paul – Radio Free

Ari Paul on Genocide in Gaza, Scout Katovich on Forced Institutionalization

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 15:54:18 +0000

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250801.mp3

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New York Times (7/22/25)

This week on CounterSpin: The mainstream US media debate on the starvation and violence and war crimes in Gaza still, in July 2025, makes room for Bret Stephens, who explains in the country’s paper of record that Israel can’t be committing genocide as rights groups claim, because if they were, they’d be much better at it. Says Stephens:

It may seem harsh to say, but there is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal—if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans—why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?

“It may seem harsh to say” is a time-honored line from those who want to note but justify human suffering, or excuse the crimes of the powerful. It looks bad to you, is the message, because you’re stupid. If you were smart, like me, you’d understand that your empathy is misplaced; these people suffering need to suffer in order to…. Well, they don’t seem to feel a need to fully explain that part. Something about democracy and freeing the world from, like, suffering.

It’s true that corporate media are now gesturing toward engaging questions of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. But what does that amount to at this late date? We’ll talk about corporate media’s Gaza coverage with independent reporter and frequent FAIR.org contributor Ari Paul.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250801Paul.mp3

Disability Scoop (8/1/25)

Also on the show: The Americans with Disabilities Act is generally acknowledged in July, with a lot of anodyne “come a long way, still a long way to go” type of reporting. There’s an opening for a different sort of coverage this month, as the Trump administration is actively taking apart laws that protect disabled people in the workplace, and cutting off healthcare benefits, and disabled kids’ educational rights, and rescinding an order that would have moved disabled workers to at least the federal minimum wage; and, with a recent executive order, calling on localities to forcibly institutionalize any unhoused people someone decides is mentally ill or drug-addicted or just living on the street.

Does that serve the hedge funds pricing homes out of reach of even full-time workers? Yes. Does it undercut years of evidence-based work about moving people into homes and services? Absolutely. Does it aim to rocket us back to a dark era of criminalizing illness and disability and poverty? Of course. But Trump calls it “ending crime and disorder,” so you can bet elite media will honor that viewpoint in their reporting. We’ll get a different view from Scout Katovich, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250801katovich.mp3

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

3 DRC journalists beaten, detained for trying to question provincial minister

CPJ Staff — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 18:42:09 +0000

Kinshasa, July 28, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls for authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to immediately drop legal proceedings against three journalists who were beaten and detained overnight while seeking to interview a provincial minister in the north-eastern city of Kisangani.

On July 23, KIS24 Info’s Steves Paluku, ElectionNet’s Paul Beyokobana, and Kisangani News newspaper’s Sébastien Mulamba visited the offices of Tshopo province’s Minister of Finance Patrick Valencio to ask him to respond to media criticism about his appearance in and alleged funding of a television series, Paluku and Beyokobana told CPJ.

The journalists said ministry officials beat them and injured Paul Peyokobana’s hand, shown here, on July 23, 2025, at the Ministry of Finance office for Tshopo province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (Photo: Steves Paluku)

Ministry officials beat the three journalists, who all work for privately owned outlets, with sticks and their fists, injuring Beyokobana’s hand, before armed police took them to a local police station and the Kisangani prosecutor’s office, where they spent the night, the journalists told CPJ.

The journalists’ lawyer, Andy Muzaliwa, told CPJ that they were released on July 24 and ordered to appear at the prosecutor’s office on Monday, July 28, to meet Valencio and his deputy chief of staff, Jacques Lomamisa.

Paluku told CPJ that the journalists did not appear in court on Monday because Muzaliwa was not available but were expected to do so in the coming days. Paluka added that on Monday he separately filed a complaint against Valencio at the Supreme Court of Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, over his detention.

“The Congolese officials and police who attacked and detained journalists Steve Paluku, Paul Beyokobana, and Sébastien Mulamba must be held accountable and the legal proceedings against the journalists should be dropped,” said CPJ Regional Director Angela Quintal. “Authorities in the DRC should focus on ensuring the safety of journalists working to report the news, not violently silencing them for asking questions.”

Valencio’s office defended the minister, saying that Congolese law did not prohibit his participation in a film at a time when he was not a minister, the online outlet Boyoma Revolution reported.

CPJ’s calls to request comment from Valencio and Lomamisa rang unanswered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Revisiting Paul Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth for Today

Greg Godels — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 15:00:28 +0000

And this brings me to what I referred to earlier as a reaffirmation of my views on the basic problem confronting the underdeveloped countries. The principal insights, which must not be obscured by matters of secondary or tertiary importance, are two. The first is that, if what is sought is rapid economic development, comprehensive economic planning is indispensable… if the increase in a country’s aggregate output is to attain the magnitude, of, say, 8 to 10 per cent per annum; if in order to achieve it, the mode of utilization of a nation’s human and material resources is to be radically changed, with certain less productive lines of economic activity abandoned and other more rewarding ones taken up; then only a deliberate, long range planning effort can assure the attainment of the goal…

The second insight of crucial importance is that no planning worth the name is possible in a society in which the means of production remain under the control of private interests which administer them with a view to their owners’ maximum profits (or security or other private advantage). For it is of the very essence of comprehensive planning for economic development – what renders it, indeed, indispensable – that the pattern of allocation and utilization of resources which it must impose if it is to accomplish its purpose, is necessarily different from-the pattern prevailing under the status quo…
— xxviii-xxix, Foreword to 1962 printing, The Political Economy of Growth, Paul A. Baran [emphasis added]

It is surely of some interest that the late Professor Baran — reassessing his important, insightful, and extremely influential 1957 book, The Political Economy of Growth — grounds his contribution to the liberation of the post-colonial world in two “insights”: 1. The necessity of “comprehensive” economic planning over the irrational decision-making of the market, and 2. The impossibility of having effective planning with the major productive forces in the hands of private entities operating for profits.

Put simply, Baran is arguing that the most promising humane and rational escape from the legacy of colonialism is for the developing countries to choose the socialist path going forward and adopt planning as a necessary, rational condition for achieving that goal.

It is of equal interest that many who consider Baran to be one of the fathers of dependency theory — the theory that development is most significantly hindered by the state-to-state structural barriers imposed by the “core” on the “periphery” or the “North” on the “South” — have abandoned Baran’s key “insights” for an approach that argues for open, unhindered “fair” exchange and the rationality of markets.

For many of today’s Western left, the locus of international inequalities is found in the economic relations between states. Exploitation — in the form of taking advantage of uneven development or resource differences — undoubtedly occurs in the relations between states, systematically in the colonial era, more indirectly today. That is just to say that competition between capitalist states within a global imperialist system will produce and reproduce various inequalities. It is popular to capture this as conflict between an advantaged North and a disadvantaged South — while the geographical reference is most inexact, it is widely understood. From Wallerstein, Arrighi, and Gunder Frank, through Amin, and an important consensus today, the central feature of imperialism is thought to be the vast differences in wealth between the rich and poor countries. Moreover, they share the belief that existing structures maintain those differences, structures established and protected by the richest countries.

Of course, they are right to object to these inequalities and the practices and institutions that preserve them. And Paul Baran was acutely aware of these structures, but also attendant to the specific historical conditions influencing the individual countries — their differences and similarities. He understands the trajectory of the post-colonial states:

Thus, the peoples who came into the orbit of Western capitalist expansion found themselves in the twilight of feudalism and capitalism enduring the worst features of both worlds, and the entire impact of imperialist subjugation to boot. To oppression by their feudal lords, ruthless but tempered by tradition, was added domination by foreign and domestic capitalists, callous and limited only by what the traffic would bear. The obscurantism and arbitrary violence inherited from their feudal past was combined with the rationality and sharply calculating rapacity of their capitalist present. Their exploitation was multiplied, yet its fruits were not to increase their productive wealth; these went abroad or served to support a parasitic bourgeoisie at home. They lived in abysmal misery, yet they had no prospect of a better tomorrow. They existed under capitalism, yet there was no accumulation of capital. They lost their time-honored means of livelihood, their arts and crafts, yet there was no modern industry to provide new ones in their place. They were thrust into extensive contact with the advanced science of the West, yet remained in a state of the darkest backwardness (p. 144).

At the same time, Baran is fully aware of the predatory nature of foreign capital, denying its “usefulness” and affirming its sole domestic benefit to the merchant class.

Perhaps his clearest statement of the logic of imperialism appears on pages 196-197:

To be sure, neither imperialism itself nor its modus operandi and ideological trimmings are today what they were fifty or a hundred years ago. Just as outright looting of the outside world has yielded to organized trade with the underdeveloped countries, in which plunder has been rationalized and routinized by a mechanism of impeccably ‘correct’ contractual relations, so has the rationality of smoothly functioning commerce grown into the modern, still more advanced, still more rational system of imperialist exploitation. Like all other historically changing phenomena, the contemporary form of imperialism contains and preserves all its earlier modalities, but raises them to a new level. Its central feature is that it is now directed not solely towards the rapid extraction of large sporadic gains from the objects of its domination, it is no longer content with merely assuring a more or less steady flow of these gains over a somewhat extended period. Propelled by well-organized, rationally conducted monopolistic enterprise, it seeks today to rationalize the flow of these receipts so as to be able to count on it in perpetuity. And this points to the main task of imperialism in our time: to prevent, or, if that is impossible, to slow down and to control the economic development of underdeveloped countries.

Notice that Baran acknowledges, along with today’s fashionable dependency theory, that imperialism’s “main task” is to impose underdevelopment. But imperialism’s agent is identified as the “monopolistic enterprise” and not specifically an antagonistic state or its government. Of course, the state hosting monopoly corporations does all it can to promote and protect their interests, but it should not be confused with either the exploiter or the beneficiary of exploitation: it is “the well-organized, rationally conducted monopolistic enterprise” that bleeds the workers of the developing countries. With monopoly capitalism dominating the state, the state plays a critical, essential role as an enabler for the most powerful monopolies in the global economy.

For Baran, the key to liberating the former colonies from the stranglehold of rapacious monopolies is not a reordering of international relations, not a campaign for a level international playing field, not alternative market institutions, nor a coalition of dissenters from the status quo, but a radical change in the social and economic structure of the oppressed country.

In this regard, Baran differs from many contemporary dependency theorists who pose multipolarity as an answer to the North-South inequalities and welcome the BRICS development as constituting an anti-imperialist stage. They believe that breaking the stranglehold of the dominant great power — the US — will somehow eliminate the logic of contemporary imperialism, that it will disable the “mechanism of impeccably ‘correct’ contractual relations” at the heart of “core” / “periphery” relations.

But this is not Baran’s thinking. He opts instead for an active engagement of the workers, peasants, and intellectuals on the periphery. His is a class approach. For Baran, working people are not dried leaves, blown this way and that by the powerful winds of great powers. Rather, they are the agents of their own liberation.

Baran draws out the potential of the post-colonial masses through his innovative concept of “surplus.”¹ Baran asks revolutionaries in the emerging countries to realize the potential surplus that they may access for development provided that they engage in a “reorganization of the production and distribution of social output” and accept “far reaching changes to the structure of society.” (p. 24). Baran emphasizes four available sources for the surplus:

One is society’s excess consumption (predominantly on the part of the upper income groups…), the second is the output lost to society through the existence of unproductive workers, the third is the output lost because of the irrational and wasteful organization of the existing productive apparatus, and the fourth is the output foregone owing to the existence of unemployment caused primarily by the anarchy of capitalist production and the deficiency of effective demand. (p. 24)

By recovering this surplus, Baran contends that the post-colonial world can begin “the steep ascent” — the escape from the legacy of colonialism and the stranglehold of capitalism. At the same time, Baran concedes that a resource-poor country, an economy violently distorted by a close neighbor — a country like Cuba — will need assistance from the socialist community, an assistance that has been less forthcoming since the demise of the Soviet Union.

The Multipolaristas and the BRICS advocates do not share Baran’s confidence in working people. They cannot conceive a revolutionary answer to the problem of development. They relegate socialism to the far, far-off future, and argue for a more humane capitalism. Their vision ends with establishing a new regime of “structural adjustments” that will blunt the economic power of the US to make way for a plurality of powers competing for global markets, but in a “friendly” way. This is the social-democratic vision taken to the global level. But this is not Baran’s vision.

Like their national counterparts, these global social democrats envision a world in which reforming capitalist social relations — taming the worst monopoly scoundrels — will result in the proverbial arc bending toward justice. BRICS, they believe, will give us a level playing field for the monopoly corporations to roam more fairly.

*****Is Baran’s 1957 (1962) recipe for development relevant to today’s world? Could the so-called global South escape the clutches of the imperialist system by applying the “insights” offered by The Political Economy of Growth?

A recent Oxfam report on inequality in Africa suggests that there is plenty of potential surplus available for building a developmental program based on a class-based approach of appropriation and surplus recovery:

● Africa’s four most affluent billionaires have $57.4 billion in wealth, which is greater than ~50% of the continent’s 1.5 billion people.

● While Africa had no billionaires in 2000, today, there are 23 with a combined wealth of $112.6 billion. The wealth of these 23 ultra-rich Africans has grown by 56% in the last 5 years.

● The richest 5% on the continent have accumulated almost $4 trillion in wealth, more than twice the wealth of the rest of the people in Africa (by comparison, the richest 10% of US households hold two-thirds of US wealth).

● Almost half of the world’s most unequal countries are in Africa.

● The bottom 50% of Africans own less than 1% of the wealth of the continent (by comparison, the bottom 50% of US households own 3% of US wealth).

Presumably, the report does not include the billionaires like Elon Musk, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Rodney Sacks, and many others who relocated and invested outside of Africa. Eight of the top foreign-born US billionaires are from Africa.

Clearly, class, and not state-to-state relations, is at the center of Africa’s human development problem. The “potential surplus” accumulated in the hands of so few would well serve a peoples’ development program that could reverse the concentration of wealth now starving the continent’s poor. Appropriated wealth could well serve an industrial drive and the rationalization of agriculture. More than enough wealth is available in Africa to implement Paul Baran’s twin insights that open this article.

The BRICS movement — a coalition of partners aligning to create a different international exchange network that would be less one-sided, less privileging wealthy nations– is not itself a bad thing. The proverbial level playing field — the fair and free marketplace — is a proper goal for capitalist participants competing internationally. But it is not a Left project. It moves the goal no closer in the struggle for justice for working people. It is not class-partisan, and thus ultimately will likely benefit those who gain from the proper functioning of capitalist economic relations in the various countries disadvantaged by existing relations. And we know from the Oxfam report who they are.

One can see the limitations of multipolarity from the recent Rio de Janeiro meeting of BRICS leaders. There is much talk of a “more equitable global order,” of state-to-state “cooperation,” of broader “participation,” even a pledge to fight disease and extreme poverty. The foreign ministers and heads of state dutifully denounce war and aggression. The current President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva “called BRICS a successor of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).” What he didn’t say was that NAM broke up when Cuba transcended toothless resolutions and declarations and actually defended Angola against apartheid South African aggression in a bloody war that brought the criminal regime to its knees. The BRICS response to the attack on Iran brings “toothlessness” back to mind.

Baran’s revolutionary path is not an easy one. Others have tried and failed. From Nkrumah and Lumumba to Thomas Sankara, revolutionaries in Africa have taken steps in this direction, only to be thwarted by powerful forces determined to snuff out even a beginning. That alone should tell the EuroAmerican left that it is the path worth following.

We should not pretend that reforming global market relations—any more than reforming national market relations– will secure justice for working people. That will come when the workers, peasants, and intellectuals of the global South decide that justice is impossible while “the means of production remain under the control of private interests which administer them with a view to their owners’ maximum profits.”

ENDNOTE:

The post Revisiting Paul Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth for Today first appeared on Dissident Voice.

1 While useful in this context, the concept of surplus is less successful as developed in Baran and Sweezy’s 1966 work, Monopoly Capital.

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

The Fraudulence of Economic Theory

Eric Zuesse — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 14:25:01 +0000

Ever since the economic crash in 2008, it has been clear that the foundation of standard or “neoclassical” economic theory — which extends the standard microeconomic theory into national economies (macroeconomics) — fails at the macroeconomic level, and therefore that in both the microeconomic and macroeconomic domains, economic theory, or the standard or “neoclassical” economic theory, is factually false. Nonetheless, the world’s economists did nothing to replace that theory — the standard theory of economics — and they continue on as before, as-if the disproof of a theory in economics does NOT mean that that false theory needs to be replaced. The profession of economics is, therefore, definitely NOT a scientific field; it is a field of philosophy instead.

On 2 November 2008, the New York Times Magazine headlined “Questions for James K. Galbraith: The Populist,” which was an “Interview by Deborah Solomon” of the prominent liberal economist and son of John Kenneth Galbraith. She asked him, “There are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and you’re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis” which had brought on the second Great Depression?

He answered: “Ten or twelve would be closer than two or three.”

She very appropriately followed up immediately with “What does this say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science?”

He didn’t answer by straight-out saying that economics isn’t any more of a science than physics was before Galileo, or than biology was before Darwin. He didn’t proceed to explain that the very idea of a Nobel Prize in Economics was based upon a lie which alleged that economics was the first field to become scientific within all of the “social sciences,” when, in fact, there weren’t yet any social sciences, none yet at all. But he came close to admitting these things, when he said: “It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.” His term “useless” was a euphemism for false. His term “blot” was a euphemism for “nullification.”

On 9 January 2009, economist Jeff Madrick headlined at The Daily Beast, “How the Entire Economics Profession Failed,” and he opened:

At the annual meeting of American Economists, most everyone refused to admit their failures to prepare or warn about the second worst crisis of the century.

I could find no shame in the halls of the San Francisco Hilton, the location at the annual meeting of American economists. Mainstream economists from major universities dominate the meetings, and some of them are the anointed cream of the crop, including former Clinton, Bush and even Reagan advisers.

There was no session on the schedule about how the vast majority of economists should deal with their failure to anticipate or even seriously warn about the possibility that the second worst economic crisis of the last hundred years was imminent.

I heard no calls to reform educational curricula because of a crisis so threatening and surprising that it undermines, at least if the academicians were honest, the key assumptions of the economic theory currently being taught. …

I found no one fundamentally changing his or her mind about the value of economics, economists, or their work.”

He observed a scandalous profession of quacks who are satisfied to remain quacks. The public possesses faith in them because it possesses faith in the “invisible hand” of God, and everyone is taught to believe in that from the crib. In no way is it science.

In a science, when facts prove that the theory is false, the theory gets replaced, it’s no longer taught. In a scholarly field, however, that’s not so — proven-false theory continues being taught. In economics, the proven-false theory continued being taught, and still continues today to be taught. This demonstrates that economics is still a religion or some other type of philosophy, not yet any sort of science.

Mankind is still coming out of the Dark Ages. The Bible is still being viewed as history, not as myth (which it is), not as some sort of religious or even political propaganda. It makes a difference — a huge difference: the difference between truth and falsehood.

The Dutch economist Dirk J. Bezemer, at Groningen University, posted on 16 June 2009 a soon-classic paper, “‘No One Saw This Coming’: Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models,” in which he surveyed the work of 12 economists who did see it (the economic collapse of 2008) coming; and he found there that they had all used accounting or “Flow of Funds” models, instead of the standard microeconomic theory. (In other words: they accounted for, instead of ignored, debts.) From 2005 through 2007, these accounting-based economists had published specific and accurate predictions of what would happen: Dean Baker, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Stephen (“Steve”) Keen, Jakob B. Madsen, Jens K. Sorensen, Kurt Richebaecher, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Robert Shiller.

He should have added several others. Paul Krugman, wrote a NYT column on 12 August 2005 headlined “Safe as Houses” and he said “Houses aren’t safe at all” and that they would likely decline in price. On 25 August 2006, he bannered “Housing Gets Ugly” and concluded “It’s hard to see how we can avoid a serious slowdown.” Bezemer should also have included Merrill Lynch’s Chief North American Economist, David A. Rosenberg, whose The Market Economist article “Rosie’s Housing Call August 2004” on 6 August 2004 already concluded, “The housing sector has entered a ‘bubble’ phase,” and who presented a series of graphs showing it. Bezemer should also have included Satyajit Das, about whom TheStreet had headlined on 21 September 21 2007, “The Credit Crisis Could Be Just Beginning.” He should certainly have included Ann Pettifor, whose 2003 The Real World Economic Outlook, and her masterpiece the 2006 The Coming First World Debt Crisis, predicted exactly what happened and why. Her next book, the 2009 The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers, was almost a masterpiece, but it failed to present any alternative to the existing microeconomic theory — as if microeconomic theory isn’t a necessary part of economic theory. Another great economist he should have mentioned was Charles Hugh Smith, who had been accurately predicting since at least 2005 the sequence of events that culminated in the 2008 collapse. And Bezemer should especially have listed the BIS’s chief economist, William White, regarding whom Germany’s Spiegel headlined on 8 July 2009, “Global Banking Economist Warned of Coming Crisis.” (It is about but doesn’t mention nor link to https://www.bis.org/publ/work147.pdf.) White had been at war against the policies of America’s Fed chief Alan Greenspan ever since 1998, and especially since 2003, but the world’s aristocrats muzzled White’s view and promoted Greenspan’s instead. (The economics profession have always been propagandists for the super-rich.) Bezemer should also have listed Charles R. Morris, who in 2007 told his publisher Peter Osnos that the crash would start in Summer 2008, which was basically correct. Moreover, James K. Galbraith had written for years saying that a demand-led depression would result, such as in his American Prospect “How the Economists Got It Wrong,” 30 November 2002; and “Bankers Versus Base,” 15 April 2004, and culminating finally in his 2008 The Predator State, which blamed the aristocracy in the strongest possible terms for the maelstrom to come. Bezemer should also have listed Barry Ritholtz, who, in his “Recession Predictor,” on 18 August 2005, noted the optimistic view of establishment economists and then said, “I disagree … due to Psychology of consumers.” He noted “consumer debt, not as a percentage of GDP, but relative to net asset wealth,” and also declining “median personal income,” as pointing toward a crash from this mounting debt-overload. Then, on 31 May 2006, he headlined “Recent Housing Data: Charts & Analysis,” and opened: “It has long been our view that Real Estate is the prime driver of this economy, and its eventual cooling will be a major crimp in GDP, durable goods, and consumer spending.” Bezemer should also have listed both Paul Kasriel and Asha Bangalore at Northern Trust. Kasriel headlined on 22 May 2007, “US Economy May Wake Up Without Consumers’ Prodding?” and said it wouldn’t happen – and consumers were too much in debt. Then on 8 August 2007, he bannered: “US Economic Growth in Domestic Final Demand,” and said that “the housing recession is … spreading to other parts of the economy.” On 25 May 2006, Bangalore headlined “Housing Market Is Cooling Down, No Doubts About It.” and that was one of two Asha Bangalore articles which were central to Ritholtz’s 31 May 2006 article showing that all of the main indicators pointed to a plunge in house-prices that had started in March 2005; so, by May 2006, it was already clear from the relevant data, that a huge economic crash was comning soon. Another whom Bezemer should have listed was L. Randall Wray, whose 2005 Levy Economics Institute article, “The Ownership Society: Social Security Is Only the Beginning” asserted that it was being published “at the peak of what appears to be a real estate bubble.” Bezemer should also have listed Paul B. Farrell, columnist at marketwatch.com, who saw practically all the correct signs, in his 26 June 2005 “Global Megabubble? You Decide. Real Estate Is Only Tip of Iceberg; or Is It?”; and his 17 July 2005 “Best Strategies to Beat the Megabubble: Real Estate Bubble Could Trigger Global Economic Meltdown”; and his 9 January 2006 “Meltdown in 2006? Cast Your Vote”; and 15 May 2006 “Party Time (Until Real Estate Collapses)”; and his 21 August 2006 “Tipping Point Pops Bubble, Triggers Bear: Ten Warnings the Economy, Markets Have Pushed into Danger Zone”; and his 30 July 2007 “You Pick: Which of 20 Tipping Points Ignites Long Bear Market?” Farrell’s commentaries also highlighted the same reform-recommendations that most of the others did, such as Baker, Keen, Pettifor, Galbraith, Ritholtz, and Wray; such as break up the mega-banks, and stiffen regulation of financial institutions. However, the vast majority of academically respected economists disagreed with all of this and were wildly wrong in their predictions, and in their analyses. The Nobel Committee should have withdrawn their previous awards in economics to still-practicing economists (except to Krugman who did win a Nobel) and re-assigned them to these 25 economists, who showed that they had really deserved it.

And there was another: economicpredictions.org tracked four economists who predicted correctly the 2008 crash: Dean Baker, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Med Jones, the latter of whom had actually the best overall record regarding the predictions that were tracked there.

And still others should also be on the list: for example, Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider headlined on 21 November 2012, “The Genius Who Invented Economics Blogging Reveals How He Got Everything Right And What’s Coming Next” and he interviewed Bill McBride, who had started his calculated riskblog in January 2005. So I looked in the archives there at December 2005, and noticed December 28th, “Looking Forward: 2006 Top Economic Stories.” He started there with four trends that he expected everyone to think of, and then listed another five that weren’t so easy, including “Housing Slowdown. In my opinion, the Housing Bubble was the top economic story of 2005, but I expect the slowdown to be a form of Chinese water torture. Sales for both existing and new homes will probably fall next year from the records set in 2005. And median prices will probably increase slightly, with declines in the more ‘heated markets.’” McBride also had predicted that the economic rebound would start in 2009, and he was now, in 2012, predicting a strong 2013. Probably Joe Weisenthal was right in calling McBride a “Genius.”

And also, Mike Whitney at InformationClearinghouse.info and other sites, headlined on 20 November 2006, “Housing Bubble Smack-Down,” and he nailed the credit-boom and Fed easy-money policy as the cause of the housing bubble and the source of an imminent crash.

Furthermore, Ian Welsh headlined on 28 November 2007, “Looking Forward At the Consequences of This Bubble Bursting,” and listed 10 features of the crash to come, of which 7 actually happened.

In addition, Gail Tverberg, an actuary, headlined on 9 January 2008 “Peak Oil and the Financial Markets: A Forecast for 2008,” and provided the most detailed of all the prescient descriptions of the collapse that would happen that year.

Furthermore, Gary Shilling’s January 2007 Insight newsletter listed “12 investment themes” which described perfectly what subsequently happened, starting with “The housing bubble has burst.”

And the individual investing blogger Jesse Colombo started noticing the housing bubble even as early as 6 September 2004, blogging at his stock-market-crash.net “The Housing Bubble” and documenting that it would happen (“Here is the evidence that we are in a massive housing bubble:”) and what the economic impact was going to be. Then on 7 February 2006 he headlined “The Coming Crash!” and said “Based on today’s overvalued housing prices, a 20 percent crash is certainly in the cards.”

Also: Stephanie Pomboy of MacroMavens issued an analysis and appropriate graphs on 7 December 2007, headlined “When Animals Attack” and predicting imminently a huge economic crash.

In alphabetical order, they are: Dean Baker, Asha Bangalore, Jesse Colombo, Satyajit Das, Paul B. Farrell, James K. Galbraith, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Med Jones, Paul Kasriel, Steve Keen, Paul Krugman, Jakob B. Madsen, Bill McBride, Charles R. Morris, Ann Pettifor, Stehanie Pomboy, Kurt Richebaeker, Barry Ritholtz, David A. Rosenberg, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, Robert Shiller, Gary Shilling, Charles Hugh Smith, Jens K. Sorensen, Gail Tverberg, Ian Welsh, William White, Mike Whitney, L. Randall Wray.

Thus, at least 33 economists were contenders as having been worth their salt as economic professionals. One can say that only 33 economists predicted the 2008 collapse, or that only 33 economists predicted accurately or reasonably accurately the collapse. However, some of those 33 were’t actually professional economists. So, some of the world’s 33 best economists aren’t even professional economists, as accepted in that rotten profession.

So, the few honest and open-eyed economists (these 33, at least) tried to warn the world. Did the economics profession honor them for their having foretold the 2008 collapse? Did President Barack Obama hire them, and fire the incompetents he had previously hired for his Council of Economic Advisers? Did the Nobel Committee acknowledge that it had given Nobel Economics Prizes to the wrong people, including people such as the conservative Milton Friedman whose works were instrumental in causing the 2008 crash? Also complicit in causing the 2008 crash was the multiple-award-winning liberal economist Lawrence Summers, who largely agreed with Friedman but was nonetheless called a liberal. Evidently, the world was too corrupt for any of these 33 to reach such heights of power or of authority. Like Galbraith had said at the close of his 2002 “How the Economists Got It Wrong“: “Being right doesn’t count for much in this club.” If anything, being right means being excluded from such posts. In an authentically scientific field, the performance of one’s predictions (their accuracy) is the chief (if not SOLE) determinant of one’s reputation and honor amongst the profession, but that’s actually not the way things yet are in any of the social “sciences,” including economics; they’re all just witch-doctory, not yet real science. The fraudulence of these fields is just ghastly. In fact, as Steve Keen scandalously noted in Chapter 7 of his 2001 Debunking Economics: “As this book shows, economics [theory] is replete with logical inconsistencies.” In any science, illogic is the surest sign of non-science, but it is common and accepted in the social ‘sciences’, including economics. The economics profession itself is garbage, a bad joke, instead of any science at all.

These 33 were actually only candidates for being scientific economists, but I have found the predictions of some of them to have been very wrong on some subsequent matters of economic performance. For example, the best-known of the 33, Paul Krugman, is a “military Keynesian” — a liberal neoconservative (and military Keynesianism is empirically VERY discredited: false worldwide, and false even in the country that champions it, the U.S.) — and he is unfavorable toward the poor, and favorable toward the rich; so, he is acceptable to the Establishment.) Perhaps a few of these 33 economists (perhaps half of whom aren’t even members of the economics profession) ARE scientific (in their underlying economic beliefs — their operating economic theory) if a scientific economics means that it’s based upon a scientific theory of economics — a theory that is derived not from any opinions but only from the relevant empirical data. Although virtually all of the 33 are basically some sort of Keynesian, even that (Keynes’s theory) isn’t a full-fledged theory of economics (it has many vagaries, and it has no microeconomics). The economics profession is still a field of philosophy, instead of a field of science.

The last chapter of my America’s Empire of Evil presents what I believe to be the first-ever scientific theory of economics, a theory that replaces all of microeconomic theory (including a micro that’s integrated with its macro) and is consistent with Keynes in macroeconomic theory; and all of which theory is derived and documented from only the relevant empirical economic data — NOT from anyone’s opinions. The economics profession think that replacing existing economic theory isn’t necessary after the crash of 2008, but I think it clearly IS necessary (because — as that chapter of my book shows — all of the relevant empirical economic data CONTRADICT the existing economic theory, ESPECIALLY the existing microeconomic theory).

The post The Fraudulence of Economic Theory first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

Tibetans protest at US-China women’s soccer match in St. Paul, Minnesota | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 21:09:40 +0000

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

Welcome to the Inquisition: Trump’s Christ Nationalist Brigades Aim to Gut Church-State Separation

Bill Berkowitz — Thu, 29 May 2025 18:55:07 +0000

The ghosts of Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the OG’s (Old Guard) of the religious right are dancing these days. Since his inauguration, Trump has rewarded his religious right allies with executive orders creating a “Religious Liberty Commission” and a “Task Force to Eliminate Anti-Christian Bias.”

“Together they will put the force of the federal government behind the conspiracy theories, false persecution claims, and reactionary policy proposals of the Christian nationalist movement, including its efforts to undermine separation of church and state,” Right Wing Watch’s Peter Montgomery recently reported.

On May 1, members of the religious liberty commission were announced, and nearly all are ultra-conservative Christian nationalists with a huge right-wing agenda. The commission’s chair is Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and its vice chair is Ben Carson.

Right Wing Watch profiled several of the commission’s members:

Paula White, serving again as Trump’s faith advisor in the White House, has used her position to elevate the influence of dominionist preachers and Christian nationalist activists. A preacher of the prosperity gospel, White has repeatedly denounced Trump’s opponents as demonic. When Trump announced the Religious Liberty Commission, White made the startling assertion, “Prayer is not a religious act, it’s a national necessity.”

Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who developed the Heritage Foundation’s “road map” for overturning marriage equality and was the face of Heritage’s anti-trans activism.

Franklin Graham, the more-political son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham, is a MAGA activist and fan of Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay policies who backed Trump in 2016 as the last chance for Christians to save America from godless secularists and the “very wicked” LGTBT agenda. After the 2020 election Graham promoted Trump’s stolen-election claims and blamed the Jan. 6 violence at the Capitol on “antifa.”

Eric Metaxas, a once somewhat reputable scholar who has devolved into a far-right conspiracy theorist and MAGA cultist, emceed a December 2020 “Stop the Steal” rally at which Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes threatened bloody civil war if Trump did not remain in power.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who helped lead U.S. Catholic bishops’ opposition to legal abortion and LGBTQ equality, was an original signer of the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto for Christian conservatives who declared that when it comes to opposition to abortion and marriage equality, “no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.”

Kelly Shackleford, president of First Liberty, who works to undermine church-state separation via the courts; Shackleford has endorsed a Christian nationalist effort to block conservative judges from joining the Supreme Court if they do not meet the faith and worldview standards of the religious right.

Allyson Ho, a lawyer and wife of right-wing Judge James Ho, has been affiliated with the anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ equality religious-right legal groups Alliance Defending Freedom and First Liberty Institute.

Other commission members include Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Word on Fire ministry; 2009 Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean Boller; TV personality Dr. Phil McGraw; and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik.

Montgomery noted that “Advisory board members are divided into three categories: religious leaders, legal experts, and lay leaders. The list is more religiously diverse than the commission itself; in addition to right-wing lawyers and Christian-right activists, it includes several additional Catholic bishops, Jewish rabbis, and Muslim activists.”

Notable new advisory board members:

Kristen Waggoner, president of the mammoth anti-LGBTQ legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which uses the courts to make “generational” wins like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, has been named as a possible Supreme Court Justice by the Center for Judicial Renewal, a Christian nationalist project of the American Family Association’s advocacy arm. The ADF is active around the world.

Ryan Tucker, senior counsel and director of the Center for Christian Ministries with Alliance Defending Freedom.

Jentezen Franklin, a MAGA pastor, told conservative Christians at a 2020 Evangelicals for Trump rally, “Speak now or forever hold your peace. You won’t have another chance. You won’t have freedom of religion. You won’t have freedom of speech.”

Gene Bailey, host of FlashPoint, a program that regularly promotes pro-Trump prophecy and propaganda on the air and at live events. Bailey has said the point of FlashPoint’s trainings is to help right-wing Christians “take over the world.” FlashPoint was until recently a program of Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel.

Anti-abortion activist Alveda King, a niece of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., once dismissed the late Coretta Scott King’s support for marriage equality by saying , ‘I’ve got his DNA. She doesn’t.”

Abigail Robertson, CBN podcast host and granddaughter of Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.

Donald Trump claiming that he’s the front man for “bringing religion back to our country,” is as if the late Jeffrey Epstein claimed that he was working to end sex trafficking.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation called Trump’s religious liberty commission “a dangerous initiative,” that “despite its branding, this commission is not about protecting religious freedom — it’s about advancing religious privilege and promoting a Christian nationalist agenda”.

The post Welcome to the Inquisition: Trump’s Christ Nationalist Brigades Aim to Gut Church-State Separation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

Obscene Wealth

Greg Godels — Sat, 24 May 2025 15:00:59 +0000

Gabriel Zucman is a French-born economist who teaches at California, Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics. Zucman’s academic specialization is in wealth inequality, using tax data to track the stratification in wealth in the US and the rest of the world. A student of famed inequality expert, Thomas Piketty, he is an important figure in the World Inequality Database.

His most recent findings expose a gross obscenity, a level of wealth inequality in the US that should shame every politician, every mainstream-media commentator, and every cultural influencer who fails to make recognition of this travesty central to his or her message.

Discussed in some detail in an article by Juliet Chung, appearing in the Thursday, April 24 Wall Street Journal, Zucman’s most recent findings draw little attention from the other corporate media.

Zucman claims that the wealth of 19 households in the US grew by one trillion dollars in 2024, more than the GDP of Switzerland. That top 0.00001% of households accounted in 2024 for 1.81% of all the wealth accumulated in the US– nearly 2% of all US wealth is held by those 19 households.

Other conclusions drawn from the WSJ article:

● Total US wealth in 2024 was $148 trillion.

● The share of total US wealth held by the 0.00001% of households was, by far, the greatest since 1913, when the US income tax system originated.

● JP Morgan Chase estimates that there were 2,000 billionaires in the US in 2024; 975 in 2021.

● The top 0.1% of households constitute approximately 133,000 households and each holds an average of $46.3 million in wealth, accumulating $3.4 million a year since 1990 (Steven Frazzari, Washington University, St. Louis).

● The next 0.9% of households– approximately 1.2 million households– were each worth $11.2 million and grew by $450,000 per year in the same period (Frazzari).

● The cumulative 1% of households account for 34.8% of total US wealth in 2023.

● In capitalist counterpart countries, the 1% account for 21.3% of the total wealth in the British Isles, 27.2% in France, and 27.6% in Germany (2023).

● The top 10% of US households hold 67% of all the wealth in the US.

● The top half of US households have secured 97% of all US wealth.

● CONSEQUENTLY, THE OTHER HALF OF US HOUSEHOLDS (~ 66 MILLION HOUSEHOLDS, ~166 MILLION CITIZENS) SHARED ONLY 3% OF ALL THE WEALTH ACCUMULATED IN THE US.

These data underscore the fact that the US is a radically unequal society, with wealth concentration increasing dramatically as one ascends the class ladder.

What conclusions can we draw from the Zucman/Wall Street Journal report?

First, it is important to distinguish wealth inequality from income inequality.

Income inequality is a snapshot of the remuneration that an individual or household might receive in a given period. For example, a sports figure or a celebrity might receive a huge compensation package for two or three years of success, but otherwise fall dramatically in income and end with modest wealth.

Wealth on the other hand, is inheritable and cumulative. In a capitalist society, it is possible to have income without accumulating wealth, but it is almost impossible to have wealth without effortlessly gaining income.

Among the employed, income is always contingent. Wealth, to the contrary, is owned and can only be alienated by legal action.

While income is empowering, accumulated wealth imbues its owner with both security and degrees of power and influence proportionate to its quantity.

Thus, wealth is a better measure of personal or household economic status than income.

For those academics and media pundits who prattle on about “our democracy,” it must be pointed out that over half of the US population is effectively economically disenfranchised from the political system. With so little accumulated wealth (3% of the total wealth), they cannot participate meaningfully in an electoral system driven by money. They lack the means to contend for office, as well as to affect the choice of candidates or the outcomes.

Even if the bottom half of households were to pool their resources, they could not match the financial assets readily available to the top 1% in order to dominate political power.

Cold War intellectuals constantly heralded the formal democracy– the rights to participate in electoral politics– enjoyed by citizens in the advanced capitalist countries. They assiduously avoided mentioning citizens’ actual means to participate in any meaningful way, influenced by the vast and telling inequalities in those means. Clearly, the bottom half of all US households have little means of engagement with politics, apart from casting an occasional vote for limited options, for which they have little say in determining.

Further, the next 40% of households have between them, in diminishing amounts as they approach the bottom half, just 30% of US wealth to express their political prerogatives. No doubt that provides the false sense of political empowerment that the two bourgeois parties prey upon.

The victory of form-over-substance in the legitimation of US social and political institutions is surely threatened by the reality of wealth inequality– a reality that empowers the wealthy over the rest.

The fact that the top 10% of US households have a grip on 67% of the wealth makes a mockery of “our democracy.”

Talk of “oligarchs” or “the 1%” — so popular with slippery politicians or internet naïfs — actually masks the rot behind our grossly unequal society. Neither “evil” nor “greedy” people can explain the travesty recorded by the Zucman data.

Instead, it is a system that produces and reproduces wealth inequality. While wars, economic crises, or the militant action of workers and their allies may temporarily slow or set back the march of wealth inequality under capitalism, the system continues to regenerate wealth inequality. That system is called “capitalism.”

As Paul Sweezy explained most clearly:

The essence of capitalism is the self-expansion of capital, which takes place through the production and capitalization of surplus value. Production of surplus value in turn is the function of the proletariat, i.e., the class of wage earners who own no means of production and can live only by the sale of their labor power. Since the proletariat produces for capital and not for the satisfaction of its own needs, it follows that capitalism, in Marx’s words, “establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with accumulation of capital.” The Transition to Socialism, lecture, 1971

Economic historians like Piketty and Zucman who carefully track the trajectory of capitalism demonstrate empirically, again and again, that capitalist socio-economic relations give rise to economic inequality.

While the distribution of wealth in advanced capitalist countries is not captured perfectly by the Marxist class distinctions, class-as-ownership-of-capital goes far to explain how wealth is distributed.

With two-thirds of all wealth concentrated in the top 10% of households and an estimated 89% of all capital-as-stocks held by that same 10%, it seems reasonable to conclude that the capitalist class resides within the top 10% of wealthy households.

It should be just as clear that the bottom 50%– with 3% of the wealth, and nearly all of that in personal real estate and other personal property– survives on income from some form of compensation; its members work for a living.

Thus, as one might anticipate from reading the 1848 Communist Manifesto, capitalist society today– 177 years later– remains substantially divided between those who create the wealth by working for a living and those who own the means of wealth creation and, therefore, gain most of their wealth from that ownership. Capital– whether it coalesces as factories, banks, or other enterprises– concentrates wealth at the top.

Between the bottom 50% and the top 10% of households is a contested field of largely income earners– workers– as well as professional, self-employed, and small business owners. While most are, strictly speaking, working class, many have illusions about their class status (“middle class”) or harbor the illusion that their class status will improve.

Some have been characterized as “aristocrats of labor” because of their relatively elevated possession of income or wealth among workers. Others are even better characterized– to follow Marx– as “petty-bourgeois”: small, insignificant capitalists.

From the classical texts through Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas to Soviet analyst S. N. Nadel, Marxism has yet to produce a robust and rigorous theory of the upper-middle strata, though their members often prove to be the pivotal factor in denying social change. Accordingly, it is the segment most intensely courted by the centrist political parties.

If we are to remove the stain of wealth inequality, it must be its sufferers– the working class– who assume that task. And that task will only be decisively accomplished with the replacement of capitalism with socialism.

The post Obscene Wealth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

How to Avoid Trade Wars – and World War Three

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 16:06:46 +0000

Not a day goes by without a new shock to Americans and our neighbors around the world from the Trump administration. On April 22, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) downgraded its forecasts for global growth in 2025, from 3.3% to 2.8%, and warned that no country will feel the pain more than the United States. Trump’s policies are expected to drag U.S. growth down from 2.7% to 1.8%.

It’s now clear to the whole world that China is the main target of Trump’s trade wars. The U.S. has slapped massive tariffs—up to 245%—on Chinese goods. China hit back with 125% tariffs of its own and refuses even to negotiate until U.S. tariffs are lifted.

Ever since President Obama announced a U.S. “pivot to Asia” in 2011, both U.S. political parties have seen China as the main global competitor, or even as a target for U.S. military force. China is now encircled by a staggering 100,000 U.S. military personnel in Japan, South Korea and Guam (plus 73,000 in Hawaii and 415,000 on the U.S. West coast) and enough nuclear and conventional weapons to completely destroy China, and the rest of us along with it.

To put the trade war between the U.S. and China in context, we need to take a step back and look at their relative economic strength and international trading relations with other countries. There are two ways to measure a country’s economy: nominal GDP (based only on currency exchange rates) and “purchasing power parity” (PPP), which adjusts for the real cost of goods and services. PPP is now the preferred method for economists at the IMF and OECD.

Measured by PPP, China overtook the U.S. as the largest economy in the world in 2016. Today, its economy is 33% larger than America’s—$40.7 trillion compared to $30.5 trillion.

And China isn’t alone. The U.S. is just 14.7% of the world economy, while China is 19.7%. The EU makes up another 14.1%, while India, Russia, Brazil, Japan, and the rest of the world account for the other 51.5%. The world is now multipolar, whether Washington likes it or not.

So when Malaysia’s trade minister Tengku Zafrul Aziz was asked whether he’d side with China or the U.S., his answer was clear: “We can’t choose—and we won’t.” Trump would like to adopt President Bush’s “You’re either with us or with the terrorists” posture, but that makes no sense when China and the U.S. together account for only 34% of the global economy.

China saw this coming. As a result of Trump’s trade war with China during his first term in office, it turned to new markets across Asia, Africa, and Latin America through its Belt and Road Initiative. Southeast Asia is now China’s biggest export market. It no longer depends on American soybeans—it grows more of its own and buys most of the rest from Brazil, cutting the U.S. share of that market by half.

Meanwhile, many Americans cling to the idea that military power makes up for shrinking economic clout. Yes, the U.S. outspends the next ten militaries combined—but it hasn’t won a major war since 1945. From Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, the U.S. has spent trillions, killed millions, and suffered humiliating defeats.

Today in Ukraine, Russia is grinding down U.S.-backed forces in a brutal war of attrition, producing more shells than the U.S. and its allies can at a fraction of our cost. The U.S.’s bloated, for-profit arms industry can’t keep up, and our trillion dollar military budget is crowding out new investments in education, healthcare and civilian infrastructure on which our economic future depends.

None of this should be a surprise. Historian Paul Kennedy saw it coming in his 1987 classic The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Every dominant empire, from Spain to Britain to Russia, eventually confronted relative decline as the tides of economic history moved on and it had to find a new place in a world it no longer dominated. Military overextension and overspending always accelerated the fall.

“It has been a common dilemma facing previous ‘number one’ countries that even as their relative economic strength is ebbing, the growing foreign challenges to their position have compelled them to allocate more and more of their resources into the military sector, which in turn squeezes out productive investment…,” Kennedy wrote.

He found that no society remains permanently ahead of all others, but that the loss of empire is not the end of the road for former great powers, who can often find new, prosperous positions in a world they no longer dominate. Even the total destruction suffered by Germany and Japan in the Second World War, which ended their imperial ambitions, was also a new beginning, as they turned their considerable skills and resources from weapons development to peaceful civilian production, and soon produced the best cars and consumer electronics in the world.

Paul Kennedy reminded Americans that the decline in U.S. leadership “is relative not absolute, and is therefore perfectly natural; and that the only serious threat to the real interests of the United States can come from a failure to adjust sensibly to the newer world order…”

And that is exactly how our leaders have failed us. Instead of judiciously adapting to America’s relative decline and carving out a new place for the United States in the emerging multipolar world, they doubled down—on wars, on threats, on the fantasy of endless dominance. Under the influence of the neocons, Democrats and Republicans alike have marched America into one disaster after another, in a vain effort to defy the economic tides by which all great powers rise and fall.

Since 1987, against all the historical evidence, seven U.S. presidents, Democrats and Republicans, have blindly subscribed to the simplistic notion peddled by the neocons that the United States can halt or reverse the tides of economic history by the threat and use of military force.

Trump and his team are no exception. They know the old policies have failed. They know radically different policies are needed. Yet they keep playing from the same broken record—economic coercion, threats, wars, proxy wars, and now genocide—violating international law and exhausting the goodwill of our friends and neighbors around the world.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. It took the two most deadly and destructive wars in human history to put an end to the British Empire and the age of European colonialism.

In a nuclear-armed world, another great-power war wouldn’t just be catastrophic—it would very likely be final. If the U.S. keeps trying to bully its way back to the top, we could all lose everything.

The future instead demands a peaceful transition to international cooperation in a multipolar world. This is not a question of politics, right or left, or of being pro- or anti-American. It’s about whether humanity has any future at all.

The post How to Avoid Trade Wars – and World War Three first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

‘The Great Educator, Sadly, Is Going to Be These Viruses’: CounterSpin interview with Paul Offit on RFK Jr. and measles

Janine Jackson — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:57:41 +0000

Janine Jackson interviewed the Vaccine Education Center’s Paul Offit about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and measles for the April 4, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250404Offit.mp3

AP (2/26/25)

Janine Jackson: Trump-appointed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is colorful, which is a problem when someone is a public hazard. Because now that Kennedy is in a position of power, we need journalists to move past anecdote to ideas—ideas that are informing actions that shape not just his reputation, but all of our lives.

Our guest suggests we could begin with a core false notion that lies in back of much of Kennedy’s program.

Paul Offit is director of the Vaccine Education Center, and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He joins us now by phone from Philly. Welcome to CounterSpin, Paul Offit.

Paul Offit: Thank you.

JJ: The context for our conversation is the first measles death in the US in a decade, in Texas, where we understand they have reported, and this news is fresh, some 400 cases of measles, just between January and March, while the national number for 2024 was 285. This is a tragedy, and a tragically predictable one, due to surges of misinformation around vaccines, around disease and, frankly, around science that have been at work for years, but are turning some kind of corner with the elevation of RFK Jr.

Beyond the Noise (2/11/25)

You identified a keystone belief in Kennedy’s book on Fauci that explains a lot. I would like to ask you to give us some history on that notion, where it falls in terms of the advance of science, and what the implications of such a belief can be.

PO: Sure. So in the mid-1800s, people weren’t really sure about what caused diseases. There were two camps. On the one hand, there were the miasma theory believers. So miasma is just a sort of general notion that there are environmental toxins, initially that were released from garbage rotting on the streets, that caused this bad air, or miasma— kind of a poison, toxin. And so therefore diseases weren’t contagious. You either were exposed to these toxins or you weren’t.

And then, on the other hand, people like Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur were the germ theory believers, that believed that specific germs—as we now know, viruses and bacteria—can cause specific diseases, and that the prevention or treatment of those germs would save your life.

Washington Post (4/7/25)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not believe in the germ theory. I know this sounds fantastic, but if you read his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, on pages 285 to 288, you will see that he does not believe in the germ theory, and everything he says and does now, supports that. His modern-day miasmas are things like vaccines, glyphosate—pesticides—food additives, preservatives: Those are his modern-day miasmas.

So he is a virulent anti-vaccine activist. He thinks that vaccines are poisoning our children. He thinks no vaccine is beneficial. And so everything he says and does comports with that, even with this outbreak now in Texas, it’s spread to 20 states in jurisdictions, he doesn’t really promote the vaccine. Rather, he promotes vitamin A, because he believes that if you’re in a good nutritional state that you will not suffer serious disease. And he still says that, even though that first child death in 20 years, that occurred in West Texas, was in a perfectly healthy child.

JJ: And again, one element of the fallout of this is that he is not just saying, don’t get vaccinated, but saying cod liver oil and vitamin A. And so Texas Public Radio, for one, is reporting kids are now showing up to hospitals with toxic vitamin A levels. So his answer is instead of a vaccine… the response is sending kids to the hospital.

PO: Right. And if you’re a parent, you can see what the seduction is, because here you’re given a choice. He presents it in many ways as a binary choice. You can get a vaccine, which means you’ll be injected, or you’ll inject your child, with three weakened live viruses, or you can take a vitamin. Not surprisingly, people take vitamins, and they take more vitamins and more vitamins, as he sends just shipments of cod liver oil into the area. And so now hospitals are seeing children who have blurred vision, dizziness and liver damage caused by too much vitamin A.

CBS (3/11/25)

JJ: And also, CBS News is having to get hospital officials to contradict just straight-up false comments. The fallout is everywhere. Kennedy is saying, “Oh, the majority of the hospitalized cases in Texas were for quarantine purposes.” And so this person has to say, “Actually, no, no, we’re not hospitalizing people for quarantine. It’s because they need treatment.”

PO: The last place we should quarantine someone, by the way, with measles, is in the hospital. You don’t want measles in the hospital. It’s a highly contagious disease, the most contagious infectious disease.

Also, just one other point is when we say, for example, that the CDC currently states that there are 483 cases in 20 states or jurisdictions, that’s confirmed cases, meaning confirmed by doing antibody testing, or confirmed by PCR analysis, that is the tip of a much bigger iceberg. People who are looking at this, and looking at the doubling time of this particular outbreak throughout the United States, estimate that it’s probably at least 2,000 cases, and maybe more. And the fear is that, given the current doubling times, given that we’re going to be dealing with this virus for at least six more weeks, the fear is that there’ll be another child death or more.

APA (7/1/24)

JJ: You cited a piece in the book where Kennedy says:

Fauci says that vaccines have already saved millions and millions of lives. Most Americans accept the claim as dogma. It will therefore come as a surprise to learn that it is simply untrue.

I think the idea of resisting “dogma” is very appealing to people, because we have seen propaganda efforts, we have seen lies that are en masse, in a way. But I also think that so many folks have, for so long, trafficked in the forms of rational argument without the content, without agreed upon standards of proof, that people are just less able to recognize fallacies, to see when something is anecdotal—not untrue, but anecdotal—and that this impedes our understanding of what public health even is. Misinformation is at the center of this in so many ways.

PO: That’s a really good point. I think we haven’t done a very good job of explaining how science works. I mean, you learn as you go. The Covid pandemic is a perfect example. We were building the plane while it was in the air. There were definitely things that we said and did that were not right over time, but you learn as you go.

And that’s the way science works. I mean, the beauty of science is it’s always self-correcting. It’s introspective, and you’re willing to throw a textbook over your shoulder without a backward glance as you learn new things.

I was a resident training in pediatrics in the late 1970s, the Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. I was taught things that were wrong. That’s OK. That didn’t mean the people, the senior pediatricians who taught me, were idiots. It just meant that we got more information over time.

And I think people, at some level, don’t accept that. When you say something that ends up being wrong, “See? You can’t trust them.” And so they throw the whole thing out, to their detriment.

New York Times (3/25/25)

JJ: I mean, yes, it points to a kind of preexisting, if not failure, weakness in media and public conversation about science that makes us poorly set up to engage this kind of thing. But I also think there’s something going on with, you know, Marion Nestle telling the New York Times that she was so excited when Trump used the words “industrial food complex.” She said, “RFK sounds just like me.”

RFK has benefited from a position of a little guy fighting Big Corporate Food, fighting Big Pharma. And I think a lot of folks identify with that. There are things, though, that you’ve talked about that complicate that depiction of him as a little guy going up against well-moneyed interests.

PO: Just the term “Big Pharma” is pejorative. Have pharmaceutical companies acted aggressively or illegally or unethically? Of course they have. I think the opioid epidemic is a perfect example of that. But that doesn’t mean that everything they do is wrong.

For example, I would argue that if pharmaceutical companies were interested in lying about a vaccine, and I’m on the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee, if they submitted data for licensure or authorization of a vaccine where they lied or misrepresented data or omitted data, they’re going to be found out, because once vaccines are out there, there’s things like the Vaccine Safety Datalink, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. There is no hiding, because we give vaccines to healthy children, and so we hold them to a high standard of safety. So there is no hiding.

And I want RFK Jr. to point to one example where “Big Pharma” has lied to us about a vaccine that’s caused us to suffer harm. Where is that example? But it’s so easy to make that case.

JJ: When it’s presented in this binary way, as though you can be for corporate medicine or corporate food, or you can be against it, and it sort of absents the idea of, “Well, let’s parse what is being said. Let’s talk about these ideas. Let’s talk about standards of proof,” news media that are more interested to present things as “controversial” shut down that more nuanced conversation.

NBC (3/20/25)

PO: Right. I think probably the most depressing email that I got over the past few weeks was from a nurse in Canada, who said that she was seeing parents of a child who was one month old, and she was giving those parents anticipatory guidance about what vaccines that child would get now a month in, it was a two-month-old. And the father said, and I quote, “I’m not anti-vaccine, but I want to wait to see which vaccines RFK Jr. recommends before I get any of them.”

Which tells you how bad this has gotten. I mean that here they want to trust, basically, a personal injury lawyer to determine which vaccines we should get, as compared to the people who sit around the table at the advisory committees at the FDA or CDC.

JJ: NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny did have a thoughtful piece about employment by anti-vaccine influencers of that horrific death of the 6-year-old in Texas, and how it’s being used to say, “No, we were actually right, because the other children didn’t die.” But there was an immunologist cited in the story who said, “It’s just harder to tell our story, because the story of ‘child does not get disease’ just doesn’t have the media pickup.”

And so it is difficult for journalists to tell a different story about public health when they are so focused on individual cases and that sort of thing. And so there is a problem there in trying to get reporters to tell public health from a different perspective, and make that as compelling as it should be.

Paul Offit: “We’ve eliminated the memory of measles. I think people don’t remember how sick that virus can make you.”

PO: No, you’re right. I think when vaccines work, what happens? Nothing.

But I’m a child of the 1950s. I had measles, and at the time I had measles, there were roughly 48,000 hospitalizations from measles, from severe pneumonia or dehydration or encephalitis, which is infection of the brain. And of those children who got encephalitis, about a quarter would end up blind or deaf, and there were about 500 deaths a year from measles, mostly in healthy children.

But again, not only have we largely eliminated measles from this country, which we did completely, really, by the year 2000, and it’s come back to some extent, because a critical percentage of parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children. But we’ve eliminated the memory of measles. I think people don’t remember how sick that virus can make you. Unfortunately, I think they’re learning now.

JJ: I’ll just ask you, finally, there’s a reason you call your Substack Beyond the Noise. What’s the noise, and what do you hope is beyond it?

PO: The noise is just this torrent of misinformation and disinformation on the internet. I mean, most people get their information from social media, and it’s just like trying to fight against the fire hose of information. And all you can do is the best you can do.

But I think in the end, I think the great educator, sadly, is going to be these viruses or these bacteria, which, if we continue along the path that we’re doing, which is not trusting public health and not trusting that vaccines are safe and effective, and believing a lot of the misinformation online, we’re just going to see more and more of these outbreaks, especially with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of HHS.

MedPage Today (3/14/25)

Look at what’s happened in West Texas. You had this massive outbreak in West Texas. So he then goes on national television and says things like: The measles vaccine kills people every year. The measles vaccine causes blindness and deafness. The measles vaccine causes the same symptoms as measles. Natural measles can protect you against cancer. All of that is wrong.

But the mother of this 6-year-old girl, that perfectly healthy 6-year-old girl who died, said one of the reasons that she didn’t vaccinate was that she thought that the natural infection would protect against cancer, which is something RFK Jr. said that was wrong. So basically, misinformation kills, and I think that until we understand where the best information is, we’re going to continue to suffer this.

JJ: We’ll end it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Paul Offit, who’s director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His Substack is called Beyond the Noise. Thank you so much, Paul Offit, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PO: Thank you.

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

Historian and comic author and editor Paul Buhle on finding and committing to your life’s work

Sam Kusek — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 07:00:00 +0000

What drew you to graphic novels? Do you remember a book or a title that really stuck with you early on?

This goes back a long time, back to childhood and comics. My introduction to the best of comics came with the paperback reprints of MAD Comics into four paperback volumes, 35 cents each, circa 1955. I was 11 years old at the time.

Those reprinted the contents very badly; they reprinted from these nice large color pages to little black and white pages. Nevertheless, it was the most important visual satire magazine of the 20th century, created and edited and substantially drawn by Harvey Kurtzman, the singular most important inventor of a kind of satire in which the genre itself is satirized and is a depth of social themes, with a courage that would allow Kurtzman and his collaborators to attack Joseph McCarthy, the rise of a heartless consumerism, and a general state of US postwar, prosperous society that was empty inside.

MAD Comics ends in 1955 because the coming of repression of comics, like the repression of communist socialists and others on the left. This puts things in a new direction, and MAD Comics became the much milder MAD magazine, which persisted and had great success, but Harvey Kurtzman left MAD Comics and tried several other satirical magazines. All were commercial failures, all three. He ended up as a teacher at the school for Visual Arts in New York, and being a great influence on the next generations of comic artists, including Art Spiegelman.

He was my childhood hero, along with Willie Mays, probably until Martin Luther King. Satire also had a strong effect on me. Lenny Bruce would be another example. These diferent people provide me a way to think about things until the early to middle ’60s, when I become involved in social movements from the Civil Rights campaign to the campus and anti-war movement. I got involved in several of the chapters of Students for a Democratic Society. And by 1968, I’m publishing a magazine for the chapters of Students for a Democratic Society called Radical America.

In 1969, I published a comic book issue of this magazine called Radical America Komiks. Explaining how this happened would be too complicated, but we’re just at the beginning of the invention of a new kind of comic. Hereafter, artists themselves will be in charge. They’re making hardly any money, but they have total control to do anything they want, which includes sex, violence, a lot of anti-war, anti-draft kinds of material.

The biggest figure, even greater than Robert Crumb, is Gilbert Shelton. Shelton is the editor of Radical America Komiks, and I’m the publisher of it, as an issue in my magazine. So I’m already, in many ways, involved in comics. I’m not drawing, I’m not an artist, I’m not writing scripts, at least not yet. But I’m deeply interested in it, so I publish a second magazine, like the first, losing money on every issue, called Cultural Correspondence. These two magazines are digitized, and you can find them on the web.

In this magazine, Cultural Correspondence, I interview various artists, such as Robert Crumb, Justin Green, Sharon Rudahl, and a handful of others who were struggling to hold on to the momentum of underground comics after 1970, when the head shop campus scene closes down, the counterculture is dying, and there isn’t a market for those underground comics. Now I have to fast-forward…

Now I’m writing for places like the Village Voice and The Nation, sometimes reviewing the newer forms of comics, which includes Art Spiegelman, but also includes Ben Katchor and others on the scene in ’80s and ’90s.

Then, suddenly it’s 2005, I’m more or less 60 years old, and someone comes to me and says, “Well, what about a graphic novel about the centenary of the Industrial Workers of the World? The most rambunctious, proletarian, fascinating labor organization in US history and North American history.”

There’s something called the One Big Union, which is more or less the same as the IWW. It’s very syndicalistic, which is to say locally controlled. It doesn’t believe in vanguard parties or political parties. It organizes the poorest workers, the migratory workers, the lumber workers, those at the bottom of the hierarchy. It’s crushed by the US government during World War I. It basically survives only as a memory by the 1920s and 1930s, although it still has an office in Chicago for many decades after that. And it’s the songs that they wrote, the poems that they wrote, these things become part of the common lore of the radical edge of the labor movement from then on.

So I come into contact with a group called World War III Illustrators, who make an annual comic anthology. It’s still being published every year from New York. I meet these people, I embrace them, they embrace me, and we bring out this book, Wobblies, in 2005. It’s big, it’s delightful, it’s still in print, and the art is fabulous and great, and conveys this message of what the Wobblies were, why they’re interested, and why people should think about them today, including a mini revival, just about that time encouraged by the comic.

Well, this is a great thing. I finally came back to comics that had meant a lot to me when I was 11 years old, and now I could understand something that I could do with them. As a familiar magazine editor, I enjoyed being an editor and bringing art as well as prose onto pages and reaching as many readers as I possibly could. And spinning off from that, what is now 20, I believe, maybe one or two more, graphic novels from a variety of publishers.

It would be too much to go into great depth about this, but among the most delightful, admired, and best-selling would have to be a biography of Rosa Luxemburg, a biography of Che Guevara, an adaptation of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, and most recently, a few months ago, an adaptation of Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’s famous book, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, and a whole succession of other comics and other themes.

And in recent years, my connection with [the publisher] Between the Lines, our subject.

The people [at Between the Lines Books] have been really wonderful in working with me. The books that they bring out are just fabulous. I’ve never been happier with a publisher, even knowing it’s not a big rich company and there are not going to be big advances to artists and so forth. But getting together with them, I was able to create, with an artist and writer, a book called The Bund, which is really the story of the Jewish secular left and its very big role in Jewish history, its role in a Yiddishkeit or Yiddishness, which is a language and a way of seeing Jewish life that is not nationalistic, but is egalitarian, in the same way, deeply Jewish.

This book, The Bund, has had a lot of great readers and even an encouragement in helping people who are on the Left, happy to be Jewish, but don’t view their Jewishness as centered in the state of Israel. So it’s both a beautiful book and also it’s a way of seeing a very important piece of history with a lot of meaning today.

So I want to skip onto the current book, and then I’ll go back to some other reflections about comics, and the world of comic art, and so forth.

The idea of the book Partisans came from the deep reality that fascist movements, fascist governments are all around us today, and very much, in many ways, a threat in the US, even if the fascism with the giant letter F doesn’t seem to be so much present. What does that mean? And more important to me, since I’m only taking a little section of that giant question, how was fascism fought in a past era? A lot of answers to this, but in one instance, people who were very, very brave and well organized created an anti-fascist movement called the Partisans during World War II. It basically was behind the lines, behind the Germans and Italians. It used to be thought it was a bunch of armed men. And it was a bunch of armed men, incredibly courageous against huge odds.

But it was also, as more recent scholars have told us, about communities of men and women and children—often a lot of women and children because the men were off in the armies. They organized themselves together to provide a wide variety of ways to resist the Germans in particular, but resist the allies of the Germans in all of the incredibly horrible things they were doing in occupied countries in part of Western Europe, mostly Central and Eastern Europe. So we have Russia, Hungary, Greece, Italy, France, and several others, all involved in this struggle.

After the Second World War, there was a great desire in the US and Western Europe to discredit the Partisans. Because after all, the armies won the war, who cares about citizens and so forth? The other reason to discredit them was that the Partisans were frequently led by communists, and parts of Eastern Europe emphatically by Jewish communists. This is all part of a memory that many in power would wish to entirely suppress and have everybody else forget about.

But among the things that appear in this book, and a previous comic that I edited called ¡Brigadistas! about the Spanish Civil War, is that volunteers, thousands and thousands of volunteers from around Europe and elsewhere, went into Spain to fight Franco. They were ill-equipped. They were arguably betrayed by Stalin’s orders. But nevertheless, they fought hard, they learned how to fight, and sometimes acquired the weapons to fight.

When the possibility came for those survivors came to return to their own countries and be part of the Partisans, they were the ones with the advanced skills who could take on the fascist invaders or the fascist native rulers and learn how to teach, how organize people against them. The story of the Partisans, the anti-fascist movement in Italy, is fabulous. There’s so much to it. But that movement in France is well known. The story of the Partisans in other countries is not so well known, and is tremendously important to understand today.

And, now we go to the art. There’s almost more than a half dozen artists. Most of them are writing their own scripts. I gather them from among my pals in the past to work with me. I have a collaborating co-editor, Raymond Tyler, who’s been working with me for two or three years now and is taking over what I’ve been trying to do now that I’ve reached the age of 80. We work with these artists, not dictating what they should do, but encouraging them and helping them where we could. We worked with the publishers at Between the Lines to make this finally come into existence. And, that’s the main story I need to tell today. Because after all, Partisans is the book that I hope folks reading this will take an interest in and help out with the Kickstarter campaign.

In the comic space, the role of an editor is often overlooked—people may feel like they don’t need one, especially in creator-owned spaces where folks may have a very clear vision of what they think they need. It’s great to hear you’ve being able to help people shape their own stories and get untold stories out into the world. Tying it back to the beginning with another great editor, Harvey Kurtzman… Did you ever have the opportunity to meet him?

I had a wonderful experience in 1969, shortly after the publication of Radical America Komiks. I had a new friend named Denis Kitchen, who would go on to be publisher of the largest number of underground comics in the mid-1970s. He’d been in touch with Kurtzman. He’d invited Kurtzman to Milwaukee to speak at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. So he gave me an address. I sent a copy of Radical America Komiks to Kurtzman. He was always interested in new things. He published Gilbert Shelton, he published Robert Crumb, and others. He wrote me an enthusiastic letter and we corresponded a little bit.

He was, at the time, to make a living, to get health benefits, scripting a Playboy strip called Little Annie Fanny. And this was the middle of the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement. So I wrote to him and said, “You were my childhood idol. How can you possibly be engaged with Little Annie Fanny in Playboy magazine?” And he wrote me back and said, ‘I desperately need the money. That’s the story on Little Annie Fanny.’” I thought, “Good. This guy is not only sincere, but he’s willing to explain it.” And in fact, Little Annie Fanny was heavily edited, mis-edited by the editor of Playboy, and he resented being under the guy’s thumb, but could do nothing about it.

I maintained a little bit of contact with Harvey Kurtzman. But Denis Kitchen, who was his literary executor, invited me somewhere around 2007, 2008 to write a biography of Harvey Kurtzman. I should go back and say, for one reason or another, in the 1980s, I’d begun to write biographies of left-wing people I admired, from my real savant Trinidadian board guy named CLR James, famous for writing The Black Jacobins to William Appleman Williams, the great historian of the American Empire, to Abraham Lincoln Polanski, the greatest of the noir film directors, who was blacklisted in Hollywood and made a comeback, but was treated most badly in the Cold War.

So I was familiar enough with writing biographies. I liked the process of writing biographies, that with Denis Kitchen, we produced The Art of Harvey Kurtzman, which is as much art as text. Another biography of Harvey Kurtzman, all prose, appeared a year or two later, is a very fine book. But The Art of Harvey Kurtzman is the very first biography of Kurtzman to appear. And I was really happy to do it. By the time we did it, Harvey had died. But it’s emphatically a tribute to one of the great figures of visual satire. People say he inspired Saturday Night Live. And I think Lorne Michaels himself said that. So that the stamp of this kind of humor with a socially significant element remains something which has been very important.

Let me talk a little bit about comic art at large. The underground comics are succeeded by alternative comics, which have fewer readers in the ’80s and ’90s, but various artists find various ways to reach an audience, often through syndicated newspapers. In one way or the other, Ben Katchor is a great example, but there are other examples just as good.

Somewhere around 1995, commercial publishers become sufficiently interested in comic art as a commercial enterprise, as a profit-making enterprise, to begin to publish books, publish what were never before, but would now be called graphic novels. There’s no doubt whatsoever that Art Spiegelman and the comic book Maus played a crucial role in this. It legitimated comic art, and he got a Pulitzer, so that others could come in behind.

A very important company, Fantagraphics, which had been urging comic art upon people for 20 years with book publishing and a journal, they had an opening to begin republishing great comic art from all periods, but also new comic art in substantial amounts. And they continue today to be a remarkable publisher of comics as daring as Joe Sacco’s latest comic about Gaza, called War on Gaza.

Now, there are a thousand other things that could be said about graphic novels, but one is that comics took a boom upward, for good or ill, when the Comicons held annually in San Diego began to include film producers, which is to say films based upon superheroes became rather suddenly gigantic, enormous. There had been Superman films before, some of them very good, but now there was a giant new enterprise of making millions and billions of dollars.

So suddenly, something about comics was appearing on the financial pages of the Toronto dailies and the New York Times. This was something new and it made the idea of graphic novels very popular. The second thing it develops is simply the web, that people can write, draw digital comics and publish, in that new sense, digital comics without any significant expense. And even if it’s difficult to reach readers to read them, at least they’ve been able to express themselves in experimental ways and, as we say, become artists in their own lives.

The other thing that happens is the globalization of this phenomenon. I reviewed a few months ago a comic from Prague, I’m going to fail to name the malady that this young woman had, but she lost all of her hair on her head and had to face the question, “Shall I buy an expensive wig? Shall I have an operation which would be of dubious value? Or shall I adapt myself a real life story of the artist herself to not having hair on her head?” And eventually, by becoming a comic artist and joining with other women, there’s an international group called Ladies Do Comics, where they encourage each other. So she publishes this comic in Prague, and a local friend of mine of Providence does a translation from the Czech–it’s published.

Is it usually successful? Is it somewhat successful? Who knows. But it’s a vital example of the way in which the genre has provided young people, I have to say, especially but by no means only young women, with a way to explain themselves to themselves, of dealing with real problems they had, physical, psychological, or whatever, and also developing their own art form. I think of these books that come across my desk and deal with personal stories as opposed to history, more of them are by women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, and they have put a very definite stamp on the 21st century nature of comic art. It’s a very remarkable development.

Are there any subjects or stories that you’re still hoping to explore in the graphic novel format?

Yes. Since the late 1960s, I’ve been pals with and sometimes publishing sections of my magazines by people from the Surrealism movement. It’s a movement that moved fast from 1924 onward, until the 1930s, disappeared sort of after the Second World War, and then has made sporadic reappearances. With the 100th anniversary exhibits in 2024, it suddenly reappeared in dozens of countries and attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors.

What does it mean beyond these particular paintings? What was the movement? Why was it important? Why is it important to think about it today? I’m not orthodox anything, any more than I’m an orthodox Marxist, but I’m encouraging the idea of a comic about the history of Surrealism. I’ve been trying to make it happen.

I’m also trying to develop a graphic novel about a figure that I mentioned, CLR James. Really the greatest Pan-African intellectual of the 20th century, and someone for whom I wrote a biography.

I haven’t been able to do much successfully in ecology, and the many threats of global warming, and the disappearance of creatures of all kinds. I’d like to do that. I never had the scientific acumen to have a sense of self-confidence about it, but I urgently hope other people are doing that.

So, those, along with general themes of social movements, how they struggle, how they succeed, why they don’t succeed. And individuals within those social movements, how we can understand those people.

I’ve been an American radical since I joined the Civil Rights Movement in central Illinois in 1960 and suddenly realized there’s something deeply wrong with society. I’m continuing on. That’s the main thing I could say.

I’m a scholar, and I’m also a reviewer of comics, something I do widely. People will find me easily on Comics Grinder, people will often find me in Rain Taxi, published in Minneapolis, in Counterpunch, published in California, and a number of other places, mostly online.

I’ll continue on reviewing new comics as long as I’m able to do that and commenting on their social content, their artistic content, and try to encourage young artists. I also want to make sure people know about older phenomena in the history of comic art, which is now being studied as a significant field of scholarship, better than they have before.

I liked it when all the scholars of comics were amateurs like myself, and never took a course in comics history. Now there are courses and people are studying it, as students do, and they’re learning a lot to say about the subject, and what its value is as an art form, as it has now been accepted.

Speaking of the younger generation of creators, what advice would you give someone who’s looking to tell their story?

I think it depends upon one’s aspirations. If your aspiration as an artist is simply to make [the work] available to people, then you can certainly find a way to do it on the web and you can find a way to reach people.

The second thing young people do is go to classes on comic art. These are being held around the country. For instance, the School for Visual Arts is one and there’s Cartoon Academy in Two Rivers Junction in Vermont, which is another. And there are many other places. For instance, many artists make a living out of providing classes locally. So, if someone looks around very hard, they might be able to find these classes, and they might even be free, or at a low cost at a local community college. That seems to be a really good thing to do: not only to develop the art as a comic art form, but just as important, in my experience, is to develop the narrative.

It’s often said that weak art can carry a strong narrative, but a weak narrative can’t be carried very far without some art. So the idea—as in every form of writing imaginable—is that the story is absolutely crucial. Developing the story is absolutely crucial. I suppose, then, it’s really good to find somebody that you can work with.

If we go a further step and talk about getting published, this is something very different and it’s problematic to find an entry point into the world of actually being published. It doesn’t require being in New York, but a lot of that stuff seems to take place in New York. It doesn’t require having an agent. I never had an agent. But there are many trade publishers that publish a handful of comics, and if a request to an editor doesn’t come from an agent, they don’t answer. That’s my experience. So it can be very tough.

The places that are available to publish, especially to publish and offer advances on publication as opposed to royalties after publication, are fairly few and the road upward is difficult. But hey, this is the life of the artist from time immemorial. The artist in the poor living situation, except those poor living situations cost a lot more than they used to, so it’s a double or triple story.

I’m also thinking back on artists that I’ve worked with, these very often very talented politically committed artists, who are working on weekends because they have a job during the week. Or somebody else in the household has a job, whether it’s a husband, wife, whatever. Finding the time and encouragement and everything else that’s required for the personal sacrifice and discipline of producing comic art is nothing to sniff at… It’s something to take seriously and regard as a commitment, or becoming successful, or even satisfying yourself, will continue to be problematic.

Paul Buhle Recommends:

The upcoming demonstrations against the Trump regime, and the leading role of my hero, Bernie Sanders, in them, ardently supported by my organization, the Democratic Socialists of America.

The global solidarity movement in support of Palestinian rights and against Israel brutality in Gaza.

The ongoing courage of students, heirs to my 1960s days in Students for a Democratic Society, in the face of extreme repression, and the courage of teachers supporting them.

The legacy of Leftwing parties and radical movements going back to the 19th century, anarchist, socialist, communist, anti-war, feminist, black liberation, gay and lesbian, a legacy that continues.

My friends at Between the Lines for bringing out an important book at the moment when it is most needed.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sam Kusek.

Paul Offit on RFK Jr. and Measles, Jessica González on Trump’s FCC

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 15:50:54 +0000

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250404.mp3

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

New York Times (11/14/24)

This week on CounterSpin: If “some people believe it” were the criterion, our daily news would be full of respectful consideration of the Earth’s flatness, the relationship of intelligence to the bumps on your head, and how stepping on a crack might break your mother’s back. News media don’t, in fact, use “some people think it’s true” as the threshold for whether a notion gets talked about seriously, gets “balanced” alongside what “data suggest.” It’s about power.

Look no further than Robert Kennedy Jr. When he was just a famously named man about town, we heard about how he dumped a bear carcass in Central Park for fun, believes that children’s gender is shaped by chemicals in the water, and asserts that Covid-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” while leaving “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” immune.

But once you become RFK Jr., secretary of health and human services in a White House whose anger must not be drawn, those previously unacceptable ideas become, as a recent New York Times piece has it, “unorthodox.”

Kennedy’s unorthodox ideas may get us all killed while media whistle. We hear from Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, about that.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250404Offit.mp3

Free Press (3/18/25)

Also on the show: For many years, social justice advocates rather discounted the Federal Communications Commission. Unlike the Federal Trade Commission or the Food and Drug Administration, whose actions had visible impacts on your life, the FCC didn’t seem like a player.

That changed over recent years, as we’ve seen the role the federal government plays in regulating the power of media corporations to control the flow of information. As the late, great media scholar Bob McChesney explained, “When the government grants free monopoly rights to TV spectrum…it is not setting the terms of competition; it is picking the winner.”

We’ll talk about the FCC under Trump with Jessica González, co-CEO of the group McChesney co-founded, Free Press.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250404Gonzalez.mp3

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

Chaos under Heaven: South Korea’s Deepening Political Debacle

K.J. Noh — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 15:00:13 +0000

US Elites want South Korea to be a “dictatorship for democracy”

Morse Tan, a high ranking former US State Dept. official, recently let the cat out of the bag on the US ruling elite position on South Korea’s Martial Law. He declared that “Yoon declared Martial Law to preserve South Korea’s Democracy.” Having previously labeled South Korea a model democracy, this is a No-Scotsman-move taken to absurdity.

Now, Tan is not a current US government official, but he is an indicator of what the US national security state is thinking, in particular, what its neocon wing is thinking. Tan also recently claimed that “the impeachment against Yoon is an insurrection” led by opposition party leader Lee Jae Myung “who wants to turn the country over to the Chinese communists”.

As absurd and conspiratorial as these allegations sound, these are actually finely-tuned and well-honed Washington-CPAC talking points about Chinese threats and interference in Korea, and they are echoed endlessly, if histrionically by US flag-waving foot soldiers at South Korean protests and on Youtube. These anti-China messages were also repeated in German State TV ARD’s documentary “Staatskrise im Schatten von China und Nordkorea” (State Crisis in the Shadow of China and North Korea), released to its German public television website on Feb 25th. The documentary claimed that China had hacked South Korea’s legislative election to put the opposition DP party into power, who are now taking their orders from North Korea and China to impeach YoonThere is clearly a highly convergent and disciplined campaign of anti-China propaganda around the impeachment. ARD has removed its documentary, but the damage has clearly been done.

It’s impossible not to highlight the absurdity of Tan’s statement–“Yoon declared martial law (i.e. military dictatorship) to preserve democracy”. And as a foreign national, Tan is breaking South Korean law by directly participating in domestic Korean politics. But the free reign he is given, and the lack of disavowal or reprimand from the State Department–if only for his own safety–is very revealing.

Tan’s position in the state department was Ambassador at Large. These are powerful, Viceroy-type postings: they represent US policy and US interests on a (grand) strategic level. Consider other Ambassadors-at-Large: Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge, Paul Nitze, Paul Bremer III, StrobeTalbott, Robert Gallucci. These are not individuals given to improvising and airing idiosyncratic personal opinions. As a former state Viceroy, with the enduring prestige and power of state connections, the platforms that Tan has been given to expound his views signal that he is expressing the direction of official doctrine, reflected both in Tan’s public statements, state media talking points, and the coordinated erasure of counterviewpoints.

Strategic Unambiguity: What the US wants

US policy on South Korea’s dictatorship/martial law is analogous to its policy on Taiwan: Strategic “ambiguity” in language, concrete support and escalation in actions. The “ambiguity” serves to pretextually mask war preparations against China. Of course, there is nothing ambiguous about the strategy, other than the desire for a fig leaf of plausible deniability.

What the US wants from Korea is that which is strategically most advantageous for the US: a right wing Korean client regime to do the bidding of the US: escalate and prepare for war with China. This is a war that it has been envisioning since the early 2000’s and which was institutionalized by Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”. In fact, the reason Yoon was selected, elected, and lionized as South Korea’s president is because he was a walking neocon fulfillment list for this war.

As these war preparations accelerate and intensify, a South Korean military dictatorship with the US in control of the South Korean military is the easiest and most advantageous configuration to enact these plans. The US will settle for a client-plutocratic democratic state, but dictatorship has actually been the historical norm since South Korea was created by the US. Given the tight timelines involved, it is also possible for this configuration to be instituted again: this project of war is urgent and time-bound–US natsec heavyweights have calendared 2025 and 2027 (“the Minihan” & “Davidson windows”) as the propitious date range to trigger war with China.

Easy-peasy political proxy

South Korea offers two key strategic advantages. First, geographically and historically, Korea has always been the on ramp and bridgehead for invasion into China. War with China has always started from the Korean peninsula or Taiwan island, usually as interlinked pairs. Second, South Korea has the world’s 3rd largest standing army–including reservists, 3.6 Million troops–,larger than the militaries of China and Russia combined. The US gets operational control over these troops immediately if there is war. War with China is thus most compatible and convenient with a South Korean dictatorship.

There is very strong circumstantial evidence that the US knew beforehand about Yoon’s Martial Law declaration, due to the length and intricacy of the preparation and the aggressive military nature of the operation-which would have required coordination and communication with US forces in Korea. At the very least, they would have been aware. And regardless, they would have benefitted, geostrategically.

Sworn testimony shows that Yoon’s gambit was to trigger war with North Korea (through drone attacks, missile attacks, shelling, false flag assassinations of opposition) to justify declaring Martial Law. Only poor execution, North Korean forbearance, and rapid citizen mobilization prevented the seamless rollout of this military coup. Evidence has come out that Yoon was preparing repeated coups. Historically, all military coups on the southern peninsula have been greenlighted by the US.

On that point, Morse Tan is the Nancy Pelosi of Korea: he functions like a Track II US envoy–cheerleading for a right-wing South Korean military coup, with just the slightest hint of plausible deniability.

Note the dead radio silence out of Washington throughout this whole process: silence during the Martial Law declaration, silence after the rejection of Martial Law, silence after the impeachment, and silence throughout. Not a word of critique or condemnation. Note also the deafening hush of the mainstream corporate media.

Meanwhile, the fissures in SK society are approaching civil war.

Institutional Civil War, Governmental chaos

There is already intergovernmental war: on March 22 the CIO (Corruption Investigation Office, similar to the US Inspector General) raided the Prosecutor’s Office (similar to the Attorney General) for corruption, just days after the Prosecutor’s Office raided the CIO for evidence of warrant shopping on Yoon’s impeachment. This would be like the Inspector General raiding the Attorney General after the Attorney General raided the Inspector General.

Yoon has been released from custody on a technicality (“counting hours, not days”) despite being indicted for insurrection. His co-conspirators are still incarcerated, but the ringleader is free, highlighting the absurdity of the ruling. The prosecutor’s office, ostensibly committed to prosecuting Yoon, did not even bother to file an appeal. The prosecutor’s office is considered to be Yoon’s private army–Yoon was the former prosecutor general of Korea, and he promised to create a “Republic of Prosecutors”. That much he has been successful on.

The Return of the Zombie

Han Duck Soo, the impeached South Korean Prime minister (and former acting president) has just had his impeachment reversed yesterday, and is now acting president again.

The constitutional court found that Han had violated the constitution (by refusing to appoint already approved justices to the Constitutional Court to rule on the impeachment issue) but they reinstated him anyway. Never mind the irony that the court could have lacked standing to try his case if he had been successful in disabling the court. Han had also been tasked with appointing an independent counsel to investigate Yoon (to avoid the conflicts of interest that have appeared with the prosecutor’s office), but he had declined, leading to the current debacle of suspect loyalties and suspicious/delayed/tampered/sabotaged legal processes. One Constitutional Court justice claimed that the current political chaos was directly related to Han’s malfeasance and non-cooperation in these matters and found for impeachment–but she was a tiny minority of one in the ruling.

The Constitutional Court’s ruling on Han Duck Soo was already problematic in that it was out of sequence. The fact that they ruled first before Yoon’s case, and ruled against impeachment is an ominous signal. Two other high officials, Kim Seong-hun, and Lee Kwang-woo (of the presidential security service), indicted for impeding Yoon’s arrest, have recently also had their arrest warrants rejected. These are powerful figures who are now at large, with huge axes to grind. The trends are not in favor of impartial justice or peaceful resolution.

Washington’s Dirty Hand

The delayed impeachment ruling of Yoon itself is widely thought to be due to Washington’s pressure: it has been one month since the testimony was completed, but still there has been no ruling. This is abnormally long for what is an open-and-shut case: there is no doubt that Yoon declared Martial Law (he is on television declaring it!), and there is no doubt that he used extra-constitutional means–military force–to implement it and to try to prevent its rescission. But it’s widely considered that the ruling is delayed so that Lee Jae Myung’s appeal ruling (due on 3/26) will be decided before the Constitutional court’s ruling on Yoon is made public.

This is because Lee Jae Myung, the opposition DP party chair, would be the leading candidate for president if the impeachment of Yoon triggers a snap election (in 60 days). He is currently 20+ points ahead of any other potential candidate by polling. The presidency would be his to take under normal circumstances.

However, if Lee’s guilt is sustained by the appellate court, he would be stripped of all political rights for a decade, and the opposition DP would lose its strongest candidate. Washington does not want Lee Jae Myung as president, because it’s understood that he would balance with China against the US, and de-escalate the coming war on China. Hence the delay. Opposition party representative Park Sun-won has verified that the US is exerting pressure through diplomatic channels to align the impeachment date as close to Lee Jae Myung’s sentencing as possible.

On the Brink of Explosion

South Korea is now a tinderbox on the brink.

One million protestors hit the streets over the weekend, demanding the Constitutional court deliver its verdict immediately. Some of these protestors had been previously protesting in the snow for weeks, demanding justice. From the right, there has been open aggression by right wing counter-impeachment protesters, paid up or pumped up with “anti-communist” fervor by religious leaders and the ruling party, repeating ARD and CPAC tropes on “Chinese communist intervention”. These shock troops have destroyed and rampaged through Seoul’s Western District Courthouse, assaulted opposition party politicians, as well as attacked Chinese tourists as “spies”. The right have openly spoken of reconstituting the North West Youth league–the genocidal red-baiting death squads of the Korean war.

And so, it seems the American flag-waving beatings will continue until the anti-communist morale improves in the country. Regardless of the rulings to come, South Korea’s destiny is precarious: more potential turbulence, more violence, even potential civil war. Certainly more twists and turns. If the constitutional court acquits Yoon, there will be mass popular protests in the millions: Yoon will be incapable of ruling and is likely to declare Martial Law again, if only to save his bacon (he is facing insurrection charges). Recent news has revealed that Yoon had plans to declare Martial Law multiple times.

On the other hand, if the constitutional court successfully impeaches Yoon, the ruling party and its followers will pull out all the stops: street violence and a Maidan-type insurrection by the right wing cannot be ruled out. The quiet acquiescence of the right as was the case after the Park Geun Hye impeachment is unlikely, given the heated propaganda allegations and the polarized ideology.

So, South Korea is facing risky outcomes either way. The forces acting on this small country are immense. Whether Koreans get a clear diamond or spontaneous combustion from the immense pressure remains to be seen.

There is a tiny, narrow path that would relieve pressure and facilitate a more peaceful outcome. If the US removes its finger from the scale in South Korean affairs–and disavows the US-flag-waving right that it is stoking and supporting–a single word of reprimand would deflate the South Korean rightwing like a sharp pin to a blow up doll.

But that would take a geostrategic shift–a downshifting and downsizing dreams of US Hegemony, and a turn towards peace and win-win.

Is the US capable of this? Or will it continue its dangerous ways? The fate of the peninsula–and possibly the planet–lies in the balance.

The post Chaos under Heaven: South Korea’s Deepening Political Debacle first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by K.J. Noh.

[Cornel West] The Legacy of Paul Robeson

info@alternativeradio.org — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 22:00:35 +0000

Paul Robeson, an enduring and multitalented figure, broke color barriers in sports, music, film and theater. He was an internationally famous singer and actor yet in the U.S. he was persecuted and blacklisted for his political beliefs. He died impoverished and in obscurity. His singular life is a model of courage and steadfastness in the face of racial and political prejudice. He said, “The artist must fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.” This program includes Paul Robeson singing in his magnificent bass-baritone voice "Joe Hill" and "Ol' Man River." Recorded at Columbia Law School.

This content originally appeared on AlternativeRadio and was authored by info@alternativeradio.org.

Philadelphia and the Darkside of Liberty

Stephen Joseph Scott — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 16:02:44 +0000

This planned investigation, titled Philadelphia and The Darkside of Liberty, is a deliberate examination into the cultural, economic, and sociopolitical foundations which undergirded America’s early colony and its newly birthed land of liberty’s class-stratified slave society – combined with a closer look at the contradictions which laid within the notions and/or paradoxes of early American equality, freedom, race, and enslavement (commencing in the seventeenth-century). This proposed study therefore will contend that to appreciate the early interpretations of American political organization, it is essential to understand its beginnings – centering on the U.S. Constitution. This review will initially focus principally (however not exclusively) on the distinct influences of important personages such as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and others – imbued within early American thought and thus influenced by renowned Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith – exemplified and exhibited in the celebrated Federalist Papers, with a specific and detailed focus on No.10;^[1] additionally including Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia,^[2] which will help to outline and undergird the key arguments put forth by this study.

Many of those notables that assembled in the city of Philadelphia in that historic year of 1787 were intent on framing a resilient centralized government that stood in accordance with Adam Smith’s essential maxims which affirmed that “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all;” contending that civil government, “grows up with the acquisition of valuable property.”^[3] Consequently, this analysis will challenge that long-held notion which has described early American thought and society as “egalitarian, free from [the] extreme want and wealth that characterized Europe.”^[4] In fact, as will be demonstrated throughout the work that follows, by an array of noted scholars and academics, this exploration will prove that property, class, and status played a significant, although perhaps not an exclusive, role in the development of that early colony and its nascent nation.

The intricacies of these contradictions will be examined in further detail throughout this study, arguing that, it is impossible to elude the fact that status, class, and race performed a major part in the views and doctrines woven within the principles and legal mechanisms formulated by those luminaries in that early republic. In fact, the following quote extracted from a letter written in 1786 by a French diplomat (positioned as the chargé d’affaires), in communiqué with his government, leading up to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, helps to delineate the top-down attitudes and devices engineered by the men historically known as the “Framers:”

Although there are no nobles in America, there is a class of men denominated “gentlemen.” … Almost all of them dread the efforts of the people to despoil them of their possessions, and, moreover, they are creditors, and therefore interested in strengthening the government and watching over the execution of the law…. The majority of them being merchants, it is for their interest to establish the credit of the United States in Europe on a solid foundation by the exact payment of debts, and to grant to Congress powers extensive enough to compel the people to contribute for this purpose.^[5]

As supported, evidenced, and argued by famed bottom-up historians like Michael Parenti, Charles A. Beard, Michael J. Klarman and others, the concepts of class and ownership and their European legacy greatly contributed to the initial composition of that early American dominion and its proprietorship stratum. In fact, as Professor Parenti demonstrates, “from colonial times onward, ‘men of influence’ received vast land grants from the [English] crown and presided over estates that bespoke an impressive munificence.” Parenti also reveals the stark differentials woven within the colonial class structure through exposing the fact that, “By 1700, three-fourths of the acreage in New York belonged to fewer than a dozen persons.” And, beyond that, “In the interior of Virginia, seven individuals owned 1.7 million acres,” exhibiting a structuralized formulation of wealth concentration from early on. In the run-up to the American Revolution, some twenty-seven years prior to the Continental Congress taking place in that celebrated year of 1787, Professor Parenti additionally notes that, “By 1760, [some] fewer than five hundred men in five colonial cities controlled most of the commerce, shipping, banking, mining, and manufacturing on the eastern seaboard.” Again, Parenti brings to the fore, a clear demarcation between the few and the many, property ownership and capital accumulation in that newly formed land of “equality,” which will be explored and surveyed in further detail within this work.^[6]

Chapter One of this dissertation will do a deep dive, in part, by focusing on documentary evidence penned by the “Framers” themselves. In addition to that, this work will seek to challenge existing historiographical debates, as noted, by displaying both the negative and positive legacy left by the men that articulated the U.S. Constitution in the city of Philadelphia in that momentous year of 1787. Furthermore, a major theoretical element of this retrospective will be working with, and challenging, the classifications and clashes within the so-called American ideals of Independence, Liberty, and Equality through studying an array of viewpoints from historical masterworks by Gordon S. Wood, Woody Holton, and others as mentioned below. Some of the topics brought forth within this research will include Chapter One, “An American Paradox: The Marriage of Liberty, Slavery and Freedom.” Chapter Two, “Cui Bono – Who Benefitted Most from the Categorical Constructs of Race and Class in Early America?” And, finally, in Chapter Three, this work will take a cogent look at “The Atomization of the Powerless and the Sins of Democracy,” historically from antiquity and beyond, by reflecting upon the judgments, attitudes and viewpoints, from a class perspective, of the privileged faction of men that forged that early nation’s crucial founding doctrines and documents. Again, these chapters above mentioned will take a thorough look at the varying constructs of race and class throughout the American experience from the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and early part of the Twentieth centuries, focusing on cui bono, that is, who benefitted most from those racialized constructs of division and how those benefits negatively affected those societies at large socially, politically, and culturally.

Specifically, the chapters summarized above will bring together the importance of understanding just how class, ownership, and status, per race, position, and wealth demarcated the early American experience within governmental and societal structures, rules, and regulations from 1787 forward – surveying the uniqueness of the U.S. Constitution (both pro and con) along with its Amendments (known as the Bill of Rights) will help provide a nuanced understanding of both said document and the men that formulated it. Which later impacted social movements and social discord from abolitionism to civil rights. This study will deliver not just a structuralized economic and political viewpoint, but a humanistic perspective. Moreover, this research will incorporate historical and scientific classics by such noted scholars as Edmund S. Morgan, Edward E. Baptist, Barbara J. Fields; and Nancy Isenberg – just to name a few. The foundations of racial divisions mentioned above were clearly measured by 16th-century English theorist and statesman Francis Bacon when he penned, “The Idols of the Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men.”^[7] As determined, Bacon defined racism as an innate element of human nature. Hence, this study will challenge that hypothesis, in part, by arguing that divisions of race within the human condition are social constructs that ultimately benefit those that exercise those dictates.

1
The Paradox of Early American Freedom

What were the underlying moral and ideological contradictions woven within that newly birthed land of freedom’s class-stratified slave society?

We believe we understand what class is, that being, an economic social division shaped by affluence and privilege versus want and neglect. “The problem is that popular American history is most commonly told, [or] dramatized, without much reference to the existence of social classes.” The story, in the main, is taught and/or conveyed as a tale of American exceptionalism – as if the early American colonies, and their break with Great Britain, somehow miraculously transformed the constraints of class structuralism – resulting in a greater realization of “enriched possibility.” This conception of America was galvanized by the men that formulated its constitution in the city of Philadelphia in that momentous year of 1787 with great elegance – an image of how a modern nation “might prove itself revolutionary in terms of social mobility in a world traditionally dominated by monarchy and fixed aristocracy.” America’s most beloved myths are at once encouraging and devastating: “All men are created equal,”^[8] for example, which excluded Indigenous Peoples and African Americans, penned by renowned American statesman and philosopher Thomas Jefferson in his landmark Declaration of Independence written in 1776 – was effectively employed as a maxim to delineate, as historian Nancy Isenberg presents, “the promise of America’s open spaces and united people’s moral self-regard in distinguishing themselves from a host of hopeless societies abroad,” but the tale is much darker, more troublesome and abundantly more nuanced than that.^[9]

An elite colonial land-grabbing class, from early on, in that fledgling America, contrived its own attitudes and perspectives – those which served it best. After settlement, starting as early as the seventeenth century, colonial outposts exploited their unfree labor: European indentured servants, African slaves, Native Americans, and their offspring – describing such expendable classes as “human waste.”^[10] When it comes to an early settler-colonial mentality of not only conquest but profitability as an exemplar, “Coined land,” is the term that Benjamin Franklin (noted Eighteenth Century political philosopher, scientist, and diplomat) used to refer to, or celebrate, the intrinsic monetary value woven within the then brutal land acquisition and/or theft from the Indigenous Native American population at the time – appropriated land which was later “privatized and commodified” in the hands of venture capitalists, described as “European colonists.”^[11] These attitudes of hierarchy over “the people out of doors,” as those eminent luminaries that gathered in Philadelphia later referred to them were long held. A phrase, according to noted Professor of History Benjamin Irvin, that was largely defined to incorporate not only “the working poor” that clamored in the streets of Philadelphia during the Convention of 1787, but all peoples who were disenfranchised by that newly formed Continental Congress, “including women, Native Americans, African Americans, and the working poor.”^[12] In fact, as Isenberg demonstrates, notions of superiority from the upper crust of that early society toward, “The poor, [or waste people], did not disappear, [on the contrary], by the early eighteenth century they [the lower classes] were seen as a permanent breed.”^[13] That is, a taxonomical classification viewed through how one physically appeared, grounded in their class and conduct, came to the fore; and, this prejudicial manner of classifying and/or categorizing bottom-up human struggle or failure took hold in the United States for centuries to come – which will be further explored within subsequent chapters.

These unfavorable top-down class attitudes toward the poor or “waste people” emanated from what was known at the time as the mother country, that is, England itself – where as early as the 1500s and 1600s, America was not viewed as an “Eden of opportunity,” but rather a “giant rubbish heap,” that could be converted and cultivated into productive estates, on behalf of wealthy landowners through the unloading of England’s poor and destitute – who would be used to develop that far-off wasteland. Again, as Isenberg contends, “the idle poor [or] dregs of society, were to be sent thither simply to throw down manure and die in a vacuous muck.” That is, before it became celebrated as the fabled “City on a Hill,”^[14] auspiciously described by John Winthrop (English Puritan lawyer and then governor), in his well-known sermon of 1630, to what was then the early settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, “America was [seen] in the eyes of sixteenth-century adventurers [and English elites alike] as a foul, weedy wilderness – a ‘sink-hole’ [perfectly] suited to [work, profit and lord over] ‘ill-bred commoners,’”^[15] clearly defining top-down class distinctions from early on.

Returning to those eminent American men that later devised the doctrines and documents which conceived of a “new nation” built on individual liberty and freedom, under further examination, begs the question: “Freedom for whom and for what?” This study will delve deeper into who those men were and how their overall attitudes toward the general populous as far as class, education, rank, and proprietorship, eventually led to a decisive result known as the U.S. Constitution. To appreciate the U.S. political and economic structure, it is essential to understand its original formulation, starting with said constitution. Those dignitaries that gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were intent on framing a strong centralized government in adherence with (what they believed to be Scottish economist and theorist) Adam Smith’s fundamental dicta and/or revelations, which stated that government was “instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor” and “grows up with the acquisition of valuable property.”^[16] As Political Scientist and author, Robert Ovetz argues below, the mechanisms and/or devices designed and implemented within the U.S. Constitution were contrived from the outset to thwart any and all democratic control. Equally noted, the Framers’ brilliance was in formulating a virtually unalterable system which offered through clever slogans like “We the People” an assurance of participation within the constructs of a Republic, all the while permitting “a few to hand-pick some representatives,” whilst the majority thus surrendered “the power of self-governance.” The U.S., still to this day, lauds itself as a “Democracy,” yet, from the outset, as argued, that illustrious landmark charter mentioned was nefariously intended to “impede democratic control of government” all the while foiling “democratic control of the economy.”^[17]

Under careful observation, no section of the U.S. Constitution is more misconstrued and misinterpreted than its Preamble. Moreover, the term, “We the People,” for example was, and still is to this day, deliberately employed as a rhetorical device in the form of a “philosophical aspiration,” separating it from the dry legalese that compose most of the rest of the charter. This, perhaps, is why the Preamble . has grasped the attention of the common everyday citizen. It embodies the hopes and values of ordinary people, cunningly expressing what they would ideally like the Constitution to achieve in practice – even though in truth it does something distinctively different. In fact, if we survey the meaning of the doctrines found within the Preamble, we find a set of material relations dating back to the 1700s which were brilliantly devised to deliberately constrain economic and political democracy:^[18]

Figure 1: The original handwritten Preamble to the U.S. Constitution on permanent display at the National Archives.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.^[19]

The “Blessings of Liberty” run amiss. Again, those “Framers,” or group of elite men that gathered in Philadelphia for that historic event in 1787 ideally utilized the inclusive language of “We the People,” . while at the same time, implementing a complex structural formulation which would stave off the will of the common people at every turn. The fifty-five of the seventy-four delegates that showed up on the scene, were, in fact, a cohort indistinguishable from themselves as “wealthy white men” of whom only a small number were not rich (but nevertheless affluent). They viewed themselves as “the People,” who would not only be provided liberties under that newly devised constitution, but also offered themselves the power to control the authority within that newly formed centralized government.^[20]

Figure 2: The Framers working out the concept of “We the People” by Tom Meyer.

By bringing the term “insure domestic Tranquility” to the fore, an early American top-down class paradigm is made evident by those men of property historically known as the “Framers.” The U.S. Constitution was the result of the repercussions of the American Revolution and decades of class conflict from within. Cogent warnings provided by not only Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence,^[21] which cautioned against “convulsions within” and “exciting domestic insurrections amongst us,” but also forewarnings offered by the man considered “the father of that newly formed nation,” George Washington. In the following statements to the run-up of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, written in correspondence to his then erstwhile comrade-in-arms and chief of artillery, General Henry Knox, George Washington (supreme commander of the American revolutionary colonial forces and hero par excellence) projected clear class distinctions, fears and/or biases which lie at the heart of this study, “There are combustibles in every state, to which a spark might set fire.”^[22] Hence, as Professor of Law, Jennifer Nedelsky asserts, what General Washington believed was necessary was a statutory formulation of control, instituted and devised by the upper crust of society, in the shape of a constitution, “to contain the threat of the people rather than to embrace their participation and their competence,”^[23] or else, as stated in a second letter to Knox, the eminent General warned, “If government shrinks, or is unable to enforce its laws … anarchy & confusion must prevail – and every thing will be turned topsy turvey,”^[24] demonstrating an elite fear most pronounced.

Figure 3: George Washington (1732-1799), Supreme Commander of the American Revolution and First President of the United States.

A good exemplar of a “spark that set fire,” which struck fear in the hearts of that elite class of men assembled in Philadelphia, is famously known as Shays’ Rebellion (August 29, 1786 to February 1787), led by former American army officer and son of Irish Immigrants, Daniel Shays, which culminated in a bottom-up armed revolt that took place in Western Massachusetts and Worcester, in response to a debt crisis imposed upon, in large part, the common citizenry; and, in opposition to the state government’s increased efforts to collect taxes on both individuals and their trades – as a remediation for outstanding war debt. The rebellion was eventually put down by Colonial Army forces sent there by George Washington himself – staving off the voice of the people, in that newly formed land of liberty. What “Tranquility” actually meant, as established by the Framers, was a centralized government formulated within the constitution, with the ability to halt and/or suppress conflict or unrest that threatened “the established order and governance of the elite.”^[25] Shays’ Rebellion in combination with the possibility of slave uprisings and native resistance offered the justification for creating, and later expanding, a domestic military force as penned into the Charter by Gouverneur Morris (1752 – 1816), American political leader and contributor to the Preamble outlined above. Morris cleverly emphasized the necessity for a general fiscal “contribution to the common defense” on behalf of his class interests, warning of the possible dangers of both “internal insurrections and external invasions” as outlined in detail in Article I Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.^[26] In summary, by centralizing a military power within a national charter, “the elites got their own protection force against the possibility of the majority’s ‘popular despotism’” as described by Washington himself – thwarting any and all popular resistance to elite rule. In fact, by 1791, just four years after the Constitutional Congress met in the city of Philadelphia, that newly formed nation’s military force tripled its cost and increased its number of troops by fivefold.^[27]

Figure 4: The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “a Laborer,” 1747–1814

In challenging that ideal of promoting “the general Welfare,” within a class paradigm, William Manning, (1747 – 1814) American Revolutionary soldier, farmer, and novelist, was one of the few voices at the Constitutional Convention that stood up and pushed back against the elite coup that was evidently taking place. After having fought in the Revolutionary War, as a common foot soldier, he began to believe that his military service and sacrifice carried little weight with the elites that surrounded him. He also delineated the fact that those measures which reflected Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and (the first President of the Continental Congress) John Jay’s views, and policies, created a poisonous atmosphere, ideology, and division between the “Few and the Many.” William Manning feared that by locking “the people out of doors,” out of government, the Founders were implementing measures such as Hamilton’s economic vision for that newly formed nation “at the expense of the common farmer and laborer.”^[28] When it came to Shays’ Rebellion, for example, his views were commensurate with those of the uprising, but not with their methods of armed resistance. Based on his staunch democratic values, he called upon the common man to forcefully use new organizational tactics by directly petitioning the government to redress grievances. Manning understood the economic divisions as implemented.^[29] In 1798, he authored his most celebrated work, The Key of Liberty, in which he displayed what he believed to be the objectives of the “Few” – which were to “distress and force the Many” into being financially dependent on them, “generating a sustained cycle of dependence.” Manning argued that the only chance for the “Many” was to choose those leaders that would battle for those with lesser economic and political authority.^[30] What Manning understood so well was that those early colonial financial interests defined their own class “influence and benefits” as “the general Welfare” which was, in his view, in diametrical opposition to much of the population.

Figure 5: Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), the First Secretary of the Treasury from 1789 to 1795 during George Washington’s presidency.

Alexander Hamilton’s celebrated financial plan alluded to above, put that early nation on a trajectory of economic growth, through a concentration of wealth in the form of property and holdings which would serve his class best, “…so capital [as] a resource remains untouched.”^[31] Hamilton delivered an innovative and audacious scheme in both his First and Second Reports on the Further Provision Necessary for Establishing Public Credit issued on 13 December 1790. Again, on behalf of his class interests, that newly devised federal government would purchase all state arrears at full cost – using its general tax base. Hamilton understood that such an act would considerably augment the legitimacy of that newly formed centralized government. To raise money to pay off its debts, the government would issue security bonds to rich landowners and wealthy stakeholders who could afford them, providing huge profits for those invested when the time arrived for that recently formed Federal government to pay off its debts.^[32] Charles Beard, Columbia University historian and author, in his famed book, An Economic Interpretation of The Constitution of The United States, succinctly outlines Hamilton’s class bias woven within his strategy per taxation, “[d]irect taxes may be laid, but resort to this form of taxation is rendered practically impossible, save on extraordinary occasions, by the provision that ‘they [taxes] must be apportioned according to population’ – so that numbers cannot transfer the burden to accumulated wealth”^[33] – revealing a significant economic top-down class preference and formulation of control from the outset. Beard summarizes as such, “The Constitution was essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.”^[34] Given the United States’ long history of top-down class biases and bottom-up class struggle, to be further explored within this research, Beard provides a cogent groundwork.

Figure 6: James Madison (1751-1836), Father of the U.S. Constitution and Fourth President of the United States.

James Madison, elite intellectual and Statesman, was and is traditionally proclaimed as the “Father of the Constitution” for his crucial role in planning and fostering the Constitution of the United States and later its Bill of Rights. For many of the Framers, with Madison in the lead, the Articles of Confederation (previously formulated on November 15, 1777, and effectuated on March 1, 1781) were a nefarious compact among the 13 states of the United States, previously the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain, which operated as the nation’s first framework of government establishing each individual State as “Free and Independent” – eloquently encouraged and outlined in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.^[35] From a class vantage point, the phrase “establish Justice” as devised by Madison within the Preamble above, meant in an idealistic sense, that the government would apply the rule of law impartially and consistently to all, irrespective of one’s station in society. But, in fact, the expression, “establish Justice,” explicitly points to the Framers’ “intent to tip the balance of power back in favor of the elites.”^[36] Notably, by early 1783, in his famed “Notes on Debates in Congress Memo” dated January 28^th, 1783, some four years prior to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution on December 12^th, 1787, Madison had well-defined what “justice” had meant to him and his cohorts by asserting that, “the establishment of permanent & adequate funds [in the form of a general taxation] to operate … throughout the U. States is indispensably necessary for doing complete justice to the Creditors of the U.S., for restoring public credit, & for providing for the future exigencies of … war.”^[37] For Madison, as argued by eminent Professor of History Woody Holton, “establishing Justice” envisioned doing what some of the States were reluctant and/or incapable of achieving – that being, the payment of debts for the elites by “safeguarding their property” whether it be slave, land, or financial.^[38]

How class and race maintained supremacy. In essence, the cleverly devised Three-fifths Compromise outlined in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, conceived by Madison, not only preserved, and reinforced the atrocity of slavery, but it also made stronger “the power of property” produced by the capitalization of all human labor. The minority checks embedded in the constitutional power of taxation ultimately prevented all types of what the Framers referred to as “leveling,” that being a fair and equal redistribution of wealth and resources amongst the general population.^[39] In doing so, the constitution serves in perpetuity to protect wealth from what the Framers feared most: “economic democracy.”^[40] Unambiguously, the Three-fifths clause established that three out of every five enslaved persons were counted, on behalf of their owners, when deciding a state’s total populace per representation and legislation. Hence, before the Civil War, the Three-fifths clause gave disproportionate weight to slave states, specifically slave ownership, in the House of Representatives.

A final element written within the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution worth further mention is the famed idiom “secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and Our Posterity,” a phrase that concisely encompasses the opinions of that band of elites, that amassed in Philadelphia, known as “the Framers” and their historical and material view of the possession of “Private Property” – greatly influenced and inspired by English Enlightenment philosopher and physician John Locke (1632-1704). Locke, in his famed The Two Treatises of Civil Government, argued that the law of nature obliged all human beings not to harm “the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another,” defined as “Natural Rights.”^[41] As a result, the Framers (most of whom were large landowners) were intent on designing a centralized government that would singularly protect and defend “private property.” The U.S. Constitution fosters this by placing a collection of roadblocks and/or obstacles in the way of majority demands for “economic democracy” – what, on numerous occasions, James Madison himself described as an oppression, enslavement and/or tyranny of the majority.^[42] In a land without Nobles, Madison declared that “the Senate ought to come from, and represent, the wealth of the nation.”^[43] With Madison’s compatriot John Dickinson of Delaware in full accord, proclaiming that the Senate should be comprised of those that are, “distinguished for their rank in life and their weight of property, and bearing as strong a likeness to the British House of Lords as possible.”^[44] Additionally, Pierce Butler, wealthy land-owning South Carolinian, stood in complete agreement confirming that the Senate was, “the aristocratic part of our government.”^[45] Those elite men, as members of that continental congress, largely on their own behalf, cleverly formulated “a plethora of opportunities to issue a minority veto of any changes by law, regulation, or court rulings,” that might menace their property ownership.^[46] In essence, that charter known as the U.S. Constitution was brilliantly constructed to ensure an elite control and privilege that would last for “Posterity” – forever unchanged and unchangeable.

There is a wealth of evidence, as demonstrated, that the U.S. Constitution was originally designed and implemented not to facilitate meaningful bottom-up systemic change, but to ultimately avert anything that does not serve the benefits of the propertied class. Let us keep in mind that meaningful change from below has always been hard-fought, but not impossible. It took roughly seventy-eight years from 1787; and, a Civil War which lasted from 1861 to 1865, culminating in the loss of nearly 620,000 lives to officially abolish slavery under Amendment XIII (ratified on December 6^th, 1865).^[47] Until then, human bondage was a long held and integral form of property ownership within the United States – to be further examined within this work. Reflecting succinctly on the underlying class interests during and prior to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, two indispensable statements, concerning “human nature,” from two essential minds, per class, which undergird the views here summarized, are as follows: Benjamin Franklin keenly observed that any assemblage of men, no matter how gifted, bring with them “all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interest and their selfish views.”^[48] Which stood ironically in accordance with Adam Smith’s, “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind,”^[49] which demonstrates Smith’s historical view per an innate class perspective of wealth concentration.

2
Cui Bono – Who Benefitted Most from the Categorical Constructs of Race and Class?

The year 1776 is a deceptive starting point when it comes to the ideologies of American freedom and liberty. Independence from Great Britain did not expunge the British class arrangement long embraced by colonial elites that undergirded a social system of division which promulgated “entrenched beliefs about poverty and the willful exploitation of human labor.” An unfavored view of African slaves and poor whites widely thought of as “waste and/or rubbish,” remained a long-held social construct which served American elites well into the modern era.^[50] From the outset, when it came to class dynamics, no one understood the manipulative power of faction and discord sown amongst the masses better than James Madison himself as boldly outlined in Federalist #10. The danger, Madison argued on behalf of his class interests, was not faction itself, but the escalation of “a majority faction” grounded in that “most common and durable source” of conflict: the “unequal distribution of property.”^[51] In that widely celebrated land of “democracy,” Madison revealed not only his class biases anathema to the concept, but his fear of the very idea: “When a majority is included in a faction,” it could use democracy, “to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest the public good and the rights of other citizens” – that is, the privileges of the propertied class.^[52] To his credit, from early on, James Madison laid out clear class distinctions, partialities, and fears woven within that newly formulated American social stratum – which are essential to this study. Within Federalist #10, Madison brilliantly devised a strategy of division which would protect elite interests by suppressing the economic menace of a majoritarian class faction through the encouragement of as many divisions within the populous as possible. Hence, as he outlined, the “greater variety of parties and interests [within class, race, gender, or religion] … make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have common motive.”^[53] Ironically, faction was problematic as stated, yet, at the same time, paradoxically, according to James Madison, more of it was the answer.

From the outset of the American experience, as outlined in his masterwork, American Slavery, American Freedom, Edmond S. Morgan, Yale Professor of History, makes evident the elite class interests and/or dynamics that fortified the use of clever rhetorical devices, such as “freedom and liberty” upon the general populous – all the while devilishly using the cruelty of slavery as a unifying force. During his visit to that early America, an astute English diplomat by the name of Sir Augustus John Foster, serving in Washington during Jefferson’s presidency (1801-1809), keenly observed, “[Elite] Virginians above all, seem committed to reducing all [white] men to an equal footing.” Foster observed, “owners of slaves, among themselves, are all for keeping down every kind of superiority”; and he recognized this pretension of equality used upon the masses as a powerful manipulative tactic. Virginians, he argued, “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves….”^[54] In that ruthless slave society, as Morgan reveals, “Slaves did not become leveling mobs, because their owners would see to it that they had no chance to. The apostrophes to equality were not addressed to them.”^[55] In clarification, he adds:

…because Virginia’s labor force was composed mainly of slaves, who had been isolated by race and removed from the political equation, the remaining free [white] laborers and tenant farmers were too few in number to constitute a serious threat to the superiority of the [elite white] men who assured them of their equality.^[56]

The ancient Roman concept of Divide and Conquer, which dates to Julius Caesar himself, was effectively implemented by Virginia’s elite propertied class through the skillful use of cooptation. Virginia’s yeoman class comprised of small land-owning farmers were made to believe that they shared “a common identity” with those “men of better sorts,” simply due to the fact that neither was a slave – hence, both were alike in not being slaves.^[57] Ironically, in the mindset of those early American elites that viewed themselves as the founders of a republic, largely inspired by Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the pushing off of monarchy, slavery occupied a critical, if not indeterminate position: it was thought of as a principal evil which free men sought to avoid for society in general through the usurpation of monarchies and the establishment of republics. But, at the same time, it was also viewed as the solution to one of society’s most pressing problems, “the problem of the poor.” Elite Virginians could move beyond English republicanism, “partly because they had solved the problem: they achieved a society in which most of the poor were enslaved.”^[58] In truth, contempt for the poor permeated the age. John Locke, English philosopher and physician (1632-1704), considered one of the most essential of Enlightenment thinkers, commonly read, discussed, and admired by early American elites, famously wrote a classic defense of the right of revolution in his Two Treatises of Civil Government published in 1689 – yet he did not extend that right to the poor. ^[59] In fact, in his proposals for workhouses and/or “working schools,” outlined in his Essay on the Poor Law, published in 1687, the children of the [English] poor would “learn labor,” and nothing but labor, from a very young age, stopping short of enslavement – though it would require a certain alteration of mind to recognize the distinction.^[60] That said, those astute men that assembled in the city of Philadelphia in 1787 took their inspiration from Locke very seriously.

Hamilton and Madison were in absolute accord with Locke’s views per property and ownership, that being, “Government has no other end but the preservation of property.”^[61] Consequently, the U.S. Constitution was designed to both govern the population through limiting its capacity to self-govern; and by protecting all forms of property ownership including the enslavement of human beings. Hence, as historian David Waldstreicher (expert in early American political and cultural history) presents, the Constitution was devised not only to safeguard slavery as a separate economic system, but as integral to the basic right of what he describes as the “power over other people and property (including people who were property).”^[62] As a result, the tensions and/or rivalries that resided in that newly formed nation, which would eventually lead to a bloody Civil War, were not over quantities of land possession between the North and the South, but more focused on how many slaves resided in each. To his credit, Madison presciently admitted as such:

[T]he States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size … but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These two causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the U. States. It did not lie between the large & small States: It lay between the Northern & Southern.^[63]

Slavery was considered insidious by some, and yet fundamental to those that profited from it, both North and South. In fact, John Rutledge, esteemed Governor of South Carolina during the Revolution; and delegate to the Constitutional Convention, spoke on behalf of the Southern planters’ class by supporting slavery, of which, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney also of South Carolina, stood in full agreement. Both men implored their fellow delegates to recognize their common interests in preserving slavery from which they “stood to profit,” not only from selling slave-produced goods, but from carrying the slaves on their ships^[64] – hence, they argued, stood a long-held alliance between Northern “personality” (that is, financial holdings) and “that particular form of property” (slavery) which dominated the South.^[65] Slaves were long held the most valuable asset in the country. By 1860, the total value of all the slaves in America was estimated at the equivalent of $4 billion, more than double the value of the South’s entire farmland valued at $1.92 billion, four times the total currency in circulation at $435.4 million, and twenty times the value of all the precious metals (gold and silver) then in circulation at $228.3 million.^[66] Thus, at the time and thereafter, North American slavery was not just a national or sectional asset, but a global one. As a result of the promise of monetary benefits and values produced by enslaved peoples, “the Framers,” in defense of their own interests, collectively devised a system of fail-safe mechanisms to protect their most cherished resource: human vassalage.^[67] Moreover, in addition to the Three-Fifths Clause described above, the Constitution contained several safeguards with a clear objective of maintaining the vile system as it was. The Foreign Slave Trade Clause as outlined in Article 1; Section 9 of that charter known as the U.S. Constitution stated that Congress could not prohibit the “importation of persons” prior to 1808 – which cleverly excluded the term “slave.”^[68] The intention of said clause, was not to stave off slavery, but was implemented to maintain, if not inflate, the monetary value of those persons already in captivity – when it came to their sale and transport to other slave states outside of Virginia. The Fugitive Slave Clause as written in Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, was clearly devised to protect elite proprietorship over individuals forcefully ensconced in a system of chattel slavery:

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.^[69]

This Clause, not nullified until the Thirteenth Amendment’s abolition of slavery, considered it “a right” on the part of a slaveholder, to retrieve an enslaved individual who had fled to another state. Finally, as esteemed University of Chicago Professor, Paul Finkelman, contends, the ban on congressional export taxes adamantly argued for by those elite men that gather in Philadelphia, was, for the most part, a concession to southern planters whose slaves primarily produced agricultural goods for export.^[70] Clearly demonstrating and demarcating an upper-class bias based on ownership, race, and wealth from the outset.

How elite capture worked in early America – diversity was implemented and utilized as a ruling class ideology. Privileged landowners, specifically Virginians, being “men of letters,” as they would have thought of themselves, understood very well that all white men were not created equal, especially when it came to property and what they referred to as “virtue,” a much admired “elite attribute” which can be traced back to Aristotle himself, in his classic work, Nicomachean Ethics, who defined the only life worth living as “a life of leisure” – that is a life of study and freedom for the few which rested on the labor of slaves and proprietorship.^[71] As thus revealed, the material forces and benefits which dictated southern elites to see Negroes, mulattoes, and Indians as one, also “dictated that they see large and small planters as one.” Consequently, racism became an essential, if unacknowledged, ingredient woven within that “republican ideology” that enabled Virginians to not only design, but to “lead the nation,” for generations to come. An important question thus addressed: Was the ideological vision of “a nation of equals” flawed from the very beginning by the evident contempt, exhibited, toward both poor whites and enslaved blacks? And beyond that, to be further explored within the final chapter of this research project: Are there still elements of colonial Virginia, ideologically, ethnically, and socially, woven within America today? More than a century after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox (on April 9^th, 1865) – those questions per race and class still linger….^[72]

As Edward E. Baptist, Professor of History at Cornell University, makes clear in his epic work, The Half Has Never Been Told, Slavery and The Making of American Capitalism, attitudes toward race and race superiority in America long remained. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, America’s first generation of professional historians, he argues, “were justifying the exclusion of Jim Crow and disfranchisement” by telling a story about the nation’s past of slavery and civil war that seemed to confirm, for many white Americans, that “white supremacy was just and necessary.” In fact, Baptist proclaims that racism had not only become culturally accepted, but historically and socially grounded within a form of “race science” to be further explored in the final chapter of this study. He states that by the latter part of the nineteenth century, “for many white Americans, science had proven that people of African descent [if not the poor in general] were intellectually inferior and congenitally prone to criminality.” As a result, he argues, that that cohort of racist whites in [Jim Crow] America, “looked wistfully to [the] past when African Americans had been governed with whips and chains.” Confirming the fact that class, race, and racism have long been integral parts of America’s long and difficult history^.[73]

American capitalism, land, cotton, slaves, and profit: by the early nineteenth century, the U.S. Banking system was fundamental when it came to entrepreneurial revenue development in the form of land acquisition, cotton production, and slave labor. Bank lending became the key ingredient that propelled slave owners to greater heights of wealth accumulation, “Enslavers benefited from bank-induced stability and steady credit expansion.” The more slave purchases that U.S. Banks would finance, the more cotton enslavers could produce, “and cotton [at the time] was the world’s most widely traded product.” As mentioned, in this newly devised system of capital, lending, and borrowing, cotton was an essential resource in an unending global market. So, the more cotton slaves produced, the more cotton enslavers would sell, and thus the more profit they would make. In fact, “owning more slaves enabled planters to repay debts, take profits, and gain property that could be [used as] collateral for even more borrowing.”^[74] Early U.S. Capitalism not just undergirded, but bolstered and expanded the harsh and inhumane system of slavery as such, “Lending to the South’s cotton economy was an investment not just in the world’s most widely traded commodity, but also in a set of producers who had shown a consistent ability to increase their productivity and revenue.”^[75] Said differently, American slave owners, throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, had the “cash flow to pay back their debts.” And, the debts of slave owners were secure, given the fact that they had “a lot of valuable collateral.” In fact, as argued by a number of economic historians, enslavers, by mid-century had in their possession the largest pool of collateral in the United States at the time, 4 million slaves worth over $3 billion, as “the aggregate value of all slave property.”^[76] These values embedded themselves in a global system of investment through slave commodification which benefitted mostly the upper crust of society in both the U.S. and the U.K., “this meant that investors around the world would share in revenues made by ‘hands in the field.’” Even though at the time, and to its credit, “Britain was liberating the slaves of its empire,” British banks could still sell, to a wealthy investor, a completely commodified human being in the form of a slave – not as a specific individual, but as a holding or part of a collective investment venture “made from the income of thousands of slaves.”^[77]

Furthermore, as mentioned, the fact that popularly elected governments repeatedly sustained such bond schemes, on both sides of the Atlantic, was therefore not only insidious by its very nature, but at the same time remarkable. Popular abolitionist movements were springing up from one side to the other, and demanding abolition across the board. Beyond that, in the United States, there were many elements of class recognition in the form of an “intensely democratic frontier electorate” of both slaves and poor whites that saw banks as “machines designed to channel financial benefits and economic governing power to the unelected elite.”^[78] By mid-century, the rift and divisions between the North and the South became catastrophic in the form of a bloody Civil War. It took a poor boy from a dirt-floor cabin in Kentucky named Abraham Lincoln, who rose to the prominence of lawyer and statesman becoming the 16^th President of the United States, to write and implement the Emancipation Proclamation brought forth on January 1^st, 1863. As President, Abraham Lincoln issued that historic decree, which served not only as a direct challenge to “property ownership,” in the form of human bondage, but a direct assault on the lucrative southern slaveocracy as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared “that all persons held as slaves within the rebellious states are, and henceforward shall be free.”^[79] Although Lincoln’s, contribution has been much contested to this day, by historians both Black and white alike, the fact remains that, his efforts as already presented, were undoubtedly a more active and direct support for the freedom of African slaves than those of all the fifteen previous presidents before him combined – The Emancipation Proclamation would prove to be the most important executive order ever issued by an American president, offering the possibility of freedom to an enslaved people held in a giant dungeon that was the confederacy.^[80] Even though there are those historians that argue that the Proclamation was incomplete due to the fact that it “excluded the enslaved not only in Union-held territories such as western Virginia, but also southern Louisiana” where there were pro-Union factions that were trying not to be antagonistic toward local whites who were hell-bent on maintaining the status quo.^[81]

But facts speak for themselves, Abraham Lincoln had been working diligently to persuade the political class in the border states that were loyal to the Union to agree to a “gradual or compensated” emancipation plan – pushing back against the benefactors of the race and class divide. Even though some within the border states refused to give in and held out for permanent slavery, by April 1862, because of Lincoln’s tenacious efforts, Congress passed legislation “freeing – in return for payments to enslavers totaling $1 million – all 3,000 people enslaved in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Delaware and Kentucky.” After the Union army’s victory at the battle of Antietam, Lincoln felt “he could move more decisively” against the institution of slavery and hence released that historic executive order which he had written months earlier as outlined above.^[82] Undoubtedly, again, the Emancipation Proclamation offered for the first time in American history the unquestioned possibility of freedom to a long-held and enslaved people that were seized in a giant open-air prison which was the American South. The Emancipation did unbar the door. Next, enslaved Africans, due to their own agency, forced it wide open.^[83]

As an exemplar of that heartfelt commitment, stood Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895), former slave in his home state of Maryland, who rose to become a historic social reformer, abolitionist, writer, orator, and statesman. Lincoln was the first U.S. President in a long line, to invite an eminent African American intellectual, such as, Frederick Douglass to the White House to discuss the wonton discrimination within the military ranks cast upon African American men. That well-known meeting between Lincoln and Douglass took place in August 1863, two years after the start of the war on April 12, 1861. Douglass tenaciously argued for the enlistment of Black soldiers in the Union Army based largely on his legendary speech delivered at the National Hall in Philadelphia (on July 6, 1863), a month prior, entitled “the Promotion of Colored Enlistments,” outlined in the well-known publication The Liberator, that same month. Where Douglass stated:

Let the black man get upon his person the brass letters US … a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.^[84]

Douglass presented the same argument to Lincoln, that “Black men in Blue” would not only swell the ranks of the Union Army but would elevate those former slaves to the status of free men of honor – shifting the course of American history.^[85] Lincoln took decisive action, per Douglass’ request, enlisting nearly 200,000 battle-ready African Americans, understanding that without those Black soldiers, there would be no Union. As a result, Douglass wholeheartedly endorsed the President for his coming reelection on November 8, 1864. “The enlistment of blacks into the Union Army was part of Lincoln’s evolving policy on slavery and race.”^[86] Ultimately, he paid the price. On April 14, 1865, the 16^th President of the United States was brutally slain by an assassin’s bullet for his valiant efforts against the racist slavocracy known as the Confederacy – Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865.^[87] The Civil War ultimately nullified the barbarity of slavery, which was later codified in the 13^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, true, yet prejudicial elements of both race and class remained a fixture in American society for decades to come….

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the coalescing or coming together from a class perspective of the lower ranks in the American South, later revealed itself in the formulation of the “Colored Farmers’ Alliance,” which stood as a direct threat to the established southern regime leading to a brutal and repressive racialized crackdown in the form of the Ku Klux Klan and the implementation of an oppressive social order known as Jim Crow – to be further explored within this study.

3
The Atomization of the Powerless
and the Sins of Democracy

Finally, as alluded to, the appellation and/or utilization of the term “race” was seldom employed by Europeans prior to the fifteen-hundreds. If the word was used at all, it was used to identify factions of people with a group connection or kinship. Over the proceeding centuries, the evolution of the term “race,” that came to comprise skin color, levels of intelligence and/or phenotypes, was in large part a European construct – which served to undergird a strategy of division amongst the masses that helped to maintain a stratified class structure with “elite white land-owning men” placed firmly at the top of the social-ladder in that newly birthed land of “freedom” called America.

As succinctly stated by David Roediger, esteemed Professor of American history at the University of Kansas, who has taught and written numerous books focused on race and class in the United States, “The world got along without race for the overwhelming majority of its history. The U.S. has never been without it.”^[88] Nothing could be further from the truth. As outlined in previous chapters, American society uniquely and legalistically formulated the notion of “race” early on to not only justify, but support its new economic system of capitalism, which rested in large part, if not exclusively, upon the exploitation of forced labor – that is, the brutal enslavement and demoralization of African peoples. To understand how the development of race and its bastardized twin “racism” were fundamentally and structurally bound to early American culture and society we must first survey the extant history of how the notions of race, ethnocentrism, white supremacy, and anti-blackness came to exist.

The ideas that undergirded the notions of “race, a class-stratified stratified slave society, as we recognize them today, were birthed and developed together within the earliest formation of the United States; and were intertwined and enmeshed in the phraseologies of “slave” and “white.” The terms “slave,” “white,” and “race” began to be utilized by elite Europeans in the sixteenth century and they imported these hypotheses of hierarchy with them to the colonized lands of North America. That said, originally, the terms did not hold the same weight they have today. However, due to the economic needs and development of that early American society, the terms mentioned would transform to encompass new racialized ideas and meanings which served the upper class best. The European Enlightenment, defined as, “an intellectual movement of the 17^th and 18^th centuries in which ideas concerning god, reason, nature, and humanity were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide assent in the West and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics,”^[89] would come to underpin and contribute to racialized perceptions which argued that, “white people were inherently smarter, more capable, and more human than nonwhite people – became accepted worldwide.” In fact, from an early American perspective, “This [mode] of categorization of people became the justification for European colonization and subsequent enslavement of people from Africa.”^[90] To be further surveyed.

As Paul Kivel, noted American author, social-justice educator and activist, brings to the fore, the terms “white” or “whiteness,” historically, from a British/Anglo-American perspective, served to underpin class distinctions and justify exploitation through human bondage by providing profit-accumulation to a distinct ownership class, “Whiteness is [historically] a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being white.”^[91] Where and how did it begin? The conception of “whiteness” did not exist until roughly 1613 or so, when Anglo-Saxon forces, later known as the English, first “encountered and contrasted themselves” with the Indigenous populations of the East Indies – through their cruel and rapacious colonial pursuits – later justifying, and bolstering, a collective cultural sense of racial superiority. Up and until that point, roughly the 1550s to the 1600s, within Anglo-Saxon society, “whiteness” was used to set forth clear class signifiers.

In fact, the word “white” was utilized exclusively to “describe elite English women,” because the whiteness of their skin indicated that they were individuals of “high social standing” who did not labor “out of doors.” That said, conversely, throughout that same period, the appellation of “white” did not apply to elite English men, due to the stigmatizing notion that a man who would not leave his home to work was “unproductive, sick and/or lazy.” As the concept of who was white and who was not began to grow, “whiteness” gained in popularity within the Anglo-American sphere, for example, “the number of people that considered themselves white would grow” as a collective pushback against people of color due to immigration and eventual emancipation.^[92] These social constructs centered around race accomplished their nefarious goals – thus, unifying early colonists of European descent under the rubric of “white,” and hence, marginalizing, stigmatizing and dispossessing native populations – all the while permanently enslaving most African-descended people for generations. As acclaimed African American Professor, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY) contends concerning America’s base history, “Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it….”^[93] A revelatory statement by John Jay (1745-1829, the first Chief Justice of the United States and signer of the U.S. Constitution) helps make evident, from a class perspective, the entrenched values of those early American elites toward their newly proclaimed democracy, “The people who own the country ought to govern it!”^[94] The preceding two quotes help to summarize and clarify the top-down legal and societal mechanisms embedded within that early American social stratum which linger to this day.

The social status and hence the nomenclature of “slave” have been with mankind for millennia. Historically, a slave was one who was classified as quasi-sub-human, derived from a lower lineage; and forced to toil for the benefit of another of higher standing. We can find the phraseology of slave throughout the ancient world and within early writings from Egypt, the Hebrew Bible, Greece, and Rome, as well as later periods. In fact, Aristotle (384 to 322 BC, famed polymath, and philosopher) succinctly clarified, from his privileged vantage-point, the social standing and value of personages classified as slaves – which would endure for epochs to come. From the legendary logician’s point of view, a slave was defined as, “one who is a human being belonging by nature not to himself [or herself] but to another is by nature a slave.” Aristotle further described a slave as, “a human being belongs to another if, in spite of being human, he [or she] is a possession; and as a possession, is [simply a tool for labor] having a separate existence.”^[95] Clarifying the fact that in the known world prior to Columbus’ famed voyage, in the late 15^th century, opening the floodgates of European colonial theft, pillage, and domination, historical notions of Western hierarchy and supremacy were commonplace. As European Enlightenment ideals such as, “the natural rights of man,” aforementioned, became ubiquitous amongst early American colonial elites throughout the 18^th century, “equality” became the new modus operandi which galvanized whites over and above all others. Hence, by classifying human beings by “race,” a new method of hierarchy was established based on what many at the time considered “science” to be further explored. As the principles of the Enlightenment penetrated the colonies of North America forming the basis for their early “democracy,” those same values paradoxically undergirded the most vicious kind of subjugation – chattel slavery.^[96]

A significant codified shift took place in colonial America within one of its most prosperous slave domains known as Virginia. Under the tutelage and guidance of the then Governor Sir William Berkeley (1605-1677), wealthy planter and slave owner, the House of Burgesses (the first self-proclaimed “representative government” in that early British colony) included a coterie of councilors hand-chosen by the governor to enact a law of hereditary slavery – which would economically serve their elite planter class interests. The English common law, known as, Partus Sequitur Patrem, traditionally held that, “the offspring would follow the condition … of the father.”^[97] But after a historic legal challenge brought by Elizabeth Key, an enslaved, bi-racial woman who sued for her freedom and won, in 1656, on the basis that her father was white – elite white Virginians understood that a shift in the law was not only necessary, but essential, if they were to maintain and/or increase their wealth through human bondage in the form of “property ownership.” Consequently, the new 1662 law, Partus Sequitur Ventrem, diverged from English common law, in that it proclaimed that the status of the mother, free or slave, determined the status of her offspring in perpetuity.^[98] Thus, African women were subjugated to the ranking of “breeders,” that would serve to produce more offspring categorized as slaves, whether bi-racial or not, and hence more profit for the ruling class. Enlightenment values ensconced in a rudimentary “race science,” by famed early Americans, would also help to solidify a systematized racialized hierarchy for decades to come.^[99]

Figure 7: Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Diplomat, Son of the Enlightenment, Planter, Lawyer, Philosopher, Primary Author of the Declaration of Independence and Third President of the United States.

Thomas Jefferson is famed to be one of the most quintessential characters in the formulation of America’s early Republic, along with James Madison and others, severing foreign rule and developing a new independent nation, substantiated on the Enlightenment principles of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,”^[100] based largely on John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, which argued that true “freedom” is defined by one’s singular control over their holdings and/or estates, i.e., property.^[101] But the most basest question which still lingers, within America’s long and twisted historical tragedy of early conquest and domination, which must be probed, is, “freedom for whom and for what?” Jefferson, that complex and enigmatic son of Enlightenment thought, both in science and sociological principles, clearly demarcated and endorsed a racialized societal structure that undergirded a system of hierarchy in which white colonists and their European legacy were considered far superior to all others – simplified notions woven within an early race science which would endure through time and memorial. Throughout his lifetime, race was defined by phenotype (or the look of human beings), physical characteristics which “appended physical traits [or idiosyncrasies] defined as ‘slave-like’ [were attributed] to those enslaved.”^[102] As Karen and Barbara Fields, two noted African American scholars, point out, Jefferson became convinced that a forced separation of people delineated by skin color was the only solution; that “the very people white Americans had lived with for over 160 years as slaves would be, after emancipation, too different for white people to live with any longer.”^[103] In fact, he suggested that if slaves were to be freed they should be promptly deported, their lost labor to be best supplied “through the importation of white laborers.”^[104]

Jefferson unabashedly qualified his racialized views when writing, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”^[105] John Locke and Thomas Jefferson stood in agreement, philosophically, when it came to the superiority versus inferiority of selected “races,” underpinning a racialized stratification within early colonial thought that helped to culturalize a race-based hierarchy in that newly formed “land of freedom,” known as the United States. These arguments of hierarchy which spread throughout the European mindset within that early colonial era, aided and abetted, “the dispossession of Native Americans” and “the enslavements of Africans” during that golden era of revolution.^[106] In his historic manuscript known as, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson outlined in detail his Enlightenment-inspired racialized interpretations of European superiority, demarcating what he believed to be a “scientific view” of the varying gradations of human beings based on race:

Comparing them [both blacks and whites] by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior … and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. But never yet could I find that a black has uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait, of painting or sculpture.^[107]

Ironically, given the complexity of the man, in response to a critic who opposed his views as presented above, Jefferson confessed that even if blacks were inferior to whites, “it would not justify their enslavement.”^[108] Hence, to his credit, he admitted and/or recognized the strangeness and/or irony of his own position when it came to Enlightenment constructs of race and their structural consequences.^[109] Again, from early on, racialized notions of superiority versus inferiority served the American planter class best, by cleverly embedding perceptions of hierarchy or white preeminence, they were able to suppress that which they feared most – which was the unification or coming together of a mass of lower classes comprising both enslaved Africans and poor whites. The historic incident which, served as an exemplar, sending shockwaves through that propertied class of early colonial America was notably Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676.

Nathaniel Bacon (1647-1676) elite Virginian, born and educated in England, member of the governor’s Council and close friend of Sir William Berkeley then colonial Governor – led a bottom-up rebellion which sent tremors through the upper classes of that newly birthed slave society, known as, Virginia – still considered one of the most foundational events of early American history. The colonial elite were threatened on all sides, as made evident by Governor Berkeley’s revelation, “The Poore Endebted Discontented and Armed” would, he feared, use this opportunity to “plunder the Country” and seize the property of the elite planters.^[110] Bacon, “who was no leveler,” was cleverly able to formulate a coalition (or unification), on behalf of his class interests, which included poor white indentured servants, free and enslaved Africans, to push back against any and all encroachments by native inhabitants which included the Appomattox and Susquehannock indigenous tribes of the region, in order to cease their lands and enrich himself and his class even further, insisting that, “the country must defend itself ‘against all Indians in general for that they were all Enemies.’”^[111] Some one hundred years later, in his acclaimed paradox of liberty known as the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, obviously influenced by Bacon’s racialized frame of thought, referred to the indigenous Native American peoples as nothing more than, “merciless Indian savages.”^[112] Hence, the native populations of that early America were collectively used as “scapegoats,” to enlarge the land holdings and wealth of the propertied class. From early on, the United States’ nascent form of Capitalism became dependent upon exploitative low-cost labor, “especially that of those considered nonwhite,” but also that of “the poor in general, including women and children – black and white alike.”^[113] Ironically, by the 1850s, antislavery sentiment grew even more intense amongst the masses, largely spurred on by white Southerner’s aggressive attempts to maintain the societal structure as such through political dominance and the spread of that “peculiar institution,” known as slavery to newly pilfered lands.^[114] In turn, the very idea of the possibility of any and all “lower class unity,” or a coming together of poor white indentured servants and African slaves as a militant force rising up against an entrenched planter class, brought forth a racialized culturalization grounded upon racial difference, racial hierarchy, and racial enmity, “a pattern that those statesmen and politicians of a later age would have found [politically useful and] familiar.”^[115] In fact, right through to the end of the 19^th century, post-Civil War and Reconstruction era (1865-1877), any form of lower-class unity in America stood as a direct threat to the established order of things throughout the nation as a whole; and especially throughout the South – most notably in the form of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance and the South’s reactionary implementation of a brutal social-order of domination and control known as Jim Crow.

Figure 8: Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), American Lawyer, Statesman and Politician. Sixteenth President of the United States and Author of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Although historically contentious, Abraham Lincoln’s primary goal within his Reconstruction scheme was to reunite a fractured nation after a bloody and costly Civil War. Through which, Lincoln’s objective was to reestablish the union and transfigure that implacable Southern society. His plan was also stridently committed to enforcing progressive legislation driven by the abolition of slavery. In fact, Lincoln directed Senator Edwin Morgan, chair of the National Union Executive Committee, to put in place a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. And Morgan did just that, in his famed speech before the National Convention on May 30, 1864, demanding the “utter and complete extirpation of slavery” via such an amendment.^[116] Beyond the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln was the first President in American history to call forth an amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishing the long-held institution of chattel slavery. For the first time, President Lincoln demanded the eventual passage of the Thirteenth Amendment Section 1 (ratified on December 6, 1865), which mandated that, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”^[117] Defining it as “a fitting, and necessary conclusion” to the war effort that would make permanent the joining of the causes of “Liberty and Union.”^[118] Lincoln’s sweeping Reconstruction agenda was a fight for freedom, requiring the South to adhere to a new constitution that would implicitly include black suffrage through the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment Section 1, ratified after his death on July 9, 1868, which for the first time in American history, declared:

All persons [meaning black and white alike] born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.^[119]

Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, saw his Reconstruction struggles above all as, “an adjunct of the war effort – a way of undermining the Confederacy, rallying southern white Unionists, and securing emancipation,”^[120] for which he paid the ultimate price. From early on, internecine rivalry, or infighting, within the Republican Party from those labeled as “the Radicals,” led to a push-back against certain elements of Lincoln’s strategy mentioned above – arguing that Reconstruction should be postponed until after the war, “as outlined in the Wade-Davis Bill of 1864, which clearly envisioned, as a requirement, that a majority of southern whites take an oath of loyalty,” to the United States; and that the federal government should by necessity, “attempt to ensure basic justice to emancipated slaves.” A point at which, “equality before the law,” not “black suffrage,” as Lincoln had suggested, was an essential factor for many of the Republicans in Congress at the time.^[121] As a result of Lincoln’s efforts in taking away the productive forces of labor within the South, and in turn, the diminishment of property, wealth, and political power of the elite southern planter class, a nefarious conspiracy to murder the President was hatched and executed by southern loyalist and assassin John Wilks Booth, on April 14, 1865, while the President sat accompanied by his wife, Mary, watching a play titled, Our American Cousin, at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. – oddly, the assassin was able to gain access to the theater, enter the Presidential Booth, and shoot and kill the President of the United States. Lincoln’s body was carried to the nearby Petersen House, where he passed away at 7:22 a.m., the following morning. At his bedside, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton famously remarked, “Now he belongs to the ages.”^[122] Reflecting upon not only the uniqueness of the man, but his tremendous contributions to those American ideals of “Liberty and Freedom.” Emphasizing the fact that the Emancipation of Africans from forced labor; and the abolishment of chattel slavery, through a stroke of his pen, uniquely placed Abraham Lincoln in the pantheon of historical renown.

That said, throughout the end of the 19^th Century, the road ahead per class relations for African Americans and poor whites alike, especially in the South, would be a hard and arduous one of top-down control and division. Reactionary as they were, as argued, Southern elites would forcefully implement doctrines of superiority, separation, and control that would crush and/or punish any form of lower-class unity which threatened their power and influence over the majority. This reaction would become most evident in the racialized militant form of the Ku Klux Klan; and later the structural control and dominance of an imposed social order known as Jim Crow, which would orchestrate the groundwork for a deepening racial divide.

The Colored Farmers’ Alliance, formulated in the 1870s, still stands as a historical model of class unity amongst the poor, both Black and white alike, which galvanized southern elites in a top-down belligerent class war to protect their interests. The Alliance was created, “when an agricultural depression hit the South around 1870 and poor farmers began to organize themselves into radical multiracial political groups”^[123] – which stood as a direct threat to upper-class Southern dominance and their wealth accumulation. Years earlier by 1865, that elite militancy revealed itself in the form of the Ku Klux Klan (a violent and racist, hate-filled supremacist terror organization) that, “extended into almost every southern state by 1870 and became a vehicle for white southern resistance to the Republican Party’s Reconstruction-era policies aimed at establishing political and economic equality for Black Americans.”^[124] Klan members devised a subversive crusade of coercion and brutal violence directed at Black and white Republican leadership. Even though the U.S. Congress had successfully pushed through regulations intended to mitigate Klan extremism, the KKK viewed its main goal as the “reinstatement of white governance and supremacy throughout the Southlands in the 1870s and beyond,” made most evident through Democratic victories within state legislatures across the South.^[125] Jim Crow was the name given to a racialized social order or caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively, in the southern and border states between 1877 to the mid-1960s. “Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life.”^[126] Under the system of Jim Crow, African Americans were consigned to the rank of second-class citizens, as emphasized by African American Professor Emeritus, Adolph L. Reed Jr., “We were all unequal, but [when it came to race and class], some were more unequal than others.”^[127] Divisions amongst the lower classes, throughout the South, served as a powerful and effective hegemonic tool of supremacy. Hence, it was not long, thereafter, within that stratified class society, before that black-white alliance had ended – as Democrats slowly united in a series of successful white supremacy campaigns to banish the Fusionists and discontinue what most white southern racists denoted to as, “Negro rule.”^[128] Hence, as noted throughout this study, class, race, and racism have long been fundamental elements of control woven within this class-conscious slave culture, paradoxically, self-described, “birthplace of freedom.”

Conclusion

From the outset, as early as the Constitutional Convention of 1787, it has been inherently difficult to reconcile a faith in the U.S. Constitution as a “living, flexible and changeable,” document – with the fundamental unfeasibility of making systemwide class transformation in the United States of America. There is copious and convincing evidence that the U.S. Constitution was intended and/or mechanized, by design, to stifle and/or inhibit any “meaningful systemic change,” in order to counteract anything that does not assist the benefits of the moneyed elite. Brilliantly designed and implemented by those acclaimed early American “Framers,” such as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and others – the means and complex configurations woven within the U.S. Constitution were deliberately intended to be unchangeable when it came to any and all challenges from below. The Constitutional aphorism over “the rights of private property possession” and its accompanied protections for example – made possible by the “expropriation of Native Americans lands, slavery; and the exploitation of lower-class labor” as discussed – has served, from the very beginning of that early American experiment, as a primary preset to protect wealth.^[129] Political Science Professor Robert Ovetz argues, in fact, that the U.S. Constitution has never really lived up to its well-known first three words, of “We the People,” insisting that that renowned Charter is, by its very nature and design, “self-breaching,” because “we the people have never directly given consent to be governed by it – nor do the laws put in place give [the people] the liberty to do so.”^[130] That said, given the complexity of mind of those men recognized as “the Framers,” and in their defense, they did interweave a certain language of liberty, in the form of protections, as exemplified in Amendment IX, which states, “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”^[131]

Amendment IX to the Constitution was authorized on December 15^th, 1791. And, it clearly proclaims that the text is not a wide-ranging list of every right of the citizen, but that the unnamed rights to come will be allowed protections under the law.^[132] The IX Amendment explicitly acknowledged that the people have a reserve of rights that go beyond the Constitution. Hence, the enumeration of specific rights “shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”^[133] As a counterweight to popular belief, American political scientist, author, and activist, Michael Parenti contends that, “those privileged delegates gave nothing to popular interests, rather – as with the Bill of Rights – they reluctantly made democratic concessions under the menacing threat of popular rebellion.”^[134] Race and class, in early America, not only substantiated that, “the wealthy are a better class of men,” as James Madison proclaimed during the Convention^[135] – but that wealth and privilege were correlated to intelligence and deserved protections. In fact, not dissimilar to present-day America, “According to the dogma [of that early elite colonial class] efforts to lessen inequality, through progressive taxation, or redistributive public spending, infringe the liberty of the rich,” meaning the rich deserve their benefits and reward as such. Consequently, intelligence determines merit, and merit apportions rewards are those early American values which permeate the culture to this day. The working class, both Black and white alike, “that have been consigned to the lower reaches of society were there,” as noted African American scholars Barbara and Karen Fields have demonstrated, “due to attributions of low intelligence” – demarcating clear class distinctions and divisions based on a model of superiority from early on which privileged an elite few.^[136] The seeds of race supremacy and the hypocrisy of liberty, throughout America’s long and difficult history, were planted by the Framers themselves, “most of whom accepted that human beings could be held as property and that Africans and Native Americans were inferior to Caucasians” in a multitude of ways^[137] – as demonstrated throughout this study.

Endnotes:

[1] James Madison, “Federalist Papers: Primary Documents in American History: Federalist No. 10,” research guide, accessed August 27, 2023, https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-1-10.

[2] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition, Notes on the State of Virginia (Yale University Press, 2022).

[3] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: G. Routledge, 1893), 556–60.

[4] Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 8th ed (Boston: Thomson-Wadsworth, 2008), 40.

[5] Louis Otto quoted in Herbert Aptheker, Early Years of the Republic: From the End of the Revolution to the First Administration of Washington (1783-1793) (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 41.

[6] Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 40. Sourcing the works of Sidney H. Aronson, Status and Kinship in the Higher Civil Service: Standards of Selection in the Administrations of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1964); Daniel M. Friedenberg, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Land: The Plunder of Early America (Buffalo, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 1992).

[7] Francis Bacon, The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, with Prefaces and Notes by the Late Robert Leslie Ellis, Together with English Translations of the Principal Latin Pieces, ed. James Spedding, vol. 4 (London: Longman & co., 1861), 64.

^[8] “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” America’s Founding Documents, National Archives, accessed March 22, 2024, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.

^[9] Nancy G. Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2017), 1.

^[10] Isenberg, 1.

^[11] David McNally, Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2020), 178.

[12] Benjamin Irvin, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–18.

[13] Isenberg, White Trash, 1.

[14] John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity, 1630,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd Series (Boston, 1838), 7:31-48, https://history.hanover.edu/texts/winthmod.html.

[15] Isenberg, White Trash, 3.

[16] Smith, Wealth of Nations, 556–60.

[17] Robert Ovetz, We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few (London: Pluto Press, 2022), 2–3.

[18] Ovetz, 41.

[19] “The Constitution of the United States,” National Archives, accessed September 3, 2023, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution.

[20] Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 40.

[21] “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.”

[22] “From George Washington to Henry Knox,” December 26, 1786, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-04-02-0409.

[23] Jennifer Nedelsky, Private Property, and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and Its Legacy, Paperback ed., (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 159.

[24] “From George Washington to Henry Knox,” February 3, 1787, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-05-02-0006.

[25] Gregory H Nobles, “Historians Extend the Reach of the American Revolution,” in Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding, ed. Alfred Fabian Young and Gregory H. Nobles (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 213.

[26] “The Constitution of the United States.”

[27] Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783-1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975), 80, 95, 120.

[28] William Manning, The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “a Laborer,” 1747-1814, ed. Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz, The John Harvard Library (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993), 113.

[29] Manning, 164–66.

[30] Manning, 162.

[31] Alexander Hamilton, “Final Version: First Report on the Further Provision Necessary for Establishing Public Credit,” December 13, 1790, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-07-02-0227-0003.

^[32] Alexander Hamilton, “Final Version of the Second Report on the Further Provision Necessary for Establishing Public Credit (Report on a National Bank),” December 13, 1790, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-07-02-0229-0003.

^[33] Charles Austin Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (Anodos Books, 2018), 88.

^[34] Beard, 164.

^[35] “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.”

^[36] Ovetz, We the Elites, 44.

^[37] James Madison, “Notes on Debates” (January 28, 1783), Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-06-02-0037.

^[38] Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, First Edition (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), 87–88.

^[39] “The Constitution of the United States.”

^[40] Ovetz, We the Elites, 96.

^[41] John Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1884), 160.

^[42] “From James Madison to James Monroe,” October 5, 1786, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-09-02-0054; “To Thomas Jefferson from James Madison,” October 24, 1787, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-12-02-0274; Madison, “Research Guides.”

^[43] James Madison quoted in Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), 210.

^[44] John Dickinson quoted in Klarman, 210.

^[45] Pierce Butler quoted in Klarman, 210.

^[46] Ovetz, We the Elites, 53.

^[47] “The Constitution of the United States.”

^[48] Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), 642.

^[49] Smith, Wealth of Nations, 342.

^[50] Isenberg, White Trash, 14.

^[51] Madison, “Research Guides.”

^[52] Madison.

^[53] Madison.

^[54] Augustus John Foster, Jeffersonian America: Notes on the United States of America, Collected in the Years 1805-6-7 and 1-12 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1954), 163, 307.

^[55] Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1995), 380.

^[56] Morgan, 380.

^[57] Morgan, 381.

^[58] Morgan, 381.

^[59] Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government, 169–75.

^[60] John Locke, “An Essay on the Poor Law,” in Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie, Transferred to digital print, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 190–91.

^[61] Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government, 239–40.

^[62] David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 14.

^[63] James Madison, “Rule of Representation in the Senate,” June 30, 1787, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0050.

^[64] James Madison, “Madison Debates,” August 22, 1787, Yale Law School, The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_822.asp.

^[65] Staughton Lynd, Class Conflict, Slavery and the United States Constitution: Ten Essays (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Pr, 1980), 14.

^[66] Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2017), 65.

^[67] Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), 294.

^[68] “The Constitution of the United States.”

^[69] “The Constitution of the United States.”

^[70] Paul Finkelman, “Slavery in the United States: Person or Property,” in The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary, ed. Jean Allain (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), 118.

^[71] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, 2009, https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html.

^[72] Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 386–87.

^[73] Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Paperback edition (New York: Basic Books, 2016), xviii–xix.

^[74] Baptist, 244–45.

^[75] Baptist, 245.

^[76] Steven Deyle, “The Domestic Slave Trade in America: The Lifeblood of the Southern Slave System,” in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, ed. Walter Johnson and Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 95.

^[77] Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 248.

^[78] Baptist, 248.

^[79] Abraham Lincoln, “The Emancipation Proclamation, 1863,” January 1, 1863, https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals_iv/sections/nonjavatext_emancipation.html.

^[80] James M. McPherson, “Who Freed the Slaves?,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 139, no. 1 (1995): 1–10.

^[81] Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 400–401.

^[82] Baptist, 400.

^[83] Baptist, 401.

^[84] “SPEECH OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Delivered at a Mass Meeting Held at National Hall, Philadelphia, July 6, 1863, for the Promotion of Colored Enlistments,” Liberator (1831-1865), American Periodicals, 33, no. 30 (July 24, 1863): 118.

^[85] David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 409–10.

^[86] John T. Hubbell, “Abraham Lincoln and the Recruitment of Black Soldiers,” Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association 2, no. 1 (1980).

^[87] “Lincoln’s Death,” Ford’s Theatre, accessed July 16, 2024, https://fords.org/lincolns-assassination/lincolns-death/.

^[88] David R. Roediger, How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Eclipse of Post-Racialism, Paperback edition (London New York: Verso, 2019), XII.

^[89] Brian Duignan, “Enlightenment,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, July 29, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/event/Enlightenment-European-history.

^[90] “Historical Foundations of Race,” National Museum of African American History and Culture, accessed July 30, 2024, https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/historical-foundations-race.

^[91] Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice (Gabriola Islands, BC: New Society Publ, 1996), 127.

^[92] “Historical Foundations of Race.”

^[93] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement,” in Abolition Geography: Essays towards Liberation, ed. Brenna Bhandar and Albero Toscano (Brooklyn: Verso, 2022), 451.

^[94] Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It, Vol Vintage Books, 1989, 15–16.

^[95] Aristotle, Politics, trans. Harris Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1944), 1.5 1254a13-18, https://catalog.perseus.org/catalog/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0086.tlg035.perseus-eng1.

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^[102] Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), 132–35, 149–51.

^[103] Karen E. Fields and Barbara Jeanne Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2014), 18.

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^[108] “Thomas Jefferson to Henri Gregoire, February 25, 1809” (Correspondence, February 25, 1809), Available at: https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.043_0836_0836/?st=text.

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^[116] Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, 1st ed (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 298–99.

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^[118] Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. VII (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, c1953-55), 380.

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^[123] Helen Losse, “Colored Farmers’ Alliance,” in Encyclopedia of North Carolina, ed. William S. Powell (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), Available at: https://www.ncpedia.org/colored-farmers-alliance.

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^[125] History.com Editors.

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^[127] Adolph L. Reed, The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives (London; New York: Verso Books, 2022), 41.

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^[129] Ovetz, We the Elites, 159.

^[130] Ovetz, 161.

^[131] “The Constitution of the United States.”

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^[135] Madison, “Notes on Debates.”

^[136] Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 278.

^[137] Klarman, The Framers’ Coup, 2016, 630–31.

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

"Congolese Are Paying the Price" for Western Demand for Minerals & Support for Rwanda’s Paul Kagame

Democracy Now! — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:20:43 +0000

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

“Congolese Are Paying the Price” for Western Demand for Minerals & Support for Rwanda’s Paul Kagame

Democracy Now! — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 13:47:40 +0000

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the advance of Rwanda-backed M23 insurgents, who have already taken two key cities in the mineral-rich eastern part of the country, is triggering panic. Reports of the surge describe widespread looting, killings, attacks on aid and mass displacement. Thousands of people have fled to neighboring Burundi over the last few days as the U.N. accused M23 of killing children and attacking hospitals. Our guest Kambale Musavuli, a Congolese author and human rights advocate, speaks to us from Ghana about Western countries’ ongoing demand for Congo’s minerals and their complicity in the deadly violence. Industrial nations as well as celebrated musicians and sports teams from the West have refused to cancel agreements and appearances with Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame, explains Musavuli, “clearly telling us that the lives of the millions of Congolese do not matter.”

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

Paul Buchanan: Trump 2.0 and the limits of over-reach

APR editor — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 12:44:38 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Paul G Buchanan

Here is a scenario, but first a broad brush-painted historical parallel.

Hitler and the Nazis could well have accomplished everything that they wanted to do within German borders, including exterminating Jews, so long as they confined their ambitious to Germany itself. After all, the world pretty much sat and watched as the Nazi pogroms unfolded in the late 1930s.

But Hitler never intended to confine himself to Germany and decided to attack his neighbours simultaneously, on multiple fronts East, West, North and South.

This came against the advice of his generals, who believed that his imperialistic war-mongering should happen sequentially and that Germany should not fight the USSR until it had conquered Europe first, replenished with pillaged resources, and then reorganised its forces for the move East. They also advised that Germany should also avoid tangling with the US, which had pro-Nazi sympathisers in high places (like Charles Lindbergh) and was leaning towards neutrality in spite of FDR’s support for the UK.

Hitler ignored the advice and attacked in every direction, got bogged down in the Soviet winter, drew in the US in by attacking US shipping ferrying supplies to the UK, and wound up stretching his forces in North Africa, the entire Eastern front into Ukraine and the North Mediterranean states, the Scandinavian Peninsula and the UK itself.

In other words, he bit off too much in one chew and wound up paying the price for his over-reach.

Hitler did what he did because he could, thanks in part to the 1933 Enabling Law that superseded all other German laws and allowed him carte blanche to pursue his delusions. That proved to be his undoing because his ambition was not matched by his strategic acumen and resources when confronted by an armed alliance of adversaries.

pic.twitter.com/95GzNiAaqs

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 15, 2025

A version of this in US?
A version of this may be what is unfolding in the US. Using the cover of broad Executive Powers, Musk, Trump and their minions are throwing everything at the kitchen wall in order to see what sticks.

They are breaking domestic and international norms and conventions pursuant to the neo-reactionary “disruptor” and “chaos” theories propelling the US techno-authoritarian Right. They want to dismantle the US federal State, including the systems of checks and balances embodied in the three branches of government, subordinating all policy to the dictates of an uber-powerful Executive Branch.

In this view the Legislature and Judiciary serve as rubber stamp legitimating devices for Executive rule. Many of those in the Musk-lead DOGE teams are subscribers to this ideology.

At the same time the new oligarchs want to re-make the International order as well as interfere in the domestic politics of other liberal democracies. Musk openly campaigns for the German far-Right AfD in this year’s elections, he and Trump both celebrate neo-fascists like Viktor Urban in Hungry and Javier Milei in Argentina.

Trump utters delusional desires to “make” Canada the 51st State, forcibly regain control of the Panama Canal, annex Greenland, turn Gaza into a breach resort complex and eliminate international institutions like the World Trade Organisation and even NATO if it does not do what he says.

He imposes sanctions on the International Criminal Court, slaps sanctions on South Africa for land take-overs and because it took a case of genocide against Israel in the ICC, doubles down on his support for Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians and is poised to sell-out Ukraine by using the threat of an aid cut-off to force the Ukrainians to cede sovereignty to Russia over all of their territory east of the Donbas River (and Crimea).

He even unilaterally renames the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in a teenaged display of symbolic posturing that ignores the fact that renaming the Gulf has no standing in international law and “America” is a term that refers to the North, Central and South land masses of the Western Hemisphere — i.e., it is not exclusive to or propriety of the United States.

Dismantling the globalised trade system
Trump wants to dismantle the globalised system of trade by using tariffs as a weapon as well as leverage, “punishing” nations for non-trade as well as trade issues because of their perceived dependence on the US market. This is evident in the tariffs (briefly) imposed on Canada, Mexico and Colombia over issues of immigration and re-patriation of US deportees.

In other words, Trump 2.0 is about redoing the World Order in his preferred image, doing everything more or less at once. It is as if Trump, Musk and their Project 2025 foot soldiers believe in a reinterpreted version of “shock and awe:” the audacity and speed of the multipronged attack on everything will cause opponents to be paralysed by the move and therefore will be unable to resist it.

That includes extending cultural wars by taking over the Kennedy Center for the Arts (a global institution) because he does not like the type of “culture” (read: African American) that is presented there and he wants to replace the Center’s repertoire with more “appropriate” (read: Anglo-Saxon) offerings. The assault on the liberal institutional order (at home and abroad), in other words, is holistic and universal in nature.

Trump’s advisers are even talking about ignoring court orders barring some of their actions, setting up a constitutional crisis scenario that they believe they will win in the current Supreme Court.

I am sure that Musk/Trump can get away with a fair few of these disruptions, but I am not certain that they can get away with all of them. They may have more success on the domestic rather than the international front given the power dynamics in each arena. In any event they do not seem to have thought much about the ripple effect responses to their moves, specifically the blowback that might ensue.

This is where the Nazi analogy applies. It could be that Musk and Trump have also bitten more than they can chew. They may have Project 2025 as their road map, but even maps do not always get the weather right, or accurately predict the mood of locals encountered along the way to wherever one proposes to go. That could well be–and it is my hope that it is–the cause of their undoing.

Overreach, egos, hubris and the unexpected detours around and obstacles presented by foreign and domestic actors just might upset their best laid plans.

Dotage is on daily public display
That brings up another possibility. Trump’s remarks in recent weeks are descending into senescence and caducity. His dotage is on daily public display. Only his medications have changed. He is more subdued than during the campaign but no less mad. He leaves the ranting and raving to Musk, who only truly listens to the fairies in his ear.

But it is possible that there are ghost whisperers in Trump’s ear as well (Stephen Miller, perhaps), who deliberately plant preposterous ideas in his feeble head and egg him on to pursue them. In the measure that he does so and begins to approach the red-line of obvious derangement, then perhaps the stage is being set from within by Musk and other oligarchs for a 25th Amendment move to unseat him in favour of JD Vance, a far more dangerous member of the techbro puppet masters’ cabal.

Remember that most of Trump’s cabinet are billionaires and millionaires and only Cabinet can invoke the 25th Amendment.

Vance has incentive to support this play because Trump (foolishly, IMO) has publicly stated that he does not see Vance as his successor and may even run for a third term. That is not want the techbro overlords wanted to hear, so they may have to move against Trump sooner rather than later if they want to impose their oligarchical vision on the US and world.

An impeachment would be futile given Congress’s make-up and Trump’s two-time wins over his Congressional opponents. A third try is a non-starter and would take too long anyway. Short of death (that has been suggested) the 25th Amendment is the only way to remove him.

It is at that point that I hope that things will start to unravel for them. It is hard to say what the MAGA-dominated Congress will do if laws are flouted on a wholesale basis and constituents begin to complain about the negative impact of DOGE cost-cutting on federal programmes. But one thing is certain, chaos begets chaos (because chaos is not synonymous with techbro libertarians’ dreams of anarchy) and disruption for disruption’s sake may not result in an improved socio-economic and political order.

Those are some of the “unknown unknowns” that the neo-con Donald Rumsfeld used to talk about.

In other words, vamos a ver–we shall see.

Dr Paul G Buchanan is the director of 36th-Parallel Assessments, a geopolitical and strategic analysis consultancy. This article is republished from Kiwipolitico with the permission of the author.

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

Far from Benign: The US Aid Industrial Complex

Binoy Kampmark — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 14:16:33 +0000

The US aid program began in earnest in the early stages of the Cold War, with an intention to beat off the contenders from the Soviet bloc in the postcolonial world. President Harry S. Truman proposed, in his 1949 inaugural address, “a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.” In 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, enabling him to issue the executive order that created the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

In 1962, the American scholar of international relations, Henry Morgenthau, suggested that foreign aid could fall into six categories: the sort that promoted humanitarian objects, the aid that offers subsistence goals and military aims, the sort that acted as a bribe, the attainment of prestige and economic development.

To provide aid suggests a benevolent undertaking delivered selflessly. It arises from the charitable mission, an attempt to alleviate, or at least soften the blows of hardship arising from various impairments (poverty, famine, disease). But the provision of aid is rarely benign, almost always political, and, in its realisation, often self-defeating. The very transaction acknowledges the inherent victimhood of the sufferer, the intractable nature of the condition, the seemingly insoluble nature of a social problem.

Morgenthau also conceded that humanitarian aid, despite being, on the surface, non-political in nature, could still “perform political function when it operates within political context.” And the very provision of aid suggests an accepted state of inequality between giver and recipient, with the former having the means to influence outcomes.

With such views frothing the mix, it is worth considering why the attack by President Donald J. Trump on USAID as part of his axing crusade against bureaucratic waste is not, for all its structural and constitutional limitations, without harsh merit. Over the years, insistent critics have been lurking in the bushes regarding that particular body, but they have been dismissed as isolationist and unwilling to accept messianic US internationalism. The Heritage Foundation, for instance, has been wondering if the whole idea of US foreign aid should be called off. In January 1995, the body produced a report urging the termination of USAID. “Despite billions of dollars spent on economic assistance, most of the countries receiving US development aid remained mired in poverty, repressions, and dependence.”

Such a viewpoint can hardly be dismissed as a fringe sentiment smacking of parochialism. (In the United States, imperialist sentiment is often synonymous with supposedly principled internationalism.) The less rosy side of the aid industry has been shored up by such trenchant critiques as Dambisa Moyo’s, whose Dead Aid (2009) sees the $1 trillion in development aid given to Africa over five decades as a “malignant” exercise that failed to reduce poverty or deliver sustainable growth. She caustically remarks that, “Between 1970 and 1998, when aid flows to Africa were at their peak, poverty in Africa rose from 11 percent to a staggering 66 percent.” Aid, far from being a potential solution, has become the problem.

The report card of USAID has not improved. One of the notable features of the aid racket is that much of the money never escapes the orbit of the organisational circuit, locked up with intermediaries and contractors. In other words, the money tends to move around and stay in Washington, never departing for more useful climes. A report by USAID from June 2023 noted that nine out of every ten dollars spent by the organisation in the 2022 fiscal year went to international contracting partners, most of whom are situated in Washington, DC. USAID funding is also very particular about its recipient groups, with 60% of all its funding going to a mere 25 groups in 2017 alone.

In January this year, the USAID Office of Inspector General authored a memorandum noting accountability and transparency issues within USAID-funded programs. USAID, Inspector General Paul K. Martin insisted, “must enforce the requirement that UN agencies promptly report allegations of fraud or sexual exploitation and abuse directly to OIG.” While the sentiment of the document echoes a long US tradition of suspicion towards UN agencies, valid points of consideration are made regarding mismanagement of humanitarian assistance. The OIG also took issue with USAID’s lack of any “comprehensive internal database of subawardees.”

Despite these scars and impediments, USAID continues being celebrated by its admirers as a projection of “soft power” par excellence, indispensable in promoting the good name of Washington in the benighted crisis spots of the globe. A cuddly justification is offered by the Council on Foreign Relations, which describes USAID as “a pillar of US soft power and a source of foreign assistance for struggling countries, playing a leading role in coordinating the response to international emergencies such as the global food security crisis.”

Stewart Patrick of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace discounts the politically slanted nature of US aid policies, not to mention its faulty distribution mechanism, by universalising the achievements of a body he cherishes. USAID “has contributed to humanity’s extraordinary progress in poverty reduction, increased life expectancy, better health, improved literacy, and so much more.”

A less disingenuous example can be found in the Financial Times, which encourages “fighting poverty and disease and enabling economic development” as doing so will improve safety, advance prosperity, curb instability and the appeal of autocracy. But at the end of the day, aid is a good idea because, reasons the editorial, it offers expanded markets for US exports. The sick and the impoverished don’t tend to make good consumers. To cancel, however “life-saving projects” at short notice was “a good way to provoke an anti-American backlash” while giving an encouraging wink to the Chinese. US Aid: far from benign, and distinctly political.

The post Far from Benign: The US Aid Industrial Complex first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

‘Turn it into a retirement village’: Inside the war of words over Eden Park

APR editor — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:56:21 +0000

After lengthy, torrid and emotional debate a critical decision for the future of Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau is being made in March. One party will celebrate; the other will slink back to the drawing board. But will it really settle the great Auckland stadium debate?

SPECIAL REPORT: By Chris Schulz

It resembles a building from Blade Runner. It looks like somewhere the Avengers might assemble. It is, believes Paul Nisbet, the future.

“It’s innovative, it’s groundbreaking, it’s something different,” says the driving force behind Te Tōangaroa, a new stadium mooted for downtown Auckland.

He has spent 13 years dreaming up this moon shot, and it shows. “We have an opportunity here to deliver something special for the country.”

Located behind Spark Arena, Te Tōangaroa — also called “Quay Park” — is Nisbet’s big gamble, the stadium he believes Tāmaki Makaurau needs to sustain the city’s live sport and entertainment demands for the next 100 years.

His is a concept as grand as it gets, a U-shaped dream with winged rooftops that will sweep around fans sitting in the stands, each getting unimpeded views out over the Waitematā Harbour and Rangitoto Island.

Located behind Spark Arena, Te Tōangaroa is also called “Quay Park”. Image: Te Tōangaroa

Nisbet calls his vision a “gateway for the world,” a structure so grand he believes it would attract the biggest sports teams, stars and sponsors to Aotearoa while offering visitors a must-see tourist destination. Nestled alongside residential areas, commercial zones and an All Blacks-themed hotel, designs show a retractable roof protecting 55,000 punters from the elements and a sky turret towering over neighbouring buildings.

He’s gone all in on this. Nisbet’s quit his job, assembled a consortium of experts — called Cenfield MXD — and attracted financial backers to turn his vision into a reality. It is, Nisbet believes, the culmination of his 30-year career working in major stadiums, including 11 years as director of Auckland Stadiums.

“I’ve had the chance to travel extensively,” he says. “I’ve been to over 50 stadiums around the world.”

Tāmaki Makaurau, he says, needs Te Tōangaroa — urgently. If approved, it will be built over an ageing commercial space and an unused railway yard sitting behind Spark Arena, what Nisbet calls “a dirty old brownfields location that’s sapping the economic viability out of the city”.

He calls it a “regeneration” project. “You couldn’t mistake you’re in Auckland, or New Zealand, when you see images of it,” he says.

The All Blacks are on board, says Nisbet, and they want Te Tōangaroa built by 2029 in time for a Lions tour. (The All Blacks didn’t respond to a request for comment, but former players John Kirwan and Sean Fitzpatrick have backed the team moving to Te Tōangaroa.)

Concert promoters are on board too, says Nisbet. He believes Te Tōangaroa would end the Taylor Swift debacle that’s seen her and many major acts skip us in favour of touring Australian stadiums.

“It will be one of those special places that international acts just have to play,” he says.

The problem? Nisbet’s made a gamble that may not pay off. In March, a decision is due to be made about the city’s stadium future. Building Te Tōangaroa, with an estimated construction time of six years and a budget of $1 billion, is just one option.

The other, Eden Park, has 125 years of history, a long-standing All Blacks record and a huge number of supporters behind it — as well as a CEO willing to do anything to win.

The stadium standing in Te Tōangaroa’s way
Stand in Eden Park’s foyer for a few minutes and history will smack you in the face. It’s there in the photos framed on the wall from a 1937 All Blacks test match. It’s sitting in Anton Oliver’s rugby boots from 2001, presumably fumigated and placed inside a glass case.

More recent history is on display too, with floor-to-ceiling photographs showing off concerts headlined by by Ed Sheeran and Six60, a pivot only possible since 2021.

Soon, the man in charge of all of this arrives. “Very few people have seen this space,” says Nick Sautner, the Eden Park CEO who shakes my hand, pulls me down a hallway and invites me into a secret room in the bowels of Eden Park. With gleaming wood panels, leather couches and top-shelf liquor, Sautner’s proud of his hidden bar.

“It’s invite-only . . . a VIP experience,” says Sautner, whose Australian accent remains easily identifiable despite seven years at the helm of Eden Park.

The future of Eden Park if a refurb is granted. Image: YouTube

This bar, he says, is just one of the many innovations Eden Park has undertaken in recent years. Built in 1900, the Mt Eden stadium remains the home of the All Blacks — but Eden Park is no longer considered a specialty sports venue.

Up to 70 percent of the stadium’s revenue now comes from non-sporting activities, Sautner confirms. You can golf, abseil onto the rooftops and stay the night in dedicated glamping venues. It’s also become promoters’ choice for major concerts, with Coldplay and Luke Combs recently hosting multiple shows there. “We will consider any innovation you can imagine,” Sautner tells me. “We’re a blank canvas.”

Throughout our interview, Sautner refers to Eden Park as the “national stadium”. He’s upbeat and on form, rattling off statistics and renovations from memory. His social media feeds — especially LinkedIn — are full of posts promoting the stadium’s achievements. He’ll pick up the phone to anyone who will talk to him.

“Whatsapp is the best way of contacting me,” he says. Residents have his number and can call directly with complaints. After our interview, Sautner passes me his business card then follows it up with an email making sure I have everything I need. “My phone’s always on,” he assures me.

He may not admit it, but Sautner’s doing all of this in an attempt to get ahead of what’s shaping up as the biggest crisis of Eden Park’s 125 years. If Te Tōangaroa is chosen in March, Eden Park — as well as Albany’s North Harbour Stadium and Onehunga’s Go Media Stadium – will all take a back seat.

If Eden Park loses the All Blacks and their 31-year unbeaten record, then there’s no other word for it: the threat is existential.

Called Eden Park 2.1, Sautner is promoting a three-stage renovation plan. Image: YouTube

Ask Sautner if he’s losing sleep over his stadium’s future and he shakes his head. To him, Te Tōangaroa’s numbers don’t stack up. “If someone can make the business model work for an alternative stadium in Auckland, I’m all for activating the waterfront,” he says.

Then he poses a series of questions: “How many events a year would a downtown stadium hold? Forty-five?” he asks. “So 320 other days a year, what’s going to be in that stadium?”

He is, of course, biased. But Sautner believes upgrading Eden Park is the right move. Called Eden Park 2.1, Sautner is promoting a three-stage renovation plan that includes building a $100 million retractable rooftop. A new North Stand would lift Eden Park’s capacity to 70,000, and improved function facilities and a pedestrian bridge would turn the venue into “a fortress . . . capable of hosting every event”.

He’s veering into corporate speak, but Sautner sees the vision clearly. With his annual concert consent recently raised from six to 12 shows, he already thinks he’s got it in the bag, “Eden Park has the land, it has the consent, it has the community, it has the infrastructure,” he says. “I’m very confident Eden Park is going to be here for another 100 years.”

Instead of a drink, Sautner offers RNZ a personal stadium tour that takes us through the exact same doors that open when the All Blacks emerge onto the hallowed turf. There, blinking in the sunlight, Sautner sweeps his arms around the stadium and grins. “I get up every day and I think of my family,” he says. “Then I think, ‘How can I make Eden Park better?”

The stadium debate: ‘It began when the dinosaurs died out’
It is, says Shane Henderson, an argument for the ages. It never seems to quit. How long have Aucklanders been feuding about stadiums? “It began when the dinosaurs died out,” jokes Henderson.

For the past year, he’s been chairing a working group that will make the decision on Auckland’s stadium future. That group whittled four options down to the current two, eliminating a sunken waterfront stadium, and another based in Silo Park.

He’s doing this because Wayne Brown asked him to. “The mayor said, ‘We need to say to the public, ‘This is our preferred option for a stadium for the city.'” It’s taken over Henderson’s life. Every summer barbecue has turned into a forum for people to share their views.

“People say, “Why don’t you do this?'” he says. Henderson won’t be drawn on which way he’s leaning ahead of March’s decision, but he’s well aware of the stakes. “We’re talking about the future of our city for generations to come,” he says. “It’s natural feelings are going to run high.”

That’s true. As I researched this story, the main parties engaged in a back-and-forth discussion that became increasingly heated. Jim Doyle, from Te Tōangaroa’s Cenfield MXD team, described Eden Park’s situation as desperate.

“Eden Park can’t fund itself . . . it’s got no money, it’s costing ratepayers,” he said. Doyle alleged the stadium “wouldn’t be fit for purpose”. “You’re going to have to spend probably close to $1 billion to upgrade it.” Asked what should happen to Eden Park should the decision go Te Tōangaroa’s way, Doyle shrugged his shoulders. “Turn it into a retirement village.”

Eden Park’s Sautner immediately struck back. Yes, he admits Eden Park owes $40 million to Auckland Council, calling that debt a “legacy left over from the Rugby World Cup 2011”. But he denied most of the consortium’s claims.

“Eden Park does not receive any funding or subsidies from Auckland ratepayers,” Sautner said in a written statement. He confirmed renovations had already begun. “Over the past three years, the Trust has invested more than $30 million to enhance infrastructure and upgrade facilities . . . creating flexible spaces to meet evolving market demands.”

Sautner said Doyle’s statement was evidence of his team’s inexperience. “We are extremely disappointed that comments of this nature have been made,” he said. “They are factually incorrect and highlight Quay Park consortium’s lack of understanding of stadium economics.”

Do we even need to do this?
As the stadium debate turns into a showdown, major stars continue to skip Aotearoa in favour of huge Australian shows, with Katy Perry, Kylie Minogue and Oasis all giving us a miss this year. New Zealand music fans are reluctantly spending large sums on flights and accommodation if they want to see them. Until Metallica arrives in November, there are no stadium shows booked; just three of Eden Park’s 12 allotted concert slots are taken this year.

Yet, Auckland City councillors will soon study feasibility reports being submitted by both stadium options.

On March 24, Henderson, the working group chair, says councillors will come together to “thrash it out” and vote for their preferred option. There will only be one winner, and The New Zealand Herald reports either building Te Tōangaroa or Eden Park 2.1 is likely to cost more than $1 billion. Either we’re spending that on a brand new waterfront stadium, or we’re upgrading an old one.

“Is that the best use of that money?” asks David Benge. The managing director for events company TEG Live doesn’t believe Tāmaki Makaurau needs another stadium because it’s barely using those it already has. He has questions.

“I understand the excitement around a shiny new toy, but to what end?” he asks. “Can Auckland sustain a show at Go Media Stadium, a show at Western Springs, a show at Eden Park, and a show at this new stadium on the same night — or even in the same week?”

Benge doesn’t believe Te Tōangaroa would entice more artists to play here either. “I’m yet to meet an artist who’s going to be swayed by how iconic a venue is,” he says. Bigger problems include the size of our population and the strength of our dollar.

No matter the venue, “you’re still incurring the same expenses to produce the show,” he says. Instead, he suggests Pōneke as the next city needing a new venue. “If you could wave a magic wand and invest in a 10,000-12,000-capacity indoor arena in Wellington, that would be fantastic,” he says.

Would a new stadium really lure big artists to NZ? Image: Te Tōangaroa

Live Nation, the touring juggernaut that hosts most of the country’s stadium shows, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Other promoters canvassed by RNZ offered mixed views. Some wanted a new stadium, while others wanted a refurbished one. Every single one of them said that any new stadium needed to be built with concerts — not sport — in mind.

“We’re fitting a square peg in a round hole,” one said about the production costs involved in trucking temporary stages into Eden Park or Go Media Stadium. “Turf replacement can add hundreds of thousands — if not $1 million — to your bottom line,” said another.

Some wanted something else entirely. Veteran promoter Campbell Smith pointed out Auckland Council is seeking input for a potential redevelopment of Western Springs. One mooted option is turning it into a home ground for the rapidly rising football club Auckland FC. Smith doesn’t agree with that. “I think it’s a really attractive option for music and festivals,” he says. “It’s got a large footprint, it’s easily accessible, it’s close to the city … It would be a travesty if it was developed entirely for sport.”

One thing is for certain: a decision on this lengthy, torrid and emotional topic is being made in March. One party will celebrate; the other will slink back to the drawing board. Will it finally end the great Auckland stadium debate? That’s a question that seems easier to answer than any of the others.

Chris Schulz is a freelance entertainment journalist and author of the industry newsletter, Boiler Room. This article was first published by RNZ and is republished with the author’s permission. Asia Pacific Report has a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

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

🎶 When The Levee Breaks feat. John Paul Jones, Remastered! Only on playingforchange.com! 🎸

Playing For Change — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 18:46:43 +0000

This content originally appeared on Playing For Change and was authored by Playing For Change.

St. Paul & The Broken Bones – Over the Rainbow (Judy Garland) | Reprise

Blogothèque — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 17:01:04 +0000

This content originally appeared on Blogothèque and was authored by Blogothèque.

St. Paul & The Broken Bones – Interview | Reprise

Blogothèque — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 17:00:00 +0000

This content originally appeared on Blogothèque and was authored by Blogothèque.

Paul Buchanan: All in all, Trump’s election is a calamity in the making

APR editor — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 23:12:15 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Paul G Buchanan

Surveying the wreckage of the US elections, here are some observations that have emerged:

Campaigns based on hope do not always defeat campaigns based on fear.

Having dozens of retired high ranking military and diplomatic officials warn against the danger Donald Trump poses to democracy (including people who worked for him) did not matter to many voters.

Likewise, having former politicians and hundreds of academics, intellectuals, legal scholars, community leaders and social activists repudiate Trump’s policies of division mattered not an iota to the voting majority.

Nor did Kamala Harris’s endorsement by dozens of high profile celebrities make a difference to the MAGA mob.

Raising +US$ billion in political donations did not produce victory got Harris. It turns out outspending the opponent is not the key to electoral success.

Incoherent racist and xenophobic rants (“they are eating the dogs, they are eating the cats”) did not give the MAGA mob any pause when considering their choices. In fact, it appears that the resort to crude depictions of opponents (“stupid KaMAla”)and scapegoats (like Puerto Ricans) strengthened the bond between Trump and his supporters.

‘Garbage can’ narrative
Macroeconomic and social indicators such as higher employment and lower crime and undocumented immigrant numbers could not overcome the MAGA narrative that the US was “the garbage can of the world.”

Nor could Harris, despite her accomplished resume in all three government branches at the local, state and federal levels, overcome the narrative that she was “dumb” and a DEI hire who was promoted for reasons other than merit.

It did not matter to the MAGA mob that Trump threatened retribution against his opponents, real and imagined, using the Federal State as his instrument of revenge.

“Standing up to Trump the duty of every public servant” . . . A New York Times edirtorial reoublished today in the New Zealand Herald.

Age was not a factor even though Trump displays evident signs of cognitive decline.

Reproductive rights were not the watershed issue many thought that they would be, including for many female voters. Conversely, the MAGA efforts to court “bro” support via social media catering to younger men worked very well.

In a way, this is a double setback for women: as an issue of bodily autonomy and as an issue of gender equality given the attitudes of Trump endorsers like Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. Those angry younger men interact with females, and their misogyny has now been reaffirmed as part of a political winning strategy.

Ukraine, Europe much to fear
Ukraine and Western Europe have much to fear.

So does the federal bureaucracy and regulatory system, which will now be subject to Project 2025, Elon Musk’s razor gang approach to public spending and RFK Jr’s public health edicts.

In fact, it looks like the Trump second term approach to governance will take a page out of Argentine president Javier Milei’s “chainsaw” approach, with results that will be similar but far broader in scope if implemented in the same way.

So all in all, from where I sit it looks like a bit of a calamity in the making. But then again, I am just another fool with a “woke” degree.

Dr Paul G Buchanan is the director of 36th-Parallel Assessments, a geopolitical and strategic analysis consultancy. This article is republished with the permission of the author.

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

Cameroonian journalist Thierry Patrick Ondoua detained on insult charges

CPJ Staff — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 22:05:32 +0000

Dakar, October 24, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Cameroonian authorities to immediately release journalist Thierry Patrick Ondoua, publishing director of the privately-owned Le Point Hebdo bimonthly newspaper, after he was arrested on Tuesday in connection with a report on the minister of housing’s alleged mismanagement, and to drop all charges against him.

“Journalist Thierry Patrick Ondoua’s troubling detention, as well as the continued imprisonment of five other journalists for their work, underscores the urgent need to reform the country’s laws to ensure journalism is not criminalized,” said Angela Quintal, head of CPJ’s Africa Program, in New York. “Government officials should be able to respond to journalistic coverage and criticism without resorting to censorious legal proceedings. Ondoua and the other jailed journalists should be released immediately and not punished for doing their jobs.”

On Tuesday, October 22, the regional division of the judicial police (DRPJ) in Yaoundé, the Cameroonian capital, summoned and arrested Ondoua on charges of false news, defamation, and insulting “constituted bodies,” which includes ministers, deputies and certain types of state officials, according to a CPJ review of the summons letters, and Prosper-Rémy Mimboé, the newspaper’s managing editor, who spoke to CPJ. The arrest followed a complaint filed by Célestine Ketcha Courtès, minister of Housing and Urban Development, and Ondoua is still waiting for arraignment in the Yaoundé court, according to those sources. He faces up to five years imprisonment if convicted.

Mimboé told CPJ that Ondoua’s arrest was in connection with several reports published by Le Point Hebdo criticizing Courtès’ management of housing policies, including one published on June 18, 2024, a copy of which CPJ reviewed.

Cameroon, which is preparing for a presidential election next year that could see the 91-year-old current president Paul Biya run for his eighth term, has seen numerous arrests and suspensions of media outlets and journalists in recent weeks related to the delay of parliamentary and local elections.

Cameroon was ranked as sub-Saharan Africa’s third-worst jailer of journalists in CPJ’s annual prison census, with six imprisoned as of December 1, 2023. One journalist, Stanislas Désiré Tchoua, was released on December 28 after serving a prison sentence for defamation and insult.

CPJ’s messages to Bangté Talamdio, a member of Courtès’ cabinet, and calls to the public listed number for Cameroon’s Ministry of Housing, DRPJ and Yaoundé court of first instance went unanswered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

The Meekness of the Australia’s Anti-Corruption Body

Binoy Kampmark — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 08:30:35 +0000

The warning signs of the Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission’s ineffectiveness were there from the start. The enacting legislation that brought it into existence, for instance, limit public hearings to “exceptional circumstances”, a reminder that the authorities are not exactly happy to let that large expanse of riffraff known as the public know how power functions in Australia.

Then came its first major decision on June 6. Pundits were on tenterhooks. What would this body, charged with enhancing the “integrity in the Commonwealth public sector by deterring, detecting and preventing corrupt conduct involving Commonwealth public officials” do about referrals concerning six public officials from the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme? The spiritually crushing automated debt assessment and recovery program, had, after all, been responsible for using, in the words of Commission report, “patently unreliable methodology as income averaging, without other evidence, to determine entitlement to benefit”. From its inception as a pilot program in 2015 till its conclusion in May 2020, a reign of bureaucratic terror was inflicted on vulnerable Australians.

The answer from Australia’s newly minted body was one of stern indifference. While the NACC was aware of the impact of the scheme “on individuals and the public, the seniority of the officials involved, and the need to ensure that any corruption issue is fully investigated” the commission felt that “the conduct of the six public officials in connection with the Robodebt Scheme has already been fully explored by the Robodebt Royal Commission and extensively discussed in its final report.”

In other words, there would be no consequences for the individuals in question, no public exposure of their misdeeds, no sense of satisfaction for victims of the scheme that their harms had been truly redressed. In refusing to act on the referrals, the NACC had, in the words of former NSW Supreme Court Judge Anthony Whealy KC, now chair for the Centre for Public Integrity, “betrayed a core obligation and failed to fulfil its primary duty.”

An absurd spectacle ensued. The inspector of the NACC, Gail Furness, found herself being called upon rather early in her tenure to investigate the very entity that had been created to expose maladministration and corrupt conduct after receiving 900 complaints about the NACC’s own alleged corrupt conduct. In the mess of not pursuing the Robodebt officials, it also transpired that Commissioner Paul Brereton had delegated, rather than recused himself, from the process given a conflict of interest. By merely delegating the role of reaching the final decision to a Deputy Commissioner, however, Brereton had not entirely precluded his part in the drama.

Two recent incidents confirm how the NACC is intended to (mal)function – at least in the eyes of Canberra’s secrecy-drugged political establishment. Far from being effective, the body’s role is intended as impotently symbolic, an annexure of the corruption consensus that rots at the capital’s centre.

The first came in the defeated efforts of Senators David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie to introduce an amendment directing the NACC Commissioner to hold public hearings if “satisfied that it is in the public interest to do so.” As Pocock explained to the Senate, the committee process into examining the NACC Act revealed “evidence from commissioners from state integrity commissions that … there should be a presumption towards having public hearings.” The current legislation, as shaped by Labor and the Coalition, was designed “in a way that we have no real oversight of what is happening in the NACC.” And that is exactly how that same unholy alliance hoped matters would remain, with both Labor and the Liberal-Nationals voting down the amendment.

In justifying that craven move, Labor Senator and Minister for Employment and Workplace relations Murray Watt held out feebly that the “appropriate balance” between holding public hearings, and considering whether they might “prejudice criminal prosecution, reputations, safety, privacy, wellbeing or confidentiality” had been struck. Any attentive student of secrecy in politics will be mindful that any balance between public interests and exceptional circumstances will always favour the pathway of least transparency. In Australia, public interest tests are almost always read down to favour opacity over openness.

In keeping with the disease of closed power, the second matter concerned revelations by the NACC about certain operational details regarding Operation Bannister. The investigative effort was established to investigate whether a Home Affairs employee’s “familial links” to contracted service provider and Paladin founder Craig Thrupp, had instanced corruption.

Paladin Holdings has handsomely profited from the Australian taxpayer, raking in over half a billion dollars to manage the brutal Manus Island detention centre between 2017 and 2019. The senior executive in question, pseudonymised as Anne Brown, received $194,701.10 from Paladin for “management and consulting services” in 2017. The money was transferred to her home loan account to assist full repayment, though she denied undertaking any work for Paladin or assisting them with the tender to Home Affairs in securing the contract.

Browne’s partner, retired Home Affairs executive pseudonymised as Carl Delaney, directly aided Paladin in securing the lucrative tender. He joined Paladin’s board of directors in 2019 and was remunerated to the sum of $5,000 for his efforts.

Thrupp also purchased another apartment for Brown and Delaney in the same complex worth $920,000, along with accompanying furniture. Two months later, it was rented back to Paladin for $1,000 per week, though eventually sold in 2020, with Brown and Delaney pocketing the proceeds.

The question being investigated was whether the failure by Brown to disclose the aforementioned events (she thought she had no obligation to do so from April 2018 when she was on long-service leave pending retirement) had affected her suitability to hold a security clearance. These included the evolving nature of her relationship with Delaney and the money and property lavished on them from Thrupp. Even Commissioner Brereton acknowledged that “she should have at least known that at least her relationship with Delaney ought to have been reported” though inexplicably thought the non-disclosure “understandable” and not actuated by intent, dishonesty or corruption.

The investigation had initially begun as a joint investigation by the Australian Commission into Law Enforcement Integrity (ACLEI) and the Department of Home Affairs. It then fell to the NACC from July 1, 2023 to finalise matters. On October 9, the report by Commissioner Brereton was released. The allegation that Brown had abused her office as a Home Affairs employee “to dishonestly obtain a benefit for herself or to assist Paladin to secure the garrison services contract is unsubstantiated.” She had not failed to disclose a potential conflict of interest between herself and Thrupp (“a close relative”), and her partner Delaney, in their links to Paladin, “in accordance with Home Affairs procedures”.

The report does not find Brown’s failure to report the “change of her circumstances to Home Affairs and AGSVA [Australian Government Security Vetting Agency]” remarkable, as it “does not appear to have been intentional”. Failure to do so was insufficient to “bring it to the notice of the head of the relevant agency.”

For a body that offered so much promise, the NACC has failed to impress. Instead of restoring trust in the public service and politics, the Commission has shown a lack of appetite to pursue its broader remit, preferring a stymying caution. The status quo remains, distinctly, intact.

The post The Meekness of the Australia’s Anti-Corruption Body first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

Cameroon bans reporting on President Paul Biya’s health, whereabouts

CPJ Staff — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 22:48:00 +0000

New York, October 10, 2024—The Cameroonian government should end its threats to sanction private media journalists who report on the condition and whereabouts of President Paul Biya, 91, who has not been seen publicly for over a month and has missed scheduled international engagements, the Committee to Protect Journalists said on Thursday.

“The Cameroonian government should simply put the rumors to rest by arranging a public appearance by the head of state,“ said Angela Quintal, head of CPJ’s Africa program, in New York. “The health of the president, who has been in power for 41 years and may seek re-election next year, is of public interest. Any misguided attempt to censor reporting about his health for national security reasons simply fuels rampant speculation.”

In an October 9 letter to regional governors, reviewed by CPJ, Cameroon’s Minister of Territorial Administration Paul Atanga Nji said any debate in the media about President Biya’s health was strictly prohibited following official government denials that the president is in ill health, and offenders would face the full might of the law.

Nji, the permanent secretary of Cameroon’s national security council, ordered the governors to create monitoring units in their departments to track and record all broadcasts and debates in private and on social media to identify the culprits.

His letter follows official denials about the president’s condition by the director of the civil cabinet Samuel Mvondo Ayolo, and Communication Minister and government spokesman Rene Sadi, who said Biya was in excellent health and would return to Cameroon in the next few days.

Biya, Cameroon’s president since 1982, and the second-longest serving head of state in Africa after Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, has not indicated whether he plans to stand for re-election in the central African country’s 2025 race, though there are calls from within the ruling party and allied politicians for him to pursue an eighth term.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Cameroon bans reporting on President Paul Biya’s health, whereabouts

CPJ Staff — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 22:48:00 +0000

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Sacred Transport

Eric Walberg — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 16:12:17 +0000

Paul MacCready bicycled across the English Channel (34 km) in June 1979 on wings of carbon and Kevlar, the Gossamer Albatross

Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts. No!

Well then, don your bicycle helmet. No! Drivers actually pay less attention to you if they see a helmet, figuring they’re not likely to kill a smarty-pants, and are less careful around you (2x as likely to pass close). A toque or baseball cap in case of rain is more practical.

Just check your tires, wake your trusty wings up and take off.

NO drugs or alcohol. You need much more focus than driving modern computerized cars. Besides, the high is natural. 68% of cyclists experience joy as they ride vs drivers (50%) and public transitters (20%).

NO car and bike rack. Okay, I’ll sponge off a driver in extremis, given our scandalous Via Rail which long ago dispensed with bike transport, making our newly minted rail trails mostly inaccessible except by you-know-what.

NO earphones. Listen to nature-man’s music. It’s all music of the spheres. And much safer.

Eyes pealed. Many a find – belt, elastic cord, lunch (!), apples, pears, berries, birds and more birds. Birds immediately take note and often swoop down, strutting their superior navigation skills, curious about this lumbering, low flying something, accompanying you through their territory.

Getting out of Toronto is the unpleasant part. City traffic is lethal. Angry, impatient pit bulls crowded together, our cowardly politicians pandering to them. I love zipping past, weaving between them, but I’m always reminded of how easily I can become roadkill. I try to limit my Toronto cycling to off hours (early morning, Sundays for a bit of urban exploring). We humans have novelty baked in our genes. The hunger-gatherer in us makes us restless.

Biking back through Ryerson (Metropolitan University) on my way back from the food bank is like a choreographed mass dance, weaving among hundreds of individuals, groups, tables. Sometimes I have to pause to avoid hitting someone, but it’s fun, and like a cat always landing on its feet, I’ve never hit or inconvenienced anyone. I’m treated like God’s little sparrow under foot, darting to avoid the crush, then right onto Yonge and a beeline across to Elm, missing a massive snarling truck, a taxi and various pedestrians, as if we are in two different worlds, with the hundreds of passer-bys, driver-bys, oblivious to me, as I very intently avoid them all. Another week, another victory, better than any video game.

At Elm street, I transform into a pigeon for the long straight stretch. The Flying Pigeon (pinyin: fēigē) is still a publicly owned bicycle company based in Tianjin. In production since 1950, the Pigeon’s very Chinese name was a call for peace during the war in Korea. More than 500 million Flying Pigeon PA-02 bicycles have been made, more than any other model of any vehicle. Thank you, Mao! Deng Xiaoping defined prosperity as ‘a Flying Pigeon in every household,’ though his ‘capitalist road’ largely abandoned the bike, following America’s disastrous path. The sturdy Pigeon long ago sated China’s market and, unchanged, needs only spare parts these days, waiting for the Chinese to get through their teen years of growth and expansion and return to adult winged transport.

Europeans have sensibly maintained their adult bikes and now lead the way in putting bicycles at the center of our coming postcapitalist New World Order. Marx seems to be right – that we all have to go through this troublesome teen growth stage, adopting nasty capitalism, producing urban jungles and sprawl, bringing death and destruction, before maturing, waking up to a more natural way of living.

Each trip is different, even if you don’t vary the route. Better yet, you can always ramp up the risk factor, so novelty is not a problem. Good for me mentally and physically, and good for all the rest of organic and inorganic nature. Just a wee bit of CO2 and heat pollution. My weekly ritual, thumbing my nose at clunky cars and plodding pedestrians.

Bike History

Is the lowly bike a silver bullet to solve our many crises – unlivable cities, urban sprawl, famine, global warming? Only as part of a wider transformation of our urban culture. In the 1970s, Portland established a greenbelt to stop sprawl, tore down its worst freeway, build light rail, streetcars, bicycle lanes. Traffic fatalities fell 80% by 2008. Portlanders save $1.1b gas a year on gas alone. Less money stolen by distant oil barons, car companies, more for food, fun, keeping local money in circulation for Portlanders. Slow-moving streetcars brought $3.5b in development.

Apart from political will, the transformation requires making real physical exercise part of your daily routine, which is very good in any case. Sitting, whether at home or in your car, helps no one. Don’t even mention the ebike, a bane to one and all, pretending it’s a bike so as to terrorize real cyclists, delivering junk food to junk people with too much money. And NOT the escooter, a fragile thing punching dangerously above its weight.

Check out Youtube for disaster videos involving them.

The first bicycle, invented in 1817 by Karl Drais, was more like a recumbent skateboard, sans pedals and gears, the Laufmaschine (running machine), which the English called the dandy horse and the French velocipede. Notice the date 1817, and that I didn’t include war in the crises we can solve. As usual with technology, the bicycle was invented as a result of war.* After the eruption of Mount Tambora (Indonesia) and the Year without a Summer (1816), which followed close on the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars, widespread crop failures and food shortages resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of horses.

Laufmaschine dandy horse velocipede

In New York City, a law was passed that banned dandy horses from all footpaths and public places, as they were big, heavy, not to mention ugly.

Last surviving dandy horse. Small is beautiful.

The French added an adjustable seat and pedals to the front wheel, creating the velocide in 1860s, the penny farthing (big little wheels), elegant but ungainly, uncomfortable (nicknamed ‘boneshaker’) and dangerous to all (no brakes!).

The 19th century was spectacular, capitalism full of vigor and innovation, and it took on the challenge of the laufmaschine. In 1885 John Kemp Starley came out with the first commercially successful ‘safety bicycle’ he named the Rover, with steering and your feet near the ground to act as brakes. (Rover switched to cars in 1925 though its name lives on in Polish ‘rower’ and Belarussian ‘rovar’.) It became the bicycle of today by adding ball bearings, the diamond-shaped frame, first rubber tires then tube tires by 1890, and finally by 1910 the French derailleur (derailer).

Viola, the perfect machine.

The bicycle was a machine waiting to be invented. I would suggest that it was the greatest achievement of capitalism, the closest to a perfect machine, good for everyone, safe, nonpolluting. Its speed is that of a bird, the perfect speed for living creatures. It is cheap and easy to produce and can’t be improved on. By the early 21st century there were more than 1 billion bicycles. There are many more bicycles than cars, though too many sit unused, despised by the rich, while being the principal means of transport for the poor in many parts of the world. But capitalism never rests and went on to give us the horrors of motorized transport at insane, unnatural speeds.

Spirited, upper-middle class western women embraced the bicycle as a new source of personal freedom.

Opposition to cycling in the Ottoman Empire was quick from conservatives and religious fundamentalists, who criticized bicycles as the Devil’s Chariot. Orthodox scholars claimed that cycling would harm reproductive organs, embolden sexual permissiveness and lead to the destruction of the family. Women’s cycling was bid’ah . i.e., an innovation which should be okayed first by a sheikh, not just thoughtlessly introduced. In the early 20th century, women in the Ottoman Empire nevertheless went on to adopt cycling for varied purposes with a new sense of freedom. Women are still not allowed to ride bikes in public in either Saudi Arabia or Iran.

Bicycles quickly spread around the rest of the world alongside the British Empire. In terms of the bicycle as workhorse, rickshaw taxis and cargo bikes were a great boon for the poor and have never gone out of fashion. Cycling steadily became more important in Europe over the first half of the twentieth century, but it was killed in the (huge, now empty) US by 1910 with the advent of the car. By the 1920s, bicycles had become children’s toys. Only since 2012 has commuter cycling increased in Britain, partly due to the 2005 metro bombing, which prompted many to turn to the bicycle as less dangerous, still a questionable assumption. The BBC even mocked at the ‘new golf’ for executive wheeling-dealing.

The only drawback healthwise is that replacing walking with cycling means your bone structure doesn’t get any exercise. Much like astronauts, bone density of cycle fanatics is up to 20% less than noncyclists. So walking up the hills is actually a necessity for overall health.

We were born to move, not to be transported. And that means walking even more than biking. In a controlled experiment with daily walking 5 miles a day, those who walked even more were the healthiest and happiest. It’s not just healthier but happier, boosts your self esteem, food tastes better, oxytocin, etc.

Bicycling is 4x faster than walking, using 1/4 energy, giving you 16x the range of a walker. The cyclist is the most efficient traveler among all machines and animals of all times. And the most aesthetic. You feel connected to the world around you in a way that’s not possible in the sealed environment of big, clunky metal boxes, be they cars, buses or metros. The journey is both sensual and kinesthetic. A survey in the Netherlands in 2007 showed

*experience of joy traveling by bike 68% by car 50% by bus 20% ,

*experience of fear travelling by bike 5% by car 8% by bus 10%.

Forget about Kamal Harris’s ‘joy’. If you want joy, hop on your bike. It and walking as our principle transport is the best possible solution to the crisis of too many carbon hungry humans’ urban nonlinear complex chaotic reality. And both the Soviet Union and China eventually dumped it in the interest of whom? What? The spirit of capitalism is pulling the strings, making fools of us. It gave us the silver bullet and then tarnished it. Only 1 in 100 in US bikes to work or school. Many suburbs have no sidewalks let alone bike lanes. ARGH!

Urban angst

In our Age of Separation, the isolated profit-maximizing individual is a hollow, simplistic way of thinking about life. Live in the machine world constantly telling us to work more, buy more. We have junk values. Even when you try to extricate that self from the hurricane, you are still in the middle of a hurricane (driving your car, driving the infernal system).

Forgive me for soapboxing, but when I think of the reality I’m living in, I am constantly amazed at how capitalism, the spirit of capitalism, is truly satanic. It inverts man’s character (good becomes bad, real unreal, creates slavery, war, jingoism, etc) and destroys nature. Everyone is afflicted. Urban bus drivers get sick more, die younger.

For a brief moment, there was a kind of middle ground – urban pockets in the countryside with amenities (store, school, clinic), and the greater city nearby for work. But that was the 1880s–1920s streetcar era, with efficient public transit, bringing the commute time down to 15-30 minutes, which is what the human animal can comfortably manage. Since then we have invested in a system that makes people sick, fat and isolated, angry and stressed.

The obvious solution to congestion is, of course, building more roads. lol. We’re still doing that in Toronto in 2024, with road builders slavering at the mouth as the government fights anti-expresswayers trying to stop the latest new ribbon of death.

After a century of this, the damage to the entire country/ world has been done, with urban sprawl covering, choking, precious soil with poisonous asphalt. As for us humans, if your spouse commutes longer than 45 minutes, you are 40% more likely to get divorced. And that commute means soulless suburbs, children withdrawn and into drugs, etc. Satan himself couldn’t have done a better job.

Bogota is legendary with its string of visionary pro-bike mayors in the 1990s-2000, as Charles Montgomery describes in Happy City (2013), combining bike lanes, car-free Sundays, designated bus lanes and express buses, lots of parks to encourage walking and cycling. The long term impact of more biking is less traffic congestion. Commute times are less, air better, fewer deaths, even murders. The city had a renaissance, even with civil war raging and right wing presidents. There was a new positive optimism and civic pride. Their ‘silver bullet’ was holistic, with the bike the key.

Your means of transport is central to who you are and what kind of society, world you inhabit. Like Marx, I’m keen to take from the cesspool of capitalism the best achievements as part of a post-commodity world, where you grow your own food, keep your heirloom bike in good repair, make your own music, etc, all the time cooperating in a village setting. The bike (and walking) is the ‘way’ to get to Marx’s ‘withering away’ of the state and an end to our commodification. It’s a pipe dream now, but it could happen if we take hold of our collective crises.

Think Dao. The way is the goal, the goal the way. Your transport is a metaphor for your life journey. Your journey is ultimate one, not just of transport, but of transcendence. Bike there.

ENDNOTES:

*Bicycles were used by paratroopers during the war to help them with transportation, nicknamed ‘bomber bikes’.

See Harnessing human nature to save the world ebook by Eric Walberg

Read No-carbon footprint travels to Toronto’s outer spaces for Eric’s cycling adventures in and around Toronto.

The post Sacred Transport first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

In post-election Venezuela, journalist jailings reach record high, media goes underground

John Otis — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 17:17:40 +0000

Shortly after Venezuela’s disputed presidential election in July, security agents arrested journalist Ana Carolina Guaita and then contacted her family to make a deal.

They offered to release Guaita if her mother, Xiomara Barreto, who worked on the opposition campaign to defeat President Nicolás Maduro, turned herself in. Barreto, who is in hiding, rejected the proposal.

“My daughter is being held hostage,” Barreto said in an August 25 voice recording posted on social media five days after her daughter’s arrest. Then, addressing authorities holding Guaita, she said: “You are doing great damage to an innocent person just because you were unable to arrest me.”

Journalist Ana Carolina Guaita was arrested in the crackdown on the press after the July 28 Venezuelan election. (Photo: Courtesy of Guaita family)

Such extortion schemes are part of what press watchdog groups describe as an unprecedented government crackdown on the Venezuelan media following the election that Maduro claims to have won despite strong evidence that he lost to opposition candidate Edmundo González.

Besides Guaita, his regime has jailed at least five other journalists – Paúl León, Yousner Alvarado, Deysi Peña, Eleángel Navas, and Gilberto Reina. (Another, Carmela Longo, has been released but faces criminal charges and has been barred from leaving the country.)

These journalists are among more than 2,000 anti-government protesters and opposition activists who have been detained following the July 28 balloting, a wave or repression that prompted González, who may have beaten Maduro by a 2-to-1 margin according to opposition tallies, to flee to Spain where he has been granted political asylum.

Opposition candidate Edmundo González holds electoral records as he and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado address supporters in Caracas after the election on July 30, 2024. González has since fled the country. (Photo: Reuters/Alexandre Meneghini)

‘This government has gone crazy’

Venezuela has now reached a decades-long high of journalists it has imprisoned, according to Marianela Balbi, director of the Caracas-based Instituto Prensa y Sociedad, and CPJ’s own data from prior years.

Like Guaita, several were arrested while covering anti-government protests. They face charges of terrorism, instigating violence, and hate crimes. If convicted, Balbi said, they could face up to 30 years in prison each, yet they have no access to private lawyers and have instead been assigned public defenders loyal to the Maduro regime.

Carlos Correa, director of the Caracas free press group Espacio Público, said security agents don’t even bother to secure arrest warrants and have, in some cases, demanded bribes of up to US$4,000 not to detain journalists. In addition, at least 14 journalists have had their passports canceled with no explanation, according to Balbi.

“This government has gone crazy,” Correa told CPJ. “The most hardline elements are now in control and they are angry about being rejected at the polls.”

Among the hardliners is Diosdado Cabello, the number two figure in the ruling United Socialist Party who last month was appointed interior minister. Cabello, who is now in charge of police forces, is a frequent press basher whose defamation lawsuit against the Caracas daily El Nacional prompted the Maduro regime to seize the newspaper’s building as damages in 2021.

Cabello also uses his weekly program on state TV to insult and stigmatize journalists. On the September 5 episode, for example, Cabello accused the online news outlets Efecto Cocuyo, El Pitazo, Armando.Info, Tal Cual, and El Estimulo, of trying to destabilize Venezuela and, without evidence, claimed they were financed by drug traffickers.

All this has created “a lot of fear and frustration,” Balbi said. “This is what happens in countries with no rule of law.”

Journalists flee amid sharp drop in press freedom

To be sure, Venezuela’s press freedom erosion predated the election, as the Maduro government has closed TV and radio stations, blocked news websites, confiscated newspapers, and fomented fear and self-censorship over its 11 years in power. But since the vote, the situation has deteriorated precipitously with the government imposing internet shutdowns and blocking communication platforms, while individual journalists face impossible choices to continue their work.

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro addresses government loyalists one month after the presidential vote, in Caracas, Venezuela, on August 28, 2024. (Photo: AP/Ariana Cubillos)

Several reporters have fled the country. One journalist, who had been covering anti-government protests in the western state of Trujillo, was tipped off last month by a government security agent that her name was on an arrest list. She hid with friends and then, after learning that police were staking out her home, made her way to neighboring Colombia.

“There is so much dread,” said the journalist who, like several sources for this story, spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity. Government officials “don’t care that you are innocent. Never before have I felt so fragile and vulnerable.”

Those who remain in Venezuela are exercising extreme caution. They are self-censoring, staying off-camera in video reports, leaving their bylines off digital stories, and avoiding opposition rallies. Some radio news programs have gone off the air or have switched to musical formats.

A journalist in western Falcón state told CPJ that security agents are tracking the articles and social media posts of individual journalists and said they have filmed her while covering opposition rallies.

“They make you feel like a criminal or a fugitive from justice,” said the reporter who is considering leaving journalism and fleeing Venezuela.

A veteran reporter in Carabobo state, just west of Caracas, told CPJ that she has worked for years to make a name for herself as a fair and balanced journalist but is now being told by her editors to remove her byline from her stories for her own protection.

Meanwhile, it’s become more difficult for reporters to interview trusted sources and average Venezuelans because, even when they are promised anonymity, they fear government reprisals, a journalist based in western Zulia state told CPJ.

CPJ called Maduro’s press office and the Interior Ministry for comment but there was no answer.

Outlets band together and use AI to shield individual reporters

To protect themselves, many journalists are staying off social media and are erasing photos, text messages, and contacts from their mobile phones in case they are arrested and the devices are confiscated. Some have gone to opposition marches posing as members of the crowd rather than taking out their notebooks and recording gear and identifying as journalists. On such outings, some are required to check in with their editors every 20 minutes to make sure they are safe.

“We are trying to report the news while also protecting our people,” said César Batiz, the editor of El Pitazo, who fled the country several years ago and works from exile in Florida. “We realize that no story is more important that our journalists’ safety.”

Since the election, El Pitazo is jointly publishing stories with several other media outlets in an effort to make it harder for the regime to target any individual news organization. For added protection, many of these same news sites are taking part in Operación Retuit, or Operation Retweet, in which their journalists put together stories that are narrated on video by newsreaders created by artificial intelligence.

“So, for security reasons, we will use AI to provide information from a dozen independent Venezuelan news organizations,” says one of the avatars, who appears as a smiling young man in a plaid shirt in the initial Operación Retuit video posted on X on August 13.

Thanks to all of these efforts important stories are still being published, including reports on regime killings of protesters, the imprisonment of minors arrested at anti-government demonstrations, and electoral observers describing government fraud during the July 28 balloting.

Or, in the words of Batiz: “The regime is cracking down so we have to be more creative.”

Still, Correa, of Espacio Público, says the repression is taking its toll. “Without a doubt there are fewer journalists covering important stories in Venezuela, and much more caution and fear.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by John Otis.

Resisting AUKUS: The Paul Keating Formula

Binoy Kampmark — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 06:15:10 +0000

From his own redoubt of critical inquiry, the former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating has made fighting the imperialising leprosy of the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the UK and the United States a matter of solemn duty.

In March 15, 2023, he excoriated a Canberra press gallery seduced and tantalised by the prospect of nuclear-powered submarines, calling the Albanese government’s complicit arrangements with the US and UK to acquire such a capability “the worst international decision by an Australian Labor government since the former Labor leader, Billy Hughes, sought to introduce conscription to augment Australian forces in World War one.”

His latest spray was launched in the aftermath of a touched-up AUKUS, much of it discussed in a letter by US President Joe Biden to the US House Speaker and President of the Senate. The revised agreement between the three powers for Cooperation Related to Naval Nuclear Propulsion is intended to supersede the November 22, 2021 agreement between the three powers on the Exchange of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information (ENNPIA).

The new agreement permits “the continued communication and exchange of NNPI, including certain RD, and would also expand the cooperation between the governments by enabling the transfer of naval nuclear propulsion plants of conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines, including component parts and spare parts thereof, and other related equipment.” The new arrangements will also permit the sale of special nuclear material in the welded power units, along with other relevant “material as needed for such naval propulsion plants.”

The contents of Biden’s letter irked Keating less than the spectacular show of servility shown by Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong on their visit to Annapolis for the latest AUSMIN talks. In what has become a pattern of increasing subordination of Australian interests to the US Imperium, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken played happy hosts and must have been delighted by what they heard.

The details that emerged from the conversations held between the four – details which rendered Keating passionately apoplectic – can only make those wishing for an independent Australian defence policy weep. Words such as “Enhanced Force Posture Cooperation” were used to describe the intrusion of the US armed forces into every sphere of Australian defence: the domains of land, maritime, air, and space.

Ongoing infrastructure investments at such Royal Australian Air Force Bases as Darwin and Tindal continue to take place, not to bolster Australian defence but fortify the country as a US forward defensive position. To these can be added, as the Pentagon fact sheet reveals, “site surveys for potential upgrades at RAAF Bases Curtin, Learmonth, and Scherger.”

The degree of subservience Canberra affords is guaranteed by increased numbers of US personnel to take place in rotational deployments. These will include “frequent rotations of bombers, fighter aircraft, and Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Aircraft”. Secret arrangements have also been made involving the disposal of nuclear propulsion plants that will feature in Australia’s nuclear powered submarine fleet, though it is unclear how broad that commitment is.

The venomous icing on the cake – at least for AUKUS critics – comes in the form of an undisclosed “Understanding” that involves “additional related political commitments”. The Australian Greens spokesperson on Defence, Senator David Shoebridge, rightly wonders “what has to be kept secret from the Australian public? There are real concerns the secret understanding includes commitments binding us to the US in the event they go to war with China in return for getting nuclear submarines.”

Marles has been stumblingly unforthcoming in that regard. When asked what such “additional political commitments” were, he coldly replied that the agreement was “as we’ve done it.” The rest was “misinformation” being spread by detractors of the alliance.

It is precisely the nature of these undertakings, and what was made public at Annapolis, that paved the way for Keating’s hefty salvo on ABC’s 7.30. The slavishness of the whole affair had made Keating “cringe”. “This government has sold out to the United States. They’ve fallen for the dinner on the White House lawn.”

He proved unsparing about Washington’s intentions. “What AUKUS is about in the American mind is turning [Australia into suckers], locking us up for 40 years with American bases all around … not Australian bases.” It meant, quite simply, “in American terms, the military control of Australia. I mean, what’s happened … is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States.”

Having the US as an ally was itself problematic, largely because of its belligerent intentions. “If we didn’t have an aggressive ally like the United States – aggressive to others in the region – there’d be nobody attacking Australia. We are better left alone than we are being ‘protected’ by an aggressive power like the United States.”

As for what Australian obligations to the US entailed, the former PM was in little doubt. “What this is all about is the Chinese laying claim to Taiwan, and the Americans are going to say ‘no, no, we’re going to keep these Taiwanese people protected’, even though they’re sitting on Chinese real estate.” Were Australia to intervene, the picture would rapidly change: an initial confrontation between Beijing and Washington over the island would eventually lead to the realisation that catastrophic loss would simply not be worth it, leaving Australia “the ones who have done all the offence.”

As for Australia’s own means of self-defence against any adversary or enemy, Keating uttered the fundamental heresy long stomped on by the country’s political and intelligence establishment: Canberra could, if needed, go it alone. “Australia is capable of defending itself. There’s no way another state can invade a country like Australia with an armada of ships without it all failing.” Australia did not “need to be basically a pair of shoes hanging out of Americans’ backside.” With Keating’s savage rhetoric, and the possibility that AUKUS may collapse before the implosions of US domestic politics, improbable peace may break out.

The post Resisting AUKUS: The Paul Keating Formula first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

Journalist shot, 2 detained as Venezuela cracks down on election protest coverage

Committee to Protect Journalists — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 18:24:39 +0000

Bogotá, August 2, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Venezuelan authorities to allow the media to report safely on protests over President Nicolás Maduro’s widely disputed claim to have won the country’s July 28 presidential election.

Government security forces shot and injured one journalist and arrested six others—two of whom remain in detention—while covering the protests.

“CPJ is extremely concerned about a sharp increase in the harassment and detention of journalists in Venezuela by government security agents following the contentious July 28 presidential election,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, from São Paulo. “CPJ calls on authorities to allow the media to do its job of keeping the public properly informed in the aftermath of the vote.”

Venezuela’s National Press Workers Union (SNTP) said the state regulator Conatel warned numerous private radio stations in the states of Bolívar, Falcón, Zulia, Carabobo, and Aragua not to report on opposition protests, as broadcasting news that “violates elements classified as violence” could result in fines or the cancellation of their broadcast licenses.

Última Hora, an online newspaper in western Portuguesa state, said Friday that it would close after state governor Primitivo Cedeño accused local media outlets of “inciting hatred” in their coverage of the presidential election and its aftermath, according to the SNTP.

Members of the National Guard shot Jesús Romero, editor of news website Código Urbe, in the abdomen and leg while he was covering anti-government protests in Maracay, the capital of Aragua state, on Monday. Romero is recovering at a local hospital.

National Guard troops arrested Yousner Alvarado, a camera operator covering protests that same day for the online news site Noticia Digital, in the western city of Barinas. SNTP reported that he remains detained and has been charged with terrorism.

Police officers arrested Paul León, a camera operator for online TV station VPI-TV, while he covered protests in the western city of Valera on Tuesday. He remained in detention as of Friday, August 2.

CPJ’s calls seeking comment from Conatel and the Defense Ministry, which controls the National Guard, were unanswered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Foregone Conclusions: Paul Kagame Retains Power

Binoy Kampmark — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 05:31:15 +0000

Rwanda has become a curiosity as an African state. The mere mention of its name tugs the memory: colonial tragedy, ethnic violence, genocide. Then comes stable rule, for the most part. It is assured, iron fisted, and corporate. Since being elected in April 2000, the country has known one leader.

Paul Kagame has kept matters running as smoothly much like a well-oiled corporate machine, aided by his Rwandan Patriotic Front. At times, he treats his country as such. His model of economic inspiration is no less the city state of authoritarian Singapore, while such think tanks as the Heritage Foundation have found much to praise in terms of “economic freedom”.

The government also impressed officials at the World Bank sufficiently for Rwanda to be ranked above Switzerland and Japan in an Ease of Doing Business Report. The themes are development, returns, benefits, but the questions about how durable the modernisation program is, let alone how tangibly it deals with rural poverty and underdevelopment, remain.

While the Kagame regime is not quite the same as those inspired by the Chicago boys in the Chile of Augusto Pinochet – a monetarist playground of economic development overseen by a brutal authoritarian government – there are some parallels.

Dissenting troublemakers are to be hounded and Kagame’s opponents rarely end up well. As Michela Wrong has revealed with chilling precision, the president has shown lusty fondness in doing away with his rivals. Even former friends such as Rwanda’s former head of external intelligence, Patrick Karegeya, can be bumped off in retributive extrajudicial assassinations. (Karegeya’s murder in a hotel room in Johannesburg on January 1, 2014 delighted the then defence minister James Kabarebe: “When you choose to be a dog, you die like a dog, and the cleaners will wipe away the trash so that it does not stink for them.”)

Any semblance of a viable opposition or boisterous civil society has ceased to exist and Kagame’s own wish to “join journalism in my old age”, expressed in April 2023, was barely credible. A far more accurate sentiment was expressed later regarding his intention to run in the July 15, 2024 election. “I would consider running for another 20 years. I have no problem with that. Elections are about people choosing.”

And some choice it turned out to be. Kagame eventually received the headshaking share of 99% of the vote. In the 53-seat Parliament, the Rwandan Patriotic Front secured 69% of the share.

Two candidates were permitted to challenge Kagame: Frank Habineza of the Democratic Green Democratic Party and Philippe Mpayimana, who counted as the token independent. Between them, they got 0.8% of the vote. Six other contenders had failed to cut the mustard for the electoral commission, which cited procedural grounds for barring them. Two opposition leaders suffered disqualification by virtue of having criminal convictions.

The Kagame government has spent much time exuding stability and reliability. It has contributed more troops than any other African state to the peacekeeping operations of the United Nations. It has held itself out, inaccurately and outrageously, as a safe third country to process unwanted asylum seekers and refugees, despite being itself the producer of asylum seekers. European governments have been particularly keen to overlook a tatty human rights record in that regard.

The regime’s copy book has been even more blotted of late. According to a UN report, some 3,000 to 4,000 Rwandan troops have been stationed in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, aiding an insurgency led by the Tutsi-dominated M23 (Mouvement du 23 Mars) rebel group. (The M23 fighters have been in open rebellion in the eastern part of the DRC since late 2021.)

The summary of the report conveys the violent messiness of the conflict: “Heavy fighting continued between M23, alongside the Rwanda Defence Force (RDF), and the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC) together with the Wazalendo coalition of local armed groups, the sanctioned Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR) and Burundi National Defence troops.”

The Ugandan military, deployed as part of a regional force in November 2022 intended to monitor a ceasefire with the M23, has shown itself to be strikingly ineffectual. In the solemn words of the UN experts, “Since the resurgence of the M23 crisis, Uganda has not prevented the presence of M23 and Rwanda Defence Force (RDF) troops on its territory or passage through it.”

Having laid waste to any viable, let alone sprouting opposition, the president has created conditions where any transition of power – when it comes – will be monstrously difficult. The shadow of the 1994 genocide is a long one indeed, and strong man politics is a perilous formula for a smooth succession. Whatever the broader stated goals of Kagame for his country, he remains motivated by a desire to preserve the position of the Tutsis, keeping the rival Hutus in check. Ethnicity, far from vanishing as a consideration, retains an aggressively beating heart.

The post Foregone Conclusions: Paul Kagame Retains Power first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

Turkish Kurdish photojournalist Murat Yazar detained for 8 days in Iraqi Kurdistan

Committee to Protect Journalists — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 14:08:23 +0000

Sulaymaniyah, July 23, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed that the prominent Turkish Kurdish photojournalist Murat Yazar was held in an Iraqi Kurdish security forces prison for eight days before his release on Sunday evening and calls on Iraqi Kurdish authorities to stop arresting journalists.

“Iraqi Kurdish authorities have made a habit out of detaining and harassing journalists,” said Yeganeh Rezaian, CPJ’s Interim MENA Program Coordinator, in Washington D.C. “We are deeply concerned over the detention of prominent photojournalist Murat Yazar in the region for eight days and call on the authorities to immediately stop harassing members of the press and let them do their jobs freely.”

Iraqi Kurdish security forces, known as Asayish, have detained, raided, and harassed dozens of journalists in the last three years.

Yazar, a Pulitzer Center grantee, had gone missing in the city of Zakho, in the Duhok province of Iraqi Kurdistan, on July 13. Iraqi Kurdish Asayish forces detained and interrogated him for what his family said was his unintentional entry into an area under restrictiondue to Turkish military operations against the outlawed Kurdish Workers’ Party, which Turkey considers a terrorist organization. Yazar entered the area while working on a visual storytelling project about the Tigris River, according to a statement by the family, which CPJ reviewed. He was released without any charges, the statement said.

The officers confiscated Yazar’s passport, phone, and camera bag, according to the statement, and did not allow him to call his family or the Turkish consulate in Erbil.

After his release from Duhok Asayish prison, he crossed the border into Turkey around 1 a.m. on Monday, according to his brother, Baran, and two of his friends, Nil Delahaye, a human rights activist, and Paul Salopek, the founding executive director of the nonprofit Out of Eden Walk.

On Sunday, CPJ called Ahmed Ramazan, head of the Zakho police, and Ali Osman, an investigator at the Zakho Asayish office, who both stated that they had no information about the journalist.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The start of NHS privatisation: How Paul Foot shone a light on New Labour

Margaret Renn — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 11:07:06 +0000

Britain’s top investigative journalist, who died 20 years ago this week, was suspicious of New Labour. Was he right?

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Margaret Renn.

The Problems with Purism and Reformism (not reforms)

Ted Glick — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 14:00:25 +0000

Over 20 years ago I wrote one of these columns examining the issue of “purism” versus “pragmatism” when it comes to organizing for systemic and desperately needed change in this world. I wrote about two essential ingredients that are sometimes in conflict.

One essential is conscious political organization motivated by principles and a genuine desire and plan for improving the lives of the disenfranchised and downtrodden, ending militarism and war, and stopping and reversing environmental devastation. But this alone won’t bring about change.

As a once-great revolutionary once said, “the masses make history.” It is only when large numbers of people identify with a movement for fundamental change and support it, verbally or actively, that we have any hope of winning political power and transforming society. In the USA that means not tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or even millions, but tens of millions of people.

Is this possible? Yes. One big example is the 15 million votes independent socialist Bernie Sanders got in 2016. Another is the NY Times report that 16-25 million people all over the country took demonstrative action in the spring of 2021 after George Floyd was murdered.

We need to go about our organizing work in a way which doesn’t undercut either, which avoids the temptation to be so committed to being principled that one becomes purist and narrow, on the one hand, or to be so committed to being with and interacting with “the masses” that problematic positions are taken and political relationships are built that end up deflecting energies into reformist and dead-end approaches to change. We need reforms, yes, but our broader objective must be to build upon successful struggles for major reforms in a way that leads to truly revolutionary, justice-grounded, social and economic transformation.

Purism versus reformism—the twin dangers of serious efforts to bring about the kind of change that is so, so needed today.

What can be done to lessen these dangers, to increase the possibilities that more of us will keep our eyes, minds and hearts on the prize?

One is the building of independent and progressive organizations that are truly democratic in the fullest sense of the term. As difficult as the process of democracy sometimes is, it is also a way to keep the group as a whole and the individuals within it centered on the stated objectives. Democratic process, sooner or later, frustrates individual power plays on the part of any person in leadership who lets power go to his/her/their head and who becomes either purist or reformist as a result. These things have happened much too much historically, but in this third decade of the 21st century, there is a growing consciousness of this danger increasingly expressed in how more and more of us are going about our organization-building.

Another necessity is an explicit commitment to the testing out of theories and ideas in practice and a process of constant evaluation based upon input from the people the ideas are being tried out on. If an independent candidate is running for office, for example, and has what they think is a great platform but the vote totals are very low, perhaps the problem is that the issues being addressed, or the way they’re being expressed, don’t connect with peoples’ understandings. Since just about any issue can be addressed from a progressive standpoint, a much better approach is to identify what the issues are to speak about because of day-to-day listening to and communicating with working-class people and people of the global majority.

The same with forms of direct action. It may feel good and righteous to some to stand up to the police during an action, but if that is done in a way which makes it easier for the government and the corporate-dominated press to call us violent, that will not generate sympathy for our cause among the wider public. Expressing our sense of urgency and anger is a good thing, if done wisely. Expressing it without political consideration of an action’s impacts is not a good thing.

Ultimately, our ability as a movement to navigate between the dangers of purism and reformism comes down to how each of us live our lives. Do we live in such a way that, on a day to day basis, we are in touch with working class people, regular folks, those in need of change? Do those of us who are white ensure that, in some way, we have regular communication and interaction with people of color so that we are constantly reminded about racism and its pernicious effects? Do we make time for meditation, allow our conscience to make itself heard over the daily demands on our time and energies? Do we interact with others in a way which prioritizes listening and objective consideration? Do we struggle to keep from responding defensively when others make constructive, or not so constructive, criticisms of us?

In the words of the late Rev. Paul Mayer, “What history is calling for is nothing less than the creation of a new human being. We must literally reinvent ourselves through the alchemy of the Spirit or perish. We are being divinely summoned to climb another rung on the evolutionary ladder, to another level of human consciousness.”

The post The Problems with Purism and Reformism (not reforms) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick.

The Problems with Purism and Reformism (not reforms)

Ted Glick — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 14:00:25 +0000

Purism versus reformism—the twin dangers of serious efforts to bring about the kind of change that is so, so needed today.

What can be done to lessen these dangers, to increase the possibilities that more of us will keep our eyes, minds and hearts on the prize?

The post The Problems with Purism and Reformism (not reforms) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick.

Visual artists Jamie Nami Kim and Paul Waters on collaboration

Jamie Nami Kim and Paul Waters — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Paul Waters, Conversation oil on cut cotton collage on canvas, 36h x 30w in

Jamie Nami Kim, Ten Women, cut paper on board, 37h x 95w in

How does a collaboration begin?

Paul: It starts with a conversation. It needs to be straightforward, open, honest, and it should allow free exchange between what’s being talked about.

Jamie: I like it when those kinds of conversations aren’t prompted. When it’s spontaneous. It’s the kind of conversation that feels like it’s happening to the people who are in conversation. They are both the recipients and participants of what’s being exchanged.

There’s a real joy that happens in these kinds of exchanges. So, in our case, we marinated for a long while in the free exchange through conversations for about a year before we actually discussed doing any art work together. Our conversations, in retrospect, were a very important part of our collaborative experience.

Paul: Yes and it’s an ongoing conversation. It doesn’t have a beginning and doesn’t seem to have an end. I feel like that’s what happens when you have a longtime collaborator. You say one year; I think it’s actually been going on for longer. There’s a real mystery in that. Our collaboration has been happening in nonlinear time.

What makes a great collaboration?

Paul: I think that one must do their work to be free of their ego. You have to be comfortable with being vulnerable especially if we are talking about creating expressions. You need to tell your personal story, whatever the story is. I think it’s very exciting when you can share your story with somebody who embraces it and understands it clearly. It’s equally exciting when you can listen and embrace someone else’s story.

Jamie: A lot of the time in our culture, we often privilege action over feeling and presence. Two or more people come together because they like to create. The questions will go towards an outcome: What are we going to do? What are we going to make? How? It’s all very action and outcome driven. What happens if we give more time and energy towards staying in a non-outcome driven state? I’m very appreciative that you and I exercise a lot of patience and curiosity to stay in a present and open state. That wasn’t always easy for me to do at times and you helped me a lot to get there.

Paul: You need to seek out the flow and get away from your individual self as much as you can. That’s the experience I had with you.

I let go of immediate concerns and enter into dream time. When I can get into that state, the unexpected and surprising always happens.

Jamie: Yes, it was helpful for me to have a method of getting into that space of dream time. Meditation, breath work, and dream analysis has really helped me access this space. Art-making of course is another way of entering into nonlinear time.

Language is also important. What words do we choose to speak in our mind to get out of our own way? Each person has to do their part in making powerful decisions about how they speak to themselves and to others. The focus needs to be centred on the collective experience and not an individual experience. More ‘us/we’ and less ‘me/I’.

Paul Waters, Warrior Woman, oil on cut cotton collage on canvas, 36h x 30w in

Jamie Nami Kim, New Life, cut paper on paper, 24h x 26w in

Paul: People need to be honest and that’s very hard. There’s a fear we all carry. Everybody wants to be accepted. People place barriers between themselves and other people out of fear and instead of getting closer, they end up further away. Shutting down and creating barriers is an indication that you don’t have enough love with yourself. Love is central in the picture of collaboration.

And it should be fun!

Jamie: Yes! If you start to feel it’s not fun, then you gotta ask yourself what’s going on?

Not feeling joy is a signal that there’s something you need to work out. It doesn’t mean it’s over. It just probably means there’s something that hasn’t been said or something that hasn’t been heard. So conversation is really important throughout the entire process. Open dialogue, open channels both with yourself and the people you are collaborating with.

Paul: Feedback is also very important. Listening and digesting what’s being shared is part of the process of creating. I learned to feel free enough in myself to accept criticism. I cultivated humility by taking time to understand myself and embrace myself. The more you love yourself, the more people will love you. I heard that as a child. Makes a lot of sense.

Humbleness is a part of humility. Humbleness is to embrace sensitivities. Appreciating what’s around you, appreciating the strengths of commitment and respecting others and their emotions.

What do you love about collaboration?

Jamie: Everybody has a story. Collaboration allows us to express our stories by celebrating the humility and humanity behind each story. At the core, our stories are the same.

It’s very exciting to witness each other bringing our own experiences and wisdom into a collaboration. There’s such a deep level of satisfaction and celebration that happens when you collectively make decisions and collectively determine that something is complete.

I love the sparkle that happens when we are in sync—it’s a real “yeah!” feeling that is large and energising and feels so good to share. It’s the feeling that anything is possible when we do it together.

Paul: Collaboration is a wonderful learning experience. More specifically, I think intergenerational relationships are very important because of the exchange of language and interpretation which is not only healthy but also a very large measuring tool. Learning how to talk to different generations has helped me to grow and learn more. I think generational differences create fear and hesitation in people because of those differences. And that’s a bad omen. So for me it’s been a great learning tool to see how you fit into the great and changing cultural dynamics.

Jamie Nami Kim and Paul Waters Recommend:

Stay true to yourself. Have happiness doing what you love.

Be kind. Be graceful.

Celebrate happiness. Enjoy loving.

Make art. Relish the creative part of you.

Be love. Love and accept love.

Paul Waters and Jamie Nami Kim sketching Twins

Paul Waters and Jamie Nami Kim, Twins, oil on cut cotton collage on canvas, 36h x 48w in

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jamie Nami Kim and Paul Waters.

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How to stop the bloodshed in #Gaza | Insider Briefing w/ former State Department Official Josh Paul

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Paul Powlesland | GB News | 21 May 2024 | Just Stop Oil

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Biden Skirting U.S. Law by Rushing More Arms to Israel, Says State Dept. Whistleblower Josh Paul

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Djuna Lund feat. Paul Behnam – Somni | A Take Away Show

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An Interview with Paul Sweezy, a Giant of 20th Century Marxist Thinking

E. Ahmet Tonak and Sungur Savran — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 06:57:23 +0000

Paul Sweezy and Ahmet Tonak in the offices of Monthly Review, NYC, 1986.

The Sweezy interview owed its origin to the urge to counter internationally the rise of left-wing liberalism (“liberalism in the European sense) and postmodernism on the left in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some countries felt this earlier and more strongly: France, which was home to these schools, or some Eastern European countries, where “market socialism” was the catchword of the rising liberal movement. The US left intelligentsia became entranced with this trend, called the “French Theory” here, from the 1980s on. In Turkey, the country of origin of the interviewers, it was also in the 1980s, when the entire left was suffering the heavy blows of the military dictatorship of 1980, that an insidious attack on Marxism started. A group of Marxists responded to this by defending a living Marxism in the face of what was, at bottom, an assault on Marxism with its rejection of “grand narratives”. Marxism was the grandest narrative of all for the attackers. This defense was done with the publication of a journal of theory, in Turkish, called 11. Tez [Thesis Eleven], bringing together Marxists of different political persuasions.

The Sweezy interview was the opening shot of a series of interviews planned for this journal. Another one with the British Marxist Ralph Miliband was soon to follow. Still another, with Perry Anderson, did not materialize, even though a date was set, for the reason that Anderson was down with a flu when the 11. Tez team arrived in England for a short stay planned for the interview.

Paul Sweezy was still going strong at the time of this interview (he was 76) and still handsome. He traveled all the way from New York to Great Barrington, Mass., for a lecture at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, where Tonak was teaching full-time then and Savran was visiting faculty. That is where we interviewed him.

Paul was of course world-renowned in the field of Marxist economics, but was the most soft-spoken, modest, and gentle person of such stature that one can find. He spoke with a very sincere and open mind, which clearly shows when he admits having made certain political mistakes, in particular with regard to Chinese communism.

We did not agree with the Monthly Review school on the nitty-gritty of Marxist political economy, in particular with the underconsumptionism and the Keynesian slant. But as two Marxists coming from a country oppressed by imperialism, where successive governments, civilian and military, of both the right and the center-left, have served NATO in a servile manner for seven decades, we greatly admired the intransigent and unrelenting anti-imperialism of that school.

That is why our relationship and contact with Paul continued until he had to retire from active participation in the affairs of MR. Each of us loyally attended with great pleasure the traditional weekly “brown-bag lunches” of MR whenever we happened to be in New York City, contributed to the discussion, and learned from the wisdom of Paul and Harry Magdoff.

In 1994, Sweezy was invited to Istanbul to the so-called “Economists’ Week”, an annual multi-day conference held in Istanbul by the Alumni/Alumnae Association of the Faculty of Economics of Istanbul University through our joint efforts with a comrade and fellow Marxist economist Nail Satlıgan, who at that time was the editor-in-chief of the magazine brought out by the above-mentioned association. He was 84 then, but still robust and going strong. He lectured to a fully-packed hall captivated by his suave style.

Paul Sweezy was a giant of twentieth-century Marxist thinking.

– E. Ahmet Tonak and Sungur Savran
February 2024

The following interview, first published in English by Monthly Review, was conducted by Sungur Savran, visiting scholar in economics, and E. Ahmet Tonak, professor of economics at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on March 20, 1986. The interview previously appeared in Onbirinci Te; (Eleven Thesis), a Marxist theoretical journal published quarterly in Istanbul, Turkey since November 1985. The interviewers, who are the members of the editorial collective of Onbirinci Tez; thank Derek Link for his contribution to the transcription of this interview. We republish it here on CounterPunch on the 20th anniversary of Sweezy’s death.

E. Ahmet Tonak (EAT): We would like to start out by discussing your lifelong activities as a socialist intellectual and author before turning to questions of theory and politics. You have, on various occasions, made clear that you turned to socialism and were convinced of its relevance for the contemporary world at the beginning of the 1930s, which means that you have been active developing and defending socialist views for more than half a century. Now it seems obvious that at least until the mid-seventies, this period was not really marked by a vitality of the socialist movement in the United States. During the Cold War period, in particular, socialism was to be down-graded and vilified by the political establishment, the mass media, the intelligentsia, etc. How would you characterize the experience of being in an extremely small minority as a socialist? Are there any significant and interesting instances of the pressures you were submitted to that you would like to evoke?

Paul M. Sweezy (PMS): Well, of course, the period of fifty years that you mentioned has been one of great variety. The reason I first became interested in Marxism and radical ideas was because of the state of the world in the early thirties, the financial collapse, and the Great Depression, the international situation which was prelude to the Second World War. And during that decade, particularly in the United States-well not particularly, but certainly markedly in the United States- there was an upsurge of radical activity and radical thought.

Up to then, I would say, there was virtually no Marxism in the United States.

You may be familiar with the work of Thorstein Veblen. He was one of the original faculty at the New School. He was not a Marxist, but he was very strongly influenced by Marxism, and he was just about the only important U.S. social scientist of the time, of the 1920s, who had really taken Marxism seriously. There was the old Socialist Party which had developed a few interesting thinkers, particularly Louis Boudin, who was more or less in the mold of Kautsky and the social democratic theories of the German party. But he was also an original thinker. And there were a few others. But by and large, in academia anyway, Marxism was nothing of any influence whatever, and whatever was known about it or written about it was a caricature, was not serious. There was no serious Marxist tradition. When I came back from England in the fall of 1933, it had already begun to change. There was a good deal of questioning and thinking around the big universities. I was at Harvard at the time, but this was true of various other universities too. Particularly in New York, New York University, City College. During the 1930s, the Communist Party, of course, grew rapidly, and took a leading role in the organization of the working class, and the CIO, the breakaway federation from the American Federation of Labor. And generally speaking it was a period of a great deal of not very sophisticated theoretical work, but a good deal of ferment and interest. And that was the context in which I became a self-educated Marxist. I had had a normal neoclassical training, but as a Marxist I had a problem of mostly teaching myself, and of course in conjunction with trying to absorb traditions, German particularly, and the European tradition. I

It was during that period that I gradually wrote, over several years, The Theory of Capitalist Development, which was started more or less as an effort of self-clarification. I was teaching from about 1935 or 1936 a course on the economics of socialism, which we interpreted in two ways. One, as the economics of a socialist society. And two, as the economic theories of socialist movements. And in the latter, of course there were many socialist traditions, Christian socialism, Fabian socialism and so on, and Marxist. And I tried to raise the level of treatment of Marxism in that course, and in graduate courses and seminars, and found that it was a long hard struggle to overcome the traditions and inhibitions of a neoclassical training. I don’t know. I can’t say I was terribly successful in the early stages. It took me a long, long time before I could accept the Marxist labor value theory because I was totally accustomed to the type of thinking of marginal utility price theory, and so on. And I couldn’t for a long time, I couldn’t see how there could be another kind of value theory with totally different purposes. That took years. The Theory of Capitalist Development was finished soon after the war started, and was published just a few months before I went into the U.S. Army. Now by that time, I think I could call myself a Marxist, with a reasonable background in the modes of theoretical reasoning and a grounding in the classical texts. But it didn’t come quickly by any means.

EA T: You wrote somewhere that after the Second World War you were “duly ushered out of Harvard.” It is also known that, despite student demands, you were never granted a stable position at other American universities. Would you say a few words on the Harvard experience and other similar incidents?

PMS: Well there is a certain misconception, fairly widespread I think, that I was fired by Harvard. That is not true. When I left Harvard in 1942, I went into the army and the OSS (I was taken from the Army into the intelligence apparatus, that’s the predecessor of the CIA, of course). I spent most of the war years in Europe-England, France, and Germany. The fact was that I was on military leave from Harvard at that time. I was an Assistant Professor, and had a five-year contract when I left; and when I returned to the United States in 1945, the fall of 1945, I had two years more on the contract, two and a half years I think, but I decided not to go back to academic teaching. I talked with my friends at Harvard and discovered that there was no possibility of the department agreeing on my being retained with tenure, so I didn’t wait. I didn’t want to go back for just a couple of years at that time, and I just resigned. So it’s not true that I was ever fired, though it certainly is true that I wouldn’t have been given tenure if I had stayed.

Sungur Savran (SS): Was it made obvious that, well at least did you know that their reasons were political?

PMS: Yeah, ideological.

SS: Yes, that’s what I mean.

PMS: The department was sharply divided. Not between radicals and conservatives, but between those who were adamantly opposed to having any radicals in the department and those, like Schumpeter for example, who were very friendly. In fact, during the war, there was an opening that came up, a permanent tenure position came up in the economics department, and they had to appoint somebody immediately. And I was one of the two candidates who were considered for the job. The other was John Dunlop, who subsequently became a very well-known labor economist. Schumpeter was a very strong supporter of my candidacy. I was told about that later, I was away at the time in England. But partly because they needed somebody who was there and could teach during the war, Dunlop was given the job. After that, there was never any chance that they would take a Marxist.

EAT: We know that, among others, you were a student of Schumpeter. It is even said that the title of your now classic The Theory of Capitalist Development, (TeD) was designed so as to distinguish your approach from that of Schumpeter, one of whose more important works having as title, The Theory of Economic Development. How would you characterize your relationship to Schumpeter, and could you evoke any personal reminiscences you have of him that may be of intellectual or political interest? In particular, what was his reaction when you were “ushered out of Harvard”?

PMS: Personally, we were very close friends, although we were at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Any economist who has studied the history of economic thought in the twentieth century, will realize that Schumpeter was a unique figure. He understood the importance of Marxism. As a matter of fact, he was a contemporary of a group in Vienna which included Hilferding, Otto Bauer, and Max Adler, the leading lights of the Austro-Marxist school. He understood their intellectual significance, their importance. His own attempt at a comprehensive theory of capitalism was deliberately architected as an alternative to Marxism. In other words, he paid Marxism the compliment of understanding and recognizing that it was the most important intellectual trend of the time. That’s totally different from anything in the Anglo-Saxon world, where Marxism was simply not taken seriously. It was regarded as part of something like what Keynes called an intellectual underworld, which he didn’t take seriously. So personally, I was very fond of Schumpeter, and he of me, I think. Actually, I wasn’t really a student of Schumpeter’s. But personally, I was very much influenced by him.

EAT: You didn’t take any formal course with him?

PMS: Well, when I came back from England, there was a small graduate seminar. Very small seminar, about four or five people, including Oscar Lange.

EAT: He was there?

PMS: Leontief used to come to it, and myself, and the woman to whom Schumpeter was later married. But it was very small. I never took anything else of his. Later on in the mid- thirties, for two years, I think it was two years, I was Schumpeter’s assistant in his introductory graduate course in economic theory. I would assist in reading papers, consulting with the students, and the like.

EAT: How about Samuelson and Solow who as students attended your postgraduate seminars?

PMS: No, Solow took the course I mentioned earlier, the Economics of Socialism. He was one of the best students I ever had, very bright and very left to begin with.

SS: Oh, that’s interesting.

EAT: Yes, he said so. I listened to him at one point.

PMS: Oh yeah, very left for a couple of years. And then after, I don’t know quite what his trajectory was, whether he did his graduate work at Harvard, but maybe he didn’t. I kept in touch with Solow a little bit right after I left in the early years of the war, but he drifted very rapidly to the mainstream, and became, well, you know Solow. I think he could be called somewhat opportunistic.

EAT: What about Samuelson, who took the course?

PMS: He was never left.

EAT: But he was in your seminar, right?

PMS: Not that particular one. He wasn’t yet in Cambridge at that time in 1933. He came about 1936. And he took Schumpeter’s course when I was Schumpeter’s assistant.

EAT: I see.

PMS: We used to have informal discussion groups from time to time. Schumpeter would be involved, but not necessarily. Visiting economists from all over the world would come to Cambridge in the 1930s, very largely because of Schumpeter’s being there. He was the drawing card. Hansen was another well-known person. Lange was one of the visiting scholars and Georgescu-Roegen, you probably know them. There were a lot of visiting economists who came on Rockefeller Fellowships and spent half a year, even a year, or in Lange’s case, two years, at Cambridge. Another was Eric Roll, whose specialty was the history of economic thought, and with whom you are probably familiar. The first edition of Eric Roll’s History of Economic Thought is still, I think, a very good book. He changed it a lot in later editions. And as you know, he became a prominent civil servant in Britain. Now he is Lord Roll, head of one of the big London banking houses. He also moved to the right, but never as much as some of the others. I see Eric Roll occasionally, when he is in the United States. While he’s not a radical anymore, he’s not unfriendly. I mean he’s not a Thatcherite or a Reaganite or anything like that. He’s too sensible for that. He’s a very able person, too.

For a lot of these people, and you can understand it, there was no real career to be made in the left movement. And there were many other careers to be made, the attractions were enormous, the possibilities in academia, the possibilities in government. Solow and Roll were almost paradigms of the kind of careers that were open to them. Very intelligent, bright radicals, who adjusted their politics to their jobs. It’s a kind of opportunism in a way, and yet in these cases it wasn’t crass or vicious. It was the kind of thing that the pressures of U.S. society make it extraordinarily difficult for a person to resist, especially if he doesn’t have some independent means. You have to understand that I probably would have gone that way, too. I was fortunate in not having to depend on an academic salary. My father was a banker; as a matter of fact, he was the vice president of the First National Bank, which was one of the predecessor corporations to the Citibank now. In its day, under the leadership of George F. Baker, it was one of the leading forces in United States finance capital. Baker and J.P. Morgan were very close partners in effect. And at that time the First National Bank had only five vice presidents.

Today, the Citibank probably has a hundred or more. The old First National was a corporate bank, I don’t think it took deposits of less than a million dollars. It had very few personal accounts, and that’s one of the reasons it couldn’t survive in the later period. It had to merge with the National City Bank in order to survive at all. But there was a time when it was sort of an adjunct to the Morgan empire, a part of it. And my father was upper-level management, a vice president, of the First National. He wasn’t very rich. He could have been but for the crash of 1929. He was heavily involved in many of the things that went bust in 1929. So it was not as though he had a big fortune, but enough to live on. That was necessary. In the United States, if you don’t have access to a little surplus value, you know, you’re not going to be able to play a really independent role in the intellectual environment. So I don’t blame these people in any personal sense. I try to explain it and thank my lucky stars that I was able to escape those pressures, to which so many people succumbed.

SS: Monthly Review has rightly been called an “institution” of the American left. You started to publish it in 1949, at the dawn of the McCarthy era. Then came Monthly Review Press (MRP) in 1952. I would like to ask you two questions concerning MR. One, was it ever subjected to judicial or political repression?

PMS: Well, both. The co-founder was Leo Huberman, whose books I think you are familiar with. He was a popularizer in the very best sense of the word. He wrote marvelously lucid and clear, well-informed books on the history of American democracy, We The People, and a history of capitalism, Man’s Worldly Goods. He and I were the co-founders of Monthly Review. And both of us were subjected to a certain amount of harassment, by what is usually called the witch hunt aspects of the McCarthy period. Leo, I think, was called once before the McCarthy Committee, and once before the Un-American Activities Committee. I was the object of a state subversive activities witch hunt in New Hampshire, where I was living at the time, which went on for four years. In 1953 I was questioned by this local state inquisition, you might call it, and actually was…well the details don’t need to bother you. I was found guilty of contempt of court, and sentenced to jail. It was in 1953-54. It was immediately appealed, and the case went on until the summer of ’57, when it was finally decided by the United States Supreme Court in my favor. So all that period I was out of jail on bail. The year 1957 was the peak of the liberal phase of the Earl Warren court. And on that day in June of 1957, they handed down six or eight decisions overturning several of the worst McCarthyite excesses. My case was one of them. But these had nothing to do with Monthly Review. I mean, except indirectly, there was no attack on the journal as such.

Neither Leo nor I had, fortunately, happened ever to join the Communist Party, although it could have happened easily enough at one stage or another. Many people joined the party in the 30s just because it seemed to be the most effective left organization of the period. They never thought of it as anything terribly important, and maybe didn’t stay very long. Lots of them went through the party, and that became later on a handle which could be used to persecute people in very vicious ways. We were lucky in that they didn’t have that available. Of course, people were very careful about subscribing to Monthly Review, or being seen with it. For years we had to mail it in a plain wrapper, so that folks wouldn’t see it. But that kind of thing is different from a direct attack. As a matter of fact, the United States legal system has been, I would say, meticulously careful: there is a certain bias against any sort of direct censorship in the system. They don’t need it. Our publications are so small, they do not pose a threat to anybody.

SS: Second: How do you now, after close to forty years of publication, evaluate the contribution of MR to socialism in America and, of course, in the world at large?

PMS: Well, I would think it has had much more influence outside the United States than in the United States. There is what is called a Monthly Review “school,” which includes, besides Huberman and myself, Paul Baran, who was at Stanford University with tenure. Fortunately, he got tenure in 1948.

EAT: He was the first American Marxist to get tenure at a big university. Is that right?

PMS: Well, no, there were others, but perhaps in economics, yes.

EAT: Yes, that’s what I mean.

PMS: But there were quite a lot of Marxists, more likely mathematicians and physicists. Marxism didn’t interfere with their work or get them in trouble. Baran was very close to us. And Harry Magdoff, and then Harry Braverman. The main works, I suppose, are my Theory of Capitalist Development, Monopoly Capital by Paul Baran and me, Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital and, Harry Magdoffs The Age of Imperialism. There is a recognizable tendency in American Marxism, which can be, in a rough way, said to be the Monthly Review school. I don’t think it’s predominant. My guess is that it definitely isn’t. In the URPE, for instance, the Union for Radical Political Economics, I would say the Monthly Review tendency is a minority, a definite minority. There are many others. Anwar Shaikh’s tendency is another minority tendency, and one could mention Bowles and Gintis, and others as well.

EAT: But they are getting to be the majority, in a way.

PMS: Could be, I don’t know. I am not really closely associated with the URPE and its inner politics. But in any case, I think it’s been useful. As you know, the U.S. Marxist movement is small, very small. Nobody can claim that it has had a major impact on American intellectual life. There’s a Cold War mentality. But Marxism has a certain toehold. It’s much more serious than it used to be. We take it as it comes.

SS: One final question concerning your career as a socialist intellectual: It is striking that a socialist of your influence and commitment should not have been involved in practical socialist politics, i.e., organizational political work. Would you tell us the reasons for this and how you feel about it when you look back over the years?

PMS: Well, that’s not altogether true. I was involved in a lot of things in the thirties. I was very active in the Teacher’s Union, and one of the founders of the Harvard Teacher’s Union.

SS: No, what I meant to say had to do with working towards the formation of a political party. And you in fact yourself, in the piece that you wrote for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Monthly Review, did mention this sort of thing. You never went into organizational politics, especially in the sixties, when the movement was on the rise. How do you view that looking back on it?

PMS: I view it as sort of inevitable, because I think to have tried to join in the sixties would have been difficult. It was a young movement in the sixties, they didn’t think they needed old people like us. But they did need something that could establish some continuity with the radical past, because the sixties movement had little sense of history, very little sense of its own place intellectually or politically in the development of the country. And we always saw our role as trying to maintain certain radical traditions, a certain sense of history, which could not be done in any of the available existing party formations, sectarian formations. And so we tried to produce something which would be useful to all of them, if they wanted to place themselves in the historical development. And really the only serious political party was the Communist Party, plus the Trotskyists, who are a variant of the Communist Party: the parties that came out of the Third International. And they were absolutely impossible from the point of view of any intellectual creativity. I remember when I wrote the Theory of Capitalist Development just when it came out, friends of mine said we don’t know what to think of it because Moscow hasn’t said anything about it yet. Well in that kind of an atmosphere, you can’t carry on serious work. Perhaps you could in England. I mean Maurice Dobb was always a member of the Communist Party, for example. And I think they left him alone. He could say what he wanted. As a matter of fact, he was a creative writer during the whole period. But that wasn’t possible in the United States. That’s a very complicated set of questions, and I don’t really know enough about it to have a definitive opinion. I would be delighted if I thought there was a movement with a possibility for the future, to join it and play a role in it. But I don’t see it. We have friends who are in the DSA. The DSA is the Democratic Socialists of America. And I can see the point of some people who find that a community, an intellectual community, is something they need. But I don’t think they take it very seriously as a whole movement.

As far as the community part is concerned, Monthly Review gives us a kind of base.

We, Harry and I, come into the office normally once a week on Tuesdays. And there is a kind of an informal tradition now of the Tuesday lunch, a brown-bag lunch (people bring their own sandwich or coffee or whatever), which attracts people from all over the world. They come in, sit down, and discuss. This last Tuesday, for example, Eduardo Galeano, very well known in Latin America, a Uruguayan, who wrote The Open Veins of Latin America, published by Monthly Review Press. He was in New York. He came to lunch. And there was somebody else, oh, our longtime colleague, Bobbye Ortiz. She just came back from the Dominican Republic, where she had been a delegate to a Women’s conference there. We get people from all over. And this establishes relationships when we go abroad. We can usually find people who have been in to see us when they have been in New York at the UN or the New School, or something like that. John Eatwell is one who comes regularly. Eric Hobsbawm comes when he’s in New York, not regularly, but two or three times. MR is a kind of center in its own right, of a very informal sort, which gives us some contacts.

We don’t have many, I wish we had more, of a grassroots variety. There really isn’t a movement that provides such contacts. Harry Braverman, had he lived, might have established a close relationship with the trends and tendencies in the working-class movement. I don’t know. We don’t have real contacts of that kind.

SS: Now I suppose you chose a conscious path of carrying on an intellectual tradition. Was that it?

PMS: Really, I think that’s the way I would say it.

+++

EAT: Moving over to your contributions to Marxist theory, can we start out by discussing some aspects of your first major contribution, Theory of Capitalist Development, which dates from 1942. That book was firmly rooted, it seems to me, in the theoretical debates that went on among European Marxists such as Grossmann, Luxemburg, Hilferding, etc., and presented in fact a synthetic view of their theories (the most obvious example being your discussion of the controversy surrounding crisis theory). Postwar American Marxism, on the other hand, seemed to have isolated itself from this sort of tradition, at least until recently. Do you agree with this judgment? And if so, don’t you think that this state of things is to be deplored?

PMS: Yes, I think there is a sort of parochialism or isolationism in the American movement. But that’s always been true organizationally, theoretically, and intellectually. It’s always been true. I was simply trying to tie into the only intellectual tradition that existed at the time, which was the one coming down from the Second International to the Third International, and to pick out the most important thinkers like Hilferding, and Lenin of course. Lenin plays an important part as a theorist in the Theory of Capitalist Development and so do Luxemburg and the English to a certain extent. Dobb was probably the only really important English thinker in this tradition. I don’t think of anybody else. In other words, that was the tradition which had to be brought over here and made available. Now the fact is that it hasn’t been followed up, except sort of sporadically and in my opinion in a superficial way. The French fashions have a tendency to catch on from time to time. And there is a serious group at the University of Massachu- setts, the Wolff/Resnick tendency. That’s a kind of development I’m not too sure that I understand. It’s a development of Althusserianism, French. But it’s a bit of a sect in an intellectual sense, not in an organizational sense. They have followers spread around at various universities, usually very intelligent and brilliant people.

But the New Left movement of the 60s was pretty much anti-intellectual, attempting to develop its own theories, its own niche in the stream of radical thought and radical organization. I’m sure you know this as well as I do. In fact, in recent years, you’ve had more opportunity to relate to younger people than we’ve had.

SS: One of the outstanding aspects of the Theory of Capitalist Development is that it was there that you first introduced into the English-language Marxist literature the debate on the so-called “transformation problem.” It would not be wrong to see the subsequent discussion in English as deeply influenced by your manner of casting the problem. We know, on the other hand, that since the 70s there has been a new current which, basing its economic analysis on the work of Sraffa, has denied any validity whatsoever to Marx’s labor theory of value. How do you personally view the debate between the so-called “neo-Ricardians” and the defenders of Marx’s theory of value?

PMS: Well, let me say first, and I think it’s very important to understand this, that Sraffa himself did not see what he was doing as an alternative to Marxism, or in any way a negation of Marxism. From his point of view, this was a critique of neoclassical orthodoxy. And he made that very clear. Joan Robinson was very explicit, saying that Sraffa never abandoned Marxism. He always was a loyal Marxist, in the sense of himself adhering to the labor theory of value. But he didn’t write about that. Now that was Sraffa’s peculiarity. He started as a critic of Marshallian economics. You remember his famous article in the 1920s. He was in the Cambridge group. He fought these ideological struggles which had their center in Cambridge. He took a certain side in them, but he didn’t take it as a Marxist, but he took it as a critic of the orthodoxy of the time. Now that’s a peculiar position, but it doesn’t entitle anybody to take Sraffa and counterpose him to Marxism, as Ian Steedman does. To make out of Sraffa a whole alternative theory, in my opinion, is quite wrong and has nothing whatever to do with the real intentions of Sraffa, or certainly nothing to do with the real purposes of Marxist analysis. There is no dynamic, no development in Steedman that I can see. Thinking that it is possible to get along without a value theory (using the term in a broad sense to include accumulation theory and so on) seems to me to be almost total bankruptcy. It’s no good at all. And I don’t think anything has come of it. It was good to show the limitations, the fallacies, the internal inconsistencies of neoclassical theory, that was fine, that was important. But to think that on that basis a theory with anything like the scope and purposes of Marxism can be developed is quite wrong.

+++

EAT: Your joint work with Baran, Monopoly Capital (MC), published in 1966, was immensely influential and could be said to have given rise to a whole school of thought. It has also been the object of much controversy. One of the points made by critics is that MC is based on a theoretical structure which is at odds with the labor theory of value. In a preface written for a Greek edition of MC you explicitly state that the theory put forth in MC is not in contradiction with the labor theory of value. However, you would perhaps concede that it is based on a conception of monopoly capitalism where the competitive battle among capitals recedes to the background, to say the least. What would you have to say about this aspect of MC, especially given that the world economic crisis has once again exacerbated competition among capitalists and tended to break down every cartel and agreement that existed before?

PMS: The first thing I would say there is that you have to remember the context within which Monopoly Capital was written. We started it in 1956, but it didn’t actually get published until 1966. So it was in the process of development for 10 years. But the atmosphere in the mid-50s was full-fledged McCarthyism, and it was practically impossible for Marxist dialogue to exist within the U.S. academy. Baran and I were trying to introduce ideas at a level and in a language which could be effective with younger, perhaps radically inclined, economists who had no real education in Marxism, no prior acquaintance with Marx’s writings. So we did use quite a lot of Keynesian and neoclassical and monopoly theory concepts like marginal revenue curves, Keynesian ideas of savings and investment as a way of analyzing the accumulation process, things of that sort. Perhaps that was a mistake. We had originally planned a couple of other chapters for Monopoly Capital which would have done more by way of explaining the relations between our conceptual framework and the Marxian value analysis. These chapters were in very rough draft, not publishable in the book or in any other form when Baran died, so there was no possibility of including them in the book. And I don’t know whether they would have succeeded, or whether they were worth the attempt. But the point was that the problem of monopoly in our view was not how the surplus got produced and how it got squeezed out of the producers, the workers, but how it got divided up.

And in Marxist theory in Volume III of Capital, there is the whole mechanism turning around the average rate of profit and competition among capitalists of roughly co-equal status as far as their power and their control in the market was concerned. All of that, following on in the classical tradition of Adam Smith. And we wanted to argue that the distribution of the surplus was affected by the changes in the structural characteristics of capitalism beginning around the 1880s or 1890s, where the market situations were altered and the big corporations rose to dominance. We felt that these developments could be effectively analyzed without in any way implying that capital is productive of value. It was simply that the surplus was distributed according to different rules. And as a matter of fact, our argument was that the changed rules, the laws of distribution of surplus under monopoly capitalism, exacerbated rather than alleviated the contradictions of capitalism, as Hilferding and some of the social democratic economists had argued, concluding that the more organized capitalist society was less prone to crises. We argued on the contrary that it was more prone to crises and to stagnation tendencies than the more competitive models of the earlier period. So the purpose of that little introduction to the Greek edition was simply to get on the record that we really weren’t abandoning Marxism by talking about surplus instead of surplus value. I have subsequently, in some instances, touched on that. You know that “Value and Prices” essay which was published in 1982, wasn’t it in the Elson volume?

SS: No, The Value Controversy.

PMS: Yes, The Value Controversy. So, I think that that criticism is very misguided on the whole; it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Now, the second point you raised as to whether the internationalization of the economy has basically altered the tendencies which we found to be present in Monopoly Capital. I don’t think so. Let’s put it in a very extreme form. If you had a real complete multinationalization, a complete elimination of all trade barriers, there would be a relatively long period during which many monopolistic positions would be destroyed, and a new pattern of monopolistically competitive relations would be established on an international scale. But basically the laws of the concentration and centralization of capital would be unchanged, whether operating on a national, multinational, or regional scale; and you would once again have the building up of a structure similar to the one we talked about in Monopoly Capital.

EAT: Me also gives the impression that at that time you attributed great importance to Keynesian techniques of demand management. The theory of the absorption of the rising surplus through wasteful state expenditure seems to be an attempt at explaining the nature of Keynesian economic policies in Marxist terms. It is true that you later explicitly criticized the shortcomings of Keynesian policies. However, it has been said many times that you viewed Marx’s contribution to crisis theory as a precursor of Keynesian analysis. Would you tell us how you would characterize your relationship to Keynes or, for that matter, the relationship of Marxist economics to Keynesianism?

PMS: Yeah, this is a very complicated problem, of course. I was very much influenced, as I think was my whole generation, by Keynes, by the General Theory. And I think that the General Theory is a much more important book than most Keynesians realize. I don’t know if you have read it recently, most people haven’t. In their student days, they read it and got certain things out of it that were mostly pretty formal, like the marginal efficiency of capital, the multiplier, the propensity to consume, all of those formal concepts. Actually there is a lot of what you might call economic sociology in the General Theory. I recently had occasion to read again chapter 16 of the General Theory, called “The State of Long-Run Expectations.” It’s a marvelous piece, sort of psycho-economic history. It’s extraordinary. And once you read that, you cannot for a moment believe that the marginal efficiency of capital is anything but a mush. There’s no reality to it, no reality whatever. It’s all based on expectations, on the general climate of opinion, on the way people react to the historical context. All those things enter into it. When it gets into a formal model, you know, it’s like there is a definite schedule of what various amounts of capital invested today will yield over a period of years, and what interest rate you can apply to this, and from these data you get a definite result. But there is nothing like that in what you might call a fuller development of a Keynesian set of ideas. He was also quite aware that private enterprise and the distribution which arises from the private ownership of capital was not a viable system. To be sure, he thought it would be easy to reform the system-not easy perhaps, but that it would be possible, because he didn’t have any theory of the state, any theory of power relations. He was completely blank on that. But in his perception of the problems of capitalism, Say’s Law for example, and the primacy of profit-making over use values. All of that is, at least, implicitly recognized in Keynes. The thing that irritates me about Marxists is that they want to throw that all out, and the thing that irritates me about Keynesians is that they want to reduce Keynes to simple formulas. I think that is to misunderstand the importance of a very important figure. He didn’t understand Marx at all, he was not at all attracted by him. But now, I think you know that at one stage, his eye was caught by the M-C-M formula. And he immediately recognized it as a conceptual way of seeing the business world which differed from that of the C-M-C formula.

EAT: You recently wrote about that.

PMS: I wrote about that in a footnote to the review of the Heilbroner book. [MR, January 1986] That just shows that Keynes’s mind was working differently from the normal neoclassical economist’s. He was not normal; he was a much more brilliant and more seminal thinker whom one should not be afraid to learn from. I think that Marxists have a certain defensiveness about Keynes: we mustn’t take seriously a bour- geois thinker because it may infect us and maybe we’ll turn out to be revisionists without wanting to be, you know. I don’t think that’s such a danger as long as you internalize the basic structure of Marxism, which is, of course, embodied in and summed up in the value theory and the accumulation theory, surplus-value theory, all of that. That’s absolutely crucial. And most of the valuable Keynesian insights can be added to that, at least in my view. There is no need to lose these basic insights which are based on a very intimate knowledge of the real business world-which of course, Marx also had in his day. But which Marxists taking their stuff out of Capital, can’t have in our day. This whole business of finance which I was talking about last night. The present financial explosion which is unprecedented can’t be handled in terms of the hints in Volume III about finance. Although, they are not unuseful, not without considerable value. The whole notion of an abbreviated accumulation formula, M-M’, without any production element M- C, is a very fruitful way of thinking about finance, how it is possible for M’ to relate only to M without the system of production in the middle. But that’s what’s happening all the time now. If we don’t think about this, if we assume that finance is only an aspect of the circulation of commodities, we’re not going to understand a lot of what goes on in the world today. I must say, my own feeling is that this is an area where nobody has done really very well. I sometimes have the feeling that economics now is in need of a general theory, in the sense that physics seems to be in need of a general theory, i.e., that there are a lot of things that are going on that don’t fit into the standard physical theories. And they are looking for a general field theory which would unify all of it. They don’t have it yet. In economics, we need a theory which integrates finance and production, the circuits of capital of a financial and a real productive character much more effectively than our traditional theories do. I don’t see that anyone is actually producing it. Some people are beginning to become aware of the need for it, but it’s terribly complicated. And I’m sure that I’m too old to be able to think of those things. I can get snatches, insights here and there, but I can’t put it together into a comprehensive theoretical framework. I think it will take somebody who starts differently and isn’t so totally dominated by M-C-M’, the industrial circuit, with the financial circuits always being treated as epiphenomenal, not part of the essential reality. I don’t know if you are familiar with the book The Faltering Economy, edited by Foster and Szlajfer?

EAT: No, I am not.

PMS: Published two years ago by MR Press. The subtitle is The Problem of Accumulation Under Monopoly Capital. It’s a collection of essays basically, but there are also some original contributions. And the ones by the young Polish economist, Henryk Szlajfer, which take off from certain ideas of surplus and surplus value as put forth in Monopoly Capital, are particularly interesting. He has some very stimulating thoughts, but they are not terribly clear. He’s a Marxist, basically. He got interested in American thought and he’s been working in Warsaw, which is quite remarkable. He certainly doesn’t get much stimulation there. He’s done work on Latin American underdevelopment theory, too. I think he’s an important thinker. You should look at the Foster-Szlajfer book. It has a collection of useful essays by Steindl and Kalecki and some of the most important works on the development of monopoly capital theory.

+++

SS: I wish to go into another subject. One of the pillars of your characterization of the world situation since 1945 is your assessment concerning the center of revolutionary struggles in this period. You have time and again put forth two closely related judgments: that the working classes of the advanced capitalist countries were, so to speak, integrated into the system and that the principal contradiction, to use your term, was that between imperialism and national liberation movements. You did certainly emphasize in the early 70s that the apathy of the working classes of the West was to be regarded as a transitory phenomenon. Nevertheless, it is striking, when one goes through the issues of MR in the early to mid-70s, that workers’ struggles in France and Italy, in the late 60s and early 70s, the British miners’ strike of 1974 which brought down a Conservative government, the Portuguese revolution of 1974–75, and the struggles of Spanish workers against the Francoist and post-Francoist state received very insufficient coverage. Would you agree that the earlier orientation of the journal acted to obstruct sufficient attention to these very significant social struggles? And how do you characterize the world situation now?

PMS: Well, I haven’t changed my mind, basically. I think the traditional Marxist theory was over-optimistic in its outlook. I think it underestimated, not only the integration of the working class into the system, but also the fragmentation of the working class, the breaking up of its component parts, which don’t really relate to each other in the way that Marxists used to think of as normal. They used to think the capitalist process itself tended to homogenize the working class, bring together workers and give them certain common ways of looking at the world, a common psychology, a common class consciousness. It doesn’t seem to be happening anywhere. In those places like France and Italy where it seemed maybe that the traditional model had more relevance, there the fragmentation is taking place too, the break-up of the unified working-class unions and parties seems to be advancing just as it is in Britain and the United States. I don’t see any integrating tendencies. I would say there is only one place in the world today where you can speak of a capitalist development yielding a capital-labor confrontation of the classical Marxist kind, and that’s South Africa, for very special historical reasons. I can see the possibility of a real proletarian revolution in South Africa, with the black working class posed against the white monopoly capital ruling class in a confrontation that would have been very familiar to Marx and Engels in their way of looking at the world. On the other hand, I think that if they woke up today and saw the United States and Britain and the other advanced capitalist countries, they would be very surprised.

SS: Do you think the rather advanced countries of Latin America would be close to South Africa?

PMS: Brazil, for example. Brazil is obviously the key to Latin America. It is so much the most important, and the most developed. Perhaps. I don’t know enough to be sure.

SS: To follow on from the last question and to talk further about Western Europe, one of the more heated debates of the mid-70s in the pages of MR was the discussion on what you called “the new revisionism,” i.e., Eurocommunism, especially Italian style. Would you say a few words on this political current?

PMS: Well, as you know, we were very skeptical about the importance of Eurocommunism as a new movement. We saw it more as an advance of the countries that so far didn’t have social democratic parties, towards catching up with the Northern countries. Well, the United States doesn’t have a social democratic party either, but in a way the Democratic Party is a kind of bad substitute for a social democratic party, a kind of welfare-state party. Eurocommunism is an abandonment of most of the really important insights, the principles of Marxist analysis of capitalism. And the Italian party today is a shambles. I don’t even know if there is a faction in the Italian party that could be called Marxist in any real sense of the word.

There are individuals, of course. But my perception of it now is that it has gone way beyond the original, you might say, intentions of Eurocommunism. Spain, what’s left in Spain of the old Communist party where Eurocommunism got its start? There are several little parties now; the French party has disintegrated, 10 percent of the vote against 25 percent; the Italian party has become reformist in the purest sense. The “historic compromise,” that was supposed to be the big Italian innovation. Compromise with what? With Christian Democracy, with capitalism. They’ve now carried that further, and they want to compromise with the United States, with the leadership of imperialism. They passed a resolution in the recent congress of the Italian Communist Party which, in effect, is a kind of conciliation of imperialism. Left-wing people wanted to introduce an amendment to, at least, strengthen the thing somewhat, but it was rejected at the Central Committee level. It’s a shambles. Eurocommunism can’t be taken seriously as a radical movement. Now whether the advanced countries are going to be capable of regaining ground, I don’t know. I don’t see any significant developments yet. The strength of Reaganism and Thatcherism seems to be waning: they have their own internal contradictions which are leading to their relative decline compared to what they promised, or what they might have seemed to be at one stage. But nothing is coming up in the opposition. The most recent issue of the New Left Review has a long article by Raphael Samuel on the Communist movement in Britain. It’s a very sad story, and it is very moving to me. But there’s nothing left.

SS: In a more recent issue of New Left Review, Ralph Miliband characterized a similar political and intellectual drift away from Marxism in Britain (and France) in exactly the same terms as you talked about Eurocommunism, that is, he also referred to a “new revisionism.” Have you seen that article of Miliband’s? Have you been following these debates in Britain?

PMS: I don’t know. My own feeling is that the best, the most important thing that can be done in the advanced countries now is to oppose the implacable drive of U .S. Imperialism, of U.S. monopoly capitalism, to prevent any change in the third world. That is the dynamics of the world conflict. That is the area where the danger of nuclear war is germinating. And without being socialist or even consciously left, we can at least say no to that. And a lot of people are doing that and becoming conscious, at least at that very elementary level. Now that doesn’t imply any great optimism about the post-revolutionary societies. But I must say that they have more potential than they have yet been able to realize, whether they are called socialist or not. I don’t think it’s very useful to call them socialist.

EAT: That’s exactly my next question. If we move further east in Europe, we could perhaps discuss your characterization of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. How do you view these societies? Has there been any significant change in your analysis over the years?

PMS: I think it’s significant in the sense that they have, the Soviet Union, in the first place, of course, and China, in spite of all their disappointing developments, repellent features, they have achieved a certain relative if tenuous and insecure independence of capitalism. It’s not complete independence by any means. And the Wallerstein school which tries to make it out still as a world capitalist system has a little going for it, but it isn’t really useful. In fact, it obscures the real tendencies.

EAT: I agree with you.

PMS: The Soviet Union is not operating under the laws of capitalism. China isn’t either, really. There the central authority can still call a halt to present policies. It may find it useful for now to use these market incentives, capitalist incentives, but that doesn’t change the whole system into one of capitalism. That is a view which some of the extreme Maoists, in my opinion quite wrongly, deduce from the present situation. The Eastern European countries, some of them are quite successful, Hungary, for example, East Germany. East Germany, I don’t know too much about it, but what I do hear from people whose judgment I respect is that it works a hell of a lot better than the U.S. and the Western press would like you to believe. Czechoslovakia, I don’t know. I haven’t seen or heard much about what is going on there. They are not third world countries, and they have a certain relative independence from capitalism. They have certain potentials which, of course, the United States is doing its very best to suppress, in the sense of making them spend all their energies on military defense. The more rational elements of the U.S. right, I think, want to believe that they can force the Soviet leaders into submission through an arms race which will become too burdensome for the Soviet Union to sustain. I think it’s crazy. It’s a totally incorrect perception. Nevertheless it does great damage.

What can a country like Nicaragua do if it has to spend 60 percent of its gross national product on war? A very poor country to begin with. What kind of development can they generate unless they get a lot of help from outside, which they don’t get, of course. Even so, they don’t do too badly in some respects. it’s remarkable how well they do. And Cuba is another example. It’s done some very remarkable things under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. If–an absolutely impossible “if,” of course–you could get the ruling classes of the advanced capitalist countries that are in the saddle in their own countries, to lay off and leave them alone, then perhaps those post-revolutionary societies would have more of a potential than most people think they do. I myself do not believe in the theory which is put forth by E.P. Thompson, for example, that the Cold War, the arms race, is essentially a two-sided affair.

EAT: Stretching the argument a little bit.

PMS: I think it’s false. I think it’s false. You can see it now. Gorbachev has had the good sense to expose the United States. The offer of complete elimination of nuclear weapons–well obviously he realizes it isn’t going to be accepted–but the actual moratorium on testing is a real factor of unilateral initiative, of stopping testing and saying, “All right, you stop testing too and it’ll be permanent.” That’s a real step. The peace movement in this country hasn’t understood its importance, I think. I am surprised. I think the Soviet Union has shown more capacity to respond to a very difficult situation and to do it in a positive rather than a negative way much better than I had feared. My feeling about the Soviet Union is not as negative as it was a couple years ago. That was partly under the influence of Maoism, which I think was always wrong in its “three worlds” theory. I don’t think it was ever a three-world universe. There is capitalism and then there are those who manage to get a bit of independence of capitalism, and not two systems. There is no socialist system. There are societies which call themselves socialist that are not under the regime of capital. That’s all to the good, and it has possibilities. But some of us went too far in our analysis. I was very much influenced by Mao because I think he was a very great man and I think he deserved to have influence. But sometimes it’s hard to know just how far to go. Take enthusiasm for the Cultural Revolution, for example. It seemed to be such a right thing to do. It seemed in an abstract sense to have all the rationality on its side. But obviously the Chinese people were not ready for that.

SS: Aren’t present developments proof of the fact that the Maoist leadership had not really laid the basis for a healthy workers’ state? Otherwise, how could the Deng leadership follow such policies without a forcible destruction of previously existing structures and without facing serious opposition. This is, in fact, an argument which you have also used, but in criticizing the Maoist characterization of the Soviet Union?

PMS: I agree with you, I totally agree with you. I think very likely, we were all living in a bit of a dream world when we imagined that the Communist movement in China had developed in the masses to the point of changing popular consciousness and class consciousness and so on. That came from other models and not from reality, I think. Mao, himself, recognized it in some of his more candid moments–in that last collection of his talks (I forget what it was called when it was finally published. The preliminary title was Mao Unrehearsed, and it contained speeches, letters, documents from the Cultural Revolution period). In some of those, he comes on understanding very well, I think, how skin-deep the Cultural Revolution really was, how it really didn’t get into the masses and didn’t change the masses. I don’t think the failure can be blamed on Mao. What else could he do?

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SS: Can we speak finally about the future prospects for socialism in the world and in the United States? You said something on South Africa which was very important. There is also the case of Nicaragua. It seems best to start out with Nicaragua. You have always been a close observer of the Cuban experience. In light of this, what is your evaluation of the Nicaraguan revolution? Do you think that the U.S. government will try to crush the Nicaraguan revolution through direct intervention?

PMS: You know I think the Nicaraguan revolution has to be distinguished from the Cuban revolution very clearly. The United States got caught off guard in Cuba. The Cuban revolution managed to consolidate itself with Soviet assistance before the United States understood what was happening. And from then on it meant definitely that full-scale intervention by United States armed forces would be necessary if it were to be overthrown. And the Soviet position, the dangers of nuclear war, were such that the United States, fortunately, didn’t have the foolishness or the rashness to try such an adventure. Now the Nicaraguan revolution is not a socialist revolution; even by the standards of the Soviet Union, or the so-called socialist countries, it’s not a socialist revolution. It has a leadership that is certainly inclined in that direction, but still 60 percent of the economy is under private ownership. All the same, from the point of view of the U.S. ruling class, it’s a great danger, it’s a great danger. If it survives, it’s bound to have imitators not only in Central America but in South America and various other places. In that sense the “domino theory” is a realistic theory. It doesn’t mean they’re all going to flop into the arms of the Soviet Union, it means they’re going to flop out of the arms of the United States. And that the United States won’t tolerate. I think the United States is very, very wary of direct intervention, however.

The so-called “Vietnam syndrome” is not dead. It’s not dead not only in the wide masses of the people, particularly religious people (church people are playing a wonderful role now in many areas). It’s not dead in the U.S. military either. The U.S. military, the top brass, the chiefs of staff, were very badly burned by Vietnam. They don’t want to get into a military adventure which will have a chance of developing into another Vietnam. Unless it has popular support, unless it is backed by the country, the minute you get into a Central American war, you’re going to have a draft again. That turns a whole section of the middle class against it. In other words, this is not a simple business where we send in some troops and clean up Nicaragua. And the U.S. tactic now is to do it another way, by means of so-called “low intensity” war, which could last for a long time. And I think they will continue to pursue that option. What the outcome will be, I don’t know. They’re in a struggle right now in Washington, which is another chapter in this story. But it’s not going to be the last chapter, by any means.

What is happening in South Africa now is just the beginning; it’s just the beginning. That will be a very decisive struggle. I think that has the potential to become the key struggle for the rest of the century, maybe even into the next century. It could be of world significance, comparable to the Chinese Revolution in its day, tipping the balance in favor of world revolutionary struggle, if the revolution should win in South Africa. I don’t know exactly what “win” means, but at least basic change in social relations, which would necessarily mean a post-revolutionary black republic. Socialist, I don’t know. I don’t care too much whether they call it socialist or not. If it isn’t capitalist, that’s the important thing to me. The world has got to get out of capitalism, before we can really begin to discuss socialism. That’s the big struggle, revolution versus counter-revolution. And South Africa is, in my opinion, a very key element in that struggle. I hope, let me say this, I hope that your country [Turkey] is going to become another one sometime in the not too far future.

EAT: We know that the United States is the only advanced capitalist country where there is no working-class political movement with a mass basis. Given this fact, as well as the search for a meaningful left agenda, what strategy in your opinion is most likely to prove fruitful and promising?

PMS: Well, I can only think now that the whole left should concentrate on defensive struggles. The working class, and the left in general, is being very strongly attacked. As you know, the union movement is disintegrating, and the standard of living of workers is being attacked. And the first necessity to get something started is to fight against that. I think it should not only be on the union front, although that’s important, too, but on the political front. Harry and I have thought for a long time that the main thing should be struggles for job creation and elementary protection of the rights not only of working people but of women and minorities, blacks and so on. What is needed is a militant defensive struggle that in the course of time can take on an offensive character. Many more opportunities of a political kind will open up when the next recession comes. This I think is the only way it can be done.

SS: Well, thank you very much.

EAT: Thank you.

The post An Interview with Paul Sweezy, a Giant of 20th Century Marxist Thinking appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by E. Ahmet Tonak and Sungur Savran.

Blinken Says He Spoke With Paul Whelan, U.S. Citizen Being Held By Russia

News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 19:20:46 +0000

U.S. President Joe Biden has called for the House of Representatives to quickly pass a bill that would provide billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine, challenging Republicans lawmakers to take a stand against Russian President Vladimir Putin and vote in favor of the spending package.

Biden urged immediate passage of the bill in comments at the White House on February 13 after House Speaker Mike Johnson (Republican-Louisiana) sharply criticized the $95.3 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and other countries, casting serious doubts on its future just hours after it passed the Senate.

"I urge speaker Johnson to bring it to the floor immediately, immediately," Biden said, adding that it is "critical" for Ukraine.

Johnson said in a statement late on February 12 that the bill was “silent on the most pressing issue facing our country" -- border security provisions that Republicans had insisted be included in the bill, casting doubt on its chances of passing the House.

Biden didn't mention border security in his comments from the White House but reminded Republicans that the United States "stands up for freedom" and stands strong for its allies.

"We never bow down to anyone, certainly not to Vladimir Putin, so let's get on with this," Biden said. "We can't walk away now. That's what Putin is betting on."

Biden, a Democrat, warned Republicans in the House who think they can oppose funding for Ukraine and not be held accountable that "history is watching" and a failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment "will never be forgotten."

He also criticized recent comments by former President Donald Trump about NATO as "dangerous" and "shockingly un-American."

Biden reiterated Trump's claim that he told NATO allies that if they didn't spent enough on defense, he would encourage Russians to "do whatever the hell they want."

"Can you imagine a former president of the United States saying that?" Biden asked. "No other president in our history has ever bowed down to a Russian dictator. Let me say this as clearly as I can. I never will," he added.

He accused Trump, the current front-runner in the race to become the Republican party's presidential nominee, of looking at NATO as if it were a "burden" and failing to see an alliance that "protects America and the world." To Trump it is a "protection racket," and he doesn’t understand that NATO is built on the fundamental principles of freedom, security and national sovereignty, he said.

The U.S. president also stressed that the bill also provides funding for other U.S. national-security priorities in the Middle East, where the U.S. military has launched numerous attacks against militias backed by Iran, and money to help defend Israel in its fight against Hamas, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the EU.

It also provides funding to support U.S. national-security goals in Asia, Biden said, saying this is the "responsibility of a great nation."

In Kyiv, Ihor Zhovkva, deputy director of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's office, told RFE/RL that the bill's passage by the Senate was "a very serious signal," and a "strong decision" was expected from the House of Representatives.

The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 70-29, and Zhovkva said the approval of 70 senators will make it difficult to find reasons for not voting for the bill.

"We have every reason to hope that the corresponding strong decision will be approved in the House of Representatives," Zhovkva noted.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

CLC Senior Vice President Paul Smith on Trump v. Anderson: Supreme Court Must Return Clear Ruling as Quickly as Possible

Newswire Editor — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 14:30:55 +0000

The president's remarks were characterized as perhaps his most direct criticism of the Israeli military's conduct since it began its large-scale war on the Gaza Strip just over four months ago, following a deadly Hamas-led attack on southern Israel.

But critics argued that Biden's words will ring hollow as long as his administration continues to arm Israel's military unconditionally, oppose global efforts to enact a lasting cease-fire, and reject evidence that Israel is committing genocide. Since October 7, the U.S. State Department has twice bypassed Congress to send lethal weaponry to Israel and is working to gut lawmakers' oversight of foreign military financing for the country.

"It's maddening to hear him say stuff like this," wrote journalist Mehdi Hasan. "Now he says Israel is going 'over the top.' Before he said they were doing 'indiscriminate' bombing. But throughout it all, he arms them, funds them, defends them, enables them, and refuses to call for a cease-fire."

Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, said that if Biden truly feels Israel has gone too far in its assault on the Gaza Strip, he should "do something about it."

"'Over the top' is how you might describe an action movie that was more violent than you were expecting, not an atrocity you've been backing to the hilt," Duss added.

Biden's press conference came as the Israel Defense Forces ramped up its bombardment of Rafah—where more than half of Gaza's population is currently living in overcrowded and increasingly horrific conditions—ahead of an expected ground invasion. Israeli airstrikes on the city, located near Gaza's border with Egypt, hit two houses on Thursday, killing and wounding multiple people.

John Kirby, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, told reporters Thursday that the Biden administration would not support an Israeli ground invasion of Rafah, which was previously deemed a "safe zone" for displaced Gazans.

"I think you all know more than a million Palestinians are sheltering in and around Rafah," Kirby said. "That's where they were told to go. There's a lot of displaced people there. And the Israeli military has a special obligation as they conduct operations there or anywhere else to make sure that they're factoring in protection for innocent civilian life."

"I could tell you that—absent any full consideration of protecting civilians at that scale in Gaza—military operations right now would be a disaster for those people, and it's not something that we would support," Kirby added.

But the White House has not publicly said there would be any consequences if Israel decides once again to ignore the administration's stated concerns and go ahead with the Rafah assault.

In late October, Biden administration officials privately urged Israeli leaders to rethink its plans for a full-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip, but Israel launched the deadly invasion anyway—and U.S. support for the country's military did not waver.

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate voted to begin debate on White House-backed legislation that would provide Israel with more than $10 billion in additional military aid as famine and disease spread across the Gaza Strip and the death toll grows.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) opposed advancing the legislation, warning in a statement Thursday evening that "so long as this bill contains $10 billion to enable [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's right-wing government to continue its horrific war against the Palestinian people, I will keep voting no."

"The taxpayers of the United States cannot continue to be complicit in this humanitarian disaster," said Sanders. "We should not provide another penny to allow Netanyahu to continue this incredibly destructive war."

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

DALI DE ST PAUL (Bristol, 2023)

Vincent Moon / Petites Planètes — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 12:20:05 +0000

This content originally appeared on Vincent Moon / Petites Planètes and was authored by Vincent Moon / Petites Planètes.

NATO War Games a Repeat of Cold War Confrontation

Global Times — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 17:52:53 +0000

Illustration: Liu Xidan/GT

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on Wednesday kicked off “Exercise Steadfast Defender 2024,” its largest military drills since the Cold War. Approximately 90,000 troops from NATO’s 31 members and Sweden are participating, with the associated exercises running until May 31. Russian media said NATO has openly admitted for the first time that the exercise is in response to a “Russian attack” and aims to convey to Western populations that “this war is inevitable.”

The exercise comes at two crucial junctures – the Russia-Ukraine conflict is entering its third year, and the US is in an election year. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine shows no signs of abating. With the Ukrainian military consistently facing setbacks on the battlefield, NATO, as the instigator of this conflict, has chosen to exert military pressure on Russia. Experts believe that NATO’s goal is to continue shaping the “Russian threat,” gain support from EU citizens for its anti-Russia policies, and justify further defense spending and economic pressure on Russia.

This NATO exercise will further escalate tensions in Europe, said Wang Xianju, a senior research fellow at the School of Global and Area Studies at Renmin University of China. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has been ongoing for nearly two years, with the international community advocating for peace. However, NATO is going against the tide, provoking and pressuring Russia through large-scale military exercises, thus creating confrontation across the world.

Meanwhile, the attention and energy of the Biden administration are increasingly consumed by the upcoming presidential elections, making it unable to continue providing the necessary support for Ukraine’s conventional warfare. The financial and military assistance that the Western alliance can currently provide to Ukraine is insufficient to sustain its resistance against Russia. Therefore, NATO aims to use large-scale military exercises to deter Russia.

In addition to perpetuating the Russia-Ukraine conflict, another alarming trend of NATO is its attempt to expand into the Asia-Pacific region. The outbreak and prolonged nature of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, coupled with global disorder and changes, have given NATO, which French President Emmanuel Macron once described as “experiencing the brain death,” an opportunity to catch its breath and extend its existence, and try to achieve its geopolitical ambitions through wild means.

NATO is not satisfied with its footprint in Europe and North America, therefore it continuously seeks expansion by enticing Asia-Pacific countries such as Japan and South Korea on board. It even follows the US script, hyping up the “China threat” and meddling in Asian affairs. Last week, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg claimed that NATO is not moving into Asia, yet China approaches NATO. This argument is extremely absurd and is NATO’s preparation in terms of public opinion for further expansion into the Asia-Pacific region. Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating once said that the Europeans have been fighting each other for the better part of 300 years, including giving two World Wars in the last century, and “exporting that malicious poison to Asia would be akin to Asia welcoming the plague.”

NATO is the spokesperson and enforcer of US interests, military expert Song Zhongping told the Global Times. NATO is actually dominated by the will of the US, swept up in the panic and tension incited by the US, becoming Washington’s axe, spear, and shovel. NATO claims that China’s behavior violates “NATO core principles of democracy, the rule of law, and freedom of expression,” echoing the US’ labeling of China and Russia as the “axis of evil.”

As a product of the Cold War, NATO should have been consigned to the trash heap of history after the end of the Cold War. However, under the influence of the US, NATO not only intensifies the crisis in Europe but also plots expansion into Asia. Asian countries must remain highly vigilant to this.

The post NATO War Games a Repeat of Cold War Confrontation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Global Times.

Josh Paul, Who Quit State Dept. Over Gaza, Slams Latest U.S. Weapons Sale to Israel

Democracy Now! — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 15:25:13 +0000

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

Rand Paul Wants to End Undeclared War in Syria

Nick Turse — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 21:08:35 +0000

Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul plans to force a vote this week on a joint resolution to remove all U.S. troops from Syria within 30 days, according to sources on Capitol Hill familiar with his plans.

“The American people have had enough of endless wars in the Middle East,” Paul told The Intercept by email. “Yet, 900 U.S. troops remain in Syria with no vital U.S. interest at stake, no definition of victory, no exit strategy, and no congressional authorization to be there.”

The U.S. conflict in Syria is just one of several forever wars — including conflicts in Niger and Somalia — that continue to smolder more than two decades after 9/11 and more than two years after President Joe Biden declared that, for the first time in 20 years, the United States was “not at war.”

Heather Brandon-Smith, the legislative director for militarism and human rights for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker group, welcomed Paul’s effort as a necessary check on the executive branch. “A debate really needs to happen about ‘why are we in Syria?’ and ‘what threat to the U.S. homeland do the groups we are fighting pose?’” she told The Intercept. “The U.S. has been engaged in these wars for two decades and Congress has been derelict in its duties while the executive branch has vastly expanded these wars. So Sen. Paul’s War Powers Resolution is one of the few vehicles that serves to force Congress to take a vote.”

The U.S. military has been conducting operations in Syria since 2014. America’s bases there and in neighboring Iraq ostensibly exist to conduct “counter-ISIS missions,” despite the fact that the Pentagon concluded in 2021 that the Islamic State in Syria “probably lacks the capability to target the U.S. homeland.” A recent inspectors general report to Congress noted that “ISIS capabilities remained degraded” and that the group now operates in “survival mode” in both Iraq and Syria.

War in the Shadows

For almost 10 years, the U.S. has battled a rotating cast of enemies in Syria, including the Syrian Armed Forces and pro-Syrian government forces; terrorist organizations such as ISIS; Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; Iranian-backed militias; the Russian-backed Wagner Group; and the armed forces of Turkey, according to Paul’s bill, which notes that Congress has not declared war against Syria or any group in that country.

“The United States cannot fix Syria. Yet we still have 900 troops in eastern Syria for eight years, going on nine,” said Robert Ford, the former U.S. ambassador to Syria for the Obama administration, in a briefing to congressional staffers this week. “I’m puzzled that we haven’t had a national debate on what U.S. troops are doing in Syria four years after they captured the last territory from ISIS. We need to have that debate about the authorization of military force. There needs to be a definition of the mission of U.S. forces. There needs to be a set of metrics to measure their success or failure. And there need to be benchmarks and timelines. Otherwise, you’re in a forever war.”

Since the October outbreak of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, bases in both Syria and Iraq have come under regular attack as part of an undeclared war between the U.S. and Iran and its surrogate militias.

Between October 17 and December 4, U.S. forces on these bases have been attacked at least 76 times — 40 times in Syria, 36 in Iraq — according to figures provided to The Intercept by the Pentagon. The strikes have been conducted by a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, and close-range ballistic missiles. The U.S. has increasingly responded by targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran-affiliated militant group facilities and personnel.

U.S. military outposts in Syria and Iraq are also plagued by thefts by criminal gangs and militias, according to an Intercept investigation. The losses of “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” — including Javelin guided missile launch systems, drones, high-explosive grenades, and armor-piercing rounds — from 2020 to 2022 were detailed in exclusive documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

Paul’s resolution, introduced on November 15, cites the 1973 War Powers Resolution — which was “designed to limit the U.S. president’s ability to initiate or escalate military actions abroad” — and directs the Biden administration to remove the U.S. military from hostilities in Syria since there has been neither a declaration of war nor any other specific authorization from the legislative branch.

Paul’s current legislation follows his October effort to require the U.S. to withdraw its troops from another long-running, undeclared quasi-war in Niger. That effort failed, as did another proposal earlier this year by Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz directing the removal of U.S. troops from Syria. Gaetz’s War Powers Resolution to withdraw most U.S. forces from Somalia received bipartisan support in the spring but did not garner sufficient votes. New York Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman has also failed in repeated attempts to limit the U.S. military presence in Syria and restore congressional war powers in regard to the U.S. conflict there.

“Some Automatic Pilot Policy”

The Intercept contacted the offices of Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — both of whom pledged in 2019 to help bring the forever wars to a “responsible and expedient” end — as well as Rep. Bowman to inquire if they supported Paul’s bid to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. None provided answers in time for publication.

The Biden administration claims that U.S. military personnel are deployed to “strategically significant locations in Syria to conduct operations, in partnership with local, vetted ground forces, to address continuing terrorist threats emanating from Syria.”

Ford questioned this supposed strategic significance, ticking off the names of Syrian towns and asking if the congressional staffers had heard of them. “There’s a reason you haven’t: because they’re not vital to U.S. national security interests. I simply fail to understand why we have U.S. troops there,” he said. “Troops should be the last resort. It should not be some automatic pilot policy that you carry over from year to year — especially not when these troops are being fired at.”

Paul echoed those sentiments. “If we are going to deploy our young men and women in uniform to Syria to fight and potentially give their life for some supposed cause, shouldn’t we as their elected representatives at least debate the merits of sending them there?” he asked in his statement provided to The Intercept. “Shouldn’t we do our constitutional duty and debate if the mission we are sending them on is achievable?”

Join The Conversation

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

An Overdue Look at the Environmental Crisis

Greg Godels — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 14:15:25 +0000

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Our global environmental crisis is widely understood to be reaching a crucial moment; the danger signals are flashing almost daily. Yet a certain complacency follows the many catastrophic climate events attributable to a critically injured environment. People talk easily of a climate Armageddon, while maintaining business as usual.

Is this fatalism? Are there onerous sacrifices necessary to save the planet? Are there insurmountable obstacles to finding solutions? Are we beyond the point-of-no-return?

These questions need urgent answers.

The truth is that some leftists have been addressing these problems and ringing the alarm for decades. But some of us, though recognizing the crisis, have paid only lip-service to its solutions, neglecting to apply the unique perspective that Marxism could bring. Looking at the crisis through the lens of class and exploitation surely offers a deeper understanding than the sensationalism and superficiality of the capitalist media and their punditry.

Mea culpa

Hopefully, my own absolution began with acquiring a copy of Monthly Review’s July-August issue devoted to perspectives on the environmental crisis from a left, Marxist-friendly perspective. Entitled Planned Degrowth: Ecosocialism and Sustainable Human Development (volume 75, number 3), the volume offers eleven contributions, with an important, essential, introductory essay by John Bellamy Foster. Foster has labored productively in the vineyards of ecosocialism for some time. The journal number comes highly recommended.

Much of the popular response to the unfolding environmental disaster is reducible to cultural environmentalism. Advocates call for a change in consumption patterns– switching from products whose production, reproduction, or disposal is most harmful to our land, water, or air. Some cultural environmentalists demand a radical overall cut in consumption, insist on the elimination of conspicuous consumption, or even pose a philosophical challenge to the very concept of consumerism so prevalent in capitalist societies.

But cultural environmentalism alone does not thoroughly address the institutions that encourage or incur needless carbon emissions, senseless waste, and the depletion of precious resources– institutions like the military, the security, judicial, and penal system, the sales and marketing effort, mass entertainment, etc. Nor does it challenge capitalism itself.

On a global level, conserving only the twentieth-century resources allocated for war making, the social wealth lost to the destruction of past wars and necessitated by the remedial costs of death and suffering would put us uncountable years behind our current rendezvous with disaster. Even eliminating today’s bloated military budgets and stopping the current wars would lessen the immediate crisis dramatically.

Most of the mainstream liberal and social democratic cultural environmentalists ignore these institutions that are deeply embedded in the capitalist infrastructure, instead opting for campaigns to eliminate or recycle the most energy-soaked articles of convenience– cans, bottles, plastic bags, etc. or forcing the issue into the thick, impenetrable muck of bourgeois politics, legislative decision-making, and state regulation.

The Green New Deal, the consensus approach of the techno-environmentalists, promises to restructure capitalism by rewarding positive changes in energy generation and use, while sanctioning corporate foot dragging and avoidance. Implementation rests with the commitment of political puppets of corporate power– the political strata. Again, there is no substantial challenge to capitalism and its institutions with techno-environmentalism.

The contributors to the Monthly Review anthology more or less understand the shortcomings of the liberal/social democratic approach. They grasp that capitalism — with its insatiable thirst for accumulation — cannot meet the challenge of environmental catastrophe. That reality animates all of the selections in “Planned Degrowth.” Yet, among the writers, there is little agreement on how to move beyond capitalism (of all the contributors, Ying Chen makes the strongest case for a robust, planned socialist economy genuinely independent of the capitalist mode of production).

Resolving those differences is made all the more difficult by the ambiguities and confusions accompanying the central concepts of planning and degrowth

It is commendable that nearly all of the participants understand that market forces alone are inadequate to extract humanity from the catastrophe awaiting us. Moreover, the alternative to markets necessarily is some form of economic planning — some form of conscious human-based decision making. This alone is a departure from the left’s post-Soviet love-fest with market mechanisms and market socialism — indeed, a welcome departure opening the way to a more robust socialism. But what form should the planning take? Who should make the plan?

Foster wisely sees the cause of environmental disaster in the capitalist’s insatiable need to “accumulate! accumulate!” — borrowing Marx’s succinct summation. Accordingly, the challenge is to organize the economy around social usefulness, and not profit — “focusing on use value rather than exchange value,” to employ Foster’s words.

Certainly, contrasting use value against exchange value, advantaging the former, requires some exiting from the market mechanism and a turn toward a different mechanism for the allocation of resources: conscious human decision-making, i.e. planning.

This makes a neat, compelling argument for some form of planning.

Unfortunately, most of the contributors have little regard for the rich twentieth-century experience in planning afforded by the now-defunct European socialist community. It is fashionable, among Western academic Marxists (or Marxians, as they sometimes like to be called), to heap scorn on the Soviet central planning mechanism in its different iterations despite its relative successes even without the benefit of today’s astounding computational powers. Apart from Paul Cockshott and some of his colleagues, there is little interest in exploring how a similar planning mechanism could be optimized using available technologies.

Foster, to his credit, offers a very modest defense of Soviet planning, especially regarding its impact on the environment. But others acknowledge the need for planning without providing even a sketch of how that would be done.

Instead, several writers revisit the old New Left fetish of participatory democracy, as though the more fingers in the planning pie, the better, regardless of the results. This reaches the limits of absurdity with the Venezuelan rural commune proposed as the model for a planning mechanism to rescue the world economy from the throes of environmental crisis, a utopian fantasy.

The other Western Marxist obsession is decentralization. Apparently, the political model beloved by the North American-European left is the Swiss canton, the landsgemeinde, combining the smallest possible political units with the most direct democracy. How such decentralized planning could successfully redirect a modern juggernaut economy to escape the tyranny of markets requires a giant leap of faith (As Nicolas Graham understates, “… it is quite difficult to imagine effective planning… without some coordinating authority and external arbiter.”)

Planned Degrowth’s other key idea, degrowth, is also underdeveloped. Informing this concept is the looming disaster cited by Foster and implicit with all of the authors:

The world scientific consensus, as represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has established that the global average temperature needs to be kept below a 1.5-degree Centigrade increase over pre-industrial levels this century– or else, with a disproportionately higher level of risk, “well below” a 2-degree Centigrade increase– if climate destabilization is not to threaten absolute catastrophe… All of this is predicated on reaching net zero (in fact, real zero) carbon emissions by 2050, which gives a fifty-fifty chance that the climate-temperature boundary will not be exceeded.

Understandably, faced with these limits, most of us recognize that, in some sense or another, we cannot have our cake and eat it, too. That is, growing carbon emissions, growing consumption patterns, more broadly– growing GDP as support for growing consumption or growing population, and any and all other forms of growth that potentially increase carbon emissions cannot be simultaneously sustained without an existential threat to life on the planet.

But is it misleading, simplistic, and maybe even harmful to popularize degrowth in general as the solution to the life-or-death challenge of carbon-emission limits? Are there different kinds of “growth” — minimal emissions, emissions-neutral, or even emissions-free– that sidestep the rendezvous with climate disaster? Would not market-free, planned economic growth, itself, forestall that rendezvous? Can we not envision a growing, planned socialist economy that stems or reverses increases in emissions?

In the historically nuanced Marxist perspective, growth of the productive forces of society need not be coupled with an anarchical, unfettered, profit-driven economy, nor has it always been so associated. On the other hand, the preferred capitalist measuring stick of growth– gross domestic product– reflects that association: in the capitalist industrial era, growth (GDP), national wealth, the unregulated exploitation of carbon-based energy, and the exploitation of labor are inextricably bound.

For Marxists, there is no such necessary link. Free of the wasteful uses of social wealth for class aggrandizement, class suppression, and endless accumulation, growth can be redefined as the unbounded improvement in both the quality and prospects of all human life. For example, the development of vaccines for Covid or future attacks of new viruses requires the further development of productive forces and constitutes a growth in social wealth, but with far less impact on the environment when undertaken outside the framework of the profit-driven capitalist system.

Marx and Engels gave us a different perspective on growth in The German Ideology, linking the development of forces of production directly to the improvement of humanity’s survivability and flourishing, while faced with ever-arising challenges from nature and other humans. They remind us that the mode of production is not only what people produce but how they produce. That ever-present, evolving challenge may, in some sense, at some time, require “growth,” but growth away from carbon emissions, waste, excess, inefficiency, and greed. Thus, we would define a new, humane concept of growth and production.

Foster comes close to recognizing this possibility by distinguishing “a quantitative as well a qualitative sense” of productive forces. But he seems to overlook that the qualitative expansion of productive forces might well be qualitative production, production independent of fossil fuels, carbon emissions, and environmental degradation– production of new ideas, new living arrangements, new divisions of labor, etc. This would be a more refined notion of growth, far more useful than the BEA or OECD definition of gross domestic product that degrowth addresses.

Two contributors, Isikara and Narin, are dismissive of the explanatory power of the second law of thermodynamics in the social world. Yet it does capture the fundamental struggle that only humans wage with ultimately limited, but astonishing success against a system’s tendency toward disorder. The development of productive forces was– qualitatively or quantitatively– the primary effective human response to this law: the law of entropy. The idea of degrowth, so superficially compelling in its simplicity, fails to account for this universal struggle. The environmental crisis is only the latest chapter in the perpetual struggle against species extinction. Like previous struggles, it will take development (and in the broadest sense, growth) of the productive forces to win, even if only temporarily from the inevitable disorder of closed systems.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to a just, viable solution to the environmental crisis is the gross inequalities found in the capitalist countries and found between the advanced capitalist countries and those less advanced. The weakness of the degrowth mantra aside, any immediate solution to the crisis will require limits to carbon emissions, limits that will fall unfairly upon the disadvantaged unless some compensatory distribution– national and global affirmative action– is established. In other words, should sacrifices be necessary, they must be fairly imposed. No poor country or poor population should be required or even asked to make commensurate sacrifices with wealthy countries or wealthy elites. More importantly, their development– their ‘catching up’– should not be delayed as long as they lag behind their wealthier counterparts. Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan make a powerful historico-empirical argument that capitalism can never meet this demand in their contribution.

The only large-scale affirmative action program ever effectively actuated was the post-World War II collaboration of the socialist countries, coordinated by the Council on Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA, known in the West as Comecon). The CMEA based itself on the Leninist doctrine and the history of intensive investment of Soviet resources in the former Russian empire’s disadvantaged oppressed nations. Cognizant of the uneven development produced and reproduced by class society, the Soviet Union proportionately devoted far more resources to the “backward” constituent republics than to the more advanced Russian Republic.

The CMEA sought to continue this policy with the post-war socialist community. For example, the Soviet Union would offer an extended contract for oil to Cuba at the lowest market price of a previous period, while agreeing to purchase a fixed amount of sugar at the highest market price of that period. In addition, the Soviet Union would grant the poorer member state favorable, extended payment terms. It should be noted that the Soviet beet crop was more than adequate to supply Soviet sugar needs at a lower cost. At the same time, the Soviet Union would provide grants and low-interest, long-term loans for Cuban infrastructure and industrial development.

This, and most internal CMEA agreements, typified affirmative action on a massive scale to correct uneven development.

Given that capitalism has never known or even devised such a leveling, developmentally egalitarian approach in international affairs nor that any country today practices it (apart from socialist Cuba, generously, but with limited resources), the necessity for global affirmative action on the environment would seem to be a powerful argument for socialism among leftist activists.

True to the history of Western Marxism, European-North American socialists find little worthwhile in the history of the Soviet Union, so the argument seldom sees the light of day.

That is not to say that the contributors to Degrowth Planning are unaware of the inequalities standing in the way of any fair and equitable answer to the environmental crisis. Foster is explicit: “At the same time, the poorer countries with low ecological footprints have to be allowed to develop in a general process that includes contraction in throughput of energy and materials in the rich countries and the convergence of per capita consumption in physical terms in the world as a whole.”

But what is lacking with all the participants’ accounts is agency. Who will tackle these challenges? Who will adopt a program that incorporates these considerations? Who will build a movement to move a program forward?

It would be unfair to fault the twelve academics contributing to this issue for having no ready answer to these questions. Nonetheless, if theory is to matter, we must have practical answers (Isikara and Narin almost broach this issue, but deliver it in unnecessarily opaque academic language) and avoid utopia-spinning. Too often intellectuals deliver theory in the passive voice: “What is objectively necessary at this point in human history is therefore a revolutionary transformation… governing production, consumption, and distribution… a shift away from the system of monopoly capital, exploitation, expropriation, waste, and the endless drive to accumulation.”

Yes, but who is to accomplish this and how are they to do it?

It is far easier to say who will not do it! But surely it can be conceded that we need a class-based revolutionary party committed to a robust socialism that will wrest political and economic power from the capitalist class. Should we not be vigorously working toward that end if we want to avoid our date with doom?

Despite my reservations, I strongly recommend the special Monthly Review issue “Planned Degrowth: ecosocialism and sustainable human development.”

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

Josh Paul Reveals The Truth Behind US Arms Supply to Israel

The Laura Flanders Show — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 22:53:04 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Laura Flanders Show and was authored by The Laura Flanders Show.

Rand Paul Wants U.S. Troops Out of Niger

Nick Turse — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 01:36:34 +0000

Sen. Rand Paul is expected to call Thursday for a vote on a joint resolution that would require President Joe Biden to “remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities in or affecting the Republic of Niger” within 30 days.

“Since 2013, members of the United States Armed Forces have been introduced into hostilities with terrorist organizations and insurgent groups in the Republic of Niger, including through direct exchanges of fire with such groups,” reads the resolution. “Congress has not declared war against the Republic of Niger or any organization or group in Niger, nor has Congress provided a specific statutory authorization for the involvement of United States Armed Forces in the armed conflict or any hostilities in Niger.”

The move follows the State Department’s October 10 declaration that a coup had taken place in Niger over the summer. For months following the overthrow of the democratically elected president by a military junta that includes at least five U.S.-trained military officers, the U.S. government declined to officially designate it an illegal takeover.

The United States has suspended approximately $200 million in foreign assistance to Niger as a result of the coup designation but continues to have a major military presence there, including a large drone base in in the northern city of Agadez and more than 1,000 military personnel, according to a June “war powers” letter to Congress from Biden. After a pause, drone flights resumed in August.

Over the last decade, during which U.S. troop strength in Niger grew by 900 percent, U.S. Special Operations forces trained local counterparts and fought and even died there. After a 2017 ISIS ambush near the village of Tongo Tongo left four U.S. soldiers dead and two wounded, a Pentagon investigation found that while U.S. Africa Command claimed that U.S. troops were providing “advice and assistance” to local forces, the missions “more closely resembled U.S. direct action” — a military euphemism for strikes, raids, and other offensive missions — “than foreign partner-led operations”

“After more than 20 years of fighting and the deaths of over 432,000 civilians and 7,052 U.S. servicemembers, we must change course from this failed militarized response and towards a more sustainable, rights-respecting approach to counterterrorism and national security,” said Heather Brandon-Smith, the legislative director for foreign policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker group, referring to those killed during the U.S. war on terror. “Senator Paul’s resolution is a critical step to help set the United States on this long-overdue path.”

In addition to FNCL, Paul’s resolution has been endorsed by The American Conservative, Frontiers of Freedom, Concerned Veterans of America, the Center for Renewing America, Just Foreign Policy, Heritage Action, and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a spokesperson for Paul told The Intercept.

Between 2012 to 2023, the U.S. provided Niger with more than $500 million in military aid, one of the largest security assistance programs in sub-Saharan Africa. But despite copious aid to Niger and its neighbors, terrorist violence in the African Sahel has spiked. “The Sahel has seen a doubling in the number of violent events involving militant Islamist groups since 2021 (now totaling 2,912),” according to a recent report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution. “It has also experienced a near tripling in fatalities linked to this violence in the same timeframe (to 9,818 deaths).”

In early September, Paul sent a letter — citing The Intercept’s reporting on the secret use of proxy forces in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia — to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin asking for information about U.S. military operations in Niger and around globe. He has yet to receive a response, according to Paul’s spokesperson. “Sen. Paul’s Niger War Powers Resolution will provide the opportunity for elected officials to debate and go on record on the question of whether the United States should send its troops to fight in Niger,” said Paul’s communications director, Madeline Meeker. “This proposal will allow the American people to see how their representatives view the responsibility of sending their sons and daughters into warzones around the globe.”

Last month, The Intercept contacted the offices of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — both of whom pledged in 2019 to help bring the forever wars to a “responsible and expedient” end — to inquire if they supported Paul’s joint resolution. Neither office responded to those emails or follow-ups.

“Any senator who is serious about ending endless wars will vote for Senator Paul’s Niger War Powers Resolution. Niger had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 and therefore this mission can’t reasonably be said to be authorized under the 2001 AUMF,” said Aida Chavez, the communications director and policy adviser at Just Foreign Policy, referring to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, the overarching justification for the so-called war on terror, enacted in the wake of the September 11 attacks. “If the Biden administration wants to have troops there in late 2023 partnering with a military that just led a coup, it should ask Congress to debate and vote and let the American people weigh in.”

Join The Conversation

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

When all the world’s failings end in Gaza – Selwyn Manning, Paul Buchanan assess the crisis

Pacific Media Watch — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 22:05:10 +0000

By Selwyn Manning, editor of Evening Report

As we prepared for this podcast, representatives of Arab states have presented a united front at the United Nations, criticising the UN Security Council of doing nothing to protect civilians from Israeli bombing and missile attacks on Gazan civilians and locations.

Since then, the UN Security Council has considered two resolutions, the latter calling for a pause in hostilities to allow a humanitarian effort to enter Gaza to assist civilians.

The United States vetoed that Security Council resolution.

Al Jazeera has detailed that Israel forces have targeted and bombed civilian facilities include hospitals, schools, residential areas resulting in the deaths of thousands of people, civilians – around one-third of the deaths are children.

It remains contested by all sides in this conflict as to who, or what, is responsible for the deadly attack on Gaza Hospital, resulting in the deaths of at least 471 people.

Additional to this, Israel has sealed the borders of Gaza while it prevents food, water and medical supplies from reaching civilians — in breach of international law requirements and laws of conflict.

Israel ordered Gazan civilians, who wish to get to safety, to get out of North Gaza and move toward the south, to the border with Egypt.

Heavy bombing, sealed border
But as people fled south toward what appeared to be safety, Israel bombed the southern Gaza region killing more civilians and sealing off that corridor for others who sought refuge.

As a consequence of the bombing, Egypt responded by sealing the Gaza-Egypt border.

Humanitarian aid now sits on trucks, waiting, on the Egypt side of the border, while United Nations officials implore Israel and Egypt to allow medical supplies, food and water to get through to those who are injured and dying.

The Israel Defence Force strikes followed a surprise-attack on Israeli citizens by soldiers operating under the Hamas banner.

Civilians were slaughtered and others taken hostage, only to be used as bargaining chips and leverage against their enemies.

Even Palestinian advocacy groups like the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa suggested that breaches of international humanitarian Law, crimes against civilians, have been committed by those Hamas-aligned fighters.

But they are clear, as others are too, that crimes against humanity, war crimes, have been committed by Israel, without consequence, as we all give witness to its response which is disproportionate, brutal, and disregarding of the thousands of Palestinian lives that have already been taken.

The View From Afar podcast on Gaza.

Getting worse
That is the grave current situation and it is likely to get much worse.

In this episode, Selwyn Manning and global security and geopolitics analyst Dr Paul Buchanan discuss the crisis yesterday:

What are the world’s leaders doing to stop the carnage?
Are the world’s nations being drawn into what will be an ever-expanding war?
Are we witnessing the beginning of a war where on one side authoritarian-led states like Russia, Iran, the wider Arab states, and possibly China stand unified against the United States, Britain, Germany, and other so-called liberal democratic allies representing the old world order?
Is what we are witnessing, what happens when a global rules-based order, multilateralism and institutions like the United Nations no longer have influence to prevent war, or restore peace and stability, or assert principles of international justice and enforce the rights of victims to see recourse to the law?
Why has this slaughter become an opportunity for the US and Russia to square-off against each other at the UN Security Council — a body that was once designed to advocate and achieve peace, but has now become a geopolitically divided entity of stalemate and mediocrity?
Eventually, will humanitarianism prevail? Will the world recognise that all people, the elderly, women, children, people of all ethnicities and religions, that they all bleed and die irrespective of their state of origin, when leaders of all sides, while sitting back in their bunkers, unleash weapons designed to kill as many people as is possible?

Watch this episode of A View from Afar

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Fukushima up Close, 13 Years Later

Robert Hunziker — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 09:48:31 +0000

The world is turning to nuclear power as a solution to global warming, but it is postulated herein that it is a huge mistake that endangers society. One nuclear meltdown causes as much damage over the long-term as a major war. Moreover, according to Dr. Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group, former secretary to the UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Internal Radiation: “It’s important to understand that nuclear is very likely to be a significant climate casualty.”

Also, of interest, Google: “France’s Global Warming Predicament,” which discusses nuclear energy’s vulnerability in a global warming world.

Beyond Nuclear International recently published an article about the status of Fukushima as well as an exposé of how the nuclear industry gets away with responsibility for radiation-caused (1) deaths (2) chronic conditions like cancer (3) genetic deformities: A Strategy of Concealment, September 24, 2023, by Kolin Kobayashi, who is a Tokyo-born France-based anti-nuclear activist journalist also serving as president of Echo-Exchange. “How Agencies That Promote Nuclear Power Are Quietly Managing Its Disaster Narrative.”

The following synopsis, including editorial license that adds important death details which defy the nuclear industry’s bogus claims about nuclear safety, opens closed pathways to what’s really going on.

After thirteen years, the declaration of a State of Emergency for Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant still cannot be lifted because of many unknowns, as well as ubiquitous deadly radiation levels. The destroyed reactors are tinderboxes of highly radioactive spent fuel rods that contain more cesium-137 than eighty-five (85) Chernobyls. Cesium-137 in or near a human body erupts into a series of maladies, one after another in short order, depending upon level of exposure: (1) nausea (2) vomiting (3) diarrhea (4) bleeding (5) coma leading to death.

The spent fuel rods at the Fukushima nuclear reactor site are stored in pools of water on the top floor of compromised reactor buildings 100 feet above ground level, except for Unit 3 which completed removal of its spent fuel rods in 2019, an extremely slow, laborious process that’s highly dangerous.

Stored spent fuel rods in open pools of water are the epitome of high-risk. “If the 440 tonne vessel collapses, it could hit the storage pool next to it. If this pool is damaged, even partially, another major disaster could occur.” (Kobayashi) In that regard, there’s significant risk of collapse in the event of a strong earthquake. And Japan is one of the most earthquake prone countries in the world. “The city (Tokyo) government’s experts reckon there is a 70% chance of a magnitude 7, or higher, quake hitting the capital within the next 30 years.” (“Japan is Preparing for a Massive Earthquake,” The Economist, August 31, 2023)

If exposed to open air, spent fuel rods erupt into a sizzling zirconium fire followed by massive radiation bursts of the most toxic material on the planet. It can upend an entire countryside and force evacuation of major cities. According to the widely recognized nuclear expert Paul Blanch: “Continual storage in spent fuel pools is the most unsafe thing you could do.” Paul Blanch, registered professional engineer, US Navy Reactor Operator & Instructor with 55 years of experience with nuclear engineering and regulatory agencies, is widely recognized as one of America’s leading experts on nuclear power.

Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant will remain a high-risk explosive scenario for decades ahead. After all, a program for future decommissioning is unclear and overall radiation guesstimates are formidable. All the structures where decommissioning will take place are highly radioactive and as such nearly impossible for the dangers to worker exposure.

TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) does not yet know the true extent of damage nor the complete dispersion of corium (molten magma from melted nuclear fuel rods in the core of the reactors). Although engineers believe they’ve located the corium in all three crippled units. For example, when unit 1 was surveyed by a robot, images showed many parts of the concrete foundation supporting the pressure vessel severely damaged by intense heat from corium. Corium, which is the product of the meltdown of fuel rods in the core of the reactor, is so hot that “corium lava can melt upwards of 30cm (12 inches) of concrete in 1 hour.” (Source: “The Most Dangerous (Man-Made) Lava Flow,” Wired, April 10, 2013)

Furthermore, on specific point: Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory created corium at 2000°C in an experiment. The experiment demonstrated that “cooling with water may not be sufficient” to halt damaging aspects of corium to concrete. According to the Argonne experiment: “One thing to remember — much of the melting of concrete during a meltdown occurs within minutes to hours, so keeping the core cool is vital for stopping the corium from breaching that containment vessel.”

In the case of Fukushima, TEPCO claims the corium did not breach the outer wall of the containment vessels, “although there is a healthy debate about this,” Ibid. Still, an open question remains. The crippled reactors are so hot with radiation that it’s nearly impossible to fully know what’s happening. Dangers of corium: “Long after the meltdown, the lava constituting the corium will remain highly dangerously radioactive for decades-to-centuries.” (Wired)

Regarding the decision to start releasing radioactive water from storage tanks at Fukushima, which water accumulates daily for purposes of keeping the hot stuff from igniting into an indeterminate fireball, the decision to release was approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency: “The IAEA does not have the scientific authority to make reference to the ecological impact of this water discharge, nor has it carried out such a long-term assessment. It is more of a political decision than a scientific one.” (Kobayashi)

Radiation Risks to Society

According to the World Nuclear Association, there were no fatalities due to radiation exposure at Fukushima. And as recently as 2021, Forbes magazine reported “No one Died From Radiation At Fukushima: IAEA Boss.” It is believed this is a lie and part of a massive coverup.

According to Green Cross (founded in 1993 by Mikhail Gorbachev, who repeatedly spoke out about interrelated threats humanity and our Earth confront from nuclear arms, chemical weapons, unsustainable development, and the human-induced decimation of the planet’s ecology): “Approximately 32 million people in Japan are affected by the radioactive fallout from the nuclear disaster in Fukushima… This includes people who were exposed to radiation and other stress factors resulting from the accident and who are consequently at potential risk from both long and short-term consequences… As with the Chernobyl nuclear accident, which impacted 10 million people, Japan is expected to see increased cancer risk and neuropsychological long-term health consequences.”

With nuclear radiation, the damage to humans shows up years later as cancer and/or deformity of newborns second/third generation. For example, only recently, the truth has come to surface about Chernobyl-related deaths, child deformities, and cancer 30+ years after the event. For example:

* A BBC Future Planet article on July 25, 2019, “The True Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster”:

According to the official, internationally recognized death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster. In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure… Brown’s research, however, suggests Chernobyl has cast a far longer shadow.

* “The number of deaths in subsequent decades remains in dispute. The lowest estimates are 4,000; others 90,000 and up to 200,000.” (Janata Weekly: “Cuba and the Children of Chernobyl,” May 7, 2023)

* According to an article in USA Today February 24, 2022, “What Happened at Chernobyl? What to Know About Nuclear Disaster“: “At least 28 people were killed by the disaster, but thousands more have died from cancer as a result of radiation that spread after the explosion and fire. The effects of radiation on the environment and humans is still being studied.”

According to Chernobyl Children International, 6,000 newborns are born every year in Ukraine with congenital heart defects called “Chernobyl Heart.”

Fukushima Report: The stress-related effects of Fukushima evacuation and subsequent relocation are also a concern. The evacuation involved a total of over 400,000 individuals, 160,000 of them from within 20km of Fukushima. The number of deaths from the nuclear disaster attributed to stress, fatigue and the hardship of living as evacuees is estimated to be around 1,700 so far. (“Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant Disaster: How Many People Were Affected? 2015 Report,” Reliefweb, March 9, 2015.

The Fukushima Report was prepared under the direction of Prof. Jonathan M. Samet, Director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Southern California (USC), as a Green Cross initiative. Green Cross International: GCI is an independent non-profit and nongovernmental organization founded in 1993 by Nobel Peace Laureate Mikhail Gorbachev.

Over time, Japan is expected to see increased cancer risks and neuropsychological long-term health consequences. “The lives of approximately 42 million people have been permanently affected by radioactive contamination caused by the accidents in the Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants. Continued exposure to low-level radiation, entering the human body on a daily basis through food intake, is of particular consequence,” Ibid.

Fukushima Deaths

The cocksure pro-nuclear crowd has trumpeted Fukushima as an example of Mother Nature taking lives because of an earthquake and tsunami; whereas the power plant accident proves nuclear power can withstand the worst without unnecessary death and illness. According to nuclear industry reports, all the deaths (16,000) were the fault of Mother Nature, not radiation.

But people in the streets and on the ground in Japan tell a different story about the risks of radiation. They talk about illnesses and death. TEPCO itself has reported few radiation illnesses and no radiation-caused deaths but what if it’s not their responsibility in the first instance, as layers of contractors and subcontractors employ workers to cleanup the toxic mess. If “subcontractor workers die” from radiation exposure, so what? It’s not TEPCO’s responsibility to report worker deaths of subcontractors, and the subcontractors are not motivated to report deaths, which are not reported.

According to credible sources in Japan, death is in the air, to wit: “The ashes of half a dozen unidentified laborers ended up at a Buddhist temple in this town just north of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Some of the dead men had no papers, others left no emergency contacts. Their names could not be confirmed, and no family members had been tracked down to claim their remains. They were simply labeled ‘decontamination troops’ — unknown soldiers in Japan’s massive cleanup campaign to make Fukushima livable again five years after radiation poisoned the fertile countryside… Hideaki Kinoshita, a Buddhist monk… keeps the unidentified laborers’ ashes at his temple, in wooden boxes and wrapped in white cloth.” (Mari Yamaguchi, Fukushima, “‘Decontamination Troops’ Often Exploited, Shunned,” AP & ABC News, Minamisoma, Japan, Mar 10, 2016)

“The men were among the 26,000 workers — many in their 50s and 60s from the margins of society with no special skills or close family ties — tasked with removing the contaminated topsoil and stuffing it into tens of thousands of black bags lining the fields and roads. They wipe off roofs, clean out gutters and chop down trees in a seemingly endless routine… Coming from across Japan to do a dirty, risky and undesirable job, the workers make up the very bottom of the nation’s murky, caste-like subcontractor system long criticized for labor violations,” Ibid.

The following is part of an interview with Katsutaka Idogawa, former mayor of Futaba, Fukushima Prefecture. (“Fukushima Disaster: Tokyo Hides Truth as Children Die, Become Ill from Radiation” – Ex-Mayor, RT, April 21, 2014):

SS (question): The United Nations report on the radiation fallout from Fukushima says no radiation-related deaths or acute diseases have been observed among the workers and general public exposed – so it’s not that dangerous after all? Or is there not enough information available to make proper assessments? What do you think?

Katslutaka Idogawa’s response: “This report is completely false. The report was made by a representative of Japan – Professor Hayano. Representing Japan, he lied to the whole world. When I was mayor, I knew many people who died from a heart attack, and then there were many people in Fukushima who died suddenly, even among young people. It’s a real shame that the authorities hide the truth from the whole world, from the UN. We need to admit that actually many people are dying. We are not allowed to say that, but TEPCO employees also are dying. But they keep mum about it.”

Mako Oshidori, interviewed in Germany, director of Free Press Corporation/Japan, investigated several unreported worker deaths, and interviewed a former nurse who quit TEPCO: “I would like to talk about my interview of a nurse who used to work at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) after the accident… He quit his job with TEPCO in 2013, and that’s when I interviewed him… As of now, there are multiple NPP workers that have died, but only the ones who died on the job are reported publicly. Some of them have died suddenly while off work, for instance, during the weekend or in their sleep, but none of their deaths are reported.” (Oshidori)

“Not only that, but they are also not included in the worker death count. For example, there are some workers who quit the job after a lot of radiation exposure… and end up dying a month later, but none of these deaths are either reported, or included in the death toll. This is the reality of the NPP workers.” (Oshidori)

During her interview, Ms. Oshidori commented, “There is one thing that really surprised me here in Europe. It’s the fact that people here think Japan is a very democratic and free country.”

Mako’s full interview “The Hidden Truth about Fukushima”

Alas, two hundred U.S. sailors of the USS Ronald Reagan filed a lawsuit against TEPCO, claiming that they experienced leukemia, ulcers, gall bladder removals, brain cancer, brain tumors, testicular cancer, dysfunctional uterine bleeding, thyroid illness, stomach ailments and other complaints extremely unusual in such young adults. One sailor died from radiation complications. Among the plaintiffs was a sailor who was pregnant during the mission. Her baby was born with multiple genetic mutations.

The sailors that filed the suit participated in “Operation Tomodachi,” providing humanitarian relief after the March 11th, 2011 Fukushima disaster based upon assurances that radiation levels were okay. But that was a lie.

Ultimately, and unsurprisingly, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the sailors’ appeal.

In summation, the final word is left to Kolin Kobaryashi: “The international nuclear lobby, which represents only a minority, has the influence and money to dominate the world’s population with immense power and has now united the world’s minority nuclear community into one big galaxy. Many of the citizens who have experienced the world’s three most serious civil nuclear accidents have clearly realized that nuclear energy is too dangerous. These citizens are so divided and conflicted that they feel like a helpless minority.”

“Former prime ministers Junichiro Koizumi and Naoto Kan called on the European Union on Thursday to pursue a path toward zero nuclear power, with the bloc planning to designate it as a form of “green” energy in achieving net-zero emissions by midcentury.” (“Ex-Prime Ministers Koizumi and Kan Demand EU Choose Zero Nuclear Power Path,” Japan Times, Jan. 27, 2022)

Five former Japanese prime ministers issued declarations that Japan should break with nuclear power generation on March 11, the 10th anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami that triggered a nuclear disaster in Fukushima Prefecture… Former prime ministers Morihiro Hosokawa, Tomiichi Murayama, Junichiro Koizumi, Yukio Hatoyama and Naoto Kan signed and released their declarations during the conference. Among them, Koizumi, Hatoyama and Kan took to the podium and shook hands… In his declaration titled ‘Don’t hold back on reversing a mistake: A zero-carbon emission society can be achieved without nuclear power plants,’ Koizumi said, ‘When it comes to the nuclear power plant issue, there is no ruling party or opposition party. Nuclear power plants expose many people’s lives to danger, bring financial ruin, and cause impossible-to-solve nuclear waste problems. We have no choice but to abolish them. (“5 ex-Japan PMs Call for Country to End Nuclear Power Use on Fukushima 10th Anniversary,” Mainichi, March 12, 2021)

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

South African court throws out urgent bid to gag Media24

Committee to Protect Journalists — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 20:29:23 +0000

Lusaka, August 10, 2023—The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomed a Gauteng High Court ruling on Tuesday to dismiss an urgent application by two businessmen connected to South African Deputy President Paul Mashatile to prevent the Media24 publishing group from referring to them as part of the “Alex Mafia.” In its ruling, the court described the application as an “abuse of process” aimed to “improperly punish” the press group and its journalists.

“Judge Ingrid Opperman’s ruling is another victory for press freedom in South Africa against politically connected individuals who are increasingly abusing court processes to try to prevent journalists from reporting in the public interest,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in Durban on Thursday. “This is the third South African court ruling in recent months to favor the press, and we welcome the judge’s statement that those with grievances against the media should seek redress through the Press Council rather than complain to the courts.”

The two businessmen, Bridgman Sithole and Michael Maile, last month filed an urgent request to the court to bar Media24 from calling them members of the “Alex Mafia.” The term refers to a group of former anti-apartheid activists from Alexandra township in Johannesburg, including Mashatile, who rose to positions of influence in the provincial government and later became powerful and wealthy businessmen by winning lucrative government contracts.

In her ruling, Opperman said she was “driven to conclude that this application is an abusive attempt by two politically connected businessmen to gag a targeted newsroom from using a nickname — ‘Alex Mafia’ — by which [Sithole and Maile] are popularly known and called by the public, politicians, political commentators, other newsrooms, and themselves — and have been for at least 16 years.”

The judge also said it was unclear why Sithole and Maile did not pursue the “potentially speedier remedies” of filing a complaint with the Press Council, an independent co-regulatory mechanism that settles disputes over editorial content between members of the public and media outlets. The judge ordered the pair to pay punitive costs in the form of all the legal fees incurred by Media24 in the case.

Adriaan Basson, editor-in-chief of News24, a division of Media24, said in response that the outlet would “continue digging into the businesses” of the “Alex Mafia” and the rest of Mashatile’s alleged funders “so that the country knows the people who are funding the lavish lifestyle of the second-in-charge.” News24’s investigative series details Mashatile’s alleged links to businessmen, including Sithole and Maile.

Sithole and Maile referred CPJ to their lawyer, who did not respond to an email.

Opperman’s judgment is the third South African court ruling in as many months to decide that litigation against the media was an abuse of process

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Violence against Netherlands’ journalists dims a beacon of press freedom

Gulnoza Said — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 15:23:52 +0000

On a small street off Amsterdam’s bustling museum district, there is no indication of the 2021 event seared into the memories of the Dutch press corps – at least not yet. Authorities have plans to build a memorial near the site where crime reporter Peter R. de Vries was shot on July 6 after leaving a TV studio where he was a frequent guest speaker. He fell into a coma and died nine days later at a nearby hospital.

De Vries’ killing was the most serious attack on journalist safety in a country where press freedom has long been taken for granted. In today’s Netherlands, journalists covering protests have been attacked by demonstrators – and occasionally detained by police — and face a torrent of online harassment. Combined with threats to crime reporters amid a rise in illegal drug trafficking, such incidents have dimmed the reputation of the Netherlands – along with other countries in the European Union – as one of the world’s safest places for journalists.

On a fact-finding and advocacy mission to the Netherlands from June 26 to 30, CPJ met with journalists, press freedom advocates, experts, and government officials about ways to keep journalists safe in an increasingly hostile media climate.

Key takeaways from CPJ’s visit:

De Vries’ killing has had ripple effects

At a café just a few blocks away from the site of de Vries’ killing, crime reporter Paul Vugts spoke to CPJ about his close colleague. Authorities believe de Vries was targeted for his role as an adviser and spokesperson for a witness in the trial of a drug kingpin rather than for his reporting, an assessment with which Vugts agrees. But he says that the killing has impacted Dutch journalism nonetheless.

“It had a chilling effect on journalists. Experienced crime reporters continue publishing. I do. But I let the police know in advance. That’s new. I wouldn’t do so before,” said Vugts, who was the Netherlands’ first journalist to go under full police protection because of death threats due to his work.

Slain Dutch crime reporter Peter R. de Vries as pictured in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on January 31, 2008. (AP/Peter Dejong)

Before de Vries was killed, he had been outspoken about receiving threats due to his connection to the witness, whose brother and lawyer were also killed. The journalist, however, was not under police protection, according to Vugts and another local journalist with knowledge of the case.

Vugts said de Vries was negotiating a kind of modified protection with law enforcement as he believed full-scale protection offered to witnesses would hamper his ability to meet with sources. De Vries’ lack of protection at the time of his death sparked criticism and calls from local and international press freedom groups for better safety measure for the press.

“Although the killing was not perceived as an attack on a journalist, it was perceived as an attack on press freedom and the rule of law,” said Guusje Somer, policy and advocacy officer at the Amsterdam-based journalist rights group Free Press Unlimited. “Its goal was to intimidate [journalists] and send a message that organized crime was a boss.”

Meanwhile, the crime remains unsolved despite authorities’ arrest of two suspects within an hour of the shooting. The case was delayed after prosecutors submitted new evidence, and then again after a judge resigned. The trial will continue in early 2024; there are now a total of nine suspects.

The Dutch government plans to improve protections for journalists

The de Vries killing was the most serious, but hardly the first, incident of its kind in the Netherlands. In 2016, Martin Kok, a convicted killer who wrote about crime on his blog, was killed in a gang-related attack. In 2018, an anti-tank missile was fired at the offices of the publisher of weekly newspapers Panorama and Nieuwe Review; two days later an attacker crashed a van into the headquarters of the daily newspaper De Telegraaf and set the vehicle on fire. While investigators did not establish formal links to criminal gangs in the newspaper attacks, prosecutors suspected a connection to the outlets’ coverage of organized crime.

“The fear among crime reporters is that now everything is possible, no one is safe,” Yelle Tieleman, an investigative journalist, told CPJ in an interview in Amsterdam. Tieleman said that Dutch crime reporters have always walked a fine line between publishing scoops about gangs and navigating potential blowback. After this series of attacks, “this line has become even finer,” he said. Some journalists are self-censoring and other reporters, in particular freelancers without institutional support, have abandoned crime reporting altogether.

A recent study commissioned by the Ministry of Justice found that crime reporting has become more dangerous, with gangs showing an increased willingness to resort to deadly force in order to suppress information or express dissatisfaction with certain publications. In response, the government has been working on a comprehensive overhaul of the protection system provided to individuals threatened by organized crime, including journalists, lawyers, and prosecutors, the specifics of which have yet to be released.

Vugts welcomed these efforts, calling the current system “top-down and rigid” and ill-equipped to handle the increasing number of individuals facing threats. He said the government must allocate resources and solutions tailored to journalists so they can continue reporting on crime, even under police protection. “We are not in a narco-state, here the state is working to provide a better system of protection,” he said.

Crime reporters aren’t the only ones at risk

The growing risks to crime reporters reflect an increasingly hostile environment for journalism in the Netherlands. Linda Bos, a communications professor at the University of Amsterdam told CPJ that the rising populism and deepening polarization have fueled anti-establishment sentiments and conspiracy theories. “The pandemic has only further highlighted this trend” due to skepticism around vaccines, she said. This has impacted journalists, who are broadly perceived as part of the establishment.

A survey by PersVeilig or “PressSafe,” a joint initiative of journalists unions, media, police, and prosecutors, showed a sharp uptick in threats to journalists between 2017 and 2021, including incidents of verbal aggression, physical assaults, intimidation, and legal harassment. Two-thirds of journalists experienced verbal aggression at least once in the year before the survey was conducted in 2021, while 17% were exposed to physical aggression. Women journalists and those from minority groups or immigrant backgrounds are at greater risk.

Peter ter Velde, the head of PersVeilig, gestures at training information on display at the organization’s headquarters in Amsterdam. (CPJ/Gulnoza Said)

The rise in hostile attacks prompted NOS, the country’s public broadcaster, to remove its logos from the company’s vehicles and equipment to better protect staff. Some outlets have also resorted to hiring safety personnel to accompany their crews during protests.

In addition, tensions between journalists and the police during demonstrations have made it harder for the media to cover civil unrest. Police must make on-the-spot decisions to identify journalists, and at times have lumped them in with protesters, arresting them or forcing them to leave demonstrations.

When CPJ met the police representatives in The Hague, they were preparing for a farmers’ protest expected the following day. Officers and members of the communications team told CPJ that the police were committed to ensuring safety of journalists covering protests, and riot police were provided with information and training on identifying members of the press.

The Netherlands’ Union of Journalists’ (NVJ) head Thomas Bruning told CPJ that police are indeed committed to ensuring press access to protests, but don’t have the resources to ensure officers on the ground follow such guidelines. “There’s a willingness of police to train their forces on press cards and rights of journalists but they don’t have sufficient training capacity,” he said. NVJ has tried to fill the gap with its own police trainings “but it has been ad-hoc. A more systemic, regular approach is needed,” he said.

Dutch journalists are harassed online

Online harassment is also a press freedom issue in the Netherlands. Another PersVeilig survey showed that nearly 82% of 300 surveyed women journalists said they had been subject to online harassment, threats, and intimidation on various tech platforms. Nearly a quarter of the incidents occurred on X (formerly Twitter), which Bos called “the main platform of hate.”

CPJ met with Peter ter Velde, the head of PersVeilig in his office in central Amsterdam. He told CPJ that he and representatives of media organizations have met with tech companies including Google and Meta to raise the issue of harassment on their platforms but had not yet been able to meet with X. PersVeilig, which shares an office with the journalists’ union, is keenly aware of how the issue affects women; it recently hired a woman to field harassment complaints from female journalists who might feel uncomfortable reporting them to a man. Ter Velde also said that the police are trying to address the issue. They are “on board,” he said, but “lack capacity to look into all cases of online harassment.”

Pieter van Koetsveld and Charlotte Wolf, of the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science’s directorate in charge of liaising with journalists, told CPJ in a meeting that online harassment is a priority for the ministry. They pointed to their department’s funding of PersVeilig as evidence of their commitment.

Pieter van Koetsveld (left) and Charlotte Wolff (second from left), of the Netherlands’ Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science, met with CPJ’s Gulnoza Said and Attila Mong. (Photo: CPJ)

“Our Ministry identified journalists as a vulnerable group who need our support and we have plans to support them,” Wolff said. Koetsveld said that the ministry has been in touch with Google on the issue of online harassment of journalists, but not with X.

PersVeilig provides hope to journalists

PersVeilig has been hailed by press freedom organizations as an international model for building bridges between journalists, law enforcement, and prosecutors in order to keep journalists safe so they can do their jobs. When ter Velde, a former journalist who covered wars and conflicts, agreed to head PersVeilig after its founding in 2019, it helped the organization gain trust in the Dutch journalism community.

In addition to hosting safety trainings and detailing security protocols, PersVeilig operates a hotline and a dedicated online platform where journalists can report threats and receive guidance on filing complaints with the police. One of PersVeilig’s biggest achievements is that it secured commitments from police and prosecutors to prioritize investigating attacks on journalists by opening a rapid criminal investigation when one occurs. Prosecutors have also committed to increasing punishments for attacks on journalists, ter Velde said.

Ter Velde told CPJ that journalists know and trust the organization, but that its work is “vulnerable” so long as he is the only employee. Ter Velde plans to hire one more staffer, with the hopes of expanding further in the future to focus on the security needs of female journalists and on legal threats.

“When we started PersVeilig, we thought it’d continue for three years. But the country has changed. Organized crime has changed – there are no red lines, no boundaries for them as Peter’s killing demonstrated,” he said. “Journalists need more help than ever before.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Gulnoza Said.

Senators Ask Billionaire Paul Singer and Power Broker Leonard Leo for Full Accounting of Gifts to Supreme Court Justices

by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 21:00:00 +0000

by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski

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

Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats have sent letters to two wealthy businessmen and a major political activist requesting more information about undisclosed gifts to Supreme Court justices.

The letters, sent Tuesday by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the committee chair, seek more details about an undisclosed 2008 luxury fishing vacation Justice Samuel Alito took that was reported last month by ProPublica. The letters went to three people: hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer; mortgage company owner Robin Arkley II; and Leonard Leo, a longtime leader at the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative legal group.

All three men played a role in paying for or organizing Alito’s 2008 vacation, but the letters go beyond that trip. The senators requested Leo and the businessmen provide a full accounting of all transportation, lodging and gifts worth more than $415 they’ve ever provided to any Supreme Court justice.

“To date, Chief Justice Roberts has barely acknowledged, much less investigated or sought to fix, the ethics crises swirling around our highest Court,” Durbin and Whitehouse said in a joint statement. “If the Court won’t investigate or act, Congress must.” The senators’ committee has announced it plans to vote on July 20 on a bill that would tighten Supreme Court ethics rules.

A spokesperson for Singer said he had received the letter and was in the process of reviewing it. Leo declined to comment but previously said that Alito could never be influenced by a free trip. Arkley and the Supreme Court press office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

ProPublica reported last month that Singer flew Alito on a private jet to a luxury Alaska fishing vacation in July 2008. Alito did not pay for the trip, including his stay at the fishing lodge, which was owned by Arkley, a significant conservative political donor. Leo helped organize the trip and asked Singer if Alito could fly on the billionaire’s jet. The justice did not disclose the gift of the private jet trip in his annual financial disclosure, which ethics law experts said appeared to be a violation of federal ethics law.

In the years following the trip, Singer’s hedge fund had cases come before the court at least 10 times. Alito did not recuse himself. He ruled with the court’s majority in favor of Singer’s hedge fund in a 2014 case that pitted the fund against the nation of Argentina.

Alito wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published before the ProPublica story that he had not known Singer was affiliated with the hedge fund, and he maintained that disclosure rules didn’t require him to report the private jet flight. A spokesperson for Singer said last month that the billionaire had “never discussed his business interests” with the justice and that Singer had not organized the trip.

The letters sent Tuesday represent a new phase in the Senate investigation of Supreme Court ethics.

This spring, ProPublica reported that Justice Clarence Thomas received decades of unreported gifts from Dallas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow. Crow took Thomas on private jet flights and yacht cruises around the world, paid private school tuition for the justice’s grandnephew and paid Thomas money in an undisclosed real estate deal. The Senate Judiciary Committee launched an investigation and wrote a series of letters to Crow, demanding a full accounting of his gifts to Thomas and any other justices over the years.

Thus far, Crow has resisted the senators’ probe. The billionaire’s lawyers have argued that Congress does not have the authority to investigate the gifts and that the inquiry violates the separation of powers. Thomas has defended himself by saying he took family trips with friends. Crow has said he never discussed pending legal matters with Thomas or sought to influence him.

Leo also joined Crow and Thomas during at least one undisclosed trip to the billionaire’s private resort in the Adirondacks. A painting Crow commissioned depicts Leo at the resort alongside the justice and the billionaire. In the new letter, the senators asked the longtime Federalist Society executive to provide details about any travel he’s ever taken with any Supreme Court justice.

The expanded investigation comes as the Senate Judiciary Committee prepares to vote on Supreme Court ethics reform. Following the Alito report, Durbin and Whitehouse announced that the panel would vote on a reform bill this month.

“To hold these nine Justices to the same standard as every other federal judge is not a radical or partisan notion,” Durbin and Whitehouse said in a joint statement, adding, “The belief that they should not be held accountable or even disclose lavish gifts from wealthy benefactors is an affront to the nation they were chosen to serve.”

The bill, titled the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, would significantly tighten ethics rules but in many cases leave the details up to the court itself.

The bill requires the court itself to create and publish a code of conduct within 180 days but doesn’t lay out in detail what rules it should contain. Lower court federal judges are already subject to a code of conduct, but it does not apply to the Supreme Court.

In other areas, the bill is more specific: It would tighten recusal rules, including in cases when justices accept gifts from litigants at the court or affiliates of litigants. If the proposed law had been in place when Alito sat on Singer’s case against Argentina, it appears it would have required the justice to recuse himself.

The bill would also require the court to create an ethics complaint process. Members of the public could submit complaints and investigations would be carried out by a randomly selected panel of five appellate judges. The panel could recommend that the Supreme Court take disciplinary action. It could also publish reports of its findings.

Under current law, justices are not required to — and rarely do — explain themselves when they do or don’t recuse themselves from a case. It’s a long-standing parlor game among Supreme Court watchers to guess what conflict or potential conflict led a justice to recuse himself or herself. The bill would end that. It would require published written explanations of recusal decisions.

The bill would also tighten some rules around the disclosure of gifts and of the funding behind friend-of-the-court briefs that are filed by outside groups in many high-profile cases.

The bill is already facing steep opposition, with influential Republicans in both the House and Senate coming out against legislative reforms. Minutes after Durbin announced the committee vote, the Twitter account for the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee responded: “And that’s as far as it will go. God Bless Justice Alito!”

The response among Republican lawmakers has not been uniform, however. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, introduced a bill this year that would require the court to adopt a code of conduct and create a process for investigating potential violations of it. Other Republican senators have encouraged Chief Justice John Roberts to take action to tighten the court’s ethical standards himself.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., told The Hill following the recent Alito revelations that she believes it’s in the Supreme Court’s “best interests to address this issue to the satisfaction of the public and use the standards that should apply to anyone in the executive or legislative branch with regard to ethics.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski.

What happened to Americans’ economic rights? w/Mark Paul | The Marc Steiner Show

The Real News Network — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 16:00:13 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

Confettigate | James Skeet talks with Paul Brand | LBC Radio | 9 July 2023 | Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 15:45:27 +0000

This content originally appeared on Just Stop Oil and was authored by Just Stop Oil.

Would Lenin Have Become a Maoist? A Chat With Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff

Alexander Cockburn — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 05:45:10 +0000

I went to the Monthly Review and interviewed Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff. HM: Back in 1949, at the founding of Monthly Review, Paul and Leo [Huberman] said, We’ve got to talk about the socialist idea. Now again we have to explore fundamental socialist ideas. You cannot create a decent society with emphasis on growth More

The post Would Lenin Have Become a Maoist? A Chat With Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Alexander Cockburn.

If Paul Revere Were Alive Today

Allen Forrest — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 15:00:20 +0000

Pre-1776, Americans sought independence from the British. Nowadays, there is a call for independence from the corporate globalists/vaccinators.

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

The Fall of the West

Paul Larudee — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 16:00:50 +0000

In his bestselling book of 1987, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, historian Paul Kennedy chronicles the rise of western power and its world dominance from 1500 to the present. He reports that the rise was not due to any particular event, nor even an unusual series of events. It was, in fact, neither foreseen nor even recognized until it was already well under way, although it may be accurately ascribed to multiple factors, which Kennedy discusses. The same may be said of the ongoing fall of western power.

Although the decline of the West is rapidly becoming more evident to informed observers of current events, the start of that decline is less easy to pinpoint, in part because it seemed less inevitable and more reversible until quite recently. Was the high point the Austro-Hungarian Empire? Victorian England? The U.S. Eisenhower administration? Some might date it from the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, marking the beginning of the truncated “New American Century.”

That “century” appears to be ending in the manner of so many other powers that fill the pages of Kennedy’s book – through imperial overreach, excessive military spending, lagging economic productivity and competitiveness, and failure to invest in the physical, technical and human resources necessary to remain a dominant power. In short, the West is flagging.

The signs for this are too evident to ignore. The industrial base of the West is withering. Post-WWII, the U.S. dominated because it was the only major industrial power to survive unscathed, and its investment in western Europe and Japan increased the wealth of all three. Over the last half of the 20th century, however, these economies began to shift much of their industry to countries with cheaper labor and more efficient production, such that by the 21st century much of their manufacturing capability had vanished, and they became mainly consumer societies.

2023 has become a watershed year for the power shift, due to dramatic western weaknesses exposed by the Ukraine war. The war revealed that a relatively modest economy (Russia) had the capability to outproduce the U.S. and all the NATO countries combined in war materiel. The U.S. “arsenal of democracy” and its European partners proved unable to provide more than a fraction of the weapons and ammunition that Russia’s factories produced. Ukrainian soldiers supplied by NATO countries found themselves vastly outnumbered in tanks, artillery, missiles, unmanned and manned aircraft, and even the latest hypersonic and electronic weapons that were arrayed against them in seemingly limitless supply. The U.S. and European NATO partners could only cobble together small numbers of incompatible weapons from their diminishing inventories, and make promises of future deliveries after months or years.

But the U.S. and its allies were not counting on physical weapons alone. They weaponized the U.S. dollar, through seizures of Russian accounts in U.S., European and other banks totaling more than $300 billion, and through application of economic sanctions, including expulsion of Russian banks from the SWIFT dollar trading system. This also backfired.

First, Russia retaliated by seizing U.S. and European assets within Russia, in equal or greater amounts. Second, they “pivoted east,” negotiating new trading partnerships with China, India and other countries. Third, they and their new partners, including other targets of U.S. sanctions, began to develop financial agreements to displace or reduce the use of SWIFT. Even countries that had heretofore not been threatened with asset seizure or economic sanctions, like Brazil, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia, joined these agreements, in order to expand their trading base, and as insurance against use of the USD for financial pressure or threats. The result was that the Russian economy proved astonishingly resilient – moreso even than many of the NATO countries. The Russian GDP fell by less than 2% in 2022 and is expected to rise by up to 2% in 2023, despite the war and sanctions. Russia has opted for a sustainable but inexorable war with less than 1/6 the casualties of Ukraine. Visitors report that it hardly feels like a country at war. The annual St. Petersburg Economic Forum attracted 17,000 participants from 130 countries and concluded 900 deals and contracts worth 3.9 trillion rubles ($46 billion).

The decline of Europe was further illustrated by the consequences of the US bombing of the Nordstream gas pipelines in September, 2022, and the sanctions on Russian natural gas and petroleum products imposed by NATO. Together, these ended the competitiveness of the European economies, which had hitherto thrived on accessibility to cheap Russian fuel. As predicted by Radek Sikorsky, MEP, this meant

… double-digit inflation, skyrocketing energy prices, and electricity shortage, … Germany will be deindustrialized, … German industries, scientists and engineers will move to the US, who will generously accept them.

And Europe will be set back a couple of decades. Already, most European countries — France, Italy, Spain etc. — have had zero growth in GDP-per-capita for more than a decade. Add in inflation, the standard of living will soon be down 30-40%.

In effect, the U.S. had defeated its NATO “partners” (mainly Germany) and cannibalized their industries for the sake of its own benefit, potentially short-lived.

But the United States believed that its mighty dollar could offset its faded industry and increasingly toothless military – that it could be printed in unlimited amounts without losing value, and could become its most powerful weapon. The history of this dollar began in 1971, when President Richard Nixon announced that, in effect, the U.S. dollar would no longer be backed by gold, but rather by whatever the dollar could purchase in the U.S., i.e. by the U.S. economy itself. This became widely accepted because a) the U.S. was the world’s largest economy, b) the two great international regulatory financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, were also based on the dollar, and c) nearly all the world’s countries outside of the Soviet Union and other socialist societies used the dollar as the reserve currency for their own money. In addition, the world shed fixed exchange rates, with their troublesome periodic revaluations, for floating rates, which generally made the changes more gradual and more stable for the major currencies, and especially the dollar.

The effect of so many dollars circulating so widely was to invest most of the world in protecting its value. The more a country’s non-dollar currency became based on the dollar as its reserve currency, the more the incentive for that country to defend the dollar. Later, as the U.S. began to lose its industry, it came to depend on this value to maintain its economy. It marketed its debt to other countries and “persuaded” other countries to fund U.S. bases on their territories for the purpose of “mutual defense.” This is part of the reason the U.S. now has more than 800 military bases worldwide. Although the U.S. national debt is, at time of writing, more than $33 trillion, the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board seem to think that they can continue to unload it without limit onto other countries.

Decision makers in the U.S. seem to think that they have found the goose that lays the golden egg: when they need more money, they have only to borrow indefinitely and market their IOUs to buyers, many of whom don’t really have the option of saying no. Thus, for example, it used unlimited borrowing to fund without hesitation a very costly Ukraine war by more than $100 billion in 2022 alone, while denying basic services to its own citizens.

But borrowing is not the only way that the U.S. raises funds. Given the stability of the dollar, many countries store or invest them in the U.S. But when a country has a disagreement with the U.S., or chooses a leadership or policies not approved by the U.S., the U.S. is not above confiscating those funds. In 2011, this is what it did with $32 billion of Libyan funds, the largest but by no means the only such confiscation of another nation’s funds at that time. Since then, similar confiscations have occurred with Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Afghanistan and other nations. Eclipsing Libya, however, was the confiscation of Russia’s $300 billion by the U.S and its mostly NATO allies, an estimated $100 billion of it by the U.S. alone.

Recently, however, other countries are becoming wary of the U.S. and choosing other options that reduce their participation in what they view as a Mafia-style protection racket as well as their placement of assets in places where they could be confiscated in case of disagreement. As noted earlier, a growing number of countries are opting to either bypass the dollar-based SWIFT system, or to complement it with new agreements where goods are paid in another currency or with multiple currencies. Even Saudi Arabia has begun accepting payment in Chinese Yuan and paying Russia in rubles. In addition, China and other countries have decided to limit or reduce their USD exposure. So far, this has had no appreciable effect on the value of the USD. But if the dollar starts to become less desirable, it may become a questionable investment, in which case the U.S. risks losing its status as a world power – even a modest one. At that point, having demolished German and other European access to cheap fuel, the U.S. will join the rest of the west in its decline, leaving the rising economies of China, India, Brazil, Russia and other countries in Asia, Latin America and possibly Africa to displace them.

Is the Dollar overvalued? By the laws of supply and demand, one could argue that it is not. But it is a fair question when the supply is enormous and growing, and the demand is artificial and coerced. What will happen when the dollar’s near monopoly as an exchange medium ends? The dollar has not always been the preeminent tool for pricing international transactions. At the turn of the 20th century, the British pound sterling was literally the gold standard. But the British economy was fading, and the pound continued to fall against both gold and the USD. Now, although it is still a major currency, it is a mere shadow of its former self. If or when the many dollars worldwide come home to claim their true value, we may discover that they buy little more than castles of sand.

When world power has shifted elsewhere, the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, France and the entire West may come to depend for glory upon their historical and cultural treasures, like the ones of other bygone civilizations that western tourists once visited so widely.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Larudee.

Anything Paul Revere Can Do, a 16-Year-Old Girl Can Do Better

Mickey Z. — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 16:50:38 +0000

Over the years, I’ve often been asked to categorize my work. I find this to be close to impossible but — when pressed — I see myself playing a Paul Revere-style role. In other words, I have important info to share. So, I call out the warning to all who have ears to hear.

All things being equal, I’d much rather compare myself to Sybil Ludington. It’s just that 99.9 percent of folks wouldn’t get the reference.

Two years after Paul Revere’s (alleged) ride, 16-year-old Sybil Ludington should have made history. I mean, she did perform a heroic feat but somehow (cough, sexism, cough), it’s been mostly forgotten.

Here’s the quick version:

Sybil’s father was Colonel Henry Ludington — a respected officer who commanded the 7th Regiment of the Dutchess County Militia during the Revolutionary War. Col. Henry Ludington later became an aide to General George Washington during the Battle of White Plains.

His teenage daughter helped him more than a little in getting that position.

On April 25, 1777, a 2000-man British force landed at Fairfield, Connecticut, and moved toward Danbury — leaving destruction in their path.

By the time word got to Col. Ludington, his men were scattered across the countryside. They needed someone quite familiar with the terrain to gather them up to fight back.

Enter Sybil Ludington.

She rode more than 40 miles (Revere is credited with riding only 12.5 miles) on the evening of April 26, 1777. She knocked on doors to rouse the American soldiers and even fought off one British soldier with the use of her father’s musket.

“The British are burning Danbury. Muster at Ludington’s at daybreak!” she shouted through the night.

By the next morning, most of Col. Ludington’s 400 soldiers were ready to march. They suffered some setbacks and were too late to save Danbury but the 7th Regiment of the Dutchess County Militia eventually chased the Brits back to their boats.

In 1907, Willis Fletcher Johnson wrote a book about Colonel Henry Ludington. In it, you can find this passage:

One who even now rides from Carmel to Cold Spring will find rugged and dangerous roads, with lonely stretches. Imagination only can picture what it was a century and a quarter ago, on a dark night, with reckless bands of Cowboys and Skinners abroad in the land. But the child performed her task, clinging to a man’s saddle, and guiding her steed with only a hempen halter, as she rode through the night, bearing the news of the sack of Danbury.

[The above is dubious quotation. Alternatively: “What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable agreed upon.” (source) — DV ed]

For the record, Paul Revere never finished his infamous ride and he was not out there alone. Two forgotten men rode with him and only one of them — William Dawes — completed the assigned task.

Take-home message: When it comes to reading history, keep yer guard up…

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

Diluted Sovereignty: A Very Australian Example

Binoy Kampmark — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 08:33:46 +0000

Australian concepts of sovereignty have always been qualified. First came the British settlers and invaders in 1788. They are pregnant with the sovereignty of the British Crown, bringing convicts, the sadistic screws, and forced labour to a garrison of penal experiments and brutality. The native populations are treated as nothing more than spares, opportunistic chances, and fluff of the land, a legal nonsense. In a land deemed empty, sovereignty is eviscerated.

Then comes the next stage of Australia’s development. Imperial outpost, dominion, federation, a commonwealth of anxious creation. But through this, there is never a sense of being totally free, aware, cognisant of sovereignty. Eyes remain fastened on Britain. Just as the sovereignty of the First Nations peoples came to be destroyed internally, the concept of Australian sovereignty externally was never realised in any true sense. If it was not stuck in the bosom of the British Empire, then it was focused on the enormity of the United States, its calorific terrors and nuclear protections.

The testament to Australia’s infantile, and contingent sovereignty, is symbolised by the US Pine Gap facility, which is called, for reasons of domestic courtesy, a joint facility. In truth, Australian politicians can never walk onto its premises and have no say as to its running. The public, to this day, can only have guesses, some admittedly well educated, about what it actually does as an intelligence facility.

Australia’s Defence Minister, Richard Marles, whose views should never be taken at face value, insists that the facility ensures that “Australia and our Five-Eyes partners maintain an ‘intelligence advantage’” while being “truly joint in nature, integrating both Australian and US operations under shard command and control by Australian and US personnel – which I have had an opportunity to see firsthand.” Hardly.

Another example is the annual rotation of US Marines in the Northern Territory. To date, there have been twelve such rotations, carefully worded to give the impression that Australia lacks a US military garrison to the country’s north. In March, Marles claimed that such rotations served to “enhance the capabilities, interoperability, and readiness of the ADF and the United States Marine Corps and is a significant part of the United States Force Posture Initiatives, a hallmark of Australia’s Alliance with the US.”

To therefore have an Australian Prime Minister now talk about sovereign capabilities is irksome, even intellectually belittling. Under Anthony Albanese’s stewardship, and before him Scott Morrison’s, the trilateral security pact known as AUKUS has done more to militarise the Australian continent in favour of US defence interests than any other.

The logistical and practical implications should trouble the good citizens Down Under, and not just because Australia is fast becoming a forward base for US-led operations in the Pacific.

Last month, President Joe Biden revealed his desire to press the US Congress on a significant change: adding Australia as a “domestic source” within the meaning of the Defense Production Act, notably pertaining to Title III. The announcement came out in a joint statement from Biden and his Australian counterpart as part of a third-in-person Quad Leaders’ Summit. It also was something of a taster for the G7 Summit held in Hiroshima on May 20.

Title III of the DPA “provides various financial measures, such as loans, loan guarantees, purchases, and purchase commitments, to improve, expand, and maintain domestic production capabilities needed to support national defense and homeland security procurement requirements.” It makes no mention about the independence of foreign entities or states which might enable this to happen.

A May 20 joint statement from Biden and Albanese welcomed “the progress being made to provide Australia with a conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarine capability, and on developing advanced capabilities under the trilateral AUKUS partnership to deter aggression and sustain peace and stability across the Pacific.”

To add Australia as a domestic source “would streamline technological and industrial base collaboration, accelerate and strengthen AUKUS implementation, and build new opportunities for United States investment in the production and purchase of Australian critical minerals, critical technologies, and other strategic sectors.”

As a statement of naked, proprietary interest, this does rather well, not least because it will enable the US to access the Australian minerals market. One prized commodity is lithium, seen as essential to such green technology as electric cars. Given that Australia mines 53% of the world’s supply of lithium, most of which is sold to China to be refined, Washington will have a chance to lock out Beijing by encouraging refinement in Australia proper. With Australia designated as a source domestic to the US, this will be an easy affair.

Washington’s imperial heft over its growingly prized Australian real estate will also be felt in the context of space technology. Australia will become the site of a NASA ground station under the Artemis Accords. Much is made of allowing “the controlled transfer of sensitive US launch technology and data while protecting US technology consistent with US non-proliferation policy, the Missile Technology Control Regime and US export controls.” Congress, however, will have to approve, given the limits imposed on the Technology Safeguards Agreement.

Australia, as a recipient of such technology, will ever be able to assert anything amounting to a sovereign capability over it. As Paul Gregoire points out, the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations makes it clear that information shared with a foreign entity becomes US property and is subject to export restrictions, though the White House may permit it.

In addition to the announcement, there are also moves afoot to involve Japan more extensively in “force posture related activities” as part of the Australia-United States Force Posture Cooperation policy. That’s just what Australia needs: another reminder that its already watered down sovereignty can be diluted into oblivion.

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

Transparency PNG calls for further charges over ‘worrying’ Paraka case

APR editor — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 22:32:45 +0000

RNZ Pacific

Transparency International Papua New Guinea has welcomed the conviction of lawyer Paul Paraka as the police confirm they are widening the investigation into the fraud case.

The NGO admits the depths of Paraka’s activities, revealed by the case, are very worrying.

Paraka, who had operated his own eponymous law firm, was convicted of misappropriating 162 million kina (about NZ$75 million) in government funds, between 2007 and 2011.

Transparency PNG spokesperson, Peter Aitsi, said the evidence outlined the complex structures that Paraka and others put together.

Significant case
He said it was a very significant case because of the amount of public money involved.

“And those are just the funds that have been identified within this case itself and paid to different parties as a result of Paraka’s activities.

“From a TI point of view we would encourage the agencies to continue to develop the evidence and if there are further charges to be laid against individuals then we would encourage them to ensure they uphold their duty and responsibility,” Aitsi said.

Paraka’s law firm, which he claimed was the biggest in the country, was engaged by the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General’s office in 2000, but this arrangement ceased in 2006.

However, from 2007 the state was still making payments to legal firms linked to Paraka.

Investigations have seesawed for 10 years and led to the replacement of the Attorney-General, the shutting down of the police fraud unit investigating the matter, and acccusations of politicians being involved.

Meanwhile, Paul Paraka threatened legal action amid claims the issues were simply administrative matters.

Police action
Police Commissioner David Manning has confirmed an investigation into fraud, money laundering and misappropriation following Paraka’s conviction.

Manning said the Paraka case attracted significant national interest due to the huge amounts of public money involved in these corrupt dealings.

“The way and manner in which these funds were syphoned through the Department of Finance to various law firms, who would then transfer this money to Mr Paraka himself, has been the subject of public outrage,” he said.

Manning said police will continue to pursue, investigate, charge and arrest those involved, and to recoup all money lost in these illegal deals.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

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

The US and Never-ending War

Roger Stoll — Sat, 27 May 2023 14:44:18 +0000

John Rachel, in his book The U.S. and Perpetual War: Interviews and Commentary (Independently published, May 16, 2023, available at Peace Dividend/Books and Amazon) has compiled a unique, concise and astonishingly compelling collection of leading left, liberal, conservative and heterodox thinkers each answering the same fifteen precisely composed questions. The questions concern the current nature of the US empire, putative US democracy, and, most important, what is to be done.

The distinguished roster of 22 respondents from politics, academia, media, law, and social activism includes Noam Chomsky, Larry Wilkerson, Paul Craig Roberts, Mark Skidmore, Coleen Rowley, William J. Astore, Abby Martin, Dan Kovalik, Lee Camp, Finian Cunningham, Michael T. Klare, Cynthia McKinney, Scott Ritter, Joe Lombardo, Bruce Gagnon, Norman Solomon, Peter Kuznick, Ajamu Baraka, Margaret Kimberley, Matthew Hoh, Garland Nixon, and Dennis Kucinich.

Rachel’s 15 question topics are: 1. The Atomic Scientists doomsday clock; 2. The US as a force for peace, justice, etc., or not; 3. The reasoning behind Russian and Chinese military action; 4. The US need for empire, or not; 5. US national electoral politics since 2014 and the demonization of Russia; 6. Taiwan and the possibility of war between US and China; 7. Syria and the US occupation; 8. Citizen influence on foreign policy; 9. Democracy and hidden government operations (CIA operations, psyops, regime-change ops, etc.); 10. Government abuses of power and the possibility of legal redress; 11. Who in fact makes foreign policy; 12. The nature of US foreign relations and the US practice of demonizing target countries; 13. Military spending; 14. What changes in US policy and priorities need to be made; 15. What options are there for change if US policy makers are in fact indifferent to what US citizens think.

What makes this book unique is that it departs from the usual organization of such anthologies. Instead of a collection of separate interviews, the responses to each of Rachel’s fifteen questions are presented together, question by question. In other words, Question #1 is followed by all the responses to Question #1, then Question #2 is followed by all the responses to Question #2, and so on. This lets the reader consider and compare answers. It also makes the book easy to dip in and out of. It’s often thrilling to see these well-informed and often eloquent voices opining in rapid succession.

Here is a sampling of the text: Questions #3 and #11, followed by a few of the responses.

Question #3:

Here’s a chicken-or-egg question: The U.S. accuses both Russia and China of rapidly expanding their military capabilities, claiming its own posturing and increase in weaponry is a response to its hostile adversaries, Russia and China. Both Russia and China claim they are merely responding to intimidation and military threats posed by the U.S. What’s your view? Do Russia and China have imperial ambitions or are they just trying to defend themselves against what they see as an increasingly aggressive U.S. military?

Noam Chomsky (excerpt):

The US is alone in facing no credible security threats, apart from alleged threats at the borders of adversaries, who are ringed with US nuclear-armed missiles in some of the 800 US military bases around the world (China has one, Djibouti). There have been international efforts to prevent militarization of outer space, a major threat to survival. They have been initiated primarily by China and Russia, blocked for many years by Washington.

Paul Craig Roberts:

Russia and China do not claim hegemony. Only the US claims hegemony.

Abby Martin (excerpt):

It is patently absurd to think that it is Russia or China, not the US that is setting the world stage militarily. For example, when the US violated the international treaty on outer space to create Space Force, Russia reacted by announcing it would pursue its own space defense to prepare for US plans.

Dan Kovalik (excerpt):

It is undoubtedly true that Russia and China have their own ambitions for increasing power, prestige and influence in the world. However, Russia and China do so largely through means of offering development and infrastructure assistance and business relations to developing countries rather than by dropping bombs on other nations. … It is the US which is the threat to China and Russia, and not the other way around. It is the US which has troops up to the Russian frontier; Russia does not have analogous troops along the US frontier, for this would be unthinkable. It is the US which is provoking China through military maneuvers in the South China Sea; China is not doing the same off the US coasts. As is its usual wont, the US is projecting its own sins upon others (in this case, China and Russia) so as to deflect blame and soul-searching for its own crimes.

Finian Cunningham (excerpt):

The United States is the party that has unilaterally abandoned arms control treaties with Russia. The ABM in 2003, the INF treaty in 2019 and the Open Skies Treaty in 2020. Abandoning these treaties has undermined the architecture for nuclear arms controls and is inducing a new arms race. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that the scrapping of the ABM by the GW Bush administration was the factor in why his nation was compelled to develop hypersonic missiles which, the Russians have calculated, would restore strategic balance. … The US — the only nation to have used atomic weapons in war and against a civilian population — is an aggressor power owing to its imperial motives. … Russia and China have a no-first strike policy. They have declared this. The US does not. It retains the right to use nuclear weapons preemptively. It is quite clear the egg in this situation is US militarism.

Cynthia McKinney (excerpt):

The U.S. allies were not the victims of the colonial atrocities of Spain, Britain, France, Belgium, Holland. U.S. allies are the perpetrators of incalculable physical and psychological pain in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Interestingly, the friends to the colonized peoples were the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, which was divided as a result of U.S. hegemony over Taiwan and Britain’s sovereignty over Hong Kong. Neither Russia nor China, at their worst, can count the globally pervasive international crimes against humanity that are owned by the so-called West.

Question #11

We hear a lot of terms and acronyms bandied about. ‘Deep State’ … ‘MIC’ … ‘FIRE sector’ … ‘ruling elite’ … ‘oligarchy’ … ‘neocons’. Who actually defines and sets America’s geopolitical priorities and determines our foreign policy? Not “officially”. Not constitutionally. But de facto.

Noam Chomsky:

250 years ago, in the early days of modern state capitalism, an astute British analyst [Adam Smith] gave a simple answer to this question. He said that the merchants and manufacturers of England are the “masters of mankind.” They are the “principal architects” of government policy, and make sure that their own interests “are most peculiarly attended to” no matter how “grievous” the impact on others, including the people of England, but more severely the victims of “the savage injustice of the Europeans” abroad. His particular concern was the victims of England’s savage crimes in India, then in their early stages. … Nothing is that simple, of course, but Smith’s picture, modified for the modern age, is a good first approximation.

Larry Wilkerson (excerpt):

“The Deep State” as a phrase and in a modern sense was first formally used by Michael Lofgren, a longtime member of the U.S. Congressional staff with the Republican Party. Mike became one of the severest critics of his own political party after retirement in 2011 and his book, The Deep State, followed.

…

Mr. Lofgren’s article was well-read across America. He wrote about “a web of entrenched interests in the US Government and beyond (most notably Wall Street and Silicon Valley, which controls every click and swipe) that dictate America’s defense decisions, trade policies and priorities with little regard for the actual interests or desires of the American people.”

Coleen Rowley:

As retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern noted some time ago, the ruling MIC (Military Industrial Complex) is now more correctly enlarged to the MICIMATT (Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Academia Think Tank) complex. Even as prescient as Eisenhower was over 60 years ago in warning how these war profiteering special interests would soon be the tail wagging the dog (i.e. whatever bit of democracy remains in the U.S.), that former president could not foresee the insatiable blood thirstiness of the monster he and his post WWII cronies had created, constantly bellowing “Feed Me!” right out of the “Little Shop of Horrors.”

Michael T. Klare:

From my experience, US foreign policy is set by what some have called the “blob” — the unelected, bipartisan, self-replicating network of senior Washington policymakers (NSC, DoD, CIA) plus the chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees; engaged former generals, admirals, and ambassadors; major defense contractor lobbyists; and key think-tank and media pundits (usually interchangeable with the other categories).

Cynthia McKinney (excerpt)

As you have probably noticed, the signature of my e-mails has a quote from a U.K. television series: “You get to the top and you realize it’s only the middle.” Tom Dawkins, UK Prime Minister in the 2012 TV series, Secret State. I watched every minute of this TV series and when this was uttered by the actor portraying the U.K. Prime Minister, I knew this was what I would call “faction.” Because that is exactly the way I felt upon realizing that Members of Congress don’t call the shots; they are mere actors [with a whole lot of squandered power that could be used to actually HELP people— including their constituents and those harmed by U.S. foreign and military policies] who trick their constituents. They are also cowards, because they could say no to these people, but they don’t dare. They are also narcissists because they think they’re smarter than their constituents and in many cases, also the donors, too. I saw some of them playing games with the so-called report cards from lobbyists, scoring 50% on them all and then collecting money from both sides on every issue!!

Joe Lombardo:

I look at this in class terms. I believe there is a ruling class that determines international policy based upon their perceived class interests, and who make the rest of us fight their wars and pay the bills. They control the two main parties and their politicians through financial control. They also control the media, the police and courts and the military. … I don’t believe that there is a “deep state” that works independently of that ruling class to determine policy.

Bruce Gagnon (excerpt):

The banksters in London and Wall Street are the essential movers and shakers of US-UK-NATO foreign policy.

*****

The other 13 questions are as pointed as these, and the responses as direct and insightful. John Rachel has given us an exquisitely timely and readable collection of leading contemporary thought on fifteen facets of what may be the most important issue of our time: Whither US empire?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger Stoll.

Rep. Paul Gosar’s Ties to Neo-Nazi Movement Under Scrutiny

Democracy Now! — Tue, 16 May 2023 14:28:17 +0000

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

Rep. Gerry Connolly Condemns ‘Unconscionable’ Baseball Bat Attack on His Staff

Brett Wilkins — Mon, 15 May 2023 19:53:02 +0000

Two members of U.S. Congressman Gerry Connolly's staff were hospitalized Monday after a man armed with a baseball bat attacked them in the Virginia Democrat's district office in Fairfax.

"This morning, an individual entered my district office armed with a baseball bat and asked for me before committing an act of violence against two members of my staff. The individual is in police custody and both members of my team were transferred to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries," Connolly said in a statement.

"Right now, our focus is on ensuring they are receiving the care they need," the congressman continued. "We are incredibly thankful to the City of Fairfax Police Department and emergency medical professionals for their quick response."

\u201cWow. A man in Fairfax, VA entered the district office of Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly with a baseball bat looking for the congressman. \n\nThe man attacked two of the staffers with the bat.\u201d
— Sawyer Hackett (@Sawyer Hackett) 1684173028

"I have the best team in Congress. My district office staff make themselves available to constituents and members of the public every day," Connolly added. "The thought that someone would take advantage of my staff's accessibility to commit an act of violence is unconscionable and devastating."

While the motive of Monday's assault is not yet clear, it came amid increasingly violent rhetoric and threats targeting Democratic members of Congress and people close to them. Last October, a far-right conspiracy theorist broke into the San Francisco home of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and brutally attacked her octagenarian husband Paul Pelosi with a hammer.

That came after an armed man threatened to kill Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) at her Seattle home last July. In a Washington Post story about that incident, the congresswoman also shared the racist, misogynistic, and violent messages she receives on social media.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Can the U.S. Adjust Sensibly to a Multipolar World?

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies — Thu, 04 May 2023 14:23:38 +0000

In his 1987 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, historian Paul Kennedy reassured Americans that the decline the United States was facing after a century of international dominance was “relative and not absolute, and is therefore perfectly natural; and that the only serious threat to the real interests of the United States can come from a failure to adjust sensibly to the newer world order.”

Since Kennedy wrote those words, we have seen the end of the Cold War, the peaceful emergence of China as a leading world power, and the rise of a formidable Global South. But the United States has indeed failed to “adjust sensibly to the newer world order,” using military force and coercion in flagrant violation of the UN Charter in a failed quest for longer lasting global hegemony.

Kennedy observed that military power follows economic power. Rising economic powers develop military power to consolidate and protect their expanding economic interests. But once a great power’s economic prowess is waning, the use of military force to try to prolong its day in the sun leads only to unwinnable conflicts, as European colonial powers quickly learned after the Second World War, and as Americans are learning today.

While U.S. leaders have been losing wars and trying to cling to international power, a new multipolar world has been emerging. Despite the recent tragedy of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the agony of yet another endless war, the tectonic plates of history are shifting into new alignments that offer hope for the future of humanity. Here are several developments worth watching:

De-dollarizing global trade

For decades, the U.S. dollar was the undisputed king of global currencies. But China, Russia, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and other nations are taking steps to conduct more trade in their own currencies, or in Chinese yuan.

Illegal, unilateral U.S. sanctions against dozens of countries around the world have raised fears that holding large dollar reserves leaves countries vulnerable to U.S. financial coercion. Many countries have already been gradually diversifying their foreign currency reserves, from 70% globally held in dollars in 1999 to 65% in 2016 to only 58% by 2022.

Since no other country has the benefit of the “ecosystem” that has developed around the dollar over the past century, diversification is a slow process, but the war in Ukraine has helped speed the transition. On April 17, 2023, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that U.S. sanctions against Russia risk undermining the role of the dollar as the world’s global reserve currency.

And in a Fox News interview, right-wing Republican Senator Marco Rubio lamented that, within five years, the United States may no longer be able to use the dollar to bully other countries because “there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”

BRICS’s GDP leapfrogs G7s

When calculated based on Purchasing Power Parity, the GDP of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) is now higher than that of the G7 (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan). The BRICS countries, which account for over 40% of total world population, generate 31.5% of the world’s economic output, compared with 30.7% for the G7, and BRICS’s growing share of global output is expected to further outpace the G7’s in coming years.

Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has invested some of its huge foreign exchange surplus in a new transport infrastructure across Eurasia to more quickly import raw materials and export manufactured goods, and to build growing trade relations with many countries.

Now the growth of the Global South will be boosted by the New Development Bank (NDB), also known as the BRICS Bank, under its new president Dilma Rousseff, the former president of Brazil.

Rousseff helped to set up the BRICS Bank in 2015 as an alternative source of development funding, after the Western-led World Bank and IMF had trapped poor countries in recurring debt, austerity and privatization programs for decades. By contrast, the NDB is focused on eliminating poverty and building infrastructure to support “a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable future for the planet.” The NDB is well-capitalized, with $100 billion to fund its projects, more than the World Bank’s current $82 billion portfolio.

Movement towards “strategic autonomy” for Europe

On the surface, the Ukraine war has brought the United States and Europe geostrategically closer together than ever, but this may not be the case for long. After French President Macron’s recent visit to China, he told reporters on his plane that Europe should not let the United States drag it into war with China, that Europe is not a “vassal” of the United States, and that it must assert its “strategic autonomy” on the world stage. Cries of horror greeted Macron from both sides of the Atlantic when the interview was published.

But European Council President Charles Michel, the former prime minister of Belgium, quickly came to Macron’s side, insisting that the European Union cannot “blindly, systematically follow the position of the United States.” Michel confirmed in an interview that Macron’s views reflect a growing point of view among EU leaders, and that “quite a few really think like Emmanuel Macron.”

The rise of progressive governments in Latin America

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, which has served as a cover for U.S. domination of Latin America and the Caribbean. But nowadays, countries of the region are refusing to march in lockstep with U.S. demands. The entire region rejects the U.S. embargo on Cuba, and Biden’s exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua from his 2022 Summit of the Americas persuaded many other leaders to stay away or only send junior officials, and largely doomed the gathering.

With the spectacular victories and popularity of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, and Ignacio Lula da Silva in Brazil, progressive governments now have tremendous clout. They are strengthening the regional body CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) as an alternative to the U.S.-dominated Organization of American States.

To reduce reliance on the U.S. dollar, South America’s two largest economies, Argentina and Brazil, have announced plans to create a common currency that could later be adopted by other members of Mercosur — South America’s major trade bloc. While U.S. influence is waning, China’s is mushrooming, with trade increasing from $18 billion in 2002 to nearly $449 billion in 2021. China is now the top trading partner of Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, and Brazil has raised the possibility of a free-trade deal between China and Mercosur.

Peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia

One of the false premises of U.S. foreign policy is that regional rivalries in areas like the Middle East are set in stone, and the United States must therefore form alliances with so-called “moderate” (pro-Western) forces against more “radical” (independent) ones. This has served as a pretext for America to jump into bed with dictators like the Shah of Iran, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and a succession of military governments in Egypt.

Now China, with help from Iraq, has achieved what the United States never even tried. Instead of driving Iran and Saudi Arabia to poison the whole region with wars fueled by bigotry and ethnic hatred, as the United States did, China and Iraq brought them together to restore diplomatic relations in the interest of peace and prosperity.

Healing this divide has raised hopes for lasting peace in several countries where the two rivals have been involved, including Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and as far away as West Africa. It also puts China on the map as a mediator on the world stage, with Chinese officials now offering to mediate between Ukraine and Russia, as well as between Israel and Palestine.

Saudi Arabia and Syria have restored diplomatic relations, and the Saudi and Syrian foreign ministers have visited each others’ capitals for the first time since Saudi Arabia and its Western allies backed al-Qaeda-linked groups to try to overthrow President Assad in 2011.

At a meeting in Jordan on May 1, the foreign ministers of Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia agreed to help Syria restore its territorial integrity, and that Turkish and U.S. occupying forces must leave. Syria may also be invited to an Arab League summit on May 19th, for the first time since 2011.

Chinese diplomacy to restore relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia is credited with opening the door to these other diplomatic moves in the Middle East and the Arab world. Saudi Arabia helped evacuate Iranians from Sudan and, despite their past support for the military rulers who are destroying Sudan, the Saudis are helping to mediate peace talks, along with the UN, the Arab League, the African Union and other countries.

Multipolar diplomatic alternatives to U.S. war-making

The proposal by President Lula of Brazil for a “peace club” of nations to help negotiate peace in Ukraine is an example of the new diplomacy emerging in the multipolar world. There is clearly a geostrategic element to these moves, to show the world that other nations can actually bring peace and prosperity to countries and regions where the United States has brought only war, chaos and instability.

While the United States rattles its saber around Taiwan and portrays China as a threat to the world, China and its friends are trying to show that they can provide a different kind of leadership. As a Global South country that has lifted its own people out of poverty, China offers its experience and partnership to help others do the same, a very different approach from the paternalistic and coercive neocolonial model of U.S. and Western power that has kept so many countries trapped in poverty and debt for decades.

This is the fruition of the multipolar world that China and others have been calling for. China is responding astutely to what the world needs most, which is peace, and demonstrating practically how it can help. This will surely win China many friends, and make it more difficult for U.S. politicians to sell their view of China as a threat.

Now that the “newer world order” that Paul Kennedy referred to is taking shape, economist Jeffrey Sachs has grave misgivings about the U.S. ability to adjust. As he recently warned, “Unless U.S. foreign policy is changed to recognize the need for a multipolar world, it will lead to more wars, and possibly to World War III.” With countries across the globe building new networks of trade, development and diplomacy, independent of Washington and Wall Street, the United States may well have no choice but to finally “adjust sensibly” to the new order.

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

“They’re So Corrupt, It’s Thrilling.” – Lenny Bruce

Carlo Parcelli — Wed, 03 May 2023 22:52:14 +0000

In Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire, Douglas Valentine descends into some of the most sinister aspects of US foreign policy. These include drug running, illegal arms sales, bribery, human and artifact trafficking, far right coups, assassinations, agitprop and disinformation, as well as fiefdoms set up by former CIA and their assets that are rife with slavery, pedophilia and sadistic sex. Pisces Moon creates a mixture of the personal and historical, an intimate Heart of Darkness, that in moments captures the poisonous fog that inhabits Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, a film that Valentine himself castigates in his book. As for the book’s title, I attribute it to happenstance, being an agnostic when it comes to all things metaphysical.

Pisces Moon is couched as a memoir of Valentine’s journey to Southeast Asia in the early 1990s. His book, The Phoenix Program, the best book on the subject I’ve ever read, had caught the eye of The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Valentine was ‘hired’as a consultant to a documentary series the BBC was making about the CIA’s activities in South Vietnam. However, other consultants on the project more sympathetic to the crimes of the CIA such as John Ranelagh, objected to Valentine’s presence and once he arrived in Southeast Asia, he received little support from the feckless BBC; this even though he ‘muled’ ten grand to the BBC’s rep in Vietnam.

Largely left high and dry by the BBC, Valentine links up with locals and ex-pats alike and recalls his adventures including being briefly detained in Vietnam. The memoir/travel framework serves as a contemporary grounding for Valentine’s impeccable research. And his major reason for traveling to Indo-China, to interview three retired CIA station chiefs living in Thailand, Anthony Poshepny, John Shirley and William Young, do produce some revelatory results.

Valentine is a consummate researcher and interviewer with an amazing ability to get criminals to speak openly about their crimes. In fact, as I have observed over the years — confirmed by Valentine — these miscreants even, or especially, at the highest levels of the clandestine world like to brag about their international felonies.

Valentine, to this purpose, reprises Kathy Kadane’s reporting in the New York Times, concerning the slaughter of 900,000 Indonesians after the US mastered coup against Sukarno. Kadane told me personally that two CIA directors, William Colby and Richard Helms, had literally bragged about their parts in the wholesale butchery of nearly a million people. The same with Robert J. Martens, political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, who provided lists of ‘communists’ to the Indonesian military and the CIA’s Deputy Station Chief in Jakarta, Joseph Lazarsky. After a couple or three of scotches and a pretty face, these psychos probably thought this turned Kadane on, as these homicidal maniacs swaggered through their tales of mass murder. Valentine describes Bill Young as being “relatively open and held little back”.

So, in agreement with anthropologist Cora Du Bois, that there are cultural types, Valentine too describes the CIA as being made up of “criminal, sociopathic (often psychopathic), capitalist, ultraconservative, racist, sexist and fascist.” As Lenny Bruce joked apropos the Richard Daley Chicago Democratic Machine, “They’re so corrupt it’s thrilling”.

Valentine’s ability to make murderous thugs confess their crimes along with his deep research makes for an exhilarating brew. And Pisces Moon is no exception. Whether it’s John Muldoon, Richard Secord, Tom Clines or The Blond Ghost, Ted Shackley, Valentine has interviewed them all. And that takes guts.

I’m reminded of the way John Pilger cringed in fear when Duane ‘Dewey’ Clarridge, drunk as a skunk and reeking violence, challenged him over the number of Chileans the US had proxy murdered after the Salvador Allende coup during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. I don’t know if it’s his excellent preparation or because Doug looks so goddamn straight, which makes these black bag felons spill the beans. But Valentine has shown uncommon courage and composure taking them on as well as a detailed knowledge which demonstrates to them he is a serious interlocutor and not another media hack.

And as a result, Valentine in Pisces Moon moves seamlessly from facts culled from his interviews to his deep research into the background, the historical context where the new information fits in like pieces of a historically credible conspiratorial puzzle. As he states on page 142 of Pisces Moon, “My visits to Udon, Chiang Mai, Phuket and Bangkok provide me now with a means to chart the extent of CIA operations and drug trafficking in Southeast Asia. What follows is a summary of the origins of that apparatus, which will help put my interviews with Poshepny, Young and Shirley in perspective.” Then follows one of many historical accounts too rich in detail and source material to reprise here.

For me, the headlong plunge into the historical data is the most exciting part of this excellent book. And for anyone familiar with the material, Pisces Moon is an essential update. All the old perps are here from Vang Pao to Bill Casey, Lucien Conein to Paul Hellilwell, Ed Lansdale to Donald Gregg, Frank Nugen to Michael Hand, George White to Sidney Gottlieb etc. But as Valentine brilliantly demonstrates, the devil is in the details and the details in their own unique sociopathic way are exhilarating. Nobody writes more vivid, in your face historical reportage than Valentine.

For example, here’s bit of Valentine on the Hmong tribesmen and Vang Pao:

CIA case officers were also busy recruiting hilltribe chiefs with no loyalty to the indigenous lowland Laotians. Vang Pao, military commander of the Hmong tribe that had migrated from China in the 18^th century and settle on mountain tops in northeast Laos, was by far the most important. Not only were the Hmong outsiders, but Pao had proved himself as a soldier while fighting for the French at Dien Bien Phu, where the French made there last stand before turning Vietnam over to the Vietnamese in 1954. Located just inside Vietnam some 250 winding miles north to Luang Prabang, Dien Bien Phu was important for having been the center of the French opium trade since 1841. Notably, the French had relied on the Hmong in the surrounding mountains for their opium supply, not to the lowland White Thais who had inhabited the region for over a thousand years.

Or this corruption titbit about Deputy Director of the OSS in China, Willis Bird and Director of OSS ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan:

Central in the CIA’s underworld was Willis Bird, who surfaced after the war [WWII] in Manila where, on behalf of outgoing OSS Director William Donovan, he managed the disposal of military surplus worth hundreds of millions of dollars. As OSS officer Oliver Caldwell observed, ‘It became wise for the colonel [e.g. Bird] to leave the Philippines without stopping over in Washington. The last I heard of him, he was living in Thailand with a bevy of beautiful Thai girls.’

There has been much excellent detailed reporting on the connection between the CIA and the international drug trade from Alfred J. McCoy’s groundbreaking Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, to Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair’s Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press; to Peter Dale Scott’s Cocaine Politics and most recently Aaron Good’s primer for the grandchildren, American Exception: Empire & the Deep State.

All of Valentine’s books including Pisces Moon abide in the pantheon of works on this most crucial topic. And all of these works expose the rot of American imperialism and its clandestine services, which, on the whole, helps explain America’s current decline. The US Evil Empire is on the wane and no doubt this is in large part a result of the institutionalized murder, theft and perfidy that are at the heart of US foreign policy. With the rise of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its commitment to peaceful development, the international community has caught on to such US militarily destabilizing efforts like Africom.

But this decline is, also, in no small part due to the efforts of courageous historians like Douglas Valentine and books like Pisces Moon. On page 213 of Pisces Moon, Valentine quotes William Burroughs calling the present collapse of US hegemony, “the backlash and bad karma of empire”.

In 1584, in the age of Elizabethan piracy and Spanish conquest, Giordano Bruno in his La Cena de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper, 1584) trumps Burroughs remark by 400 years. Bruno prophecies the future decline of the West in terms of the Age of Discovery and European Imperialism:

The helmsmen of explorations have discovered how to disturb the peace of others, to profane the guardian spirits of their countries, to mix what prudent nature has separated, to redouble men’s desires by commerce, to add the vices of one people to those of the other, to propagate new follies by force and set up unheard-of lunacies where they did not exist before, and finally to give out the stronger as the wiser. They have shown men new ways, new instruments, and new arts by which to tyrannize over and assassinate one another. Thanks to such deeds, a time will come when other peoples, having learned from the injuries they suffered, will know how and be able, as circumstances change, to pay back to us, in similar forms or worse ones, the consequences of these pernicious inventions.

Bad ‘karma’ indeed. And Douglas Valentine is one of our best chroniclers of this grand ‘karmic’ collapse. Pisces Moon gives ample context to the US’s moral, ethical and material tumble. It is an essential read.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Carlo Parcelli.

Hunger Profiteers, Granny Killers, and Skin-Deep Morality

Colin Todhunter — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 13:38:04 +0000

Today, a fifth (278 million) of the African population are undernourished, and 55 million of that continent’s children under the age of five are stunted due to severe malnutrition.

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.

Penny Wong’s World View: AUKUS All the Way

Binoy Kampmark — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 03:26:38 +0000

If anyone was expecting a new tilt, a shine of novelty, a flash of independence from Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s address to the National Press Club on April 17, they were bound to be disappointed. The anti-China hawks, talons polished, got their fill. The US State Department would not be disturbed. The Pentagon could rest easy. The toadyish musings of the Canberra establishment would continue to circulate in reliable staleness.

In reading (and hearing) Wong’s speech, one must always assume the opposite, or something close to it. Whatever is said about strategic balance, don’t believe a word of it; such views are always uttered in the shadow of US power. From that vantage point, Occam’s Razor becomes a delicious blessing: nothing said by any Australian official in foreign policy should ever be taken as independently relevant. Best gaze across the Pacific for confirmation.

In Wong’s address, the ill-dressed cliché waltzes with the scantily clad platitude. “When Australians look out to the world, we see ourselves reflected in it – just as the world can see itself reflected in us.” (World, whatever you are, do tell.)

The basis for this strained nonsense is, at least, promising. Variety can, paradoxically, generate common ground. “This is a powerful natural asset for building alignment, for articulating our determination to see the interests of all the world’s peoples upheld, alongside our own.” Mightily aspirational, is Wong here, though such language seems pinched from the Non-Aligned Movement of the Cold War, one that Australia, US policing deputy of the Asia-Pacific, was never a part off. No informed listener would assume otherwise.

Like a lecture losing steam early, she finally gets to the point of her address: “how we avert war and maintain peace – and more than that, how we shape a region that reflects our national interests and our shared regional interests.” It does not take long to realise what this entails: talk about “rules, standards and norms – where a larger country does not determine the fate of the smaller country, where each country can pursue its own aspirations, its own prosperity.”

That the United States has determined the fate of Australia since the Second World War, manipulating, interfering and guiding its politics and its policies, makes this statement risible, but no less significant. We are on bullying terrain, and Wong is trying to pick the most preferable bully.

She can’t quite put it in those terms, so speaks about “the regional balance of power” instead, with Australia performing the role of handmaiden. She dons the sage’s hat, consumes the shaman’s herbal potion, insisting that commentators and strategists have gotten it wrong to talk about “great powers competing for primacy. They love a binary. And the appeal of a binary is obvious. Simple, clear choices. Black and white.”

It takes one, obviously, to know another, and Senator Wong, along with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, have shown little resistance to the very binary concept they supposedly repudiate. Far from opposing it, we might even go so far as to see their seduction by US power as a move towards the unitary: there is only one choice for the Canberra cocktail set.

Much of the speech seems trapped in this register. It rejects the “prism of great power.” It abhors the nature of great powers scrapping and squawking over territories. And yet, Wong is keen to point the finger to one great power’s behaviour: unstainable lending, political interference, disinformation, reshaping international rules and standards.

Finally, the dastardly feline is out of the bag – and it is not the United States. “China continues to modernise its military at a pace and scale not seen in the world for nearly a century with little transparency or assurance about its strategic intent.”

Oh, Penny, if only you could understand the actual premise of AUKUS and the US modernising strategy, given that Washington’s defence budget exceeds those of the next nine powers combined. Yes, you do say that a conflict over Taiwan “would be catastrophic for all”, but there is nothing to say what will restrain you, or your colleagues, from committing Australia to such a conflict. Given that the Albanese government has turned up its nose at war powers reform that would have given Parliament a greater say in committing national suicide, confidence can hardly be brimming.

The assessment of Australia’s own role in international relations is not just off the mark but off the reservation. “We deploy our own statecraft toward shaping a region that is open, stable and prosperous. A predictable region, operated by agreed rules, standards and laws. Where no country dominates, and no country is dominated. A region where sovereignty is respected, and all countries benefit from a strategic equilibrium.”

To this, one is reminded of the remarks of former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, who describes Wong’s alms-for-the-poor routine as, “Running around the Pacific Islands with a lei around your neck handing out money”. This could hardly count as foreign policy. “It’s a consular task. Foreign policy is what you do with the great powers: what you do with China, what you do with the United States.”

Much of the speech inhabits the realm of the speculative. Wong is delusionary in assuming that regional states will accept Australia’s observance of the Treaty of Rarotonga, whatever the stance taken by the AUKUS pact members. Otherwise known as the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, Wong has revealed Australia’s ambivalence in observing its provisions. For one, she is on record as accepting the position that the US need not confirm whether nuclear-capable assets visiting Australia have nuclear weapons. She merely says that Washington “confirmed that the nuclear-powered submarines visiting Australia on rotation will be conventionally-armed.”

This hardly squares with the assessments of her own minions in the Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs, who have confirmed that Australia will accept the deployment of nuclear weapons on its soil as long as they are not stationed.

The last word should be left to that great critic of the Albanese tilt towards Washington’s military-industrial pathology. “Wong,” observed Keating, “went on to eschew ‘black and white’ binary choices but then proceeded to make a choice herself – extolling the virtues of the United States, of it remaining ‘the central power’ – of ‘balancing the region’, while disparaging China as ‘intent on being China’, going on to say ‘countries don’t want to live in closed, hierarchical region, where rules are dictated by a single major power to suit its own interests’. Nothing too subtle about that.” The Washington establishment will be delighted.

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

Paul Bell with Jeremy Vine | Channel 5 | 18 April 2023 | Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 12:56:45 +0000

This content originally appeared on Just Stop Oil and was authored by Just Stop Oil.

Remembering Paul Robeson: ‘I Had No Alternative’

Paul Von Blum — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:21:38 +0000

Despite this well-earned acclaim, Paul Robeson has seemingly faded into obscurity. 125 years after his birth, the civil rights titan remains a role model for battling racism and fascism.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Paul Von Blum.

‘A Win for the History Books’: Brandon Johnson Defeats School Privatizer in Chicago

Jake Johnson — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 10:29:47 +0000

Progressive Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson defeated conservative Democrat and school privatizer Paul Vallas in Chicago's mayoral runoff on Tuesday, a victory he called a "gateway to a new future" for the nation's third-largest city.

"Tonight is the beginning of a Chicago that truly invests in all of its people," Johnson said in his victory speech, pledging to help usher in "a city that actually respects the workers who keep it running" and one "where public schools have the resources to meet the needs of every child."

Education policy quickly emerged as a central issue in the contest between Johnson and Vallas, which the progressive won with just over 51% of the vote.

A former public school teacher and longtime union organizer, Johnson vowed to prioritize investments in public education and oppose charter expansions—an agenda that couldn't have contrasted more sharply with that of Vallas, the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools and an ardent supporter of school privatization.

Vallas, whose campaign was backed by Republican donors and business interests, aggressively pursued school privatization schemes during his tenure as the head of school districts in Chicago, New Orleans, and Philadelphia—a record that Johnson's campaign spotlighted in an ad that aired this week as well as in debates ahead of Tuesday's vote.

"My opponent talks about school closures," Johnson said during one debate. "Well, he set up the market for schools to be closed. He got so good at it, he went around the country doing it."

Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said in a statement late Tuesday that the Chicago runoff marks "a win for the history books."

"Brandon Johnson just defeated a deluge of far-right money and misinformation thanks to people power and his positive vision for a safe and thriving Chicago," Mitchell added. "Now comes the hard work of building a Chicago for the many, with strong schools, good jobs, and safe communities," Mitchell added. "We look forward to working with Brandon and the new class of Working Families alder members to reopen mental health clinics, pass universal childcare, and implement a local Green New Deal."

\u201cTonight, we have shown the world the power of hope, the strength of organizing, and the might of our collective voice.\n\nTomorrow, the real work begins. We will build a safer, stronger Chicago that reflects the hopes and dreams of every one of us \u2014 together.\u201d
— Brandon Johnson (@Brandon Johnson) 1680667897

In contrast to Vallas, whose campaign was also backed by a super PAC with close ties to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the bulk of Johnson's support came from unions such as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).

"Make no mistake about it," Johnson said in his victory speech, "Chicago is a union town."

Stacy Davis Gates, president of the CTU, said in a statement that "today, Chicago has spoken."

"Chicago has said yes to hope; yes to investment in people; yes to housing the unhoused, and yes to supporting young people with fully-funded schools," said Gates. "It is a new day in our city."

AFT President Randi Weingarten called Johnson's win "a transformational moment" that "sends a message that efforts to exploit anxiety will not work in the face of a multiracial, multiethnic, multigenerational working-class movement standing together as one."

Johnson's upset win Tuesday capped off a remarkable rise for a progressive lawmaker who was polling at just over 3% in December. At that time, according to one survey, Vallas was polling at 19%.

In January, Chicago's outgoing mayor, Lori Lightfoot, brushed aside the CTU's endorsement of Johnson, saying: "Brandon Johnson isn't going to be the mayor of this city."

During his remarks Tuesday night, Johnson gave a nod toward those who dismissed his chances.

"They said this would never happen," he told a crowd of supporters. "If they didn't know, now they know."

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

Senate Leaves 2001 AUMF For Secret Wars In Force, Rejects Paul and Hawley Proposals.

John V. Walsh — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 04:37:52 +0000

On March 29, the Senate voted to repeal two Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, (AUMF’s), one passed in 1991 and another in 2002. The repeal now goes to the House. But those Authorizations are irrelevant to the present; they apply only to the Iraq war. But a third AUMF, passed in 2001, was More

The post Senate Leaves 2001 AUMF For Secret Wars In Force, Rejects Paul and Hawley Proposals. appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John V. Walsh.

Is Chicago Mayoral Candidate Paul Vallas a Republican?

Akela Lacy — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 18:04:32 +0000

When Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot lost her reelection bid in the first round of voting in February, onlookers prepared for the end of an era. Lightfoot was close to the police and the city’s moderate Democratic political establishment, so when she lost, progressives in Chicago saw an opening to elect a candidate who would advocate for the city’s public schools and address economic inequality, police brutality, and public safety.

Former Chicago Public Schools teacher and Chicago Teachers Union organizer Brandon Johnson came in second place in the February election and will face former Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Paul Vallas in a runoff election on Tuesday.

Vallas has positioned himself as a moderate Democrat, but his campaign support from several major Republican donors, a recent endorsement from the Chicago Republican Party, and exploration of a Republican campaign in 2009 have raised questions about his political leanings. Vallas and his supporters, including major donors to President Donald Trump, as well as Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, are outspending Johnson 2-to-1.

“Paul Vallas’s campaign is emboldening and legitimizing far-right extremists in Chicago, including Trump supporters.”

“Paul Vallas has really activated and emboldened what kind of Republican base exists in Chicago,” said Emma Tai, executive director of United Working Families, the Chicago chapter of the Working Families Party, which is backing Johnson. “Paul Vallas’s campaign is emboldening and legitimizing far-right extremists in Chicago, including Trump supporters, including people like John Catanzara” — the head of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police — “who said there would be ‘blood in the streets’ if Johnson was elected.”

Vallas’s campaign spokesperson said he is a lifelong Democrat with support from many Democratic leaders and that he was proud to have support from outside the party.

“Our campaign has drawn support from a broad, diverse coalition from across the ideological spectrum,” campaign spokesperson Philip Swibinski said in a statement to The Intercept. Swibinski cited union and industry support for Vallas’s public safety program. “The truth is that Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson agree on many Democratic values issues, from protecting abortion rights to standing up for the LGBTQ community, but Johnson has mischaracterized Paul’s record in order to distract attention away from his embrace of the defund the police movement and his plan to increase taxes by $800 million.”

Johnson has said he would not “defund” police and supports investing city dollars in a way that actually increases public safety. He has also said he would promote at least 200 detectives to try to solve more crimes. In February remarks to the Chicago Tribune, Vallas said Republicans were donating to his campaign because “crime is out of control.”

The election is nonpartisan, which means that people who vote in Republican primaries can vote for the mayor of a predominantly Democratic city, Tai said. While you can’t win an election in Chicago by counting on support from Republicans alone, Democrats backing Vallas have decided that while they might find the politics of some of Vallas’s supporters distasteful, like DeVos or the Fraternal Order of Police, “they’re nonetheless endorsing and legitimizing Paul Vallas and his agenda.”

“What’s the point of calling yourself a Democrat if you endorse someone who is about as closely aligned as you can be with the Fraternal Order of Police and Trump donors?” Tai said. “It’s a real indictment of both parties that someone like Paul Vallas, who has decimated public education systems across the country and even in other countries like Haiti and Chile, can be seen by the political establishment as a legitimate contender for mayor. And not only a legitimate contender, but better than someone who has dedicated his life to serving working people.”

Though Vallas has distanced himself from the Chicago GOP in this race, he has in the past toyed with the idea of running for office as a Republican and garnered support from the Chicago GOP in past political efforts. In 2009, Vallas publicly stated that he planned to leave the Democratic Party and run as a Republican in the 2010 election for Cook County Board president, though he did not end up running in the race. A spokesperson for Vallas’s campaign said Vallas discussed running for county office as a Republican that year “because he opposed the corrupt political machine that the incumbent ran at the time, but he did not run and he has never changed his party affiliation.”

The Chicago Republican Party voted to endorse Vallas in his 2019 bid for mayor. This cycle, he and the Chicago GOP have distanced themselves from one another in response to ads from Johnson’s campaign claiming that the Chicago GOP had endorsed him.

Vallas has also gotten support this cycle from former Illinois Republican Senate candidate and extremist election denier Darren Bailey, who posted a Facebook Live video, since removed, touting his support for Vallas and warning against electing Johnson. Several major GOP donors have also given to Vallas’s campaign, including people who contributed to Trump and other Republicans across the state, the Chicago Tribune reported last week. A PAC founded by DeVos has spent at least $60,000 on ads backing Vallas, the Chicago Sun-Times reported last week.

Vallas’s top campaign supporters include major Republican donors and Trump supporters. Ronald Gidwitz, who Trump appointed as ambassador to Belgium in 2018, and members of his family have given at least $66,200 to Vallas’s campaign. Republican donors Craig Duchossois and Michael and Rosalind Keiser have given at least $1.6 million so far. Employees of Citadel, the hedge fund run by Republican megadonor and former Trump supporter Ken Griffin, have given at least $812,000 for Vallas’s campaign.

On top of individual support from wealthy donors, super PACs have spent more than $1 million backing Vallas or opposing Johnson, who has no super PAC support. Johnson’s campaign has been endorsed by teachers’ and workers’ unions, including the Chicago Teachers Union and the American Federation of Teachers COPE, as well as United Working Families. Those groups have spent at least $9 million backing his campaign.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

French police beat, obstruct journalists covering pension protests

Committee to Protect Journalists — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 17:03:55 +0000

Berlin, April 4, 2023—French authorities should swiftly and thoroughly investigate recent attacks on journalists covering protests and ensure that police officers responsible for harassing members of the press are held to account, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday.

Demonstrations broke out throughout France on March 16, after the government raised the retirement age by two years, according to multiple news reports. Over the ensuing weeks of protests, police officers have attacked, harassed, or detained multiple journalists, according to news reports and journalists who spoke with CPJ.

“French authorities should conduct a swift, thorough, and transparent investigation into recent police attacks on journalists covering protests and hold those responsible to account,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “Journalists in France must be able to cover protests without fear that they will be beaten with batons, detained without reason, or threatened by law enforcement officers.”

On March 16, in the northwestern city of Rennes, a police officer grabbed Angeline Desdevise, a photojournalist working for photo agency Hans Lucas, and threw her to the ground, according to news reports and Desdevise, who communicated with CPJ via email. Officers also briefly held Desdevise and other journalists at gunpoint, and released her after she repeatedly identified herself as a member of the press.

In Paris, Amar Taoualit, a reporter for privately owned news website Loopsider who was wearing a press vest, was filming police encircle a group of protestors when officers instructed him to move back, according to a video by the outlet and Taoualit, who communicated with CPJ via email. When Taoualit responded that he was a journalist and showed his press card, police sprayed him with tear gas, threatened him with a baton, and pushed him away. Taoualit told CPJ that he was not seriously injured and filed a complaint with the police.

The following evening in Paris, police arrested Chloé Gence, a reporter for the privately owned independent news outlet Le Média TV, and freelance reporter Paul Ricaud, according to multiple news reports, a video published by Turkish news agency Andalou, and a statement by Le Média TV.

During the arrest, police dragged and choked Gence while she shouted that she was a member of the press and could not breathe. Police held Ricaud until March 18 and released Gence on March 19, and did not file any charges against the journalists. Gence posted photos on Twitter showing that she received serious bruising from the incident.

On March 18 in Paris, a police officer used a baton to hit Clément Lanot, a photojournalist working for press agency CL Press, and knock him to the ground, according to the journalist, who posted about the incident on Twitter and communicated with CPJ by email. As he picked his equipment up from the ground, another police officer approached him and mockingly acted like he was going to kick him, Lanot told CPJ, adding that he was not injured and did not plan to report the incident.

As police charged a group of protesters, they knocked Lanot and around a dozen journalists to the ground on March 20 in Paris, according to Lanot and a video he published on Twitter.

Also in Paris on March 20, police detained Raphaël Kessler, a photojournalist working for Hans Lucas, alongside protesters when he was caught between two cordons, according to Kessler, who communicated with CPJ via email. Kessler was carrying his camera and showed police a letter from his agency proving his work as a journalist, but officers said the letter was outdated.

Kessler called his agency and obtained an updated letter, but police detained him for 20 hours before releasing him without charge. He told CPJ that he is preparing to file a collective complaint to the police with other journalists.

On March 21 in Rennes, a police officer held Samuel Clauzier, a photojournalist for local news website Le Poing, at gunpoint and cursed at him, saying the officer did not care “about your press thing,” before letting him go, according to news reports and Clauzier, who spoke to CPJ by messaging app and wrote about the incident on Twitter.

Around 9 p.m. on March 23 in Paris, freelance reporter Paul Boyer was interviewing a protester when a group of around 10 riot police began hitting people with truncheons, including Boyer, who identified himself as a member of the press and held his press card, according to multiple news reports, and Boyer, who tweeted about the incident and spoke to CPJ by phone. Police hit him once on the back of the head, twice in the face, and several times on the left hand as he covered his head. He received medical treatment at a hospital for a head wound and hand fracture and was deemed unable to work for 14 days due to his injuries. Boyer filed a complaint with the police online but had not heard back as of April 4, he said.

Separately, in the southern city of Montpellier, police officers pointed their guns at Clauzier and freelance reporter Ricardo Parreira while the pair walked backward, holding their cameras and yelling that they were members of the press, before letting them go, according to news reports, reports from Le Poing, Twitter videos posted by Clauzier.

On March 28, in the eastern city of Besançon, police repeatedly pushed Toufik-de-Planoise, a reporter with privately owned local outlets Média 25 and Radio Bip who was wearing a press helmet and vest, as he documented officers dispersing a protest, according to a Twitter video published by his colleague Emma Audrey, who also spoke to CPJ via messaging app. Audrey said de-Planoise filed a complaint with the police.

CPJ’s email to the press department of the French Ministry of Interior, which oversees the police, did not receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Ahead of Chicago Runoff, New Ad Spotlights ‘Trail of Destruction’ Left by Paul Vallas

Jake Johnson — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 18:51:13 +0000

With Chicago's closely watched mayoral runoff just two days away, the campaign of progressive Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson debuted an ad on Sunday featuring expert and parent testimony on conservative candidate Paul Vallas' education record, including his stints managing school districts in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.

The picture they painted was not flattering. One New Orleans parent, identified as Kevin G., said that "Paul Vallas has left a trail of destruction, everywhere he goes."

"We've literally seen this man destroy public education, sadly for Black and Brown children," he added.

Kendra Brooks, a Philadelphia parent and city councilmember, offered a similarly scathing assessment during her appearance in the ad, which the Johnson campaign said will air on broadcast and cable across Chicago until Tuesday's runoff.

"I think folks in Chicago should look at the destruction that he has left behind," said Brooks. "Money was being spent carelessly. Millions of dollars are missing, at the loss of Black and Brown communities."

Watch the two-minute spot:

[embedded content]

Vallas' is an ardent school privatization advocate who served as CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 1995 to 2001 before moving on to head the School District of Philadelphia and the Recovery School District of Louisiana.

As The TRiiBE's Jim Daley wrote in a detailed examination of Vallas' record:

In each city, he opened charter schools, promoted military schools, and expanded standardized testing and zero-tolerance disciplinary policies. He also ran school districts in Haiti and Chile between 2010 and 2012...
Under Vallas' tenure, Philadelphia underwent what was then the largest privatization of a public school system anywhere in the country. He opened 15 new charter schools over the protests of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, who called for a moratorium on new charters in 2006.

In New Orleans, Daley continued, Vallas "immediately set to work opening more charter schools, and the trend continued after he left."

"New Orleans is now the only city in America with a school district that is entirely made up of charters," Daley noted, "something Vallas also took credit for: he wrote that he 'implemented reforms that created the nation's first 100% parental choice district, with all schools public, non-selective, and nonprofit.'"

Reshansa W., a New Orleans parent and education policy expert featured in Johnson's new ad, said that "everything about education in New Orleans is suffering" due to Vallas' reforms.

"It decimated our middle class," Reshansa added. "He wasn't right for New Orleans. He wasn't right for Philly. He will not be right for Chicago."

\u201cPaul Vallas has spent weeks lying about his "success" in cities like Philadelphia and New Orleans.\n\nBut those who suffered under his policies tell a much different story:\n\n"We have literally seen this man destroy public education, sadly, for Black and Brown children."\u201d
— Brandon Johnson (@Brandon Johnson) 1680447617

The contrasts between Vallas and Johnson on education policy have become central to the April 4 contest—which, if polling is any guide, is set to be razor-close.

Despite mounting criticism of his record, Vallas has pledged to expand charter schools if elected mayor—a promise that may help explain why a super PAC with ties to school privatization zealot Betsy DeVos recently spent $60,000 in support of his campaign.

Vallas' campaign is also backed by rich investors—a class he catered to during his tenure as CEO of Chicago Public Schools.

Johnson, a former public school teacher and organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union, has pledged to prioritize strengthening Chicago's public schools, which have long been badly underfunded.

ChalkBeat Chicagoreported late last month that "if voters pick Johnson, his election would be the crowning achievement in a decade-long grassroots battle waged by the Chicago Teachers Union against mayoral control and many of the controversial policies that came with it, like school closures and charter expansion."

"Johnson opposes adding charter schools and closing small district schools, of which Chicago has a growing number," the outlet noted. "Johnson has talked about getting state lawmakers to ramp up funding increases to the state’s funding formula so Chicago and all districts get to so-called 'adequate funding' more quickly. He—and district officials—have also suggested pushing the state to kick in more for Chicago teachers' pensions, which have been underfunded since the mid- to late-2000s."

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

‘They Have a Lot of Money… We Have the People’: Sanders Rallies for Brandon Johnson in Chicago

Jake Johnson — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 10:56:34 +0000

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders stumped for progressive Chicago mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson late Thursday, imploring the city's voters to turn out in record numbers to overcome what he described as the powerful establishment forces backing conservative Democrat Paul Vallas.

"Our job on Tuesday is to make sure we have the largest voter turnout this city has ever seen," Sanders (I-Vt.) told the crowd gathered at the University of Illinois Chicago days ahead of the April 4 runoff. "This is going to be a close election, and the deciding factor will be voter turnout."

A Northwestern University poll released earlier this week showed the race is in a dead heat, with Johnson and Vallas each receiving 44% support and 12% of voters still undecided.

"Brandon's opponent and the other side—they have a lot of money," the Vermont senator said Thursday. "That's what always happens when you take on the establishment. They have the money. They've got a lot of power. But you know what we have? We have the people."

The rally came after new financial disclosures showed that a super PAC with close connections to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos recently spent nearly $60,000 on digital media supporting Vallas, the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools who has worked to privatize education in his home city as well as New Orleans and Philadelphia.

"The fundamental issue, the deep down issue, is: Which side are you on?" Sanders said Thursday night. "Are you on the side of working people, or are you on the side of the speculators and billionaires? And I know which side Brandon is on."

While Sanders didn't explicitly mention the DeVos-tied super PAC's support for Vallas' campaign during Thursday's rally, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten did, saying it "tells you everything you need to know about" Vallas.

In a statement earlier Thursday, Weingarten said that "Paul Vallas’ goal of defunding public schools and dividing parents against teachers makes him precisely the kind of candidate who would appeal to a fellow wrecker like Betsy DeVos—a person who's devoted her life to ending public education as we know it."

"From Chicago to Philadelphia to New Orleans," Weingarten added, "Vallas waged a craven campaign to voucherize and pauperize, just like DeVos tried—and failed—to do when she served as Donald Trump's education secretary."

Watch Thursday's rally:

[embedded content]

Johnson, a longtime educator and organizer, also called attention to the Illinois Federation for Children PAC's spending on the race during a candidate forum late Thursday.

"Betsy DeVos has inserted herself and her resources into my opponent's coffers," Johnson said.

Vallas countered that he has "never had any conversations or contacts with Betsy DeVos."

"Our campaign has not received any money from her," Vallas said, citing the often vanishingly thin barrier separating so-called "independent expenditures" by super PACs and direct donations to political campaigns.

In addition to the DeVos-connected spending, Vallas has also received financial support from "conservative contributors and prominent Republicans," the Chicago Tribunereported earlier this month.

"Vallas' largest contributor was golf course developer Michael Keiser, who has given him $700,000," the Tribune noted. "Keiser previously contributed $11,200 to former President Donald Trump, a Republican. Vallas has taken money from John Canning, a Chicago private equity executive who has given to many politicians locally but also national Republicans, and Noel Moore, who has given to Trump and Texas Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz."

Johnson's biggest contributors, by contrast, have been unions representing teachers and service workers.

"When you take dollars from Trump supporters and try to cast yourself as a part of the progressive movement, man—sit down,” Johnson said at Thursday night's rally.

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

DeVos-Tied PAC Spends $60,000 in Support of Chicago School Privatizer Paul Vallas

Jake Johnson — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 15:37:47 +0000

A super PAC with close ties to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos—one of the nation's most fervent supporters of school privatization—has taken an interest in Chicago's April 4 mayoral runoff, spending nearly $60,000 in support of notorious school privatizer Paul Vallas as the contest heads into its final stretch.

Vallas, a right-wing Democrat who previously served as the head of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), is taking on Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, a longtime educator and public school champion whose campaign has been endorsed by prominent national progressives including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

The Illinois Federation for Children PAC, which is bankrolled by the DeVos-backed American Federation for Children Action Fund, recently spent $59,385 on digital media supporting Vallas, according to new campaign finance disclosures.

The Illinois super PAC's bare-bones website states that "families should have the choice to enroll their children in the best school to meet their needs, whether it’s a district-assigned public school, homeschool, public charter, private, virtual, or blended-learning school," adding that "this election cycle will be one of the most important in the history of Illinois' school choice movement."

The group has received $465,000 from the American Federation for Children Action Fund, including a recent donation of $65,000. (The American Federation for Children Action Fund is an affiliate of the DeVos-founded American Federation for Children.)

Spotlighting the super PAC's outlay in Chicago's mayoral race, the advocacy group Illinois Families for Public Schools (IFPS) said in a statement that while "DeVos has not endorsed Vallas, Vallas' education plans for Chicago's school system are directly aligned with the DeVos agenda of school privatization, one she supported as secretary of education and promotes through her national network of advocacy organizations and PACs: defunding and dismantling public school systems and redirecting public funds via programs like vouchers to private schools."

"Vallas voices his support for 'a reconstituted system in which parents get to direct the per-pupil public dollars to the school (or education model) of their choosing'... The education platform on Vallas' website calls for 'dismantling the central administration' of CPS," the group continued. "These are exactly the policy goals that DeVos and American Federation for Children are advocating for: 'fund students not systems' and 'dollars must follow students.'"

"As secretary of education, DeVos' education policies were harmful to public schools on a national scale," IFPS added. "Chicago voters should know that DeVos supports Vallas' candidacy, and that there is no daylight between DeVos and Vallas' education agendas."

Johnson, by contrast, has pledged to strengthen Chicago's underfunded public schools. The progressive candidate's top donors are the Chicago Teachers Union PAC and the American Federation of Teachers' Committee on Political Education.

\u201cAnd just like that...\n\nWe find out the truth about #PaulVallas. \n\nToday, Vallas received an almost $60,000 contribution from Trump's former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's Super PAC. \n\nDon't believe the hype, a "lifelong Democrat" would never take $$ from DeVos.\u201d
— Chicago Teachers Union (@Chicago Teachers Union) 1680135527

The Illinois Federation for Children PAC's intervention in Chicago's mayoral race is part of a broader assault on public education financed in part by DeVos, a billionaire who has used her fortune to erode public education in her home state of Michigan and nationwide.

NBC Newsreported Thursday that DeVos' American Federation for Children "poured about $9 million into state elections last year, backing nearly 200 candidates."

"Now, some of those candidates are pushing a wave of legislation boosting DeVos' longtime goal: subsidizing private schools with public dollars," the outlet continued. "Using at least $2.5 million from DeVos and her husband, the American Federation for Children has played a pivotal role in getting what supporters call 'school choice' policies passed into law in at least three states and introduced in several more."

The American Federation for Children's board includes infamous political figures such as former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), both of whom are outspoken supporters of school privatization.

Lieberman—a former Democrat-turned-Independent who is widely reviled by progressives for his role in tanking the prospects of a public option in healthcare more than a decade ago—introduced DeVos at her Senate confirmation hearing in 2017, praising the Trump nominee as a "purpose-driven team builder."

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

Traditional chiefs still have strong place in Fiji, says linguist

APR editor — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 23:48:15 +0000

By Arieta Vakasukawaqa in Suva

The installation of the Turaga Bale na Vunivalu Na Tui Kaba, Ratu Epenisa Cakobau, clearly indicates that Fiji’s traditional chiefly system still has a strong footing and chiefs still command respect among the country’s citizens.

This is the view of Dr Paul Geraghty, the University of the South Pacific’s associate professor of linguistics.

Dr Geraghty said even though the previous government had downplayed the role of chiefs, the population at large did not belittle their roles in society.

“Although Ratu Epenisa has been the de facto Vunivalu for a number of years, this confirmation by the vanua is important not only for ethnic Fijians, but also as the late National Federation Party leader, Jai Ram Reddy, pointed out to the Bose Levu Vakaturaga, for all races for whom Fiji is home,” he said.

“It is confirmation that the traditional chiefly system, though viewed by some as anachronistic, still has a place in Fiji society, and that chiefs still command respect among all citizens of Fiji.”

Dr Geraghty explained that the recent traditional installation was also met with approval by most segments of society and this was a solemn occasion worth celebrating.

He said given that those who had opposed Ratu Epenisa had passed on, he was the oldest available candidate and one who knew Bau and its people well.

On the chiefly island of Bau, the chief herald, Ratu Aisea Jack Komaitai said the first Great Council of Chiefs (GCC) meeting would be held on the island on May 24-25.

Meanwhile, iTaukei Affairs Minister Ifereimi Vasu said the installation of Ratu Epenisa was significant to the reinstatement of the GCC.

Arieta Vakasukawaqa is a Fiji Times reporter. Additional reporting by Elena Vucukula. Republished with permission.

‘I kept my promise’

Watching the pomp and pageantry of the installation of the Turaga Bale na Vunivalu, na Tui Kaba on Friday took me back some 42 years. pic.twitter.com/1jWm7nbih4

— Sitiveni Rabuka (@slrabuka) March 12, 2023

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

The Cell Phone Is a Pair of Red High Heels

Edward Curtin — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 15:34:36 +0000

It is comical how easily one can be ignored for pointing out that new technology is dangerous and fetishistic. So-called “smart” cell phones are a prime example. For years I have been pointing out their dangers on many levels. To say most people are devoted to them is an understatement. Maybe it is an exaggeration to say they revere them, but if asked, they will say they couldn’t live without them. It’s sort of like saying I don’t revere my partner but couldn’t live without her or him. Ah love!

But what’s love got to do with it? Love and romance are out of date. Sex is a just a quick fill-in when there’s a break in the technological action. Creative and erotic energy is pissed away on trivia. Being lost and confused and having no time is in. But only the latter can be admitted.

Busy busy busy! Beep beep beep as the eyes go down to the screens. Thumbs athumbing or voices talking to the gadgets, while the busy beavers forget who is under whose thumbs.

Eros is replaced by Chaos while Aphrodite weeps in the woods, but no one hears.

Pass the remote. The silence stings.

We are children of Greece but we forget its truths in our time of digital dementia, if we ever knew them. Beauty is banished for ugliness and technology is worshipped as a god. Art has become meaningless unless it’s falsely connected to celebrities and entertainment culture. There are no limits; everything is permitted. Hubris reigns. Even the thought that Digital IDs, Central Bank Digital Currencies, and vaccination passports are on the agenda does not dissuade the lovers. It’s a game of control abetted by radical stupidity, and it is not a mistake, as Dylan, contrary to his public posturing and corporate imaging, lets his artist’s soul sing:

There are no mistakes in life some people say
It is true sometimes you can see it that way
But people don’t live or die, people just float

Floating in a void of gibberish and double-talk, heads barely above the water, alienated from reality while fixated on the Spectacle, while sometimes when panicky looking for a life preserver but never to the right source, this is where technology and capitalism have taken us. On any issue – the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, the facts about the U. S. proxy-war against Russia in Ukraine, Covid-19, the economy, etc. – the mainstream media daily pumps out contradictory stories to confuse the public whose attention span has been reduced to a scrolling few seconds. Sustained attention and the ability to dissect the endless propaganda is a thing of the past and receding faster than the computer jargon of milliseconds and nanoseconds. Planned chaos is the proper name for the daily news reports.

Fetishism, in all its forms, rules.

What else is the cell phone but a pair of red high heels?

What else are all those phone photos millions are constantly taking as they antique reality to store in their mausoleums of loss?

What about the constant messaging, the being in touch that never touches?

Despite the fact that everything digital is extremely ephemeral, the smart phone itself seems god-like, a way to transcend reality while entering it. “My phone is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.”

A toehold on “reality.” A machine in hand that saves nine – million abstractions. And prevents boredom from overwhelming minds intent on floating, because, as Walter Benjamin wrote in “The Storyteller”: “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.” Vibrating and dinging phones will suffice to disturb that dream bird of creative silence that is the only antidote to floating in the void of noise.

But fetishes come in many forms because the need for false gods is so attractive. To think you have a way to control reality is addictive.

I recently saw an article about an auction sale at Sotheby’s in New York of the movie stars Paul Newman’s and Joanne Woodward’s personal effects. These include Woodward’s (who is still alive and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease) wedding ring and dress, the shackles Newman wore in the film Cool Hand Luke, a suit from his racing car days, etc. – over three hundred items in all. According to a Sotheby spokesperson, the Newman-Woodward family, who will receive the proceeds, are doing this to “continue telling the stories of their parents.” Don’t laugh. The article mentions that one of Paul’s watches sold at auction a few years ago for $17.8 million dollars and another for $5.4 million.

So I ask: what are the wealthy purchasers of these objects really buying? And the answer is quite obvious. They are buying fetishes or transference objects that they think will grant them a piece of the immortal stars’ magic. They are buying idols, Oscars, illusions to worship and to touch in place of reality. Ways to enter the cultural hero system.

Ernest Becker put it this way in The Denial of Death: “The fetish object represents the magical means for transforming animality into something transcendent and thereby assuring a liberation of the personality from the standard bland and earthbound flesh.” If one can possess a piece of the demi-god’s power – an autograph, a watch, a ring – one will somehow live forever. It’s not about “trusting the science” but about believing in the magic.

Newman’s daughters who have pushed this sale, as well as a new documentary, The Last Movie Stars, and the memoir Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man – compiled from their father’s transcripts of conversations with his friend, Stewart Stern, over thirty years ago – have done something supremely ironic. On one hand, they are selling their father’s and mother’s memorabilia, allegedly to tell their stories, through things that are fetishes for those desperate for holy secular relics, while at the same time publishing a book in which Paul honestly knocks himself off the pedestal and says he was always an insecure guy, numbed by his childhood and the false face Hollywood created for him. In other words, an ordinary man with talent who was very successful in Hollywood’s dream factory, where illusions are the norm.

“I was my mother’s Pinocchio, the one that went wrong,” he tells us right away, leading us to the revelations of his human, all-too-human reality. His was a life of facades and dead emotions, false faces, and his struggles to become who he really was. He tells us he wasn’t his film roles, not Hud or Brick or Fast Eddie or Cool Hand Luke, but he wasn’t really the guy playing them either. He was a double enigma, an actor playing an actor. He says:

I’ve always had a sense of being an observer of my own life…. I have a sense of watching something, but not of living something. It’s like looking at a photograph that’s out of focus …. It’s spacey; I guess I always feel spaced out.

His courageous honesty reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche’s final work, Ecce Home (Behold the Man), not because Paul waxes philosophical but because he’s brutally honest. If a movie star’s truths strike you as not comparable to those of a great philosopher, I would suggest considering that Nietzsche’s key concern was the theater and how we are all actors, a few genuine and most false. In The Twilight of the Idols he asked, “Are you genuine? Or merely an actor? A representative? Or that which is represented? In the end, perhaps you are merely a copy of an actor.”

Paul Newman lived for 17 years after speaking to his friend Stewart Stern. I like to think those conversations helped him break through to becoming who he really was. From what I know of the man, he was generous to a fault and did much to ease others’ pains, especially to bring joy to children with cancer. I think he changed. While his things that are on the auction block now serve as illusionary fetishes for those looking for crutches, I believe he finally threw away the mental crutches he used when playing Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Perhaps the wooden ones will be in the auction and some desperado will bid on them.

We know that with the planned chaos being used to shock people into submission through fear, there has been a drastic rise in depression and mental distress of all kinds, especially since the Covid-19 propaganda rollout with its lockdowns and deadly jabs. The magic anti-depression pellets dispensed for decades by the criminal pharmaceutical cartels can not begin to contain this sense of helplessness that continues to spread. They too are fetishes and ways to divert people’s attention from the social and spiritual sources of their anguish.

There is something very chilling in the way the reality of flesh and blood humans living in a natural world has been replaced by all types of fetishes – drugs, objects, celebrities, machines, etc. While all are connected, the cell phone is key because of its growing centrality to the elites’ push for a digitized world. No matter how many articles and news reports about Artificial Intelligence (AI) that appear, it is all just a gloss on a long-developing problem that goes back many years – machine worship.

“Smart” cell phones are the current apotheotic control mechanism promoted as liberation. They are a form of slavery promoted by the World Economic Forum, their bosses, and their minions. As Alastair Crooke puts it, “It is that a majority of the people are so numbed and passive – and so in lockstep – as the state inches them through a series of repeating emergencies towards a new kind of authoritarianism, that they don’t fuss greatly, or even notice much.” Freedom is slavery.

Here is Ernest Becker again:

Boss [Medard Boss, Swiss psychanalyst and psychiatrist] says that the terrible guilt feelings of the depressed person are existential, that is, they represent failure to live one’s own life, to fulfill one’s own potential because of the twisting and turning to be ‘good’ in the eyes of the other. The other calls the tune to one’s eligibility for immortality, and so the other takes up one’s unlived life. . . . In short, even if one is a very guilty hero he is at least a hero in the same hero-system [personal and cultural]. The depressed person uses guilt to hold onto his objects and to keep his situation unchanged. Otherwise he would have to analyze it or be able to move out of it and transcend it…. Better guilt and self-punishment when you cannot punish the other – when you cannot even dare to accuse him [the social system], as he represents the immortality ideology with which you have identified. If your god is discredited, you yourself die; the evil must be in yourself and not in your god, so that you may live.

I wonder if I should bid on the shackles Paul Newman wore as the prisoner in Cool Hand Luke. They are probably the cheapest item on the auction menu. I think they will remind me that the Captain was wrong when he said to Luke, “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

“Where are you calling from,” she asked. “My cell,” he said.

“Of course,” she answered.

The post The Cell Phone Is a Pair of Red High Heels first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

Rejecting Lightfoot, Chicago Picks Progressive to Face School Privatizer in Mayoral Runoff

Jake Johnson — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 11:47:37 +0000

Chicago voters rejected Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot's bid for a second term on Tuesday, elevating progressive Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson to face conservative candidate Paul Vallas—an ardent school privatization advocate—in an April 4 runoff.

Johnson, a longtime educator and organizer, advanced to the runoff with roughly 20% of the vote after a grassroots campaign centered on expanding resources for Chicago's public schools and taxing the rich to boost affordable housing, public transportation, healthcare, and other priorities.

"Today, we are on the verge of creating a new Chicago," Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said in a statement applauding Johnson's campaign. "It's a Chicago for the many, not the few—a city where the unhoused can access affordable and sustainable housing, where our public schools are fully funded and provide the support students need, and where our young people can play in safe, welcoming, and thriving communities."

Vallas, though, is seen as the frontrunner, having received 34% of the vote on Tuesday in his second bid for mayor.

U.S. Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.) received less than 14% of the vote in Tuesday's contest, under Lightfoot's 17%.

The former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Vallas is a longtime proponent of school privatization, having expanded charter schools and other privatization schemes in his home city as well as in Philadelphia and post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.

Far from shying away from his record—which has drawn vocal criticism from lawmakers and officials from the areas where he's attacked public schools—Vallas has pledged to build on it if elected mayor of Chicago.

Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party—which is backing Johnson—said late Tuesday that "the contrast in this runoff could not be clearer."

"In one corner, we have a classroom teacher and union organizer with deep community roots," said Mitchell. "In the other corner, we have conservative Paul Vallas, who is backed by the Trump-supporting Fraternal Order of Police and has never come across a public school he didn't want to gut."

Following Tuesday's vote, Johnson—who has described his opponent's approach to education as "morally bankrupt"—tweeted that "if tonight is proof of anything, it's proof that anything is possible."

"It's proof that we can build a Chicago as big and generous as its promise," he continued. "And it's proof that City Hall can truly belong to the people. Tonight is just the beginning. Thank you, Chicago."

\u201cIf tonight is proof of anything, it\u2019s proof that anything is possible. It\u2019s proof that we can build a Chicago as big and generous as its promise.\n\nAnd it\u2019s proof that City Hall can truly belong to the people.\n \nTonight is just the beginning. Thank you, Chicago. \n\nLet\u2019s go. \ud83d\udcaa\ud83c\udfff\u201d
— Punch 5 for Brandon Johnson! (@Punch 5 for Brandon Johnson!) 1677643318

To defeat Vallas, Johnson will have to overcome a likely torrent of opposition spending from dark money organizations that have taken an interest in the race to lead the United States' third-largest city.

As the Chicago Tribunereported last month, groups spent "hundreds of thousands of dollars in the final weeks of the race for mayor" while "hiding where that money is coming from."

One dark money organization, the Chicago Leadership Committee, has "spent more than $165,000 on TV and digital ads for Vallas' mayoral bid," the Tribune reported.

"There's no question even more dark money will flood this election in the coming weeks," Mitchell warned. "The right wing sees our movement gaining momentum and will do everything possible to stop us. But tonight is more proof that organized people can beat organized money. Brandon Johnson has always had the backs of working families, and in April, we'll have his."

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

“America is Not a Racist Country”

Ramzy Baroud — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 03:39:57 +0000

Though it has been argued that the so-called American dream is long dead, Nikki Haley is proof that the dream is still alive. Unfortunately, the ‘dream’ is hers alone.

Until recently, a close confidante of former US President Donald Trump and his pro-Israel circle, Haley wants to be the next United States president. On February 14, she officially declared her candidacy and, starting February next year, she will be officially competing against her former bosses in the Republican primaries.

It is true that her popularity among Republican Party supporters hovers between 3-4 percent, but Haley still feels that she stands to win, if she plays her cards right. Though a victory in a party that is neither keen on women nor minority politicians, she has enough success stories to give her the needed confidence.

“Even on our worst day, we are blessed to live in America,” Haley said in her campaign launch video. Though such a statement may appear somewhat typical by US politicians on such occasions, Haley’s statement carries hidden, if not troubling, insinuations.

Haley considers her life a testament to the ahistorical claim that “America is not a racist country”, a chant she led to the cheers of thousands of her supporters at her first campaign rally on February 15 in Charleston, South Carolina.

For Republicans, the Haley profile is critical because it is uncommon. They understand that a Black candidate will not perform well among their constituency or that of the Democratic Party. Still, they desperately need any ‘person of color’ who would appeal to disenchanted minority voters, if that candidate reaffirms the pre-existing beliefs of most Republicans: that America is a great country free of racism and inequality, with many dangerous foreign enemies and that Israel is its most trusted ally. Haley, for years, has enthusiastically played that part.

“I was the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. Not Black. Not White. I was different,” she said. This seemingly innocuous statement has served as Haley’s central message in her political career since she left her family’s Exotica International clothing business in 2011 to run for the Governor’s office in South Carolina, and won.

In 2017, Haley’s success story continued. She became the US Ambassador to the UN. This position has historically been far more relevant to Israeli interests rather than the US’, because the UN is one of a few international platforms in which Palestinians and their supporters attempt, though often in vain, to hold Israel accountable for its illegal practices in occupied Palestine.

For decades, the US has opposed any attempt by Arab and other countries to punish Israel for its military occupation and continued human rights violations in Palestine. The dozens of vetoes used by the US to block any attempt at condemning Israeli colonialism or war crimes at the UN Security Council only tell part of the story.

Within the relatively short span of two years of diplomacy that catered mostly to serve Israel, Haley managed to successfully help in the blocking of US funding of the UN Palestine Refugees Agency (UNRWA). She also engineered her country’s exit from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) due to its criticism of Israel.

She is also credited for being part of the decision that led to the US’ abrupt withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and was a crucial member of the Trump team behind the so-called ‘Deal of the Century’, which has ultimately fizzled into empty rhetoric.

Now Haley is hoping to cash in – literally – on her dedication to Israel and to her country’s hawkish foreign policy in the Middle East. One claim that she has repeatedly made to her donors, who consist mostly of pro-Israeli billionaires, is that she has kept all the promises she made to Israel at the 2017 AIPAC conference. Indeed, she has.

Her performance at the lobby group’s annual policy conference ‘thrilled the crowd’, the Times of Israel then reported. In her speech, Haley, intoxicated by the political potential of winning standing ovations from 18,000 AIPAC conference attendees, declared herself a “new sheriff in town”, who will make sure that “the days of Israel-bashing at the UN are over.”

As far as Israel was concerned, the sheriff delivered, ushering in Israel’s golden age at the UN, and forging lasting friendships between Haley and top Israeli officials and donors.

Haley became a “source of pride for hawkish supporters of Israel for leading the fight against anti-Israel resolutions,” the Jewish weekly newspaper, the Forward, wrote on February 14.

Notably, a four-second footage in Haley’s campaign launch video was in Israel, specifically near the fence with besieged Gaza. Walking alongside her is the former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon. While at the UN, they developed a “unique working relationship – and a lasting friendship”, the Forward reported, citing Danon, currently a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.

Significantly, the former Israeli ambassador believes that if “Haley was running for president in Israel she would have won easily”. Considering her poor performance among US voters, one must raise the question: why would an American presidential candidate be far more popular among Israelis than Americans?

Haley’s strategy, however, is paying dividends, at least financially. Jacob Kornbluh elaborated on the sources of funding for Haley’s super PAC, Stand for America. Much of the $17 million raised in the last election cycle came from “prominent Jewish donors”. They include Miriam Adelson, wife of late pro-Israeli casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, along with money from Paul Singers, Bernie Marcus and Daniel Loeb, among many others.

It may seem strange that such funds are invested in a candidate who has, at least for now, little chances of winning the Republican nomination, but the money is not wasted. Tel Aviv is simply rewarding Haley’s many favors, knowing that, regardless of her exact position in government, Haley will always continue to prioritize Israel’s interests in her political agenda, and, if needed, even ahead of her own country’s.

The post “America is Not a Racist Country” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

Intellectuals and the Imperialist Affairs

Yadullah Shahibzadeh — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 14:18:47 +0000

From time to time, academics, and journalists from the Global South, express their disappointment with what they call Western progressive intellectuals. These “progressive intellectuals” are accused of criticizing the imperialist policies of their governments and the propagandist nature of the mainstream media in general terms while relying on the same misinformation and disinformation that the media disseminate and endorse the same imperialist policies that their governments pursue in the Global South, especially against the states and nations which resist Western hegemony.

The response, of these so-called progressive intellectuals to recent socio-political unrest in Iran, expressed in two statements; Listen to the Voices of a Feminist Revolution in Iran and Faculty for Women, Life, Freedom, are a case in point. These statements are the responses of two groups of Western academics and feminists to the demonstrations which, after the death in custody of the young Iranian woman Mahsa Amini on 16 September 2022, took place in different Iranian cities. The statements indicate that there must be a grain of truth in the claim of the complaining academics and journalists from the Global South.

While the peaceful demonstrations were turning into riots and mob lynchings, these so-called progressive intellectuals from the global North took the coordinated and ferocious misinformation and disinformation campaign about the events in Iran as indisputable facts. The misinformation and disinformation campaign was first disseminated by the Persian TV Channels which were financed by Europe and the United States and their milking cow, Saudi Arabia, social media, and Western mainstream media. Relying on such a misinformation and disinformation campaign and in unison with their ministries of foreign affairs, these so-called progressive intellectuals interpreted the protests in Iran — which barely gathered a few hundred people in one place — either as a “feminist revolution” in the making that would overthrow the “ruling regime” or an uprising in which “millions of Iranians” have poured into the streets for their basic human rights, the same rights that these “intellectuals” take for granted in Western democracies.

While these progressive intellectuals would never consider any demonstration in the West as a threat to the legitimacy of the governing structure of their countries, nonetheless based on the same misinformation and disinformation campaign on Iran, they not only call into question the legitimacy of the Iranian state in the name of solidarity with the Iranian people but predict its inevitable collapse soon. Regardless of the intentions of their signatories, the real function of the statements should be evaluated in relation to the dynamic geo-strategic role that the Iranian state plays in the West Asia region and its immediate region vis-à-vis the desperate efforts of the Western governments under the leadership of the United State to protect and preserve their supremacy in the region as a component of their global hegemony.

The main message of the misinformation and disinformation campaigns on Iran that misled Western “progressive intellectuals” was that the political system in Iran was on the verge of collapse, that despite the relentless suppression of the demonstrators and mass killings committed by Iranian security forces, the “brave demonstrators” were pouring into the streets by millions, and that Iranian statesmen were escaping the country and taking refuge in other countries. Omid Djallili, the British comedian, claimed that Iran’s leader escaped to Venezuela. According to the misinformation and disinformation campaigns, the revolution that had begun in the name of “Women, Life, Freedom” in Iran would, with the help of “the international community,” overthrow the “Iranian regime” in a matter of days or weeks. We know that “The international community” consists of Western governments and their allies, Western NGOs, movie stars, musicians, and “progressive intellectuals.” The misinformation and disinformation campaign against Iran represented the thugs who lynched, murdered, and assaulted unarmed policemen and ordinary people accused of siding with the Iranian government, and burned public properties,¹ as peaceful protesters whose only crime was opposing the “Iranian regime.” This happened even though these “peaceful protesters” took videos of their crimes which were published instantly on the Persian broadcasts funded by Saudi Arabia and Western governments and then appeared in social media. Thanks to their Iranian native informers, the Western “progressive intellectuals” took every piece of misinformation and disinformation as a fact.

The first statement, Listen to the Voices of a Feminist Revolution in Iran, by a group of “feminist activists and academics” and their native informers was published in late September. The statement claimed that “we are witnessing a feminist revolution in Iran” to end the violence of “a theocratic regime” against “the marginal bodies.” The statement which came in the early days of the protests complained about the silence of “the broader academic and activist community around the world” on the event and called upon Western media and academia to make the ongoing “feminist revolution” in Iran more visible. These “academic-feminist activists” describe the “feminist revolution” in Iran as a revolution against a regime that had made women invisible in the public sphere. Hence, they remind the “progressive voices in the Global North” of their ethical and political responsibility and that “the long history of colonial oppression, [and] racism” and “the neo-orientalist approaches” should not prevent them from “taking a full stance of solidarity with the struggles of people in the Middle East and other Muslim-majority countries.” The statement urges the “progressive voices in the Global North” to recognize not only the epistemic and political subjectivities of the people in these regions in general but recognize as well the epistemic and political subjectivity expressed in the “Iranian feminist and queer resistances” and its role in the ongoing “feminist revolution in Iran.” The “academic-feminist activists” urge “the international feminist communities to build a transnational solidarity network with “women and marginalized bodies in Iran.” They ask the progressive forces in the Global North to recognize the “queer-feminist, anti-capitalist, and anti-fascist” character of the current revolution as the struggle of the marginalized bodies for their emancipation from the “Islamic theocracy.”

The second statement, Faculty for Women, Life, Freedom, issued in early October, by a group of scholars whose ideas and visions represent the “progressive voices” from the Global North, called on academics from different parts of the world to show their solidarity with the Iranian “protesters” by boycotting Iranian universities and institutions of higher education. The statement considers the protests as an uprising of the Iranian people that fight in the name of Women, Life, Freedom for the realization of their basic human rights. The subsequent senseless violence and hatred that were expressed toward anyone who criticized the so-called feminist revolution or uprising revealed that the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” were just words without any references to things on the ground, words which were put together to impress people who had no clue of the degree of the hatred expressed, the thirst for acts of revenge expected, the violence exerted and the crimes committed under the banner of this pretty slogan. According to the statement, in the name of Women, Life, Freedom, millions of “brave, courageous, and creative” Iranian protesters came into the streets and university campuses, to challenge “the theocratic dictatorship” and to demand “their basic human rights, dignity, and justice.” The protesters who came “from a range of social classes and regions of the country” refuse, according to the statement, to be cowed by intimidation and repression. Hence, despite their suffering through “gruesome beatings, killings, abductions, and disappearances,” they have created a nationwide uprising. In solidarity with the struggles of the Iranian people “for freedom, equality, and democracy,” the statement calls upon students and scholars around the world to condemn the Islamic Republic of Iran. It asks academics from various countries and continents “to prevent the state institutions of the Islamic Republic and representatives thereof from having any presence in global higher education, be it physically or virtually.” Furthermore, the statement asks academics around the world to use their “influence and capacities” to not only boycott “events and initiatives… backed by the Iranian state or in which officials of the Islamic Republic play an active part” but create an international network to grant “scholarships and fellowships for precarious students and scholars at risk in Iran.” A few days after the release of this statement, the signatories who had realized the scandalous contents of the statement and its unconditional endorsement of the murderous economic sanctions implemented by the US and its Western allies against the Iranian state and people, a postscript was added to the statement. The postscript says that “the “boycott” aspect of the statement “only relates to active and sitting officials holding office in the executive, legislative, judiciary, Office of the Supreme Leader, security, and intelligence apparatuses.” The problem is that those who are imposing economic sanctions on Iran can find the necessary connections between all Iranian scholars and their educational and research institutions to the Iranian state institutions.

It is worth noting that while Jacques Ranciére and Judith Butler are co-signers of the first statement, Angela Davis, Cornel West, Etienne Balibar, Slavoj Žižek and Yanus Varoufakis are among the signatories of the second statement. However, many of the scholars who have signed the statement are originally from the Global South and Iran, who live in the Global North. This group of scholars is aware of the ongoing geo-strategic game in the region with the United States and its Western and regional allies on one side and Iran on the opposite side as the key players in the game. While the first statement calls upon the “progressive voices in the Global North” to show their solidarity with the protesters, the second statement shows its solidarity with the protesters by calling on academics from different parts of the world to boycott Iranian state-affiliated academic institutions and exclude Iranian academics from the global higher education. The signatories of both statements would like to call themselves academic activists and regard each other as intellectuals in the way Sartre understood the term in the 1960s. For Sartre, intellectuals are the technicians of practical knowledge who discover and expose the contradiction between the universality of their method of inquiry and the particularity of the dominant ideology. Only the technicians of practical knowledge who in their search for universality discover that universality does not exist but must be created, reinvent themselves as intellectuals because the intellectuals are aware that the dominant ideology is not “a set of clearly defined propositions” but actualized in social and political events.²

A great number of the technicians of practical knowledge in France turned into intellectuals during the Dreyfus Affair, because they realized that captain Dreyfus was the victim of the French racist ideology that dominated both the media and the legal institutions. For Sartre, the technicians of practical knowledge turned into intellectuals when in their search for truth and universal knowledge that was supposed to serve the entire humanity, discovered the contradiction between their search for truth and universal knowledge and their practice of knowledge production which served the interests of the ruling class. Since this theoretical contradiction reflects the existing social contradictions between the exploiting few and the exploited masses within the capitalist and imperialist systems, the technicians of practical knowledge have two choices. Either they remain true to their search for truth and universality and take the position of the oppressed masses or continue their contribution to the dominant ideology that safeguards the capitalist and imperialist interests. Now, the question is whose side the signatories of the above mentioned statements are taking? Do they consider themselves to be the progressive forces or intellectuals whose politics is a continuation of their search for truth and universality? The above mentioned statements are not the reflection of the technicians of practical knowledge on a historical event, because a historical event does not happen by naming the coordinated operations of misinformation and disinformation that have targeted Iran a “feminist revolution” or a popular “uprising.” They are the contributions of the contemporary technicians of practical knowledge in the West to the dominant imperialist ideology actualized in the propaganda operations against Iran. Since the knowledge produced in the statements by the “academic-feminist activists” and the “progressive voices in the Global North” on the so-called “feminist revolution” and popular uprising in Iran is a contribution to the rationalization of the imperialist adventure in West Asia.

Rather than a declaration of solidarity with the exploited and oppressed masses in the region, the statements are a gesture of solidarity with the Western Imperialist forces as the principal exploiters and oppressors. On the one hand, the second statement is a supplement to the economic sanctions imposed by the United State and other Western governments on the Iranian state and nation, to make Iran’s economy so unstable that the Iranian society implodes from within as a result of popular discontent and protests. On the other hand, the statement calls for support of the “students and scholars at risk” in Iran in form of student and research grants, while the signatories of the statement are fully aware that they can only depend on Western governments and entrepreneurs close to these governments to finance the “students and scholars at risk” projects. The fact is that both statements contribute to the ongoing imperialist strategy to force the Iranian state into a corner so that it gives concessions to the demands of the US and its allies regarding its peaceful nuclear technology, defense technology, and its political influence in the region. The US and its Western allies consider the Iranian state as the only state in the region, which have both capability and the will to challenge their hegemony in the region. Consequently, they welcome all the support they can get in their multilayered war against Iran. It does not matter whether the support comes from Saudi Arabia in form of money, or from “academic-feminist activists” or “progressive voices from the Global North.”

Since the early 1990s, the so-called progressive intellectuals or voices in the West have been convinced that Western liberal democracies/Global North have reached the end of history. They theorized the idea that the rest of the world or countries in the Global South, that lagged behind these democracies, would be able to overcome their democratic shortcomings either through revolutions or reform, either through bombs or education. Concepts such as feminist revolution and uprising for basic human rights, to which the signatories of the two statements refer, have been brought into the political discourse because the rest of the world is still in the cage of history, and its fate, unlike the West, is determined by the movement of history. In this regard, the Western academic-feminist activists, and the progressive intellectuals, together with their governments and their native informers who stand outside the historical time, act as the omnipotent subjects of the historical movement which is going on in the rest of the world and assign the epistemic and political subjectivity of whoever they want. While they represent small groups of cruel thugs as peaceful demonstrators who exercise their political subjectivity in this “feminist revolution” and “popular uprising,” they are silent about the fact that while the so-called leaders of this so-called revolution or uprising³ are the employees of the US and European governments and that every small and big media which backs this revolution or uprising is financed either by Saudi Arabia, or European governments and the United States.⁴ Perhaps, the signatories of the above mentioned statements consider their alliance with their governments and the entrepreneurs close to these governments as the rebirth of the alliance between French Enlightenment thinkers and the French bourgeoisie around the demands for freedom and equality which resulted in the French Revolution.

As men of practical knowledge, the Enlightenment thinkers demanded freedom of inquiry as the fundamental requirement for independent research, but this freedom could not be protected without the equality of all citizens before the law. The demand for equality before the law enabled the bourgeois class to mobilize the entire society against the nobility. While the aristocratic nobility accused the Enlightenment thinkers of meddling in affairs that were not theirs, the bourgeoisie defended their right to freedom of inquiry and their right to meddle in public and political affairs. According to Sartre, the moment the Enlightenment thinkers rejected the principles of authority, renewed the spirit of contestation, and embraced the universality of freedom and equality of all men, which became the main principles of bourgeois humanism, they transformed themselves into intellectuals. But after the bourgeoisie achieved its political goals, it integrated the intellectuals into the state bureaucracy and reduced them to mere technicians of practical knowledge whose concrete demand for freedom had been transformed into the bourgeois ideology of freedom.⁵

As early as the 1840s Marx argued that bureaucracy which had always relied on authority, had succeeded, in its reconstructed and bourgeois version, to make authority the principle of knowledge and obedience the principle of ethics, and thus opposed any form of public or political mentality.⁶ Marx argues that there is a spiritual aspect to the bourgeois bureaucracy that generates “materialism of passive obedience,” among the individual bureaucrats to the extent that “they are unable to distinguish between their existence and the existence of the bureaucratic system.” As a result, the bureaucrats are convinced that “material life is the only real and meaningful life” and that the most meaningful aim in life is careerism and competition for higher posts.⁷ In a brief moment of French history, in the mid-1890s, during the Dreyfus Affair, by meddling in an affair that was not theirs, according to the ruling class, a great number of French teachers, doctors, writers, artists, and professors who had been integrated into the bourgeois state as the technicians of practical knowledge, and whose social positions were defined by the ruling class for almost five decades, acted as intellectuals. But the meddling of the technicians of practical knowledge in public affairs did not last long. Soon they returned to their assigned social function which was transmitting the ideology and the received values of the bourgeois state through education and other cultural and political means, provided that the ruling class granted them a degree of social and political power to pursue their group interests.

Up until the late 1970s European communists were trying to convince their states of their usefulness.⁸ As the transmitters of the received ideology and values, the technicians of practical knowledge have functioned ever since as the agents of ideological particularism of the capitalist and imperialist states and as the servants of the aggressive European nationalism expressed in Nazism or liberal humanism with its claims on universality. What both aggressive European nationalism and liberalism had in common was the idea that non-Westerners are inferior races or only “shadows of men.” Sartre argued that since the European technicians of practical knowledge depended economically on the surplus value extracted from the exploitation of the working class, they were convinced of the inferiority of this class. The reason for such conviction was, according to Sartre, that a small percentage of the technicians of practical knowledge had a working-class background. Sartre was hoping that with the increase in the number of technicians of practical knowledge with working-class backgrounds in France, they would be able to discover the true meaning of bourgeois humanist egalitarianism and its universality and thus expose its particularism.⁹ The same can be said about the dependence of Western technicians of practical knowledge on the surplus values extracted from the imperialist exploitation of the Global South.

Time has changed, and now, an overwhelming number of the contemporary technicians of practical knowledge, are sons and grandsons, daughters, and granddaughters of working-class parents, some of whom have signed the above mentioned statements. But the statements demonstrate that the contemporary technicians of practical knowledge have internalized the authoritarian principle of the dominant imperialist ideology that assumes that non-Western states and nations have assigned places in the global order and do not hesitate to theorize and justify the decisions of Western governments led by the United States to punish states and nations such as Iran that refuse to recognize this authoritarian and imperialist principle. Some of the signatories of the statements are originally from the Global South and identify themselves with or introduce themselves as the compatriots of the Iranian people and express their solidarity with their struggles but are unable to understand the real meaning of their struggles. Whether as workers, women, intellectuals, or in any other shape, the Iranian people are engaged in numerous social and political struggles to resolve their internal differences, overcome their social and political contradictions, acquire their political and social rights as citizens, and as a nation, they are defining their future by exercising their equal rights with other nations and states by resisting the interference of the outside forces in the West Asia region. But instead of recognizing these socio-political struggles and acting as intellectuals, the technicians of practical knowledge who are originally from the global South chose to contribute to the authoritarian and imperialist disinformation and misinformation campaign that targets the autonomy, dignity, and welfare of the Iranian people, and in doing act as native informers.

Since the US and its Western allies are unable to put Iran in its assigned place in the current global order militarily, they have tried to push the Iranian society toward economic collapse, social disintegration, and political instability, so that it is reduced to a weak or failed state that is ready to surrender the sovereignty of its nation to the West. The function of the native informers, as the technicians of practical knowledge, is to process the received misinformation and disinformation about the events that are supposed to have taken place, in Iran and represent the sporadic protests by a small fraction of Iranian citizens with a specific demand for justice, which barely attracted a few hundred demonstrators, as the million demonstrators who poured into the streets, and describe these sporadic protests as a “feminist revolution” or the uprising of “millions of Iranians.” The result has been the turning of a decent and peaceful political struggle for the realization of a specific form of justice, that is the state’s refraining from the enforcement of the Hijab law, into a series of nihilistic, fascist, and misogynist violent actions resulting in the killing and lynching of more than 60 policemen and the killing of several hundred ordinary people.¹⁰ To increase the tension between the discontented people and the Iranian government to the point of no return, the Persian TV stations based in Europe and the US encouraged and even instructed blind violence and then romanticized, in social media and Western mainstream media, the murderous violence that had taken place. First, a group of academic feminists from the Global North call on the “progressive academics and voices” in the Global North to recognize and show their solidarity with what they call a feminist revolution in Iran. Then the so-called progressive academics who do not consider the events in Iran as a revolution, call it the uprising of the Iranian people for their basic human rights, rights that they take for granted in Western democracies. What these “progressive academics” from the Global North do in response to the call of the academic-feminist activists for solidarity with the feminist revolution in Iran is to issue a statement. But in the statement, they demonstrate their gratitude to their democratic governments and support their murderous sanctions against the Iranian people. These sanctions have been a part of the multilayered war against the Iranian state and people to reduce Iran’s geo-strategic role in West Asia and the ongoing global struggles against Western global hegemony led by the United State.

Unlike the Enlightenment thinkers whose search for truth and universality led them to defend freedom and equality for a while and the technicians of practical knowledge who turned into intellectuals by extending their search for truth and universality in the field of ethics and politics, for a brief period, during the Dreyfus Affair, the “progressive academics” or “intellectuals” who signed the above mentioned statements consider authority to be the principle of knowledge. Since the signatories of the above mentioned statements assume the authority of Western imperialism as the principle of the knowledge they are producing, they fail to understand why the Iranian state and nation challenge the hegemony of Western imperialism in their immediate region. Did the signatories of the above mentioned statements, sign the statements, for the material benefits they receive from their governments? We know that Western scholars are using much of their time to apply funds to finance their research projects, and they know that their governments do not forget their sincere gestures of loyalty in matters of national interests and security. Paul Nizan said once that “the bourgeois intellectuals do not fear social revolts because of their dangerous consequences for freedom of thought, but because social revolts may put their income and the wealth they will leave for their children in danger.”¹¹

Nowadays, Western “intellectuals” are highly selective in supporting, theorizing, and instigating protests and riots in the countries in the Global South. They are choosing the riots that while bringing death and destruction to the local people, are strengthening Western global hegemony, and securing the wealth that these “intellectuals” may leave for their children. But many writers and scholars, and especially those who are widely recognized and well-known “intellectuals,” may not defend their immediate material interests, but their ideological interests, embodied or objectified in their work.¹² But regardless of the reason, contemporary technicians of practical knowledge in the Global North are not meddling in the imperialist affairs of their governments. Instead, they theorize, conceptualize, and justify those affairs.

Killing of the unarmed Arman Aliverdi, a member of Basij Militia, here and here. The last forty seconds of this footage shows the killing of the unarmed member of Basij militia Rooholah Ajamian. An ordinary citizen is accused of being a member of Basij militia and beaten into coma by the mob. Burning of an unarmed policeman and an ambulance. Here and here.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism (New York: Verso, 2008), p. 234
Here and here and here.
While disseminating news about protests and strikes which did not take place, and calling for mass demonstrations and general strikes which never materialized, in the past few months, these Persian TV stations played a central role in instigating, rationalizing and justifying violence against security forces in the streets. “Iran-international, a Saudi funded Persian TV, Guardian. The Manoto TV based in London that has “has lost around 92 million pounds over the years and has been operating with the money received from unknown investors who don’t seem to be concerned about making profits.” “Generous Investors Behind Manoto TV Have Lost 92 Million Pounds,” Iranian Canadian Journal. BBC Persian Funded by UK government, VOA Persian funded by US government, Radio Farda (Persian Radio Free Europe) funded by US government, Radio Zamane financed by Netherlands government.
Sartre, p.235-236.
Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’,” in Selected Writings, Edited by David McLellan (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.35.
Marx, p.37-38.
Yadullah Shahibzadeh, Marxism and Left-Wing Politics, From Europe to Iran, (New York, Palgrave Macmillan 2018.), p. 206.
Sartre, p.239-240
According to the US-funded Radio Farda, 56 Iranian security forces were killed during the protests. Iranian government published names and pictures of 63 persons claimed to be killed by the rioters and ISIS’s attack on a Shiite shrine in Shiraz, Iran.
Paul Nizan, Les Chiens de Garde (Paris: Francois Maspero, 1965), p. 58-60.
Sartre, p. 292-294.

The post Intellectuals and the Imperialist Affairs first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yadullah Shahibzadeh.

Paul Cezanne-an Artist for Our Time

David Carrier — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 06:43:47 +0000

Recently I went to a major museum retrospective in London. I looked the first painting on display, and wondered, ‘how amazing that a hedge fund can lose tens of billions of dollars’. I had no idea how the swift disappearance of so much money was possible. Was my mind drifting when that thought about business More

The post Paul Cezanne-an Artist for Our Time appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

Police bar Zimbabwean journalists from covering opposition activists at court

Committee to Protect Journalists — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 20:34:23 +0000

Lusaka, January 23, 2023—Zimbabwean authorities should immediately investigate the recent barring of journalists from covering a court appearance of an opposition politician and ensure that members of the press are not blocked from doing their jobs, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday.

Around noon on January 16, in Budiriro, southwest of the capital city of Harare, anti-riot police harassed about 20 journalists, barred them from covering a court hearing, and threatened to beat them, according to media reports, a statement by the Zimbabwean chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), and five of the journalists, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

The journalists had gathered to cover the hearing of opposition party Citizens Coalition for Change Organizing Secretary Amos Chibaya and 24 others charged with holding an unlawful gathering with the intent to incite public violence, according to those sources.

Police only allowed journalists from the state-owned outlets Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and The Herald newspaper to cover the hearing, according to the MISA statement and the journalists who spoke to CPJ.

“Zimbabwean authorities must facilitate open justice in the country’s courts and ensure that journalists’ access is not impeded by baton-wielding riot police favoring state media over privately owned media outlets,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “All journalists should be free to cover cases before the courts and not risk censorship, harassment, and beatings for simply trying to do their jobs to keep citizens informed.”

The journalists who were barred included those working for the privately owned news outlets ZimLive, TechnoMag, NewsHawks, NewsDay Zimbabwe, NewZimbabwe, Nhau News Online, and Heart and Soul TV, among others, according to the five journalists who spoke with CPJ.

TechnoMag’s Audience Mutema told CPJ that, although the journalists produced press identification cards, police pushed them away with their batons, ordered them outside, and refused to allow them to stand near the court building.

Freelance journalist Frank Chikowore told CPJ that police threatened to beat the journalists if they continued trying to gain access to the court.

“They asked us: ‘Who invited you here?’ And they then told us, ‘We don’t want any journalists here, go away,’” Chikowore said. “They told us, ‘We will beat you up; get out of here.’”

The news outlet NewZimbabwe tweeted that some journalists “were even dragged and pushed out of the court,” and that one police officer told a journalist, “I’ll injure you.”

Ruvimbo Muchenje, a NewsHawk reporter, told CPJ that anti-riot police “pushed us around and told us to leave; they said the court was full.”

Later that afternoon, a few journalists were allowed in the courtroom after the intervention of Zimbabwe national police spokesperson Paul Nyathi and the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, Mutema told CPJ.

CPJ called and texted Nyathi for comment but did not receive any responses.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

‘The [Airline] Industry Pretty Much Has Veto Power Over Any Consumer Regulation’ – CounterSpin interview with Paul Hudson on airline meltdown

Janine Jackson — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 16:48:04 +0000

Janine Jackson interviewed FlyersRights‘ Paul Hudson about the airline meltdown for the January 6, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230106Hudson.mp3

(NBC News, 12/29/22)

Janine Jackson: You will likely have seen the images, if you weren’t in them yourself: thousands of people stranded in airports, baggage lost, plans foiled. Is this how it has to be? And if not, well, what exactly is in the way?

Paul Hudson is president of FlyersRights, a nonprofit group organizing the consumer rights of airline passengers. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Paul Hudson.

Paul Hudson: Thank you for having me.

JJ: Reasonable folks understand acts of nature, unfair and brutal as they can be, but what were the non-weather-related conditions or circumstances that contributed importantly to the air travel breakdowns that we all saw in late December?

PH: Air travel has been deteriorating for a long time, really, in the last 20 years especially. So we were in a situation, especially coming out of the pandemic, where I would now analogize it to say, we’re in rough air.

We had terrible conditions over the summer with delays. We had awful situations during the pandemic, with flyers not being given refunds when their flights were canceled.

And now, in the most recent situation with Southwest, we have the equivalent of a crash landing. Their software system no doubt broke down, but it’s been in bad shape for many years, and their personnel were simply inadequate to handle the schedule that they have set up.

So there’s a lot of reforms that need to be done, some short-term and some longer-term, and hopefully this will be a wake-up call that allows the system to get back to where it should be, and where it really was in, say, the 1980s, or prior to that.

JJ: It’s not really a reduction, as maybe some folks have seen in media, it’s not a reduction to “finger-pointing,” or to “he said, she said,” to try to trace causes and to call for accountability.

There were systemic issues and problems that employees and their representatives were on the record, right, as pointing to, as being concerned about.

PH: Yes. And these things were ignored. I mean, this is not the first time an airline or Southwest has had computer breakdowns. Delta had some, a number of others had some. The systems are not nearly as robust as they need to be. They need to be failsafe.

If you look at other systems that, like the internet, like the phone system, even like your electrical grid system, if one part of it goes down, it doesn’t crash the system. You have backups, and you get what’s called graceful degradation.

AP (1/4/23)

But in the airline business, they have underinvested in a lot of these things. And as a result, we get these brownouts. And the cost of it, the inconvenience of it, is dumped on the public.

JJ: Associated Press offered an explainer, which, right there in the name, it’s supposed to tell folks, you’re not inside this system, you don’t understand the ins and outs of this system, but here’s what you need to know.

And in that explainer, AP said, “What happened?” And their answer was:

Airlines were prohibited from furloughing employees as a condition of receiving $54 billion in federal pandemic aid from taxpayers. But that didn’t stop them from encouraging tens of thousands of workers to quit or take long-term leaves of absence after the pandemic torpedoed travel in 2020.

I’m a little confused by that. I’m sort of getting “no one wants to work,” I’m sort of getting “airlines couldn’t keep people in jobs.” I just—as an explainer of what happened, I’m a little confused by that.

Paul Hudson: “Airlines, unfortunately, are only incidentally in the transportation business. They’re primarily…in the business of making money.”

PH: Well, the intention of the PPP programs and some other bailouts of the airlines, which altogether involved about $90 billion, the intention was that you would keep the staff on the payroll so they would be ready when pandemic ended to restore traffic, and they wouldn’t have to go from a cold start.

But the airlines, unfortunately, are only incidentally in the transportation business. They’re primarily, especially their executives, in the business of making money. If that meant reducing their payroll through other means that got around the intention of the law—and there was no real oversight by the federal government on money—that’s what they did.

And they continued to pay, in some cases, dividends. They paid large bonuses to CEOs and top executives. Some of them also did stock buybacks to keep their stock price up while their profits, of course, were dwindling to nothing.

JJ: Let me just take you on maybe a side trip there, because when I looked at airline meltdown, everything, 100% of the stories, were about Southwest. And I wonder if you see any danger in making this conversation, and making conversations about how to come out of it, only about Southwest Airlines per se.

Is there a reason to expand the conversation beyond that, as though they were outliers or rogues?

PH: Definitely there is. The other airlines have all had lesser brownouts and crashes, not only their computer systems, but their lack of personnel coming out of the pandemic.

The reforms that we’ve been promoting pretty much have been ignored by DoT, which is the only regulator of the airline industry. And as a result, things have gotten worse and worse.

For example, you would think there would be some requirement to have a certain level of backup or reserve capacity, for personnel as well as equipment. But there is none. There is no requirement, and some airlines actually have negative reserves. So even on their best day, they cancel 1 or 2 percent of their fights. It’s profitable to do that.

Another example is that there is no requirement that they maintain any level of customer service. Each airline sets their own goals about that, but there’s no enforcement. And they just say, “Well, I’m sorry.” They don’t answer your phones. They don’t have the personnel to do it.

And the area that’s most crucial, which is pilots; we have a shortage of pilots. Pretty much everyone agrees with that, except perhaps the pilot union that wants to leverage the situation says there is no shortage. But the airlines are simply not recruiting the pilots they need, and haven’t done so for years, especially for regional airlines. They don’t pay them nearly enough.

And the proposals that FlyersRights made, going back to June of this year, about 17 of them, have pretty much been ignored by DoT, at least until recently.

JJ: Let me ask you to talk about journalism. When we see structural or infrastructural problems that you’re pointing to of this order, news media coverage can be unfortunately predictable, really, in terms of, just to put it crudely: There’s going to be a wave of disaster, human-interest, “what the heck is happening” stories, and then a smaller wave of, “well, who’s to blame for this” stories. And then later, maybe a ripple of “serious people” analysis. And that often says, “Golly, everybody’s upset, but there’s really nothing to blame here. There’s nothing to point to.”

And then we rinse and repeat, and we act surprised the next time there’s a crisis. I wonder, what did you make—good, bad or indifferent—of media’s reporting on the airline meltdown?

PH: Well, it was somewhat predictable. I think, though, that the fact that air travel affects such a wide proportion of the population, and the media are, frankly, doing a lot of air travel in many cases—personally, it has affected them. So there was a wider coverage than I would have expected.

I was interviewed on CNBC for six-and-a-half minutes. And, as you know, in national television….

JJ: That’s a lot.

PH: You’re lucky to get one or two minutes. That’s huge.

JJ: So that’s very helpful.

We’re coming out of an era where the White House was issuing sort of comic book rules like, well, for every new regulation, you have to eliminate two. And regulation is evil, and that’s the way we’re meant to understand it. The bar is pretty low.

But I don’t know, listeners may remember, this country had moments when we could talk about consumer rights, not maybe as robust and expansive as some of us would want. But it wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t a “snowflake issue” to want companies to make products that were safe and nontoxic, and that had consumers—human beings—in mind.

What do you say about the moment to reinvigorate that consumer perspective?

PH: I hope it’s going to come back to some degree. We issued a Bill of Rights for airline passengers back in 2014 and ’13. And we visited 150 congressional offices over the next two or three years. Now, there’s 535 members of Congress; we could not find one member who would introduce any substantial legislation, even drop a bill in.

And so we’re in a total desert situation now. And if you don’t have a member of Congress that wants to make, not just this, but other consumer issues important, and will not introduce legislation, you’re just not going to get anywhere.

The agencies that are the regulators, they are political at the top. And whether and however they’re controlled by the Democrat or Republican administration, our experience has been, over the last 30 years, that they’re actually controlled by the industry. And the industry pretty much has veto power over any consumer regulation.

JJ: It’s what we call being captured.

Do you have any final thoughts for journalists, many of whom might be starting out new, and think they can cover what they want to cover and let the chips fall where they may? What would you encourage journalists to look at or to ignore or to think about, or any thoughts for media?

PH: I would say if I was a journalist starting out, or even not starting out, experienced, in an issue like air transportation, you have to look at all the different sides, not just go with the propaganda or the sound bites from any interest groups, because every group you speak to comes with their own agenda.

But even so, there are many facts that can be distilled from these things. And it’s not impossible to come up with reasonable policies and come up with a reasonably accurate story in many situations.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Paul Hudson. He’s president of FlyersRights. They’re online at FlyersRights.org. Paul Hudson, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PH: Thank you so much.

The post ‘The [Airline] Industry Pretty Much Has Veto Power Over Any Consumer Regulation’ appeared first on FAIR.

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

Paul Hudson on Airline Meltdown, Melissa Crow on Asylum Policy

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 16:55:41 +0000

(NBC News, 12/29/22)

This week on CounterSpin: Media criticism is, at its heart, consumer advocacy. There’s an unarticulated underpinning to elite media conversation that goes: As a citizen you may have rights, but as a consumer, you don’t have anything called a “right”; the market is an arrangement—the best possible arrangement—but still, you can only hope you’re on the right side of it where it’s profitable to serve you. And if it isn’t, well, too bad. It’s a kind of caveat emptor, devil-take-the-hindmost situation, which would be bad enough if corporate media didn’t present it as though it were unproblematic, and as if we’d all agreed to it! Paul Hudson is president of the consumer group Flyers Rights. He’ll talk about what you did not, in fact, sign up for, in terms of air travel.

CounterSpin230106Hudson.mp3

(Center for Gender and Refugee Studies)

Also on the show: Enacted under Trump, Title 42 instructed officials to turn away asylum seekers at US borders in purported protection of the country’s “public health” in the face of Covid-19. Officialspeak currently has it that Covid is over, so far as public regulations go…. Oh except for that exception about denying hearings to people fleeing violence and persecution in their home country. The Supreme Court has just furthered this injustice with a ruling that, according to one account, “does not overrule the lower court’s decision that Title 42 is illegal; it merely leaves the measure in place while the legal challenges play out in court.” We’ll hear from Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies.

CounterSpin230106Crow.mp3

The post Paul Hudson on Airline Meltdown, Melissa Crow on Asylum Policy appeared first on FAIR.

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

Rep. Ro Khanna on Paul Pelosi Hammer Attack, Ending Ukraine War & Rethinking U.S.-Saudi Relations

Democracy Now! — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 14:12:39 +0000

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

Rep. Ro Khanna Condemns Attack on Paul Pelosi, Says GOP Is Stoking Political Violence

Democracy Now! — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 12:40:48 +0000

Police in California have arrested a 42-year-old man for breaking into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home and assaulting her 82-year-old husband with a hammer. Paul Pelosi suffered a skull fracture and other injuries, but is expected to make a full recovery. We speak to Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California as President Biden links the attack on the Pelosis to election conspiracy theories spread by Republicans. Khanna says “he is sickened by what happened” and that simply condemning violence is not enough. “What we need to be responding to is the threat of political violence that is being stoked by conspiracy theories and propaganda and hate speech,” he says.

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

Zimbabwean journalists assaulted, harassed, and blocked from covering events

Committee to Protect Journalists — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 17:41:42 +0000

Lusaka, October 13, 2022—Zimbabwean authorities and ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) should investigate the assaults and harassment of journalists covering events of public interest in the past week, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.

“The increasing cases of violence against journalists in Zimbabwe is becoming a serious source of concern and must be strongly condemned,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “Press freedom violations and the rising impunity for crimes against journalists should not be tolerated as the country prepares for a general election in 2023.”

Between Thursday, October 6, and Monday, October 10, five journalists were assaulted, briefly detained, and prevented from covering events by police, ZANU-PF activists, and suspected government agents from the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO):

On Thursday, October 6, in Mbare, a suburb south of the capital Harare, police assaulted NewsDay reporter Moreblessings Nyoni after he was found taking pictures of Harare City Council employees demolishing vending stalls and residential structures, the journalist and news reports said. According to the journalist, who communicated with CPJ via messaging app, police asked for his press card before assaulting him using batons, leaving him with a swollen arm and painful buttocks. “I showed them my press card, but they said, ‘It’s fake. You are a sellout,’” the journalist said.

On Saturday, October 8, in Harare’s Kuwadzana neighborhood, ZANU-PF members and people believed to be members of the CIO assaulted Voice of America correspondent Godwin Mangudya and forced him to delete footage captured at the ruling party’s central committee elections, according to the journalist who spoke to CPJ via messaging app, news reports, and the Zimbabwean chapter of the regional press freedom group Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA). Mangudya was held for over an hour and his personal and work-related data was wiped from his devices before they were returned, the journalist and MISA statement said.

On Sunday, October 9, around 1 p.m. in Masvingo, about 183 miles (294 kilometers) south of capital Harare, ZANU-PF security officers barred NewsDay journalist Desmond Chingarande from covering the central committee elections, which were held at Masvingo Teachers’ College, according to the journalist, a news report and MISA’s Zimbabwean chapter. Chingarande told CPJ via messaging app he was informed that NewsDay reporters were not being allowed in. Other journalists from state broadcaster Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation were granted access to the event, he added.

On Monday, October 10, in Mbare, police assaulted Dunmore Mundai and Gadaffi Wells, journalists from Alpha Media Holdings’ HStv, according to the journalists who spoke to CPJ via messaging app, news reports, a MISA statement, and the International Federation of Journalists. The two were in the area filming a documentary when they captured an exchange between police and vendors from ruling ZANU-PF and opposition Citizens Coalition for Change over vendors’ market stands, the journalists and MISA statement said. Mundai and Wells were only released after identifying themselves as journalists despite having news cameras, the journalists said.

CPJ did not get any response from phone calls and repeated queries sent via messaging app to ZANU-PF information director Tafadzwa Mugwadi and police spokesperson Paul Nyathi.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Rwandan court acquits, releases 3 Iwacu TV journalists

Committee to Protect Journalists — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 18:29:55 +0000

Nairobi, October 5, 2022—In response to the acquittal and release on Wednesday of three journalists for YouTube-based Iwacu TV who have been detained in Rwanda since October 2018, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued the following statement expressing relief:

“We are greatly relieved that the court has recognized the charges against Damascene Mutuyimana, Shadrack Niyonsenga, and Jean Baptiste Nshimiyimana as baseless. Finally, these journalists can go home to their families,” said CPJ’s sub-Saharan Africa representative, Muthoki Mumo. “However, the four years that these journalists lost behind bars are a great injustice, underscoring the willingness of Rwandan authorities to abuse judicial systems to the detriment of the press. A repeat of such injustice should not be allowed, and all those other journalists who remain behind bars in Rwanda for their work should be released without delay.”

On Wednesday, October 5, a court in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, acquitted the three journalists of charges of spreading false information with the intention of creating a hostile international opinion of Rwanda, publishing unoriginal statements or pictures, and inciting insurrection, according to reports by BBC News Gahuza and Reuters. One of their lawyers, Jean Paul Ibambe, confirmed to CPJ that the journalists were released from Nyarugenge Prison in Kigali on Wednesday evening, following the acquittal. The journalists were held in pre-trial detention until their trial started in August 2021. Earlier this year, prosecutors requested that they be sentenced to 22 years and five months in prison.

At least four other journalists, most of them YouTube-based, remain detained in Rwanda.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Quality of iTaukei language under threat, says Fiji scholar

APR editor — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 22:15:31 +0000

By Rachael Nath of RNZ Pacific

Concerns are being raised about the future survival of the iTaukei (Fijian) language as a threat of extinction looms despite its everyday use among its people.

A language and culture scholar in Fiji, Dr Paul Geraghty, said a growing generational gap within the iTaukei language had been detected and caused concern.

Dr Geraghty said the extent of knowledge of iTaukei vocabulary and its diversity through the different dialects had reduced significantly over the years.

READ MORE: The origins of the Fijian language – Dr Paul Geraghty
Other Pacific language reports

Fijian language scholar Dr Paul Geraghty … “People are losing their distinctiveness. The language is becoming what I would call standard Fijian.” Image: USP

“Young people of today, especially in urban areas, do not speak as well as their parents or grandparents. They don’t have the same vocabulary knowledge, so that is something to be concerned about,” he said.

“People are losing their distinctiveness. The language is becoming what I would call standard Fijian or Fijian of the urban centres.”

Dr Geraghty added that the loss of richness within the iTaukei language was rooted in Fiji’s long colonial history.

“The peculiar colonial history that we have is to a large extent to blame not only for the loss of indigenous languages in Fiji or the reduction of the knowledge of Fijian language but also perceptions are an essential thing.”

New Zealand’s influence on Fijian education
Dr Geraghty explained that until 1930 all education was in the vernacular, either iTaukei, Hindi (Fiji’s second largest spoken language) or Rotuman, until it was no longer sustainable and colonial law makers began to look to the region for assistance.

“The New Zealand government began teaching in Fiji, and its education system was not inclusive towards teaching Māori, which is not the case today. But that culture was brought across to Fiji and children were punished for speaking in their native languages.”

The lasting impacts of this event were still actively practised in Fiji, added Dr Geraghty.

“We look up to English as a superior language and make jokes about people who don’t speak English well. That is not funny — English people don’t make jokes about people who can’t speak French. The most important thing in a child’s education is learning to speak their language well.”

Dr Geraghty has advocated the importance of incorporating native language into the education system as a scholar of language.

History has always been a leading guide to the future, and learning not to repeat the past, is what linguists advise.

Importance of sustaining iTaukei language
Dr Geraghty said that multilingualism was vital for a child’s education as it stimulated the mind and opened many other possibilities.

“Bilingualism and multilingualism — speaking two or more languages should be encouraged as it will increase the beauty of diversity in the world and our knowledge of this world and our position in it.”

A call for the Fijian Ministry of Education to act now and implement the compulsory learning of iTaukei and Hindi in schools was paramount.

Dr Geraghty added while the Fijian government and universities had started incorporating vernacular into the curriculum, more needed to be done.

Fijian Language Week celebration

NZ’s Minister of Pacific Peoples Aupito William Sio … “The Fijian people can always rely on their language, traditions and values to sustain them.” Image: RNZ Pacific

The Fijian community has launched a week-long celebration of the Fijian language, traditions and culture with events across Aotearoa.

The Minister for Pacific Peoples, Aupito William Sio, marked Macawa ni Vosa Vakaviti — Fijian Language Week, welcoming this year’s theme of nurture, preserve and sustain the Fijian language.

Aupito acknowledged the enduring strength and sustainability of Vosa Vakaviti and its importance as the Fijian community navigated its recovery from the covid-19 pandemic.

“Fiji has been hit hard by the covid-19 pandemic and climate change’s ever-increasing impacts,” he said.

“Yet, while it faces a road to recovery, the Fijian people can always rely on their language, traditions and values to sustain them.

“Now more than ever, the Fiji language, culture, and identity is important to uphold both in Aotearoa and Fiji.”

Aupito said the Fijian community in Aotearoa, New Zealand, should be applauded for their tireless efforts in advocating for and strengthening Vosa Vakaviti.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

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

Zambian officials threaten journalist Wellington Chanda over reporting

Committee to Protect Journalists — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 18:07:09 +0000

At least four officials with Zambia’s ruling political party, United Party for National Development (UPND), threatened Wellington Chanda, a reporter for the privately owned City TV broadcaster in the northeastern town of Kasama, during two separate phone calls on August 7 and 8, 2022, over a City TV report, according to news reports, a statement by the Zambia chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa press freedom group, the journalist, and recordings of the calls.

The City TV report, which aired on August 7, featured local youth who wanted Elizabeth Goma, a Kasama district commissioner, to leave her position.

Around 9 p.m. on August 7, after the report aired, Goma called Chanda and said the journalist’s report had started “a war” that he “would not end” and accused Chanda of having disseminated “falsehoods,” according to a recording of the call. Chanda responded by reminding Goma that he contacted her for comment before the story aired, but Goma repeated that the journalist had started “a war.” Goma added that she considered Chanda a “son” and said the journalist had been “unfair,” before the line disconnected.

Separately, around 10 a.m. on August 8, Paul Mulenga, chairperson of a UPND youth league in Northern Province, where Kasama is the provincial capital, phoned Chanda in relation to the same broadcast and, in the local Bemba language, said “life is short” and that he would send political operatives to “sort out” the journalist, according to a recording of that call. Mulenga asked Chanda why City TV broadcast the story without notifying him and told the journalist not to report anything about the UPND. Then two other party officials also on the call—Moses Kanyanta, deputy provincial youth chairman, and Doreen Namuchenje, provincial women’s chairperson—repeated the threats.

Chanda told CPJ in a recent interview via messaging app that he has continued to work as a journalist but remained concerned that the UPND would send agents to harm him.

CPJ’s repeated calls to Goma, Mulenga, Namuchenje, and Kanyanta rang unanswered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Interview: Paul Craig Roberts

John Rachel — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 04:05:33 +0000

Events continue to unfold at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we asked Paul Craig Roberts for his current thoughts.

Paul Craig Roberts is a widely renowned political analyst. He was Ass. Secretary for Economic Policy under President Ronald Reagan, associate editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Ser vice. His awe-inspiring insights, astute analysis, and developing views can be accessed at his Institute For Political Economy website.

We focus here on the realities of the international power struggle unfolding in real time, specifically addressing the role of the U.S. in the tensions and its capacity to reduce them. We are looking for paradigm-shift ideas for improving the prospects for peace. His responses below are exactly as he provided.

Here is what Paul Craig Roberts had to say.

John Rachel: We hear a lot of terms and acronyms bandied about. ‘Deep State’ … ‘MIC’ … ‘FIRE sector’ … ‘ruling elite’ … ‘oligarchy’ … ‘neocons’. Who actually defines and sets America’s geopolitical priorities and determines our foreign policy? Not “officially”. Not constitutionally. But de facto.

Paul Craig Roberts: I don’t know the full answer to this question, and I don’t know anyone who does. We do know that US foreign policy is shaped by powerful and entrenched material and ideological interests. President Eisenhower warned as long ago as 1961 about the influence of the military/industrial complex (today the military/security complex), and there are other powerful interests such as Wall Street and the large banks, pharmaceutical companies, oil industry, agri-business. In brief, any organized group that can further its interest through US foreign policy. These interests prevail over national interests, because there is no one to represent national interests. Presidents, senators, and representatives are indebted to the interest groups that fund their political campaigns, not to voters. The only way to stop the influence of organized economic interests over foreign policy is to take money out of politics. The Supreme Court decision in 2010 that gave corporations the right to purchase the government would have to be overturned.

The idea of American exceptionalism provides an ideological basis for US interventions in the world. This belief of liberal interventionists hardened under the neoconservatives following the Soviet collapse in 1991 into a demand for American hegemony. The original draft of the Wolfowitz Doctrine states the demand forcefully. The belief that the US is indispensable and exceptional means that everyone else is unexceptional and dispensable. It is this belief that removes Washington from humane and legal constraints and gives Washington a free hand to overthrow leaders and invade countries that do not adhere to Washington’s agendas.

The CIA has long used media to control the explanations, which makes it difficult to establish the facts of any event.

Some commentators see powerful families pulling the strings, such as the Rothchilds, the Rockefellers, and the British monarchy, or individuals such as George Soros. The World Economic Forum is another candidate as are the Bilderbergs, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Israel Lobby, and other organizations of influential people who seek to exert influence. Little doubt these organizations exert influence, but how so many contending interests resolve into one controlling interest has not, to my knowledge, been explained.

What is clear is that interest groups backed by US military and financial power and underwritten by an exceptionalist ideology are not subject to control by voting in elections. As the oligarchic rule of interest groups is too powerful to likely be dislodged from control, the only way unorganized people can escape such control is through failure of excessive ambition and decline.

JR: We’ve had decades of international tensions. Recent developments have seen a sharp escalation in the potential for a major war. The U.S. apparently cannot be at peace. “Threats” against the homeland are allegedly increasing in number and severity. The trajectory of our relations with the rest of the world appears to be more confrontations, more enemies, more crises, more wars.

Is the world really that full of aggressors, bad actors, ruthless opponents? Or is there something in our own policies and attitudes toward other countries which put us at odds with them, thus making war inevitable and peace impossible?

PCR: The ideology of American hegemony puts the US at odds with countries such as Russia, China, and Iran which are sufficiently powerful or positioned to serve as constraints on American unilateralism. Tensions will remain high as long as Washington demands a uni-polar world with itself at the top.

JR: Our leaders relentlessly talk about our “national interests” and our “national security”, warning that both are under constant assault. Yet, we spend more than the next nine countries combined on our military. Why does such colossal spending never seem to be enough?

PCR: Enemies and threats are valuable to the profits and power of the military/security complex. Moreover, in recent years with the formation of the US Department of Homeland Security, threats to national security are no longer only from abroad, but also arise internally from domestic threats such as “white supremacy” and President Donald Trump’s alleged “January 6 Insurrection.” Even medical doctors and medical scientists who dissented from Big Pharma’s Covid protocols were labeled threats. A situation is developing in the US in which all who dissent from official narratives are regarded as “terrorists.”

JR: It’s evident that you, and the many individuals who follow you and support your work, believe that America’s direction in both the diplomatic sphere and in the current conflict zones represents exercise of government power gone awry. Can you paint for us in broad strokes the specific changes in our national priorities and policies you view as necessary for the U.S. to peacefully coexist with other nations, at the same time keeping us safe from malicious attacks on our security and rightful place in the world community?

PCR: If the US is attacked, it is because of its aggressiveness toward others. I don’t know of any such attacks. 9/11 was an obvious false flag operation. The “Muslim terrorist” threat was invented in order to justify the Middle East and North Africa invasions which were in behalf of secret agendas, not a “war on terrorism.” To repeat myself, to return power to the American people, the 2010 US Supreme Court decision (Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission), which ruled it a First Amendment right for corporations to buy the government, would have to be removed, and the liberal interventionist/neoconservative ideology of US hegemony would have to be abandoned. After watching the entrenched establishment dispose of President Trump, I do not foresee the possibility of any leader being able to rise and form a movement capable of reining in the power of special interests and repudiating the doctrine of American exceptionalism. Whoever tried would be framed in some way and shut down or eliminated.

JR: The general public, especially when it’s aware of the self-sabotaging results of our current foreign policies and military posturing, clearly wants less war and militarism, preferring more peaceful alternatives on the world stage and greater concentration on solving the problems at home. As peace activists, we are thus more in line with the majority of citizens on issues of war and peace, than those currently in power.

What happens if we determine that those shaping current U.S. policy don’t care what the citizenry thinks, are simply not listening to us? What if we conclude that our Congress, for example, is completely deaf to the voice of the people? What do we do? What are our options then? What are the next concrete steps for political activists working toward a peaceful future?

PCR: The conclusions you list are correct. Democracy or rule by the people is no longer a respected value among the ruling elites. The World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” is prime proof of that. The WEF and the elite in general see masses of humanity as useless in the digital age. See, for example, “The Cult of Globalism: The Great Reset and Its “Final Solution” for “Useless People“, especially the 6 minute video with Israeli intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, an advisor to the WEF’s Klaus Schwab. The useless people are not to be allowed to determine anything. They are to be kept on drugs and entertained by video games and interactions with holograms. Life for them will be in a virtual world. Only the appearance of awareness among the insouciant masses sparking revolution against all elites could save the peoples of the world from tyranny.

*****

John Rachel: We are grateful to Paul Craig Roberts for sharing his valuable and thought-provoking views. The interview was arranged by John Rachel, Director of the Peace Dividend Project. The Peace Dividend strategy is not a meme or a bumper sticker. It is an end-to-end methodology for challenging the political establishment and removing from power those compromised individuals who work against the interests of the great majority of U.S. citizens. The only hope for our hyper-militarized nation is each and every one of us having a decisive voice in determining the future we want for ourselves and our children.

The post Interview: Paul Craig Roberts first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

Paul Wolffram: Resisting sorcery violence in PNG from the ‘grasruts’

APR editor — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 12:05:54 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Paul Wolffram

It was at the end of a long day of walking back and forth over the dusty roads of Goroka town in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea that I first met Evelyn.

I’d spent the morning interviewing three inmates in the regional penitentiary, Bihute Prison, about their participation in the murder of three people who they believed had killed a relative.

That afternoon I interviewed a policeman and a government official about the increasing impact of sanguma — sorcery violence — on the people of the region.

Everyone I talked with agreed that sanguma was a serious issue. I ended each interview by asking the men, what can be done to quell the violence and halt the spread of this growing problem.

Not one of them was able to provide an answer. “The problem was simply too big” and “there are no resources to help”, they said. As I climbed into the back of a rust-filled Econovan, the wife of one of the officials who had lingered in the background during the last interview, rushed to hand me a piece of paper.

She handed over the torn note, saying: “You must find her.”

The note contained the hastily written name “Evelyn Kunda” and a phone number. By the time I climbed out of the Econovan, back in the centre of Goroka, I’d made contact and walked directly to the Catholic mission.

There I found Evelyn Kunda. She looked like many other women in Goroka, dressed in a Meri blouse –- a Mother Hubbard style dress. Her hair was deep back and densely curled.

Warmth and intelligence
She looked to be in her early 50s but life in the Highlands towns and villages can make it hard to tell. What struck me the most about her appearance was the warmth of her smile and the intelligence in her eyes.

I didn’t know why the official’s wife had to told me to find her, I struggled to find a place to start. I told Evelyn, that I was researching sanguma in the Highlands, and asked what she might know.

WILDFIRE from Paul Wolffram on Vimeo.

Kunda explained that she, along with other volunteers of the Catholic Church, worked to hide, rehabilitate, and eventually — where possible — relocate the survivors of sorcery accusation-related violence (SARV).

As trucks expelled oily exhaust fumes, pushing dust down the road behind us, she described how difficult and dangerous the work had become for her and other volunteers in Goroka.

“In one instance we were looking after a woman whose husband had beaten her. He wanted to kill her. I took her to my house. Then her husband wanted to kill us as well,” Kunda said.

For a time, the Catholic church provided Kunda with a house in their compound but that soon became problematic, and the women were asked to leave. Now Kunda runs an unofficial safe house hidden among the shanties on the outskirts of the town.

‘They’re traumatised’
Kunda does her best to provide for them, but she explains: “They often can’t talk with us, they find it very difficult to talk about what has happened, they’re traumatised”.

She provides them with a place to sleep, food from her tiny garden, and whatever she can afford from the markets and trade stores.

At the end of our interview, I posed the same question to Evelyn Kunda that I’d asked the officials earlier that day.

“What can we do to stop sorcery violence?” Kunda’s response was immediate and practical, “We do all we can with whatever we have. Solutions can’t be found by sitting on our hands.”

Her work is proof that she’s a woman of action.

The following year, in 2019, I visited Evelyn Kunda’s safe house. A small two-room dirt floored hut that she’d built with offcuts of timber, bush materials, and sheets of old corrugated iron.

At the time she had two women living with her. One had escaped a violent partner and the other had been beaten as an accused witch. Kunda is desperate for support.

On the streets of Goroka town 2019 … hard hit as covid-19 swept through communities in Papua New Guinea the following year. Image: Paul Wolffram

Working on a film
We began working together on a film, with the aim of showing the extent of the impact of sanguma in the Highlands. I also wanted to show the world the incredible work Kunda is doing to resist the violence, rescue survivors, and educate others against gender and sorcery-based violence.

I was to return to Goroka in 2020 to complete the filming and to bring Evelyn Kunda back to New Zealand to work with us on the post-production but, like so many other plans, co covid-19 interrupted them.

The last two years have been more difficult than usual in the dusty frontier towns in the Highlands. As covid-19 swept through communities in Papua New Guinea and the morgue at Goroka hospital filled to overflowing, the amount of sorcery accusation-related violence rose too.

Local researcher Fiona Hukula said that there was a lack of clear communication about covid-19 available in PNG and significant amounts of disinformation. The National newspaper reported about a 45-year old woman and her daughter who were accused of sorcery and tortured by their relatives after her husband died of covid-19 in April last year.

Emma Dawson, Caritas Australia’s Pacific manager, described increasing domestic violence reports and sorcery accusation-related violence in July last year.

The violence occurs when a community blames a death or illness on sorcery. They identify a local man or woman as a witch and torture and kill them in shocking scenes of mob violence.

Earlier in 2021 a young boy died suddenly in the Highlands province of Hela. Within a few days a woman’s body was left by the side of the road. She’d been lynched and killed by her own community.

No cultural background
Ruth Kissam who works for a local NGO, the Tribal Foundation, told the ABC that violence like this didn’t have a cultural background, even in areas where belief in sorcery was traditional.

“Sorcery accusation-related violence picked up about 10 to 15 years ago. Culturally, there is a deep belief in sorcery in many parts of PNG but it was never violent.” Kissam said that this was a law-and-order problem.

Back in Goroka there were other instances where people were known to have died from covid-19 but the community and family refused to accept the diagnosis and in one case a woman was burnt with hot irons and thrown from a bridge. She survived, but her daughter and other family members were also targeted.

For Evelyn Kunda at the grasruts, running a safe house in a community where her presence and work are not always supported by landowners, life has become even more tenuous. Over the last two years I’ve maintained constant contact with her. At one time she had eight adults and children living in her tiny house.

Last week, Kunda was accosted by a group of women who beat her because of the work she does with the community’s most vulnerable.

Evelyn Kunda has no government support; she is not linked with any national or international NGO or aid organisation. She volunteers for this work out of compassion. Despite these difficulties, she is making a real difference to the lives of the women, men and children she houses and supports.

How long she will be able to continue this work is unknown.

Dr Paul Wolffram is a film maker and associate professor in the Film Programme at Te Herenga Waka. He has been working with communities in Papua New Guinea for more than 20 years.

More information about Evelyn Kunda’s safe house: www.sangumafilm.com
PledgeMe Link to support Evelyn Kunda’s safe house: www.pledgeme.co.nz/projects/7287-fundraising-for-evelyn-s-safehouse

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

TVNZ head of news and current affairs Paul Yurisich resigns after review

Pacific Media Watch — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 06:00:54 +0000

RNZ News

TVNZ’s head of news and current affairs, Paul Yurisich, has resigned after a review into the hiring of presenter Kamahl Santamaria.

TVNZ released its long-awaited report this afternoon. It came after an inquiry was carried out by senior employment lawyer Margaret Robins.

The former Al Jazeera presenter lasted just 32 days in the job and left under a cloud of accusations of inappropriate behaviour to colleagues.

READ MORE: The Breakfast anchor media saga

The review covered TVNZ’s recruitment practices and processes in general, as well as the specific recruitment of Kamahl Santamaria, who had carved out a strong television broadcasting reputation while a news anchor and presenter at Al Jazeera in Qatar between 2005 and 2022.

In addition, TVNZ took the opportunity to have Robins undertake a review of several policies, including those relating to internal workplace complaints and the development of TVNZ’s “Speak Up” policy.

The review found that Santamaria was hired “without meaningful input from key individuals” who usually included senior staff, including the chief executive, the general manager of news and current affairs and the chief people officer.

Robins concluded that Yurisich had not sufficiently consulted with senior executives, although “the fundamental problem was the failure of TVNZ’s recruitment policy to provide a process suitable for the recruitment of unique roles such as a key presenter”.

New policy needed
While TVNZ’s recruitment policy was suitable for the majority of roles, it did not traditionally apply to hiring key presenters, she said.

She said even if Yurisich had consulted more widely it was likely Santamaria would have been hired.

Resigned current affairs anchor Kamahl Santamaria saga … raised questions about TVNZ’s recruitment processes, managing complaints, and responses to questions of public interest. Image TVNZ Screenshot APR

However, if he had consulted more widely and had secured two additional references, more safeguards could have been put in place and sufficient due diligence may have been provided.

She recommended that the People and Culture team, which carried out recruitment, should set out new recruitment guidelines, and that it should also follow some suggestions from the review author on recruiting in a “fair and robust” manner where the usual guidelines were not being followed, such as for presenters.

Former head of news and current affairs Paul Yurisich … resigned after the TVNZ inquiry. Image: TVNZ

TVNZ chief executive Simon Power said “the review’s findings and its recommendations provide a clear path to ensure TVNZ’s recruitment practices and internal policies are adequately robust and fit for purpose”.

He said TVNZ supported the findings and recommendations of the review.

“There are improvements needed in our recruitment policies and work is already under way to embed these,” he said.

Power said Yurisich had spearheaded the digital transformation of the newsroom which has set TVNZ up strongly for the future. He had also provided strong leadership to the news and current affairs team during the pandemic.

Phil O’Sullivan will continue in the role of acting head of news and current affairs.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Paul and Blackburn Among GOP Senators Opposing Extension of School Meal Program

Brett Wilkins — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 21:24:43 +0000

A House-approved bill to continue funding a free school lunch program for low-income families hit a roadblock Thursday after at least two Senate Republicans—including a lawmaker who objects to a Biden administration policy banning discrimination against LGBTQ+ students—moved to thwart the measure.

"The USDA waivers provided essential flexibility for families to get food and to ensure schools can keep providing nutritious meals for children across the country."

In an overwhelmingly bipartisan 376-42 vote, House lawmakers approved the Keep Kids Fed Act, a bill to extend the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) child nutrition waiver authority—which was set to expire June 30—and authorize $3 billion in funding for communities to provide healthy meals for children and support to schools and daycares amid supply chain challenges and soaring food costs.

"No child in the richest country in the world should go hungry," Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said in a statement after the House passed the bill.

"The USDA waivers provided essential flexibility for families to get food," she continued, "and to ensure schools can keep providing nutritious meals for children across the country—as many as 10 million children received free breakfast and lunch each day under this program."

"The impact of this program has been unequivocal," Jayapal asserted, noting that "95% of school nutrition staff reported the waivers helped reduce child hunger, 89% said they eased the burden on parents and guardians, and 82% said they support academic achievement."

House Democrats urged the Senate to swiftly approve the measure. However, according to NPR's Ximena Bustillo, Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) have put holds on the proposed legislation.

Blackburn was one of five GOP senators led by Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Ks.) who last week sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office objecting to USDA guidance prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in any program receiving federal nutrition funding.

The Republican lawmakers' obstruction won't stop the bill from passing, but it will delay approval.

"While those waivers were scheduled to expire this month, the need has not," Jayapal stressed. "Especially given the inflated cost of food and the continuing challenges of Covid, we cannot allow 95 million meals to be missed by kids this summer."

Bustillo explained the significance of the waivers:

Before the pandemic, federal laws required schools meet specific nutrition requirements that governed what they could and could not serve students. They had to serve their meals in "congregate" settings, like a cafeteria or a park. Families had to meet income requirements to receive free or reduced-price meals under the National School Lunch Program. And in the summer, only areas that had 50% of kids qualifying for free or reduced-priced meals can operate a summer meal program.
Those rules went out the window during the pandemic... The school meal waivers allowed for students to grab lunches to-go and or be delivered via school buses. They also provided flexibility for schools when the supply chain disruptions began and never quite went away.

"The biggest omission," writes Bustillo, "is the exclusion of flexibilities that suspended eligibility requirements for free and reduced-price meal applications, giving every student free meals. Though the bill provides free meals to more students, families will need to resume filling out applications to qualify."

Jillien Meier, director of partnerships and campaign strategies at No Kid Hungry, told NPR that the waivers "really provided a lifeline, because in a lot of rural and suburban communities, poverty is so widely dispersed over large geographies."

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

Masongate: Exposing Paul Mason’s secret spook plot to destroy The Grayzone

The Grayzone — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 03:45:08 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

@David Numwami – My Love (Paul McCartney) | Reprise

Blogothèque — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 16:00:37 +0000

This content originally appeared on Blogothèque and was authored by Blogothèque.

BoJo and Senator Paul

Christopher Brauchli — Wed, 11 May 2022 08:19:42 +0000

We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.

– Winston Churchill, Radio broadcast to the French people October 21, 1940

If these were normal times there would be no need for those of us who live across the ocean from the country that is now governed by Boris Johnson to be apprehensive. His problems are uniquely his own and in ordinary times would not give us even a moment’s pause. These are not, all would agree, ordinary times.

As far as Boris is concerned his problems are of his own making and may, if not properly addressed, threaten his ability to retain his premiership. And some in the United States are concerned that his attempts may place the United States in peril. It has all come about because of Boris’ fondness for a good time and his willingness to attend a Downing Street Garden party during the pandemic when such gatherings were forbidden. Pictures of the gathering were distributed on the internet at a time when Boris’ subjects were themselves subject to a prohibition against such gatherings.

The result of the episode is that now, many months later, Boris finds himself in a position where he may lose the position that enables him to live at 10 Downing Street and, indeed, members of the opposition hope that the party will lead to Mr. Johnson’s downfall. It is not, however, a given. There are ways he may be able to retain his position.

One possibility is that he will seek a confidence vote before the summer and, if that is successful, will call for a general election in the fall. If he wins that election he will have overcome the result of having succumbed to a love of parties during the pandemic. That, of course, is not the only possible way Boris can take steps to secure his position. The obvious alternative to a confidence vote or a general election that may be available to Mr. Johnson was presented to us (and Mr. Johnson if he hadn’t already thought of it) by one of Kentucky’s two United States senators, Rand Paul.

Before his election to the United States Senate, Rand was an ophthalmologist. His expertise in matters of vision have given him unique insights into many aspects of government including foreign policy. During congressional hearings in 2017, when the Senate was considering a vote on a treaty admitting Montenegro to membership in NATO, Senator Paul blocked an attempt for the Senate to vote on the treaty causing former Senator John McCain to observe that: “The senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin.” (Notwithstanding Senator Paul’s efforts, Montenegro was formally admitted to NATO on June 5, 2017.)

Senator Paul’s employment by Putin was once again shown during hearings on Putin’s war in Ukraine. During a Congressional hearing at the end of April Paul explained that one of the reasons Putin had invaded Ukraine was that Ukraine was once part of the Soviet Union. Paul said that although there was no justification for the invasion of Ukraine by Putin “You could also argue that the countries that it has attacked were. . . part of the Soviet Union” and Putin has long wanted a “sphere of influence” over former Soviet states.

Although Putin’s position in Russia is not as imminently threatened as is Boris Johnson’s in England, it is undeniable that in the back of Putin’s mind is an awareness that by successfully invading former members of the Soviet Union he enhances his stature and his ability to retain control of Russia. And that is, of course, why Rand Paul’s observations are cause for alarm for some of us living on this side of the Atlantic.

As most of us know, the United States was once a part of the British Empire. That all came to an end in the period between 1765 and 1791 when those of us who lived in the 13 colonies formed independent states and defeated the British in the Revolutionary War thus gaining independence from the British Crown. Although that defeat of the British is not much discussed today, the concern expressed by some is that, like Putin, Boris Johnson may, in the back of his mind, intend to reclaim the 13 Colonies that Britain lost during the American Revolution. He may hope that in undertaking that task he will prove his ability to govern and retain his position as Prime Minister.

To reclaim what the 13 Colonies comprised in 1776 is of course, a daunting task, but people who are at risk of losing positions of power that they consider valuable are not beyond attempting what most of us would consider a foolish undertaking. This column is not intended to serve as a roadmap should Boris happen to see it. The complexity of fairly dividing up what were the original 13 colonies is itself such a daunting task that it is unlikely Boris would undertake it. Nonetheless, it has given some readers cause for alarm and the purpose of this piece is to give them some assurance that such an invasion is highly unlikely. Rand Paul notwithstanding.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Christopher Brauchli.

The Chris Hedges Report: Gerald Horne on the unrelentingly radical life of Paul Robeson

The Real News Network — Fri, 06 May 2022 16:00:11 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

Paul Krugman, China, mRNA Vaccines, and Right-Wing Populism

Dean Baker — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 08:55:13 +0000

I rarely disagree with Paul Krugman’s columns, but every now and then he does say something that I have to issue with. In a column last month, Krugman complained about the enormous costs associated with China’s zero Covid policy. He tied it to its reliance on old-fashioned Chinese vaccines that used dead virus material, instead of using the mRNA vaccines developed by researchers in the United States and Europe.

There are good grounds for criticizing China’s zero Covid policy. It may have been reasonable in the early days of the pandemic when we had neither vaccines nor effective treatment. However, the massive lockdowns required, which also literally threaten lives (people can’t get necessary medications and medical care), are hard to justify in the current situation.

But Krugman, and others (several people, who I respect, have picked up this line on Twitter), error in tying the zero Covid policy to China’s rejection of mRNA vaccines. In fact, with the omicron variant currently hitting China, the dead virus vaccines are actually quite effective in preventing serious illness and death.

The case fatality rate in Hong Kong for people who have gotten three doses of China’s vaccines is 0.03 percent. Even for people over age 80 it is just over 1.0 percent. This compares to a rate of 2.9 percent overall and 15.7 percent for those over age 80, who are unvaccinated. These data imply that China’s vaccines are highly effective in preventing death.

The big problem in Hong Kong, and now for mainland China, is not that its vaccines are ineffective, but rather they have done a poor job in vaccinating the elderly. Before the omicron surge, less than a quarter of Hong Kong residents over age 80 had received at least two doses of a vaccine. This explains their high death rates.

While the Chinese vaccines have not been effective preventing the spread of the omicron variant, neither have the mRNA vaccines. Denmark, which has one of the highest vaccination and booster rates in the world, was seeing over 40,000 cases a day at the peak of the omicron wave in February. This would be equivalent to more than 2.3 million daily cases in the United States. Clearly, breakthrough infections in Denmark were the norm.

The mRNA Mythology

It is striking that so many people are anxious to wrongly blame the costs of China’s zero Covid policy on its rejection of U.S.-made mRNA vaccines. To my view, this reflects an incredibly wrongheaded view of medical technology and the pandemic, that has likely cost millions of lives and also substantially worsened inequality.

As I argued in the early days of the pandemic, the United States should have taken the lead in pooling resources worldwide in order to maximize innovation and the deployment of effective vaccines, tests, and treatments. Instead, it doubled down on government-granted patent monopolies as a mechanism for financing research.

Moderna is the main villain in this story. It was paid $483 million for developing its vaccine, then another $472 million to conduct its phase three clinical trials. It also got advance purchase agreements for hundreds of millions of doses at close to $20 a shot, if the vaccines were approved by the FDA. (The shot cost around $1.50 to manufacture and distribute.) Not surprisingly, with this amount of government support, Moderna had generated at least five new billionaires, as of last summer.

The riches that have gone to Moderna’s billionaires, and other well-placed executives and researchers there and at other drug companies, could have instead gone to items like expanding the child tax credit, or subsidies for day care. Alternatively, if we are worried about inflation from an over-stimulated economy, we could have reduced demand in the economy by not giving so much money to the drug industry.

To be clear, I am very happy that we have the vaccines (I got three myself), but the question is whether the route we went was the most efficient. As I argued more than two years ago, we should have been looking to finance open-source vaccine development, with all results being freely shared around the world.

This would have meant that U.S. and European researchers would be posting their results on the web for researchers around the world to view and examine. The same would be the case for researchers in China, Russia, India, Brazil, and elsewhere.

Researchers need to be paid, and we would do that, exactly as we did with Moderna. If Moderna as a company wasn’t interested in taking part, then we would just pay their researchers directly. Moderna would threaten them with lawsuits over violating non-disclosure agreements, but the government could just agree to cover their legal expenses and any potential damages. These lawsuits (against researchers for sharing their knowledge) would also have the great benefit of showing precisely how much Moderna and other drug companies care about human life.

We would also need some agreement on sharing costs among countries. This need not be worked out in advance, we can always have payments going back and forth after the fact. We would just need a commitment in principle. Of course, moving along this route would not have been possible in 2020 when Donald Trump was in the White House. We would have needed a president who actually cared about limiting the human and economic cost of the pandemic, as opposed to just the crowd sizes at his rallies.

If we had freely pooled technology we could have had massive stockpiles of every promising vaccine available at the time they were first approved by the FDA or other health oversight agencies. If all the drug manufacturers in the world had full access to the mRNA technology as the vaccines were being tested, it is very plausible that we could have had a stockpiles of billions of doses of Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines at the time they were approved. The cost of having to throw out a billion doses (remember they only a $1-$1.50 to produce) of a vaccine that proved to be ineffective, are trivial compared to the benefits of being able to quickly put 1 billion doses in people’s arms.

And, we also could have had large stockpiles of China’s vaccines. They were less effective than the mRNA vaccines, but hugely more effective than no vaccine. If we had rushed to distribute doses of stockpiles of all the vaccines that proved effective, as quickly as possible, it is very likely we could have prevented the mutation that became the omicron variant, and possibly even the Delta variant. This could have saved millions of lives and prevented the loss of trillions of dollars of economic activity.

Patent Monopolies and Right-Wing Populists

What does this story of open-source research have to do with right-wing populists? The support for right-wing populists from Donald Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, and Marine Le Pen in France comes overwhelmingly from white working-class voters. This is typically attributed to racism.

While racism is undoubtedly a large factor in these politicians’ appeal, the question this explanation leaves unanswered is why did these people suddenly become so racist. Or perhaps better put, why did racism come to dominate their political behavior.

In the United States, many people who voted for Trump in 2016, had voted for Barack Obama four years earlier. It may seem like ancient history, but it was not long ago that Obama carried states like Iowa and Ohio by comfortable margins. These states are now considered out of reach for a Democratic presidential candidate. There is a similar story elsewhere, where working class voters, who used to support socialist, social democratic, or communist candidates, now support right-wing populist politicians.

An alternative explanation is that these working-class voters are being left behind by the course of economic development in recent decades. It is clear that this is true, workers without college degrees have not shared to any substantial extent in the benefits of economic growth over the last four decades, but a key issue is whether they were “left behind,” or pushed behind.

Government-granted patent monopolies, along with their cousin copyright monopolies, are a big part of this story. In this period of rising inequality, these forms of intellectual property have played an enormous role in the growth of inequality.[1] To take my poster child, Bill Gates would likely still be working for a living, instead of one of the richest people in the world, if the government did not threaten to arrest anyone who made copies of Microsoft software without his permission.

One of the great absurdities of current policy debates is that people will instantly say that we wouldn’t have any innovation without patent and copyright monopolies. In the next sentence they will tell us that technology is causing inequality. If the contradiction between those two claims is not immediately apparent, then you could be a leading intellectual pontificating on economic policy.

The point is that patent and copyright monopolies are very explicitly government policies. We can make them longer and stronger, or shorter and weaker, or not have them at all. It is absurd to claim both that we need patent and copyright monopolies and that technology is driving inequality. It is our policy on technology that drives inequality, it is not the technology.

The fact that we never even had a serious policy debate over relying on patent monopolies in the development of vaccines in the pandemic shows the extent to which elite ideology dominates public debate. The policies that might challenge the upward redistribution of income are not even allowed to be discussed, even when they might save millions of lives and trillions of dollars.

Instead, we get Moderna billionaires. The debate on inequality is focused on politically far-fetched proposals like a wealth tax. The debate over these policies may fill many pages in newspapers and magazines, and make for many promising academic careers, but the more obvious route would be to not structure our economy in a way that makes so many billionaires in the first place.

Basically, the people who control major news outlets and other arenas of public debate do not want any discussion of the ways we have structured the economy to redistribute so much income upward. They want the working class to believe that they are just losers. We may feel sorry for them and want to have a better social welfare state, but the fact that they are losers is not supposed to be up for debate.

In that context, it is not surprising that working class people would not feel much affinity for the politicians who see them as losers and support the policies that make them losers. The right-wing populists may not have a serious route for improving the plight of the working class, but they can at least present a villain and tell the working class how their situation was imposed on them, rather than the result of their own failings.

Many had hoped that revulsion against Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine would be a death blow to the right-wing populists, who were generally very friendly towards Putin. With Viktor Orban winning re-election in Hungary, Marine Le Pen seriously challenging for the presidency of France, and the stench of Donald Trump still haunting U.S. politics, clearly the right-wing populists are not about to fade away. It would be nice if we could have some more serious thinking about the conditions that created the atmosphere for their political ascendency.

Notes.

[1] Intellectual property is not the only force driving inequality in recent decades. The weakening of unions, trade policy, a bloated financial sector and other factors have also been important to the rise in inequality. I discuss this issue in more detail in my book Rigged (it’s free).

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

Cameroon Web reporter Paul Chouta assaulted again in Yaounde

Committee to Protect Journalists — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 18:10:15 +0000

New York, March 11, 2022 — Cameroonian authorities should immediately investigate an attack on Paul Chouta, a reporter for the privately owned news website Cameroon Web, and ensure those who assaulted him are held accountable, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.

On Wednesday evening, Chouta was watching the UEFA Champions League soccer game between Real Madrid and Paris St. Germain with friends in a snack bar in the Damas district of the capital Yaounde when three unidentified men in a green pick-up truck abducted the journalist, drove him to the outskirts of the city, and viciously kicked and beat him with stones, bricks, a baton and a whip, according to a statement by his employer reviewed by CPJ, media reports, and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

In the statement, Cameroon Web editor-in-chief Emmanuel Vitus was unable to say what report may have prompted the latest attack; he told CPJ via messaging app that this was not the first time that Chouta was attacked for his journalism and that the reporter, and his family should be placed under police protection while the assault was investigated. Vitus described the assault as “an attack on freedom of the press and on democracy,” adding that Chouta was a “courageous journalist and whistleblower.”

“Cameroonian police must thoroughly investigate the latest attack on Paul Chouta, a journalist and outspoken critic of the government, and bring swift justice to those responsible,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator. “Failure to act will reinforce perceptions that impunity for crimes against journalists is the order of the day in Cameroon and that journalists like Paul Chouta are simply not safe in their own country.”

Chouta went outside during half-time and was accosted by men wearing civilian clothes, who carried him across the road and threw him in the vehicle, the journalist told CPJ. Chouta shouted for help, but his attackers pushed him into the pick-up truck and used his shirt to blindfold him, he said. Chouta said he believed he had been tailed and that a few miles down the road the men stopped the car and picked up a fourth man.

The men drove Chouta to the outskirts of the city, near the airport, where he was told to kneel and was severely beaten and kicked for about four minutes before he fell unconscious, he told CPJ. “They told me that I’m stubborn and that I never learn a lesson,” Chouta said. “They said this time they will kill me, as I wanted to show that I was a hero.”

Chouta said he was left for dead. When he regained consciousness, he said he had been stripped naked; his wallet, identity, and bank cards had been taken; and he was unable to see out of his left eye, had a swollen face and ear, and was in great pain.

The journalist walked naked and barefoot for about two miles (three kilometers) before he was helped by strangers. He was able to remember his girlfriend’s telephone number and they called her to take him to the hospital, Chouta said.

Chouta spent Thursday night in the hospital and is expected to be discharged today to seek treatment at another medical facility, according to the reporter and his editor.

Chouta told CPJ that he had been interviewed at the hospital by police this morning and was told that a knife had been found where he was attacked. Video footage from the snack bar’s closed-circuit camera was also taken by police, he said.

Police spokeswoman Joyce Ndem replied to CPJ’s request for comment by saying itshould send a representative to talk to her in her office in Yaounde. She did not reply to a subsequent text via messaging app.

In February 2019, Chouta was attacked outside his home following political coverage, as CPJ documented at the time. Four months later, he was arrested on charges believed to be politically motivated. He was jailed for nearly two years until a court in May 2021 found him guilty and sentenced him to 23 months, which he had already served, and released him.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Let’s Recall What Exactly Paul Manafort and Rudy Giuliani Were Doing in Ukraine

by Ilya Marritz — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 21:45:00 +0000

by Ilya Marritz

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

Though Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is just days old, Russia has been working for years to influence and undermine the independence of its smaller neighbor. As it happens, some Americans have played a role in that effort.

One was former President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Another was Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

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It’s all detailed in a wide array of public documents, particularly a bipartisan 2020 Senate report on Trump and Russia. I was one of the journalists who dug into all the connections, as part of the Trump, Inc. podcast with ProPublica and WNYC. (I was in Kyiv, retracing Manafort’s steps, when Trump’s infamous call with Ukraine’s president was revealed in September 2019.)

Given recent events, I thought it’d be helpful to put all the tidbits together, showing what happened step by step.

Americans Making Money Abroad. What’s the Problem?

Paul Manafort was a longtime Republican consultant and lobbyist who’d developed a speciality working with unsavory, undemocratic clients. In 2004, he was hired by oligarchs supporting a pro-Russian party in Ukraine. It was a tough assignment: The Party of Regions needed an image makeover. A recent election had been marred by allegations that fraud had been committed in favor of the party’s candidate, prompting a popular revolt that became known as the Orange Revolution.

In a memo for Ukraine’s reportedly richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, Manafort summed up the polling: Many respondents said they associated the Party of Regions with corruption and considered it the “party of oligarchs.”

Manafort set to work rebranding the party with poll-tested messaging and improved stagecraft. Before long, the Party of Regions was in power in Kyiv. One of his key aides in Ukraine was, allegedly, a Russian spy. The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Trump and Russia said Konstantin Kilimnik was both “a Russian intelligence officer” and “an integral part of Manafort’s operations in Ukraine and Russia.”

Kilimnik has denied he is a Russian spy. He was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for obstruction of justice for allegedly trying to get witnesses to lie in testimony to prosecutors in the Manafort case. Kilimnik, who reportedly lives in Moscow, has not been arrested. In an email to The Washington Post, Kilimnik distanced himself from Manafort’s legal woes and wrote, “I am still confused as to why I was pulled into this mess.”

Manafort did quite well during his time in Ukraine. He was paid tens of millions of dollars by pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and other clients, stashing much of the money in undeclared bank accounts in Cyprus and the Caribbean. He used the hidden income to enjoy some of the finer things in life, such as a $15,000 ostrich jacket. Manafort was convicted in 2018 of wide-ranging financial crimes.

“We Are Going to Have So Much Fun, and Change the World in the Process”

In 2014, Manafort’s plum assignment in Ukraine came to an abrupt end. In February of that year, Yanukovych was deposed in Ukraine’s second uprising in a decade, known as the Maidan Revolution, in which more than a hundred protesters were killed in Kyiv. He fled to Russia, leaving behind a vast, opulent estate (now a museum) with gold-plated bathroom fixtures, a galleon on a lake and a 100-car garage.

With big bills and no more big checks coming in, Manafort soon found himself deep in debt, including to a Russian oligarch. He eventually pitched himself for a new gig in American politics as a convention manager, wrangling delegates for an iconoclastic reality-TV star and real estate developer.

“I am not looking for a paid job,” he wrote to the Trump campaign in early 2016. Manafort was hired that spring, working for free.

According to the Senate report, in mid-May 2016 he emailed top Trump fundraiser Tom Barrack, “We are going to have so much fun, and change the world in the process.” (Barrack was charged last year with failing to register as a foreign agent, involving his work for the United Arab Emirates. He has pleaded not guilty. The case has not yet gone to trial.)

A few months later, the Trump campaign put the kibosh on proposed language in the Republican Party platform that expressed support for arming Ukraine with defensive weapons.

One Trump campaign aide told Mueller that Trump’s view was that “the Europeans should take primary responsibility for any assistance to Ukraine, that there should be improved U.S.-Russia relations, and that he did not want to start World War III over that region.”

According to the Senate report, Manafort met Kilimnik twice in person while working on the Trump campaign, messaged with him electronically and shared “sensitive campaign polling data” with him.

Senate investigators wrote in their report that they suspected Kilimnik served as “a channel for coordination” on the Russian military intelligence operation to hack into Democratic emails and leak them.

The Senate intel report notes that in about a dozen interviews with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Manafort “lied consistently” about “one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik.”

Manafort’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Manafort didn’t make it to Election Day on the Trump campaign. In August 2016, The New York Times revealed that handwritten ledgers recovered from Yanukovych’s estate showed nearly $13 million in previously undisclosed payments to Manafort from Yanukovych and his pro-Russian party. Manafort was pushed out of his job as Trump’s campaign chairman less than a week later.

After Trump won the election, the Senate report says, Manafort and Kilimnik worked together on a proposed “plan” for Ukraine that would create an Autonomous Republic of Donbas in separatist-run southeast Ukraine, on the Russian border. Manafort went so far as to work with a pollster on a survey on public attitudes to Yanukovych, the deposed president. The plan only would need a “wink” from the new U.S. president, Kilimnik wrote to Manafort in an email.

Manafort continued to work on the “plan” even after he had been indicted on charges of bank fraud and conspiracy, according to the Senate report. It’s not clear what became of the effort, if anything.

“Do Us a Favor”

With Manafort’s conviction in 2018, Rudy Giuliani came to the fore as the most Ukraine-connected person close to President Trump. Giuliani had long jetted around Eastern Europe. He’d hung out in Kyiv, supporting former professional boxer Vitali Klitschko’s run for mayor. One of Giuliani’s clients for his law firm happened to be Russia’s state oil producer, Rosneft.

By 2018, Giuliani had joined Trump’s legal team, leading the public effort to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation. Giuliani saw that Ukraine could be a key to that effort.

Giuliani ended up working with a pair of émigré business partners, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to make contacts in Ukraine with corrupt and questionable prosecutors, in an effort to turn up “dirt” on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Giuliani also worked to sow doubt about the ledger that had revealed the secret payments to Manafort, meeting with his buddies in a literally smoke-filled room.

Parnas and Fruman told the president at a donor dinner in 2018 that the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv was a liability to his administration.

((Transcript courtesy of rev.com))

Trump recalled Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who had been a vocal opponent of corruption in Ukraine, from Kyiv in May 2019.

Two months later, Trump had his infamous call with Ukraine’s new President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Zelenskyy asked Trump for anti-tank Javelin missiles. You know what happened next. Trump said he needed Zelenskyy to first “do us a favor” and initiate investigations that would be damaging to Joe Biden. He also pressed Zelenskyy to meet with Giuliani, according to the official readout of the call:

These events became publicly known in September 2019, when a whistleblower complaint was leaked.

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistleblower wrote.

In December 2019, as an impeachment inquiry was at full tilt, Giuliani flew to Ukraine and met with a member of Ukraine’s parliament, Andrii Derkach, in an apparent effort to discredit the investigation of Trump’s actions. Derkach, a former member of the Party of Regions, went on to release a trove of dubious audio “recordings” that seemed to be aimed at showing Biden’s actions in Ukraine, when he was vice president, in a negative light.

Within months, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach, describing him as “an active Russian agent for over a decade” who tried to undermine U.S. elections. Derkach has called that idea “nonsense.”

In a statement, Giuliani said, “there is nothing I saw that said he was a Russian agent. There is nothing he gave me that seemed to come from Russia at all.” Giuliani has consistently maintained that his actions in Ukraine were proper and lawful. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Where They Are Now...

Many of Trump’s allies have been charged or investigated for their work in and around Ukraine:

Paul Manafort: convicted of financial fraud — then pardoned by Trump

Rick Gates: a Manafort aide who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI

Sam Patten: another Manafort associate convicted for acting as a straw donor to the Trump inaugural committee on behalf of a Ukrainian oligarch

Rudy Giuliani: reportedly under criminal investigation over his dealings in Ukraine; his lawyer called an FBI search of his home and seizure of electronic devices “legal thuggery”

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman: convicted for funneling foreign money into U.S. elections; Parnas’ attorney said he would appeal

Key Documents

US Senate Intelligence Committee Russia Investigation Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report
Many of the exhibits from Paul Manafort’s 2018 trial are available for free with a CourtListener account

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Ilya Marritz.

The Situation in Haiti, 1995: an Interview with Paul Farmer, MD

Fred Gardner — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 09:50:26 +0000

In the spring of 1995, Paul Farmer, who died last week, was in San Francisco to take part in a weekend conference on resurgent TB. This interview —all too timely today— was conducted for the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Paul Farmer runs a clinic in rural Haiti, where tuberculosis is the leading cause of death (and has More

The post The Situation in Haiti, 1995: an Interview with Paul Farmer, MD appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Fred Gardner.

Who Lives, Who Dies: The Remarkable Life and Untimely Death of Dr. Paul Farmer

Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 21:08:16 +0000

Paul Farmer, rest in peace and power, and may your work continue.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan.

Who Lives, Who Dies: The Remarkable Life and Untimely Death of Dr. Paul Farmer

Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 21:08:16 +0000

Paul Farmer, rest in peace and power, and may your work continue.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan.

Malcolm X Hit 2022 on the Head

Paul Haeder — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 18:21:38 +0000

I have people worried that as white writers they will be hit with “cultural appropriation” if they write a novel with characters who are not of their own race. You know the deal — writing about barrios, or ghettos or even a mix of people in a big city, people outside the lily white background of the author.

We know that is balderdash, to put it lightly. The cultural appropriation fear came up in a memoir writing class I teach. Memoirs, which are about people remembering a time in their lives with significance, tied to themes. They are about the person, and then, through their looking glass and through deep analysis, about how they experience the world. A memoir is what the person, the author, is remembering. So, for instance, I grew up all over the place, but say, when I was three or four, we were in the Azores. Of course, I have a right to write about my Portuguese “nanny” (babysitter). Or anything I learn/learned about Portugal.

Wrestling with my Mexican-American friends in high school in Tucson? Doing a sweat with my Apache friends up on the White River Apache Reservation? All the time I was in Central America, or in Mexico? These are off limits to me because I am Irish-German? Bull-shit!

The issue was broached by a student who was watching that Uncle Tom, Oprah, who had on her show the author of American Dirt. She wrote a novel about — Mexicans coming across the border. She’s white, and she got all the hype, a seven-figure advance, and she said her husband, too, was an undocumented immigrant, but the problem is that fellow is Irish. Lots and lots of hype, publicity, and $$. She was even a headliner for an annual Spokane literary festival, Get Lit, set for April 2020. I was also going to be there as small potatoes writer reading, but both she was cancelled, through her agent and publisher, and the event got hit with the Covid paranoia.

There’s no use in getting into the debate about how she may have done some “brown facing,” or the fact that minority and marginalized and BIPOC writers in the USA get short shafted when it comes to literary notice, literary contracts, big promo’s and the big bucks. I explained to my students that to have a panel of people who have studied cultural appropriation, who know the ins and outs of the bizarre debate about teaching history about blacks, women, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and such, and how they can debunk these anti-“critical race theory” racists, to have them there, talking, and then giving the students a chance to query and discuss, that is the only way to deal with the actual issue of cultural appropriation.

Here, the background:

Oprah Winfrey will soon host a conversation about “American Dirt,” a novel mired in controversy that’s also the latest selection for her book club.

It’s too little too late. Winfrey should rescind her support now.

In nearly 25 years, only once has the entertainment mogul yanked a coveted book club endorsement. That came in 2006, after James Frey’s memoir about his addiction and recovery, “A Million Little Pieces,” turned out to be far more fiction than fact.

“American Dirt” needs to be the second.

For months, Jeanine Cummins’s novel about a Mexican mother and her young son heading to the border to escape a drug cartel has been widely criticized in Latinx circles for perpetuating what writer and translator David Bowles calls a “pastiche of stereotypes and melodramatic tropes of the sort one might expect from an author who did not grow up within Mexican culture.”

Cummins has long identified as white. In interviews, she now mentions her Puerto Rican grandmother, and some headlines call her “a white Latina.” She says she deeply researched the book, including spending time in Mexico.

Yet this isn’t about how Cummins self-identifies. It’s about a novel fostering stereotypes, and what happens when communities of color get shut out from telling their own stories.

After a publishing industry bidding war, Cummins received a seven-figure advance, and the movie rights have been sold. Her novel received glowing blurbs from Stephen King and John Grisham. She got a major credibility boost from acclaimed Latinx authors Sandra Cisneros, who called the book “masterful,” and Julia Alvarez, who said it’s “a dazzling accomplishment.” All appear on the book’s back cover.

In the ensuing debate, neither Cisneros nor Alvarez have stepped forward to defend a book to which they lent their names and, especially, their reputations. — Renée Graham Globe Columnist,Updated January 28, 2020

I get where this entire thing comes down to (bad writing, white woman with no real ground-living/ground-truthing). And without shooting myself in the foot, me being a white guy who happens to know where I have been, for whom the people I have been with, what those close relationships I have fostered — with people way outside my demographic — have taught me about them and myself. I get how I stick out like a sore thumb when dealing with academic types, with university types, with those in MFA writing programs. I have been cancelled and delegitimzed my entire life. My stories and my characters in stories are my characters. Having to tell me that I have only the right to write about my own people and gender (heterosexual white as is my family/blood) is absurd. But I get the reactions to this white privilege in publishing, but I also hate what the MFA Writing Programs have done to writers and writing the past 30 years. I hate the barbaric thinking on both sides of this debate. And Oprah? I am an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, and I wonder what Malcolm X might think of the current affairs of this rot-gut country? Billionaire? Oprah? The make or break literary arbiter?

The fact is just two days ago, we get the Oregon news around the education outcomes of Black students in Multnomah County.

Part of why Portland’s Black and Latino students are so vastly underrepresented in advanced courses, parents of color say, is that many teachers, counselors and other educators assume those students aren’t smart or skilled enough to handle the challenge.

Low expectations and a lack of structural support for Black and Latino students also continue to lead to persistently low graduation and college-going rates for those groups, an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive has found.

That is true even though the district’s top leaders pledged nearly 2 ½ years ago that they would dramatically boost Black and Latino student achievement by this year.

Despite making up about 7% of the overall student population, Black students represent about 1% of those who took advanced courses this school year and last, district figures show.

And even though Latinos make up about 16% or 17% of district enrollment, they represent about 8% of those taking advanced courses. (“Left Behind: Low expectations, lackluster education for high school students of color in Portland span decades” — Oregonian)

This is 2022, not 1964 when Malcolm X did his The Ballot or the Bullet speech.

I am not embarrassed or ashamed of the white crackers in this country, whether they are dirt poor crackers or rich as kings crackers. Racists, sexists, ageists, they all are a bunch of privileged fools. But they hate. Most people I know of never ever go into a cracker bar with a bunch of Harleys outside. I do. And the shit coming out of these people’s racist mouths is consistent with their country’s history of killing and killing. So embarrassed? Why? These people are the natural (sic) outgrowth of who they are (their roots, lineages); where they came from (forefatherrs the superstitious colonizers); and how they have developed (on the muscle and brawn and graves of slaves and First Nations). Bad-bad folks. Yes, there are deplorables in the mix, just not the way that white racist Hillary was thinking about! So, this is a story from 2022. Imagine that, Kansas:

Just a few days ago:

A Kansas principal was allegedly forced to apologize to high school staff after showing them a video about white privilege, KMUW reports.

The incident started in January when Principal Tim Hamblin reportedly showed Derby High School staff a 2011 video focused on the perspectives of Dr. Joy DeGruy. DeGruy, who is a Black author, spoke about her personal experiences with racism and white privilege.

The story was about her being forced to present identification to a grocery store cashier, while her sister-in-law, who has a fair complexion, did not have to do such a thing. The relative ended up calling out the store manager and staff for racism.

“She used her white privilege to educate and make right a situation that was wrong,” DeGruy says in the footage. “That’s what you can do every single day.” (source)

I’ve been in meetings and conferences with DeGruy. An amazing person. Is it just Kansas? The putz apologizes? This is one sick country — and the sickness is deep:

What would Malcolm X think or say? About this shit in this day and age?

What would Malcolm X think about this government overreach, the Klanadians and lockdowns? How would Malcolm C see these white Klanadians — really, who they are — as compared to who the Americans are? The same side of the same coin? Beware of Trudeau and beware of most of the truckers. Vaccination status and crossing the US-Canada border and mandates are not the ONLY issues for which they have axes to grind. Go a little deep with Canadians, about the theft/rape of the land, about the ravaging of First Nations’ land and culture, about really their country’s thuggish ways, from RCMP, the RCAF, well, you might just find yourself at the wrong end of the grill on that big Volvo 18-wheeler. How in god’s name do any Canadians run around with Trump flags? The tail and the dog and the pile of you know what — Canada-USA-UK!

From Workers World: “This movement has become, in a few days, a symbol for all those who are more and more shocked by everything that is happening in our society, but who — and this should not be underestimated — are also more and more attracted to right-wing and even extreme right-wing movements.

“These trucker convoys, which fail to raise the key work issues of truck drivers in both countries, are being well financed by U.S. reactionary movements and getting tremendous business media attention. Meanwhile, Big Media is barely acknowledging the enormous U.S. worker resurgence underway and growing — the strike wave this past fall, massive education and health worker organizing, the unionization struggle spreading like wildfire through Starbucks, the drive to unionize Amazon, one of the biggest high tech exploiters in the world. Working-class activists can take heart from these developments and more.”

+–+

Here, from . . . . Kanyenkehaka (Mohawk) is from the Tehanakarineh family of the Bear Clan. His home is in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, but he currently resides at the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory (near Hamilton, Ontario). He is an Onkwehon:we (Indigenous) man and belongs to the Kayenkehaka Nation, not the Canadian or English nation. His people have kept their ways and traditions, and despite generations of mistreatment at the hands of the Canadian government, they remain a separate, allied Nation with their own rights and responsibilities to creation.

For all of you who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, maybe you’re new to this country. They didn’t teach you that Indigenous people own these lands. They’ll tell you that it’s theirs. It’s Canada’s wonderful free place. It was only free because they stole things. I’m talking to all the brown people in the cities that didn’t want to go and support the truckers because they thought they were racist. Well, the Liberal Government’s racist and so is the Conservative Government. The entire government of Canada is racist. And the RCMP are racist. Let’s face the facts the RCMP are just as much a culprit in the in the theft of the indigenous children that got sent to residential schools, because they were the collectors.

Here, the Latinx calling out “American Dirt”: Myriam Gurba,

When I tell gringos that my Mexican grandfather worked as a publicist, the news silences them.

Shocked facial expressions follow suit.

Their heads look ready to explode and I can tell they’re thinking, “In Mexico, there are PUBLICISTS?!”

I wryly grin at these fulanos and let my smile speak on my behalf. It answers, “Yes, bitch, in México, there are things to publicize such as our own fucking opinions about YOU.”

I follow in the cocky footsteps of my grandfather, Ricardo Serrano Ríos, “decano de los publicistas de Jalisco[1],” and not only do I have opinions, I bark them como itzcuintli. También soy chismosa and if you don’t have the gift of Spanglish, allow me to translate. “Chisme” means gossip. It’s my preferred art form, one I began practicing soon after my period first stained my calzones, and what’s literature, and literary criticism, if not painstakingly aestheticized chisme?

Tengo chisme. Are you ready?

A self-professed gabacha, Jeanine Cummins, wrote a book that sucks. Big time.

Her obra de caca belongs to the great American tradition of doing the following:

Appropriating genius works by people of color
Slapping a coat of mayonesa on them to make palatable to taste buds estados-unidenses and
Repackaging them for mass racially “colorblind” consumption.

Rather than look us in the eye, many gabachos prefer to look down their noses at us. Rather than face that we are their moral and intellectual equals, they happily pity us. Pity is what inspires their sweet tooth for Mexican pain, a craving many of them hide. This denial motivates their spending habits, resulting in a preference for trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf. To satisfy this demand, Cummins tossed together American Dirt, a “road thriller” that wears an I’m-giving-a-voice-to-the-voiceless-masses merkin.

I learned about Dirt when an editor at a feminist magazine invited me to review it.

I accepted her offer, Dirt arrived in my mailbox, and I tossed it in my suitcase. At my tía’s house in Guadalajara, I opened the book.

Before giving me a chance to turn to chapter one, a publisher’s letter made me wince.

“The first time Jeanine and I ever talked on the phone,” the publisher gushed, “she said migrants at the Mexican border were being portrayed as a ‘faceless brown mass.’ She said she wanted to give these people a face.”

The phrase “these people” pissed me off so bad my blood became carbonated.

I looked up, at a mirror hanging on my tía’s wall.

It reflected my face.

In order to choke down Dirt, I developed a survival strategy. It required that I give myself over to the project of zealously hate-reading the book, filling its margins with phrases like “Pendeja, please.” That’s a Spanglish analogue for “Bitch, please.”

Back in Alta California, I sat at my kitchen table and penned my review. I submitted it. Waited.

After a few days, an editor responded. She wrote that though my takedown of Dirt was “spectacular,” I lacked the fame to pen something so “negative.” She offered to reconsider if I changed my wording, if I wrote “something redeeming.”

In the end, though, it’s Black History Month. Anyone with any worth should listen to Malcolm X’s talk, “The Ballot or the Bullet.” Goddamn it, listen.

I’m not a politician, not even a student of politics; in fact, I’m not a student of much of anything. I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican, and I don’t even consider myself an American. If you and I were Americans, there’d be no problem. Those Honkies that just got off the boat, they’re already Americans; Polacks are already Americans; the Italian refugees are already Americans. Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren’t Americans yet.

Well, I am one who doesn’t believe in deluding myself. I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate. Being here in America doesn’t make you an American. Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American. Why, if birth made you American, you wouldn’t need any legislation; you wouldn’t need any amendments to the Constitution; you wouldn’t be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington, D.C., right now. They don’t have to pass civil-rights legislation to make a Polack an American.

No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver — no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.

These 22 million victims are waking up. Their eyes are coming open. They’re beginning to see what they used to only look at. They’re becoming politically mature. They are realizing that there are new political trends from coast to coast. As they see these new political trends, it’s possible for them to see that every time there’s an election the races are so close that they have to have a recount. They had to recount in Massachusetts to see who was going to be governor, it was so close. It was the same way in Rhode Island, in Minnesota, and in many other parts of the country. And the same with Kennedy and Nixon when they ran for president. It was so close they had to count all over again. Well, what does this mean? It means that when white people are evenly divided, and black people have a bloc of votes of their own, it is left up to them to determine who’s going to sit in the White House and who’s going to be in the dog house. (transcript here)

Ahh, some Mexican writers have called this latest book on today’s Mexico, one of the best. Written by, well, Theroux, the old white guy!

Theroux then goes deep into the hinterland, on the back roads of Chiapas and Oaxaca, to uncover the rich, layered world behind today’s brutal headlines.

He meets with the legendary Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista movement dedicated to defending the rights of Mexico’s indigenous people. ON THE PLAIN OF SNAKES: A Mexican Journey is replete with adventures, history, discursions on literature about Mexico, stunning descriptions and, running through it all, a deep humanity and respect for the ordinary Mexicans who are his main subject.

Paul Theroux has been called “The world’s most perceptive travel writer”. He is the author of many highly acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Great Railway Bazaar, The Mosquito Coast and Riding the Iron Rooster. We spoke with him last about his book Deep South.

Interview here of Paul Theroux: Source/Podcast.

What would Malcolm X say?

So, what I’m trying to impress upon you, in essence, is this: You and I in America are faced not with a segregationist conspiracy, we’re faced with a government conspiracy. Everyone who’s filibustering is a senator — that’s the government. Everyone who’s finagling in Washington, D.C., is a congressman — that’s the government. You don’t have anybody putting blocks in your path but people who are a part of the government. The same government that you go abroad to fight for and die for is the government that is in a conspiracy to deprive you of your voting rights, deprive you of your economic opportunities, deprive you of decent housing, deprive you of decent education. You don’t need to go to the employer alone, it is the government itself, the government of America, that is responsible for the oppression and exploitation and degradation of black people in this country. And you should drop it in their lap. This government has failed the Negro. This so-called democracy has failed the Negro. And all these white liberals have definitely failed the Negro.

See/read the initial Black History Month piece by yours truly: “To the Victor Go the Spoils“, DV, February 5th, 2022

The post Malcolm X Hit 2022 on the Head first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Remembering Dr. Paul Farmer: A Public Health Pioneer Who Helped Millions from Haiti to Rwanda

Democracy Now! — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 15:49:47 +0000

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

Remembering Dr. Paul Farmer: A Public Health Pioneer Who Helped Millions from Haiti to Rwanda

Democracy Now! — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 13:33:45 +0000

We remember the life and legacy of Dr. Paul Farmer, a public health icon who spent decades building community health networks helping millions of poor people in Haiti, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and beyond. He died unexpectedly Monday at the age of 62. We feature Farmer’s past interviews with Democracy Now! and speak with his longtime colleague, Dr. Joia Mukherjee. Farmer leaves behind a remarkable legacy and an “enormous community of people that he brought to this large table that is now global health,” says Mukherjee, chief medical officer for Partners In Health, where she worked with Farmer for 23 years.

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

‘A Great Loss’: Partners In Health Co-Founder Dr. Paul Farmer Dead at 62

Andrea Germanos — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 16:47:12 +0000

"The many lives he saved are his legacy," said one friend and colleague.

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

When The Levee Breaks feat. John Paul Jones | Playing For Change | Song Around The World

Playing For Change — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 17:04:18 +0000

This content originally appeared on Playing For Change and was authored by Playing For Change.

Paul Pillar

Ralph Nader Radio Hour — Sat, 26 Mar 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Former CIA intelligence analyst and terrorism expert, Paul Pillar, tells us about how in his experience at the CIA during the lead up to the Iraq War, the intelligence community was completely ignored.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.

ISIS; Al Gore; Bernie and Paul

Ralph Nader Radio Hour — Sun, 13 Dec 2015 00:44:12 +0000

This week, we devote the entire episode to Ralph answering our listeners' questions.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.

Eben Moglen, Paul Hudson

Ralph Nader Radio Hour — Sat, 03 Oct 2015 23:54:13 +0000

Ralph talks to Columbia Law Professor and software expert, Eben Moglen, about the recent VW scandal and how computer software in cars and voting machines is ripe for mischief and accidents. And Paul Hudson, president of Flyers Rights tells us how we can fight bad airline service.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.

paul – Radio Free

Ari Paul on Genocide in Gaza, Scout Katovich on Forced Institutionalization

3 DRC journalists beaten, detained for trying to question provincial minister

Revisiting Paul Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth for Today

The Fraudulence of Economic Theory

Tibetans protest at US-China women’s soccer match in St. Paul, Minnesota | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Welcome to the Inquisition: Trump’s Christ Nationalist Brigades Aim to Gut Church-State Separation

Obscene Wealth

How to Avoid Trade Wars – and World War Three

‘The Great Educator, Sadly, Is Going to Be These Viruses’: CounterSpin interview with Paul Offit on RFK Jr. and measles

Historian and comic author and editor Paul Buhle on finding and committing to your life’s work

Paul Offit on RFK Jr. and Measles, Jessica González on Trump’s FCC

Chaos under Heaven: South Korea’s Deepening Political Debacle

[Cornel West] The Legacy of Paul Robeson

Philadelphia and the Darkside of Liberty

"Congolese Are Paying the Price" for Western Demand for Minerals & Support for Rwanda’s Paul Kagame

“Congolese Are Paying the Price” for Western Demand for Minerals & Support for Rwanda’s Paul Kagame

Paul Buchanan: Trump 2.0 and the limits of over-reach

Far from Benign: The US Aid Industrial Complex

‘Turn it into a retirement village’: Inside the war of words over Eden Park

🎶 When The Levee Breaks feat. John Paul Jones, Remastered! Only on playingforchange.com! 🎸

St. Paul & The Broken Bones – Over the Rainbow (Judy Garland) | Reprise

St. Paul & The Broken Bones – Interview | Reprise

Paul Buchanan: All in all, Trump’s election is a calamity in the making

Cameroonian journalist Thierry Patrick Ondoua detained on insult charges

The Meekness of the Australia’s Anti-Corruption Body

Cameroon bans reporting on President Paul Biya’s health, whereabouts

Cameroon bans reporting on President Paul Biya’s health, whereabouts

Sacred Transport

In post-election Venezuela, journalist jailings reach record high, media goes underground

Resisting AUKUS: The Paul Keating Formula

Journalist shot, 2 detained as Venezuela cracks down on election protest coverage

Foregone Conclusions: Paul Kagame Retains Power

Turkish Kurdish photojournalist Murat Yazar detained for 8 days in Iraqi Kurdistan

The start of NHS privatisation: How Paul Foot shone a light on New Labour

The Problems with Purism and Reformism (not reforms)

The Problems with Purism and Reformism (not reforms)

Visual artists Jamie Nami Kim and Paul Waters on collaboration

How to stop the bloodshed in Gaza | Insider Briefing w/ former State Department Official Josh Paul

How to stop the bloodshed in #Gaza | Insider Briefing w/ former State Department Official Josh Paul

Paul Powlesland | GB News | 21 May 2024 | Just Stop Oil

Biden Skirting U.S. Law by Rushing More Arms to Israel, Says State Dept. Whistleblower Josh Paul

Djuna Lund feat. Paul Behnam – Somni | A Take Away Show

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