Image by Thanos Pal.

Once again, Donald Trump is taking steps to destroy our planet. He signed an executive order fast-tracking deep-sea mining in U.S. and international waters for critical minerals such as cobalt, nickel, and manganese. The problem is that such activity will cause irreversible damage to fragile deep-sea ecosystems.

The Trump administration has framed the directive, which involves the 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act, as a strategy to boost the U.S. economy and counter China’s dominance in mineral supply chains. They claim it secures America’s national interests but it threatens marine ecosystems, violates global governance, and creates a diplomatic problem where none needs to exist in the first place.

A 1970s mining test, reviewed by the National Oceanography Centre, showed that while some deep-sea creatures recovered after mining, larger animals did not return to the test site. Trump’s directive, which encourages mining without robust environmental safeguards, risks permanent damage. Environmental groups like Oceana and the Center for Biological Diversity are warning that heavy machinery scraping the seabed will disrupt ecosystems for centuries, with sediment plumes smothering marine life and altering oxygen flows. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, considered a prime mining target, is important to scientists due to its rich marine life and they fear it will disappear forever if Trump gets his way.

Not enough research has been conducted to safely ensure that we will not permanently destroy marine ecosystems. The deep sea is fragile and highly misunderstood. Other countries, such as France and Canada, understand the seriousness of the situation and have called for a moratorium until countries can agree on stronger regulations. Trump, of course, has no respect for international maritime law or the concern of other countries and is intent on disregarding scientific consensus, jeopardizing fragile marine ecosystems, and threatening an environmental disaster. Through his order, Trump is deliberately attempting to preempt global consensus on this sensitive and important issue and risks sparking a free-for-all in international waters, as competing nations will exploit resources without any international oversight.

By signing such a directive, Trump is flouting the International Seabed Authority (ISA), established under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Furthermore, the ISA is working on negotiations to finalize mining rules and if Trump bypasses the ISA, what is the point of rules-based order? This will cause nothing but retaliation between countries, perhaps a possible conflict, and certainly the erosion of trust.

Of course the White House is calling its effort to carry out destructive deep-sea mining as a boon for the U.S. economy, and estimates it will cause $300 billion in GDP growth and bring in more than 100,000 jobs over the next decade. But will it? This is nothing but speculation aimed at exciting the public. The facts remain that deep-sea minig has not been proven to be cost-effective commercially, and environmentalists agree that land-based resources are sufficient to meet America’s mineral demands.

In fact, Trump’s directive willfully ignores the economic fallout of environmental damage that deep-sea mining will cause. Fishery operations will be disrupted, waters will become contaminated, and any lost biodiversity will harm coastal communities and industries reliant on healthy oceans.

Trump’s “America First” approach may sound like music to MAGA ears, but this policy endangers deep-sea ecosystems, causes severe ecological devastation, flouts international law, and rejects global cooperation. We must protect – not exploit or destroy – our oceans.

Trump should be taking seriously the warnings of scientists, environmentalists, and climate activists. Instead of racing to mine the ocean bed and destroy fragile ecosystems, the U.S. should join global efforts to study and protect deep-sea ecosystems. It’s not “America First” – it’s “Our Planet First.”

The post Don’t Let Trump Get Away with Deep Sea Mining  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Chloe Atkinson.

Just after New Years in 1979 I moved from the East Village to Brooklyn.  Carol was pregnant, but her cramped digs on Carroll Street would not accommodate us.  We found a loft building, very rare in Park Slope, on the lower margins of the neighborhood near 4^th Avenue, a six lane artery running from downtown Brooklyn to Bay Ridge.  Across the avenue a ruined commercial zone of dilapidated red brick structures of unknown provenance, mostly abandoned, spread over both sides of the Gowanus Canal, described in the tabloids as “the most polluted body of water in the nation.”

Creating a home in the loft was a stretch, financed on a limited budget, the $12,000 I’d saved from the combat pay of a first lieutenant in Vietnam, augmented by disability payments.  We had a raw space 30 x 100 feet to enclose, electrify and plumb, roughly half the second floor off the center stairwell in the warehouse of a former wholesaler.  Two existing partitions in lacquered beadboard divided the space in three sections, front, rear and center, and absorbed whatever light the windows on the street side provided, and photos show the interior was always dark even after a large metal door over an opening used for uploading deliveries from an empty lot along the side wall was replaced with a pane of glass half the dimensions of a typical storefront.

Plumbing was a major challenge, and I gaped in awe as our guy melted lead for joints stuffed with oakum in steel drainpipes lowered into the building’s basement to enter the urban sewage.  We found sinks for the kitchen and bathroom, and a gas range and fridge in a used fixtures outlet on Delancy Street in Manhattan.  And we used my brother’s econovan to transport a cast iron tub we found dumped on a street corner in the Bronx.  Finding matching claw feet to support it seemed improbable until I picked through a brim-filled bin with demolition discards in a salvage yard on the fringes of Red Hook.  I picked up translucent glass bricks in the same yard.  These formed a rear wall in the bathroom to allow some natural light after windows along the building’s rear wall were obscured by the narrow corridor we erected leading to a fire exit. The front beadboard partition formed a T and one side became our bedroom, the other a study, dappled with daylight through four large greasy windows facing the street.  To a working chimney we attached a Ben Franklin Stove in front of our bed, acquired how I no longer recall, but fueled by firewood consigned periodically in face cords from a Long Island supplier and hoisted to our loft on a freight elevator accessed from the sidewalk.  A large gas blower suspended from the ceiling in the central space provided most of the heat.

Additional bedrooms were roughed out behind the beadboard to the rear paralleling the kitchen wall, for two kids, the child we were expecting and Carol’s daughter, Sarabinh, then six, in joint custody between her father’s nearby apartment in the upper Slope and our loft.  A hodge podge of chairs, couches and hanging house plants was arranged near the large sidewall window and a hammock of acrylic fiber stretched between two lally columns that helped support the floor above us.  A ballet bar was installed along the rear beadboard wall, which I used for stretching, and in front of that I laid my tumbling mat for acrobatics.  In New York at the time, legal occupancy in a loft building required AIR – Artist in Residence – status.  As a sometimes student of Modern Dance and other movement disciplines, my certification as a dancer was granted under the signature of Henry Geldzahler, the then reigning New York City Culture Czar.  A small sign with AIR in black lettering was affixed near the building’s front door, and applied collectively to all the residents split among six lofts, mostly painters and a sculptor.  In December that year, we hosted a party, a belated celebration of Carol’s birthday in October and Simon’s birth in August.  It would also honor ‘Lofts Labors Won.’

The following August with our one year old in tow, we departed the city on Carol’s literary mission, destination Castine, Maine.  Our first stop was at a commune near Brattleboro, Vermont, where old movement cronies of Carol’s had gone back to the land in the late sixties.  They were an ingrown, argumentative lot which, on their periphery, included two columnist for the Nation in private summer residence.  For three days we labored and convived with these old comrades, one of whom formerly in the Weather Underground and ensconced there pseudonominously, was still wanted by the FBI.  Carol phoned to Castine to confirm our arrival time, and was informed by Mary McCarthy that the visit was off.  This was to have been the first face to face with the subject of the  biography Carol had just begun, postponed now because Mary’s husband had broken his leg falling off a ladder while cleaning the gutters.

A majority of Carol’s forebearers had settled in Maine from colonial times, and a great aunt whose story she greatly revered was buried there in the family plot, along with a host of other Brightmans and Mortons.  The Maple Grove Cemetery played like Thornton Wilder country.  So, Maine trip on.  While passing from New Hampshire into Maine we stopped to orient ourselves at a Visitor’s Center, where I haphazardly grabbed a few brochures, including a pamphlet of real estate listings.  Except where work was concerned – I was also in the midst of a book project –  Carol and I weren’t planners; we were impulsive doers.  On occasion we daydreamed out loud about finding a place “in the country,” never projecting the fantasy beyond the nearer regions of upstate New York.  One real estate offering showed an old federal house on a saltwater farm near where we were now bound. And when our route took us past the office of the agent representing the property, we joked that it was fated.   We’d go check it out, “but we’re not serious,” Carol disclaimed.

The house, which had been empty for a quarter century, was structurally sound with a good roof, and came with several outbuildings, including a barn and the middle twenty acres of the old homestead, in field and woodlot.  An old bachelor farmer had lived there without indoor plumbing or electricity until the early sixties, then in the local tradition took refuge with a younger family for his final years.  Without thinking that this would become the rural equivalent of our recent urban undertaking, another residence to be mounted from scratch, we focused on the $45,000 asking price and bought it on the spot.  We had to lean on friends and relatives to assemble the ten grand downpayment, and we had a rough ride to get a mortgage approved, but while we put that home back together, it became our summer escape for the next six years.

There were always wooded areas where I grew up on Long Island, and I was drawn to them.  I’m sure looking back they were enlarged in a child’s eyes, and minuscule when compared to our twenty acres of tall pines and spruce that blended seamlessly into miles of contiguous woods where I now wandered on frequent constitutionals.  The solitude was compelling and a balm to my mental wellbeing.  That I would soon find on the mothballed Brooklyn waterfront a far from bucolic but equally suitable option for these frequent bouts of solitary wool gathering, not for only three months, but for nine, astounds me still.

Exploring the environs of the Gowanus was my first step toward Red Hook.  Plans for the rehabilitation of the canal would become a topic for a deep investigative dive by Carol and me into the history of the canal from its idyllic indigenous setting as a healthy estuary where foot long oysters grew, to the contemporary canal in decay which civil minded community leaders in Carroll Gardens, the largely Italian American neighborhood bordering the other side of the patch surrounding the Gowanus, had long in their sights for cleanup and development.  We dug into that story for a couple of years, wrote a serious proposal, but nothing ever came of it.  Why, I no longer recall?  When you live by your pen engineering projects from elevated states of endorphin fueled enthusiasm that never reach completion, certainly for me and Carol also, was a not infrequent occurrence.  A colorful sidebar here would include the presence of the Joey Gallo crime family among these mostly silent empty blocks, and while remaining agnostic as to its veracity, news reports on the doings of the New York Mob if the Gowanus warranted a mention might note the neighborhood legend that held the canal was where the wise guys dumped the bodies of their rivals.

We’d soon settled into the neighborhood where a number of familiars from the anti-Vietnam War movement had also settled to start their own families.  Carol was teaching remedial classes at Brooklyn College which had initiated open admissions, at the same time peddling articles, to a variety of outlets.  I still commuted to my non-profit, Citizen Soldier, in the Flat Iron Building on lower Fifth Avenue in the city until early 1982.  It was a movement job at movement wages, advocating for GIs and veterans around a host of issues, most recently the alleged health related illnesses from exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, and for vets who participated in Atomic Tests during the fifties, from radiation.  After twelve years of full time activism primarily related to Vietnam, the move to Brooklyn had severed that umbilical and I was ready for a change, which initially took the form of painting someone else’s living spaces and querying magazines for assignments.  Apart from family responsibilities, my time was my own.

When Simon turned three, we enrolled him in the Brooklyn Child Care Collective, one of those alternative institutions organized by lefties of our generation.  It was located a fair piece from the loft near Grand Army Plaza.  Shaded under the concrete infrastructure of the Williamsburg Bridge in Manhattan I found a shop to custom build a bike adapted to Brooklyn’s rough streets: ten speed, but thick tires, straight handlebar and a large padded seat.  With Simon strapped into a red toddler carrier mounted over the real wheel, I peddled him to day care most mornings.

The exploration of the Gowanus along our stretch of 4^th Avenue from 9^th Steet to Union Street, and taking in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood where many of our informants resided, began during Carol’s and my investigative project.  Often, however, I would walk these blocks on my own, camera at the ready.  My way of seeing the material wreckage strewn along the banks of the canal was informed by the work of Robert Smithson’s, The Monuments of Passaic.  Smithson sited installations “in specific out door locations,” and is best known for his Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake of Utah.  In his article for ArtForum illustrated with six bleak black and white photographs Smithson described “the unremarkable industrial landscape” in Passaic, New Jersey as “ruins in reverse…the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.”  This was the perfect conceptual framework for reflection on what I was looking at.  Embedded in Smithson’s musings, his “set of futures” perhaps made predictable the upscale development that would totally transform the blocks around the Gowanus forty years later; but that’s another story.

In an earlier time, the canal had provided the perfect conduit for the materials from which the surrounding neighborhoods had been constructed.  A small number of enterprises, the Conklin brass foundry, a depot for fuel storage, were still in operation but the vast acreage that once served some productive purpose was littered with industrial waste and the shells of abandoned buildings, some capacious like a former power plant.  Idle cranes and derricks stories high stretched their necks over the canal like metallic dinosaurs.  At three compass points along the horizon billboard sized signs on metal grids perched on spacious roof tops – Kentile Floors, Goya Foods, Eagle Clothes – were markers of manufacturing life, but if still active I never learned.

With my new bike, I began to wander farther afield, making stops along Court Street, the main drag in Carroll Gardens where you’d find an espresso stand where Italian was spoken that seemed to have been imported intact – baristas to stainless counter top – from Sicily.  If only for the historical record, I insert here the presence of two storefronts that were likely unique throughout the entire city.  Pressed tin sheets were still common for ceilings in commercial buildings in New York, and spares in a variety of designs filled upright bins at a specialty shop on Court Street.  In the same block locals who kept roof top flocks of pigeons could buy replacement birds and the feed that sustained them.

The pigeon shop in particular conjured scenes from the Elia Kazan film of Budd Schulberg’s On the Waterfront in which Brando tends his own flock on the roof of a tenement, the typical dwelling for the families of stevedores who worked the Brooklyn docks, once the most active waterfront in the nation.  After World War Two, container ships were rapidly replacing the old merchant freighters with their cargo holds, and increasingly making landfall, not in Brooklyn, but across the harbor in New Jersey.

Frozen in time, the old Brooklyn waterfront, adjacent to the neighborhood known as Red Hook, now became the cycling grounds for my long solitary ruminations.  Access to the area was usually across the swing bridge over the canal on Carroll Street which, after emerging under the Gowanus Expressway, dead ended on Van Brunt Street, a long artery that ran for nearly two miles parallel to the string of wharfs that jutted into the harbor, terminating before an enormous stone warehouse dating from the Civil War.  An old wooden wharf, long and wide, ran that building’s length on the water side, its thick rotted planking making an obstacle course I often ventured over despite the warning sign to keep off.

I could ride Van Brunt and up and down its side streets for an hour without ever seeing another person or being passed by a motor vehicle.  Many of the roadways were paved with cobble stones, safely navigated by my bike’s thick tires.  As with select locations on the Gowanus streets, a sprinkle of diminutive dwellings mysteriously still inhabited and surprisingly well maintained co-existed with the adjoining wasteland, the hold outs from more stable and more populated times.  There was a storefront selling live chickens that, when open, filled small wooden crates on the sidewalk.  And at the end of one particularly isolated block a small two story clapboard-sheathed home behind a chain link fence and next to a vacant lot, but where several late model gas guzzlers were parked at street side, I actually saw live chickens in the yard pecking at the ground.  If I rode down Wolcott Street to the water’s edge, I’d have a close up 400 yards across Buttermilk Channel of Governor’s Island, a military installation for almost two centuries, and since the new millennium the site of a public park accessible only by ferry.  Inhabited all those years, generations of soldiers had a front row view of the rise and fall of the Brooklyn waterfront.

The Loft in 2024.

Just before Christmas on an overcast day I was riding along one of these interior streets feeling hemmed in by the ghostly emptiness surrounding me between shuttered buildings to one side and the old dockside secured behind walls of security fencing on the other, when a pack of feral dogs appeared several hundred feet to my front.  There was a wooden creche at road side  – clearly the devotional installation of a local parish I could never identify – with oversized statues of the cast at the Manger that had become the territorial shelter that four gum baring yelping canines were now furiously defending.  As they began to rapidly close on me, I swung my bike one-eighty and hit the peddles with a sprinter’s gusto, soon realizing I could never outrun them.  In an instant I stopped my bike, dismounted and faced the charging pack, waving my arms high above my head growling and barking as loudly and aggressively as I could.  They stopped in their tracks, turned in formation and low tailed it from whence they’d come.  Not to push my luck, I did the same.  Barely through the door back home, still in the flush of wonder and exhilaration, I yelled to Carol, “you’ll never believe what just happened to me.”

All photographs by Michael Uhl.

The post Wild Dogs of Brooklyn appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael Uhl.

Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

Avelo Airlines has entered into a controversial agreement with US immigration authorities to operate deportation flights, sparking protests from coast to coast. Activists, legal organizations, and local communities are mobilizing against the carrier’s role in deportations. The controversy reflects a broader reckoning with the US’s long and bipartisan history of immigration enforcement.

Ultra-low budget airline flies gamblers, Hillary Clinton, and now deportees

Avelo Airlines started off flying gamblers in 1989 as Casino Express. Rebranded in 2005 as Xtra Airlines, it provided air transport for the Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign among other ventures. Current CEO and former United Airlines CFO Andrew Levy acquired the carrier in 2021, renamed it Avelo, and expanded from charter flights to low-cost commercial operations.

Following its California launch on a Burbank-Santa Rosa route, Avelo developed a hub at Tweed New Haven Airport in Connecticut. Avelo continued to expand destinations, most notably with its recent agreement to make federal deportation flights from Arizona starting in May. The “long-term charter” arrangement for the budget airline headquartered in Houston, TX, is with the US Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration Control and Enforcement Agency (ICE).

Chilling realities of ICE deportation flights

Research by the advocacy group Witness at the Border tracks ICE flights. Costly military deportation flights have largely been discontinued, leaving the dirty work to charter carriers such as Avelo.

An exposé by ProPublica revealed appalling conditions on ICE deportation flights by a similar charter carrier, GlobalX. The report states: “Flight attendants received training in how to evacuate passengers but said they weren’t told how to usher out detainees whose hands and legs were bound by shackles.

Leaving aside the issue of human decency, the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) “90-second” rule for accomplishing a full evacuation from an aircraft is impossible to achieve with passengers in chains.

Private security guards and an ICE officer accompany these ICE Air flights and are the only ones allowed to interact with the deportees, including even talking to them. But only the professional flight attendants, who are FAA certified, are trained in how to evacuate passengers in an emergency.

So if a plane crashes on the runway, ProPublica cautions, the rules are for the flight attendants to leave the aircraft for safety and abandon the shackled prisoners. Unfortunately, this grim scenario is not hypothetical.

Snoopy’s airport

On April 26, protesters lined the entrance to what locals affectionately call Snoopy’s airport. The Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport, named after the late cartoonist who lived in Sonoma County, is an Avelo Airlines hub. The Democratic Party-aligned Indivisible called the “profiting from pain” protest at the California wine country airport against Avelo’s plan to carry out deportation flights.

One protester flew an upside-down US flag, a signal of “dire distress in instances of extreme danger,” according to the US Flag Code. A sign proclaimed: “planes to El Salvador are just like trains to Auschwitz – a prison without due process is a concentration camp.”

“Boycott Avelo,” was the message on one young woman’s sign that implored, “travel should bring families together, not tear them apart.”

An Immigrant Legal Resource Center activist passed out wallet-sized “red cards” at the demonstration. She reported that nearly a thousand northern Californians have taken their training in recent weeks to defend their friends and neighbors who, regardless of immigration status, have certain rights and protections under the US Constitution.

At the grassroots level, communities are organizing and resisting. The North Bay Rapid Response Network hotline for reporting immigration enforcement activities dispatches trained legal observers and provides legal defense and support to affected individuals and families. Other resources include VIDAS, Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, Legal Aid of Sonoma County, and Sonoma Immigrant Services.

Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, New Haven Airport, CT, April 17. (Photo by Henry Lowendorf)

New Haven no-fly zone

Blowback against the nativist anti-immigrant wind was also evident across the continent in New Haven, CT. This Avelo Airlines hub city along with the state capital, Hartford, are both designated sanctuary cities. The state of Connecticut itself has also enacted measures limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

These politics reflect the demographics of urban Connecticut, which are now largely Latino and African American. Non-Hispanic whites, using Census Bureau terminology, are an urban minority.

According to local organizer Henry Lowendorf with the US Peace Council, the vast majority in New Haven are “adamantly opposed to the airline massively violating human rights with no judicial process and dumping people in a concentration camp in El Salvador.”

Over 200 protested Avelo Airlines on April 17 for the second Tuesday in a row, responding to a call by Unidad Latina en Acción, the Semilla Collective, and others. Led by immigrant rights activists, speakers included local and state officials. Even US Senator Richard Blumenthal spoke out against Trump’s immigration outrages.

Avelo currently benefits from a Connecticut state exemption from fuel taxes, which subsidizes its hub operations in New Haven. The pressure is on for Avelo to either cancel the deportations or pay the fuel levy.

The state Attorney General William Tong demanded that Avelo confirm that they will not operate deportation flights from Connecticut. But the airline has refused the AG’s request to make public their secret contract with the Homeland Security.

The continuity of US deportation policy

Aside from the heated rhetoric, The New York Times reports “deportations haven’t surged under Trump” although he has taken “new and unusual measures.” These have included deporting people to third countries far from their origins and invoking the eighteenth century wartime Alien Enemies Act.

The NYT concludes that deportations “fall short” from being the threatened mass exodus and, in fact, “look largely similar” to what was accomplished by Joe Biden. Despite all the drama and an initial surge of arrests, the pace of deportations under Trump has been slower than under Biden.

Barack Obama still retains the title of “deporter in chief” with 3.2 million individuals expelled. And Joe Biden still holds the record for the most expulsions by a US president in a single year if migrant removals under the Title 42 Covid-era public health provision are included (technically “expulsions” but not “deportations”).

Going forward, however, we can rest assured that Trump will try to beat those records. Lost in the mainstream discourse on the migrant controversy is the reality that US policy, such as sanctions, are a major factor driving migration to the US. This takes place in the context of the largest immigration surge into the US ever, eclipsing the “great immigration boom” of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

Protests expand to other Avelo cities

A petition is circulating with some 35,000 signatures to-date demanding cessation of the Avelo deportation flights. According to the petition, a leaked memo discloses that Avelo’s decision to enter the deportation business was financially motivated to offset other losses.

Boycott Avelo protests have expanded to other destinations served by the airline, including Rochester NY, Burbank CA, Daytona Beach FL, Eugene OR, and Wilmington DE. The campaign against Avelo is growing – locally, regionally, and nationally.

As the sign at the boycott Avelo protest in Santa Rosa reminds us: “immigration makes America great!”

Roger D. Harris is with the human rights group Task Force on the Americas, founded in 1986.

The author at the Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26.

The post ICE Contracts Avelo Airlines to Fly Deportees appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Roger Harris.

Image by Ash Hayes.

To conquer a place is to fundamentally subdue its population. This must be clearly differentiated from ‘occupation’, a specific legal term that governs the relationship between a foreign “occupying power” and the occupied nation under international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention.

When Israeli forces were ultimately compelled to redeploy from the Gaza Strip in 2005, a direct consequence of the persistent resistance of the Palestinian population there, the United Nations resolutely insisted that the Gaza Strip remained an occupied territory under international law.

This position stood in stark contradiction to that of Israel, which conveniently produced its own legal texts that designated Gaza a ‘hostile entity‘ – thus, not an occupied territory.

Let us try to understand what appears to be a confusing logic:

Israel proved incapable of sustaining its military occupation of Gaza, which began in June 1967. The paramount reason for Israel’s eventual redeployment was the enduring Palestinian Resistance, which rendered it impossible for Israel to normalize its military occupation and, crucially, to make it profitable – unlike the illegal settlements of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Between 1967 and the early 1970s, when Israel began investing in building illegal settlement blocks in the Strip, the Israeli military under the command of Ariel Sharon relentlessly strove to suppress Palestinians. He employed extreme violence, mass destruction, and ethnic cleansing tactics to subdue the Strip.

Yet, at no juncture did he achieve his ultimate and comprehensive objectives of complete subjugation.

Subsequently, he invested in his infamous, but failed ‘Five Fingers‘ plan. At the time the head of the Israeli army Southern Command – which included Gaza – Sharon stubbornly believed that the only way to defeat the Gazans was by severing the contiguity of the Strip, thus hindering organized resistance.

In pursuing this aim, he sought to divide Gaza into so-called security zones where the main Israeli Jewish settlements would be built, fortified by massive military build up. This would be joined by Israeli military control of key routes and the blocking of most coastal access.

However, this plan never fully actualized, as creating these ‘fingers’ required that Palestinians on both sides of the ‘security zones’ would have to be pacified to some extent – a condition that reality on the ground never delivered.

What did actualize was the building of isolated settlement blocks: the largest was in the southwest of the Gaza Strip, near the border with Egypt, known as the Gush Katif, followed by the northern settlements, and finally the central settlement of Netzarim.

Housing a few thousand settlers, and often requiring the presence of a far greater number of soldiers assigned to protect them, these so-called settlements were essentially fortified military towns. Due to the limited geography of Gaza (181 square miles or 365 square kilometers) and the stiff resistance, the settlements had limited space for expansion, thus remaining a costly colonial endeavor.

When the Israeli army emptied the last illegal settlement in Gaza in 2005, the soldiers snuck out of the Strip in the middle of the night. At their heels were thousands of Gazans who chased the soldiers until the last of them fled the dramatic scene.

That singular and powerful episode alone is more than sufficient to allow one to assert with unwavering certainty that Gaza was at no point truly conquered by Israel.

Though Israel withdrew its permanent military presence from the main population centers of the Strip, it continued to operate within so-called buffer zones, which were often significant incursions into Palestinian territory, far beyond the armistice line. It also imposed a hermetic siege against Gaza, which starkly explains why the majority of Gazans have never stepped a foot outside the Strip.

Israel’s control over airspace, territorial water, natural resources (mostly Mediterranean gas fields), and much more readily led the UN to its immediate conclusion: Gaza remains an occupied territory.

Unsurprisingly, Israel vehemently opposed this reality. Tel Aviv’s true desire is absolute control over Gaza, coupled with the convenient and self-serving designation of the territory as perpetually hostile. This twisted logic would grant the Israeli military an endlessly exploitable pretext to initiate devastating wars against the already besieged and impoverished Strip whenever it deemed convenient.

This brutal and cynical practice is chillingly known within Israel’s military lexicon as ‘mowing the grass‘ – a dehumanizing euphemism for the periodic and deliberate degradation of the military capabilities of the Palestinian Resistance in an attempt to ensure that Gaza can never effectively challenge its Israeli jailors or break free from its open-air prison.

October 7, 2023, ended that myth, where Al-Aqsa Flood Operation challenged Israel’s long-standing military doctrine. The so-called Gaza Envelope region, where the late Sharon’s Southern Command is based, was entirely seized by the youth of Gaza, who organized under the harshest of economic and military circumstances, to, in a shocking turn of events, defeat Israel.

While acknowledging the UN designation of Gaza as occupied territory, Palestinians understandably speak of and commemorate its ‘liberation’ in 2005. Their logic is clear: the Israeli military’s redeployment to the border region was a direct consequence of their resistance.

Israel’s current attempts to defeat the Palestinians in Gaza are failing for a fundamental reason rooted in history. When Israeli forces stealthily withdrew from the Strip two decades ago under the cover of night, Palestinian resistance fighters possessed rudimentary weaponry, closer to fireworks than effective military instruments. The landscape of resistance has fundamentally shifted since then.

This long-standing reality has been upended in recent months. All Israeli estimates suggest that tens of thousands of soldiers have been killed, wounded, or psychologically impaired since the start of the Gaza war. Since Israel failed to subdue the Gazans over the course of two relentless decades, it is not merely improbable, but an outright absurdity to expect that Israel will now succeed in subduing and conquering Gaza.

Israel itself is acutely aware of this inherent paradox, hence its immediate and brutal choice: the perpetration of a genocide, a horrific act intended to pave the way for the ethnic cleansing of the remaining survivors. The former has been executed with devastating efficiency, a stain on the conscience of a world that largely stood by in silence. The latter, however, remains an unachievable fantasy, predicated on the delusional notion that Gazans would willingly choose to abandon their ancestral homeland.

Gaza has never been conquered and never will be. Under the unyielding tenets of international law, it remains an occupied territory, regardless of any eventual withdrawal of Israeli forces to the border – a withdrawal that Netanyahu’s destructive and futile war cannot indefinitely postpone. When this inevitable redeployment occurs, the relationship between Gaza and Israel will be irrevocably transformed, a powerful testament to the enduring resilience and indomitable spirit of the Palestinian people.

The post The Myth of Conquest: Why Gaza Will Never Be Subdued by Israel appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” on April 2, 2025, marked the formal launch of sweeping global tariffs, capping months of escalatory announcements since returning to office. Amplifying the economic nationalism of his first term, it marks the culmination of Trump’s decades-old advocacy for raising tariffs and reviving American industry.

His latest push builds on more than two decades of previous presidential efforts to recalibrate trade, in a far more aggressive form. Influenced by Project 2025’s chapter on fair trade by longtime adviser Peter Navarro, it calls for rapid, uncompromising trade action to reduce deficits, lower debt, and reshore manufacturing. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has similarly framed tariffs as part of a larger economic realignment to restore U.S. industrial and economic dominance.

Though rarely stated outright, Trump aims to break the dominance of China’s export-led economic model, with the understanding that there will be some consequences for the U.S. economy. While his strategy builds on former efforts to reshape trade, the public’s understanding of Trump’s agenda and impression of its execution enjoys only modest domestic support. The gamble carries the risks of global economic destabilization, blowback from allies, and handing China even more power on the global stage.

Protectionism, Free Trade, and Resurgent Skepticism

From 1798 to 1913, tariffs covered 50 percent to 90 percent of income and shielded American industry from foreign competitors. After World War II, however, the U.S. aimed to rebuild allied economies and draw them away from communism by opening its consumer, industrial, and capital markets. Trade deficits emerged by the 1970s, but abandoning the gold standard in 1971 let the U.S. print dollars more easily and sustain the imbalance.

The Cold War’s end in the early 1990s left the U.S. confident it could continue steering global trade on its own terms. It pushed for global tariff cuts and free trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), while U.S. corporations helped build up foreign manufacturing, particularly in China, which benefited from preferential trade terms under its most-favored-nation trade status. American consumers absorbed global overproduction, and corporate profits soared, but many American workers were increasingly left behind.

These policies added to the anti-globalization movements of the late 1990s, most visibly at the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Seattle, prompting a rethink of trade policy. Domestic industries like steel had collapsed under cheap imports, and former President George W. Bush briefly imposed steel tariffs in 2002 before the WTO struck them down. The 2008 financial crisis brought bipartisan calls for economic restructuring, with the Obama administration pledging to reshore manufacturing jobs. Obama later distanced himself from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a free trade agreement—a move echoed by Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump’s first-term trade agenda broke from the previous caution. Favoring unilateral action, he withdrew from the TPP in 2017, clashed with the WTO, and renegotiated NAFTA. He then imposed tariffs on key trade partners, especially China. By then, the cost of offshoring had become clear. With U.S. corporate assistance, China had gained capital and technology expertise to become the “world’s factory.” Low-tariff access to the U.S. market gave Beijing a $300 billion surplus over America in 2024, and it emerged as the world’s top exporter and creditor.

President Biden struck a less confrontational tone upon assuming office in January 2021, yet he similarly raised tariffs on China. Like China, the EU and Japan had established large trade surpluses with the U.S., an issue he sought to address, but geopolitical unity with the U.S. on the global stage tempered criticism. Despite lowering tariffs on Europe, Biden nonetheless passed the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science Act, both criticized by the EU as protectionist.

Trump’s second-term focus has again hit allies, yet the attention remains squarely on China, with individual tariffs on other countries being paused on April 9, while tariffs on Beijing have increased. Aside from direct exports, Washington also seeks to target China’s role in global trade. Biden’s push to “nearshore” manufacturing to countries like Mexico exposed the limits of decoupling, as Chinese companies quickly established themselves in new Mexican industrial parks.

Many imports shipped to the U.S. from other countries also contain Chinese components, meaning Trump’s 10 percent “baseline” tariff hike on all imports is meant to counteract other countries serving as conduits for Chinese goods.

In Project 2025, Peter Navarro emphasized the role of non-tariff barriers, like strict safety standards, customs delays, and local content requirements, in obstructing U.S. exports. The U.S. uses these, too, and in early February 2025, Trump cited fentanyl smuggling as justification for raising tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada.

Even if a more conventional president follows, Trump’s tariff hikes and resulting supply chain rerouting may prove difficult to undo. Critics question whether this transition can be fast, affordable, or effective, but the COVID-19 pandemic proved supply chains can reorient under pressure relatively quickly, just as China showed its agility by setting up operations in Mexico during the 2020s.

Internal Risks

A tariff war will nonetheless raise prices for consumers and businesses, ending the era of cheap global goods that the U.S. economy has depended on for decades. Countries maintained friendly ties to keep consumer market access and reinvested U.S. dollars into American stocks, bonds, and real estate. Uncertainty over Trump’s policies saw a fake tweet about tariffs on April 7 trigger multi-trillion-dollar swings. Prolonged stock volatility or declines would reduce pensions, household wealth, and corporate valuations.

Some argue that if the stock markets crash, money could flow into and lower the price of U.S. treasuries, reducing their prices and allowing the government to refinance long-term bonds with cheaper debt. However, many traditional U.S. debt holders may demand concessions before continuing to finance it. Treasury yields have already risen, making new debt more expensive, and China, the second-largest holder of U.S. debt, is suspected of shedding bonds to help do so.

China has also retaliated by raising its own tariffs and recently haltingexports of rare earths and critical minerals essential for modern technologies. Its state-backed firms can flood global markets with cheap goods and advanced tech, squeezing out competitors. With a growing presence in international institutions and trade blocs, Beijing could increasingly shape global economic norms if these institutions and agreements become more fluid and the U.S. steps back.

Trump also wants to devalue the dollar to make U.S. exports more competitive, but insists on keeping the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, which eases access to cheap debt. His approach is undermining global confidence in the dollar, even if no clear alternative has emerged yet. Trump’s pressure on a resistant Federal Reserve to cut interest rates further reflects limited borrowing options and coordination in U.S. financial policy as he embarks on major economic upheaval.

Democrats have largely avoided serious condemnation of Trump’s policies, recognizing it may be a losing political strategy. Still, some top members like Chuck Schumer and Gavin Newsom have marked early opposition, along with seven GOP senators who recently voted against Trump’s Trade Review Act.

Trump’s policies have some support from the U.S. business class, which once saw China as a promising market but now sees it as a rival. No longer limited to cheap goods, Chinese companies like Temu, Shein, and BYD increasingly threaten giants like Amazon and Tesla. Any success in bringing manufacturing back will mostly come through automation instead of high-paying jobs, benefiting major U.S. corporations. Still, decades of cooperation with China means that these businesses remain exposed, with major corporate figures expressing public concern and Elon Musk publicly criticizingPeter Navarro’s role in the tariff push.

Trump has, in turn, framed tariffs not only as leverage over trading partners but also as a source of revenue to offset other taxes. His 2024 campaign called for cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, down from 21 percent, already lowered from 35 percent during his first term. However, the promised economic boom was not evident before COVID-19 hit, and his suggestion of replacing personal income tax with tariff revenue is also unlikely to generate enough funds to do so, even in an optimistic scenario.

And while the U.S. needs to expand production for both domestic use and exports, current capacity falls far short. Tariffs might push companies and consumers toward new habits, but blanket protection without government initiatives in infrastructure development, skills training, and research and development risks doing more harm than good, and leaves the private sector to act with little guidance.

Compared to Trump’s unpredictable approach, China and the EU have positioned themselves as stable anchors of the global economy. U.S. calls to coordinate with major economic allies like the EU and Japan to limit dealings with China, including reducing Chinese imports and preventing its companies from establishing themselves, risk falling on deaf ears as tariffs have strained ties.

Global Risks

Reducing access to U.S. consumers also threatens a major pillar of global economic stability. The U.S. accounted for roughly 13 percent of global import consumption in 2023, acting as a safety valve for global overproduction by absorbing excess goods.

China, facing a property crisis, high youth unemployment, and mounting local government debt, has pledged to “vigorously boost domestic consumption,” according to the People’s Daily, to help replace American consumers. But its $300 billion trade surplus with the U.S. exemplifies its reliance and more limited leverage for retaliation. The EU has signaled it will not tolerate a flood of Chinese goods, as it, like the U.S., increasingly finds itself competing with China in high-end products.

The EU and Canada have similarly raised tariffs on the U.S. The Trump administration has tested EU unity by courting globalization-skeptic allies like Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, though tensions are likely to deepen before they ease. Europe’s struggle to sustain support for Ukraine against Russia has shown the perils of deindustrialization, a trend the U.S. now seeks to radically reverse ahead of others. And, by targeting allies with tariffs too, the U.S. ensures that any self-inflicted economic pain is matched abroad, making the cost of reshaping trade a shared burden.

Forcing a global trade war—an escalating Canada-China tariff clash in 2025 is one encouraging sign—is likely to further weaken China’s export-led model. As the U.S. signals a reduced role in safeguarding global maritime trade, already strained by disruptions like Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and rising piracy, geopolitical tensions could disrupt other key routes. Without U.S. intervention, free trade will face rising shipping and insurance costs.

Trump frequently changed tactics in his first term, mixing threats with negotiations. If his tariff strategy falters, voices like Kent Lassman’s in Project 2025, calling for a return to free trade, may gain traction. But Trump has been warning of trade imbalances since the 1980s, when Japan and West Germany were his main targets. He seems determined to make reversing it central to his legacy, this time focusing on China.

Scrapping the old, in his view, unreformable system, and embracing whatever follows is based on the belief that the U.S. is best positioned to shape the new system. The question now is which countries will support that shift or be forced to. Whether a complete globalization teardown occurs or not, he appears ready to push as hard as possible within constraints. As evidenced by much of MAGA’s merchandise still being made in China, dismantling Beijing’s advantages in global trade will not be easy.

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

The post Trump’s Global Tariffs Are Meant for China appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John P. Ruehl.

Photograph Source: Jason “Textfiles” Scott – CC BY 2.0

Despite Donald Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025, his administration began enforcing that initiative’s agenda immediately after his second inauguration. This includes efforts to erase history through education cuts, classroom and book censorship, website scrubbing, and the silencing of media outlets and institutions like PBS, NPR, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

One week after Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025, in a post on the online platform Free Government Information, data services librarian emeritus from the University of California, San Diego, James A. Jacobs wrote, “There is a difference between the government changing a policy and the government erasing information, but the line between those two has blurred in the digital age… In the digital age, government publishing has shifted from the distribution of unalterable printed books to digital posts on government websites. Such digital publications can be moved, altered, and withdrawn at the flick of a switch. Publishing agencies are not required to preserve their own information, nor to provide free access to it.”

While noting that “digital government information was being lost before President Trump,” Jacobs stressed that “[t]he scale of loss and alteration of information under Trump may prove to be unprecedented” and that “librarians, archivists, and citizens” must create a “new distributed digital preservation infrastructure.”

Organizations like the Freedom Archives in Berkeley, California, have been working for decades to preserve online information on history, social issues, and activism. Established in 1999, this nonprofit educational facility houses audio, video, and print materials that “chronicle the progressive history of the Bay Area, the United States, and international movements for liberation and social justice,” according to the organization’s website. Its digital collection of content on progressive movements, culture, and activism includes materials on subjects like Black liberation, gender and sexuality, and Indigenous struggles.

The Freedom Archives’ co-director and co-founder, Claude Marks, notes that conservative extremists “are purposefully rewriting history to eliminate references to slavery of Blacks from Africa and genocide against Indigenous people, and the purpose of that is to reify and reinforce white supremacy. Oftentimes, the truth lies more with the resisters who may have been defeated in various struggles with their colonizers. If that’s your shared point of view, you want to protect access to material that gives voice to those people who were engaged in liberatory struggles and were fighting for justice and human rights.”

For instance, nearly 37 states in the U.S. have measures in place “that limit how America’s undeniable history of racism—from chattel slavery to Jim Crow—can be discussed in public school classrooms,” according to a 2023 articlein the Conversation.

Many fear this attempt to rewrite history, especially under the Trump administration, might have far-reaching consequences. “The danger isn’t just that they’ll purge accurate data from the past but that if and when that data is ever reposted that some of it will be modified with false information,” saidCharles Gaba, a health care policy data analyst and web developer, according to a February 2025 Salon article.

As an independent organization, the Freedom Archives is largely funded through grassroots efforts. “We’re not vulnerable to: ‘Oh, we didn’t get that big grant through the Department of Education,’ which will no longer exist [soon],” Marks says.

The Freedom Archives’ staff has collaborated with archives and organizations like the Manilatown Heritage Foundation, the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, and the Los Angeles-based Southern California Library, which “documents and makes accessible histories of struggles that challenge racism and other systems of oppression so we can all imagine and sustain possibilities for freedom.”

It has also worked with Interference Archive, a Brooklyn, New York-based organization that curates in-person and online exhibits of “cultural ephemera” such as posters, books, zines, and flyers created by activists and participants in social movements. Interference Archive uses these materials “to animate histories of people mobilizing for social transformation” and to preserve and honor “histories and material culture that is often marginalized in mainstream institutions,” its website states.

Highlighting the importance of these efforts to archive information, the New England Archivists state, “Archives are the foundation of a democratic society. They exist to safeguard the rights of individuals, ensure transparency, and hold public servants accountable.”

Another notable online library is the Internet Archive, whose Wayback Machine contains “more than 928 billion web pages saved over time,” the site explains. In March 2025, the Wayback Machine’s director, Mark Graham, toldNPR that the Internet Archive was the only place to find an “interactive timeline” of the January 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol and that “it’s in the public’s interest to save such records.” More people have been referring to the information on the Internet Archive website since Trump took office.

In April 2025, the San Francisco Standard reported that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had cut funding for the Internet Archive while the organization “was halfway through an NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] grant of $345,960.” Jefferson Bailey, the Internet Archive’s director of archiving and data services, said that funding from other sources would help the organization stay afloat, but he worried about the impact of the cuts on smaller nonprofits.

One such nonprofit is the HathiTrust Digital Library, which contains digital copies of more than 18 million items from research libraries. The universities of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (formerly known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation) and the 11 libraries of the University of California launched the archive in 2008 “to ensure that those digitized collections—and the libraries that steward them—remain strong and serve scholarship into the future,” the website explains. “Our reach now includes members outside of the United States. Over 18 million digitized library items are currently available, and our mission to expand the collective record of human knowledge is always evolving.”

Meanwhile, the Zinn Education Project (ZEP) provides educational materials for middle and high school teachers. “Based on the approach to history highlighted in Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States, our teaching materials emphasize the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history,” the site states. Free downloadable lessons and articles are categorized by theme, time period, and reading level.

A worldwide network of volunteers curates the Marxist Internet Archive, a storehouse of writings by nearly 1,000 authors “representing a complete spectrum of political, philosophical, and scientific thought.” The site’s content comprises more than 180,000 documents published in 83 languages. Its founders’ primary motivation for starting this archive was to dispel misinformation and misconceptions about Marxism, the site explains.

Open Culture consolidates, curates, and provides free access to culture and educational media, including history, politics, education, life, and current affairs. “Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video,” the archive’s website states. “It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content… and give you access to this high-quality content whenever and wherever you want it.”

The Public Domain Review’s archives cover subjects like culture, history, politics, and war. “It’s our belief that the public domain is an invaluable and indispensable good, which—like our natural environment and our physical heritage—deserves to be explicitly recognized, protected, and appreciated,” the nonprofit’s website notes.

Many of these organizations’ ties to progressive movements extend far beyond archiving. For example, Marks says that “as participants in a broader struggle for liberation, justice, and global values that are liberatory instead of oppressive and colonial,” the Freedom Archives’ staff participates in local and national activism and stays conscious of “the importance of causes like international solidarity—defending the right for Cuba to exist without an embargo, the right of the Palestinians to survive the genocide, and the right to their own identity and state. As long as we’re doing that, I have faith that all these movements will survive the brutality and the willingness of the powers of the empire to try to destroy them and snuff them out.”

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy.

The post As History Erasure Intensifies, Independent Internet Archives Are Helping Fortify the ‘Digital Preservation Infrastructure’ appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Damon Orion.

Main St., Belfast, Maine. Photograph Source: Centpacrr – CC BY-SA 3.0

It’s not every day a small town beats back a $500 million industrial project, but that’s exactly what just happened in Belfast, Maine, population 6,700.

The project was a land-based industrial fish farm as big as Gillette Stadium, Fenway Park and two Boston Gardens – combined. In dollar terms, it might have been the biggest industrial project in Maine history. It would have destroyed dozens of acres of mature forest, vital wetlands, part of a popular hiking trail, and the habitat of the extraordinary, and threatened, bobolink bird, which, at all of 1-2 ounces, migrates 12,000 or more miles a year, and 1,100 miles or more in a single day.

And in the best-case scenario, Nordic Aquafarms of Fredrikstad, Norway would have destroyed dozens of acres of mature forest, wetlands, and wildlife habitat, and then would have simply walked away when the mammoth project had run its course and become inoperable in 20-30 years – leaving behind its vast buildings.

And then there was the cumulative effect of the 7.7 million gallons of effluent per day that Nordic would have dumped into Belfast Bay.

For fully seven years the Nordic project stalked Belfast, propped up by a craven town government and DINO Maine Governor Janet Mills, who never saw an industrial project she didn’t want to ram down the throat of a reluctant citizenry.

But local citizens, environmental activists and a gaggle of enviro-lawyers can’t claim all the credit for the demise of Nordic’s Belfast project. Nordic’s own incompetence deserves a good chunk of the credit.

There were many nails in Nordic’s Belfast coffin, but the biggest was Nordic not owning the intertidal land it needed to lay its saltwater intake and effluent discharge pipes. Nordic knew early on it didn’t own the land, but it said nothing, apparently hoping no one would notice.

But someone did notice. Firebrand Nordic opponent and deed-and-title research whiz Paul Bernacki discovered it, and Nordic, caught with its pants down, said in a Facebook post that it wasn’t their place to say who owned what. Hours later, perhaps realizing the post constituted a land-grab confession, Nordic took down the post.

Nordic could have bought the intertidal land, and the upland seaside home connected to it, which were both for sale, but it didn’t, in an apparent effort to save a few bucks. Nordic rolled the dice and lost, and spent the next several years paying big-boy Maine lawyers to defend its hallucinated right to use land it didn’t own.

To build its project, Nordic needed a barnful of state and local permits, and all of them required clear title to all needed land – something Nordic didn’t have. Not even close. But state and local licensing agencies found a way around the ubiquitous clear-title requirements: ignore them.

Nordic opponents also faced a Belfast City Council that rammed through a crucial zoning change in the face of written comments that ran 130-0 against the rushed vote. With that, the city council was off to the Nordic races, and for six years it never looked back.

The City of Belfast spent more than $160,000 on legal bills defending the ill-fated project, and when the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2023 that Nordic didn’t own the intertidal land it needed, the Belfast City Council went to the mattresses and attempted to seize the needed intertidal land through eminent domain. But Maine law bars eminent domain for private purposes, so the city council announced that it was creating a public park on the needed property.

The so-called park was laughable from the get-go. To access the park, visitors would have to park across Maine’s arterial Route 1, and then dodge vehicles in a 50-mph zone with limited visibility, all to enjoy the company of an industrial pump house in the middle of the alleged park. And with a 14-day dispersal rate for Nordic’s daily effluent discharge of 7.7 million gallons, park visitors could enjoy more than 100 million gallons of effluent discharge right offshore.
Nice.

But the Belfast City Council’s inept land seizure spilled over into the neighboring town of Northport, and under well-established Maine law, one cannot take what one does not own. So the Maine Supreme Judicial Court tossed out the city council’s farcical eminent domain action.

Undeterred, the city council then voted to spend thousands of dollars on bizarre schemes to hire pliant surveyors to redraw the Belfast-Northport town line. One need not travel 650 miles to Washington to find clueless public officials.

And when the Belfast City Council finally gave up that ghost, Nordic, which for six years had professed its undying love for Belfast, sued the City of Belfast for not following through on the sham public park.

After the 2023 Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruling, and after Belfast residents Jeffrey Mabee and Judith Grace sued Nordic for $2.5 million for wrongly claiming part of their property, Nordic’s home office in Fredrikstad, Norway cut loose its U.S. operations in an apparent attempt to insulate itself from the potential liabilities of operations whose prospects looked decidedly grim.

Then in January 2025, almost two years after the Maine Supreme Judicial Court sealed Nordic’s fate, the company finally abandoned its Belfast project.

And so ended the seven-year saga of a $500 million industrial project beaten back by the citizens of a small town in midcoast Maine. Such victories don’t come along every day, but it happened here, and the world is a better place for it.

The post The Little Town that Could appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lawrence Reichard.

Photograph Source: Richard Giles – CC BY-SA 2.0

After Ringling Bros. ended its 145-year-long tradition of forcing elephants to perform in 2016, many assumed that the protracted era of American elephant abuse was finally over. Unfortunately, that isn’t true yet.

To be sure, there has been tremendous progress. Localities across the country, followed by some states, have banned bullhooks—the fireplace-poker-like devices with a sharp point on the end that are deployed on the most sensitive parts of elephants’ bodies to force them into compliance. Without these weapons, circuses insist they can’t use elephants, massive animals who can easily kill a person, on purpose or by accident, with a single trunk swipe or foot stomp.

After being trained to perform under the constant threat of punishment with a bullhook—and taught that if they don’t perform as directed, they will face a violent “tune-up” with a bullhook while chained down—the mere sight of a bullhook can instill enough fear to keep these majestic animals compliant. At least, most of the time.

Ringling Bros. Shifts From Elephant Acts

Unable to use elephants in jurisdictions that adopted bullhook bans, Ringling Bros. began leaving elephants chained in boxcars at specific stops along its routes. Indeed, the circus cited the increasing patchwork of local laws when it announced in 2015 that it would finally bow to long-standing public pressure and stop using elephants.

Today, Ringling Bros. features only willing human performers. Other circuses followed suit. But not all of them. Numerous circuses continue to chain elephants up and haul them around the country for a few brief moments of demeaning entertainment. Often, these animals are supplied by Carson & Barnes.

Elephants have repeatedly escaped from this notorious outfit, including twice in 2024. Loose elephants pose serious public safety threats, and the animals themselves are often injured, sometimes even killed. Carson & Barnes’ head trainer was caught on video attacking, electroshocking, yelling, and swearing at elephants while the animals cried out. Yet, numerous circuses continue to lease animal acts from Carson & Barnes.

Challenges Elephants Face in Zoos and Captivity

And it’s not just circuses. Even the best-intentioned zoos can’t provide the vast acreage these wide-ranging animals need. Elephants evolved to traverse many miles every day. Unable to move in any meaningful way and often kept on hard surfaces, captive elephants frequently suffer from painful arthritis and foot disease. Indeed, these are the leading reasons captive elephants are euthanized. Some zoos, such as the Bronx Zoo, even continue to hold these highly social animals in solitary confinement.

In 2024, the Oakland Zoo, whose six-acre elephant enclosure was one of the largest in the U.S. yet still comprised less than one percent of an elephant’s home range, made the compassionate decision to send its last surviving elephant to the Elephant Sanctuary. This marked the end of three-quarters of a century of keeping elephants, but not the end of the zoo’s work to help elephants in the wild.

CEO Nik Dehejia explained, “Oakland Zoo’s ‘elephant program of the future’ requires much more than our habitat and facilities can provide today for this species to thrive in human care.” Two decades prior, the Detroit Zoo made a similar decision, sending elephants Winkie and Wanda to The Elephant Sanctuary in recognition of their complex physical and psychological needs.

But Oakland and Detroit are the exceptions. Many more zoos continue to hold and breed elephants. In 2017, a cohort of American zoos even imported 18 wild-captured elephants.

Given the extensive knowledge of how complex these animals’ needs are, how extraordinarily social and remarkably intelligent they are, how is it that hundreds of elephants are still confined across the U.S.? Why haven’t we banned these outdated exhibits? What legal protections do these animals have?

Insufficient Standards for Elephants on a Federal Level

The primary law governing the treatment of captive elephants in the U.S. is the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA). Congress intended this law to ensure the humane care and treatment of animals like elephants who are used for exhibition. However, the AWA’s standards are truly minimal. They lack elephant-specific requirements.

Instead, elephants are governed by the same generic standards that regulate most animals, from bats to bears to tigers to zebras. For example, these standards don’t set forth specific space requirements. Instead, they vaguelyrequire “sufficient space to allow each animal to make normal postural and social adjustments with adequate freedom of movement,”—which inspectors and regulated entities alike have struggled to understand, let alone enforce. Nor do the standards require enrichment or social companionship for elephants.

What’s worse, even these minimal standards of the AWA are not meaningfully enforced. Congress tasked the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) with implementing this law. Still, time and time again, the agency’s own Office of Inspector General (OIG) has found the AWA enforcement to be appallingly paltry. When violations of the minimal standards are documented, the most likely outcome for an exhibitor is a meaningless warning. If they disregard said warning, odds are good the USDA will not take any follow-up action—or that, if it does, it will be in the form of another warning (sometimes even a third warning!) or a fine that is so heavily reduced that, in the words of the OIG, it is treated as a “cost of doing business.”

Minimal Fines and Consequences for Elephant Exploitation

The horrific abuse by Carson & Barnes’ head trainer that was documented on video resulted in a $400 fine. When two elephants were injured after a Carson & Barnes truck crashed and flipped on its side, the USDA fined the company $550. In 2016, the company paid a higher fine after three elephants were injured after escaping and damaging property, but it was still a tiny fraction of the potential penalty under the law. In 2012, the company paid just $3,714 for 10 Animal Welfare Act violations, including yet another escape, as well as public endangerment. Such trivial penalties do nothing to deter violations—hence, yet another elephant escape in 2024.

The USDA is fully empowered to revoke Carson & Barnes’ license to exhibit animals after such an extensive record of violations. But it has refused to exercise this authority. Instead, the agency continues to renew that license.

Nor have efforts to advocate for elephants in the courtroom fared well. Lawsuits seeking recognition of a right to bodily liberty for elephants have failed in the U.S., essentially on the grounds that, while elephants are remarkably intelligent and complex and fare exceptionally poorly in captivity as a result, they aren’t humans. Though courts have the authority, under the common law, to recognize such rights, they’ve declined to do so, instead instructing advocates to go to the legislature. And so they have.

State and Local Advocacy Succeeds in Protecting Elephants

In the face of court refusals and federal government and industry failure, animal advocates have stepped up their legislative efforts—and they’ve met considerable success. In 2024, Massachusetts became the 11th state to restrict the use of elephants and other wild animals in circuses. More than 200 local jurisdictions across the country have done the same. In 2023, Ojai, California, became the first city to “codify elephants’ fundamental right to bodily liberty, thereby prohibiting the keeping of elephants in captive settings that deprive them of their autonomy and ability to engage in their innate behaviors.”

But with hundreds of elephants still held captive without meaningful legal protections—some of them still subjected to grueling travel and performance regimens—the work is not done.

The Role of Every Individual in Supporting Elephant Protection

The good news is that every one of us can play a role in getting us closer to a world in which widespread public awe and respect for elephants is codified into our laws. We can start by not patronizing institutions that profit from elephant suffering and educating our family and friends about these animals and what they endure. We can also reach out to our city council members and county commissioners to ask them to follow in the footsteps of the many jurisdictions that have banned traveling elephant (and other animal) acts.

The Humane Society of the United States (now Humane World for Animals) created an extensive, step-by-step guide to help advocates pass such ordinances in their communities. If your local government has already banned traveling animal acts, or if none come to your town, you could go even further and work to enact an ordinance modeled on Ojai’s that prohibits elephant captivity. Similar measures can be pursued at the state level as well, especially if local jurisdictions within the state have already made strides.

And let’s not forget the possibility of federal protection. Animal protection is one of the few remaining bipartisan issues, and more than 50 other countries have already banned or restricted traveling animal acts at the national level. In 2022, despite extensive legislative gridlock, animal advocates successfully persuaded Congress to enact the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which prohibits private ownership and public interactions with big cats. Bills to ban traveling wild animal acts have been introduced at the federal level in the past and, with persistence, could meet similar success.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The post How the United States Is Failing Elephants—and What You Can Do appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Delcianna Winders.

Photograph Source: Seattle City Council – CC BY 2.0

Top Amazon executives have received huge tax windfalls from the 2017 tax reform and stand to reap even bigger windfalls from the new tax legislation Congress is currently crafting.

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, the Athena Coalition, and PowerSwitch Action provides detailed analysis on how our rigged tax system has expanded the massive fortunes of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and CEO Andrew Jassy while leaving ordinary workers and small businesses behind.

Jeff Bezos has reaped billions from the capital gains tax double standard

When the Republican-controlled Congress passed the last major tax bill in 2017, they failed to fix one of the most perverse aspects of our tax code: the deeply discounted rate on income from wealth versus income from work. Because the rich get most of their money from investments, millions of teachers and firefighters wind up paying a higher tax rate than many billionaires.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has sold $36.7 billion worth of his company’s stock since the 2017 reform. If that law had equalized the 20 percent capital gains rate with the 37 percent top marginal rate on ordinary income, he would’ve owed Uncle Sam $6.2 billion more in taxes on those sales. To put that sum in perspective, it would be enough to cover the cost of nearly 650,000 public housing units for a year.

Current Congressional leaders appear eager to perpetuate this perversity.

Corporate and top marginal tax rate cuts are boons to executives

In the last tax reform go-round, Congress cut the top marginal income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 37 percent. This didn’t affect Bezos much because he receives a modest annual salary as Amazon’s executive chair.

Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy, on the other hand, enjoyed a significant windfall. Based solely on the $263 million in salary and vested stock he pocketed between 2018 and 2024, we estimate that Jassy saved roughly $6.6 million from this rate reduction. That amount could’ve covered annual child care costs for more than 600 families.

The post The Tax Debate: What’s In it for Jeff Bezos and Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sarah Anderson.

Image by Elimende Inagella.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Medea Benjamin - Nicolas J. S. Davies.

Image by Planet Volumes.

“Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.” Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 2

Where are all those righteous-sounding people in the Western nations that for years have denounced in the media, to politicians, to the world that the human rights of the people of Venezuela needed to be defended from a supposed “authoritarian” government, first of Chávez then of Maduro? Where are they now when the powerful government of the United States, led by a bone fide authoritarian, trashes the human rights of Venezuelans?

Recent USA governments encouraged Venezuelans to leave their country and enabled them to enter the USA. The Trump administration, however, has rounded them up like criminals, accused them of being members of a defunct local Venezuelan criminal gang, denied them a legal hearing or access to defense lawyers, and sent them, for a handsome fee, handcuffed to a most brutal prison in another country, El Salvador. Others are helpless in domestic detention centres. They were taken out of their homes, out of schools, out of their places of work, given no notice, nor any option, nor allowed to give any explanation. Tattoos on their person were enough to convict them as terrorists and criminals. In El Salvador they were imprisoned and beate.

“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.” Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article

Let there be no mistake: in September 2023 combined forces of the Venezuelan police and military, arrested, disbanded, and eliminated the local thugs called Tren de Aragua. At the same time, the authorities cleaned out Tocorón Prison, in the state of Aragua and re-took control from the gangs. The leaders were captured and those few that escaped had INTERPOL warrants issued against them.

What created this horrific and unjust imprisonment of Venezuelans in El Salvador? The extreme fascist Venezuelan opposition leaders, who live outside the country by choice, committed what is perhaps the worst unpatriotic and immoral crime against their own people. In 2024 Maria Corina Machado, Luis Borges, Leopoldo Lopez, persuaded Ted Cruz that the Venezuelan government had sent members of the (defunct) Tren de Aragua gang to the USA; and furthermore, that the Venezuelan migrants were instruments of that gang. Hence, Trump announced that same false and dangerous lie to the public.

There has been, to this day, no evidence whatsoever of this supposed conspiracy by the Venezuelan government to send criminals to the USA, nor has the criminality of the migrants who were rounded up been proven in a court of law.

Moreover, “a new U.S. intelligence assessment found no coordination between Tren de Aragua and the Venezuelan government, contradicting statements by Trump administration officials to justify their invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and deporting Venezuelan migrants” (https://apnews.com/article/trump-deportation-courts-aclu-venezuelan-gang-timeline-43e1deafd66fc1ed4e934ad108ead529)

“Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.” Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 11

This is how they rounded up the Jewish people in the Third Reich before gassing them. Even Nazi butchers were given the right of a trial and access to lawyers at Nurenburg – but not Venezuelans.

“Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.” Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 10

The USA has created a concentration camp in El Salvador: it has paid the dictator Bukele $6 million to incarcerate Venezuelans. They are there simply because of their NATIONALITY. If any other country other than the USA had made this deal, it would have been denounced as human trafficking.

Fortunately, Trump has not been able to quite dismantle the US judicial system, despite having “stacked” courts with his followers. Thus, on April 19^th the US Supreme Court, in a surprising act of defiance, temporarily blocked the deportation of Venezuelans detained in Texas under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a controversial 18th-century military law. The Court has ordered the Trump administration not to expel these migrants held at a detention center “until further order of this court.” The ruling comes just hours after a federal appeals court similarly blocked the US government from moving forward with eliminating temporary legal protection, better known as TPS, for some 350,000 Venezuelan migrants, who are at risk of imminent deportation.

According to the Migration Policy Institute of the USA, Venezuelan migrants are merely 2% of the 47.8 million registered migrants. Clearly, Venezuelans have been targeted for strictly political reasons: it is another canard aimed at trying to depose the legitimate, democratic, Venezuelan government. “…a criminal gang is clearly being used, with its capacity and reach clearly exaggerated, in order to generate the necessary excuses for renewed attacks against Venezuela: sanctions, tariffs and, naturally, the inhuman treatment of migrants. The worst example so far was the deportation of 238 of them to El Salvador.”

Internationally, there has been very little outcry from western nations in defense of the kidnapped Venezuelans. This is disgraceful.

Another example of the lawlessness of the Trump regime is its refusal to comply with the April 10^th order of the Supreme Court to obtain the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorean, sent to El Salvador with the Venezuelans, and who the US has admitted was deported in error. “This defiance of a lower court and the Supreme Court is indeed historic and constitute what is correctly referred to as dictatorial action. But if we look around the world at the nations of the collective west, those that claim to be paragons of democratic virtues and condemning other nations for what they call human rights abuses, we see similarly repressive activities.”

Some in the press have falsely claimed that the situation of the migrants somehow favours Nicolas Maduro. Those that think this have no idea firstly, of the public outcry and anguish the people of Venezuela are showing because of their abused compatriots. Secondly, they have no idea of the many initiatives of the government to obtain the return of their citizens. Since 2018 Venezuela has had a program called Return to the Homeland which – free of charge – has flown Venezuelans home from other countries where they migrated to but ended up suffering poverty and abuse. Thousands have returned to Venezuela in these flights and have been received with open arms. Venezuela would send its planes to the US and El Salvador to obtain the return of its citizens were they allowed to do so. President Maduro has said,” if they don’t want them, we do.”

“Do not ask for whom the bells toll, they toll for thee”:

The abuse of human rights of any group or nationality means they are all at risk.

The post Where Are the Defenders of the Human Rights of Venezuelans? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Maria Paez Victor.

Image by Rod Long.

President Trump, in his March 4 State of the Union address, stated:

“And I also have a message tonight for the incredible people of Greenland. We strongly support your right to determine your own future, and if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America. We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And we’re working with everybody involved to try and get it. But we need it really for international world security. And I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it. We will keep you safe. We will make you rich. And together we will take Greenland to heights like you have never thought possible before. It’s a very small population, but very, very large piece of land and very, very important for military security.”[1]

“One way or the other, we’re going to get it” sounds like a threat to me. In fact, Trump’s entire statement could have come out of a mob boss’ mouth.

It was delivered coupled with his offer to buy Greenland from Denmark and make it the 51^st state (or 52^nd if Trump has his way with Canada). Hence, it is in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism, as Trump is determined to take control of the island, thus expanding the U.S. empire.

On Tuesday March 11, one week after Trump’s threat, Greenlanders went to the polls to elect their 31-seat Parliament, one factor in how Greenland is governed. Greenland is currently a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, which controls the island’s foreign policy, defense, and other important aspects of its economy. Denmark provides around 50 percent of the budget for Greenland, providing for schools, social services, and cheap gas. And while polls show that over 85 percent of Greenlanders favor independence from Denmark, Greenlanders are divided on the pace of independence.[2]

Local issues dominated the election in Greenland, but Trump’s rhetoric did have an impact. The pro-business Demokraatit party, which favors a slow path to independence that does not disrupt social services or economic growth, won a surprise victory with 29.9 percent of the votes and will now form a coalition government. The second-place finisher was the ardent pro-independence party Naleraq, with 24.5 percent of the vote. In third place was the former governing party, Inuit Ataqatigiit, with 21.4 percent. [3]

Putting teeth into Trump’s rhetoric, just weeks after the Greenland election: Vice-President Vance, along with his wife, Second Lady Usha Chilukuri Vance; National Security Advisor Chris Waltz; and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright paid a visit to the island. The visit was confined to Pituffik Space base, a U.S. military base in Greenland, in order to avoid protests in Nuuk, the capital and largest city. During his visit, Vance accused Denmark of both underinvesting in the island and failing to provide for its defense.[4]

One consequence of the Vice President’s visit was the firing of the base commander, Col. Susannah Meyers, for allegedly undermining the chain of command and subverting President Trump’s agenda. Her sin—sending an email stating that she disagreed with Vance’s criticisms of Denmark.[5]

Why Greenland and Why Now?

Greenland has a population of approximately 56,500 people. This tiny population inhabits the largest island in the world, with an area of 836,330 square miles, more than a fourth of the area of the lower-48 states. And the Greenlanders are sitting on a treasure trove of oil, mineral wealth, and fisheries. What’s more, Greenland straddles increasingly important Arctic Sea lanes that shorten the distance of shipping routes, and therefore the cost of transporting goods from Europe to Asia. Further, the island is militarily significant because it acts as a barrier between Russia and the U.S.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, Greenland has approximately 31.4 billion barrels of oil and natural gas. Extraction of these resources is blocked by the Greenland government, which instituted a moratorium on all oil and gas exploration in 2021, citing the environmental costs to the island. Greenland also has deposits of coal and uranium. In addition, Greenland has vast deposits of rare earth elements (REEs) essential for modern technology, renewable energy, and the military industrial complex.[6] Access to this mineral wealth is not only blocked by the government moratorium: Greenland lacks the infrastructure of ports, roads, and pipelines needed to extract this wealth. Nevertheless, Greenland is an important part the Trump administration’s seeking to secure access to mineral wealth across the globe – a strategy necessary for economic domination.[7]

In early April, China, which the U.S. considers its chief competitor, placed restrictions on the export of rare earth elements (REE) and on REE magnets. The REE are essential to many modern technologies such as lasers, computers, and missiles. Powerful REE magnets are used in auto factories and are essential to jet fighters. Ninety percent of the world’s REE magnets are produced in China.[8] Together, these restrictions, directed at U.S. technology and war industries, could cripple the U.S. military.[9] Should China ban exports of REE and REE magnets completely, the U.S. would be even more desperate to find alternative sources – hence the interest in Greenland.

A History of U.S. Intervention

The Inuit people make up over 87 percent of Greenland’s current population. Archeological evidence suggests they arrived on the island at least 3,500 years ago, but as with the evidence for other native peoples we know that this most likely underestimates the date of their arrival. The Norse-Icelandic explorer Erik the Red later established two settlements on the island around 980 CE, giving the island its European name in the hopes of attracting settlers. These European settlements died out or were abandoned in the early 1500s. This did not stop Denmark from claiming the island and asserting control over the native people in 1720.

The U.S. considered buying Greenland from Denmark in 1868, when Secretary of State William Seward (yes—the same Seward who engineered the purchase of Alaska) proposed the purchase of Greenland from Denmark. In 1910 the U.S. again tried to acquire Greenland from Denmark by offering to exchange Greenland for islands in the Philippines, which were then a U.S. colony. This deal also fell through.[10]

U.S. intervention began in earnest with the 1940 German invasion of Denmark. The U.S. took military control of the island to prevent it from falling under German control. Over the course of World War II, tens of thousands of U.S. planes used the island as a stopover on the way to Europe. The weather forecasts from Greenland proved crucial to the success of the D-Day invasion.

After World War II, the island became an important part of the U.S. Cold War against the USSR. The U.S. offered to buy the island again from Denmark for $100 million U.S. dollars. The Danish government rejected the offer. They did, however, sign, in 1951, a treaty giving the U.S. significant rights to station military troops in Greenland. The U.S. constructed the Thule Air Base in northwestern Greenland, which at its peak housed 10,000 U.S. troops. The base still exists, renamed Pituffik Space Base; it’s under the control of U.S. Space Force. The U.S. had also built a second base, which was secret. Located under the Greenland ice cap, about 150 miles from Thule Air Base, it no longer exists but was called Camp Century and powered by a nuclear reactor.[11]

On January 21, 1968, a B-52 from Thule Air Base crashed on the Greenland ice cap carrying four hydrogen bombs. The U.S. tried to clean up as much of the contaminated ice as possible, but one of the bombs is still missing.[12] This missing nuclear weapon could be a major environmental catastrophe should it leak in the melting ice cap. The crash also revealed that during the Cold War with the USSR, the U.S. stationed B-52s and nuclear weapons at Thule Air Base to strike at the USSR. Construction of new U.S. bases in Greenland would be considered crucial to any U.S. plans for nuclear war and would threaten Russia and China.

How might future U.S. intervention play out?

There are several possible scenarios for future U.S. intervention, based on historical precedence.

In the first, the U.S. could invade directly with military, as Trump has threatened. But Greenland is part of Denmark. Both the U.S. and Denmark are members of NATO, whose sole purpose is as a military alliance. NATO countries are obligated to defend any member that is invaded. If the U.S. were to invade Greenland, this would mean one NATO member, Denmark, being invaded by another, the U.S. This would trigger a crisis in NATO.

In a March 13, 2025 meeting at the White House between Trump and Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary-General Rutte told Trump that NATO would not stop a U.S. military intervention in Greenland, essentially giving the U.S. a green light for a possible invasion. [13]

I think of this as the Spanish-American War scenario. In 1898 the U.S. went to war with Spain, at the time a weak and declining colonial power, to seize the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.[14]

In case this seems farfetched, note that the U.S. now has an Arctic division – a division consists of 10,000 and 15,000 troops – specialized in fighting in polar regions. In mid-February the Arctic division, the 11^th Airborne, deployed to the Arctic regions of Finland in a training exercise.[15] While part of a NATO exercise aimed at Russia, the training served as a practice run for any potential invasion of Greenland.

The U.S. has a history of invading island nations. The most recent case was the island nation of Grenada in 1983 when a force of fewer than 8,000 U.S. troops seized the tiny island nation of fewer than 100,000 on the pretext of protecting American students during a coup within the government. That invasion was hastily planned and powerfully executed. Still, it took the U.S. less than a week to totally control the island. A U.S. invasion of Greenland will be better planned and will most likely start with the seizure of the international airport in Nuuk, the capital and largest city.

In the second scenario, the U.S. would employ non-military means or soft power. It would encourage independence and then meddle in local politics, cultivating pro-U.S. politicians and parties, and extracting considerable economic and political concessions. These concessions would likely include mining rights and additional military bases. Trump has already started this process and may have found a willing partner in Kuno Fencker. A prominent leader of the second-place Naleraq party, Fencker attended Trump’s inauguration and then toured the White House at Trump’s invitation. Fencker has publicly defended Trump in his podcasts and speeches, saying that Trump is misunderstood. Fencker has been called a traitor by leaders of the other parties. Naleraq wants immediate independence from Denmark and closer ties with the U.S.[16]

This second scenario appears to be the current U.S. strategy. In a bombshell front-page article in The New York Times on April 11, it was reported that the White House, under the leadership of the National Security Council (NSC), is moving “forward on a plan to acquire the island from Denmark.” The NSC has sent directives to multiple arms of the U.S. government, is developing a propaganda plan to persuade Greenlanders to join the U.S., and is considering a direct payment to each Greenlander of $10,000 per year, approximately the same amount of money that Denmark gives to the island for education, healthcare, and other social services.[17] At the same time that President Trump is trying to persuade Greenlanders, he is making his case to the American people.

I think of this as the Panama Scenario because it is similar to what the U.S. did in Panama when it encouraged local elites to break away from Colombia and then extracted significant concessions from the new government, including the right to build and control the Panama Canal Zone and maintain a massive U.S. military presence.[18]

In the third, and least likely, scenario, the U.S, would encourage independence, meddle in the political affairs of Greenland, and encourage U.S. investment in and immigration to the island. The immigrants and pro-U.S. Greenlanders could then demand annexation by the U.S. I think of this as the Hawaii Scenario, because it is similar to what the U.S. did when it annexed the Kingdom of Hawai’i in 1893.[19]

If one of these scenarios plays out, there will be two big losers and one big winner. The losers will be the people of Greenland and the environment of their island nation. The big winner will be U.S. imperialism, more specifically the corporate elite that will pillage the resources of the island for their own profit and power. While standing in solidarity with the rights of the Greenlanders to make their own decisions for their nation and independence, we must also oppose all U.S. intervention and exploitation. We must especially raise our voices against Trump and his efforts to convince the American people that “we” need to acquire the island. Greenland belongs to the people of Greenland, not the U.S. capitalist elite!

The post Greenland in the Crosshairs of U.S. Imperialism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael Livingston .

Image by Filip Andrejevic.

Although the statement that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun” was made by Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, it’s an idea that, in one form or another, has motivated a great many people, from the members of teenage street gangs to the statesmen of major nations.

The rising spiral of world military spending provides a striking example of how highly national governments value armed forces. In 2024, the nations of the world spent a record $2.72 trillion on expanding their vast military strength, an increase of 9.4 percent from the previous year. It was the tenth year of consecutive spending increases and the steepest annual rise in military expenditures since the end of the Cold War.

This enormous investment in military might is hardly a new phenomenon. Over the broad sweep of human history, nations have armed themselves―often at great cost―in preparation for war. And an endless stream of wars has followed, resulting in the deaths of perhaps a billion people, most of them civilians. During the 20^th century alone, war’s human death toll numbered 231 million.

Even larger numbers of people have been injured in these wars, including many who have been crippled, blinded, hideously burned, or driven mad. In fact, the number of people who have been wounded in war is at least twice the number killed and has sometimes soared to 13 times that number.

War has produced other calamities, as well. The Russian military invasion of Ukraine, for example, has led to the displacement of a third of that nation’s population. In addition, war has caused immense material damage. Entire cities and, sometimes, nations have been reduced to rubble, while even victorious countries sometimes found themselves bankrupted by war’s immense financial costs. Often, wars have brought long-lasting environmental damage, leading to birth defects and other severe health consequences, as the people of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, and the Middle East can attest.

Even when national military forces were not engaged in waging foreign wars, they often produced very undesirable results. The annals of history are filled with incidents of military officers who have used their armies to stage coups and establish brutal dictatorships in their own countries. Furthermore, the possession of military might has often emboldened national leaders to intimidate weaker nations or to embark upon imperial conquest. It’s no accident that nations with the most powerful military forces (“the great powers”) are particularly prone to war-making.

Moreover, prioritizing the military has deprived other sectors of society of substantial resources. Money that could have gone into programs for education, healthcare, food stamps, and other social programs has been channeled instead into unprecedented levels of spending to enhance military might.

It’s a sorry record for what passes as world civilization―one that will surely grow far worse, or perhaps terminate human existence, with the onset of a nuclear war.

Of course, advocates of military power argue that, in a dangerous world, there is a necessity for deterring a military attack upon their nations. And that is surely a valid concern.

But does military might really meet the need for national security? In addition to the problems spawned by massive military forces, it’s not clear that these forces are doing a good job of deterring foreign attack. After all, every year government officials say that their countries are facing greater danger than ever before. And they are right about this. The world is becoming a more dangerous place. A major reason is that the military might sought by one nation for its national security is regarded by other nations as endangering their national security. The result is an arms race and, frequently, war.

Fortunately, though, there are alternatives to the endless process of military buildups and wars.

The most promising among them is the establishment of international security. This could be accomplished through the development of international treaties and the strengthening of international institutions.

Treaties, of course, can establish rules for international behavior by nations while, at the same time, resolving key problems among them (for example, the location of national boundaries) and setting policies that are of benefit to all (for example, reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere). Through arms control and disarmament agreements they can also address military dangers. For example, in place of the arms race, they could sponsor a peace race, in which each nation would reduce its military spending by 10 percent per year. Or nations could sign and ratify (as many have already done) the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which would end the menace of nuclear annihilation.

International institutions can also play a significant role in reducing international conflict and, thus, the resort to military action. The United Nations, established in 1945, is tasked with maintaining international peace and security, while the International Court of Justice was established to settle legal disputes among nations and the International Criminal Court to investigate and, where justified, try individuals for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.

Unfortunately, these international organizations are not fully able to accomplish their important tasks―largely because many nations prefer to rely upon their own military might and because some nations (particularly the United States, Russia, and Israel) are enraged that these organizations have criticized their conduct in world affairs. Even so, international organizations have enormous potential and, if strengthened, could play a vital role in creating a less violent world.

Rather than continuing to pour the wealth of nations into the failing system of national military power, how about bolstering these global instruments for attaining international security and peace?

The post The Limitations of Military Might appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lawrence Wittner.

there is no time left
to look for saviors
or rain from clouds
or ghosts of gods

the tree of life
survivor of the unsurvivable
clings to cliffsides
suspended over the bardo
roots exposed
naked battered
by king tides
and mighty winds
they say this year will be her last

beware the raven’s caw
and the stench of those who pose
as preachers on the doorsteps of civility
here is where the jet stream crashes
where chaos alights
and laughter disappears

hearts sag to the pounding surf
while democracy is cast like dice
into the lukewarm waters
of who cares
anyway

The post Kidnapping the Rubicon appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mimi German.

This past Thursday, April 17, 2025, marked Palestinian Prisoners’ Day amid the height of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the West Bank. Commemorated since 1974, this day honors the central role of Palestinian political captives in the struggle for national liberation. It is also a date etched in sorrow as well as resistance. Nearly one million Palestinians have been imprisoned since 1948—teachers, farmers, health workers, children, artists, and leaders. Today, nearly 10,000 remain behind bars, including 3,500 held in administrative detention without charge or trial, 400 children, and 29 women. Many more abducted from Gaza are held in secret military facilities like Sde Teiman, where they endure severe torture, starvation, and denial of medical care. Nearly 40% of Palestinian men in the occupied territories have been imprisoned at least once. These are not statistics. They are fathers, daughters, poets, farmers- lives interrupted, families torn apart, futures deferred.

Palestinian prisoners are not only victims but leaders of the resistance. From inside the prisons, they organize, write, educate, and inspire movements beyond the prison walls. Their leadership is visible not only in political statements and hunger strikes, but also in the forging of cultural and educational collectives that have spread through refugee camps and solidarity tents. During annual commemorations, family members-especially women-gather in massive numbers, surrounding tents and camp walls covered with portraits of imprisoned, martyred, and disappeared loved ones. These gatherings reflect a deep communal identification with the imprisoned, who are seen as both symbols and agents of resistance. In some cases, imprisoned men have smuggled out sperm to enable their wives to conceive, a powerful act of defiance against a system intent on severing family continuity and reproductive futures.

Administrative Detention in Israel

Israel’s policy of administrative detention allows for the imprisonment of individuals without charge or trial, often based on “undisclosed evidence”. This practice has been widely criticized by human rights organizations. As of early 2025, reports indicate that over 10,000 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, with many detained under administrative orders. Detainees endure harsh conditions, including inadequate food, medical care, and reports of physical abuse.(AP, 2025)

The trauma experienced by detainees frequently extends beyond their captivity, a captivity never justified (Guardian, 2025). Former prisoners have reported severe psychological effects, such as insomnia, anxiety, and difficulty reintegrating into family life. For instance, Amer Abu Hlel, after over a year in administrative detention without charges, suffered from physical injuries and profound psychological distress, leading to social withdrawal and fear of re-arrest. Palestinian captives speak of beatings, deprivation, torture, rape: Palestinians speak of the ‘hell’ of Israeli prisons. (Le Monde, 2024)

Gendered Violence in Israeli Colonial Prisons

In the landscape of Israeli colonial repression, the prison emerges not merely as a site of incarceration, but as a gendered apparatus of control. Palestinian feminist scholars and human rights researchers have long argued that sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is not incidental, but structural to the Israeli occupation regime. From degrading strip searches to sexual torture, these acts serve as tools of humiliation, discipline, and subjugation, part of a calculated strategy to dominate and destabilize both individuals and the broader Palestinian social fabric.

Such acts are not random- they are calculated forms of domination. Sexualized violence against male prisoners is used to demasculinize the colonized subject, to strip away dignity and humiliate in ways that destabilize identity and community. This strategy echoes other colonial regimes where emasculation and rape were used not only to extract confessions but to degrade the captive into an object of scorn-even in their own eyes. On the other side of this gendered war is the violation and control of women’s bodies, used to rupture kinship lines and reproductive futures. As Palestinian feminist scholars have long argued, this is not merely about torture-it is about reconfiguring power through gendered, sexualized trauma.

Palestinian criminologist Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2009) has been at the forefront of theorizing sexual violence as a pillar of settler-colonial governance. In her foundational study, Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case-Study, she documents how the Israeli state weaponizes threats of rape, sexual humiliation, and coercive tactics such as isqāt siyāsī (political subjugation) to recruit collaborators and terrorize communities. Through a decolonial feminist lens, Shalhoub-Kevorkian contends that sexual violence is not an aberration but a “normal” extension of colonial power, aimed at dismantling kinship structures, eroding resistance, and reinforcing both Israeli domination and internal patriarchal controls (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2009).

Sociologist Nahla Abdo (2014) expands this analysis through her historical account of Palestinian women political prisoners in Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System. Drawing on oral histories and testimonies, Abdo reveals how Palestinian women have endured sexual torture, harassment, and invasive bodily violence as tools of repression. The story of Rasmea Odeh-who was raped, tortured, and later exiled-stands as a harrowing example of how the Israeli prison system targets women’s bodies to punish political dissent and stigmatize resistance. For Abdo, gendered violence is not just about physical harm-it is an assault on Palestinian womanhood itself, aimed at “criminalizing” female fighters and instilling collective fear (Abdo, 2014).

Khalida Jarrar, a Palestinian feminist, former political prisoner, and human rights advocate, contributed further to this field with a 2023 report for the Independent Commission for Human Rights. Based on firsthand accounts from detainees during Israel’s war on Gaza, the report catalogues gendered violations against women, men, and children alike-including threats of rape, verbal sexual degradation, forcible removal of veils, and collective strip searches. Jarrar situates these acts within the framework of colonial gendered violence, emphasizing that such humiliations are not isolated misconduct but “systematic strategies of domination” meant to erode identity and social integrity (Jarrar, 2023).

International findings echo these feminist insights. The 2024 United Nations Commission of Inquiry report on the Occupied Palestinian Territory explicitly recognized the use of sexual and gender-based violence by Israeli forces. It concluded that such acts are “intrinsically linked” to the broader framework of occupation and racial domination. The report confirmed the use of rape, sexual torture, and humiliation against both men and women in detention-including forced nudity in front of family members and rape threats used to extract confessions or silence dissent. These findings offer international validation of long-standing feminist critiques, emphasizing that the body-especially the colonized body-becomes a battleground where control is exercised and trauma inscribed (UN COI, 2025).

Together, these scholarly and investigative efforts reveal a disturbing consistency: Israeli prisons and detention centers function as laboratories of colonial violence where gender and sexuality are weaponized with precision. Whether by emasculating men through sexual torture or stripping veiled women to break cultural codes, these acts aim to humiliate and destroy the social and psychological fabric of Palestinian life. Feminist theorists like Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Abdo remind us that this is not merely about individual suffering; it is about domination through intimate, bodily terror. (Abdo, 2014)

Ultimately, the violence meted out in these carceral spaces must be understood as political and gendered. It is not accidental that Palestinian children, women, and men emerge from Israeli detention systems with scars-visible and invisible-that reshape families and futures. Nor is it incidental that these abuses often go unpunished and unacknowledged. As this feminist and decolonial analysis shows, sexual violence is not a side effect of war-it is a core tactic of colonial rule, designed to break resistance from the inside out.

The Machinery of Dehumanization: The Children

​A 2013 UNICEF report concluded that the ill-treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention is “widespread, systematic and institutionalized.” The report documented practices such as night arrests, physical violence, blindfolding, and coercive interrogations without legal counsel or parental presence. It also noted that children were often forced to sign confessions in Hebrew, a language they did not understand.

Israel’s prison system is not merely punitive-it is a pillar of its colonial regime. It functions to exhaust and disempower a people fighting for freedom. Military courts convict 99% of Palestinians. (Aljazeera, 2018) Children as young as 12 are tried as adults. “Since 2000, an estimated 12,000 Palestinian children have been arbitrarily detained in Israel’s military detention system. They are mostly charged for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, an act punishable by up to maximum 20 years in prison.” (Justice for All, Canada, 2024) Torture, including beatings and stress positions, is routinely used in interrogations-93% of Palestinian children report experiencing it. (Jabr, 2024)

Incarceration becomes a method not only of silencing dissent but of waging psychological warfare.

Solitary Confinement as Torture: Over 500 Palestinian captives are held in solitary confinement, sometimes for months or even years. According to the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Mandela Rules), solitary confinement exceeding 15 days constitutes torture. (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). More than 1400 Palestinians are held in solitary confinement (B’tselm, 2014). Prolonged isolation has severe psychological consequences-ranging from depression and hallucinations to long-term cognitive damage. (Reiter, et al, 2020) In many documented cases, Palestinians with developmental or psychiatric disorders have been subjected to repeated humiliation and neglect rather than care. Ahmad Manasra, arrested at 13 and later suffered serious psychological consequences, in part as a result of prolonged solitary confinement. He is one of many who have suffered under such conditions. (Amnesty, 2023, Abu Sharar, 2021)

Medical Neglect: Writer Walid Daqqa spent 38 years in prison and died in 2024 after Israeli authorities denied him treatment for leukemia. “They are killing me slowly,” he wrote in his final letter, “but my ideas will outlive them.” In March 2025, 17-year-old Walid Ahmad from the West Bank died in Megiddo Prison after six months of detention without charge. An autopsy observed by an Israeli doctor indicated that severe malnutrition and untreated colitis likely contributed to his death. Ahmad had shown signs of starvation, scabies, inflammation of the colon, and overall physical frailty, exacerbated by inadequate food, poor sanitary conditions, and possibly contaminated meals during Ramadan.

Deliberate Disease: In 2024, a scabies outbreak spread to 800 captives in Naqab. Guards withheld medicine and hygiene supplies, leaving detainees to scratch their skin raw. An investigation by Haaretz revealed that a quarter of Palestinian captives in Israeli prisons have been infected with scabies in recent months. Prison authorities have been accused of allowing scabies to spread by restricting inmates’ water supply and depriving them of clean clothes and medical care. Without treatment, these wounds become infected. Left untreated in overcrowded, unsanitary cells, even a condition as treatable as scabies becomes a source of ongoing pain and torture, as a result of systemic neglect. These infections are not incidental-they reflect a broader strategy of dehumanization through deliberate medical denial.

Stolen Childhoods: Palestinian children are the only children in the world systematically prosecuted in military courts. Every year, between 500 and 700 are arrested-most during night raids. They are often blindfolded, shackled, and transported to interrogation centers where they are beaten, threatened, denied access to a lawyer, and coerced into signing confessions in Hebrew, a language many do not understand (DCIP-Military Detention).

In 99% of cases, these children are convicted for minor acts such as throwing stones or posting comments on social media. In 2016, the Israeli Knesset passed legislation allowing children as young as 12 to be sentenced to prison, including life imprisonment. This law has been used to target Palestinian children specifically, violating multiple international legal standards (Time, 2025).

In July 2019, a four-year-old boy named Muhammad Rabi’ Elayyan from Issawiya in occupied East Jerusalem was summoned for interrogation by Israeli authorities after allegedly throwing a stone. A dozen armed officers arrived at his home (Middle East Monitor, 2019). The child cried in terror. His father accompanied him to the police station where he was questioned. While he was ultimately not charged, the event reflects the extreme and surreal nature of repression faced even by toddlers.

Ahmad Manasra, arrested at age 13, became a global symbol of this brutality. Severely injured and interrogated while bleeding in custody, his forced confession was broadcast publicly. After nearly a decade of unjust incarceration, solitary confinement, and deteriorating mental and physical health, Ahmad was released on April 10, 2025. Despite evidence that he did not participate in the 2015 stabbing incident in Jerusalem, he was sentenced to 12 years (later reduced to 9.5), following a trial that violated his rights as a child. During his imprisonment, Ahmad was subjected to prolonged solitary confinement, denied adequate medical and psychological care, and endured treatment condemned by international human rights organizations. His release came without proper coordination; he was left alone, disoriented, and deeply distressed in the desert near the prison. He was later reunited with his family and continues to receive psychological support. Ahmad’s case remains a haunting emblem of the systemic “unchilding” of Palestinian youth and a call to end the imprisonment of children under military occupation.(Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, 2025)

Ahed Tamimi, detained at 16 after slapping an Israeli soldier in the wake of her cousin being shot in the face with a rubber bullet, spent eight months in prison. Her case drew international attention, not just for the injustice she endured, but for her defiance. “They think they broke me,” she said upon release. “But this generation was born from the womb of the Intifada” (The Guardian, 2018).

The Psychological Toll of Imprisonment on Palestinian Children

Physical and Emotional Abuse: A 2023 report by Save the Children revealed that 86% of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention experienced physical violence, and 69% were strip-searched. Nearly half (42%) sustained injuries during arrest, including gunshot wounds and broken bones. Such traumatic experiences contribute to long-term psychological distress (Save the Children, 2023).

Psychological Distress and Alienation: The same report highlighted that detained children often suffer from anxiety, depression, and a sense of alienation upon release. Many struggle to reintegrate into their communities, with feelings of fear and mistrust persisting long after their detention (Save the Children, 2023).

Impact on Future Aspirations: A 2023 study titled “Injustice: Palestinian children’s experience of the Israeli military detention system” found that imprisonment disrupts children’s education and future plans. One child expressed, “After you are released from prison you start racing against time trying to catch up… Whatever you had in your mind before your arrest just passed you by” (Save the Children, 2023).

BDS: Breaking the Chains of Complicity

If prison is Israel’s tool of domination, Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) is our collective tool of resistance.  BDS calls for economic and cultural pressure on Israel until it complies with international law.

At this moment in history-when the genocide in Gaza continues unabated, when the bodies of the dead and maimed outnumber the living, when fascism parades through global capitals and tyrants rule with impunity-it is easy to lose hope. When every weapon is being waged against our Palestine and her people, when those who speak are censored or arrested, when friends hide their articles and delete their words, and when we all feel we are waiting our turn to be plucked from the path of resistance—it is tempting to believe that our struggle is lost.

But it is not. It is not lost when we remain on the path of steadfastness (sumud), of clarity, of collective care.

History is our witness:

+ Apartheid South Africa was brought to its knees by coordinated global boycott, cultural isolation, and a refusal to normalize oppression.

+ British colonial rule in India fell after decades of economic noncooperation and moral resistance.

+ The U.S. Civil Rights Movement broke segregation’s legal backbone with sustained boycotts and protests.

+ Chile’s Pinochet regime, Argentina’s military dictatorship, and East Germany’s Stasi rule all crumbled in the face of international solidarity and internal resistance.

These movements teach us that boycott, divestment, and sanctions are not abstract theories-they are tools that have toppled empires. Yet we must also recognize that such victories are not permanent. The recent far-right resurgence in Argentina under Milei and the dismantling of civil rights protections in the U.S. under Trump remind us that gains can be reversed when fascism reasserts itself. That is why the fight for Palestinian freedom must be connected to broader global anti-fascist and anti-colonial movements-because the forces we confront do not remain in one place. They metastasize.

And so it is with BDS. Launched in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, BDS is our weapon and our lifeline. If Israel’s tools are walls, prisons, and erasure, ours are presence, refusal, and solidarity.

BDS has already shown its power:

+ AXA Insurance divested from Israeli arms company Elbit Systems.

+ Ben & Jerry’s halted sales in illegal settlements, stating, “It’s inconsistent with our values.”

+ Veolia lost over $20 billion in contracts and withdrew completely from Israel.

+ G4S, under pressure, sold its Israeli prison operations.

+ Dozens of universities, churches, and pension funds have divested from companies profiting from apartheid.

This is not symbolic. This is material. Every contract canceled, every artist who says no, every pension fund that walks away-weakens the machinery of domination.

Freedom Is the Only Antidote

Palestinian captives are not just victims. They are witnesses. They are leaders. They are the barometers of our shared humanity.

When a blindfold is tightened on a child in the dark, it is our moral vision that is obscured. When a prisoner is denied medicine, our silence sharpens the knife.

BDS is not a slogan. It is a form of care. It is a nonviolent weapon in a world that knows only violence.

As Assata Shakur, a Black activist, author, and former member of the Black Liberation Army, wrote:

The chains will break. The cell door will rust.
And we will still be here,
roots deeper than their prisons.

And so we return to the knock on the door—a summons in the dead of night that, for too many Palestinian families, has become the echo of generational pain. These prisons, with their barred cells and perpetually shadowed halls, are meant to vanish people and break their spirits. But from these very sites of despair come the songs, letters, smuggled stories, and steadfast courage that galvanize a global movement.

This article aims to name the systematic brutality against Palestinian prisoners for what it is—an intentional, gendered, colonial assault designed to cripple an entire people’s struggle for self-determination—and, at the same time, to honor the indomitable spirit that refuses to submit. By shining a light on the prison system and the suffering within it, we also illuminate a path of resistance and solidarity. When we choose Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, we choose a peaceful but potent form of collective action—one that can weaken the pillars of apartheid just as similar movements have toppled oppressive regimes worldwide.

What is at stake here is not just the fate of the imprisoned, but the moral fabric that binds us all. Each time a child is blindfolded or a woman is threatened with sexualized violence, our collective conscience is tested. Each time we stay silent or look away, we risk allowing injustice to calcify into permanence. But every refusal to be silent—every poem written on contraband paper, every protest sign raised in the streets, every institution that cuts ties with profiteers of apartheid—becomes proof that solidarity can transcend walls and barbed wire.

If these prisons exist to bury hope, then hope must outgrow the walls. If this system thrives on complicity, then let our voices, our actions, and our global alliances sever the chains. In the unbreakable words of Palestinian prisoners and in the unwavering commitment of those who stand with them, we find the enduring truth: that freedom is both a right and a responsibility. We owe it to one another—and to all who have been caged—to turn each knock at the door into a rallying cry for liberation.

The post A Knock at the Door appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lama Khouri.

Image by Hany Osman.

“Rights are granted to those who align with power,” Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student, eloquently wrote from his cell. This poignant statement came soon after a judge ruled that the government had met the legal threshold to deport the young activist on the nebulous ground of “foreign policy”.

“For the poor, for people of color, for those who resist injustice, rights are but words written on water,” Khalil further lamented. The plight of this young man, whose sole transgression appears to be his participation in the nationwide mobilization to halt the Israeli genocide in Gaza, should terrify all Americans. This concern should extend even to those who are not inclined to join any political movement and possess no particular sympathy for – or detailed knowledge of – the extent of the Israeli atrocities in Gaza, or the United States’ role in bankrolling this devastating conflict.

The perplexing nature of the case against Khalil, like those against other student activists, including Turkish visa holder Rümeysa Öztürk, starkly indicates that the issue is purely political. Its singular aim appears to be the silencing of dissenting political voices.

Judge Jamee E. Comans, who concurred with the Trump Administration’s decision to deport Khalil, cited “foreign policy” in an uncritical acceptance of the language employed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Rubio had previously written to the court, citing “potentially serious foreign policy consequences” stemming from Khalil’s actions, which he characterized as participation in “disruptive activities” and “anti-Semitic protests”.

The latter accusation has become the reflexive rejoinder to any form of criticism leveled against Israel, a tactic prevalent even long before the current catastrophic genocide in Gaza.

Those who might argue that US citizens remain unaffected by the widespread US government crackdowns on freedom of expression must reconsider. On April 14, the government decided to freeze $2.2 billion in federal funding to the University of Harvard.

Beyond the potential weakening of educational institutions and their impact on numerous Americans, these financial measures also coincide with a rapidly accelerating and alarming trend of targeting dissenting voices within the US, reaching unprecedented extents. On April 14, Massachusetts immigration lawyer Nicole Micheroni, a US citizen, publicly disclosed receiving a message from the Department of Homeland Security requesting her self-deportation.

Furthermore, new oppressive bills are under consideration in Congress, granting the Department of Treasury expansive measures to shut down community organizations, charities, and similar entities under various pretenses and without adhering to standard constitutional legal procedures.

Many readily conclude that these measures reflect Israel’s profound influence on US domestic politics and the significant ability of the Israel lobby in Washington DC to interfere with the very democratic fabric of the US, whose Constitution’s First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and assembly.

While there is much truth in that conclusion, the narrative extends beyond the complexities of the Israel-Palestine issue.

For many years, individuals, predominantly academics, who championed Palestinian rights were subjected to trials or even deported, based on “secret evidence”. This essentially involved a legal practice that amalgamated various acts, such as the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) and the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), among others, to silence those critical of US foreign policy.

Although some civil rights groups in the US challenged the selective application of law to stifle dissent, the matter hardly ignited a nationwide conversation regarding the authorities’ violations of fundamental democratic norms, such as due process (Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments).

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, however, much of that legal apparatus was applied to all Americans in the form of the PATRIOT Act. This legislation broadened the government’s authority to employ surveillance, including electronic communications, and other intrusive measures.

Subsequently, it became widely known that even social media platforms were integrated into government surveillance efforts. Recent reports have even suggested that the government mandated social media screening for all U.S. visa applicants who have traveled to the Gaza Strip since January 1, 2007.

In pursuing these actions, the US government is effectively replicating some of the draconian measures imposed by Israel on the Palestinians. The crucial distinction, based on historical experience, is that these measures tend to undergo continuous evolution, establishing legal precedents that swiftly apply to all Americans and further compromise their already deteriorating democracy.

Americans are already grappling with their perception of their democratic institutions, with a disturbingly high number of 72 percent, according to a Pew Research Center survey in April 2024, believing that US democracy is no longer a good example for other countries to follow.

The situation has only worsened in the past year. While US activists advocating for justice in Palestine deserve unwavering support and defense for their profound courage and humanity, Americans must also recognize that they, and the remnants of their democracy, are equally at risk.

“Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere,” is the timeless quote associated with Abraham Lincoln. Yet, every day that Mahmoud Khalil and others spend in their cells, awaiting deportation, stands as the starkest violation of that very sentiment. Americans must not permit this injustice to persist.

The post Deporting Dissent: The Dangerous Precedent Set by the Persecution of Pro-Palestine Activists appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

German officers of the Ordnungspolizei examining a man’s papers in Nazi-occupied Poland, 1941. Public domain.

American citizens are being routinely caught in Trump’s deportation dragnet, detained, jailed, and threatened with deportation, even a four-year-old with cancer and a pregnant mother who would have given birth to an American citizen. When ICE’s “mistakes” are revealed, usually through the presentation of a birth certificate days after the false arrest, the typical response has been to blame the victims. That’s if they haven’t already been deported. 

Take the case of 19-year-old Jose Hermosillo, who was detained by Border Patrol outside Tucson on April 8 and held for 10 days in the privately run Florence Correctional Center before being released. Hermosilla, who has a learning disability, told his jailers he was an American citizen. They told him to tell his lawyer. At that point, Jose Hermosillo didn’t have a lawyer. Two days later, Jose told an immigration judge the same thing. Federal prosecutors requested a week-long delay in the case. And Jose, who is the father of a six-month-old American citizen, was held for another seven days until his family could finally present the court with his birth certificate.

After his release, DHS smeared Hermosillo, blaming him for his own arrest and detention. In a post on Twitter (of all places), DHS said: “Hermosillo’s arrest and detention were a direct result of his own actions and statements.” In trying to cover their own cruel blunders, DHS officials alleged “that Jose Hermosillo approached Border Patrol in Tucson, Arizona, stating he had ILLEGALLY entered the U.S. and identified himself as a Mexican citizen.”

This was a convenient concoction, a fiction. Hermosilllo hadn’t been in Mexico and he’s not a Mexican citizen. To support their self-serving claim, DHS said Hermossilo signed a transcript of an alleged interview attesting to this version of events. But Hermosilla can’t read or write. He can only scratch out his name, according to his girlfriend. 

What really happened is quite different, tragic even. Hermosillo lives in Albuquerque and had traveled to Tucson with his girlfriend to visit her family. While in Tucson, he suffered a seizure and was taken by ambulance to the hospital. He was treated and released, unsure exactly where he was or how to return to his girlfriend. 

Hermosilla flagged down what he thought was a police car to ask for directions. It turned out to be Border Patrol. He told the officer he was staying in Tucson but was lost.

The BP officer responded harshly, “You’re not from here. Where are you from?

“New Mexico,” Hermosilla said.

“I don’t believe you,” the BP cop said. “Show me your papers?”

Hermosilla told him he’d left his New Mexico ID at his girlfriend’s family’s place.

“I’m not stupid,” the cop told him. “I know you’re from Mexico.”

Then the cop arrested Hermosilla, told him to sign some papers, and then deposited him in a cell with 15 other men, where he was served cold food and denied his medications for the next 10 days.

“I told them I was a US citizen,” Hermosillo told Arizona PM. “But they don’t listen to me.”

+++

+ On Friday, Federal Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, issued an order saying that DHS had apparently deported a 2-year-old American citizen to Honduras with “no meaningful” process, even though the girl’s father, also a US citizen, fought to keep her in the country.

+ The ACLU reported that on Friday, the New Orleans field office of ICE deported two families with minor children. Three of the children (age 2, 4 and 7) are US citizens. One of the children suffers from a rare form of metastatic cancer. The citizen child was deported without medications or being able to consult with their doctors, even though ICE was fully briefed about the child’s dire medical condition. One of the mothers is pregnant. Both families have lived in the US for many years. 

According to the ACLU, “ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.”

+ Aldo Martinez-Gomez, a US citizen living in California, received a DHS notice on April 11, threatening “criminal prosecution” and fines if he does not depart within seven days, even after he showed them his birth certificate. “Do not attempt to remain in the United States,” the letter warned. “The government will find you.’ Martinez-Gomez: “I’m just trying not to be one of the government’s mistakes.”

+ But wait, the Democrats have a solution for American citizens being “mistakenly” rounded up for deportation.

+ “Show Us Your Papers”…

+ Yglesias is, of course, the Biden whisperer and they followed his right-center advice right off the electoral cliff. That hasn’t stopped Matty from veering even farther right.

+ Since Friedman believes the world is flat, maybe that Waymo will drive him right off the edge…

+ What, pray tell, does a Waymo Democrat do? “Waymo Democrats would do everything Trump is doing maliciously today — but do it productively.” Sorry, I asked.

+++

+  At 8:30 in the morning on Friday, U.S. Marshals entered a county courthouse in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and arrested trial judge Hannah Dugan on charges that she had obstructed the arrest of a noncitizen. Trump officials, including FBI director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, publicly gloated over her arrest, as did Trump, who posted a photo of the judge wearing a medical mask on his Truth Social feed.

Shockingly (right?), the facts are a little different from what the Trumpites have presented. Flores was in Dugan’s courtroom on another matter, when ICE agents entered and attempted to arrest him without a warrant. Dugan ordered the agents out of her court and told them to contact the supervising judge. Then she escorted Flores and his attorney out the back of the courtroom to a public hallway.

Flores Ruiz was not, as Patel crudely asserts, a “perp.” He hadn’t been accused of “perpetrating” any crime, except that of being in the US without papers. There was no “increased danger” to the public because there was never any “danger” to begin with, except to Flores Ruiz. He was later detained by ICE and jailed without incident. Surely, judges have sovereignty over their own courtrooms and have the authority to demand to see a warrant before an arrest is made inside their chambers.

Of course, this is yet another provocation, pushing the limits of executive power to see how far it reaches. It seems as if Trump is heeding Bukele’s advice at the White House that you need to “get rid of the judges.” In 2021, the Salvadoran despot removed all five judges from the nation’s supreme court and fired its attorney general.

+ In a federal court filing last Thursday,  the Trump administration admitted ICE agents did not have a warrant when they detained Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil in March, conceded that it was a warrantless arrest: “We were permitted to arrest him without a warrant, because he gave us reason to think he would escape, namely that he said he was going to walk away if we didn’t have a warrant.”

+ This admission by the Feds contradicts what officers told Khalil and his lawyers at the time of his arrest and in a later arrest report.

+ How Columbia grad student Mohsen Mahdawi was entrapped and kidnapped at his own citizenship hearing: “At his citizenship interview, he signed a pledge to “defend the Constitution.” The official left to go “check” something. Then masked & armed agents came in, shackled Mahdawi, and tried to fly him to Louisiana.”

+ How is it possible to feel any allegiance to the government of a country that does things like this to children who are citizens of the US as a matter of policy? “For months, NPR has been receiving tips about the Detroit-Canada border, immigrants and U.S. citizen children being held without access to legal counsel, because they took a wrong turn on the highway.”

+ After terminating legal support for noncitizen children, the Trump administration is making 4-year-olds represent themselves in immigration court.

+ ICE moved a Venezuelan man who had worked in construction in Philadelphia to Texas for possible deportation after a federal judge had issued an order blocking his removal from Pennsylvania or the United States.

+ Three ICE agents raided a courthouse in Charlottesville in plain clothes without badges, ID or warrants and carted off two men without explanation and dragged them into an unmarked van.

+ Sulayman Nyang, a soccer coach in Aurora, Colorado, was detained by ICE at the airport—24 hours later, his family still doesn’t know where he is. Nyang has a green card, is married to a U.S. citizen, and is the father of a 3-month-old son. He has no criminal record — a marijuana possession allegation was dismissed in 2009. “Seeing that he’s been in the country for 25 years, we didn’t think there was a problem,” his wife said. “What do you mean, 2009? He hasn’t done anything. Everything has been dismissed… They won’t explain why. They give two different answers.”

+ So ICE isn’t rounding up rapists, murderers and maniacs, but mostly day laborers, who would be paying taxes and contributing to Social Security: “Laborers who arrived at a Home Depot in Pomona on Tuesday morning in hopes of earning a day’s wage were met with uniformed ICE agents who reportedly began rounding up workers in the parking lot. ”

+ Radley Balko, one of the best criminal justice journalists around, is charting the pattern of ICE officers attempting to intimidate immigration lawyers, including one outrageous case where ICE agents showed up at a lawyer’s home to harass him about representing immigrants and cut his wifi to disable his Ring cam from recording the interaction…

+ The Trump administration gratuitously released Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wife’s address, resulting in the predictable flood of abuse, threats, and harassment from MAGA goons that’s gotten so extreme she’s had to move to a safer place with her three kids, two of whom are autistic…

+ In its 8-2 ruling last week, the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. They ordered the Trump administration to give people a fair day in court and the chance to file a lawsuit. How did Trump respond? By giving detainees facing deportation only 12 hours to file suit.

+ David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute: “We have a situation where the executive branch intentionally violates the law, evades judicial review for as long as it can, then gets ordered to stop but pretends not to understand that, and keeps violating the law the whole time. It doesn’t matter if they eventually stop…”

+ The Trump administration has been texting college professors to ask if they are Jewish. Barnard College admitted to its staff that it had provided Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with personal contact information for faculty members.  The federal government reaching out to our personal cellphones to identify who is Jewish is incredibly sinister,” said Barnard associate professor Debbie Becher, who is Jewish and received the text. Some might recall that IBM helped the Nazis ID Jews in Europe and facilitate their transport out of Warsaw to Auschwitz.

+ The same college (Barnard) that gave Trump the contact info for its faculty tried to use a bomb threat to smear the students the threat targeted!

+ What kind of so-called university disciplines students for writing an op-ed in the school’s newspaper? That would be Columbia, which sanctioned two students, Maryam Alwan and Layla Saliba, for their “alleged participation” in writing a pro-Palestinian editorial (“Recentering Palestine, Reclaiming the Movement“) for the Columbia Spectator in October 2024.

+ Trump’s immigration/deportation policies cut overseas travel by 11.6% in March, putting up to 7900 American jobs at risk. Every 40 international visitors generate one U.S. job.

+ On Wednesday, a federal judge barred the Trump administration from pulling federal funds from places it deems “sanctuary cities,” saying the policy is unconstitutional.

+ Cost of Trump’s original border wall: $11 billion

Number of times it was breached by smugglers in 3 years: 3,200.

+++

+ The lower he sinks, the more whacked out he’s going to get.

+ Trump’s numbers in the latest Reuters poll are even worse: 37% approval, 57% disapproval.

+ Gen Z women emphatically don’t want to be baby mills in the Tradwife Sweatshops envisioned by Trump and Musk…

+ Trump’s net approval rating on immigration (his strongest issue for months) is now -5 and he’s squandered whatever marginal allure he once had with Hispanics: Trump approval/disapproval with Hispanics in new Pew poll: 27% / 72%–a collapse of the 42% support he enjoyed (courtesy of Biden and Harris’ incompetence) in the 2024 election.

+ Trump approval among independents (April)

Fox News: 26-73 (-47)
NYT/Siena: 29-66 (-37)
CNN: 31-67 (-36)
YouGov: 30-59 (-29)
CBS: 36-64 (-28)
ABC/WP: 33-58 (-25)
Gallup: 37-57 (-20)
AtlasIntel: 39-57 (-18)
Quantus: 41-53 (-12)

Of course, the Democrats are polling even worse than Trump (38% approval rating, five points worse than the Republicans). There’s a reason. Consider Chuck Schumer’s answer to CNN’s Dana Bash on the Democrats’ response to Trump’s threats against Harvard: “We sent him a very strong letter just the other day.”

Bash: “You’ll let us know if you get a response to that letter?”

Trump: Get me a ticket on an aeroplane
Ain’t got time to take the fast train
I can’t stay here, I’m running away in fear
Cause Chuckie, he sent me a letter…

+ Or consider this feckless cavilling from another top Democrat…The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner allows Deborah Lipstadt, Biden’s former “antisemitism” envoy, to expose her shameful moral hypocrisy. Chotiner’s interviews with imperious powerbrokers are master classes in how to lead elites into condemning themselves…

+ DOGE staffers allegedly marked four million people as dead in the Social Security database, without having any evidence that these people had died.

+ In yet another blow to Trump and Bessent’s “great encirclement” plan to isolate China, Japan categorically refuses to do any trade deal with the US, detrimental to their relationship with China.

+ Trump on April 23, claiming negotiations with China were ongoing: “Everything is active. Everybody wants to be a part of what we’re doing.”

He Yadong, spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Commerce: “There are currently no economic and trade negotiations between China and the United States. Any claims about progress… are baseless rumors without factual evidence. If the us truly wants to solve the problem, it should…completely cancel all unilateral tariff measures against China.”

+ Wall Street Journal editorial board: “[the] harsh reality is that China called Mr. Trump’s bluff and seems to have won this round.”

+ One big reason for Trump’s humiliating surrender: In the 3 weeks since the tariffs took effect, ocean container bookings from China to the United States are down over 60% industry-wide.

+ Within two weeks, the Port of Los Angeles, the largest in the US, will experience a 40% drop in cargo ship traffic.

+ Percent of Americans worried about the economy falling into a recession: 53%.

By party

Democrats: 75%
Independents: 59%
GOP: 25%

–AP/NORC

+ S&P Global reports that more US companies declared bankruptcy in the first quarter of 2025 than at any time in the last 15 years.

+ At $4.1 trillion a year, California now boasts the fourth-largest economy in the world, trailing only the USA as a whole, China, and Germany.

+ Millennials, who were born between 1981 and 1996, earn 20% less than baby boomers did at their age, per FORTUNE

+ March existing home sales in the US were the weakest since the Great Financial Crisis. At the same time, 42% of mortgage refinance applications are being denied — the highest rejection rate in more than 12 years.

+ The 19 richest households in the US amassed more than $1 trillion in new wealth last year alone. Inequality isn’t the word for the kind of grotesque disparities our economic system generates…

+ According to Gallup,53% of Americans (a record high) now say their financial situation is getting worse. It’s the first time since 2001 that a majority has expressed an economic outlook this gloomy.

+ The National Institute of Health is now prohibiting the awarding of new grants to any institutions that boycott Israeli companies. Boycotts of companies from other countries are perfectly okay.

+  Journal of the American Medical Association on declining vaccination rates in the US for measles: “If current vaccination rates stay the same, the model estimated that the US could see more than 850,000 cases, 170,000 hospitalizations, and 2,500 deaths over the next 25 years. The results appear in the

+ It’s not just rare earth materials. Big pharmaceutical companies now buy one-third of their experimental molecules from Chinese laboratories. Three years ago, this number was 10 percent. Nearly 25% of all early drug development is done in China.

+ Countries that hold the most sovereign US debt:

Japan: $1,591 billion (22%)
China: $761 billion (10.5%)
UK: $740 billion (10.2%)
Luxembourg: $410 billion (5.7%)
Cayman Islands: $405 billion (5.6%)
Belgium: $378 billion (5.2%)
Canada: $351 billion (4.9%)
France: $335 billion (4.6%)
Ireland: $330 billion (4.6%)

+ Who will DOGE the DOGErs?

+++

+ “History shows again and again,
How Nature proves the folly of men…”

+ The first quarter of 2025 was the second warmest on record, just a fraction behind last year’s mark. An ominous portent, given that  2024 was super-charged by a strong El Nino event, while 2025 started off with weak La Nina conditions.

+ According to a new study by researchers at Dartmouth College published last week in “Nature”, emissions from 111 fossil fuel companies have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, the study finds. These five generated the most harm.

+ Only three years ago, China imported three times as many cars as it exported. This year, it’s exporting more than it’s importing.

The top culprits….

Saudi Aramco: $2.05 trillion
Gazprom: $2 trillion
Chevron: $1.98 trillion
ExxonMobil: $1.91 trillion
BP: $1.45 trillion

+ Volkswagen’s EVs are now outselling Teslas across Europe.

Since January 2025…

VW: 65,679
Teslas: 53,237

+ UNICEF has warned that the water crisis in Gaza has reached “critical levels,” with only one in 10 people able to access clean drinking water.

+++

+ Lemkin Institute on Genocide Prevention’s warning about RKF, Jr’s Autism Registry:

The Lemkin Institute urges the American people, especially the scientific community, to take an unwavering stand against any sort of registry of autistic people (or any other group). We also urge Americans to push back hard against violations of privacy and limits on disabled people’s rights to life, inclusion, and respect. Americans must reject the idea that the state should be able to trample these fundamental rights whenever it feels a certain group is a threat to “national strength” or is becoming too costly, as RFK Jr. has made clear he views autistic people to be.

+ Meanwhile, RFK, Jr. has fired the HHS staffers who ran “a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on so babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. The office overseeing the enforcement of child support payments nationally has been hollowed out.”

+ Public Citizen: “Donations to Trump’s inauguration from corporations facing federal investigations/lawsuits: $50 million (one third of corporate inauguration donations).

+ “President Trump will have an ‘intimate private dinner’ with top 220 buyers of his crypto memecoin at his DC-area golf club, the issuers of the token said on their website. The coin skyrocketed on the news, at one point up 49%…” This is like the Clinton/Gore Koffee Klatches, except those were to sell off face time with the president and vice president for political donations. This money is going right into Trump’s own pockets. Like the genocide in Gaza, the political corruption here is taking place right out in the open. They even advertise the opportunity to take part…

+ If the purchaser/influence-seeker were domestic, they would have used Binance.USA.

+ The value of Trumpcoin increased by over 80% after Trump’s announcement.

+ The Fox Business Network reported that Trump’s team privately alerted Wall Street executives to the state of its trade deal negotiations, giving them inside knowledge to help them profit off the swings in the market. Martha Stewart went to prison for less, MUCH less.

+ The Trump regime is now using U.S. attorneys to intimidate academic journals by sending them letters demanding they explain how they ensure “viewpoint diversity.”

+ According to the FBI, Americans aged 60 and older reported losing almost $3 billion to crypto scams last year. In total, Americans reported being bilked out of around $9.3 billion via crypto, out of a total of $16.6 billion in reported losses to financial scams that year.

+ Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at the Kennedy School on Trump’s threats against Harvard, including terminating federal grants and banning visas for foreign students:

“What’s at stake is the presence of independent centers of thought in a free society. Ultimately, this is an attempt by the administration to bring Harvard, as the world’s most prominent private university, under its control. If you read the [Trump] letter carefully, they were basically wanting to have control over who got hired, control over what got taught, control over the content of the curriculum, control over admissions, in a variety of different ways. At which point the university is no longer independent. It has to get up every morning, say to itself: ‘Gee, what does the president think of what we’re doing here?’ And that means you don’t have independent thought.”

+ NYPD officers attended a training session informing them that Palestinian symbols like the watermelon and the keffiyeh, as well as phrases such as “settler colonialism” and “all eyes on Rafah,” were antisemitic. Apparently, being born Palestinian is an antisemitic act. “All eyes on Rafah,” of course, stemmed from Biden’s warning to Israel that a full-scale invasion of the city was a “red line” that would trigger a ban on offensive weapons sales to Israel. Israel destroyed the 2,000-year-old city, anyway. Now, to even mention it is evidence of anti-semitism.

+ Why does the Defense Department need a $1 trillion budget next year? Pete Hegseth has ordered the construction of a make-up studio inside the Pentagon.

+ All these tough MAGA guys need their own beauticians: Trump gets his face with orange paint, Vance has his eyes done up in kohl and Hegseth needs to get prettified in his own make-up room. The Trump cabinet is being to look like an over-the-hill glam rock band.

+ Speaking of Trump cabinet members demanding their own make-up rooms, it sure looks like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told his stylist to give him “the Full Rumsfeld.”

+ Bessent: “I intend to make an all-out push to make Americans financially literate.”

= Be careful what you ask for, Secretary Bessent. When the French became “financially literate” (236 years and counting before the Americans), it didn’t turn out so well for the Ancien Régime…

+ France’s Jean-Luc Melenchon: “The only reason Trump won is that there is no left in the United States.”

+ Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: “The government can and will collect defaulted federal student loan debt by withholding tax refunds, federal pensions, and even their wages.” Imagine Trump’s bankers doing the same to him!

+ Michigan State Rep. Matt Maddock claims that anyone who opposes his bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico hates America. “I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the people opposed to this are the same people that hate America.”

Netanyahu to the Pope: “We have a natural bond. We know Jesus. He was here in our land. He spoke Hebrew.”

The Hippie Pope: “He spoke Aramaic.”

+ After attending a Mar-a-Lago soiree with top Republicans, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the fanatical Kahanist and ethnic cleanser who, as a young man, cheered the assassination of Rabin, said: “They expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed.”

+++

+ There are “rules” to Columbus Day? Rule 1: Make the Genoan mercenary for Spain an Italian! Rule 2: Pretend the Genoan mercenary “discovered” “America”, which had been discovered 30,000 years earlier by the ancestors of the people living there, over a much more treacherous route! Rule 3: Ignore the fact that the Genoan mercenary had no idea where in the world he was. Rule 4: Elide from the “celebration” any troublesome mention of the Genoan mercenary’s rape, slaughter, infection and plunder of the people living on the Islands the wind and ocean currents thrust his ships upon…

+ A vicious new bill in the Texas legislature would criminalize transporting youth younger than 18, or funding their transportation, out of state to access abortion without written parental consent, with up to 20 years in prison.

+ America needs babies, consent be damned!

Indiana State Sen. Gary Byrne (R) amended a sex education bill to remove requirements to teach consent.

STATE REP. ANDREA HUNLEY (D): “What groups were consulted in the removal of the section about consent?”

BYRNE: “Nobody came to me. This is a decision that I made not to have it in there.”

Speaking of the legislature of my home state, Benjamin Balthatzar tells me that it has exerted DeSantis-like power over the state’s leading university: “Indiana state legislature just staged a hostile takeover of IU, functionally eliminating tenure, promising to close smaller (hum) majors, taking over the IU board, and cutting the IU budget. This is so bleak.”

+ Sen. Patty Murray: “I was denied permission to host a roundtable at the Puget Sound VA to hear from women veterans about their health care. I have NEVER been outright denied from having open & honest conversations with VA—until this administration.”

+ As Freud (or, was it, Groucho Marx?) said, sometimes a flagpole is only a flagpole. But probably not this time…

+ Travis Akers: “Since hiring Kristina Wong from Breitbart News as the Secretary of the Navy Communications Director this week, the Secretary of the Navy’s Twitter account has twice posted the incorrect date of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, ‘a date which will live in infamy.’”

+++

I’m a H.O.O.D, low-life scum, that’s what they say about me…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

America, América: A New History of the New World
Greg Grandin
(Penguin Press)

24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep
Jonathan Crary
(Verso)

Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars and the Rise of Climate Justice
Abby Reyes
(North Atlantic Books)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Dance Music 4 Bad People
Hieroglyphic Being
(Smalltown Supersound)

Mingus in Argentina: the Buenos Aires Concerts
Charles Mingus
(Resonance)

Thunderball
Melvins
(Ipecac)

Peace is Their War, Peace is Their Poverty

“Who are the oppressors but the nobility and gentry, and who are oppressed, if not the yeoman, the farmer, the tradesman and the like?  .. Have you not chosen oppressors to redeem you from oppression? . . . It is naturally inbred in the major part of the nobility and gentry .  .  . to judge the poor but fools, and themselves wise, and therefore when you the commonalty calleth a Parliament they are confident such must be chosen that are the noblest and richest . . . Your slavery is their liberty, your poverty is their prosperity . . . Peace is their ruin . . . by war they are enriched . . . Peace is their war, peace is their poverty.”

– Lawrence Clarkson, A General Charge of Impeachment of High Treason, 1647

The post Roaming Charges: Show Us Your Papers! appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

Image by Mostafa Meraji.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Voltaire, Enlightenment author and philosopher (1694-1778)

Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the United States and Israel have been zealous in their efforts to disempower it. Israel has used its powerful hasbara (propaganda) machine to peddle absurdities about Tehran as a nuclear threat to the region and the world.

For refusing to bend to U.S.-Israeli demands to abandon the Palestinian cause and for standing against their hegemonic plans for the region, Iran has been the target of the most restrictive economic sanctions in history and under perpetual threat of military intervention.

Like any sovereign nation, Iran has a right to defend itself. Nuclear weapons are a security guarantee that Iran has not sought. Unlike Israel and the United States, it has not threatened nor bombed, invaded or occupied its neighbors. However, after Israeli air strikes in April and October 2024 and continued U.S. threats, Iran has had no choice but to debate and reevaluate its long-held nuclear doctrine which regards weapons of mass destruction against Islam.

In a civilized conflict-free world, there would be no need for weapons, nuclear or otherwise. Unfortunately for some countries, like Iran, possessing nuclear weapons may become a necessary tool for survival. For others, like the United States and Israel, the ghastly weapons are used as cudgels to bully countries into submission.

It is important to establish that the U.S. intelligence community—the collective work of America’s 18 spy organizations—has determined that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons. It stated as much in its “Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community” 2024 report: “Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.” Previous reports have also stated that Iran’s military doctrine is defensive and its nuclear program is meant to build negotiating leverage and to respond to perceived international pressure.

The question then becomes why is it that the nuclear issue is front and center when the United States does engage with Iran and why has its program, in existence for more than four decades and intended for civilian energy/scientific purposes, been so falsely represented.

Demonizing Iran has served the imperial interests of the United States and its military outpost Israel in the Middle East. Through the well financed aggressive propaganda efforts of Israeli lobby groups like the tactically benign sounding American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Tel Aviv has been successful in selling Washington, the corporate media and the American public on the provocative idea that Iran is a threat to it, the region and the United States.

The narrative about Iran and its nuclear objectives is replete with myths and distortions. U.S. foreign policy decisions have been largely framed to protect and secure Israeli interests, often to the detriment of America’s own.

A fettered Iran allows Israel unchallenged regional supremacy. Like former U.S. administrations, the Trump White House, in collaboration with Israel and their Arab allies, are determined to strip Iran of its revolutionary identity and undermine its regional clout.

Iran has legitimate security interests and concerns, fully aware that it is the primary target of Israel’s military and nuclear arsenal. A 2025 Arms Control Association report reveals that Israel—the only nuclear weapons power in the Middle East—has an estimated 90 nuclear warheads with sophisticated delivery systems in its inventory, as well as the fissile material stockpiles for at least 200 nuclear weapons.

Iran, on the other hand, is a threshold state. To achieve the weaponization stage, it would need to enrich uranium to 90 percent purity, weaponize the fissile material and develop the delivery systems. None have been done.

Unlike Israel, Iran is a signatory to the 1968 U.N. Non-Proliferation Treaty. As such, it is prohibited from developing, acquiring or using nuclear weapons, although it does have the right to manufacture and enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. In addition, Iran’s leaders have vigorously pursued the establishment of a nuclear weapons-free zone for the region.

There are a number of rational reasons for the Islamic Republic to go down the road toward acquiring nuclear weapons; principally, self-defense.

Former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak (2007-2013), in his memoirs, for example, reveals that the regime of then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came close to attacking Iran at least three times between 2010 and 2012. Barak stated that he and Netanyahu had pushed for military operations against Iranian facilities, but they backed down after opposition from their top security officials.

Barak also discloses that he disagreed with Netanyahu that Iran’s nuclear program posed an existential threat to Israel. He was instead more concerned about the regional balance of power.

Some in Iran’s political class, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,

suspect that the United States, Israel and their Arab allies are intent on

overthrowing the Islamic Republic. Recent history confirms their suspicions.

They point to crippling economic sanctions, covert operations, cyber attacks, assassination of nuclear scientists and military personnel, missile attacks and sabotage of gas pipelines and military sites.

In July 2022, for example, during a visit to Israel, President Joe Biden signed a pledge to never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon and to “…use all elements of its national power to ensure that outcome.”

It is with that pledge and President Trump’s ultimatums that the United States has entered a new round of nuclear talks with Iran, currently underway. Strangely enough, it was Trump, encouraged by Netanyahu, who pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement in 2018 and imposed heavier “maximum pressure” sanctions; believing that economic hardships would drive Iranians to topple the government.

Before the recent nuclear meetings began in early April, Trump threatened: “If they [Iran] don’t make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.” In a show of force, in addition to two aircraft carriers in the Red Sea, the White House has deployed a squadron of fighter jets, stealth bombers, air defenses and large quantities of weapons to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

Also, Netanyahu, incapable of remaining silent, sounded off saying that the only nuclear deal Israel would accept would have Iran agreeing to eliminate its entire program. He further elaborated: “We go in, blow up the facilities and dismantle all the equipment, under American supervision and execution.”

The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reported (17 April 2025) that Netanyahu recently sought the U.S. administration’s support to conduct joint commando and air strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. Trump, however, vetoed the plan while discussions with Tehran are ongoing. Netanyahu is clearly intent on derailing the negotiations to insure that there will never be rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran.

Except for a short interval during the Obama administration, when Iran and the P5+1 countries (China, France, Russia, U.K., U.S.) plus Germany finalized the JCPOA in 2015, the United States has leaned on a muscular military policy and has never been serious about engaging cooperatively with Iran. It has, however, been serious about insuring Israel’s hegemony in the region.

President Obama’s “new dawn for the Middle East” included moving away from years of failed policies, particularly “Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” a 1996 initiative pushed by pro-Israel stalwarts and advanced during the George W. Bush administration.

Following the attacks of 11 September 2001, Bush and Netanyahu set in motion the aggressive goals documented in “Clean Break” to contain, destabilize and overthrow governments that challenged U.S.-Israeli hegemony. Plans were drafted for military action against seven countries, starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. All but Iran have been destabilized and/or balkanized.

Even though the relationship between Obama and Netanyahu was often strained, Obama’s actual record in office makes him one of the most pro-Israel presidents since Harry S. Truman.

The scale of Israel’s barbarity in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and its insatiable addiction to expansion and power forewarns Iran and other actors in the Middle East that they must be vigilant in their defense to survive.

Netanyahu’s jingoistic vision of Zionist Israeli supremacy has never changed. Ten years ago, he bluntly told an Israeli parliamentary committee that there could never be peace with the Palestinians: “I’m asked if we will forever live by the sword,” and I say “yes.”

Israel may not be visibly present at the nuclear negotiating table, its influence over the outcome is, however, palpable and discernible.

What Washington and Tel Aviv fail to understand is that they are dealing with a politically astute country, that deserves the respect it demands as a nation that has

resisted colonizers and colonization throughout its 5,000-year history in West Asia.

No amount of absurdities—American or Israeli—can change that reality.

The post Iran and the United States: Nuclear Argy Bargy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by M. Reza Behnam.

Joseph Marshall III.

Since my previous post referenced the renowned Lakota author Joseph Marshall III, it is with great sadness that I inform you of his passing into the spirit world on April 18. It is somewhat coincidental that he departed the day following my discussion of Crazy Horse. His literary works and historical insights have profoundly influenced my perspective. I frequently revisit his writings, particularly those concerning Crazy Horse, as I seek to make sense of the world, especially in times of great suffering. While our political ideologies may differ, his depictions of the last generation of free Lakotas is authentic. And I am very critical of the term “authentic” when applied to American Indian history.

As a historian, one encounters the necessity of engaging with library shelves containing volumes of U.S. apologia of various orientations concerning the theft of a continent and the associated genocide of its Indigenous peoples. A sense of frustration and predictability can often mark this experience. For example, the predominant narrative trajectory concerning Lakota historiography, as articulated by non-Lakotas, generally follows this pattern: initially, the portrayal depicts us as violent savages; subsequently, we are reframed as noble savages. Eventually, the representation culminates in depicting an archetypal image of American Indians: dwelling in tipis, donning headdresses, engaging in war cries, and riding bare-chested across expansive plains. The arrival of Kevin Costner’s Private Dunbar further popularized this image, leading to a widespread belief that others, if they tried hard enough, could become us.

Additionally, some assert that we were latecomers to our own site of creation—territory which we purportedly appropriated—aggressively displacing others until we finally got what was coming to us. (Imagine them telling Christians that Adam and Eve were invaders within the Garden of Eden.) Recently, a Finnish historian has endeavored to restore our rightful position in the historical narrative, concluding that we were imperialists in our own right, akin to the Comanches, competing against our expansionist counterpart, the United States of America. It is noteworthy that most of these authors have neither resided in Lakota Makoce, nor have they mastered the Lakota language, spoken to Lakota experts, or investigated the extensive archives of Lakota knowledge and textual materials. My academic qualifications in history required fluency in at least one foreign language, ideally corresponding with a regional specialization. Mastery of a foreign language is a prerequisite for conducting thorough archival research in a foreign nation. What credibility would we attribute to a Russian historian who lacked proficiency in the Russian language and did not undertake travel or study within Russia? (The answer may suggest otherwise, given the prevailing anti-Russian sentiments in the United States; however, the central argument remains intact.) So why give so much credibility to historians and writers who lack these credentials?

On the other hand, Joseph Marshall, or Joe as I called him, possessed these qualifications. He was a first-language Lakota speaker, and much of his referenced knowledge comes directly from the Lakota oral tradition. Having lived among and been closely related to many of the finest practitioners of Lakota oral history, he provides unique insights. For instance, The Journey of Crazy Horse includes no footnotes or non-Lakota references. Instead, Marshall lists numerous Oglala and Sicangu elders in the book’s sources section, his primary references. Several elders were just a generation away from when Crazy Horse walked the earth. I am unaware of any contemporary histories of the nineteenth century that rely so heavily on oral traditions as primary sources. Marshall exemplified the strength of Lakota knowledge. He was more than a historian; like the elders who served as his archives, he became a living memory for the Lakota people.

I first met him at an American Indian education conference in Oacoma, South Dakota, in 2010. Since that time, his books have occupied a prominent place on my shelves and have been included in many of my high school syllabi. A former student of mine, now an adult, once showed me that they still possess their well-worn copy of “ The Lakota Way, “ which I assigned in my Oceti Sakowin studies course years ago. I have gifted his writings to friends, family, and acquaintances more than any other author, owing to their unwavering commitment to portraying an unapologetic Lakota perspective.

Since the U.S.-backed Zionist genocide in Palestine, it has been hard to ignore the parallels between American Indians and Palestinians. But it’s one thing to pity the victims of genocidal war and quite another to try to understand why they continue to resist, despite facing enemies equipped with more technologically advanced weapons and a propensity for extreme violence. Marshall inspired me to write about Palestinian and Lakota resistance. In the analysis section of The Journey of Crazy Horse, trying to understand Crazy Horse’s spirit of total resistance, Marshall asks the reader to:

[T]hink of the emotional impact if suspicious and pushy people suddenly drove an armored troop carrier into your quiet suburban or rural neighborhood, deployed men with guns, made unreasonable demands that couldn’t be satisfied, and opened fire, killing and wounding your friends, neighbors, and relatives. Any[one] who witnessed such a horrific incident would be suspicious and distrustful of such intruders forever.

Palestinians don’t have to imagine this scenario. They are living it. Lakotas lived it, too. And that’s what Marshall’s books did to me. They humanized the Lakota warriors of the last free generation who did not live on reservations. They were deeply scarred and defined by the horrors they witnessed. Their terror and pain were their motivations for resistance; they were acts of self-defense and survival. And it became more than that. Their courage and skill to defeat their enemies turned them into legends, inspiring future generations. They broke the spell of inviolability that surrounds the colonizer. They tore him from his horse, just as Palestinians in sandals pulled him from his tank, forcing him to confront his mortality, reminding him that we may not be equals in this world, but we are all equals in death. They did this in the face of terrible danger, remaining steadfast and humble protectors while confronting their own shortcomings as human beings, as sometimes imperfect relatives and lovers.

I have observed this same spirit reflected in the eyes of Water Protectors and veterans of the Red Power Movement, aware that they may not live long enough to witness the results of their sacrifices. They embodied the spirit of Crazy Horse. Marshall conveyed it as a living memory for all future generations of the Lakota people and our allies, rather than as an idealistic fantasy of violence and adventurism. This unique essence of recognizing a higher power, or living for a greater purpose, has the potential to inspire ordinary individuals to achieve extraordinary feats. That’s what makes it powerful. It moves people, and, using their only possession—their life, people make history with it.

For that, we know Joe Marshall joins the ancestors. His gift to us was not stories about the best days of the Lakota Nation in the nineteenth century. His gift was that, if we embody the spirit of Crazy Horse, our best days are in front of us.

This piece first appeared on Red Scare.

The post Crazy Horse and Joseph Marshall III appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

Image by Kelly Sikkema.

America desperately needs a united front to restrain the wrecking ball of the Trump regime. While outraged opposition has been visible and vocal, it remains a far cry from developing a capacity to protect what’s left of democracy in the United States.

With the administration in its fourth month, the magnitude of the damage underway is virtually impossible for any individual to fully grasp. But none of us need a complete picture to understand that the federal government is now in the clutches of massively cruel and antidemocratic forces that have no intention of letting go.

Donald Trump’s second presidential term has already given vast power to the most virulent aspects of the nation’s far-right political culture. Its flagrant goals include serving oligarchy, dismantling civil liberties, and wielding government as a weapon against academic freedom, civil rights, economic security, environmental protection, public health, workers’ rights, and so much more.

The nonstop Trumpist assaults mean that ongoing noncooperation and active resistance will be essential. This is no time for what Martin Luther King, Jr., called “the paralysis of analysis.” Yet the past hugely matters. Repetition compulsions within the Democratic Party, including among self-described liberals and progressives, unwittingly smoothed the path for Trump’s return to power. Many of the same patterns, with undue deference to party leaders and their narrow perspectives, are now hampering the potential to create real leverage against MAGA madness.

“Fiscal Conservatism and Social Liberalism”

Today, more than three decades after the “New Democrats” triumphed when Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, an observation by Washington Post economics reporter Hobart Rowen days after that victory is still worth pondering: “Fiscal conservatism and social liberalism proved to be an effective campaign formula.” While campaigning with a call for moderate public investment, Clinton offered enough assurances to business elites to gain much of their support. Once elected, he quickly filled his economic team with corporate lawyers, business-friendly politicians, lobbyists, and fixers on loan from Wall Street boardrooms.

That Democratic formula proved to be a winning one — for Republicans. Two years after Clinton became president, the GOP gained control of both the House and Senate. Republicans maintained a House majority for the next 12 years and a Senate majority for 10 of them.

A similar pattern set in after the next Democrat moved into the White House. Taking office in January 2009 amid the Great Recession, Barack Obama continued with predecessor George W. Bush’s “practice of bailing out the bankers while ignoring the anguish their toxic mortgage packages caused the rest of us,” as journalist Robert Scheer pointed out. By the time Obama was most of the way through his presidency, journalist David Dayen wrote, he had enabled “the dispossession of at least 5.2 million U.S. homeowner families, the explosion of inequality, and the largest ruination of middle-class wealth in nearly a century.”

Two years into Obama’s presidency, his party lost the House and didn’t regain it for eight years. When he won reelection in 2012, Republicans captured the Senate and kept control of it throughout his second term.

During Obama’s eight years as president, the Democrats also lost upward of 900 seats in state legislatures. Along the way, they lost control of 30 legislative chambers, while the Republican share of seats went from 44% to 56%. So GOP state legislators were well-positioned to gerrymander electoral districts to their liking after the 2020 census, making it possible for Republicans to just barely (but powerfully) gain and then retain their stranglehold on the House of Representatives after the 2022 and 2024 elections.

Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024 ran for president while sticking to updated versions of “fiscal conservatism, social liberalism,” festooning their campaigns with the usual trappings of ultra-mild populist rhetoric. Much of the media establishment approved, as they checked the standard Democratic boxes. But opting to avoid genuine progressive populism on the campaign trail meant enabling Trump to pose as a better choice for the economic interests of the working class.

Mutual Abandonment

The party’s orientation prevents its presidential nominees from making a credible pitch to be champions of working people. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted immediately after the 2024 election. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.”

But there’s little evidence that the party leadership wants significant change, beyond putting themselves back in power. Midway through April, the homepage of the Democratic Party seemed like a snapshot of an institution still disconnected from the angst and anger of the electorate. A pop-up that instantly obscured all else on the screen featured a drawing of a snarling Donald Trump next to the headline: “We’re SUING Trump over two illegal executive orders.” Underneath, the featured message proclaimed: “We’re rolling up our sleeves and organizing for a brighter, more equal future. Together, we will elect Democrats up and down the ballot.” A schedule of town halls in dozens of regions was nice enough, but a true sense of urgency, let alone emergency, was notably lacking.

Overall, the party seems stuck in the mud of the past, still largely mired in the Joe Biden era and wary of opening the door too wide for the more progressive grassroots base that provides millions of small donations and volunteers to get out the vote (as long as they’re genuinely inspired to do so). President Biden’s unspeakably tragic refusal to forego running for reelection until far too late was enabled by top-to-bottom party dynamics and a follow-the-leader conformity that are still all too real.

On no issue has the party leadership been more tone-deaf — with more disastrous electoral and policy results — than the war in Gaza. The refusal of all but a few members of Congress to push President Biden to stop massively arming the Israeli military for its slaughter there caused a steep erosion of support from the usual Democratic voters, as polling at the time and afterward indicated. The party’s moral collapse on Gaza helped to crater Kamala Harris’s vote totals among alienated voters reluctant to cast their ballots for what they saw as a war party, a perception especially acute among young people and notable among African Americans.

The Fact of Oligarchy

Pandering to potential big donors is apt to seem like just another day in elected office. A story about California Governor Gavin Newsom, often touted as a major Democratic contender for president in 2028, is in the category of “you can’t make this stuff up.” As reported by Politico this spring, he “is making sure California’s business elite can call him, maybe. Roughly 100 leaders of state-headquartered companies have received a curious package in recent months: a prepaid, inexpensive cell phone… programmed with Newsom’s digits and accompanied by notes from the governor himself. ‘If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away,’ read one note to a prominent tech firm CEO, printed on an official letterhead, along with a hand-scrawled addendum urging the executive to reach out… It was Newsom’s idea, a representative said, and has already yielded some ‘valuable interactions.’”

If, however, you’re waiting for Newsom to send prepaid cell phones to activists working for social justice, telling them, “If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away,” count on waiting forever.

The dominance of super-wealthy party patrons that Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been railing against at “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies has been coalescing for a long time. “In the American republic,” wrote Walter Karp for Harper’s magazine shortly before his death in 1989, “the fact of oligarchy is the most dreaded knowledge of all, and our news keeps that knowledge from us.” Now, in the age of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the iron heel of mega-capital is at work swiftly crushing democratic structures, while top Democrats race to stay within shouting distance of the oligarchs.

A paradoxical challenge for the left is that it must take part in building a united front that includes anti-Trump corporatists and militarists, even while fighting against corporatism and militarism. What’s needed is not capitulation or ultra-leftism, but instead a dialectical approach that recognizes the twin imperatives of defeating an increasingly fascistic Republican Party while working to gain enough power to implement truly progressive agendas.

For those agendas, electoral campaigns and their candidates should be subsets of social movements, not the other way around. Still, here’s one crystal-clear lesson of history: it’s crucial who sits in the Oval Office and controls Congress. Now more than ever.

Fascism Would Stop Us All

A horrible reality of this moment: a fascist takeover of the government is within reach — and, if completed, any possibility of fulfilling a progressive agenda would go out the Overton window. The words of the young Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, murdered in 1969 by the Chicago police (colluding with the FBI), ring profoundly true today: “Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.”

But much of the 2025 Democratic Party leadership seems willing to once again pursue the tried-and-failed strategy of banking on Trump to undo himself. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the party leaders in the House and Senate, have distinctly tilted in that direction, as if heeding strategist James Carville’s declaration that Democrats should not try to impede Trump’s rampage against the structures of democracy.

“With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” Carville wrote in late February. “Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.” (Evidently impressed with his political acumen, the editors of the New York Times published the op-ed piece with that advice only four months after printing an op-ed he wrote in late October under this headline: “Three Reasons I’m Certain Kamala Harris Will Win.”)

As for the Democratic National Committee, it probably had nowhere to go but up in the wake of the chairmanship of Jaime Harrison, who for four years dutifully did President Biden’s bidding. Now, with no Democratic president, the new DNC chair, Ken Martin, has significant power to guide the direction of the party.

In early April, I informed Martin that my colleagues and I at RootsAction were planning a petition drive for the full DNC to hold an emergency meeting. “The value of such a meeting seems clear for many reasons,” I wrote, “including the polled low regard for the Democratic Party and the need to substantively dispel the wide perception that the party is failing to adequately respond to the current extraordinary perils.” Martin replied with a cordial text affirming that the schedule for the 448-member DNC to convene remains the same as usual — twice a year — with the next meeting set for August.

The petition, launched in mid-April (co-sponsored by RootsAction and Progressive Democrats of America), urged the DNC to “convene an emergency meeting of all its members — fully open to the public — as soon as possible… Business as usual must give way to truly bold action that mobilizes against the autocracy that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their cronies are further entrenching every day. The predatory, extreme, and dictatorial actions of the Trump administration call for an all-out commensurate response, which so far has been terribly lacking from the Democratic Party.”

No matter what, at this truly pivotal time, we must never give up.

As Stanley Kunitz wrote during the height of the Vietnam War:

In a murderous time
   the heart breaks and breaks
      and lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go
   through dark and deeper dark
      and not to turn.

While reasons for pessimism escalate, I often think of how on target my RootsAction colleague India Walton was in a meeting when she said, “The only hope is in the struggle.”

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post Top Democrats Have Been Enabling Trump appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Norman Solomon.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

When President Trump ran for office in 2024 he promised to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine within 100 days of taking office.  The unofficial centerpiece of his plan was the proposals raised publicly by US General Kellogg earlier in 2024. While Trump in 2024 did not officially adopt the Kellogg proposals as his plan to end the war, it is clear in retrospect he unofficially embraced the Kellogg plan. One of his first unofficially appointments before even taking office in January was to task Kellogg to explore responses to his—Kellogg’s— proposals among the interested parties.

It is important to note that the Trump plan to negotiate an end to the war during his first 100 days in office has been the Kellogg Plan, revised somewhat to represent a US political compromise within the Trump administration between the Trump neocons—Rubio, Walz, etc.—and those in the administration who advocate a faster US extrication from the costly and unwinnable war—i.e. Vance, Witkoff, et. al. Thus a ‘Kellogg Plus’ US plan.

At this past week’s EU/UK meeting in London, however, ‘Kellogg Plus’ died and was buried. Put on the table for discussion by the USA as a possible unified west/NATO solution to end the Ukraine war by a  compromise with Russian positions, the Kellogg plan was never even discussed by the Europeans or the Ukrainian delegation sent to London. It was rejected and ‘killed off’ by a unified Europe & Ukraine opposition.

As others have reported, the Europeans and Ukraine had developed their own set of proposals over the past few weeks in the flurry of their meetings in Europe, the most recent occurring in Paris. London was the meeting in which the Europeans expected the US delegation to discuss the Euro-Ukraine plan which differed substantially from the US ‘Kellogg Plus’ proposals. The US reportedly caught the Europeans by surprise, presented their plan for discussion in lieu of the Europeans’.  The latter then refused to discuss the Kellogg plan and, in return, the US delegation left the meeting..

Having had a copy of the US plan just before the London meeting, Zelensky publicly, and in somewhat insulting language, rejected the US plan outright. He followed up after the meeting with another public statement to the media declaring “There is nothing to talk about”.  His European supporters, notably Macron of France and Starmer of UK, quickly joined him and publicly declared the same. It is now clear the US proposals are rejected in their entirety, both by Ukraine and the Europeans

The US had announced its plan was its ‘best and final offer’ to all the parties as the basis for starting negotiations, including Russia, and threatened to exit the negotiations process altogether if not accepted by all.  Whether it does has yet to be determined.

Today, April 25, 2025, Trump special envoy meets with Putin in Moscow to discuss the same Kellogg proposals. It is highly likely Putin will not accept the offer in its entirety either, but may accept some elements and declare it a basis to continue discussions—unlike Zelensky or the Europeans who have rejected it outright and completely.

Given that total rejection—and regardless of the outcome of the Witkoff-Putin meeting in Moscow, it is clear the first phase of the Trump administration’s attempt to negotiate an end to the Ukraine conflict has come to an abrupt end.

So what was the Kellogg Plan proposed by the USA that was so abruptly shot down by Zelensky and the Europeans? And what was their alternative proposal that they thought the US would accept as the starting point of negotiations with the Russians—a move by the Europeans to put them back in the negotiations game alongside the Americans as equals, a role so far denied them to their great consternation?

Here are the main elements of the Kellogg Plus American plan:

+ No NATO membership offered to Ukraine nor Ukraine to seek membership, although Ukraine could join the European Union

+ Recognition de jure of Crimea as part of Russia and Lughansk province now fully occupied by Russia

+ Ceasefire implementation details to be worked out by Russia & Ukraine, without Europe or US participation

+ Recognition de facto the other three east Ukraine regions (Donetsk, Zaporozhie, Kherson) now occupied by Russian forces along the current combat line

+ Lifting of US sanctions since 2014 on Russia, leaving Europe sanctions to Europe to decide

+ Europe could offer Ukraine security guarantees if it wanted but the USA would not

+ US and Russia would continue to explore joint deals on energy and industry

+ The US would operate the Zaporozhie nuclear power plant and distribute its resources to both Ukraine and Russia

+ Russia also gives up its control of the dam on the Dnipr, its territory in Kherson where the nuclear power plant is located, its occupation of far western ‘spit’ of Kherson on the river, and the area in the Kharkov province Russia also now occupies

+ US & Ukraine conclude a minerals deal, with participation by Europe as well

+ The Plan said nothing about the size of Ukraine’s army after the war’s end

In negotiations of agreements, sometimes what’s left out intentionally is as important as what’s included. Here’s some key omissions in the US plan:

+ No reference to the size of the Ukrainian military as part of a peace deal, or whether Ukraine could build up its forces while ceasefire and negotiations continued

+ No reference to whether NATO troops were to participate in any peacekeeping operations in Ukraine after the war

+ No mention of whether or how Ukraine might be compensated and rebuilt, by whom, or whether Russia’s $260 billion assets in European banks would be used

The Europeans were shocked, reportedly, by the provisions of the Kellogg Plus plan. They had expected the US to attend London to discuss the plan they had alternatively hammered out in the preceding weeks with the assumed approval of Ukraine.  That alternative plan was fundamentally different from the USA’s. In fact, it is better described not as a plan to reach some kind of a compromise settlement to the conflict, but a plan that amounted to a capitulation of Russia in the conflict.

The Europeans proposed something historically similar to the France-Britain 1918 armistice agreement on Germany that ended world war I.  That armistice was a ceasefire after which the victors—France and Britain—imposed impossible terms on Germany, which were eventually forced on Germany and which, in the end historically, led to the continuation of the world war in 1939. The 1918 negotiations was an agreement forced by victors on the defeated. The problem in Ukraine today, is that the Russians are clearing winning militarily and it is the Ukrainians and Europeans who are likely the defeated before this year’s end on the battlefield.

Here’s the elements of the Europeans-Ukraine 2025 ‘Armistice Plan’, which they had hoped, were the USA to accept as basis for negotiations, would put them—the Europeans—back on an equal footing in negotiations with the USA that the latter has thus far denied them since discussions between the US and Russia were opened in Riyadh and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in March.

The Main Elements of the European Armistice Plan:

+ Russia & Ukraine accept an unconditional ceasefire. Details of the implementation of the ceasefire subsequently negotiate by all four parties together: Russia, Ukraine, Europe and USA

+ Russia required to return all prisoners, troops and children allegedly kidnapped but no mention of Ukraine similar release of prisoners, etc.

+ Security Guarantees to Ukraine provided by US and Europe, along lines of NATO article 5 language; Ukraine may join NATO at a later date

+ No limits or restrictions on Ukraine’s size of military. Ukraine allowed to rebuild army and weapons during ceasefire negotiations

+ Europe and other States may send troops to Ukraine as part of peacekeeping force

+ No reference made to Russia right to Crimea or other occupied territories

+ Ukraine to control the Zaporozhie nuclear power plant, with US only assisting. Also Ukraine control Dnipr river and Kharkov dam

+ Russian assets in European banks remain frozen until Ukraine compensation for damages is determined by negotiations

+ Sanctions on Russia remain in place. Any relief of sanctions reinstated if Russia breaches agreement in any way

It should be noted this European proposal is not the plan Ukraine has been proposing the last two and a half years. Ukraine/Zelensky’s position to end the war hasn’t changed since late 2022.

Ukraine’s Terms for Ending the War:

Almost three years to the day this April, following Russia’s initial invasion in February 2022 and territorial gains across Ukraine, Russia and Ukraine representatives met in Istanbul, Turkey and worked out details of terms tentatively to end the conflict. The terms of Istanbul I, as it is called, included Ukraine agreeing not to join NATO, Crimea remaining in Russia but the other four provinces of east Ukraine remaining in Ukraine providing assurances were given its almost total Russian population be allowed to practice its Russian Orthodox religion, speak Russian, and continue other cultural practices—all of which were being denied by the Kiev regime at the time in the hands of ultra-nationalist, proto fascist forces intent on denying the same to its eastern Russian population. The shelling of cities in the east by Ukraine forces also had to stop.

Ukraine tentatively agreed to Istanbul I, took the terms back to Zelensky in Kiev, who reportedly was considering signing them—until then UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, flew into Kiev and convinced Zelensky that unlimited NATO funds and weaponry would be forthcoming, that Russia would collapse politically and economically if Ukraine resisted militarily and the war with Russia should therefore continue.  Zelensky ultimately agreed. Istanbul was abandoned and, after the initial Ukrainian tactical victories in the summer of 2022, Zelensky and Ukraine adopted the following hard line positions for negotiations that Ukraine formally retains to this day:

+ Russia should immediately exit all Ukraine territories, including Crimea

+ After exit, Ukraine will commence negotiations with Russia

+ Negotiation topics to focus on reparations paid to Ukraine by Russia

+ War crime tribunals of Russia leaders in Europe to follow

+ Ukraine never to cede control of the Zaporozhie nuclear plant to anyone

+ It will never agree to any limits or reductions of its military forces

+ Europe must agree to let Ukraine into NATO or else provide it Article 5 NATO equivalent security guarantees

Russia’s Terms for Ending the War

As Ukraine’s position evolved in the course of the first year of the war, so too did Russia’s.  After its initial offer in Istanbul in April 2022, and its retreat from areas around Kiev and in the south in Kherson Russian demands stiffened as well. That fall 2022, as Ukraine demands total capitulation by Russian forces, Putin established a new Russian position:

At the center of that was that now after referenda were conducted in the four regions of East Ukraine showing over-whelming voting to join Russia, the four provinces were now legally part of Russia and were non-negotiable.

Other Russian demands were Ukraine must not join NATO, must become neutral between Europe and Russia, and its government must be purged of fascist elements to ensure the same.

In early 2024 Putin gave an interview with US journalist, Tucker Carlson. In it he made an interesting remark which has largely been ignored by western media and which may yet be raised as part of any ultimate negotiations.  In it he described the far west Ukraine as not really part of the Slavic homeland of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.  He noted that territory was formerly Poland and Romania and was given by Stalin to Ukraine at the end of World War II. It was an historic hotbed of fascism and the region had strongly supported the Nazis in the world war, often doing their dirty work on the local resistance and the jews.  Putin then suggested if the west wanted this region, he didn’t have any great opposition to it, if they were that foolish to accept its inherent pro fascist elements.

Later in June 2024 Putin established Russia’s most recent position for a negotiated end of the conflict which has remained to this day. These terms include:

+ No NATO membership for Ukraine

+ Political neutrality by Ukraine

+ Ukraine government remove neo-nazi politicians from its government

+ Recognize that Crimea and the four provinces are now legally part of Russia

+ To ensure Ukraine is no threat to Russia, it must reduce its military force to around 80,000

Why European Obstinacy Toward Continuing the War?

Many observers in America and elsewhere in the world have been perplexed about why the European leadership—especially those of the larger countries Britain, France and now Germany—have been so consistently in favor of continuing the war?  They ask questions like: don’t they (European leaders) see that the war cannot be won? That Ukraine is losing? That it may mean an irrevocable split between the USA and Europe and break up of NATO itself? Can Europe actually go it alone, providing the massive funding to Ukraine and weapons it clearly does not have the economic base to produce by itself?

Here’s some possible explanations for the European obstinate support for Zelensky, Ukraine and for continuing the war:

1) European leaders are politically committed in terms of their personal careers to the war, both at national and Euro-wide institutional (EU Commission, EU Council, etc.) levels. Should the war end on Russian terms, it will be perceived as a personal defeat for them with repercussions for their personal careers

2) War is often a convenient diversion by politicians from problems at home in their own constituencies. It’s not the first time in history politicians start and continue wars to stay in office

3) Some European/NATO have a visceral bias against and hate for anything Russian. This is especially true of the Baltics states’ leaders and also to some extent for Poland, Finland, and even for Britain

4) The War continuance serves to keep NATO from falling apart (while it also has the opposite effect). So long as the war continues, perhaps US and Trump can not leave NATO so quickly or completely

5) The War is clearly pushing Europe toward building its own defense industry and independent military force. For decades it’s been overly dependent on the US for weapons provision and massive funding of NATO operations in Europe which has meant significant US dollars inflow to Europe. Europe leaders now talk of spending trillions of Euros on defense, important for boosting an otherwise slowing stagnating real economy for almost two decades now. Without the war—and media manufactured threat of an eventual Russia invasion of Europe should it win in Ukraine—it is impossible for Europe to spend trillions Euros planned for a new defense industry.

6) One must assume some European leaders—especially those less competent in the umbrella EU Commission, EU Council, etc—actually believe Russia will invade Europe after Ukraine with a Russian army barely a million when it took 15 million Russians to take east Europe and Germany during world war II at the cost of 20 million killed.

7) Some European generals and no doubt politicians have stated and believe that Russia will lose the war if NATO just stays committed and fights for another year. This is the original argument that dominated NATO thinking back in 2022: that Russia’s economy can sustain a war for long and opposition to Putin will quickly result in his overthrow. How that view succeeds today after three years of evidence to the contrary is difficult to understand.

Ukraine’s and Zelensky’s obstinacy and existential commitment to continue the war is more understandable and rational, notwithstanding its inevitable failure.

Zelensky must continue to war in order to continue martial law and, in turn, remain in office given that his authority as president expired in May 2024 and he’s no longer actually the president.  Should the war end elections in Ukraine will be held and he will almost certainly be forced out of his current role.

Without the protection of his office he then becomes personally vulnerable from several directions. He’ll be blamed by the radical nationalists for losing Ukraine territory and the death of hundreds of thousands Ukrainians will have been in vain. They’ll come after him. The Russian secret services may do the same indirectly. Or perhaps some everyday Russian, or Ukrainian, citizen who’ll blame him for their family losses. He won’t have the level of personal protection he enjoyed from the Americans, and now the British, while in office.

The War keeps the radical nationalists on his side so long as the fighting continues and he remains obstinate about any negotiations with the prospect of even the slightest compromise.

There’s also the question of wide spectrum of Ukraine society and political-social forces that have grown dependent on the flow of money from the west. Many politicians and political interests have been sharing in that western funds injection. Per Zelensky himself, Ukraine must spend $8 billion a month just as government workers wages and pensions. Ukraine’s broken economy cannot generate that. Then there are the hordes of shadowy arms traders making money off the flow of funds and weapons. And Ukraine companies and their western investors as well.

Trump’s Next Moves?

There’s been much conjecture in the US media, and talk by Trump administration team assigned to the war, that should the parties not accept the Trump Kellogg Plus plan then the US will simply walk away from the negotiations.  That’s not likely. There’s many ways to continue negotiations. In the case of Russia and US that’s simple as part of the future meetings planned to discuss restoring diplomatic relations and defining economic deals and cooperation.

Some clarity where Trump’s going next may emerge from the WItkoff-Putin meeting now underway.  Trump needs Putin to agree to something to keep the ball rolling and keep at bay US critics who’ll say it’s futile to negotiate with Putin and Russia. On the other hand, Putin cannot embrace too much a plan that clearly is designed to get Russia to de facto freeze the war in place or even slow Russian offensives.

The war cannot be concluded by negotiations designed to end the fighting; it can only be concluded on the battlefield that leads to negotiations that then conclude the conflict.

The most likely outcome of the war is a military one.  Russia will have to take more territory in order to convince Ukraine and Europe allies that if it doesn’t agree to Russia’s fundamental demands Ukraine may lose even more territory. Russia will need to succeed in major new offensives in the north and south to create that realization and scenario.

The question is whether Russia’s Special Military Operation, SMO, is sufficiently large enough to do so. 800,000 men and voluntary recruits may not prove sufficient. It should not be forgotten that Ukraine was ‘conquered’ in 1944-45 by a force of more than three million in arms. Modern technology perhaps does not require that many but nonetheless requires more than 800,000 given the scope of the front lines and the fact Russia, while it has an advantage of 2 to 1 in combat manpower, that ratio is probably not enough for a complete military victory.

However, one more proviso is relevant. It’s not impossible that Ukraine’s army collapses later this summer, especially if the USA and Trump pull out of weapons deliveries and discontinue surveillance and targeting support for Ukraine forces. But that depends on Trump’s next after next move.

Returning with a token concession from the Witkoff-Putin meeting is not sufficient. To end the war, as Trump says he wants to do, will require a hard break of US involvement militarily, logistically and financially—and soon.  He will have to ‘bite the bullet’ no later than June and cut Ukraine loose. And perhaps ‘stick a stake’ in the political heart of those Europeans who have been playing the USA to provide them their military toys and games for almost eighty years now.

The post Why Trump’s Ukraine War ‘Kellogg Plan’ Collapsed appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jack Rasmus.

Photograph Source: שי קנדלר – CC BY-SA 4.0

Universities are in a bind.  As institutions of learning and teaching, knowledge learnt and taught should, or at the very least could, be put into practice.  How unfortunate for rich ideas to linger in cold storage or exist as the mummified status of esoterica.  But universities in the United States have taken fright at pro-Palestinian protests since October 7, 2023, becoming battlegrounds for the propaganda emissaries of Israeli public relations and the pro-evangelical, Armageddon lobby that sees the end times taking place in the Holy Land.  Higher learning institutions are spooked by notions of Israeli brutality, and they are taking measures.

These measures have tended to be heavy handed, taking issue with students and academic staff.  The policy has reached another level in efforts by amphibian university managers to ban various protest groups who are seen as creating an environment of intimidation for other members of the university tribe.  That these protesters merely wish to draw attention to the massacre of Palestinian civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, and the fact that the death toll, notably in the Gaza Strip, now towers at over 50,000, is a matter of inconvenient paperwork.

Even worse, the same institutions are willing to tolerate individuals who have celebrated their own unalloyed bigotry, lauded their own racial and religious ideology, and deemed various races worthy of extinguishment or expulsion.  Such a man is Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who found himself permitted to visit Yale University at the behest of the Jewish society Shabtai, a body founded by Democratic senator and Yale alumnus Cory Booker, along with Rabbi Shmully Hecht.

Shabtai is acknowledged as having no official affiliation with Yale, though it is stacked with Yale students and faculty members who participate at its weekly dinners. Its beating heart was Hecht, who arrived in New Haven after finishing rabbinical school in Australia in 1996.

The members of Shabtai were hardly unanimous in approving Ben-Gvir’s invitation.  David Vincent Kimel, former coach of the Yale debate team, was one of two to send an email to a Shabtai listserv to express brooding disgruntlement.  “Shabtai was founded as a space for fearless, pluralistic Jewish discourse,” the email remarks.  “But this event jeopardizes Shabtai’s reputation and every future.”  In views expressed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Kimel elaborated: “I’m deeply concerned that we’re increasingly treating extreme rhetoric as just another viewpoint, rather than recognizing it as a distortion of constructive discourse.”  The headstone for constructive discourse was chiselled sometime ago, though Kimel’s hopes are charming.

As a convinced, pro-settler fanatic, Ben-Gvir is a fabled-Torah basher who sees Palestinians as needless encumbrances on Israel’s righteous quest to acquire Gaza and the West Bank.  Far from being alone, Ben-Gvir is also the member of a government that has endorsed starvation and the deprivation of necessities as laudable tools of conflict, to add to an adventurous interpretation of the laws of war that tolerates the destruction of health and civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

After a dinner at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort (the bad will be fed), Ben-Gvir was flushed with confidence.  He wrote on social media of how various lawmakers had “expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.”  By any other standard, this was an admission to encouraging the commission of a war crime.

In July last year, Israel’s State Prosecutor Amit Aisman reportedly sought permission from Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara to open a criminal investigation into Ben-Gvir for alleged incitement of violence against residents of Gaza.  The move was said to be a gesture to placate the International Court of Justice as it considers the genocide case filed by South Africa against Israel over the war in Gaza.  In a string of increasingly agitated interim orders, the ICJ has asked that Israel comply, as signatory member, with the obligations imposed by the United Nations Genocide Convention.  These include prohibitions against incitement to genocide.

Incitement has become something of a nervous tic for the minister.  In November 2023, for instance, Ben-Gvir remarked that “When we say Hamas should be destroyed, it also means those who celebrate, those who support, and those who hand out candy – they’re all terrorists, and they should also be destroyed.”  Seeing himself as essentially immune to any form of prosecution, Ben-Gvir gave the State Prosecutor a sound verbal thrashing, claiming that it was “trying to make an Israeli minister stand trial for ‘incitement’ against citizens of an enemy state that danced on the blood our soldiers on the streets of Gaza on October 7.”

In a statement responding to protests against Ben-Gvir’s visit, Yale stated that the student encampments set up on April 22 on Beinecke Plaza were in violation of the university’s policies on the use of outdoor spaces.  Students already on notice for previous protests along similar lines would face “immediate disciplinary action”.  With dulling predictability, the university revealed that it was looking into “concerns … about disturbing anti-Semitic conduct at the gathering”.

University officialdom had also focused on the activities of Yalies4Palestine, a student organisation whose club status was revoked for “sending calls over social media for others to join the event”.  The statement makes the claim that the group “flagrantly violated the rules to which the Yale College Dean’s Office holds all registered student organizations”. Consequently, the body cannot receive funding from Yale sources, use the university name, participate in relevant student activities, or book spaces on the campus.

This profaning of protest in a university setting is a convenient trick, using the popular weasel words of “offensive” and “unsafe” while deploying, more generically, the pitiful policy inventory that makes freedom of expression an impossibility.  Mobilised accordingly, they can eliminate any debate, any discussion and any idea from the campus for merely being stingingly contrarian or causing twinges of intellectual discomfort.  The moment the brain aches in debate, the offended howl and the administrators suppress.  Play nice, dear university staff and students, or don’t play at all.  Besides, Ben-Gvir, by Yale standards, is a half-decent fellow.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia – Public Domain

Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act is under attack. It’s not the first time. The rationale for these attacks has remained the same for the last 50 years: Section 106 compliance is slow, expensive, and unpredictable; it hinders economic growth and kills jobs. All of this comes easy to its detractors; none of it is true.

Section 106 requires federal agencies to assess the effects of their actions that involve lands they administer, permits they provide, and licenses they grant on historic, archaeological, and cultural properties listed in or eligible to be listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and, to the extent possible, minimize harmful effects to these significant places. The rules governing Section 106 have been in place since 1974. The path toward compliance is well-worn and easy to follow. So why the attacks?

Who Cares?

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the fight over Section 106, let’s start with three broader questions: Do Americans care about preserving their history? Do Americans want historic places protected and preserved? Do Americans want taxpayer money spent on historic preservation? The best answers to these questions come from polls taken over the last 25 years (Ipsos 2018, 2023; Ramos and Duganne 2000; Shannon 2014). Consistently, between 80 percent and 90 percent of respondents state that archaeological sites and historic buildings are important to them. In the latest poll (Ipsos 2023), 64 percent responded that archaeological site preservation should be a priority of the federal government, with 77 percent replying that there should be laws to protect archaeological sites and only 5 percent desiring no laws. Most respondents want federal funding for the protection of sites to increase and 80 percent want more land associated with archaeological sites to be set aside and preserved.

It’s one thing to answer a poll, it’s another to act on those beliefs. “So, what do Americans do on their vacations and how do they spend their money?” For many, the answer is visiting archaeological and historic sites. For example, since it opened in 1908, Mesa Verde National Park has hosted about 37 million visitors, with an average of more than 500,000 annually for the last 60 years. Gettysburg National Military Park was established in 1934 and has been visited by more than 136 million visitors, with an average attendance for the last 65 years cresting more than 1 million annually.

Perhaps surprising to some, one of the most visited National Historic Parks (NHP) is the San Antonio Missions, which since 1983 has preserved four of the five Spanish Missions near San Antonio (the fifth, the Alamo, is the best known and most visited but is not part of the park and not included in the visitation numbers). The San Antonio Missions NHP has been visited by more than 42 million people, easily exceeding an average of 1 million visitors a year since its inception.

But it’s not just the most famous parks that receive visitors. In my home state of Arizona, there are 19 national parks (NP), monuments, historic sites, and memorials administered by the National Park Service (NPS) (Table 1). Of these, 11 are national monuments, historic sites, or memorials (collectively, termed “NM” below) focused around archaeological or historic sites. In 2024, more than 1.6 million people visited these 11 NMs (NPS 2025), spending about $167 million and accounting for about 1,650 jobs (Flyr and Koontz 2024). In all, the archaeological and historical NMs account for about 20 percent of all NPS visitation in Arizona and more than 10 percent of the money spent and jobs created at NPS units in the state.

One of the parks in Arizona is the Grand Canyon, which by itself accounts for more than half of all visits, money, and jobs to Arizona NPS units. If we exclude the Grand Canyon National Park, then archaeological and historical NMs are responsible for about 45 percent of all visitations, money, and jobs at NPs and NMs in Arizona. Some may scoff at the size of the numbers, but it’s important to remember that many archaeological and historic NMs are in rural parts of the state, where the dollars generated and the jobs created at these units are extremely important to local businesses and communities. Also, some of the archaeological and historical NMs are hard to get to (for example, you need to hike a 3-mile loop to get in and out of Fort Bowie).

No matter how difficult, Americans keep coming. With their money and their time, Americans overwhelmingly declare that they enjoy visiting and learning about the past at archaeological and historical sites. They come alone, with their families, their friends, their schools, and their churches. They are awed by what Americans have done and are inspired to dream about things they might do.

Back to Section 106

Section 106 seeks to balance the interests of project proponents and land developers with protecting the historic fabric of this country. Those who contend that Section 106 is an impediment to development tend to be those with an economic interest. They provide anecdotal evidence of particular projects in which Section 106 compliance was maddeningly slow and outrageously expensive. They never, however, analyze Section 106 actions in a systematic and comprehensive manner, since such an evaluation shows a very different story.

Table 2 is derived from a report on the cumulative impact of the Historic Preservation Fund for the period 2001-2021, commissioned by the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers (PlaceEconomics 2023:22). It shows that for the first two decades of the 21st century, the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) in 59 jurisdictions made about 4.3 million decisions related to Section 106 undertakings. Nearly 80 percent of these decisions were findings that either no historic properties were found in the project area or that those that did exist were not sufficiently significant to warrant any action. In short, about 3.4 million projects brought before SHPOs were dealt with quickly and cheaply, with the project proponent or developer free to proceed in less than 30 days (often in less than a week). In addition, many federal agencies, in partnership with SHPOs and other consulting parties, have made agreements that exclude a vast number of small-scale projects from Section 106 reviews, which have minimal potential to adversely affect the National Register listed or eligible properties. These Section 106 agreements are effective tools that streamline and expedite a wide range of development projects.

About 900,000 projects were found to include a significant property and/or have an adverse effect on such a property. Most of these were altered, redesigned, or withdrawn so that the historic property or properties were not harmed and the proponent was free to proceed or move on to another project without having spent lots of money or wasted considerable time. Of the millions of Section 106 undertakings, less than 0.5% resulted in an agreement document among the SHPO, federal agency, affected Native American tribes, project proponent, local jurisdictions and communities, and other interested public groups on how to resolve the project’s harmful effects on significant historic properties. In 21 years, less than 20,000 agreement documents were signed in the 59 SHPO jurisdictions, or less than 20 per year in the entire country. What do these 20 projects have in common? They contained properties of historical and cultural value to our nation, local communities, Native American tribes, and descendants. The Section 106 agreement documents protected the values embedded in those places while allowing development to proceed.

Safeguard or Obstruction

There are two views of Section 106. Many in the development community view it as a regulation that inhibits economic progress. They argue that the Section 106 process is used by opponents to stymie or kill projects, particularly large and controversial ones. In contrast, local and descendant communities maintain that Section 106 provides them with one of the few means by which they have any say in development decisions. Even with Section 106, however, these groups maintain that the playing field is unequal, with development holding the stronger hand.

Each view has some truth to it, and each overstates the harm that regulations cause them. I have been involved with more than 1,000 Section 106 projects in the last 50 years. The vast majority were uncontested and noncontroversial. The results documented the past, protected significant places, and expedited economic development. There were also a handful of controversial projects, in which passions became inflamed, the proponents and opponents talked past each other, and the agreement reached was in name only, with both sides feeling that they had been shorted.

Critics of Section 106 point to these controversial projects as evidence that the regulation doesn’t work, that it neither protects significant places nor allows the country to build needed infrastructure or improve property. Yet this view is wrong on the facts and mistaken in where it places the blame. Section 106 is a procedural law that does not establish a required outcome. The federal agency with jurisdiction over a project has the final decision, which in almost every case is to allow the project to proceed.

As a country, we want economic development that betters our lives and strengthens our communities. Development that offers a brighter future must be grounded in our shared past. Killing Section 106 would do nothing to further our aspiration to balance economic development with historic preservation. It would not even speed up development. Instead, it would ensure that historic preservationists, who otherwise welcome the opportunity to work with developers, would become entrenched opponents. Heritage strikes at the heart of a community’s ethos, so few land battles stir more passion. Section 106 negotiations can be intense, irate, and irreconcilable, but they take place within a structure designed to make sure everyone is heard and all viewpoints considered. With it, even the most controversial projects move forward. Without it, battle lines form at development sites with no one emerging unscathed.

Let me be clear, development projects proceed not in spite of but because of Section 106. Without the Section 106 regulations, local and descendant communities would have no voice to ensure that development is in keeping with their values and their past. Their only recourse would be to sue. Litigation would be everything critics say about Section 106 and then some—excruciatingly slow, extremely expensive, and unpredictable.

We Can Still Do Big Things

In 1999, Statistical Research, Inc. (SRI), the cultural resource management consulting firm my wife and I founded, was awarded a five-year contract to provide historic preservation services on the U.S. Air Force portion of the Barry M. Goldwater Range (BMGR). Located in the region of Southwest Arizona known as the Papaguería, the main military mission of the BMGR is to train fighter pilots. At the time when we were awarded the contract, the commanding officer took me aside and quietly, but firmly, said, “You’re free to do all the research and studies you want as long as the fighters continue to fly. The day that archaeology stops one flight will be your last day on the BMGR.”

Today, SRI continues to provide CRM services on the BMGR. In more than 25 years, not a plane has been grounded; not a flight has been aborted; not a mission has been altered because of archaeology. Hundreds of thousands of acres have been inventoried, thousands of archaeological sites have been recorded, hundreds of test excavations have been conducted, and several large-scale excavations have been completed. Native Americans from multiple tribes have joined archaeologists and the U.S. Air Force personnel on scores of site tours. Tribes have inventoried the BMGR for traditional properties and sacred sites, and with almost no exception, these areas have been avoided by military training. More than a bookshelf of technical reports have been written and thousands of artifacts cleaned, analyzed, and stored. Articles, books, and lectures for professional and non-professional audiences have been written or presented.

There are those on the right and the left who argue that we can’t do big things in this country. That Section 106 is choking off growth. But thousands of fighter pilots, many of whom went off to war to defend this country, were trained without interruption, while below, archaeologists and Native Americans worked together to document thousands of years of human occupation of the Papaguería.

There are those who will grant that the process works but still argue that the archaeology and history of places like the Papaguería are not critical to the history of the United States. The BMGR lies in one of the hottest, driest deserts in the United States. Who in their right mind would live here? And, really, who cares?

One hot summer day, in exasperation, I asked these very same questions. Accompanying me in the field that day was Joe Joaquin, an elder of the Tohono O’odham Nation as well as a Marine veteran of Korea and Vietnam. Joe looked around and then, with a wry grin, looked at me, “Who wouldn’t want to live here?” And then more seriously he went on, “These mountains hold our stories, the valleys [are] our ancestral sites, as O’odham people, we are put on this earth to take care of them, and without them we lose who we are. You have the skills and knowledge to find these places, which we don’t have. What you do is important.”

Joe has long since passed away, though his words still reverberate in me. Training fighter pilots is paramount to the defense of this country. But we can do that and still honor an obligation to the first people of the land. The path to doing so is clear. It’s called Section 106.

References

– Flyr, M., and Koontz, L. (2024). “2023 National Park Visitor Spending Effects: Economic Contributions to Local Communities, States, and the Nation.” Science Report NPS/SR-2024/174. National Park Service, Fort Collins, Colorado.

– Ipsos (2018). “American Perceptions of Archaeology.” Report commissioned by the Society for American Archaeology.

– Ipsos (2023). “American Perception of Archaeology.” Report commissioned by the Society for American Archaeology.

– National Park Service (NPS) (2025). NPS Stats (National Park Service Visitor Use Statistics).

– PlaceEconomics (2023). “The Cumulative Impact of the Historic Preservation Fund.” Report commissioned by the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers.

– Ramos, Maria, and Duganne, David (2000). “Exploring Public Perceptions and Attitudes about Archaeology.” Report prepared by Harris Interactive for a coalition of professional societies and federal agencies.

– Shannon, Sandra (2014). “A Survey of the Public: Preferences for Old and New Buildings, Attitudes about Historic Preservation, and Preservation-Related Engagement.” MA thesis, School of Architecture, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

This article was produced by Human Bridges.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey H. Altschul.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says that HHS and the US Food and Drug Administration will phase out the use of petroleum-based food dyes over the next two years to “Make America Healthy Again.”

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Cargo ship on the Columbia River bound for Portland. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The Trump tariff story keeps getting crazier. It may seem like ancient history now, but it was just over three weeks ago that Donald Trump gave us “Liberation Day,” a set of massive tariffs on imports from almost every country in the world, including the uninhabited Heard and McDonald islands off the coast of Antarctica.

The tariffs were billed as “reciprocal” even though they bore no relationship to any tariffs or other trade barriers these countries impose on US exports. Incredibly, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick actually defended the Heard and McDonald Islands’ tariff, insisting that it was not a mistake at all but rather to prevent transshipment from other countries attempting to evade tariffs.

Lutnick’s explanation was obviously absurd. First, they left many other uninhabited islands without tariffs, apparently leaving the door open for transshipment through them. More importantly, if our customs staff really can’t catch items coming in from uninhabited islands, then they will be completely useless dealing with a complex system of tariffs charging vastly different rates between countries and on different products from the same country. The bottom line is that we yet again see how the Trump administration finds itself unable to admit a mistake.

But back to the timeline: As the markets were crashing Trump backed away on April 9, eliminating his so-called reciprocal tariffs and saying that he would lower his tariff on most countries to 10 percent. Note that this is still a very large tariff. When we negotiated trade deals with Mexico, Canada, and other countries their average tariffs were already well below 10 percent. In the context of “reciprocal” tariffs that were as high as 40 or 50 percent, Trump’s fallback tariff seemed low, but not by pre-Trump real world standards.

Trump boasted that a reason for the rollback was that 75 countries around the world had called to negotiate with him, although he refused to give the list of countries. Trump also went ahead and imposed 25 percent taxes on imports of steel and aluminum, which went into effect in March. He imposed 25 percent taxes on imports of cars and car parts which went into effect at the start of this month.

The big tariff that Trump did not delay on April 9 was the 104 percent tax on imports from China. He actually raised this to 124 percent in response to China’s retaliation. He raised his tax further to 154 percent a few days later and some items are even subject to higher taxes. In addition to its retaliatory tariffs, China also announced that it was suspending exports of rare earth minerals which are essential for many manufacturing processes in the United States. It also is boycotting US soybeans, which means US soybean farmers are losing their largest customer.

But then Trump decided to exempt smartphones and a number of other electronic devices from his massive taxes on China’s imports. Whether this was due to a special relationship with Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, or concern about outraged consumers looking at $2,000 iPhones, is anyone’s guess.

The tariff game is still far from over. On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the tariff levels between the US and China were not sustainable and Trump hinted they would likely come down soon, even though there was no evidence of high level negotiations. These comments got a great reaction from financial markets, leading to big stock rallies, but left open the question as to the purpose of the tariffs.

Just to remind everyone, if we go back to “Liberation Day,” Trump’s tariffs were supposed to be about bringing manufacturing back to the United States and ending our trade deficits. Many of us pointed out that this was unlikely to work even in the best case scenario. But if the tariffs were just a negotiating ploy, or a way for Trump to extort favors, they are certainly not going to have much impact on manufacturing. They may make Trump even richer, but no one will invest in the United States based on a tariff that can disappear in a year or even a week.

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

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Image by Lo Lo.

Recently released GDP numbers for 2024 show that Wall Street’s excesses cost Americans $1.51 Trillion last year. Instead of looking for inefficiency and bloat in government the Trump Musk duo should look at ‘the market,’ because that is where we are getting ripped off.

The market, the Finance and Insurance portion of GDP, accounted for 7.4% of GDP ($2.164.2 Bil) in 2024; up .2% from 2023. Meaning It cost more for the market to operate because it grew faster than the overall economy. In 1972 the last year before our free markets regime began when we abandoned the last vestiges of fixed exchange rates and let the market sort out, Finance and Insurance accounted for 4.2% of GDP. In other words, the market portion of GDP has increased 3.2% (7.4% – 4.2%) relative to the overall economy since 1972. The value of 3.2% of GDP in 2024 was $934 Bil. So bloat in the market cost us close to a trillion dollars last year.

Look at it this way. A dollar, $1, spent by Finance and Insurance in 1972 generated $24.04 of GDP. By 2024 a dollar, $1, spent by Finance and Insurance in 2024 generated $13.48 of GDP. With such a dramatic decline in productivity and rise in inefficiency is it any wonder why market participants are eager to deregulate and limit government oversight?

No doubt market participants will cry foul and point to actions such as financialization whereby the market has taken over a larger role in the economy. To what ends? Is securitization, the process of converting financial assets such as loans into tradeable securities creating anything new? No. Do derivatives that allow for leveraged speculation, increase trading activity and supposedly make the market more efficient create anything new? No. Derivatives, whose value is derived from another security were almost nonexistent in 1972. By June of 2023 non-exchange traded derivatives had an estimated notional value (the face value of the underlying instrument it is derived from) globally of $715 Trillion (6/23 BIS). The fact is that derivatives have been behind just about every recent financial crisis ; 1987 stock market crash (portfolio insurance), 1998 LTCM (excess leverage), 2008 (mortgage-backed securities)… Financialization, securitization, privatization, derivatives and excessive trading are nothing but the churning of our country’s savings.

Finance and Insurance has a privileged role in the economy. It acts as a medium between savers and borrowers to facilitate the economy; savers are paid for their savings and borrowers get capital to help their businesses grow. It also acts as a medium for the Federal Reserve (Fed) to operate in financial markets. The Fed is able to conduct monetary policy by buying and selling government bonds through the market. In a way giving the market the first look at its policy and arguably giving the market a say in its distribution. While the Fed acts through banks and not the market overall, the walls separating banking, brokerage and insurance had been eroding for some time and were set in stone with Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999.

The growing inefficiency of the market runs counter to the 47% improvement in productivity overall since 1972; odd since it has greatly benefitted from telecommunications and computing advances. Had Finance and Insurance similarly been 47% more efficient its GDP contribution would have fallen to 2.2% of GDP. So our beginning base of 4.2% of GDP should have fallen by 2% (4.2% – 2.2%). The value of 2% of GDP in 2024 was $584 Bil.

Adding the excess costs together, the surge in the size of Finance and Insurance relative to GDP since 1972 (3.2%) $934 Bil., with the lost productivity (2%) of $584 Bil., we get $1,518 Bil. for 2024. Then there is 2023, 2022…. 1973.

The market is wildly inefficient and flawed. The unfortunate thing is that we have built a world around it; in doing so we have built a world on a lie.

Over the last fifty years our free market regime has robbed us of tens of trillions of dollars. Trump’s demonizing of government, is part of a longer trend began with Reagan’s claim that government was the problem and wailing away about welfare queens. It is just another ploy to divert our attention from the heist that is happening right in front of us.

NOTES

GDP numbers are from the BEA’s ‘Gross Domestic Product (Third Estimate), Corporate Profits, and GDP by Industry, 4th Quarter and Year 2024’, Table 14, Page 21.

Historical GDP numbers are from FI’ GDP contribution/Total GDP, $51.5B/$1238.3B=4.158%. Per Table 1. Value Added by Industry Group for Selected Yea, Gross Domestic Product by Industry for 1947–86 https://apps.bea.gov/scb/pdf/2005/12December/1205_GDP-NAICS.pdf

In 1972 total factor productivity was 72.701 in 2024 it was 106.847. 106.847/72.701 =’s 1.46967 or 47%. You find actual numbers at Historical Total Factor Productivity. (Note clicking on this link will download the file). Here is the link: Top line is total factor productivity.

Regarding the cost per dollar spent versus GDP gained. Total GDP/Finance and Insurance. For 1972, $1238.3B/$$51.5B =‘s $24.04. For 2024 $29184.9B/$2164.2B =’s $13.48.

Wall Street has benefitted more than most industries from technological change since the 1970’s. One of the top three According to AI, “Since the 1970s, telecommunications and computing have revolutionized industries like finance, media, entertainment, and e-commerce, enabling global connectivity, digital content distribution, and new business models. “

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Sue Coe, Touchless Fascism, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

Preface: Emigre politics

When writers go into exile, I read somewhere, they discuss the politics of their former countries more than before they left. I have an image of that in my head – scruffy emigres huddled over coffee and schnapps in a smoke-filled café. Voices are raised, tables are pounded, and drinks are spilled, before a quiet settles on the group — the silence of displacement.

My writer friends here in Norwich are all British, and they don’t go in for fist pounding. Their take on American politics is mostly expressed in eyerolls and feigned shock. They always knew, they seem to be saying, there was something terribly the matter with the U.S; now it’s wrongs are laid bare. “You’re the American,” they say, “what do you think?” In the quiet that follows those conversations, I don’t feel displaced, just a little nauseous.

1. Fascism is embarrassing

The press and liberal politicians have responded with suitable alarm to the Trump administration’s attacks upon education, the environment, law, non-profits, immigrants, the economy (tariffs) and the courts. They have described violations of due process, and the threat of authoritarianism. They have predicted recession, inflation, or stagflation, and warned about the costs to the nation–material, intellectual, cultural-of the deportation or exclusion of immigrants.

Trump’s onslaught has been relentless, and no one is safe. If legal residents – immigrants and students – protected by the first amendment, are subject to deportation because of their speech, so are birthright or naturalized citizens. If law firms are punished for their selection of clients, no one can be confident of obtaining legal representation when they need it. If research scientists can have their funding cut for ignoring Trump administration priorities, then nobody can be sure public health and safety are protected; if non-profits are targeted for their charitable work, how many people will step up to fill the gaps left by a tattered social safety net?

Just before the 2024 election, the words fascist or Nazi were beginning to be used by Democratic politicians – including Joe Biden and Kamela Harris – to describe Trump. Those terms have now largely disappeared from public discourse. The savants say they were politically ineffective, turning off the very voters who most needed to be engaged. There’s no evidence to back up those claims. I think the real reason is different: the wolf at the door has taken up residence in our living rooms, and that fact is simply too shameful to acknowledge. A majority of American voters freely elected a fascist, an approbation even Hitler never received. What’s more, they elected a congress willing to disable itself to enable him. Who would want to admit such things?

2. Universal tariffs — a Hitlerian policy

Since inauguration, Trump has done everything he can to cement his power. That’s what dictators do. In Hitler’s time, the process was called Gleichschaltung, meaning stabilization or bringing into alignment. The Reichstag (parliament), the courts, businesses, education, law, unions, the police and military, and the organs of civil society, including charities and arts organizations, were all made to toe the Nazi line. Many did so willingly. Those that didn’t were steamrolled or destroyed.

Hitler accomplished Gleichschaltung in a matter of months. Trump has been in office just four months and has already managed to dismantle entire government agencies and subvert well-established consumer, investor, civil and environmental protections. He has disbanded U.S.A.I.D., the government’s largest provider of foreign aid, and brought to heel some of the nation’s biggest law firms and a few of its wealthiest universities. It’s a veritable Anschluss, and as with Austria, those who accede to the dictator will remain in his thrall for as long as he’s in power. Trump has been less successful so-far, however, in accomplishing what got him elected: improving the economy by reducing prices.

Trump’s economic policies appear at first glance conventional. By embracing the budget framework put forward by the U.S. House – which slashes about $1.5 trillion in spending — Trump plants himself firmly in the camp of austerity. That’s the policy of every Republican since Herbert Hoover. The theory behind it is roughly as follows: Cut spending to reduce the supply of money and lower inflation and interest rates. That makes it easier for businesses to borrow to invest in new enterprises and produce more goods and services. That in turn, increases hiring and raises salaries (because of competition for workers) and improves the general welfare of the nation.

In fact, austerity never works like that. Cuts in spending reduce both employment levels and the social safety net, disempowering workers, and emboldening businesses to lower salaries. Eventually, a lack of consumer demand idles factories and services, propelling the economy into recession. The crisis can be long or short, depending upon outside forces available of to stem the crisis – war or militarization, a major government stimulus, a large increase of credit, or a paradigm changing technology. Under monopoly capitalism, as Paul Sweezy wrote, “stagnation is the norm, good times the exception.” In recent years, the economy has been propped up by enormous profits in the financial sector, but little of that has trickled down to the mass of the population; thus, the continued anger and disillusionment of the American working-class, comprising 70% or more of the population. (The working class consists of those who live on salary alone, paycheck-to-paycheck, not investments).

By firing thousands of federal workers and shuttering whole agencies, Trump is a typical austerity-loving Republican. (That despite stuffing the White House with gold-plated bling.) His vow to cut taxes for the wealthy – even though that would vastly increase the deficit – is also standard Republican fare. It’s always the poor, not the rich, who are forced to accept austerity. But where Trump parts ways with Republican orthodoxy is his plan to achieve economic autarchy (self-sufficiency) through tariffs. His model here isn’t so much President McKinley, Trump’s favorite president, as Adolf Hitler, with whom he also has a relationship.

A tariff is a duty or tax on an imported good. They have been used for millennia, mostly for corrupt purposes, such as increasing the wealth of a ruler or raising funds for wars of conquest. As early as the 15^th century, however, tariffs were used for more benign, or at least more rational reasons: import substitution. Successive English monarchs taxed imported woolens so that domestic producers could gain a bigger share of the market. Indeed, because of tariffs – plus a large navy — England ultimately gained global dominance in cloth manufacture and sale. The English Corn Laws (1815-46) too were a set of tariffs intended to protect British manufacture and trade. They prevented the importation of grain, raising the prices of domestic products and enriching landowners. However, they also increased food costs, exacerbating starvation in Ireland (under English control), and antagonizing manufacturers forced to pay their workers higher wages.

Some of Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, April 2, 2025. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The goal of Trump’s tariff program is something like Britain’s – empire building, or in this case, empire repair. American global dominance has been in decline for a generation, and China is now the world’s leading manufacturer (by far) and the leading trading nation. A closer parallel than imperial Britain, therefore, is Nazi Germany. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he faced an economic crisis. His country was deeply dependent upon imports – especially oil, rubber, animal feed and fertilizer – but lacked the export income to pay for them. In addition, Germany still owed significant war reparations to the United States — those to France and England had already been cancelled. Hitler’s policy therefore, devised by his economic minister Hjalmar Schacht, was to abrogate remaining reparations agreements, embrace tariffs to prioritize exports over imports, and pursue relative autarchy — “a selective policy of disengagement,” as Adam Tooze called it — with its chief trading partners, including the U.S. The roll out of this program was fraught with challenges, but it ultimately allowed the Nazi regime to rapidly re-arm while at the same time boosting the domestic economy. Germany achieved full employment by 1938 with the significant exception of Jews forced from their jobs by the repressive Nuremberg Laws. By 1940, labor shortages began to arise, quickly compensated by slave labor performed by Jews and war prisoners. In the end, of course, Hitler’s economy could not sustain such a massive war effort against the combined forces of the U.S. and US.S.R. and by the spring of 1945, it was decisively defeated.

Like Hitler, Trump is focused on disengaging from historical trading partners – Canada, Mexico, the EU, U.K., Japan, Soth Korea and China — and achieving relative autarchy. He wants to strengthen American imperialism, and expand the American Lebensraum to include Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal. His chief economic target is China, which he’s hit with tariffs as high as 145%, but every nation in the world (including non-nations, like the Heard and McDonald Islands, inhabited only by penguins) are subject to tariffs in an effort to reduce foreign dependency, increase domestic production, and raise money.

Tariffs of the kind currently implemented or proposed, make no economic sense and have no chance of either heading off stagnation or restoring lost dominance. If Trump wants to raise enough money from tariffs to cut or eliminate income taxes, he’s bound to fail since rates high enough to pay for U.S. government services and spending will quickly reduce imports, cutting off the very revenue tariffs are supposed to raise. If his goal is instead to use tariffs to foster domestic manufacturing (import substitution), he must fail since imports – raw materials, silicon chips, machine parts and exotic food items (such as avocados) – are essential to U.S. business expansion and consumer spending. China’s retaliatory threat to cut-off U.S. access to essential rare earth elements is one example of the necessity of imports.

Finally, the underlying premise that high tariffs always buttress American prosperity is fundamentally flawed. Consider the following thought experiment:

The Chinese government, in “an expression of love for the great American people”, decides to give to every American adult an electric car worth about $50,000. The U.S. government at first thinks this is a Trojan Horse, but after examining a thousand cars sent as a downpayment, discovers there are no booby-traps or listening devices. The American public rejoices. Car manufacturers and the U.A.W. are furious.

Question: What should the U.S. do?

Answer: Take the cars.

If the Chinese people want to dispense raw materials, capital and labor with a value of $50,000 – we’d be idiots to turn it down. The cars would increase the net worth (as well as mobility) of American adults, allowing them to buy other goods and services. They would stimulate the economy and greatly reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses. There would be a rush to build charging stations and electric generation to power them, and lots of scrap metal to make new steel. If some auto workers lose their jobs, they can be employed in industries juiced by the $1.25 trillion Chinese gift. The U.S. government can support workers with the transition.

Now suppose the Chinese only offered the value of one-half, one-third, or even just one-tenth of a car? The answer must be is the same – take the money. Turning down cheap Chinese and other imports is the equivalent of turning down the car, so long as the goods are sold at prices below the global, average necessary labor time required for their production. (For model calculations, please see Zhming Long, et al. Also Larry Summers.)

This hypothetical transfer of resources is not in fact, exceptional; it is the basis of Imperialism. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the expropriation of colonial resources and exploitation of people enriched the metropolitan powers, including the U.S. The difference today is that many, so-called “developing” countries self-exploit to establish domestic industries sufficient to move their populations out of extreme poverty. Moreover, they accept as payment for their goods dollars used to buy American products or U.S. Treasury bonds. China is the greatest example of this self-exploiting practice, but its willingness to continue is being tested right now. It may decide to simply accelerate existing plans to increase domestic consumption in pursuit of a long-term policy of “de-globalization” and “co-development.”

In the face Chinese push back, Trump’s protectionist and Hitlerian trade policy is ludicrous. His plans to impose further tariffs on computer chips and pharmaceuticals, or even charge nations to trade with the U.S will, if implemented, speed the coming recession, or deepen it when it arrives. The only plausible way to ameliorate the declining fortunes of the American working class are the ones that Trump and other Republicans (and most Democrats) have ruled out from the start: subsidize or nationalize industries key to a sustainable, green economy; restore high marginal tax rates, like those in effect from 1944-63; tax wealth to reduce inequality; support the growth of labor unions to ensure fair wages; clip the wings of the non-productive finance sector by imposing fees on stock trades; limit patent protection; and establish good, non-coercive trading relationships with other nations.

2. Trump aims to punish immigrants to validate his racism

Trump’s tariff policy discomfits allies and adversaries alike. His capriciousness – tariffs raised one day and lowered the next — is not a flaw in his system, it’s the purpose. By controlling with a word or a tweet the rise and fall of global markets, or a nation’s trade and monetary policies, Trump manifests his dreamed omnipotence, the product of a narcissism that’s Hitlerian in scale if not so far in impact. The pathology is not limited to the economic domain. It’s also apparent in immigration policy, the other issue that got him elected.

During the presidential campaign, Trump called immigrants from non-European countries murderers, rapists, diseased, vermin and blood poisoners, language borrowed from Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and other Nazis. He proposed arresting and expelling twenty million of them (even though there are only about 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S.) and building an archipelago of camps to facilitate the process.

Trump is not alone in his extremism. He’s supported by a vast organizational and personnel infrastructure that includes anti-immigrant think tanks, “English only” advocates (a policy recently advanced by executive order), and opponents of diversity and educational multiculturalism such as Christopher Rufo. Among Trump’s most committed individual allies, naturally, is his vice-president, former Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, who infamously claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating resident’s pets, and last week stated, prior to his visit to the Vatican, that the U.S. Conference of Bishops was settling “illegal immigrants” just to collect federal aid. (A rumor is growing that Vance killed the pope. I have no evidence to prove or disprove the claim.)

Many other prominent Republicans, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton and Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller have expressed similarly hateful views.

Miller in the past endorsed openly racist, online publications such as VDARE and American Renaissance and recently demanded “reparations” for all the damage done to U.S. families by “uncontrolled, illegal, mass immigration.”

Lately, Trump has moved away from Nazi-inspired, biological racist language to a rhetoric that focusses instead on public safety. He’s accused large numbers of Latin American immigrants of being members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, and the El Salvadorian gang MS-13. That was the pretext used to deport about 200 immigrants to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador. Few if any of the deportees were afforded due process, and most are neither gang members nor in fact guilty of any crime. (Under federal law, being undocumented is a civil, not criminal offense.) The case of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Venezuelan legal immigrant, deported due to an “administrative error” according to the government, remains the focus of intense interest. Despite a Supreme Court judgement that the U.S. must “facilitate” his release, he remains in prison. Further deportations to El Salvador are currently blocked by a Supreme Court order.

In late March, work was begun on an immigrant detention center at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas. It will hold about 8,000. (Biden previously housed an unknown number of unaccompanied migrant children at Fort Bliss.) The camp would be a model for about ten others at bases across the country from Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station near Buffalo, N.Y., to Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Assuming all are built – an unlikely prospect given the coordination and focus required — that would mean that 80,000 immigrants could be housed in camps, awaiting processing, a small fraction of the promised 20 million deportations.

In fact, Trump has so far detained and expelled fewer immigrants than Biden at the same point in his term. The reasons are both banal and programmatic. Trump fired most of the people at the Department of Homeland Security who knew what they were doing. But more important, Trump recognizes that any program of mass expulsions would be devastating to the American economy. At least 40% of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented; 31% of workers in the hospitality sector; and smaller but still large percentages in health care and construction.

Site Monitor, Fort Bliss, April 10, 2025. (Photo: Rose Thayer for Stars and Stripes (U.S. Department of Defense).

Another focus of racial and xenophobic bias is college students. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has expanded its scope to arrest legally resident, but foreign-born students. Many of them – around 1700 so far, but possibly many more — have been involved in pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel protests. Others have had their visas revoked for minor legal infractions, including speeding tickets, or for having been charged, but not convicted of misdemeanors. These students are not however immigrants at all; they are recipients of U.S. educational exports. Foreign-born students collectively add almost $45 billion to the U.S. economy and support almost 380,000 jobs, about ½ the impact of the U.S. auto industry. The improve the U.S. balance of trade.

The point of Trump’s detentions and expulsions is not to end immigration, or even significantly reduce its numbers. It’s to stigmatize immigrants and non-whites, thereby validating the national and racial superiority of the president, his allies and supporters. Still more broadly, it’s to affirm the naturalness and inevitability of a political, economic and social system – challenged by developing nations, allies and rivals — in which the United States occupies the center of the global order. By his actions on tariffs and immigration, Trump is inadvertently hastening the end of that dominance. For that we can thank him. But what will be the cost?

The post Three Theses on Trump’s Rule appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stephen F. Eisenman.

Puyé Ruins, northern New Mexico. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

“If we approach nature and the environment without [an] openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously.”

– Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home,

On the day Pope Francis released his encyclical on the fate of the Earth, I was struggling to climb a near-vertical cliff on the Parajito Plateau of northern New Mexico. My fingers gripped tightly to handholds notched into the rocks hundreds of years ago by Ancestral Puebloans, the anodyne phrase now used by modern anthropologists to describe the people once known as the Anasazi. The day was a scorcher and the volcanic rocks were so hot they blistered my hands and knees. Even my guide, Elijah, a young member of the Santa Clara Pueblo, confessed that the heat radiating off the basalt had made him feel faint, although perhaps he was simply trying to make me feel less like a weather wimp.

When we finally hurled ourselves over the rimrock to the top of the little mesa, the ruins of the old city of Puyé spread before us. Amid purple blooms of cholla cactus, piñon pines and sagebrush, two watchtowers rose above the narrow spine of the mesa top, guarding the crumbling walls of houses that once sheltered more than 1,500 people. I was immediately struck by the defensive nature of the site: an acropolis set high above the corn, squash and bean fields in the valley below; a city fortified against the inevitable outbreaks of turbulence and violence unleashed by periods of prolonged scarcity.

The ground sparkled with potsherds, the shattered remnants of exquisitely crafted bowls and jars, all featuring dazzling polychromatic glazes. Some had been used to haul water up the cliffs of the mesa, an arduous and risky daily ordeal that surely would only have been undertaken during a time of extreme environmental and cultural stress. How did the people end up here? Where did they come from? What were they fleeing?

“They came here after the lights went out at Chaco,” Elijah tells me. He’s referring to the great houses of Chaco Canyon, now besieged by big oil. Chaco, the imperial city of the Anasazi, was ruled for four hundred years by a stern hierarchy of astronomer-priests until it was swiftly abandoned around 1250 AD.

“Why did they leave?” I asked.

“Something bad happened after the waters ran out.” He won’t go any further and I don’t press him.

Cliff dwelling, Puyé, northern New Mexico. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The ruins of Puyé, now part of the Santa Clara Pueblo, sit in the blue shadow of the Jemez Mountains. A few miles to the north, in the stark labs of Los Alamos, scientists are still at work calculating the dark equations of global destruction down to the last decimal point.

This magnificent complex of towers, multi-story dwellings, plazas, granaries, kivas and cave dwellings was itself abandoned suddenly around 1500. Its Tewa-speaking residents moved off the cliffs and mesas to the flatlands along the Rio Grande ten miles to the east, near the site of the current Santa Clara (St. Clair) Pueblo. A few decades later, they would encounter an invading force beyond their worst nightmare: Coronado and his metal-plated conquistadors.

Again, it was a prolonged drought that forced the deeply egalitarian people of Puyé — the place where the rabbits gather — from their mesa-top fortress. “The elders say that the people knew it was time to move when they saw the black bears leaving the canyon,” Elijah told me.

Elijah is a descendant of one of the great heroes of Santa Clara Pueblo: Domingo Naranjo, a leader of the one true American Revolution, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which drove the Spanish out of New Mexico. Naranjo was half-Tewa and half-black, the son of an escaped slave of the Spanish. That glorious rebellion largely targeted the brutal policies of the Franciscan missionaries, who had tortured, enslaved and butchered the native people of the Rio Grande Valley for nearly 100 years. As the Spanish friars fled, Naranjo supervised the razing of the Church the Franciscans had erected — using slave labor – in the plaza of Santa Clara Pueblo.

Now the hope of the world may reside in the persuasive powers of a Franciscan, the Hippie Pope, whose Druidic encyclical, Laudato Si’, reads like a tract from the Deep Ecology movement of the 1980s, only more lucidly and urgently written. Pope Francis depicts the ecological commons of the planet being sacrificed for a “throwaway culture” that is driven by a deranged economic system whose only goal is “quick and easy profit.” As the supreme baptizer, Francis places a special emphasis on the planet’s imperiled waters, both the dwindling reserves of freshwater and the inexorable rise of acidic oceans, heading like a slow-motion tsunami toward a coast near you.

Climate change has gone metastatic and we are all weather wimps under the new dispensation. Consider that Hell on Earth: Phoenix, Arizona, a city whose water greed has breached any rational limit. Its 1.5 million residents, neatly arranged in spiraling cul-de-sacs, meekly await a reckoning with the Great Thirst, as if Dante himself had supervised the zoning plans. The Phoenix of the future seems destined to resemble the ruins of Chaco, with crappier architecture.

Puyé Cliffs, looking across the Rio Grande. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

I am writing this column in the basement of our house in Oregon City, which offers only slight relief from the oppressive heat outside. The temperature has topped 100 degrees again. It hasn’t rained in 40 days and 40 nights. We are reaching the end of something. Perhaps it has already occurred. Even non-believers are left to heed the warnings of the Pope and follow the example of the bears of the Jemez.

Yet now there is no hidden refuge to move toward. There is only a final movement left to build, a global rebellion against the forces of greed and extinction. One way or another, it will either be a long time coming or a long time gone.

This is excerpted from The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink.

The post Living on the Cliff’s Edge: the Anasazi, Pope Francis and the Fate of the Earth appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

Image by ALEXANDRE DINAUT.

You know something is up when the longtime deeply conservative establishment pundit David “Aw Shucks” Brooks calls for a “a comprehensive national civic uprising” against Trumpism, as he did one week ago.

“It’s time,” Brooks wrote, “for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.”

Brooks described “Trumpism” as “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men,… driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.”

“Trumpism,” Brooks writes, “is primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake.”

Trump’s assault on America’s institutions is “not normal,” Brooks says, arguing that the movement to stop Trumpism must also be “not normal.”

Brooks criticizes the early Trump47 resistance for letting itself be divided and thereby potentially conquered because it has failed to properly to understand that the various different Trump attacks are all part of the same Trumpist offensive:

“So far, we have treated the various assaults of President Trump and the acolytes in his administration as a series of different attacks. In one lane they are going after law firms. In another they savaged U.S.A.I.D. In another they’re attacking our universities. On yet another front they’re undermining NATO and on another they’re upending global trade. But that’s the wrong way to think about it. These are not separate battles. This is a single effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power. And it will take a concerted response to beat it back….Slowly, many of us are realizing that we need to band together. But even these efforts are insular and fragmented. Several members of the Big Ten conference are working on forming an alliance to defend academic freedom. Good. But that would be 18 schools out of roughly 4,000 degree-granting American colleges and universities” (emphasis added).

Brooks even chided the progressive Democrats Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for failing to think outside the box of “normal” politics:

“So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this too is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans. What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.”

What would Brooks’ “comprehensive national civic uprising” look like? He cites the academics Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan to advocate the use of “many different tools… lawsuits, mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns, boycotts and other forms of noncooperation and resistance” and “clear messages that appeal…to a variety of groups” and “shift… the narrative so the authoritarians [are] no longer on permanent offense.” He even notes that past successful anti-authoritarian movements have “sometimes… used nonviolent means to provoke the regime into taking violent action, which shocks the nation, undercuts the regime’s authority and further strengthens the movement. (Think of the civil rights movement at Selma.)”

“Chenoweth and Stephan emphasize,” Brooks adds, “that this takes coordination. There doesn’t always have to be one charismatic leader, but there does have to be one backbone organization, one coordinating body that does the work of coalition building.”

There are some things for a revolutionary Marxist anti-fascist (like the present writer) to criticize in Brooks’s column. It’s absurd in my view for Brooks to describe capitalist business firms, bourgeois constitutions, bourgeois legal systems, and corporate media outlets as “institutions [that] make our lives sweet, loving and creative.”

Brooks is wrong to see Trumpism as about power for its own sake. Trumpism is a 21^st Century US-Amerikaner version of fascism, which seeks to lock in dictatorship on behalf of white supremacism, patriarchy, and xenophobic nationalism – the aggressive re-institution of oppressive “traditional values.” Fascism leaves the underlying capitalist class dictatorship over the nation’s core material/economic/productive institutions fully intact, minus the fig leaf of bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy atop the political superstructure.

Like Bernie and AOC, Brooks does not call out the full politico-ideological content and pathology of Trumpism. The problem with the progressive Dem duo’s rallies isn’t just that they “make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.” Intimately related to that, the problem is that they keep harping on “oligarchy,” when the real issue now is fascism.

If you are just using the word “oligarchy” to describe the Trump fascist regime, you are in danger of being part of the problem. We’ve had oligarchy all our lives. We still very much do, of course, with an especially nasty “gangster capitalist” feel under Trump47. What’s distinctive about the current era is the attempted consolidation of a new form of governance beyond previously normative bourgeois electoral, parliamentary and rule of law governance: fascism.

Brooks underestimates how truly and normally American Trumpism and its critical ingredients – militantly illiberal authoritarianism, white supremacism, political violence, patriarchy, xenophobic nationalism, anti-intellectualism, Christian fundamentalism, and more – actually are (please see the sixth chapter, titled “America Was Never Great: On ‘The Soul of This Nation,’” in my latest book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America.)

And Brooks fails to take up the (I think now) essential demand that Trump’s “fascist regime” (as the Yale philosopher Jason Stanley describes the Trump47 administration) be forced out as soon as humanly possible –well before the next presidential election (bearing in mind that Trumpists don’t accept election outcomes they don’t like and are already hard at work undermining the 2026 and 2028 elections if they are even held).

Now would be a good time for Trump to go. Fascism is taking great leaps forward right now. Trump’s brazen defiance of a 9-to-0 Supreme Court ruling that his regime must “facilitate the return” of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, coupled with Trump’s horrific pledge to send US citizens to prisons in El Salvador (which he claims are beyond the reach of US courts), crosses the Rubicon into sheer lawlessness. The implications are stark: anyone who Trump and his fascist minions designate as a “threat” or an “enemy” – or anyone who is swept up by “mistake” – can be disappeared to rot and face torture beyond any semblance of legal oversight in a distant Third World Fascist prison. This is not a drill. This is fascism here and now. This is the five alarm fire Illinois Governor JB Pritzker tried to warn his state about last month.

Still, it is very good indeed that David Brooks – yes, David Brooks – has outflanked Bernie on people’s power by calling for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” against Trumpism – one that transcends single-issue divide and rule politics and takes on the Trump offensive as a whole, and one that doesn’t fall prey to mere partisan electoral politics and the lethal quicksand of the election cycle.

The post David Brooks Gets Something Right appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

Jewish families arriving at Jasenovac Death Camp. Public Domain.

Eighty years have passed since April 1945, when the surviving inmates of the Croatian Nazi camp—Jasenovac—rose in revolt, staged a breakout, and thus brought an end to the existence of the largest death camp in the Balkans during the Second World War. That prompted me to reflect on a dilemma from the past.

As a young author, I was prone to reductive comparisons. In contemplating the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995, I wrote a text entitled The Serbian NDH, in which I compared Republika Srpska—on account of the systematic crimes committed against the Bosniak population, for which its wartime leadership is unquestionably responsible—to the criminal puppet creation of the Second World War: the Independent State of Croatia (Serbian: Nezavisna država Hrvatska – NDH). Today, more than fifteen years after that text was written, I better understand what in it was exaggeration—and what was not.

Republika Srpska and the NDH cannot be likened, if only because the former arose from the plebiscitary will of the Serb people during the disintegration of Yugoslavia, at a time when monoethnic political organization had no viable—or even conceivable—alternative. It was not proclaimed in the midst of war, but on the threshold of armed conflict. Unlike the NDH, it was not founded by a foreign power installing a black-shirted fascist clique it had long groomed for that very purpose. Nor was it grounded in racial laws, but in a liberal constitution adopted by a freely elected constituent assembly. Its army was not partisan, but conscripted—of the people—and its officer corps was made up predominantly of former Yugoslav People’s Army personnel. The individuals who led it had not, until shortly before the war, stood at the helm of a movement defined by a clearly articulated ideology of extermination.

And yet, when these differences are set aside, we are left to confront other indisputable truths. The wartime government of Republika Srpska bears direct responsibility for the brutal deaths of more than 20,000 Bosniak civilians; for their dehumanization in media echoing the racist rhetoric of the Ku Klux Klan; for acts of sadistic torture; for the mass rape of women who, in parts of eastern Bosnia, were treated as sexual slaves—bought and sold for barely a hundred German marks; for forced deportations; and for the systematic destruction of Bosniak material and spiritual culture, within which not a single Muslim sacred site survived the war.

There is no doubt that the Serbian people west of the Drina, deeply scarred by the horrors endured between 1875 and 1941, had every reason to believe they were fighting against a new NDH. For, hand on heart, neither Zagreb’s nor Sarajevo’s policies—despite their cheap rhetoric about “European values”—harbored any sincere goodwill toward them, neither in the short nor long term.

But equally, there is no doubt that their own leadership, inspired by the dark, racist, and fundamentally neo-Nazi ideology of Dragoš Kalajić and Dragoslav Bokan, exploited those collective traumas to burden them with the historical weight of Ustasha methods. That comparison remains firm as a rock, no matter how different the historical conditions and origins of Republika Srpska may have been to casually call it the “Serbian NDH.” In that light, let my youthful exaggerations be forgiven—for they were not without foundation.

It is for this reason that the speech of veteran Goran Samardžić before the assembled Serbian students outside the blockaded RTS (Radio Television of Serbia) on April 17 carries such historical weight. Greeting the crowd with “Pomoz’ Bog” (God be with you) and “Es-selamu alejkum,” he then said the following:

“I was wounded in May of ’92 in Sarajevo, not yet 21 years old—about the same age as most of these young people here. My generation either marched into the war in Bosnia or found themselves caught up in it.

Some of us went off to fight, quote-unquote, ‘the Balijas,’ ‘the Turks’—believing, as we were told, that they wanted to establish an Islamic state in the heart of Europe. And we wanted to defend Serbian lands and protect the Serbian people.

In April ’92, the bloody Bosnian cauldron was set ablaze. All sides rushed to stoke the fire—each racing to inflame it more than the other. Our own ‘kitchen’ for spreading hatred and lies was right here, in the building above us—yes, in this very RTS, which even today continues to spread lies and hatred.

My generation believed those lies. We thought we were doing the right thing, that we were on the side of truth and justice—and that the others were evil. And the others believed the same about us. That’s how the wheel of evil began to turn—a wheel that, to this day, has not stopped.”

This reminded me of another, far less known historical piece—not a speech, but a written reflection about Nataša Zimonjić-Čengić, granddaughter of the Metropolitan of Dabar-Bosna, Saint Petar Zimonjić (1866–1941), published in the Trebinje periodical Vidoslov by Archpriest Danilo Dangubić.

“Petar was my grandfather. I remember his love; the warmth of his hand, the safety in his gaze, the joy I felt when I saw him. My father would sometimes take us to Sarajevo, because Pata (as we called him) served there. If I told you that I remember how the Bishop would take us for walks along the Miljacka, holding us gently by the hand…” Nataša recounted to Father Dangubić.

Not long ago, for the first time, I held in my hands the family photo album from the funeral of my great-grandfather, Bogdan Babić, then Director of Forests of the Drina Banovina—buried by none other than Metropolitan Petar. During liturgy in the Sarajevo Cathedral, I always stand near his icon and recall the testimony left behind by Vojislav Kecmanović–Đedo, the first president of the State Anti-Fascist Council for the Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina:

“When Metropolitan Zimonjić was being led through Zagreb to his execution site—along with a group of Orthodox priests (I’ve forgotten the name of the place)—a mob of Ustaša scum (Croatian Nazis, editor’s note) jeered at him and spat upon him. Metropolitan Zimonjić, who stood out among that great throng of martyrs—his towering height, silver hair, and ascetic appearance unmistakable—was kneeling from hunger and torture, yet still he offered blessings to both sides of the street, to these monsters of Western European and Christian civilization.”

Archpriest Dangubić’s text is historical in its essence, for it records the historical truth of the martyrdom of his great-grandson, Goran Čengić—son of Nataša. At the outbreak of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the authorities of Republika Srpska armed criminal riffraff and gathered them into so-called “paramilitary formations” to carry out the dirtiest of tasks. One such unit rampaged through the Sarajevo neighborhood of Grbavica. In a grim twist of blasphemy, it was named the White Angels, and at its head stood Veselin Vlahović Batko, a former boxer and nightclub bouncer, who answered directly to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Republika Srpska, Momo Mandić.

When the croatian nazis seized power in Sarajevo in 1941, Metropolitan Petar was offered the chance to flee to Montenegro. He refused, choosing instead to share in the suffering of his flock, just as he had shared in their joys.

In the final decade of the 20th century, as Sarajevo was ravaged by roaming paramilitary bands of psychopathic killers, Goran Čengić—a descendant, no less, of fierce historical adversaries: Deda-aga Čengić, a high Bosniak nobleman from Herzegovina, and Vojvoda Bogdan Zimonjić, one of the Serb rebel leaders against Ottoman rule—did not turn his face away from a sick neighbor.

Here is how Archpriest Danilo Dangubić described it:

“…the sound of footsteps echoes through the stairwell, a fist pounding on a neighbor’s wooden door, a sharp voice yelling something like: ‘Open up!’; the metallic clatter of a Kalashnikov barrel striking the blade of a knife strapped to the executioner’s waist; then the deafening pounding of one’s own heart in the ears—so loud that even the quiet voice of the neighbor they’ve come for is drowned out; and then, the hand, as if by its own will, reaches for the latch and opens the door…

“’What are you doing? Can’t you see the man is ill?’

“In those dark June days of 1992, evil had taken up residence in the Sarajevo neighborhood of Grbavica—and Goran Čengić knew it. He also knew that when he opened that door and uttered the words with which he tried to protect his helpless neighbor, Dr. Husnija Ćerimagić, that evil would come crashing down upon him as well. He knew that facing evil meant only one thing—death.

“And yet, he did not remain on the other side of the door. He did not stay silent, waiting for the evil to pass. He did not dig through his conscience for excuses not to act. He did not lean his sweat-soaked back against the wall in fear and wait for the butchers to drag away a defenseless, sick old man.”

And so, the Metropolitan’s grandson was tortured and killed by men who called themselves the White Angels, inspired by Bokan’s brand of neopaganism. Whoever fails to see the terrifying symbolism in this act—the attempted murder of the Metropolitan’s immortal legacy—and in so many ways, a reenactment of the satanic humiliation he endured on the streets of Zagreb and later in Jasenovac (the largest death camp for Serbs, Jews, and Roma on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia (editor’s note)), will never understand that the comparison of such atrocities to those of the NDH does not arise from malice on the part of the observer, but from the NDH-like darkness within the hearts of the perpetrators.

It is no wonder that fear, panic, and revulsion reign in hearts like theirs at the sight of what is unfolding in the spring of 2025 on the streets of Belgrade and Novi Pazar (a city in Serbia with a predominantly Muslim population). No wonder that the hordes of demonic agitators—those who greet each anniversary of the Jasenovac breakout with sorrow, solely because they have yet to succeed in establishing their own sanctuary of evil—feel fear, panic, and revulsion at the catharsis of a veteran who was wounded in the almost vanished Sarajevo of Petar and Goran.

“I want to send a message to the parents of children from Novi Pazar—do not be afraid. There is no more ‘our’ and ‘your’ children. They are all our children. We, the war veterans, will protect them with our honor and with our lives. No one has the right to harm them. These children, in just the past few months since they awakened, have lifted many of us—yes, even us war veterans. I want to express my admiration and gratitude to the true heroes of our time—our students, our children. Thank you, children!”

Thank you, children. On this anniversary of the breakout from the Jasenovac death camp: never again the NDH. Never again anything that even faintly resembles it.

The post The Self-Liberation of the Jasenovac Death Camp and a New Serbian Catharsis appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vuk Bačanović.

Photo by Kybluegrass of the sculpture of Barbaro, one of the horses who has died in the Kentucky Derby (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Saturday the 3^rd of May is Derby Day at Churchill Downs in Louisville. Here come the frivolous cocktails. The pointedly gendered dress code. And one of the crassest annual performances of human domination over the living communities of this planet.

The layers of domination reflected in the spectacle are numerous, and chronically overlooked. In the mix, we find:

The torment of animals for sport. Each year, many hundreds of colts race to their deaths. They run so hard their lungs bleed; diuretics prevent them from breathing out blood. They’re given bisphosphonates that hastily patch up fractures without healing them. Phenylbutazone is used commonly as a pain reliever. Even the horses who escape the fate of running into the ground with compound fractures are running wounded and doped.

A constant role for the killer buyer. As long as breeders exists, so do auctioneers. A trader can bid for the animals in Texas, then sell them into the auction-to-slaughter pipeline. Many thousands of horses—a mix of race and show animals, free-roaming mustangs and former pets—are exported to Canada and Mexico every year, according to agriculture department data. (The EU requires U.S. horses to be held in Canada for six months, to clear their flesh of residual pharmaceuticals—and good luck with that. The details of the holding pens are obscene. Anyone who watches the Derby ought to learn about them.)

The end consumers are mainly in Europe, Japan, China, and Russia. The fate of a sold horse won’t be known to the original seller, but word seeps out, from time to time, about particularly well-known horses going to slaughter. Such was the fate of Ferdinand, who was spectacularly triumphant in the 1986 Kentucky Derby and later “exiled to a breeding farm in Japan”:

“The word shobun, used by owner Yoshikazu Watanabe to describe Ferdinand’s fate, is the Japanese horse industry’s camouflage for saying Ferdy had been killed in a slaughterhouse. So, it may be assumed, America’s 112th Kentucky Derby winner, at age 19, was either consumed as dinner filets by humans—Japanese and Europeans, unlike Americans, eat horse meat—or ground up into pet food.”

The live export of horses to Japan continues.

Disrespect for natural evolution. Even the critics of racing may love seeing horses run. But…isn’t the core of that emotion a yearning to witness freedom? To see untamed horses run? Triple Crown horses exist in an incestuously purpose-bred state. Their delicate legs are often compared with long-stem champagne flutes. They’re bred for speed, then drugged and exploited for money. (That’s a $5 million purse, if they make it to the Kentucky Derby.)

A history of race-based exclusion. Although the first Kentucky Derby winner was Oliver Lewis, a Black jockey who rode Aristides to the finish line in 1875, the Jim Crow era sidelined Black participation. And you’ve really got to dig to find any mentions of the mint julep‘s African-American roots. Or any reminder that Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr. established Churchill Downs on land passed down from Armistead Churchill, who drew wealth from plantation slavery.

Wealth transfers from the workers to the horsey set. As Noah Shachtman has observed, the public is losing interest in horseracing. New York, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky prop up the business with revenue from slot machines, which extract money from those who have the least. Kentucky has one of the highest poverty rates in the United States. Kentucky poverty encompasses the stable workers—typically seasonal migrants who live in dorms, travel in horse trailers, and are lucky if they get minimum wage.

End the Subsidies for Racetracks. End the Breeding. End This Make-Believe Sport.

Today, as Noah Shachtman points out, ownership of a thoroughbred horse can be divided up into shares as small as $15,000. As racing declines, the strategy attracts investors, creating a new “political constituency for billions of dollars in racing subsidies.” So tracks that get state money can keep horses running, running, running—with or without spectators.

Most of us claim to abhor animal abuse. Racetrack realities call our pious claims into question. Truth be told, we humans excel at using other animals, extracting wealth from them, exhausting them, discarding them. Now, for the 151^st time, the Kentucky Derby will showcase our arrogance and pretend it’s an elegant sport. The opposite is true. Make it stop.

The post The Multilayered Inhumanity of the Kentucky Derby appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lee Hall.

Image by Andrej Lišakov.

The United States has been in the throes of a mental health and overdose crisis so severe it has spanned five presidential administrations and been classified as an official state of emergency in three of them. No one knows exactly how this emergency will play out during the current Trumpian cocktail of uncertainty, fear, and cuts to social services, but charts of the recent turbulence of the stock market suggest a relevant visual: imagine the nervous systems of millions of already struggling Americans, along with millions more who are being pushed to the limits of what they can handle, all experiencing deep emotional crashes, briefly recovering, only to collapse again into new lows. And while it might be tempting to think that many of us aren’t affected by the present gut-wrenching emotional tumult because we appear fine and don’t seem to care about what’s happening to the more desperate among us, our recent research suggests that people do care — including, perhaps, those you’d least expect to do so.

Last year brought a widely reported piece of news in mental health. Overdose fatalities in the United States declined substantially, a notable but qualified victory. As overdose deaths fell 9% from 2021 to 2023 for white Americans, such deaths increased 12% for people of other races, according to a Reuters analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Street drugs continue to kill more than 84,000 people in the United States annually and overdoses remain the leading cause of death among Americans ages 18 to 44.

In other words, many young Americans and people of all ages attempt to numb difficult, even unbearable feelings, and sometimes that numbing is fatal. Depending on who you are, your preferred numbing agent might be wine, work, prescription pills, social media, street drugs, or something else entirely. But in the second age of Donald Trump, as well as long before him, all too many of us have been grappling with profound pain, whether from a sense of hopelessness about the future, oppression, trauma, grief, job loss, or general financial strain in ever more economically difficult times. Those among us who are not U.S. citizens are increasingly seized with the fear of being deported due to false, unknown, or unsubstantiated allegations and without due process. In addition to sowing terror, this has also been exacerbating an already widespread sense of loneliness, as people stay inside for fear of being detained.

Another source of despair is the urgent overseas humanitarian crisis over which non-citizens and legal permanent residents are now being seized, shackled, and imprisoned or disappeared for expressing moral protest. One (but not both) of the authors of this article has the protection of U.S. citizenship, although experts now question whether even citizenship will continue to provide protection, and so, for safety’s sake, we’re not naming that crisis or the widely shared sense of grief and powerlessness as men, women, and heartbreaking numbers of children die there. Students and people in all walks of life continue to take to the streets in protest, including the one of us who is a citizen.

Indeed, in such a devastating moment, in all corners of American society, people are in ever greater need of mental health services, just as funding for them is being slashed. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and so a ripe moment to take stock of the damage being done and to report that there appears to be surprising agreement among people with divergent political beliefs that it’s time to expand services for those who are struggling.

Dismantled?

In late January, the Trump White House issued a vague memo that put a temporary freeze on the disbursement of federal financial assistance. By early February, NBC News had reported that some health clinics were closing their doors. Then, in March, the Trump administration announced the cancellation of more than $11 billion in funding to deal with addiction, mental health, and related issues. A federal judge subsequently halted that cancellation of funds, saying such a sudden termination caused “direct and irreparable harm to public health.” The Trump administration requested a stay of the order, with plans to appeal.

By mid-April, around the same time that Elon Musk’s DOGE took over responsibility for posting federal grant opportunities for the public, Reuters published an extensive investigation on the subject. It drew on interviews with dozens of experts to conclude that funding cuts and associated layoffs were “dismantling the carefully constructed health infrastructure that drove the number of overdose deaths down by tens of thousands last year.”

In Philadelphia, where one of the authors of this article resides, the Inquirer reported that a forensic research lab that tests the nation’s illicit drug supply for new and harmful substances hadn’t received crucial funds from the federal government. That, in turn, meant the furloughing of staff and a growing backlog of untested samples. If you’ve followed news about the evolving nature of illicit and counterfeit drugs, you know that novel and dangerous molecules are continually turning up in unexpected places, whether the veterinary sedative xylazine or the more potent medetomidine found in batches of fentanyl, or as deadly levels of nitazenes in seemingly innocuous pills. Slowing or halting drug-testing is a dangerous proposition.

Meanwhile, a Philadelphia outreach program run by Unity Recovery was recently forced to shut down, while its workers who had offered services in addiction, nutrition, and other kinds of healthcare suddenly lost their jobs. At the time of this writing, the organization’s website features a red warning symbol and the message: “Due to federal funding cuts enacted on March 24, 2025, Unity Recovery has lost critical access to resources to provide peer support services.” It also notes that “information is changing rapidly” — a nod to the fact that a judge halted the cancellation of funds and no one now knows exactly how the pending cuts will (or won’t) unfold.

And while there is supposedly stark disagreement between the Trumpist and non-Trumpist halves of this country about whether such cuts should be taking place at all, extensive data from the purple state of Pennsylvania suggests there is far more agreement than anyone might have guessed.

“It Is in All Our Interests to Give Help and Support”

Over the past year, the two of us have worked on a research project that collected perspectives from thousands of Pennsylvanians about mental health, substance use, and the state’s criminal justice system. We also collected hundreds of surveys from Pennsylvanians who work in law enforcement and criminal justice. We guessed that such anonymous surveys would capture punitive viewpoints and a belief that people who use drugs should be put behind bars. And, yes, there was a bit of that, but to our surprise, on the whole, we found something quite different.

More than a quarter of Pennsylvanians said that, in recent years, they had become more sympathetic toward people who struggle with drugs or alcohol. A majority of the respondents identified stress and traumatic life events as a primary cause of problematic substance use. And most surprising of all, we found broad agreement on policy priorities across — yes, across — the political spectrum.

Eighty-three percent of Pennsylvanians agreed that “addressing social problems such as homelessness, mental health, and substance use disorder” was a greater priority than “strengthening social order through more policing and greater enforcement of the laws.” That view was shared across political affiliations: 71% of respondents identifying as conservative agreed with it, as did 88% of those identifying as liberal.

Asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “It is in all our interests to give help and support to people who struggle with drugs and/or alcohol,” 68% of respondents identifying as conservative or very conservative agreed, as did 77% of liberal or very liberal respondents. Notably, there was majority support (61%) for increasing government spending for this cause. Even 54% of conservatives said they supported increasing spending to improve treatment and services for substance-use disorder.

We assumed that Americans who work in law enforcement and criminal justice would have more hardline views. Again, we were wrong. Compared with Pennsylvanians overall, over the past five years, those who work in the criminal justice system were — yes! — more likely to report feeling greater sympathy toward people who struggle with drugs or alcohol, and an overwhelming 70% of them believed that this society was obliged to provide them with treatment. Asked what services they believed could help prevent people struggling with substance use from becoming involved in the justice system, 71% said “more access to mental health treatment providers or services.”

Because much drug use in this country is criminalized, those who work in criminal justice are on the frontlines of our mental health crisis. These new findings suggest that, at least in Pennsylvania, justice system workers feel a responsibility to offer genuine help and see bolstering mental health services as the best way forward.

Of course, the opposite is happening. Yet it’s notable that, in this purple state where the current president won more than 50% of the vote, there is majority support across the political spectrum for providing genuine assistance to people who need it.

The ongoing axing of services will likely prove devastating. It leaves many feeling like there is nothing they can do. Yet, as individuals, count on one thing: we are not powerless (as we so often believe).

Looking Out for Others

When life feels scary and uncertain, as it increasingly does in the Trump era, many people respond by thinking a lot about what might happen in their world and trying to anticipate the future in order to make plans and gain at least some minimal sense of control. Both authors of this article — one of us a doctor, the other a writer — struggle with our ruminations on the state and direction of this country, which can lead us deeper into anxiety and isolation.

And while we probably can’t escape those fearful feelings (and probably shouldn’t try to), we can at least stay in touch with others instead of giving in to the common urge to withdraw. That isn’t easy, of course. Both of us find ourselves struggling to pick up the phone. But this is a time when picking up that phone couldn’t be more important. A time when so much of our world is endangered is distinctly a moment to put special effort into looking out for one another and regularly experiencing the energy that comes from human connection.

We also understand that many Americans are living on the edge. We often don’t know who among our neighbors and loved ones is wrestling with the question of whether life is worth living. (Suicide rates remain high for Americans generally and especially for those with drug and alcohol use disorders.) Right now, there is a dire need for better services, but even if every person had access to quality mental health care, our actions as community members would still matter. It’s sometimes possible to save the life of someone you care about just by telling them you care.

Each of us, including you, has a role to play in keeping all of us alive and safe as best we can in ever more difficult times.

From Crisis to Care

No one yet knows exactly how the Trump administration’s potentially staggering cuts to community healthcare and social services will unfold. But amid the chaos, people across this nation continue to do meaningful, lifesaving work.

The Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit outfit that seeks to prevent harms associated with drug use and drug criminalization, recently published a report entitled “From Crisis to Care.” It presents an intelligent roadmap for improving mental health and addressing substance use and homelessness, including investing in treatment options that are evidence-based and voluntary, as well as housing programs and community-based crisis response systems. These are anything but radical ideas. They’re grounded in research and can serve as a model for the future. Of course, funding and some political power will be necessary to accomplish such things, and that might sound farfetched in our current situation. But simple actions in the present make it more likely that such services will be launched in the future.

We can save a life by reaching out to friends and neighbors, and it’s no less important to recognize when we ourselves are struggling. Sometimes we worry about others without acknowledging that we, too, are on the edge. With that in mind, we’re writing the following words for you and every other reader but also for ourselves: When you’re struggling, contact someone you trust for support. By doing so, you’re also implicitly giving them permission to ask for help from you when they need it, and by giving and receiving help, you create a new pattern of reciprocity.

Such reciprocity has political significance. It fosters social cohesion, a precursor for coordinated action on a far larger sale.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post This Mental Health Awareness Month appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mattea Kramer and Sean Fogler.

Image by Mattia Faloretti.

Significant numbers in the Black community feel betrayed by our so-called allies who ignored the warnings of Black people regarding the elections, its political rhetoric, and the history of racism and white supremacy in the country. So, in response to feelings of betrayal a Black preacher in Chicago recently framed the sentiment on social media writing, “Nope, I turned out in November; they didn’t!” This feeling is pervasive within the Black community as people articulate the frustrations felt because of the outcome of the presidential elections last November. When asking people to turn out for the “Hands Off” rallies, the Gaza and pro-Palestinian demonstrations, or even to protest the roundup of immigrants there is a post-November 2024 pushback which is derived from a sense of betrayal because the people now asking for our participation and support did not stand with the Black community in the 2024 elections. In barbershops, beauty shops, nail salons, social clubs, fraternities, and sororities discussions have been animated expressing various theories in America’s rejection of a Black person for President, and particularly in this case, a Black woman. The underlying feelings is that of betrayal and desertion.

Sure, there are all kinds of justifications for the rejection of the Harris/Walz ticket ranging from the Biden/Harris support of the genocide in Gaza, “She was a prosecutor who contributed to mass incarceration”, to “I will not vote for the lesser of two evils.” There were also the economic arguments citing inflation, and the failure of the Biden administration to deal with the cost of going to the grocery store. There were also the clandestine discussions laced with misogyny and race offering that a woman was unable to lead, and a Black woman was even worse than a Black man. Race and gender hatred are strong undercurrents of the Harris rejection which is confirmed by the Trump/MAGA obsession with attacking and dismantling all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. The dog-whistle to white America is that DEI led to the election of a Black president in 2008, the increasing visibility of other Black faces, the prominence of people of-color and different kinds of people in government and leadership, as well as advancing the sensibilities of gender equality. The anti-DEI framework also believes that immigrants have been welcomed and coddled by offering sanctuary and protection multiplying their numbers which dilutes the white population and poses a serious threat to the powers of white supremacy and the white ability to rule. Indeed, we are seeing and witnessing currently an aggressive clutch for power and the reassertion of white supremacy.

The Black community had seen all this before and can still hear the ghostly chains of enslavement synchronized to the racist tropes of old. The Black community largely was not fooled by the appeals of grocery store affordability or removing immigrants to make way for “black” jobs, or the other empty promises of MAGA/Trump. We had seen it all, and it is incredulous for us to believe that others could not see what we saw. Likewise, it is difficult and unbelievable to hear people now state that “it is worse than I imagined.” We knew what would happen, and we feel betrayed by so-called allies who did not listen to our counsel, should have understood the racist history of America better, and heeded the violence planned against people because of race, immigration, gender, or belonging to the LGBTQIA community. Instead of heeding all our warnings and alarms significant enough numbers of white women, Latinos, and even some Black folks chose to drink the Kool-Aid of a sanitized racism sweetened with appeals of bringing jobs home, cheaper eggs, and making America first in the world.

There are all kinds of justifications for the Trump victory in 2024. Economic grievances, the lesser of two evils argument, objections resulting from the Gaza genocide, concern over Harris’ legal career and governmental service, and the secret handshakes and winks expressing real disdain for a Black woman led to Harris’ defeat. But the latter three arguments or justifications were not persuasive to the Black community because the choices offered in this political system has always been the lesser of two evils, and race history in America has taught us of the precariousness of life and that we always live under threat of a massacre or genocide. We have never experienced a benevolent government. Though some governments and candidates have been better than others the very structure of governance have never been benevolent. The system is not a system that is just or fair, but it has always been a system where fights have had to be waged for justice and fairness. We have always had to weigh who would be better on race, and who would be worse. We have had to weigh who would be better to fight against versus who would be worse. We have had to analyze and understand what sources of money and forces of political power were behind a candidate and what that ultimately meant for the safety of the Black community and our advancement. The lesser of the worst argument has always been the Black reality and we have understood historically that the system is malicious in character, racially unjust, and unfair. There has been a constant fight to go forward, and a continuous struggle against being pushed back.

We said to the immigrant community that the assault on race was real, that the immigrant community would be hunted and hounded like Black folks were before and after passage of the Slave Fugitive Act or stopped and arrested like scores of people “driving while Black”, but we were not heard or understood. Portions of the Latino community was pulled to the right and voted against their own interest despite the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Trump/MAGA agenda. A segment of the Latino community did not realize at the time that the rhetoric would criminalize and endanger all the Latino community. A resident of Prince Georges County, Maryland, Kílmar Abrego García, was disappeared to El Salvador. According to the administration his arrest and deportation was a mistake, but it is a mistake that the administration obstinately refuses to correct. There are also numbers of Latinos being stopped and arrested by masked goons and swept away. It is reported that the administration is scouring through social media and legal documents gleaning any kind of justification for the cancelling of student visas and the deportation of immigrants (documented and undocumented). Yet, 43% of the Latino community voted for Trump!  This represented an increase of 8% more Latino votes going to Trump than in the previous presidential elections. When we hear this statistic, we are rightfully alarmed, yet we cannot lose sight that this also means that 57% of the Latino community understood the struggle in America and took seriously the alarm cited by the Black community.

We were further alarmed by women who seem unable to hear the warnings of misogyny that have been experienced throughout the Black sojourn in America. The struggle to have autonomy over being, health, and existence have been all too real in the Black experience. Therefore, the Black community felt that women would surely hear, understand, and mobilize around the assaults on reproductive freedom, healthcare, and body autonomy. So, it was a surprise to know that 53% of white women voted for Trump. Similar majorities of white women have backed Republican presidential nominees in every election since 2004. But we have also forgotten, because of the ways statistics are sensationalized, that a majority of “ALL” women voted for the Harris/Walz ticket. They rejected the narrow and racist perspectives of the right-wing agenda in this election and in previous elections as well.

We can emotionally understand the Arab/Muslim/Pro-Palestine base not voting for Harris. By any stretch of the imagination, it would have been a steep climb to expect them to simply vote for the supporters of the Netanyahu/Zionist genocide in Gaza. So, this bloc of voters in protest either voted for Trump, a third-party candidate, or sat out the elections as punishment for the Biden/Harris blind support of Israel and its occupation and genocide. But not voting for the lesser of two evils in this case was to cast a vote for the victor — Trump. The protest vote, whether for Trump, a third-party candidate, or to sit out the election had the effect of turning loose and unmuzzling the monster of America’s original sin — racism and white supremacy. The deserved punishment of Harris meant rewarding the deeply entrenched agenda of whiteness and unleashing a ferocious and unapologetic form of hatred that will require extreme and herculean measures to resist.

Yet even the Black community is not immune from its own contradictions rooted in sexism and racial self-hatred. We are infected with all the gender bias that exists in the larger community, as well as our own struggles against one another — self-hatred. For example, though Harris won 80% of the Black vote, that however represented a 10% drop from Biden in 2020. This means that 90% of the Black community would vote for a white man versus only 80% for a Black woman. Biden received 81 million votes in 2020 and Harris only 75 million in 2024. 6 million votes either stayed home or voted for a third-party candidate. It was not necessarily that Biden was a better candidate over Harris, but he was white and male!

The Trump/MAGA forces exploited the gender and race biases within the Black, Latino, and white (male and female) communities. The political right offered and framed news stories and opinions promoting the gender crisis for Harris among Black males in an effort to give permission to Black males to desert a Black woman. There is also the psychological damage of being Black in a white world where the culture has conditioned people to think that white is better than Black, and white male is far better than Black female!

The impurity and contradictions of the American political system has always placed before us choices of evil. The Black perspective however had always had to discern which evil is more entrenched and enshrined in the callous and sub-human hatred of old. One evil represents a historical cloth that produced the Trail of Tears, protected slavery, removed indigenous people from lands at home and abroad, and celebrates white supremacy and power and theologically call it Manifest Destiny. The other is a liberal appearing form of evil. It speaks in terms of the rule of law and democracy but lacks in each. It forms alliances internationally with other flawed liberal appearing democracies, if those governments are aligned financially and politically with its interests. It is permissive towards racism and white supremacy at home and abroad as evidenced by the massive urban “renewal” (removal) programs of the 1960s and 70s, mass incarceration that fell disproportionately on Blacks, and its support of the old racially segregated regime in South Africa or apartheid Israel today. It speaks to Blacks and other politically oppressed people in patronizing and paternalistic terms. It offers empty solutions to real problems to present themselves as magnanimous and sincere while not threatening or giving away their own grip on power. We have had to constantly organize against and challenge this evil endeavoring to bend it towards justice or break it. One evil is clothed in the hatred and imperialism of old, and the other, though bad, was the lesser of evils that represented a dynamic that the Black community always had to live and struggle with. Again, people did not and could not hear our counsel to stand and fight another day than to lose and have it all taken away by madmen unapologetically bent on a white agenda in a white world.

We recognized who and what the Trump/MAGA movement is and what it meant to the safety of the Black community. We also knew intuitively that the safety of the Black community also meant the safety of all our allies whether those allies were real or not. Black people could see the writing on the walls because we have heard all the rhetoric before lingering in the air and echoing through the cobwebbed hallways of racial struggle that unfortunately is not only of the past but in the present.

We are startled to think that people are still deluded by myths of democracy and think the system is well-meaning. People believe in the kindness of the system only because the legacies of enslavement, exploitation, and genocide are ignored along with the continuing effects of those legacies. The banning of books, the discarding of photographs showing images of Black people and women, the erasing of history, and the castigation of Critical Race Theory are calculated programs to further sanitize the foul odors of the country’s past and present. Given all those factors it should be no surprise that Trump was able to declare victory because of a combination of arguments and reasons that were woven from the torn mythologized fabric of America’s illusion of democracy and its altruism. We were surprised and shocked by what appeared to be a betrayal by people and movements that we considered to be part of the wall guarding against the re-entrenchment of racism, misogyny, hatred, xenophobia, and white supremacy. We were surprised, in shock, bewildered, and astonished by people who did not recognize the historical language of racism or the vicious actions that would ensue from it. The feelings of betrayal are real but are also shallow and misguided.

The sense of betrayal and alienation plays into the hands of the forces dismantling DEI, deporting immigrants, curbing First Amendment rights, and flagrantly violating the rule of law. They were able to get elected because they fostered spears of division that separated us over gender, race, and economics. Their strategy worked superbly. Our unity is our strength. If we don’t join together in this current crisis and the battles to come but sit on the sidelines licking our wounds continuing to feel offended and betrayed, then the forces of oppression wins. Let’s admit that we have all been played, and their agenda was to play us against one another fracturing votes over one issue or another and splintering one constituency group from the other until the numbers secured their victory. We have been played, and it is important for us to remember that the political game of fascism will have its way with us if we decide to sit out the various movements that attempt to resist this currently hostile order. Let’s get over it and get back to work. This means that we must support one another from federal workers to Palestine, from Black Lives and reparations to LGBTQIA Rights, from immigrants to the rights of foreign students to study and speak out. All the issues are mine. And all the issues must be ours. We must support one another and join together so that no one is left out or behind. As Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Emma Lazarus said similarly, “No one is free until everyone is free.”

The post The Betrayal of the Black Community appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler.

The second Trump administration has sought to eliminate DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) in hiring and admission policies of government agencies, universities, and corporations; and in educational and entertainment programs in public schools, libraries, and cultural institutions. Claiming that diversity goals and affirmative action place minority hiring and admissions ahead of competence, Trump and his followers assail DEI as racism against white Americans. They fail to see that DEI programs were adopted to allow people of color to compete for school admissions, jobs and public contracts on an equal basis. DEI was meant to correct centuries of intended exclusion.

Now we are viewing the eradication of DEI wherever it exists; in the media, universities, museums, and even in performances and books that recognize the accomplishments of minorities. Recent changes at Washington’s Kennedy Center and Smithsonian museums that now restrict Black performers and erase Black history are cases in point.

 The quest for whiteness is evident in the Trump immigration policies, which combine rigid exclusion at the borders with mass deportations from inside the country. Only racism can explain the administration’s zeal to keep non-whites out of the country and to arrest and deport as many  as possible of such persons residing in the U.S. Witness the recent kidnappings, jailing and deportations of students and faculty members (many of whom hold green cards) simply for speaking out against the Gaza genocide. The victims of such abuses are mostly Palestinians and other persons of color from the global south, rather than white-skinned Europeans or Scandinavians.

The ongoing efforts of the U.S. government to deport Columbia University Graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder from Palestine, is only one of hundreds of similar deportations now taking place around the country,  Another even more egregious case is the  continuing refusal  of the Trump administration to retrieve from an El Salvador prison green card holder Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorian immigrant who was abducted and deported by mistake and sent to a notorious torture prison in El Salvador.  Garcia is a father,  married to a U.S. citizen. He has no criminal record. These are only two of the many ongoing ICE kidnappings and deportations of apparently hundreds of young persons from all over the country. In all of them, the common denominator is dark skin color.

Following his inauguration on January 20, Trump declared his intention to suspend the entry of migrants from “countries of particular concern.” He is now reportedly considering an expansion of his 2017 Muslim travel ban, which would primarily target seven Muslim-majority countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Leaked information from the White House suggests a long list of other countries that would face higher scrutiny. While the public rationale for such a ban is “national security,” residents in almost all of the affected populations have black or brown skins.

Like his predecessor, Trump sides with and supports Israel with lethal weapons for its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza. He goes even further by giving Netanyahu carte blanche for the  removal of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank to make room for (mostly White) Israeli settlers. The color line is also evident in joint Israel-U.S. plans to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank.

Last month, Trump announced his plan to offer some 67,000 white South Africans refugee status in  the U.S. He claims that they were victims of racial discrimination by the Black-led government.  This follows his executive order in February, cutting-off U.S. funding to South Africa for AIDS medicines, citing  violence against white landowners by the government of South Africa.

Racism and the goal of white supremacy are evident in each of the above cited cases. While the Trump agenda has other objectives, such as tariffs (that hit hardest against black and brown countries), his administration’s larger program has a pronounced racist bent. Clearly, Trump and his associates are  determined to Make America White Again.

The post Trump World is a White World appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by L. Michael Hager.

The second Trump administration has sought to eliminate DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) in hiring and admission policies of government agencies, universities, and corporations; and in educational and entertainment programs in public schools, libraries, and cultural institutions. Claiming that diversity goals and affirmative action place minority hiring and admissions ahead of competence, Trump and his followers assail DEI as racism against white Americans. They fail to see that DEI programs were adopted to allow people of color to compete for school admissions, jobs and public contracts on an equal basis. DEI was meant to correct centuries of intended exclusion.

Now we are viewing the eradication of DEI wherever it exists; in the media, universities, museums, and even in performances and books that recognize the accomplishments of minorities. Recent changes at Washington’s Kennedy Center and Smithsonian museums that now restrict Black performers and erase Black history are cases in point.

 The quest for whiteness is evident in the Trump immigration policies, which combine rigid exclusion at the borders with mass deportations from inside the country. Only racism can explain the administration’s zeal to keep non-whites out of the country and to arrest and deport as many  as possible of such persons residing in the U.S. Witness the recent kidnappings, jailing and deportations of students and faculty members (many of whom hold green cards) simply for speaking out against the Gaza genocide. The victims of such abuses are mostly Palestinians and other persons of color from the global south, rather than white-skinned Europeans or Scandinavians.

The ongoing efforts of the U.S. government to deport Columbia University Graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder from Palestine, is only one of hundreds of similar deportations now taking place around the country,  Another even more egregious case is the  continuing refusal  of the Trump administration to retrieve from an El Salvador prison green card holder Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorian immigrant who was abducted and deported by mistake and sent to a notorious torture prison in El Salvador.  Garcia is a father,  married to a U.S. citizen. He has no criminal record. These are only two of the many ongoing ICE kidnappings and deportations of apparently hundreds of young persons from all over the country. In all of them, the common denominator is dark skin color.

Following his inauguration on January 20, Trump declared his intention to suspend the entry of migrants from “countries of particular concern.” He is now reportedly considering an expansion of his 2017 Muslim travel ban, which would primarily target seven Muslim-majority countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Leaked information from the White House suggests a long list of other countries that would face higher scrutiny. While the public rationale for such a ban is “national security,” residents in almost all of the affected populations have black or brown skins.

Like his predecessor, Trump sides with and supports Israel with lethal weapons for its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza. He goes even further by giving Netanyahu carte blanche for the  removal of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank to make room for (mostly White) Israeli settlers. The color line is also evident in joint Israel-U.S. plans to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank.

Last month, Trump announced his plan to offer some 67,000 white South Africans refugee status in  the U.S. He claims that they were victims of racial discrimination by the Black-led government.  This follows his executive order in February, cutting-off U.S. funding to South Africa for AIDS medicines, citing  violence against white landowners by the government of South Africa.

Racism and the goal of white supremacy are evident in each of the above cited cases. While the Trump agenda has other objectives, such as tariffs (that hit hardest against black and brown countries), his administration’s larger program has a pronounced racist bent. Clearly, Trump and his associates are  determined to Make America White Again.

The post Trump World is a White World appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by L. Michael Hager.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

As a child, I felt so fancy when we used the purple food stamps — those were the pretty ones.

We were a hardworking, loving family. My parents ensured we weren’t around anyone who tried to make us feel “less than” for needing help to make ends meet.

That’s just reality in America. When the federal minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25 while prices for everything else increase month after month, year after year…yeah, we’re going to need some help feeding our families, affording health care, and keeping a roof over our heads. Where I live, the hourly cost of child care alone is more than twice the minimum wage.

So as an adult I again rely on food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to feed my family. SNAP helps over 40 million Americans put food on the table.

And I’m watching with fear as the Republican majority in Congress and the Trump administration propose slashing food assistance to 40 million people and denying free and reduced school meals to 12 million children. Even Meals on Wheels, already deeply underfunded, has taken a hit recently.

“So, go to a food pantry,” these people say. The reality is that for every one meal that food pantries struggle to supply, SNAP provides nine. And the Trump administration is also cutting funding for food banks.

“Get a job. Budget better,” they say. I have a job, and I know how to budget.

But you can’t “budget better” when there isn’t enough in your paycheck to cover even basic human needs. Most people who receive SNAP benefits who are able to work do work. Two-thirds are children, seniors, or people with disabilities. We’re all at risk of losing even this modest assistance to feed ourselves and our families.

‘We’re just cutting waste, fraud, and abuse in the SNAP program,” they say. But the fraud rate in SNAP is just 1 percent. So why is food for children, families, people with disabilities, workers, and seniors on the chopping block?

Let’s get beyond the false rhetoric to the truth: The new administration and its allies in Congress want to fund a massive tax giveaway to the richest Americans and the largest corporations. So they’re taking our taxpayer dollars away from programs that support us and giving them to those who need the least help.

They all took an oath to serve us, but instead they’re betraying us. The rich have so much already, but they always seem to want more.

Even though we didn’t have a lot of money, my father always worked in our community to help others. I do the same to help my neighbors find the resources they need and to hold our elected officials accountable. My heart is full of love. When I look at my community, I see the beauty and the greatness among the need.

We may be poor due to this country’s wage and income system, which rewards inherited wealth over hard work and disinvests in families and communities. But we know the values of family, community, work, and service. We demand that those elected to serve us do the same.

The post Starving the Poor to Feed the Rich appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Tania Whitfield.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

As a child, I felt so fancy when we used the purple food stamps — those were the pretty ones.

We were a hardworking, loving family. My parents ensured we weren’t around anyone who tried to make us feel “less than” for needing help to make ends meet.

That’s just reality in America. When the federal minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25 while prices for everything else increase month after month, year after year…yeah, we’re going to need some help feeding our families, affording health care, and keeping a roof over our heads. Where I live, the hourly cost of child care alone is more than twice the minimum wage.

So as an adult I again rely on food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to feed my family. SNAP helps over 40 million Americans put food on the table.

And I’m watching with fear as the Republican majority in Congress and the Trump administration propose slashing food assistance to 40 million people and denying free and reduced school meals to 12 million children. Even Meals on Wheels, already deeply underfunded, has taken a hit recently.

“So, go to a food pantry,” these people say. The reality is that for every one meal that food pantries struggle to supply, SNAP provides nine. And the Trump administration is also cutting funding for food banks.

“Get a job. Budget better,” they say. I have a job, and I know how to budget.

But you can’t “budget better” when there isn’t enough in your paycheck to cover even basic human needs. Most people who receive SNAP benefits who are able to work do work. Two-thirds are children, seniors, or people with disabilities. We’re all at risk of losing even this modest assistance to feed ourselves and our families.

‘We’re just cutting waste, fraud, and abuse in the SNAP program,” they say. But the fraud rate in SNAP is just 1 percent. So why is food for children, families, people with disabilities, workers, and seniors on the chopping block?

Let’s get beyond the false rhetoric to the truth: The new administration and its allies in Congress want to fund a massive tax giveaway to the richest Americans and the largest corporations. So they’re taking our taxpayer dollars away from programs that support us and giving them to those who need the least help.

They all took an oath to serve us, but instead they’re betraying us. The rich have so much already, but they always seem to want more.

Even though we didn’t have a lot of money, my father always worked in our community to help others. I do the same to help my neighbors find the resources they need and to hold our elected officials accountable. My heart is full of love. When I look at my community, I see the beauty and the greatness among the need.

We may be poor due to this country’s wage and income system, which rewards inherited wealth over hard work and disinvests in families and communities. But we know the values of family, community, work, and service. We demand that those elected to serve us do the same.

The post Starving the Poor to Feed the Rich appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Tania Whitfield.

Photo by Ashwin Vaswani

In 2022, Pope Francis created a will expressing his desire that just one word be inscribed on the stone marking his burial place: Franciscus.

Franciscus, Latin for Francis, is the name Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose when, twelve years ago, cardinals elected him to become the Bishop of Rome. He sought union with Saint Francis, known as one who lived on the margins, who discarded his worldly clothes, and who kissed the lepers. Pope Francis longed for “a church that is poor and is for the poor.” He recognized, as Bishop Robert McElroy once expressed it, that “too much money is in the hands of too few, while the vast majority struggle to get by.”

As the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, Pope Francis unified people of different generations. He encouraged genuine love for humans—“Todo, todo, todo.” Or, as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal physician, the late beloved Chicagoan Dr. Quentin Young would often say, “Everybody in, nobody out.”

Pope Francis exhorted people to set aside the futility of war and to always care for those who bear the worst brunt of war, particularly the children. His were the words of a man whose heart aches for children who are being punished to death, sacrificed by powerful people whose lust for greed and power overcomes their capacity for compassion.

“Yesterday, children were bombed,” Pope Francis said in his final Christmas message last December. “Children. This is cruelty, this is not war.” He added, touching the cross he wore around his neck, “I want to say this, because it touches my heart.”

Pope Francis was speaking about the children of Gaza, who have been orphaned, maimed, sickened, starved, forcibly displaced, traumatized, and buried under fire and rubble. In excerpts from the book Hope Never Disappoints. Pilgrims Towards a Better World, published in November 2024, he was blunt about Israel’s accountability, writing: “What is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide. It should be investigated to determine whether it meets the definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.”

On Easter, the day before his death, Pope Francis expressed in a written message: “I appeal to the warring parties: Call a ceasefire, release the hostages, and come to the aid of a starving people that aspire to a future of peace!”

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The post Pope Francis’s Lesson of Love and Peace appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Photo by Ashwin Vaswani

In 2022, Pope Francis created a will expressing his desire that just one word be inscribed on the stone marking his burial place: Franciscus.

Franciscus, Latin for Francis, is the name Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose when, twelve years ago, cardinals elected him to become the Bishop of Rome. He sought union with Saint Francis, known as one who lived on the margins, who discarded his worldly clothes, and who kissed the lepers. Pope Francis longed for “a church that is poor and is for the poor.” He recognized, as Bishop Robert McElroy once expressed it, that “too much money is in the hands of too few, while the vast majority struggle to get by.”

As the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, Pope Francis unified people of different generations. He encouraged genuine love for humans—“Todo, todo, todo.” Or, as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal physician, the late beloved Chicagoan Dr. Quentin Young would often say, “Everybody in, nobody out.”

Pope Francis exhorted people to set aside the futility of war and to always care for those who bear the worst brunt of war, particularly the children. His were the words of a man whose heart aches for children who are being punished to death, sacrificed by powerful people whose lust for greed and power overcomes their capacity for compassion.

“Yesterday, children were bombed,” Pope Francis said in his final Christmas message last December. “Children. This is cruelty, this is not war.” He added, touching the cross he wore around his neck, “I want to say this, because it touches my heart.”

Pope Francis was speaking about the children of Gaza, who have been orphaned, maimed, sickened, starved, forcibly displaced, traumatized, and buried under fire and rubble. In excerpts from the book Hope Never Disappoints. Pilgrims Towards a Better World, published in November 2024, he was blunt about Israel’s accountability, writing: “What is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide. It should be investigated to determine whether it meets the definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.”

On Easter, the day before his death, Pope Francis expressed in a written message: “I appeal to the warring parties: Call a ceasefire, release the hostages, and come to the aid of a starving people that aspire to a future of peace!”

+++

The post Pope Francis’s Lesson of Love and Peace appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Photograph Source: Michael Vadon – CC BY-SA 4.0

Article III of the US Constitution provides for congressional establishment of “inferior courts” — that is, courts other than the Supreme Court — and for congressional regulation of those courts’ jurisdictions.

In that sense, there’s nothing unusual about US Senator Mike Lee’s bill proposal for a streamlined appellate process where actions “commenced against the executive seeking injunctive or declaratory relief against the Executive,” other than the stilted writing and mismatched capitalization.

The problem Lee’s trying to solve, if it really is a problem, is that individual US District Court judges can, and sometimes do, issue injunctions with nationwide effect.

Lee’s proposal would require such actions to be heard by panels of three judges rather than by a single judge, with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court selecting the judges. It would also require the Supreme Court to hear all appeals of injunctions issued by those panels.

No problem, I guess. It seems well within Congress’s powers as described above.

Unfortunately, Lee decided to give the bill a title that doesn’t match its effect. He’s calling it “The Restraining Judicial Insurrectionists Act of 2025.”

“Insurrection” has remained much on the public mind since 2021 when outgoing US president Donald Trump was accused of fomenting one with his January 6 “Stop The Steal” rally preceding the notorious Beer Belly Putsch, also known as the Capitol riot and, by many, simply as “the insurrection.”

Some unsuccessful attempts to bar Trump from the 2024 ballot as an “insurrectionist” followed, and Trump, now in his second term, recently took up the word himself, asking the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to report to him with recommendations on “whether to invoke the Insurrection Act” so that he can use the armed forces to enforce his domestic immigrant abduction and deportation efforts (both departments are recommending against such an invocation).

It kinda feels like Lee wants to pander to Trump’s newfound fascination with “insurrection,” and that’s clearly working (Trump publicly agrees with Lee one the existence of something called “judicial insurrection” ).

Federal judges doing what federal judges are, at the moment, authorized to do (issue injunctions) based on what they’re constitutionally bound to support (due process) doesn’t really seem very insurrectiony,  though.

Can you think of something, anything, that sounds more like an “insurrection” — defined as “obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States?”

How about a rogue president and his co-conspirators invoking an extra-constitutional and ahistorical “unitary executive” claim to justify ignoring — when they’re not openly violating — laws they don’t like, in violation of the chief executive’s constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed?”

Trump, as Trump likes very much to do, is accusing others of doing what he’s actually doing himself in hopes of getting away with mischief.

As an anarchist, I’ve got no problem with insurrection as such. I’d just prefer insurrection in support of, rather than against, liberty. I guess the fake judicial insurrection looks a little more like that than the real Trump insurrection. But not much.

The post Every Accusation is a Confession: Insurrection Edition appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

Photograph Source: Michael Vadon – CC BY-SA 4.0

Article III of the US Constitution provides for congressional establishment of “inferior courts” — that is, courts other than the Supreme Court — and for congressional regulation of those courts’ jurisdictions.

In that sense, there’s nothing unusual about US Senator Mike Lee’s bill proposal for a streamlined appellate process where actions “commenced against the executive seeking injunctive or declaratory relief against the Executive,” other than the stilted writing and mismatched capitalization.

The problem Lee’s trying to solve, if it really is a problem, is that individual US District Court judges can, and sometimes do, issue injunctions with nationwide effect.

Lee’s proposal would require such actions to be heard by panels of three judges rather than by a single judge, with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court selecting the judges. It would also require the Supreme Court to hear all appeals of injunctions issued by those panels.

No problem, I guess. It seems well within Congress’s powers as described above.

Unfortunately, Lee decided to give the bill a title that doesn’t match its effect. He’s calling it “The Restraining Judicial Insurrectionists Act of 2025.”

“Insurrection” has remained much on the public mind since 2021 when outgoing US president Donald Trump was accused of fomenting one with his January 6 “Stop The Steal” rally preceding the notorious Beer Belly Putsch, also known as the Capitol riot and, by many, simply as “the insurrection.”

Some unsuccessful attempts to bar Trump from the 2024 ballot as an “insurrectionist” followed, and Trump, now in his second term, recently took up the word himself, asking the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to report to him with recommendations on “whether to invoke the Insurrection Act” so that he can use the armed forces to enforce his domestic immigrant abduction and deportation efforts (both departments are recommending against such an invocation).

It kinda feels like Lee wants to pander to Trump’s newfound fascination with “insurrection,” and that’s clearly working (Trump publicly agrees with Lee one the existence of something called “judicial insurrection” ).

Federal judges doing what federal judges are, at the moment, authorized to do (issue injunctions) based on what they’re constitutionally bound to support (due process) doesn’t really seem very insurrectiony,  though.

Can you think of something, anything, that sounds more like an “insurrection” — defined as “obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States?”

How about a rogue president and his co-conspirators invoking an extra-constitutional and ahistorical “unitary executive” claim to justify ignoring — when they’re not openly violating — laws they don’t like, in violation of the chief executive’s constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed?”

Trump, as Trump likes very much to do, is accusing others of doing what he’s actually doing himself in hopes of getting away with mischief.

As an anarchist, I’ve got no problem with insurrection as such. I’d just prefer insurrection in support of, rather than against, liberty. I guess the fake judicial insurrection looks a little more like that than the real Trump insurrection. But not much.

The post Every Accusation is a Confession: Insurrection Edition appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

Francis was not your average pope. He lent hope for the world to plenty of people who are not Roman Catholic, and he wasn’t shy about his papally unconventional views, as he led a very hidebound global institution with 1.4 billion adherents toward recognizing that things are not as they should be, are even, in some cases, abominations not only to the divine but to any living human conscience.

On the verge of nuclear Armageddon, Francis noted that Europe and the U.S. provoked the crisis with Russia, a far from popular perspective in the west. He never stopped advocating for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, meeting with former Israeli hostages and talking by phone regularly with Gazan Christians under bombardment. He loved the humble and did so without a scintilla of cloying false modesty. It always seemed that given the choice between a meal with a world ruler and an indigent Syrian immigrant, Francis would prefer the latter, though he certainly regarded the former as an opportunity to bend power toward justice.

So now one cannot help wondering who will replace this profoundly good man? There have been ferociously anti-communist popes, popes who collaborated with Nazis and no pope, aside from Francis, who cared about the Great Mistake of humanity’s desecration of the natural world. Will the pendulum swing back to a cardinal with right-wing bona fides taking the helm? Though not a Roman Catholic, I can’t help remarking that this is not what our species needs now. The hard right rules much of the globe, just as it assiduously ignored Francis, regarding him as some kind of outdated hippie gadfly rather than God’s emissary, a role popes are cast for but which, in Francis’ case, offended secular power. The powerful and the wicked ignored him, even as they conferred with him in the Vatican, taking absolutely nothing he said to heart.

Francis brought to mind the Latin American heroes of liberation theology, heroes so ferociously extirpated by that infamous institutional evil called the CIA. Though not explicitly a liberation theologian, he shared the zeitgeist that produced that noble, doomed experiment and made it seem that maybe it wasn’t so doomed after all. Because if someone like Jorge Bergoglio could ascend to the papacy, then those priests, down among the people, who made peasants’ struggles their struggles, who make peasants’ liberation their fight and were killed for it, well, in some sense they won.

It may seem that Francis was a once-in-a-century pope, but maybe not, maybe there are enough cardinals satisfied with how he managed things to balk at electing someone who would seek to undo it all. Because never underestimate the late pope’s agility when it came to navigating church politics. He packed the conclave of cardinals with his own people and survived a dozen years of internecine attempts, some spearheaded by very conservative American churchmen, to undo his work. And don’t forget the skill involved in becoming pope in the first place. No one knew better than Francis how reactionary some church factions could be. But he slipped past them, they couldn’t trip him up, and he thus managed to serve truth and justice like no pope before. His death is a huge loss for all people of good will.

The post Pope Francis: a Loss for Humanity appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.

Francis was not your average pope. He lent hope for the world to plenty of people who are not Roman Catholic, and he wasn’t shy about his papally unconventional views, as he led a very hidebound global institution with 1.4 billion adherents toward recognizing that things are not as they should be, are even, in some cases, abominations not only to the divine but to any living human conscience.

On the verge of nuclear Armageddon, Francis noted that Europe and the U.S. provoked the crisis with Russia, a far from popular perspective in the west. He never stopped advocating for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, meeting with former Israeli hostages and talking by phone regularly with Gazan Christians under bombardment. He loved the humble and did so without a scintilla of cloying false modesty. It always seemed that given the choice between a meal with a world ruler and an indigent Syrian immigrant, Francis would prefer the latter, though he certainly regarded the former as an opportunity to bend power toward justice.

So now one cannot help wondering who will replace this profoundly good man? There have been ferociously anti-communist popes, popes who collaborated with Nazis and no pope, aside from Francis, who cared about the Great Mistake of humanity’s desecration of the natural world. Will the pendulum swing back to a cardinal with right-wing bona fides taking the helm? Though not a Roman Catholic, I can’t help remarking that this is not what our species needs now. The hard right rules much of the globe, just as it assiduously ignored Francis, regarding him as some kind of outdated hippie gadfly rather than God’s emissary, a role popes are cast for but which, in Francis’ case, offended secular power. The powerful and the wicked ignored him, even as they conferred with him in the Vatican, taking absolutely nothing he said to heart.

Francis brought to mind the Latin American heroes of liberation theology, heroes so ferociously extirpated by that infamous institutional evil called the CIA. Though not explicitly a liberation theologian, he shared the zeitgeist that produced that noble, doomed experiment and made it seem that maybe it wasn’t so doomed after all. Because if someone like Jorge Bergoglio could ascend to the papacy, then those priests, down among the people, who made peasants’ struggles their struggles, who make peasants’ liberation their fight and were killed for it, well, in some sense they won.

It may seem that Francis was a once-in-a-century pope, but maybe not, maybe there are enough cardinals satisfied with how he managed things to balk at electing someone who would seek to undo it all. Because never underestimate the late pope’s agility when it came to navigating church politics. He packed the conclave of cardinals with his own people and survived a dozen years of internecine attempts, some spearheaded by very conservative American churchmen, to undo his work. And don’t forget the skill involved in becoming pope in the first place. No one knew better than Francis how reactionary some church factions could be. But he slipped past them, they couldn’t trip him up, and he thus managed to serve truth and justice like no pope before. His death is a huge loss for all people of good will.

The post Pope Francis: a Loss for Humanity appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.

Image by Anne Nygård.

The term “economy” is often used as a catch-all, but the way it’s discussed by politicians and pundits is typically misleading. We frequently hear that “the economy” is growing, but this narrative obscures the fact that most people don’t experience this growth equally. In reality, there are at least two distinct economies in every country: one benefiting the asset-holding class, the “Wall Street” elite who profit from inflation, protectionism, and stagnant wages, and another for renters and workers on “Main Street,” who are squeezed from both ends. This divide is even more pronounced on the global stage, where economies in the Global South subsidise the prosperity of the Global North through unequal exchange and debt servicing.

Recognizing that we are not all part of the same economy is key to understanding how the prosperity of the few and the suffering of the many are two sides of the same coin. The mechanisms of wealth transfer from the productive economy (Main Street) to the extractive economy (Wall Street) are central to shaping policies that prioritise sustainable development, redistribution, and collective well-being, rather than speculation and accumulation.

Segmenting the economy makes sense, it’s a tactic employed by top-level marketers worldwide, yet economists typically overlook it. Acknowledging the multiple, sometimes antagonistic, “economies” allows us to better understand political decisions, especially when we consider which segment benefits from each policy. For example, policies like tariffs or the dismantling of public services in the US, and Starmer’s disability cuts, are designed to enrich a small group of asset holders through extractive wealth transfers, privatization, monopolization, and rent-seeking, rather than improving the welfare of the general population. This neoliberal strategy, characterised by deregulation, privatization, and cuts to public spending, aims to colonise the economy and siphon wealth from the working majority to the asset holders, where it speculates and accumulates, rather than being spent in the productive economy, where it could stimulate growth through the higher propensity of the working class to consume.

During the pandemic, the economic split became especially clear. While millions lost jobs and struggled to pay rent, and the ´essential workers´, who uncoincidentally were the worst treated and lowest paid, kept the economy from collapsing, yet have since become poorer. On the other hand, the stock market on Wall Street soared and billionaire wealth hit new heights as newly created public money was funnelled into corporations through novel mechanisms like corporate bond buying. Since 2020, the richest five men in the world doubled their fortunes, while five billion people globally became poorer. The idea that a rising tide lifts all boats has proven to be a myth. Politicians still preach that if we grow the economy, everyone will benefit eventually – the old trickle-down economics story, but even the IMF has shown this is a lie. When the income share of the richest 20% increases, overall economic growth actually tends to decline, “suggesting that the benefits do not trickle down”. In other words, making the rich richer doesn’t make society richer; it typically does the opposite.

So, who is “the economy” really growing for? Take GDP, often treated as the ultimate scoreboard of success. A country can have strong GDP growth while most of its citizens struggle as GDP fails to show who captures that growth. Are gains going to regular people or just to corporate profits and asset owners? According to the World Inequality Report, the top 1% captured 38% of all global wealth growth since 1995, while the bottom half received just 2%.

After the 2008 financial crisis central banks deployed quantitative easing (QE), essentially creating new money to buy up financial assets and stimulate asset price growth, rather than stimulating demand in the productive economy. Stock prices rebounded, benefiting the 1%, who according to Oxfam own 43% of the world’s financial assets, and enriching vulture investors who could then accumulate undervalued assets, in particular properly, but wage growth for ordinary people remained stagnant and purchasing power continued to decrease, particularly in the increasingly concentrated housing market where people routinely pay over 50% of their salaries on rent. This pattern repeated during the pandemic, as central banks funnelled new money directly into BlackRock-managed corporate bonds, enabling corporations to buy up property and stressed assets, extracting further wealth from “Main Street” to Wall Street.

French economist Thomas Piketty demonstrated that such outcomes are no accident. In his research on inequality, he found that wealth tends to concentrate at the top when returns on capital (like stocks and property) outpace overall growth. In most economies, returns on wealth (5–7%) consistently exceed economic growth (1–3%) and so, over time, “the vast majority of wealth” ends up in the hands of a small minority. We see this in today’s economy: CEOs, shareholders, landlords and monopoly owners enjoy record gains as prices soar and the stock market booms, while median wages barely budge, representing a decrease in purchasing power and real wages and more wealth transfers from the productive economy to the extractive economy.

In Ireland, my home, which I and swathes of other young people have been forced to leave en masse due to scandalously high rents, homeowners own 97% of all wealth, while renters, around 30% of the population and rising, hold just 3%. While not all homeowners are wealthy, it is the rise of rentier capitalism, where wealth is extracted from the rest of society through passive ownership of essential goods like housing, that defines the “extractive economy.” Here, profits accumulate in the hands of large landlords and institutional investors, with landlords owning over 100 properties now controlling 22% of Dublin’s rental market, a significant increase from 5% in 2016, while 26 landlords, companies, or investment firms each own more than 500 residential properties in Ireland, averaging nearly 1,000 units per owner.

These profits are siphoned out of the ‘productive economy,’ where wages are spent, services sustained, and livelihoods supported, and instead reinvested to further concentrate the housing market. This trend is apparent across European cities, where large institutional investors now own a significant portion of the rental stock. In Dublin, 26 landlords or investment firms each own an average of more than 1000 properties, further solidifying their market control. Meanwhile, renters in places like Spain, Ireland, and the UK are routinely spending over 50% of their income on rent, an untenable burden in cities with skyrocketing property values.

Beyond GDP: What Really Matters

Using GDP as shorthand for prosperity hides the real story. Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen reminds us that high GDP growth can go hand-in-hand with poor outcomes in people’s actual lives. For Sen, economic progress is about expanding people’s freedoms and capabilities, ensuring people lead healthy, educated, stable and empowered lives, not just raising income per head. What good is “growth” if it only results in excessive hoarding and waste despite scarcity and need. When essential resources, money included (due to private bank, debt-based money creation), are allocated based only on profit and purchasing power instead of need, they accumulate where they are least likely to be used and most likely to be wasted, resulting in a world where over 343 million people worldwide face acute food insecurity, with nearly 37 million teetering on the edge of famine, the highest numbers in recent history, while in wealthy economies we criminally waste over 1/3 of all food produced and consume more resources than 3-5 planets could sustainably support.

Economists like Thomas Piketty produce distributional national accounts to break down income growth by groups, from the poorest 10% to the richest 0.1%. These tools quantify how economic gains are distributed and can therefore show true progress in the productive economy, rather than misrepresent growth in the extractive economy as progress, when in reality, it is the opposite. Meanwhile, scholars like Peter Turchin offer a macro-historical lens, showing how extreme inequality and “elite overproduction” have historically fuelled social breakdown, suggesting that rising top-heavy income shares are not only unjust or inefficient, but destabilizing.

In the US, such data revealed that for decades nearly all income growth went to the wealthiest, while the bottom 50% became worse off during this neoliberal period of historic offshoring and union-busting. This divergence is laid bare by data from the World Inequality Database and the DINA project, which harmonises tax records, surveys, and national accounts. One of its most staggering findings is that from 1980 to 2020, the top 1% of earners in the United States saw their incomes rise by 205%, while the bottom 50% gained just 1%. This confirms what many experience daily: “the economy” is growing, but it’s growing away from the majority. Meanwhile, the share of wealth held by the top 0.1% is now equivalent to that of the entire bottom 90%, further evidencing how capital accumulation, unregulated finance, and policy capture have hollowed out economic democracy. Trump’s tariffs, while serving as tools of geopolitical leverage, also restrict competition, facilitating greater monopolization of key sectors. This concentration of market power enables corporations to engage in price-making, raising profits for business owners while inflating prices for consumers, particularly in industries like steel, phones, cars, and pharmaceuticals.

Looking at these numbers changes how we think about progress. It’s not enough to tout a 3% GDP rise in the hope that a rising tide lifts all boats, if that 3% only lifts, as Joseph Stiglitz claims, the superyachts. In fact, in Jason Hickel’s “The Divide”, he shows that in order to lift everyone above the $5.50 per day poverty line using growth alone (without redistribution), the global economy would need to grow 175 times its current size. Global GDP is also 1:1 correlated with global energy use, of which over 80% is fossil fuels, meaning our fossil fuel consumption would need to increase by about 140 times, something that is not only impossible due to resource scarcity, but would make us all extinct. Yet, believe it or not, this is actually the dominant economic viewpoint and what our leaders are actually aiming for.

We also have to consider what counts as value in our economy. For too long, if something had a price tag, we assumed it must be valuable, but that’s flawed logic. Economist Mariana Mazzucato argues that “much of what is passing for value creation is just value extraction in disguise”. Financial speculation, monopoly pricing, and other rent-seeking behaviour inflates GDP figures as intrinsically valued public wealth is transferred to private riches. At the same time, genuinely valuable work often goes unpaid or underpaid, particularly by women. Think of a parent raising a child or a nurse tending to the sick. The “official” economy simply assumes that families will raise children, neighbours will support each other, and someone will care for the vulnerable – all without pay or recognition. Yet without this hidden labour, the formal market economy would grind to a halt. Nancy Fraser warns that today’s financialised capitalism is even consuming the social foundations “like a tiger that eats its own tail,” creating a systemic “crisis of care” as serious as our ecological crisis.

The Global South Experience

This divide between two economies isn’t only within wealthy countries, it’s global. The same patterns of inequality play out on the world stage. During the 1980s, many Latin American countries went through a brutal austerity period known as the “lost decade.” Under pressure from foreign lenders and the IMF, governments slashed spending on education, healthcare, and subsidies in order to service debts. The result? Growth for creditors, but mass suffering for ordinary Latin Americans: rising poverty, unemployment, and a generation of stunted progress.

Across Africa, similarly, IMF policy conditions attached to loans forced painful adjustments. Countries that took IMF loans often had to cut public sector jobs, remove support for farmers, and privatise essential services. A recent study confirms that these structural reform conditions increased poverty, as they “raise unemployment, lower government revenue, and increase the costs of basic services” for the public. Once again, one economy’s “rescue plan” was another economy’s hardship. Western financiers got their repayments, western economies got cheap access to labour, commodities and raw materials, while communities in borrower countries endured decaying schools and clinics and a loss of economic sovereignty and public wealth. Today, many impoverished African governments spend more each year servicing debt than on health or education for their people.

This gutting of public services, in particular, the redistributive power of in-kind benefits like education and healthcare, which according to DINA can equal 30% of a poor household’s income, was effectively erased, entrenching inequality not only in earnings but in access to life itself, and instead allowing parasitic private companies to step in and profit the destitution of others. This appears to be the goal in the US today, as USAID and Public Education are defunded and the public sector, including healthcare, is gutted further. Undoubtedly causing harm to “the economy” whilst enriching Trump’s cronies.

The global economy operates on a multi-tiered basis, with countries and regions classified as the Core, Periphery, and Semi-Periphery. In the Core, asset holders, creditors, and multinational corporations accrue vast benefits from trade and finance. Meanwhile, in the Periphery, the ‘have-nots’ find their wealth extracted, where, in countries like the DRC, it’s possible to be amongst the resource richest countries on Earth and the financially poorest.

Scholars like Fadhel Kaboub note how wealth extraction continues in new forms. Rich countries import high-volumes of underpriced, raw materials and commodities from the Global South, while exporting low-volumes of high-priced goods to the global south, whilst simultaneously demanding debt repayments to pay for them, leading to massive wealth transfers and a lopsided flow of labour, energy and resources. According to Jason Hickel’s research, this process of “unequal exchange” translates to a drain of $2.2 trillion from developing countries each year, enough to end extreme poverty dozens of times over. This echoes the old colonial pattern: profits accumulate in London, Paris or New York, while the global south is left with extreme poverty, polluted ecosystems, sweatshop wages and unsustainable debts.

Rethinking “The Economy”

It’s time to retire the myth of a singular economy that treats everyone equally. We need to start talking about which economy we mean and who wins or loses in each. A more honest economics would focus on distribution and well-being by long-term planning and policy, not just short-term profit-oriented production and aggregate growth. Governments can begin by adopting new metrics: for instance, using distributional national accounts alongside GDP to track how income and wealth are divided alongside measuring well-being and environmental health as key indicators of progress.

Policy must shift away from prioritizing investor confidence and stock market indices, focusing instead on bolstering Main Street. This can be achieved through progressive reforms, including living wages, universal basic services (UBS), and green job guarantees. Programs like UBI and public housing should be implemented as part of a broader strategy to reorient the economy. For example, cities like Vienna or Copenhagen have introduced public housing initiatives which consistently place them atop City liveability indexes. In addition, windfall taxes on large corporate profits and wealth taxes on billionaires can generate revenue for such investments, promoting economic stability and equity. These reforms would be paid for through progressive monetary policy, eliminating the need for austerity measures that disproportionately harm the working class

The trillions created by central banks through quantitative easing and corporate bond buying could be redirected from what Keynes describes as the ‘casino economy’ and toward the productive one where money would circulate rather than speculate and accumulate, building green infrastructure, resilient food-systems or funding healthcare and education, and rather than the austerity being suggested by the likes of Musk & Starmer; debt relief and public investment should be the go-to tools for international financial institutions, so that global growth means growth in the areas which lead to shared prosperity, not just capital accumulation, excess, inequality and overshoot.

The “economy” is not a monolithic, natural force as economists would have you believe, it’s a human-made system of policies based on priorities and power dynamics which we have the power to change. By embracing a more pluralist approach to economics, we can bridge the gap between the various “economies” within and across countries, and deliberately design policy that is regenerative and distributive, as Doughnut Economics argues, orienting our economy towards what truly enables a high quality of life within planetary boundaries.

So the next time you hear a politician claim they are doing something for the economy, whether that be depriving people of healthcare or education, increasing prices through tariffs or slashing regulations, make sure you ask, which economy?

The post The Myth of “The Economy” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daragh Cogley.

Image by Anne Nygård.

The term “economy” is often used as a catch-all, but the way it’s discussed by politicians and pundits is typically misleading. We frequently hear that “the economy” is growing, but this narrative obscures the fact that most people don’t experience this growth equally. In reality, there are at least two distinct economies in every country: one benefiting the asset-holding class, the “Wall Street” elite who profit from inflation, protectionism, and stagnant wages, and another for renters and workers on “Main Street,” who are squeezed from both ends. This divide is even more pronounced on the global stage, where economies in the Global South subsidise the prosperity of the Global North through unequal exchange and debt servicing.

Recognizing that we are not all part of the same economy is key to understanding how the prosperity of the few and the suffering of the many are two sides of the same coin. The mechanisms of wealth transfer from the productive economy (Main Street) to the extractive economy (Wall Street) are central to shaping policies that prioritise sustainable development, redistribution, and collective well-being, rather than speculation and accumulation.

Segmenting the economy makes sense, it’s a tactic employed by top-level marketers worldwide, yet economists typically overlook it. Acknowledging the multiple, sometimes antagonistic, “economies” allows us to better understand political decisions, especially when we consider which segment benefits from each policy. For example, policies like tariffs or the dismantling of public services in the US, and Starmer’s disability cuts, are designed to enrich a small group of asset holders through extractive wealth transfers, privatization, monopolization, and rent-seeking, rather than improving the welfare of the general population. This neoliberal strategy, characterised by deregulation, privatization, and cuts to public spending, aims to colonise the economy and siphon wealth from the working majority to the asset holders, where it speculates and accumulates, rather than being spent in the productive economy, where it could stimulate growth through the higher propensity of the working class to consume.

During the pandemic, the economic split became especially clear. While millions lost jobs and struggled to pay rent, and the ´essential workers´, who uncoincidentally were the worst treated and lowest paid, kept the economy from collapsing, yet have since become poorer. On the other hand, the stock market on Wall Street soared and billionaire wealth hit new heights as newly created public money was funnelled into corporations through novel mechanisms like corporate bond buying. Since 2020, the richest five men in the world doubled their fortunes, while five billion people globally became poorer. The idea that a rising tide lifts all boats has proven to be a myth. Politicians still preach that if we grow the economy, everyone will benefit eventually – the old trickle-down economics story, but even the IMF has shown this is a lie. When the income share of the richest 20% increases, overall economic growth actually tends to decline, “suggesting that the benefits do not trickle down”. In other words, making the rich richer doesn’t make society richer; it typically does the opposite.

So, who is “the economy” really growing for? Take GDP, often treated as the ultimate scoreboard of success. A country can have strong GDP growth while most of its citizens struggle as GDP fails to show who captures that growth. Are gains going to regular people or just to corporate profits and asset owners? According to the World Inequality Report, the top 1% captured 38% of all global wealth growth since 1995, while the bottom half received just 2%.

After the 2008 financial crisis central banks deployed quantitative easing (QE), essentially creating new money to buy up financial assets and stimulate asset price growth, rather than stimulating demand in the productive economy. Stock prices rebounded, benefiting the 1%, who according to Oxfam own 43% of the world’s financial assets, and enriching vulture investors who could then accumulate undervalued assets, in particular properly, but wage growth for ordinary people remained stagnant and purchasing power continued to decrease, particularly in the increasingly concentrated housing market where people routinely pay over 50% of their salaries on rent. This pattern repeated during the pandemic, as central banks funnelled new money directly into BlackRock-managed corporate bonds, enabling corporations to buy up property and stressed assets, extracting further wealth from “Main Street” to Wall Street.

French economist Thomas Piketty demonstrated that such outcomes are no accident. In his research on inequality, he found that wealth tends to concentrate at the top when returns on capital (like stocks and property) outpace overall growth. In most economies, returns on wealth (5–7%) consistently exceed economic growth (1–3%) and so, over time, “the vast majority of wealth” ends up in the hands of a small minority. We see this in today’s economy: CEOs, shareholders, landlords and monopoly owners enjoy record gains as prices soar and the stock market booms, while median wages barely budge, representing a decrease in purchasing power and real wages and more wealth transfers from the productive economy to the extractive economy.

In Ireland, my home, which I and swathes of other young people have been forced to leave en masse due to scandalously high rents, homeowners own 97% of all wealth, while renters, around 30% of the population and rising, hold just 3%. While not all homeowners are wealthy, it is the rise of rentier capitalism, where wealth is extracted from the rest of society through passive ownership of essential goods like housing, that defines the “extractive economy.” Here, profits accumulate in the hands of large landlords and institutional investors, with landlords owning over 100 properties now controlling 22% of Dublin’s rental market, a significant increase from 5% in 2016, while 26 landlords, companies, or investment firms each own more than 500 residential properties in Ireland, averaging nearly 1,000 units per owner.

These profits are siphoned out of the ‘productive economy,’ where wages are spent, services sustained, and livelihoods supported, and instead reinvested to further concentrate the housing market. This trend is apparent across European cities, where large institutional investors now own a significant portion of the rental stock. In Dublin, 26 landlords or investment firms each own an average of more than 1000 properties, further solidifying their market control. Meanwhile, renters in places like Spain, Ireland, and the UK are routinely spending over 50% of their income on rent, an untenable burden in cities with skyrocketing property values.

Beyond GDP: What Really Matters

Using GDP as shorthand for prosperity hides the real story. Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen reminds us that high GDP growth can go hand-in-hand with poor outcomes in people’s actual lives. For Sen, economic progress is about expanding people’s freedoms and capabilities, ensuring people lead healthy, educated, stable and empowered lives, not just raising income per head. What good is “growth” if it only results in excessive hoarding and waste despite scarcity and need. When essential resources, money included (due to private bank, debt-based money creation), are allocated based only on profit and purchasing power instead of need, they accumulate where they are least likely to be used and most likely to be wasted, resulting in a world where over 343 million people worldwide face acute food insecurity, with nearly 37 million teetering on the edge of famine, the highest numbers in recent history, while in wealthy economies we criminally waste over 1/3 of all food produced and consume more resources than 3-5 planets could sustainably support.

Economists like Thomas Piketty produce distributional national accounts to break down income growth by groups, from the poorest 10% to the richest 0.1%. These tools quantify how economic gains are distributed and can therefore show true progress in the productive economy, rather than misrepresent growth in the extractive economy as progress, when in reality, it is the opposite. Meanwhile, scholars like Peter Turchin offer a macro-historical lens, showing how extreme inequality and “elite overproduction” have historically fuelled social breakdown, suggesting that rising top-heavy income shares are not only unjust or inefficient, but destabilizing.

In the US, such data revealed that for decades nearly all income growth went to the wealthiest, while the bottom 50% became worse off during this neoliberal period of historic offshoring and union-busting. This divergence is laid bare by data from the World Inequality Database and the DINA project, which harmonises tax records, surveys, and national accounts. One of its most staggering findings is that from 1980 to 2020, the top 1% of earners in the United States saw their incomes rise by 205%, while the bottom 50% gained just 1%. This confirms what many experience daily: “the economy” is growing, but it’s growing away from the majority. Meanwhile, the share of wealth held by the top 0.1% is now equivalent to that of the entire bottom 90%, further evidencing how capital accumulation, unregulated finance, and policy capture have hollowed out economic democracy. Trump’s tariffs, while serving as tools of geopolitical leverage, also restrict competition, facilitating greater monopolization of key sectors. This concentration of market power enables corporations to engage in price-making, raising profits for business owners while inflating prices for consumers, particularly in industries like steel, phones, cars, and pharmaceuticals.

Looking at these numbers changes how we think about progress. It’s not enough to tout a 3% GDP rise in the hope that a rising tide lifts all boats, if that 3% only lifts, as Joseph Stiglitz claims, the superyachts. In fact, in Jason Hickel’s “The Divide”, he shows that in order to lift everyone above the $5.50 per day poverty line using growth alone (without redistribution), the global economy would need to grow 175 times its current size. Global GDP is also 1:1 correlated with global energy use, of which over 80% is fossil fuels, meaning our fossil fuel consumption would need to increase by about 140 times, something that is not only impossible due to resource scarcity, but would make us all extinct. Yet, believe it or not, this is actually the dominant economic viewpoint and what our leaders are actually aiming for.

We also have to consider what counts as value in our economy. For too long, if something had a price tag, we assumed it must be valuable, but that’s flawed logic. Economist Mariana Mazzucato argues that “much of what is passing for value creation is just value extraction in disguise”. Financial speculation, monopoly pricing, and other rent-seeking behaviour inflates GDP figures as intrinsically valued public wealth is transferred to private riches. At the same time, genuinely valuable work often goes unpaid or underpaid, particularly by women. Think of a parent raising a child or a nurse tending to the sick. The “official” economy simply assumes that families will raise children, neighbours will support each other, and someone will care for the vulnerable – all without pay or recognition. Yet without this hidden labour, the formal market economy would grind to a halt. Nancy Fraser warns that today’s financialised capitalism is even consuming the social foundations “like a tiger that eats its own tail,” creating a systemic “crisis of care” as serious as our ecological crisis.

The Global South Experience

This divide between two economies isn’t only within wealthy countries, it’s global. The same patterns of inequality play out on the world stage. During the 1980s, many Latin American countries went through a brutal austerity period known as the “lost decade.” Under pressure from foreign lenders and the IMF, governments slashed spending on education, healthcare, and subsidies in order to service debts. The result? Growth for creditors, but mass suffering for ordinary Latin Americans: rising poverty, unemployment, and a generation of stunted progress.

Across Africa, similarly, IMF policy conditions attached to loans forced painful adjustments. Countries that took IMF loans often had to cut public sector jobs, remove support for farmers, and privatise essential services. A recent study confirms that these structural reform conditions increased poverty, as they “raise unemployment, lower government revenue, and increase the costs of basic services” for the public. Once again, one economy’s “rescue plan” was another economy’s hardship. Western financiers got their repayments, western economies got cheap access to labour, commodities and raw materials, while communities in borrower countries endured decaying schools and clinics and a loss of economic sovereignty and public wealth. Today, many impoverished African governments spend more each year servicing debt than on health or education for their people.

This gutting of public services, in particular, the redistributive power of in-kind benefits like education and healthcare, which according to DINA can equal 30% of a poor household’s income, was effectively erased, entrenching inequality not only in earnings but in access to life itself, and instead allowing parasitic private companies to step in and profit the destitution of others. This appears to be the goal in the US today, as USAID and Public Education are defunded and the public sector, including healthcare, is gutted further. Undoubtedly causing harm to “the economy” whilst enriching Trump’s cronies.

The global economy operates on a multi-tiered basis, with countries and regions classified as the Core, Periphery, and Semi-Periphery. In the Core, asset holders, creditors, and multinational corporations accrue vast benefits from trade and finance. Meanwhile, in the Periphery, the ‘have-nots’ find their wealth extracted, where, in countries like the DRC, it’s possible to be amongst the resource richest countries on Earth and the financially poorest.

Scholars like Fadhel Kaboub note how wealth extraction continues in new forms. Rich countries import high-volumes of underpriced, raw materials and commodities from the Global South, while exporting low-volumes of high-priced goods to the global south, whilst simultaneously demanding debt repayments to pay for them, leading to massive wealth transfers and a lopsided flow of labour, energy and resources. According to Jason Hickel’s research, this process of “unequal exchange” translates to a drain of $2.2 trillion from developing countries each year, enough to end extreme poverty dozens of times over. This echoes the old colonial pattern: profits accumulate in London, Paris or New York, while the global south is left with extreme poverty, polluted ecosystems, sweatshop wages and unsustainable debts.

Rethinking “The Economy”

It’s time to retire the myth of a singular economy that treats everyone equally. We need to start talking about which economy we mean and who wins or loses in each. A more honest economics would focus on distribution and well-being by long-term planning and policy, not just short-term profit-oriented production and aggregate growth. Governments can begin by adopting new metrics: for instance, using distributional national accounts alongside GDP to track how income and wealth are divided alongside measuring well-being and environmental health as key indicators of progress.

Policy must shift away from prioritizing investor confidence and stock market indices, focusing instead on bolstering Main Street. This can be achieved through progressive reforms, including living wages, universal basic services (UBS), and green job guarantees. Programs like UBI and public housing should be implemented as part of a broader strategy to reorient the economy. For example, cities like Vienna or Copenhagen have introduced public housing initiatives which consistently place them atop City liveability indexes. In addition, windfall taxes on large corporate profits and wealth taxes on billionaires can generate revenue for such investments, promoting economic stability and equity. These reforms would be paid for through progressive monetary policy, eliminating the need for austerity measures that disproportionately harm the working class

The trillions created by central banks through quantitative easing and corporate bond buying could be redirected from what Keynes describes as the ‘casino economy’ and toward the productive one where money would circulate rather than speculate and accumulate, building green infrastructure, resilient food-systems or funding healthcare and education, and rather than the austerity being suggested by the likes of Musk & Starmer; debt relief and public investment should be the go-to tools for international financial institutions, so that global growth means growth in the areas which lead to shared prosperity, not just capital accumulation, excess, inequality and overshoot.

The “economy” is not a monolithic, natural force as economists would have you believe, it’s a human-made system of policies based on priorities and power dynamics which we have the power to change. By embracing a more pluralist approach to economics, we can bridge the gap between the various “economies” within and across countries, and deliberately design policy that is regenerative and distributive, as Doughnut Economics argues, orienting our economy towards what truly enables a high quality of life within planetary boundaries.

So the next time you hear a politician claim they are doing something for the economy, whether that be depriving people of healthcare or education, increasing prices through tariffs or slashing regulations, make sure you ask, which economy?

The post The Myth of “The Economy” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daragh Cogley.

Photo by Karl Fredrickson

Many of us start our morning with a cup of coffee (or several). It’s easy to take for granted. But where does it come from?

Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee, but it was first cultivated commercially in 15th century Yemen. In fact, the word “coffee” is derived from the Arabic qahwa, as Yemenis called it. And “mocha” originates from Yemen’s al-Mokha port, where coffee was first shipped.

Coffee is just one of the countless contributions that Arab culture has brought to our everyday lives. As we commemorate National Arab American Heritage Month this April, it’s also worth recognizing the contributions of the over 3.5 million Arab Americans who strengthen our nation.

At first sip, Yemeni coffee brings communities together. I witnessed this recently at a Yemeni coffee house in Sacramento, where I heard people speaking Arabic, Spanish, and English, and observed college students working on their laptops next to older people who’d just returned from a protest wearing “Hands Off Social Security” t-shirts.

Yemeni coffee is known for its natural sweetness and its distinct addition of spices, like cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger. The Yemeni coffee I tasted unlocked layers of flavor and deeper meanings as well — a source of cultural identity under threat from ongoing war.

Yemeni coffee houses are sprouting up all over the country — like Qamaria Yemeni Coffee Company, a popular chain founded by Yemeni entrepreneurs with locations in Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Texas, and California.

Qahwah House, another chain founded by a Yemeni immigrant, operates dozens of stores, including in Illinois, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Michigan  — home to the nation’s largest population of Yemeni Americans.

As Mohamed Algushaa, founder of Aldar Cafe in Memphis, told Bon Appétit, “Yemeni coffee is our identity.”

In a time-honored tradition, Yemeni coffee houses offer pots of coffee (and tea) to be shared among friends, lovers, family, and colleagues well into the late evening. This promotes a more communal experience. After all, catch-up sessions and spirited political debates cannot easily be contained in a commuter cup.

Yemeni coffee houses also place a premium on the aesthetic, blending tradition with modern design. Many feature mosaic tiles, arches inspired by famous mosques in Yemen, and embroidered cushions.

With each sip of aromatic coffee and bite of sweets at these coffee houses, we learn more about Yemen’s proud people and rich history beyond the prevailing mainstream narrative, which demonizes Yemeni people by routinely equating them with racist tropes.

That’s something other Arab Americans like myself know all too well, and continue to confront.

Through these coffee houses, Yemeni Americans preserve a culture threatened by decades of war, including the U.S.-backed, Saudi and UAE-led bombing campaign that killed hundreds of thousands from 2015 until 2022. And since March, ongoing U.S. airstrikes have escalated, killing over 100 people and injuring hundreds more in what are likely war crimesagainst civilians.

These conflicts have ravaged the country, which suffers “one of the world’s worst protracted humanitarian crises — a crisis defined by hunger, deprivation, and now, a worrying escalation,” observed a United Nations representative.

Such challenging circumstances directly impact the farmers and their coffee bean harvests, not to mention most Yemenis trying to survive and make a living. The most fundamental way to preserve their culture is to stop the bombings.

Yemen is more than an unending war zone or the subject of Signalgate intrigue. It’s home to millions of families, unique biodiversity, and several UNESCO World Heritage Sites, including the Old City of Sana’a, which has been continuously inhabited for over 2,500 years. 

Despite the profound difficulties, we should raise our coffee cups to the resilient Yemeni people who first brought us this ubiquitous beverage and to the Yemeni Americans who carry on their traditions.

May they bring us all together to share a much-needed pot in peace.

The post Each Cup of Coffee You Drink is a Celebration of Arab-American History appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Farrah Hassen.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I recall seeing a sign in a yard in my small hometown of around 12,000 residents. “No matter where you are from,” it said, “we’re glad you are our neighbor.”

It was positioned defiantly, facing a Trump sign that had been plunged into the neighbor’s yard across the street. It poignantly illustrated the tensions in my rural Ohio town, which — like many similar communities — has experienced a rapid influx of immigrants over the last 20 years.

The sign’s sentiment was simple yet profound. I found myself wondering then, as I wonder now, when compassion had become so complicated. It seems everyone has become preoccupied arguing over the minutiae of immigration that they’ve missed the most glaring and essential point: We are neighbors.

While writing this piece, I gathered studies and prepared a detailed analysis of the ways immigrants have transformed and revitalized the economies of the Rust Belt. I was going to explain how immigrants have helped fill vacant housing and industry in this region’s shrinking cities to reverse the toll of population decline.

I gathered statistics showing the economic growth and revitalization that’s happened as immigrants have brought flourishing small businesses to their new communities. Like: Despite making up only around 14 percent of the U.S. population, immigrants own 18 percent of small businesses with employees — and nearly a quarter of small businesses without employees. (And immigrants in Rust Belt cities are even more likely to be entrepreneurs.)

Small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy, a truth so widely acknowledged that it bridges the ever-growing partisan divide. Both Vice President JD Vance and former Vice President Kamala Harris have promoted the critical role of small businesses in economic flourishing.

I was going to tell a story about Joe, a vendor at my local flea market. He and other vendors were heavily averse to migrants purchasing the dilapidated building from the previous owner. Now they laud the building’s new management and improved conditions.

I was going to describe the experiences of my recently immigrated high school peers, who sometimes fell asleep in class from sheer exhaustion after working night shifts at meatpacking plants and attending school for seven hours the next day.

I was going to explain why communities not only benefit from immigrants, but need them.

Without immigrants, I learned, U.S. communities would lose the nearly $1 trillion of state, local, and federal taxes that immigrants contribute annually. This number is almost $300 billion more than immigrants receive in government benefits.

Without immigration, the U.S. working-age population is projected to decline by approximately 6 million over the next two decades — a shift that would carry significant consequences, especially for the Social Security system. Sustained population growth is critical to preserving a balanced ratio of workers contributing to Social Security for every beneficiary receiving support.

As immigration is expected to become the sole driver of U.S. population growth by 2040, restrictive immigration policies threaten to undermine this vital program, as a cornerstone of the American social safety net. With broad public support for strengthening Social Security, embracing immigration is not just beneficial — it is essential to ensuring the program’s long-term stability and success.

I was prepared to comb through every dissent in an effort to prove why our neighbors are deserving of empathy and compassion. But none of these answers address the larger, more urgent question: When did being neighbors cease to be enough?

Most Americans still tell pollsters immigration is good for their communities and reject cruel deportations, especially those that separate families, target people without criminal records, or penalize people who came here as young children.

My rural Ohio town, and countless communities like it, are slowly learning the most important lesson about this supposedly complicated issue: Compassion doesn’t need to be complicated.

The post Immigrants Are Our Neighbors, Isn’t That Enough? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Meredith Lehman.

Naming an American Pope would likely place the American Church in the heat of the current battle, undoubtedly enraging some Catholic conservatives that supported Trump last November while emboldening liberals and the left to raise their voices of opposition much higher – not just with political fervor but with something resembling theological and Scriptural gravitas. There are some amazing candidates to choose from – including 9 US cardinals that are part of the so-called Conclave of 138 electors, giving an American Pope a strictly mathematical possibility of 6.8% of being chosen. In fact, the odds are much lower. Given US domination of worldwide Catholicism, and the world generally, there’s been a long-held assumption that choosing a non-American Pope is important symbolically,  as a sign of the church’s own willingness to cast off the jackboot of Western colonialism.

But there’s been a counter-movement of sorts in recent years that could well defy these time-worn expectations. Pope Francis, the first Latin American Pope, was a welcome choice in 2013, but his selection wasn’t expected, either. Even more shocking, perhaps, Irish-born Cardinal Sean O’Malley, then the Archbishop of Boston, and a long-time hero to the Hispanic Catholic laity, was also given serious consideration as Pope. So traditional nationality considerations, while not by any means moot, may not carry the day.

O’Malley, because of his age and resignation from the Boston Archdiocese last year, is no longer formally a part of the Conclave that elects the next Pope. But that may actually boost his chances further. Of the 9 American cardinals theoretically in contention, he’s the prelate that was closest to Pope Francis, with whom he shares a religious pedigree. O’Malley is a Capuchin priest in the Franciscan Order, whose primary mission – indeed, only mission – is humble service to the poor. Pope Francis, an Argentinian whose given name was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, chose the papal name “Francis” to celebrate the legacy of St. Francis of Assisi, the same inspiration behind O’Malley’s Franciscan order. In part due to that affinity, after his ascension, Francis assigned O’Malley a number of key roles at the Vatican, which raised the American cardinal visibility and stature still further. While no formal line of succession exists, the Irish-born prelate may be considered the “first among equals” when it comes to American-born candidates for Pope.  The upshot?  While there are plenty of top Italian candidates – and several are considered favorites – no one would be completely shocked or surprised were O’Malley to emerge from the pack triumphant.

There are some really powerful reasons for naming O’Malley, who is widely regarded in the US as the sentimental favorite among liberal and left-wing Catholics, especially Hispanics, given his long history of forceful advocacy on behalf of undocumented immigrants, as well as minors that were abused by Catholic priests. O’Malley oversaw the troubled Boston Archdiocese following the forced retirement of Cardinal Bernard Law, a towering figure in the American church who was found to have covered up the sexual abuse of thousands of children by hundreds of priests ostensibly in his care. Law took over the Archdiocese in 1984 and fancied himself a mini-Pontiff, probably thinking he might one day be named Pope himself.  But his earthly power never reached that of his predecessor bishops to whom politicians had regularly bent their will in Boston for decades. Law, a diehard conservative, exhorted the state legislature to pass bans on abortion and public funding for parochial schools – and he failed miserably on both counts. The church had already evolved demographically and politically and had largely soured on Law’s brand of Catholic orthodoxy. When the abuse crisis struck, and Law was exposed, having shuttled accused priests around the diocese to escape judgment, his fall was swift. By the time O’Malley arrived, the Archdiocese had fallen into disgrace. Many doubted it would ever recover, but thanks to O’Malley, who reached out to church victims and orchestrated generous settlements of their claims, it did. Under his nearly twenty-year reign, the Archdiocese has rebounded and its ranks have grown. Nearly everyone credits O’Malley’s forceful but unassuming style and his forthrightness about past Church abuses for Boston’s diocese’s spiritual renewal.

That said, it’s O’Malley history as a champion of immigrant rights dating to his years as a young priest in the Archdiocese of Washington, DC that really sets him apart from nearly all the other candidates. O’Malley, who studied and became fluent in Spanish as well as Portuguese, championed the plight of undocumented Salvadorans in the late 1980s who were fleeing the US-based counterinsurgency war of terror in their native land. O’Malley didn’t just preach – he got his hands dirty. The Hispanic Catholic Center whose founding he spearheaded became a critical reception point for Salvadoran refugees and a source of Spanish-speaking employment referrals and health services that allowed the refugees and their families to get stabilized. Washington, DC wasn’t officially a sanctuary city – but O’Malley’s parish, Shrine of the Sacred Heart, in Columbia Heights, where thousands of refugees lived and worked under the threat of arrest and deportation, almost certainly was. He not only pushed back against local immigration authorities, he also pushed his church to shed its caution and become more vocal and supportive. O’Malley predicted – rightly, of course – that Hispanics would come to dominate the ranks of the US church. And though he was intent on integrating Hispanics and non-Hispanics into common parish worship and lay ministries, he defended demands for the creation of all-Hispanic “national” parishes modeled on the ethnic churches formed by earlier generations of immigrants, including his own Irish ancestors. The shift, while controversial, gave Hispanics greater “ownership” over their own faith experience and empowered a new generation of Hispanic immigrant priests and lay leaders to assume more visible roles in the Church.

Though born in the White heartland of Ohio, O’Malley’s deep immersion in the daily lives and troubles of poor and working class Central Americans in exile made him over time virtually indistinguishable, culturally, from his flock. He became fluent in Spanish as well as Portuguese, and as a Capuchin monk (a division of the Franciscan order) he dressed in a simple brown smock and lived modestly, forswearing the usual emblems of priestly privilege, which further endeared him to his parishioners. Much like El Salvador’s own Oscar Romero, O’Malley became more than a respected and beloved priest. Many considered him an authentic “voice of the people,” who inspired true reverence among those with whom he served and guided, and the thousands to whom he ministered. In retrospect, it’s not hard to see why Pope Francis – with his own modest unassuming style and steadfast dedication to service to the poor – had a special affinity for him.

But O’Malley’s baptism by fire in the nation’s capital in the late 1970s and early 1980s also earned him enormous respect within the US Catholic leadership. He was soon rewarded with elevations to the rank of bishop – first in the Virgin Islands in 1985, and then at the Dioceses of Palm Beach, FL and in 1992, Fall River, MA, before becoming Boston Archbishop in 2003. As always, he made his name by reaching out to the abused and neglected – for example, he opened the first homeless shelters and the first sanctuary for AIDS victims in Palm Beach. But he also continued to focus much of his pastoral work on outreach to the Central America immigrants and refugees that were congregating at Catholic churches virtually everywhere by now. After his elevation to Cardinal, O’Malley began exhorting his fellow bishops to take more vocal public action on immigration, including in 2014, by organizing an unprecedented US-Mexico border protest in Nogales, AZ.  To be sure, O’Malley, as he rose in prominence, could also be restrained in his use of power, and rarely struck the posture of a firebrand.  He sought to bridge the bitter divisions on immigration by acknowledging the rights of nations to control their borders but still insisting that they must do so “justly and humanely,” treating all would be entrants, legal or not, as a “blessing” rather than a “burden,” usually compelled by war and economic circumstances to flee.  Mass deportations, even of alleged criminals and terrorists,  were simply out of the question.

Pope Francis, it turns out, was well aware of O’Malley’s reputation for achieving miracles on difficult and divisive issues facing the Church. After his election as Pope, he asked O’Malley to join his exclusive policy advisory council – one reserved for just 8 cardinals worldwide. A year later, Francis appointed O’Malley to head a New Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, solidifying the church’s commitment to atoning for its past sins – and honoring O’Malley’s leading role in making public amends with generous settlements to the church’s victims. For much of the last decade O’Malley’s name has been bandied about for a number of other top positions at the Vatican that would have added to his influence – for example, a Pontifical commission to redefine the rights and roles of religious orders, including his own. But O’Malley has seemed content to remain in the US. In fact, many Vatican watchers say a man of his temperament and feel for daily ministry would likely chafe in a Rome-based bureaucratic role. But being named Pope and placed in charge of the Church’s worldwide flock of 1.4 billion adherents – and growing?  That’s not an offer any Catholic cardinal could refuse.

Still, with so much growth in the church occurring in Latin America and Asia, most observers consider O’Malley’s possible ascendance to Pope as something of a long-shot. But not all. The church may well decide that 2025 is an extraordinary conjuncture, not just for itself internally, but for its role on the global scene. In 2013, when his name first surfaced as “Pope-able,” O’Malley was asked by reporters how his newfound star status in Rome might affect his Ministry back home. O’Malley, amused, quipped. “I’m hoping it might mean more free dinners in the North End.” It was the Obama years, of course, and a decided shift in the American presidency toward greater openness toward the world – and toward support for environmental protection, social justice and migrants – had left many American Catholic leaders – like their foreign counterparts – hopeful of a positive change in global politics.

That was then.  Today, after Trump’s return to office – and with dark political clouds hovering over Europe and the US – a new mood of sobriety has set in. There’s a dawning sense that the global church needs to step up and meet the challenge of a renegade American president who has the audacity to claim Jesus as his inspiration and God as his personal guardian. Naming an American crusader like O’Malley would likely be perceived as a shot across the bow of the new administration but one coming from within America’s own borders – not from a foreign-born prelate but from a native priest steeped in American cultural traditions. That could pose a unique challenge to Trump, who celebrates nativism at every turn. Trump said he felt deeply honored and blessed to meet Pope Francis back in 2017. Will he listen as respectfully to O’Malley’s insistence that we are bound, Scripturally, to “welcome the Stranger,” and respond to his fellow American’s call  for a “comprehensive” immigration reform that includes a generous legalization program?

This is a Pope “transition” like few before it. Cardinal O’Malley is already 80, which means under church law he is now too old to vote for the next Pope – but he’s not too old to receive the honor himself, should a majority of the electors choose him. In theory, another better-known American cardinal – for example,  Timothy Dolan, the former archbishop of New York and one of America’s most recognized Catholic officials – could get the nod. But Dolan represents the cultural orthodoxy of the past – a mainstream American largely identified with White Catholics. O’Malley, despite his age, reflects the church’s forward-looking quest for unity amid diversity, with Spanish-speakers clearly in the forefront. And while no formal line of papal succession exists, O’Malley seems to represent a natural evolution from the reign of Pope Francis. A priest who never lost his common touch and who still exudes a fervent passion for grassroots ministry.

Other prelates from abroad preaching sympathy for immigrants might not get as fair a hearing among a broad swath of American voters as O’Malley can. Hailing from Ohio, and sporting a full gray beard and pasty Irish complexion, O’Malley might be the perfect anti-MAGA Catholic populist to go head to toe with the likes of JD Vance and his boss.

It may not happen, but with O’Malley, the church of Rome has a rare opportunity to name a Pontiff that could transform US-Vatican relations for an entire generation. A Pope that can meet the global moment, and compel the world’s leading power – and its president – to humble themselves. It’s a tall order, one that only a man of unshakable faith in himself, his flock, his God – and his country – can possibly handle.  For the Church, it’s a roll of the dice at a time of great foreboding – when extraordinary faith and courage are called for. Are the great Pontiffs of Rome up to the challenge?

The post Could the Next Catholic Pope Be an American? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stewart Lawrence.

Photograph Source: SergioOren – CC BY 4.0

In Serbia—perhaps the last corner of the world where Brussels’ viceroys, now impotent even within the EU itself, are still inexplicably consulted—stabilocracy has imploded. Along with the collapse of the SNS (the ruling Serbian Progressive Party) regime, the entire political ecosystem that reliably upheld it for twelve years has come crashing down. Not merely because presidents Vučić’s personal fiefdom could only ever thrive amid the wreckage of a state and society left behind by the Siamese twins of today’s Progressives.

Since the 2012 reshuffling within Serbia’s comprador caste, it is they who have assumed the mantle of an anti-popular opposition—parade-ground, parasitic micro-parties with no foothold beyond the polished pavements of Belgrade and Novi Sad, dedicated solely to hoarding public funds and foreign donations. Having an actual membership with opinions, or an electorate that dares to ask questions, is seen as a bothersome liability. Compared to their Twitter posturing, the crude vote-buying of the poor with cooking oil and flour starts to look like genuine concern for the common folk.

This new breath of popular will and democratic stirrings in Serbia is, ironically, the very byproduct of parliamentary collapse into a tycoon-comprador operetta.

In Serbia today, it is no longer difficult to stand with the students and against Vučić—who, much like the final days of America-backed despot Reza Pahlavi before the Iranian Revolution, has managed to unify the most ideologically disparate factions against himself. Yet beyond the tabloid fever dreams of a “color revolution,” festering like boils on the body of a student movement that has assertively emerged as the primary force in Serbian politics, we see a new crop of Iznogouds—opportunists seeking, through OTPOR (an organization from the 1990s supported by American funding against the regime of Slobodan Milošević)-style tactics and the familiar spiral of jungle law and self-humiliation (the only true legacy of the post-Milošević era), to carve out a fatter slice of the pie for a rival comprador-oligarchic dynasty.

The childish notion that Vučić might engineer his own downfall via an obscure so-called “expert government”—a relic of history’s junkyard, now populated by the SNS’s softer, less radical faces spouting anti-corruption rhetoric (à la Ana Brnabić in her early days)—with Đura Macut as a placeholder prime minister and no serious guarantees for real reform, is the latest lifeline pseudo-oppositional circles are offering the regime’s machinery. A feeble bid to defuse the rising social pressure, which has proven to be the only force capable of pushing Vučić’s satraps onto the defensive.

Peddling technocratic shock therapy as a remedy for an acute political crisis—sidestepping the unified demands of the student plenums—while Serbia cries out for republican dialogue and constitutionalism, is an act of civic illiteracy potentially more damaging than the rabble-rousing street politics it pretends to transcend.

These demagogic slogans were first sounded by the leadership of the internal pressure group Stav, emerging from the cloak of Dinko Gruhonjić and, before him, Milenko Perović—himself a financial-bureaucratic lever of Đukanović’s DPS regime and a leading voice of Austro-Slavic, Štedimlija-style racialism at the University of Novi Sad. Together, they had schemed to use a metaphorical hammer on March 15 against student marshals—young people who, with their blood types written on their forearms, were preventing the student body from becoming cannon fodder for anyone’s agenda.

Meanwhile, the foundation-funded pen of Tomislav Marković, who mourned a supposed lack of solidarity from colleagues who promptly distanced themselves from such vile intrigues, had not lifted a finger over the police crackdown on citizen-journalist Srđa Žunić, nor the arrests of peasant protesters from Mačva.

But the ultimate low point of this kind of filth was reached by Peščanik’s resident pamphleteer from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, Stevan Filipović, who, in his polemical screeds, chastises students in tones reeking of clerical-police condescension—everything but the cassock and badge—accusing them of capitulating to youth-corrupting forces, from Putin’s agents to anarcho-syndicalist utopians (a jab clearly aimed at the assemblies behind the Letter to the People of Serbia). And why? Simply because they refuse to cave to the pedantic blackmail of a hollow, petty-bourgeois secular priesthood, which insists on presenting its own political own goals as divinely inspired directives.

Taking a case all the way to Strasbourg—regardless of perfectly legitimate Euroscepticism—is entirely justified given Serbia’s subordinated position within the EU. This is the same EU that celebrates Giolani’s batons and nullifies the electoral will of Romanian citizens. In this light, legal recourse becomes a form of protest against Brussels’ favoritism toward the tentacles of Vučić’s regime—much like the Serbian peasant in Petar Kočić’s tale threatens the feudal lord with taking him “all the way to the Kaiser,” but without the groveling of petitioning the Sultan for protection from the Dahije.

How deeply such unrequited love can sting was revealed during the Tel Aviv excursion of Milorad Dodik, President of Republika Srpska—a man of extraordinary talent for promoting his own tormentors in venues like West Mostar, Washington, Budapest, or among AfD/FPO neo-Nazis under the cloak of phony anti-imperialism. There, he delivered a tribute of nearly one million taxpayer dollars from Republika Srpska to Mark Zell, Trump’s diaspora envoy, to launder his image in front of American patrons even as the genocide in Gaza raged on.

Taken more broadly, Dodik’s toast on foreign soil—the equating of the anti-colonial struggle of Bosnian Serb peasant masses, as historically materialist Milorad Ekmečić understood it, with the Zionist settler project of displacing Palestinian farmers, orchestrated by British imperialism—is more fitting for Kalaj’s synthetic Bosnian nation project than for any patriot of Republika Srpska. It stands as a profound insult to national honor.

They say the path of revolution winds and twists, while the roads of reaction run straight like arrows. Whatever the outcome of the April maneuverings over the formation of the government, I take quiet sustenance from the thought that Vasa Pelagić and Mita Cenić—nineteenth-century Serbian champions of social justice—would be heartened to cast their eyes once more upon their people. We have shown ourselves not so far beneath them after all. And to write off not only the freshmen—who, after the blockade semester, still have at least five years of university ahead of them—but also the wider citizenry, who, after three decades of degradation, have finally tasted a breath of popular democracy, would be like trying to send rivers back to their sources.

Just like the insurgents of the Sretenje Uprising, who refused to hitch Serbia’s fate to the Romanov or Habsburg fleets, instead hacking out a Robinsonian island of liberty, at first stretching only from Belgrade to Aleksinac—despite imperial power projections that extended from Niš to Djibouti, from Ada Ciganlija to the Elbe—so too does our moment insist: every temporary defeat is a step on the staircase toward final upheaval and transformation.

Or, as Bogdan Žerajić (the assassin of the Austro-Hungarian governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, General Marijan Varešanin) consoled himself amid the ruin and disorientation of his time:“Nothing. A trifle. There will be people among the youth, in the indestructible and unconquerable Serbian nation.” 

The post Critics of Serbian Students, From Liberals to Neo-Nazis appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vojislav Durmanović.

A Turkish bus getting a wash on the line between Erzurum and Kars, in eastern Turkey, where Russia and the Ottoman Empire fought an endless series of battles in 1877-78 and in World War I. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.

My original plan for the day was to ride the 16:25 Dogu Express from Erzurum to Kars, and arrive there at 20:27, in time for a late dinner. But what interested me the most that afternoon was exploring the battlefields that lie between Erzurum and Kars, where the fate of one million Armenians might well have been determined.

Ideally, I should have hired a car and driven around the parched, hilly landscape that has seen many battles between the Turks and the Russians (some hilltops have small monuments and plaques). But neither the desk clerks at my hotel nor anything online pointed me toward an available car and driver.

Nor did I see any options for renting a car in Erzurum and returning it in Kars. I could have used a combination of taxis and my bicycle to see some of the battlefields, but I was leery of that, as it was on a road outside Erzurum that the American cyclist Frank Lenz had vanished in 1895 in his bid to become the first man to cycle around the world.

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The dramatic story of his last ride is told in David V. Herlihy’s The Lost Cyclist, which was published in 2010 and given to me for a birthday by my brother-in-law Tom Meyer.

Lenz ran afoul of Kurds in a village outside Erzurum, and apparently the next day they ambushed him on the road and buried his body, which was never found.

In reading the book, I pondered his bad luck to be on the road across eastern Turkey when there were pogroms against the Armenians in the same area at the same time. (To Kurdish villagers, I am sure an American cyclist and Armenians looked about the same.)

So in the end, I bought a ticket to Kars on an intercity bus, and decided that I would see what I could of the intervening battlefields from my bus window.

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Before leaving my hotel, I figured out that the Otogar (bus station) for Erzurum was about six miles north of the city, on the busy road to the airport. I gave myself an hour to find it on my bicycle and followed the directions on my phone, which took me on a small lane through fields outside the city.

At one point I was held up (figuratively, not by Kurds) by a herd of cattle that was grazing on the road. Eventually a shepherd with a stick and a dog came to my rescue, and shooed the cows off the pavement. I carried on and found the Otogar on the side of main highway.

In general, the Turkish bus system shines. Most of the buses are new and well maintained, and porters on board pass out hot tea, free bottles of water and snacks. Above all, Turkish buses seem to go everywhere in the country at all times.

In the course of a day, I am sure there are at least ten buses going between Erzurum and Kars. Perhaps the only challenge of Turkish buses is that they can come and go anonymously from the terminals, and sometimes even their brief stops in the stations can be a bit of a state secret.

In this instance, I had remount my bicycle and ride at top speed across the terminal parking lot, when the bus parking bay changed at the last minute. Then with the driver scouring at me, I had to pack the bike in its bag and load it under the bus.

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I settled into my seat, ready to take in the landscape on the road to Kars, but five minutes outside Erzurum we stopped again, this time at a rest stop so that everyone on board could smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and eat something, while the porter washed down the bus. It explained why the three hour drive to Kars takes four hours on the bus.

To redeem itself for the lost 45 minutes at the rest stop, the bus went right past the arches of the Çobandede Bridge in Köprüköy, which has been standing for almost a millennium (on the caravan route from Tabriz to Erzurum and beyond), and earlier bridges spanning the same stretch of the Aras River.

The approach to Erzurum from Köprüköy might well be mentioned in Xenophon’s Anabasis (his march with the ten thousand to and from the wilds of Cyrus’s Persia), as he writes:

Passing on from thence in four stages of twenty parasangs, they reached a large and prosperous well-populated city, which went by the name of Gymnias, from which the governor of the country sent them a guide to lead them through a district hostile to his own. This guide told them that within five days he would lead them to a place from which they would see the sea, “and,” he added, “if I fail of my word, you are free to take my life.” Accordingly he put himself at their head; but he no sooner set foot in the country hostile to himself than he fell to encouraging them to burn and harry the land; indeed his exhortations were so earnest, it was plain that it was for this he had come, and not out of the good-will he bore the Hellenes.

Many scholars have suggested that Gymnias was Erzurum, or at least close to it, and Xenophon’s harrowing account of his escape from Persia in 399 B.C. was another reason that I was glad I had not rented a car.

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Elsewhere in Köprüköy there was a military memorial to battles that took place around the strategic bridge and town in 1914–18, although from my bus seat I didn’t really know where to look and, besides, was focused on the stone bridge, off to my right.

The night before, I had searched around on Google maps for a link but came up with nothing, which isn’t surprising, as Köprüköy is only marginally bigger than a village. It does have an army base, a train station (for the Dogu Express), and a long military history, as anyone attacking Erzurum from the east (usually the Russians or the Persians) had to cross over the famous bridge (perhaps with a descendant of Xenophon’s guide).

In 1877, on their way to the Aziziye redoubt in Erzurum, the Russians had come this way and fought their way across the bridge. In his account of The Armenian Campaign (published in 1878), Charles Williams (a British war correspondent in 1877) writes:

On my way in I was glad to find that further preparations are being made for another stand, if necessary, at Keuprikeui, near the only big bridge in these parts, which is therefore regarded as a miracle of science and art, and has two names all to itself, for it spans the Praxes under the designation Choban Keupri, or the Shepherd’s bridge. The new works are close to, but slightly in advance of, those erected fifty years ago in the vain attempt to stop the advance of Prince Paskiewitch. There are several battalions here, and the works are well concealed and well placed, while there is one battery of field artillery.

A more significant battle was fought here in January 1916, as the Russians advanced, yet again, toward Erzurum with about 75,000 men (the Ottomans had 65,000).

The Russian general, Nikolai Yudenich, managed to outflank the Ottoman lines strung across the river, bridge, and village, and he inflicted some 20,000 casualties, which sent the Ottomans reeling into the fortified city of Erzurum.

On the internet I managed to download a picture of a melee that shows Russians with swords (even in 1916) breaking through the Ottoman lines. That it was a Turkish defeat may explain why more isn’t made of the 1916 battle.

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From the bus it was harder to distinguish the outlines of the battle of Sarikamis, which is a 90 minute drive to the east from Köprüköy and about 35 miles southwest of Kars.

The new highway linking Erzurum to Kars winds through the hills to the east of Sarikamis, and even on an intercity bus it is easy to see why this was such a strategic pass in the endless wars between the Russians and the Ottomans.

In the defense of Erzurum, it’s a logical chokepoint to keep invaders on the far side of the rolling hills. To anyone defending Kars, what makes the most sense is to begin a defense at the center of this plateau and pass.

There is a war memorial and cemetery in the center of Sarikamis, a small town, but I didn’t see them from my seat, as they were distant from where we stopped. But I did get a good look at the landscape in which the Ottomans suffered one of the worst defeats in a war of endless defeats.

For reasons not entirely clear, except in a mindset that defines war as a series of annihilations, Enver Pasha, then the minister of defense who took temporary command of the 3rd Army, ordered his men to charge up the hillside at Sarikamis in successive waves directly into Russian guns.

It wasn’t a Light Brigade charge in one day, but took place over the course of ten days at year’s end in 1914–15, costing the Ottoman side some 60,000 casualties; this from an army of 90,000.

What made it worse was that in late December 1914, Sarikamis was a bitterly cold snowfield, where many soldiers, on both sides, froze to death in the raw elements.

The Ottomans hoped to drive the Russians back across their border and into Kars, while the Russians sought to bleed the Turkish lines in the snow, thus re-opening a path to Erzurum, from which they had retreated in November 1914 back to Sarikamis.

Perhaps of more significance is the conclusion that the Ottoman defeat is what (along with the Allied landings at Gallipoli) set off the Armenian deportations in April 1915.

One account I read of the battle states: “Thoroughly outmanoeuvred by his Russian rivals, Enver blamed the defeat on Armenians, using some Armenian desertions as a pretext, even though Armenian soldiers and officers in the Ottoman army generally fought loyally and bravely. The Turkish debacle at Sarikamis triggered the Armenian Genocide, which was begun by the Ottoman state on 24 April.”

The post The Bloodlands Between Russia and Turkey appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Matthew Stevenson.

The primary issues of concern include:

Low data quality: The effectiveness of AI largely depends on the quality of the data it uses. If the data is inaccurate or incomplete, the AI’s performance will suffer.

Data quality is crucial in artificial intelligence because it directly impacts AI models’ performance, accuracy, and reliability. Poor data quality is the primary obstacle to deploying and executing artificial intelligence and machine learning projects and operations. “Garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO), a concept familiar to computer users for generations, is just as applicable to AI. If an AI model is of poor quality, inaccurate, or irrelevant, the system’s output will also be of poor quality, inaccurate, or irrelevant.

Even the most sophisticated AI algorithms can produce flawed results, leading to poor performance and failure. A high-quality AI model should aim for accuracy, consistency (meaning that the data follow a standard format and structure to facilitate processing and analysis), completeness (to avoid missing essential patterns and correlations), timeliness, and relevance.

To ensure the AI model is efficient, developers need to collect relevant data, which depends on the choice of sources from which to draw the data. This challenge is compounded by the need to maintain quality and standards to eliminate duplicate or conflicting data. Then, the data must be labeled correctly, a process that can be time-consuming and prone to errors. At the same time, data must be stored to prevent unauthorized access and corruption. Data poisoning is another risk: it refers to a deliberate attack on AI systems, where attackers inject malicious or misleading data into the dataset, resulting in unreliable and even dangerous outputs.

Bias in AI Models

Sometimes, AI can be biased, meaning it might unfairly treat certain groups of people differently. For example, if an AI system is trained on biased data, it may make decisions that discriminate against specific individuals based on factors such as race, gender, or other characteristics.

There are two basic types of bias: explicit and implicit. An explicit bias refers to a conscious and intentional prejudice or belief about a specific group of people. An implicit bias operates unconsciously and can influence decisions without a person realizing it. Social conditioning, the media, and cultural exposure all contribute to these decisions.

Algorithmic bias can creep in because of programming errors, such as a developer unfairly weighting factors in algorithm decision-making based on their own conscious or unconscious biases. For example, indicators like income or vocabulary might be used by the algorithm to discriminate against people of a certain race or gender unintentionally. People can also process information and make judgments based on the data they initially selected (cognitive bias), favoring datasets based on Americans rather than a sampling of populations worldwide.

Bias in AI is not merely a technical issue but a societal challenge, as AI systems are increasingly integrated into decision-making processes in healthcare, hiring, law enforcement, the media, and other critical areas. Bias can occur in various stages of the AI pipeline, especially with data collection. Outputs may be biased if the data used to train an AI algorithm is not diverse or representative of the actual data. For instance, training that favors male and white applicants may result in biased AI hiring recommendations.

Labeling training data can also introduce bias since it can influence the interpretation given to the outputs. The model itself might be imbalanced or fail to consider diverse inputs, favoring majority views over those of minorities.  To make AI more accurate and fairer, researchers need to retrain it regularly. Companies, especially insurers, must ensure that they use accurate, complete, and up-to-date data while also ensuring their models are fair to everyone.

Transparency

Transparency is a key issue, as it can be challenging to explain how AI makes its decisions. This lack of clarity can be a problem for both customers and regulators who want to understand how these systems work. Transparency in AI is essential because it provides a clear explanation for why AI’s decisions and actions occur, allowing us to ensure they are fair and reliable.

Using AI in the workplace can help with the hiring process, but understanding how AI does so without bias can only be achieved if it is transparent. As AI becomes increasingly important in society, business, healthcare, the media, and culture, governments and regulators need to establish rules, standards, and laws that ensure transparency in the use of AI.

Transparency is closely related to Explainable AI (XAI), which allows outsiders to understand why AI is making its decisions. Such explainability builds customer trust. This is referred to as a glass box system, as opposed to a black box system, where the results or outputs from AI are transparent and the reasons for their decisions are known, sometimes even to the system’s developer.

Errors in AI Predictions

AI can sometimes produce incorrect results, known as false positives or false negatives. This happens because the data used to train AI systems is often imperfect, leaving room for errors. It’s human nature to overestimate a technology’s short-term effect and underestimate its long-term effect. This tendency certainly applies to AI predictions. The question, of course, is how long the long run is.

The rise of generative AI confronts us with key questions about AI failure and how we make sense of it. As most experts (and many users) acknowledge, AI outputs, as astonishing and incredibly powerful as they can be, may also be fallible, inaccurate, and, at times, completely nonsensical. A term has gained popularity in recognition of this fallibility—“AI hallucination.”

The scholar and bestselling author Naomi Klein argued in an article for the Guardian in May 2023 that the term “hallucination” only anthropomorphized a technical problem and that, “by appropriating a word commonly used in psychology, psychedelics and various forms of mysticism, the tech-industry is feeding the myth that by building these large language models, we are in the process of birthing an animate intelligence.”

Nonetheless, all major AI developers, including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, have publicly addressed this issue, whether it is called a hallucination or not. For instance, an internal Microsoft document stated that “these systems are built to be persuasive, not truthful,” allowing that “outputs can look very realistic but include statements that aren’t true.” Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has admitted that it’s a problem “no one in the field seems to have solved.”  That means AI outputs cannot be entirely relied upon for their predictions and need to be verified by reliable sources.

Privacy Concerns

In many cases, real data cannot be used to train AI due to privacy issues. Instead, fake data is created based on real data, which can lead to inaccuracies and lower performance in the AI system.

AI privacy refers to the protection of personal or sensitive information that is collected, used, shared, or stored by AI systems. One reason AI poses a greater data privacy risk than other digital technology is the sheer volume of information AI needs to be trained on: terabytes or petabytes of text, images or video which often includes sensitive data such as healthcare information, personal data from social media sites, personal finance data, and biometric data used for facial recognition.

As more sensitive data are being collected, stored, and transmitted, the risks of exposure from AI models rise. “This [data] ends up with a big bullseye that somebody’s going to try to hit,” Jeff Crume, an IBM Distinguished Engineer, explained in an IBM Technology video.

Data leakage from an AI model can occur through the accidental exposure of sensitive data, such as a technical security vulnerability or procedural security error. Data exfiltration, on the other hand, is the theft of data. An attacker, hacker, cybercriminal, foreign adversary, or other malicious actor can choose to encrypt the data as part of a ransomware attack or use it to hijack corporate executives’ email accounts.

It’s not data exfiltration until the data are copied or moved to some other storage device under the attacker’s control. Sometimes, the attack may come from an insider threat—an employee, business partner, or other authorized user who intentionally or unintentionally exposes data due to human error, poor judgment, ignorance of security controls, or out of disgruntlement or greed.

The Future of AI in Fraud Detection

As AI technology improves, it is expected to become more effective at detecting and preventing complex fraud. For example, let’s consider phone insurance fraud.  Phone insurance fraud, also known as device insurance fraud (because it can refer to fraud involving laptops and tablets as well as smartphones), occurs when someone intentionally makes a false claim on their device’s insurance company, falsely asserting that their device was lost, stolen, or damaged, or exaggerating the extent of the damage.

One survey showed that 40 percent of all insurance claims are fraudulent. For companies, fraud can result in significant losses and increase the cost of premiums for consumers. Rates of fraud incidents have increased significantly. A survey by Javelin Strategy Research found that fraudulent claims on mobile phones increased by 63 percent between 2018 and 2019.

Phone theft has also become more sophisticated and organized, leading to phishing attacks and social engineering used to access stolen devices and perpetrate fraud and false claims. In some instances, phone owners will buy multiple policies on the same phone and then claim theft, loss, or damage to obtain money for the phone from numerous insurance providers.

There’s another type of fraud to be aware of. According to Jonathan Nelson, director of product management for Hiya, an insurance and finance provider, insurers need to be mindful of how their customers are being misled or unwittingly targeted. “The most common thing that you’ll experience when you’re becoming a victim of… an automobile, insurance, or warranty scam, is what we call illegal lead generation. Effectively, the goal is to manipulate the recipient into signing up with a different third-party insurance company [that] may or may not be aware of the fact that their new customers are coming through this illegal sort of scam-like channel.”

AI to the Rescue

One promising development is the use of deep learning models, which can quickly compare new insurance claims against millions of past claims. These models look for unusual patterns that might suggest fraud, such as strange damage descriptions, multiple claims from the same person, or inconsistencies in location data.

These advanced models don’t just follow fixed rules; they learn and improve with every new piece of data they analyze. For example, they can examine pictures of damaged phones, compare them with large databases, spot signs of image manipulation, and assess whether fraud may be involved.

The Internet of Things will enhance these fraud prevention efforts by connecting data from various devices, such as smartphones and wearables. This will allow insurers to gather real-time information about how devices are used, where they are located, and any unusual activity. Additionally, new platforms are being developed to help insurance companies share anonymous data on fraud, making it easier to identify repeat offenders and stay ahead of evolving fraud tactics.

As AI continues to develop, striking a balance between innovation and ethical considerations will be key. While AI has the potential to revolutionize fraud detection and many other industries, it is essential to address biases, improve data quality, and ensure transparency. With proper oversight and responsible implementation, AI can be a powerful tool that benefits both businesses and consumers.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

The post How Can We Balance AI’s Potential and Ethical Challenges? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Gaurav Mittal.

Image by Mohamed Nohassi.

If there’s one truth about the nuclear power industry, it would be that it is persistent. Despite the fact that nuclear power has been drastically curtailed in a few countries and is being rejected for economic and other reasons in many others, the industry continues to push its product as if it had never been the pariah it should be. Like an annoying mosquito, it buzzes in and out of the body politic, just waiting for an exposed place to suck blood from that body. Sometimes this means convincing individuals and associations identified with what is known as the green energy movement that nuclear energy is an affordable, safe and clean way to meet rising energy demands. Other times, it worms its way into agreements with foreign governments looking to move beyond petroleum-based energy sources. Indeed, Iran is probably the only nation being called on to end its nuclear energy program. In the United States, another of its methods is to charm, cajole and otherwise force itself into conversations in state governments looking for ways to cut their carbon footprint. It only takes one or two well placed state politicians to be receptive and the next thing the people know is they will be paying for nuclear reactors they neither asked for or want. Unless New Englanders do something, this is the situation they will find themselves in before they know it.

Recently, the Vermont news organ VTDigger published an article alerting its readers to the fact that Vermont governor Phil Scott and some other officials in various New England governments are considering the use of nuclear power to provide the region’s future energy needs. Although the discussions are in the early stages, it is still a good time to begin developing opposition to an energy source that has been resoundingly rejected by Vermonters. This is especially true given that the omnibus climate bill that Scott presented at the beginning of the Vermont 2025 legislative session would change the current Vermont Clean Energy Standard. This standard requires all of Vermont’s energy to be from renewable sources by 2035. The nuclear industry and its allies in the public sector—who include Governor Scott—want to redefine nuclear power as renewable. Indeed, Scott’s proposed changes would reclassify nuclear power as a renewable energy source, something that it most clearly isn’t.

From 1972 until 2014, a General Electric-designed reactor operated in Vernon, VT. At its peak it provided up to a third of Vermont’s energy needs. Like many other reactors the plant, known as the Yankee Nuclear Reactor, was the target of many protests aimed at shutting it down. Although I did not participate in the movement to shut down the Yankee plant, I was quite involved in similar efforts in California and participated in meetings, rallies and at least one direct action during the campaign to close the Diablo Canyon plant near San Luis Obispo, CA. I also attended a protest at New Hampshire’s Seabrook plant. I do know several Vermonters who did participate in the movement to close the Yankee Plant in Vernon; most of them remain completely opposed to bringing nuclear power back into Vermont. Like them, I remain unconvinced that nuclear power is safe, cheap or environmentally friendly—green, if you will.

As has been reported in Counterpunch and elsewhere, the nuclear energy industry spends a lot of money in its efforts to convince politicians bureaucrats to participate in its boondoggle. In Vermont, it seems reasonable to assume that some of that money is already being spent on convincing politicians and regulators to change Vermont’s renewable energy definition and add nuclear energy to that definition. This would then allow the building of nuclear reactors in the state. The product the industry is currently pushing are known as SMRs or small modular reactors. According to the industry, these reactors are less expensive than the giant science-fiction type building once synonymous with nuclear energy. Although the units are considerably smaller the original cost estimates are usually exceeded exponentially. History tells us that this usually the case in the industry, One typical example of this can be found in a July 20, 2023 article in The Nation magazine by writer and environmental activist Joshua Frank. In that article, Frank describes a proposed SMR project by NuScale corporation in Utah that saw its cost estimates go from an estimate of $55 a megawatt hour to $89 a megawatt hour. Neither price includes the original four billion dollar subsidy from US taxpayers—such subsidies are a fairly standard practice in the building of nuclear reactors. In addition, it seems fairly reasonable to assume that the estimated price of $89 a megawatt hour made in 2023 is considerably higher than that in 2025. After all, what isn’t a lot more expensive now than it was two years ago?

Equally, if not more importantly, is the carbon footprint created in the process of building and maintaining these reactors. In other words, the uranium mining, the plant construction and the disposal of radioactive waste (which has a half-life in the millions of years). On a more mundane and practical plane, even if these plants should be approved, it would take years, maybe even a couple decades to build them and get them in operation. That time estimate does not include potential delays—delays which almost certainly would lead to higher costs. Vermont and the rest of New England would be better off using that time to develop and improve renewable sources from wind, sun and water than bowing to the misrepresentations, cajolery, and bribes of the nuclear power industry in its never-ending attempt to sell its poison genie.

The post Nuclear Power Reactors in Vermont? Not Again appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

The church that Francis inherited was then locked in a profound crisis and was being rapidly deserted by lifelong Catholics, even in traditional strongholds. His predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI were staunch conservatives in both their theological and political leanings. In his efforts to stamp out the ‘heresy’ of liberation theology—a ‘preferential option for the poor’ that propelled a powerful Catholic left across Latin America in the 1970s and 80s—the strident anti-communist John Paul had aligned Rome with US President Ronald Reagan’s bloody counter-insurgency and did not flinch even when US-armed militias raped and massacred grassroots Catholic clergy. Indeed, some of his bishops are said to have provided lists of potential targets to the right-wing death squads.

Serving an apprenticeship as John Paul’s doctrinal henchman, Benedict assumed the papacy after leading a purge of left-wing clergy: his own reign was marked by hysteria around creeping secularism and women’s demand for equality in the church. Benedict pushed an early version of the ‘culture wars’, encouraging an obsessive focus among conservative clergy on sexuality, abortion rights and the traditional family. This was part of a calculated effort to exorcise the social justice focus of the liberationists.

Their successful prosecution of a war on the Catholic left endeared both of Francis’s predecessors to church conservatives, but outside these narrow circles they are most popularly associated with a series of profound scandals that, by 2013, threatened the church’s very existence. The best-known of these exploded after a series of revelations about the massive scale of clerical sexual abuse, compounded by proof that—for all their pious moralizing around sexuality—both popes had played central roles in covering up these crimes and shielding perpetrators from justice. The Boston Globe concluded that John Paul had been ‘guilty of one of the biggest institutional cover-ups of criminal activity in history.’

On its own the disclosures around massive, endemic sexual abuse rocked the church internationally, but they were compounded by shocking financial scandals. The release of the Panama Papers in 2016 revealed that Rome kept tens of millions in offshore tax havens. The twilight days of Benedict’s papacy saw further, sensational revelations of the deep financial corruption at the heart of the Vatican. To take just one example from the Vatileaks disclosures, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, living in a ‘princely dwelling’ in Rome with a nun serving as housekeeper, was found to have ‘redirected tens of millions of euros from a foundation meant to support the Bambino Gesu paediatric hospital in Rome and used the funds to renovate his apartment instead’. Bertone travelled around Rome by helicopter, running up a tab of nearly €24,000 in 2012. The church’s global ‘Peter’s Pence’ charity—meant to be used ‘for the relief of those most in need’—was revealed to be a financial ‘black hole’, with nearly 70% of its collection handed over to maintain the ‘Vatican bureaucracy’. There were dozens of similar exposures.

The Politics of Church ‘Renewal’

All of this passed under Francis’s predecessors without a murmur of complaint, and it meant that he inherited an institution in freefall. There were other pressing challenges: at a time when membership was declining in the US and elsewhere in increasingly secular former Catholic countries in the West (like Ireland and Spain), across Latin America—where Catholicism had long exercised a monopoly—and in Africa, Rome faced increasing competition from evangelical Protestants, Pentecostals and other sects. Benedict’s rout of liberation theology and the hierarchy’s reassertion of command only created new problems: in Brazil and elsewhere believers deserted the stale ritual of elite-led Catholicism en masse.

Catholics who clung to their faith despite the revelations looked to the new pope—an outsider, the first from Latin America—to clean house and reset the church’s crumbling foundations. Progressives within its ranks saw an opportunity not only to return to the spirit of Vatican II—to ‘open the window and let in some fresh air’—but, crucially, to take up root-and-branch reform of the church’s approach to sexuality, and correct the longstanding subordination of women in Catholic religious and lay practice.

Rhetorically at least, Francis committed himself to a vaguely-defined project of ‘renewal’: the church needed to ‘come out of herself and go to the peripheries’, to become a ‘field hospital for the faithful’. He abandoned the opulence of his predecessors for a [relatively] modest daily routine, and pledged to root out corruption and address the legacy of endemic sexual abuse.

In the end the results never matched even the most modest expectations of those who looked to Francis for reform. Francis took steady aim at the most flagrant corruption (though without touching the church’s vast accumulated wealth) and was not slow to oust church bureaucrats who stood in his way, but he was far more hesitant in facing up to the church’s history of abuse, or to its position on sexuality more generally. Survivors of sexual abuse were bitterly disappointed at his unwillingness to move decisively: Boston survivor Anne Barrett Doyle characterised Francis’s inability to deliver on his promises as a ‘tremendous disappointment’ that would ‘forever tarnish his legacy’.

Quickly it became clear that there would be no fundamental change in women’s place in the church; there were gestures indicating a more ‘compassionate approach’ to lesbians and gay men in the Church but, as one commentator has put it, ‘in doctrinal terms Francis remained firmly within the letter of existing canon law’. This massive gap between rhetoric and substance is conspicuous across Francis’s record around gender and sexuality.

While an increasingly belligerent Catholic right seethed with outrage over the occasional gestures coming out of Francis’s papacy—his willingness to regard lesbians and gay men as human beings worthy of compassion—what is most striking is the degree to which Francis held the line on Church teaching on sexuality throughout a period of profound crisis. Not only did he reject ordination for women and refuse to move on endorsing same-sex marriage: as late as 2023 Francis upheld the Church ban on contraception; his opposition to abortion led him to share the stage with far right politicians like Italian PM Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, even to the point of endorsing their hysteria around declining European birth rates. Mary McAleese was clearly on the mark in insisting that, beyond rhetorical posturing, the Church under Francis remained ‘one of the last great bastions of misogyny’.

Francis: an Anti-Capitalist?

At one level, his fundamental conservativism around sexuality seems out of step with Francis’s willingness to speak out plainly on other issues that placed him in the crosshairs of the Catholic right. Their intense hostility—and in recent years his willingness to stand up to a growing far right—have led some commentators to make Francis out to be more than he was.

Francis has been mistakenly credited—in Jacobin, the social democratic US magazine, and elsewhere—with having ‘brought to the Vatican a concern for social justice rooted in the radical liberation theology of his home region’.  The reality is that so long as liberation theology thrived in Argentina and elsewhere, Bergoglio regarded himself as an opponent: Francis’s ‘most sympathetic biographers concede that he “kept his mouth shut” throughout the period the [Argentinian dictatorship] was carrying out its worst atrocities, but there are indications that his actions bordered on complicity’.

Bergoglio played an important role in articulating a new ‘middle ground’ between church traditionalists and the liberationists—a kind of theological ‘third way’. As I argued in an earlier piece on Rebel, it was only after the defeat of liberation theology that opponents within the Church ‘began to endorse some of the language of the movement’ while ‘emptying [them] of their class-based political vision’. The precondition for Bergoglio adopting the role of a critic of ‘unbridled capitalism’ was the success of Rome’s counter-offensive against liberation theology.

Long before he ascended to Rome, Francis had advocated a theology of class reconciliation, of ‘persuad[ing] the rich to surrender power rather than help the poor to take control of their own destiny.’ The source for this was not liberation theology, but the well-known social teachings of Vatican II. Even John Paul had insisted that ‘the development of a more harmonious society is going to require both forgiveness from the poor, for past exploitation, and sacrifice from the rich.’ Francis’s articulation of this well-worn perspective stood out more conspicuously in a neoliberal world, where public discourse was everywhere saturated by the worship of market forces. One sceptic rightly pointed out that in his calls for solidarity between rich and poor and the amelioration of capitalism’s ‘excesses’ Bergoglio had ‘moved from the right to the middle not the left.’

The outlook he brought to Rome was almost explicitly a Catholic articulation of ‘third way’ politics, which enjoyed a brief shelf life in the 1980s and 90s as the Clinton-led Democratic Party in the US and the traditional parties of social democracy in Europe (Blair’s Labour) and elsewhere shifted to the right to accommodate neoliberalism. Francis’s problem was that by the time he assumed the papacy this strategy had proven bankrupt: across the globe, the 2008 crash brought harsh austerity and accelerated growing inequality: the despair growing out of this made for a volatile and highly polarised political atmosphere. That Francis’s advocacy of a ‘humane capitalism’ mark him out as a radical iconoclast on the global stage only shows how far politics have lurched to the right in the post-crash period.

A Rising Catholic Far Right

This political polarisation in the outside world reflected and gave form to internal tensions within the church hierarchy. Some of these were longstanding and mostly theological: at the top there had always been a humourless rump of traditionalists who resisted Vatican II, and who’d looked to Benedict to restore rank and order: they objected to Francis’s restrictions against the Latin mass; they were apoplectic when he met with Buddhist and Muslim counterparts; they scoffed at his washing the feet of migrants, and refused to implement his move toward blessing same-sex couples.

These tensions were most profoundly registered in confrontations between Francis and the American church, today closely aligned with Trump and the far-right. Embracing a ‘pathological worldview’ forged out of disparate, often peculiar ideological strands—a Catholic version of the ‘prosperity gospel’ that Protestant televangelists have popularised to justify getting rich as ‘the Lord’s work’, for example—they wield control over a vast ‘Catholic media ecosystem’ that attacked Francis relentlessly. The Trumpian Cardinal Raymond Burke tried his best to annul Francis’s papacy, and on the fringe conspiracy theories flourished suggesting that Frances was not the ‘real’ pope, that he was a ‘servant of Satan’—even that Benedict was alive and poised to return.

The festering disaffection with Francis’s leadership at the top of the US church both reflected and encouraged a shift to the right among (overwhelmingly white) lay Catholics who, in an earlier period, were more likely to have voted Democrat. The swing is reflected in the Trump administration, which is ‘stocked with conservative Catholics’ who make up more than a third of [his] cabinet, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Catholic convert JD Vance, whose ‘hillbilly theology’—an attempt to deploy Catholic teaching to justify mass deportations—became the target of sharp and direct rebuke from Francis.

Immigration, Genocide: A Refusal to Back Down

The same global crisis that drove mounting inequality unleashed waves of mass migration among those fleeing war and poverty: to his credit Francis went out of his way to place the church on their side. His first trip outside of Rome was to the island of Lampedusa, where he condemned those who’d transformed the Mediterranean into a ‘giant cemetery’ and called for a ‘reawakening of consciousness’ in a world that has ‘forgotten how to cry’. Three years later he spent Holy Thursday at an asylum centre outside of Rome, washing the feet of refugees, ‘our brothers and sisters in search of a better life, far away from the poverty, hunger, exploitation and the unjust distribution of the planet’s resources which are meant to be shared equitably by all.’

These were powerful symbolic gestures at a time when politicians across Europe and the US were busy ramping up anti-immigrant hysteria. They brought Francis into sharp collision with an emergent far right attempting to galvanise new forces around a reactionary agenda, and to his credit he refused to back down. But his principled approach on immigration stands out mainly because of the abject cowardice of every other major political figure over recent years. As Michael Coman observed in The Guardian, ‘As western governments have increasingly battened down the hatches and adopted draconian short-term responses to the new reality, the pope at times appeared a lonely and isolated ally of millions of vulnerable people on the move.’

More recently, his willingness to speak out against the barbarism being unleashed on Palestine—his call for an investigation into whether Israeli actions amount to genocide, his persistent demand for a ceasefire—made Francis the target of vile attacks from Zionists and their allies among the leading imperialist powers.

But among Palestinians living under the bombs in Gaza and besieged in the West Bank, this solidarity—in a context where the whole western establishment has abetted their annihilation—is deeply felt. ‘I think no Palestinian will ever forget when [in 2014 Francis] stopped his car, stepped down and prayed at the separation wall separating Jerusalem from Bethlehem,’ pastor Reverend Munther Isaac told Democracy Now. Christians in Gaza recalled that Francis ‘used to call us daily during the war, on the black days under the bombing—on the days when people were killed and injured[.] We’re like orphans now.’

After Francis: Which Way for the Catholic Church?

As Pablo Castano has observed, it’s likely that we will eventually ‘look back on the last decade as an anomaly in the modern history of the Catholic Church’. Institutionally, as a relic of a feudal order based on hierarchy and elite rule, on the imposition of a cramped, conservative vision of human sexuality and the subordination of women, the church is far more amenable to a social order that upholds class inequality and regards democracy as a threat.

Indeed for all its history, the church has been a pillar of class domination, performing an important ideological function in reconciling the poor and oppressed to the status quo.

Francis’ papacy represented an attempt to revive the liberal spirit of Vatican II and remake a church fit for the modern world, to clear the stench of corruption and widespread abuse. But the limitations that he himself accepted in defending the church meant that ‘renewal’ could never move beyond rhetoric or gesture.

More importantly, Francis embarked on reform in a context where the ‘humane capitalism’ that he’d long advocated was everywhere off the agenda, and where the austerity-merchants of the neoliberal era had not only overseen massive inequality and a sharp withdrawal of democratic rights, but came to reconcile themselves to pitiless genocide. In this, they prepared the ground for a challenge to their own power from the monsters of an emerging far right. As ever, the future of the Catholic church is bound up with developments in the world at large. With Francis out of the way, his enemies in and outside the church aim to capture the Vatican to aid in imposing the far right’s authoritarian vision globally. We need to resist their project at every turn.

This originally appeared in Rebel.

The post Francis: the Fantasy of Church Renewal in a Time of Monsters appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brian Kelly.

Milwaukee trial court judge, Hannah Dugan.

This morning, President Trump directed the FBI to arrest trial court judge Hannah Dugan in Milwaukee. She is being charged with obstructing law enforcement, a federal crime.

Let’s be clear. Trump‘s arrest of Judge Dugan in Milwaukee has nothing to do with immigration. It has everything to do with his moving this country toward authoritarianism. He is illegally usurping Congressional powers. He is suing media that he dislikes. He is attacking universities whose policies he disagrees with. He is intimidating major law firms who have opposed him. He is ignoring a 9-0 Supreme Court decision to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador, where he was illegally sent. He is threatening to impeach judges who rule against him.

Trump’s latest attack on the judiciary and Judge Dugan is about one thing – unchecked power. He will attack and undermine any institution that stands in his way. Trump continues to demonstrate that he does not believe in the Constitution, the separation of powers, or the rule of law. He simply wants more and more power for himself. It is time for my colleagues in the Republican Party who believe in the Constitution to stand up to his growing authoritarianism.

The post On Trump’s Arrest of a Milwaukee Trial Judge appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bernie Sanders.

Silicon Valley start-ups are racing to get lab-grown meat on the market. And with good reason. Bethan Grylls of Food Manufacture, a UK-based resource for food and drink processors, reports that GovGrant, a research and development tax relief consulting firm, “anticipates that by 2040 cultured meat will make up 35 percent of global meat consumption, with conventional meat accounting for 40 percent and vegan meat alternatives the remaining 25 percent.”

Cultured meat emerged in the early 2000s and is a miracle of modern science. Fish filets, burgers, and bacon produced in this way taste just as consumers would expect them to, but millions of animals don’t need to be bred, confined, or slaughtered to create these actual meat products.

How Is Lab-Grown Meat Made?

The term “lab-grown meat” might sound off-putting. However, labs are only involved in supporting ongoing research and development. Once they begin to produce at scale, cultured meat companies will swap out laboratories for facilities resembling microbreweries—a far cry from the industrial farms that profit from the abuse and slaughter of sentient animals.

Instead of using slaughtered animals, lab-grown meat is made by carefully removing a few muscle cells from a living animal. The pain is typically relieved with local anesthesia. The animal experiences a momentary twinge of discomfort, not unlike the feeling of getting a routine blood test at the doctor’s.

Then, a lab technician places the harvested cells in bioreactors before adding them to a bath of nutrients. The cells grow and multiply, producing actual muscle tissue, which scientists shape into edible “scaffoldings.”

These scaffoldings can transform lab-grown cells into steaks, chicken nuggets, burger patties, and fish products. National University of Singapore scientists have even begun using sorghum grain to produce cultivated pork. These offerings could sway pork eaters who are wary of parasites and disease.

The final product is an actual cut of meat, ready to be marinated, breaded, grilled, baked, or fried—no animal slaughter required! Cells from a single cow can produce an astonishing 175 million quarter-pounder burgers.

Lab-Grown Meat Is More Humane and Sustainable

Lab-grown meat is created from the same animal cells as traditional meat. The key distinction lies in the process—lab-grown meat eliminates the need for breeding, raising, and slaughtering animals, offering a more humane and sustainable alternative to conventional farming practices.

One of the most compelling aspects of lab-grown meat is its potential to reduce animal suffering. By harvesting cells without killing the animal, this innovative approach addresses the ethical concerns of consumers who oppose factory farming and industrialized slaughterhouses.

As Brian Spears, founder of New Age Meats, explains, “People want meat. They don’t want slaughter.” This sentiment reflects a growing demand for products that align with the values of compassion and sustainability without requiring individuals to give up their dietary preferences.

In addition to its ethical appeal, lab-grown meat could serve as a practical solution for meeting the global demand for meat while addressing the environmental and health challenges associated with traditional meat production. Industrial farming is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and water pollution.

By bypassing the need for large-scale animal agriculture, lab-grown meat has the potential to significantly reduce the industry’s environmental footprint. Furthermore, it can be produced under controlled conditions that minimize health risks, such as antibiotic resistance and contamination from pathogens like E. coli.

Lab-grown meat represents a revolutionary shift in how we think about food production. It merges scientific innovation with ethical and environmental consciousness, providing a tangible alternative to unsustainable practices. At the same time, it is not without challenges, such as high production costs and reliance on inevitable animal-derived by-products. Ongoing technological advancements and scaling promise to address these hurdles.

For many, enjoying real meat without traditional methods’ moral and environmental consequences offers a hopeful glimpse into a future where food choices are both satisfying and responsible.

Cultured Meat Is Not Artificial

Lab-grown meat isn’t artificial meat—it’s real meat produced in a new, innovative way. One of the most exciting aspects of lab-grown meat is its ability to replicate the taste, texture, and appearance of conventionally produced meat. Scientists are continually refining techniques to ensure that lab-cultivated muscle tissue mimics the sensory qualities consumers expect from products like steak, chicken, and bacon. From marbled beef to flaky fish fillets, lab-grown meat offers a near-identical eating experience to traditional meat while eliminating the need for breeding, confining, and slaughtering animals. This innovation provides meat lovers with an option that aligns with their dietary preferences and ethical concerns.

Thanks to this breakthrough, consumers can enjoy the foods they already love without contributing to the cruelty and environmental damage inherent in factory farming. Lab-grown meat allows people to indulge in burgers, chicken wings, or pork chops with the peace of mind that no animal endured suffering to create their meal. As this technology scales and becomes more accessible, it can transform global food systems by providing a sustainable and humane way to meet the world’s growing appetite for meat.

Healthier Alternative

Meat consumption has long been associated with health risks, mainly due to meat’s high levels of cholesterol and saturated fat, which can contribute to conditions like heart disease and obesity. Traditional meat production provides little control over these factors, as the fat content of an animal’s meat is determined by its diet and genetics.

However, lab-grown meat offers a unique opportunity to address these health concerns at their source. By cultivating meat in a controlled environment, food scientists can precisely regulate its nutritional composition, reducing harmful cholesterol and saturated fat levels while retaining the flavor and texture consumers expect.

This ability to engineer healthier cuts of meat could make lab-grown products a game-changer for public health. For example, lab-grown meat can be tailored to include healthier fats, such as omega-3 fatty acids, typically found in fish and known to support heart and brain health.

Additionally, lab-grown meat could mitigate the growing threat of antibiotic resistance. Since the animals are not kept in filthy factory farms or bred in painful, disease-prone ways to maximize meat production, there is far less need for antibiotic treatment. Plus, lab-grown meat is pretty resilient against bacteria like E. coli. Thus, lab-grown meat will offer new options to consumers looking for better proteins for their health, the planet, and animals. By offering a nutritionally improved and safer alternative, lab-grown meat can revolutionize how we think about meat consumption and its impact on our well-being.

Better for the Environment

Industrial animal farming significantly contributes to some of the planet’s most pressing environmental issues. From climate change to deforestation and water pollution, the environmental toll of raising billions of animals for meat for a skyrocketing human population is staggering. According to the United Nations, animal agriculture accounts for 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, a figure that rivals emissions from the entire transportation sector.

Industrial farming releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and drives deforestation to create grazing land and grow feed crops, further exacerbating the climate crisis. Lab-grown meat presents an innovative solution to these challenges by eliminating the need for large-scale animal agriculture.

One of lab-grown meat’s most notable environmental benefits is its significantly lower resource footprint than that of conventional meat production. While some lab-grown meat producers currently rely on fossil fuels to power their operations, the process still uses far less land, water, and energy than raising animals on factory farms.

Cultivating meat from animal cells does not require clearing forests for pastures or growing massive quantities of feed crops. The production process not only conserves natural ecosystems but also reduces the water and fertilizer usage that often pollutes local water supplies. As production methods evolve, transitioning lab-grown meat facilities to renewable energy sources could make them even more sustainable. Studies show that producing lab-grown meat using renewable energy would have a significantly lower carbon footprint than even the most “sustainably raised” traditional meat products.

The potential environmental benefits of lab-grown meat extend beyond reduced resource consumption. It bypasses traditional farming practices and avoids many adverse side effects associated with industrial agriculture, such as soil degradation, water contamination from animal waste, and habitat destruction.

By offering a cleaner and more sustainable way to produce meat, lab-grown meat has the potential to drastically reduce the environmental impact of meat consumption. As this technology continues to advance and scale up, it could play a critical role in mitigating climate change and preserving the planet’s natural resources for future generations.

Lab-Grown Meat Is Not Vegan

Lab-grown meat is not technically vegan because it involves using cells taken from living animals. While these animals are not killed in the process, the act of harvesting cells places lab-grown meat outside the realm of purely plant-based or vegan products. However, the primary goal of lab-grown meat is not to replace vegan options but to provide a viable alternative for meat-eaters who are concerned about the ethical and environmental consequences of traditional factory farming. This innovation bridges the gap between ethical concerns and dietary preferences by offering a way to enjoy real meat without causing extensive harm to animals or the planet.

Lab-grown meat is specifically designed to appeal to consumers who might be hesitant to adopt plant-based alternatives but are nonetheless troubled by industrial agriculture practices. As Damian Carrington of the Guardian explains, “The companies developing lab-grown meat believe this is the product most likely to wean committed meat-eaters off traditional sources.”

For many, the idea of consuming meat without contributing to animal suffering, confinement, and slaughter is a compelling proposition. Furthermore, lab-grown meat offers the potential for health benefits and a reduced environmental footprint, making it an increasingly attractive choice for ethically and environmentally conscious consumers.

While lab-grown meat still requires keeping animals in captivity, the scale of this practice is drastically smaller than that of traditional factory farming. Instead of raising thousands of animals in confined, inhumane conditions, cellular agriculture relies on small herds from which cells can be periodically harvested.

This significant reduction in the number of animals used can significantly diminish the suffering caused by meat production on a global scale. Additionally, because animals are not slaughtered, the process of harvesting cells avoids the emotional and physical trauma typically associated with traditional farming practices.

The widespread adoption of lab-grown meat could mark a turning point in how society approaches food production and animal welfare. By reducing the reliance on factory farms and minimizing the number of animals needed for meat production, lab-grown meat represents a more humane and sustainable future for food systems.

With continued technological advancements, increased public awareness, and support for ethical alternatives, the vision of lab-grown meat becoming a mainstream option could help shift global consumption patterns and pave the way for a more sustainable world.

Lab-Grown Meat Isn’t Perfect

Lab-grown meat isn’t perfect—yet. Some lab-grown meat is created using an animal by-product known as fetal bovine serum. Slaughterhouses obtain fetal bovine serum by collecting blood from the unborn calves of pregnant cows after they’re killed.

San Francisco-based lab-grown meat producer Eat Just uses a “very low level” serum in its chicken, the first lab-grown meat product to hit the market. In response to ethical concerns about using a slaughterhouse by-product in otherwise lab-grown meat, Eat Just is developing an animal-free alternative to fetal bovine serum.

Another controversy surrounding lab-grown meat is its price—some companies charge around $50 per serving, significantly more expensive than conventional meat. Hopefully, prices will drop as companies scale upoperations, making it more accessible.

A 2024 study in Nature Food Journal projects that cultivated chicken will cost $6.20 per pound, given the proper production scale. This is competitive with the current cost of traditional organic chicken.

Lab-Grown Meat Availability

In 2020, the Singapore government approved the sale of lab-grown meats, giving consumers in Singapore the first chance to taste lab-grown chicken. But as of March 2025, lab-grown meat is not readily available to American consumers. Lab-grown meat companies are working to perfect their products, lower costs, and scale up.

More consumers worldwide should soon get their first taste of lab-grown meat. In 2023, the U.S. approved sales of lab-grown meat, though Florida and Alabama have banned the product from grocery store shelves. Tyson Foods, one of the world’s ten largest meat processors, has invested millions in Future Meat Technologies, which indicates a demand for meat industry support. Until lab-grown meat hits the market, leaving animals off our platesis the kindest thing we can do.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The post How Lab-Grown Meat Could Bring an End to Needless Animal Cruelty appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Laurie Wills.

Richard (Luckey) Perri portrait of Sterling Bunnell. Photo: Jonah Raskin.

Think of San Francisco artists and you’re likely to think of Ruth Asawa, whose work is currently on exhibit at SFMOMA, and Wayne Thieibaud, who had his first show in SF in 1960 and whose work is now at the Legion of Honor. To those artists add the name Richard (“Luckey”) Perry, whose colorful paintings are on the walls of the Italo Americano Museo in a show curated by Bianca Friundi, who recently told a crowd,“We’re proud to have Perri’s work here and to have him in person.”

The exhibit opened February 8, 2025 and runs until June 7, 2025. Wearing black trousers, a black jacket and a pork pie hat, Perri stood in front of his painting of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill and talked for an hour about art and The City where he has lived and worked for decades.

Perri loves Italy; his father came from Sicily and his mother from Calabria. He holds dual citizenship: Italian and American. He might one day be forced to leave the US and go to Italy. It’s no secret that Perri also loves San Francisco. So no one was shocked when he told the audience at the Italo Americano Museo in Fort Mason, “I love this city.”

Perri doesn’t love all of the city’s 46.9 square miles.

He loves a particular slice of San Francisco that is vanishing but that hasn’t entirely disappeared. Perri loves the old San Francisco that once had a thriving waterfront, ships in the harbor, longshoremen and cafes like “Red’s Java House” at 38 Bryant that was founded during the Depression of the 1930s and that is still serving its signature sausage sandwiches on Mondays and the ever popular corn beef and hash on Saturdays and Sundays. “I express my attachment to this place through my paintings,” Perri says. “There’s a lot of freedom here.”

No one has captured in color the urban face of old San Francisco more faithfully than Perri and that’s no accident. For years he owned and operated a bar at Mission and 29^th Street where the regulars were, he says, characters out of the pages of Damon Runyan and had names like “Gorilla Dog,” “Indian Dave” and “Baldy Ray.” In their company, Perri acquired the nickname “Luckey.”

The Italo Americano Museo in Fort Mason’s Building C is exhibiting more than two dozen of his iconic canvases of landmark places like Red’s Java House and City Lights Bookstore on Columbus Avenue, plus San Francisco personalities like Gavin Newsom, and the poet, publisher, and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as Sterling Bunnell, the Bay Area psychiatrist whose patients included a great many artists and writers.

Perri isn’t as well known as many of the places, such as Coit Tower, he has captured on canvases, and not as famous as some of the people, including ex mayor and now Governor Newsom, whose portraits he has painted. But neither is he a complete unknown. Over the decades he’s acquired a small devoted following.

Call him the peoples’ painter. Granted, he doesn’t paint workers or working class neighborhoods but he paints the places where workers have eaten and the streetcars that they’ve taken to and from employment. Perri’s studio on the second floor of the Odd Fellows Building on Seventh Street near Market, isn’t located in a neighborhood that’s a destination for tourists and foodies. Call it an outdoor living room for members of the lumpenproletariat.

Perri doesn’t have an agent and he’s not connected to a gallery, which enables him, he says, “to paint whatever I want to paint.” Not a single canvas exhibited at the Italo-Americano Museum has a price tag. “I’m not trying to sell my work,”Perri says. “And I’m not thinking about living a long life. I’m thinking about painting.” He adds, “But if you want to buy one of my canvases we can talk.” A quotation from Perri on a wall painted white reads, “I have more ideas and images in my mind than I have seconds in my life.”         At the age of 81, he’s still painting, still tapping into his creative energy. Years ago, during a bout with depression, Sterling Bunnell provided a dose of much needed talk therapy, but mostly Perri’s art has kept him feeling good about himself and the world. He’s been a lucky man.

Perri was born to a blue collar Catholic family; his father came from Sicily, his mother from Calabria. His father worked for the railroad and was injured on the job, an experience that his son has long remembered. Working class life could be precarious. Perri grew up in Rockville Center on Long Island, before the coming of Levittown, the suburban housing development.

He got out of Long Island as fast as he could, left the church and went west, attended college in Santa Fe, New Mexico and in Tempe, Arizona before enrolling at the San Francisco Art Institute. “I arrived with flowers in my hair,” he says. He joined the underground comic scene, met and worked with Art Spiegelman long before Spiegelman mined his father’s concentration experience and created the Maus comic books with Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Spiegelman made art from the darkest of material.

Perri’s paintings might, on a first take, look realistic, but they’re not, especially not the colors. “They all express a certain mood,” Perri says. A journalist named Julie Zigoris noted that his paintings express both loneliness and a sense of nostalgia. That sounds about right, though one might also say that working class people are an invisible, palpable presence. The immense skies in Perri’s work have no matching colors that one might see and recognize in the skies above Russian Hill or Golden Gate Park, and his street cars look far more psychedelic than any streetcars that operate on Market Street.

The Dutch artist, Vincent van Gogh, famous for his sun flowers, blue skies and wheat fields with crows, has inspired some of Perri’s best work. “The application of the paint is the important thing,” he says. What he’s after is called “luminosity,” which he defines as the “spirituality of something that is gone.” Indeed, his art captures the luminosity of San Francisco. The word, luminosity, also provides the title of his book for sale at the Italo Americano Museo.

The post San Francisco’s Inimitable Artist, Richard “Luckey” Perri  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jonah Raskin.

Muhammad Abed El Rahman (left) and Saleh Bakri in ‘The Teacher’ COCOON FILMS.

Set in the hills of the West Bank, The Teacher, written and directed by British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi, tells the riveting story of Bassem (Saleh Bakri), a Palestinian high school English teacher struggling to inspire his students under the pall of Israel’s occupation. What’s it all for–the studying, the scholarship–if only to see armed settlers burn down your village olive trees and an Israeli government demolish your family home to make way for another illegal settlement. To the Palestinian teen who speaks in despair, as though old and tired with little for which to live, the middle-aged Bassem tells his student to return to his books to “regain control” in pursuit of an education that holds hope for a better life.

Although the film is Bassem’s journey of self-blame, new found love and quiet yet determined resistance, we also see events through the eyes of his prized student Adam (Muhammed Abed Elrahman), who becomes Bassem’s surrogate son replacing the one Bassem lost, the one we meet only through scenes that take us back in time.

Blessed with looks and smarts, the surrogate son Adam pours over his books at a desk in the dirt outside overlooking the village destined for erasure. His home is gone. The tractor left only slabs of cement under which Adam recovers a desk, a couch and a pair of binoculars that afford him advance notice of a looming threat or gut punch.

One measure of a good movie is whether you care about the characters or feel compelled to watch them, regardless of whether you agree with their choices or roles in the film, regardless of whether the character is a teacher invested in his students or a cunning Israeli intelligence officer who knows exactly which emotional button to push. For character development–raw, textured–The Teacher scores 10 out of 10, not only because Bassem is heroic, protective and ultimately selfless but because both he and Adam are tested in ways most of us never will be challenged, leaving us wondering what we would choose if we lived under occupation–the scorched land of nighttime raids and vigilante violence, where our futures are not our own, where the fork in the road between self-defense and vengeance sometimes merges and where the greater good beckons us to hush creeping doubts. Would we remember The Teacher’s words, “Revenge eats away at you and destroys from the inside.”

Reviewers from legacy media– New York Times, LA Times–criticize the movie for having too many subplots. “But a teacher-student bonding narrative, a legal procedure, a family tragedy, a romance and a kidnapping thriller are a lot to hang on one character,” writes NYT reviewer Ben Kenigsberg. “Nabulsi, unfortunately, muddles the story with multiple subplots, some inelegant acting and contrived English-language dialogue,” writes the LAT’s Carlos Aguilar.

Did these movie critics see the same film this reviewer saw?

Such undeserved criticism suggests the writers are imposing their detached notion of reality on a drama that is all too real. The critics’ desire for a less complicated storyline with more refined dialogue suggests colonization of the art form rather than criticism, for strands of multifaceted characters must not be removed to suit cinematic preferences for a formulaic Hollywood blockbuster.

Conversations in The Teacher resonate as familiar even in the most unfamiliar surroundings, where rough-around-the edges Palestinian teens stereotype Lisa (Imogen Poots), the blonde British school counselor as a mere do-gooder. “Miss United Nations has arrived,” joke the teens who call their teacher a “player” when between cigarette puffs he locks eyes with the British import. As for the subplots–the gun behind the bookcase, the woman who emerges in only a towel, the judge who delivers injustice – these are not disconnected B or C stories but deftly interwoven branches of the A story about survival and subterfuge under the boot of a brutal occupier. Life is not simple nor a singular line, certainly not when the path to decolonization can be uncertain and torturous, both for the colonized and the colonizer, though never in equal measure.

Nabulsi –who wrote the script in Britain during the Covid lockdown and met with checkpoint delays during three months of filming in the West Bank–adds depth to her story when she introduces the subplot based on the abduction of Gilad Shalit, a former Israeli soldier held captive for over five years in Palestine before released in a hostage deal that freed 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. In one of the most compelling scenes in The Teacher, a US American father, an Israeli resident whose son is held hostage by Palestinians, sympathizes with Bassem having lost a son, for in a metaphorical sense the American father also lost his son after the young man insisted the family emigrate to Israel following a Birthright Israel trip. Now the father, whose wife berates him – much as Basem’s wife berated her husband for failing to protect their son–finds himself a stranger in a strange land called Israel. No, he assures Bassem, he is not one of them, one of the heartless occupiers.

Nabulsi, the daughter of a Palestinian mother and a Palestinian-Egypian father, was born and raised in London, where she pursued a career in finance and worked for J.P. Morgan before becoming a filmmaker. She switched careers, from stocks to scripts, after visiting Palestine to trace her family history–a mother who fled to Kuwait following the ‘67 war, a father who emigrated to London to study civil engineering.

Nabulsi’s short film The Present–also set in occupied Palestine and also starring Palestinian actor Bakri– was nominated for an Oscar and won a BAFTA (British Academy Film Television Award). The Teacher–a suspenseful one hour and 55 minute drama– premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of 2023, just weeks before October 7th. During shooting Nabulsi set up large black screens to cover actors playing IDF soldiers because she feared that if villagers thought the soldiers were real a hurricane of heartache would ensue.

Now–during the US-armed Israeli genocide in Gaza and emboldened settler movement ripping through the West Bank–it is hard to imagine Nabulsi entering the Israeli-controlled West Bank to film The Teacher. Fortunately, for us–the movie audience, for Palestine, the resistance, and for the solidarity movement, marchers across the globe, The Teacher can be livestreamed on several platforms or watched in theaters from coast to coast.

The post From the West Bank with Love and Rage appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Marcy Winograd.

Photo by Samuel Ramos

I was not intending to write about the Oscars this year as I usually do, in some shape or form, but in catching up with the nominees I began to see a pattern. Jews. Jewish experiences seemed to be disproportionately represented among the nominated films. It kind of made me uncomfortable, as if I were being played or emotionally manipulated — like you know you are when the movie soundtrack cues you to begin weeping or smiling with hope or gorgeously humane empathy even in the face of devastation.

A definition of propaganda is information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view. Edward Bernays wrote the book on propaganda in 1928. It was called Propaganda. Get it? Bernays was a Jew. But so what. He was also the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who also wrote books, including The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Freud was a Jew. But so what. He nailed it: Religion and aggression would doom us, each in their own ways. Oy!

Still, Bernays as a propagandist and Freud as the father of psychoanalysis, both knew how easy it was for people to be manipulated. Both implied that most people seem to live their lives as gaslight victims of the stronger. Even T.S. Eliot, who was not a Jew, and who some say may have hated Jews (but that may have been as a result of his overexposure to that crazy guy Ezra Pound who had to be straitjacketed eventually), that “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

Anyway, I have watched a bunch of the 2025 Oscar nominated films, as well as other recent films not nominated, but which I would have reviewed ordinarily, such as Riefenstahl, which I tried forever to find a decent stream that was not, you know, handy cam. I like candied ham. That film would be a natural one to watch. It reminded me so much of Inglourious Basterds, what with the revenge-seeking Jews out to kick the heck out Nazi schweinhunden and, more importantly, supposedly was based on a real-life unit of Jewish commandos out of Fort Detrick. It is an alternative history graphic novel-like Riefenstahl who sends the crazy guy with art school paint brush mustache to Siegfried Hell. (It was like good propaganda: Imagine if Bernays had helped blow up the United Fruit Gum Company, instead of helping the CIA kill peasants for fun and setting the stage for the migrant crisis at the US southern border decades later). The music cues: we cry, F*ck You, Adolf! Und your stilllife roses sucked, too. Directed by Tarantino. Not a Jew. What a pity.

I had a similar problem, for the longest time, procuring a copy of The Brutalist. Finally, I saw some of it. I like architecture more than the next guy probably. Albert Speer would have loved what the film had to say. Wrote one wag, “Speer-style Nazi buildings have a brutalistic tone with square columns and avoidance of details that point to a humanistic heritage.” This is a film about Jews. And the brutality meted out to them. No one is more humanistic than the Jewish people.

Oh, ha-ha, laugh now, hypocrite mon lecteur, my pretty little flowers of evil. But the brutal fact is that the Western tradition is largely an Abrahamic tradition, and Abe bequeathed us Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And God promised them all, more or less, a piece of the Promised Land pie. Very depressing and brutal, our collective cultural history. We mustn’t forget. First human, Cain, was a stone cold murderer; Abel, the second born, garnered all the love. Watch James Dean in East of Eden, you’ll see what I mean. (Watch out for the manipulative soundtrack though.) Ja, east of Eden, the second exile in a generation — where Adam and Eve told Cain to go f*ck himself, if he’s going to kill his brother. Eve was preggers with Seth, the third human, at that time. Have fun with animals. And Adam tore his fur and that was that.

2025 also saw a remake of Nosferatu (1922), the cinema classic that is based on the trials and tribulations of a Jew. Or maybe I’m thinking of A Complete Unknown, the Dylan biopic so incomplete and wrongheaded that I was terrified it betokened the first of many sequels, like Raven with a Broken Wing, followed by Coming as He Lifted Up His Fork, My So-called Friends, Too Much of Nothing, Theme from Big Lebowski, Alias Anyone You Please, etc. I may have actually woken up in fright exclaiming with a Homer Simpson-like scream. Dylan is a Jew. And a genius. Hell, can you name a Jew who is not? I can’t. Probably they are The Chosen People. Them and the African diaspora types. I’d start civilization over with American Jews and Africans any day. Fuck me.

Yeah, 2025 was the year of the Jew in film anyway. And this is always a good thing. We need constant reminders of the Holocaust. What we done. Fuck what happened to Christ, who was after all a Jew. That’s what made the excellent film, A Real Pain, so poignant. Culkin’s numb. He could use real pain. And he gets it — plenty. I don’t know about you, but I was moved. I fuckin hate those Nazis more than ever for what they did, and how they keep trying to make a comeback, like the South, always gonna rise again, and then they do and get to Washington and sing throwaway Disney tunes (“I’ll Make Mommy Proud Yet”) and dressed as boffo Vikings, and then suddenly everyone thinks we’ve been taken over by Trump instead of having voted the twice-impeached president, and convicted felon into office. Trump is not a Jew, but his buddy Bibi is, and Trump may have towers in Gaza, Greenland, and Moscow when this is all over and the smoke of hell has cleared. And Trump is a real pain.

And there were a couple of other films about Jews which you may not have thought as Jewish at first. Conclave. Holy smoke, that was a Jewish as you could get. Abe was like the Pope; God’s rep on Earth, the original Patriarch. Anyway, no Jews, no Conclave. And how modern this Conclavewas! one that finally tackled non-binary issues. Probably Francis had a heart attack thinking about what thus film implied,

And there was the non-nominated film September 5, another re-telling of the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympics by Palestinian terrorists. We immediately see the title light up on the screen and begin to weep, thinking October 7, September 11, Juneteenth — will the terrorism never end? Well, at least I wept, and I consider myself an honorary Jew. Like John Goodman in Lebowski. Cue the music. Goddamn Gentiles. You’ll get yours, I thought. Shut up, Donny.

And then there was the disruptor film, also about Jews: No Other Land, which won for Best Doco. And then Hamdan Balla, the film’s director, getting attacked by Israeli settlers. It was a gritty film in the rubble of civilization. AI is training on our behavior: Is it any wonder that they hallucinate. Half the time we can’t believe our own eyes.

Even the Best Picture of 2025 has at its heart Jews. Yes, Anora. Coney Island and the Russian connection was a first sign. Lots of Russian Jewish migrants there. Coney Island of the Mind, right? Ginsberg was a Jew. Idiot volunteered for MKULTRA. Did you see what they did to his song, Ma. One pundit says on Medium: “Sean Baker’s newest film is a square in the quilt of the modern Jewish pop culture diaspora.” Hot Damn. Ed Snowden is in Russia right now with wife, a former pole dancer. He used to spy on her, he says in his memoir, Permanent Record (2019), like the Israelis spy on Palestinians with their Pegasus software.

I come away from all this exposure to Jewishness feeling. And that’s good enough for now.

The post The Soft Propaganda of the Oscars appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Kendall Hawkins.

Workers at risk of fatalities and injuries on the job labor in the goods-producing and service industries. National COSH, with a network of grassroots worker groups across the U.S., selects the 12 companies, dubbed the Dirty Dozen. Input for this annual list comes from a nationwide network of workers, safety activists, labor union members, health and safety professionals, and academic experts.

A leading cause of workplace danger is exposure to heat. High temperatures have caused the deaths of hundreds of workers and sickened scores more of them in the U.S. recently. They are labor force victims of the climate crisis that is rapidly worsening. As a result, centering worker safety is a high priority to combat the abusive workplace conditions of the companies on the 2025 Dirty Dozen list.

The agriculture and food processing industries are  rife with employers that hire immigrant workers, children and adults, to harvest and process the food that Americans eat. These employers are on the list of the 2025 Dirty Dozen for failing to protect workers from scorching heat, while forcing them to work long hours, a recipe for labor fatalities and injuries. Employers can and do impose such oppressive workplace conditions on their laborers because they are politically weak to resist (immigrants and at-will, union-free). Deportation is a constant threat, as the Trump administration scapegoats immigrants as “enemy aliens” invading the U.S. The fact that farm and food processing firms and their customers rely on the super-exploitation of immigrant labor is underreported news.

This year’s Dirty Dozen also focuses on racial justice. The color line that binds discrimination and immigration reflects the risk factor of fatalities and injuries to nonwhite workers compared with their Caucasian counterparts. Latino labor is most at risk. Black workers are next most likely to face death and wounds on the job.

The criteria for selection to the 2025 Dirty Dozen are: severity of safety risks to workers; repeat and serious violations of safety laws and standards, political power to set broader workplace norms; and ongoing worker and ally campaigns to address unsafe conditions. The 2025 Dirty Dozen list details worker resistance to dangerous labor conditions such as union drives, always an uphill struggle in the U.S., given the balance of power tilted to the employer class under the nation’s labor laws.

Here are the 2025 Dirty Dozen:

Alpha Foliage, Inc.,
Barnes Farming,
99 Cost Bargain;
Cooperative Laundry;
Egreen Transport Corporation;
Envy Nails;
LCMC Health Systems;
Mar-Jac Poultry;
McDonald’s Corporation;
Miracapo Pizza Company,
Star Garden and Magic Tavern;
and the GEO Group.

Amazon.com, Inc., is in the penalty box for repeat violations of workplace safety.

Jessica E. Martinez is the executive director of National COSH.  “Too many workers are dying,” she said in a statement, “getting sick, or sustaining lifelong injuries—often in incidents that are entirely preventable.  The employers we’re highlighting in this year’s Dirty Dozen list have ignored known risks and failed to implement basic safety measures, putting profit over people. We must hold them accountable.

 “We refuse to stay silent in the face of deadly exploitation. We’re organizing for a future where every worker, in every workplace, is safe—no matter their job, their zip code, or their immigration status.”

For more information on the 2025 Dirty Dozen list, visit nationalcosh.org/press-room.

The post Hall of Shame: Exposing 2025’s “Dirty Dozen” Employers  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Seth Sandronsky.

Image by Robin Jonathan Deutsch.

With America’s constitution undergoing a stress test, it’s important to revisit and understand its fundamental structure and design. America’s Constitutional convention occurred in 1787, several years after the Revolutionary War. In addition to addressing the errors that long plagued history’s governments, the founders sought to correct the recent defects of the Articles of Confederation.

There were many. The Articles outlined the alliance between America’s several states. The arrangement was, to put it charitably, a train wreck. The central government was weak and dysfunctional, lacking both executive and judicial functions. The legislature couldn’t levy taxes to fund its operations and relied instead on voluntary state payments. The states had their own currencies, stifling trade among them. And after the war, the new nation’s economy was so weak it couldn’t settle its substantial war debts to European countries and investors.

Shays’ Rebellion in 1786 and 1787 brought the Confederation’s embarrassing weakness into stark relief. The central government couldn’t even quell a small tax protest by Western Massachusetts farmers. Led by Daniel Shays, a former revolutionary soldier, the rebellion initially was confined to several violent attacks on government buildings. It ballooned into a full-scale military confrontation before finally—months later—being subdued.

Today many Americans on the right glorify this post-war era as the triumphant celebration of a blossoming young democracy. Not quite. The nebulous alliance between the states hung together by the thinnest of threads, barely surviving each successive day. Mistakes, blunders, and setbacks dominated the fledging government. And everything easily could have been different: A negative twist here, an unfortunate turn there, and the American experiment could have died in the womb. America’s Constitution was thus inspired as much by the stress of the young nation’s post-war crisis as by the energy of the founders’ political passions.

The Constitution was a carefully engineered response to the enormous challenges—old and new, grand and practical—inherent in forming a lasting and effective government. It was enacted on June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify it. The drafters set forth their goals in the Preamble: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Merely 4,400 words, the Constitution has seven articles that form the basic structure of American government:

· Article I outlines the Legislative Branch, including Congress’s power to pass legislation, borrow money, and declare war.

· Article II outlines the Executive Branch, including the President’s power to enter treaties, nominate federal judges, and command the military.

· Article III outlines the Judicial Branch, including judges’ power to rule on “cases and controversies” between litigants.

· Article IV outlines responsibilities of the federal government and state governments.

· Article V outlines the Constitutional-amendment process.

· Article VI declares the assumption of the Confederation’s debts, asserts the preeminence of federal law, and requires government officials to swear an oath to the Constitution.

· Article VII states that the ratification of nine states shall be sufficient to enact the Constitution.

A vital source for understanding how America works, the Federalist Papers emerged shortly after Americans ratified the Constitution. The Federalist Papers were a series of 85 newspaper columns written by political leaders James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, under the pen name Publius. The columns expounded on the new Constitution’s reasoning, language, and structure.

For example, Hamilton, in Federalist 22, echoed John Locke in highlighting the central importance of government by consent: “The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid bases of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority.” (Emphasis included.) Madison, in Federalist 51, explained how the structure of government must be designed to accept and harness the realities of human nature: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” And Madison, in Federalist 58, emphasized the vital importance of checks and balances: “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy so that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.”

Today, many critics focus myopically on the Constitution’s errors. Columnist Ryan Cooper, for example, shares sentiments with many on the left: “The American Constitution is an outdated, malfunctioning piece of junk—and it’s only getting worse. When written, the Constitution made a morally hideous compromise with slavery that took a war and 750,000 lives to make right. And while its basic structure sort of worked for awhile in the 20th century, the Constitution is now falling prey to the same defects that has toppled every other similar governing document the world over.”

Meanwhile many triumphalists over-emphasize the Constitution’s virtues. America’s 40th president Ronald Reagan (still a conservative champion) expressed sentiments common on the right: “If our Constitution has endured, through times perilous as well as prosperous, it has not been simply as a plan of government, no matter how ingenious or inspired that might be. This document that we honor today has always been something more to us, filled us with a deeper feeling than one of simple admiration—a feeling, one might say, more of reverence.”

Neither extreme is correct. Some parts of the Constitution are, in fact, quite dreadful. And some parts are, unquestionably, extremely positive. America’s founding document should thus be condemned and celebrated—not one or the other. It is indeed a great irony of human history that the same document that contains numerous searing abominations—some of which still reverberate today—also sets forth an essential architecture of government that has dramatically increased human flourishing.

The post America’s Constitution: the Good and the Awful appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by William Cooper.

The first is that Donald J. Trump is not American anymore.

The second is that Tariffs imposed at a macroeconomic level represent a taxation as a form of vigorish/ ‘vig’ as to a gangster parasitology power structure seeking to further resource transfer as extracting a pound of flesh by way of intermediation.

The remainder this small article is composed of attempting  as an metapolitical exercise to substantiate these two propositions and to contextualise them within an expanded paradigm as would be placed under hegemony beyond our reach vis a vis a dumbing down of civil discourse.

As ever ‘Cui Bono?’ and ‘follow the money’ concerning racketeering and criminal forensics are embraced at an axiomatic level under said ‘metapolitics’.

Donald John Trump was born as a ‘fortunate son’ (Don’t ya just love CCR?) to a wealthy family in the New York City Borough of Queens on June 14, 1946. The family business which he renamed as ‘The Trump Organization’ found itself obliged to file for bankruptcy no less than six times (!) in the 1990’s and 2000’s. In other words no’ Midas’ was Donald John; ít could be contended that everything he ‘touched’ turned to shit..

Enter stage left Wilbur Louis Ross Jr. ‘The King of Bankruptcy’ as he was known while running the bankruptcy restructuring practice on behalf of N M Rothschild & Sons. Somewhat philanthropically, or rather philathropathically (sic) young Wilbur assisted Donald John and the Trump Oganization to survive as a business entity. While exact details as to the particular ‘art of the deal’ made and contingencies of bankruptcy restructure are not common knowledge it is contended that a result Donald John became of a new loyalty as of  one does not bite the hand that feeds variety. ‘Sic transit’ so it as puppetry and whredom goes.

That is instead of an economically bankrupt ‘bum’ Donald John became a morally bankrupt bum on that fateful day he ceased to be American and sold his soul. Wilbur Louis sold him the satanic pup!

Here it must be noted that these small quarters do not look scornful at Donald John; rather it is with pity. Presidentially he is about to bring new levels of treachery and treason by way of ‘step up’ to the Plate second chance?

Which brings us to the second proposition this small article: Viz ; that Tariffs imposed at a macroeconomic level represent a taxation as a form of vigorish/ ‘vig’ as to a gangster parasitological power structure seeking to further resource transfer as extracting a pound of flesh by way of ‘intermediation’. In gangster parlance this is known as wetting the beak/taking a cut.

One is a simple man of simple needs as per Maslowian hierarchy. (Metapolitical humor there)

So one day I buy a pair of shoes.

The next day I find the price of said exact same shoes has risen dramatically. Ceterus Paribus – but for the introduction of trade tariffs. Now cutting to the chase here and following the greatest question in the  English language – ‘Cui Bono?’ (ain’t metapolitics funny) one is obliged to question after the fashion of criminal forensics a following of the money? Where does the extra tax just imposed on those shoes overnight go as entails the purchase power of my dollar just declined further? Is this a variant/extrapolation upon the permit to control and issue currency one dares to ask?

The fact is that trade tariffs are but another racket as brought to you by the Rothschilds; but another sly means of resource transfer as a parasitical naught to say necrotrophic killing of the host under abuse of trust; another means of picking the pockets of everyday citizens by way of further resource transfer effected; a variation of quantitative ease?

Whom;  such the source and application of funds  are the revenues arising from International trade tariffs as an intermediation/arbitrage to go to?  Mine suspicion as small quarters is that as per quantitative ease debauchery it is to ‘the mob’.

What sealed the fate of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK was his concept of ‘quantitative ease for the People?’ As a reverse of resource transfer from poor to rich.

Trade tariffs – coming by Presidential Decree to you courtesy of treason and necrotrophy?

The post The Cruel Puppet Dance of Trade Tariffs as Increased Resource Transfer Metastasing appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stephen Martin.

Gazing East: New York City: Empire State Building and More.

My camera merely dreams:

A frozen pulse as if in mid-pen motion: Photographer Bill Brandt snaps poet Robert Graves: A satisfying cacophonic camera shutter freeze-frame is heard: Four imminently patient tickled ivories touch me as Keith Jarrett’s “Köln Concert” plays: Director Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning rolls across the screen: The birthing of portentous evil is seen atop aqua blue night shaded curvy rolling hills: Writer Geoffrey Dyer’s “But Beautiful” musicians Duke Ellington and Harry Carney drive through the blackness of the night: My vision quest may be part music quest, part light quest for something not yet known: Maybe like a strip-naked vibrato, dark contoured intricacies heard ahead: Prophecies appear: There are signals of better light, near:

Ruminating through history encourages me to engage foreign lightscapes across urban and rural destinations: The romance of missions ahead reminds me of anticipated treasures filled with hope: They are what soothe my sleeps and frighten me awake.

In every city I visit, I wonder if one city is enough: I am continually accompanied by a “Breathless” vibe. Imagine actor Belmondo; Artist Caravaggio; Cartoon character (Taz)Tasmanian Devil; And Melville’s Ahab all shrink wrapped together as a single piercing voice: I hear far and near passions breathing.

Gazing South East through a corridor of light: The Empire State Building: New York City.

Continents, countries, and cities my camera has seen:

Ernest Hemingway’s sitings appear: Hills like white elephants afar could easily or seemingly be my template for every building and cityscape I have seen or might. Every day I imagine a magicians wand hovering above my image to make: One blink and the event vanishes: Fleeting  images designed by light is an extraordinary sense of my life: I can blink one thousand times and see the building in front of me a million different ways and see divinely, canvases of urban and rural moments: Vanishing white elephants may infer my own living “Old Man in the Sea”: The white elephants may be my Melville white whale: Breathlessness days are my common denominator:

The imminent fleeting disappearance of my light pales me: My light barely remains before the camera’s f-stop shakes my aperture for the capture: Light is a rewarding selfish fleeting companion: Close your eyes once and it is gone: “Hurry” my mere camera shrieks loudly: I must always capture what appears as white elephants or another imaginary capture.

Voices ring:

Architects Thom Mayne, David Childs, Bernard Tschumi and Charles Gwathmey, ring my phone: All are known across the architectural curriculum: Their place in history is not mine: Their voices heard on my iPhone audio become considerations and possibly proclamations for where and why my camera should focus: They as in an a cappella of visual ideas offered intuitive advice: My eyes were momentarily flooded with their ideas: Their visions merged into mine: The moments reminded of  archaeologists softly navigating like a brain surgeon: The soft lift of  the skull for observation; Like the archaeologist sifting through a layer of soil many times more fragile than a finite sprinkle of salt on our diet: If I apply the gentle nudging, siphoning through ideas of others I just might discover the moment- the architects design: The results sometimes fail to share what I see: Often I imagine I hear “Eureka” bellowed  between my interlocking ears: Voices of suggestions sometimes may be what the camera needed.

Gazing South and West: The Empire State Building: New York City.

The photographer’s art of fact and fiction is often about utilizing space and time: Astrophysicists

live in some respect by a similar notion: They ask us to imagine beyond the stars: They like photographers use math and science to determine an inevitable truth: We all must assume a leap of faith that the truth is before our eyes: The photograph and stars are just right there: Look closely.

The light we see and the light not seen illuminate our stories:

My photography reminds me of the movie title “La Grande Vadrouille” (a grand stroll)-The life with camera in tow: Maybe everything I share is akin to Duke Ellington’s confession that he does not play piano, but is just dreaming; Maybe I have not made thousands of pictures, I am merely dreaming.

Gazing above: Empire State Building: New York City.

The post Architecture of Cities: One Building at a Time appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard Schulman.

Image by Breana Panaguiton.

Racial and social justice remains a cornerstone of liberal philosophy and activism. As we live through another terrifying four years with President Trump in the now-excessively gaudy and overgilded Oval Office, we must fight for reforms to dismantle inequities, promote marginalized communities, and promote inclusivity across all institutions.

Let’s start with criminal justice reform. We need to end mass incarceration, reform policing practices, and eliminate racial bias during sentencing. One proposal to achieve this is to end for-profit prisons, reallocate police budgets to community welfare services, and decriminalize non-violent offenses.

But such reform is pointless unless it is accompanied by equitable education funding. We must fight to ensure schools in underserved communities receive adequate funding and resources. This is a critical issue, and we cannot allow a cut in federal funding for public schools, student debt relief, or programs that assist minority students.

The LGBTQ+ community is rightfully concerned that the Trump administration is crossing red lines by reducing federal protections against discrimination in employment, housing, and healthcare. We must push Congress to pass the Equality Act to ensure our rights and counter any restrictions on transgender rights – whether state-level or federal – especially in schools and healthcare. The Trump administration is weakening the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, such as those under the Civil Rights Act, and is dismantling DEI programs in federal agencies and schools. Trump’s support for restricting discussions of race or limiting transgender rights will only embolden further discrimination.

With all that is going on now regarding immigration and Trump’s horrific ICE agency, we need to fight for the rights of individuals and families who have arrived in our country in the hope of pursuing a better life. The Trump administration must end its Soviet Stasi-style arrests of innocents, racial profiling, and mass deportations reminiscent of some communist countries.

Trump’s agenda prioritizes divisive rhetoric and policies that are reversing decades of civil rights progress.

Centuries of systemic injustice in America – whether slavery or segregation – means we need proactive policies that level the playing field. The alternative means the continuation of inequity across society. By reducing racial and social disparities, we can boost economic growth. Closing the racial wealth gap will benefit all Americans. Equality is a moral imperative and we, as a just society, must guarantee equal opportunities and protections for all citizens, regardless of race, gender, or identity.

Social cohesion and political stability requires inclusive policies – the opposite of what the Trump administration is doing. Instead, they are deepening division with misguided policies and creating more problems than solutions.

And when it comes to America’s global standing, the administration’s isolationist and exclusionary policies aren’t helping. We must champion human rights abroad since this will enhance our credibility.

But the only way we can achieve our goals is to unite. Currently, the Democratic Party is fractured, and we don’t have much time to piece it back together. Through grassroots organizations and legislative advocacy, we can raise awareness and pressure lawmakers to support liberal policies such as protecting voting rights, expanding healthcare access, and defending the LGBTQ+ community.

Liberals can and should file lawsuits to block discriminatory state laws, such as those restricting transgender healthcare or banning critical race theory in schools.

The Trump administration’s misguided policies should serve as a reminder of the urgency of the situation in the United States today, especially since it is not too late to protect our rights and our values of equity and justice. By banding together, we can overcome political headwinds and shape America’s future for the better.

The post The Pursuit of Racial and Social Justice During the Trump Era appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Chloe Atkinson.

Image by Jon Tyson.

At his inauguration in January, President Trump suggested that his greatest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and uniter. Many Americans voted for the President because they believed he would end U.S. involvement in foreign wars.

Exit polls show that foreign policy issues like the wars in Gaza and Ukraine influenced American voters in 2024. For example, one-third of voters reported that the war in Gaza, “was highly important in their choice of presidential candidate.” In the swing state of Michigan, Muslim voters rejected Harris in favor of third-party candidates or Trump.

Americans are tired of war. As a millennial, my life is bookmarked by the global war on terror, the loud wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the quiet wars in places like Somalia and Yemen (where U.S drone strikes have killed thousands), and, today, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. I’ve dedicated my professional life to non-partisan and non-profit work that analyzes the drivers of war and the opportunities for peace.

That work is under attack by the “peace” President. This dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), and incoming reports of a diminished State Department are proof that peace is not the priority. All signs point to a continued, escalated, bloated budget for U.S. military spending.

I think it’s important that we think critically about what can feasibly end wars and build peace. It matters how we understand these issues, what we demand of our current elected leaders, and how we choose new leaders in the future.

It starts with these questions.

Do you think we end wars by investing trillions of dollars in military spending?

Do you think we end wars by systematically gutting the only institutional voices for diplomacy, cooperation, dialogue, and conflict resolution (USAID, USIP, or State)?

I think this is a recipe for war.

Imagine what the decision-making process is in responding to a security crisis (a good book that shows insight to what this process looks like inside government is Thirteen Days by Robert F. Kennedy). A President brings together top advisors to weigh options. Military leaders come with a litany of military responses. Diplomats come with a litany of diplomatic responses. Usually, the response blends the two approaches.

If we’re only investing in military spending, the scales of the decision-making process are skewed away from diplomacy and other peaceful responses, increasing the probability of war.

Military leaders will come to the table with a vast workforce of analysts, intelligence officers, and strategists creating thoroughly vetted military solutions. They come with $trillions in weapons systems and an expansive global network of more than 800 overseas bases and ships primed for action—the means and capability for fast and deathly force.

Diplomats come to the table with far less: a depleted and demoralized workforce of foreign service officers, isolation from global allies who are less and less likely to play nice with us, the erasure of tools like development assistance and humanitarian aid, and cut-off from global institutions of influence, like the United Nations. They come to the table with fewer viable options.

More simply, when the tool you have is a hammer (the military), everything looks like a nail (a war).

We cannot build peace without the voices for peace in government. We also need strong voices outside of the government to advocate for pro-peace policies. Peace movements, non-profit or non-governmental organizations, and the charitable foundations that support them are all involved in this work. These civil society organizations do more to represent a war-weary American public than a government that cuts all funding for peace.

The post How to be a Peace President   appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kelsey Coolidge.