instances, and are there any that stand out for you?

New York Times (6/5/24)

MG: Sure. One of them, obviously, I would say Steve Bannon—who is the long-time Trump advisor, and host of the War Room podcast—he spent the days since the verdict making the case for the need for widespread prosecutions of Democrats as a matter of retaliation.

You also see it running the gamut on Fox News, but in particular people like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, are very invested in defending Trump on his conviction specifically.

And then you think about someone like Ben Shapiro—the Daily Wire co-founder—who was famously opposed to Donald Trump when he first ran for president back in 2016, but now, due to the incentives of the right-wing press, he’s come around, and said that the charges against Trump were spurious, and entirely made up so that the media and Joe Biden could claim that he’s a convicted felon, that this is all in evidence of incipient tyranny.

Really just a wild level of rhetoric going on through every aspect of the right, as they try to get around the fact that they’re supporting someone who has been convicted of felony charges.

JJ: Just to pivot for a second, and acknowledge the painful hilarity of the idea, and we kind of talked about it, but the idea that an appeal by Trump would be passed to the New York state’s appellate division, a branch of the New York Supreme Court—and “oh my God, they’re all Black women; obviously he won’t get a fair shake.”

Which, first of all, you’re telling on yourself with that, right? Like, obviously Black people and women would hate him because, you know, he’s just like Jesus Christ, who was famously hated by Black people and women.

But also, like so much that we’re seeing on our screens, it’s just not accurate. The women of color on the meme that people are looking at are five of 21 judges who could be selected to sit for the case. In other words, and maybe we’ve said it, but going bold on disinformation is part of the landscape now.

CNN (5/14/24)

MG: Absolutely, and because of the bifurcation of the news landscape, because you have Republicans bubbled off within their own media sphere, the contrary information doesn’t enter the bubble. They don’t get exposed to the facts or the contradictions that are inherent in what’s going on.

There’s been this big push that I mentioned to declare the Justice Department somehow politicized by Joe Biden, and that is happening at the same time when Joe Biden’s own son is on trial in a federal court for gun crimes. This is an investigation that was launched during the Trump administration, under a Republican attorney general and a Republican FBI director, and is currently carried out by a Trump appointee who Joe Biden kept on.

There’s just not a similar groundswell of people on the left or in the mainstream press who are desperately trying to defend every aspect of Hunter Biden’s life, and try to invalidate the entire judicial system for political gain, the way you see happening literally simultaneously regarding the Trump conviction.

JJ: My complaint about corporate news media right now is that I feel like they are just narrating the nightmare, and they don’t acknowledge how insufficient that is right now, in a society with democratic aspirations, as I say, that relies on public information to make choices. And it’s not about how I feel about a political person, it’s what I’m looking for from a press, and I just wonder, what do you think—you don’t need to name names, but what do you think responsible journalism would look like right now? We’ve said it’s contested waters, it’s difficult. It is a hard time, but what would be the role for independent, responsible journalism right now?

AP (8/29/23)

MG: I think it would be keeping the focus as much as possible on the stakes over the next several months. We are looking at an election where we have, on the one hand, a fairly normal set of politicians, and on the other hand, you have people calling for radical and dangerous changes at every turn. And I think giving people the full explanation, the implication of Trump’s worldview and the policy changes likely to happen if he becomes president, and has, as we might expect, much more leeway within his own party than he had during his last term, is crucial. I don’t think the American public is getting that sort of information about what the election might mean for themselves, and for the future of the country.

JJ: We’re not talking about Trump versus Biden. We’re talking about what journalists could do to lay clear what the information is, what’s at stake, what Trump has said he will do. You don’t have to be politically partisan to ask more of reporters.

MG: That’s absolutely right.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Matt Gertz; he’s a senior fellow at Media Matters for America. They’re online at www.MediaMatters.org. Matt Gertz, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MG: Thank you for having me.

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

Yahoo (5/31/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Surprising no one, Donald Trump and his sycophants responded to his 34-count conviction on charges of lying in business records by claiming that the trial was “rigged,” the judge and jury corrupt, that it was somehow Joe Biden’s doing, and “you know who else was persecuted? Jesus Christ.” Trump publicly calling the judge a “devil,” and Bible-thumping House Speaker Mike Johnson and others showing up at the courthouse in Trump cosplay, were just some of the irregular, shall we say, elements of this trial. It is a moment to examine the right-wing media that have fomented this scary nonsense, but also to look to reporting from the so-called “mainstream” to go beyond the “some say, others differ” pablum we often see. We’ll talk with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, about press response to the trial and the verdict.

New York Times (11/21/16)

Also on the show: For some people the violent police crackdown on peaceful college students protesting their schools’ investments in Israel’s war on Palestinians has been eye-opening. For others, it’s one more example of the employment of law enforcement to brutally enforce corporate power. The fight led by Indigenous women against the Dakota Access pipeline is not long enough ago to have been forgotten. We’ll hear a bit from an August 2017 interview with North Dakota organizer Kandi Mossett.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Over the last decade I’ve become fixated on exploring the relationship between numinous experience, metaphysics, and music, and more broadly the creative process. So as an artist, that informs my work—I draw from dreams, I draw from metaphysical philosophy. I’m really inspired by all these things.

So that led me to ask “What was my lineage?,” and I couldn’t find it when I went looking for it. So I went digging and researching and basically collecting all these artists through history who have had similar interests in connecting the creative process with spiritual perspective. Basically all my work pertains to that, whether it’s through my own creative process and making music or painting, or by researching the history and philosophy of these traditions and the artists that applied them in their art. That’s kind of it in a nutshell. I developed the American Museum of Paramusicology to house or umbrella this larger [aim], all the different things that are attached to that, whether it’s podcasts or writing or archival collection.

It seems like you probably have finely honed project management skills, given the sheer output of information-dense projects that you have undertaken. Can you tell me a little bit about how you go about organizing projects?

It can get pretty chaotic at times. Everything is, to me, based on inspiration. So whether that’s a creative project that I’m working on or a historical figure that I’m studying, wherever the inspiration leads me, I collect those things. So on my computer I have lots of folders and in my space, I have lots of stacks. And sometimes things are more forthcoming than others. Other times I’m waiting on an archivist to get back to me about this thing I’m researching or I’m trying to track down something but can’t find it.

And I like it to be that open. I pretty much work for myself, don’t make much money at all, live in my mother’s attic in basic poverty, but that all allows me this freedom to work the way that I do. I’m not beholden to anyone, so I just respond to the inspiration. It’s very synchronistic and natural the way things come together. And that’s how I love to work, that’s how I love to live my life when I’m able.

It sounds like you’ve been very intentional in making sacrifices in order to have the space to center your creative work in your life. Can you talk a little bit about that decision-making process?

Yeah, some of it’s a decision and some of it’s circumstantial. For the last 10 years, I’ve been doing delivery jobs, waiting tables, factory work, and I just quit my job at a grocery store after being harassed by customers and having a horrible experience there. So I’m kind of in limbo right now and really devoting myself to the work while I have this free time. It’s not ideal, but I do find that having these kinds of low wage jobs allows me to check them at the door so that when I come home my focus is entirely devoted to this practice.

The stress that comes along with a lot of those jobs and the financial stress of life, those stresses don’t disappear when you get success or financial stability, they just transform themselves into something else. So I find that the way to work with that stress is to transmute it into the art practice, transmute it into devotional work. It is a balancing act. When I look back on things, I can become bitter, I can feel kind of self-victimizing, but at the end of the day, I know that it’s not going to ever be any better than it is right now. There has to be some sort of peace. Deep inside, you have to realize that all of this is just an ephemeral thing.

I’m still working out my path in that regard and I’d like what I do to become self-sustaining. But at the same time, I see that alienate people—when the creative practice becomes a means to an end to get money, it can often corrupt the practice, but that’s not a guaranteed outcome. There is a part of me that almost prefers to struggle in order to preserve the total freedom that that allows. My perspective on that changes a lot, I have to ask myself that question a lot.

It sounds like to some extent, you have to be in a constant process of negotiating how you feel about what sustainability means, and what freedom means in creative practice.

We live in this culture where everybody’s a life coach. There’s kind of a toxic positivity that has taken hold. And this idea of manifesting—that’s the most popular version of metaphysics in our culture. To me, it becomes very self-centered, it becomes very materialistic and delusional. Most of the things that we think we want, when we get them, they’re not what we thought they were, or we’ve changed and we don’t want them anymore. So this idea of having some sort of utopian vision of the way life is supposed to be is really almost impossible. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t recognize what we care about and pursue our dreams and that kind of thing, but this idea of manifesting your destiny and trying to control it in that way seems very misguided to me. But at the same time, I could maybe use a little more of that.

Going back to your response about organizational approach, it sounds like you feel comfortable with the amount of chaos that you are welcoming in. So maybe instead of trying to control your destiny, it’s just having a developed relationship with chaos.

Yeah, I require chaos. It’s really vital to everything I care about.

Can you tell me more?

Well, a lot of my creative practices, these more open forms that allow a certain amount of chaos into the process that break down your inhibitions and your habitual way of doing things. I have to try to get to that place where those habits dissolve and something natural and serendipitous can arise. That’s the goal of art for me, to touch base with that serendipity and be present with it.

When there’s not any chaos, everything becomes very rigid very quickly and we attach ourselves to things. Even in music, for example, you come up with a nice melody or a cool lyric and you attach yourself to it because you’re proud of it and you love it. But a lot of times when we attach too much to something like that, it prevents us from developing it further, or it prevents us from new ideas that come in or other people’s perspectives. So that kind of non-attachment, which to me is a gentle form of chaos, is really important in the creative process and in our lives because we can box ourselves in pretty easily.

I have kind of a big question for you that relates to this—where do you believe ideas come from?

I am inclined to use terms like universal consciousness or something to that effect. I love David Lynch’s description of fishing: the deeper you cast your pole, the bigger the thoughts are down there. But it’s really clearing that space, it’s dissolving all of those habits, all of those obstacles that get in your way to create an open space where an idea can come up.

Can you expand on that a little more? You have such deep familiarity with different ways that people have gone about accessing what we might call universal consciousness, plucking things from the ether, communicating with the muses…

There’s a billion terms.

With all that you’ve learned, what are some of your favorite tactics you have seen artists using to make space for new ideas?

That’s a good question, I have like a thousand different artists in my head. I’m very inspired, for example, by the use of meditation in the music of Arthur Farwell or Irma Glen, the use of dreams by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, astrology by Kelan Phil Cohran and Richard Tyler, numerology by Arthur Russell and in early hip hop philosophy, or the use of mediumship in the music of Francis Grierson, Exuma, and Merceditas Valdés—there are innumerable examples. Methodology isn’t everything, and sometimes we can get stuck in the methods we embrace.

But I tend to personally be drawn towards artists who share my own affinities for dreamwork: working with symbolism and translation across different media, involving multiple senses. Dreamwork is pretty central and that’s probably one of the more pervasive creative methods across cultures and art media. A lot of that has to do with working with symbols that are gifted to you, ideas that are gifted to you.

And that doesn’t have to be necessarily just in sleep, like the beats and a lot of other artists would describe your relationship walking around the city, taking notice of the word on the street sign or recognizing a flower, just observing what’s right in front of you. That’s the same kind of gift that we get when we have a dream, even though it’s a little more enigmatic. I guess for me and a lot of the artists that I’ve looked at, collecting those experiences and really treasuring them is probably the greatest gift. That and meditation, just clearing your head and centering yourself. Paying attention to what’s right around you and right inside you if you’re asleep. Those are the most important things that I’ve continuously come across.

Can you tell me a little bit more about your spiritual upbringing and early metaphysical influences?

I grew up in the Episcopal church. My father was a bishop in Mississippi and later in North Carolina. He was not very dogmatic, it was all about social justice, environmentalism, eating, music, joy—things I could relate to and had no instinct to push away. But the church itself was very alienating to me and I found myself having an allergy to Messiahs in general. So I was always drawn from an early age to very mystical traditions. I read The Cloud of Unknowing at a young age and Simone Weil at a young age and those two in particular had a huge influence on me. Psychedelics, LSD also played a huge role in kind of opening my mind. And yeah, music was always trance-based for me. Really I would say losing myself, but it’s more like finding yourself in the music. And that was something I didn’t understand as a teenager. It was mesmerizing and it became the goal.

I kind of pushed spiritual stuff away for quite a while. I would say like half my life. Partly because I was raised in the church and had bad experiences, outside of my father who was a really positive influence. It took a long time. I basically had to suffer quite a bit before I was receptive to it and then it saved my life, dreamwork in particular. That and engaging Arthur [Russell]’s Buddhist influences really opened my eyes to exploring it all more. I used my dreams to pull myself out of a really dark hole. I had to quit alcohol and everything else all at once. And when I did that—I don’t pray a lot, but I prayed that day—I was like, “I promise to myself that I would devote myself to this work if I could survive,” because I was not doing well. And so there was a vow that I made to myself to really devote myself to it.

Thanks for sharing that. I wonder if there’s any advice that you’d like to share for others who are struggling in similar ways?

The transition out of that, especially if you’re struggling with alcoholism or anything like that, becomes the main obstacle to confront. I found that I had to find ways to hold on to whatever inspiration I could hold onto. So making music, for example, I didn’t have time or the energy to work on a long piece. So I would just start doing improvisatory songs for like 30 seconds or a minute. Something that I could feel like had a wholeness to it, that contained something inspiring, that came from a place of inspiration. So that when space opened up or time opened up, I was able to come back and really feel like I could fly a little more.

That was an important discovery. I know a lot of people are like, I can’t do what I want to do, so I’m not going to do it at all. A big part of my development [is] being able to be adaptive to different forms of creativity and finding what you’re capable of doing in the circumstances you’re in. If you can tap into that, there’s an even greater chance that that can grow and that that can sustain you through a hard time. And when you come out of it, then you’re on the other side and you planted all these seeds and you can have a garden. And that’s when I was making the podcast Secret Sound. I was holding onto that when I was a bad alcoholic and I would have to clean myself up to do that.

And when I made that vow and I quit drinking—this was at the beginning of the pandemic—I was like, I know if I plant these seeds now, it’s going to grow on the other side. And I’ve stuck with it. I’m still struggling in various ways, but I’m really grateful for holding on, for keeping on top of it. I guess to answer your question, it’s being patient and being adaptable to different ways of accessing your creativity and engaging what inspires you.

Can you share what you feel most hopeful about, some of your goals for the future connected to your work?

At some point, I’d like to have this large collection of archival materials to share with people, so I’m hoping to find ways to do that. Ultimately, it would be great to have an exhibition space, either at my home or another space. One of the most important things to me, in life and in creativity, is really about what you bring together, the disparate things that are separated otherwise, that you bring together and form a greater meaning. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do with this archive. I’m strategizing and hopeful that that can be the end game, where I can at least offer an introduction or an overview of metaphysics that is not delusional, that is not narcissistic, that is not spiritually materialistic, but that stirs inspiration. That’s the goal.

Yeah, it sounds like part of your goal is to function as a translator, connecting those threads so that those resources can be helpful to other people too.

Yeah, and also recognizing that we’re all so different. I think this is something people lose sight of, because once people find a tradition that they love, it becomes this totalizing thing. Especially when you look at metaphysics, it all comes out of specific personalities. Some people are really into contemplative mysticism and they like complicated philosophy and crazy diagrams that they can really work through. Other people need a more extroverted role-playing thing where they do ceremonial magic and put on outfits and have objects and stuff, then other people need just a simple prayer or quiet meditation with no thinking. And so realizing that a lot of the things I study and share aren’t necessarily things that I’m into, but I know that for somebody out there, it’s perfect. It’s exactly the opening that they need. So that’s why it’s really important for me to do a comparative offering.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Rene Kladzyk.

Over the last decade I’ve become fixated on exploring the relationship between numinous experience, metaphysics, and music, and more broadly the creative process. So as an artist, that informs my work—I draw from dreams, I draw from metaphysical philosophy. I’m really inspired by all these things.

So that led me to ask “What was my lineage?,” and I couldn’t find it when I went looking for it. So I went digging and researching and basically collecting all these artists through history who have had similar interests in connecting the creative process with spiritual perspective. Basically all my work pertains to that, whether it’s through my own creative process and making music or painting, or by researching the history and philosophy of these traditions and the artists that applied them in their art. That’s kind of it in a nutshell. I developed the American Museum of Paramusicology to house or umbrella this larger [aim], all the different things that are attached to that, whether it’s podcasts or writing or archival collection.

It seems like you probably have finely honed project management skills, given the sheer output of information-dense projects that you have undertaken. Can you tell me a little bit about how you go about organizing projects?

It can get pretty chaotic at times. Everything is, to me, based on inspiration. So whether that’s a creative project that I’m working on or a historical figure that I’m studying, wherever the inspiration leads me, I collect those things. So on my computer I have lots of folders and in my space, I have lots of stacks. And sometimes things are more forthcoming than others. Other times I’m waiting on an archivist to get back to me about this thing I’m researching or I’m trying to track down something but can’t find it.

And I like it to be that open. I pretty much work for myself, don’t make much money at all, live in my mother’s attic in basic poverty, but that all allows me this freedom to work the way that I do. I’m not beholden to anyone, so I just respond to the inspiration. It’s very synchronistic and natural the way things come together. And that’s how I love to work, that’s how I love to live my life when I’m able.

It sounds like you’ve been very intentional in making sacrifices in order to have the space to center your creative work in your life. Can you talk a little bit about that decision-making process?

Yeah, some of it’s a decision and some of it’s circumstantial. For the last 10 years, I’ve been doing delivery jobs, waiting tables, factory work, and I just quit my job at a grocery store after being harassed by customers and having a horrible experience there. So I’m kind of in limbo right now and really devoting myself to the work while I have this free time. It’s not ideal, but I do find that having these kinds of low wage jobs allows me to check them at the door so that when I come home my focus is entirely devoted to this practice.

The stress that comes along with a lot of those jobs and the financial stress of life, those stresses don’t disappear when you get success or financial stability, they just transform themselves into something else. So I find that the way to work with that stress is to transmute it into the art practice, transmute it into devotional work. It is a balancing act. When I look back on things, I can become bitter, I can feel kind of self-victimizing, but at the end of the day, I know that it’s not going to ever be any better than it is right now. There has to be some sort of peace. Deep inside, you have to realize that all of this is just an ephemeral thing.

I’m still working out my path in that regard and I’d like what I do to become self-sustaining. But at the same time, I see that alienate people—when the creative practice becomes a means to an end to get money, it can often corrupt the practice, but that’s not a guaranteed outcome. There is a part of me that almost prefers to struggle in order to preserve the total freedom that that allows. My perspective on that changes a lot, I have to ask myself that question a lot.

It sounds like to some extent, you have to be in a constant process of negotiating how you feel about what sustainability means, and what freedom means in creative practice.

We live in this culture where everybody’s a life coach. There’s kind of a toxic positivity that has taken hold. And this idea of manifesting—that’s the most popular version of metaphysics in our culture. To me, it becomes very self-centered, it becomes very materialistic and delusional. Most of the things that we think we want, when we get them, they’re not what we thought they were, or we’ve changed and we don’t want them anymore. So this idea of having some sort of utopian vision of the way life is supposed to be is really almost impossible. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t recognize what we care about and pursue our dreams and that kind of thing, but this idea of manifesting your destiny and trying to control it in that way seems very misguided to me. But at the same time, I could maybe use a little more of that.

Going back to your response about organizational approach, it sounds like you feel comfortable with the amount of chaos that you are welcoming in. So maybe instead of trying to control your destiny, it’s just having a developed relationship with chaos.

Yeah, I require chaos. It’s really vital to everything I care about.

Can you tell me more?

Well, a lot of my creative practices, these more open forms that allow a certain amount of chaos into the process that break down your inhibitions and your habitual way of doing things. I have to try to get to that place where those habits dissolve and something natural and serendipitous can arise. That’s the goal of art for me, to touch base with that serendipity and be present with it.

When there’s not any chaos, everything becomes very rigid very quickly and we attach ourselves to things. Even in music, for example, you come up with a nice melody or a cool lyric and you attach yourself to it because you’re proud of it and you love it. But a lot of times when we attach too much to something like that, it prevents us from developing it further, or it prevents us from new ideas that come in or other people’s perspectives. So that kind of non-attachment, which to me is a gentle form of chaos, is really important in the creative process and in our lives because we can box ourselves in pretty easily.

I have kind of a big question for you that relates to this—where do you believe ideas come from?

I am inclined to use terms like universal consciousness or something to that effect. I love David Lynch’s description of fishing: the deeper you cast your pole, the bigger the thoughts are down there. But it’s really clearing that space, it’s dissolving all of those habits, all of those obstacles that get in your way to create an open space where an idea can come up.

Can you expand on that a little more? You have such deep familiarity with different ways that people have gone about accessing what we might call universal consciousness, plucking things from the ether, communicating with the muses…

There’s a billion terms.

With all that you’ve learned, what are some of your favorite tactics you have seen artists using to make space for new ideas?

That’s a good question, I have like a thousand different artists in my head. I’m very inspired, for example, by the use of meditation in the music of Arthur Farwell or Irma Glen, the use of dreams by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, astrology by Kelan Phil Cohran and Richard Tyler, numerology by Arthur Russell and in early hip hop philosophy, or the use of mediumship in the music of Francis Grierson, Exuma, and Merceditas Valdés—there are innumerable examples. Methodology isn’t everything, and sometimes we can get stuck in the methods we embrace.

But I tend to personally be drawn towards artists who share my own affinities for dreamwork: working with symbolism and translation across different media, involving multiple senses. Dreamwork is pretty central and that’s probably one of the more pervasive creative methods across cultures and art media. A lot of that has to do with working with symbols that are gifted to you, ideas that are gifted to you.

And that doesn’t have to be necessarily just in sleep, like the beats and a lot of other artists would describe your relationship walking around the city, taking notice of the word on the street sign or recognizing a flower, just observing what’s right in front of you. That’s the same kind of gift that we get when we have a dream, even though it’s a little more enigmatic. I guess for me and a lot of the artists that I’ve looked at, collecting those experiences and really treasuring them is probably the greatest gift. That and meditation, just clearing your head and centering yourself. Paying attention to what’s right around you and right inside you if you’re asleep. Those are the most important things that I’ve continuously come across.

Can you tell me a little bit more about your spiritual upbringing and early metaphysical influences?

I grew up in the Episcopal church. My father was a bishop in Mississippi and later in North Carolina. He was not very dogmatic, it was all about social justice, environmentalism, eating, music, joy—things I could relate to and had no instinct to push away. But the church itself was very alienating to me and I found myself having an allergy to Messiahs in general. So I was always drawn from an early age to very mystical traditions. I read The Cloud of Unknowing at a young age and Simone Weil at a young age and those two in particular had a huge influence on me. Psychedelics, LSD also played a huge role in kind of opening my mind. And yeah, music was always trance-based for me. Really I would say losing myself, but it’s more like finding yourself in the music. And that was something I didn’t understand as a teenager. It was mesmerizing and it became the goal.

I kind of pushed spiritual stuff away for quite a while. I would say like half my life. Partly because I was raised in the church and had bad experiences, outside of my father who was a really positive influence. It took a long time. I basically had to suffer quite a bit before I was receptive to it and then it saved my life, dreamwork in particular. That and engaging Arthur [Russell]’s Buddhist influences really opened my eyes to exploring it all more. I used my dreams to pull myself out of a really dark hole. I had to quit alcohol and everything else all at once. And when I did that—I don’t pray a lot, but I prayed that day—I was like, “I promise to myself that I would devote myself to this work if I could survive,” because I was not doing well. And so there was a vow that I made to myself to really devote myself to it.

Thanks for sharing that. I wonder if there’s any advice that you’d like to share for others who are struggling in similar ways?

The transition out of that, especially if you’re struggling with alcoholism or anything like that, becomes the main obstacle to confront. I found that I had to find ways to hold on to whatever inspiration I could hold onto. So making music, for example, I didn’t have time or the energy to work on a long piece. So I would just start doing improvisatory songs for like 30 seconds or a minute. Something that I could feel like had a wholeness to it, that contained something inspiring, that came from a place of inspiration. So that when space opened up or time opened up, I was able to come back and really feel like I could fly a little more.

That was an important discovery. I know a lot of people are like, I can’t do what I want to do, so I’m not going to do it at all. A big part of my development [is] being able to be adaptive to different forms of creativity and finding what you’re capable of doing in the circumstances you’re in. If you can tap into that, there’s an even greater chance that that can grow and that that can sustain you through a hard time. And when you come out of it, then you’re on the other side and you planted all these seeds and you can have a garden. And that’s when I was making the podcast Secret Sound. I was holding onto that when I was a bad alcoholic and I would have to clean myself up to do that.

And when I made that vow and I quit drinking—this was at the beginning of the pandemic—I was like, I know if I plant these seeds now, it’s going to grow on the other side. And I’ve stuck with it. I’m still struggling in various ways, but I’m really grateful for holding on, for keeping on top of it. I guess to answer your question, it’s being patient and being adaptable to different ways of accessing your creativity and engaging what inspires you.

Can you share what you feel most hopeful about, some of your goals for the future connected to your work?

At some point, I’d like to have this large collection of archival materials to share with people, so I’m hoping to find ways to do that. Ultimately, it would be great to have an exhibition space, either at my home or another space. One of the most important things to me, in life and in creativity, is really about what you bring together, the disparate things that are separated otherwise, that you bring together and form a greater meaning. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do with this archive. I’m strategizing and hopeful that that can be the end game, where I can at least offer an introduction or an overview of metaphysics that is not delusional, that is not narcissistic, that is not spiritually materialistic, but that stirs inspiration. That’s the goal.

Yeah, it sounds like part of your goal is to function as a translator, connecting those threads so that those resources can be helpful to other people too.

Yeah, and also recognizing that we’re all so different. I think this is something people lose sight of, because once people find a tradition that they love, it becomes this totalizing thing. Especially when you look at metaphysics, it all comes out of specific personalities. Some people are really into contemplative mysticism and they like complicated philosophy and crazy diagrams that they can really work through. Other people need a more extroverted role-playing thing where they do ceremonial magic and put on outfits and have objects and stuff, then other people need just a simple prayer or quiet meditation with no thinking. And so realizing that a lot of the things I study and share aren’t necessarily things that I’m into, but I know that for somebody out there, it’s perfect. It’s exactly the opening that they need. So that’s why it’s really important for me to do a comparative offering.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Rene Kladzyk.

I cannot sit back and allow the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

— General Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove

Most people would agree that in any modern, wealthy, multicultural, free, non-colonized, democratic society, people have the right to know what is going on in their community. In fact, in order to fulfill their various responsibilities as citizens, consumers, workers, company presidents, government officials, family members, etc., they have to know what is going on. We want and need to know what our own government and foreign governments are doing; what products, services, and sociopolitical programs are available in our country; and what medical choices we have when we are sick or injured. There are exceptions, such as children and psychopaths, but in general, all people have the right to benefit from the knowledge in libraries, on the Internet, in museums, and in doctors’ offices. In U.S. cities, almost everyone has a right to a library card.

During a “state of exception” or a state of emergency though, some convincingly argue that you do not have the right to certain dangerous information. The United States is officially not at war yet with Russia; we just supply their enemies with lots of expensive weapons. But if and when we are at war with Russia, do U.S. citizens have a right to hear Vladimir Putin speak? When we are under attack by a lethal virus, do we have the right to hear about all the various methods of protecting our health, even alternative, traditional, foreign, naturopathic, or unorthodox methods?

Some would say “no.” Just as you must not be allowed to buy enriched uranium and download from the Internet blueprints for how to make a nuclear bomb, you do not have the right to protect your health from SARS-CoV-2 without using mRNA vaccines. And people who advocate for the Russians, who love Russia, work with Russian companies, promote positive images of Russia, and facilitate the spread of state-sponsored, pro-Russia propaganda must be silenced or banned. Like hate speech, there are certain statements that are just beyond the pale, that are too dangerous and must be suppressed. Some, such as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, argue that when teens are jumping out of windows, the government has a responsibility to step in and prevent people from reading posts encouraging them to engage in this dangerous behavior. With the Supreme Court case of Murthy v. Missouri, Americans are now forced to think about exactly how precious our First Amendment is, and when we prioritize free speech over health and safety.

In the U.S. today, the government is censoring people and publications on both the Left and the Right, the typical library book-banning activities are up, and there is evidence that artificial intelligence (AI) systems are now doing some of the censorship work, strengthening the hand of the government vis-a-vis the people in ways generally only seen during great crises or wars. (This is documented in the downloadable report from the U.S. House of Representatives “The Weaponization of the National Science Foundation: How NSF Is Funding the Development of Automated Tools To Censor Online Speech”).

Here we delve into two cases of the Government suppressing free speech, one on the “Left” of the political spectrum and one on the “Right.” On the Left we see the anti-racist and anti-imperialist, African-American activist Omali Yeshitela and two other socialists. On the Right we see people such as Jill Hines, co-director of conservative Health Freedom Louisiana, and Jim Hoft, founder of Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site that reportedly has published threats against election workers for false claims of election-rigging. Suppressed along with these two on the Right but actually going beyond political categories, we see Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologists that raised questions about government pandemic policies, and professor of psychiatry and human behavior Aaron Kheriaty, who was dismissed by the University of California, Irvine, for refusing an mRNA shot. And finally, we see the suppression of millions of people who do not identify with either the Left or the Right, some of whom are not conspiracy theorists, who have expressed dissatisfaction with the government’s public health measures that were taken in response to SARS-CoV-2.

Silencing African-American Socialists

In April of last year the “Uhuru 3,” Omali Yeshitela, an African-American man born in 1941; Penny Hess, a white woman over the age of 70, who is the chairperson of the African People’s Solidarity Committee; and Jesse Nevel, a young, white man who is the “National Chair of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, the mass organization of the African People’s Solidarity Committee,” were charged by a federal grand jury with acting as unregistered agents of the Russian government. The Biden administration apparently considers them major threats to U.S. national security.

Yeshitela’s political roots go back to the Civil Rights Movement as a member of the legendary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1972, he and others felt the need to move beyond protests and to capture political power, so they formed the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP). This was and is an internationalist Black Power movement, or African internationalism, and has been developed over 50 years, fighting against colonialism, and this is not the first time that their free speech rights have been violated, he says.

Yeshitela explains that he got in trouble with the law this time by touring the U.S. in 2016 to gain support for a movement charging the U.S. with genocide, and going to Russia to speak about self-determination with a Russian NGO, not for the government of the Russian Federation. According to Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors, for the sacrifices he made for white, capitalist Russia, he has received the whopping sum of $7,000. In a summary of the case in October, the Grayzone’s Anya Parampil warns that “lawyers for the Uhuru 3 maintain that the DOJ’s justification for prosecuting their clients sets the stage for the US government to legally harass and prosecute other Americans who criticize US domestic and foreign policy, particularly where designated enemies like Russia or China are concerned.”

Award-winning peace advocate, spokesperson for the Black Alliance for Peace, and 2016 candidate for U.S. vice president on the Green Party ticket Ajamu Baraka has provided insightful analysis of this case. Early on in the “Russiagate” hype, he warned that those fearmongering about Russia would soon target anti-capitalist, Black liberation movements, just as they did at the end of the Second World War, when peace activists including W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and Paul Robeson (1898-1976) suffered government oppression. (Robeson also charged the U.S. government with genocide. He did so in 1951 for their failure to stop U.S. lynchings).

Like Noam Chomsky, Baraka categorizes the U.S. as a lawless, “rogue state.” He warns that our “national security state” is engaging in systematic repression against anyone who opposes them, including “the Left” (from around 7:30 in the video). For example, people who protest “Cop City” are being labeled as “domestic terrorists.” What we are looking at is “McCarthyism 2.0,” he suggests. The Peninsula Peace and Justice Center is one of the few organizations standing up for the Uhuru movement’s right to free speech.

As Chomsky once said, “Democratic societies can’t force people. Therefore, they have to control what they think.”

Silencing Opponents of Government COVID-19 Policies

Besides the violations of free speech that have resulted from Russophobia, Afro-phobia, and reparations-justice-phobia, we are now also facing such violations caused by SARS-CoV-2-phobia, the biosecurity panic, and the war on the virus. In the opinion of Benjamin Wallace-Wells writing for the New Yorker, “the most eyebrow-raising revelations in the Twitter Files, documented mostly by Matt Taibbi and Lee Fang, concern the extent to which the F.B.I. and the Pentagon were interested in controlling what was seen on the platform.” For instance, Lee Fang has written about a British company called “Logically.ai.” According to AP, they are “an established social enterprise bringing credibility and confidence to news and social discourse,” and they launched an app in the U.S. in 2020 that enables “users to receive personalized, verified and in-depth information on any storyline in order to restore digital trust.”

Such words might make some people feel safe, but Lee Fang warns about the American censorship advocate Brian Murphy, who used to be an FBI agent leading the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, and is an executive of Logically.ai. Murphy has argued that the U.S. government must now rein in the social media companies, and we, U.S. citizens, must give up some of our freedoms that we “need and deserve” so that we can get our “security back.”

“Since joining the firm, Murphy has met with military and other government officials in the U.S., many of whom have gone on to contract or pilot Logically’s platform.” The company Logically is doing work outsourced to them by the British government. The government agency responsible, called the “Counter Disinformation Unit” or “CDU,” were targeting a “former judge who argued against coercive lockdowns as a violation of civil liberties and journalists criticizing government corruption. Some of the surveillance documents suggest a mission creep for the unit, as media monitoring emails show that the agency targeted anti-war groups that were vocal against NATO’s policies,” Fang explains. Apparently, not only groups that opposed lockdowns but also groups that promote peace are being surveilled and flagged as dangerous, by a foreign company based in a foreign country.

Not long ago, few would have guessed that Stanford University would be against free speech, but now it appears that some segment of the university is actively participating in censorship, as a kind of government proxy. Professor Jay Bhattacharya at the Stanford School of Medicine, who is an expert on health policy at Stanford University, and who holds an M.D. as well as a Ph.D. in Economics, has summarized the free speech case Murthy v. Missouri that is currently before the Supreme Court. He points out that Stanford University, his own employer, has a program called the “Stanford Internet Observatory” (SIO) (10:00 to 12:00 in the video) who describe themselves as a “cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies, with a focus on social media.” The program was founded in 2019.

In an appellate court struggle, his own university weighed in against him, and they claimed that the Stanford Internet Observatory is not a government cut-out, is just doing research, and is not meant to violate the 1st Amendment. He describes that as “disingenuous.” Stanford has a rule that they require researchers to adhere to, like universities around the world, that human subjects of a research project must not be harmed by the research. Yet this Internet Observatory is basically making a list, effectively a blacklist, of organizations or people to suppress. That would constitute an ethics violation, since the subjects of the research are U.S. citizens, and their rights under the 1st Amendment have been violated. Either this is not research, or it is unethical research, Bhattacharya argues.

In his expert opinion, the U.S. government is “the number one source of misinformation during the Pandemic.” His “short list” of their misinformation includes the following:

1. The government overestimated the lethality of COVID-19.
2. The risk to children was minimal, but the government talked as if everyone was equally at risk.
3. The government suppressed the “idea of immunity after COVID recovery,” and made people wait for the vaccine.
4. Evidence that masking was ineffective was available during the early stages of the pandemic. There was no consensus among scientists that masks worked, but the government recommended masks anyway.
5. The government promoted the illusion that there was a consensus about lockdowns and censored the Great Barrington Declaration.
6. The government censored people who provided evidence that the vaccines were not safe and effective, even after evidence emerged that there was a risk of myocarditis.

(12:00-17:00 in video)

In May of last year, the “New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group, filed a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s ongoing efforts to work in concert with social media companies and the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project to monitor and censor online support groups catering to those injured by Covid vaccines.”

The Stanford Internet Observatory is a proud member of the “Election Integrity Partnership” (EIP) along with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (“DFRLab”), Graphika, and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. The Atlantic Council are notorious militarists.

In his Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi calls the Stanford Internet Observatory the “ultimate example of the absolute fusion of state, corporate, and civil society organizations.” The DFRLab is partially funded by the Global Engagement Center (GEC). And they, the GEC, are part of the State Department. Taibbi views the GEC as part of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex,” along with organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the DFRLab itself, and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD). In other words, it appears that many of the same organizations that have engaged in fear mongering over Russia or promoting militarism have also engaged in censoring Americans.

Conclusion

The U.S. has become a nation-state that is obsessed with national security. Ajamu Baraka sums up our situation best:

It’s us today but it’s you tomorrow, if you persist in any kind of oppositional politics, because the ruling element in the U.S. is serious. They are serious about attempting to maintain their hegemony, and their global hegemony. And the notion, of some of the values of the liberal framework, liberal philosophy, liberalism—they have completely abandoned that. They have jettisoned that. And basically they are engaged in lawlessness. The U.S. is now a rogue state. What we have domestically in the U.S. is systematic repression from a national security state that seems to be completely unbound by any kind of standards beyond its own. (From 6:50 to 7:40 in video).

Then Baraka raises a very important question, i.e., “Where is the opposition?” Our national security state is currently run by “liberals,” people who are supposed to care about freedom of speech and freedom in general, like their liberal predecessors who espoused the idea that freedom was an essential condition for happiness. (Never for people of African or Native American descent or for women, but they did espouse it for wealthy white men). Instead of protecting our rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” they are giving us “death, shackles, and misery.” Now the question is, “What are we going to do about it?”

We need free speech if we are to build peace. Today they are coming for militant revolutionaries who reject white supremacy, for the narrow-minded Right, and for the medical scientists who recommend a different approach from the government’s approach to SARS-CoV-2. Without a thriving movement against the current censorship, the U.S. government, along with the companies that help the government censor people, could easily pull the rug out from under our feet, even as we diligently work for peace and human rights. Do not be surprised if tomorrow the FBI, or the “Blob,” (i.e., the foreign policy establishment including the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA), or any of the many companies that work for them in this constantly expanding biodefense industry come after you next.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Joseph Essertier.

As the White House steps up its shelling of targets in the Middle East amid regional unrest over Israel’s monthslong assault on Gaza, we discuss the possibility of wider war with Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, now with the Center for International Policy. “The Biden administration’s strategy here is failing,” says Duss. Voter outrage over its unwavering pro-Israel stance is “incandescent” and on track to harm the president’s reelection campaign as Democratic Party members pull back on get-out-the-vote efforts, while some may refuse to vote at all. “The issue of Israel-Palestine is not just a foreign policy issue. It is an issue of social and racial justice,” explains Duss. “This is going to be fixed, if it can be fixed at all, by changing policy and ending support for this massacre.”

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

Janine Jackson interviewed Media Matters’ Matt Gertz about new House Speaker Mike Johnson for the November 10, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Medium (11/4/23)

Janine Jackson: The new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, describes himself as a “Bible-believing Christian,” though theologians are coming forward to say “go pick up a Bible” is not really a coherent spiritual worldview. Johnson claims he has zero assets and no bank account because he’s “a man of modest means,” though financial analysts are saying that actually suggests something rather shadier. And then there’s when he said new US funding for Israel would be balanced out by “pay-fors” in the budget.

There are a number of questions about Mike Johnson, which is not at all the same as calling the person third in line for the presidency, as did CNN, a “blank slate.”

Our next guest has been tracking the right and its influence for many years now. Matt Gertz is senior fellow at Media Matters for America. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Matt Gertz.

Matt Gertz: Thanks for having me.

JJ: I want to ask you about this “offset Israel aid with IRS cuts” thing, but first, Mike Johnson himself: He’s not a babe in the woods with no defining characteristics. What should we know about where he’s been and what he’s done?

MG: I think Mike Johnson is a sort of House back-bencher who’s been promoted quite swiftly to one of the most powerful positions in Washington. And so I think everyone has been struggling to figure out what he’s all about and how to define him.

Rolling Stone (10/29/23)

That said, I think it’s quite clear that he comes out of the social conservative part of the GOP. He was, for a long time, an attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom, which is an anti-LGTBQ hate group. He is a fierce opponent of abortion rights, and his legislative record reflects both of those.

In addition, I think we might want to consider him as the sort of “dog who caught the car” here. He became speaker after a long struggle in which Republicans found themselves unable to find someone who could unite the party. Everyone basically got exhausted and put him forward and made him the speaker.

But Mike Johnson is someone who has never done any of the functions that the job requires. He has never served as the chief communicator for House Republicans. He has never needed to count votes to pass bills. He has never raised large sums of money, as the position also requires. He’s never run a large staff.

And so I think what we’ve been seeing, certainly in the early going here, is that he is really struggling to handle the core functions of the job. We’re seeing budget bills that are getting pulled from the floor, votes that the Republicans are losing that they’re not supposed to…. He’s really just not managing the party in the way you would expect from someone in that position.

CNN (10/27/23)

JJ: And then if we look at what he has actually said and stood for—I mean, his ability to do the job, such as it is, is one thing, but he is a person. He has a record, and part of his record is homophobia, as you’ve said, but it’s not just garden variety. He calls same-sex marriage equality a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy.” That’s not normal language. “It’s a bizarre choice,” he says, “to be gay.” But media talk about that as though it’s his eye color. That’s like a thing that he thinks: He hates gay people. Isn’t that actually a disqualification from making laws for the US public?

And then, also, he’s an election 2020 denier. He’s a climate change denier. There are things that we do know about him that should inform our understanding of his actions.

MG: That’s exactly right. He is very much a creature of the far-right fringe of the Republican Party, and someone who, if he gets his way and is able to pass legislation that he has previously supported—things like a national version of Florida’s “don’t say gay” law, nationwide abortion bans—would be extremely dangerous.

And I don’t think the mainstream press has done quite a good enough job of making that clear to the public. Now, on the one hand, they’re struggling just to figure out what this is all about, but you really need to do your job and get those basic details out into the public.

JJ: Yeah, I just saw a headline that was something like, “Most US Voters Don’t Have an Opinion on Mike Johnson.” I’m like, well, yeah, they don’t know him. And that would be where reporting would come in. And for CNN to call him a “blank slate,” I think that’s very telling. There’s work for journalists to do there, and to not do it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need to be done.

Media Matters (10/25/23)

MG: I don’t usually quote Steve Bannon, but I think it’s worth pointing out here that he describes Mike Johnson as “one of the intellectual architects of pushing back on the stolen election,” and “by far the most conservative speaker in the history of the country.”

I think with January 6, his role there is very telling. He was the architect of the brief that congressional Republicans filed in support of Texas’s bid to throw out electoral votes in key states, and basically have Trump declared president. He was doing that at Trump’s request, he has said.

And of course that lawsuit went nowhere, which did not keep him from continuing to say that he was going to fight against the “stolen election” through January 6, and then vote to not count electoral votes after the insurrection happened. So he’s clearly a true believer in these heinous ideas.

But there was an initial push from reporters to get him on the record on January 6. In his first press conference, he was asked about it, and the result was the Republicans around him booed, and he simply moved on to the next question. The next reporter in line did not say, “You should just answer the question you were just asked,” but moved on to something else. And he’s basically been able to dodge that ever since.

JJ: I did want to give a little time here to talk about this offset thing, not just because of what it tells us about Mike Johnson, but because so many media seemed to swallow and regurgitate what was a fairly obviously nonsensical idea. And just like with the election denial, it’s like you can say, “Well, it came to naught, so let’s not consider it,” but you have to consider it, because it’s important to tell us the way these people are thinking.

So tell us about this idea that Johnson put forward, that we’re going to speed forward aid for Israel, but it’s not going to cost taxpayers anything, because we’re going to balance it out.

Media Matters (10/31/23)

MG: His claim was that there would be pay-fors in the budget to pay for this aid; we’re not just printing money to send it overseas. He said to Sean Hannity, “We’re going to find the cuts elsewhere to do that.” But when House Republicans released their bill, it paired $14.3 billion for Israel with $14.3 billion in cuts for the IRS, from the IRS funding that was passed last year in the Inflation Reduction Act.

The problem, of course, is that the money used to increase the budget of the IRS is actually beneficial to the budget, because it gets more money out of wealthy taxpayers who have been cheating on their taxes. So the Congressional Budget Office ends up looking into it and finds that actually it’s going to blow a huge hole in the deficit, rather than paying for it.

Unfortunately, a lot of journalists swallowed this altogether, and just reported that the aid would be paid for by cutting from the IRS. Some of them did a little bit better and pointed out, deep in the article, that actually the offset, so to speak, was going to be worse for the deficits. And some did, to their credit, actually explain that this wasn’t the case.

It was an early test whether the press would be willing to regurgitate false claims from Mike Johnson, and I don’t think we could say by any means that they passed it.

JJ: All right, we’ll end it there, but not forever. We’ve been speaking with Matt Gertz; he’s a senior fellow at Media Matters. Thank you so much, Matt Gertz, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MG: Thank you.

The post ‘A True Believer in Heinous Ideas’ appeared first on FAIR.

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

Truthout (11/9/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media use at least a couple of largely unexplored lenses through which to present US human rights violations. One is: The US does not commit human rights violations, except by accident, or as unavoidable collateral for an ultimately net-gain mission, be that international or domestic.

The other is: They aren’t violations if the US does them, because we’re in a civilization war, a fight of good over evil, so all battles are holy, and you can’t commit human rights violations against non-humans, after all, so where’s the problem? Again, the narrative covers global and at-home violations.

Elite media have trouble navigating the place of the US in a global context, and the media-consuming public suffers as a result. There’s a new report from the UN about this country and human rights. We’ll hear about it from Jamil Dakwar, director of the Human Rights Program at the ACLU.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (CC photo: Gage Skidmore)

Also on the show: Headlines tell us that the US public don’t know a lot about Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House of Representatives. That’s true as far as it goes, but isn’t it also a kind of admission of failure for a press corps that really should be actively involved in informing us about the person third in line for the presidency—like maybe his idea that some of the people he’s nominally representing should just burn in Hell?

Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, will give us some things to consider as we see coverage of Mike Johnson unfold.

The post Jamil Dakwar on US & Human Rights, Matt Gertz on Mike Johnson appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

We speak with analyst Matt Duss, former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, about the U.S. political response to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. The third Republican presidential debate on Wednesday saw candidates pledge unwavering support for Israel with “rhetoric that was frankly barbaric,” according to Duss. “This is just knuckle-dragging hawkishness to feed their base,” says Duss, who comments on Congress censuring Palestinian American Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sanders’s stance on a ceasefire, and the parallels between Ukraine and Palestine. “As a Ukrainian American, I also stand in solidarity with people under occupation.”

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

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

Matt Mitchell: My first book I wrote was about California which, in the moment, I was like, “Yeah, this is cool.” And then, afterwards, I’m like, “I feel like a fucking fraud.” I’ve only been to California once, but what inspired [The Neon Hollywood Cowboy] was I studied in California for almost a month in college and I felt, weirdly, more at home there than I had in Ohio—when it came to what I was going through at the time. It felt like a jumping-off point and then, when I was writing [Vampire Burrito], I was like, “I’ve gotta go home. I need to start excavating some stuff from where I grew up instead of trying to romanticize a place I don’t live in.”

Meg Duffy: It reminded me, though, of, when I was young and learning about California—it’s such a fantasy world. And especially it being, for white settlers, the “final frontier.” I think California represents something better to a lot of people, especially people on the East Coast from small towns. I really related to that. You can project a lot onto something you don’t understand, too. It’s always easier to imagine the grass being greener, or even better—even though it’s not here. I was curious about that relationship, if you hadn’t spent a lot of time in California and what it represented to you when you were writing your first and your second book, too—because it appears in the second book, too.

Matt Mitchell: Yeah, I wanted to have a continuity in it where I acknowledged it for people who had read [The Neon Hollywood Cowboy], so they could see that it’s a story that is connected in a way. But also, I didn’t want to get so elaborate with the Easter eggs if someone was reading this book for the first time without knowing anything else I’ve ever written, so they could not have to piece together something. They could just be like, “Oh, well, this book is starting where he’s on a flight back from California. This makes sense, he’s going home.”

I think, subconsciously, at the time—and it’s become more known to me now—I was really interested in Hollywood, in particular, because I was really frustrated with representation for intersex people in movies and TV. My only frame of reference—I have two sides of the spectrum. There’s the episode of Friends where the whole show is dedicated to one joke about a hermaphrodite person. And then, on the other side, there’s one episode of Freaks and Geeks where Judd Apatow and Paul Feig do this super thoughtful and empathetic portrayal of an intersex person.

Meg Duffy: Do they use the word “intersex” [in Freaks and Geeks]?

Matt Mitchell: They don’t use it in the episode, no. They don’t use the term “hermaphrodite,” either. It felt like a very innocent way of showing exactly how two high school kids would talk about it. It’s framed as “When I was born, I had both sets of genitalia and my parents made a decision.”

There’s a line in that episode that inspired a couple of images in my poetry, where James Franco, Seth Rogen, and Jason Segel are together and Rogen says “She was born with the gun and the holster.” It’s a line that stuck out to me, and I tried to play around with it in a few poems. You never hear the word “intersex” and you never hear the word “hermaphrodite,” you don’t hear any of these buzzwords. It’s just high schoolers trying to figure out a different way of explaining things. And by the end, Rogen’s character is like, “I don’t care. I love you, I want to be with you.”

For me, obviously, it’s not the most perfect representation of that story, but, when I was growing up, my parents never let me watch that episode. It was the only episode of the show they would never put on for me. And I never knew why. Then, when I grew up and watched it and was told by a doctor that I’m intersex, I put the pieces together. And, obviously, my mom was like, “It wasn’t intentional, we didn’t know. We just weren’t sure how we should present those ideas to a child.”

Meg Duffy: They were aware of the episode?

Matt Mitchell: Yeah, they love that show and passed it down to me when I was eight or nine.

Meg Duffy: Do you think it was subconscious of them to introduce you to the show and then not the episode?

Matt Mitchell: Well, there were two episodes they didn’t show me. There’s one before that where a main character almost dies from an allergic reaction to peanuts—and I was allergic to peanuts, so they were like, “I don’t want to show him, I don’t want him to get freaked out.” That, I get. But the problem is, my intersex identity is not the kind of intersex identity that was portrayed in Freaks and Geeks. Mine is genetic and chromosomal, so I don’t even know if, consciously or subconsciously, it was a decision. I think I believe my mom, that it was a heavy thing they didn’t know how to broach with a child. But that episode, as imperfect as it can be, was the only reference I ever had—and still have—on television or movies that ends with something kind.

And going back all the way to the beginning of our talk, a lot of my motivations for making the setting in Hollywood were because I had this idea of trying to build my life into a cinematic experience, because no one else was doing that. I’ve always maintained this idea—which I’m less adamant about now, just from moving intro perspectives and growing up—that, if no one’s gonna make a movie about me, I might as well do it myself. How long can you wait until you feel an obligation to write the story yourself and share that with people? Everybody has had some sort of representation on the screen, but I’ve always felt cheapened, because it’s always intersex people who are treated like shit. Hollywood is becoming more open to having queer characters, and I think about how, in BoJack Horseman, Todd is an ace person. That felt revolutionary to me. I’m just waiting for intersex people to get a similar treatment where we’re getting empathetically written into things.

Meg Duffy: It probably also takes people who identify as intersex publicly in those writing rooms and spaces. Have you ever considered writing a script?

Matt Mitchell: My dream is to write a Netflix show where that identity is at the forefront. Being intersex definitely gets people intrigued, which I had using that as a jumping-off point. But, sometimes, I can’t even get my foot in the door in conversations unless people are compelled by curiosity.

Meg Duffy: I would definitely watch that show. I remember, too, with curiosity, that it can be dangerous, because people romanticize what they don’t understand. But also, more often than not, especially right now, people are afraid of what they don’t understand and immediately put it into the threat category.

I’m interested to see what happens in the next 20 years in the media with representation of intersex people, trans people, non-binary people—especially because we’re so under scrutiny and attack. I don’t feel as under attack as people who are a little bit less digestible, in terms of white supremacy and heteronormative ideals. I feel like, once you start to unravel the question of why there’s not representation, at least for me, it feels defeating—because most publications or corporations, big businesses that have a lot of money that fund these places where representation happens in the media, aren’t willing to be scrutinized.

I don’t think that most people, including myself, know how to have fair and accurate representation without scrutinizing the powers that kept them out of those places in the first place. And that becomes this onion, right? I’m curious about how you feel about how the intersection of capitalism is always this volcanic thing and how you grapple with that when you are trying to express yourself.

Reading Vampire Burrito, there’s a lot of anger and frustration, which I definitely share—not in the same way, but in a similar way. How does that affect you when you sit down to write something like this?

Matt Mitchell: I benefit greatly from this “shock factor” narrative. It sucks, because capitalism has driven us to sensationalize the more sought-after “narratives.” Cis-het consumers and, notably, white cis-het consumers, are very interested in fetishizing the stories of minority identities in a lot of ways. I’ve benefited from that because I know that I can write the story and present it the way it is and people who don’t share that identity are gonna see it as a more desirable thing to consume than just a run-of-the-mill love poem that a straight guy in rural America wrote. But I also hate that, too, because I don’t want who I am to be just a selling point. There’s this double-edged sword of “Well, how am I supposed to live if that doesn’t happen?” It’s like, when can we get to a place where I can just live my life and tell my story and I don’t have to constantly be under the blade of someone else’s expectations.

Vampire Burrito is angry, and I feel like The Neon Hollywood Cowboy before it was even angrier. When I wrote it, I didn’t think that I was that angry, but when I look back I see it. I tried to not make Vampire Burrito so brutal but, at the same time, it’s hard to not look at that kind of grief and see it in any other light. We’re on this call right now and I can feel my body going through withdrawal from hormones, because I need a shot tonight. That’s an ongoing thing with this life, where it doesn’t just stop. I don’t have a stomach covered in welts anymore, but I still feel all of these wounds. I think people want that to exist only on the page. They want me to go back to my regular life where I’m normal and having a good time. But I close out of a Google doc and I feel like shit. I’m just always dealing with that in some way or another, and capitalism plays a huge factor in it. There’s probably a subconscious part of my brain where I’m like, “I gotta be brutal in these poems, because, I guess, brutal sells.”

Meg Duffy: There’s that line in [Vampire Burrito] about not being able to look you in the eye and say the word “intersex,” and everybody’s dancing around that word. It’s very interesting to think about how, when you walk away from the interview and when you walk away from these experiences on the page, you’re still living in that reality. As an intersex person, too, the philosophical conversation comes to mind about choice, how so much of an identity can be reduced to somebody choosing to identify in some way or it being spiritual—or, in an intersex case such as yourself, your body made a choice for you.

Spiritually, you choose how to live in relationship with your body and your identity, and I feel that way as a trans person, too. There’s part of it that doesn’t feel like a choice. Part of it just feels like the physical aspect of taking hormones or choosing to live more in-line with how I feel on the inside. You surrender a lot of privilege and a lot of comforts and a lot of safety. I think you are surrendering a lot of comforts and privilege by choosing to even just publicly identity as intersex. I think it’s violent to not, to yourself. Either way, there’s violence on either side. And I think it’s really brave and I also think it’s complicated. I wonder what your relationship is to choices.

Matt Mitchell: I think about it a lot because, in some aspects, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier since I started publicly identifying in this way. In doing that, you take control over your personhood, but, at the same time, you are losing autonomy in a lot of public spaces. I feel good most of the time, because hormones have, in a lot of ways, saved my life. But, outside of my own being, people are going to hear that I’m on hormone therapy and they’re going to take it whichever way they want. I just don’t have any control over that and that’s where a lot of that violence comes in, too, that, beyond my immediate grasp, I have no control over where that goes. It’s kind of devastating, too. But, ever since coming out five years ago, or whatever, I haven’t been able to meet a lot of intersex people—because a lot of intersex people don’t even know that they’re intersex, which is a whole different conversation of privilege.

That first book I wrote, I filled it with pop culture references. And that’s what people latched onto. Non-trans and non-intersex people who were interviewing me about that book were really hammering home the pop culture part. I get it, that’s something that was maybe more in their wheelhouse than identity poetics, but I wanted to strip [Vampire Burrito] down as far away from pop culture as possible so people would be forced to examine the intersex part of the book. They can’t hide behind pop culture buzzwords and zeitgeist references. I just wanted people to see me as who I am, and there were times where, with the press around that first book, I wasn’t being seen in the way I set out to be.

It was weird, too, because I think [Vampire Burrito] has alienated some people. It hasn’t caught on as well as the first book did, and that’s such a weird thing to deal with. I was like, “Well, I think this book is better.” In retrospect, I feel there are parts of that first book where I wasn’t really doing the work that I had thought I was doing. I wanted to rectify that on this new thing, and I feel like I did. I don’t know if it’s just the downfall of media, with Twitter collapsing and algorithms getting fucked up, but it’s been weird having to figure out who to get this book in front of people—especially when you want to fight hard for what you’ve made, especially when it’s a personal thing.

Meg Duffy: Your book, it gives me hope—because it’s an accurate representation of working class people and how you move as an intersex person within those spheres. The whole poem [“Building a Bird”] about selling a farm to build a development, I’m interested in those struggles, too, because I have a blue-collar chip on my shoulder.

Matt Mitchell: A big factor in not writing about California and continuing the story from the first book to the second one was because it really wasn’t me. I’m a first-generation college grad on my dad’s side of the family. My dad’s side comes from the rural, middle-of-nowhere, Central West Virginia region. My Papaw didn’t even finish high school. My Mamaw had to do all of the document work because my Papaw could barely write. He had horrible handwriting and quit school to help his family. It took me four or five years to write my first book, and then it took me only a year to write the second one—because I knew how to zero in, immediately, on what story needed to be told. And that was me needing to go home. I needed to consider what it means to be an intersex person with Appalachian heritage, who also must confront intergenerational trauma and toxic masculinity. How do you exist as this kind of person in a town of 3,000 people? I don’t need to go to New York or California to tell this story. I knew I had to stay home and stay in Ohio and go back to Grafton to illustrate the story—because no one else is doing that.

Some of the most compelling poetry I’ve ever read by trans poets is where it’s blue-collar, Southern trans writing. It’s so necessary beyond belief. And that’s another thing where capitalism comes into play, because capitalism has pushed so many gay, trans, and intersex people to the coasts—because that’s where the Promised Land is supposed to be and that’s where you’re going to survive. I always think about, “Well, what about our community? What about our brothers and sisters who don’t have the luxury of leaving their towns? I’m always thinking about “How can I service these people?” And that was something I really struggled with after the first book came out, because I had felt like I’d done a really important service to my intersex community. Then I went back and re-visited it while writing Vampire Burrito and I realized I didn’t.

I was trying to fantisize a life of acceptance. There’s a line at the end of [The Neon Hollywood Cowboy], where I talk about dreaming of living in a decade where no one knows what to call me and I wondered what kind of bliss would come with that. Then, I realized that it’s actually harmful to imagine not having to carry this weight anymore.

Meg Duffy: I understand that, when you give something a name then you can control it and you can politicize it and you can punish it and you can kill it. I think about that a lot, just with queerness in general, how, now that we all have a word for queer, now the government can say “Oh, that’s what that is. That’s where we can take away the rights.” Angela Davis talks about this a lot, how, as soon as you can identify something, then it can be controlled. I understand that yearning for a nameless existence.

I felt that a lot with Placeholder, my second record, how you can queer relationships and keep them ambiguous—because, if they’re ambiguous, then you can’t define them and place them into this box of something that has a context within society and within class and within what you deserve, how a person should if they’re this kind of person or that kind of person. I don’t think it’s always from a vista of violence or a position of violence. I think that, as humans, it’s very natural for us to just want to name something so we can understand it. That’s why we have language, so we can relate to it and have a relationship with it. But I definitely relate to that longing, of going back to a time when there weren’t words—because the words then get taken very far away from us. They can be weaponized.

And you see that a lot with BLM. We saw it with the War on Drugs. As soon as there was a scapegoat for problems, white supremacy is going to be like, “Oh, that thing that we don’t really understand.” That’s definitely the issue with our fundamentals, because they can say it’s threatening the stability of our country. It’s all just erasure, too. I don’t know how to express this image I’m having, but there’s a beauty in being erased, too, but we don’t want to be erased.

Matt Mitchell: It made me want to explore reclamation in a lot of ways in Vampire Burrito, because I’ve seen how gay people are taking back the F-slur and lesbians are taking back the D-slur. I was thinking about how hermaphrodite has become a slur and I wanted to take that name and play around with it. I’ve enjoyed watching other communities under the queer umbrella fight to take back these terms and make it their own in the face of how it’s been weaponized against them for decades. The hard part about all of it is how complex it is. And, sometimes, you wake up in the morning and you just don’t have the energy to wade through that and the conversations around class and how trans people of color are being targeted so much more than any other intersection of identity.

It’s hard, sometimes, to wake up and prepare yourself to examine and acknowledge all of that. But, at the same time, you have to fight through that exhaustion. I think, from my own perspective, there’s such little resources out there for intersex people that I just can’t help but fight. That’s why I wanted to be really direct in Vampire Burrito and be very upfront about being intersex and do it in an relentless way. I wanted to imagine a place where I was asking “Hey, what if I have a child and they’re intersex?” Let’s bring another intersex person into the fold, let’s add another voice to the world. I’ve always wrestled with whether or not it’s safe to bring a child into this world with climate change and the US government stripping back rights every fucking week. I keep having the internal discussion about whether or not it’s ethical or unethical to bring a child into this world right now. But, for this book, I loved the idea of having another intersex person in my world and wondering what that would look like. That’s such a small fight that meant everything to me. There’s a lot of loneliness that comes with being intersex, but it’s not so lonely to consider one more person who’s like you.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Meg Duffy.

Not everybody who reads Refuse to Be Done is doing it because they’ve ever read any of my fiction. A big difference in promotion that was interesting to me is that Refuse to Be Done has this direct applicability to the reader. The people who read it are trying to learn how to write a novel. Promoting an actual novel, that sort of urgency is less evident. Readers might ask, “Why is this the novel that I need to read right now?”

I really privilege the conversations I had around each book, which were obviously different. With Appleseed, we talked a lot about climate change, about some of the intellectual ideas about the book, things about manifest destiny and other topics that are interesting or fun. To be in conversation with someone who was thinking on top of that kind of work with me was enjoyable.

Events for Refuse to Be Done were more teacherly events. That book grew out of a lecture I’d been giving for 10 years, so it was sort of interesting to have that lecture go back out in that form. It’s been interesting to watch both books find their audiences. I think both have done similarly well, though the Venn diagram of people who read both books is smaller than it might be if I’d come out with two novels in the same year.

Did you find that you enjoyed talking with audiences about one book over the other?

In some ways, the novel is the thing that means the most to me—my own words. You never know who’s going to be interested in your novel. The conversations that happen around a novel aren’t always the things you think as you’re writing it. With Refuse to Be Done, I knew the questions people would ask because I’ve been teaching novel-writing for a long time.

If money wasn’t a factor, do you feel like you would still be a writer who teaches? Or would you focus more on your own creative work?

I really like teaching. I get a lot out of teaching for my writing. I’ve been teaching for 15 years or so, and I often think, if all things were equal, if I didn’t have to teach, I would still want to, but maybe I’d do it entirely on my own terms. The thing I would quit from academia is not teaching, but administrative meetings. I love the teaching. And one of the things about being in a good MFA program is that every year, a new group of smart, interesting young writers moves to town and talks to me about writing. It’s restorative and interesting. Even in the short time I’ve been teaching, I’ve observed that different eras of students have different concerns and different interests, and that’s invigorating. There are certain things in my own writing that I would not have thought about if I hadn’t been in these sorts of conversations.

Also, I was a reasonably poor undergrad student. I graduated undergrad in eight years at three schools. But I liked being on campus and I liked being part of the university life. I like that there are events and lectures and different things happening all the time. The university has given me access to lots of other people’s ongoing thinking in a way that’s great, especially as someone who doesn’t live in New York City or Los Angeles or San Francisco. Phoenix is great on its own, but it’s obviously a different cultural space.

Being a novelist doesn’t always feel super useful, either, and being a teacher does—even if I’m teaching other people to be novelists, which is not useful! I totally believe that a life of making art is super useful, but it doesn’t feel like it every day.

Since Refuse to Be Done was released, you seem to have taken on a beat as “the novel revision guy.” Some folks have called you “a writer’s writer.” I’m wondering how you feel about a term like that.

Oh, I’m not going to argue with that. You can become an expert in something by deciding you are one, to some extent. You can publish a book on novel revision, and then people ask you questions about novel revision. That feels good. It’s been great to see people find the book useful and to see people achieve things that they want to do through it. Refuse to Be Done has helped people I admire finish their novels, and I think that’s just great. Anything I can do that makes things more achievable for other people seems fantastic.

I feel the same way about the craft books I love most. There are books that help me think about things or show me the way or clarify. And there are lots of ways to be in community with people, and one of the ways is the ways in which you’re helpful or useful or adding something to your community. And it does feel like Refuse to Be Done achieves that in a way that’s different than my own fiction does.

What you’re saying about community is interesting, because you’re one of the more extroverted writers I’ve met. I don’t know if you identify as an extrovert, but you’re certainly a lot more bubbly and outgoing than most writers.

[laughs] Sure, yeah.

And it makes me wonder, thinking back to when you first started writing, if you felt like you wanted to utilize that part of your personality as someone who also helps other writers, or if you were more focused on your own writing and teaching somehow found its way into that.

I like talking about writing. I know there are writers who are like, “That’s, like, the worst thing.” There’s sort of a false modesty thing, and we live in a culture that considers the claim that you want to be an artist or that you care about art is somehow verboten—even among other writers, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. You’re in a room full of people who are all writing, and you have to pretend that you have no ambitions and you’re not trying hard? That seems a little silly to me.

I’m enthusiastic, and I do think that’s part of it. If writing was miserable, I wouldn’t do it. If I didn’t enjoy talking about this, I would talk about something else. I write because I think it’s fun. It’s an entertaining thing to do. It’s an interesting problem to wrap my head around. Talking about those things is useful.

Plus, it’s amazing how often just talking about what you’re doing is helpful to other people. Some of it’s just making the way the thing is done visible. I feel like the way creative writing used to be taught was like, there was a genius in the room and you just spent time around that genius, who didn’t necessarily ever teach you anything directly or talk about how they did things. And that seems a little ridiculous to me. It seems like it can be more direct. It doesn’t diminish my process to share my process. In fact, talking about writing has made me a stronger writer.

Is there anything you find challenging about being open about your process with students and other writers?

There are two things that are hard to teach. The first is the stuff that you do most naturally, because you don’t have to think about it. So then you go to teach that part of the process, and it’s often very challenging to put it into language. The second is the stuff that’s hard for you, that you can’t talk about because you don’t know how to do it yet.

There are things that I realize I teach poorly just because they’re hard for me. For example, I don’t think I’m the most natural dialogue-writer. I work hard at dialogue, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. And when I first started teaching creative writing, I’d think, “Well, it’s probably time for a dialogue lesson.” But then I’d show good dialogue and ask my students, “Why is this Denis Johnson dialogue good?” I couldn’t even explain it.

You said earlier that being a novelist doesn’t always feel useful, but being a teacher does. How do you manage that feeling in terms of your approach to your own creative work?

When I’m writing long-form fiction, the book is mostly bad the entire time I’m working on it. The big satisfaction comes very, very late for me, but there’s daily pleasure in surprising myself and playing with language and writing a sentence, trying to get seen and making a thing that is well-constructed, indulging in my weirdness. A huge part of the daily process for me is creating a space in which to think my own thoughts. That’s incredibly gratifying.

A lot of the satisfaction from teaching is watching people take these sorts of leaps in their work, and it’s fun to be around that. It’s fun to be around their enthusiasm, to feel the kinship of a bunch of other people who are trying to do the same difficult thing. When I teach novel-writing, I teach it in a generative fashion. Students usually start from scratch and write forward together. The idea is that they go through the stages at the same time. They hit similar problems. For example, first chapters have similar issues when they’re in a generative phase, and I have enough experience to lead students through those stages. But it also is good to be reminded, “This is what everybody’s first draft looks like.” Teaching keeps me from getting discouraged in my own work.

Speaking of students, I recently heard you speak on a panel with the writer Allegra Hyde.

Oh, she’s so good.

She’s so good! She’s had marvelous success over the past couple of years, and she happens to be a former student of yours. I’m wondering how it feels to watch a former student achieve in that way.

It’s always exciting to see students go on to succeed. The best students, of course, just keep getting better after grad school. I think it is reasonably hard to guess who those students will be, though I’m not surprised that Allegra turned out to be one of those people—she was publishing extraordinarily well as a grad student, and it was sort of obvious that she was on the path. I do think there is a sort of Venn diagram of ambition and drive and raw talent, and you just have to make that whole thing come together.

The early career’s an exciting place. They’re really more interesting at the beginning than they are in the middle! The middle is actually the hardest part. Most people who want to publish a book can eventually, as long as they have a certain baseline of talents and work at a certain level. I really do believe that. I think a lot of people have the talent to write a book, but I think fewer people have the long-term persistence to publish, like, five books, which is half marketplace stuff and half—well, they’re hard. You finish a book and you’re like, “Am I going to do this again?” I’ve had some of those checks in my own career, which has gone as well as I’d wanted it to, where I’m just not sure if I have it in me to do it again, because it is so much.

It interests me to hear you say that, because I notice that you tweet a lot about long-distance running. I saw a tweet of yours a few months ago that was like, “Heading to the airport, just ran 20 miles,” and I was like, “What?!” I would just never, ever do that. You’re clearly someone who is really accustomed to endurance, and I’m curious how you became that way both on and off the page.

I’m hard to discourage, so maybe that’s part of it. I don’t know that I feel overwhelmingly confident, but I do believe that effort over time adds up. Every novel is just a certain amount of effort expressed over a certain amount of time. I didn’t become a runner until my mid-thirties, but it does feel fairly similar in mindset to writing books.

I think the writing is the part you can control, and running is the same way. There’s a book on ultra-running called Relentless Forward Progress, and that’s all you have to do: continue to move forward at pace for a long time, and you can run any race. I think there’s something similar in the writing light. It’s not about who writes a book fast. It’s not about who publishes first. You just continue forward in your practice over time. That seems to me to be the real goal in my own work.

What is your writing schedule like during the teaching semester? Are you the kind who packs in more writing time during the summer and winter breaks, or do you try to keep a fairly steady pace throughout the year?

It depends. Ideally, I write from breakfast to lunch, five days a week. Even during the semester, I do that a lot. I’ve been lucky to teach in the afternoons and evenings and do a lot of my other work there. And so I do, more often than not, have that time, though that doesn’t mean it doesn’t always get lost to catching up or something else.

When I’m drafting, I think I can only productively draft two or three hours a day anyway. That’s the farthest I can see to the book. My brain gets sort of sloppy after that. I’ve had some experience at residencies and stuff where I can write really long days, but that requires all of the rest of life to be cleared out of the way. In the summer, I might do a little more, but not a lot. I just read more and things like that.

At the end of a draft, and certainly in deep revision, I work really long hours. That’s the phase where I need to be able to see the whole book. In late-stage revision, I can work eight to 12 hours spread over different parts during the day, but only for a couple of weeks. That’s the phase where I’m most like a writer in a movie. I look a little haggard. I’m not fun to talk to. I’m drinking and eating too much. I don’t want to do that all the time.

Mostly it’s a couple hours a day, and then I do everything else. That way, I don’t spend the rest of my day going, “I wish I was writing.” I don’t resent being in the classroom. I don’t resent being with my students or doing errands around the house or doing other things. I don’t need all day to write, but I do need my time. And when I’m not getting that time, I feel pretty frustrated. But it doesn’t have to be eight hours a day. And I don’t even think that would be useful most of the time.

Aside from that privileging of creative time, what advice do you have for artists who help fellow artists? How can they keep their own projects afloat while helping others with their work?

I think you have to be sure that you’re doing what you want to do, and you have to be willing to say no. One of my own guides for that is imagining when it comes time to do the thing that I’m being asked to do and asking myself, “Will I resent doing this? Would I rather be writing? Would I rather be doing something else?” I think I’m a little wiser about knowing which opportunities are okay to let somebody else do. It’s easy to fill your life with service to other people, and I do a fair bit of that, but I try to do it in a way that helps me finish what I want to do.

That’s always an ongoing balance, and I get it wrong, of course, all the time.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nick Turse.

For this reason alone, the movie should be shown on the floor of Congress and in the White House as required viewing by all in DC bent on spending $1.7 trillion over the next decades to build new nuclear weapons to kill us all.

Only those with a global death wish or on the payroll of Northrop Grumman, the military contractor with the nuclear “modernization” contract, could watch this film and still root for US nuclear rearmament, a horror show now underway with the blessings of DC politicians. Unless people rise up in fury, unless this Hollywood movie sparks a second nuclear-freeze movement, a repeat on steroids of the 80’s nuclear weapons freeze, Congress and the White House will raid the treasury to expand our nuclear arsenal.

On the agenda is a new sea-launched nuclear cruise missile, a gravity bomb with two-stage radiation implosion, a long range strike bomber and the replacement of 400 underground nuclear missiles in the midwest with 600 new Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. These new ICBMS–The Sentinel–could each carry up to three warheads 20 times more powerful than the atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to incinerate 200,000 people in a span of three days.

Irish actor Cillian Murphy plays the role of J. Robert Oppeneheimer, a hand-wringing scientist, a lackluster womanizer, a man with few convictions but lots of demons, who traverses an emotional landscape of ambition, doubt, remorse and surrender.

Oppenheimer oversees the Manhattan Project, the team of scientists hunkering down in the beautiful desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, to build the hideous atomic bomb before the Germans or Russians crack the code.

In a scene reminiscent of the absurd 1950s, when pig-tailed school children scrambled under desks in mock nuclear drills, scientists don sunscreen and goggles to protect themselves during the blinding Trinity Test. This was the first atomic test conducted with no warning to the downwinders–the nearby Indigenous people of the Southwest who developed cancer as a result of radioactive fall out. This was the test before President Truman ordered a 9,000 pound uranium bomb named Little Boy loaded onto a B-29 bomber. This was the trial performance before the same President, depicted in the movie as unctuous and arrogant, orders Fat Boy, a second plutonium bomb– prototype for today’s nuclear weapon–dropped on Nagasaki.

Though the movie can be slow, a three hour endurance test, its historical insights and gut-churning imagery compensate for its lack of likable characters, save for Lt. General Leslie Groves, played by a fun-to-watch Matt Damon as Oppenheimer’s Pentagon handler.

One of the most haunting moments juxtaposes in living color celebrations of the bombings, applause and accolades for Oppenheimer standing at the podium with the guilt-consumed scientist’s black and white visions of irradiated souls, skeletal remains, flesh turned to ash–all amid a cacophony of explosions and pounding feet, the death march.

Even more disturbing are the questions that tug at the moviegoer, who wonders, “Where are the Japanese victims in this film? Why are they missing from this picture? Why are they never shown writhing in pain, their lives and cities destroyed?” Instead, the human targets are seen only through the lens of Oppenheimer who imagines faceless x-rayed ghosts torn asunder in the burning wreckage, their skin, their flesh falling off their bones, their bodies disappearing into nothingness. The omission of the real victims in the interest of maintaining a consistent point of view may make sense from a filmmaker’s perspective, but not from the standpoint of historians and truth tellers. Writer-director Christopher Nolan could have shown us photos, authentic aerial footage of the Japanese, blinded and burned, before the final credits roll to remind us the horror is real, not just a Hollywood movie bound for several Oscar nominations.

In the name of truth the movie does, however, smash the persistent myth that the US had no other choice but to drop the atomic bombs to end WWII. Through dialogue, we learn Japan was about to surrender, the Emperor simply needed to save face; the point of irradiating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, targeting civilians in far off cities, was not to save the world but to show the Soviets the US possessed the technology to destroy the world, so better not cross the aspiring empire.

In closed door sessions, all filmed in black and white, we watch as crusading anti-communist politicians–determined to stop Oppenheimer from advocating for arms control talks with the Soviets–crucify their atomic hero for his association with members of the Communist Party, leftist trade unions and a long ago anti-capitalist lover who threw his bourgeois flowers in the trash.

When the McCarthyites strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance, it’s a big “who cares” shrug for a movie audience weary of Oppenheimer’s internal conflicts over whether science can be divorced from politics, from the consequences of a scientist’s research. How can anyone with a heart want to continue this line of work? To hell with the security clearance.

The movie Oppenheimer is compelling and powerful in its timeliness, though one can’t help but think it would have been exponentially more powerful had it  been told from a different point of view, from the point of view of a scientist who opposed the death-march mission.

We see glimpses of a pond-staring fate-warning Albert Einstein, who in real life lobbied to fund the atomic bomb research only to later oppose the project. It could have been his story–or the story of one of the 70 scientists who signed a “Truman, don’t drop the bomb” petition that Oppenheimer squelched, persuading Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb” not to present Truman with the petition drafted by Leo Szilard, the chief physicist at the Manhattan Project’s Chicago laboratory. The movie’s reference to the petition was so fast, so quiet, so mumbled, the audience could have missed it.

If we are not careful, more mindful, more awake, we might miss our moment, our moment to avert another nuclear holocaust, this one a far worse nightmare in which five billion of the Earth’s 8 billion people perish, either immediately from radiation burns and fire or in the months that follow during a famine in which soot blocks the sun.

The White House and a majority of Congress want to rush us, a sleepwalking populace into WWIII with Russia, a nation of 143 million people, 195 different ethnicities and 6,000 nuclear weapons. For those, like the shameful editors of the Washington Post, who insist we continue to forever fund the proxy war, for those in high places who refuse calls for a ceasefire, this movie reminds us of the existential danger we confront in a sea of denial, complicity and exceptionalism.

Despite campaigning on a platform of no first use of nuclear weapons, President Biden’s Nuclear Posture Review echoes his predecessor Trump’s approval of first use should our allies’ interests be threatened.

CODEPINK activists are distributing flyers outside showings of Oppenheimer to invite stunned movie goers leaving the theater in a daze to take action, to join our organization and amplify our peace-building campaigns, to ground the nuclear-capable F-35, to declare China is Not our Enemy and to partner with the Peace in Ukraine Coalition.

This is the movie, this is the moment, this is the time to challenge the euphemistic nuclear modernization program, to expose the madness of militarism that abandons urgent needs at home to line the pockets of military contractors gorging at the Pentagon trough.This is the time to demand a ceasefire and peace talks to end the war in Ukraine, to stop preparations for war with China, to finally pass legislation to ban first use, to take our ICBM’s off hair trigger alert, to abide by our disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to campaign for the US to become signatories to the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Opposed by NATO–a huckster for nuclear proliferation–the TPNW has been signed by 95 state parties wishing to outlaw the development, deployment and use of nuclear weapons.

Unlike Oppenheimer, we can make the right choice; the choice that saves the human race from immediate extinction.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Marcy Winograd.

Matt Berninger: It’s evolved. I almost never come into a song with a bunch of lyrics already written. I’m always texting myself and I used to have notebooks and just also filling it with random bits and pieces that I might use later, and I usually only end up using 10 percent of what I write. I don’t do any curating of my writing or thinking or anything until much later. I feel like I don’t really dig in until there’s music, and it could be the simplest thing, that’s where I’ll start to sort of be absorbed and to start to craft it a little bit.

Everybody in the band’s kind of got their own little spots where they write and record and are always sending me tracks. Some of them have multiple parts and are kind of produced already, but others are just really scrappy, even sometimes phone recordings. I don’t even think about the music, I just sort of react to it. Everything they send me, I will throw into GarageBand and just kind of freestyle and react to it, and I’ll add another vocal track and I’ll do it again, and mute that, then add another one, do it again, and I’ll end up having, often, 10, 15 vocal mumble nonsense things all stacked up to a sketch.

Then I’ll switch gears, and I’ll do that on lots and lots of sketches. So there will be months and months where I’m not actually really thinking about doing any kind of crafting of songs, they’re just reacting and throwing melody and paint at it and not analyzing anything. And then, I’ll later go back. This is the harder part, going back and listening to all your terrible nonsense mumbles and trying to identify the little bits of it, like, “Oh, it sounds like I’m saying that, and I kind of like that.” And oftentimes, you will just start saying actual words. But trying to find that little piece, really it’s a small percentage of the stuff I throw at it that I feel like keeping.

All my favorite songs have multiple ideas cooking. A love song is never just that or anything else, they’re always a weird collage of thoughts. And so, a record becomes just an uber collage of all those thoughts.

For this last record [First Two Pages of Frankenstein], there was a long phase where I couldn’t write at all and nothing was coming, and it wasn’t because of the music, it was 100% me. I couldn’t force it, so just kind of waited it out until it started happening again, and the songs that happened out of that were what they are, and sometimes you just kind of have to say that it’s done and put it out. It’s kind of like a picture of a certain phase of your adolescence. And the songs change and evolve as you play them live, but most of the time, with us, our records are the baby, infant versions of our songs. They go through all their evolution live later. It’s a matter, for us, of just making, and when it’s over, you’ll see what you made.

BH: That’s such an interesting approach. You never have a melody idea that you hum into your phone or anything like that?

MB: Occasionally, but rarely. Mostly, it’s just like, “Oh, that’s a phrase I like,” or I’ll overhear something. Usually if it’s a melody that just pops into my head, it’s probably something off of some top-forty thing that I heard in Gap.

BH: Have you run into any problems wanting to learn an instrument? Because I feel like now, I am leaning towards learning at least a little bit of guitar, just so that I’m not doing the a capella voice memos. It works works, but… I want to, because my whole thing is that performing live, which I wonder if you have this problem, too? I sometimes feel a little bit awkward not holding anything.

MB: Oh my god, totally.

BH: Just having a microphone and pacing around and trying to do something with my hands. I’ve been telling everyone I’m going to have one song on this next record that I play guitar, just so that I have a moment to look like a musician on stage. Have you ever just thought about it in that way?

MB: I have. I took piano lessons as a kid, and just the anxiety of recitals and performing in front of people is when I stopped. It’s kind of like sports. I played a lot of sports when it was just kids running around, throwing stuff around. But the minute they start keeping score is when I’m like, “Oh, I’ve lost interest.”

This isn’t something I want to win, or with a piano recital it’s like, what? People are going to judge this? Yeah, no thanks. Once a year I’ll like, I’ll pull out a keyboard or something. I think you’ll have a lot of fun. I’m blessed with so many friends just sending me all this stuff, whereas I’m like, my henpeck keyboard, Casio arrangements. I’ll be like, “Oh, I was using one of the black keys.” I’ll be like, “This is going to blow everybody’s minds.”

My daughter’s learning guitar. She took a year and a half of guitar lessons when she was little, but just like me, as soon the guitar teacher was going to have all the students play at a show, she’s like, “I’m out.” But then she’s on her own, right at that age where I I was at 12 and 13, where all of a sudden other people’s songs, other songs felt like, “Oh, this is relief.” This is a world, this is my world. This is a magical realm. That’s what happened to me.

It was the Smiths, mostly, for me. It wasn’t entertainment, it was literature. It was about life. It was about everything. She started picking up the guitar, learning songs from people on YouTube. When I go in and she shows me something that she’s playing, she’s mashing songs together and she’s like, “This one needs a pick.” And I’m like, “Well, you don’t have to, I mean, you can probably just try a finger.” And she’s like, “Oh, it doesn’t sound right.” It’s so good that I don’t know how to play the guitar. I wouldn’t be able to resist trying to help her. But the fact that I’m no help is, I think, really good. I like that music is something that I’m not supposed to understand what she’s into, and it’s really good. The more I see her falling in love with this thing stuff, it’s becoming so much more apparent that there’s no formula. It’s a mystery of what works and what connects and what doesn’t.

BH: My parents both love music and I was raised listening to music, so I never really got into the technical aspects, which I also think is a part of knowing an instrument. I feel lucky in that way, just because I’m not paying attention in a real technical sense. I’m loving it for what it is. She’s going to have such a great relationship with it, just because you’re not beating in like, “that note” or “that certain guitar part.” She’s just going to have it easy.

MB: Yeah, I don’t want her to worry about, I mean, she’ll get there on her own, but worrying about the technical aspects of tuning and stuff like that, who cares?

When did you first write a song and when did you first feel like, I’m going to put this in? Did you put any music out or self-publish it in any way before you put records out?

BH: I first started writing songs when I was little. I had a music journal. The songs were stupid. I would just sing them around the house. The year I graduated high school, I wrote a song on guitar, but an out-of-tune guitar. I was plucking two strings with one finger, or something. I thought it sounded cool, so I put it on Bandcamp and posted about it. I’ve scrubbed it from the internet since then, because it’s so embarrassing. But that was the first time that I made something and thought that, yeah, maybe I could do it again. But I didn’t start really making much more music until 2020.

MB: It’s a huge shift from being on your computer and then putting it into the world. When we started, we had to start our own label just to put something out. But I didn’t actually feel like a musician until we put it out in the world. That is the hardest thing, because nobody’s going to care for it, unless there’s just the rarest of cases. But [TCI co-founder] Brandon was, I think, the only person that really said anything positive about our first record. It’s like, well, we put it out and it was on, we sent it into the world, and it was almost entirely ignored.

But it wasn’t totally ignored. And I’ve said this to Brandon before, and I’ve said it to lot of people, I think when he wrote something that I was like, “Yeah, one person gets me.” And that was enough fuel for the next five years. It was our third or fourth, that record that started getting a little more of attention on audience. And now it’s like, you can put out a lot and you don’t even need to be on a label or anything like that.

BH: I released my first real song during the pandemic. I didn’t do any promotion. I just put it on TuneCore so that it could go on all streaming services and posted about it the day it came out. I was embarrassed at first, because I was like, “This is going to be so random for people that don’t know that I have ever made music.” It got put on a H&M in-store playlist, and it lived its own little life. I didn’t even feel like a real musician until I played my first show, just because it was the pandemic.

MB: Doing it in front of people and playing live, like we were saying, is a whole different dimension and really hard. That’s even scarier. I’ve been doing it 25 years that every time I walk on the stage, I do feel like I’m stepping out into an outer space. I don’t feel myself when I get out there. You find some other version of yourself and you evolve and you figure out a way to lean into it if you can.

BH: I used to be good at it. I could be really chatty, but I’ve gotten more nervous as time goes on, which you’d think it’d be the opposite. You think I’d get more comfortable, but with the more personal songs, I get embarrassed on stage.

MB: You know what music you connect to and almost always when somebody is saying this stuff out loud, they wouldn’t normally say it out loud. That’s what it’s about. Emotional cliches sometimes can be the most embarrassing things to say out loud, it doesn’t mean the lyrics have to be clever every time. That’s a disaster when in a song every line is intentionally clever. Nobody’s going to pay attention if they don’t believe you, if they don’t think you’re being sincere.

Those moments that you’re a little bit embarrassed about, are probably the best stuff. That’s the essential stuff. If you’re not a little bit wondering if this line’s going to work. If you’re like, “Oh, this song that’s a hole in one,” that’s where you’re probably in a danger zone. But if you’re a little bit like, “I’m a tiny bit embarrassed by saying this, but I’m going to say it anyway,” that’s the best.

You cannot worry about what anybody’s going to think about you or about themselves or about anything. The things that are stuck in your brain for whatever reason, because they’re painful or they’re funny or you just have to get it off your chest or something, those are the Legos that you build songs out of.

BH: Do you think where you grew up has any effect on your musical framework?

You don’t think of Cincinnati as being a rock scene. I will say, just going to clubs in Dayton and going out and seeing bands at these little places in Cincinnati, seeing bands live was where I was like, “I want to do this.” It was listening to whatever it was still felt like it was transmissions from outer space, from these magical beings. But then when you go to see things live and you start to realize, “Oh, this is just a bunch of goofballs, they don’t look as cool as I imagined them.”

When you see a room of people, that’s when you realize, this whole thing is not just a private experience, we’re everywhere. People want to go to the same weird emotional places or get thrilled by the same strange stuff. You look around and you see you’re not alone in those live things. That’s where I was like, “This world is good. This is a good world.”

I delivered pizzas for many years, I did hundreds of different jobs, but I remember delivering pizzas to places, and I’d also go to all these little weird shows and stuff, and I don’t remember what band it was, but there was this guy, some goth kid, and he always had an arm bone, a human arm bone hanging around his neck. And one day I delivered a pizza and all of a sudden, the door opens and there he is, no arm bone, no makeup.

BH: Just normal?

MB: Yeah. In his pajamas. We recognize each other and I’m wearing my pizzeria hat and we were just like, “I’ve seen you out there.” The weirdos are hiding everywhere. That was the part of it, where I thought, maybe someday I’ll give this a shot.

BH: I remember before my first show, I was sick about it. The idea of doing it would make me so nauseous. Then I did it and didn’t die. Now every time I’m like, “You’ll feel that way for a second, but then it’ll be fine.”

MB: Nothing bad’s going to happen. You’ll realize that you’re still getting what you need out of it. You might have to still work at Best Buy or anything else, but working at Best Buy is going to be so much easier when you know one night out of every couple of weeks or something, or you got a tour coming up and it solves so many problems.

If I still had to do something else to pay the rent, would I still be making music? I really hope so. Luckily with our band, we didn’t get much attention at all for so long that we just got used to feeding off the songs and feeding off each other, and that was the only feedback we needed. If the five of us were like, “Yeah, let’s put that on a record,” or, “Let’s play that tonight,” if enough of us, or even only three of us, thought it was worth putting on a record, that’s all the validation we really needed. The other two trusted the other three.

BH: It’s hard for me with songwriting, I don’t really involve anyone. I’ve always wanted to make songs with other people, but I never know how to approach that. How do you do it?

MB: Our last record had a lot of different singers on it because we were writing I Am Easy To Find. We were working with a filmmaker, and it was a woman at the center of the story. [My wife] Carin and I were writing. She wrote a lot on that record because we were writing for a lot of different characters and a mother and a father and a daughter and all these different things.

There’s a thing where sometimes features with Sufjan [Stevens] or Justin Vernon or with Phoebe [Bridgers], a lot of times they are adding colors in area, but not necessarily writing a duet or a counterpoint. But occasionally, like the song that we did with Taylor [Swift], she wrote all the lines she sings on that. Aaron sent me a sketch and I wrote my part of that pretty quick and sent it back to him without any idea, I thought that was probably going to be the song. He sent it to Taylor Swift and she wrote melodies in between mine that were a reaction to my melodies and the words. She jumped right in and was able to inhabit that sort of space. I was also writing about my wife who’s a writer, so there’s this stuff about writing in a notebook. I think it was a real easy character for her to jump into. That was a genuine duet.

I’ve done that in other places. We worked on a musical, and writing things that were intended to be back and forth conversation. That was really challenging, a whole different type of writing. Sufjan and Annie Clark were early people that started doing little bits and pieces in the studio with us on our records, and it just was like, “Oh, that’s really refreshing to have a whole other brilliant brain coming in and pulling the song in new directions and that kind of thing.”

BH : Were there a lot of songs on this new record that didn’t make it? What do you do with those songs that don’t make it?

MB: In the past, I think we would probably put them in the freezer and sometimes they would come out of the freezer, sometimes they would be resurrected in some other way, and sometimes we would play them live, but a lot of them would stay there and never be heard from again, which is also totally fine.

BH: How do you pick what songs that you release with The National versus what you do solo? And also, are you doing any more solo music ever again?

MB: The stuff on my solo stuff is just like anybody I’m writing with who isn’t in The National, those songs will go on a solo thing. So I was writing with guys from The Walkmen and a lot of different people that have just been friends for a long time. That’s kind of where that record came out of. I don’t put on a different personality ever for anything. Just putting on any kind of personality that can survive live performance and just doing it at all is enough of a thing to try to work yourself into. I mean, there many times I wish I could put on a robot helmet or paint my face to create a character.

BH: How about Fuck, Marry, Kill? Fuck, Marry, Kill: writing, recording, and playing live. You have to say which one would you marry, which one would you kill, which one would you fuck, obviously.

MB: And I have to pick one of those things which I would not want to do anymore, right?

BH: Which would be Kill. Yeah, that would be kill. Fuck Is like do it once, marry is do it forever.

MB: Weirdly, I think I might kill performing live first. Marry is definitely the writing. The writing is definitely the marry part. That’s the one I want to always do. Being in the studio for me feels more like that’s the “fuck” part of it all, you know? That’s like wild fun and that has real consequences. And you can’t do it alone, really. So that’s what it feels like. I think performing live is the thing that maybe ruins my brain more than any other part of it. It’s not the act, it’s not the being on being there, performing live in the moment. It’s the turning it off, trying to turn it off and getting some sleep, and then the next night all of a sudden, in half an hour, you got to turn that back on. After a lot of that, that’s where I go into the danger zone and my brain can get broken. The other two I would never want to stop doing.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Matt Berninger and Becca Harvey.

Four members of the U.S. House of Representatives from across the political spectrum came together on Tuesday to introduce the Bipartisan Restoring Faith in Government Act, which would ban federal lawmakers and their immediate relatives from owning and trading stocks.

Momentum for such a ban has been growing in the wake of various investigations last year, but Democrats—who controlled both chambers of Congress in 2022, but now only have a slim majority in the Senate—failed to pass any of the related legislative proposals, despite their popularity among voters.

"The fact that members of the Progressive Caucus, the Freedom Caucus, and the Bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, reflecting the entirety of the political spectrum, can find common ground on key issues like this should send a powerful message to America," said Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick (D-Pa.), who is leading the new bill with Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

"We all view this as a critical first step to return the House of Representatives back to the people."

"We must move forward on issues that unite us, including our firm belief that trust in government must be restored, and that members of Congress, including their dependents, must be prohibited from trading in stocks while they are serving in Congress and have access to sensitive, inside information," Fitzpatrick continued. "This is basic common sense and basic Integrity 101. And we all view this as a critical first step to return the House of Representatives back to the people."

As Trevor Potter, president of the Campaign Legal Center and former chair of the Federal Election Commission, explained last September, "Congress passed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act into law 10 years ago, but the STOCK Act did not decrease the appearance of corruption that arises when members of Congress engage in suspicious stock trades."

If passed, the new restrictions proposed by Fitzpatrick's diverse group would apply to all members of Congress as well as their spouses and dependents.

"The ability to individually trade stock erodes the public's trust in government," asserted Ocasio-Cortez. "When members have access to classified information, we should not be trading in the stock market on it. It's really that simple."

While the progressive "Squad" member has often clashed with Gaetz, their comments Tuesday made clear they agree on this topic.

"Members of Congress are spending their time trading futures instead of securing the future of our fellow Americans. We cannot allow the Swamp to prioritize investing in stocks over investing in our country," said Gaetz. "As long as concerns about insider trading hang over the legislative process, Congress will never regain the trust of the American people. Our responsibility in Congress is to serve the people, not hedge bets on the stock market."

Krishnamoorthi also agreed that "members of Congress must be focused on their constituents, not their stock portfolios."

The Hill on Tuesday highlighted some recent events that have fueled bipartisan support for a stock trading ban:

In 2022, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) husband sold millions of dollars worth of shares of a computer chip maker as the House prepared to vote on a bill focused on domestic chip manufacturing. A spokesman for Pelosi said at the time that he sold the shares at a loss.

Former Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who at the time was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also unloaded stocks at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The Securities and Exchange Commission recently closed a probe of his trading activities without taking action.

The legislation unveiled Tuesday is supported by advocacy groups including the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

"When members of Congress own and trade stock in companies they regulate they undermine the democracy that they were elected to serve," argued CREW policy director Debra Perlin. "It is Congress' duty to rebuild the trust that it has lost by banning members of Congress, their spouses, and their dependent children from owning or trading stocks. And that is precisely what the Bipartisan Restoring Faith in Government Act does."

The proposed "complete prohibition on congressional stock ownership demonstrates that in our democracy the public's needs, rather than members' stock portfolios, come first," Perlin added. "CREW commends Rep. Fitzpatrick for his work on this issue and strongly encourages Congress to pass stock ban legislation as quickly as possible."

Emma Lydon, managing director of P Street, the government affairs sister organization of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, similarly called on the House—which is now narrowly controlled by Republicans—to "take swift action to pass this critical, bipartisan anti-corruption legislation to restore public trust in our democracy."

"Elected officials should represent the interests of their constituents, not their own pocketbooks," declared Lydon. "It's a scandal that members of Congress are still allowed to own and trade individual stocks while casting votes that move markets and transform economic sectors."

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

The United States' counterterrorism efforts in Somalia, which were ramped up after the emergence of the armed group al-Shabab in 2006, are worsening the East African country's instability, according to a new analysis released Thursday as progressives in Congress voted for a withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the nation.

As the Costs of War project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University said in the new report, the U.S. has spent at least $2.5 billion on counterterrorism operations in Somalia since 2007, including funding for the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and the Somali National Army. This figure does not include the undisclosed amount of money the government has poured into intelligence and military operations there.

U.S. spending in Somalia, ostensibly to eliminate al-Shabab and a new armed group that emerged in 2016, amounts to more than the country's annual tax revenue, and according to the Costs of War report, has gone towards ineffective top-down conflict resolution tactics which only serve to perpetuate conflict.

As Oxford University lecturer Eniọlá Ànúolúwapọ́ Ṣóyẹmí explains:

The U.S. government’s top-down approach to counterterrorism has now come to be incorporated into the political motivations and objectives of high-level political operatives in Somalia, who have the greatest access both to the U.S.' financial resources and to control of U.S.-trained forces. The U.S. military's centralized approach reinforces the tendency among elites in the Somali federal government to, themselves, centralize power in opposition to more inclusive, bottom-up politics that aim genuinely to stabilize security in Somalia for the benefit of the wider population.

"Somali forces trained by the United States have been co-opted and misused by the Somali political elite for non-counterterrorism purposes like bodyguard duty, roadblock policing, or attacking political opponents," Ṣóyẹmí added. "These forces are also exacerbating conflict, leading many to fear the outbreak of full civil war."

The Pentagon recorded a 23% rise in violent activity involving al-Shabab between 2021 and 2022, and the group is "still on the rise," the report says, despite more than a decade of counterterrorism efforts by the United States.

There are currently about 500 U.S. troops in Somalia conducting counterterrorism operations, and the U.S. has completed more than 275 air strikes and raids in the country in the past 16 years.

The Biden administration, like its predecessors, has claimed U.S. military involvement in Somalia is permitted under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, but members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) including Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) joined 100 other House members in supporting a War Powers Resolution put forward by on Thursday calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

"House progressives remain principled in their commitment to upholding the constitutional authority of Congress's sole powers over war and peace, a check designed by the framers to limit needless conflicts led by the executive," a representative for the CPC told The Intercept ahead of the vote.

In voting for the resolution, progressives sought to end U.S. policies which Ṣóyẹmí says are "ensuring that the conflict continues in perpetuity."

"What the United States government is doing in Somalia is not peacekeeping, but warfighting," said Ṣóyẹmí.

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

This week, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy plans to hold a vote on a bill that would raise the nation’s debt limit, but only in conjunction with extraordinarily steep spending cuts and new barriers to accessing income support programs. This is the next milestone in House Republicans’ attempt to play a game of dangerous political brinkmanship with the U.S. economy, trying to force through harmful and deeply unpopular federal spending cuts in exchange for increasing the debt limit. This approach recklessly flirts with bringing on the economic catastrophe of a government default in the short term.

Speaker McCarthy’s proposal would slash spending across federal programs for the next decade, cutting federal resources for everything from child care programs to environmental protection safeguards. If these deeply unrealistic spending cuts actually came to pass, the human toll would be enormous, and economic growth would be deeply damaged.

The McCarthy proposal also resurfaces a completely inaccurate but alarmingly persistent conservative claim: the idea that government anti-poverty programs are unnecessarily generous, bloated, and are keeping people out of the workforce who should otherwise be supporting themselves entirely through income earned in the labor market. The proposal seeks to severely restrict access to Medicaid health coverage and food stamps by imposing onerous requirements to prove that recipients are working or looking for work. Past evidence about these types of burdensome reporting requirements shows clearly that they will not actually lead to increased employment but will deprive vulnerable families of vital support.

Income support programs are not keeping people out of the workforce

The implicit claim that the U.S. labor market is hobbled by a too-generous welfare state is awfully hard to see in the data. Job growth in 2021 and 2022 hit its highest two-year stretch in the nation’s history. The unemployment rate is currently at a near-historic low. The prime-age employment-to-population ratio hit its highest point in March 2023 in more than 20 years. In general, many low-wage workers have seen the benefits of a tight labor market in the pandemic recovery, as employers have raised wages to attract and retain workers. In short, when jobs are available, workers have rushed to fill them. And while food assistance programs and other safety net supports are a vital lifeline to keep many out of poverty, the benefits are nowhere near enough on their own to fully support the cost of living for many families. Where has the idea come from that there’s an urgent need to address these supposedly too-comfortable benefits keeping people out of the workforce?

The premise of adding more onerous work and reporting requirements is also based on an inaccurate picture of who currently receives federal assistance through these programs. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently noted, nearly two-thirds of adults with Medicaid already work. Since the early 2000s, many safety net and income support programs have actually shifted toward requiring proof that recipients are also working or looking for work, but the gains of this shift have been near-impossible to see in terms of increased employment. Since 1990, all new investments in safety net spending have gone toward families with at least some labor market earnings. Those who are unable to find or do work under the current requirements are already in extremely difficult circumstances, and taking away the few safety net supports they have available would be economically devastating.

Those who are unable to find or do work under the current requirements are already in extremely difficult circumstances, and taking away the few safety net supports they have available would be economically devastating.

The U.S. safety net is in serious need of reforms, but not because of inaccurate claims that its excess generosity keeps people out of work. Public spending in the United States as a share of GDP is extremely low relative to other rich nations, and we spend far less to fight poverty than other comparatively wealthy countries. Low-income people already spend a ridiculous amount of energy attempting to prove and maintain their eligibility for these modest supports.

Imposing additional “work requirements” would restrict access to Medicaid and food stamps

Burdensome work reporting requirements are about making the benefits system more sluggish and difficult to access, and do nothing to boost employment. Existing reporting requirements already impose too-high a bureaucratic burden to accessing needed help. Passing these more burdensome requirements being called for by Speaker McCarthy would require people in need of assistance to devote even more of their bandwidth to dealing with forms and make-work bureaucratic tasks, rather than spending that time and energy looking for good work in meaningful and productive ways. The solution should be to reduce the amount of “means-testing” required and to make programs more readily accessible, not to restrict them further.

The biggest problem with the U.S. safety net is that our programs don’t help as many people, or as effectively, as they should.

Further, Speaker McCarthy’s claims that this proposal would put the United States on a path to “fiscal responsibility” and lower inflation are laughable. The biggest driver of deficits for the last 20 years has been a steady trend toward ever-larger tax cuts for corporations and the richest U.S. households. No one who actually wants to reduce the federal deficit should be looking to do that on the backs of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans.

The strongest “incentive” that people have to enter or reenter the workforce already exists—they need income to survive and provide for themselves and their families. If they’re not already working but want to, there is likely a very good reason. Many people simply can’t afford or access quality child care, or quality care for other family members, and need to take on those responsibilities themselves rather than entering the paid workforce. People with disabilities may struggle to find jobs that accommodate their needs appropriately, or that provide adequate health coverage. Many can’t find jobs with the fair and predictable scheduling they need. Others may stay out of the workforce because of a persistent lack of economic opportunities available in their neighborhoods, towns, or cities—a lack of opportunity often caused by systemic public and private disinvestment in communities of color or rural areas.

Any policymaker serious about getting people who want to work into the workforce should be looking to address these problems, rather than taking away lifelines to food and health care.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Samantha Sanders.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Jenna Corderoy.

Far-right House Republicans are reportedly "thrilled" with the debt ceiling legislation that Speaker Kevin McCarthy unveiled earlier this week.

That's likely because, according to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), McCarthy (R-Calif.) simply "picked up the House Freedom Caucus plan and helped us convert it into legislative text."

"And it shows," replied the progressive watchdog group Accountable.US.

Gaetz, one of a number of far-right Republicans who led a revolt against McCarthy's speakership bid earlier this year, told reporters Thursday that "if you held this plan and the plan that the House Freedom Caucus laid out some weeks ago and held them up to a lamp, you would see a lot of alignment."

Titled the Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023, the legislation would revert federal spending back to fiscal year 2022 levels and cap annual spending growth at 1% over the next decade—central demands of the hardline House Freedom Caucus members who threatened to deny McCarthy the speaker's gavel in January.

Last month, the House Freedom Caucus outlined a more detailed proposal that would claw back unspent coronavirus pandemic funds, repeal clean energy tax credits and other elements of the Inflation Reduction Act, block President Joe Biden's stalled effort to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt per borrower, and impose new work requirements on recipients of Medicaid and federal food assistance that could kick millions off the lifesaving programs.

The Limit, Save, Grow Act would do all of the above and more, a fact that helps explain the bill's largely positive reception among far-right Republicans—though some, such as former House Freedom Caucus chair Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), want the bill to attack aid programs more aggressively.

As Semafor reported, Biggs "expressed openness to voting for the bill" but said he "wanted to see even stricter rules around food stamps."

"That's who is really in charge of the MAGA majority," the progressive advocacy group Indivisible said of the House Freedom Caucus.

Citing Gaetz's comment to reporters, Accountable.US argued the GOP's debt ceiling bill is "a MAGA wishlist, not a serious proposal."

\u201cMAGA Republican, @RepMattGaetz, admitted that @HouseGOP leadership "just picked up the House Freedom Caucus plan and helped us convert it into the legislative text."\n\nThis budget is a MAGA wishlist, not a serious proposal. \n\nhttps://t.co/jGK3gwDgmZ\u201d

— Accountable.US (@Accountable.US) 1682023380

If passed—an unlikely scenario given opposition from congressional Democrats and the Biden White House—the Republican bill would increase the debt limit by $1.5 trillion or suspend the ceiling until next March, setting up another high-stakes standoff in early 2024, a presidential election year.

Congressional Democrats rejected the legislation as a nonstarter, pointing to the massive impact it would have on federal programs related to housing, education, healthcare, climate, and other critical areas.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development warned that roughly 640,000 families would lose rental assistance if its budget was reverted to fiscal year 2022 levels. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, estimated that 1.2 million people would lose access to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) under the Republican proposal.

"These caps are cuts," Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement on Wednesday. "They would ensure that resources for critical programs 10 years from now remain below the levels in effect today. That's 10 years of cuts for less than one year of preventing a default."

Analysts stressed that the cuts to social programs would be even steeper under the GOP plan if it exempts the bloated Pentagon from its austerity spree.

Republicans have two options to make their math work, according to Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress.

Option one, Kogan noted, is "the entire discretionary budget is cut 28% by 2033 due to McCarthy's caps—including a 28% cut to defense and [Veterans Affairs] Medical Care." The second option is shielding the military budget and inflicting "a 58% cut to all else," leaving "most essential services destroyed."

"This is a ludicrous demand," Kogan argued. "McCarthy's position is that, unless both the president and Congress accede to his very specific and extreme demands, he will force the government to illegally default on its statutory obligations—such as payments to disabled veterans and [Social Security] recipients."

Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, said the House GOP leadership's proposal is "a reflection of just how totally controlled by the fringes of his caucus McCarthy is."

"It's just as bad as we expected," said Levin. "Literally take food off the table of millions of families just trying to get by? Help the ultra-wealthy and big corporations get away with cheating on their taxes? Strip away healthcare from children, veterans, and seniors? Saddle millions with crushing student debt? Pull the plug on new clean energy jobs? That's your big pitch to the American people?"

"It'd be funny if it wasn't so serious," Levin added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. Oxfam and Development Finance International also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next few years. 

As a result, almost three-quarters of Africa’s governments have reduced their agricultural budgets since 2019, and more than 20 million people have been pushed into severe hunger. In addition, the world’s poorest countries were due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports. 

Last year, Oxfam International Executive Director Gabriela Bucher stated that there was a terrifying prospect that in excess of a quarter of a billion more people would fall into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 alone. That year, food inflation rose by double digits in most African countries.  

By September 2022, some 345 million people across the world were experiencing acute hunger, a number that has more than doubled since 2019. Moreover, one person is dying of hunger every four seconds. From 2019 to 2022, the number of undernourished people grew by 150 million. 

Billions of dollars’ worth of arms continue to pour into Ukraine from the NATO countries as US neocons pursue their goal of regime change in Russia and balkanisation of that country. 

Yet people in those NATO countries are experiencing increasing levels of hardship. The US has sent almost 80 billion dollars to Ukraine, while 30 million low-income people across the US are on the edge of a ‘hunger cliff’ as a portion of their federal food assistance is taken away. In 2021, it was estimated that one in eight children were going hungry in the US. In England, 100,000 children have been frozen out of free school meals.  

Due to the disruptive supply chain effects of the conflict in Ukraine, speculative trading that drives up food prices, the impact of closing down the global economy under the guise of COVID and the inflationary impacts of pumping trillions of dollars into the financial system between September 2019 and March 2020, people are being driven into poverty and denied access to sufficient food. 

Matters are not helped by issues that have long plagued the global food system: cutbacks in public subsidies to agriculture, WTO rules that facilitate cheap, subsidised imports which undermine or wipe out indigenous agriculture in poorer countries and loan conditionalities, resulting in countries ‘structurally adjusting’ their agri sectors thereby eradicating food security and self-sufficiency – consider that Africa has been transformed from a net food exporter in the 1960s to a net food importer today.  

Great game food geopolitics continue and result in elite interests playing with the lives of hundreds of millions who are regarded as collateral damage. Policies, underpinned by neoliberal dogma masquerading as economic science and necessity, which are designed to create dependency and benefit a handful of multi-billionaires and global agribusiness corporations who, ably assisted by the World Bank, IMF and WTO, now preside over an increasingly centralised food regime. 

Many of these corporations have engaged in rampant profiteering at a time when people across the world are experiencing rising food inflation. For instance, 20 corporations in the grain, fertiliser, meat and dairy sectors delivered $53.5 billion to shareholders in the fiscal years 2020 and 2021. At the same time, the UN estimates that $51.5 billion would be enough to provide food, shelter and lifesaving support for the world’s 230 million most vulnerable people. 

As a paper in the journal Frontiers noted in 2021, these corporations form part of a powerful alliance of multinational corporations, philanthropies and export-oriented countries who are subverting multilateral institutions of food governance. Many who are involved in this alliance are co-opting the narrative of ‘food systems transformation’ as they anticipate new investment opportunities and seek total control of the global food system. 

This type of ‘transformation’ is more of the same wrapped in a climate emergency narrative in an attempt to move food and farming further towards an ecomodernist techno-dystopia controlled by big agribusiness and big tech, as described in the article “The Netherlands: Template for Ecomodernism’s Brave New World.” 

A ‘brave new world’ where a concoction of genetically engineered items, synthetic food and ultra-processed products will do more harm than good – but will certainly boost the bottom line of the pharmaceutical corporations.  

While securing further dominance over the global food system and undermining food security in the process, global agribusiness frames this as ‘feeding the world’. 

The model these corporations promote not only creates food insecurity but also produces death and illness.   

Former Professor of Medicine Dr Paul Marik recently stated: 

If you believe the narrative, Type 2 diabetes is a progressive metabolic disease that’ll result in cardiac complications. You’re going to lose your legs. You’re going to have kidney disease, and the only treatment is expensive pharma drugs. That is completely false. It’s a lie.

It is projected that by the end of this decade half of the world’s population are going to be obese and over 20% to 25% will have Type 2 diabetes.   

According to Marik, the bottom line is Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disease due to bad lifestyle and really bad eating habits: 

“We eat all the time. We snack all the time. This is part of the food industry’s goal. Processed food, starch, becomes an addiction. Most of us are glucose addicted and it’s, in fact, more addictive than cocaine. It creates this vicious cycle of insulin resistance.” 

He adds that if you’re insulin resistant, this prevents leptin and the other hormones acting on your brain, so you’re continually hungry: 

“If you are continually hungry, you eat more, which causes more insulin resistance. It causes this vicious cycle of overeating carbohydrates…” 

This is the nature of the modern food system. Cheap processed ingredients, low-nutrient value, highly addictive and maximum profits. A system that is being imposed or has already been imposed on countries whose populations once had healthy, unadulterated diets (see Obesity, malnutrition and the globalisation of bad food – theecologist.org). 

Over the past 60 years in Western nations, there have been fundamental changes in the quality of food. In 2007, nutritional therapist David Thomas in “A Review of the 6th Edition of McCance and Widdowson’s the Mineral Depletion of Foods Available to Us as a Nation” noted a precipitous change towards convenience and pre-prepared foods containing saturated fats, highly processed meats and refined carbohydrates, often devoid of vital micronutrients yet packed with a cocktail of chemical additives including colourings, flavourings and preservatives. 

Aside from the negative impacts of Green Revolution cropping systems and practices, Thomas proposed that these changes are significant contributors to rising levels of diet-induced ill health. He added that ongoing research clearly demonstrates a significant relationship between deficiencies in micronutrients and physical and mental ill health. 

Increasing prevalence of diabetes, childhood leukaemia, childhood obesity, cardiovascular disorders, infertility, osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis, mental illnesses and so on have all been shown to have some direct relationship to diet, specifically micronutrient deficiency, and pesticide use. 

It is clear that we have a deeply unjust and unsustainable food system that causes environmental devastation, illness and malnutrition, among other things. People often ask: So, what’s the solution? The solutions have been made clear time and again and involve a genuine food transition towards agroecology.  

Unlike the co-opted version of ‘food transition’ being promoted, agroecology offers concrete, practical solutions to many of the world’s problems that move beyond (but which are linked to) agriculture. Agroecology challenges the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics of a neoliberalism that drives a failing system. Well-known academics like Raj Patel and Eric Holtz-Gimenez have written extensively on the potential of agroecology. And its benefits are clear. 

In finishing, let us consider the skin-deep morality pedalled throughout the COVID period. During COVID, the official narrative was underpinned by emotive slogans like ‘protect lives’ and ‘keep safe’. Those who refused the COVID jab were labelled ‘granny killers’ and ‘irresponsible’. All presided over by government politicians who too often failed to obey their own COVID rules.  

Meanwhile, while having terrorised the public with a health crisis narrative, they continue to collude with powerful agrifood corporations that destroy health courtesy of their practices. They continue to facilitate a system that serves the needs of global agricapital and ruthless investors like BlackRock’s Larry Fink who secure massive profits from a monopolistic food system (Fink also invests in the pharma sector – one of the biggest beneficiaries of a sickening global food regime) that by its very nature creates illness, malnutrition and hunger.    

The COVID narrative was imbued with the notion of moral responsibility. The people who sold it to the masses have no morality. Like the UK’s former health minister and COVID rule breaker Matt Hancock (see Matt Hancock’s Car Crash Interview), they are willing to sell their soul (or influence) to the highest bidder – in Hancock’s case, a £10,000 wage demand for a day’s ‘consultancy’ as a sitting politician or a few hundred thousand to bolster his ego, bank balance and image on a celebrity TV programme.  

In a corrupted and corrupting society, the rewards could be even higher for the likes of Hancock when he leaves office (a health minister who helped traumatise the population while doing nothing to hold the health-damaging agribusiness corporations to account). But with a long line of well-rewarded fraudsters to choose from, we already know that.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

Leaked document predicts a “protracted war beyond 2023.” Image credit: Newsweek

The U.S. corporate media’s first response to the leaking of secret documents about the war in Ukraine was to throw some mud in the water, declare “nothing to see here,” and cover it as a depoliticized crime story about a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who published secret documents to impress his friends. President Biden dismissed the leaks as revealing nothing of “great consequence.”

What these documents reveal, however, is that the war is going worse for Ukraine than our political leaders have admitted to us, while going badly for Russia too, so that neither side is likely to break the stalemate this year, and this will lead to “a protracted war beyond 2023,” as one of the documents says.

The publication of these assessments should lead to renewed calls for our government to level with the public about what it realistically hopes to achieve by prolonging the bloodshed, and why it continues to reject the resumption of the promising peace negotiations it blocked in April 2022.

We believe that blocking those talks was a dreadful mistake, in which the Biden administration capitulated to the warmongering, since-disgraced U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and that current U.S. policy is compounding that mistake at the cost of tens of thousands more Ukrainian lives and the destruction of even more of their country.

In most wars, while the warring parties strenuously suppress the reporting of civilian casualties for which they are responsible, professional militaries generally treat accurate reporting of their own military casualties as a basic responsibility. But in the virulent propaganda surrounding the war in Ukraine, all sides have treated military casualty figures as fair game, systematically exaggerating enemy casualties and understating their own.

Publicly available U.S. estimates have supported the idea that many more Russians are being killed than Ukrainians, deliberately skewing public perceptions to support the notion that Ukraine can somehow win the war, as long as we just keep sending more weapons.

The leaked documents provide internal U.S. military intelligence assessments of casualties on both sides. But different documents, and different copies of the documents circulating online, show conflicting numbers, so the propaganda war rages on despite the leak.

The most detailed assessment of attrition rates of troops says explicitly that U.S. military intelligence has “low confidence” in the attrition rates it cites. It attributes that partly to “potential bias” in Ukraine’s information sharing, and notes that casualty assessments “fluctuate according to the source.”

So, despite denials by the Pentagon, a document that shows a higher death toll on the Ukrainian side may be correct, since it has been widely reported that Russia has been firing several times the number of artillery shells as Ukraine, in a bloody war of attrition in which artillery appears to be the main instrument of death. Altogether, some of the documents estimate a total death toll on both sides approaching 100,000 and total casualties, killed and wounded, of up to 350,000.

Another document reveals that, after using up the stocks sent by NATO countries, Ukraine is running out of missiles for the S-300 and BUK systems that make up 89% of its air defenses. By May or June, Ukraine will therefore be vulnerable, for the first time, to the full strength of the Russian air force, which has until now been limited mainly to long-range missile strikes and drone attacks.

Recent Western arms shipments have been justified to the public by predictions that Ukraine will soon be able to launch new counter-offensives to take back territory from Russia. Twelve brigades, or up to 60,000 troops, were assembled to train on newly delivered Western tanks for this “spring offensive,” with three brigades in Ukraine and nine more in Poland, Romania and Slovenia.

But a leaked document from the end of February reveals that the nine brigades being equipped and trained abroad had less than half their equipment and, on average, were only 15% trained. Meanwhile, Ukraine faced a stark choice to either send reinforcements to Bakhmut or withdraw from the town entirely, and it chose to sacrifice some of its “spring offensive” forces to prevent the imminent fall of Bakhmut.

Ever since the U.S. and NATO started training Ukrainian forces to fight in Donbas in 2015, and while it has been training them in other countries since the Russian invasion, NATO has provided six-month training courses to bring Ukraine’s forces up to basic NATO standards. On this basis, it appears that many of the forces being assembled for the “spring offensive” would not be fully trained and equipped before July or August.

But another document says the offensive will begin around April 30th, meaning that many troops may be thrown into combat less than fully trained, by NATO standards, even as they have to contend with more severe shortages of ammunition and a whole new scale of Russian airstrikes. The incredibly bloody fighting that has already decimated Ukrainian forces will surely be even more brutal than before.

The leaked documents conclude that “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the offensive,” and that the most likely outcome remains only modest territorial gains.

The documents also reveal serious deficiencies on the Russian side, deficiencies revealed by the failure of their winter offensive to take much ground. The fighting in Bakhmut has raged on for months, leaving thousands of fallen soldiers on both sides and a burned out city still not 100% controlled by Russia.

The inability of either side to decisively defeat the other in the ruins of Bakhmut and other front-line towns in Donbas is why one of the most important documents predicted that the war was locked in a “grinding campaign of attrition” and was “likely heading toward a stalemate.”

Adding to the concerns about where this conflict is headed is the revelation in the leaked documents about the presence of 97 special forces from NATO countries, including from the U.K. and the U.S. This is in addition to previous reports about the presence of CIA personnel, trainers and Pentagon contractors, and the unexplained deployment of 20,000 troops from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Brigades near the border between Poland and Ukraine.

Worried about the ever-increasing direct U.S. military involvement, Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz has introduced a Privileged Resolution of Inquiry to force President Biden to notify the House of the exact number of U.S. military personnel inside Ukraine and precise U.S. plans to assist Ukraine militarily.

We can’t help wondering what President Biden’s plan could be, or if he even has one. But it turns out that we’re not alone. In what amounts to a second leak that the corporate media have studiously ignored, U.S. intelligence sources have told veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that they are asking the same questions, and they describe a “total breakdown” between the White House and the U.S. intelligence community.

Hersh’s sources describe a pattern that echoes the use of fabricated and unvetted intelligence to justify U.S. aggression against Iraq in 2003, in which Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan are by-passing regular intelligence analysis and procedures and running the Ukraine War as their own private fiefdom. They reportedly smear all criticism of President Zelenskyy as “pro-Putin,” and leave U.S. intelligence agencies out in the cold trying to understand a policy that makes no sense to them.

What U.S. intelligence officials know, but the White House is doggedly ignoring, is that, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, top Ukrainian officials running this endemically corrupt country are making fortunes skimming money from the over $100 billion in aid and weapons that America has sent them.

According to Hersh’s report, the CIA assesses that Ukrainian officials, including President Zelenskyy, have embezzled $400 million from money the United States sent Ukraine to buy diesel fuel for its war effort, in a scheme that involves buying cheap, discounted fuel from Russia. Meanwhile, Hersh says, Ukrainian government ministries literally compete with each other to sell weapons paid for by U.S. taxpayers to private arms dealers in Poland, the Czech Republic and around the world.

Hersh writes that, in January 2023, after the CIA heard from Ukrainian generals that they were angry with Zelenskyy for taking a larger share of the rake-off from these schemes than his generals, CIA Director William Burns went to Kyiv to meet with him. Burns allegedly told Zelenskyy he was taking too much of the “skim money,” and handed him a list of 35 generals and senior officials the CIA knew were involved in this corrupt scheme.

Zelenskyy fired about ten of those officials, but failed to alter his own behavior. Hersh’s sources tell him that the White House’s lack of interest in doing anything about these goings-on is a major factor in the breakdown of trust between the White House and the intelligence community.

First-hand reporting from inside Ukraine by New Cold War has described the same systematic pyramid of corruption as Hersh. A member of parliament, formerly in Zelenskyy’s party, told New Cold War that Zelenskyy and other officials skimmed 170 million euros from money that was supposed to pay for Bulgarian artillery shells.

The corruption reportedly extends to bribes to avoid conscription. The Open Ukraine Telegram channel was told by a military recruitment office that it could get the son of one of its writers released from the front line in Bakhmut and sent out of the country for $32,000.

As has happened in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and all the wars the United States has been involved in for many decades, the longer the war goes on, the more the web of corruption, lies and distortions unravels.

The torpedoing of peace talks, the Nord Stream sabotage, the hiding of corruption, the politicization of casualty figures, and the suppressed history of broken promises and prescient warnings about the danger of NATO expansion are all examples of how our leaders have distorted the truth to shore up U.S. public support for perpetuating an unwinnable war that is killing a generation of young Ukrainians.

These leaks and investigative reports are not the first, nor will they be the last, to shine a light through the veil of propaganda that permits these wars to destroy young people’s lives in faraway places, so that oligarchs in Russia, Ukraine and the United States can amass wealth and power. The only way this will stop is if more and more people get active in opposing those companies and individuals that profit from war–who Pope Francis calls the Merchants of Death–and boot out the politicians who do their bidding, before they make an even more fatal misstep and start a nuclear war.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

That’s the battle as an artist because I don’t want to get trapped. But at a certain point, if you’re trying to make a living off of your art, it’s impossible to not be swayed by that. A little context: my parents were both artists and I have a pivotal memory of when my Dad would talk about this in front of me. He had made a whole new body of work, was really excited about it. He showed it to the gallerist that he was working with, and they essentially were like, “We want that other stuff you make.” That really stuck with me because I was just like, “I never want to be told what to do as a creative.”

The symbols, images, and subjects that I work with are very much these classic American tropes that, at least for me, have a lot of meaning behind them. When I use a cowboy, which is the most continuous subject that I work with, it’s not about glorifying cowboys necessarily. Sometimes, sure. But for me, it’s much more of what does that represent? And what does that represent now? Because I’m not approaching it in a cowboy porn kind of way.

For me, it’s more of a visual representation of Americans, and how our ideology has affected the course and discourse of society post-World War II, essentially. When we came out of World War II as these worldwide heroes who saved the day and it led to this time of the white picket fence, and this pull yourself up by your bootstraps—I like playing with that image to express desire, frustration, longing for this promised dream that isn’t really the reality that our generation faces. On a surface level, it can look like a pretty image of a cowboy cresting across a beautiful mountain range. But those initially stemmed from growing up in more suburban areas where you would see that image on a Marlboro advertisement. Or, you’d see it in a movie as this kind of beautified representation of what it means to be an American. Because I’m not trying to pretend to be a cowboy. But for me, a cowboy, a Coke bottle, a pack of Marlboro Reds, a Ford truck, these things are exactly the same. They mean the same thing to me, which is why I bring those images in as well.

But to what I was saying, the cowboy works, so it’s hard to not keep trudging away on that because I want to keep being able to do it, and I got to make money as an artist. The cowboy, on a commerce level, sells a lot better than other images. So, it becomes this push and pull where internally, I’m constantly like, “I just want to do a painting of this thing because I think it might work better in this situation.” But then, it doesn’t garner the same reaction. It’s just the battle of being an artist, and how do I balance creative freedom, but also keep the machine going?

Matt McCormick, Unstable Escalation

As a British person—and probably for people around the world—when you think of America you almost immediately think of a cowboy. Particularly, because in fashion, art, and other spheres, it seems to be everywhere right now. I don’t know if you’ve also noticed that.

Oh, I’ve noticed [laughs].

So these slogans, and cowboys, and landscapes capture this American spirit. How do you pair these things together and decide what works on the page?

For me, a lot of times, it’s dealing with feeling states, and the trials and tribulations of just being a person. When I include lyrics or quotes and then re-contextualize them to create new phrases, it’s to reference what I’m experiencing as a person. It’s why I think certain people can connect to it. Because it’s not just about like, oh, I love cowboys, and they’re pretty, and cool, or they’re badass. I’m trying to talk about the human experience. I’m constantly going back to this imagery, but it is really a starting point to just create a work. And the work isn’t necessarily about this cowboy. It’s been a way for me to open the door to then start. Because a lot of times you’re not going into work being “I have to make this beautiful thing that talks about this, this, this. And I need to project these ideas.” It’s trying to create an image that works together, and hopefully can cause the viewer, or me honestly, just to have a reaction of some kind.

Maybe this is basic but I love the use of color in the landscape. I know those colors are real in America because I’ve seen them. I was wondering whether you go on research trips, road trips, or you take your own photography of places for inspiration?

Short answer, yes. But it started from just looking at pictures, and movies, and having this idea, or a dream about what this landscape and America looked like. I go to Europe a lot. And as an American who looks at lots of different parts of the world, and places other parts of the world on a pedestal, it’s good to be reminded that America’s massive. And you forget that being here.

So, cutting back where this all comes from, before my art was an art career, and I was still figuring it out, I toured with bands. And I toured around America. Well, all over. That was how I finally left America, and got to go to Europe for the first time. But I did a lot of driving around the country, and I had grown up watching and looking at these photos of the New Topographics, Stephen Shore, and all these people having this image of what America looked like. Which is much more like what my paintings and drawings and the rest of it are. Or even my photos, because I tend to focus on the pieces that fit into the narrative that I idolize. But the reality is when you actually drive around the country, it’s a lot of Subways, and gas stations, and TGI Fridays, and whatever. These things that aren’t the beautiful Highway 66 movie version that we have been raised to look at. And it’s interesting.

When I started making this work, I was obsessing over this dream of what America looked like. And the reality is, there are parts of it, and you can still get that, but you have to search it out because what you actually get is much different. It’s Walmarts, and the rest of it. I find a lot of beauty in those things too in a weird way.

Matt McCormick, Goin Back (Just For A Moment)

I guess looking at those references sustains that dream-like, fantasy quality, which is so nice in your work. Once you do a piece, what is your process after that? Do you go away, and come back to it, and be like, “Have I captured the spirit of this place in this?”

I think that is much more of a subconscious thing. I’m really in my own bubble, which is another reason why working in New York sometimes has been refreshing because in LA, which is where I’ll be for the next few weeks, I have my house, I drive like 13 minutes to my studio in the morning. My routine is very set. I wake up, exercise, go to the studio. I’m there with my team in my studio from 10:00 AM, 11:00 AM, to like 8:00 PM. And it’s very easy to get in just this routine of hammering away at the task at hand, which in LA is much more factory-style commissions or long-term projects and books. Things that are less of the “artist in the studio battling on a canvas.” A lot of my creative process occurs on the computer, which I don’t think many people would assume because my work is done in a much more traditional manner most of the time. Like, oil painting. But essentially, everything I make, I build on a computer in Photoshop before I make it, which might make people think one thing or the other. But I guess it’s the easiest place for me to work through ideas. The hardest part is coming up with the idea. By the time I’m actually touching the canvas, or whatever, it’s already done. At that point I’m just executing. That happens for sometimes weeks, months, digitally, before I even touch what ends up being the work itself.

Your work is deeply emotive for me and accessible, which I like as someone who doesn’t know a huge amount about visual art. When I went to your show in London last year, I went at a really weird hour, and no one was there. And after just going around, seeing it all together with that movie of cowboys you had playing too, it felt like I’d been away on some fantasy trip somewhere.

That is one thing that I want to do more of: do shows like that because it’s the best way to fully get the ideas together. Because if you just see one image on the internet, it’s like, “Okay, cool, this is a pretty Western thing.” And maybe if you follow the work. But going into a space and seeing the different rooms, and the different objects, and all that kind of stuff, it very much helps get the other side that I’m trying to do.

Matt McCormick, Lord Can You Hear Me (How Does It Feel)

Do you have any kind of advice, or tips, or approaches for any kind of artist who wants to capture a place in their work?

I’ve always been really interested in physical spaces themselves. A few years ago I designed a bar in New York, and they brought me in because they wanted to make what felt like a Western dive bar, or whatever. And when I was explaining how you do that to these guys that are New York Club guys, used to making these ritzy, high-end-looking things, but they wanted to make this thing that had the spirit of a roadside shit hole, I was like, “To do that…” I didn’t say it in this pompous way, but you can really study what makes that space. What makes a roadside shit hole so great? For me, why am I attracted to those spaces? It’s because of the life that has lived in them.

It’s not just like, “Oh, let me throw up a neon sign here, and some wood paneling, and we’ll call it a day.” It’s all these small, tiny objects that essentially are the life of a place. And for me, when I’m trying to talk about America, and all that is good and bad in this place, you can build that image, and you can build that world by looking at all these pieces, whether it’s a used tire with grass growing in it on the side of a road, or a piece of trash, or a beautiful horse off in the distance, or all these kind of things. You have to really analyze every detail of a place. And you have to really dig into it deeply, and then, even go below the surface of the visual. Which is like, okay, there’s the people. What are the people going through in this place? What are these hardships?

For America, we deal with these crazy drug epidemics as most of the world does, but ours are always America, bigger, better, I guess. They lead to mental health crises. We have all these gun problems, all these kinds of things. And so, you can touch on all of this. And due to my audience being both sides of the fence…probably far different political leanings than I am, I tend to try to walk that line in a very cautious way. Because I think that one of the most major problems we deal with is an inability to talk to each other anymore. And so, I’m trying to study these pieces that we’re all going through. Because at the end of the day, we’re all humans, and we’re all experiencing life on life’s terms.

Not to go so deep into the minutiae of America and its problems, but you have to study all that to truly get a picture in place. I think that’s the only way to get a full grasp of a place, and a spirit of a place: it is to not ignore anything, whether it’s good, bad, terrible.

Matt McCormick, Angel Of The Field

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hannah Ewens.

Led by Rep. Matt Gaetz and other far-right members of the House GOP, Republican lawmakers are intensifying their push to establish new work requirements for millions of people who receive Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance, an effort that progressives slammed as a cruel attack on the poor.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Republicans, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), have rallied around work requirements as a key demand as they use the ongoing debt ceiling standoff as leverage to pursue steep spending cuts and other policy changes.

"The debate in some ways resembles the Republican-led campaign against so-called welfare queens in the 1990s, when a politically resurgent GOP—then under the leadership of House Speaker Newt Gingrich—secured a dramatic restructuring of the government's social safety net," the Post noted. "The resulting overhaul, enacted by President Bill Clinton, slashed cash benefits for millions of Americans in ways that GOP leaders now cite as a model."

In a February letter to President Joe Biden, Gaetz (R-Fla.) and four other House Republicans favorably cited the 1996 welfare reform law—which doubled extreme poverty—as an example of bipartisan cooperation that should be replicated to avert a catastrophic debt default.

During a press conference last month, Gaetz cast his call for tougher work requirements as an attempt to extract a "broader contribution" from "couch potatoes," which is often how Republicans demean people who receive federal food aid and other benefits—even though most who get such assistance work.

"The legislators that want new work requirements for food stamps and Medicaid are the same ones working to eliminate the estate tax so that billionaire heirs never have to work a day in their lives," the Patriotic Millionaires, a group that supports tax hikes on the rich, tweeted Tuesday. "It's not about work, it's about hurting the poor."

A recent analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that legislation introduced by Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) would strip Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits from more than 10 million people, including 4 million children.

Research has repeatedly shown that SNAP work requirements, which add significant complexity and administrative burdens to the process of obtaining benefits, aren't effective at boosting employment.

"SNAP recipients who can work, do work," Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) said Tuesday. "Yet they do not earn enough to escape poverty. Taking away SNAP doesn't help anyone find work, it just makes them hungry and ensures the cycle of poverty continues."

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) echoed his colleague, writing on Twitter that "adding draconian hurdles to receive food assistance and benefits makes it harder for people to get back on their feet, not easier."

"The GOP should call it what it is—a cut to benefits," he added.

"Republicans still haven't released a budget, but they're continuing to make their priorities clear: They want to protect wealthy donors while cutting food assistance and healthcare from families."

As for Medicaid, state experiments with work requirements have proven disastrous. In Arkansas, a state that briefly imposed work requirements on Medicaid recipients during the Trump era before a judge intervened, more than 18,000 people lost health coverage due to the rules.

Some Republicans, including Gaetz and Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), want to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients nationwide, a move that would compound massive coverage losses stemming from the recent end of pandemic protections.

In February, Gaetz unveiled the Medicaid Work Requirements Act, which would mandate that adults deemed "able-bodied" work at least 120 hours a month, volunteer for at least 80 hours a month, or take part in a work training program for at least 80 hours a month to remain eligible for Medicaid benefits.

"Republicans still haven't released a budget, but they're continuing to make their priorities clear: They want to protect wealthy donors while cutting food assistance and healthcare from families," tweeted the Senate Budget Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

In a statement to the Post on Tuesday, White House spokesman Michael Kikukawa indicated that Biden will oppose adding new work requirements to SNAP and Medicaid as part of any deal to raise the debt ceiling.

"The president has been clear that he will oppose policies that push Americans into poverty or cause them to lose healthcare," said Kikukawa. "That's why he opposes Republican proposals that would take food assistance and Medicaid away from millions of people by adding burdensome, bureaucratic requirements."

As the GOP ramps up its assault on SNAP and other critical programs, members of the Senate Democratic caucus are urging the Biden administration to do everything in its power to bolster and expand federal food aid, which was slashed for many families earlier this year when pandemic-related enhancements lapsed.

In a letter to the heads of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Social Security Administration (SSA) earlier this week, a dozen Senate lawmakers called for action to remove "administrative burdens that create barriers to food security" for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients.

"SSI recipients are low-income people at least 65 years old, or blind or disabled adults or children," the lawmakers wrote. "To help alleviate food insecurity, SSA and USDA must create a seamless path to ensuring that SSI recipients and applicants can obtain SNAP benefits, one with minimal administrative burden. SNAP is the nation's largest anti-hunger program and SNAP benefits translate to fewer people in poverty and a healthier population."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

The post Briahna Joy Gray Asks Matt Taibbi the Right Questions appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Pemberton.

More than 170 House Republicans and 150 Democrats teamed up Wednesday to defeat a resolution aimed at withdrawing all remaining U.S. troops from Syria, a proposal led by right-wing Rep. Matt Gaetz and supported by members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

The measure, just the latest House push to bring the nation's yearslong military presence in Syria to an end, failed by a vote of 103 to 321, with Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York and Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California among the no votes.

The resolution would have required the president to remove 900-plus U.S. troops from Syria within 180 days of passage, barring congressional action to authorize their continued presence.

Opponents of the resolution who support prolonging the occupation echoed the Pentagon claim that U.S. forces are needed in Syria to prevent a resurgence of ISIS and to ensure "stability" in the region.

"Either we fight 'em in Syria, or we'll fight 'em here," said Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana.

While lamenting the proposal's defeat, peace advocates noted that it garnered more Republican support than any previous war powers resolution, with 47 GOP yes votes. Fifty-six House Democrats—including Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ro Khanna of California, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Cori Bush of Missouri—voted for the resolution.

“There is a new generation of thinking on two central issues," Khanna toldThe Intercept following Wednesday's vote. "A concern about wars and entanglements over the last 20 years that have not made us safer, and a concern over the offshoring of our domestic production over bad trade deals that have left the working class and middle class poorer."

"I believe that this new generation of political leaders can help fix those two mistakes that the country has made, and that there is an emerging consensus that we should not have our troops fighting overseas without congressional authorization," Khanna added. "If the president wants to make the case for a certain presence that is required for America to protect the Kurds, then he should come to Congress and work with us to make that case."

As The Intercept's Ryan Grim and Daniel Boguslaw noted, "the legal rationale for U.S. occupation" of Syria is "dubious at best."

Opponents of the Syria war powers resolution, including Zinke, pointed to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)—a law that U.S. presidents have cited to give legal cover for airstrikes and ground operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere.

"With ISIS suppressed," Grim and Boguslaw wrote, the Biden administration "has suggested the purpose of the occupation is to act as a bulwark against Iran."

Pointing to U.S. officials' claim that the presence of American troops prevents Iranian forces from establishing a "land bridge" to shuttle weapons to allies in Lebanon, Grim and Boguslaw observed that Iran "already has a direct 'land bridge' through eastern Syria to Lebanon; the U.S. occupation merely adds some time to the Iranian truckers' journey."

Critics of the U.S. troop presence in Syria have stressed that Congress did not specifically authorize a military operation to confront "Iran-backed militias" in Syria.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Not only was it the first national demonstration against Joe Biden’s cruel proxy war; it was the first to be live streamed and is now archived here with all the speeches. A very 21st Century event!

The crowd in DC was estimated variously from 2000 to 5000, with sister rallies in 19 other cities. This was a remarkable achievement as the first action for a fledging. Its success is testimony to the hunger for such a broad-based movement.

And broad-based it was, another first, bringing together people from across the political spectrum to oppose the war. The lead organizations were the leftist Peoples Party and the Libertarian Party. The broad base was reflected by four former presidential candidates, well known national figures, among the many speakers: Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Jill Stein and Tulsi Gabbard. No other antiwar protest in the U.S. even aspires to such inclusivity.

Without such an inclusive anti-interventionist movement, it is virtually impossible for popular forces in the U.S. to end the war in Ukraine, let alone wider wars with Russia or China. This kind of popular movement must succeed if we are to get off the road to nuclear war, WWIII. We have no other alternative as we face a threat to our very existence. It must grow if we are to survive.

The February 19 protest was the first to raise as its lead demand “Not one more penny for war in Ukraine.” This is simple, direct and captures the nature of the growing discontent over the war. Previous, smaller, local demonstrations most often called for “Peace In Ukraine,” a sentiment, not a demand, and one that can easily be co-opted by warhawks. After all, Joe Biden is for “Peace in Ukraine” – once Russia has been brought to its knees, the goal of the war as Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, and Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, state openly.

“Not one more penny for war in Ukraine” is directed at the role of our government, the only one we can influence. If that demand were met, then a negotiated settlement would have to be undertaken. As the second demand of the demonstration, “Negotiate Peace,” states: “The US government instigated the war in Ukraine with a coup of its democratically elected government in 2014, and then sabotaged a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in March. Pursue an immediate ceasefire and diplomacy to end the war.”

“Not one more penny for war in Ukraine” addresses the needs of Americans whose support it was designed to develop. Most Americans feel this war in their pocketbooks, and the last thing we need is more tax dollars on top of the more than $113 billion allotted in 2022. It is a demand meant for the ears of the US government – and of the American people.

Average Americans feel the effects of this war in their daily lives. They are strapped by inflation worsened by the war; by an economy slipping into recession, by neglected disasters like the toxic spill in Palestine, Ohio; by rising national debt; by the crisis of homelessness; and by a health care system that grows ever more expensive, less comprehensive and less universal.

This demand is so eminently practical that is now embodied in a Resolution has been introduced in the House, aptly named “The Ukraine Fatigue Resolution.” It is authored by Rep. Matt Gaetz and gained 15 co-sponsors so far. It quite simply calls for the U.S. to “end its financial and military aid to Ukraine.” (A weakness of the bill is that it is only “a sense of the House,” not a law that is binding. A strength is that a vote on it would force Representatives to stand up and be counted. Most importantly, it is a beginning and shows that antiwar sentiment is growing. A binding law is the next step.)

Tellingly, Gaetz and all co-sponsors of the bill are Republicans, a rebuff to the idea that all antiwar sentiment exists only on the “left.” The desire to end this war can be universal if politics and ideology would get out of the way. The next step is for some – even one – progressive in Congress to sign onto the Gaetz bill. That way, the Congress would mirror the universalist sentiment we saw in the streets on Feb. 19.

Finally, a broad-based movement like RageAgainstWar is part of a growing international trend, as Max Blumenthal discussed here beginning at the 1hr, 37 min mark. As one example, six days after the Feb. 19 rally, Sarah Wagenknecht, member of the Bundestag (federal Parliament) and of the German Party Die Linke (The Left), and feminist activist, Alice Schwarzer, led a demonstration of tens of thousands at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. It too called for an end to military funding for Ukraine. When Wagenkenknecht was asked if members of the right wing AfD, (Alternativ fur Deutschland) were welcome, she declared they were if they opposed the war. And Schwarzer said it is time to look beyond left and right.

Schwarzer’s plea to look beyond left and right should constitute watchwords not only for Germans, but for Americans and the entire West as we face the peril of nuclear war that could easily be triggered by this cruel U.S. proxy war.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John V. Walsh.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

President Biden made a surprise visit to Ukraine ahead of this week’s first anniversary of Russia’s invasion and announced another $500 million in military aid to Ukraine and more sanctions on Russia. The visit underlines what Biden called his “unwavering support” for Ukrainian independence at a time when growing numbers of people in the United States and other countries are pushing for a negotiated end to the fighting. “For an American president to make a trip like this is enormously symbolic,” says Matt Duss, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former Bernie Sanders adviser. “I feel this is a propaganda move to shore up support for a senseless war that the American public are starting to realize has no end in sight except for more senseless waste of lives,” says CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin.

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

President Biden delivered his second State of the Union speech Tuesday and discussed his administration’s support for Ukraine, growing tensions with China and other international challenges. Foreign policy scholar and former Bernie Sanders adviser Matt Duss says one major missing theme was the “global war on terror.” “We need to acknowledge that this war is still very much ongoing,” says Duss, noting that thousands of U.S. troops are deployed around the world. He also says that while the Biden administration’s approach to the Chinese balloon that entered U.S. airspace was calm and measured, the strong anti-China position that seems to divide much of Washington is a concern. “This idea of trying to create political unity around … any external threat has a very bad history,” says Duss.

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

I’d wondered how Republicans would mark the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Then untarnishable Florida Man Matt Gaetz and his freedom contras reenacted it by other means this week. This insurrection is from within. It’s just starting.

Kevin McCarthy, the wobbliest amoeba to be elected Speaker and stand third in line for the presidency, got his prize by sacrificing it. There is no Speakership anymore except in name.

Any single member of the House can now call for the speaker’s ouster whenever they choose. Previously, only party leaders could. Insurrectionists got their pick of crucial committee assignments. They’ll dictate what bills get to the floor, rig any bill with whatever suicidal amendment they choose, kill any spending bill they don’t like. These 20 insurrectionists with neither congressional seniority nor accomplishments to their names will sabotage committees, Congress and country from weaponized backbenches, with their party’s blessing. Is anybody surprised?

McCarthy surrendered gavel for grovel.

Lost in the din is the very unusual bipartisan success of the two years of the 117th Congress that just ended. Democrats and Republicans combined to give us laws that protect gay marriage. They gave us the largest infrastructure bill and largest government investment in research and development in decades. They gave us tighter background checks on younger people buying guns. And they gave us a law that changed the way electoral votes are counted so people like Donald Trump couldn’t attempt the kind of coup he did two years ago by fabricating constitutional clauses the way he does his tax returns.

Every one of these laws drew a dozen or more Republican senators and quite a few Republican House members, too. It was one of the most productive congresses in not-so recent years. Now the barbarians are back in charge. It only takes a few, if the rest of them allow it. That’s the thing: we keep hearing that the 20 insurrectionists are a tiny minority. But they’re the core of Republican ideology, such as it is. They couldn’t get away with their stunts if they didn’t represent a constituency reflecting the anarchy. It’s Trumpism on steroids. It can only end one way. The Republicans had yet to swear-in their new House majority before they turned the whole thing into Jonestown. You remember Jonestown, don’t you, the town the paranoid California preacher and power-mad Jim Jones established in the jungles of Guyana with about 900 of his more gullible church flock, first taking their savings then taking their lives in a mass murder-suicide in 1979. That’s where the expression drinking the kool aid comes from, because he had everyone drink cyanide mixed in with kool aid as he drilled their souls with conspiracies all around. Jones was a QAnon stem cell.

It’s Trumpism on steroids. It can only end one way.

You know Republicans have gone Jonestown when the likes of Marjorie Taylor Green and action-figure Trump end up sounding like their most reasonable voices. Here those two were this week, begging the monsters they created to calm down at least long enough to elect that other Californian while Gaetz’s horde played what Green herself called “Russian Roulette” with their newly gained power. Republicans know suicide.

Lost in the din, too, is the scum pond that “Freedom Caucus” crawled out of a few years ago. One of its founding members was none other than Ron DeSantis, the Guantanamo graduate who’d have been standing right along Gaetz and other insurrectionists this week had he not become Florida’s doubleplus caudillo-in-chief. Every time DeSantis speaks the word “freedom”–as he did 12 times in his inaugural address Tuesday–another liberty loses its wings.

Like the speakership, the word freedom has lost its meaning, though in fairness to DeSantis he’s only applying the Grand Old Party’s stately definition of the word, coined by Ronald Reagan, that unassailable freedom-loving deity, when he called the rapists, terrorists and mass murderers of Central America “freedom fighters.”

“Freedom lives here,” DeSantis told us Tuesday, the way it does in the Republican House: The 20 nut cases holding it hostage are the party’s purest, and purist, expression.

What we saw this week is a preview of much worse to come, with or without McCarthy as figurehead speaker. There’s nothing to cheer here, not for anyone who cares about this country. Not as long as Maga’s white-collar insurrectionists are calling the shots.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Pierre Tristam.

It’s the afternoon of January 6. There is chaos on the floor of the House of Representatives, and the business of Congress is stalled. Will the meeting be adjourned so that leaders can figure out whether and how it might be possible to restore normal order, so that the business of the House can be resumed?

Back in 2021 these questions arose in the most dramatic way imaginable, in response to the insurrectionary invasion of the Capitol building by an angry ragtag mob seeking to attack public officials deemed “disloyal” and to undermine the democratic election of Joe Biden as president.

It’s now 2023, and the outcome of another election is unfolding at the Capitol. Again a right-wing mob is attempting to seize control of the House floor in order to hijack the political system. But this time the mob consists of besuited Republican politicians recently elected to the House.

The chaos we are now witnessing centers on the inability of the newly elected Republican majority to agree on a new Speaker of the House. The mainstream media has focused obsessively on the dramatic confrontation between Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and a small group of self-styled “change agents,” led by Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, willing to delay indefinitely the normal business of the House in order to obstruct McCarthy’s ascension to the Speakership. This obstruction is figured as “extremist,” and the effort to codify Republican control of the House and “get back to business” is regarded as “normal.” The obstructionists are figured as “radicals” and the supporters of McCarthy as “moderates.”

Pundits on CNN and MSNBC breathlessly wonder whether McCarthy can “get control of the extremist wing of his party.” And every time they wonder, they lend a patina of respectability to McCarthy and his supporters, and obscure the fact that every House Republican, on either side of this dispute, is an extremist, the differences between them miniscule and largely personalist.

Through thirteen rounds of House voting, each one followed by more McCarthy concessions, this has been made increasingly clear, and indeed it has been stated, explicitly, by every Republican who has risen to speak in support of McCarthy: the real “enemy” of them all is Biden and his supposedly critical race theorizing, open border loving, and freedom hating liberal supporters. And so they should “reach across the aisle,” and join together as America-loving Republicans, to vanquish their “Democrat” foes, “enemies of the people” all.

Let us not forget that on the evening of January 6, 2021, when the House finally reconvened hours after members had fled the chamber and the building in fear for their lives, 139 House Republicans—two thirds of the caucus– voted to overturn the election results in order to nullify Joe Biden’s election. Among them were the four top leaders of the current Republican caucus who are now being touted as “institutionalists”—Steve Scalise, Elise Stefaniak, Jim Jordan, and Kevin McCarthy himself.

Since last November’s washout of the so-called Republican “red wave,” it has become fashionable to say that the electorate had decisively repudiated “election denialism.” And it is true that almost all of the most extreme election deniers endorsed by Trump, especially at the state level, were defeated. But, as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump has shown, “House Republicans who opposed 2020 electoral vote paid no price,” and indeed almost every single one of them who ran for reelection—over a hundred– was successful. Indeed, according to the Huffpost, when newly-elected Republicans are added in, the number of election deniers in the 2023 House rises to as many as 170—more than the number who voted to overturn Biden’s election in 2020.

On January 3, the Post’s Amy Gardner reported that “all but two of the 20 Republican House members who voted against Kevin McCarthy . . . are election deniers who embraced former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.” This may be true. But it is also true that all but a handful or two of the House Republicans who voted for McCarthy were also election deniers and in effect still are election deniers.

To put this more bluntly: the idea that the Biden presidency, and indeed Democratic political power more generally, is illegitimate, and must be reversed by a combination of culture war and dramatic changes to election law—this idea is the common sense, and indeed the catechism, of the entire current Republican party.

Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan and their crowd are not eager to become the official leaders of the House so that they can promote a coherent policy agenda. They are eager to assume the reins of power so that they can do what they have long said they wanted to do: relentlessly stymie, investigate, and hound the Biden administration, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Centers for Disease Control, and more generally to undermine what they call “the deep state.” If there is any distance between McCarthy supporters and “Never Kevins,” it is only that the latter are eager to proceed in an even more fanatical way (one MSNBC journalist just reported that one of McCarthy’s “concessions” to his opponents was an agreement to support the impeachment of Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas–something that McCarthy himself threatened last November).

The distance between the “original” January 6—2021—and today is not very great at all.

As the House Selection January 6 Committee Report now makes clear, the violent assault of the mob on the Capitol that day was the culmination of a very extensive effort by Trump and his supporters to use a range of legal and extra-legal means to stay in power. The violence was rather quickly seen as excessive by almost all Republican members of Congress—no doubt because it threatened their very lives—if only for a while (within days they were walking back their criticisms of Trump, then opposing his impeachment, and then eventually kissing his ring at Mar-a-Lago). But it has long been clear that the primary means by which the Republican party seeks to weaken political opposition, cement its own power, and thereby limit democracy, are legal or quasi-legal means—through federal and state law, court rulings, and executive power when they control it. And the key to this agenda is the weakening and the delegitimation of the Biden administration, the Democratic party, and liberal democracy itself. Control of the House of Representatives is now central to this. On this all the House Republicans now squabbling about titles and rules and committee assignments agree.

There may be differences among them. But when it comes to their hostility to liberal democracy, they are united. They may be wearing suits and carrying briefcases. But they are a mob, and they are dangerous.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jeffrey C. Isaac.

While Kevin McCarthy’s struggle to become Speaker of the House of Representatives appears to be about personality and struggles within the House Republican caucus, it’s really about something much larger: the fate and future of American “big government” and the middle class it created.

Ever since the Reagan Revolution, the phrase “big government” has been on the lips of Republican politicians. They utter it like a curse at every opportunity.

It seems paradoxical: Republicans complain about “big government,” but then go on to support more and more government money for expanding prisons and a bloated Pentagon budget. Once you understand their worldview, however, it all makes perfect sense.

First, some background.

From the founding of our republic through the early 1930s the American middle class was relatively small. It was almost entirely made up of the professional and mercantile class: doctors, lawyers, shop-owners and the like. Only a tiny percentage of Americans were what we would today call middle class.

Factory workers, farmers, carpenters, plumbers, and pretty much all manner of “unskilled laborers” were the working poor rather than the middle class. Most neighborhoods across America had a quality of life even lower than what today we would call “ghettos.”

As recently as 1900, for example, women couldn’t vote, senators were appointed by the wealthiest power brokers in the states, and poverty stalked America.

There was no minimum wage; when workers tried to organize unions, police would help employers beat or even murder their ringleaders; and social safety net programs like unemployment insurance, Social Security, public schools, Medicare, food and housing supports, and Medicaid didn’t exist.

There was no income tax to pay for such programs, and federal receipts were a mere 3 percent of GDP (today its around 20 percent). As the President’s Council of Economic Advisors noted in their 2000 Annual Report:

“To appreciate how far we have come, it is instructive to look back on what American life was like in 1900. At the turn of the century, fewer than 10 percent of homes had electricity, and fewer than 2 percent of people had telephones. An automobile was a luxury that only the very wealthy could afford.
“Many women still sewed their own clothes and gave birth at home. Because chlorination had not yet been introduced and water filtration was rare, typhoid fever, spread by contaminated water, was a common affliction. One in 10 children died in infancy. Average life expectancy in the United States was a mere 47 years.
“Fewer than 14 percent of Americans graduated from high school. ... Widowhood was far more common than divorce. The average household had close to five members, and a fifth of all households had seven or more. …
“Average income per capita, in 1999 dollars, was about $4,200. … The typical workweek in manufacturing was about 50 hours, 20 percent longer than the average today.”

The Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, though, was a huge wake-up call for American voters, answered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

His New Deal programs brought us, for the first time, “big government” and the people loved it. They elected him President of the United States four times!

FDR created Social Security, unemployment insurance, guaranteed the right to unionize, outlawed child labor, regulated big business by creating the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other agencies, and funded infrastructure across the country from roads to bridges to dams and power stations.

He raised taxes on the morbidly rich all the way up to 90% and used that money to build schools and hospitals across the nation. He brought electricity to rural parts of the country, and put literally millions to work in various “big government” programs.

“Big government,” in other words, created the modern American middle-class.

By the 1950s a strong middle class representing almost half of Americans had emerged for the first time in American history.

By the late 1970s it was around 65 percent of us.

And that’s when the billionaires (then merely multimillionaires) decided enough was enough and got to work.

In 1980, David Koch ran for vice president with the Libertarian Party, an organization created by the real estate lobby to give an air of legitimacy to their efforts to outlaw rent control and end government regulation of their industry.

His platform included a whole series of positions that were specifically designed to roll back and gut FDR’s “big government” programs (along with those added on by both Nixon and LBJ’s Great Society) that had created and then sustained America’s 20th century middle class:

— “We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.
— “We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.
— “We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.
— “We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.
— “We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.
— “We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service.
— “We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.
— “We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.
— “As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.
— “We support repeal of all law which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.
— “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.
— “We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.
— “We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.
— “We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
— “We support abolition of the Department of Energy.
— “We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.
— “We demand the return of America’s railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.
— “We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called ‘self-protection’ equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.
— “We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.
— “We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.
— “We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.
— “We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
— “We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
— “We support the repeal of all state usury laws.”

Today’s challenges to Kevin McCarthy are mostly coming from members of the Republican House Freedom Caucus, pretty much a reinvention of the Tea Party Caucus, funded in substantial part by rightwing billionaires and CEOs who share the late David Koch’s worldview.

The world is made up of “makers” and “takers,” they’ll tell you. The billionaire “job creators” shouldn’t be taxed to support the “moochers” who demand everything from union rights to a living wage to free college.

Why, these Freedom Caucus members ask, should their billionaire patrons be forced — at the barrel of an IRS agent’s gun! — to pay taxes to support the ungrateful masses through “big government” programs? Isn’t it up to each of us to make our own fortunes? Wasn’t Darwin right?

These Republicans believe our government should really only have a few simple mandates: maintain a strong military, tough cops, and a court system to protect their economic empires.

That’s why they’ll support massive prison expansions and nosebleed levels of pentagon spending but (metaphorically) fight to the death to prevent an expansion of Social Security or food stamps.

And that’s why they hate Kevin McCarthy.

In the past, McCarthy has shown a willingness to compromise and negotiate with Democrats. Most recently, as Congressman Chip Roy pointed out on the House floor yesterday when nominating Byron Donalds to replace McCarthy, he failed to block the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill through Congress that was loaded with what rightwing billionaires consider “freebies” for “taker” and “moocher” Americans.

It appears all or nearly all of the Freedom Caucus members, dancing to the tune first played by David Koch, don’t believe in our current form of American government. They want us to go back to the pre-1930s America, before FDR’s New Deal.

Those were the halcyon days when workers cowered before their employers, women and minorities knew their places, and government didn’t interfere with the business of dynasty-building even when it meant poisoning entire communities and crushing small businesses.

They appear to agree with the majority of the Supreme Court Republicans who recently began dismantling the “big government” administrative state by ending the EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gasses.

They’ve already succeeded, over the past 40 years of the Reagan Revolution, at whittling the middle class down from 65 percent of us to around 45 percent of us: NPR commemorated it in 2015 with the headline: “The Tipping Point: Most Americans No Longer Are Middle Class.”

Now they want even more poverty for workers and more riches for their morbidly rich funders, and don’t believe that “moderate” Republicans will get them there. As Ginni Thomas and a pantheon of “conservative” luminaries wrote yesterday in an open letter opposing McCarthy’s speakership:

“[H]e has failed to answer for, or commit to halting, his coordinated efforts in the 2022 elections to promote moderate Republican candidates over conservatives.”

The “conservative” Republicans have already announced that once they get their act together in Congress with a new speaker, their first order of business is going to be to cut more taxes on billionaires.

While the battle for House Speaker appears to be about personality, it’s really about ideology and policy. It’s about the future of “big government” and whether or not we will continue to have an American middle class.

And as long as Libertarian-leaning billionaires continue pouring cash into the campaigns and lifestyles of Republican members of Congress, this battle that’s been going on for over 40 years to tear apart the American middle-class is not going to end or go away any day soon.

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

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

I don’t like being a boss of people. I’m okay at it I guess, but I am a pretty radically-to-the-left person who’s continually lived a life where that is what’s important. I used to play in bands and tour full-time and did a label. I don’t necessarily have success averseness, but also I honestly don’t really care about money. I want to make sure I have enough to pay for the apartment and whatever. I’d been talking about wanting to do the studio as a co-op for years, and we finally made the jump. Basically everybody that’s worked for me is now a partner.

In terms of organizational structure, it’s largely flat. There’s a degree of different roles—we have design leads on various projects because we do systems design, we do graphic design, we do writing, we do content generation type stuff like writing trivia questions or adventures for games that have narrative stories, stuff like that with games, and then we do some stuff with comics. Within that creative space, functionally, we’ve decided that it’s very difficult to have it purely, entirely non-hierarchical in terms of the creative work side. So all the business stuff is flat. We basically vote on stuff. We try to figure things out. Creatively, there needs to be someone who’s the final authority on any given project.

If there’s a disagreement, we talk about. We want to make everybody happy. We try to reach consensus. But practically speaking, there are times where it’s like, “Yeah. Well, we’re split on this one.” What we do is we establish that early in the project; we have a clear tiebreaker that’s established before anyone knows if they’re going to disagree or exactly how they’re going to be involved in it and how their involvement’s going to develop over the life of making that project.

What was something that you wish someone had told you when you had first started doing this business and working in this industry?

One of the biggest things for me is be true to yourself and have a vision of what it is you want to be doing, and then do that. Don’t worry as much about fitting into the boxes that other people have created for how you can exist in the industry and the kind of stuff you can make and the way you do business. I think looking back, I wish I had embraced that earlier, but I was still the weirdo when I was first doing little bits and pieces of stuff. A lot of it comes from doing a DIY, punk and hardcore label and bands; that attitude and energy is something that I brought with me when it came to starting to make things.

Sacrifice is a big thing. I think I did it but I wasn’t as intentional about it early on in my career. I’m very in the mindset that we need to remove barriers to entry to help get more people involved, and we need to keep it from being a thing for people that have the money to do—they need to fuck off and not make money for a while. But, yeah, I am also a big believer there are sacrifices you can make to get to the place you’re in.

I don’t have kids. I’m not interested in kids and that means that that’s a whole full-time job that costs a ton of money that I don’t have to deal with. No judgment in any direction, but people are like, “Well, how did you do it?” And I’m like, “Well, I lived very DIY punk rock lifestyle and don’t have kids or expenses,” and so, sure, I was able to go volunteer for this company and chase after this thing and do that. I didn’t think about it as directly as that at the time.

Being more mindful about the choices I was making and the impact they were going to have and thinking a little bit further ahead, maybe that’s it. I wish I had told myself to think a little bit further ahead. Think about where you want to be, think about what your dream situation is in a more specific way, too, because I think it’s very easy. It’s important not to be unrealistic in the realities of what it takes to do the stuff.

You have to recognize that if you want to put time into this, you have to lose time somewhere else.

I feel like “I don’t have time” is largely not actually what the situation is. It’s that I’ve not prioritized this in my life. And there’s zero value judgment around how people should or shouldn’t prioritize things in their lives, but it’s like, “Yeah. Well, I don’t want to give up my day job, I really want to have a bunch of kids. I want to have this. I want to have that.”

Another big piece of advice: Don’t compare yourself to other people. I think everyone says this all the time. No matter how many times any of us hear it, it’s impossible to actually do, but we’re still all going to say it because really the best you can do is not compare yourself to other people because you don’t know their circumstances.

The flip side to that is you can make as much luck as you can. You can really up that. That’s why I do so many conventions a year and used to do even more. My biggest game on the road year, I did 236 days on the road, I just cranked out conventions and was going everywhere, talking to everyone. Even things that were one in a thousand chance, I gave myself a few thousand chances, so that volume of chasing those opportunities I think is really hard. It’s not going to find you, right?

Everybody can look at that one person who, “Oh, well, I don’t know. I just got plucked out of obscurity, fucking around and look at me now,” right? Yeah, sure there’s always outliers and exceptions to the rule, but really you got to put in the effort.

How did you manage to create a path for Forever Stoked outside of the established system of the tabletop gaming industry?

I’m 40 and our generation, a lot of parents in my mom and grandparents who raised me very much like, “You can do anything, you’re smart. You’re talented. Whatever you want to do, you can do it. I believe in you.” Then when I was a teenager and getting into punk, which I’m going to use as a giant umbrella, I was reading Henry Rollins’ Get in the Van. That sort of energy has run as a thread through what we do with Forever Stoked, where we say yes to kind of whatever, we chase stuff that we probably have no business chasing after as potential clients. Part of the joy of being able to have that kind of path is that we largely do what we want. We’re very values first as an organization, myself as a person, and we’re able to do that because we have carved this path.

We’re kind of the cool weirdos in the game industry. I’m not a cool weirdo in the wider world, and I’m not trying to insult the game industry either, but there’s not a whole lot of people covered in tattoos that are ridiculous cartoon characters that played in bands, just the profile that we cut is our branding is all. We look like a black light poster. Our aesthetic is this very out-there thing. There are enough people that are into what we do that when they find us or we find them, whatever, it’s like, “Oh, we totally vibe.”

How do you avoid burnout in your career?

When you have a good answer for that, I would love to hear it. As much as I want to say that I’m not the boss and that it’s not hierarchal, everyone still screens me that way, and it means that there’s a lot of extra pressure on me. But I’d say honestly for me, a lot of it is just keep going. The just keep swimming philosophy of, “I can’t be burned out so I’m not,” or I try not to be. But that said, I’m trying to be better.

Something that I get to do because the studio has been growing is that I do have the ability to shift my focus day-to-day. If I’m feeling like my brain’s just not interested in being creative right now, that’s not going to happen. There’s plenty of other shit I can work on. There’s a diversity of things that I can do that are still furthering the work that we’re doing and the cool stuff we’re making, but that doesn’t require me to be as on. I can look at a calendar and try to figure out who we want to meet with at a convention. Stuff like that is a lot less demanding and taxing mentally, so I can sort of half work. I mean, now I sound like a psycho who just works all the time. But I mean, the thing is that I legitimately adore what we do.

I think there’s a doggedness that comes from that DIY culture where you’re like, “I’m always trying to find a path to that success,” and the success is whatever you define it to be, right?

Yeah. That’s something that’s really stuck with me for the co-op: I would rather have a dope life than a bunch of money. I’m fortunate enough that at this point in my life, we do okay. Well, we do more than okay. I mean, we do great. If you’re a business bro, we don’t do great. But for my standards, we do great.

I’m also very not interested in any of that materialistic consumption type stuff. I wear jeans until they fall apart, which I think comes from the punk rock, but also just years and years of not having stuff. Growing up, we went through periods of time where we didn’t have money, certainly not to a degree that a lot of people have had to struggle through. We weren’t worried about ever being homeless, but we had to move with my grandparents. So thinking about what you spend money on, and what it actually makes you happy, which also comes from punk rock where it’s just that kind of anti-materialism.

I am very proud of the fact I live my values in the sense that I try as much as possible to make as little money as possible when it means that I can help other people do cool stuff, and we can build something together. That’s been the attitude before we were officially a cooperative for a long time, and now I’m excited about really putting our money where our mouth is, to go somewhat esoteric. It’s one of the core tenets of Leninism that set it apart from some of the other competing lead interests in building the USSR before Stalin turned it into absolutely fucking garbage.

I think a lot about business structure and co-ops and how we can do things in the world at large. This idea that if we had good people who made a thing and then were great and now we’re giving it to the people. When the labor movement really took off, it seems like most of the most successful things in business followed that sort of pattern where it was a more traditional business, or it fell within that kind of like, “Yeah, there’s a boss, there’s an owner, there’s a couple owners,” or whatever it is. Then at some point it was decided, “Hey, we have this successful company, now let’s convert it to a co-op, make it work. Let’s do that.”

I’ve been involved in a lot of political work over the years and various other sort of co-op type things, both creative and otherwise, and it’s difficult to get you going when you have a bunch of opinionated weirdos that are like, “Well, I don’t know, I read this book and that book,” and then all of a sudden you’re debating Trotsky. It’s good and interesting, but also difficult to get over that hump to make a sustainable business from the ground up. I want to say that that’s what more people should do.

I want to say that that’s where society should be, and I think that that is where I would like society to get to. This business is a real-ass business and everyone makes salaries the same that you would make if you were doing this, in, say, a more corporate world. That money’s there. Business is making that kind of money. It’s just now we’re distributing it more equally amongst everybody, and having that money makes it so much easier to then redistribute. It’s difficult to redistribute wealth when there isn’t any wealth.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Elle Nash.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Lobby Akinnola.

As the U.S. pours billions in military aid into Ukraine, we host a debate on the Biden administration’s response to the war and U.S. policy toward Russia amid increasing calls among progressives for a diplomatic end to the conflict. We speak to former Bernie Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who specialized in the Soviet Union. “Everyone understands that at some point there will need to be a negotiation to bring this war to a close, but I think the tension within the progressive community comes to when and how that diplomacy actually takes place,” says Duss. McGovern stressest that U.S. policymakers must understand Russia’s motivations, saying Russia sees the eastward expansion of NATO as threatening its core interests akin to how the United States viewed the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s. “We need to go back and figure out how this all started in order to figure out how to end it,” says McGovern.

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

Matt Damon appears in an advertisement for the company Crypto.com on October 28, 2021.

Screenshot: The Intercept

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

Fox News (7/19/22)

This week on CounterSpin: In May of this year, a white supremacist killed ten people in Buffalo, New York. He made clear that he wanted to kill Black people, because he believes there is a plot, run by Jews, to “replace” white people with Black and brown people. News media had an opportunity then to deeply interrogate the obvious spurs for the horrific act, including of course the media outlets and pundits and politicians who repeatedly invoke this white replacement idea, but it didn’t really happen.

The Washington Post offered an inane tweet about how Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ But a racist massacre raises questions about that promise.”

CounterSpin spoke at the time about the issues we hoped more media would be exploring, with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, who has been following Fox News and Tucker Carlson, and their impact on US politics, for years.

And we spoke also with Eric K. Ward, senior fellow at Southern Poverty Law Center and executive director at Western States Center, about ways forward.

We  hear these conversations again this week.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the assassination of Darya Durgina.

The post Matt Gertz and Eric K Ward on White ‘Replacement’ Theory appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 4/12/21)

This week on CounterSpin: Ten human beings were killed and three wounded in Buffalo, New York. By the killer’s own admission, he sought to kill Black people because they are Black, and he is a white supremacist who believes there’s a plot to “replace” white people with Black and brown people, a plot run by the Jews. If you’re news media, you could go all in on media outlets and pundits and political figures whose repeated invocations to this white replacement theory are the obvious spurs for this horrendous crime. Or you could be the Washington Post, and tweet that Joe Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ A racist massacre raises questions about that promise.”

A press corps that wanted to go down in history as doing better than pretending to raise questions about the “soul of America” would be busy interrogating the structural, economic, political relationships that promote and platform white supremacy. They’d be using their immense and specific influence to interrupt business as usual, to demand—not just today, but tomorrow and the next day—meaningful response from powerful people. They would not be accepting that mass murder in the name of white supremacy and antisemitism is just another news story to report in 2022 America, film at 11.

We’ll talk about what we ought to be talking about with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, who has been tracking Fox News and Tucker Carlson, and their impact on US politics, for years now.

And also with Eric K. Ward, senior fellow at Southern Policy Law Center and executive director at Western States Center—about ways upward and outward from this current, difficult place.

The post Matt Gertz, Eric K. Ward on the Buffalo Massacre & ‘Replacement Theory’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

While President Biden has ruled out sending troops into Ukraine, the U.S. is directly aiding Ukraine militarily and has imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia amounting to what some have called “economic warfare.” We look at Biden’s response with Senator Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, who is also Ukrainian American. He says the U.S. should continue to exhaust all diplomatic avenues in order to stop violence in Ukraine. Duss also details the U.S. role in setting the stage for Putin’s oligarchical government and says the U.S. must not use “Ukranians as a tool for our foreign policy and our conflict with Russia.”

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