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NYT’s Ross Douthat Rants Incoherently on Trump’s Bloodbath

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It’s amazing how so many arguments in policy circles are transparently self-contradictory. Ross Douthat gave us a fantastic example in a NYT column defending Donald Trump’s bloodbath comment.

Douthat defends Trump by arguing that his bloodbath referred to the need to protect the U.S. auto industry from Chinese cars. This is arguably what Trump meant, but not what he said. I suppose we can give a pass to someone in Donald Trump’s mental condition.

But the neat part of the story is that Douthat goes on to criticize the plans announced by the E.PA. to accelerate the switch to electric cars. Douthat argues that this is terrible politics since it will be forcing people to buy cars they don’t want. He says people want traditional gas-powered cars and the Biden administration is pushing electric cars down their throats.

Okay, let’s get back to Donald Trump’s bloodbath. The Chinese cars that Trump wants to keep out of the U.S. with really high taxes (tariffs) are electric.

Many are now as cheap or cheaper to buy than equivalent gas-powered vehicles and far cheaper to fuel and maintain over their lifespan. This is why Trump insists on high taxes to keep people from buying them.

So to recap, Ross Douthat is telling us that Biden is trying to shove electric cars down consumers’ throats that they don’t want, while also implicitly defending Donald Trump’s plans to impose high taxes so that consumers won’t buy Chinese electric cars that he apparently thinks they do want.

That sort of argument might make sense on the New York Times opinion page, but not in reality-land.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.  

The post NYT’s Ross Douthat Rants Incoherently on Trump’s Bloodbath appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


Article 8

The Hidden Genocide in Ethiopia

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Image by Jack Prommel.

The Ethiopia of Abiy Ahmed and his Prosperity Party, is a dark and frightening place, where anyone challenging the government are at risk of violence and arrest.

People from the Amhara ethnic group are particularly targeted; killing of Amhara men, women and children is a daily occurrence in what constitutes a genocidal campaign of hate

Uniformed thugs, federal and regional, as well as Oromo militia (Oromo Liberation Army or Shene), carry out the killings. Drones hover in the skies; faceless messengers of death used to slaughter Amhara civilians in the streets as they go about their daily lives.

A suffocating shadow of fear hangs heavy over Amhara people, in villages, towns and cities. Fear of being identified as Amhara, fear of imprisonment for being Amhara or speaking out about the Amhara genocide. Fear that family members and friends will be murdered, their wives or sisters raped, their homes taken from them or ransacked.

Stop killing Amhara civilians is the desperate cry of rational peace loving Ethiopians throughout the country and abroad; end the discrimination, the persecution and unlawful arrests, the spying and monitoring. Stop the Amhara genocide Abiy Ahmed.

Homeless and scared

In the five years since Abiy and Co. came to power tens of thousands of Amhara have been killed and millions displaced from Oromia, the largest region in the country; their land, property and cattle stolen by Oromo extremists.

And now these people, many of whom have either been the victim of violence or witnessed the killing of family members and friends, are the subjects of a forced relocation programme. Pushed to return to the very places they were evicted from. Towns and villages that are unsafe, where the armed gangs that attacked them are still at large, and where no alternative accommodation is being offered.

At best this is a chaotic plan by an inept regime attempting to present a fiction of regional safety, at worst it is a deliberate act by a brutal dictator to force people back into harms way.

In addition to murder and forced displacement, a mass programme of unlawful arrests of Amhara people as well as Oromo opposition supporters is in place. Hundreds of thousands of Amhara have been arrested, with many inmates being executed. The prisons are full to overflowing, leading to detainees being located in unknown semi-industrial units, where there are reports of captives being injected with highly contagious fatal diseases and left to die.

Ethnic profiling by government bodies is widespread and highlights the fact that individuals are targeted based on ethnicity, beliefs, and opposition to the Amhara genocide.

Internet access is closely monitored, social media accounts are scrutinised; arbitrary stop and search operations are in force; mobile phones are searched, and as The International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) found, any images discovered of historical Amhara figures or national flags bereft of stars arouses suspicion and potential arrest.

Leave them defenceless

After being subjected to ethnic based violence for years, in April 2023 the federal government announced unconstitutional plans to disband the only force protecting Amhara communities, the Amhara Special Forces (ASF). This triggered huge protests throughout the region. Abiy sent in the Federal Army (ENDF) and fighting erupted between the ENDF and Fano, a regional militia made up of poorly armed, but determined volunteers, together with ex members of the ASF.

Indiscriminate killing of Amhara civilians by ENDF forces exploded. In a recent report, Amnesty International (AI) documented serious violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) by the ENDF, which they say, “may amount to war crimes.” Amnesty highlight examples of extrajudicial killing of Amhara civilians by ENDF troops in Abune Hara, Lideta and Sebatamit, and acknowledge that these are but the tip of an iceberg of death and intimidation.

Unable to overcome the Fano and unwilling to withdraw and reinstate the ASF, a State of Emergency (SoE) was imposed in the Amhara region on 5 August 2023.

The shadowy declaration gives the government far reaching powers to arrest/imprison people without due process, impose curfews, ban the right to assembly and search property without a warrant. Draconian powers that the government has employed widely and indiscriminately. Violence and unlawful arrests against Amhara people have increased exponentially.

In its six monthly report the Amhara Association of America (AAA) document, 1606 deaths, and injuries to 824 Amhara civilians (August – February 2024); 37 drone attacks, resulting in 333 civilians killed; Rape of at least 210 young girls and women; Mass arrest of over 10,000 ethnic Amharas……with detainees facing physical and psychological torture”. These numbers according to AAA, shocking as they are, represent a small fraction of the total killed, raped and arrested.

Despite overwhelming evidence of killings, mass arrests and executions, on 6 February PM Abiy Ahmed told parliament that, “since we think along democratic lines, it is hard for us to even arrest anyone, let alone execute them.” A sick joke perhaps? Either Abiy is completely deluded and actually believes his own propaganda, or he is an habitual liar — probably both.

Hope killed

Swept along by a belief that change could come about, in 2018 when Abiy and his cohorts took office there was tremendous optimism in the country. That hope soon evaporated as it became clear that the new regime was no different to the previous mob – the EPRDF, in fact many believe they are worse.

The ruling Prosperity Party is a dictatorship led as they all seem to be, by a narcissist, under the guise of a democratically elected coalition government. Contrary to his liberal eulogising and pre-election pledges to respond to historical grievances and ethnic discrimination, Abiy has emboldened extremists and fuelled division and hatred.

Not only is the county fractured as never before, as a result of Abiy’s arrogance and misjudgments, Ethiopia is increasingly isolated within the Horn of Africa and the wider region.

Among the international community and mainstream media, there is little or no interest in the fractured state of the country. For almost thirty years western nations turned a blind eye to EPRDF suppression and violence, and now, despite the human rights reports, the UN warnings and calls for action, despite the suffering and pain of millions of people, the pattern of neglect and apathy continues.

Why are these people ignored? They are poor, black and African, this, many suspect, is the reason for global indifference.

Imagine for a moment that such atrocities were taking place in Europe say, or the US. There would rightly be outrage and immediate action. And there should be the same response to the Amhara genocide taking place in Ethiopia. Action that impacts Abiy and his government directly; targeted sanctions applied by the US and allies, as well as international institutions to directly hurt the men in power.

Dictators like Abiy, and the world is littered with such monsters, do not suddenly curb their behavior and embrace justice and democracy, they must be forced to do so.

The post The Hidden Genocide in Ethiopia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The Critical Missing Piece from the U.S. Energy Transition

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At the outset, the United States was blessed with enormous tracts of land (that it stole from the natives) and a considerable labor force (that it enslaved from Africa) to achieve economic success based largely on growing things. The next leap forward—into the industrial era—was facilitated by large deposits of coal and oil. A century later, inspired by a gifted group of engineers and funded early on by the Pentagon, Silicon Valley led the country into the computer age.

The United States, in other words, has been lucky. When the luck ran thin, it also relied on brute force.

Today, the world stands at the brink of another new economic revolution. Thanks to the same fossil fuels that made the industrial age possible—for the United States and other countries of the Global North—humanity has to shift over to renewable energy or else risk frying the planet.

This time, however, the United States is not so lucky.

When it comes to the 50 minerals necessary for the “clean” energy transformation, the United States is currently 100 percent reliant on exports for 12 of them (including graphite). For another 31 of those minerals—including cobalt, zinc, and tin—it imports at least 50 percent of what it needs. (If you’re not sure what minerals qualify as “critical,” here’s a list.)

The Biden administration is investing a lot of money to build a bridge to this renewable energy future. But it has neglected to secure all the necessary building materials to make that bridge happen.

Remember all the brouhaha around ensuring America’s energy independence? Boosters of domestic oil and gas production, especially the fracking industry, made a big deal about cutting ties of dependency to the Middle East and other regions of the world.

So far, there has been no comparable push to create mineral independence. Up until a few years ago, there wasn’t much appetite for such a campaign. To quote just one example, the United States closed down its only rare earth mine in California and was perfectly content to let China mine and process the 17 rare earth minerals that figure so prominently in the components of batteries, solar panels, and windmills.

The example of rare earth elements is not unique. The United States lacks many of the minerals that China currently controls. China produces more than 50 percent of rare earth elements and graphite, and it has secured access to other critical raw materials, including cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo and lithium mines elsewhere in Africa.

Policymakers and titans of industry wouldn’t be sweating right now if the United States had a good relationship with China. But the two countries have engaged in tit-for-tat tariffs and export restrictions, especially around minerals and high technology. Suddenly, U.S. policymakers from both parties are worried about how the country will cook up electric batteries, EVs, solar panels and so on if it can’t get the necessary ingredients.

Europe has already acted to address mineral dependency. The EU will pass its own critical raw materials legislation this year to increase domestic sourcing of these important minerals and also to expand efforts to recycle them.

The United States hasn’t yet passed comparable legislation. It’s running low on luck, and it can’t rely on the outright brutality of earlier eras to seize what it needs. Instead, America is using a variety of incentives, positive and negative, to get these critical raw materials.

But the most obvious way for the United States to wean itself of fossil fuels has nothing to do with luck or brutality. To have a chance at creating a just green transition for all, the United States simply has to repair its relationship with China.

Homegrown Extraction

Like oil, strategic minerals are unevenly distributed around the planet. Lithium mines are concentrated in Australia and the ABC triangle of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. The largest producer of nickel is Indonesia. Peru and Chile dominate the copper market. The DRC is responsible for nearly 70 percent of cobalt production.

The United States is not short on mines, particularly in the western part of the country. America was once the world’s largest copper producer (it’s now number five). It was once the largest extractor of rare earth elements (it’s now a distant second to China). For a period it supplied over 90 percent of the world’s bauxite (it’s now nowhere near the top ten).

It’s not as if mining has disappeared from the United States. It is still number two in the world in terms of overall mineral production of 2.2 billion tons (behind China’s 4.6 billion tons). In terms of the value of that production, the United States falls to third place, far behind China. Drill down into those numbers—pardon the extractive pun—and it’s easy to understand why the value of U.S. extraction is comparatively low. Crushed stone is the top mined commodity in the United States, followed by cement, copper, and construction sand and gravel.

Crushed stone is not exactly a strategic mineral, however useful it might be. You can’t make a computer or an EV out of cement.

Sometimes, the U.S. mining industry has lost out to countries with larger deposits. Sometimes, U.S. mines were simply tapped out. But in some key instances, the United States decreased or even stopped production in favor of imports. It turned out to be cheaper to rely on other countries either because their labor costs were lower or because they didn’t bother with profit-reducing environmental regulations.

Consider the case of rare earth elements. The Mountain Pass mine in California once produced most of the world’s supply, which went into color televisions, lasers, and microchips. U.S. dominance in production lasted into the 1990s, even as it began shipping the ore to China for processing, effectively exporting that particular environmental hazard. Certain U.S. regulations increased the cost of production; then a toxic waste spill in 2002 and subsequent litigation shut down the mine. China easily overtook the United States in the production and processing of rare earth elements.

U.S. Policy Evolves to a Point

Back in 2009, as the Obama administration was struggling to drag the U.S. economy out of a profound financial crisis, it managed to pass the $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which contained $90 billion for renewable energy. It was a modest but important nudge for the solar and wind energy industry, electric vehicle production, and the electrification of public transport.

Then came the Trump dark ages.

With the pandemic still in place and the economy struggling once again, Joe Biden took office and followed the Obama game plan. This time, he went even bigger on renewables in the $1 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and even more so with $300 billion earmarked for energy and climate in the Inflation Reduction Act.

But there was very little in all that legislation that specifically addressed critical raw materials.

The Biden administration is clearly committed to shifting eventually to renewables. The key word here, of course, is “eventually.” The administration has also pumped out a record amount of oil, in part in response to the war in Ukraine and the replacement of Russian supplies to European countries.

But when it comes to building the infrastructure for the energy transition, the United States will be competing with everyone for finite resources. According to the International Energy Agency, this transition will boost demand for rare earth elements fourfold, nickel, cobalt, and graphite 20-fold, and lithium an astounding 40-fold. The World Resources Institute assesses the stakes for the United States:

Expanding renewable energy infrastructure in the U.S. and coupling it with stationary storage batteries will require significant quantities of critical minerals such as lithium, nickel and cobalt. Likewise, the rapid shift to electric vehicles will depend on new EV batteries that require these same minerals. As the country increases its overall reliance on electricity, moreover, it will require increased transmission which calls for large amounts of copper and aluminum.

The only mineral mentioned above that the United States is mining in any quantity at the moment is copper.

The Inflation Reduction Act contains a single provision that addresses the sourcing of these minerals. To qualify for EV tax incentives, the batteries used in electric vehicles must contain at least 40 percent of critical minerals sourced either from the United States or from its free trade partners. A Korean manufacturer of EVs, for instance, has to reduce its dependency on Chinese imports for its battery production or risk being outpriced in the U.S. market. By 2027, that percentage rises to 80 percent.

There are no requirements for any other Green transition product: not solar panels, not wind turbines, not heat pumps. However, there is something called 45X in the IRA. It’s a production tax credit that provides a 10 percent credit for the use of domestic critical minerals. But, as critics have pointed out, it doesn’t support either the mining of those minerals or the recycling of them.

Congress is a little late to the game, but there’s bipartisan support for a Critical Materials Security Act which would help companies divest from the Chinese supply chain and share knowhow on processing with allied countries. But along with earlier legislation on battery production, the bill hasn’t yet gone anywhere.

In the absence of congressional action, the Biden administration has moved forward with the Minerals Security Partnership, a trade bloc of 14 nations designed to establish a supply chain for the resources they all need. It’s billed as a kind of responsible alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, at least when it comes to minerals, though urgent need will probably trump “responsible” when push comes to shove.

The administration also wants to open new mines that can power the energy transition. It created a new permitting process (FAST-41) to expedite new ventures, like a zinc and manganese mine in southern Arizona. New lithium mines are popping up in Imperial Valley (California), Thacker Pass (Nevada), and Smackover (Arkansas). Mountain Pass has subsequently reopened, but it will now face competition from other rare earth mines slated for Wyoming and Nebraska. Opposition from local groups might derail these efforts, however, just as they have blocked the mining of the largest potential U.S. lithium deposit in Maine.

Competition with China

The United States and its allies have tried to block China from acquiring advanced technology, such as the latest semiconductorsnecessary for AI applications. China has retaliated by slapping export restrictions on key rare earth minerals. It’s the kind of trade war that doesn’t immediately affect consumers—unlike the proposed TikTok ban—but it will prove hugely consequential for the future production of pretty much everything.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

China and the United States could collaborate profitably for mutual benefit on renewable energy technology. It did so during the Obama administration with the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center (CERC). Even in the current period of heightened tensions, Ford has been collaborating with China’s CATL to build a factory in Michigan that would produce batteries for its American-built EVs. But such cooperation has raised red flags among House Republicans, who sent Ford a letter that read, in part: “we are concerned that Ford’s partnership with a Chinese company could aid China’s efforts to expand its control over United States electric vehicle supply chains and jeopardize national security by furthering dependence on China.”

This kind of Cold War, zero-sum thinking could very well destroy what little chance the world still has of addressing the climate crisis. At Brookings, Cheng Li and Xiuye Zhao put it well:

Properly handled, U.S.-China collaboration in clean tech could further drive carbon reduction of the top two emitters, build trust, and put a floor under the deteriorating bilateral relationship. If framed as yet another battleground for zero-sum competition, however, mutual hostility in the form of trade restrictions and technology decoupling will disrupt global supply chains and torpedo the climate agenda worldwide.

China is just as suspicious of U.S. motives as the United States is of China’s. But the two countries don’t have to trust each other across the board. The United States and Soviet Union didn’t during the Cold War, and yet they were able to forge important arms control agreements that led to real reductions in nuclear arsenals and reduced the risk of war. China and the United States must do the same in the field of renewable energy, reduction of carbon emissions, and other environmental priorities.

Competition is meaningless, after all, if the prize is a dead planet.

This article is part of the new Global Just Transition project.

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The Cost of Revenge: A Cantor’s Critique of Israel’s Response to Hamas

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In the wake of the deadly Hamas terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, many of Israel’s supporters, myself included, have succumbed to the understandable impulse for violent retribution. Israel is a land that I love, both culturally as a Jew — and third-generation Holocaust survivor — and spiritually as an ordained cantor. It follows that I have experienced the initial drive for vengeance that has beaten palpably in the hearts of many of my coreligionists after the slaughter that Am Yisraeil (the People of Israel) endured on that awful day. This is the very same feeling with which I and others like me have struggled for decades in the shadow of the mass murder of family members during the Shoah (Holocaust). Any reasonable human being can empathize with this initial reaction, as well as with the overwhelming urge for decisive military action to expedite the return of the Israeli hostages, whose ongoing plight in Gaza and that of their loved ones is unfathomable. As a former prison chaplain and the co-founder of L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty — a group with more than 3,300 members who actively campaign against all executions across the world — I cannot help but see how this longing parallels the toxic feelings that have motivated advocates for capital punishment since time immemorial.

Many death penalty proponents, as I myself used to be, justify their support of retaliatory state killing by invoking the popular misconception of a literal reading of the Biblical verse demanding an  “eye for an eye.” This sentiment was on full ignominious display once again just yesterday, when proponents of state killing celebrated Georgia’s execution of Willie Pye. According to Rabbinic interpretation, of course, the notion of “eye for an eye” referred to financial compensation for the value of said eyes. The Jewish version of lex talionis was in fact intended to curtail, rather than feed, the collective yearning for expansive massacres that societies practiced in response to killings. Israel’s excessive action in Gaza demonstrates this danger of collective punishment, offering yet another chilling reminder of Gandhi’s astute observation that “an eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”

Let there be no doubt: the issues of judicial executions and war are markedly distinct. Still, the yearning for retribution is a common germ that inevitably infects both cycles of violence. This insidious undercurrent has blinded the Israeli government and many of its staunchest advocates to the human rights violations that the IDF has committed in Gaza. As a result, Israel has mercilessly escalated what had been a necessary initial response to secure its borders after Hamas’ rampage. Likewise, its government has continued to stubbornly pursue a military solution to bringing home the remaining Israeli hostages, at the expense of prospects of diplomatic resolution.

A brief review of the body count bears out this reality. This past October 7th is now the bloodiest day in Israel’s history and the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. On that infamous date, Hamas terrorists slaughtered nearly 1,200 people in southern Israel, injured roughly 1600, and took 253 Israelis back to Gaza as hostages, raping and engaging in unspeakable sexual violence throughout. In response, the Israeli military launched a massive air and ground campaign to attempt to annihilate Hamas. As of this writing, at approximately five months into the war, this operation has led to well over 30,000 Gazan deaths. The vast majority of those killed have been civilian children and women. Hamas already had earned a global reputation as a murderous terrorist organization — one whose very charter calls for the destruction of Israel. Now, history and posterity will also deservedly judge Israel extremely harshly for the exorbitant disproportionality of the death toll it has inflicted. The International Court of Justice and an ever-increasing number of nations and leaders across the world view the extent of Israel’s response as unjustifiable. In the minds of countless individuals, the scale and scope of the resulting devastation on Gazans has even become “genocidal” in nature. How then can it be that many supporters of Israel have sought to rationalize such widespread civilian deaths, eschewing a ceasefire, and flouting international humanitarian law?

To begin to answer this question, I turn to the lens through which I have come to see human behavior in response to some of the most heinous crimes imaginable: from the unparalleled slaughter of the Shoah, to the “worst of the worst” of capital cases, and now to the depraved atrocities of October 7th. The natural penchant for reprisal is evident in all such situations. For my fellow Jews today, this phenomenon is exacerbated by Hamas’ recent triggering of an intergenerational trauma that is still raw in the wake of the Holocaust. I believe this has impaired the vision of many of my well-intentioned peers, blocking their ability to contextualize the breadth of Israel’s response. It has led some to double-down on attempts to discredit the empirics of the civilian casualty tally itself in order to justify their narrative. For certain others, it has contributed to the view that all members of Hamas are subhuman. This characterization calls to mind society’s labeling of those condemned to death rows as “monsters” who are incapable of change. Many defenders of Israel consequently hold the erroneous belief that only the most aggressive Israeli military action in Gaza will deter future violence, rather than incite it further. This sentiment is eerily reminiscent of death penalty proponents’ obstinate adherence to the patently false notion that executions serve as a deterrence to future crimes, instead of perpetuating the cycle of violence.

A tragic byproduct of this kind of collective shortsightedness is the tendency to overlook how more killing invariably fails to bring closure. Regarding the death penalty, studies reveal that the drive for lethal retribution actually interferes with the ability to move forward. The hundreds of murder victim family members that comprise the death penalty abolitionist group Journey of Hope: From Violence to Healingoffer inspiring testaments to this fact. Consider Rev. Sharon Risher, whose mother and cousins were three of the nine African-American victims in the June 17, 2015, Charleston, SC mass shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church. The US federal government sought to execute 21-year-old Dylann Roof for perpetrating that terror attack. Rev. Risher, however, opposed Roof’s ultimate death sentence, just as she firmly stands against capital punishment in all cases. Risher eloquently articulated her position in a recent USA Today op-ed in response to the Biden administration’s decision to seek execution for the shooter in the May 14, 2022 Tops supermarket massacre in Buffalo, New York. “By not taking a possible death sentence off the table,” Risher wrote, “I believe that [US] Attorney General [Merrick] Garland has denied a turning point for the families that would have allowed them to move toward healing sooner.” Many family members of October 7th hostages know all too well how this also applies in Gaza, where the Israeli government’s decision to keep a ceasefire deal off the table has denied a potential turning point that would halt the ongoing cycle of violence and open the door to a return of their loved ones.

Critics will argue – justifiably – that the causes of the present havoc in Gaza are complex and should not be reduced to the notion that the Israeli government is solely motivated by the need to avenge the pogrom of October 7th and the ongoing hostage crisis. In the messy real world, I certainly appreciate the impossible place in which Israelis find themselves, with many feeling that if they do not achieve certain military goals, they will never be safe. That orientation is informed by the clear and present danger of the terrorist entity of Hamas, which has maniacally and inextricably embedded itself among noncombatants and civilian infrastructures. Some also will say that the underlying issue is not revenge, but rather a longstanding indifference for Palestinian suffering, which is simply explained away or rendered unacceptable by just-war terms, rather than viewed as a dirty-hands problem that should plague even a person who believes every operation is necessary. To be sure, this too is a blindness that long predates October 7.

While this all is indeed true, it does not negate how the dangerous desire for vengeance also plays a part — however latent — in the calculus of Israel’s response. Human beings, including world leaders and the governments they run, have long wrestled with the craving for retributive justice. For an unfiltered manifestation of this pattern, one need only look to Donald Trump’s ongoing success among the hoi polloi as he campaigns under the disinhibited platform of “vengeance” in pursuit of a second term as US president, threatening a “bloodbath” were he to lose again in 2024. Machiavellian Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sought to exploit a similar vengeful undercurrent as he — like Trump — seeks to protect and promote himself with the relentless pursuit of military glory. I do not claim to know with certainty the exact extent to which the underlying drive for inflicting collective punishment has dictated Israeli policy these past five months. As was the case with me and other supporters of the death penalty, the impact of this emotion is naturally greater than what is discernible to the naked eye. The genocidal rhetoric of various right-wing Israeli cabinet ministers who raise ideas such as dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza or hoping for a “Nabka 2023” provide but a dark glimpse into the dangerous nature of this obstinate quest for reprisal.

It is imperative that the Israeli government and my fellow allies of the Jewish State acknowledge as soon as possible how these psychological dynamics have influenced their response to October 7th. Not unlike my own epiphany and resipiscence regarding executions, this self-awareness is a crucial prerequisite to relinquishing the increasingly strained justifications that have allowed the land I love to unleash such an immense wave of killing, starvation and destruction upon Gazan civilians. The very same rationale of course also applies to Gazans themselves, who in all likelihood will now seek to avenge their own slaughter with the shedding of more Israeli blood.

The brutality of Israel’s military response — like Hamas’ unconscionable October 7th attack — warrants the application of the phrase that former Associate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun used to describe the death penalty. They are all examples of the “machinery of death,” fueled in great part by the vengeful urge for lex talionis. Holocaust survivor, Nobel laureate and staunch death penalty abolitionist Elie Wiesel knew this all too well, famously asserting that “Death should never be the answer in a civilized society.”

What then is “the answer?” As my late friend Bill Pelke —  a murder victim family member and co-founder of Journey of Hope — so beautifully voiced it: ideally, “the answer is love and compassion for all of humanity.” In a similar vein, The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander has eloquently written that the solution must center on lovingkindness and nonviolence. Failing the realization of these laudable, lofty charges, any “answer” to the most horrendous of violent acts must at the very least be built upon a bedrock of restorative justice principles, and in the case of the Israel-Hamas War, a diplomatic solution. The violence that this conflict has wrought is otherwise doomed to persist. As Gandhi prophesied in his shrewd “eye for an eye” observation, it is a vicious cycle that will last for as long as the warring parties in Israel-Palestine retain their blind spots. Until that vision is restored, there will be no end in sight to the depredations executed in the de facto death chamber of the Gaza Strip.

This first appeared on The Jurist.

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Coming Soon to a Mansion Near You: A Tax on Over-the-Top Greed Grabs

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The post Coming Soon to a Mansion Near You: A Tax on Over-the-Top Greed Grabs appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The Monster in the House

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I read with interest Ron Waterman’s guest view in the March 19, 2024 Independent Record regarding Hitler’s and the Nazi’s attacks on Jewish people and our own Country’s slide toward authoritarianism. I agree with his commentary.

What piqued my further interest, however, was what I had just read about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in Naomi Klein’s newest book, Doppelganger.[1]

According to the author, we tend to regard the Holocaust as a one-off tragedy, a frenzy of death, without historical precedent, birthed in the mind of a diabolical dictator and carried out by Der Führer’s equally evil minions.

Make no mistake, the Holocaust was an industrially efficient, genocide of Jewish people, and included the extermination of LGBTQIA+ people, people of color, people with mental and physical disabilities, “useless eaters,” “brutes,” Gypsies and anyone else who didn’t fit into the model of Hitler’s “Christian,” Aryan Master-Race.

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicitynationality, religion, or race.[2]

But, genocide did not begin with Hitler.

In his 1871 book, The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin observed that “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.”  Sadly, some of those genocides have taken place already; worse, some are happening now. Keep in mind that the races that are “savage” are in eyes of their exterminators.

To that point, genocide was created by man, and its historical roots are traceable, at least, back to the great Greco-Persian City-States.  In fact, Thucydides reports on the slaughter of the people of Melos during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, 431-404 BCE.

Then there were the Catholic Crusades, between, 1095-1300 CE, tasked with wresting control of the Holy Lands from Moslem rule. These eight or nine Crusades resulted in the deaths of 1.7 million people.[3]

Other genocidal events are listed in a Wikipedia article at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides. The table runs 2+ pages of small type.

By my count, prior to WWII, there were two-dozen genocidal events taking, at a minimum, 6.6 million peoples’ lives.  Hitler and the Nazis accounted for, conservatively, 10 million deaths during WWII, 1939 to 1941. Since WWII the article reports some 20 genocides taking, at a minimum, 3.2 million peoples’ lives.

Not included in the table are the estimated 100 million indigenous peoples’ deaths during the last five centuries caused by Europeans and their descendants and attributable to their colonialism, institutionalized racism, religions, wars and repression.[4]  Then, to that we must also add the 2 million to 60 million deaths resulting from the transatlantic slave trade, again attributable to Europeans and their descendants.[5]

Finally, we must account for genocidal events that are presently ongoing:  In the Ukraine, an estimated 40 thousand+ deaths attributable to Russia[6], and in the present Gaza conflict, over 32,000 Palestinian deaths attributable to Israel and 3,000 Israeli deaths attributable to Hamas.[7]

This synopsis is neither exact nor comprehensive and, in all likelihood, grossly undercounts the numbers of actual deaths.

But nearly all reported genocides have been perpetrated by white, nominally Christian, Europeans or Anglo-Saxons and their descendants.

As Klein notes, when, in 1941, Hitler remarked that concentration camps were not invented in Germany, but, rather, were invented by the English, he was speaking an element of truth.

So, asks Klein, “What if full-blown fascism is not the monster at the door, but the monster inside the house, the monster inside us—even we whose ancestors have been victims of genocide?”

Our next Presidential election may well answer her question.

Notes.

[1] Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY, 2023, pp 267-277.

[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/genocide

[3]https://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320hist&civ/chapters/15crusad.htm#:~:text=Spanning%20more%20than%20two%20centuries,Holy%20Lands%20from%20Moslem%20control.

[4]chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.se.edu/native-american/wp-content/uploads/sites/49/2019/09/A-NAS-2017-Proceedings-Smith.pdf

[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#:~:text=The%20transatlantic%20slave%20trade%20resulted,to%20as%20high%2060%20million.

[6]https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-troops-killed-zelenskyy-675f53437aaf56a4d990736e85af57c4;

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293492/ukraine-war-casualties/

[7]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war#:~:text=As%20of%205%20March%202024,over%20136%20UNRWA%20aid%20workers.; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

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Here’s Why You Can’t Afford an Electric Car

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Cybertruck, Tesla.

It seems that there has never been a better time than now to buy an electric vehicle in the United States, especially if you read news headlines and White House press releases. You might be forgiven for thinking that you can actually afford to upgrade your old gas-guzzling sedan with a sleek, new zero-emissions EV. And if you can’t afford one, the various local, state, and federal rebate programs will surely knock thousands off the price tag, right?

Wrong. In order to be able to qualify for the ever-changing and complicated federal $7,500 rebate on EVs, one has to be rich enough to be able to afford to buy a new EV (some used ones qualify but good luck figuring out which one, and then even better luck finding such a car available for purchase). But, in order to qualify for the rebate, one can’t be too rich. If you’re middle-income, like me, you can lease an EV, but then you don’t qualify for the rebate—your leasing company does—and you’re left paying a hefty monthly lease.

News headlines about Tesla slashing its EV prices might still convince you that a new EV is within reach—that is if you don’t mind enriching one of the worst humans on the planet. But Teslas are still among the more expensive cars on the market.

Meanwhile, there are sensationalist headlines about EV sales falling over the past year, so much so that one might be forgiven for thinking that maybe most people wanting an EV already purchased one and demand is simply weakening. Dig past the headlines however, and the news reports all come to the same conclusion: EVs are still unaffordable for the majority of Americans, especially those who simply want to reduce their carbon footprint and their financial expenses at the same time. “Pricing is still very much the biggest barrier to electric vehicles,” according to one research analyst.

A Los Angeles Times report agreed: “Although the cost of building EVs continues to drop, it has yet to reach price parity with conventional gasoline-powered vehicles.” But the paper then bizarrely blamed Americans for the high price tags, saying, “Americans’ preference for larger vehicles necessitates larger, heavier and costlier battery packs, contributing to the high prices.” There was no mention of auto manufacturers spending years aggressively marketing SUVs and other giant gas guzzlers to Americans. Indeed, there is a whole range of EV trucks on the market right now—still out of the grasp of ordinary middle-income Americans looking for an efficient commuter family car.

Too bad these consumers don’t have access to China’s new EV, the BYD Seagull, a car that test drivers in the U.S. are gushing over, and whose price tag begins at a mere $9,698. “That undercuts the average price of an American EV by more than $50,000,” explained Bloomberg. In fact, more than 70 percent of all EVs sold globally are Chinese manufactured. You don’t have to live in China to buy a Chinese EV. You just have to live outside the U.S.

What most headlines aren’t saying overtly and what the Biden administration is also keeping relatively quiet about is that the U.S. is engaging in a fiercely protectionist trade war with China in order to shield American automakers. Forget the TikTok war—it’s Chinese-made EVs that keep U.S. auto CEOs up at night.

To protect them, the Biden administration is fanning the flames of anti-China sentiment and claiming it is worried about “National Security Concerns” over the computer systems of Chinese-made EVs. “China is determined to dominate the future of the auto market, including by using unfair practices,” said Biden in late February. “China’s policies could flood our market with its vehicles, posing risks to our national security.” The president has even ordered an investigation into China’s so-called smart cars, which most EVs are these days.

But the Biden administration’s climate goals for auto emissions rely on a mass transition to EVs across the nation. Already, it’s behind in ramping up towards its goal of wanting half of all vehicles sold in 2030 to be EVs, likely because most Americans can’t afford them, or can’t access the far-cheaper Chinese-made cars. On top of that, the GOP has now made attacking EVs part of its new culture war. It’s no wonder EVs remain out of reach for most Americans.

Why are Chinese cars so much cheaper, more varied, and just better than American ones? It doesn’t all boil down to the cost of labor as one might imagine. Chinese labor costs are not as low as they used to be. China’s government has simply made EVs a massive priority. An analysis in MIT Technology Review explained, “the government has long played an important role—propping up both the supply of EVs and the demand for them,” and that there have been “generous government subsidies, tax breaks, procurement contracts, and other policy incentives.”

Instead of adopting a similarly aggressive approach to making EVs a priority, the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has created a complex series of tax credits that require all EV materials and labor to be sourced in the U.S.—a goal whose math just doesn’t add up. And, the IRA doesn’t even protect U.S. workers enough. The United Auto Workers (UAW) denounced the IRA on its first anniversary for failing to require fair labor standards in the transition to an EV economy.

Still, UAW did the job itself. Fresh from a major union victory in late 2023 the union won job protections from the three biggest U.S. automakers for workers transitioning into the EV industry.

Our economy relies far too much on cars and most American cities are planned around car-centric living. It’s no wonder that petroleum-powered vehicles are the single largest U.S. source of climate-changing emissions. There are many ways to reduce this source, including redesigning cities to be more walkable, improving the quality and cost of public transportation and train systems, and encouraging bicycle transportation when possible—all of which will take concerted effort, time, and resources.

But the climate clock is ticking fast. After decades of scientists and climate activists sounding the alarm and being ignored, we are only now starting to take baby steps to mitigate climate change and it’s simply not enough. Even when accounting for the mineral extraction needed to make EV batteries, EVs have a far lower carbon footprint than petroleum-based cars and are perhaps the best, most accessible tool we have to quickly reduce our carbon impact.

his article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Climate Agreements Suck

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Image by Agustín Lautaro.

Climate agreements suck. There are no real enforcement provisions. Many signatories cheat. Some don’t rep0rt at all. Moreover, reported data is highly suspect. It’s a worldwide scandal recently exposed by YaleEnvironment360.

Evidence of cheating is found in the atmosphere: Global CO2 is on a rampage, skyrocketing upwards like never before, double-to-triple rates of only one year ago, see: CO2 Bursting into the Atmosphere. This is not supposed to be happening. It is twisting the planet’s climate system into a pretzel that doesn’t know which way to turn next. There are plenty of reasons to believe it is going to get much, much worse. The planet’s climate system is already so far whacked-out that it’s breathing fire.

For example, the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-3A satellite registered a 705% increase in fire activity in Canada in 2023 versus the prior six-years.

Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions are skyrocketing in the aftermath of the much-touted climate agreement Paris ‘15 when 196 countries agreed to cut to net zero. Oops, wrong, many signatories are “net nothing.”

There is compelling evidence that signatory nations to Paris ’15 don’t give a damn about the agreement or care about Hot House Earth as they cavalierly undercount, when they do report, or they simply refuse to report. As a result, UN climate goals go straight into the trash, worthless.

In March 1994 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) organized an objective to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions to prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system. That’s when “humans” were “officially recognized” as an active participant in climate change. It’s been downhill ever since. In fact, it’s been an ongoing disaster. The evidence is found in greenhouse gas emissions increasing every year since UNFCCC formalized. And now, as of 2024, emissions are bordering on torrential increases.

Worse yet, UNFCCC and Paris ’15 lures the world community into a false sense of hope, false pretense that everything is under control, we’ve got the nations of the world agreeing to combat global warming, not to worry. The illusion works because very little outrage about the illusion has been touted in public. In the real world, UNFCCC and the Paris climate agreement of 2015 are phony symbols of success. Get over it.

YaleEnvironment360 recently, March 21, 2024, published an exposé about the scandalous behavior of signatories to climate agreements: Nations Are Undercounting Emissions, Putting UN Goals at Risk researched and written by Fred Pearce, one of the best most respected environmental journalists.

The article opens by stating the heart of the problem as “lax rules” allow for national inventories reporting to the UN “grossly underestimating many countries’ greenhouse gas emissions.”

In fact, according to the article “most countries published data to UNFCCC’s website is typically out of date, inconsistent, and inc0mplete.” According to Glen Peters, Centre for International Climate Research (Norway): “I would not put much value, if any, on the submissions.”

For example, China’s coal reporting is likely so seriously underreported that its underreporting equals total emissions of many major industrial countries. And in the US, a recent article in Nature, US Oil and Gas System Emissions from Nearly One Million Aerial Site Measurements d/d March 13, 2024, exposed methane emissions three times more than the government reported.

One of the world’s major oil & gas producers, Qatar stopped reporting emissions in 2007. No surprise there as it’s the world’s highest per-capita CO2 emissions abuser. Meanwhile, they revel in billions of dollars the world pays to dishevel the planet’s climate system. Even worse yet, it’s believed their undeclared emissions have doubled since 2007. Is something radically amiss here?

The Philippines last sent its inventory in 2013. Guyana in 2012.

According to Pearce’s article: “The world is flying blind, unable either to verify national compliance with emissions targets or figure out how much atmospheric ‘room’ countries have left for emissions before exceeding agreed warming thresholds.”

The standards for reporting are replete with uncertainties. Even with activity data that’s filed there’s no way to know how much fossil fuel is burned in most countries or how much methane leaks. And uncertainties are prevalent in how activities are converted into emissions estimates. Off the shelf formulae often fails to reflect real conditions. In short, it’s almost as if a gigantic Ponzi scheme oversees UN reporting standards.

The deception is found everywhere, e.g., in Canada, aircraft measurements of CO2 over the enormous tar sands project revealed emissions 64% higher than reported. Moreover, satellite data analyzed by the International Energy Agency on a global basis discovered methane emissions 70% higher worldwide over oil and gas fields than officially reported.

The overall scandal even extends to what should be “positive reports.” According to Clemens Schwingshackl of Ludwig-Maximilian’s University/Munich: “Governments collectively claim their forests are soaking up 6 billion tons more Co2 each year than scientists can account for.”

Everybody everywhere is fudging, cheating, obscuring, pretending, and/or avoiding reality. Yet over 100 heads of state, presidents, prime ministers, environmental ministers, secretaries of state, etc. show up for the annual COPs (UN Conference of the Parties) for photo-ops. And that’s pretty much the extent of the substance.

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West Papua: The Torture Mode Of Governance

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A group of people in military uniforms Description automatically generated
A group of people in military uniformsDescription automatically generated

Photo: Made available by Benny Wenda (President ULMWP).

Budi Hernawan said it ten years ago: “torture in Papua … has become a mode of governance.” It hasn’t stopped. It’s got worse. It’s got worse precisely because it’s a mode of governance accepted and blessed by the international “community” whose neoliberal politics of extraction means extermination of anything and anyone getting in its way.

It’s got worse just now because Israel’s genocide, ecocide, starvation, and torture in Palestine isn’t only distracting attention from these practices in smaller and more remote places but also showing that it’s okay, it’s part of our system, you can do it with impunity because it’s all part of a bigger plan, and even the US presidential elections might have something to do with decisions being made to let Israel get on with its murderous work. It’s okay because 91-times-indicted US presidential candidate Trump is given his electoral stump and media loudspeakers to warn, Hitler-style, that his enemies are “vermin”, that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and promising the largest ever deportation operation in U.S. history. Not that Europe is much better. Of course it’s not. It’s part of the same system. Just wearing different masks. One result is that, since 2014, some 29,000 people from empire-damaged parts of the world have died trying to migrate to Europe, and rejected by Europe. Many “could have been prevented by prompt and effective assistance to migrants in distress”. And it’s okay to have former Suharto son-in-law, mass murderer, war criminal Prabowo Subianto, former head of US-trained Kopassus “Special Forces” (special at torturing and kidnapping) as the new president of Indonesia. He’s our ally against China.

But what about torture itself? What about the human beings who are routinely called “moneys”, “dogs”, “pigs”, “rats” and “stone-age idiots” and thus harmed and mutilated by their fellow human beings? What about the place where it happens? Who allows it to happen? West Papua was handed to Indonesia (and international corporations) by the United Nations in a trumped-up referendum in 1969, but the brutality actually began in 1963 after Indonesia was given control of West Papua in the (Cold War) New York Agreement concocted by the United States, Holland, and Indonesia. What happened next? To start with, more than 500,000 people have been murdered. Institutionalised torture was part of that.

The latest example to come out of West Papua is from a highlands place called Yahukimo (named for the Yali, Hubla, Kimyal, and Momuna tribes in the area) with a population of about 362,000 (but more than half the population of Melanesian West Papua consists of Indonesian transmigrants—another slow but effective mechanism of genocide). Look at the videos, if you can stomach them. Look anyway, even if it makes you want to throw up, because this affects everyone who has something called humanity.

Here we see young Indonesians having fun as they joke about taking turns to thrash, stab, slash, and kick the “animal flesh” of a West Papuan man they have made to stand in a drum of freezing water. Seeing the suffering of the shivering, wounded man is unbearable. Seeing young men amused about what they’re doing to him is also unbearable. What world raised them to do this with their young lives? This is nothing new in Yahukimo. Last month two teenage boys were arrested and tortured by grinning Indonesian soldiers, who took trophy photos of their victims. Another five teenage boys were murdered by Indonesian soldiers in September 2023. Two women were raped and murdered last October. Some 40% of woman torture victims are raped. Illegal gold mining is killing people with mercury, precious metals, and in the name of security for the miners. Dozens of people have died in a recent famine in Yahukimo. That didn’t make world headlines either. Famine also happened in 2006, 2009, also unheadlined. It’s normal there. But who knows or cares about Yahukimo?

Unlike torture perpetrated in the infamous black sites, it isn’t secret in West Papua. Well, it isn’t and is, depending on the audience. On the one hand, it’s a show for Indonesian and Papuan audiences within West Papua and, on the other hand, in the international domain, it’s under wraps because Indonesia effectively seals the borders, and the international powers-that-be are happy with it for their own geopolitical reasons. It’s an international secret because Indonesia is “our” ally against China, not to mention easy legally untrammelled plunder of its natural resources.

Budi Hernawan describes ten aspects of torture in West Papua.

1) Most victims are village people, subsistence farmers, either accused of supporting the independence movement or “collateral” victims. The collateral crime doesn’t matter because, since West Papuans are described as animals and primitive, they’re innately members or sympathisers of “armed criminal groups” and, in their occupied land non-citizens, and therefore a threat by their very existence. So, they can all only be disciplined by the harshest of measures. Extreme Indonesian nationalist views dating back to Sukarno’s “Sabang to Merauke” (an Indonesia encompassing all the former Dutch East Indies) slogan, is an expression of sovereignty and a licence to kill the “animals” that get in the way of Indonesian settler colonial projects. Torture proves their subhuman nature.

2) Rape is often part and parcel of torturing women who are being interrogated about the whereabouts of their menfolk. In one case, witnesses tell of a woman whose vagina was gouged out after which her husband was made to eat it. And rape doesn’t end with the act: “Women who suffered torture, sexual violence we find from the 70s or 80s whose children were shot, tortured and so on are still alive; but living in discrimination because there is a stigma attached to them”. Other tortured women, left with the agony of damaged bodies are impaired in their ability to communicate what happened to them. They can’t express it to their community and, not heard, they’re forced into an excruciating exile because “language, the bridge between the survivor and the world, has been destroyed”.

3) The torturers are mostly members of the Indonesian army and police (the “security” apparatus that sows terror and insecurity everywhere it is established). Therefore, torture is state policy, a “mode of governance” that was established more than sixty years ago. Torture is a “crime of obedience”, upholding the integrity of the state and its “security”. Through its manifest presence within West Papua, as part of a network of power, it’s an underlying aspect of all political and social life, even in health and education systems and development policy. The deeply embedded state doctrine is NKRI harga mati (Indonesian territorial integrity is non-negotiable). The message is that the end (state security) justifies the means (any means).

4) Torture is cheap. It doesn’t require expensive instruments and depends on the perverse imagination and cruelty of the perpetrators. “Security” service members are poorly equipped and underpaid, and the armed forces are notorious for funding their operations through business, extractive business, which automatically entails human rights violations. The techniques of torture might be cheap but they are, as Budi Hernawan notes, part of “a sophisticated architecture of domination.”

5) Unproven, wild, often crazy accusations referring to the catch-all “armed criminal groups”, any sign of support (like refusing to denounce friends and relatives) for West Papuan independence, or attacks against Indonesia personnel, their installations or illegal gold miners are sufficient basis for torture to be used and with impunity. Rule of law doesn’t apply.

6) Especially since the Suharto military coup of 1965, torture has been a common resort when dealing with secessionist movements in general and in West Papua in particular. It involves the highest levels of political and military authority.

7) As the International criminal Court for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) determined, “such a long-term and unpunished practice of state-sponsored torture can only be possible if there is a plan or policy”.

8) Hernawan estimates that more than 80% of torture cases were performed publicly, deliberately making a show of the victim’s wounded and mutilated body, so its purpose is not only inflicting pain but communicating it as a show of force, of the type of sovereignty that’s operating. It happens on roadsides, yards of people’s homes, marketplaces, next to police or military compounds, and other open areas so that everybody, including children, can see what’s happening and hear the screams. People are often forced to watch. In Aceh and East Timor, dead tortured bodies were left on display but in West Papua they’re kept alive to illustrate the sovereignty story and infect communities with terror. Making videos of torture is a particular feature of its practice in West Papua. While it’s effective propaganda, the videos, like the ones shown here, don’t have borders than can be blocked and they’re now in the international arena so, to some extent, they’re backfiring. With its primitive practices of sovereignty, Indonesia has inadvertently lobbed the ball into the court of western powers that can no longer plead ignorance of what is happening.

9) Using public space as a torture arena is also a way of advertising impunity, at least within West Papua. So far, impunity prevails in the international system too, even though these videos are now entering ubiquitous digital spaces.

10) Most of the torture in West Papua has been reported by local church organs and NGOs, but now more reports are coming from outside West Papua, in large part thanks to the communication skills of the Oxford based ULMWP.

Papuan resistance to Indonesian sovereignty is intolerable because it challenges the sanctity of the whole inviolate state of Indonesia, no matter how it was actually cobbled together. Since it’s a product of Cold War engineering and continues to be of geopolitical importance in the global balance of power, Indonesian rulers have little fear of being held accountable for their atrocities in West Papua. Hence, the international system, which “democratically” claims to speak for all of us, is also hurting, maiming, and leaving scars on West Papuan bodies. We’re all being made complicit by the message that the pleasures of western daily lives are somehow based on this.

More than a hundred countries have called for a UN monitoring visit of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to West Papua. Needless to say, Indonesia is blocking such a visit, not that the UN, party to the genocide-and-torture show in West Papua from the very beginning, will be keen to get involved in a project that questions its own honour and decency. Indeed, Indonesia was able to boast that it was “re-elected as a member of the UN Human Rights Council on October 10, 2023 … with a significant vote gain and the support of the majority of UN member states. … Indonesia has once again earned international trust!” This “trust” says a lot about the UN and also that torture isn’t just something that happens in places like Yahukimo but is officially embraced by the highest human rights body of the international system. Such “trust” tells us that if we want to live in a world without torture, everything must change.

Once again, the most castigated people are the most steadfast and daring. So, in times when the merest glance at the daily news shrieks catastrophe in ocean currents, vanishing species, fires, floods, starvation, Europe on a “war footing”, violence, and the whole planet in danger, the West Papuan leaders have presented a coherent solution, their Green State Vision, a “Green Philosophy… inclusive in thinking and action, involving participation of all communities of beings: spirits, plants, animals and humans, rather than individualism.” This Green State Vision would, perforce, mean an end to neoliberalism.

Yes, we have to change everything. Change the foul neoliberal system. And here is a blueprint. But it can only be implemented if the whole evil, torturing system is overthrown. As new forms of fascism are gaining ground, this is really the task we’re faced with. An early step in facing it is recognising that torture in Yahukimo isn’t an isolated thing. In this global system, people of conscience have a responsibility to try and stop it, there and everywhere else. We’re all living in a Zone of Interest.

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The Votes That Count

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In the US there are elections because of our Constitution. There is political bantering over everything, including whether the US is much of a democracy or not.

But, make no mistake, starting from the Declaration of Independence, when Thomas Jefferson wrote “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.” The vote has always been important, and who, what, when, where, why, and how people vote has always been controversial.

There is no shortage of questions about electoral politics. Speaking with a friend recently I heard about a plot to steal the election by allowing immigrants to vote. It struck me for both how unremarkable the claim was (the complaints about immigrants and illegal immigrants voting are common, Trump and others have complained regularly since 2016) and ignorant of history such claims are.

Alien suffrage—the voting of non-citizens—was the norm for most of the country for a long time. The practice predates the establishment of the US, it was common practice from 1704 to 1926 (when it was banned state-by-state) and was not explicitly prohibited by US law until the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. It was not in the US Constitution. State laws for non-federal elections still vary, and there are states where aliens can vote for local and state offices and referenda.

Current cases about whether states can remove Trump from the ballot are another example. Much like the electoral politics changed in the 1920’s, following World War I, politics changed following the Civil War. In a nutshell: the arguments being made to keep Trump off the ballot use rules put in place to prevent the Confederacy from attempting to return to elected office or hold power in the public trust, because they could not be trusted to honor sworn oaths.

It is not some liberal conspiracy, “Six Colorado voters — four Republicans and two unaffiliated — brought the lawsuit.” The lead plaintiff is 91-year-old Republican Norma Anderson who says, “Our democracy is too precious to let a Donald Trump be president and destroy it.”

It is easy to forget that the case Trump v. Anderson is a test of legal principles. Does the Constitution (the 14th Amendment, Section 3 in this case) mean what it appears to say or can legal experts manipulate the language and obfuscate it out of practical application?

The challenge is real. On the one hand we have legal requirements that must balance between competing values and principles. On the other we have clear interests and desires, and people regularly disagree about what they want.

Ideally, we would be able to trust in due process, but the Supreme Court is now stacked. A quick review of cases like Dred Scott v. Sandford, Bowers v. Hardwick, Plessy v. Ferguson, Buck v. Bell, and Korematsu v. United States showcase the appalling willingness of the Supreme Court to allow the prejudicial restriction of rights and freedoms at times, depending upon the makeup of the court at those times.

Why should anyone expect fair judicial review from Justices who’ve lied about things like reproductive rights?

The Presidential election is a practice unlike any other. Candidates ultimately compete for electors in an electoral college–which means the candidate who wins the popular national vote may not win the election (e.g., Hillary Clinton beating Trump in 2016 by some 2.8 million votes but losing the Electoral College vote, plus four others who lost the popular vote but won election thanks to the Electoral College in our history: John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and George W. Bush).

In most of the rest of our democracy, we have a principle of equality; Reynolds v. Sims, held that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment includes “one-person, one-vote.” But the President is not chosen by the popular vote, George W. Bush and Donald Trump both lost the popular vote but managed to become President.

More and more I wonder whose votes count? If you measure voter importance by attention from candidates, for example, you discover a hyper-focus on swing states. It is easy to track campaign stops and advertising spending.

It makes sense that candidates spend their time trying to earn the votes of voters that will make the most difference. It is predictable, the closer the polling, the more attention the geography will receive. But safe states receive no campaign attention at all (in 2020 there were 33 safe states).

It is winner take all, and it is good to be a winner. I just fear that this all further drives the polarization that is tearing our social fabric apart.

There are many voices of legitimate grievances and fears over a candidate who has declared an interest in being a dictator. It is worth remembering that when We the People disagree, we can petition the government and force change. If we decide that we want all our votes counted, we can demand suffrage.

If we decide we want all our votes counted equally, we can demand an end to the Electoral College. If we want to keep insurrectionists off the ballot, we can demand Congress enforce the Fourteenth Amendment.

People power will always win. But it has to be exercised, not simply left on the table for others to grab.

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A One-State Solution Could Transform the World

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Probably fewer ideas are treated with more contempt in today’s world than . . . ahem: a one-state solution for Palestine and Israel, with, good God, every resident equally valued, equally free.

“Snort! No one wants this! It’s not possible — it’s not true!”

My reply to the cynics is this: We will not enter the future with closed minds. We will not find security — we will not evolve — if we choose to remain subservient to linear, us-vs.-them thinking. We will not become our fullest selves or have access to our own collective human consciousness if we choose to stay caged in our own righteous certainty. Our god is better than your god!

I acknowledge from the start: This is not a simple process, any more than America’s reluctant embrace of the civil rights movement was, or is, simple. But armed dehumanization — which is to say war, hatred, ethnic cleansing, cultural erasure, endless slaughter, the murder of children, genocide — is neither “simple” nor the least bit effective in creating a world that is safe for anyone. War and hatred perpetuate nothing but themselves. You know that, right?

But what about a two-state solution? Neither side actually wants this and, with the West Bank overrun with Israeli settlers, it’s hardly possible anyway. The concept of a two-state solution, Samer Elchahabi writes at the Arab Center website. “has been used to delegitimize Palestinians’ aspirations for equality and freedom, has allowed for relentless settlement expansion on Palestinian land, and has offered a fig leaf for perpetuating occupation with Western support.”

I also note the insightful words of management consultant and social philosopher Mary Parker-Follett, who pointed out, in her groundbreaking 1925 essay “Constructive Conflict,” that there are three basic ways of dealing with conflict: domination, compromise and what I would call transcendence.

Domination is simplistic. I win, you lose. This is the essence of every war and obviously the essence of Israel’s ongoing devastation of Gaza. Attempted domination never touches the heart of the conflict but, rather, attempts to kill it. This never works. Compromise is usually seen, with scathing reluctance, as the only other choice, a la some sort of two-state solution. Both sides give something up; neither side gets what it wants. “Compromise,” Parker-Follett pointed out, “does not create, it deals with what already exists.” And the conflict doesn’t really go away. It just takes a different form.

But the third option, which she referred to in her essay as “integration,” addresses the needs and wishes of all parties to the conflict and creates something — a solution — that hadn’t previously existed. In short, it creates a better world.

“As conflict — difference — is here in the world, as we cannot avoid it, we should, I think, use it,” Parker-Follett wrote. “Instead of condemning it, we should set it to work for us.”

Is this possible — in the midst of the hell called war? Most analysts of the conflict seem to dismiss a one-state, equality-for-all solution as “delusional” . . . oh gosh, too much work. It’s so much easier to keep hating and killing and just “finish the job,” as Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner put it in a recent interview, adding that Gaza’s “waterfront property could be very valuable.”

Yeah, dominance is seductive, especially for those in the most advantageous position. Perhaps that’s why it usually seems to be the disadvantaged ones — victimized, endangered, deprived of their full humanity — who are able to envision the transcendent blessings of equality, not for some but for all. This has certainly been the case here in the U.S.A., where those still addicted to “white America” view the country’s swelling tide of equality with fear (“they’re trying to replace us!”) rather than wonder and awe.

Elchahabi writes: “A departure from the two-state solution to another model based on equality and democratic rights for all is imperative. The one-state solution entails a single democratic state encompassing Israel, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza, with equal rights for all inhabitants, irrespective of ethnicity or religion. This paradigm shift addresses core issues: the right of return for Palestinian refugees, as stipulated in UN General Assembly Resolution 194; the status of Jerusalem; and the question of settlements.”

And then he makes a key point: “The one-state solution reimagines these as internal challenges of a unified polity rather than as zero-sum elements of a bilateral conflict.”

This is stepping out of the usual context in which the media presents the horrific conflict: us vs. them. Attempting to understand the conflict from a transcendent vision of unity and connection is what it means to evolve. The world we are in the process of creating is bigger and more whole than the fragmented, shattered world that currently exists.

He goes on: “Israelis and Palestinians alike should imagine a unified state that upholds the rights and dignity of all its citizens, forging a shared identity from the rich tapestry of its diverse peoples. This vision, while challenging, holds the promise of a lasting peace built not on separation and segregation but on the foundations of justice and mutual respect.”

This is the language of peace. It swells the heart, it transcends the small-mindedness of global politics. Palestine and Israel could transform the world.

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AI, Budget Defecits and the Aging Crisis

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I have long been amazed at how major debates over various economic policy issues can have completely contradictory assumptions, and no one seems to notice. This was driven home to me by a New York Times column by Peter Coy (a very good columnist) where he addressed the issue of whether AI would take all our jobs.

This risk has been arousing some concern in social media and various publications. This is striking because the prospect of no jobs raises a set of concerns that is 100 percent in the opposite direction of the frequently expressed problem of budget deficits and debt, as well as the problem of an aging population.

To put the issue as simply as possible, the story of AI taking all the jobs is a story where we can produce too much. The idea is that people don’t have jobs because there is no demand for their labor, AI is doing all the work.

This is the exact opposite of the budget deficit problem or the aging problem. Both of these are stories of scarcity. The deficit story is that government spending, given current tax structures, is pushing the economy beyond its capacity to produce goods and services.

If we are not hitting the economy’s capacity then we can just print the money, no matter how large the deficit is. We only get inflation if we push the economy beyond its ability to produce goods and services.

It’s a similar picture with the aging population story. The argument here is that we have too few workers to support a growing population of retirees. We would need ever higher taxes on the working population if we are to provide retirees with food, housing, healthcare and other necessities.

It is possible to construct stories where AI will lead to massive overproduction and an enormous reduction in the demand for labor. It is also possible to construct stories where large budget deficits push the economy up against constraints, leading to inflation, or where the aging population requires much larger taxes on workers.

However, it is not possible to put both stories together. If we really have to worry about AI radically reducing the demand for labor, then we don’t have to worry about the size of our budget deficit or debt. We also don’t have to worry about the rising ratio of retirees to workers. AI will take care of that, providing the goods and services our elderly need.

As far as my own view, I lean towards the AI taking the jobs story, although perhaps my scenario would not be as dramatic as some have been suggesting. I’m sure AI will have a big productivity impact in many sectors, but it is not going to be instantaneous.

We will gradually see reduced demand for lawyers, accountants, engineers, and in hundreds of other occupations. This will translate into lower prices for many items, which means higher real wages for workers in sectors seeing fewer layoffs. That should mean increased demand, as these workers spend their pay, which will create new jobs.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the benefits of increased productivity will accrue to workers, although that has generally been the case in the past. (The wage stagnation since 1980 has largely been a story where the wages of workers at the middle and bottom of the distribution went to workers at the top end like CEOs and Wall Street types.) We need policies to ensure that the productivity gains from AI are widely shared.

Just to be clear on this point, the issue is not one of government “redistribution,” as it is often framed. Government rules, not the market, will determine how the bigger pie associated with AI gets cut. There is no natural market distribution.

Just to take the most obvious and important example, ownership of AI is bestowed by government-granted patent and copyright monopolies. These are government policies, not the market.

Without these monopolies, it is unlikely that any company and/or individuals would be in a position to hugely profit from AI. Imagine that all AI software was fully open and could be used by anyone at zero cost. Also, the software embedded in the servers that power AI was fully open, so that anyone with a factory could replicate the servers. In this case, AI would likely be very cheap for anyone who saw a use, which means its benefits should be quickly passed on in the form of lower prices.

The government can take steps to ensure that gains are broadly shared. A higher minimum wage to go along with higher productivity would be an obvious measure. (We used to raise the minimum wage in stepwith productivity, it would be over $24 an hour today if we had continued this practice.)

We can also reduce the standard workweek. Instead of having overtime pay kick in at 40 hours a week, we can set the cutoff at 36 hours or 32 hours, or even less, depending on how much AI is increasing productivity.

And we could use our AI productivity dividend to spend more in areas like health care and education, as well as cleaning up the environment. All of which will be possible without higher taxes due to the AI increasing our output.

Again, I don’t see us stumbling into a world of unbelievable plenty tomorrow, but I do think AI offers enormous potential for productivity gains that can be broadly shared with the right policies. There really is not a basis for fears that we won’t have any jobs, but the fact that the issue is even raised means that we likely don’t have to worry about budget deficits or not having enough workers due to an aging population.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.  

 

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The AUKUS Cash Cow: Robbing the Australian Taxpayer

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Two British ministers, the UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron and Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, paid a recent visit to Australia recently as part of the AUKMIN (Australia-United Kingdom Ministerial Consultations) talks.  It showed, yet again, that Australia’s government loves being mugged.  Stomped on.  Mowed over.  Beaten.

It was mugged, from the outset, in its unconditional surrender to the US military industrial complex with the AUKUS security agreement.  It was mugged in throwing money (that of the Australian taxpayer) at the US submarine industry, which is lagging in its production schedule for both the Virginia-class boats and new designs such as the Columbia class.  British shipyards were hardly going to miss out on this generous distribution of Australian money, largesse ill-deserved for a flagging production line.

A joint statement on the March 22 meeting, conducted with Defence Minister Richard Marles and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, was packed with trite observations and lazy reflections about the nature of the “international order”. Ministers “agreed the contemporary [UK-Australian] relationship is responding in an agile and coordinated way to global challenges.”  When it comes to matters of submarine finance and construction, agility is that last word that comes to mind.

Boxes were ticked with managerial, inconsequential rigour.  Russia, condemned for its “full-scale, illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine”.  Encouragement offered for Australia in training Ukrainian personnel through Operation Kudu and joining the Drone Capability Coalition.  Exaggerated “concern at the catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”  Praise for the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and “respect of navigation.”

The relevant pointers were to be found later in the statement.  The UK has been hoping for a greater engagement in the Indo-Pacific (those damn French take all the plaudits from the European power perspective), and the AUKUS bridge has been one excuse for doing so.  Accordingly, this signalled a “commitment to a comprehensive and modern defence relationship, underlined by the signing of the updated Agreement between the Government of Australia and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for Defence and Security Cooperation.”

When politicians need to justify opening the public wallet, such tired terms as “unprecedented”, “threat” and “changing” are used.  These are the words of foreign minister Wong: “Australia and the United Kingdom are building on our longstanding strategic partnership to address our challenging and rapidly changing world”.  Marles preferred the words “an increasingly complex strategic environment”.  Shapps followed a similar line of thinking.  “Nuclear-powered submarines are not cheap, but we live in a much more dangerous world, where we are seeing a much more assertive region [with] China, a much more dangerous world all around with what is happening in the Middle East and Europe.”  Hardly a basis for the submarines, but the fetish is strong and gripping.

With dread, critics of AUKUS would have noted yet another round of promised disgorging. Britain’s submarine industry is even more lagging than that of the United States, and bringing Britannia aboard the subsidy truck is yet another signal that the AUKUS submarines, when and if they ever get off the design page and groan off the shipyards, are guaranteed well deserved obsolescence or glorious unworkability.

A separate statement released by all the partners of the AUKUS agreement glories in the SSN-AUKUS submarine, intended as a joint effort between BAE Systems and the Australian Submarine Corporation (ASC).  (BAE Systems, it should be remembered, is behind the troubled Hunter-class frigate program, one plagued by difficulties in unproven capabilities.)

An already challenging series of ingredients is further complicated by the US role as well.  “SSN-AUKUS is being trilaterally developed, based on the United Kingdom’s next designs and incorporation technology from all three nations, including cutting edge United States submarine technologies.”  This fabled fiction “will be equipped for intelligence, surveillance, undersea warfare and strike missions, and will provide maximum interoperability among AUKUS partners.”  The ink on this is clear: the Royal Australian Navy will, as with any of the promised second-hand Virginia-class boats, be a subordinate partner.

In this, a false sense of submarine construction is being conveyed through what is termed the “Optimal Pathway”, ostensibly to “create a stronger, more resilient trilateral submarine industrial base, supporting submarine production and maintenance in all three countries.”  In actual fact, the Australian leg of this entire effort is considerably greater in supporting the two partners, be it in terms of upgrading HMAS Stirling in Western Australia to permit UK and US SSNs to dock as part of Submarine Rotational Force West from 2027, and infrastructure upgrades in South Australia.  It all has the appearance of garrisoning by foreign powers, a reality all the more startling given various upgrades to land and aerial platforms for the United States in the Northern Territory.

The eye-opener in the AUKMIN chatter is the promise from Canberra to send A$4.6 billion (£2.4 billion) to speed up lethargic construction at the Rolls-Royce nuclear reactor production line.  There are already questions that the reactor cores, being built at Derby, will be delayed for the UK’s own Dreadnought nuclear submarine.  The amount, it was stated by the Australian government, was deemed “an appropriate and proportionate contribution to expand production and accommodate Australia’s requirements”.  Hardly.

Ultimately, this absurd spectacle entails a windfall of cash, ill-deserved funding to two powers with little promise of returns and no guarantees of speedier boat construction.  The shipyards of both the UK and the United States can take much joy from this, as can those keen to further proliferate nuclear platforms, leaving the Australian voter with that terrible feeling of being, well, mugged.

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Sick Cultures: When Belief Systems Turn Pathological

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

It might come as a surprise but the answer to this question derives from influences many of which are beyond our control. For instance, most of us experience attitudinal changes along a spectrum from day to day or maybe even hour to hour. This has to do with our individualized reaction to all manner of hormonal and other secretions in your body. These, in turn, are influenced by epigenetic factors triggered by both internal and external environmental conditions.

A lot of these factors are inherited. You did not choose your genetic makeup or the parents who gave it to you and they did not choose their parents, and so on. This unchosen heritage sets your body up for all sorts of possibilities. Some might turn out to be good for you: nicely working immune system, relatively stable and positive mental disposition and acuity, etc. But it doesn’t have to go like that, and a propensity for illness and instability might be your inherited lot. 

Nor did you choose the sort of environment in which you were born. I might tell you to avoid being born into poverty, but you can’t do that. Nonetheless, statistically, the chance for a “prosperous and productive” life is low if early poverty is your fate. I might suggest that you avoid parents who are neglectful or physically/emotionally abusive. Do not grow up next to a “super fund” contaminated site. Just so, you should avoid being born in the middle of a raging war. Despite the fact that all of these outcomes would certainly affect your behavior, none involve choices you can make. It is amazing how much of our history and condition is beyond our control. 

What Do We Believe?

Just as we are arbitrarily centered in a body we did not choose, we are arbitrarily centered locally in time and space. That is, in a culture. And, here too, much is beyond our control. 

It has been one of the frequent themes of these blog essays that there is something called “natural localism.”* That is, most people tend to settle down in a local community. It is within this locale that they work or go to school, live within a family and friendship network, and come to feel a community identity. That does not mean that people don’t travel (mostly to visit friends and family) or relocate within that same cultural realm for work or school. However, the natural inclination of most is find a place to settle down. There is even an evolutionary aspect to this. Natural localism provides a time and space that maximizes familiarity and predictability. That is why it usually provides a sense of security. 

There is, of course, a downside. Natural localism ties one to a community worldview that mitigates against independent questioning and fact-checking. Over time established communities and groups socialize members into views supported by traditions, the interests of whatever passes for a ruling class, and often an ideology that idealizes the community’s raison d’être. Most who live within the range of such an aggregation will, almost habitually, see the world through the community’s lens. 

That means, for most of us, our belief system encompassing our notion of what is right and wrong and who is friendly and who is unfriendly, is not something we have independently chosen. There are endless examples of this. Take the Cold War between the U.S. and its allies on one side and the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact countries and China on the other. If you are old enough to remember this time (roughly 1945 to 1991) you should recall that the majority of adults in the U.S. and Western Europe had a hostile outlook toward the USSR and its allies. Most had no direct contact or experience that would provoke this hostility. They got it in an osmotic way. The culturally negative messages in one’s external environment shaped their perceptions so that they conformed to a community-wide point of view. 

Of course, just like bodies react differently to hormones and other secretions, individuals have varying reactions to the inherited belief systems of their cultures. A bell curve results—most people will be within an average range of cultural compliance. They will readily accept what they are taught at at home and in school, and hear from their teachers, leaders and media. There may be differences of opinion on the details, but most will buy into the overall message. At the edges of the curve will be found those who, for whatever experiential reasons, ignore or reject the message. The majority will see this minority as weird. At the extreme, they will be seen as a threat to social stability.

The Pathological Potential of Belief Systems

The negative feelings generated during the Cold War were felt by populations that were, for the most part, geographically separated. What happens when this inherited fear and negativity runs between populations sharing the same immediate landscape? What can your community point of view make you feel and do then?

Here are two examples: 

The United States prior to the 1960s:

U.S. culture prior to the 1960s was characterized by an institutionally and legally sanctioned racial divide between White and Black Americans. Racism relegated Black Americans to an inferior status enforced by legal segregation and discrimination. This resulted in an impoverished economic and social environment. From the point of view of many Whites, Black disadvantage was an historically ratified “normal” situation. That is, it felt natural and orderly to the White population based on tradition and long practice.

Thus, White Americans had been acculturated to a system that periodically pushed Black Americans to rebellion—“race riots.” These uprisings frightened White citizens who then supported strong police action against Blacks in order to maintain social stability and security. Such a posture only made future uprisings more likely. 

This situation did not begin to change until the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown v Board of Education, followed by a Black political movement led by Martin Luther King Jr.  The goal of this movement was to outlaw segregation and other egregious acts of discrimination in the public sphere. This effort was supported by a liberal sector of the White population who recognized the need for change based on a culturally idealized view of American socio-economic potential. King and his allies were successful in bringing change to the public sphere— essentially creating a new definition of normal based on a more egalitarian United States. However, changing individual laws is relatively easy compared to changing culture. Since the 1980s the country has experienced what is known as “culture wars.” That is, a political pushback by a sizable number of “conservatives” against progressive legislation.

Several things are to be noted here: (1) U.S. culture, since its beginning, has had a racist character that dehumanized its minority populations. It is in this sense that it was and, in some regards, still is pathological. (2) For most of its history this toxic environment was, and for some continue to be, invisible because most Whites were raised in family and/or local community surroundings that registered the toxicity as normal. Despite the change that eventually came in the 1950s and 60s, today some are so addicted to the older worldview that they are waging a political battle to return to a “sick normal.”

Contemporary Israel:

Israel’s story overlaps with that of the United States: (1) A sense of racially/religiously based superiority. While it is White Christians in the U.S., it is Jewish Zionists in Israel. (2) A claim that the country’s land is divinely deeded or blessed. (3) The existence of a largely segregated and disadvantaged class of “others.” In Israel, the “others” are the Palestinians. 

Israeli and other Jews, and many who support them (i.e. Joe Biden), have learned about Israel through a biased narrative. The result is an attitude sustained by a customized pro-Zionist history. To maintain the narrative within Israel itself, education has been turned into a process of indoctrination. What is taught in this process? (1) God gave the land of Palestine to the Hebrew ancestors of contemporary Jews. (2) Jews need the State of Israel to be safe in a world where antisemitism is widespread. (3) The world owes it to the Jews to secure this Jewish state. (4) Palestinians are dangerous interlopers who hate Jews and seek to destroy the Jewish state. For Zionists, the Palestinians have replaced the Nazis as perpetrators of another potential Holocaust. The result has been the maintenance of Israel as a fortress nation—roughly resembling ancient Sparta where an elite population lived in fear of the serfs (helots) they had oppressed and driven by that fear, these elites trained constantly for war.

The national and local environment inherited by Israeli Jews is infused with this mindset. Defense against Palestinian and Arab “terrorists” is an important psychological theme of their culture. It is reinforced in the average family setting. It is detailed out for them in school. It provides a sense of camaraderie among friends and within the workplace. It is capped off by a program of near-universal conscription of Jewish Israelis. It is extraordinarily difficult to escape the pressures of such an overbearing cultural climate. Here too, the toxic nature of this environment is invisible to many of Israel’s Jewish citizens because of having been raised in local surroundings that registered their perceptions as normal. The predominant rationalization for the resulting Israeli aggressiveness has always been “national defense.” What can be more normal than that? Hence, the fact that “Israelis overwhelmingly are confident in the justice of the present Gaza war.” And this support of the wholesale destruction of Gaza** is the final confirming factor demonstrating the pathological nature of Israeli/Zionist culture. 

Conclusion

The United States and Israel are not the only sick cultures on the planet. However, as noted, they stand together due to a historical symmetry. This connection allowed the Zionists in the U.S. to build a powerful special interest organization and easily convince most of the American population to accept the Israeli narrative that, among other things, claimed the two countries held similar values. This despite the fact that Israel does not even have the framework for an idealized just society. It lacks a constitution and, insisting on a culture of Jewish supremacy, guarantees the absence of equal justice for all.

The connection also sees both nations attempting to deny similar sins while claiming similar virtues: Israeli claim that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East” covers up the reality that it is an apartheid state and, in the case of the U.S., the claim of exceptionalism due to the practice of high ethical standards covers up a continuing national struggle against racism and a foreign policy that contradicts U.S. claims of spreading democracy.

On the other hand, over time the United States did create legislative and judicial ideals for itself based on a self-glorifying narrative—that the U.S. was a nation of superior moral-ethical potential. Thus, when the government fails the citizenry you can get civil rights movements and anti-war protests of historic importance.

Significantly, it is this lurking moral uneasiness with their nation’s hypocrisy, felt particularly by the youth, that is now eroding the American alliance with Israel. The ethnic cleansing and genocide, so acceptable to Israeli Jews, is a behavior that a number of Americans see as indefensible—particularly from an “ally” claiming to hold values similar to their own. 

Thus is change possible even in an environment over which we have but nominal control. And, in this case, for the U.S. to get past its own hypocrisy—the sick elements of its own culture—it must finally leave Israel behind. 

Notes.

*See Lawrence Davidson, Foreign Policy Inc. (University Press of Kentucky, 2009), chapter 1. 

**The proper historical analogy to the destruction of Gaza is the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.  

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Is the Same Old Democratic Party Ready to Correct Course? In Time?

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While calling this year’s presidential election against Der Fuhrer Donald Trump the most critical ever, the Democratic Party is using the same old playbook for this year’s campaigns.

The same old obsession with raising record amounts of money at the expense of presenting an authentic, vibrant agenda that will motivate millions of voters to vote for Democratic candidates.

The same old corporate-conflicted political/media consultants are controlling what the candidates say and do so as not to upset the monied interests and the lucrative consulting business for corporate clients.

We will see the same old exclusion of experienced grassroots and national citizen groups, with millions of members, who just might have some good ideas about policies, strategies, tactics, messaging, rebuttals, slogans and ways to get out the vote, that the “politicians” have never thought of or, in their arrogance, ignored. (See winningamerica.net).

Expect the same old retention of Party apparatchiks wallowing profitably in their sinecures, never looking themselves in the mirror and asking themselves why they can’t landslide the worst GOP in history. Republican candidates are openly anti-worker, women, children, consumers and the environment. If your name ends in INC the GOP might be on your side.

Get ready for the same old resistance to infusing the Party with energetic young leaders to start replacing older, smug, bureaucrats who lose to the GOP in eminently winnable races at local, state and national levels, yet have victory parties when their losses are less than the pundits or polls had predicted. (They celebrated their 2022 loss of the House of Representatives to the vicious, cruel, ignorant GOP.)

The same old scapegoating of Third Party candidates, spending gobs of money and filing frivolous lawsuits to block them from the ballot so as not to give voters more voices and choices, and to stifle any voters who might choose Third Party candidates, is in full swing. Instead of focusing on getting more of the 120 million non-voters to vote for Democratic candidates this year, the Democratic Party is focused on denying the First Amendment rights – free speech, petition and assembly – of Third Party candidates and their minuscule number of voters.

As Bishop William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, so cogently points out, just getting out 10 to 15 percent more low-wage/poor voters would easily help the Democrats win the national presidential election. Instead, the Democrats feed reporters material that leads newspapers to feature stories like the New York Times March 21, 2024 article titled “Democrats Prepare Aggressive Counter to Third-Party Threats.” What they mean is being heavy on obstructing their access to the ballot.

The same old plans to waste huge amounts of money that allow media consultants to reap 15% on campaign ad buys instead of really going for the ground game are underway. For example, one pro-Democratic Party PAC announced it would spend $140 million to put real-life voter testimonials on television praising Biden and his Party. They think that’s a winner, right out of the practice of dramatized testimonials by Madison Avenue advertising firms.

Note the same old stories reporting periodic fundraising totals fed to eagerly waiting reporters comparing the Dems and the Reps money totals unattached to any programs, agendas, or commitments to the people. Thus, the March 20, 2024, New York Times dreary headline: “Outside Groups Pledge Over $1 Billion to Aid Biden’s Re-Election Effort.”

They include environmental groups, labor unions and other “liberal PACs” that shell out the money without asking the Democratic Party to commit to any reforms or to address long-avoided necessities for the people. It’s enough that the Dems are against Trump and the GOP – assuring a race to the bottom in the presidential election.

The lengthy Times article goes on and on reporting announcements by assorted Democratic moneypots and their GOP counterparts. Similar dreary ‘cash-register politics’ articles will appear in the coming weeks and months with ever more frequency.

Heaven forbid that reporters start writing about how all this money inhibits candidates from reforming the campaign finance system that is rotten to the core. Congress and the White House are for sale or rent! For example, the Democrats could – but do not – advance a much overdue agenda to curb the corporate crime wave, repeal anti-labor laws (like the notorious Taft-Hartley Act,) junk the corrupt tax system written by big corporate tax escapees, debloat the vast, wasteful, redundant military budget, and push for the popular Medicare-for-All legislation languishing for years in Congress – for starters.

Don’t look for resignations from poor performers like the managers of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). Imagine barely winning the Senate in 2022, when twice as many GOP Senators were up for re-election as Democratic Senators? How are these losers, given an encore, going to do this year when more than twice the number of Democratic Senators are up than GOP solons?

The same old inability to confront shrinking support or turnout from their base – African Americans and Hispanic Americans – is inexcusable. The Democrats can’t seem to convincingly say that the Party is not taking them for granted and to build the relationships that could motivate these voters to return to the fold.

How about not being able to recover the loss of many unionized workers to Trump, of all demons, and show all workers why their livelihoods would improve with a Democratic victory? The Dems don’t even know how to use LABOR DAY to showcase their sincerity with events on the ground in every locality.

Same old Empire of lawless military forces, now growing with unconditional weapons shipments to Ukraine and Israel – the latter’s genocidal war taking us into co-belligerent status under international law against defenseless Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

For a majority of American voters who reject Trump as a law-violating, unstable, narcissistic, liar weaving fantasies and fabrications that service what Rep. Jamie Raskin calls “dangerous extremists” in Congress and state legislatures, this is what the Democratic Party and the two-party duopoly offer in November.

At the least, concerned, engaged voters should demand that unresponsive Party campaigns return their calls to receive their input. That’s how primordial the situation is these days.

The same playbook will produce the same failed Democratic efforts. Change course before it is too late.

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Taurus and the Bullfighters

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A Taurus on display at the 2006 ILA air show. Photograph Source: axesofevil2000 – Public Domain

Watching genteel Bundestag ladies and gentlemen speechifying, often with forceful words and gestures but mostly polite, it is hard to imagine that their topic is war or peace, possibly world war or peace, even atomic war or peace. A key word was Taurus, Latin for “bull.” But they weren’t arguing about Zodiac astrology or the myth about the god Jupiter, cheating on wife Juno by taking on the shape of a bull to abduct a princess. Nor about the starry constellation named for his disguise. The name of that princess was Europa, and the continent bearing her name was indeed involved in the subject of debate: steel-covered missiles called Taurus, weighing 1000 lbs., 17 foot long, which, if fired from a plane well inside Ukraine can reach and pierce the walls of the Kremlin or destroy concrete bunkers as deep or deeper than Moscow’s subway system. 

Of course, Volodymir Zelenskiy wants them and any weapons or aid in a war now looking less and less like the triumph he predicted a year ago. Should his wishes, which often sounded more like demands, be fulfilled?  

That mythical Jupiter fathered three sons with Europa (I hope he was back in the body of Jupiter by then). Three sons of modern Europa met in a hastily arranged “Paris-Berlin-Warsaw” summit in early March to reach an agreement about Ukraine, especially about Taurus. Poland’s Tusk, only four months into his top job, is seen as more moderate than his predecessor. But he seems no less eager to supply anything if it damages the hereditary Russian enemy and solidifies Poland’s role as main USA outpost in Eastern Europe. However, he soon had to hurry home to mollify farm tractor drivers blockading borders to protest cheap Ukrainian grain imports. 

Macron, who had spoken boldly of sending in “European” troops to oppose the Russians, toned that down with the words: “Maybe at some point – I don’t want it, I won’t take the initiative – we will have to have operations on the ground…to counter the Russian forces… France’s strength is that we can do it.”  

Evidently Scholz had stepped on the brakes with Tusk and Macron: “To say it sharp and clear: as German chancellor, I will send no Bundeswehr soldiers into Ukraine!” So, at least for now – no Taurus!

Was his seemingly bold front a façade for a general German downward skid in Europe? There was a decline of the economy in 2023. A predicted puny plus of 0.2% for 2024 could mean that Germany is already in a recession, for only the second time since 1945. Economy Minister Habeck warned: “We cannot continue this way!” One expert’s brief analysis: “Germany has lost cheap energy from Russia, flourishing trade markets in China and an almost cost-free guarantee of security from the USA.” 

Olaf Scholz’s three-party government has rapidly declined in popularity. The Greens, who promised a “green economic miracle” a year ago, have made one ecology compromise after another, like their go-ahead for big docks for liquid gas from US frackers to replace the Russian gas-oil cut by war, politics and that suspicious explosion of the Baltic pipeline. The new docks threaten both major bird emigration stopovers and some of Germany’s most idyllic beach resorts (once peopled, back in GDR days, by happy, mostly nudist bathers).

Ecology disputes turned dramatic with Elon Musk’s Tesla gigafactory on Berlin’s outskirts, his first and largest in all Europe and now capable of turning out 500,000 E-cars a year, beating out VW. That meant chopping down 740 acres of the protective forest ring around Berlin and draining into crucial aquifers. But Musk now aims at a million cars – costing 420 more forest acres and drying-up ponds and creeks. The village hit hardest voted “No!” and one group plans to defy a planned police onslaught in tree houses and platforms. On March 5th a secret, more extremist group set fire to a high-voltage power pylon, cutting local electricity for a few hours and shutting down production for a few days. Such disputes are getting hotter. 

Rounding out the picture, Germany has been facing its biggest strike wave in years: railroad engineers, bus and tram drivers, airport personnel, public service workers, kindergarten teachers, even clinic doctors. Their demands are mostly for enough pay to catch up with inflation and frightening rent increases but also – for many – for a 35-hour work week with no cut in pay. 

While the compromising Greens strain to hold onto their dwindling professional college-graduate base and the Social Democrats struggle to win back working-class support, the weakest of the three partners, the Free Democrats (FDP), closest to big-biz, keep flirting with the Christian Democrats across the aisle, blackmailing attempts by the other two to seem socially conscious by resisting remaining environmental restrictions, preventing rules against child labor on products from abroad, limiting aid for the many poverty-ridden children in Germany, reducing assistance for the elderly and, above all, insisting on keeping or lowering low taxes on the super-wealthy, using the old trickle-down argument. More and more, the coalition is coming to resemble a free-for-all wrestling match.

But they agreed on one main issue: in Ukraine, keep that war going! Till victory! The Greens, always most valiant with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock hoping to see Russia “ruined,” are being overtaken as word and banner bearers by the Free Democrats, who now boast a “Defense Committee” spokesperson who is formidable in word, appearance, personality and even name: Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann. Her imperative calls for more weapons until total victory over the Russians rouse up TV viewers almost every single evening. And even when a majority in the Bundestag ended the Taurus debate by voting “Nein” to a Christian Democratic bill to give Kyiv the missiles, she broke the ranks of coalition party discipline and voted “Ja” with the opposition. 

Somehow I haven’t yet heard anyone remark that Düsseldorf, which she represents, is also home to Rheinmetall, Germany’s leading armaments manufacturer since 1889. After great sales records in World War I it had giant success in World War II, largely by working thousands of miserable POWs and forced laborers to the bone. Now super-good times are back again thanks to its Panther tanks and all kinds of weapons and explosive ammo. Company boss  Armin Papperger, who took home a tidy € 3,587,000 in 2022 (about  $3.9 m) and expects this year’s company earnings to finally top its € 10 billion goal made a happy prediction of “a continuing strong growth increase in sales and earnings.” But who could dare to suspect any connection between Rheinmetall and its Düsseldorf neighbor,  Frau Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann. (BTW, big hunks of those handsome sums also go to Blackrock in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards and other solid Transatlantic benefactors.) 

But in his crumbling coalition Olaf Scholz’s leading Social Democratic Party has also been vigorously supporting  the Ukrainian cause! It was he who dramatically called for a “Zeitenwende” an “historic turning point” – with an extra fund of  € 100 billion for a major military build up – in Ukraine, Germany, the European Union and NATO, with drones, jets, artillery, ammo, tanks, missiles (but at least not yet the Taunus for Kyiv.

But his Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (Social Democrat) is never sated; for him the Bundeswehr is always far too weak. “It must be made fit for the challenges ahead. Germany needs a Bundeswehr that can fight, one which is operational and sustainable. Germany must defend itself, because ‘war is back in Europe.’  The Bundeswehr must become fit for war again. I know that sounds harsh… But I am concerned with nothing other than preventing war. That is why credible deterrence is the motto of the hour – to be able to fight in order not to have to fight. An important signal in this context is the formation of the brigade in Lithuania.”

Despite all disavowals, some beans have recently been spilled about NATO military experts secretly helping Kyiv ever since 2014. A mysteriously leaked report on a meeting of top German brass revealed plans for helping  Ukraine use the Taunus to destroy the Russian bridge to Crimea. The whole atmosphere in Germany is becoming frighteningly “kriegstüchtig,” to use Pistorius’ word – “ready for war.” He also raised the question of renewing the military draft whose last vestiges were ended thirteen years ago – this time perhaps including women. The proposal was a trial balloon – and soon dropped, at least for this pre-election season. Another trial balloon came from the Education Minister, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, who called for air raid drills in schools, with renovated or new shelter rooms in the cellars and more visits by officers to prepare children  for the worst – or recruit them. When protests against this proposal grew too strong she modified it a bit – to stress, aside from war, readiness for possible floods or other climate catastrophes.

Weapons, weapons, weapons – the more the better! With ever louder talk about “the foe” and “protective measures”, as if Putin were amassing troops or maneuvering warships along German borders – instead of just the opposite taking place in the Baltic and Lithuania – and no longer so secretly in Ukraine. The blitzkrieg-laden spirit of 1941 Germany is all over the media, with no audible recollections of Stalingrad in 1943 or a wrecked and wretched Berlin (and Dresden, Hamburg and all the others) in 1945.  

The reports on Gaza since October contrasted markedly with the anger over the Russian attack on Ukraine; they almost never mentioned Hamas without the prefaced adjective “terrorist” but showed few pictures of devastated Gaza which, for me, bitterly recalled those German cities I saw a few years after the war, like Dresden. Over and over we were shown Israeli soldiers bravely firing away; at what? Or digging in wrecked hospitals;  for what? Or showing those “compassionate” parachute drops, a sad joke when small crowds of Israelis were somehow permitted to block hundreds of truckloads of really tangible assistance – and while Germany joined the USA in sending weapons to Netanyahu while stymying UNO efforts to end the slaughter.  

But the heart-wrenching pictures of weeping fathers and dead or maimed children in Gaza could not be ignored. Demonstrations, led by Arabs in Germany but including many other, also Jewish Germans, grew larger, despite all attempts to prevent, limit or sideline them. Their calls for negotiations and peace sometimes included the war in Ukraine – and a rejection of SPD-FDP-Green-CDU-CSU militarist unity. But then came the giant rallies against the fascistic Alternative for Germany (AfD). In the past often harassed or at best ignored, they were now amazingly well-organized and coordinated, clearly promoted from above and blessed in the media. I suspect they were consciously aimed at deflecting a progressive, pro-peace trend born of horror at the hugely disproportionate Israeli response to October 7th, misusing a popular anti-AfD cause for the purpose, together with an increased stress on opposing anti-Semitism, while equating it with any criticism of Israeli repression and extreme brutality. It was good that the rallies  opposed racism and fascists, but they were no longer leaning toward united left opposition.  

Is there now any opposition to top level policies?  Yes, of a sort. Or rather of approximately four sorts. 

Within the ranks of the Social Democrats, while many admire dynamic (and ambitious?) Minister Pistorius, some others may be coming to their senses. Most courageous recently was Rolf Mützenich, chair of the SPD caucus in the Bundestag and long known as a rare opponent of militarism. During the Taurus debate he asked the Bundestag delegates: “Isn’t it time not only to speak about waging a war but to start thinking about how we can freeze a war and then end it as well?“ He had hardly finished his brief remarks with question when the counterattack began, from fellow politicians and from most of the mass media. Two nasty words recurred shamelessly: “Appeasement” and “Cowardice”. Unlike Pope Francis, who dared to voice similar sentiments, Mützenich had no shred of any “infallibility” status, and the truly vicious attacks forced him to stage a partial retreat to save his neck. But the words had been uttered and some may have listened. As for appeasement, Neville Chamberlain and Daladier let Hitler expand in Spain, then tolerated his expansion eastward to Austria and Czechoslovakia because it meant closing in on the hated USSR. His all-European attack in June 1941 was more analogous to EU-NATO eastward-aimed unanimity than the reverse!

Olaf Scholz often vacillates. But at times, unlike some ministers, he seems to listen to and echo people like Mützenich. “German soldiers must at no point and in no place be linked to targets this Taurus system reaches…Not in Germany either…This clarity is necessary. I am surprised that this doesn’t move some people, that they don’t even think about whether … a participation in the war could emerge from what we do.” 

But then, Scholz certainly learned arithmetic at school. The European elections are due this June, Bundestag elections next year, with key state elections in between. In the polls his Social Democratic party is stuck at about a weak 15%, half its traditional Christian rivals and even behind the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Opinions change frequently but 80% now favor diplomatic negotiations for Ukraine and 41% want less weapons sent there. Scholz – or Germany – cannot really change course in such basic matters. But  he may think that dragging his feet rather ambiguously might win back more voters.  

A second group demanding negotiations and an end to the Ukraine war, perhaps very surprisingly,  is the AfD. Although it supports big business, NATO, the draft and German rearmament enthusiastically, it calls nevertheless for negotiations, peace and a resumption of normal trade relations. It is possible that the AfD simply wants only to further increase its popularity , especially in eastern Germany, where there is the least military enthusiasm – and it is already amazingly strong  (and dangerous) position, at about30%. Of course they are called “Putin-lovers.” Who knows, perhaps they are. But their top woman in leadership, Alice Weidel, is intelligent, shrewd, a skilled speaker, and made an eloquent plea for peace, while thanking Mützenich and congratulating Scholz for not sending Taurus to Kyiv. Thus creating a difficult complication.                        

And then there is the Linke party, which has seen itself from birth as the ”party of peace”. Indeed, over the years it has opposed every deployment of German troops or ships outside its borders, it has opposed the payment of giant sums to Rheinmetall and its siblings at home or abroad, it has opposed the export of German weapons to nearly every oppressive government that could be found, it has opposed every form of militarization. A brave and exemplary record, alongside its fight for a higher minimum wage, more money for seniors, for child care and women’s rights. Its stand also forced Social Democrats and Greens to take better positions, if only to avoid a drift of their voters to the small yet potentially growing Linke.

Perhaps it was its successes which became its weak point. Not only the delegates who got elected on the national, state or local level but also  their staffs and assistants had good jobs. Some tended, too often, to become a part of the mistrusted “establishment” in the eyes of dissatisfied and disappointed voters – or then non-voters. Their increasingly respectable status led to interest in “identity rights”, immigrant rights, gender rights, but too often to a growing distance from neglected, underpaid, overburdened working people, including temps and the jobless. Some leaders, hoping to crown state cabinet posts with those in a national coalition, watered down their rejection of NATO and its relentless eastward moves and threats. Their rejection of even meager approval of the giant peace demonstration led by Sahra Wagenknecht last year on flimsy grounds borrowed from the mass media proved the last straw for many members and led to the formation of a breakaway party, called (temporarily it is hoped) Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. 

Some in the Linke, convinced Marxists, think it was a mistake to split and leave the party instead of fighting it out, even though they were outvoted by conformist, status quo leaders who now want to force them out just as they did to Sahra Wagenknecht and her adherents. And some believe that if the Linke again becomes more militant in something whose name is hardly even whispered these days  (class conflict) then it can be rescued from menacing-oblivion. It is already in great trouble, nationally down to 3%, which would bar it from the next Bundestag. 

As for Sahra’s BSW, it stands full square for negotiations and peace, like no other, and certainly for working people’s rights and needs. But much of its program remains vague as yet and seems to be turning out to be less militant than expected. It polls 5 to 7% nationally, not bad for a newbie with rudimentary state structures but less than some had expected in view of Sahra’s popularity. The European Union elections in June and the state elections in September will show how the two stand, now as rivals in a divided Left.  

As for the bellicose forces, some pro-American “Atlanticists” are worried about being cast adrift after November 5th by that unpredictable man from Mar-a-Lago, or they are studying geriatric tables. Others, the Germanic wing, who reject American infiltration, from music styles to dirty slang, are scheming and dreaming of the good old days of smart uniforms, clicking heels, Iron Crosses and people knowing their proper place. But they all join Rheinmetall, Lockhead and the others in hoping the warring may last until they get new chances to win out in broad Eurasian expanses, re-establish Germany’s proper position in the world and perhaps for some, a hope to avenge that disaster for their grandfathers back in 1945. More and more, we are engulfed by all their  war talk – and preparatory action.

What is desperately needed, not only in Germany but especially in Germany, is a new consolidation of all those in any party, or no party, who still have unaddled brains in their heads and a heart in their chests for an end to the killing and starving of Ukrainians, Russians, the Palestinians and the still as yet far too small number of  brave Jewish Israelis (like the “refuseniks”) to build up a dynamic peace movement like that against the Vietnam war, or against missiles in West Germany in the 1980s, or the marches to prevent the Iraq war or,  I recent months, to rescue the tortured million and more innocent people of Gaza – yes, and those100 hostages as well.  Such a movement is desperately necessary; the clock is ticking away. Can the Jupiters of the world be dethroned? For Europa and for the world. Is that possible?

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Close-up of Death Culture: 1,000 in Entertainment Biz Proclaim Support for Gaza Slaughter

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Poster for the film The Zone of Interest directed by Jonathan Glazer

Last week, Variety reported that “more than 1,000 Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals have signed an open letter denouncing Jonathan Glazer’s ‘The Zone of Interest’ Oscar speech.” The angry letter is a tight script for a real-life drama of defending Israel as it continues to methodically kill civilians no less precious than the signers’ own loved ones.

A few ethical words from Glazer while accepting his award provoked outrage. He spoke of wanting to refute “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people,” and he followed with a vital question: “Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Those words were too much for the letter’s signers, who included many of Hollywood’s powerful producers, directors and agents. For starters, they accused Glazer (who is Jewish) of “drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.”

Ironically, that accusation embodied what Glazer had confronted from the Academy Awards stage when he said that what’s crucial in the present is “not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’”

But the letter refused to look at what Israel is doing now as it bombs, kills, maims and starves Palestinian civilians in Gaza, where there are now 32,000 known dead and 74,000 injured. The letter’s moral vision only looked back at what the Third Reich did. Its signers endorsed the usual Zionist polemics — fitting neatly into Glazer’s description of “Jewishness and the Holocaust” being “hijacked by an occupation.”

The letter even denied that an occupation actually exists — objecting to “the use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years.” Somehow the Old Testament was presumed to be sufficient justification for the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, most of whose ancestors lived in what’s now Israel. The vast majority of 2.2 million people have been driven from their bombed-out homes in Gaza, with many now facing starvation due to blockage of food.

Israel’s extreme restrictions on food and other vital supplies are causing deaths from starvation and disease as well as enormous suffering. In early March, a panel of U.N. experts issued a statement that declared: “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys.” (So much for the anti-Glazer letter’s claim that “Israel is not targeting civilians.”)

Last weekend, on Egypt’s border at the crossing to Rafah, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said: “Here from this crossing, we see the heartbreak and heartlessness of it all. A long line of blocked relief trucks on one side of the gates, the long shadow of starvation on the other. That is more than tragic. It is a moral outrage.”

But there is not the slightest hint of any such moral outrage in the letter signed by the more than 1,000 “creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals.” Instead, all the ire is directed at Glazer for pointing out that moral choices on matters of life and death are not merely consigned to the past. The crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany against Jews are in no way exculpatory for the crimes against humanity now being committed by Israel.

What Glazer said in scarcely one minute retains profound moral power that no distortions can hide. Continuity exists between the setting of “The Zone of Interest” eight decades ago and today’s realities as the United States supports Israel’s genocidal actions: “Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Much of the movie’s focus is on the lives of a man and a woman preoccupied with career, status and material well-being. Such preoccupations are hardly unfamiliar in the movie industry, where silence or support for the Gaza war are common among professionals — in contrast to Jonathan Glazer and others, Jewish or not, who have spoken out in his defense or for a ceasefire.

“What he was saying is so simple: that Jewishness, Jewish identity, Jewish history, the history of the Holocaust, the history of Jewish suffering, must not be used in the campaign as an excuse for a project of dehumanizing or slaughtering other people,” the playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner said in an interview with an Israeli newspaper days ago. He called Glazer’s statement from the Oscars stage “unimpeachable and irrefutable.”

Yet even without signing the open letter that denounced Glazer’s comments, some in the entertainment industry felt compelled to assert their backing for a country now engaged in a genocidal war. Notably, a spokesperson for the financier of Glazer’s film, Len Blavatnik, responded to the controversy by telling Variety that “his long-standing support of Israel is unwavering.”

How many more Palestinian civilians will Israel murder before such “support for Israel” begins to waver?

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The New Modern-Day Militarized Fort!

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Photograph Source: Tyler Lahti – CC BY-SA 4.0

This week represents the first year anniversary of the State’s attack and arrest of Amin Chaoui and others who were challenging its attempt to build another kop city, this time within the Atlanta, Ga, area.

It’s important to look at the creation of kop city within the larger context of State repression and the creation of an expanded police State of hyper surveillance, pushing ever greater intrusion into the private lives of the people. The repressive State relies upon the use of poor or working class folks to police and dominate other poor, oppressed and marginalized folks.

It is also interesting to note where a lot of these Kop Cities– modern day forts for the police, sheriff, modern day posse and local settler populations– are being built and their function to further impose minority rule. To monitor, control and secure the natives, the perceived threat population. In whose interest are they serving?

In the old days, when genocide was being visited all across this land, military and settler forts were built from which to launch raiding parties, supposedly to protect the local population (we know this isn’t the case here) and likewise served as places where captured natives, enslaved Afrikans and others were held, interrogated, tortured or forced into servitude.

“Cop City-ATL is designed to join Michigan Camp Grayling founded in 1913 when local lumber baron, Rasmus Hanson, donated over 13,000 acres to the State of Michigan for military training. Camp Grayling has since grown to 147,000 acres that spans over three counties of maneuver area, state-of-the-art ranges and modern support facilities, making it the largest National Guard Training Center in the Country.

In fact, there are Forty-Seven other States that have the same or similar plans.” (1)

So why are so many of these being built all over and around the country? Why on such a large scale and why with such a wide array of training dealing with urban warfare and repression? The same training and tactics being utilized in theaters of war such as Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Afghanistan and various parts of Afrika are now being taught and prepared to be visited upon the Neo Colonized Natives and People of Color and other so called disenfranchised folks within the heart of the empire. Could it be an opportunistic response to the rebellions and BLM protests in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Mike Brown to just name a few? An opportunity to push forward a neo-fascist agenda of further militarization of the shock troops of so called law enforcement.

The rebellions and protests a few years back exposed the flaws and weaknesses within the U.S. government and security infrastructure as protesters and resistors attacked government agencies, police stations, court houses, city halls, etc. all of which invigorated and emboldened the masses who may have before been initially afraid, fearful or intimidated by the State and its and its security forces/apparatus.

This is also why you see the heavy handed response to the kop city resisters. The use of the RICO Act and other Federal conspiracy Statutes, designed to both intimidate, crush and dismantle said organizations and developing political infrastructures.

This is a strategy and tactic hiding in plain sight of the supposed Constitutional right to assemble, to protest, to speak truth to power, but apparently not.

If people like the kop city defendants are convicted on these types of conspiracy charges it sets a dangerous precedent for all revolutionaries and political activists and any organizations that oppose and challenge U.S. domestic policies. The thought police can come arrest you, prosecute you, claim you’re a conspirator if you belong to a political organization or collective. You then become a terrorist or security threat and end up in one of the many Prison Industrial Complex Supermaxes. It’s no different in a prison setting where political organization is identified as gang activity or Security Threat Group/S.T.G. activity, our books and literature are deemed to promote terrorism, subversiveness or violence and you end up housed in a Secure Housing Unit or in a Supermax on Admin Segregation Status.

These kop city complexes being built are military bases masquerading as Protect and Serve. It is not to serve the interest of the people and should be exposed and challenged!!!

Notes.

(1) Quoted from The Winter 2023 edition of ReBuild

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Car Wars: Hydrocarbons, Lithium, and the Greening Grid

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Image by Eren Goldman.

New battlelines are being drawn in today’s revamped auto world, not over style as in the 1980s – when Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca characterized success as “to grab the new just as soon as it is better” – or performance as in the 1930s – when Henry Ford introduced the V8 to an evolving car crowd – ushering in a free-wheeling independence that soared in the 1950s with 41,000 miles of freshly paved road (thanks to a $25-billion US Federal Aid Highway Act). Now it’s the engine itself and whether electric vehicles are worse for the environment than “gasmobiles” as is dubiously being claimed by some. With electric vehicle sales reaching 10% in 2023, the petrolheads are overheating. At over $3 trillion in annual sales, it’s only standard business practice to badmouth the competition.

Today, almost 100 million automobiles are sold around the globe each year, compared to 66 million 2 decades ago, as sales continue to climb in the developing world (30 million in China, a fivefold increase since 2005). In 2009, Chinese vehicle sales roared past the US for the first time (11 million) and Europe in 2012 (19 million), although Americans still enjoy the distinction of living in the only country with almost as many cars as people (1.25 people per car). That’s a big pie to slice, not to mention almost 100 million barrels of oil consumed per day, much of it burned in an internal combustion engine (ICE). With over $200 billion in annual profits, the Big 7 (ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, TotalEnergies, BP, ConocoPhillips, ENI[1]) aren’t planning on giving up their lucrative market share without a fight.

Henry Ford once boasted a customer could have any color Model T “so long as it is black,” a misstep that cost his company top spot to GM and Chrysler, along with Ford’s long-standing resistance to change such as hydraulic brakes, windshield wipers, luxurious interiors, loan financing, and unions. Back then in 1921, Ford boasted half of all American cars, over 15 million Model Ts by 1927, and is still a major player today (6.4 million annual sales), behind industry leaders Toyota and Volkswagen (10 million each). Alas, Detroit’s Big Three eventually paid the price for being slow to adapt to labor changes and smaller model sizes from Asia and Europe, albeit nothing compared to a complete engine overhaul.

Innovation is key in any vibrant market and despite various roadkill from poor management, bad financing, and unfair competition, such as Tucker, Bricklin, DeLorean, and Fisker, electric vehicles (EVs) are here to stay. How much market they capture and how fast are the issues. The delayers may try to slow the pace to incorporate their own alternatives, but they can’t stop the change – the manufacturing dies are cast. Automobile journalist Dan Neil succinctly explained the new thinking: “I spent my childhood driving fast cars, working on them, writing about it. I love gasoline horsepower, but I have come to the conclusion that I will never buy another gasoline-powered car as long as I live.”[2]

Enter the latest challenger, Tesla Inc, almost twice bankrupted as it worked through battery issues, transmission problems, costs, and a relentless manufacturing “performance hell,” before offering a higher price on its next EV and reinventing itself online. Despite having made only 76,000 cars by 2017, Tesla became the world’s highest valued car company at $50 billion. In 2022, it was the highest-valued company ever added to the S&P 500 Index. Although short-sellers tried to burst a presumed bubble, no one expects its demise anymore. Last year, Tesla sold 1.8 million EVs, made in 4 assembly plants (Fremont, Tilburg, Shanghai, and Berlin). They can’t build ‘em fast enough, while its one-time CEO darling cum self-styled free-speech guardian Elon Musk is raking it in at over $200 billion and counting.

But as Europe and others plan to ban the sale of gasmobiles by 2035 (2040 for gasoline-fuelled trucks and buses), the issue is whether EVs are bad for the environment: dirty versus clean, noisy versus quiet, armed global supply chains versus local microgrids. Few will be left unbloodied in the fight as we begin the revolution revolution and anoint new kings.

We can discard the obvious, that EVs produce as much pollution as gasmobiles because the grid is dirty, albeit elsewhere at the source, i.e., the fossil-fuel power plants that prime most of the electricity supply. That would be true if the grid was 100% brown, but those days are gone. Last year, global grid capacity was already 10% green (800 GW) and could become 100% green by 2050. Some countries such as Denmark (wind power) and Norway (hydroelectric) are already almost 100% green, where EV sales are rocketing. True, Norway still extracts oil and gas from lucrative North Sea stores and hydropower has green issues, but Norwegians no longer burn fossil fuels to fuel their grid.

In the US, some states have shown huge increases in wind-turbine and solar-panel installations. By 2016, 12 American states reached at least 10% wind penetration, led by Iowa (31%) and South Dakota (25%), with Texas at almost 18 GW capacity, more than all but 5 countries and enough to power 6 million homes. In Iowa, almost half the grid is now powered by wind, aiding corn production as one in two bushels goes to making ethanol fuel, ironically using as much petroleum to produce, just as carbon intensive, and not as clean as claimed. The latest data lists US solar installations at 32 GW in 2023 and 180 GW in total.[3]

Despite questionable green credentials for nuclear and hydropower, the onsite power plant carbon emissions, however, are still much less, as in France (56% nuclear) and Quebec (99% hydroelectric). Costa Rica, Tasmania, El Hierro, T’au are powered by a mix of geothermal, wind, hydro, and solar, such that a grid-fuelled car is 100% clean, while others are getting there. In 2013, Spain’s primary grid source was wind – a world first[4] – and in 2023 reached over 50% renewables. Portugal, Ireland, and Scotland are similarly greening their grids via expanded wind power, both onshore and offshore. In Germany as elsewhere, the utility bill lists the percentage of green juice consumed while you can choose your own clean providers.

Of course, full life-cycle analyses are needed to measure all fuel impacts of burnt hydrocarbons versus spinning electrons, from well to ship to refinery to pipeline to gas station to gasmobile (for petroleum) or from mine to plane to factory to assembly plant to vehicle (for EV batteries), but on the street there is no comparison: EVs emit no toxic fumes while running, and increasingly less so elsewhere as the grid greens. An EV cannot be considered “zero-emission,” however, without counting all imbedded emissions in the supply chain. For example, cobalt mined in the Congo can be refined in Finland, processed in China, and turned into production packs in Nevada before being used in an EV battery in Fremont, California (20,000 air miles[5]).

Most EV life-cycle worries involve mining in the “lithium triangle” of South America (over 50 million tons) as well as elsewhere that impacts local populations, especially from excessive water use. No one can justify destroying one environment to save another, and safeguards are needed in any industry, including the nascent battery building biz. Led by progressive president Gabriel Boric, Chile is already planning to limit the impact of lithium mining via increased regulatory control.[6] Some high-lithium sources aren’t as intrusive as in a proposed geothermal brine extraction process in the Salton Sea in southern California that could fuel the entire American market of almost 300 million cars and trucks.

Similar analyses are needed to compare the impact of petroleum infrastructure (extraction, transportation, refining) versus geological concerns for solar panels (e.g., silicon) and wind turbines (e.g., steel, carbon fibers, rare-earth elements) that produce the hydrocarbon or electric fuel. One has only to look to the petroleum industry to see what not to do. Take your pick from the hundreds of thousands of accidents at wells, on ships, along pipelines, and at stations. In the name of easy liquid fuelling, Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon, and Santa Barbara are three of the worst hydrocarbon foulings. According to the US Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, almost two incidents per day occur along the 2.8-million-mile national network, caused by corrosion, excavation damage, shoddy workmanship, and welding or equipment failure. Since 2010, there have been more than 100 deaths, 500 injuries, and $3.5 billion in damage.[7]

As noted by environmentalist Jonathan P. Thompson in The Land Desk newsletter, “If the media paid as much attention to oil and gas mishaps as it did to clean energy calamities, it wouldn’t be able to cover much else.”[8] Aesthetic issues are also concerns. I wouldn’t want to live next to a wind farm, but most are located away from homes. I wouldn’t want to live near a coal plant, oil well, or petroleum refinery either. Unfortunately, millions of Americans live near such sites.

We aren’t talking lesser evils. A 2011 Duke University study on water-well contaminants near shale gas pads found that homes within 1 km of a fracking site are “15 or 20 times more likely to have excessive methane in their water.”[9] According to a 2018 study by the University of Colorado’s School of Public Health, the risk of cancer is 8.3 times higher for those who live near an oil and gas facility.[10]. A 2020 Yale School of Public Health study further reported that children between the ages of 2 and 7 who lived near fracking sites at birth are two to three times more likely to suffer from leukemia, primarily because of exposure to contaminated drinking water.[11]

During fracking, air is also polluted with hydrogen sulfide – a nerve toxin that can cause irreversible brain damage – as well as benzene and other carcinogenic volatile organic compounds, generating lingering problems for those who live nearby, including headaches, nose bleeds, vomiting, nausea, allergies, eczema, hives, arrhythmia, and intestinal and respiratory ailments. Damage to groundwater, aquifers, and the underlying soil strata via ongoing seismic activity adds to the perils of everyday fracking.

And yet some will argue that clean and green is worse for our health than dirty and brown. One wonders how the toxic fumes from burnt hydrocarbons that continue to fill our streets can avoid the obvious criticism amid plummeting air quality in many large cities, including Paris, London, and Madrid. To fight the fumes, some city governments have enacted no-car days or designed clean zones to restrict high-emission vehicles (especially diesel-fuelled), alas disadvantaging low-income gasmobile drivers who then travel further to circumvent the tolls, thus increasing emissions.

In 2015, the smog in Paris was so bad the Eiffel Tower and the Sacre Coeur were completely shrouded, prompting an emergency vehicle restriction – alternate-day, even–odd plate numbers – that reduced particulate matter by 40%. The following year, a partial car-free day was instigated on the first Sunday of every month, restricting cars on 650 km of Parisian streets. On its first car-free day, nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide (NOx) levels decreased by as much as 40% and sound levels by half.

During the 2018 running of the London Marathon, NOx emissions decreased by 89%, highlighting the effect of tailpipe pollution that directly contributes to the premature deaths of about 40,000 Britons each year, roughly the same number who ran the marathon. In Los Angeles, the effect of sunlight on reactive hydrocarbons and NOx gases can produce lingering photochemical smog. One such episode in 1979 saw a 50% rise in hospital patients with “chronic lung diseases such as emphysema and asthma.”[12]

The main culprits are NOx gases, VOCs (volatile organic compounds such as benzene, toluene, butadiene, and formaldehyde), PM2.5, and CO. Infirmities associated with car exhaust include cardiovascular problems, heart disease, lung cancer, asthma, and respiratory tract infections. Bad air is everywhere, killing 8.7 million people per year according to a 2019 WHO study – even more than smoking – primarily from burning fossil fuels and biomass.[13] The economic cost of an increasingly toxic environment has been estimated at almost $3 trillion per year from premature deaths, diminished health, and lost work.[14]

The single largest emitter of pollution is transportation, while contributing 30% of greenhouse gases. Although no longer added to gasoline to reduce engine knock, lead additives were another deadly toxin responsible for increased poisoning and lowered IQs. A 1985 EPA study calculated that up to 5,000 Americans died annually from lead-related heart disease, while since the ban the mean blood-lead level of the American population has declined more than 75 percent.”[15] Note that today’s gasoline isn’t lead-free, rather none is added, although lead is still used as an additive in jet fuel and boat fuel and in countries with weak regulations such as China.

To be sure, change doesn’t happen overnight and no technology is 100% green, but more EVs and zero-emission vehicles on our roads will help redress a century of unchecked toxicity, clogging up the roads but not the air. The real knock against EVs is lost sales. As noted by Martin Eberhard, cofounder and first CEO of Tesla, “If you took the energy in a gallon of gas and used it to spin a turbine, you’d get enough electricity to drive an electric car 100 miles.”[16] No wonder the oil companies are worried – a 100-mpg (equivalent) mass-market electric vehicle will destroy their more-than-century-old market for gasmobiles.

Another reason to slow the change is control over utility companies that would increase competition as more solar- and wind-powered sources, transmission lines, and interconnectors are added to the grid. The growth of EVs will be stymied if juice is not available on demand. As noted by IEEE Spectrum, “As we increasingly electrify our homes, transportation, and factories, utility companies’ choices about transmission will have huge consequences for the nation’s economy and well-being. About 40 corporations, valued at a trillion dollars, own the vast majority of transmission lines in the United States. Their grip over the backbone of U.S. grids demands public scrutiny and accountability.”[17] With more new-energy sources incorporated into the electric mix, centralized control over an antiquated, one-directional system will be challenged, loosening restrictions that hinders equal access to public transmissions lines.

As countries aim for “net zero” by 2050, the knives are being sharpened by the usual suspects. ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods blamed global warming on greedy consumers, who choose cheap over expensive, smugly questioning who will pay for the cost of change: “The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.”[18]

Maybe we should charge the oil industry for damages to solve “the problem,” starting with $50/ton for carbon dioxide, not to mention the uncountable costs of a century of pollution deaths and diseases. Why not start by garnishing ExxonMobil’s 2023 profits of $34 billion? Or its CEO’s $50 million/year salary? Will Shell pay to clean up the Niger Delta, Chevron the interior of Ecuador, BP the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, ExxonMobil Port William Sound? Who pays for the hundreds of thousands of unplugged wells that continue to leak methane? Maybe, the oil and gas industry shouldn’t be receiving trillions of dollars in annual subsidies without cleaning up its messes.

Amin Nasser, CEO of the world’s richest oil company, Saudi Aramco, added to the pretend concern, stating that the transition is a “fantasy” and is “visibly failing” because of the consumers’ reliance on cheap fuels.[19] In fact, solar- and wind-generated electrical power is already as cheap or cheaper than fossil fuels, but is not as convenient because of lagging infrastructure. Nor are pollution or greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) factored into the real cost of burning hydrocarbons. In the midst of increased carbon pollution and tailpipe GHGs, Saudi Aramco announced profits of $120 billion and a $98 billion dividend for 2023. Of course, renewables are in direct competition with petroleum and so business as usual is essential to continue banking the profits from burning black gold.

With so much at stake, one expects a backlash. The Wall Street Journal recently published the article, “Electric cars emit more particulate pollution,” implying that EVs are worse for the environment than gasmobiles, rehashed by The New York Post as “Electric vehicles release more toxic emissions than gas-powered cars: study,” blatantly misrepresenting the 2020 UK-based Emission Analytics study cited by both.[20] In fact, the study compared particle mass emissions from a gasmobile’s tailpipe versus its tires, noting that a heavier and more aggressively driven car puts more pressure on the road and thus sheds more rubber. Nothing about toxic emissions from internal combustion engines that contaminate our streets, such as soot (C), carbon monoxide (CO), NOx gases, or sulfur dioxide (SO2).

With a basic understanding of an induction engine, the obvious clickable nonsense is refuted, but the damage is done for those who don’t read beyond the headlines and head straight for the commenting bile. Some newer gasmobiles do emit fewer toxins because of higher octane fuel and catalytic converters – that more completely combust the C4-C12 gasoline-range hydrocarbons, thus emitting less C, CO and PM – but there are no emissions from an EV induction engine.

Alas, low-emission gasmobiles are required only in a few jurisdictions such as California, whose clean-air standards the Trump Administration tried to rescind. For his part, Joe Biden announced new measures to counter vehicle emissions, effectively enacting a rising quota on EVs and hybrids by 2035, albeit weakening the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed tailpipe pollution standards, essentially giving gasmobiles a free ride for another decade.

What’s more, EV drivers use their brakes less, because of regenerative braking, hence less rubber wear and longer-lasting brakes (some EV drivers claim not to touch the brakes), while most EVs are lighter than the gasmobiles they replace and thus emit less roadside particle mass, partly because bigger SUVs are still rarer and expensive. Although the engine weight is about half, batteries do add weight to an electric refit, making the car handle better and safer, but anyone can wear out their tires with aggressive driving, which presumably has more to do with the driver than the car.

The backlash against Tesla, however, became more than just words after an electricity transmission pylon was destroyed in early March near its latest manufacturing plant, southeast of Berlin, knocking out power to the factory and nearby villages. The activist group Vulkan claimed responsibility, stating that the factory “consumed both natural resources and labour and was neither ecological or sustainable.”[21] All are important concerns, especially excessive water consumption in a low-water area or destroying a forest to clear more land for a proposed plant expansion. Presumably similar concerns apply to BMW in Bavaria, Daimler in Baden-Württemberg, and Volkswagen in Lower Saxony for their starring roles in urban pollution.

The group also called Musk a “techno-fascist” in a 2,500-word open letter,[22] while Musk called the arson “a strange kind of environmentalism,” adding on X, “These are either the dumbest eco-terrorists on Earth or they’re puppets of those who don’t have good environmental goals. Stopping production of electric vehicles, rather than fossil fuel vehicles, ist extrem dumm” (i.e., is extremely dumb). No mention was made of Tesla’s worrying stance against unions or circumvention of German labor practices.

Indeed, one wonders about the lack of protest against gasmobiles. Volkswagen has even been redeemed after cheating on EPA emissions tests in 2015, where a dyno calibration was turned on to burn fuel more completely under indoor test conditions but not on the road, adding to 38,000 more diesel-related deaths per year.[23] VW was forced to pay almost $15 billion for its Dieselgate deception in the largest auto-industry class-action case in US history. At least, the appalling deception has helped cut diesel sales in Europe where its future seems doomed, 125 years after German engineer Rudolf Diesel first demonstrated his novel compression-combustion engine (initially run on peanut oil).

Fires and accidents are also being cited to derail the electric transition. In 2016, Samsung lost almost $1 billion after recalling 2.5 million just-launched Galaxy Note 7 smartphones when the lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery was found to catch fire during recharging, the positive and negative electrodes merging because of an excessive fast-charging voltage on the thinner, larger battery as the cathode-anode separation was reduced to save space. After a couple of high-profile early fires, Tesla devised a liquid glycol cooling system enmeshed in its vehicle battery packs and added an underside aluminum/titanium shield to ensure battery safety in the event of an accident. All new technologies undergo upgrades to ensure safety in an evolving market. Boiler explosions were a regular occurrence in the early days of steam power.

In 2023, fires from charging e-bike batteries were responsible for 11 UK deaths, often started overnight in hallways, prompting calls for certification standards to ban substandard technology and poor retrofits.[24] A compromised battery was responsible for a fatal house fire in Australia, the first such battery fire in New South Wales.[25] All deaths are regrettable, but such tragedies don’t compare to the ongoing damages from petroleum-sourced fires. A devastating blaze in early March in Valencia, Spain, killed 10 people and destroyed a 15-year-old apartment block after the petroleum-based polyethylene-filled aluminum façade erupted in flames caused by a faulty appliance, echoing the horrific Grenfell fire in London in 2017 that officially took 72 lives and left hundreds homeless. No one should live in a battery or petroleum-fuelled death trap. No one should ever encase an apartment building in highly flammable hydrocarbon tiles or use unsafe battery chargers.

Some arguments are cherry-picked from isolated events, usually involving a Tesla crash or EV fire. Crashes are on the decline, however, in both EVs and gasmobiles because of improved safety features, aided by machine vision, collision-avoidance braking, and intelligent routing. One hopes such features will soon become standard in all cars, given the millions of people killed and maimed on our roads each year.

Of course, all changes should be scrutinized. Consumer advocate and auto-safety pioneer Ralph Nader commends robotic systems that don’t get drunk, fall asleep at the wheel, or develop poor driving skills, yet still cautions against computers that fail and are susceptible to hacking, preferring more investment in clean energy and public transport. Nader is especially wary of allowing “full self-driving” on our roads, calling for federal regulators to ban “malfunctioning software which Tesla itself warns may do the ‘wrong thing at the worst time’ on the same streets where children walk to school.”[26]

Range is also cited as a concern, but is not an issue for most drivers as half of all trips are under 5 miles, while according to the US Department of Transport, the average daily driving distance is 37 miles. GM’s CEO Mary Barra noted that 80% of commutes are less than 25 miles, easily covered by an EV on one hour of charge.[27] Range anxiety is in fact charger anxiety as lack of infrastructure impacts long-distance journeys. Fortunately, sufficient infrastructure exists at home, where 98% of EVs are charged, although malls, motels, and service stations are adding more units as demand increases. Cold-weather performance, where the battery’s electrolytic gel hardens, is not a concern with an internal heating system, albeit reducing range.

Cost is a real concern, however, both for vehicles and fuel. Indeed, what choice does the consumer have between a $14,000 Ford Fiesta and a $44,000 Tesla? The EV sticker price is still beyond the reach of most budgets, although fill-up costs are currently less than half.[28] Costs will drop with improved batteries (up to one-third the price) and economies of scale, while the cost to repair an EV is minor compared to an internal combustion engine (mostly broken battery cells).

The wallet makes most decisions, but as economist Tony Seba noted, “under $20,000 and the thing will be unstoppable.”[29] Henry Ford famously cut Model T prices by over a half with improved high-volume production, creating affordable private transportation for middle- and working-class families ($850 in 1908 slashed to $360 in 1916[30]). Nonetheless, expense is still a dealbreaker for most potential buyers. Furthermore, a 2022 Irish transport study found that EV grants and charging locations favored high-income people in urban areas, essentially “luxury goods.”[31]

China is leading the way in lowering prices as companies such as BYD, headquartered in Shenzhen, recently surpassed Tesla as the world’s top seller, becoming the leading supplier of EVs. The entire fleet of over 16,000 public buses in Shenzhen runs on batteries charged overnight, while BYD is winning more contracts around the world. BYD is also number 2 in batteries behind another Chinese company CATL. The so-called Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway holding company owns a number of power utilities, was an early BYD investor, although others are worried about Chinese domination in the burgeoning EV market – shades of cheaper, more efficient Japanese and German imports outselling American models in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Europe and the US are scrambling to catch up to save their own markets.

The founder of Singulato Motors – a young Chinese entrepreneur whiz-kid named Tiger Shen – sussed the transformative power of EVs for China after seeing the launch of Tesla’s Model S in 2012, and thinks that software controlled cars and 4- to 5-times more battery range in the next 20 years will spell the end of the gasmobile. Singulato’s first production model, the iS6, was purposefully designed to help clean up smog-filled cities and reduce congestion in China, which has 8 of the world’s 10 most-congested urban centers, especially Beijing where the average driving speed is only 7.5 mph. As Shen noted, “It is our duty to get the blue sky back in Beijing and other cities in China.”[32]

Change is never simple and requires money and time. Rome wasn’t built in a day nor was American consumerism. As late as the 1950s, 11% of Americans still had ice boxes,[33] while the US Census was still counting draft animals in the 1960s.[34] Standard appliances weren’t universally adopted after Edison’s Pearl Street coal-fired power station in 1882 nor Niagara Falls hydroelectric power station in 1895, which essentially inaugurated the grid and the twentieth century. The adoption of early home appliances lagged because of incomplete supply lines, non-existence infrastructure, and cost. As author Hamish McKenzie notes in Insane Mode, “In 1960, less than 10 percent of US households owned a color TV. In 1990, less than 10 percent of US households had a cell phone.”

Same for the washing machine (1907), vacuum cleaner (1908), home refrigerator (1912), radio (1920s), television (1940s), microwave (1970s), PC (1970s), the Internet (1990s), and now the EV. Remember Alf Langdon, the Republican nominee who was picked to win the 1933 US presidential election based on a telephone poll? Alas, 90% of Americans didn’t have a phone back then, while those who did were financially better off and more likely to vote Republican. Franklin Roosevelt won in a landslide. As for Rome, they will be the first to ban diesel cars next year, while the EU as a whole has set 2035 for a ban on gasmobile sales. Expect lots of debate, choice words, and protests.

Recycling is not as worrisome as some think. Today, 90% of lead-acid batteries are recycled, and although more metals are involved in a Li-ion battery (e.g., cobalt, nickel, iron) a similar system is evolving, including the 4Rs (refabricate, recycle, resell, and reuse). Second-life batteries are being refashioned for grid storage after an EV battery loses 20% of its charge. One such system is in operation at the Johan Cruyff Arena in Amsterdam, made of reused Nissan Leaf batteries. BMW also started up a backup battery facility in Leipzig from its own i3 batteries. Improved energy density and charging software will also increase longevity. Of course, recycling needs to increase across all sectors – US numbers are only 32% – but used battery components will always be needed to reduce mining costs and increase value. Recycling can also add to more conservation, reduced consumption, and less waste.

New battery chemistries are also being developed that will ease mining extraction and the growth in materials for an evolving home charge-storage market. All-solid-state batteries may strain the environment less, while sodium could rejig the entire market. Heavier than lithium and thus not as useful for transportation, sodium is as plentiful as seawater. Deep-sea mining is more controversial, however, where pristine ecosystems are disturbed.

The loss of manufacturing jobs must also be properly managed as electric vehicles are much easier to assemble. As EVs start outselling gasmobiles, perhaps by 2030, the United Auto Workers union expects a loss of 35,000 jobs. EVs may even have been the tipping point for the 2019 strike at GM and subsequent 2023 strike at GM, Ford, and Stellantis.

More worrisome are electricity prices that can be leveraged against beholden customers. Of course, one can make one’s own juice at home, a dangerous operation with oil. The cost of a 400-watt, 20%-efficient, off-the-shelf solar panel has dropped 100fold in the last few decades. No need to pay Big Oil or the utility companies. Interestingly, it is not the meter that scares government policy makers who tax measurable consumption, it is no meter.

Same goes for high-temperature manufacturing industries (steel, cement, fertilizer), forced to swap coal or natural gas for electricity. The concerns are legitimate if future prices are unknown, for example, steelmaking giant ArcelorMittal threatening to pull out of Asturias, Spain, over unguaranteed costs of electricity needed to make so-called green steel via DRI. Green hydrogen (GH2) is the latest EU plan to reduce Russian gas, but also depends on electricity prices. The problem is not as severe if the GH2 is made by solar- or wind-powered electrolyzers, but the infrastructure is still very much in its infancy. Even with large profits and billion-euro grants, uncertainty is a deal-breaker to the captains of industry.

Battery energy storage systems (BESS) and vehicle to grid (V2G) technology will also upend the one-directional grid, where home charge-storage and EVs can be employed to flatten the electrical load, improving grid efficiency and cleanliness, as more intermittent renewables come online. The batteries can be switched on and off as needed in an evolving “prosumer” market as customers buy and sell arbitraged energy across an interconnected, bi-directional smart grid. Alas, access is a problem for those ill-equipped to pay, further widening the digital divide and adding another layer of opaque technology between sellers and buyers.

The coming changes are as scary as they are exciting as we share resources in a new contract between neighbors, where one borrows charge as easily as a cup of sugar. A whole new set of rules and regulations are evolving, including improved cyber security. More one-offs will also crop up as wealthier customers opt out, weakening the public grid with their own isolated micro grids. It’s not just “preppers” going their own way, but the wealthy who can afford to tune out as they please. The ethics of another new modernity is only just being established, again pitting shared societal values against individual moneyed goals.

More biofuels (the big lie), green hydrogen (the old pretender), and carbon capture (unproven eye candy) are also being touted to save the old ways and continue with liquid fuels, some of which are just as dirty as the replaced petroleum. Some basic math explains the difficulty: 25% of American farmland is already used for biofuels that displace only about 5% of the fuel supply while using hydrogen gas is half as efficient as a battery.

Nonetheless, both new and old technologies will coexist in the transition, just as wood, coal, and oil did in the twentieth century and beyond. Is each technology practical, cost effective, and safe? Those are the questions that should be asked. Better technology always wins in the end. Better, greener, and cheaper technology is no contest.

You will find stories about fishermen opposing an offshore wind farm, anti-pollution activists against a chemical battery plant, environmentalists condemning an EV manufacturing plant. More organized opposition goes beyond backyard concerns to stop or ban change as well-funded petroleum interests aim to rebrand clean as dirty and cheap as expensive. Any new technology comes with its own set of challenges, although clean energy is not a lesser of two evils, but a chance to break free from a toxic past.

New energy isn’t exempt from emission controls and safety concerns. We should welcome the increased scrutiny over EVs to ensure a clean, practical, and affordable rollout, which hopefully increases scrutiny over toxic gasmobiles and dangerous petroleum supply chains. Why does the oil industry escape the same criticism about its dangers? If we paid more attention to all emissions, we wouldn’t be in such a pickle. What’s not to like as we kick gasoline to the curb – no more petroleum wars, fewer exploitative supply chains, reduced pollution?

Change is never easy, especially an energy transition that upends an entire economy, but once an EV can do the same (or more) than a gasmobile at the same (or cheaper) price and everyone can buy one, no one will want yesterday’s goods. With a cleaner technology, we will all breathe easier. Expect more battles ahead as we change from brown to green.

Notes

[1] Djuang, J., “The New Seven Supermajor Oil Companies,” LDI Training, 2023.

[2] “Revenge of the Electric Car” [documentary], directed by Chris Paine, West Midwest Productions, USA, 2011.

[3] “Solar Industry Research Data,” Solar Energy Industries Association, March 6, 2024.

[4] “Spain breezes into record books as wind power becomes main source of energy,” El País (in English), January 15, 2014.

[5] McGee, P., “This Tesla co-founder has a plan to recycle your EV batteries,” Financial Times, September 15, 2021.

[6] Janetsky, M. et al., “Native groups sit on a treasure trove of lithium. Now mines threaten their water, culture and wealth,” AP News, March 13, 2024.

[7] Paterson, L. and Wirfs-Brock, J., “Protesters say pipelines are dangerous. Are they?Inside Energy, November 18, 2016.

[8] Thompson, J., in “Boiling Point: Are dams good or bad?Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2024.

[9] “Shattered Ground,” The Nature of Things [documentary], directed by Leif Kaldo, Zoot Pictures, CBC, February 7, 2013.

[10] McKenzie, L. M. et al., “Ambient nonmethane hydrocarbon levels along Colorado’s northern front range: Acute and chronic health risks,” Environmental Science and Technology, March 27, 2018.

[11] Clark, C. J. et al., “Unconventional oil and gas development exposure and risk of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia: A case-control study in Pennsylvania, 2009–2017,” Environmental Health Perspectives, 130(8), August 17, 2022.

[12] Valavanidis, A. et al., “Airborne particulate matter and human health: Toxicological assessment and importance of size and composition of particles for oxidative damage and carcinogenic mechanisms,” Journal of Environmental Science and Health, Part C, 26: 4, pp. 339–362, November 26, 2008.

[13] Lelieveld, J. et al., “Cardiovascular disease burden from ambient air pollution in Europe reassessed using novel hazard ratio functions,” European Heart Journal, 40(20):1590–6, March 12, 2019.

[14] Buck, H. J., Ending Fossil Fuels: Why net zero is not enough, p. 59, Verso, London, 2021.

[15] Kitman, J. L., “The secret history of lead,” The Nation, March 2, 2000.

[16] McKenzie, H., Insane Mode: How Elon Musk’s Tesla sparked an electric revolution to end the age of oil, p. 67, Faber and Faber, London, 2018.

[17] Peskoe, A., “Profiteering Hampers U.S. Grid Expansion,” IEEE Spectrum, February 22, 2024.

[18] Ochoa, J., “ExxonMobil CEO’s corporate gaslighting tries to shift the blame for climate change, The Street, March 4, 2024.

[19] Pringle, E., “Saudi Aramco CEO says it’s time to abandon the ‘fantasy’ of phasing out oil because the $9.5 trillion energy transition is on a ‘road to nowhere,’Fortune, March 19, 2024.

[20] “Tyres Not Tailpipe,” Emissions Analytics, January 29, 2020.

[21] Connolly, K., “Leftwing group claim responsibility for Tesla factory arson attack in Berlin,” The Guardian, March 5, 2024.

[22] Latschan, T., “Tesla sabotage in Germany: Who is the Volcano Group?Deutsche Welle, March 6, 2024.

[23] Carrington, D., “38,000 people a year die early because of diesel emissions testing failures,” The Guardian, May 15, 2017.

]24] Ungoed-Thomas, J., “‘Unexploded bombs’: call for action after 11 deaths in UK due to e-bike fires,” The Guardian, March 9, 2024.

[25] “‘Compromised’ battery blamed for fatal house fire in Australia,” PV Magazine, March 11, 2024.

[26] Nader, R., “Statement by Ralph Nader on Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology,” Nader.org, August 10, 2022.

[27] “The First Electric Car for the Masses: Mary Barra Talks Bolt EVand Future of Mobility” [conference], Wired Business, June 29, 2016.

[28] Sivak, M. and Schoettle, B., “Relative costs of driving electric and gasoline vehicles in the individual US states,” SWT-2018-1, The University of Michigan, Sustainable Worldwide Transportation, January 2018.

[29] McKenzie, H., Insane Mode, p. 175.

[30] McKenzie, H., Insane Mode, p. 194.

[31] Caulfield, B. et al., “Measuring the equity impacts of government subsidies for electric vehicles,” Energy 248, 123588, February 24, 2022.

[32] Walz, E., “Singulato Motors CEO Tiger Shen hopes its iS6 EV will help bring blue skies back to Beijing,” Future Car, October 2, 2017.

[33] Bakker, S., From Luxury to Necessity: What the railways, electricity and the automobile teach us about the IT revolution, p. 95, Boom, Amsterdam, 2017.

[34] Smil, V., Energy and Civilization: A history, p. 392, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017.

The post Car Wars: Hydrocarbons, Lithium, and the Greening Grid appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Europe Sleepwalks Through Its Own Dilemmas

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Photograph Source: Dati Bendo – CC BY 4.0

On March 19, 2024, the head of France’s ground forces, General Pierre Schill, published an article in the newspaper, Le Monde, with a blunt title: “The Army Stands Ready.” Schill cut his teeth in France’s overseas adventures in the Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, and Somalia. In this article, General Schill wrote that his troops are “ready” for any confrontation and that he could mobilize 60,000 of France’s 121,000 soldiers within a month for any conflict. He quoted the old Latin phrase—“if you want peace, prepare for war”—and then wrote, “The sources of crisis are multiplying and carry with them risks of spiraling or extending.” General Schill did not mention the name of any country, but it was clear that his reference was to Ukraine since his article came out just over two weeks after French President Emmanuel Macron said on February 27 that NATO troops might have to enter Ukraine.

A few hours after Macron made his indelicate statement, the U.S. president’s national security advisor John Kirby said, “There will be no U.S. troops on the ground in a combat role there in Ukraine.” This was direct and clear. The view from the United States is bleak, with support for Ukraine diminishing very fast. Since 2022, the U.S. has provided over $75 billion in aid to Ukraine ($47 billion in military aid), far and away the most important assistance to the country during its war against Russia. However, in recent months, U.S. funding—particularly military assistance—has been held up in the U.S. Congress by right-wing Republicans who are opposed to more money being given to Ukraine (this is less a statement about geopolitics and more an assertion of a new U.S. attitude that others, such as the Europeans, should shoulder the burden of these conflicts). While the U.S. Senate passed a $60 billion appropriation for Ukraine, the U.S. House of Representatives only allowed $300 million to be voted through. In Kyiv, U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan implored the Ukrainian government to “believe in the United States.” “We have provided enormous support, and we will continue to do so every day and every way we know how,” he said. But this support will not necessarily be at the level it was during the first year of the war.

Europe’s Freeze

On 1 February, the leaders of the European Union agreed to provide Ukraine with €50 billion in “grants and highly concessional loans.” This money is to allow the Ukrainian government to “pay salaries, pensions, and provide basic public services.” It will not be directly for military support, which has begun to flounder across the board, and which has provoked new kinds of discussions in the world of European politics. In Germany, for instance, the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the parliament—Rolf Mützenich—was taken to task by the parties of the right for his use of the word “freeze” when it comes to military support for Ukraine. Ukraine’s government was eager to procure Taurus long-range cruise missiles from Germany, but the German government hesitated to do so. This hesitation and Mützenich’s use of the word “freeze” created a political crisis within Germany.

Indeed, this German debate around further arms sales to Ukraine is mirrored in almost all the European countries that have been supplying weapons for the war against Russia. Thus far, polling data across the continent shows large majorities against the continuation of the war, and therefore against the continuation of arming Ukraine for that war. A poll conducted for the European Council on Foreign Relations conducted in February shows that “an average of just 10 [percent] of Europeans across 12 countries believe that Ukraine will win.” “The prevailing view in some countries,” the poll analysts wrote, “is that Europe should mirror a U.S. that limits its support for Ukraine by doing the same, and encourage Kyiv to do a peace deal with Moscow.” That view is beginning to enter the discussions even of the political forces that continue to want to arm Ukraine. SPD parliamentarian Lars Klingbeil and his leader Mützenich both say that negotiations will need to start, although Klingbeil said it would not happen before the U.S. elections in November, and until then, as Mützenich had said, “I think that the most important thing now is that [Ukraine] get artillery ammunition.”

Military Not Climate

It no longer matters whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden wins the U.S. presidential election in November. Either way, Trump’s views on European military spending have already prevailed in the United States. The Republicans are calling for U.S. funding for Ukraine to be slowed down and for the Europeans to fill the gap by increasing their own military spending. This latter point will be difficult since many European states have debt ceilings; if they are to increase military spending this would be at the expense of precious social programs. NATO’s own polling data shows a lack of interest from the European population in a shift from social to military spending.

Even more of a problem for Europe is that its countries have been cutting back on climate-related investments and increasing defense-related investments. The European Investment Bank (set up in 2019) is, as the Financial Times reported, “under pressure to fund more projects in the arms industry,” while the European Sovereignty Fund—set up in 2022 to promote industrialization in Europe—is going to pivot toward support for military industries. Military spending, in other words, will overwhelm the commitments to climate investments and investments to rebuild Europe’s industrial base. In 2023, two-thirds of the total NATO budget of €1.2 trillion was from the United States, which is double what the European Union, the UK, and Norway spent on their militaries. Trump’s pressure for European countries to spend up to 2 percent of their GDP on their armies will set the agenda even if he loses the presidential election.

Can Destroy Countries, but Can’t Win Wars

For all the European braggadocio about defeating Russia, sober assessments of the European armies show that European states simply do not have the ground military capacity to fight an aggressive war against Russia let alone defend themselves adequately. A Wall Street Journal investigation into the European military situation bore the stunning title, “Alarm Grows Over Weakened Militaries and Empty Arsenals in Europe.” The British military, the journalists pointed out, has only 150 tanks and “perhaps a dozen serviceable long-range artillery pieces,” while France has “fewer than 90 heavy artillery prices” and Germany’s army “has enough ammunition for two days of battle.” If they are attacked, they have few air defense systems.

Europe has relied upon the United States to do the heavy bombing and fighting since the 1950s, including in the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Due to terrifying U.S. firepower, these Global North countries are able to flatten countries, but they have not been able to win any wars. It is this attitude that produces wariness in countries such as China and Russia, who know that despite the impossibility of a Global North military victory against them there is no reason why these countries—led by the United States—will not risk Armageddon because they have the military muscle to do so.

That attitude from the United States—mirrored in the European capitals—produces one more example of the hubris and arrogance of the Global North: a refusal to even consider peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. For Marcon to say things like NATO might send troops into Ukraine is not only dangerous, but it strains the credibility of the Global North. NATO was defeated in Afghanistan. It is unlikely to make great gains against Russia.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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How Moscow Terror Attack Fits ISIS-K’s Strategy

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Russian Crocus City Hall amphitheater interiors, day after terrorist attack on 22 March 2024. Photograph Source: Mosreg.ru – CC BY 4.0

What is ISIS-K?

ISIS-K, short for Islamic State Khorasan Province, is a regional affiliate of the larger Islamic State group.

The affiliate group operates primarily in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, although it has presence throughout the historical “Khorasan” – a region that includes parts of the modern-day nations of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, along with other Central Asian countries.

Established in 2015, ISIS-K aims to establish a physical “caliphate” – a system of governing a society under strict Islamic Sharia law and under religious leadership – in the South and Central Asian region.

ISIS-K’s beliefs follow the ideology of its parent organization, the Islamic State group, which promotes an extreme interpretation of Islam and sees secular government actors, as well as non-Muslim and Muslim minority civilian populations, as legitimate targets.

The group is known for its extreme brutality and for targeting both government institutions and civilians, including mosques, educational institutions and public spaces.

Following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, ISIS-K’s key objectives have been to diminish the now-ruling Taliban’s legitimacy in the war-ravaged nation, assert itself as the rightful leader of the Muslim community and emerge as the principal regional adversary to regimes it deems oppressive.

Moreover, the Taliban’s transition from an insurgency group to a governing entity left numerous militant factions in Afghanistan without a unifying force – a gap that ISIS-K has aimed to fill.

Why was Russia targeted by ISIS-K?

ISIS-K has long framed Russia as one of its main adversaries. It has heavily featured anti-Russian rhetoric in its propaganda and has attacked Russia’s presence within Afghanistan. This includes a suicide attack on Russia’s embassy in Kabul in 2022 that left two Russian Embassy staff and six Afghans dead.

The broader Islamic State group has targeted Russia for several reasons.

They include long-standing grievances relating to Moscow’s historical interventions in Muslim-majority regions like Chechnya and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Russia’s partnerships with regimes opposed by the Islamic State group, notably Syria and Iran, have positioned Russia as a primary adversary in the eyes of the terrorist organization and its affiliates.

In particular, Russia has been a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since the beginning of Syria’s civil war in 2011, providing military support to the Assad regime against various opposition groups, including the Islamic State group.

This direct opposition to the terrorist group and its caliphate ambitions has rendered Russia as a prime target for retaliation.

Moreover, Russia’s cooperation with the Taliban – ISIS-K’s key nemesis in Afghanistan – adds another layer of animosity. The Islamic State group views countries and groups that oppose its ideology or military objectives as enemies of Islam, including actors who seek to establish relations with the Taliban.

By attacking Russian targets, ISIS-K in part seeks to deter further Russian involvement in the Middle East. But also, such attacks provide high publicity for its cause and aim to inspire its supporters worldwide.

As such, for the Islamic State brand, the Moscow attack serves as retribution for perceived grievances held against Russia, while also projecting global reach. This approach can provide significant dividends, especially for its South and Central Asian affiliate, in the form of increased recruitment, funding and influence across the jihadist spectrum.

What does the attack tell us about ISIS-K capabilities?

The mere association of ISIS-K with this attack, whether it was directly or indirectly involved, bolsters the group’s reputation.

Overall, the attack signals ISIS-K’s growing influence and its determination to make its presence felt on the global stage.

Being linked to a high-profile attack in a major city far from its base in Afghanistan indicates that ISIS-K can extend its operational reach either directly or through collaboration with like-minded militant factions.

The scale and sophistication of the attack reflect advanced planning, coordination and execution capabilities. This only reaffirms unequivocally ISIS-K’s intent, adaptability and determination to internationalize its agenda.

Similar to ISIS-K’s attack in Iran in January 2024 that left over 100 dead, this latest atrocity serves to reinforce ISIS-K’s stated commitment to the broader global jihadist agenda of the Islamic State group, and helps broaden the appeal of its ideology and recruitment campaign.

How does this fit ISIS-K’s strategy?

The attack in Moscow serves as a powerful recruitment and propaganda tool by attracting international media attention to the group. This allows it to remain politically relevant to its audiences across South and Central Asia, and beyond.

But it also helps divert attention from local setbacks for ISIS-K. Like its parent organization Islamic State group, ISIS-K has been confronted with military defeats, loss of territory and leadershipand diminishing resources.

In the face of such challenges, ISIS-K’s potential links to the attack in Moscow remind observers of its persistent threat and adaptability.

By targeting a major power like Russia, ISIS-K aims to project a broader message of intimidation aimed at other states involved in anti-Islamic State group operations and undermine the public’s sense of security.

Additionally, operations such as the Moscow attack seek to solidify ISIS-K’s position within the broader Islamic State group network, potentially securing more support and resources.

More broadly, the strategy follows a process of “internationalizing” ISIS-K’s agenda – something it has pursued with renewed vigor since 2021 by targeting the countries with a presence in Afghanistan, including Pakistan, India, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China and Russia, marking a deliberate expansion of its operational focus beyond local borders.

The Moscow attack, following the January assault in Iran, suggests that ISIS-K is intensifying efforts to export its ideological fight directly to the territories of sovereign nations.

It is a calculated strategy and, as the Moscow attack has exemplified, one that has the potential to strike fear in capitals far beyond ISIS-K’s traditional base.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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UN Charter, UN Credibility and Unlawful Unilateral Coercive Measures

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Photograph Source: Mojnsen – CC BY-SA 4.0

Statement before the United Nations Security Council, Arria Formula Meeting, 25 March 2024.

Excellencies, distinguished delegates,

The unlawfulness of unilateral coercive measures imposed by certain countries against other States, businesses and individuals has been documented in United Nations studies going back to the seminal report issued in the year 2000 by the Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights[1], the 2012 report of High Commissioner Navi Pillay[2], and General Comment Nr. 8 of the Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights[3].

Dozens of General Assembly Resolutions, most recently of 19 December 2023[4],  resolutions  of the Human Rights Council, most recently of 11 October 2023[5], identify the specific violations of international law inherent in UCMs and the threat they pose to international peace and security. These resolutions, adopted with ample majorities, urge all states to lift UCMs. Thirty one GA resolutions condemn the US embargo against Cuba, most recently on 2 November 2023[6].

Notwithstanding the clear will of the global majority that UCMs be abolished, a number of States violate these resolutions with impunity and continue imposing coercive measures with unlawful domestic and extra-territorial effects. Circumvention of these unlawful UCMs is subject to draconian penalties.  This coercion-based international order usurps the functions of the United Nations and undermines its authority and credibility.

It is important to recognize that the semblance of law is not law, that not every executive order is legitimate or deserves to be obeyed, as we know from Sophocles Antigone[7] and saw confirmed in the judgment of the Third Nuremberg Trial, the Justices Trial[8].

Many Nazi laws were “laws”, but in name only. They were dictates that violated the essence of justice.  So too European and US laws on slavery and the slave trade, the laws imposed by colonial powers, and the laws of Apartheid.

Indeed, when laws do not serve justice but rather geopolitical domination, they subvert the rule of law itself, and what we call civilization[9]. Far from bending to such unlawful measures, all civilized persons have a duty to resist them.

Civilization demands that States, individuals and enterprises resist the hijacking of the administration of justice, the instrumentalization of law for power and injustice, including through unlawful UCMs.

It is documented that UCMs engender gross violations of human rights, including the right to life, food, health, water and sanitation. UCMs have impeded prompt and effective action against pandemics like Covid-19, have aggravated outbreaks of cholera, polio, tuberculosis, hindered life-saving cancer treatment and are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide[10].

We are witnessing retrogression in the respect owed to international law and human dignity. Government lawyers should be advising their governments how best to comply with international treaties and norms, and not how to find loopholes and weasel out of international obligations.

Notwithstanding the lethal impacts of UCMs, government lawyers in some countries downplay them in an attempt to mislead democratic audiences into believing that UCMs serve legitimate purposes. It is profoundly cynical to invoke human rights in an attempt to justify measures that demonstrably violate the rights of the most vulnerable.

Victims and victimizers are here reversed. The practise of UCMs manifests how legal concepts and language have been corrupted, how human rights are being weaponized to destroy human rights. Cognitive dissonance becomes the new normal. No, the narrative of a purported good end is false.  The geopolitical end does not justify the criminal means.

The diagnosis is clear: UCMs generate humanitarian crises, legal and social chaos, leaving victims without effective access to justice and without remedies.  UCMs are incompatible with the noble principles of the UN Charter[11] and the Constitutions of many UN agencies including UNESCO and WHO.

Let us therefore escape from the epistemology trap, and stop referring to UCMs as “sanctions”.  The only legal sanctions are those imposed by this Security Council.  Everything else constitutes the unlawful use of force in contravention of the letter and spirit of the UN Charter, in particular article 2, paragraph 4.

Moreover, the word “sanctions” implies that the State imposing them has the moral or legal authority to do so.  This is not the case as exposed by UN Special Rapporteurs Dr. Idriss Jazairy, Dr. Alena Douhan, Dr. Michael Fakhri and others.

I will not further elaborate on our diagnosis but prefer now to formulate pragmatic proposals how to rescue the international order and how to give recourse and remedy to the victims.

Bearing in mind that some States persist in applying UCMs to about a third of the population of the planet, and that hitherto they have done this with impunity, I propose that:

1) UN Agencies like ILO, UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO, UNICEF, WHO henceforth collect, quantify and evaluate the harm caused by UCMs. Impact assessments should be widely publicized.

2) An international observatory should be established to document the impacts of UCMs. This observatory or “UCM Watch” should function under the UN Human Rights Council and be serviced by OHCHR, which should keep a database and establish a monitoring mechanism.

3) The General Assembly should invoke article 96 of the UN Charter referring the legal questions associated with UCMs to the ICJ for an advisory opinion on their illegality and the level of compensation to be paid to the victims. The ICJ should also consider whether the humanitarian crises and thousands of deaths caused by UCMs constitute “crimes against humanity” for purposes of Article 7 of the Statute of Rome.

4) Pursuant to article 9 of the 1948 Genocide Convention[12], States parties should refer the ICJ the question whether the deliberate creation of conditions that in effect destroy in whole or in part a group plausibly constitutes genocide. The requirement of “intent” can be inferred from the foreseeability of the deaths resulting from UCMs. The ICJ judgement in Bosnia v. Serbiaimposes an obligation to prevent[13].

5) The Inter-state complaints procedures of several UN treaty bodies should be engaged. Article 41 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights grants jurisdiction to the Human Rights Committee to examine inter-state complaints concerning grave violations of human rights, including the right to life. In the absence of reservations to this article, the competence of the Human Rights Committee is prima facie established. The Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights would also provide for inter-state complaints pursuant to Article 10[14].

6) The laws of many countries impose a civic obligation to help persons in grave danger to life. These laws are sometimes referred to as duty of rescue laws.[15] Undoubtedly UCMs entail a grave danger to life, and States should ensure that individuals and businesses under their jurisdiction abide by such duty to help laws and do not become complicit in UCM crimes.

7) States should exercise diplomatic protection on behalf of individuals and businesses penalized by States that impose UCMs.

Excellencies,

If we want that international institutions, tribunals and other mechanisms function properly, we must ensure that all parties recommit to the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations.  We must escape the epistemology trap and reject the attempt to camouflage UCMs as “sanctions”, reject the unethical demand for “compliance” with what are in reality totalitarian commands that violate the sovereign equality of States and the self-determination of peoples.

I invite all here present to rediscover the spirituality of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and ensure that the authority and credibility of the United Nations is strengthened by observance of UN resolutions, and not subverted by complicity in tolerating UCMs, which in a very real sense manifest a rebellion against the UN Charter and entail crimes against humanity.  I urge you to work constructively at cooperation and reconciliation in this common planet of ours.

I thank you for your attention.

Notes.

[1] E/CN.4/Sub2/2000/33, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/422860

[2] A/HRC/19/33, https://undocs.org/Home/Mobile?FinalSymbol=A%2FHRC%2F19%2F33&Language=E&DeviceType=Desktop&LangRequested=False

[3] E/C.12/1997/8

https://www.refworld.org/legal/general/cescr/1997/en/52393

[4] https://www.un.org/en/ga/78/resolutions.shtml

[5] https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/regular-sessions/session54/res-dec-stat

[6] https://www.undocs.org/Home/Mobile?FinalSymbol=A%2FRES%2F78%2F7&Language=E&DeviceType=Desktop&LangRequested=False.  Res. 78/7

[7] https://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/antigone.html

[8] https://www.archives.gov/files/research/captured-german-records/microfilm/m889.pdf

[9] https://iihl.org/the-laws-of-humanity/

https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/assets/files/other/irrc-844-coupland.pdf

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-6265-299-6_3

Jeffrey Sachs, The Price of Civilization, Random House, New York 2011.

[10] https://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/venezuela-sanctions-2019-04.pdf

[11] See also the 25 Principles of International Order, published as Chapter 2 of A. de Zayas, Building a Just World Order, Clarity Press, 2021.

[12] It is not possible to submit case against the US under article 9, because of US submitted a reservation against article 9 when ratifying the Convention in 1992.  But it is possible to submit cases against Canada, UK, France, Germany, and all other countries imposing UCMs and causing suffering and death in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Syria, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc.

[13] https://icj-cij.org/case/91

[14] https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/optional-protocol-international-covenant-economic-social-and

[15] https://www.thelaw.com/law/good-samaritan-laws-the-duty-to-help-or-rescue-someone.218/

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Our Body Our Choice

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Image by Gayatri Malhotra.

The abortion debate continues to rage and women still need to fight for the right to decide whether or not we can or should abort.

Pew Research Center has conducted no shortage of surveys about abortion over the years, providing a window into Americans’ views on the subject.

In a Center survey conducted nearly a year after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion, 62% of U.S. adults said the practice should be legal in all or most cases, while 36% said it should be illegal in all or most cases. Another survey conducted a few months before the decision showed that relatively few Americans take an absolutist view on the issue.

The last year for which the CDC reported a yearly national total for abortions is 2021. It found there were 625,978 abortions in the District of Columbia and the 46 states with available data that year, up from 597,355 in those states and D.C. in 2020.

In 2020, there were 1,603 facilities in the U.S. that provided abortions, according to Guttmacher. This included 807 clinics, 530 hospitals and 266 physicians’ offices.

While clinics make up half of the facilities that provide abortions, they are the sites where the vast majority (96%) of abortions are administered, either through procedures or the distribution of pills, according to Guttmacher’s 2020 data.

Monmouth University conducted a poll among Republicans in February and found that 12% believe it should be legal in all cases and 27% in most cases. However, 41% said they believe abortion should be illegal in most cases, while 14% said it should be illegal in all cases.

According to a March 7 poll conducted by health research organization KFF, 85% of Republican voters who want abortion to be illegal in all or most cases say they trust former President Trump more than President Biden on the issue of abortion. Half of Republican voters who want abortion to be legal in all or most cases also say they trust Trump more than Biden on this issue.

The KFF poll also showed that voters who say abortion is the most important issue to their vote are disproportionately younger, Democratic-leaning, and want abortion to be legal in all cases.

According to the authors, “there seems to be a new generation of abortion voters largely made up of those who want abortion to be legal in all cases. Voters who say abortion is the “most important issue” in their 2024 vote (12% of all voters) are disproportionately made up of Black voters, Democratic voters, women voters, and the youngest voting bloc – voters ages 18 to 29.”

In addition, according to KFF, “There is broad support, even among partisans, for protecting access to abortions for patients who are experiencing pregnancy-related emergencies and protecting patients’ right to travel to access abortions, but partisans disagree on other policy proposals such as whether there should be a federal right to abortion or a nationwide 16-week abortion ban. Two-thirds of the public, including majorities of Democrats (86%) and independents (67%), support a law guaranteeing a federal right to abortion. Yet, this is opposed by nearly six in ten Republicans (57%). In addition, while among the public overall about six in ten (58%) oppose a 16-week abortion ban, a majority of Republicans (63%) adults support this proposal, while most Democrats (75%) and independents (59%) oppose it.”

It is important to remember that those advocating for abortion rights are in essence advocating for human rights. These polls demonstrate what is important to so many of us: control over reproductive decisions is crucial for women’s social, economic, and political equality – a basic tenet of the Democratic party and its voters.

Separating church from state, personal values from religion, is essential to ensuring individual freedoms and rights that guarantee absolute equality for women. It is our body. It should be our choice.

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In Distress, Niger Expels US Military, Resurrects Hope

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Logo of the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland – Fair Use

On March 16, Amadou Abdramane, spokesperson for Niger’s governing military council, announced that Niger was dropping its 12-year-old military-cooperation agreement with the United States. Niger’s military council had assumed power following the coup in July, 2023 that removed Mohamed Bazoum, the elected president.

U.S. military intervention in Niger is now a poor fit with grim realities in the western Sahel region of Africa and with the Nigerien people’s needs and aspirations.

The U.S. military presence there co-exists with danger posed by Islamic extremist military groups. These expanded after 2011 when NATO destroyed the Libyan government, a stabilizing force in the region. Niger faces a humanitarian crisis worsened by environmental disaster. The military council is seeking alternative arrangements for security cooperation and looking to China for help with societal development.

Abdramane denounced “the attitude of the [recently visiting] U.S. delegation in denying the sovereign right of Niger’s people to choose partners and allies capable of really helping them fight terrorism.” General Michael Langley, delegation member and head of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), “expressed concerns” that Niger was pursuing close ties with Russia and Iran.

AFRICOM, headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, operates 20 bases in Africa. The two largest are air bases in Djibouti, in East Africa, and Agadez, in central Niger. Niger hosts two other U.S. bases, an airbase near Niamey, the capital city, and a CIA base in the northeast.

According to a report, the Agadez base cost $110 million to build and costs $30 million annually to maintain. It is “the largest Air Force-led construction project in history.” By means of these two large bases, the United States conducts air war, with drones, over a significant portion of the earth’s surface.

In moving to end U.S. military involvement, the coup government had backing “from the trade unions and the protest movement against French presence.”  The new government had already pressured France, Niger’s colonizer, to remove its military units from the country; the last of them departed in January, 2024. Coup governments in Mali and Burkina Faso expelled French troops in February 2022 and February 2023, respectively.

Also in January 2024, the three countries abandoned the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). France had led in forming this trade bloc in 1975; it would include 15 African nations. Critics cited by the BBC claim that France, through ECOWAS, was able to “meddle … in the politics and economics of its former territories after independence.”

The French government failed in an attempt to mobilize an ECOWAS military force to punish Niger for leaving the trade bloc. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger reacted by forming their Alliance of Sahel States. They “are exploring alternative security relations, including with Russia.” Niger also looks to Iran for security assistance.

Investigator Nick Turse points to U.S. failures to explain why Niger is looking elsewhere for military assistance. He documents the vast number of deaths in the western Sahel region at the hands of extremist Islamist groups over the course of 20 years. The killings skyrocketed despite the U.S. military presence in Niger.

Niger may have given up on the United States also on considering that U.S. and NATO military action in Libya in 2011 contributed to worsening living conditions in the region now. A commentator notes that, “The toppling of Gaddafi created a power vacuum that fostered civil war and terrorist infiltration, with disastrous regional ramifications.”

Additionally, in a Niger unable on its own to adequately fulfill human needs, U.S. focus on military advantage without attention to human suffering would have been disheartening. The scale of suffering is the Sahel region is immense, as evidenced by diminished foodproduction and migration, with climate-change contributing to both.

The International Rescue Committee reports that, “The Central Sahel region of Africa, which includes Burkina FasoMali and Niger, is facing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Over 16 million people need assistance and protection, marking a 172 percent increase from 2016.”

China responded and Washington officials are perturbed. A report from Mali indicates that, “In Niger, the main areas of [Chinese] investment are energy ($5.12 million); mining ($620 million) and real estate ($140 million), other aspects of cooperation include: the construction of stadiums and schools, medical missions, military cooperation, infrastructure (roads, bridges, rolling stock, thermal power plants).”

A “Nigerien security analyst” told investigator Nick Turse that “the trappings of paternalism and neocolonialism” have marred Niger’s military-cooperation agreement with the United States.

Expanding upon these polite words while commenting on Niger’s current situation, Casablanca academician Alex Anfruns observes that, “international capitalism has destroyed the hopes of entire generations of Africans while inflicting its policies like a thug with white gloves. Actors like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are complicit as key functionaries of the neocolonial system.”

U.S. policy-makers, enablers of world capitalism, look longingly at Africa. Africa claims “98%of the world’s chromium, 90% of its cobalt, 90% of its platinum, 70% of its coltan, 70% of its tantalite, 64% of its manganese, 50% of its gold, and 33% of its uranium.” Even more: “The continent holds 30% of all mineral reserves, 12% of known oil reserves, 8% of known natural gas, and 65% of the world’s arable land.”

Alex Anfruns sees hope: the leaders of Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso,  with their Alliance of Sahel States, “have sent a powerful message of solidarity to millions of Africans who share a vision and an emancipatory project, that of pan-African unity.” Indeed, “From now on neither the United States or France under the flag of NATO can destroy an isolated African country, as happened in Libya in 2011.”

Burkina Faso president Thomas Sankara expressed a far-ranging kind of hope in 1984, at the United Nations: “We refuse simple survival. We want to ease the pressures, to free our countryside from medieval stagnation or regression. We want to democratize our society, to open up our minds to a universe of collective responsibility.”

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After All These Years: Still Sucking

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Dormant lilac buds. Photograph Source: Selena42 – CC BY-SA 4.0

Spring brings many things. With March waning our small greenhouse coaxes 400 tomato seedlings and three flats of sprouting lettuce along. If the recent growing seasons are any indication, they will face what are called “challenges,” in the neutered and anesthetic lingo of the day—— seared by heat and drought, drowned by deluge.

March also brings remembrances of the war against Vietnam for those of us aged enough to recall: The emblematic My Lai (“Pinkville”) massacre on March 16, 1968, and March 29, 1973 when the last American troops officially departed that bombed-out and dioxin-contaminated landscape.

In March or April the Trustees of the Social Security Administration annually issue their report on the finances of Social Security and Medicare: What Reagan’s budget director David Stockman referred to as “the twin citadels of the welfare state.” The “storming” of these “citadels” has long-been a Republican Party objective and sadly it’s increasingly becoming more bipartisan.

When the report is issued this year we’ll hear again the dishonest doom-fest fiction of looming “insolvency” and earnest calls for “saving” country’s most popular programs by cutting them. As T. S. Eliot once observed, “April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land….”  Yes, dear reader, the fiscal pruners will be intent again on sharpening their shears.

Meanwhile the recently passed congressional $1.2 billion “spending package” was, according to Maine’s own Senator Susan Collins, “…truly a national security bill—70% of the funding in this package is for our national defense, including investments that strengthen our military readiness and industrial base, provide pay and benefit increases for our brave service members and support our closest allies.” (And no money for UNRWA.) (Of course.)

In April 1967, one year before his assassination, Martin Luther King delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

It was “controversial” at the time. He was accused of wandering off the “civil rights” reservation. He recounted the hopes aroused by Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs that would have furthered the New Deal legislation of the 30s—“a promise of hope” he called it.  But….“Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.”

Decades later in a new century with many more militarist “adventures like Vietnam” in the rearview, more being teed-up, and proxy wars in the Ukraine and historic Palestine bankrolled from the U.S. purse, King’s words loom large.

Meanwhile, homeland societal security is increasingly shaky as austerity bites. Slick Willie Clinton famously destroyed the modern Democratic Party by getting the Reagan-Bush North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) wet dream enacted. This created what H. Ross Perot called a “giant sucking sound” as US corporations pursued massive profits exploiting sweat-shop (non-union) labor in the “global south.”

So how’s that working? Interestingly, the “Mounties” in the Great White North of Canada just completed a (partially redacted) study for policymakers there. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) function much like “our” FBI.Wikipedia notes that, “As part of its national security and intelligence functions, the RCMP (has) infiltrated ethnic or political groups considered to be dangerous to Canada.” Sounds familiar. Yup.

Their recently completed “Whole-of Government Five-Year Trends for Canada” report forecasts that, “The coming period of recession will… accelerate the decline in living standards that the younger generations have already witnessed compared to earlier generations.”  (See: “Secret RCMP report warns Canadians may revolt once they realize how broke they are”)

The National Post’s headline (3/20/24) above is a grabber. It continues, “The report, labeled secret, is intended as a piece of ‘special operational information’ to be distributed only within the RCMP and among ‘decision-makers’ in the federal government.”

“The heavily redacted version was made public as a result of an access to information request filed by Matt Malone, an assistant professor of law at British Columbia’s Thompson Rivers University, and an expert on government secrecy.”

“In addition to worsening living standards, the RCMP also warns of a future increasingly defined by (climate-related) unpredictable weather and seasonal catastrophes, such as wildfires and flooding.”  The report finds that “many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever” to afford “a place to live” with the Royal Bank of Canada finding condos affordable to only 44.5% of households and single family houses “only to the richest 25%.”

Meanwhile, back in the USA (currently consuming 80% of the worlds’ opioids) the situation is somewhat grimmer.

CBS “MoneyWatch” (9/28/23) reported, “Homes ‘unaffordable’ in 99% of nation for average American.” The Mounties warn of a restive population where 44.5% can buy a condo, 25% can afford a house and everyone has single-payer healthcare.

Here, all’s quiet, except for that demonic, destructive sucking sound.

The post After All These Years: Still Sucking appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Democracy or Epismocracy?

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Photo by Jose M

Democracy refers to a government in which people rule directly or through their elected representatives.  It is, in other words, what President Lincoln referred to in his Gettysburg address as a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” but which Plato warned is a chimera.

Indeed, the ancient Greek philosopher thought a government elected by the people would end up being ruled by populists who, in the words of the Encyclopedia Britannica, “claim to embody the will of the people in order to consolidate their own power.”  Therefore, he called for governments of the people and for the people but by individuals termed philosopher kings who would be singled out at a young age for their curiosity, intelligence, and desire to promote everyone’s wellbeing and then given an education that would provide them with the skills to do just that.

Lincoln, however, thought everyone should receive a high-quality education.  That is the reason in his first political announcement he called education the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in and then as President signed the Morill Act of 1862 to assure that education would be available to all social classes.  Indeed, throughout his career Lincoln echoed the view of Horace Mann that the purpose of education:

“is to inspire the love of truth as the supremist good, and to clarify the vision of the intellect to discern it.  We want a generation … above deciding great and eternal principles upon narrow and selfish grounds.  Our advanced state of civilization has evolved many complicated questions respecting social duties.  We want a generation…capable taking up these complex questions, and of turning all sides of them towards the sun.”

We too share that view.

Clearly the more highly educated voters are the more likely they are to elect officials (including most importantly a President) that have the ability and desire to make decisions in their best interest.  Hence, it is not surprising that, given the highly unequal way wealth and income are distributed in our country today, we tend to end up with a government of the people, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy.    Why?   Because as Emmanuel Saez and other economists pointed out, children of high-income earners and the wealthy are “77 times more likely to attend an elite school than those with parents in the bottom 20 quintile.”

How do we deal with that problem?  The answer Saez along with the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph StiglitzThomas Piketty and many others give is “by imposing higher taxes on wealth and income.” But inequality in the distribution of wealth and income leading to educational differences and other inequities is not the only reason our democracy fails.  Another reason is it has yet to devise a method of providing voters with reliable information about the qualifications of those running for office, in particular and most importantly, the highest office in the land.

Hence, to deal with the latter problem we propose that to have their names placed on the ballot for President, candidates be required to take a four-part written exam crafted by academics from left to right across the political spectrum and then have their results on the exam made public.

The first part of the exam would test candidates’ ability to acquire, retain, and process information or what is referred to as their cognitive ability.  The second part would test their knowledge of history, economics, natural science, statistics, and other subjects. The third part would test their stance on major issues of concern to voters such as climate change, Israel’s incursion into Gaza, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, abortion, immigration, health care, and LGBTQ and women’s rights.  Finally, the fourth part would address ethical issues.

A question on the ethical portion of the exam, for example, might ask: “Is it fair to give more weight to the views of individuals who contribute financially to your campaign than to others?”  And another might ask: “can you describe an ethical dilemma you faced in the past and how you dealt with it?

What questions might the results of the exam help voters answer today?  A recent justice department report claimed President Joe Biden’s memory was “extremely limited.”  In response, Biden asserted that his memory “is fine.” How much weight should voters give to each of these points of view.  Biden’s answers to the questions posed in the first part of the exam would help them determine the answer.

Furthermore, after it was pointed out that his statements about  immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” were reminiscent of Adoloph Hitler’s view that “all great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning” Donald Trump  claimed he  knew nothing about Hitler.   Results from the second part of the exam would indicate just how knowledgeable he and other candidates are of important historical events and hence how capable they would be to use lessons from those events to guide their decisions.

Additionally, Trump claims he is “a very stable genius,” while Niki Haley has characterized him as anything but.  Whose point of view deserves more credence?  The results of the Presidential Aptitude Examination would help voters determine the answer.  And as a last example, both Biden and Trump have promised to reduce government malfeasance.  How likely is it that they would do so?  Their answers to the ethical questions on the exam would help provide voters with an answer to that question too.

In conclusion, for governments of the people to end up promoting the peoples’ welfare they need to be headed by educated, conscientious, and skillful individuals bent on doing just that. In such governments political power would be distributed in proportion to knowledge and competence.  Hence, they would be what Jason Brennan refers to in his book Against Democracy as an epistocracy.  But to get from a democracy to an epistocracy requires two steps.

First, as the Harvard scholar E.O. Wilson suggested in his book titled Consilience, we need to provide all voters with a first-class education that addresses ethical issues as well as issues in the hard sciences, social sciences, history, mathematics, and humanities.  Then to end up with a government of, by, and for a well-educated socially conscious people or what might be termed an epismocracy, we need to make information about the views and abilities of candidates for President and other elective offices (such as the information that might be provided by the Presidential Aptitude exam we propose) readily available.

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“Uncommitted” Is the Antiwar Movement Breaking into Mainstream U.S. politics?

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Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty airman based in San Antonio, Texas stood outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, February 25th, and announced to the world:

“I’m an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

His last words were, “Free Palestine!” He then doused himself with an accelerant and set himself on fire. He died soon afterwards. Aaron’s self-sacrifice was the second produced by Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza backed by the United States. On December 1, 2023, a woman, whose name has still not been released to the public, set herself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta. She survived, but is in critical condition and remains hospitalized.

Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice drew quick comparisons with Vietnam War era acts of immolation, most notably Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist Monk, who protested the repressive religious policies of the Saigon government in June 1966. Alice Herz and Norman Morrison, who immolated themselves respectively in March and November, 1965, in response to the escalation of U.S bombing and the extensive use of napalm by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson. Morrison immolated himself in the view of then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

Those who knew Aaron Bushnell described him as a kind person who did outreach to the homeless, and had become increasingly influenced by leftwing ideas after growing up in an insular, authoritarian religious community in Massachusetts. Levi Pierpont, who knew Bushnell in basic training, and was later was released by the Air Force after he was granted conscience objector status in 2023, wrote:

Aaron is by no means the only United States military member who has felt complicit in the military’s violence, powerless to change anything, and stuck waiting until the end of a four- or six-year contract. There are thousands of military members similarly distraught, having thoughts of taking extreme actions to escape something that feels inescapable.

Marine Corps Veteran and author Lyle Jeremy Rubin took the Nation magazine to argue,

“When someone commits an act like this, and leaves us with words like that, I feel obligated to take the person at their word. And the words couldn’t be more instructive. Bushnell doesn’t spell out the precise nature of his complicity. But the mere mention of his branch of service suffices. The US Air Force has played a significant part in the killing spree in Gaza, assisting with intelligence and targeting. It has helped build Israeli airpower for decades now, and shares the same suppliers of aircraft, missiles, and munitions.”

The Lesser Evil?

Two days after Aaron Bushnell’s death, the Michigan presidential primaries were held on February 27. While President Joe Biden won the Democratic primary, the Listen to Michigan campaigners were asking for those opposed to Biden’s pro-Israel policies to vote “uncommitted.” The goal was to get 10,000 uncommitted votes, the margin that Trump won Michigan by in 2016. Ultimately, just over 100,000 voted uncommitted, ten times the goal for campaign organizers, and was helped by the over seventy U.S. cities that have passed ceasefire resolutions.

While some Arab-American Democratic Party officials boosted the campaign, including Abdullah Hammoud, the Mayor of Dearborn, and Michigan State Representative and Majority House leader Abraham Aiyash, it is largely driven by a younger generation of Arab-Americans. “We’re experiencing a revolution,” said Lexis Zeidan, a 31-year-old Palestinian American organizer and spokeswoman for Listen to Michigan told National Public Radio (NPR). “We’re no longer going for the lesser of two evils.”

The prospect of Biden losing Michigan in the November presidential election is openly discussed, and the prospect of Trump returning to power hasn’t, so far, swayed pro-Palestine activists from campaigning against the Biden administration. “I’m going to live under Trump, because I survived under Trump, because he’s my enemy,” Palestinian-American Nihad Awad, co-founder and the national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow. “I cannot live under someone who pretends to be my friend.”

A hairline fracture has appeared in the traditional “lesser evil” approach taken to U.S. elections by the U.S. left in support of the Democratic Party, that has derailed, corrupted, and repressed a broad spectrum of movements of the working class and oppressed for the past century. Marcie Pedraza, a UAW activist in Chicago, whose Local union passed one of the most politically significant resolutions in favor of Gaza, expressed this sentiment circulating around pro-Palestine activism:

“One day, you’re calling for a ceasefire, the next, you endorse a candidate that’s funding the genocide. I don’t want another four years of Trump, but … there has to be another way.”

Campaigns for an “uncommitted” vote spread to “Super Tuesday” primaries on March 5th. Reuters reported,

With almost 90% of the expected votes counted in Minnesota, 19% of Democrats marked their ballots “uncommitted” to show their opposition to Biden’s backing for Israel’s attacks against Hamas in Gaza.

The “uncommitted” vote was also on the Democratic ballot in six other Super Tuesday states — Alabama, Colorado, Iowa, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Support in those states ranged from 3.9% in Iowa to 12.7% in North Carolina, with more than 85% of the votes counted in each of those states, according to Edison Research.

A handful of unions have called for an “uncommitted” vote by its members, something unheard of in past presidential elections. In Washington state, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) 3000 posted on its website:

As the largest labor union in Washington State with over 50,000 members, and the largest UFCW local union in the nation, the UFCW 3000’s member-led Executive Board decided on Wednesday February 28th to endorse the effort to have people in the Democratic primary in Washington State vote “uncommitted” on the upcoming ballot.

But the UFCW 3000’s executive board was careful to frame their call as first and foremost about defeating Trump. “The hope is that this will strengthen the Democratic party’s ultimate nominee to defeat Trump in the General Election in November,” they wrote. Last October, UFCW 3000 and the United Electrical Workers union (UE) issued a petition calling on U.S. trade unions that called for a ceasefire, but fell far short of the Palestinian trade unions movement’s demands.

The Washington Democratic primary took place on March 12th. Almost 50,000 people cast their vote for “uncommitted”, or 7.5% of the vote after a campaign that started at the end of February and spent only $20,000.

For an older generation around the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA), many of whom are from the 1968 generation of radicals, campaigning for an “uncommitted” is a short diversion from how they will vote in November. The New York Times reported that the story of seventy-three year old Lon Herman of Detroit:

On Tuesday, he was volunteering with the Democratic Socialists to help with the “uncommitted” effort in Hamtramck. “We need to make sure the White House knows its policy is unacceptable,” he said. But, he added, he expects he’ll vote for the president again. “If it’s between him and Trump, the Palestine issue would basically be a wash, so I’d have to hold my nose and vote for the Democrat, as I usually do.”

Dearborn

Whether the hairline fracture will heal or widen during the rest of the presidential campaign is still too be seen. But, judging from the response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union (SOTU) speech, many Arab-Americans and Pro-Palestine supporters appeared in Dearborn are unmoved. At an “Abandon Biden” SOTU’s watch party, Farah Khan told CBS News:

“Dropping the aid in Gaza, that’s a photo opp. That’s a desperate cry for awards, that’s a desperate cry for I’m doing good, you know. I’m a humanitarian too, even though, until today, I’m still supplying weapons to kill innocent civilians.”

Another attendee, Anthony Hall said, “All I’ve heard is a lot of what he wants to do. I haven’t really heard any plans. There’s nothing really definite from him. So far, I’m disappointed.” Yet, Dr. Nidal Jbor , of Doctors Against Genocide, noted, “His rhetoric is improving compared to what he was talking about in October to November, so the pressure from the civil society and the United States and all over the world is paying off.”

It’s not surprising that Dearborn is the center of opposition to Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. A city with a majority of residents are from Arab and North African countries, and it has also become a lightning rod for racist hysteria for many years now. Most recently the Wall Street Journal, ran a commentary piece on February 2nd by Steven Stalinsky, a professional Islamophobe and executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute“Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital, where he warned:

What’s happening in Dearborn isn’t simply a political problem for Democrats. It’s potentially a national-security issue affecting all Americans. Counterterrorism agencies at all levels should pay close attention.

Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said that Stalinsky’s article is an example of “an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn”. Hammoud posted on X (formerly Twitter):

“Effective immediately — Dearborn police will ramp up its presence across all places of worship and major infrastructure points. This is a direct result of the inflammatory @WSJ opinion piece that has led to an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn.”

Hammoud cautioned Dearborn residents, “Stay vigilant.”

Dearborn has seen this before. While it is best known for being the world headquarters of the Ford Motor Company, Christian Evangelicals have targeted the city repeatedly over the years. For example, in 2011, according to Daniel Devir:

Pastor Terry Jones burned a Koran in Gainesville, Florida, sparking deadly clashes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One year later, he burned a Koran again, and no one paid any attention. That same month he came to Dearborn, Michigan, to protest in front of the Islamic Center of America, the nation’s largest mosque. “Islam has one goal,” Jones told the small crowd, and a much larger group of counter-demonstrators and police, according to the Detroit Free Press. “That is world domination.”

“All-American Muslim” television series, a small effort by the TLC network to portray five Dearborn Muslim families in everyday challenges and circumstances of American life, was canceled after one season, because a hate campaign succeeded in getting major sponsors to end their support.

Dearborn’s Arab community can trace its roots back to the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, but saw a large influx of Arab and Muslim residents following the 1967 war onward. They sought employment, like many other immigrants in the past, in the region’s auto industry, and they also brought their politics with them, including Palestinian nationalism and opposition to Zionism. They were also inspired by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, who supported Palestinian liberation. On November 28, 1973,

On November 28, 1973, approximately 2,000 Detroit auto workers, led by Arab Americans, walked off their jobs at Chrysler’s Dodge Main plant, demanding that the leadership of their union, the United Auto Workers (UAW), divest from Israel. The strike, which was organized by the union’s recently formed Arab Workers Caucus, was centered around an event taking place that same day in Detroit: Leonard Woodcock, the president of UAW, was set to receive a humanitarian honor from a Zionist organization, B’nai B’rith International.

The UAW had a long history of politically supporting Israel and financially through the purchase of State Of Israel Bonds. The 1973 Arab workers strike, a long forgotten episode in the struggle against Zionism and U.S. imperialism, has been written about in many places, most recently by historian Jeff Schuhrke writing in Jacobin and available here. No wonder why the worst elements of the mainstream to crackpot far right are obsessed with Dearborn, it has and will continue to be central to the opposition to the Biden administration’s policies towards Palestine.

March on the DNC

Meanwhile, despite the hostility of the Democratic Party establish, the “Uncommitted” vote activists continued to push ahead. In Illinois, the March 19th primary revealed at that over fourteen percent of Chicago’s Democratic voters refused to vote for President Joe Biden. Illinois’ highly restrictive primary doesn’t offer an “uncommitted” option. “Uncommitted National is so proud of organizers in Chicago for mobilizing support for our anti-war movement,” says Layla Elabed, chair of the Uncommitted National campaign told In These Times. ​“Even without an uncommitted or equivalent option on the ballot, Chicago organizers were able to strongly refute Biden’s unrestricted funding of genocide in Gaza.”

Cook County, including Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, has one of the largest Palestinian populations in the country. The WLS, local ABC news affiliate, reported last December, “Today, the Chicagoland area is home to more Palestinians than anywhere else in America, with over 18,000 living in Cook County. The second largest population is in Wayne County, Michigan, which covers the Detroit metro area and has four times less than Cook County.” Not surprisingly, it has also been the seen of mass demonstrations in support of Palestine since Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

While the antiwar movement has certainly had an impact on mainstream politics, so far, it hasn’t had the effect of shaking up the mainstream political parties. There are no antiwar challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination, and unlikely given the short time left in the primary season. The few candidates running on third party platforms, such as Cornell West, face many hurdles due the U.S. electoral system’s hostility to third parties.

Right now, pro-Palestine activists are beginning to shift their eyes to the upcoming Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago in August. Along with abortion rights activists, pro-Palestine activists are battling a worried DNC and Chicago’s “Progressive” Mayor Brandon Johnson to secure permits as close to the United Center, where the convention is to be held. Chicago passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in January, after the city council passed a resolution supporting Israel in October.

Convention planners are clearly worried of potential protests that could disrupt the convention proceedings on the outside and on the inside from a handful of dissidents. “What makes this difficult is there’s going to be a lot of people who legitimately should be there, like credentialed, relatively high-up people who will have access to sort of exclusive areas of the convention,” said one person to WBEZ radio, who previously worked on several Democratic campaigns. “They might protest, but it’s not like you can just keep out, like, a vice chair of [a state] Democratic Party.”

A nationwide mobilization at the DNC would send a global message of solidarity to Palestine. See you in Chicago.

A version of this piece first appeared at Rebel.

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A Slow-Motion World War III?

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Image by UX Gun.

I’ve been describing this world of ours, such as it is, for almost 23 years at TomDispatch. I’ve written my way through three-and-a-half presidencies — god save us, it could be four in November! I’ve viewed from a grave (and I mean that word!) distance America’s endlessly disastrous wars of this century. I’ve watched the latest military budget hit almost $900 billion, undoubtedly on its way toward a cool trillion in the years to come, while years ago the whole “national security” budget (though “insecurity” would be a better word) soared to well over the trillion-dollar mark.

I’ve lived my whole life in an imperial power. Once, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was even “the lone superpower,” the last great power on planet Earth, or so its leaders believed. I then watched how, in a world without great-power dangers, it continued to invest ever more of our tax dollars in our military. A “peace dividend“? Who needed that? And yet, in the decades that followed, by far the most expensive military on planet Earth couldn’t manage to win a single war, no less its Global War on Terror. In fact, in this century, while fighting vain or losing conflicts across significant parts of the planet, it slowly but all too obviously began to go down the tubes, or perhaps I mean (if you don’t mind a few mixed metaphors) come apart at the seams?

And it never seems to end, does it? Imagine that 32 years after the U.S. became the last superpower on Planet Earth, in a devastating kind of political chaos, this country might indeed reelect a man who imagines himself running a future American “dictatorship” — his very word for it! — even if, publicly at least, just for a single day.

And yes, in 2024, as chaos blooms on the American political scene, the world itself continues to be remarkably at war — think of “war,” in fact, as humanity’s middle name — in both Ukraine and Gaza (with offshoots in Lebanon and Yemen). Meanwhile, this country’s now 22-year-old war on terror straggles on in its own devastating fashion, with threats of worse to come in plain sight.

After all, 88 years after two atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, nukes seem to be making a comeback (not that they were ever truly gone, of course). Thank you, Kim and Vlad! I’m thinking of how North Korean leader Kim Jong-un implicitly threatened to nuke his nonnuclear southern neighbor recently. But also, far more significantly how, in his own version of a State of the Union address to his people, Russian President Vladimir Putin very publicly threatened to employ nukes from his country’s vast arsenal (assumedly “tactical” ones, some of which are more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II), should any European countries — think France — send their troops into Ukraine.

And don’t forget that, amid all of this, my own country’s military, eternally hiking its “defense” budget, continues to prepare in a big-time fashion for a future war with — yes — China! Of course, that country is, in turn, rushing to upgrade its own nuclear arsenal and the rest of its military machine as well. Only recently, for instance, the U.S. and Japan held joint military maneuvers that, as they openly indicated for the first time, were aimed at preparing for just such a future conflict with China and you can’t get much more obvious than that.

Another World War?

Oh, and when it comes to war, I haven’t even mentioned, for instance, the devastating civil war in Sudan that has nothing to do with any of the major powers. Yes, we humans just can’t seem to stop making war while, to the tune of untold trillions of dollars globally, preparing for ever more of it. And the truly strange thing is this: it seems to matter not at all that the very world on which humanity has done so forever and a day is now itself being unsettled in a devastating way that no military of any sort, armed in any fashion, will ever be able to deal with.

Let’s admit it: we humans have always had a deep urge to make war. Of course, logically speaking, we shouldn’t continue to do so, and not just for all the obvious reasons but because we’re on a planet that can’t take it anymore. (Yes, making war or simply preparing for it means putting staggering amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and so, quite literally, making war on the planet itself.) But — as both history and the present moment seem to indicate all too decisively — we just can’t stop ourselves.

In the process, while hardly noticing, it seems as if we’ve become ever more intent on conducting a global war on this planet itself. Our weapons in that war — and in their own long-term fashion, they’re likely to prove no less devastating than nuclear arms — have been fossil fuels. I’m thinking, of course, of coal, oil, and natural gas and the greenhouse gases that drilling for them and the use of them emit in staggering quantities even in what passes for peacetime.

In the previous century, of course, there were two devastating “world” wars, World War I and World War II. They were global events that, in total, killed more than a hundred million of us and devastated parts of the planet. But here’s the truly strange thing: while local and regional wars continue in this century in a striking fashion, few consider the way we’re loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane while, in the process, heating this planet disastrously as a new kind of world war. Think of climate change, in fact, as a kind of slow-motion World War III. After all, it couldn’t be more global or, in the end, more destructive than a world war of the worst sort.

And unlike the present wars in Gaza and Ukraine, which, even thousands of miles away, continue to be headline-making events, the war on this planet normally gets surprisingly little attention in much of the media. In fact, in 2023, a year that set striking global heat records month by month from June to December and was also the hottest year ever recorded, the major TV news programs of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox actually cut their coverage of global warming significantly, according to Media Matters for America.

If I Don’t Get Elected, It’s Going to Be a Blood Bath”

I live in New York City which, like much of the rest of the planet, set a heat record for 2023. In addition, the winter we just passed through was a record one for warmth. And I began writing this piece on a set of days in early March when the temperature in my city also hit records in the mid-60s, and when, on March 14th (not April 14th, May 14th, or even June 14th), it clocked 70-plus degrees. I was walking outside that afternoon with my shirtsleeves rolled up, my sweater in my backpack, and my spring jacket tied around my waist, feeling uncomfortably hot in my blue jeans even on the shadier side of the street.

And yes, if, as my wife and I did recently, you were to walk down to the park near where we live, you’d see that the daffodils are already blooming wildly as are other flowers, while the first trees are budding, including a fantastic all-purple one that’s burst out fully, all of this in a fashion that might once have seemed normal sometime in April. And yes, some of what I’m describing is certainly quite beautiful in the short run, but under it lies an increasingly grim reality when it comes to extreme (and extremely hot) weather.

While I was working on this piece, the largest Texas fires ever (yes, ever!), continued to burn, evidently barely contained, with far more than a million acres of that state’s panhandle already fried to a crisp. Oh, and those record-setting Canadian forest fires that scorched tens of millions of acres of that country, while turning distant U.S. cities like New York into smoke hells last June have, it turns out, festered underground all winter as “zombie fires.” And they may burst out again in an even more devastating fashion this spring or summer. In fact, in 2023, from Hawaii to Chile to Europe, there were record wildfires of all sorts on our increasingly over-heated planet. And far worse is yet to come, something you could undoubtedly say as well about more intense flooding, more violent storms, and so on.

We are, in other words, increasingly on a different planet, though you would hardly know it amid the madness of our moment. I mean, imagine this: Russia, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, clearly doesn’t consider climate change a significant issue, is on pace to achieve an oil-drilling record for the second year in a row. China, despite installing far more green power than any other country, has also been using more coal than all other nations combined, and set global records for building new coal-fired power plants.

Meanwhile, the third “great” power on this planet, despite having a president dedicated to doing something about climate change, is still the largest exporter of natural gas around and continues to produce oil at a distinctly record pace.

And don’t forget the five giant fossil-fuel companies, BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies, which in 2023 produced oil, made profits, and rewarded shareholders at — yes, you guessed it! — a record pace, while the major petrostates of our world are still, according to the Guardian, “planning expansions that would blow the planet’s carbon budget twice over.”

In sum, then, this world of ours only grows more dangerous by the year. And I haven’t even mentioned artificial intelligence, have I? As Michael Klare has written in an analysis for the Arms Control Association, the dangers of AI and other emerging military technologies are likely to “expand into the nuclear realm by running up the escalation ladder or by blurring the distinction between a conventional and nuclear attack.”

In other words, human war-making could become both more inhuman and worse at the same time. Now, add just one more factor into the global equation. America’s European and Asian allies see U.S. leadership, dominant since 1945, experiencing a potentially epoch-ending, terminal failure, as the global Pax Americana (that had all too little to do with “peace”) is crumbling — or do I mean overheating?

What they see, in fact, is two elderly men locked in an ever more destructive, inward-looking electoral knife fight, with one of them warning ominously that “if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath… for the country.” And if he isn’t victorious, here’s his further prediction: “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.” Of course, were he to be victorious the same could be true, especially since he’s promised from his first day in office to “drill, drill, drill,” which, at this point in our history, is, by definition, to declare war on this planet!

Unfortunately, Donald Trump isn’t alone. All too sadly, we humans clearly have trouble focusing on the world we actually inhabit. We’d prefer to fight wars instead. Consider that the definition not just of imperial decline, but of decline period in the age of climate change.

And yet, it’s barely news.

This piece first appeared at TomDispatch.

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The United States and the Middle East: the Politics of Miscalculation

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John Foster Dulles with U.S. President Eisenhower in 1956 – Public Domain

The U.S. experience in the Middle East is a classic study of political and military miscalculation leading to strategic failure.  President Joe Biden’s political support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which is being sorely tested, and his military support for Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which is making the United States complicit in Israel’s genocidal campaign, is the latest and worst example of U.S. miscalculation.  Overall, the exercise of U.S. military power in the Middle East, designed to gain strategic advantage, has backfired.  It has led to disarray in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, and has opened diplomatic opportunities for Russia and China.

The modern start for U.S. miscalculation in the Middle East took place nearly 70 years ago, when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles offered to support the construction of Egypt’s Aswan Dam and then abruptly reneged.  When Dulles, bowing to right-wing pressures to stop the financial support for the dam, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company.  The original offer to Egypt created political anxiety in Israel, leading to a huge increase in French military support to the IDF and eventually to a secret British-French-Israeli scheme to invade the Sinai and secure the Suez Canal.  The withdrawal of U.S. aid also opened the door to increased Soviet influence in Cairo, and the nationalization of the canal led to the tripartite invasion of Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s criticism of the tripartite invasion was treated favorably by Egypt, but the proclamation of the Eisenhower Doctrine a year later was critical of Nasser and the strengthened Soviet-Egyptian relationship.  The Eisenhower Doctrine led to CIA’s covert support for Nasser’s political opposition as well as a serious economic boycott.  The boycott served as a model for later (mostly unsuccessful) sanctions against such Third World countries as Cuba and Libya, which opened up additional opportunities for Soviet diplomatic influence.

The wars of Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush had enormous unexpected consequences that are still creating political and military problems for the United States throughout the region.  The Gulf War in 1990, popularly known as Desert Storm, is considered by most pundits to be a major success for U.S. interests, but the war could have been avoided. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had received Saddam Hussein’s agreement to withdraw Iraqi forces from Kuwait, but it was too late for a Bush administration that was committed to the use of force.  The war led to serious difficulties for President Bill Clinton in the Middle East throughout his two-term presidency.  Moreover, Operation Desert Storm was Osama bin Laden’s inspiration to attack the United States.

Interestingly, Bush Senior and his national security adviser, General Brent Scowcroft made a serious effort to dissuade Bush Junior from his fateful decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003, which rivaled the war in Vietnam as two of the worst miscalculations in any U.S. decision to go to war.  The elder Bush argued that the use of U.S. military power could lead to fracturing the Iraqi state and compromise the long-term balance of power in the Persian Gulf, which it certainly did.  The United States had no genuine case for war against Iraq, so it manufactured a bogus case around non-existent nuclear weaponry.  CIA director George Tenet helped the president in making the case by providing phony intelligence reports to the White House.  Tenet assured the president that it would be a “slam dunk” to provide such intelligence.

Scowcroft wrote an article for the New Yorker to remind the younger Bush that his father’s administration had good reasons for stopping the U.S. invasion at the Iraqi border in 1991.  Scowcroft concluded that a U.S. invasion would lead to civil war in Iraq and would require a U.S. military presence for a protracted period.  Indeed, several thousand U.S. military forces are still in Iraq, and contending with the presence of Iranian influence.  The U.S. invasion opened the door to Iran after all. 

President Biden may have made the most impactful miscalculation of any American president with his belief that huge amounts of military and economic aid to Israel would lead to U.S. influence over Israeli decision making as well as to Israeli moderation of its policies in the West Bank and Gaza.  There is no reason for Biden to be surprised by any opposition from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that would compromise the interests of the United States.  Netanyahu often timed the announcement of new settlements on the West Bank during official U.S. visits, including two of Biden’s visits, and the Israeli prime minister’s address in 2015 to a Joint Session of Congress in order to block the Iran nuclear accord should have led to consequences, particularly a review and reduction of U.S. military support.

Biden also should have known that he can’t have it both ways by criticizing the illegal and immoral Russian invasion of Ukraine while being complicit in the illegal and immoral Israeli war in Gaza.  There is really no moral difference between President Vladimir Putin’s horrific campaign to suffocate Ukrainian self-determination and sovereignty and Netanyahu’s horrific campaign to suffocate the Palestinians.  Biden continues to emphasize the importance of “the day after” regarding the Gazan war, when the urgent need today for a cease-fire and the end to Israeli occupation should have the highest priority.  Biden may build his reelection campaign around his support for Ukraine, but his re-election bid may fail because of his complicity with Netanyahu and the IDF.

The post The United States and the Middle East: the Politics of Miscalculation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.





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