Posted by David Ehrens
on 2025-07-21Comments Off on Progressive Democratic plan for 2026
younger and better-looking, maybe, but still representing the Democratic Party
The Center for Working-Class Politics and Jacobin Magazine, from the vaguely left wing of the Democratic Party that includes Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have released a study entitled “Working-Class Social and Economic Attitudes: An Analysis,” which recommends a strategy for calibrating an appeal to working class voters sufficient to re-take the U.S. Senate.
Their conclusions are hardly different from any that mainstream Democrats may have drawn from their stinging rebuke in 2024: stay away from social issues (“identity politics”), focus on bread-and-butter economic issues, strengthen the social safety net, but don’t even dream of tackling head-on the rot at the heart of America’s Capitalist economic system. And even after Gaza you still won’t find the words “war” or “foreign policy” in the CWCP-Jacobin report. America’s #1 budget expense — war — doesn’t even rate a mention.
For the “progressive” Democratic authors of this report, the Democratic roster is already filled with sufficient careerists and machine Democrats — if only they employ “careful persuasion” — to woo back the red-hatted American voter with a carefully calibrated, poll-tested, and lab-grown shpiel.
“We have presented a comprehensive analysis of the attitudes and preferences of working-class Americans, all against the backdrop of the Democratic Party’s decisive defeat in the 2024 presidential election. The relevance is clear: over the past several decades, the Democratic Party has increasingly pivoted away from the working class, leaning into a misguided assumption that they would still retain a large enough voter base to be electorally successful. Kamala Harris’s defeat proves the weakness of that assumption. The only realistic hope the Democrats have for building a political base capable of winning national elections and taking consistent control of the US Senate is to win back a significant portion of the working class. Our analysis offers insights into how this might be achieved. Our findings suggest that the Democratic Party would be wise to capitalize on the working class’s strong preference for policies that are economically egalitarian — particularly predistributive policies that involve strengthening worker rights and leverage as well as existing universal social insurance and health care programs — while deemphasizing potentially divisive social policies. Several of the economic policies we analyzed here, such as those concerning increased job security, wages, and worker power, would make a strong foundation for a successful campaign.
The right candidates for this plan are out there. And given our findings, the Democratic Party would be wise to embrace such candidates, while eschewing those politicians on its current roster that have comparably little to offer the working class. The stakes couldn’t be much higher. The second Trump term has combined authoritarian populist rhetoric with a slash-and-smash approach to the federal government that threatens to undermine democracy as we know it and can only result in a greater concentration of wealth at the top and a hollowed-out state incapable of solving our biggest national problems.
Yet at the same time, working-class voters’ skepticism toward government and government spending poses a serious challenge to progressives who advocate bold, transformative economic policies. While such programs might be necessary to turn around decades of neoliberal policies that have left so many working-class communities behind, careful persuasion is still needed to win back working-class trust. This is both an indispensable task and an extraordinarily difficult challenge given the current state of working-class attitudes. Nonetheless, if we have any hope of undercutting Trump’s savvy exploitation of populist resentment, it’s our only option.”
Is this free advertising for Giulani’s endorsed candidate, Curtis Sliwa?
It’s fair to say that everyone from the hardcore far right to the marshmellowy liberal center has been seriously unnerved by the victory of Zohran Mamdini, a Muslim and a member of the Democratic Party left, in the New York Democratic primary race for mayor.
The Right has lost its mind to the point you’d think that End Times were upon us and that Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao had replaced the Four Horsemen.
Former shell of a shell of a shell Rudi Giuliani went on the Benny Show to call for Mamdani’s arrest. Trump sycophant and content-free Islamophobe Laura Loomer pulled every fire alarm she could find warning of a communist jihadi — from Africa! — taking over the city. Wingnuts like this one and this one depicted the Statue of Liberty in a burqa were Mamdani to become mayor.
Liberals played it a bit cooler but they had their own singular concern — Israel.
On the night before the primary Steven Colbert invited Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander onto his show and, after a few warmup questions, went straight to the Big Question, requiring an answer with no nuance but every reassurance that Zionism remained sacrosanct:
“Despite this being a New York City race, foreign affairs have become part of it, partly because this has become such a multicultural city,” Colbert led with. “And so I’ll ask the same question of both of you; I’ll start with you, Mr. Lander. Does the state of Israel have the right to exist?”
Neither candidate was offered the opportunity to answer the question of what sort of state Israel should exist as, so questions of a secular democracy or a single state in which everyone has precisely the same rights were never open for discussion. Which is precisely the illiberal position “liberals” take on Israel.
Lander answered the question first with an oxymoron, “I support the vision of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” Colbert then turned to Mamdani: “Mr. Mamdani, same question: does the State of Israel have the right to exist?” “Yes,” Mamdani quickly answered. “Like all nations, I believe it has the right to exist and a responsibility also to uphold international law.”
Both candidates chose the Liberal Zionist-approved formulation: two states with Israel preserving Jewish supremacy over its non-Jewish citizens, with the world pretending it’s a democracy. Everyone left the studio happy.
Despite Mamdani’s checking off all the correct boxes for the cameras, Democrats remained frosty to a candidate who has voiced reservations about both Zionism and Capitalism. The Forward reported that New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand refused to endorse Mamdani and condemned his support for international resistance to the Occupation. Axios reported that neither New York’s other Senator Chuck Schumer nor Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (NY) would be endorsing Mamdani either. Nassau County (NY) Rep. Laura Gillen called Mamdani the “absolute wrong choice for New York” and Nassau County Rep. Tom Suozzi also expressed “serious concerns” with Mamdani’s victory.
Axios also reported that Mamdani’s win had Democratic Party donors scrambling to find ways of breathing new life into the campaign of disgraced New York governor Andrew Cuomo.
And in an editorial intended to nip Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral aspirations in the bud, the New York Times suddenly felt it necessary to warn its readers that any outrage or anger over Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran (which no doubt contributed to Mamdani’s win) were actually expressions of “antisemitism.”
Never mind that a flood of Islamophobia had just been uncorked in the City and could easily have been the subject of NYT editorial chastisement. But there was no way that was ever going to happen. Ignoring all the Muslim bashing, the Times plowed ahead, bashing the Left for its supposed “double standards” regarding Israel.
The Times editors chose the brutal arson attack on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, the murder of Israeli embassy employees, and a gruesome arson attack in Boulder, Colorado for their readers to illustrate the severity of antisemitism (which is true enough) — but the well-documented daily slaughter of food seekers by Israeli occupation troops, systematic starvation of Palestinian children by Israeli policy, the head-bashing of anti-Zionist Jewish students in the U.S., McCarthyite repression and attacks on higher education demanded by far-right Christian and Zionist extremists — were all somehow irrelevant to any discussion of why people are so angry at Israel — or in the editors’ formulation, “antisemitic.”
The antisemitism “statistics” the Times cited are also questionable. Whatever passes for “antisemitism” nowadays is most often determined according to the IHRA definition which applies 16 tests, 11 of them related to Israel, to cast all criticisms of Zionism or the Zionist state as “antisemitism.” Other cases rely on largely unsubstantiated numbers from the ADL, a group Wikipedia considers unreliable, which has now abandoned any pretense of being a civil rights group and instead is little more than a domestic collaborator with the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
If criticism of Israel is weaponized to inflate antisemitism statistics, what is the real level of baseless hatred of Jews? Thanks to pro-Israel zealots, we have no idea.
Aside from extremely rare cases of murder and physical intimidation — easily matched by the murders of Muslims, Sikhs, Latinos, Black and trans people, and now Democratic politicians — many of these so-called “victims of antisemitism” are snowflakes like Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Harvard student who alleged he was targeted as a Jew because not enough Muslim and Jewish anti-genocide protesters were getting their heads cracked open by police in the encampments he so hated. For his “courage” Kestenbaum became a darling of Trump’s GOP.
Or Yoav Segev, a Harvard business student and son of two Israeli Foreign Ministry “diplomats,” who stepped on protesters as he tried to doxx them at a “die-in” and ended up claiming that he was the victim of assault. Both were student members of the Brandeis Center (not to be confused with the university), a far-right Zionist attack group whose secondary goals are dismantling DEI and affirmative action.
The New York Times appears to subscribe to the old Zionist saw that Jews are always the victim, no reason, no exceptions, and this inexplicable, primeval force has led, precisely now, to a spike of “hate crimes” unrelated to anything happening in the world. In emphasizing ahistorical antisemitism the Times essentially invokes biblical Amalek.
The more mysterious and inexplicable any phenomenon is, the better propaganda it makes. Statistics that portray anti-Israel protests as antisemitic are no longer burdened by having to account for actual geopolitical events like the slaughter of civilians or unprovoked military assaults on other countries. No sir. Just chalk up every expression of disgust or anger at Israel’s actions to an eternal, mysterious — even biblical — source. Needless to say, arguments like the Times’s are irrational hogwash.
Part of the unfairness of all Jews taking the blame for the crimes of Zionism is that mainstream Jewish organizations, from Jewish federations to congregations, insist on conflating Zionism with Judaism. Mainstream Jewish institutions have embraced Zionism in a death grip so tight that Jews who regard Zionism’s immoral nationalism as diametrically opposed to Judaism’s ethical values are marginalized and reviled as “self-hating” by their own communities. A good example is New York’s YeshivaWorld magazine, which attacked Brad Lander in precisely this way.
It was no coincidence that the New York Times’s “reminder” of the sins of Left “antisemitism” appeared so quickly following Mamdani’s primary victory. The Times not-so-subtly placed its fat thumb on the mayoral race by tag-teaming with MAGAworld to attack both Mamdani and the Left.
The Times perfunctorily dinged Trump for his crackdown on campuses — but not with much enthusiasm or consistency. The Times editors actually agree with Trump, Elise Stefanik, Virginia Foxx and the Brandeis Center that antisemitism is “exploding” on college campuses. Except that it is not, at least in comparison to Islamophobia.
If you read the studies that Harvard’s Task Force produced, 80% of Muslims feel unsafe on campuses — a much higher number than that of Jewish students — and this is largely because of the constellation of Zionist groups like Canary Mission which doxx Muslim students, because of police and government repression, and because their own cowardly university administrations have been collaborating with the Trump administration.
Trump’s State Department never targeted Jewish and Israeli students as it did Muslims (culminating with summarily withdrawing student visas and then “disappearing” them), but the Harvard study took far more seriously the hurtfeelings of Zionist students whose Israeli hostage posters were ripped down.
Showing perfunctory “balance” by offering a couple of examples of right-wing antisemitism, the editors pointed a finger at Trump for dining with a Holocaust denier. But since the NYT itself denies the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, this only highlights the editors’ hypocrisy.
But the heart of the NYT editorial was to overtly push the pro-Zionist IHRA definition, to use it to excoriate the Left, and to discredit any mayoral candidates who just might,coincidentally, belong to the anti-Zionist Left:
“Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, has suggested a “3D” test for when criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism, with the D’s being delegitimization, demonization and double standards. Progressive rhetoric has regularly failed that test in recent years.”
Sharansky, who worked for the Israeli Foreign Ministry at the time, concocted the IHRA definition, and his 3D test was its first iteration.
The NYT uses this handy multi-tool to elaborate upon various examples of supposed “double standards” on Israel — none of which are worthy of addressing here because such criticisms simply do not reflect double standards.
There is no other nation that the United States throws so much money at, devotes so many UN vetos to, provides so much funding for (in even our domestic budgets), or is so often involved with in military aggressions — as Israel. Furthermore, since the end of South Africa’s apartheid state, Israel has been unique in the world as the only pro-Western state anything like Afrikaaner South Africa.
Historically, Israel is an aberration, an anachronism, a relic that still embraces 19th century nationalism and 18th century settler-colonialism. It is a state that historian Tony Judt predicted would not and could not survive into the 21st century in its present form. In 2003 Judt wrote with amazing clarity: “The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians.”
Liberals seem to have a preference for the worst choices.
So if anything is a double standard, it is the coddling of Israel by the U.S. and other Western imperialists, who routinely slap sanctions on savage, repressive regimes that violate human rights — but not Israel. While these nations themselves claim to embrace secular democracy and the rule of law, and in the U.S. Democrats claim to oppose Christian nationalism, they spare no effort to promote ethno-nationalism abroad, undermine democracy even in their own countries and to violate domestic, international, and moral law in defending one of the worst human rights abusers on the planet.
Posted by David Ehrens
on 2025-06-24Comments Off on Trump’s and Israel’s tag team war on Iran
a B-2 getting ready to take off to bomb somebody, somewhere
In most American coverage of the US bombing of Iran, there is an implicit acceptance that Iran “had it coming,” that after all it is a fanatical regime everyone understands is building a bomb to destroy Israel. We can thank Israel and its fleet of lobbyists for this narrative. We can also thank institutions like the New York Times, which endlessly recycle Israel’s talking points. Last week the NYT’s editorial board published a weasel-worded op-ed which contained this:
“A nuclear-armed Iran would make the world less safe. It would destabilize the already volatile Middle East. It could imperil Israel’s existence. It would encourage other nations to acquire their own nuclear weapons, with far-reaching geopolitical consequences.”
Naturally Israel’s own nukes or it’s ongoing genocide of Gazans weren’t mentioned and the article went on to describe the main defect of Israel’s bombing Iran:
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has acted to destroy Iran’s capacity to build nuclear weapons without first shoring up allies’ support.”
So according to the NYT editors, it’s not that bombing Iran is unwise or bad — they’ve already told you why they approve — it’s that Israel has thoughtlessly failed to get sufficient American support for its aggression. What the editors of the New York Times want is bloody war — but with an AUMF that specifically includes Iran:
“If Mr. Trump wants the United States to join the Israeli war against Iran, the next step is as clear: Congress must first authorize the use of military force.”
Where Liberals seem to part company from war hawks is solely in objecting to the current inhabitant of the White House doing bombing unilaterally; in their liberal world military savagery requires a war powers resolution — not even passing the Constitutional bar for Congress to actually declare war. In other words; it’s not bad for the United States to attack another country for no good reason; it’s simply how you go about doing it.
But in a post-nuclear world, does anyone think that any nation can responsibly build nuclear weapons without eventually using them?
Not really. Americans almost universally believe restrictions on nuclear weapons should be placed solely on Iran. Not on the U.S. itself, which actually used nuclear weapons on human beings — twice. Not on India, which has become an authoritarian, ethno-nationalist state like Israel or Hungary and frequently rattles sabres at Pakistan, another nuclear power. No restrictions on Russia, China or North Korea, who are serious nuclear rivals. Demanding “no nukes” of any of these three would only serve to highlight our own hypocrisy.
And of course Americans don’t fear the nukes any of the European nuclear powers — the UK or France — who are habitual partners in American and/or NATO-led colonial-imperialist adventures. Nor from Israel — the most reckless, bloodthirsty regime in the Middle East, possessing between 90 and 300 nukes, a nation that over the last 24 months has bombed pretty much every one of its neighbors.
No, somehow in the homogenous Western narrative only Iran must be prevented from having nukes.
Let us recall, however, that China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, the EU, the United States, and Iran all signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on July 14, 2015 in Vienna. It came into force on January 16, 2016. The agreement called for Iran’s peaceful use of nuclear technology, placed limits on enrichment, set milestones for verification of peaceful uses of the technology, and provided a path to removing sanctions from Iran. The agreement anticipated “that full implementation of this JCPOA will positively contribute to regional and international peace and security.” And Iran was sticking to it.
Netanyahu has been selling war on Iran for years. He finally closed the deal.
But true to American and Israeli contempt for international agreements and the rule-based order, both objected to the JCPOA so Trump abandoned the agreement in his first term, on May 8, 2018. Despite the U.S. withdrawal from JCPOA, it hypocritically insisted that Iran stick to the agreement even while slapping additional sanctions on Iran in violation of the JCPOA. When Biden became president, he went through the motions of re-joining the agreement. But, like Trump, his goal was to re-negotiate a more restrictive JCPOA than Iran had originally signed, appease Israel’s lobbyists, preserve Trump’s sanctions, and show that Democrats could be every bit the war-mongers as their MAGA brethren. For all his dithering and excuses, Biden could have simply re-committed to the original JCPOA.
There are 32 countries with nuclear programs, and only a handful of them have weapons programs. Despite the Israeli propaganda thrown at us for decades, each time ringing the alarm that Iran is mere weeks away from nuclear weapons, Iran has plenty of legitimate uses for nuclear technology that have nothing to do with weapons or even nuclear power. Especially because of Western sanctions.
Typical commercial uses of nuclear technology include: food irradiation; sterilization of medical instruments and equipment; radiation therapy for insect control and crop protection; inspecting welds and materials in manufacturing; gauging and measurement in various industries; and radioisotope-based analysis for analyzing materials and detecting impurities.
Medical uses include: radiation therapy to treat various types of cancer; nuclear medicine techniques such as PET scans to diagnose and monitor disease; radioisotope-based therapies for targeted cancer treatments, such as thyroid cancer; sterilization of medical instruments and equipment; radio-pharmaceuticals for diagnosing and treating cancers, cardiovascular disease, and neurological disorders; diagnosing and monitoring bone density and osteoporosis; and nuclear medicine research.
Specific radioisotopes often used for cancer treatment include: technetium-99m, for diagnostic imaging and cancer treatment; iodine-131, for thyroid cancer treatment and diagnostic imaging; molybdenum-99, for diagnostic imaging and cancer treatment; samarium-153, for pain relief and cancer treatment; and radium-223, for prostate cancer treatment.
After the US overthrew a secular, democratic Iranian government, it installed Shah Reza Pahlavi. Israel and the US both supported this monster. Iran’s nuclear program was just fine as long as it was in the hands of a US-approved tyrant.
The 32 countries with nuclear technology represent over half the world population. Within these 32 countries (Israel won’t admit to having a nuclear program), there are 440 power plants and all of them require some sort of enrichment or processing. Armenia with 2.1 million people has nuclear power. Other nations under 50 million people with nuclear power include: Argentina; Belgium; Bulgaria; Canada; the Czech Republic; Finland; Hungary; Netherlands; Romania; Slovakia; Slovenia; Spain; Sweden; Switzerland; Taiwan; Ukraine; and the United Arab Emirates.
Of the nuclear weapons states, France, with two-thirds the population of Iran, has 58 nuclear stations. The UK, also two-thirds the size of Iran, has 15.
All of these countries have programs much like the one the US just bombed at the behest of Israel. Miraculously, we have not bombed Switzerland or Canada. Yet.
In all of this is the inconvenient truth that Iran has never had a weapons program. If the Trump administration has any proof that Iran does, they won’t show us. The EU, the IAEA, various U.S. national security assessments, and even an opinion only weeks ago from National Security Advisor Tulsi Gabbard — before Mafia Don Trump leaned on her — was that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.
Instead, Trump appears to be getting his “intelligence” from Israel and a small group of dubious “experts”, according to the Independent. These “advisors” include: Stephen Miller; Steve Witkoff, a luxury real estate developer; Steve Bannon; Marjorie Taylor Greene; Lindsay Graham; Tom Cotton; Candace Owens; John Ratliffe, a former CIA director with close ties to Israel; and a pro-Israel general, Michael Erik Kurilla.
When asked on Air Force One about Gabbard’s previous assessment, Trump shot back, “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having it.” Similarly refusing to acknowledge the discrepancy between European and previous U.S. assessments that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons — and Trump’s “experts” — Marco Rubio was asked on “Face the Nation” where Trump’s “intelligence” came from. “It doesn’t matter!” he screamed at news anchor Margaret Brennon. “That’s irrelevant!”
TheIsraeli-American Council, a front for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, wants to restore the Iranian dictator’s son to power.
For over 30 years American foreign policy makers have been looking for an opportunity to bomb Iran. Recall Senator John McCain singing “Bomb, Bomb Iran” to a Beach Boys tune 18 years ago. In the intervening years there were two Gulf wars — fought on equally spurious intel. Civil liberties were a casualty, a huge surveillance and police state were built, and the power of the President to declare war was handed over to him on a platter by a cowardly Congress using “war powers resolutions” which bypass the Constitutional requirement that it is Congress that declares war.
Ultimately, war hawks and Israel’s lobbyists found a president who didn’t give a damn about war powers resolutions or even Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. Nor anything else in that wrinkly old document.
The “Art of the Deal” maker simply made a side deal with Israel, and in so doing blindsided the American Congress, lied about a two-week timetable during which Congress might have given him war powers anyway (so much for the New York Times argument), and then had his White Supremacist Crusader-tatted defense chief send B-2’s to bomb Iran.
Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have been deer in the headlights since the election, unable to get Democrats to fall into line. Some of them — for example, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, New Jersey Congressman Josh Gottheimer, former Clinton aide Jamie Metzl, and others — actually cheered the illegal bombings and sang Trump’s praises.
California Congressman Rohit Khanna penned a piece in the Nation arguing for support for his bipartisan war powers resolution, which so far has only a small number of cosponsors. In the Senate Tim Kaine of Virginia filed a similar resolution, which does nothing but attempt to claw back powers ceded to the president in previous AUMF agreements, and only in regard to Iran. Congress is neither bold enough nor smart enough to terminate all AUMFs and forcefully exercise its Constitutional rights.
Texas Congressman Al Green did actually file articles of impeachment citing Trump’s usurpation of Congressional powers. Not only is bombing a nation and killing hundreds of civilians without Congressional approval an unconstitutional act, doing so as an professional courtesy for [another] genocidal regime and lying to Congress about it ought to result in impeachment, prison, or the firing squad.
But neither resolutions nor articles of impeachment have accomplished anything more than to give Congress a platform for grand theatre. If we really want to hold criminal presidents accountable, the Department of Justice needs to stop treating them as emperors and to start prosecuting them. But because the Constitution unwisely placed the Department of Justice under the Presidential branch (which Washington felt was too similar to a King), prosecutions of a sitting president are virtually impossible. Any trials of past presidents must be held when a new regime comes to power. For that a simple DOJ memo would suffice.
But none of this alters the insanity and the depravity of bombing Iran in the first place.
A few nights ago I listened to Mehdi Hasan’s interview with Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute. Parsi knows more about Iran than Trump, his kooky Iran war panel, Hegseth, Rubio, Cruz, Schumer, Jeffries, and both Clintons put together. Parsi’s own father was jailed by the Shah and then again by the Ayatollah, so you don’t have to tell him about the sins of the Islamic Republic. Parsi also gave a shorter interview to CBS Mornings.
In both interviews Parsi alluded to the JCPOA, which was doing its job and was something Trump should not have abrogated. And for all the contempt in which Parsi holds the Iranian regime, he nevertheless does not regard Iran as a bunch of fanatical lunatics. Iran’s responses have been measured, restrained, strategic, and its counter-attacks have been measured and proportionate. For example, Iran called the White House to warn the U.S. of the reprisal missiles to Qatar in order to minimize loss of life.
Parsi has a pretty good idea of what comes next. And it’s a completely rational response on Iran’s part. Parsi told CBS Mornings, “I frankly think that what has been done here [by Trump] more or less guarantees that Iran will be a nuclear weapons state five to ten years from now.”
Iran and every other target of American foreign policy and military “intervention” have surely noticed that the only country that the U.S. will not bomb is one with nuclear weapons.
So the bombing of Iran is the result of the conventional wisdom — of both the Dr. Strangeloves and also the liberals who mumble in their sleep that Iran is a “fanatical” state.
Because of ingrained, irrational, and institutionalized American hostility toward Iran, our Israel-influenced refusal to accord Iran’s non-defense nuclear program the same rights as dozens of other nations (especially Israel), or to honor an international agreement both nations signed, Iran has now been forced to start developing nuclear weapons in earnest.
And, now, as Israel and the U.S. contemplate even more bombings, there’s a quick solution for this too.
Once upon a time there was a sheriff’s son… let’s call him Jimmy Lee.
Jimmy Lee lived in an old plantation built by slaves on Indian land, on a lovely lane lined with trees covered in Spanish moss. Jimmy had been given every advantage in a world constructed expressly for people of his complexion. But still he was unsatisfied. There were few rules for a boy like Jimmy Lee. He graduated from killing cats as a tyke, to tipping over Black families’ outhouses as a teen, to beating Black folks up as an adult, even blinding a young man in a particularly violent incident, eventually joining the Klan — all while Daddy Lee groomed him to be the next sheriff.
Daddy Lee had no qualms about stealing from county taxpayers to finance extravagant toys for himself and young Jimmy. The pampered son naturally had a collection of hand guns and semiautomatics, quite the bachelor pad, and Daddy’s old Chevy 454 SS pickup. He was brash and hard-assed. He was the envy of even liberal townfolk.
Jimmy Lee’s Apocalypse 6×6
But now, with all the money Daddy had managed to siphon from the county, good ole Jimmy now also had an Apocalypse 6×6 Dodge Hellcat with 707 horses and a reworked chassis. The goddamn thing looked like a frigging armed personnel carrier and scared the shit out of all the neighbors — which of course was the whole point.
A youthful career of unpunished theft, assault, and arson eventually led Jimmy to home invasions and fraudulent home foreclosures, made possible only through the quasi-legal machinations of Daddy Lee, judicial cronies, and several banks. Within short order Jimmy and his friends had taken ownership of almost half the homes on the other side of the tracks that marked the town’s racial boundary.
Jimmy Lee
One day Jimmy simply broke into a Black doctor’s home, Glock in hand, his masked friends carrying bats, knives and AR-15’s. This time the home owner put up quite a fight but still ended up in the emergency room at his own underfunded Black clinic. The doctor’s friends and neighbors protested, of course, and launched a fruitless legal effort to reclaim the beloved physician’s home from the invaders. They even mounted a boycott of businesses that supported Jimmy Lee and his corrupt father, but legislators labelled them racists and terrorists, enacting dozens of laws to criminalize victims and shield the perpetrators.
The entire system was stacked against them. Even the small town papers always seemed to side with Jimmy Lee or Daddy Lee. Nevertheless, the case became so well-known outside the county and engendered such outrage that a deal was reached — Jimmy Lee would stay in the invaded home, but the doctor and his family got to stay in the basement while everyone but the actual owner decided what was fair. Town liberals heralded this new “two family” arrangement as the best and only viable resolution to such cases — which were quickly multiplying.
Daddy Lee
But the arrangement rankled Jimmy Lee, who believed he was entitled to the entire house. It rankled his pride. It rankled his sense of white superiority and entitlement that this… this clearly inferior doctor was treated with kid gloves and was allowed to stay in Jimmy Lee’s house, albeit in the basement.
As the anger welled up in Jimmy Lee’s veins, he’d periodically stomp down the old wood basement stairs to give the doctor a thrashing to remember. Or he’d kill one of the doctor’s cats, destroy some furniture, or traumatize his children. In his heart of hearts what Jimmy Lee really wanted was to murder them all in the most grotesque manner imaginable. But the time wasn’t quite right.
One day it was the doctor’s turn — long overdue, if you ask me — to erupt in rage. He left his basement and found some of Jimmy’s buddies in their stolen homes and killed them in their beds. Having made his point the doctor went home to his little house — the only home he knew — and waited.
Unfortunately for the doctor, whatever little public sympathy there was for his situation rapidly went up in smoke. Every county deputy, every sheriff and deputy and police officer from every surrounding county — even the state police — were called to the good doctor’s house to deal with him. And of course Jimmy’s Klan buddies showed up too, armed to the teeth.
By the end of the day, the doctor’s house was splinter and ash. The doctor was no more. His children were no more. Every one of his neighbors was no more. All of their houses lay in ruin. The level of destruction was unimaginable. It was like a hundred seasonal hurricanes had blown through the little Southern town.
Jimmy and his Klan buddies — even the forces of “law and order” who had joined in — were so convinced that no one would ever hold them accountable that they filmed the entire orgy of murder and destruction and posted it on social media. And it turned out that they were right — no one ever did hold any of them accountable.
And so, unpunished and undeterred, Jimmy Lee climbed back into his Apocalypse 6×6 modified Dodge Hellcat 707 and turned his gun sights on everyone who had tried to stop him.
June 2025, California National Guard deployed by America’s wannabe dictator
Written by slaveholders who never imagined that anyone but wealthy white plantation owners would ever be running the country, the United States has one of the most vague and dysfunctional Constitutions and system of government in the Western world.
Antidemocratic design choices like the US House of Lords (the Senate), our peculiar Electoral College, the inability to hold no-confidence votes to end a government, together with all the mood swings of voters and the periodic and arbitrary re-interpretations of law by a broken, partisan judicial system drive citizens of every political persuasion mad.
The level of corruption, criminality, cowardice, and hypocrisy within every branch of this system of government is astounding and only keeps growing.
Last month Supreme Court approval ratings dropped below 50% for the first time in five years. Since being elected, Donald Trump’s approval ratings have dropped 12 points and are now at 41%. Coming in dead last in being trusted by Americans, Congressional approval ratings are now at 37%.
We no longer have a government that governs by the consent of the governed.
Instead, our rulers are a lawless band of pardoned criminals and oligarchs who have set about to loot the country, destroy anything of use to working people, and are doing a bang-up job of reprising Germany of 1933. Not to mention participating in a genocide and threatening us all with World War III.
Naturally, would-be dictators are sensitive to criticism and don’t much appreciate hearing from the hoi polloi.
Last week we experienced Trump’s unusual mobilization of the National Guard in California and an illegal deployment of U.S. Marines on the streets of Los Angeles in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. I guess we had it coming. We find nothing wrong with sending in the Marines on other people’s streets to intimidate and/or murder them — or as we like to say, to “keep peace” — so it was just a matter of time before it happened to American citizens too.
June 2025, U.S. Marines with 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, attached to Task Force 51, police Los Angeles in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act
Watching Angelinos stand up for their undocumented friends and neighbors must have been a shocking, unwelcome sight to MAGA Americans whose ideological roots trace back to the aptly-named No Nothing Party, which had a platform remarkably like their Führer’s.
One of MAGA world’s many conspiracy theories is that of the paid “crisis actor.”
Magnified by social media and the rightwing press, a narrative emerged that the Los Angeles ICE protests and the “No Kings” demonstrations were funded by George Soros, always the go-to Jew that MAGA antisemites accuse of “bankrolling” any protest or progressive effort they don’t like.
The Washingon Examiner dismissed community outrage at masked men in unmarked cars operating like Stasi agents with no warrants. Instead they figured it had to be a “well-funded” effort by Democratic operatives to “make them appear spontaneous and grassroots.” If only Democrats would fight like that — or at all.
The New York Post ran out of fingers coming up with new culprits — immigration rights groups, the Chinese Communist Party, Code Pink, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), various terrorist groups and individuals — not to mention your grandmother in Pasadena.
Others imagined they recognized the fingerprints of lefty tech mogul Neville Singam and the service employees international union SEIU on the protests. Naturally, ICE, which has now become Trump’s Republican (or perhaps Praetorian) Guard, assaulted the SEIU president and arrested him on Trumped-up charges. Several Democratic elected officials shared similar manhandling. Thuggish beat-downs of the loyal opposition were a prominent feature of the Sturmabteilung.
It was inconceivable to any of these racist morons that people might come out into the streets to show solidarity with their friends, coworkers, and neighbors. After all, people like this can’t imagine solidarity with anyone except perhaps other white Christian nationalists.
One of the biggest racist morons of them all is Senator Josh Hawley. You’ll remember him as the puffed-up provocateur who stood behind a protective police shield egging on January 6th seditionists, but who ran like a jackrabbit when his neo-nazi buddies actually breached the Senate.
Hawley — a hypocrite with clearly selective outrage for protest — is now playing the well-greased part of Joseph McCarthy by launching a witch hunt against the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights and at least one socialist group, the PSL.
Without a shred of proof or bothering to enumerate any specific cases of lawbreaking other than the Constitutionally-protected right to protest and (yes) disrupt, Hawley accuses both of “financing and materially supporting the coordinated protests and riots” and providing “logistical support and financial resources to individuals engaged in these disruptive actions.”
Threatening each with “referral for criminal investigation,” Hawley’s fishing expedition is asking for each to provide:
All internal communications, including emails, text messages, chat logs, and messaging applications, relating to protest planning, coordination, or funding.
All financial documents related to protests, demonstrations, or mobilization efforts in Los Angeles or elsewhere relating to immigration enforcement.
All third-party contracts or vendor agreements, including any arrangements with event organizers, transportation providers, security personnel, or communications consultants relating to immigration enforcement or the Los Angeles protests, or similar protests elsewhere.
Grant applications and funding proposals that relate to or reference immigration enforcement.
Travel and lodging records for individuals or groups supported or reimbursed in connection with protest activities.
Media or public relations strategies, including talking points, press releases, and coordination with journalists or influencers relating to immigration protests.
Donor lists.
That’s quite the shopping list.
* * *
Treating dissent as terrorism is precisely how the Nazis began hounding the German Left in 1933. And we all know how that turned out.
Daniela Melo and Timothy Walker are editors of Wilfred Burchett’s book, The Captains’ Coup, an account of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution. The couple are Massachusetts professors both well-steeped in Portuguese politics and history. While bookstore browsing in Lisbon they came across Wilfred Burchett’s book in Portuguese translation, then attempted to locate the original English edition. The hunt for Burchett’s original manuscript plays a small but intriguing part in the introduction to the book, and Melo and Walker’s scholarly notes (and the occasional correction of Burchett’s errors) serve readers very well.
Burchett’s “you are there” reporting is exciting and very readable, while at the same time he provides much-needed background into the dismal conditions in both the industrial centers of Portugal and in the Alentejo and other agricultural areas.
In 1974 Burchett dropped everything to travel to Portugal to observe the Carnation Revolution (still in progress) and to interview many of the major protagonists, the minor characters, and everyday people who participated in shutting down the world’s longest-running empire (at that point) together with a brutal fascist regime.
Burchett’s accounts give you a sense of how desperate the Portuguese people were. He paints a detailed picture of the brutality, senselessness, and economic recklessness of conducting multiple simultaneous colonial wars in Africa. At one point 57% of the Portuguese economy was devoted to wars in Africa, with horrendous casualties of the young men of the bourgoisie and a growing number of working class army and naval officers.
Even as the Portuguese dictatorship was playing colonizer, Portuguese workers were themselves colonized by European and American corporations which treated them as disposable equipment and relied on PIDE, the Portuguese secret police, to crush any labor disturbances. Absentee landlords created many levels of misery for those from whom they stole traditionally communal land. The peasantry was overwhelmingly illiterate and the Church, particularly in the North of Portugal, played an exceptionally reactionary role in mis-informing parishioners and in collaborating with the fascists.
The Portuguese “revolution” was, true to the book’s title, more a coup. The Portuguese working class did not rise up in any Marxist sense of revolution. Although different elements of a disgruntled and worn-out military competed for the loyalty of the people, and though the “revolution” at first had some of the characteristics of peasant and worker revolts, particularly against the latifundia, rebellion was quickly quashed by the Socialist Party with a certain amount of acquiescence of the Portuguese Communist Party, which feared not only widespread strikes but that what the “captains” had unleashed could not be put back on a leash.
An Afterword by New Left scholar Tariq Ali attempts to draw lessons from the failure of the Carnation Revolution, fixing blame on the Communists, “ultra-leftists,” the Socialists, the CIA, and the Portuguese military itself. Ali quotes Lenin: “without the independent activity of the masses, there can be no revolution,” and he goes on to slam the various factions for suppressing the independent activity of the masses.
But at the end of the day, the Carnation Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, fomented by the sons of the privileged classes. To quote Lenin again, “without the independent activity of the masses, there can be no revolution.” As Ali points out, the Captains and the young bourgeois officer corps which spawned the revolution had also considered a Plan B – becoming executives in Capitalist enterprises in a modernized European social democratic state.
We absolutely need more mass mobilizations and protests as the country goes down in flames — especially as America’s own “Il Douchey” makes even more Mussolini moves, criminalizes anti-ICE and anti-genocide protests, violates the Posse Cometatus Act, stages self-congratulatory military parades like a North Korean despot, and as Congressional lackeys like Josh Hawley launch McCarthyite hearings of immigrant groups and the American Left.
I’m just not sure what to make of the “No Kings” events scheduled for June 14th.
No Kings is a project of Indivisible, which in turn is a project of Democratic operatives and former Democratic Congressional aides who decided (in typical Democrat fashion) that the Tea Party movement’s successes could be mimicked. Only thing is, they do it half-heartedly, sporadically and unconvincingly, and they completely lack any program to truly fight back.
There is nothing inherently wrong with attending one of these feel-good events. I’m sure the mainstream press will report that X number of people showed up to protest Trump. But they won’t be able to report on exactly what the organizers had planned – because there is no real plan.
How are Democrats going to challenge and thwart Trump and a MAGA Congress enjoying a temporary and only razor-thin majority? Where is the opposition?
Are any of “No King’s” Democratic organizers about to challenge Chuck Schumer’s increasingly out-of-touch and impotent sputtering and posturing or his go-along-to-get-along collaborationist “strategy”?
Do “No Kings” organizers want to replace the 95 fellow Democrats who sided with Republicans to “express gratitude” to ICE for “protecting” us from those evil gardeners, housekeepers, meat packers, textile workers, and roofers who pay into a system they will never benefit from yet lack the ability to switch borders on whim like Big Business routinely does?
Are “No Kings” organizers calling for a shakeup in their party’s leadership or condemning party members who voted for the Laken Riley Act which actually authorized the crackdown that now these organizers and their duplicitous party claim to be protesting?
No, not for one damned millisecond. The Democratic Party they shill for demonstrates each time their representatives in Congress vote that its values are not substantially different from the Republicans’. At the end of the day, street theater like “No Kings” is nothing but a safety valve, a way to let off a little steam, a cynical mechanism to defuse the righteous anger of working people betrayed by both parties.
We’d all be better-served by not putting all of our eggs in the electoral basket. Neither party represents us in elections and a healthy amount of hell-raising must be done outside the electoral arena.
Join an organization with a real program, dare I say a socialist one. Consider working with the kind of organization that autocrats fear enough to launch witch hunts against. One that grasps better than the toothless, Janus-faced, war-mongering Democrats what the true objectives of America’s lords and masters really are in dismantling every shred of democracy and governance, demonizing our “illegal” friends, coworkers, and neighbors, while rushing us headlong into war after war of aggression and genocide.
In short, if you really want change, friends, start looking beyond the Democratic Party.
On August 6th, 1945 the United States was the first, and to-date the only, state to ever use nuclear weapons on human beings. At roughly 9:15 that morning a B-29 bomber dubbed Enola Gay dropped a bomb named Little Boy which, for maximum carnage, was detonated roughly 2,000 feet over Hiroshima, killing 10,000 Japanese troops, 12 Allied prisoners of war and 156,000 civilians in an unprecedented display of such a weapon of mass destruction. An exultant Harry Truman called it “the greatest thing in history.”
Three days later the U.S. repeated the atrocity in Nagasaki. On August 9th, another B-29 named Bockscar took off carrying a bomb nicknamed Fat Man intended for the city of Kokura. But because of poor visibility the bombing run was switched to Nagasaki and, once it had arrived, the secondary target was not visible either. But the show had to go on, so at almost precisely noon the crew of the B-29 dumped Fat Man anyway, several miles from the intended target, detonating it 1,650 feet above Nagasaki, obliterating half the city and killing 150 Japanese soldiers, 13 Allied prisoners, and 80,000 civilians.
Even today, many liberals mouth the line that Truman’s bomb saved American lives by ending the war. In the middle of a discussion with this writer about Hiroshima, the friend waved his hands in dismissal: “Hard things have to be done in circumstances not of our own making.”
But when you’re a superpower, as the United States has been since at least August 6th, 1945, almost every circumstance is of its making.
It is a presidential prerogative to be able to send hellfire missiles into someone’s bathroom window without consequence — a perk extended to Israeli prime ministers under U.S. protection. When Donald Trump fantasized about murdering someone with impunity in Times Square he was not only anticipating his own future impunity but describing that of every US sitting president. Trump is just the latest monster we have elected many times before.
“Hard things” and “hard choices” are hollow phrases used to defend the indefensible. They imply that only a select few, unencumbered by normal human, moral qualms or trifling legalities, are capable of making the tough decisions that “keep us safe.” An example from popular culture is the monologue delivered by a fictional Colonel Nathan Jessep in Aaron Sorkin’s “A Few Good Men.”
“You can’t handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? … You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don’t want the truth, because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.”
Naturally, no perversion of ethics or morality can be accomplished without the falsification of history to cast these “grotesque and incomprehensible” choices in the most favorable light.
If we are to believe such creatures, the Israel-Palestine conflict began on October 7th, 2023. A century of Israeli colonization, ethnic cleansing and land theft is completely irrelevant and instead substituted with vehement declarations that “Israel has every right to defend itself” — at least to the extent that any home invader has the “right” to defend himself from someone whose home he has invaded at gunpoint and tied to a chair.
Gaza, 2025
The American use of nuclear weapons on Japan was an uncanny precursor to Israel’s carpet-bombing of Gaza. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki a combined 36 kilotons of TNT were used to level both cities. The kilotonnage dropped by Israel in its latest war dwarfs that dropped by the Allies on Dresden — and even the 25 kilotons dropped on Baghdad in 2003. By July 2024, provided unlimited munitions by the Biden administration, Israel had dropped 36 kilotons of munitions on Gaza. The past year, with Trump’s complicity, that number has only increased.
Israel has now surpassed all previous records for the number of kilotons of weapons used to snuff out human life in a relatively small area.
Truman’s mendacious justifications for dropping the Bomb were very much like Netanyahu’s excuses for the total destruction of Gaza and the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians. Of the 226,000 Japanese killed, only 20,000 were military casualties. Virtually every justification for dropping the Bomb recited by Truman, Oppenheimer, Department of Defense officials, or echoed by a compliant, cheerleading media until they became “true” was spun from a tissue of exaggeration and lies.
But not everyone bought it. General and future President Dwight D. Eisenhower dismissed the human costs of slaughtering so many civilians: “Japan was at the moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of ‘face’. It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
J. Samuel Walker, Chief Historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote, “The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.”
Katie McKinney, Scott D. Sagan, and Allen S. Weiner argue in Lawfare and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that today the 1945 bombings would be considered a war crime and that
“The archival record makes clear that killing large numbers of civilians was the primary purpose of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; destruction of military targets and war industry was a secondary goal and one that “legitimized” the intentional destruction of a city in the minds of some participants. The atomic bomb was detonated over the center of Hiroshima. More than 70,000 men, women, and children were killed immediately; the munitions factories on the periphery of the city were left largely unscathed. Such a nuclear attack would be illegal today. It would violate three major requirements of the law of armed conflict codified in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions: the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution. There could be great pressure to use nuclear weapons in future scenarios in which many American soldiers’ lives are at risk and there is no guarantee that a future US president would follow the law of armed conflict. That is why the United States needs senior military officers who fully understand the law and demand compliance and presidents who care about law and justice in war.”
“In his first radio address after the bombing of Hiroshima, President Harry S. Truman claimed that “[t]he world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”Footnote1This statement was misleading in two important ways. First, although Hiroshima contained some military-related industrial facilities, an army headquarters, and troop loading docks, the vibrant city of over a quarter of a million men, women, and children was hardly “a military base” (Stone Citation1945, 1). Indeed, less than 10 percent of the individuals killed on August 6, 1945 were Japanese military personnel (Bernstein Citation2003, 904–905). Second, the US planners of the attack did not attempt to “avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” On the contrary, both the Target Committee (which included Robert Oppenheimer and Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project) and the higher-level Interim Committee (led by Secretary of War Henry Stimson) sought to kill large numbers of Japanese civilians in the attack. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was deliberately detonated above the residential and commercial center of the city, and not directly on legitimate military targets, to magnify the shock effect on the Japanese public and leadership in Tokyo.”
Sun Tzu wrote of the “selective, instant beheading of military or societal targets to achieve shock and awe.” The Nazis called it Blitzkrieg. The U.S. doctrine of “Shock and Awe” was codified in 2005, two years after the “Battle of Baghdad.”
“Shock and awe” — or whatever you call the use of massive force for terror — always expresses itself in genocidal rage and is fed by domestic racism. During World War II Japanese American citizens were rounded up (euphemism: “interned”) and placed in concentration camps.
“internment” orders
White Americans were even given instructions on how to differentiate a “Jap” from other Asians:
how to spot a “Jap”
In 1942 Fortune Magazine managed to roll up every Japanese stereotype together with a call for the destruction of “medieval” Japanese society and its false gods:
Fortune Magazine calls for civilizational destruction
Today the aims of Israeli generals and Israel’s far-right government are no different — vent racist genocidal rage on a despised population through the disproportionate use of military power, ostensibly to demoralize the enemy but in fact designed to scrape him off the face of the earth.
A recent Haaretz poll showed that a shocking 82% of all Israelis approve of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Last year a couple of podcasters broadcast an episode (since removed) of a podcast called “Two Nice Jewish Boys,” expressing not only their approval of ethnic cleansing but of genocide.
“If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow, I would press it in a second,” Eytan Weinstein, co-host of the Israeli English-language podcast Two Nice Jewish Boys, said in an Aug. 9, 2024 episode. His co-host Naor Meningher went on to reiterate several times that he would press that extermination button “right now,” adding that “most Israelis would.”
And if you think these two psychopaths represent Israel’s fringe, both genocide enthusiasts hosted Deborah Lipstadt, Joe Biden’s “antisemitism” advisor, on one of their episodes.
Add to this the thousands of social media posts by Israeli troops in Gaza self-documenting war crimes and looting. All this is in line with incitement so frequent and numerous that Law for Palestine has documented incitement by more than 500 Israeli legislators, journalists, and the military calling for the annihilation of Palestinians.
While the disproportionate use of weaponry is based on hate, not strictly self-protection, the very nature of such wars always betrays the true aims of the colonial powers that use them.
When an imperialist power has virtually unlimited armaments for “Shock and Awe,” every day is an opportunity to terrorize smaller nations — or share its munitions with geopolitical allies.
When an imperialist power chooses warfare designed to cripple and demoralize “societal targets” through the massive destruction of civilian infrastructure, it is always and predictably accompanied by an enormous loss of civilian life. And that is by design when you are not fighting an enemy as much as subduing a nation.
The generals have long ceased worrying about how many women and children they will slaughter. But, more importantly, the imperialist powers deliberately choose these tactics in order to reinforce hegemony and destroy global (or local) rivals.
As we peel away the lies and propaganda that America’s many wars and military adventures are built on — lies that also permeate the teaching of history, particularly around race — we need to question the propaganda we are continuously fed. A lazy, tractable media is always more than happy to repeat the conventional wisdom or reprint an official story, even verbatim, but sometimes they reveal (as the Washington Post did not that long ago in a story about the Bomb) some new finding based on diving into archives to see how history was really made.
This is what happened with contemporary scholarship on Palestine. Until Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev, Rashid Khalidi and others began poking around Israeli archives, the “official story” went something like this:
“In 1947 the Zionist leaders accepted the UN partition plan, which was rejected by the Arabs, who united to launch a war to expel the Jews from Palestine, a war during which Israel narrowly escaped destruction. In the course of the war, the Palestinians fled at the behest of Arab leaders. Later, Israel sought a peace which has always been refused by every Arab state.”
What the “new historians,” many Israeli, actually discovered was that Israel had long planned to completely depopulate Palestine of Arabs, and in 1948 they came close to finishing the job. 80% of Palestine — over 500 cities, towns and villages — were emptied of Palestinians through murder and terror.
References to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by one of the planners can be found in the diary of Yosef Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Transfer Committee and Chief of land confiscation operations. On December 20, 1940, Weitz referred to a plan later referred to as Plan Dalet in his diary: “The only solution is a Land of Israel devoid of Arabs. There is no room here for compromise. They must all be moved. Not one village, not one tribe, can remain. Only through this *transfer* of the Arabs living in the Land of Israel will redemption come,” he wrote.
The Zionist “solution” to the Palestinian Problem was formulated more than a year before the Nazis came up with a similar “solution” to the Jewish Problem.
But this is all Zionism 101. “Transfer” was the 1940’s Zionist term to describe ethnic cleansing. Israelis still use it and mean it in its original sense. Theodor Herzl had written in 1896 in his own diary, “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country.” In the 1950’s another plan, Operation Yohanan, was conceived to ship to South America any remaining Arab Christians who had not been “transferred” in the 1948 Nakba.
75 years after the Nakba, Israel is still trying to eliminate Palestinians. And in 2025 it even revived the “South American” plan — this time the end of the line for “transferred” Palestinians was to be Africa.
To the average liberal Zionist American or Israeli, such narratives are unimaginable cognitive dissonance and are rejected out of hand as blatant antisemitism. Nevertheless, they are unpleasant historical facts that must be reckoned with honestly — just as the truth behind bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki is unimaginable to a liberal American because he simply cannot bring himself to believe that his country could ever commit a crime so heinous.
140+ days into the Trump administration many Democrats fondly remember the last president a bit too wistfully. For the average liberal, Joe Biden is credited with making “hard choices,” even as the enthusiastic self-described “Zionist” signed on to assist Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
But Biden’s choices were never that difficult to make because every president surrounds himself with national security advisors, generals, admirals, lobbyists, donors, a handpicked defense secretary, relies on the assistance of Congressional and Senate Foreign Affairs Committee members from his own party (people like Bill Keating), or has been delegated war powers that actually belong to Congress, by men exactly like himself.
Foreign affairs experts call this assemblage of homogenous and self-reinforcing decision-making “The Blob” — institutional group-think by a revolving door of business and foreign policy interests and lobbies, some foreign. Within the “Blob” there are no principled positions, no out-of-the-box solutions, only pre-approved policy based on the expectations of interests that have paid to bring the president to power and keep him there.
All of this fosters legal and moral isolation as well. Who in the Blob is going to remind the President that genocide is wrong? At the end of the day, such creatures don’t make hard choices at all; they play the parts they were hired, or appointed, to play. This is, after all, how Capitalism works. Only after they leave government (men like Matthew Miller) do they occasionally screw up the courage to tell the world that the boss was wrong or that they themselves were lying to the public.
Of all the dismal aspects of American foreign policy madness, the worst may be the almost messianic belief that America has a divinely ordained “exceptional” mission in the world, that it must maintain a military edge at all cost, must be allowed to operate freely on foreign soil or interfere in the affairs of other nations at any whim or minor provocation — that only the United States has valid national interests. There is only one other nation that shares such a messianic view — Israel.
Unburdened by conventional morality or ethics, swatting away trivial Constitutional and legal barriers to illegal acts, surrounded by ideological clones, and armed with an almost fundamentalist religious belief about the nation, a president’s “tough” decisions are actually quite easy, fairly rote. He simply does what he is paid to do. All the rest is public relations.
As for the rest of us, the lies we tell ourselves about the abilities and decency of these “exceptional” men to make “hard choices” to “keep us safe” — this just keeps us electing sociopaths and genocidal maniacs, always voting against our own interests.
Today is Memorial Day, only one of several American holidays for celebrating our massive military and the enlisted personnel who “just follow orders” every time they bomb someone’s home, school, or hospital — and whom we excuse from having any moral agency. Even liberals thank some of these baby killers and torturers “for your service.” The sad fact is, there are just too many sadistic war criminals like now- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who enlist so they can murder and torture people without consequence. After 250 years of American history, everybody knows the dark purpose of the American military — and it’s sure as hell not “protecting ourselves.”
So today, as Americans remember Memorial Day and some of us shout USA! USA! USA!, let us remember that what this day really celebrates is not the bravery of these unquestioning, compliant servants of death, destruction and violence, but of America’s perpetual state of war on the rest of the world and its pursuit of dominance and hegemony.
Unquestioned American military support for Israel makes possible the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza
America’s endless military adventures — almost always to put down uprisings against USA-friendly dictators, imperialism and colonialism, or to seize territory and resources from other nations — are only rarely launched for anything good. Today, as “we” celebrate “our” military’s “accomplishments” we ought to face the many tons of evil along with the precious few grams of good we’d rather focus on. The following is only a partial list of America’s many wars, most of them with the US playing the bully:
The American Revolution – Britain (1775-1783); Indian Wars – stealing indigenous land (1775-1890); Shay’s Rebellion – Massachusetts rebels (1786-1787); The Whiskey Rebellion – USA (1794); Naval war with France (1798-1800); Fries’s Rebellion “The Hot Water War” – USA (1799); Barbary Wars – Libya, Algiers, and Morocco (1800-1815); Putting down slave rebellions (1800-1865); War of 1812 – Britain (1812-1815); Invasion and annexation of Mexico (1846-1848); “Bleeding Kansas” – Slavery wars (1855-1860); Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry – USA (1859); United States Civil War (1861-1865); U.S. Intervention in Hawaiian Revolution (1893); The Spanish-American War – plundering Spain’s colonies (1898); U.S. Intervention in Samoan Civil War (1898-1899); U.S.-Philippine War (1899-1902); Boxer Rebellion – China (1900); The Moro Wars – Philippine Musliims (1901-1913); U.S. Intervention in Panamanian Revolution (1903); The Banana Wars – all over Central America (1909-1933); U.S. Occupation of Vera Cruz – Mexico (1914); Pershing’s Raid Into Mexico (1916-1917); US involvement in World War I (1917-1918); Allied Intervention to undermine Russian Bolsheviks (1919-1921); US involvement in World War II (1941-1945); The Cold War (secret war with USSR and Communist China) (1945-1991); US undermining Palestine sovereignty (1948-present); The Korean War (1950-1953); America’s war in Vietnam (1956-1975); U.S. Intervention in Lebanon (1958); Invasion of the Dominican Republic (1965); The Mayaguez Rescue Operation – Cambodia (1975); Iranian Hostage Crisis and Rescue Attempt (1980); U.S. Libya Conflict (1981-1986); U.S. Intervention in Lebanon (1982-1984); U.S. Invasion of Grenada (1983); The Tanker War – “Operation Earnest Will” (1987-1988); U.S. Invasion of Panama (1989); Second Persian Gulf War “Operation Desert Storm” – Iraq (1991); “No-Fly Zone” War – Iraq (1991-2003); U.S. Intervention in Somalia (1992-1994); U.S. Occupation of Haiti (1994); US/NATO Intervention in Bosnia (1994-1995); U.S. Embassy bombings and strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan – Bin Laden War (1998); “Desert Fox” Campaign (part of U.S./Iraq Conflict)- Iraq (1998); Kosovo War – Yugoslavia/Serbia (1999); Afghanistan War – Operation Enduring Freedom (2001-2021); Third Persian Gulf War “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (2003-2011); Intervention in Haitian civil conflict (2004); Intervention in Somali civil conflict (2006-2009); U.S. Operations against Al-Qaida in Somalia (2006-present); Libyan War – deposing Gadhafi (2011); Deposing Joseph Kony and the LRA – Uganda (2011-2017); ISIS War – Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya (2014-present); Arming Ukraine against Russia (2014-present); U.S. Missile Strike on Syria (2017); Persian Gulf Crisis (2019-2020) (2019-present); Bombing Sudan in behalf of Israel (2025); Bombing Somalia in behalf of Israel (2025); Bombing Yemen in behalf of Israel (2025).
Following anti-war unrest not seen since the Sixties, both major parties have decided that repression and clamping down on free speech, rather than reconsidering an off-the-rails foreign policy, is the solution to America’s problems. With thousands of cases of censorship, repression, and punishment for anti-Israel views, we have truly entered a new era of McCarthyism and thought control.
Since the Gaza war began we have witnessed unprecedented police violence against campus protesters, as well as outrageous accusations of “antisemitism” by mainstream media and politicians of both parties. Like candidate Hubert Humphrey before him, candidate Joe Biden has doubled down on American militarism and, like Humphrey, it’s going to cost him the presidency. With tens of billions for war on three fronts, active conflict in 16 different countries, “counterterrorism” operations in 78, and now with U.S. boots on the ground in Gaza, Biden risks pushing the U.S. to the brink of World War III while undermining domestic initiatives he claims to support.
Likewise, Biden seems unconcerned that his “ironclad” support for Israel, even in the face of a credible genocide case at The Hague, has irrevocably alienated his own voters. With the exception of a handful of Democrats, both major parties are equally committed to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and refuse to either call for a ceasefire or try to prevent Israel’s impending slaughter in Rafah. What we are now seeing is the unmasked, unapologetic face of bipartisan American imperium.
This week Democrats joined MAGA Republicans in not only suppressing free speech and ratcheting up support for World War III but in legislating the meaning of words.
We have been long accustomed to MAGA America insisting on their own definitions of “life,” “marriage,” “freedom of religion,” and “privacy.” Resisting any common or commonsense understanding of these terms, and now undermined by an overwhelmingly Christian Nationalist Supreme Court, we have entered an Orwellian world where words have only the meanings that authoritarians assign to them.
This week Democrats are joining the authoritarians. Bipartisan bill H.R.6090, the Antisemitism Awareness Act (AAA), attempts to redefine “antisemitism” as not the generally-accepted concept of “hatred of Jews” but as “criticism of Israel.” The alteration is based on the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which has a long history but in short was concocted by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. A number of Democrats have joined the bill’s MAGA sponsors in altering the meaning of a commonly understood word being changed for blatantly political purpose.
Accompanying this bill, H.R.7921, the Countering Antisemitism Act, would establish an Antisemitism Czar to clamp down on criticism of Zionism.
Sponsored by Senator Jackie Rosen and Congresswoman Kathy Manning, among others, the bill is the result of lobbying by virtually every Zionist organization in America: Agudath Israel of America; American Israel Public Affairs Committee; American Jewish Committee; American Jewish Congress; Anti-Defamation League; B’nai B’rith International; Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; Hadassah; Hillel International; Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy; Israeli-American Civic Action Network; JCC Association of North America; Jewish Council for Public Affairs; Jewish Federations of North America; Jewish on Campus; National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry; National Council of Jewish Women; Nexus Leadership Project; Secure Community Network; The Rabbinical Assembly; Union for Reform Judaism; Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America; United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism; and the World Jewish Congress.
Now, in addition to the Israel Lobby applying pressure from outside government, they will effectively be part of it and playing a repressive role — for the benefit of a foreign power.
No doubt many more Democrats than merely the bills’ sponsors, and among them Massachusetts representatives like Seth Moulton, a cosponsor of CAA, will support both pieces of legislation.
Wartime has an uncanny facility for showing citizens the true face of their own democracy.
In coming days Americans will be treated to further proof that voting for Democrats is no less evil than voting for their ideological friends on the other side of an aisle that, increasingly, separates the two parties by only a name.
An authoritative critic of the American national security state is Andrew Bacevich, West Point Class of 1969, retired Army Colonel, and historian specializing in international relations, security studies, American foreign policy, and American diplomatic and military history. Bacevich is a Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University and President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Bacevich’s essay in TomDispatch yesterday (“America Terrorized”) makes the case that billions, and now trillions, of national treasure have been squandered annually since the 1950’s fighting largely phantom enemies. This may have turned us into a national security juggernaut but our dubious status has cost us our democracy and failed to protect us from all-too-real threats.
From the 1950s through the 1980s, keeping us safe provided a seemingly adequate justification for maintaining a sprawling military establishment along with a panoply of “intelligence” agencies — the CIA, the DIA, the NRO, the NSA — all engaged in secret activities hidden from public view. From time to time, the scope, prerogatives, and actions of that conglomeration of agencies attracted brief critical attention — the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, the Vietnam War of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the Iran-Contra affair during the presidency of Ronald Reagan being prime examples. Yet at no time did such failures come anywhere close to jeopardizing its existence. […]
Presidents now routinely request and Congress routinely appropriates more than a trillion dollars annually to satisfy the national security state’s supposed needs. Even so, Americans today do not feel safe and, to a degree without precedent, they are being denied the exercise of basic everyday freedoms. Judged by this standard, the apparatus created to keep them safe and free has failed. In the face of a pandemic, nature’s version of an act of true terror, that failure, the consequences of which Americans will suffer through for months to come, should be seen as definitive.
Let us remember 9/11. Today we remember the victims who died in New York, Washington, and in Pennsylvania. In the years immediately following 9/11 we were told that as a nation we had come together, that we were stronger for our national trials — that our democracy had triumphed over terrorism. It was, unfortunately, a short-lived lie. Today we hardly remember the world that preceded 9/11.
The American economy has been ravaged by trillions spent on wars that have never ended. Newborns on September 11th, 2001 are now eligible to vote. The Bill of Rights has been shredded by wiretaps, ethnic and racial profiling, the Patriot Act, police militarization, the end of habeus corpus, torture, kidnapping, illegal detentions, secret courts, and assassination teams that have targeted even American citizens. We have declared war on millions of people in a dozen covert wars we fight by incinerating civilians with drones. Our wars of choice have destroyed half a dozen countries and made millions of refugees flee their homes.
The world we inhabit today is a twilight dream, a fantasy land in which evolution competes with creationism, multiculturalism clashes with nativism, and freedom challenges authoritarianism. We have for so long lived in denial of American slavery and imperialism — is it any wonder we are so good at denying science and verifiable fact?
Useful lessons will likely never be drawn from 9/11. Every print and video remembrance presents the saccharine, the patriotic, the triumphal. No one wants to know why so much of the world hates us. And if we did we couldn’t be bothered for an honest answer. No, they hate us for our democracy.
Let us remember 9/11. This is a day for candlelight memorials and somber speeches. We’ll trot out patriotic stories of death and sacrifice, ask each other where we were when the Twin Towers fell, mouth prayers invoking god and first responders, vow to never let it happen again, then cloak ourselves in the righteousness of martyrdom.
Let us remember 9/11. Next year there will be another anniversary. Another year of perpetual war, of drone attacks, meddling in the affairs of other nations, the squandering of national treasure on war, the loss of even more civil liberties.
Let us remember 9/11. But let us also regard with honest, open eyes the America we have created in its wake.
We are on the brink of another American war — this time against Iran. After Iran shot down a U.S. drone in its own airspace, Donald Trump ordered a military strike which, by his administration’s own estimates, would have killed 150 Iranians. But then, as if scripted for Reality TV, Trump changed his mind with just minutes to spare. That’s how close we came to a war on Iran.
New Bedford Democrat Richard Drolet recently wrote an excellent overview of the history of Iranian-American relations, appealing for Congress to block any move to attack Iran. As Richard points out, U.S. claims of Iranian attacks on marine vessels in the Persian Gulf have precedent in other deceptions of the American public. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin? Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Remember the Maine?
It doesn’t take much to deceive a credulous and poorly-informed American public. Despite the administration’s claims of Iranian aggression, this will not be a war over drones and shipping channels. This will be a long-desired war to ensure Israel’s status as the only nuclear superpower in the region. And, if Trump’s neoconservatives John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, and Michael Pompeo get their way, it will also be another chance to effect regime change in the Middle East.
Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the US-Iranian nuclear agreement, placing the Iranian military on a terrorist watchlist, supporting violent Iranian exile groups like the MEK, hitting Iranian civilians with more crippling sanctions, and deploying the U.S. military force to the Persian Gulf have all brought us to this crisis.
Trump’s neoconservatives have convinced Republicans that invading Iran is one way to make America Great Again, and that an American invasion would be a “slam dunk.” Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton thinks it wouldn’t take much to defeat Iran — “two strikes, the first strike and the last strike.”
But an entire generation has gone by since the first Gulf War and the US is still not out of Iraq, a much smaller country than Iran. After hundreds of thousands killed, and trillions of dollars squandered, the US is also still in Afghanistan propping up a puppet regime.
Cooler and better-informed heads remind us that a US invasion would be the Mother of all Quagmires. Juan Cole, a Mideast expert at the University of Michigan, published the “Top Ten differences between the Iraq War and Trump’s Proposed Iran War.” Among them:
Iran is 3.7 times bigger than Iraq — 1.5 million square miles, almost the size of Alaska.
Iran has 3 times more people than Iraq — 81 million.
Iran can mobilize 1.5 million paramilitary forces and 500,000 active duty personnel.
While the Gulf War “Coalition” drew on NATO allies to fight Iraq, Europe is now skeptical of a war on Iran.
Many of Iraq’s neighbors were happy to see Saddam go. Iran still has many regional friends.
Congress must reclaim its Constitutional authority and pass legislation to prevent an unauthorized conflict with Iran. 71 House Representatives have sponsored H.R.2354 — the Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act of 2019. Shamefully, of the 9 Massachusetts Congressional Representatives, only Jim McGovern and Ayanna Pressley are co-sponsors.
So here we are, again, on the brink of another American invasion of a country in the Middle East. Call the Congressional switchboard at 202-224-3121 and leave a message with your Representative. Remind them that, under the Constitution, it is up to Congress, not the President, to declare war. Demand that they hold Donald Trump accountable for any illegal military actions. And ask them to cosponsor H.R.2354 to stop what will surely be another disastrous war of choice.
We now have a proto-fascist in the White House, breaking everything he touches. Trump is at war with minorities, gays, women, non-Christians, science, education, the environment, the poor, Congress, the Constitution, Mexico, Central America, China, Russia, and even European allies. Americans are always willing to make regime change elsewhere — but we sure could use some here.
Even if we were not in the middle of a Constitutional crisis, distracted by Trump’s chaos and his intentional destabilization of government, most Americans wouldn’t pay much attention to militarism and foreign policy. The appointments of John Bolton, Michael Pompeo, and Elliott Abrams were no doubt less compelling than the Mueller Report, Brett Kavanaugh’s hearings or James Comey’s firing. But they were chosen to throw bloody red meat to Trump’s “base.”
Elliott Abrams is a war criminal convicted of lying to Congress, though he was subsequently pardoned. Mike Pompeo is fond of threatening enemies with US invasion. Like Pompeo, John Bolton has never met a war he didn’t love, pressing for “regime change” in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen, North Korea, and Iran. With the selection of these three sociopaths, Trump is telegraphing plans for Venezuela and Iran. Like Iraq, both countries have long been in the crosshairs of American neoconservatives. The administration’s plans may be old but they’re reliable — coups, puppet regimes, and manufactured threats to the US and its allies. All depend on gullibility and attention deficit from the American public.
In March 2017, amid US sanctions and right-wing sabotage and violence which included ongoing assassination attempts, the Venezuelan Supreme Court granted Nicolás Maduro emergency powers and dissolved the National Assembly. The “old” legislature was replaced by the Constituent Assembly, which was originally formed to rewrite the Constitution. Since then Venezuela has been divided over the legitimacy of both the “new” and the “old” legislature. But this is what happens when a nation grants special powers to a leader, who then uses them to delegitimize the legislature. Since 2017 the “old” legislature has functioned as Venezuela’s opposition and — like it or not — the “new” legislature is now the people’s house. In 2018 Maduro was re-elected president of Venezuela, which — again, like it or not — should have answered the question of legitimacy.
But in January 2019, after receiving an OK from Vice President Pence, the chairman of the “old” legislature, Juan Guaidó, simply took microphone in hand and declared himself president of Venezuela. This was apparently enough legitimacy for the Trump Administration’s John Bolton, who then set about to create rebellion among the Venezuelan military. Guaidó follows a long history of US puppetry — the Pahlavis, the Somozas, Batista, Ngo Dinh Diem, Costillo Armas, Rios Montt, Chalabi, Micheletti, Karzai, to name a few. By recognizing Guaidó and then expelling Maduro appointees from their own embassy, the Trump administration is now trying to depose the head of a divided but democratically-elected government.
Yet, of all the chaos that Trump has unleashed, the threat of an attack on Iran is the most terrifying. Neocons have never been happy with John Kerry’s Iran deal, in which Iran and the US agreed to an accord that would keep Iran from enriching weapons-grade plutonium in exchange for relief from US sanctions. Despite zero evidence of violations by Iran, Trump withdrew from the deal and is considering prosecuting Kerry for violating the Logan Act — for speaking with foreign diplomats, as most former American diplomats do even after leaving their diplomatic posts.
To escalate the provocations even further, Trump denoted the Iranian Guard a “terrorist” organization. And last week, following the deployment of a carrier strike force and B-52 bombers to the Persian Gulf, the US accused Iran of sabotaging tankers. Two Saudi, one Norwegian, and one Emirati ship were allegedly attacked with improvised limpet mines close to the Emirates. Trump threatened to send 120,000 troops to the region, telling the press, “It’s going to be a bad problem for Iran if something happens, I can tell you that. They’re not going to be happy.”
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif suggested that the sabotaging of vessels was a “false flag” operation and ascribed war noises to the work of the “four Bs” — Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, United Arab Emirates crown prince Mohamed bin Zayed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and White House national security adviser John Bolton, who in 2015 advocated bombing Iran. And if one looks at a map of US military bases surrounding Iran, it is hard to imagine why Iran would want to provoke the US.
Europeans, who remain party to the Iran agreement, are skeptical of Trump’s accusations. Norbert Röttgen, chair of the Foreign Affairs committee of the German parliament, downplayed American warnings of imminent Iranian attacks. He said that the BND (German intelligence) has not found any escalation in Iranian threats. In fact, Röttgen described the US warnings as mere “saber rattling, a show of force to demonstrate seriousness and to justify American foreign policy vis-a-vis Iran.”
But, after a generation of American wars in the Middle East, there is still an appetite for more. The Trump administration and its supporters believe invading Iran would be a “slam dunk,” as the Bush administration thought Iraq would be. Almost a generation has gone by since the first Gulf War and the US is still not out of Iraq. And after a generation, hundreds of thousands killed, and trillions of dollars squandered, the US still remains in Afghanistan propping up a puppet regime. Geniuses like Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton doubt it would take much to defeat Iran — “two strikes, the first strike and the last strike.”
Cooler heads remind us that a US invasion would be the Mother of all Quagmires. Juan Cole, a Mideast expert at the University of Michigan, published the “Top Ten differences between the Iraq War and Trump’s Proposed Iran War.” Among them:
Iran is 3.7 times bigger than Iraq — 1.5 million square miles, almost the size of Alaska
Iran has 3 times more people than Iraq — 81 million
Iran can mobilize 1.5 million paramilitary forces and 500,000 active duty personnel
While the Gulf War “Coalition” drew on NATO allies to fight Iraq, Europe is now skeptical of a war on Iran
Iraq’s neighbors were happy to see Saddam go; Iran still has many regional friends
Even FOX News host Tucker Carlson was concerned about Bolton’s influence. “More than anything in the world, national security adviser John Bolton would love to have a war with Iran. It will be like Christmas, Thanksgiving, his birthday [all] wrapped into one,” Carlson said.
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has introduced a petition to block Trump’s unilateral entry into a war with Iran, and Nancy Pelosi reminded everyone that “the responsibility in the Constitution is for Congress to declare war. So I hope that the president’s advisers recognize they have no authorization to go forward in any way. They cannot call the authorization, AUMF, the authorization for the use of military force that was passed in 2001, as any authorization to go forward in the Middle East now.”
Impeachment might be largely a formality in the almost certain absence of Senate prosecution of Trump’s crimes, but proceedings should be initiated anyway. Congress must insist on all its rights and powers, which include declaring war. As for Abrams and Bolton, they deserve tenures just as short as Anthony Scaramucci’s — if not cells at the Hague.
But if anyone should be getting regime change this month, please, let it be the American people.
The Massachusetts Senate is open for business and a whopping 2,202 pieces of Senate legislation await co-sponsorship, dismissal, or eventual votes.
You can’t claim to live in a democracy if it doesn’t have strong and widely-observed civil liberties. What we have instead is overwhelmingly a police and prison state sitting atop a playground for Capitalists. Many of the bills before the Legislature concern criminal “justice” reforms, including decarceration, treating substance abuse in jail, parole and probation reforms, and more accountability for guards and police. Not everybody behind bars is an animal, and not everybody with a badge is a saint. With a shocking 50% of all American families affected by prison, probation, parole, or the cruel stigma of prior incarceration, this and white supremacy are the top crises now afflicting America — not the lack of a border wall.
Speaking of which. Civil liberties don’t stop at the border. Over decades American “interventions” have created the human rights abuses, the collapse of democratic governments, and the economic and political chaos that asylum-seekers from Central America are now fleeing. We’ve had racist immigration and border patrol polices for generations and, to be honest, I’d much prefer to throw Trump and his tax-cheating, wife-cheating, white supremacist buddies out of the country — instead keeping hard-working Central Americans who may be here “illegally” but actually pay taxes and contribute to the Social Security system I depend on. And I don’t want to pay for my racist county sheriff to get to play ICE agent on the state dime. It turns out that by supporting the re-filed Safe Communities Act we also strengthen everyone’s Constitutional rights.
Over time I’ve noticed that the police and military seem to be the only constituency of importance to some legislators — mostly Republican, but some Democrats as well. These guys file bill after bill that scream — Blue Lives Matter! Khaki Lives Matter! To hell with teachers, garbage men, and anyone else who provides an essential service. This year’s Senate bills include legislation to make harming one of them a more serious offense than harming any other citizen. Some bills unfairly move vets to the front of the hiring line or eliminate training and age requirements for them. Or they give away state tax money for awards and allowances for federal military service.
Well, I’ve had it with the veneration of all things militaristic. It’s time to say no to all this legislation. The phrase “thank you for your service” has become a completely hollow slogan. Do we ever ask about the nature of the actual service rendered by a mercenary army or its true value? Does an unemployed or aimless guy who heads over to the local Army recruiter bear any responsibility for war crimes he wittingly or unwittingly participates in? Did he ever question what he was signing up to do? Does anyone really believe that a generation of wars and invasions has kept us safe? Are we not in fact guilty of destabilizing much of the Middle East and creating much of Europe’s refugee crisis? In the face of such weighty questions, these giveaways must be seen for what they really are — blood money.
The Massachusetts House has not published the text of any of its legislation, though only a week remains during which you can urge your representative to co-sponsor the mystery bills. As with so much that is wrong with the Massachusetts House, I’m inclined to blame it all on Bob DeLeo.
The day after is a good time to reflect on what you’ve done. Whether it’s drinking, casual sex, or Memorial Day.
On Memorial Day American newspapers, both conservative and liberal, are littered with variants of “thank you for your service.” The jingoistic lie that seventeen years of endless war has somehow kept us safe grates on me every time I read it. In fact, the opposite is true. Destroying Iraq, Libya, and Syria has not made us safer. It has made the world a more frightening place and invited retaliation by those radicalized by our militarism. Creating a ring around Iran and supporting ruthless regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, the Philippines, and elsewhere has not strengthened our democracy. It has hastened the appearance of our own Orange Mussolini.
The military today is a mercenary force. People enlist for money and the many benefits we refuse to give other citizens – among them free college education, healthcare, and preferential hiring. Some serve because they have no qualms about traveling halfway around the world to kill those doing no harm to us. Please, let’s not paint them with the same brush as the Greatest Generation.
Instead of saying “thank you for your service” I would ask our warriors what, in fact, they have done to protect me. Did killing an entire Iraqi family at a roadside checkpoint make me safer? Did killing thousands of innocent civilians by drone make me safer? What enduring signs of success in Iraq and Afghanistan can you point to with pride and say — “I did that!”
There are no satisfactory answers to any of these questions. There is only the objective truth that the endless wars go on, benefiting no one but defense contractors, destroying lives and nations. No matter how many parades and flags and speeches we throw at this reality, the truth remains – the blood on the hands of American warriors has served no purpose, and our national veneration serves only to protect them from the remorse that any other man would be expected to show when accounting for his sins.
If Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on civilians, add it to a long list of atrocities and injustices perpetrated daily on this planet. To this same list we should also add Israel’s Passover massacre of civilians in Gaza, the genocide of the Rohingya, and dictatorships at work in Turkey, Venezuela, Egypt and dozens of other countries. To crimes against humanity we should also add our own “surgical strikes” by drones and missiles which have killed thousands of Syrians in our never-ending “War on Terror.”
But America is focused on Assad — not because we really care about Syrians or any of the other victims of brutality around the world — but because “regime change” is part and parcel of bending the Middle East toward American interests. It’s the height of hubris — playing god by remaking the world in our own image.
I have rarely known a year when the United States was not throwing its weight around, invading another country, murdering its citizens — sometimes by the hundreds of thousands or millions in the case of Viet Nam. If Americans really want to stamp out malign evil I suggest we start by looking in the mirror.
Start with the Boltons who advocate for war, the Hampels who torture in secret prisons and conceal the evidence from even Congress, the Trumps who use American military power for political dog-wagging, the Mattises who manage slaughter like a CEO rolling out a new product, and the many sociopaths in Congress who funnel national wealth away from the care of citizens into a vast war machine. We delude ourselves if we think the United States is the greatest force for good in the world. Quite the opposite. We are the most homicidal nation on the planet.
Which is why no one in their right mind would give one man — especially a volatile racist with dementia — sole power to wage war. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is quite clear that it is the responsibility of Congress to do the dirty work of waging wars:
To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;
To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;
Our unhinged president is sufficient example of why Congress must take back this grave responsibility from the Executive Office and must wield it responsibly and only with great reluctance.
Images of policemen shepherding children to safety
It’s not the fault of the FBI
It’s not even the fault of local police, who were notifed over 20 times
Those same policemen who tighten a perimeter aroudn the school, show up in APCs, in SWAT teams, are sometmes the ones to train children in using weapons
Puerto Rico is rapidly turning into another Katrina, and North Korea may have justifiably construed Donald Trump’s reckless threats to “totally destroy” its 25 million citizens as an act of war. But as Rome burns the president is doubling down on his favorite pastime: race-baiting.
While chaos swirls all around, the White Supremacist-in-Chief seems unusually miffed this week by insufficient displays of patriotic fervor at NFL games. Oh, one more trifling detail – it’s insufficient patriotism by black players.
Trump called NFL players who “take a knee” to protest systemic racism in the United States “sons of bitches” and wants them to be fired for exercising their First Amendment rights. Teresa Kaepernick, the mother of former San Francisco 49er Colin Kaepernick, who started taking the “knee,” quipped, “I guess that makes me a proud bitch.” But when pressed on why black athletes were protesting Trump denied it had anything to do with race; it was all about patriotism and respect, he said.
Meanwhile, Trump World echoed their Dear Leader. Any criticisms of the country were fireable and deportable offenses. Former NASCAR champion Richard Petty told the Associated Press that anyone on his team protesting during the national anthem would be fired. “Anybody that don’t stand up for the anthem oughta be out of the country. Period. What got ’em where they’re at? The United States.”
But regardless of how Trump chooses to frame the controversy, protests in the NFL – and now also basketball and baseball league – most certainly are about race. Especially under the presidency of a president ESPN anchor Jemele Hill unapologetically labeled a “white supremacist.” While approximately 75% of both NFL and NBA players are black, NASCAR fans are 80% white – and apparently unfamiliar with the First Amendment.
Politics: not for those with grievances
Former NFL player John Elway, now head of operations for the Denver Broncos and a Trump supporter, attempted a more conciliatory tone: “Hopefully as we go forward we can start concentrating on football a little bit more. Take the politics out of football. But I think that last week was a good show of unity by the NFL and hopefully this week we can move forward.”
Elway’s lament was widely echoed by many in White America: sports are sports and players have no business taking political positions on or off the field. Football is just a game.
But players lead lives off the field. Just ask Seattle Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett, who “just happens to be black.” Three weeks ago, in Las Vegas for the McGregor-Mayweather fight, Bennett was walking back to his hotel when he fled from the sounds of gunfire – along with a stampede of other pedestrians. But the Las Vegas police singled out Bennett, threatened to “blow [his] f*cking head off” and used excessive force. Bennett was lucky. He wasn’t killed.
And the sordid tale of Donald Sterling reminds basketball players and their fans how inseparable sports can be from real life.
CBS commentator Rob Long expressed a typical sentiment when he wrote: “Recently political topics have invaded sports. Athletes have used their celebrity to voice their political agendas. They’ve used the sports forum to speak out against political and social issues as well as race. This is a growing trend that isn’t losing momentum. The networks are looking for content and as long as athletes provide them with it, they will use it. It’s the gift and the curse.”
But Long (and Elway) are way off the mark. Since the Olympics were first celebrated 2600 years ago, sports have always been political. Ancient Sparta and Nazi Germany certainly approached competitions seriously. National pride and dominance is always at stake. And anything that drowns out the nationalist narrative – for example, a player making his own statement – is unacceptable. Recall the 1968 Summer Olympics, when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in black gloves, wearing black socks.
The two were ejected from the games for protesting institutional racism, and they were booed by American fans and fellow Olympians: “It is very discouraging to be in a team with white athletes. On the track you are Tommie Smith, the fastest man in the world, but once you are in the dressing rooms you are nothing more than a dirty Negro.”
Not much has changed since then.
The unforgivable sin that Smith and Carlos committed was eclipsing a nationalistic show of the Stars and Stripes and the playing of the American national anthem. And nationalism can’t tolerate even quiet criticism.
Sports, nationalism and militarism
We often talk about the police being militarized, but since 9/11, especially, professional sports teams and Hollywood have lined up to serve the U.S. military in unexpected ways.
Two years ago Arizona senators McCain and Flake published a report on how the Pentagon pays sports teams tens of millions of dollars for patriotic displays. Stadium-sized flags, military flyovers, parachuting into the stadium, color guards, anthems, and jumbotron reunions with servicemen have become the norm for the NFL.
You’d be hard-pressed to describe the difference between one of these hyper-patriotic events and a similar North Korean spectacle. But these are engineered by the Pentagon and not simple acts of patriotism by franchise owners. As Jeff Flake explained, “What we take issue with is the average fan thinking teams are doing this on behalf of the military.”
McCain’s and Flake’s 145-page report lists contributions to 18 NFL teams, 10 MLB teams, eight NBA teams, six NHL teams, eight soccer teams, as well as NASCAR, Iron Dog and several college football programs. The Atlanta Falcons pocketed $879,000, Trump Donor Robert Kraft’s New England Patriots received $700,000 and the Buffalo Bills $650,000. And all this represents only a fraction of the amount the DOD has spent on sports marketing. “In all, the military services reported $53 million in spending on marketing and advertising contracts with sports teams between 2012 and 2015.” The Army alone spends $10 million on the NFL.
Is it patriotism when you’ve been manipulated?
But NASCAR took in the biggest haul, $1,560,000 in 2015. This included personal appearances by Aric Almirola and [the aforementioned] Richard Petty, as well as 20 Richard Petty Driving Experience ride-alongs. In 2011 NASCAR presented the largest USO “Military Village” Expo ever in Dover, Delaware – incidentally (or perhaps appropriately) home to the largest military mortuary in the country.
Who says that the U.S. government can’t do anything right? When it comes to militarism and jingoistic propaganda, no one does it better. Andrew Bacevich describes how all the moving parts of an “authentic” patriotic experience come together – and it’s enough to make anyone take a knee:
Fenway Park, Boston, July 4, 2011. On this warm summer day, the Red Sox will play the Toronto Blue Jays. First come pre-game festivities, especially tailored for the occasion. The ensuing spectacle – a carefully scripted encounter between the armed forces and society – expresses the distilled essence of present-day American patriotism. A masterpiece of contrived spontaneity, the event leaves spectators feeling good about their baseball team, about their military, and not least of all about themselves – precisely as it was meant to do.
In this theatrical production, the Red Sox provide the stage, and the Pentagon the props. In military parlance, it is a joint operation. In front of a gigantic American flag draped over the left-field wall, an Air Force contingent, clad in blue, stands at attention. To carry a smaller version of the Stars and Stripes onto the playing field, the Navy provides a color guard in crisp summer whites. The United States Marine Corps kicks in with a choral ensemble that leads the singing of the national anthem. As the anthem’s final notes sound, four U. S. Air Force F-15C Eagles scream overhead. The sellout crowd roars its approval.
But there is more to come. “On this Independence Day,” the voice of the Red Sox booms over the public address system, “we pay a debt of gratitude to the families whose sons and daughters are serving our country.” On this particular occasion the designated recipients of that gratitude are members of the Lydon family, hailing from Squantum, Massachusetts. Young Bridget Lydon is a sailor – Aviation Ordnanceman Airman is her official title – serving aboard the carrier USS Ronald Reagan, currently deployed in support of the Afghanistan War, now in its 10th year.
In 1905, disgusted by U.S. militarism and jingoism, and American war crimes committed in the Spanish-American and Phillipine-American wars, Mark Twain penned a short story. It was never published in his lifetime – he realized it would never be accepted and feared it would end his career. So the “War Prayer” remained buried in his papers for almost twenty years.
The story is simple: a nation goes to war, as most do, invoking God and flag. There is a church service for soldiers going off to battle. A stranger appears and offers up the ultimate benediction, one that fully expresses the dark side of the nation’s militarism and the demonization of its enemies. All couched in the Word of God.
But, as today, an honest expression of a nation’s primitive and bloody views is a step too far. Twain’s story ends: “It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.”
This is the stranger’s prayer:
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”
According to an article in the New York Times, the president summoned his aides to the Oval Office to discuss his reasons for asking Congress for permission to wage war on Syria – not that American presidents feel obliged to follow the Constitutionally-mandated procedure: “He had several reasons, he told them, including a sense of isolation after the terrible setback in the British Parliament. But the most compelling one may have been that acting alone would undercut him if in the next three years he needed Congressional authority for his next military confrontation in the Middle East, perhaps with Iran.”
If this sounds familiar it’s because it happened four years ago, just barely into Obama’s second term, when Syria looked every bit like the target it is today and Iran, too, was squarely within American crosshairs. Obama had drawn a moral “red line” in the sand warning Assad against the use of chemical weapons. The U.S. seemed to be on the brink of another war.
Bush had gotten Saddam. Obama had already dispatched Ghadafy and was now weighing going after Assad. And why not? The Middle East is America’s playground and American presidents murder foreign leaders at whim. Accusing foreign leaders of atrocities has always been common and self-serving – but it’s especially hypocritical in light of our own practices.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched the nation’s first biological weapons program in 1941. From 1943 to 1969, the U.S. developed weaponized anthrax, Q fever, Malta fever, botulinum, cholera, dengue fever, and various dysentery agents.
The American chemical weapons program began even earlier, in 1918, with mustard and phosgene gases, Lewisite, hydrogen cyanide, and cyanogen chloride. After WWII, the U.S. developed sarin, VX nerve agents, and Agent Orange. When it signed the Geneva Protocol, the U.S. specifically exempted itself from defoliants like Agent Orange and gases for riot control. In 1997, the U.S. signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, committing to destroy its 30,000 tons of such weapons. But then it dragged its heels for decades.
A chemical weapons depot in Tooele, Utah once hosted the largest stockpile of chemical weapons in the world. Tooele stored 14 million tons of chemical agents, blistering agents, and nerve gas – almost half the U.S. total – and was closed only five years ago. Depots in Alabama and Maryland are still operational. A facility in Colorado is not expected to complete destruction of its stockpiles before 2019. Another one in Kentucky won’t be done before 2023.
The United States is the world’s leading arms dealer. Not individuals or corporations – but the government itself. 78% of the world’s arms come from U.S. government sales to foreign nations. In 2008 Israel committed a war crime by using white phosphorus against civilians in Gaza. The weapon, which melts human flesh, came from a U.S. stockpile stored in Israel. When Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Kurds, they were stamped “Made in the USA.” As old archives are opened and foreign policy documents leaked, U.S. culpability in historical atrocities is revealed. The German press recently reported that Chile’s dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, had stockpiles of U.S. botulinum toxins.
All the moral “red lines” regarding chemical weapons seem to converge in the United States.
From Havana harbor (“Remember the Maine!”), Laos and Cambodia, to fake yellowcake and invented WMD’s in Iraq, the U.S. has seized on many pretexts to bomb, blast, incinerate, and shoot people in faraway lands – as always, the majority civilians.
At this point, no one knows whether Trump’s claims that Assad is using chemical weapons are true or whether they’re simply a welcome distraction from his many corruption probes. But if history is a guide, “red lines” are never used as moral guideposts. They are usually just cynical pretexts to justify another war.
There was a vote last Thursday on S.722, “Countering Iran’s Destabilizing Activities Act of 2017,” a bill which slaps economic sanctions on both Russia and Iran. The vote passed almost unanimously in the Senate, except for two senators with fiercely independent streaks. One of them was Rand Paul. The other was Bernie Sanders.
On his website Sanders wrote that, if fashioned as a separate bill, he would have voted for Russian sanctions and noted he has previously voted for sanctions on Iran. But the bill, he wrote, “could endanger the very important nuclear agreement that was signed between the United States, its partners and Iran in 2015.”
Massachusetts senators Warren and Markey, however, both enthusiastically voted for the sanctions, as did every Democrat in the Senate. Warren had previously been opposed to Iran sanctions and supported the Iran deal. But on Thursday she voted with the herd to both jeopardize the work John Kerry had done and to wage economic war on Iran. In fact, Warren not only voted with the herd but was a co-sponsor.
Economic sanctions are acts of war. The Council on Foreign Relations characterizes them as alternatives to war, but the targets of sanctions understand quite well what they really are. When, in 2015, the EU slapped sanctions on Russia, one Russian banker called it “economic war.” And North Korea has never minced words: “We consider now any kind of economic sanctions to be taken by the Security Council as a declaration of war.”
As economic acts of war, sanctions can provoke military responses just as easily as bombing. Students of history may recall that reparations and economic sanctions against Germany following World War I fed both German nationalism and militarism leading up to World War II. Writing in Foreign Policy Journal, Gilles van Nederveen wrote:
Sanctions can lead to war “if the state is militarized and the central government is backed to the wall. Consider an example of pre-World War II Japan. American and Japanese militaries prepared for a confrontation throughout the twenties, but real tensions did not start until the 1931 invasion of Manchuria by Japan. At the outset of U.S.-imposed oil blockade in 1940, Japan estimated that it had a fuel reserve of just under two years. The Imperial Japanese Navy drafted plans to seize the oil fields in the Dutch East Indies (present day Indonesia) in order to maintain steady supply of oil and its military strength. International organizations like the League of Nations were powerless in curtailing aggression during the thirties. After the initial oil blockade in 1940, each Japanese move was met with yet another U.S. embargo: scrap metal, access to the Panama Canal, and finally, the U.S. froze all Japanese accounts in the US, effectively putting Japan on the collision course with the U.S.”
Sanctions are an overused tool of both neoconservatives and neoliberals. The Heritage Foundation pointed out in 1997 that, during Bill Clinton’s administration, Clinton managed to slap sanctions on 42% of the world’s population. Of course, this was twenty years ago when Conservatives were out of power and posing as reasonable statesmen. Fast forward twenty years: they’re back in power and they’re leading the charge themselves.
Economic sanctions are often accompanied by physical blockades, embargoes, interdiction of shipments on the high seas, proxy wars, and covert warfare. All of these apply to Iran. Speaking at the Carnegie Endowment, former Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew described sanctions in the same terms as precision bombing:
“The sanctions we employ today are different. They are informed by financial intelligence, strategically designed, and implemented with our public and private partners to focus pressure on bad actors and create clear incentives to end malign behavior, while limiting collateral impact.”
But economic sanctions do not limit collateral impact. Sanctions are every bit as lethal as bunker-busters. On May 12, 1996 — long before Obama awarded her a Presidential Medal — Madeline Albright was asked if the deaths of half a million Iraqi children from U.S. economic sanctions were worth it. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State didn’t shed a tear or miss a beat when she answered “yes.”
Van Nederveen points out that during the Cold War — a time when there was no single superpower — economic sanctions had no teeth. But now that the U.S. is the biggest, meanest dog in the kennel it can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. Returning to the Carnegie’s black-tie event, Obama’s Treasury Secretary went on to describe the restraint that the U.S. must show once it forces other nations to submit to its sanctions:
“To preserve the effectiveness of sanctions over the long term, we must use them wisely. We must clearly articulate our goals, and we must provide relief when those goals are met.”
But no such restraint was ever exercised with Iran following the nuclear deal. Virtually the moment the ink had dried on the deal, the United States began undermining it. Last year Roger Cohen, writing in the New York Times, described the Obama administrations sabotage of its own accord:
“But today America is undermining that balance, reinforcing Iranian hawks and putting the hard-won deal that reversed Iran’s steady advance to the nuclear threshold at risk. It’s a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot policy after a major diplomatic achievement.”
The professed American love of democracy and diplomacy now only provokes derision throughout most of the world. American power is out of control and neither Conservatives nor Liberals have any great urge to rein it in. American Exceptionalism, AIPAC, and tantalizing Saudi defense dollars are the real hammers that forge our foreign and military policy. It is in moments like Thursday’s vote that we see how bi-partisan American imperialism and aggression really is.
Bernie Sanders was right. The vote by every Democratic senator jeopardizes the Iran nuclear deal and creates a more precarious world. Here in Massachusetts we just learned our so-called “progressive” senators just couldn’t resist waving the flag and voting for more American bullying.
Americans might want to imagine the day when China slaps economic sanctions on the United States. And it is coming. Our global militarism has made us a “bad actor” that must be taught a lesson by the next superpower. Like Germany a century ago, when that day comes there is no doubt that Americans will regard those sanctions as an act of war.
Britain was still in the grip of the May 23rd suicide bombing in Manchester which claimed twenty-two lives. Tory Prime Minister Theresa May was running on a “fear and crackdown” platform in the last days of her collapsing campaign, even promising to curtail civil liberties “if they get in the way” of cracking down on terror.
Not to be out-done American Defense Secretary “Mad Dog” James Mattis was promising a policy of annihilation toward ISIS, telling West Point cadets, “Manchester’s tragic loss underscores the purpose of your years of study and training at this elite school. […] We must never permit murderers to define our time or warp our sense of normal. This is not normal.”
It was a perfectly normal day in the War on Terror. Where killing civilians has become the new normal. Not only for ISIS but for the United States and its allies.
Although the U.S. admits killing only 352 civilians, human rights groups that track the civilian slaughter put the number closer to 4,000. But for Mattis civilian deaths are just too damned bad when one is waging just war (the West’s word for jihad) against ISIS. Appearing on Face the Nation Mattis commented, “Civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation.”
The “sort of situation” Mattis means is the permanent war the United States has been waging in the Middle East for going on 30 years.
The savagery of ISIS-encouraged suicide bombings, drivers plowing through pedestrians on crowded bridges and, in one case, three attackers setting upon one woman with knives, is enough to sicken anyone. But if we look at ISIS attacks somewhat dispassionately, this is simply asymmetric warfare.
This is how people fight when they don’t have an air force or SEAL teams to slaughter civilians the “proper” way.
Two weeks ago the Pentagon admitted it had killed two ISIS snipers in the al Jadidah district of Mosul, Iraq – with “collateral damage” of 100 civilians. In Yemen, the U.S. military killed five civilians, including a blind seventy year-old man. This followed another disaster in Yemen last January in which SEALs killed twenty-five civilians, including fleeing children. Regardless of which news outlet covered it, the civilian deaths were downplayed. If it’s not on TV, it’s not real.
Most Americans think that the war in Yemen is just another fight against ISIS but it is in fact a civil war, and it involves a Shi’a insurgency in the south being put down by a Saudi-allied dictator in the north. It is fair to call it a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran – one into which we have poked our noses.
After all these screw-ups CENTCOM was recently forced to undertake some damage control, so it released figures claiming that, regretfully, 484 civilians have been killed. But regardless of the number – whether 484 or 4,000 – U.S.-led wars have displaced, killed, and terrorized millions of people throughout the Middle East. In Mosul alone 200,000 people were driven from their homes. In Syria, half the population are refugees.
In Syria, the U.S. has stepped up indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Raqaa. In Tabqa, a nearby town, eleven people – “including eight members of the al-Aish family: three women between the ages of 23 and 40, and five children, the youngest one just 6 months old” – packed themselves into a vehicle to flee from U.S. bombing. They didn’t make it. They were hit with heavy machine gun fire by a U.S.-led coalition forces. It was a tragedy local reports called a “massacre.”
Or, as Mad Dog Mattis might call it, Annihilation.
But if you really want to do repression and terror right, there’s nothing like State Terror. And the United States and its “allies” throughout the region are the undisputed experts. The Saud family, which owns and runs Saudi Arabia as a family-owned and operated kleptocracy, is barely distinguishable from ISIS in its repressive version of Wahhabism. Shortly after Donald Trump visited the country, the kingdom announced it would expand the use of the death penalty for peaceful protest.
Appearing with Donald Trump and Saudi King Salman in Riyadh, all touching a curious glowing orb together, was Egyptian dictator Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, who is cracking down on protests and journalists. In Egypt, where Al Jazeera journalist Mahmoud Hussein is now beginning his seventh month of prison, el-Sisi has also severely restricted the ability of NGOs, particularly those focused on human rights, to operate.
I could go on about Erdogan and Duterte, two of Donald Trump’s favorite thugs, but what’s the point? America’s commitment to human rights is hypocritical. The same Trump who was wined and dined by the Saudis – where no one dares challenge the royal family – criticizes Venezuela for repression and calls for free elections. The same U.S. government, outraged by Cuba’s treatment of political prisoners, has looked the other way at Israel’s imprisonment of almost a million people since 1967, where 40% of all Palestinian men have been in jail.
* * *
While Conservative PM Theresa May was campaigning on fear and xenophobia, crackdowns and ditching civil liberties, Jeremy Corbyn was campaigning on fresh ideas and offering unpleasant truths.
One of Corbyn’s truths was that the War on Terror is a failure. And that only a new foreign policy can solve the problem:
“Many experts, including professionals in our intelligence and security services pointed out the connections between wars that we’ve been involved in or supported … in other countries, such as Libya, and terrorism here at home.”
And how can anyone really refute his argument? Killing civilians, propping up dictators, wrecking entire countries, and creating millions of refugees doesn’t make you any friends.
This is why they hate us. This is why they fight us.
If we really want to end terrorism, we’d better stop terrorizing other people ourselves.
Only about six percent of Americans care about foreign policy. Thanks to geography and most of us speaking only English, Americans don’t really engage with the rest of the world – except when we’re pointing weapons at them. Most voters just accept that presidential candidates will formulate their own foreign policy by surrounding themselves with lobbyists and talking heads from ideological think tanks.
Well, if that sounds like a terrible idea to you, here’s another. Put specific foreign policy planks into all the state party platforms. And put the best and best-supported ideas into the national party platform.
Last year Democrats drafted a national party platform that some said was the most progressive platform of all time. And maybe it was – for the Democratic Party – and only when limited to certain domestic planks.
But when it came to foreign policy, the Democratic Party’s hawkish platform reflected its presidential candidate’s worldview. We would fight ISIS by giving taxpayer money to repressive and right-wing governments – Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel – the Usual Suspects – though so far they’ve been useful only to Defense contractors. The DNC platform ignored Congress’s right and obligation to declare war while calling for the use of presidential AUMF statements – like the one Donald Trump used last week. The platform downplayed the use of ground forces while preferring technology – Tomahawks and drones – like the ones Donald Trump used last week. Nobody really has a different plan – just keep on using extrajudicial killing indefinitely, without ever declaring war, without ever clearing the endless war with Congress.
The DNC platform is full of jingoistic phrases such as “Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism.” But many are beginning to question whether it just might be the United States that has inflicted the most damage on world peace and stability. We originally funded Islamists to fight the USSR, have given Israel $128 billion since 1948 while simultaneously turning our backs on Palestinians, created failed states in Iraq, Libya, and Syria – and then created millions of refugees Europe and Turkey have had to deal with.
We’re not winning any friends with this.
Republicans of the Bush administration, and Democratic Secretaries of State Clinton and Kerry have all pursued policies of enlarging the world’s militaries – which ratchet up global dangers – failing to stop settlements, pulling NATO into our misadventures, conducting war games on Russia’s doorstep, throwing money at successive Egyptian dictators – all while playing God by deciding which regimes shall live, and which regimes shall die. Trump has pushed everything to its extreme, but what we’re seeing now is merely an exaggeration of the same foreign policy mistakes Democrats and Republicans have committed for years.
Meanwhile, the DNC leaves foreign policy to its presidential candidates. It also seems to think that, as long as Democrats pursue more enlightened domestic policies, maybe voters won’t even notice the foreign policy. But today’s progressive Democrats are taking notice. Many of the issues Democrats are arguing about now are not trivial differences. They deserve to be discussed, debated, and put into platforms.
Somewhere between domestic and foreign policy lie the American colonies. The ambiguous legal status and distances to places like Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Mariana Islands provide numerous opportunities for exploitation. Over decades, tax breaks and bonds bankrupted Puerto Rico. PROMESA was the Republicans’ way of sending thugs to break kneecaps and tell islanders to pay up. And PROMESA had bi-partisan support. To our shame, Democrats did almost nothing to help Puertorriqueños. Yet when it comes to taxpayer giveaways, “fiscal responsibility” rarely applies to the Usual Suspects, the DOD, or Defense contractors. That’s a bipartisan principle.
Now, if you don’t care about the people in our colonies – in far-flung places some of us can’t even find on a map – and you still haven’t been convinced that foreign policy is important, let’s consider how it affects you personally.
Police forces are now militarized. It’s not just the APCs and tanks, all that military surplus and the surveillance gear, but the many vets-to-cops who are now the face of the modern police force. State governments are passing draconian bills that threaten or abridge civil liberties. You can’t post a thought, send an email, or place a cellphone call without it being monitored. Right here in Massachusetts, partly out of good intentions – but also because of lobby groups – Democrats have proposed house and senate bills that strip the Constitutionally-protected right to boycott Israel. In New York, governor Andrew Cuomo set up a blacklist to punish these boycotters. But regardless of how you feel about Israel, stomping on the First Amendment is not something Democrats should be doing. That’s the GOP’s job.
You can’t fly into the country without being asked to give up your phone and passwords. You can’t fly out of the country without being subjected to increasingly intimate pat-downs. Men of a certain age can skip their annual prostate exams because the TSA now provides them free of charge. And you can’t climb on a plane without fear that someone will call the cops on you for speaking Arabic, working on a math problem, using the wrong word, telling the wrong joke, or having goons break your nose and knock out your teeth if you object to being bumped on a flight you’ve paid for.
None of this is new. And this is not just Trump’s Great New America. This is the authoritarian America that Democrats had a hand in making.
Two hundred million Americans no longer enjoy civil liberties along borders with Mexico or Canada, or within a hundred miles of the oceans. Homeland Security can set up checkpoints, stop and question you, confiscate your belongings, detain you, subject you to the third degree. All in violation of the 4th Amendment. Democrats voted for the Patriot Act, the FISA Courts, expansion of Homeland Security, and resisted effective oversight of the NSA and CIA. Many Democrats didn’t even read the Patriot Act before signing it.
So if you think that foreign policy doesn’t affect you, think again. Foreign policy is not something that should be decided by a presidential candidate. This is why it is critical that foreign policy planks be presented, debated, and adopted in each of the state Democratic Party platforms. Besides setting forth principles for legislative priorities in our own states, they’ll also send strong messages to the national party.
Trump’s 2018 budget, says OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, is supposed to “send a message to our allies and our potential adversaries that this is a strong-power administration.” In fact weaponization of the budget is pretty much Trump’s only objective:
“The core of my first Budget Blueprint is the rebuilding of our Nation’s military without adding to our Federal deficit. There is a $54 billion increase in defense spending in 2018 that is offset by targeted reductions elsewhere. […] We must ensure that our courageous servicemen and women have the tools they need to deter war, and when called upon to fight, do only one thing: Win. […] this public safety and national security Budget Blueprint is a message to the world–a message of American strength, security, and resolve.”
The 2018 budget takes money, quite literally, from food programs for children, seniors, the poor, and strips virtually every federal program of value to the average citizen. Tens of billions of dollars – on top of the excess hundreds of millions already being spent – will be redirected to homeland security and the military. The Washington Post has examined the percentages of cuts to federal programs:
If this budget sends any kind of message to NATO allies whom Trump has described as “freeloaders” it is that the United States will continue to spend more than half its discretionary budget on war. This level of obscene military spending tells allies there really is no need to increase their own defense spending. Allies can continue building their economies and providing for their citizens’ real needs with continued modest defense spending. It will be the American taxpayer who must do without in order to pay for weapons we don’t really need.
And if the 2018 budget sends any kind of message to potential adversaries, it is that the U.S. relishes its role as rogue nation and that they’ll need to raise the level of their own military spending.
Trump voters chose combat and elected a combatative president. And this is what they will get. But they probably thought they would get some “American greatness” too.
Trump is a sociopath whose idea of playing president is to throw around military power. His supporters were given simple formulas for an American resurgence that simply won’t stand up to scrutiny. These voters should have known better than to trust a casino developer who profited with other people’s money and who regularly stiffed his contractors. He’s a serial liar who’d make P.T. Barnum envious.
But he had help.
Conservative ideologues have been selling a war machine and income inequality for years. For instance, Breitbart News claims the U.S. military has been “depleted” by reductions under the Obama administration.
But Trump voters are not going to get much “make America great” out of the the 2018 budget. The “Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again” threatens economc progress for working Americans and eliminates the lifelines they depend on – all while siphoning away tax money for corporate welfare schemes.
Yet Conservatives are all over the map on budget priorities. The American Spectator applauds the president’s “terrible swift sword.” But paleoconservatives at the American Conservative and neocons at Commentary don’t like the defunding of State Department and UN programs like Unicef. Even with a 9% increase in war spending the American Enterprise Institute claims the Trump budget doesn’t go far enough in diverting taxpayer money to defense contractors. The CATO Institute freely admits the Trump budget is a tool for putting public money into the hands of private investors, but it can’t contain its impatience to steal even more from the taxpayer:
“Trump proposes to devolve to state and local governments and private parties a number of programs now funded by the feds. In theory, the result should be greater efficiency and less regulation. However, in most of the areas I know about, Trump could have gone further and produced even better results.”
The Federalist complains that there is too much hand-wringing over the budget and that it’s all about eliminating bureaucracy – if you don’t count America’s massive “defense” and homeland security complex as a bureaucracy. Free market fundamentalists at the Foundation for Economic Education admit that the Trump budget is Big Government on steroids – but they aren’t buying his hype about job creation. Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation calls it a “skinny budget” and applauds cost savings by slashing social and health programs for working people. America’s fake news center, FOX News, dismisses the end of the Meals on Wheels program with jokes.
The Marie Antoinette of the Trump administration, “let them eat cake” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, says, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” For school kids, yes, that’s true. But for billionaires there’s no end of caviar to be found in the 2018 budget.
While the GOP is full of ideologues competing for their own pet budget priorities, economists generally dismiss Trump’s budget as a fast-approaching train wreck for the economy. The Brookings Institution says Trump’s budget priorities will seriously hobble the economy by eliminating programs that help small businesses, aid technology and research, and help businesses improve productivity. Brookings warns the president that only competitiveness – not protectionism – can help American business. It concludes:
“Trump’s budget, like much of his rhetoric, is fundamentally backward-looking. It attempts to support a 21st century economy with 20th century tools and ideas.”
In looking at the federal budget, we have to distinguish the pension and health benefits that the federal government holds and manages for retirees – called “entitlements” or non-discretionary spending – as sacrosanct funds. These are for a citizen’s rainy day fund. It’s personal money.
The federal budget also includes “discretionary” expenses – money normally targeted for the common good – whether it’s the EPA, NASA, education, the arts – or for war. Under both Republicans and Democrats discretionary spending has often been mainly for war:
But now, with Trump’s draconian cuts to social, business, and welfare programs, the federal budget has become even more weaponized than in previous years.
