As voters across the United States head to the polls, we speak with New York Times writer Jim Rutenberg about how Donald Trump may try to preemptively declare victory and challenge election results. The former president has ramped up claims Democrats are “a bunch of cheats” and preemptively cast doubt on a win by Vice President Kamala Harris, following a similar playbook as 2020 when he baselessly claimed the election was stolen. Rutenberg spoke to pro-Trump election officials in battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania who say they are ready to refuse to certify local election results as part of a wide-ranging effort to throw the system into disarray. Rutenberg says after the failed insurrection of January 6, 2021, many in Trump’s orbit had a clear goal for 2024: “We have to go local.” He also discusses the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 that makes it harder to stop the final certification of results.

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

Image by Stefan Müller.

A few days ago, my partner and I went in search of packing tape. Our sojourn on an idyllic (if tick-infested) Cape Cod island was ending and it was time to ship some stuff home. We stopped at a little odds-and-ends shop and found ourselves in conversation with the woman behind the counter.

She was born in Panama, where her father had served as chief engineer operating tugboats in the Panama Canal. As a child, she remembered celebrating her birthday with a trip on a tug from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, sailing under an arch of water produced by fireboats on either side.

“But that all ended,” she said, “with the invasion. It was terrifying. They were bombing Panama City. The Army sent my family back to the U.S. so we wouldn’t be killed. I’ve never been back.” She was talking, of course, about the 1989 invasion of Panama ordered by President George H.W. Bush to arrest Manuel Noriega, that country’s president. For years, Noriega had been a CIA asset, siding with Washington as the Cold War played out in Central America. He’d worked to sabotage the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the FMLN guerillas in El Salvador who opposed a U.S.-supported dictatorship there. And he’d worked with Washington’s Drug Enforcement Agency while simultaneously taking money from drug gangs.

That a CIA asset was involved in the drug trade could hardly have come as a surprise to that agency, given its own long history of cooperating with drug merchants, but when journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of Noriega’s drug connections, the U.S. decided to cut him loose and hardline neoconservatives like Elliot Abrams, one of the architects of the Contra war in Nicaragua, began pushing for an invasion. Abrams himself would resurface in the second Bush administration, where he would become a cheerleader for some of the worst crimes of the Global War on Terror. He would bob up yet again like some kind of malevolent cork in Donald Trump’s administration. And then, in July 2023, perhaps in a fit of bipartisan amnesia, President Joe Biden would nominate him to serve on his Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

My partner and I told this woman that we remembered the invasion all too well. In fact, we’d joined a group of demonstrators occupying Market Street in San Francisco to protest it. But, I added, “Lots of people in this country don’t even know that there was an invasion, or that hundreds of civilians died.”

She nodded. “Nobody here knows about that. I’ve never met anyone who does. It was just one crook fighting another and Panama got in the way.” As we prepared to leave, she asked us, “Do you mind if I give you a hug?” We didn’t mind. We were honored.

The Curses of Cassandra

Speaking with that woman reminded me that those of us paying attention had a pretty good idea what the invasion of Panama would look like. After all, we’d followed the 1983 invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada. We knew civilians would die. You could say that we predicted the obvious before it happened, but no one in power seemed to believe us and, after it happened, no one seemed to care.

Reflecting on those moments brought to mind the Trojan prophet Cassandra, doubly cursed by the god Apollo both in her ability to foresee the future and in the fact that no one would believe her. She predicted the bloody and ultimately pointless Trojan War, but no one listened to her. The truth is that neither Cassandra in Troy nor those of us predicting the obvious outcomes of America’s follies today really need divine gifts to see the future. All it takes is a little attention to history and the present moment.

As I started to write this piece, however, something bothered me, like a student raising an insistent hand in the back row of the classroom of my mind. Wait, I thought, haven’t I written this before? And it turns out that, in a way, I did — back in 2021 on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. At the time, I focused on the rehabilitation of Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had made a lonely run for president in 1968 on a platform opposing the American war in Vietnam. In those days, opposing that war was considered naïve at best, treasonous at worst. Today, almost everyone in this country who even remembers Vietnam considers it a historic mistake, if not a moral catastrophe.

In that piece, I also pointed to editorials 20 years after 9/11 celebrating Representative Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, in the wake of those attacks. That AUMF authorized the use of “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” It permitted the 2001 invasion and disastrous 20-year occupation of Afghanistan and served as legal cover for the equally disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 2021, press outlets that had once excoriated Lee for her vote were praising her for her courage and foresight. I imagine that, 20 years later, that praise was small comfort to her or any of the thousands of Cassandras who predicted that the U.S. would fail in Afghanistan — as it once had in Vietnam — or to the millions who knew (because the evidence was all around us) that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and so filled the streets of the world to protest that illegal and ill-judged war.

I ended the piece with a meditation on three young “Cassandras” — climate activists Greta Thunberg of Sweden, Vanessa Nakate of Uganda, and Martina Comparelli of Italy, who had traveled to Glasgow for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference. “Your pressure, frankly, is very welcome,” Italy’s then-prime minister Mario Draghi told them. “We need to be whipped into action. Your mobilization has been powerful, and rest assured, we are listening.”

“For the sake of the world,” I wrote then, “let us hope that this time Cassandra will be believed.”

You’re probably not surprised that the world has not acted to forestall the future foreseen by those young Cassandras. Today, Italy has a far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who complains to other European right-wingers about the “ultra-ecological fanaticism” she considers a threat to her country’s economy. Meanwhile, just like the 10 months before it, April 2024 was globally the hottest on record, a trend that shows no sign of abating. In fact, as I write this, temperatures topping 127 degrees Fahrenheit (another record) present a threat to human life in India and Pakistan.

Nor have our own right-wing politicians been willing to recognize the truth of the crisis humanity faces. Consider, for example, the Republican governors of Florida and Texas — two states recently ravaged by heat and extreme weather — who not only have refused to recognize the climate reality in front of them, but have actively prevented measures that could mitigate global warming’s effects on working people in their states. Both governors have, in fact, signed laws prohibiting local governments from requiring employers to implement heat-safety measures for their workers. Not to mention the brazen “quid-pro-quo” meeting Donald Trump had with top oil executives where he demanded a billion-dollar bribe for his election campaign, in return for wiping out Biden-era climate regulations.

What Else Did We Know?

Well, there’s Palestine.

I’ll admit to having felt a surge of hope when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. That long-ago agreement between then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chief Yasser Arafat began a lengthy, ultimately fruitless series of negotiations over the fate of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, areas seized by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.

I remained hopeful, but I should have known better.

Hanan Ashrawi (long one of my personal heroes) did know better. In 1991, she’d been part of the Palestinian delegation to what came to be known as the Madrid Conference, convened by Spain at the behest of American President George H.W. Bush to try to find a way forward for the Palestinians and Israel. Other attendees represented the governments of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. What Ashrawi, a brilliant politician, scholar, and activist, didn’t know was that the process would also spawn secret talks between Israel and the PLO from which she and other Palestinian leaders would be excluded. Those talks culminated in the Oslo Accords (named for the city where they were negotiated).

Ashrawi immediately spotted a fundamental problem with those Accords, embodied in their first product, a letter of “mutual recognition” between the state of Israel and the PLO. “When I saw the letter, I was furious,” she told +972 Magazine in September 2023. Why? Because while the PLO formally recognized the state of Israel, and Israel, in turn, recognized the PLO as the official representative of the Palestinian people, the letter said nothing about the establishment of an actual Palestinian state. It did, however, allow the PLO’s leadership to return from exile, something they had long desired.

In that interview, Ashrawi also said:

“I told Yasser Arafat that this agreement does not give him the basis for sovereignty or genuine access to the right to self-determination, that this is a functional administrative agreement… He was furious: ‘What, do you want an alternative leadership? Do you want the PLO not to return? That’s the whole point.’ I said the goal is for you to return freely, as a sovereign leadership.”

“One hates to be a Cassandra,” she added, “but unfortunately, I was 100 percent right.”

Unlike Arafat, Ashrawi had been living under the Israeli occupation and understood how it worked. Not having experienced the occupation in person, the exiled PLO leadership, she understood, simply couldn’t imagine Israel’s true intentions.

In truth, it took no Cassandra-like clairvoyance to see what would come of the Oslo agreements. Twenty years earlier, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had made Israeli intentions perfectly clear, explaining his plans for the occupied territories this way: “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlement in between the Palestinians and another strip of Jewish settlement right across the West Bank so that in 25 years’ time neither the U.N. nor the U.S., nobody will be able to tear it apart.”

Another major feature of Oslo was the creation of the Palestinian Authority, the entity empowered (and funded) by Israel to administer the occupied territories alongside the Israeli Defense Forces. This, too, Ashrawi had resisted when, “way back in the 1980s,” the Israelis offered a similar arrangement “and we refused; we said we are not collaborators. I remember telling the military governor at the time that we are quite capable of running our lives, but we will not work under you.” When the PLO agreed to the formation of the Palestinian Authority in 1993, Ashrawi understood all too well that the new entity’s institutional survival, and (not incidentally) the jobs of its many employees would eventually come to depend on how well it served the occupation.

It’s not surprising then that, drawing on the insights of people like Ashrawi, some of us predicted a version of Israel’s endgame for Gaza back in 2005 when Ariel Sharon’s government announced its plan to “disengage” from that strip of land, granting to the Palestinian Authority the duty to run what has since come to be known as the world’s largest open-air prison.

And When Did We Know It?

This capacity to predict the future is beginning to feel a bit déjà-vu-ish. Right now, it’s not too hard to foresee the approaching catastrophe in Gaza. Indeed, at my own university and across the country and the world, even in Israel, students are desperately trying to prevent a genocide already in progress. While the “grownups” debate the legal definition of genocide, those young people continue to point to the murderous reality still unfolding in Gaza and demand that it be stopped before it’s too late.

There are enough dangers looming right in front of us that you don’t need second sight to realize how bad it is. In addition to the clear and present dangers of climate change, not to mention the potential for a new global pandemic, there’s another foreseeable horror looming over this country, which, despite blaring sirens and flashing lights, the mainstream media seems unable to quite believe is real. Ignoring the clanging alarms, many media outlets continue to treat the 2024 election season as just another contest between two equally legitimate political parties.

The reality is entirely different. In this year’s presidential election, we are facing the potential elevation of a genuine instrument of fascism. I think it’s appropriate to characterize Donald Trump as an “instrument” of other people’s ideology, because I suspect that he personally has neither the knowledge nor the attention span to elaborate any political theory or coherent plan for the future. His previous presidency was, in fact, marked by chaotic, instinctive stabs in the direction of whatever target presented itself – or was presented to him by those seeking to influence his decisions. The world is probably lucky that the people surrounding Trump then were a greedy, self-serving lot.

We wouldn’t be that lucky in a second Trump presidency. It doesn’t take a prophet to imagine what such a regime might look like. All you have to do is dip into the 887-page Mandate for Leadership the Heritage Foundation has prepared for his future presidency. It lays out an explicit vision of an authoritarian government serving the interests of the wealthy, one likely to unfold under the auspices of Project 2025, a step-by-step plan to replace our democratic government apparatus with Heritage-vetted-and-trained political functionaries.

We don’t need Cassandra to predict that future. All we need to do is pay attention to what’s right in front of us right now.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post Cassandra Redux appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rebecca Gordon.

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Not since the 2016 election has U.S. foreign policy been this consequential. We're experiencing serious 2016 vibes here at Gaslit Nation, when the Obama foreign policy team, including Biden and his advisors like Jake Sullivan, let Russia jack our democracy in front of their eyes. Now, they are allowing wannabe autocrat Netanyahu, a genocidal maniac, and close ally of Kushner and Putin, to pursue his long war to retain power after his failed coup to dismantle Israel's courts.

If Biden and his foreign policy team are unmoved by the tens of thousands of Palestinians facing starvation—a slow, torturous way to die (see Andrea's film Mr. Jones)—then surely they must be concerned about their re-election chances and should finally demand a ceasefire.

Terrell Starr of the Black Diplomats podcast and Substack joins Andrea to discuss the crisis in Gaza and its impact on the 2024 election, what the GOP Iowa Caucus (Klan rally) truly represents, the moral inconsistency of U.S. as well as South African foreign policy, the potential role of Kushner surrogate Nikki Haley in the Trump regime, the historic role of Black women in saving America from itself, and more!

This week's bonus episode discusses the economies of the civil war, past and present, and what they can tell us about the country's potential direction. The bonus show will also feature a continuation of Andrea's conversation with Terrell Starr. They discuss the recent Lloyd Austin non-scandal hospitalization "scandal" and compare it to Hillary Clinton's non-scandal email "scandal," highlighting how the media and Republicans are determined to dehumanize and terrorize women and nonwhite people.

See you at the Social Media Workshop for People Who Hate Social Media this Thursday, January 18th, at 8 pm! Look out for a Zoom link posted on Patreon that morning for supporters at the Truth-teller level and higher. Thank you to everyone who supports the show – we could not make Gaslit Nation without you!

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

Photo by Thiébaud Faix

Just over twenty years ago, I wrote an article with the same title as above. In that piece, which can be viewed here and was written when George W. Bush was president, I noted that our society has been infected with a “disease of reversals.” I provided some examples in the article.

The reversals have continued since GW to the point now where an entire party — the GOP — has adopted opposites as a mainstay. Trump, who has engaged his entire life in grift, fraud, and theft, is their man. The “radical left” has “weaponized” the law and the judiciary (even while Trump used the DOJ as his personal lawyer and then engaged in an alleged conspiracy to overturn the election). “They” want to rob “us” of our “freedoms” — even while MAGA followers tried to stop Congress from counting the electoral votes. Biden represents and does the bidding of the “Deep State” (although he’s so old and senile, he can’t even walk on a beach).

It’s not only the Right that is now fully engaged in reverse thinking. Mystifyingly, many people formerly of the so-called “radical Left” have adopted the reversals propagated by the hard Right or by Donald Trump.

Mind Structure

Because of this huge proliferation of reverse thinking, I would like to discuss something I learned about way back in the late 1970’s: the work of a scientist named Bettina Olivier, who had made a major discovery that even today is virtually unknown.

I was attending the Gallatin Division at New York University. I had taken a master writing class (as it was called) taught by the eminent classics Professor Albert Hazen Smith. The class was amazing, but more significant for this article, it was through him that I learned about a class being offered titled “Mind Structure,” taught by former attorney and theoretical scientist, Bettina Olivier.

Olivier had discovered twelve different types of brain structure she called “mind structures” that had evolved in humans. She wrote about the last three of these in her book titled “Einsteinian, Newtonian, and Darwinian Mind Structures.” (Unfortunately, you cannot find this book in print or online and Olivier herself is no longer here. I hope to work with her family to get it properly republished at some point.)

The Einsteinian mind structure was, according to Olivier, the twelfth one to have evolved. As with all other mind structures, the Einsteinian one contains both a learning and an organizing structure. By structure is meant “the three-dimensional, literal juxtaposition of neurons in the brain,” according to Olivier. Thus, she called the Einsteinian mind structure: the 12–12 (learning and organizing) mind structure. The Newtonian mind structure is the 11–11 one. Darwin, the 10–10.

Most people now are genetically 12–12’s, according to Olivier, but sometime back in the 1950’s, society had started to filter out 12–12 and had begun to promote what she called “12–11 abstractions.”

You cannot BE a 12–11 (or an 11–12). Your learning and organizing structures must match.

Nor can an 12–12 produce 11–11. An Einsteinian can use what a Newtonian does but cannot produce it himself. (However, one cannot see above one’s own mind structure, so a Newtonian can neither produce nor use what an Einsteinian produces.)

So Olivier believed that what may have happened that caused the proliferation of 12–11 was that at some point, as more 12–12’s came into existence and 11–11’s began to disappear, many 12–12’s were born who had, say, an 11–11 parent.

The demands of one’s mind structure are hard-wired by your genetics. You can’t change your mind structure or the requirements for you to learn and organize information.

So, the mind structure of an 11–11 requires that person to learn and organize information the way an 11–11 must. The demand of an 11–11 parent on a 12–12 child , however, causes the child to try to do what he or she is not able to do — or, in other words, to do the impossible, opposite or reverse.

These days, you will see a LOT of people (who are not 11–11’s) spouting what is essentially the demand of the 11–11 mind structure.

Here is the 11–11 demand on itself in order to obtain “information meaning”: it requires “If and only if conditions precedent, if X then Y.”

The ways in which the 11–11 mind structure demand is copied and pasted into our daily lives are alarmingly myriad and vast. We are so used to “if x then y” assertions, we don’t even find them offensive, although they often twist logic so extremely they make no sense at all.

It is important to recognize that those illogical twists and fallacies are not what an 11–11 does. They are what a 12–12 does when trying to meet the demand of an 11–11.

That demand is not obvious or conscious. It comes from our early childhoods, from parents who were either 11–11’s themselves or were carrying on the “legacy” of their parents. Again, we are so accustomed to this demand, we take it for granted as “logical,” even when it’s not.

What an Einsteinian mind structure requires in order to obtain “information meaning” is probably harder for most people to grasp these days, due to the proliferation of 12–11 abstractions and by-rote 11–11 framing.

In order for the Einsteinian mind structure to obtain meaning, we require “the juxtaposition of two universes of discourse, in invariant relation, such that where one is in existence, the other is not.”

What in the world does that mean??

Well, first — think of Einstein’s E = Mc2. Energy is one “universe of discourse” and matter is the other. Where energy exists, matter does not (and vice versa). So these are two mutually exclusive universes. They are juxtaposed in the equation in an invariant relation.

Of course, that is about a topic of physics. How does that apply to us non-scientist 12–12’s?

It is simple. First of all, we separate out factual material: “This is this and not that.”

Let’s talk about Trump’s actions on January 6th. Trump exhorted people to come to D.C. and march on the Capitol. Did his actions incite insurrection or were they merely expressions of free speech? In order to answer that question, we need to know how to interpret the terms incitement, insurrection, and free speech. We need to distinguish insurrection from mere protest. We separate out First Amendment-protected speech from speech intended to incite violence.

Insurrection is “a violent uprising against an authority or government.” Do the actions of the January 6th march on the Capitol meet this definition?

Incitement is “the action of provoking unlawful behavior or urging someone to behave unlawfully.” What does “provoke” mean? What is “unlawful”? In defining these, we distinguish between actions that provoke and those that do not, those that are lawful and those that are unlawful. In order to do this, we need to know what the law is.

Actions that are unlawful are not the same as those that are lawful. In other words, where one exists, the other does not. They are mutually exclusive. We continue to make these distinctions until we are able to arrive at a conclusion that Trump’s actions do or do not constitute unlawful incitement of insurrection.

In a jury trial, each side — the prosecution and the defense — will have the opportunity to present facts, apply the law and draw conclusions. The jury will then decide what the facts are (what is credible, relevant, material), the judge will instruct the jury on the applicable law in relation to the facts, and the jury will then apply the law to the facts as they have found them and decide on a verdict. This is all 12–12.

Each of us has a right to our opinions. In a jury trial, jurors are asked to set aside any pre-existing opinions and come to their conclusions based only on the facts before them at trial.

So, it’s all well and good for you or me to say that Trump is a conman or that Biden is senile or Putin was justified in invading Ukraine or that there’s a Deep State undermining all the efforts of the working class. But those are just opinions. And many of these assertions may be based on unexamined assumptions, circular reasoning, and logical fallacies.

Meantime, without knowing how to use our 12–12 Einsteinian mind structures, most of us will rely on argument by authority, appeals to emotion, straw man arguments, reverse logic (projection), or other forms of thinking that don’t get us anywhere but back to the muck and quagmire.

Trump and Our System

Many people in this country have lost faith in our legal system. (Trump has a lot to do with that but he’s not the only cause.) But our legal system is still functioning. Judges are flawed and sometimes corrupt but the system is largely self-correcting. Decisions of judges such as Eileen Cannon in Miami, who is so obviously biased in favor of Trump it’s embarrassing, are appealable and reviewable by appellate judges with more experience. Federal District Court appellate opinions are reviewable by Circuit Courts and those may be petitioned to the U.S. Supreme Court. By the time a question gets to the Supreme Court, it has been thoroughly hashed out and the issues narrowed. The High Court usually only decides a point of law.

We may not have faith in the Supreme Court but even though the Court may have what seems to be the final say, their opinions are not the end of any matter either.

Senator Samuel L. Mitchell (NY) is recorded in the Annals of Congress in February 1808 as saying the following:

The human mind does not acquire knowledge by intuition, but by experience. The march of understanding in the investigation of truth is slow. In cases of jurisprudence, as well as in every other intellectual research, the advances toward truth are gradual. Case after case must be studiously considered, judgment after judgment must be rendered and revised, and consequence after consequence traced to their terminations. In such a course of proceeding, it might happen, according to the amount of business which occurred, that generation might follow generation, and age succeed to age, before the summa ratio, the high result of reason on the subject, could be attained.

[“Lex est ratio summa, insita in natura, quae iubet ea quae facienda sunt, prohibetque contraria.” (Law is the highest reason, ingrafted in nature, which commands what must be done and prohibits the contrary.) Cicero]

This is what courts do.

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

Illustration of the first American Labor parade held in New York City on September 5, 1882 as it appeared in the September 16, 1882 issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper – Public Domain

As we again approach Labor Day, a day set aside as a National Holiday in 1894, we commemorate the labor union movement, the demand for an eight hour work day, better working conditions, fair wages and an end to child labor.

Gender equality, racial equality, fair farm prices and farm worker rights are separate issues but all related to the struggle of the unions for a fair wage and decent working conditions. Labor unions may have initially been all white and all male but, that changed.

Unions were not about the individual, they were about everyone. If one is oppressed, all are oppressed. Labor unions evolved and recognized the need to bring everyone into the struggle regardless of color or gender, because the struggle was about everyone.

While we still celebrate the contributions of labor, currently, only one in 10 American workers is a union member, down from nearly one in three workers during the 1950s. But despite falling union membership workers are demanding better, demanding respect and fair wages.

While President Ronald Reagan’s firing of 12,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 could be considered to be the beginning of the war on organized labor, the “Striketober” movement that began in October of 2021, was an overdue response to the long hours and low wages workers were forced to accept during the COVID-19 pandemic—even as business profits increased and income inequality grew.

Workers, both union and non-union realized that they did have power. In 2022 and 2023 the number of strikes and potential strikes has continued to grow. From baristas to Teamsters, teachers unions to Hollywood writers and actors, workers only demand fairness and respect –- for all workers.

Now, generations after the early struggles of labor unions and decades after Ronald Reagan, corporations have done their best to de-unionize America. Exporting jobs, closing union factories and union busting have taken their toll on jobs, wages and the economy in general.

Whether it was exploitation from the “Robber Barron’s” of the nineteenth century, the segregationists of the Jim Crow South, the growers who exploit migrant farm laborers, the agribusiness interests that squeeze and impoverish small farmers, the mentality that suppresses women with a glass ceiling, or the outright discrimination of the LGBTQ+ community, the parallels are pointedly exact.

Labor unions, suffragists, feminists, civil rights advocates, small farmers and farm workers all struggled against the rich, the powerful and the corporate interests who intend to control the economy and maintain their notion of social class. The labor movement was, and still is, a reflection of society. They challenged the idea, that power and money should belong only to the most privileged who gained their position by exploiting the masses.

Everyone, owes a debt to the laborers. Those who put their lives on the line, for safe work places, an eight hour work day, a five day work week, insurance, disability benefits, a fair wage, dignity and respect for manual labor. Farmers are laborers too, nearly impossible to organize, but they, like all workers, must depend on each other. Without farmers, without farm workers, without farm related manufacturing workers, without transportation workers, farmers will not thrive, rural America will not thrive and the nation will not thrive.

Labor Day is a day to reflect on how we can do better, for everyone. In 1925 Calvin Coolidge said “ the chief business of the American people is business.” What he also said that is generally not repeated was, “Americans make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things we want much more. We want peace and honor, and charity which is so strong an element of all civilization”. In these polarized times I hope those thoughts are still true.

So this Labor Day let’s celebrate the power of the worker, but no less the social movements that evolved with and from the unions. Perhaps this is another soul-searching moment when farmers and farm workers, like laborers, need to realize that they are all fair game for the corporate interests that control our lives. Workers need fair wages, farmers need fair prices. We must attain fairness, for everyone.

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

Photograph Source: Sean Devine – CC BY-SA 3.0

The young son of an English friend who lives in Los Angeles presently enjoys a deep interest in visual effects. He is talented. His father is a scriptwriter. Film must run in the veins. VFX, as associates like to call visual effects, are to film what jewellery is to royalty — fascinating, opulent, not always necessary. I told my English friend I knew another Brit in Los Angeles, a former colleague, responsible over the years for some pretty impressive work in this sphere, no easy feat when you consider the restrictive nature of the briefs sometimes, and that we should attempt to put the two of them together, so that my friend’s son could at least benefit from what I know would be some pretty serious and sound advice. It got me thinking. London, never mind Los Angeles, or Vancouver for that matter, has a really intense relationship with VFX. In film circles, the VFX industry stands alone. Its death in London is often rumoured but survival seems assured. What is it about this sometimes dark art that makes it so prevalent here?

It was in London one day that I first encountered this obsessively created imagery that is the world of VFX, its curious physical absence, its dizzying, often precocious, use of CGI, Compositing, Motion Capture; its 3D modelling, green screen filming, animalistic performances and capture. The expert I had mind for my friend’s son was Nicholas Lloyd. When I spoke to Nicholas on a video call last week about this he was characteristically willing. He lives in LA close to the airport (LAX). He likes California and California likes him. I knew Nicholas when he was Nick. Incredible to think he has been living and working over there for over 20 years now. I first knew him here in London when he used to ride a motorbike like a road-seeking missile, when not locked-on like one to two giant computer screens, at the same time as running code like a revolutionary might run guns. And all in the name of the boffinist of visual digitalia.

At the time it was as if hyperbole itself had been designed for some of these so-called digital artists. The only downfall was that it was largely men doing this, with few of the brilliant women we thankfully have now in this world. Producer Emma Ibbetson I remember from the start. Nicholas was telling me on the call he had surrendered his bike, replacing it for the equally padded charms of ice hockey, which he said he loved playing. He was always adventurous was Nicholas, tightly wound, quick-thinking, generously spirited. Like many of his colleagues, he was also an incredible hard worker. One Christmas I worked with Nicholas and a group of other highly talented people and could hardly drag them away from their screens. Even on Christmas Day, to have a meal round the corner from where we were working all-nighters, it was the hardest thing to get any of them to switch off. We were chasing a merciless deadline and such was our dedication, such our wrestling with the at times incomprehensible technology, that we would not on any account surrender to the lesser charms of celebration. My main job, from what I could tell, seemed to be to watch people’s backs, ensure they got on happily and uninterruptedly with the task at hand, usually by allowing people like myself to be their person absorbing the burden of production. Just as with any other walk of life, there were always mercenaries in the wings, but loyalty was aways your best shot. There were more than enough bean counters along the way waiting to take advantage of people without wanting to become one yourself. Some real sharks feature in this industry and anyone with any kind of self-respect has the scars to prove it.

It was great working with Nicholas. It had felt like we were in control. It was all so intense and concentrated that we would run relays of minicabs to places like Hitchin in Hertfordshire outside London to render all the generated code at genuinely eccentric so-called render farms. None of us really knew what we were doing, because none of us had properly done this before. It was all part of the excitement and rookie-like elation. Funny, in retrospect, how one’s idea of adventure can travel from the physical to the mental then back to the physical again. I eventually left the world of VFX for Afghanistan again. Nicholas for example was not so long ago climbing the same peaks where fellow Californian Brit Julian Sands went missing — ‘I felt lots of pairs of eyes watching me,’ he said of the wildlife there late one night.

If VFX is all about the digital manipulation of images — lies for eyes, so to speak — it is also about adding something to images, either by piggybacking some pre-existing or supervised live-action or as total replacement or re-fabrication. Even the tiniest of tweaks will often take place, but these can be obsessive not crucial. People like Nicholas work largely in the world of film, in movies as he now calls them, but countless TV dramas and commercials need this kind of thing too. I used to believe that if a viewer noticed the work, you weren’t really doing it properly. Today, arguably, we have far too much VFX. In the mid-90s, London was straining at the leash in all things visual effects, but it was never fetishistic, sat, or compulsive. Remember, this was before the sudden massive Harry Potter franchise sent the whole UK VFX scene spiralling into some kind of maddeningly golden stratosphere, making London a burning semi-automated hotspot, and making so much revenue for the country, as well as for one or two privately self-amassing individuals. Oddly, despite all that money flooding in, there was never that much left for the people doing the real work. Especially when they were not working as freelancers. As an industry today, it still has to fight for proper governmental recognition. Maybe they have the wrong interlocutors. This is despite the fact that London presently houses at least six of the world’s biggest VFX companies — a success story that goes quite against the grain of just about every other industry in the country right now. That said, it does still require constant fighting over competing contracts with the rest of Europe, the US, India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia.

In those earlier Wild West digital days, I remember British-based company Qantel maintaining its famously closed architecture with ‘Henry’, the world’s first multilayer compositing system, while Discreet Logic made theirs — revolutionarily — open with Henry’s new rival on the block, Flame. On the surface, it was like just another of those corporate battles. My toy is better than your toy sort of thing. But in reality this was also to do with the quality or otherwise of what would end up on our Tv screens, for example. The US with its weaker NTSC resolution was no match to the PAL quality over here. This incidentally was never anything much to do with content. VFX — in the creative sense — is devoid of content. This is both its strength and its flaw. In some people’s opinions, certainly when it comes to so-called true artistry, or the ungovernable spirit of great art, you were always working within limits. Only in one or two animation directors had I seen any kind of ‘ownership’ retained. The open architecture of Flame was in the end part of the beginning of software based products helping develop a digital upper-hand. I remember attending a Qantel do once with super-talented Lyndon Gaul, one of the brightest people I had met in VFX. This was at Highclere Castle where Downton Abbey was filmed. One truly far out former research director presiding over the celebration was the wonderful Paul Kellar, who reminded me when introduced by Lyndon of Ian Fleming’s well-known James Bond character ‘Q’. Paul happened also to be obsessed with clocks, and, befitting a true horologist possessed hundreds of them, I assumed simply because he loved the way the most intricate of things were put together. I believe Paul went on to become a leading member of the Bombe Restoration Project that rebuilt, maintains and now runs the famous Enigma code-breaking machine.

Anyway, against a hazily warm and blue English sky — ‘Strawberries and cream anybody?’ — this Newbury-based company actually had a Spitfire dive-bomb its international clients and guests, including a group of bright-as-button Germans, chortling away rather sportingly I thought at the context. Pangs of nostalgia: I guess Europe was headily and attractively indivisible back then. Nicholas when we first met was more into 3D, unlike Lyndon, who was a young king compositor. Lyndon’s responsibilities often began at the stage immediately after or halfway through the 3D, though he would regularly supervise, even design, this part of the process. Lyndon was when the greater weight of the work moved into his Henry or Flame suite — he could master both. For the reader who is interested in these things, Nicholas was using Alias Wavefront, while one or two of the other 3D ‘artists’ were into Softimage.

A typical Flame suite was like the deck of a high-tech battle cruiser — The Cool, not The Cruel, Sea. A brand new world it was for all of us back then. The last time I had taken such an interest in technology was as a child staring into my grandmother’s large coke boiler, while trying to work out how it heated her building. With VFX, the Luddite in me felt out of sorts, but the adventurist loved the lack of explanation. Apart from two brief segues to cover two wars after returning from the States, I was now more than fully keen to try out new things in the UK, and to occupy a space other than reportage. I was eternally curious for some reason. Don Hawkins, a forever generous-minded friend, was working on a script with post-production house Red at the time, a den of brilliance run by the aforementioned Lyndon Gaul and by Tim Kemp with the superb support of David Carradice and tireless vim of Carl Grinter. Don was responsible for getting me inside the tent, so to speak, and on the back of further recommendations I was invited to help develop a potential 3D TV series on Greek Myths which I called ‘Spiro’s Heroes’. (The still legendary Tim Kemp became ill and ultimately the project was aborted.) This ‘Red’ incidentally was not to be confused with Nicola Schindler’s production company Red, who I would later work with on various Manchester-based dramas — Manchester being a city of many Reds, with all its Man United support. Walking through Lyndon’s different Red door, so to speak, on Warwick Street close to Regent Street, was like walking into a separate reality. It was a creative hothouse like no other I had witnessed before. It was also incredibly cool and chilled and like an ice cube in a bowl of paradise. It had a giant aquarium in the main meeting area whose exotic fish would always entertainingly attempt to do a runner every time talented Irish director Paul Donnellon arrived for a meeting. The fish never seemed to mind his excellent cinematographer brother Noel. I had known many artists in New York and had seen many people working often in genuinely creative clusters. But nothing had prepared me for this giddy melange of wilful technologists married to kind souls. Architects will understand the regrettable constraints of some seriously technical challenges. You still need the building to stay up. But I would grow to admire many of the people I began working over the years in VFX. Live-action people never quite understood VFX, I remember. They always underestimated both the hours and perfectionism. In time, I had worked with a number of leading film directors, too, and I can’t say any of them fully grasped what they were dealing with. One time I helped with a massive push by the UK TV and film industry in LA. That was an eye-opener. Back in London, I saw up close lots of dog eat dog wretchednesses from greedy powerbrokers but also thankfully witnessed moments of exquisite flair and genuine wit back at the rock-face. Tony Lawrence I particularity enjoyed working with as he possessed — and still possesses — one of the tidiest minds in the country. And few things would ever match those innocent first few days with people like Nicholas and Lyndon. Not to forget the likes of Ivor Middleton and Kevin Shepherd.

I do hope my friend’s son finds what he is looking for. The two will have been in touch by now. It is a strange world out there. We never know what Trojan horse, digitised or otherwise, is waiting for us around the next corner, even if the corner exists at all. I left the scene when I began to crave content again, though funnily enough I have begun recently to reconnect with one or two still thriving luminaries. I think it was the initial camaraderie as well as nervous technology which attracted me first. I wonder if my friend’s son knows that the real challenge for any truly creative person is control. VFX is ultimately hierarchal, even patriarchal, and a true artist should always have the final say. At least he will be in good hands talking to Nicholas.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bach.

Promising what one pundit calls a looming "year of the asshole," the GOP House sorrowfully confirms that, after so much awful in lo these endless past few years, they still haven't hit the bottom. Lacking any real ideas, policies or principles and flaunting what John Cusack's hitman in Grosse Pointe Blankterms "a certain moral flexibility," a fear-and-vengeance-fueled GOP has chosen to focus on several bizarre goals nobody else in America supports: depriving women of the right to choose, fewer books, no bad things said about white people, fatter fat cats funded by a 30% sales tax on the proletariat, more hunger, poverty and unwanted children, and getting a peek at Hunter Biden's penis. Their dubious hallmark is willed stupidity super-glued to shameless hypocrisy: They want to cut a bedrock Social Security and Medicare in the name of their "mission to end wasteful Washington spending" despite the fact that 25% of the national debt over the last 200-plus years was accrued by their feckless Art-of-the Deal guru in just four years, and despite his unprecedented record of crimes, grifts, scams and corruption they're intent on uncovering "every corrupt business dealing, every foreign entanglement, every abuse of power" by Biden.

These dubious efforts will be headed by a piteous and deeply beholden McCarthy who's turned the critical House Oversight Committee - charged with investigating said imaginary crimes - into what's been deemed "a Tucker panel" and an easily dismissed "circus of deplorable clowns" unfit to run a blender, never mind a House. Almost every member is an election denier, conspiracy theorist, Jan. 6 fan-boy or other crackpot extremist, from Aryan white Nationalist Paul Gosar to QAnon-er Anna Luna to puffed-up moron Gym Jordan to dimwit Chairman James Comer, who's obsessed with Hunter Biden and "the Biden family influence-peddling investigation." To ensure he'd totally stripped Committees of any competence or credibility, Kevin also removed Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from key posts - for, respectively, "lying" he didn't know the whistleblower who sparked Trump's impeachment on Ukraine though there's no evidence he did, and knowing someone who may or may not have been a Chinese spy even though law enforcement said he was "under no suspicion of wrongdoing." That didn't stop Lauren Boebert from shrieking they're "a bunch of Blue Anons and "conspiracy theorists," because irony is dead.

Also, because we are now in The Twilight Zone, "SNL gold piece" Marjorie Taylor Greene got plum posts on Oversight and Homeland Security, so whew now she can keep a look out for dastardly Jewish space lasers. In her vaunted if insane new roles she has proclaimed herself "the leading MAGA voice of Congress," which makes total sense given she believes the world is run by a secret cabal of Democratic pedophiles; she's claimed Hillary Clinton killed RFK to become "Senator of New York City" - "It was one of those Clinton murders" - despite a 20-plus-year discrepancy in the timeline; she recently urged followers to "no longer serve the Uniparty and the Globalist agenda," vowing, "Vengeance is mine declares the Lord. God will not let evil go unpunished"; and every day she gets out of bed seemingly just to parade around Congress bleating to any microphone in sight, "Impeach Biden! That's what we need to do!" Twitter has other ideas: "Asking the universe to stop giving that dope mike time." Some of her own colleagues seem to agree: A former adviser called her "a mentally deranged fool" for citing "a so-called plane" hitting the Pentagon on 9/11, and after she just bravely declared, “I for one will not sign a clean bill raising the debt limit” - House Reps don't sign bills and they're just paying Trump's debts - GOP pol Michael Steele raged, “This woman has no clue...Stop with the stupid."

Theirs is not the only internecine bickering in this ignorant pack of fraudsters, bandits and narcissists. MTG and Lauren Boebert had a catfight in the bathroom, Florida Rep. Vern Buchanan, passed over for chair of Ways and Means despite seniority, reportedly assailed McCarthy with, "You fucked me! I know it was you," and much of a discomfited GOP views serial fabricator George Santos/ Devolder/Zabrovsky, under pressure to resign and facing local, state, federal and international investigations, as one clown too many - and that was before they learned the party obsessed with banning drag queens as groomers and perverts has now evidently elected their first (open) drag queen. Having lied about his entire life story - his schooling, religion, work history, mother dying on 9/11, stealing money from a disabled vet for his dying service dog, fantastical show business career (Hanna Montana!) - he's now refuting multiple reports, evidently confirmed, that he performed at drag queen beauty pageants in Rio de Janeiro under the name Kitara Ravache. From a former friend and fellow queen, "He's changed a lot, but he was always a liar." Despite his denials - charging, without irony, the media “continues to make outrageous claims about my life” - Politico cites further proof in the barely literate Wikipedia bio of a Santos alias: He "startted his ‘stage’ life at age 17 as an gay night club DRAG QUEEN (and) won sevral GAY ‘BEAUTY PAGENTS.’" Cue delighted tweets. "The realest thing about curious George is that he's a drag queen," said one, and, "This is divine."

Others are having a fine time with the tawdry chaos. After McCarthy placed Ravache on two committees, including Science, Dem members gleefully welcomed him. From (actual) retired astronaut Rep. Scott Kelly, "Awesome to have former NASA astronaut and moon walker (Santos)...To infinity and beyond!" From Rep. Bill Foster, "As the only recipient of the Wilson Prize for High-Energy Particle Accelerator Physics serving in Congress, it can get lonely. Not anymore! I'm thrilled to be joined (by) Dr. George Santos, winner of not only the Nobel Prize but also the Fields Medal (in) Mathematics for his groundbreaking work with imaginary numbers." Much like Kyle Rittenhouse, dubbed "the George Santos of George Zimmermans" as he whines about events cancelled by "the woke mob," or the Orange Guy newly babbling he only kept "ordinary folders with words printed on them" as a "cool keepsake," it's easy to dismiss these morons as insufferably bad stand-up comics. But the dark underbelly of their outlandishness - their "whiplash-inducing willingness to straight-up lie in total lockstep about literally anything" - is a key part of what's been dubbed a seriously unfunny "slow civil war." Thus, the friendly reminder of one recent protest sign: "It doesn't take that many fascists to make fascism."

In the latest episode of his podcast, "The Problem With Jon Stewart," the ever-perspicacious Stewart mulls "insurrection, the end of democracy, autocracy on the move." Noting Brazil just "had a little insurrection...It was a Carnivale insurrection," he brings up Santos and what one of his guests calls, even before the drag story broke, his "sprawling cheesecake factory of stories - it's astounding what he's offering up to us." Stewart laughingly agrees, comparing Santos' unease on the House floor to a "Fresh Meat" scene in a prison movie: "He looks like he just had to give up a carton of smokes to get to keep his muffin." But then he pivots to Trump, whose idiocy he first viewed as a "comedic gift of Heaven...I thought it made him a buffoon, (but) it made him the perfect vessel. Because it takes people with no shame to do shameful things...I thought he was so ridiculous, and then you realize the worst people in history have been ridiculous" - Hitler and his mustache, Gaddafi raving, Kim Jong-un's haircut. "The thing we have to be careful of, and I always caution myself on this," he somberly concludes, "is we cannot mistake absurdity for lack of danger." He's seconded by Liberal Redneck Trae Crowder, who recounts the current GOP tomfoolery - gas stoves, drag queens - celebrates what we got done before "we as a society got hit by the dumb truck," and likewise warns, "We gotta stay vigilant, y'all." "Do not let their hollering about these nonsensical thin-air controversies," he urges, "distract you from the truly nefarious undertakings to which they are indeed fully committed."

Anti-COVID-precaution propaganda going out in the mail, part of "a slow civil war."Twitter photo

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

Photograph Source: Arbitrarily0 – CC BY-SA 3.0

Fifty years ago, no symbol of university complicity with the military angered more students than the on-campus presence of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). The manpower requirements of the Vietnam era could not be met by conscription, draft-driven enlistments, and the graduating classes of military service academies alone. The Department of Defense also needed commissioned officers trained in DOD-funded Military Science Departments at private and state universities.

Anti-ROTC campaigning became a major focus of the campus-based movement against the Vietnam War. Critics demanded everything from stripping ROTC courses of academic credit to, more popularly, kicking the program off campus. Foot-dragging by college trustees, administrators, and faculty members reluctant to cut ties with the military sparked an escalation of protest activity, from peaceful picketing to more aggressive action. ROTC buildings were trashed, bombed, or set on fire — most famously at Kent State University. There, a May 1970 arson attempt triggered a National Guard occupation that led to the fatal shooting of four students (one of them a ROTC cadet) and then the largest student strike in US history.

As historian Seth Kershner points out, after US troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and the draft ended in 1973, “high schools became the answer to the Pentagon’s manpower problems.”  While the armed forces beat a strategic retreat from the Ivy League and some elite private colleges, enrollment in public high school Junior ROTC programs (JROTC) mushroomed. About half a million teenagers now get military training in 3,500 schools around the country, many of which serve poor and working-class students.

According to a New York Times analysis, “majority minority schools are nearly three times as likely as majority white schools to have a JROTC program.” About 40 percent of the cadets who spend three years in such programs end up enlisting after graduation. This makes JROTC a key component of the Pentagon’s annual struggle to meet its “all-volunteer force” recruitment quotas. As of late June, for example, the Army had only 40 percent of the 57,000 new soldiers it wants signed up by September 30 — and is now offering enlistment bonuses as high as $50,000.

Adult Mentoring?

JROTC programs are promoted not as a pipeline to active duty, but as a valuable source of adult mentoring, exposure to military discipline, and inculcation of civic values. Cadets get to drill in uniform, handle weapons, learn military ranks and history, and stand at attention when visitors come to their classes. Their instructors are military veterans certified by the DOD, but many states don’t require them to have either teaching certificates or a college degree. In addition, the DOD leaves day-to-day monitoring of their performance to school administrators busy with many other responsibilities.

That lax oversight has had calamitous results. As the New York Times recently revealed in a major investigative piece, at least 33 JROTC instructors have engaged in sexual misbehavior with young women in the program during the last five years. And that JROTC rap sheet does not even include the “many others who have been accused of misconduct but [were] never charged” or the inappropriate behavior that went unreported because cadets were afraid of jeopardizing their potential military careers.

The front-page revelations have sparked outrage from two House members with government oversight functions. In an August 15 letter to DOD Secretary Lloyd Austin and the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, US Representatives Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Stephen Lynch (D-MA) called incidents of sexual harassment and abuse “completely unacceptable and an abject betrayal of the trust and faith these young men and women placed in the U.S. Military.” The House members specifically demanded to know what action Pentagon leaders are taking in response to the reports, including whether additional oversight of JROTC instructors is being planned “to insure the safety and well-being of cadets.”

Unfortunately, if the DOD’s past response to sexual harassment and assault of women in uniform by fellow soldiers is any guide, its efforts to protect vulnerable teenagers from pre-enlistment exposure to “military culture” will also be inadequate.

Two years ago, a major scandal over violence against female soldiers at Texas’s Fort Hood seemed to have persuaded enough members of Congress that sexual assault in the military required more aggressive investigation and prosecution. By May 2021, sixty Senate Democrats and Republicans favored a bill cosponsored by Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and retired National Guard lieutenant general Joni Ernst (R-IA), a sexual assault survivor. Under their proposal, decision-making power about such cases and other felonies, including some hate crimes, would be removed from commanding officers and assigned “to a specially trained team of uniformed prosecutors.”

But two veterans on the Armed Services Committee, Rhode Island Democrat Jack Reed and Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, fought to narrow the scope of the legislation, limiting it to sexual assault cases only. Their deference to the Pentagon aided Secretary Austin’s own resistance to  reform. In November 2021, a bipartisan group of eight senators, including Gillibrand and Ernst, strongly objected to further foot-dragging by the former four-star general. “The men and women who serve in our military cannot continue to operate another day, let alone another decade, under a chain of command that is unwilling or incapable of taking decisive action to address this epidemic,” they wrote in a joint letter.

A month later, Congress passed a watered-down measure  that did not strip commanders of their control over court-martials but did empower new “special victim prosecutors” to handle cases involving sexual assault, rape, murder, and domestic violence. Gillebrand called the compromise a “disservice to our service members.” And these new prosecutors have no power to aid the “special victims” of JROTC, who have been severely harmed before even becoming a service member.

Counter Recruitment Boost?

The criminal behavior of so many “military science” instructors, implanted in public high schools by the DOD, could have two unintended consequences. First, it could give campaigners against such programs a new issue to organize around. Their grassroots efforts are well described by Kershner and Scott Harding in their 2015 book Counter-Recruitment and the Campaign to Demilitarize Public Schools, which documents JROTC targeting of “under resourced schools and low-income communities, where opportunities are limited and young people are susceptible to the military’s promise of career advancement and college benefits.”

Second, as Maloney and Lynch note, negative publicity about JROTC could further dampen enthusiasm for enlistment. further undercut . Even with the Pentagon dispatching some 20,000 recruiters, spending $1.4 billion every year on 1,400 military recruiting stations, and gaining wide access to high schools throughout the country, only one in ten young people say they would consider military service. As Major General Edward Thomas, Jr., commander of the Air Force Recruiting Service, says of that polling result, “There are just lower levels of trust with the U.S. government and the military.”

In addition, among seventeen- to twenty-four year-olds targeted by recruiters, three-quarters have disqualifying conditions like no high school diploma, a criminal record, chronic obesity, or some other physical or mental health problem that renders them ineligible to serve without a special waver. Among those in the last category are at least a few of the scarred survivors of Junior ROTC. One, profiled by the Times, is Victoria Bauer from Picayune, Mississippi who wanted to become a Marine before she was sexually assaulted, at age fifteen, by her instructor. Bauer’s traumatic experience led her to engage in self-harm that left scars on her leg, now covered with heavy tattooing. To this day, she still wants to know why those ostensibly responsible for defending the US can’t even protect their “own people.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Steve Early - Suzanne Gordon.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John V. Walsh.

It is not hard to imagine how Zelensky’s words must have fallen on those European ears that were attentive.  His warning surely conjured up images of World War II when tens of millions of Europeans and Russians perished.

Zelensky’s words echoed those of Philippine’s President Rodrigo Duterte on the other side of the world at the Eastern edge of the great Eurasian land mass: “When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled flat.”  We can be sure that Duterte, like Zelensky, had in mind WWII which also consumed tens of millions of lives in East Asia.

The United States is stoking tensions in both Europe and East Asia, with Ukraine and Taiwan as the current flashpoints on the doorsteps of Russia and China which are the targeted nations.  Let us be clear at the outset.  As we shall see, the endpoint of this process is not for the U.S. to do battle with Russia or China but to watch China and Russia fight it out with the neighbors to the ruin of both sides.  The US is to “lead from behind’ – as safely and remotely as can be arranged.

To make sense of this and react properly, we must be very clear-eyed about the goal of the U.S.  Neither Russia nor China has attacked or even threatened the U.S.  Nor are they in a position to do so – unless one believes that either is ready to embark on a suicidal nuclear war.

Why should the U.S. Elite and its media pour out a steady stream of anti-China and anti-Russia invective?  Why the steady eastward march of NATO since the end of the first Cold War?  The goal of the U.S. is crystal clear – it regards itself as the Exceptional Nation and entitled to be the number one power on the planet, eclipsing all others.

This goal is most explicitly stated in the well-known Wolfowitz Doctrine drawn shortly after the end of the first Cold War in 1992.  It proclaimed that the U.S.’s  “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet union or elsewhere….”  It stated that no regional power must be allowed to emerge with the power and resources “sufficient to generate global power.”  It stated frankly “we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global power.” (Emphasis, jw)

The Wolfowitz Doctrine is but the latest in a series of such proclamations that have proclaimed global domination as the goal of U.S. foreign policy since 1941 the year before the U.S. entered WWII.  This lineage is documented clearly in the book by the Quicny Institute’s Stephen Wertheim “Tomorrow, The World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy.”

Let us consider China first and then Russia, the foremost target of the U.S., first.  China’s economy is number one in terms of PPP-GDP according to the IMF and has been since November, 2014.  It is growing faster than the U.S. economy and shows no signs of slowing down.  In a sense China has already won by this metric since economic power is the ultimate basis of all power.

But what about a military defeat of China?  Can the U.S. with its present vastly superior armed forces bring that about?  The historian, Alfred McCoy, answers that question in the way most do these days, with a clear “no”:

The most volatile flashpoint in Beijing’s grand strategy for breaking Washington’s geopolitical grip over Eurasia lies in the contested waters between China’s coast and the Pacific littoral, which the Chinese call “the first island chain.

But China’s clear advantage in any struggle over that first Pacific island chain is simply distance. …The tyranny of distance, in other words, means that the U.S. loss of that first island chain, along with its axial anchor on Eurasia’s Pacific littoral, should only be a matter of time.

Certainly the U.S. Elite recognizes this problem.  Do they have a solution?

Moreover, that is not the end of the “problem” for the U.S.  There are other powerful countries, like Japan, or rapidly rising economies in East Asia, easily the most dynamic economic region in the world.  These too will become peer competitors, and in the case of Japan, it already has been a competitor both before WWII and during the 1980s.

If we hop over to the Western edge of Eurasia, we see that the U.S. has a similar “problem” when it comes to Russia.  Here too the U.S. cannot defeat Russia in a conventional conflict nor have U.S. sanctions been able to bring it down.  How can the U.S. surmount this obstacle? And as in the case of East Asia the U.S. faces another economic competitor, Germany, or more accurately, the EU, with Germany at its core. How is the U.S. to deal with this dual threat?

One clue comes in the response of Joe Biden to both the tension over Taiwan and that over Ukraine.  Biden has said repeatedly that he will not send U.S. combat troops to fight Russia over Ukraine or to fight China over Taiwan.  But it will send materiel and weapons and also “advisors.”  And here too the U.S. has other peer competitors most notably Germany which has been the target of U.S. tariffs. The economist Michael Hudson puts it succinctly in a penetrating essay, “America’s real adversaries are its European and other allies: The U.S. aim is to keep them from trading with China and Russia.”

Such “difficulties for the U.S. were solved once before – in WWII.  One way of looking at WWII is that it was a combination of two great regional wars, one in East Asia and one in Europe.  In Europe the U.S. was minimally involved as Russia, the core of the USSR, battled it out with Germany, sustaining great damage to life and economy.  Both Germany and Russia were economic basket cases when the war was over, two countries lying in ruins.

The US provided weapons and materiel to Russia but was minimally involved militarily, only entering late in the game.  The same happened in East Asia with Japan in the role of Germany and China in the role of Russia.  Both Japan and China were devastated in the same way as were Russia and Europe.  This was not an unconscious strategy on the part of the United States.  As Harry Truman, then a Senator, declared in 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.. . ”

At the end of it all the U.S. emerged as the most powerful economic and military power on the planet.  McCoy spells it out:

Like all past imperial hegemons, U.S. global power has similarly rested on geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, now home to 70% of the world’s population and productivity. After the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan failed to conquer that vast land mass, the Allied victory in World War II allowed Washington, as historian John Darwin put it, to build its “colossal imperium… on an unprecedented scale,” becoming the first power in history to control the strategic axial points “at both ends of Eurasia.

As a critical first step, the U.S. formed the NATO alliance in 1949, establishing major military installations in Germany and naval bases in Italy to ensure control of the western side of Eurasia. After its defeat of Japan, as the new overlord of the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, Washington dictated the terms of four key mutual-defense pacts in the region with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia and so acquired a vast range of military bases along the Pacific littoral that would secure the eastern end of Eurasia. To tie the two axial ends of that vast land mass into a strategic perimeter, Washington ringed the continent’s southern rim with successive chains of steel, including three navy fleets, hundreds of combat aircraft, and most recently, a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily to the Pacific island of Guam.

The U.S. was able to become the dominant power on the planet because all peer competitors were left in ruins by the two great regional wars in Europe and East Asia, wars which are grouped under the heading of WWII.

If Europe is plunged into a war of Russia against the EU powers with the U.S. “leading from behind,” with material and weapons, who will benefit?  And if East Asia is plunged into a war of China against Japan and whatever allies it can drum up, with the U.S. “leading from behind,” who will benefit?

It is pretty clear that such a replay of WWII will benefit the U.S.  In WWII while Eurasia suffered tens of millions of deaths, the US suffered about 400,000 – a terrible toll certainly but nothing like that seen in Eurasia.  And with the economies and territories of Eurasia, East and West, in ruins, the U.S. will emerge on top, in the catbird seat, and able to dictate terms to the world.  WWII redux.

But what about the danger of nuclear war growing out of such conflicts?  The U.S. has a history of nuclear “brinksmanship,” going back to the earliest post-WWII days.  It is a country that has shown itself willing to risk nuclear holocaust.

Are there U.S. policy makers criminal enough to see this policy of provocation through to the end?  I will leave that to the reader to answer.

The Peoples of East and West Eurasia are the ones who will suffer most in this scenario.  And they are the ones who can stop the madness by living peacefully with Russia and China rather than serving as cannon fodder for the U.S.  There are clear signs of dissent from the European “allies” of the U.S., especially Germany but the influence of the U.S. remains powerful.  Germany and many other countries are after all occupied by tens of thousands of U.S. troops, their media heavily influenced by the U.S. and with the organization that commands European troops, NATO, under U.S. command.  Which way will it go?

In East Asia the situation is the same.  Japan is the key but the hatred of China among the Elite is intense.  Will the Japanese people and the other peoples of East Asia be able to put the brakes on the drive to war?

Some say that a two-front conflict like this is U.S. overreach.  But certainly, if war is raging on or near the territories of both Russia and China, there is little likelihood that one can aid the other.

Given the power of modern weaponry, this impending world war will be much more damaging than WWII by far.  The criminality that is on the way to unleashing it is almost beyond comprehension.

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

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.