The shift to post-industrialism was associated with the rise of a powerful new set of capitalist elites and new corporate centers of production, finance, and communication. In the 21st century, Silicon Valley became the symbol of the new post-industrial high-tech world. It would become the showcase of the new high-tech companies, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, which were becoming the first trillion-dollar companies, led by tycoons such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Peter Thiel, all fabulously wealthy members of the Big Tech power elite. Silicon Valley introduced itself as a modern miracle, bringing unprecedented new productivity and prosperity that would benefit both owners and workers, and contribute to the betterment of the general population with magical new products such as the personal computer, the iPhone, and the new internet-based world of online culture and communication on social media. This new world revolutionized the economic and social spheres, while also having major uses and implications for politics and the military. Because billions of people globally now have iPhones or personal computers, with access to the new online universe of the internet and social media, Silicon Valley seemed to open up not only a transformative new economy for entrepreneurs and knowledge workers but a transformed, newly connected world of online social communication and relationships.

This is not entirely an illusion. The online world does open up new social connections and political connections, with social media being a powerful new tool for the younger generation to build new friendships, communities, and politics. But Silicon Valley’s fantastic new array of electronic communications and online connections may also prove to be a gateway to weak social relations and ultimately the end of strong face-to-face social relationships, as well as democracy itself. We face a sociocidal transformation fueled by high tech, with Silicon Valley also proffering its own politics of authoritarianism. Sociocide is the process by which human connection is largely severed, and individuals are only concerned for themselves. A sociocidal society is one in which solidarity is nonexistent and meaningful human relationships are destroyed.

Several sociocidal forces emerge directly from the economic restructuring created by huge Big Tech firms, especially the “Magnificent Seven,” whose individual worth now reaches into the trillions:  Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), and Tesla. One is the interest of these corporate high-tech elites, much like their corporate counterparts in other spheres, in eroding the face-to-face workplace and social ties that can challenge their power. In the workplace, that translates into the intensified attack on secure employment, unionism, and a collective physical workplace. The intent is to weaken the social relations of workers in the workplace – and more broadly, to subvert the solidarity and face-to-face connections of people throughout society that can challenge authoritarianism in both work and politics.

Focusing first on the workplace, the Magnificent Seven play a special role here by creating and developing the technology – including the personal computer, iPhone, internet apps, AI, robots, and social media — that allows corporate elites to create a precariat of dispersed and contingent workers, increasingly separated from each other, while also replacing millions of workers and transferring their jobs to robots and other AI inventions.

The most rapid replacement of workers by robots and AI is in high-skill jobs. Matt Sigelman, president of the Human Resources Institute, summarized his Institute’s widely circulated report on AI, saying, “There’s no question the workers who will be most impacted are those with college degrees, and those are the people who always thought they were safe.” He indicates that: “Companies in finance, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, have some of the highest percentages of their payrolls likely to be disrupted by generative A.I. Not far behind are tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Meta.”

Tech workers, talented and highly trained, are developing the tools allowing their companies to eliminate many of their own jobs. Meanwhile, employers are also using robots to replace low-skill workers. The sociocidal tech impulse of Silicon Valley, as in other sectors, is embraced because of its profit-saving capacity. And the fastest way to increase profit is to reduce wages, usually by weakening relations among employees or busting unions.

The Magnificent Seven have used their overwhelming economic power to directly undermine unions, the most effective form of worker social relations and organization. In January 2024, Elon Musk, now legendary for his anti-union and broader right-wing views, filed a lawsuit in federal courts to declare unconstitutional the National Labor Relations Board, which protects and regulates workers’ right to organize. In August 2024, just before his re-election, Trump joked with Musk about firing workers, complimenting Musk during a two-hour conversation on X for firing Tesla workers who wanted to strike. “They go on strike,” Trump said to Musk, “and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone.’” Trump then added, “You’re the Greatest!” The UAW filed labor charges against both Trump and Musk for the unfair labor practices that the two had celebrated; Musk’s Tesla had clashed with union activists for years, and the NLRB in 2021 had found that the non-union Tesla violated labor laws when it fired a union organizer.

One of Musk’s Magnificent Seven compatriots, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, quickly joined in Trump and Musk’s union-busting party, filing a copycat suit to make the NLRB and unions unconstitutional. Here, we see the world’s two richest men, leaders of the High-Tech Robber Barons, exploiting economic size to reap the fruit of their technology’s economic power. They are seeking a revolutionary breakdown of workplace social relations, moving from the sociopathy of the first Gilded Age to the sociocide of today’s Gilded Age.

The Magnificent Seven’s power undercuts workplace social relations and fiercely attacks union solidarity in the name of free-spirited libertarianism running rampant in Silicon Valley. The broader corporate success in drastically weakening unions is key to sociocide in the entire US labor force and has been achieved not only by the anti-union fervor of corporations since the New Deal but also by the zeal of the Republican Party from Reagan through Trump to make the destruction of labor solidarity and unions a top political priority.

_________________________________________

The above is an excerpt from Charles Derber’s most recent book, Bonfire: American Sociocide, Broken Relations, and the Quest for Democracy.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Charles Derber.

“Now by coming in and being part of the cover-up, the Trump administration has become part of it.”—Alex Jones, InfoWars

Once again, the American police state is choosing to protect predators, not victims.

Jeffrey Epstein—the hedge fund billionaire/convicted serial pedophile and sex trafficker—may be dead, but the machinery that empowered and protected him is still very much alive.

You see, the Epstein case was never just about Epstein—it was about the entire edifice of power that shields the ruling class, silences victims, and erases accountability.

Thus, the latest about-face declarations from the Trump administration—that Epstein had no client list, that he did, in fact, kill himself, and that there’s nothing more to discuss or investigate so we should just move on—have only reinforced what many have suspected all along: the system is rigged in order to protect the power elite because the power elite are the system.

In this age of partisan politics and a deeply polarized populace, corruption—especially when it involves sexual debauchery, depravity, and predatory behavior—has become the great equalizer.

With the reemergence of Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost in the public discourse, we are once again reminded of just how deep the rot goes.

Politics, religion, entertainment, business, law enforcement, the military—it doesn’t matter the arena or affiliation: all are riddled with the kind of seedy, depraved behavior that gets a free pass when it involves the powerful.

For years, the Epstein case has stood as a grotesque emblem of the depravity within America’s power elite: billionaires, politicians, and celebrities who allegedly trafficked in sex with young girls while insulated from accountability.

It is believed that Epstein, who died in jail after being arrested on charges of molesting, raping, and sex trafficking dozens of young girls, operated a sex trafficking ring not only for his own personal pleasure but also for that of his friends and business associates.

According to The Washington Post, “several of the young women…say they were offered to the rich and famous as sex partners at Epstein’s parties.”

Despite the government’s insistence that there’s nothing more to see, here’s what the public record already reveals:

• Epstein ferried his friends about on his private plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express” after the Nabokov novel, due to the presence of what appeared to be underage girls on board.
• Both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were counted among Epstein’s friends.
• Both Clinton and Trump were at one time passengers on the Lolita Express.
• Both Clinton and Trump are renowned womanizers who have been accused of sexual impropriety by a significant number of women over the years. In fact, The Rutherford Institute represented Paula Jones in her landmark sexual harassment lawsuit against then-President Clinton—a case that helped expose how far the political establishment will go to shield its own.

So you have to wonder… when President Trump, who has used his administration’s war on human trafficking to justify expanding the government’s police state powers, quietly dismantles the very government agencies tasked with investigating and exposing sex trafficking… what exactly is going on?

The message from the top is clear: there will be no accountability.

This isn’t justice. It’s a double standard—one set of rules for the untouchables, and another for everyone else.

If it looks like a cover-up, smells like a cover-up, and appears to benefit all the usual suspects, is it so far-fetched to suspect that the government is once again closing ranks to protect the members of its power elite?

We’ve seen it before: from the CIA’s MK-Ultra experiments and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations to CIA black sites and NSA mass surveillance.

Each time, secrecy protected the powerful and betrayed the people.

And it will keep happening—again and again—unless we confront the truth hiding in plain sight: that abuse of power is not an aberration of the system—it is the system.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the shadow economy of sex trafficking, where power, profit, and predation converge.

This is America’s seedy underbelly.

Child sex trafficking—the buying and selling of women, young girls, and boys for sex, some as young as 9 years old—has become big business in America. It is the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.

This is the darkness at the heart of the American police state: a system built to shield the powerful from justice.

While Epstein’s alleged crimes are heinous enough on their own, he is part of a larger narrative of how a culture of entitlement becomes a cesspool and a breeding ground for despots and predators.

Give any one person—or government agency—too much power and allow them to believe that they are entitled, untouchable, and will not be held accountable for their actions, and those powers will be abused.

We see this dynamic play out every day in communities across the United States.

A cop shoots an unarmed citizen for no credible reason and gets away with it. A president employs executive orders to sidestep the Constitution and gets away with it. A government agency spies on its citizens’ communications and gets away with it. An entertainment mogul sexually harasses aspiring actresses and gets away with it. The U.S. military bombs a civilian hospital and gets away with it.

It’s no coincidence that the same administration dismantling offices tasked with fighting human trafficking is also defunding the few agencies left to hold law enforcement accountable.

This is how the system works, protecting the untouchables—not because they’re innocent, but because the system has made them immune.

Abuse of power—and the ambition-fueled hypocrisy and deliberate disregard for misconduct that make those abuses possible—works the same whether you’re talking about sex crimes, government corruption, or the rule of law.

Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.

For too long now, Americans have tolerated an oligarchy in which a powerful, elite group of wealthy donors is calling the shots.

We need to restore the rule of law for all people, no exceptions.

The rule of law means no one gets a free pass—no matter their wealth, status, or political connections.

As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, and in its fictional counterpart, The Erik Blair Diaries, the empowerment of petty tyrants and political gods must come to an end.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

“Now by coming in and being part of the cover-up, the Trump administration has become part of it.”—Alex Jones, InfoWars

Once again, the American police state is choosing to protect predators, not victims.

Jeffrey Epstein—the hedge fund billionaire/convicted serial pedophile and sex trafficker—may be dead, but the machinery that empowered and protected him is still very much alive.

You see, the Epstein case was never just about Epstein—it was about the entire edifice of power that shields the ruling class, silences victims, and erases accountability.

Thus, the latest about-face declarations from the Trump administration—that Epstein had no client list, that he did, in fact, kill himself, and that there’s nothing more to discuss or investigate so we should just move on—have only reinforced what many have suspected all along: the system is rigged in order to protect the power elite because the power elite are the system.

In this age of partisan politics and a deeply polarized populace, corruption—especially when it involves sexual debauchery, depravity, and predatory behavior—has become the great equalizer.

With the reemergence of Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost in the public discourse, we are once again reminded of just how deep the rot goes.

Politics, religion, entertainment, business, law enforcement, the military—it doesn’t matter the arena or affiliation: all are riddled with the kind of seedy, depraved behavior that gets a free pass when it involves the powerful.

For years, the Epstein case has stood as a grotesque emblem of the depravity within America’s power elite: billionaires, politicians, and celebrities who allegedly trafficked in sex with young girls while insulated from accountability.

It is believed that Epstein, who died in jail after being arrested on charges of molesting, raping, and sex trafficking dozens of young girls, operated a sex trafficking ring not only for his own personal pleasure but also for that of his friends and business associates.

According to The Washington Post, “several of the young women…say they were offered to the rich and famous as sex partners at Epstein’s parties.”

Despite the government’s insistence that there’s nothing more to see, here’s what the public record already reveals:

• Epstein ferried his friends about on his private plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express” after the Nabokov novel, due to the presence of what appeared to be underage girls on board.
• Both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were counted among Epstein’s friends.
• Both Clinton and Trump were at one time passengers on the Lolita Express.
• Both Clinton and Trump are renowned womanizers who have been accused of sexual impropriety by a significant number of women over the years. In fact, The Rutherford Institute represented Paula Jones in her landmark sexual harassment lawsuit against then-President Clinton—a case that helped expose how far the political establishment will go to shield its own.

So you have to wonder… when President Trump, who has used his administration’s war on human trafficking to justify expanding the government’s police state powers, quietly dismantles the very government agencies tasked with investigating and exposing sex trafficking… what exactly is going on?

The message from the top is clear: there will be no accountability.

This isn’t justice. It’s a double standard—one set of rules for the untouchables, and another for everyone else.

If it looks like a cover-up, smells like a cover-up, and appears to benefit all the usual suspects, is it so far-fetched to suspect that the government is once again closing ranks to protect the members of its power elite?

We’ve seen it before: from the CIA’s MK-Ultra experiments and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations to CIA black sites and NSA mass surveillance.

Each time, secrecy protected the powerful and betrayed the people.

And it will keep happening—again and again—unless we confront the truth hiding in plain sight: that abuse of power is not an aberration of the system—it is the system.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the shadow economy of sex trafficking, where power, profit, and predation converge.

This is America’s seedy underbelly.

Child sex trafficking—the buying and selling of women, young girls, and boys for sex, some as young as 9 years old—has become big business in America. It is the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.

This is the darkness at the heart of the American police state: a system built to shield the powerful from justice.

While Epstein’s alleged crimes are heinous enough on their own, he is part of a larger narrative of how a culture of entitlement becomes a cesspool and a breeding ground for despots and predators.

Give any one person—or government agency—too much power and allow them to believe that they are entitled, untouchable, and will not be held accountable for their actions, and those powers will be abused.

We see this dynamic play out every day in communities across the United States.

A cop shoots an unarmed citizen for no credible reason and gets away with it. A president employs executive orders to sidestep the Constitution and gets away with it. A government agency spies on its citizens’ communications and gets away with it. An entertainment mogul sexually harasses aspiring actresses and gets away with it. The U.S. military bombs a civilian hospital and gets away with it.

It’s no coincidence that the same administration dismantling offices tasked with fighting human trafficking is also defunding the few agencies left to hold law enforcement accountable.

This is how the system works, protecting the untouchables—not because they’re innocent, but because the system has made them immune.

Abuse of power—and the ambition-fueled hypocrisy and deliberate disregard for misconduct that make those abuses possible—works the same whether you’re talking about sex crimes, government corruption, or the rule of law.

Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.

For too long now, Americans have tolerated an oligarchy in which a powerful, elite group of wealthy donors is calling the shots.

We need to restore the rule of law for all people, no exceptions.

The rule of law means no one gets a free pass—no matter their wealth, status, or political connections.

As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, and in its fictional counterpart, The Erik Blair Diaries, the empowerment of petty tyrants and political gods must come to an end.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

In the latest installment of Inequality Watch, TRNN investigative reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis explore the roots of today’s historic levels of economic inequality and the system that has perpetuated it while devastating the lives and livelihoods of wage earners. To do so, they speak with renowned economist Dr. Richard Wolff about how ideas hatched in the classroom decades ago prompted economic elites to put the US on a treacherous path that would hollow out the middle class, suppress wage growth for working people, and ensure a future where only the wealthiest benefit from America’s economic growth.

Production: Stephen Janis, Taya Graham
Studio: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Adam Coley

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Taya Graham:

Hello, my name is Taya Graham and welcome to the Inequality Watch. It’s a show that seeks to expose the dangers of extreme wealth inequality and discuss what we can do to fix it and to do so, I’m joined by my reporting partner, Stephen Janis

Stephen Janis:

Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Taya Graham:

It’s good to have you. Now, this is a form to examine the facts and figures, consequences, and solutions for our current wealth and balance, which infiltrates every aspect of our civic life. On this show, we won’t just tell you about inequality. We will dig deeper and show you how it works, how it affects your lives, and the political system that has grown inherently hostile to the working class. And to do so, we’ll be joined by a guest who knows more about this topic than anyone I can think of. Dr. Richard Wolfe is an expert economist who’s become YouTube’s foremost public intellectual at the intersection of economics and politics. And his analysis of what is driving America’s progression towards oligarchy has been critical for the movement to fight against it. And I know his historical context has helped me understand how politics can often sit decidedly downstream from economics.

So we’re going to have Dr. Wolff respond not just to the report, but to some recent pronouncements from politicians on Capitol Hill who we interviewed and some recent moves by the Trump administration. But before we get to Dr. Wolff, we want to delve into a new report about the devastating impact of our decades long march towards wealth imbalance, and it’s from the Rand Corporation. And reveal just how profoundly the inequities and unfairness are wired into the American economy. We will dig deep into the consequences of this stunning report and unravel deeper roots of unease. It is generated among Americans and how that lack of confidence in the system has manifested itself in the very tense politics of the present. But first, some of the details of the report itself. Now, as I said, it was released by the RAND Corporation. The premise of this analysis is relatively straightforward.

The authors take a look at working class income as a share of the overall GDP or all the goods and services produced by our economy in a given year. The study looks back 50 years to determine the share of income that went to working people and then compares it to the present. It’s an indicator of how much of the wealth of the largest economy in the world goes to the people who actually make it work. And guess what? It’s done nothing but drop consistently. Believe it or not, in 1975, roughly 75% of the total American economic output went to workers’ wages. That’s three quarters of all economic activity into workers’ pockets. You heard that right? Nearly 50 years ago, workers were the biggest beneficiaries of our country’s increasing wealth. But things have certainly changed. As recently as 2023, the RAND study found that the percentage had dropped dramatically to 46%. Over time, the share of the nation’s income that goes to workers has dropped by roughly 30 percentage points. And where has that income gone? Well, not just to the rich or the very rich or the extremely rich, but to the insanely rich to the top 1%, although, and all they’ve done well, don’t worry. In fact, the biggest bulk of the gain has actually gone to the 0.01%, not even the 1%, the actual

Stephen Janis:

Tip of

Taya Graham:

The iceberg 0.01%,

Stephen Janis:

The

Taya Graham:

Most absurdly wealthy group in America. And that income transfer has led to an astounding amount of loss of wealth for people who actually do the work to keep this country running. The RAM report estimates that since 1975, a jaw dropping $73 trillion of wealth has migrated from the working class to the elites. That’s trillion with a T. That’s twice the total annual output of our economy in any given year. And that trend is accelerating. That’s because in just 2023, a mind boggling, 3 trillion additional dollars would’ve gone to working people if wages had garnered the same share of economic growth as they did in the 1970s. And all of this, of course, brings us back to the most stunning takeaway from these incredible numbers, namely that wealth follows power. And with power accumulating and concentrating in fewer and fewer hands, our democracy becomes unable to solve complex problems. And Steven, this sort of becomes a vicious cycle.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think that this report points out and sort of parallels that you need to bring up to understand just how catastrophic it’s been, is the fact that we have been living in a progressively extractive economy. In other words, as the worker share has diminished the parts of the economy that actually produce things for people that are useful and improved, their lives has diminished. And that economy has come more and more extractive. And just to illustrate that point, to make it very simple, as you think about what share financial services have played in the economy since the 1970s where it was about two to 3% of the economy, meaning hedge funds, investment bankers, hedge funds actually didn’t exist, but investment bankers, people who feed off the froth of the economy, well, it’s tripled since then, tripled to almost eight or 9%.

And at one point, just before 2008, before the great recession, about 40% of corporate profits came from companies that just did nothing but shuffle the deck and make money off of money. And so that illustrates what happens. And that’s when you’re talking about sort the political paralysis that precedes it because the more people are extractive, the more antagonistic relationship they have with the working class, working class doesn’t become a group that you want to lift up and improve their lives. It becomes people that you want to extract money from and make their lives worse. And so I think that’s what evolves in parallel, and that’s where we see these sort of mean billionaires, angry billionaires all the time. They’re always angry. Elon Musk is always angry, and Donald Trump is pretty much always angry. And it has to do with the fact that their relationship with the people who actually make this economy run has become purely antagonistic in the sense that their wealth is based upon extracting from people. So I think that’s a good point, and that’s what comes out in this report.

Taya Graham:

That’s actually such an interesting point, and I really hope Dr. Wolf will respond to it.

Stephen Janis:

Oh, he will.

Taya Graham:

And you’re basically saying that bad policy follows

Stephen Janis:

Wealth

Taya Graham:

In a way that we can’t see

Stephen Janis:

Because good policy requires collective thinking and it requires thinking that is most beneficial to everyone. That’s a hard thing to do in a democracy. We don’t understand that it’s not easy to build a bullet train or to improve housing or to build more affordable housing. It takes concerted effort where people are kind of on the same page where I will benefit from what you will benefit. But when the economy becomes purely extractive and wealth is based on the power of accumulating so much that the people underneath you have no power whatsoever. You can’t think big in that sense. You can think big on individual scale, but not collective scale. And I think that’s what we’re seeing,

Taya Graham:

Steven. I think this imbalance also destabilizes communities and makes them more susceptible to things like over-policing and economic exploitation. I mean, so many of the small towns that we covered

Stephen Janis:

Were

Taya Graham:

Also under economic duress, and they had issues with policing. They were overwhelmed by aggressive ticketing and fines and general overreach and overspending on things like law enforcement.

Absolutely. But these are questions we can put to our guests. Dr. Richard Wolf, I’m sure will have a lot of interesting things to say about all of it, and I’m sure most of you are familiar with him, especially if you’re watching us on YouTube. Dr. Wolf is an esteemed economist and founder of Democracy at Work whose ability to analyze the economics of the present through the history of the past is unparalleled. He’s also the author of multiple books, including his latest capitalism crisis, deepens, and he’s perhaps one of the best people we know to break down the mechanics of how rampant inequality is reflected in the politics of the present. A topic of great importance now more than ever. Dr. Wolf, thank you so much for joining us.

Richard Wolff:

My pleasure. I’m a big admirer of what you do as well, so this is thank an opportunity for me to join you, and that’s worth it for me right there.

Taya Graham:

Thank

Stephen Janis:

You, Dr. Wolf.

Taya Graham:

That’s so wonderful to hear. Thank you, Dr. So first I just wanted to address the Rand report, and to me the numbers were really quite shocking. So I guess my first question would be just taking in the raw numbers and weighing on the methodology, how does the economic share of wages drop so dramatically? I mean, how did the oligarchs pull this off basically? That’s a good question.

Richard Wolff:

Well, first of all, let me reinforce, this is a very historic process. You don’t see this very often. That is, you don’t see changes this big in so relatively short a historical period. So yes, you’re right to focus on it. It is stunning. And in order to explain it, you have to look at certain basic shifts here in the United States and in the global economy that span the last 40 years or so in terms of when this really took off. The 1975 is the right year for the Rand Corporation to have used because it is a crucial, not that particular year, but the 1970s are a crucial time. You should think about it as sort of the end of the very special situation that came out of the end of World War ii, 1945 to 75. Those 30 years were a period that the United States must have known, certainly the leaders knew could not possibly be sustained because all of the potential competitors in the world, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, were all destroyed.

Russia, if you want to ask them, they were literally destroyed. Immense bombing had wrecked their train systems, their factories, their cities killed enormous numbers and hurt enormous numbers of their people. So they were finished. Whereas in the United States, it was radically other, other than Pearl Harbor, no bombs fell in the United States. Pearl Harbor happened as you know at the very beginning. So for the bulk of the war, the United States was immune as a percentage of our population. We lost many fewer young people in the fighting compared to every other one of those countries. Japan had an atomic bomb dropped twice, we dropped it, but nobody dropped anything comparable on us. So in those years, the world readjusted itself. The war forced it, and suddenly we saw very dramatically the end, the final end, it had been dying, but the final end of the British empire that had dominated the world for the previous two to three centuries, it was completely gone.

The jewel of the empire, India became independent in 1947. It was over and there was no one to fill that void, no one with one exception, the United States. So in a very short time, the global currency went from the British pound sterling to the US dollar from the British Navy being the power force of the world to the American military operation on a global scale with atomic weapons. You cannot overstress this. The only way Japan and the Europe were able to rebuild from the war was because the United States lent them the money to buy the equipment from the US with which to do that. So after the 1970s, all of that was over the 1970s were in fact a watershed. The great fear in the United States, the great fear was to slide back into the economic problems that the United States had had before World War ii.

Let me remind you, 29 to the war or the great depression, the worst collapse of capitalism in the history of that system, even to this day, we have not had anything worse than the 1930s. So there was always a fear then that oh, what would happen if we slid back with that in the back of your mind? Then you get the results that the Rand Corporation, like many other investigations have shown that the response, and this is really important, folks, that the response of the capitalist class and who do I mean by that? I mean the people who are employers, the people who are in the position of hiring other human beings. The United States census tells us that 3% of the American people are employers, the other 97% are not. And what that means, whatever else you think, it puts that 3% in a position to make powerful decisions that the other 97% of us have to adjust to have to live with and basically have to accept unless we make a revolution, which as you both noticed, we have not had.

So here is what that 3% did, and then I’ll stop. The 3% started, particularly in the 1970s, realized that the Europeans in the Japanese had recovered from the war as everyone should have expected them to do. They were still the Germans in the Japanese, hardworking, highly skilled engineer, modern country, all of that. And they understood that their place in the sun could only be achieved if they could outdo the absolutely dominant economy in the world, namely the United States. So they set their goals on producing goods and services that were either better than or cheaper than, or hopefully both what was done in the United States that made the United States great, which is why Americans discovered in the 1970s and eighties, the Volkswagen and the Toyota and the Nissan, and they fill in the blank. They did it. They did what they set out to do. They produced better cars so that even Americans bought them ahead of the Ford, the Chevy, the Chrysler and so on.

And in that moment, the discovery of the American capitalist class was that if they didn’t do something dramatic, they would be sliding downward as their former adversaries. The Europeans in the Japanese made their move, and that move was more and more successful with each passing year. So here’s what they did. Number one, they made the decision to move the manufacturing base of the United States. Out of the United States. The working class in the United States had been so successful in pushing up wages over the previous century, a century in which profits froze faster than wages, but they rose fast enough right up until the seventies that the employer could share with the workers a modest increase every year that the union would negotiate. And when an employer didn’t do it, the unions had the muscle to strike and to get it, and so wages were much higher.

But in the 1970s, the invention of the jet engine and the invention of the internet made it possible to supervise, organize, monitor a manufacturing factory in China pretty much as easily as you used to do it across the street in New Jersey or St. Louis or Chicago or where you were. So they left. The second thing they did was to take advantage of their history and to automate, to really go about systematically focusing on replacing these high cost workers, which they kept seeing as their great problem. Wages were lower in Japan, wages were lower in Europe, significantly so, and so they realized how do we do well? We replace workers with machines and the third action bring cheap workers here when it wasn’t convenient to move production there where the cheap workers live, those three things, export of jobs, automation and immigration of working class people.

That is mostly people in their working ages, 20 to 50 who would come here with or without family. No one really cared but would work for Penny on the dollar compared to what Americans were used to. And I have to tell you that worked, that strategic move of the business class, those 3% who run the businesses work, they all did it. By the way, at the beginning. Many of them were hesitant. They didn’t want to go to China. China don’t speak English and China’s far away and China’s run by a communist party. Very scary, don’t want to do it. But they had to because the first ones who did it made such profits that those who were not willing to go had to overcome their cautionary anxieties and go, but I want to stress here because Americans are being fed real nonsense about all of this.

No one held a gun to their head. The Chinese never had the authority or the power to make that happen. They might’ve wished it, they might’ve wanted it, but they never had it. This is a decision made by Americans and by the way, their counterparts against whom they were competing in Japan and Europe followed suit, also went to China. And exactly for the same reasons, which is one of the reasons Europe is in the trouble. It is in now Japan having difficulties that it is in now. The world has changed. The people’s republic of China is an entity in the world economy, the likes of which we have not seen for a century. I need to explain to people so often, Russia, the Soviet Union, may and I underscore may, may have been an adversary, militarily may have been an adversary ideologically, but economically never.

It was much too poor. It could never hold a candle to the American economy. That was its Achilles heel. And then when it tried to match the arms race with the US, when it tried to control another country, Afghanistan, it discovered that it was simply too poor to pull that off. And having waited too late, it dissolved. It couldn’t survive. No one has missed that lesson, least of all the people’s republic of China. So they’ve been super careful. If you watch them now, they’re still, when they don’t actually need to anymore, be super careful. They don’t impose tariffs on us until and after we do that to them. That’s been their kind of behavior all the way through. But we Americans have to understand, we do not. We are not in position to win. We’re not even in a position to fight another Cold war. China isn’t the Cold War the way the Soviet Union was. The conditions are completely different. And if the United States pursues it, I as a betting person would bet we will lose. Not out of it, not that we aren’t strong, we are not that we aren’t rich, we are, but the world isn’t a place where statements like we’re rich and we’re strong carry the day that

Is over. And I think that is a necessary way to frame or to contextualize all of the other important issues.

Stephen Janis:

Well, Dr. Wolf, thank you so much for laying that out. That is really fascinating. And I guess when we’re talking about the Rand report, so they were at this sort of pivot point, they make this decision, was there an option to be more inclusive with the working class here? I mean, does it have to end up the way it did where wealth is so extremely unequal? I really appreciate the way you rooted that and we now kind of understand the mechanisms, but could they have done this a different way, in a way that would’ve led to less economic dislocation for the working class in this country, or was it just the table was set the way it was? That’s a good

Taya Graham:

Question.

Richard Wolff:

Well, the way I would answer it, which will upset some perhaps, but it’s the only way that makes sense to me. If you allow the system to function in the normal way that a capitalist economic system functions, then I have to give you the answer your own words. That’s the way the world was. That’s the way decisions got made and it isn’t neither surprising nor shocking that they were made in that way. Could you have had a different outcome? Absolutely. But in order to get it, and I’ll describe it to you in a moment, in order to get it, you would have to change the system. And what I mean by that is you would have to stop making the decision based on what is profitable. Look, I’m a professor of economics. I have learned about capitalism as the profit maximizing system. That’s what I learned, and I went to all the fanciest schools. This country has to learn it, and they tried their level best. Half of my professors were Nobel Prize winners and sitting next to me in my class at Yale where I got my PhD, was one of the very few women that took economics courses in those days, and her name is Janet Yellen.

Stephen Janis:

Wow. Oh my god. Wow. So you were there in the room where it happened,

Richard Wolff:

And I know these people personally because we all went through college and university together, et cetera, et cetera. If you make profit the guiding, if profit is the bottom line, which not only I was taught, but I have taught that to generations of students as a professor, then you get these results. If you don’t want these results, you’ve got to deal with the way people are taught to make decisions. I’ll give you the simplest example. If you move your manufacturing out of Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and St. Louis and all the other places, Detroit. I mean I love to use Detroit. In 1975, it had 2 million people. Today it has 700,000 people. I mean, that’s it. End of conversation. That’s called an economic disaster. That’s as bad as having dropped bombs on that place and having killed all those people, obviously that’s not what happened,

But they were driven out by loss of jobs, et cetera, et cetera. So if you move your manufacturing, what is going to happen? Well, we know what happened to the companies that did it. They profited, which is why they did it and keep doing it. But let’s take a look, just you, me and the people participating here. If you produce it in China, it means you’re going to have to bring it back 10,000 miles from Shanghai or any of the in order to sell it to the American public. And you all know you can go buy an electronic device or furniture or kitchenware or a whole lot of other things and it says made in China. Well, what’s the problem here? The problem is you are be fouling the air with all the exhaust from all the freighters that are crisscrossing the ocean. What are you doing to the water? What are you doing to the fish?

Stephen Janis:

What

Richard Wolff:

Doing to the air? Well, here’s the important thing. No one has to worry about it because the companies that profit, even though they cause all of that turmoil, which will cost a fortune if you even can clean it up, they don’t have to pay a nickel. If they had to pay a nickel if they had to, they probably wouldn’t have done it because the profit wouldn’t have shown it as a reasonable thing to

Stephen Janis:

Do. So just so I understand, you’re saying that if the environmental costs were factored into this business decision to move everything to China, if the environmental costs were really factored in, then it wouldn’t be technically profitable to have this kind of transcontinental business or not transcontinental transatlantic. That’s

Richard Wolff:

Amazing.

Stephen Janis:

Wow.

Richard Wolff:

Only amendment I would give you is it’s not just the environmental costs. Let me give you a couple of other examples.

Stephen Janis:

Of course,

Richard Wolff:

When Detroit and I love the city, I’ve been there, I’ve been taken through it, the people treated me one, I have no complaint about the people, but an enormous part of Detroit is empty, burned out neighborhoods, mile after mile. They took me through, I’m talking, I’m not secondhand this, I saw with my own eyes, this is a disaster for these people. They had to pull up stakes, leave their homes, leave their families, leave their churches if they had kids in school, those kids at a very important time in life when they’re making friends and boyfriends and girlfriends, we yanked out of all of those relationships. One of the reasons all due respect that we have Mr. Trump in office is the dislocation of the white, particularly the white manufacturing working class.

It’s been a disaster for our labor movement because our unions were concentrated in manufacturing and you lost them and their member. And then remember all the communities in which those auto workers who lost their jobs lived, the stores in those communities went belly up. The housing market in those communities collapsed. They were unable to maintain their schools. How many children’s educations were interrupted, slowed down, deteriorated. This teach, if you add up all the costs, here’s the irony. Every one of the last eight or nine presidents of the United States have promised in their campaigns to bring manufacturing back. Our current president makes a thing of saying over and over again, he’s doing this to bring back manufacturing. None of them have done it. None of them have delivered on the promise. And we see why because private profit makes it. Well, let me give you an example. In his first presidency, Mr. Trump visited a factory in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, true temper or temper something, I forget the exact name. The factory made three quarters of all the wheelbarrows in the United States.

Taya Graham:

Wow.

Richard Wolff:

In 2023, I just followed it through 2023, a venture capitalist bought the company out and did what they all do, which is carved it up into pieces, sold each of the pieces and made more money that way than they had to pay to get the factory in the first place. Today, that brand is still the brand of most wheelbarrows in America. But if you look at the label on the wheelbarrow underneath the same brand temper, whatever it was in small letters made in China,

Taya Graham:

Incredible.

Richard Wolff:

That’s how this works. If you leave the profit system in, if your loyalty to capitalism means that, then you’ve got a hard road ahoe because you’ve got to understand that commitment by you and by this society is producing the problems. Its presidents cannot and will not

Stephen Janis:

Solve. So Professor Wolf, this is kind of profound. It’s kind of effective because in Baltimore we have 11,000 vacant houses. I never conceptualized your thought of it that those ideas that were taught in that classroom, when you sat next to Janet Yell, and because we conceptualized profit in a certain way led to this destruction, which you kind of made an analogy to a war on the working class and cities like ours that were Baltimore is another example of postindustrial malaise. Absolutely. So you’re saying how these ideas were conceptualized, how we thought about profit, what profit meant has as much to do with the destruction we see as even any other force. Is that what you’re saying? I just want to understand because it’s pretty

Richard Wolff:

Profound. Yeah, you’ve understood me absolutely perfectly. We live in a society. Look, it’s really bad, you know that. I know that

Stephen Janis:

Absolutely.

Richard Wolff:

That part of that understanding. I know a little bit about the history, that understanding is part of the history of where the Real News network comes from and what it was designed to do by the people who have worked at it all these years. It’s an understanding, but we are now evolved enough in the United States that the taboo I’m about to mention doesn’t have its hold anymore. And you were very kind at the beginning to talk about me being all over the internet. Believe me, I’m as amazed by that as possible because having been a critic of capitalism most of my adult life, I know that people approached me always as a kind of an odd duck. If I didn’t have the credentials of the fancy universities, I wouldn’t be in these auditoriums. I wouldn’t be invited. It’s not me, it’s all the other you all know. You know how America works.

I’m here to tell you. Yeah, we now have to do what we have been afraid to do for 75 years, as I like to say, Americans are good. We question our education system, our transportation system, our hospital healthcare system. My God, we are in the forefront of questioning institutions like marriage, heterosexuality and so on, and good for us that we open up those questions. But when it comes to questioning capitalism, oh, all the old taboo sets in and you’re not supposed to go there. You’re not supposed to. Here’s the problem if you don’t go there, if we don’t go there, we are foregoing the solution to the problems. We say we. We should never have undone our manufacturing system that because there’s anything special about it. But a balanced economy is a diverse one. Yes, we need service industry. Yes, we need, but we also need manufacturing.

Right now, the most troubled part of our population are relatively less educated in the formal sense. Males without jobs and without any prospect forgetting them, those were the people who worked in manufacturing and a manufacturing job doesn’t have to be dirty and dusty and it can be clean and in noling if you want it to be. All of that is within reach. Unless we hold on to the taboo and the only people left for whom that taboo works is the very elite that the Rand Corporation makes so clear to us sits at the top. If it weren’t for them, I would be able to talk to 10 times more people and all the others like me. And I can assure you, I’m not the only one out there ready and willing to go would have the audiences that need to hear that message.

Stephen Janis:

Amazing. You’re asking the question, but I was just going to say Toay and to Dr. Wolf. I remember sitting in my macroeconomic was class and the professor said, all people make rational decisions. That was like the basis of it. Now it’s all falling apart as Dr. Wolf. But go ahead. You had the next question.

Taya Graham:

I was just thinking that criticizing our for-profit system, the way we accrue profits and how

Stephen Janis:

And

Taya Graham:

Conceptualizing even a person who is wonderful at accumulating those profits, how they’re lionized, how they’re

Stephen Janis:

Heroes, right? The ideology. The ideology,

Taya Graham:

It’s such this incredible ideology built around it and tackling that as a last taboo is just so important

And very powerful because I think people do sense the imbalance and that’s why when tariffs were proposed by our president that people have the feeling, well, yes, we do want these jobs back, but instead the way tariffs have been implemented has caused a lot of confusion. And so what I want to know is if you’ve discerned any strategy behind it, but before I have you answer, I actually asked Senator Sanders about Trump’s tariffs and what he was doing and I just want you to hear what Senator Sanders response was. And I just want to ask you a question. President Trump has been describing America as a sick patient and tariffs as secure. Do you think America is sick and what would you say should be the remedy

Senator Bernie Sanders:

In America today? My definition of what is wrong with America is very different than Trump’s. My definition of what’s wrong is that we have three people in America who sat beside Trump in his inauguration who own more wealth than the bottom half of American society. My definition of what’s wrong with America is we’re the only major country on earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right, that our childcare system is broken, that 60% of the people in this country, as you’ve heard today, are living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to put food on the table. So that’s my analysis, which is very different than Trump’s. I happen not to believe in unfettered free trade. I helped lead the effort against nafta, PMTR, with China. I think we need trade policies that work for workers, not just the CEOs of large corporations. I think selective tariffs in the right time in the right place are exactly right. I think a blanket tariff in terms of what Trump is doing, which number one happens to be illegal, don’t have the power to do that, and second of one will be counterproductive. Okay, thank

Taya Graham:

You so much. So I guess my question for you is what do you think the approach should be with tariffs and what do you think of President Trump’s approach so far?

Richard Wolff:

Okay, I won’t comment on Bernie’s response, although that would be a conversation I think we could profitably all of us have about the tariffs. Here’s the problem. A tariff is a nasty action. It hurts other people. Americans love to imagine that somehow that’s not the case. If you put a tax, let’s take an example of our major trading partner Canada. If you put a tariff on the things that Canada ships into the United States, and remember, we have thousands of miles of unguarded border between our two countries and we are each other’s major trading partner. We more important for Canada than vice versa because it’s a much smaller country than we are in terms of population and activity, but nonetheless, we depend on each other. Okay? If you suddenly say that for every foot of timber Canada grows wood and we need wood for our housing industry and we bring it in from Canada, if every tree stump that we bring in has to now be paid for, so we have to give the Canadian company that cuts and ships the wood, whatever it costs to get it.

But now on top of that, the buyer in America has to give Uncle Sam tax. That’s what the tariff is. The tariff is exactly the same as a sales tax, right? When you go to the local store and you buy a shirt, if you are in a jurisdiction that has a sales tax, you pay for the shirt and then on top of it, the cash register rings for you. The tax, the sales tax that is for you, an extra cost of that shirt or that pot or whatever you bought. A tariff is exactly the same. It’s a sales tax on imported items, okay? This means that Americans will buy fewer of them because they have become more expensive. So a tariff imposes on the seller in this case, notice a American official not elected by any Canadian makes a decision, a tariff that hurts a Canadian lumber company. Same thing. If you put a tax on electricity, which US spies from Canada and from many other things, oil, gas, those are important exports. You are hurting them. You are telling them we here in America have some economic problems and we are going to kick you in the face to relieve ourselves.

You don’t do that unless either you have a sense of entitlement that the whole world will hate you for or you feel you can browbeat and force them to accept it. And then you have the nerve, which by the way, president Trump did today with the visiting new leader of Canada. He told him today, we don’t want to buy Canadian automobiles. We don’t want to buy your steel, your aluminum. He mentioned half a dozen items. Well then only Mr. Trump could say that and seem, because I watched it actually live, seemed not to grasp that he was condemning major industries in Canada to unspeakable decline in a short amount of time. I mean, he’s making Detroit’s out of these places, but he’s not elected by them. Why they are sitting there. These Canadians, you can be sure, and I can tell you this again from personal experience, they are sitting there transforming a really positive attitude towards Americans, which they had into a really deep hatred for Americans.

Yes, they understand Trump is not all American and they’re not not children, but you are putting them and then now multiply this by virtually every other country on earth. Here’s the irony. After World War ii, if you remember, the policy of the United States was containment. George Kennan was a great thinker in American political science. That was a strategy. So the Americans put bases around Russia and we isolated and we constrained Russia, the Soviet Union. Here’s the irony. Today it is the United States pursuing that kind of policy, but with the absurd opposite result. We are isolating us. We are turning the whole world into looking at the United States, and understandably, I wish I could say they were wrong about it, but they’re not.

Mr. Trump is doing unspeakable damage. Now on the economics, if you are going to put a tariff the way we are doing, and you’re going to say as Mr. Trump does, I want automobiles to be built here. I don’t want them to be built in Canada. I don’t want them to be built in Mexico where a lot of them are. Well, okay, then put a tariff and hope cross your fingers that the profit calculations of the car companies will lead them to do what you hope they will do if you impose such a tariff. But here’s the one thing you cannot do. You cannot say, here’s the tariff, and then two days later take it away and then a week and a half later raise it up a bit more. You know why? Because that introduces uncertainty and here’s why that matters. Go to any large company that’s busy in Canada or Mexico or anywhere else. They hear about these tariffs and do they consider moving into the United States? Of course they do. They want to escape the damage that a tariff does to them, but to move back into the United States takes two or three years, costs a ton of money, and is an immense risk. If you have any reason to doubt that this tariff will stay the way it is, you would never do it.

That’s why no one is going to do it. That’s why that such a point policy. Policy is a roaring failure from the get go. Wow. He has economic advisors. I know them. Either they’re intimidated and don’t tell him these things or they tell him and he doesn’t care or doesn’t listen. I don’t know. I’m not privy to that sort of thing, but I can tell you that the whole world watches this look, it was a long shot for him, which he didn’t understand because he’s not going to be president in three and a half years and most of these moves of companies, they take much longer than he will be president. So they have to worry that whoever comes in, Kamala Harris or anybody else will undo all of this, in which case they will have spent a fortune of money and moved and be regretful that they ever did it. They’re not going to move there, they just aren’t.

Stephen Janis:

Well, Dr. Wolf, I’ve been really thinking about some of the things you’ve said, and a lot of us we’re kind of naive. We always look at economics as a science, right, as a science. But from what you’re telling me, economics as a philosophy and it’s a philosophy, kind of turned somewhat as a religion where we’re worshiping at the feet of Milton Freeman or something, and that where prophet has become invaluable, prophet is like the catechism or something. You can’t question it, and I’m kind of profoundly affected by this because I did take micro macro and I feel like, wow, I was misled. I mean, you’re talking profit has become sort of invaluable. You can’t say anything against it, is that

Richard Wolff:

Where we are? But let me correct you about something you said a few minutes ago, and you were very wise. If I heard you correctly. You said you sat in a course and the course began with the teacher saying to you, in this course, we assume that everybody is a rational person, who

Stephen Janis:

That’s what was said.

Richard Wolff:

Yeah, that’s what was said. But you were clever when you said it a few moments ago in this program, I’ve got you here. You said you let us know that you thought that was nuts, what we were being told.

Stephen Janis:

Yes I did. Even at 19 years old I did.

Richard Wolff:

Yes. Here you were 19 years old. You already knew that this was crazy. Well, let me just tell you, I am married. I’ve been married a very long time. I know I’m a dinosaur. I got married at 23. I’m still married to the same lady. Congrats.

Taya Graham:

That’s lovely.

Richard Wolff:

She is a psychotherapist, and when I was a graduate student, we were just sort of getting together. Then when I was a graduate student, I came home one day and I told her that I had heard in my class what you heard, that economics is based on the notion that decisions are rational.

She fell off her chair laughing. She thought I was making it up to pull her leg to say something humorous. I said, no, there was no humor at all. And she said, oh my God. My whole field of psychology is an attempt to understand the very difficult combination of drives and urges and fears, half of which we’re not even conscious of that determine RB, the notion we are all rational calculators of costs and benefits. She could finish the sentence. She started laughing again at the thought of mature men and women sitting around talking like that. It struck her as incredible,

Stephen Janis:

But why do we worship the notion of prophet if it’s irrationally derived? Do you know what I mean? That’s what I’m just thinking about. What you said was so profound because these were conscious decisions, but they really were also exclusive decisions. That’s right. We are going to exclude the working class because of this idea of profit. How come we’ve come to worship at this idea of the science of it when it really is more like a philosophy, I guess is what I’m asking, because you’re there

Richard Wolff:

When I teach it. Now, in order to get at this, when I teach it now, I say to the students, profits are part of the revenue when you sell, if you make shoes or you make software programs, when you sell your product, you get a revenue and part of that revenue stream comes into the pocket of the worker, and we have a name for that. That’s wages and salaries, and another part of the revenue stream goes into the hands of the employer, and we call that profits. Now, if you want to make a economic system, have an objective, a goal, if you make it to profits, then you say the whole system is supposed to work to maximize what goes to a tiny minority of the people involved. Why wouldn’t you say more democratic for sure that it is the wages that we are most interested in securing because that’s where most of the people’s needs lie with the wages and the salaries, not with the, and when I explain it that way, everybody nods. It makes sense if you don’t explain it that way. If you explain it the way most universities and colleges do, and I still teach. I’m sitting here in New York City, I teach at something called the New School University,

But that’s a recognized American university. But most of my colleagues, they continue to teach profit maximization as the royal road to efficiency it.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, I mean, inequality is not efficient, right? That’s right. Can you explain that a little bit? How inequality is not efficient economic

Richard Wolff:

Principle, you should have stayed with economics. You’re getting perfectly well,

Stephen Janis:

I blew it. I was an economics minor, English major as you can imagine, but never too late, right? But yeah, so inequality is inefficient, right? Professor?

Richard Wolff:

Yeah, it’s a terrible inefficiency. And again, you can see because nobody has to calculate it in a profit system. If inequality means that inner city schools across America can barely hold it together as disciplinary institutions, let alone chances to motivate, educate, and inspire young people who need it, then you are going to pay a cost in those kids’ lives not being anywhere near the contributions that they’re actually capable of not being able to earn the income that they need for their fear. The social cost of this is enormous to tell me that private profit doesn’t see its way clear to deal with this is to tell me that we got a system that doesn’t work well. It’s making profit driven decisions that are outweighed by the social costs that these private profit calculators never have to take into account. And that’s cuckoo. That’s the distill way of organizing yourself, right? Yeah.

Taya Graham:

Professor Wolf, you were mentioning how tariffs work, and I remember Peter Navarro, who’s the White House senior counselor for trade. He said that the administration intends to raise 6 trillion over the next decade via these reciprocal tariffs and that this would actually shrink the annual trade deficit, which is about $1.2 trillion. So I would have a two-part question for you. So would the US government actually directly raise trillions of dollars via tariffs? And my second question, is a trade deficit really a bad thing?

Richard Wolff:

Yes. It’s a very, very old question. Okay,

Let me make a parenthetical remark just to set the context. Tariffs are not, new. Tariffs have been used by many countries over centuries. I tell you this only because there is a vast literature that has developed in all modern languages about tariffs because they have been used so often and we have lots of empirical studies. Under what conditions did they achieve the goals they set? Under what conditions did they fail to achieve? I’ve taught courses in international trade, and there’s a segment of the semester when you talk about tariffs. That’s how established they are. So having said that and wanting to remain very polite, I would tell you that Mr. Navarro is considered even in the economics profession, to be, I’m searching for the polite word, difficult to take seriously. I’ll leave it at that.

Taya Graham:

That’s very diplomatic.

Richard Wolff:

Yes. So the notion of the trillions, there is no way to know how much money a tariff will raise. That’s what the literature shows. Mr. Navarro should know that because it depends always on how people react. So for example, if the tariff, let me give you an example that’s real. The best and cheapest electric vehicles in the world are currently made in China by Chinese companies, the most famous of which the BYD three letters, which stands by the way for the English words, build your dream. That’s the name. The Chinese company took BYD. Let’s say you wanted to get one of those cars, which by the way, you’ll see on the roads of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. The only place you don’t see him is here. Why? Because of the tariff. The tariff now stands right now at a hundred percent. It was raised from 27.5%.

That’s what Mr. Trump put on it in his first presidency, and Mr. Biden raised it to a hundred percent. So if you want a $30,000 BYD car or truck, you have to come up with 30 grand that goes to China to pay for the vehicle, and another 30%, another 30 grand, a hundred percent tariff go to Uncle Sam. So you would have to pay, or I would have to pay $60,000 for that $30,000 car. Now hear me out. Every competitor of the United States, every company in the world that uses electric trucks to get its inputs to ship its outputs, they are all able to buy the best and the cheapest truck for $30,000. But the American company that has to compete against them would have to pay 60,000 for the same truck. You know what that means? That America is shooting itself in the foot by what it’s doing.

It’s not going to make more jobs. And what are Americans going to do as a result? They’re not going to pay the tariff. They’re going to settle for a cheaper electric vehicle made by Ford or General Motors or Tesla or Toyota because it’s not as good as the Chinese, but it isn’t 60 grand. And so guess what? No tariff will be paid because Americans will get out of paying the tariff by buying the cheap car, buying the cheap truck with the end result. That step-by-step Americans will isolate themselves in a walled off tariff universe, which makes them progressively incapable of competing. Let me put it to you this way. I look at all of this as a professional economist, and my image is I’m watching one of those proverbial movie scenes where you see a train crowded with people having a good time, but from where you sit, you can see the train is heading for a stone wall. Oh, wow, Jesus. And you want to yell loudly, get off the train, but they’re having such a good time telling each other’s stories and drinking their cocktails that they simply can’t

Stephen Janis:

Hear me. Wow, it’s

Taya Graham:

A nightmare.

Stephen Janis:

I’m just thinking about what you’re saying. And so we have, as we discussed before, we have a irrational system that sort of presents itself with science, comes up to an irrational conclusion to create tremendous wealth inequality, which creates the conditions for a political class now that is making totally irrational decisions. And so are we looking at a point where capitalism is turning in on itself in America, because the elite said profit above all else, profit above people, and now people are pushing back. But what they’re getting is actually not a good solution, but really irrational decisions that are kind of based on that irrational idea in the first place. Not to be too circular, but

Richard Wolff:

Because of my time constraint, I have to get off, but let me end by breaking another taboo.

Stephen Janis:

Okay, great.

Richard Wolff:

Here it is. The way this system is going, the way it is acting, it is doing exactly what you said, holding on to the taboo and building the conditions, which I know we haven’t got there yet, but building the conditions where the next concept we will be discussing is revolution. You cannot do this to the mass of people. Our people are already showing many signs of extreme stress. Mr. Trump is an exemplar of where that stress can lead. It can go to the right, of course it can, but if it goes to the right, which it’s doing now, and if the right proves itself unable to solve these problems, which it’s clear to me it will, then the next step for the American people is to try to go to the left, which after all they did in the 1930s, there is no reason they can’t or won’t do it again. That’s a wonderful

Taya Graham:

Thing. Professor Wolf, I know you have a time constraint, but I was hoping I could just ask you one quick question.

Richard Wolff:

Okay. Quick.

Taya Graham:

Okay. The question is, I think this is really our most important question for you is what do you see on the horizon? What advice do you have for your average worker out there who’s paying off their car or their home or their credit card, who doesn’t have a whole bunch in their savings account, who doesn’t make over $70,000 a year? What should we be looking out for on the horizon? I mean, we’ve talked about the macro economics. What can we do on the micro to protect our wallets? What do we need to look out for?

Richard Wolff:

Well, the first part of the answer is to be honest. If people say to me, which they do, is it possible by some mixture of good luck that this all works out for Mr. Trump? The answer is yes, that could happen. It’s not a zero probability it could, but if you want me to tell you what I think is going to happen, I think it’s going to be a disaster. And therefore, I would say to every working man or woman, any person, you must now be extremely careful about your financial situation. Don’t make major expenditures if you don’t have to. Hold on. Find ways of accommodating and economizing because there are risks now of a recession, which by the way, most of Wall Street expects later this year or early next year, there are serious risks of an inflation. There are serious probabilities of a combination of both of those things, which we call stagflation. And all of those are terrible news for the working class. And I’ll add one more. Having told the working class for the last 70 years that there is this thing called the American Dream, and that if they work hard and study hard, they will have an entitled chance to get it, an nice home, a car, a vacation, a dog, a station wagon, all the rest of it.

You’re not providing that now to millions of people. And if we have an economic crisis, and remember the last two were immense. The 2008 and oh nine crisis was very, very bad. And the 2020 so-called pandemic crisis. Also, if we have another one on those scales on top of the receding American dream, you are putting your working class under X extraordinary stress, and it would be naive not to expect extraordinary political ideological outgrowths from that situation.

Taya Graham:

Wow.

Richard Wolff:

Well,

Stephen Janis:

Dr. Wolf, thank you.

Taya Graham:

We appreciate you so much. So can

Richard Wolff:

We take your class?

Taya Graham:

I would like to sign up, please.

Richard Wolff:

Okay. Send me an email. I’m sure we can work it out.

Taya Graham:

That would be wonderful. I’m going to take you up on that. Yes, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much,

Stephen Janis:

Dr. Wolf.

Taya Graham:

We really appreciate you Professor Wolf.

Stephen Janis:

We take care. Bye.

Taya Graham:

Wow. We learned something new from

Stephen Janis:

Him.

Taya Graham:

Every time we ask a question,

Stephen Janis:

I mean the discussion of economics, it always sort of presents itself with a science. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I didn’t pursue it because it felt scientific to me. But the way he unpacks it, you understand. You see, you, Vince, the philosophy that defines it, which is so profound. We don’t even think about it. We accept it. Well, profit motive is the only thing. And look, I sound a little pollyannaish, but still to think about it in that context where he kind of turns it into a philosophy that you can kind of wrestle with and see the underlying assumptions is pretty powerful. And I really appreciate the way he does that, because we need to think of it that way. If we’re going to survive the next decade, we need to think of it as something that comes with conscious decisions, not made from scientific analysis, but someone’s preference. Preference of having inequality. And that’s the preference you’re expressing, right?

Taya Graham:

Yeah.

Stephen Janis:

That’s what Milton Freedom Express is, absolute inequality, because there can only be so many capitalists. So when he equated, and I thought about Baltimore does look like a war zone. I mean, our own city looks like a war zone, right?

Taya Graham:

Oh, absolutely. I mean, we have 11,000 vacant buildings. A lot of them are burned out. We were just in Santown Winchester where Freddie Gray was killed in police custody. It doesn’t look any different. Someone’s living in a house that’s connected to a burned out building with part of the roof

Stephen Janis:

Missing.

Taya Graham:

I mean, how can you have hope to have any value in your home? How can you hope to have any wealth to pass on to your children when you have a home attached to a burned out building?

Stephen Janis:

And I used to think of it like Baltimore. I would look a war zone like post drug war, but the way Dr. Wolf said it, it was really post economic malaise. It really was affecting me profoundly. But anyway,

Taya Graham:

What’s interesting is the idea of interrogating the very base assumptions. I mean, for years he’s been speaking about interrogating those base assumptions. Exactly the way we run. That’s a better way our economy.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah,

Taya Graham:

It is for profit. Is that the direction it should be? It should be for profit, or should it be for people? And he’s asking us to really take a look at that, and I think people are finally now ready to at least ask these questions. It’s no longer so taboo to even ask the question, which

Stephen Janis:

It was. It’s interesting you called it taboo, because it really is.

Taya Graham:

Oh, absolutely. It really is. Absolutely.

Stephen Janis:

But thank you.

Taya Graham:

Well, as we discussed, the Rand report is shocking and sort of makes a point about the uncertain times we’re living in now. I mean, regardless of your partisan preference, it is undeniable that the curtain era is both turbulent and unpredictable, which is why the Rand Report meets such a deep impression for me, because along with the truisms, it revealed about how wealth inequality breeds more wealth inequality. I couldn’t help but think of something else, a special type of influence that accompanies this kind of economic dislocation. And that’s chaos. I mean, utter chaos. Just think about it, that shrinking piece of the pie for workers harms, people’s lives, real lives, people with family, with loved ones, with children, with elders, people who watched as their incomes technically shrank, who could nothing as fewer and fewer of the benefits of the wealthiest country in the world, were not shared with them. I don’t even think shared iss the right word here. Maybe denied or withheld. You know what? How about stolen? You know what? Pick your adjective. Pick your verb. But the effect is the same. But let’s use the word stolen in this case.

I mean, when you look at the numbers, I want you to imagine the lives that impacted and then imagine the chaos it created. All of us, no matter where we are in our lives, have experienced the trauma of losing a job or having trouble paying off a student loan or getting squeezed by your landlord or trying to figure out how you can pay for a car or fund your kid’s education or take care of your grandma. All of us have confronted these choices and often ask a question, how can anyone afford this? And what the heck are we going to do? And don’t even get me started about surprise medical bills. A fact that Bernie Sanders shared during his press conference pushing for Medicare for all. He said, think about this. 60% of cancer patients go through their entire life savings two years after their diagnosis, cancer patients and their families left destitute.

And add to that, the even more disturbing reality that roughly 500,000 people a year are pushed into bankruptcy by medical debt. That’s right, due to being in an accident or getting sick. How’s that for the wealthiest country on earth? But it’s also why this Rand report hit so hard, because it’s not just about 50 years of a declining share of income. It’s also about 50 years of chaos for working people. It’s about five decades of shrinking paychecks, fewer opportunities, insane student loans and unaffordable housing. It’s about the time we spend worrying about a utility bill or keeping a cell phone on or paying for an ailing parent that needs around the clock care. And even worse, it’s often about keeping a job we don’t even like just for the health benefits or working two jobs or even three, or working for a way to offers just enough to get by, but not enough to build a future.

Meanwhile, the horizon and opportunities for the 1% keeps expanding. The future for them gets brighter and brighter and brighter while ours, the working people of this country gets dimmer and dimmer. In fact, today’s conversation isn’t just about numbers or charts or percentages on a page. It’s about the lives of everyday Americans who have been systemically deprived of dignity, stability, and justice. By extreme wealth inequality, $73 trillion didn’t just disappear. It was taken. It was taken from working families, from communities and from our collective future and handed over to a tiny elite whose power and influence grow more unchecked each day. This isn’t an accident. It’s a choice, a political and economic decision made by those who benefit the most from the imbalance. But here’s our choice. We can stay informed, we can stay vigilant, and we can demand accountability, and we can refuse to accept a rig system is normal. This type of inequality thrives in silence, and I guess you can tell we won’t be silent. Isn’t that right, Steven?

Stephen Janis:

Absolutely. Clearly.

Taya Graham:

Well, I just want to again, thank our guest economist, Dr. Richard Wolfe, for helping us make sense of the dismal science and our current fiscal ups and downs. And of course, I have to thank you my cohost, reporters, Steven and Janice. Great. Thank you. I appreciate your insights in helping make this show

Stephen Janis:

Possible. Absolutely.

Taya Graham:

And of course, I have to thank our friends in the studio, Kayla Cameron, and Dave, thank you all for your support and I want to thank you out there watching. Thank you for watching us. Thank you for caring, and thank you for fighting the good fight. My name is Taya Graham. I’m your inequality watchdog. See you next time.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Taya Graham and Stephen Janis.

Explaining Columbia’s capitulation, the Wall Street Journal (3/21/25) reported that “the school believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands.”

President Donald Trump’s campaign against higher education started with Columbia University, both with the withholding of $400 million in funding to force major management charges (Wall Street Journal, 3/21/25) and the arrest and threatened  deportation of grad student Mahmoud Khalil, one of the student leaders of Columbia’s  movement against the genocide in Gaza (Al Jazeera, 3/19/25). The Columbia administration is reportedly acquiescing to the Trump administration, which would result in a mask ban and oversight of an academic department, to keep the dollars flowing.

Trump’s focus on Columbia is no accident. Despite the fact that its administration largely agrees with Trump on the need to suppress protest against Israel, the university is a symbol of New York City, a hometown that he hates for its liberalism (City and State NY, 11/16/20). And it was a starting point for the national campus movement that began last year against US support for Israel’s brutal war against Gaza (Columbia Spectator, 4/18/24; AP, 4/30/24).

And for those crimes, the new administration had to punish it severely. The New York Times editorial board (3/15/25) rightly presented the attack on higher education as part of an attack on the American democratic project: “​​Mr. Trump’s multifaceted campaign against higher education is core to this effort to weaken institutions that do not parrot his version of reality.”

But the response to Columbia’s protests from establishment media—including at the Times—laid the groundwork for this fascistic nightmare. Leading outlets went out of their way to say the protests were so extreme that they went beyond the bounds of free speech. They painted them as antisemitic, despite the many Jews who participated in them, following the long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism (In These Times, 7/13/20; FAIR.org, 10/17/23, 11/6/23). Opinion shapers found these viewpoints too out of the mainstream for the public to hear, and wrung their hands over students’ attempts to reform US foreign policy in the Middle East.

‘Incessant valorization of victimhood’

The New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (6/25/24) included Columbia on his list of schools that “have descended to open bigotry, institutional paralysis and mayhem.”

I previously noted (FAIR.org, 10/11/24) that New York Times columnist John McWhorter (4/23/24), a Columbia instructor, made a name for himself defending the notion of free speech rights for the political right (even the racist right), but now wanted to insulate his students from hearing speech that came from a different political direction.

Trump’s rhetoric today largely echoes in cruder terms that of Times columnist Bret Stephens (6/25/24) last summer, who wrote of anti-genocide protesters:

How did the protesters at elite universities get their ideas of what to think and how to behave?

They got them, I suspect, from the incessant valorization of victimhood that has been a theme of their upbringing, and which many of the most privileged kids feel they lack—hence the zeal to prove themselves as allies of the perceived oppressed. They got them from the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training seminars, which divide the world into “white” and “of color,” powerful and “marginalized,” with no regard for real-world complexities — including the complexity of Jewish identity.

In fact, in the month before Khalil’s arrest, Stephens (2/27/25) called for swift and harsh punishments against anti-genocide protesters at Barnard College, which is part of Columbia:

Enough. The students involved in this sit-in need to be identified and expelled, immediately and without exception. Any nonstudents at the sit-in should be charged with trespassing. Face-hiding masks that prevent the identification of the wearer need to be banned from campus. And incoming students need to be told, if they haven’t been told already, that an elite education is a privilege that comes with enforceable expectations, not an entitlement they can abuse at will.

Stephens has been a big part of the movement against so-called cancel culture. That movement consists of journalists and professors who believe that criticism or rejection of bigoted points of views has a chilling effect on free speech. As various writers, including myself, have noted (Washington Post, 10/28/19; FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 5/20/21), this has often been a cover for simply wanting to censor speech to their left, and Stephens’ alignment with Trump here is evidence of that. The New York Times editorial board, not just Stephens, is part of that anti-progressive cohort (New York Times, 3/18/22; FAIR.org, 3/25/22).

‘Fervor that borders on the oppressive’

The Atlantic (5/5/24) identified Iddo Gefen as “a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive psychology at Columbia University and the author of Jerusalem Beach,” but not as an IDF veteran who spent three years in the Israeli military’s propaganda department.

The Atlantic’s coverage of the protests was also troubling. The magazine’s Michael Powell, formerly of the New York Times, took issue with the protesters’ rhetoric (5/1/24), charging them with “a fervor that borders on the oppressive” (4/22/24).

The magazine gave space to an Israeli graduate student, Iddo Gefen (5/5/24), who complained that some “Columbia students are embracing extreme rhetoric,” and said a sign with the words “by any means necessary” was “so painful and disturbing” that Gefen “left New York for a few days.” It’s hard to imagine the Atlantic giving such editorial space to a Palestinian student triggered by Zionist anti-Palestinian chants.

The Atlantic was also unforgiving on the general topic of pro-Palestine campus protests. “Campus Protest Encampments are Unethical” (9/16/24) was the headline of an article by Conor Friedersdorf, while Judith Shulevitz (5/8/24) said that campus anti-genocide protest chants are “why some see the pro-Palestinian cause as so threatening.”

‘Belligerent elite college students’

Paul Berman (Washington Post, 4/26/24) writes that Columbia student protesters “horrify me” because they fail to understand that Israel “killing immense numbers of civilians” and “imposing famine-like conditions” is not as important as “Hamas and its goal,” which is “the eradication of the Israeli state.”

The Washington Post likewise trashed the anti-genocide movement. Guest op-ed columnist Paul Berman (4/26/24) wrote that if he were in charge of Columbia, “I would turn in wrath on Columbia’s professors” who supported the students. He was particularly displeased with the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a chant demanding one democratic state in historic Palestine. Offering no evidence of ill will by the protesters who use the slogan, he said:

I grant that, when students chant “from the river to the sea,” some people will claim to hear nothing more than a call for human rights for Palestinians. The students, some of them, might even half-deceive themselves on this matter. But it is insulting to have to debate these points, just as it is insulting to have to debate the meaning of the Confederate flag.

The slogan promises eradication. It is an exciting slogan because it is transgressive, which is why the students love to chant it. And it is doubly shocking to see how many people rush to excuse the students without even pausing to remark on the horror embedded in the chants.

Regular Post columnist Megan McArdle (4/25/24) said that Columbia protesters would be unlikely to change US support for Israel because “20-year-olds don’t necessarily make the best ambassadors for a cause.” She added:

It’s difficult to imagine anything less likely to appeal to that voter than an unsanctioned tent city full of belligerent elite college students whose chants have at least once bordered on the antisemitic.

‘Death knell for a Jewish state’

While “defenders of the protesters dismiss manifestations of antisemitism…as unfortunate aberrations,” Max Boot (Washington Post, 5/6/24) writes. “But if you read what the protesters have written about their own movement, it’s clear that animus against Israel runs deep”—as though antisemitism and “animus against Israel” were the same thing.

Fellow Post columnist Max Boot (5/6/24) dismissed the statement of anti-genocide Columbia protesters:

The manifesto goes on to endorse “the Right of Return” for Palestinian refugees who have fled Israel since its creation in 1948. Allowing 7 million Palestinians—most of them the descendants of refugees—to move to Israel (with its 7 million Jewish and 2 million Arab residents) would be a death knell for Israel as a Jewish state. The protesters’ slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call not for a two-state solution but for a single Palestinian state—and a mass exodus of Jews.

Boot here gives away the pretense that Israel is a democracy. The idea of “one Palestine” is a democratic ideal whereby all people in historic Palestine—Jew, Muslim, Christian etc.—live with equal rights like in any normal democracy. But the idea of losing an ethnostate to egalitarianism is tantamount to “a mass exodus of Jews.”

Thirty years after the elimination of apartheid in South Africa, the white population is 87% as large as it was under white supremacy. Is there any reason to think that a smaller percentage of Jews would be willing to live in a post-apartheid Israel/Palestine without Jewish supremacy?

The New York Times, Atlantic and Washington Post fanned the flames of the right-wing pearl-clutching at the anti-genocide protests. Their writers may genuinely be aghast at Trump’s aggression toward universities now (Atlantic, 3/19/25, 3/20/25; Washington Post, 3/19/25, 3/21/25), but they might want to reflect on what they did to bring us to this point.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

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As members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have fanned out across the government in recent days, attention has focused on the young Silicon Valley engineers who are wielding immense power in the new administration.

But ProPublica has identified three lawyers with elite establishment credentials who have also joined the DOGE effort.

Two are former Supreme Court clerks — one clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, another for Justice Neil Gorsuch — and the third has been selected to be a Gorsuch clerk for the 2025-2026 term.

Two of the lawyers’ names have not been previously reported as working for DOGE.

All three — Keenan Kmiec, James Burnham and Jacob Altik — have DOGE email addresses at the Executive Office of the President, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. Altik was recently an attorney at the firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, but his bio page is now offline. Neither the White House nor any of the three lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment about their roles.

Referring to DOGE work, the White House told ProPublica in a statement earlier this week that, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law.”

However, DOGE’s aggressive actions across the government have already drawn lawsuits contending that the group has broken the law.

The legal challenges brought by several groups could ultimately reach the Supreme Court. This week, for example, more than a dozen Democratic attorneys general said they would sue to block DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems, and federal employee unions sued to challenge the DOGE-led dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“What’s striking is how contemptuous the administration seems to be of traditional administrative law limitations — in ways that might get them into trouble,” said Noah Rosenblum, a law professor at New York University. “When this stuff goes to the courts, one important question is going to be: How well-lawyered was it?”

Trump formally created DOGE with an executive order on the first day of his administration. The order describes teams of at least four people — a leader, a lawyer, a human resources professional and an engineer — who would be detailed to government agencies. Exactly how DOGE is currently structured is not clear, nor are the specific assignments of each of the DOGE lawyers identified by ProPublica.

Trump has granted Musk, the world’s richest man, vast powers to seize control of government agencies, their offices and staff. “He’s a very talented guy from the standpoint of management and costs, and we put him in charge of seeing what he can do with certain groups and certain numbers,” Trump said of Musk on Monday, adding that “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval.”

The Trump administration has declined to provide information on who is working in Musk’s DOGE group. More than two dozen members of the effort have been identified, and ProPublica is compiling them as part of an ongoing reporting project.

A bit more about the three DOGE lawyers most recently identified by ProPublica:

James Burnham, whose title at DOGE is listed internally as general counsel, is a prominent lawyer in conservative legal circles. In Trump’s first term, Burnham said he was brought to the White House counsel’s office by the office’s top lawyer, Don McGahn. He said he worked on the administration’s judicial selection process, including Gorsuch’s appointment to the high court. He went on to work in the Trump Justice Department and clerk for Gorsuch in 2020.

"He’s a smart guy, and a very conservative lawyer,” Ty Cobb, a lawyer in the first Trump White House, said of Burnham in an interview.

Burnham later launched a boutique law firm and a litigation finance fund that seeks to “ensure righteous lawsuits never falter for lack of financial resources,” according to its website. Burnham was also helping DOGE with legal matters before Trump’s inauguration, The New York Times reported in January.

Keenan Kmiec’s career veered from elite law to, more recently, crypto. After clerking for then-Judge Samuel Alito on a federal circuit court, he clerked on the Supreme Court for Roberts in the 2006-2007 term, according to his LinkedIn. He did a stint at a corporate law firm and had his own firm focused on insider-trading litigation.

Kmiec appears to have become interested in crypto long before it went mainstream. A friend wrote an essay published online recalling meeting Kmiec at an Irish pub in Washington’s Dupont Circle in the mid-2010s, where the men spoke about “the errors of central banks, the libertarian movement, and Bitcoin.”

In 2021, Kmiec began working for a Swiss foundation that promotes a blockchain called Tezos, according to his LinkedIn. He then served for nine months as CEO of a now-defunct startup called InterPop, which described itself as “forging the future of digital fandom with comic, game, and collectible NFTs minted responsibly on the Tezos blockchain.” A former staffer at InterPop described the company in an interview as a refinement of the Magic: The Gathering card game. But the former staffer added, “We ran out of money and the game failed.”

There’s little in the public domain about Kmiec’s political views. In 2009, he wrote a column for Politico critiquing the widespread use of the term “judicial activism,” which he called an ill-defined “empty epithet.” The previous year, he gave $500 to Barack Obama’s campaign, according to federal election records. Kmiec’s father, Douglas Kmiec, a former Reagan administration lawyer and prominent conservative law professor, also made headlines for endorsing Obama. (Obama later named Douglas Kmiec ambassador to Malta.)

DOGE lawyer Jacob Altik is a 2021 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School. Altik was selected to clerk for Gorsuch at the Supreme Court in the term that starts this summer, according to an announcement by his law school that was confirmed by a Supreme Court spokesperson.

Altik recently worked as a corporate litigation associate at Weil and previously clerked for D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee known for critiquing the administrative state. He also interned at a nonprofit called the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which has been at the forefront of legal efforts to rein in the power of federal agencies.

We’ve added these names — along with more than 20 others — to ProPublica’s ongoing project tracking DOGE members.

We are still reporting. Do you have information about any of the people listed below? Do you know of any other Musk associates who have entered the federal government? You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201. Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can.

Kirsten Berg, Christopher Bing and Annie Waldman contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Justin Elliott, Avi Asher-Schapiro and Andy Kroll.

The New York Times‘ Jess Bidgood (1/17/25) suggests Democrats should be wary of criticizing Donald Trump’s wealthy friends, “given the popularity of some of those billionaires.” (Elon Musk, pictured, is viewed unfavorably by 52% of poll respondents, with 36% having a positive opinion.)

Sometimes the headline says it all, as with the New York Times on January 17: “If Democrats Attack Trump’s Rich Pals as ‘Oligarchs,’ Will It Stick?”

The piece presents Elon Musk’s influence on the new administration as something “Democrats…have suggested”; the role of Trump’s billionaire allies is something Democrats “plan to invoke” in the fight over tax cuts; and the idea that Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos might be front and center at the inauguration isn’t meaningful in itself, so much as something Democrats saw as “an irresistible opportunity to further highlight those connections.”

Is it true that the Trump administration, slated to be the richest presidential administration in history, not even counting Elon Musk, represents “oligarchy“? Not the point. The important question is: Will such a charge (clearly defined as partisan) “stick”? What it means for a charge to “stick,” and what role media like themselves have in making it stick, are not things the Times would have you consider.

For its part, AP went with the headline (1/20/25): “Trump, a Populist President, Is Flanked by Tech Billionaires at His Inauguration,” over a piece noting it as a “shift from tradition, especially for a president who has characterized himself as a champion of the working class.” Is it a wacky juxtaposition—or a sign that elite media see the story as, not whether Trump actually is a champion of the working class, but whether he characterizes himself that way?

It would be work enough to counter the actual things actually happening without news media dedicating themselves to putting up a rhetorical scrim between us and the things we need to understand and resist.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

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

The New York Times‘ Jess Bidgood (1/17/25) suggests Democrats should be wary of criticizing Donald Trump’s wealthy friends, “given the popularity of some of those billionaires.” (Elon Musk, pictured, is viewed unfavorably by 52% of poll respondents, with 36% having a positive opinion.)

Sometimes the headline says it all, as with the New York Times on January 17: “If Democrats Attack Trump’s Rich Pals as ‘Oligarchs,’ Will It Stick?”

The piece presents Elon Musk’s influence on the new administration as something “Democrats…have suggested”; the role of Trump’s billionaire allies is something Democrats “plan to invoke” in the fight over tax cuts; and the idea that Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos might be front and center at the inauguration isn’t meaningful in itself, so much as something Democrats saw as “an irresistible opportunity to further highlight those connections.”

Is it true that the Trump administration, slated to be the richest presidential administration in history, not even counting Elon Musk, represents “oligarchy“? Not the point. The important question is: Will such a charge (clearly defined as partisan) “stick”? What it means for a charge to “stick,” and what role media like themselves have in making it stick, are not things the Times would have you consider.

For its part, AP went with the headline (1/20/25): “Trump, a Populist President, Is Flanked by Tech Billionaires at His Inauguration,” over a piece noting it as a “shift from tradition, especially for a president who has characterized himself as a champion of the working class.” Is it a wacky juxtaposition—or a sign that elite media see the story as, not whether Trump actually is a champion of the working class, but whether he characterizes himself that way?

It would be work enough to counter the actual things actually happening without news media dedicating themselves to putting up a rhetorical scrim between us and the things we need to understand and resist.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

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

The New York Times‘ Jess Bidgood (1/17/25) suggests Democrats should be wary of criticizing Donald Trump’s wealthy friends, “given the popularity of some of those billionaires.” (Elon Musk, pictured, is viewed unfavorably by 52% of poll respondents, with 36% having a positive opinion.)

Sometimes the headline says it all, as with the New York Times on January 17: “If Democrats Attack Trump’s Rich Pals as ‘Oligarchs,’ Will It Stick?”

The piece presents Elon Musk’s influence on the new administration as something “Democrats…have suggested”; the role of Trump’s billionaire allies is something Democrats “plan to invoke” in the fight over tax cuts; and the idea that Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos might be front and center at the inauguration isn’t meaningful in itself, so much as something Democrats saw as “an irresistible opportunity to further highlight those connections.”

Is it true that the Trump administration, slated to be the richest presidential administration in history, not even counting Elon Musk, represents “oligarchy“? Not the point. The important question is: Will such a charge (clearly defined as partisan) “stick”? What it means for a charge to “stick,” and what role media like themselves have in making it stick, are not things the Times would have you consider.

For its part, AP went with the headline (1/20/25): “Trump, a Populist President, Is Flanked by Tech Billionaires at His Inauguration,” over a piece noting it as a “shift from tradition, especially for a president who has characterized himself as a champion of the working class.” Is it a wacky juxtaposition—or a sign that elite media see the story as, not whether Trump actually is a champion of the working class, but whether he characterizes himself that way?

It would be work enough to counter the actual things actually happening without news media dedicating themselves to putting up a rhetorical scrim between us and the things we need to understand and resist.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

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

Ten months before the 2024 election, high-profile news outlets were already sounding the alarm: If Trump were to win another term, widespread fatigue, despair and activist burnout would probably minimize resistance.

Exhaustion and burnout are real phenomena that pose a significant challenge to political movements (Psychology Today, 6/24/20). But articles that focus on feelings of burnout, and exclude or downplay questions of changes in strategy amid shifting conditions, often have the effect—and occasionally the goal—of making everyday people seem and feel less powerful than they are.

A year ago, Politico‘s Michael Schaffer (1/26/24) was predicting that a Trump victory might “be met with avoidance, listlessness and apathy.”

Politico writer Michael Schaffer (1/26/24) noted a year ago that the shock of Trump’s 2016 victory “sparked a burst of activity that profoundly altered Washington”:

Donations to progressive advocacy groups soared. Traffic to political media spiked. Protests filled the calendar…. But now, as a second Trump term becomes an increasingly real possibility, there’s no consensus that anything similar would happen in January 2025.

While acknowledging that the post-2016 burst of activity had profoundly altered Washington, Politico warned Trump opponents that pioneering new strategies would only get them so far, since passivity in the face of a second Trump term “has as much to do with psychology as it does with the tactics or organizational skill of the activist class.”

Humans “respond to a sudden threat with a fight-or-flight instinct,” Schaffer observed, and for many, “the string of jolts that accompanied the first Trump months of 2017—the Muslim ban, the firing of James Comey, Charlottesville—spurred an impulse to fight.” The same was unlikely to be true of a second Trump win, he speculated, because for many it would amount to proof that fighting back “wasn’t enough,” and could “just as easily be met with avoidance, listlessness and apathy.”

Good journalists don’t pretend an energetic and cohesive resistance exists when it does not. But presenting opposition to authoritarians like Trump as pointless, ineffectual and doomed is journalistically irresponsible and historically illiterate, particularly when it’s clear that the initial backlash to Trump had an effect (New York Times, 12/18/17).

‘A weary shrug’

After the election, Politico again predicted a muted response to Trump’s second term. A Politico EU story (11/13/24) characterized the 2024 Trump resistance as “flaccid” (“Toto, we’re not in 2016 anymore,” read the subhead), and proclaimed that while Trump’s 2016 win had “sparked a global revolt,” his recent triumph has been “met with a weary shrug.”

The outlet suggested that Trump’s latest win had been inevitable—

part of a broader, inexorable rightward trend on both sides of the Atlantic, leaving a dejected liberal left to helplessly scratch their heads as the fickle tide of political history turns against them.

Which might leave anti-Trump readers wondering: Don’t humans have a role to play in turning history’s tide?

After the election, Politico‘s Schaffer (11/15/24) presented the exodus from the far-right X (formerly Twitter) as a sign that “the post-election progressive ferment that in 2016 gave us the resistance is going to be a lot quieter this time.”

A couple of days later, Schaffer (Politico, 11/15/24) wrote a column headlined “The Resistance Is Not Coming to Save You. It’s Tuning Out.” Noting a decline in critical coverage of Trump, Schaffer wrote that for a nation

wondering whether the return of Trump will drive an immediate return of the public fury and journalistic energy triggered by his first win, it makes for an early hint that the answer will be: Nope.

Where Trump’s first victory “triggered Blue America’s fight instinct,” he added, “the aftermath of this year’s win is looking a lot more like flight.” The question of why so many Americans are now in “fight or flight” mode went largely unexamined. Schaffer’s main takeaway was that Blue America cannot credibly blame a “feckless pre-election press” for “bungl[ing] the coverage” of the race this time around, as if alarmist corporate media coverage of crime, immigration, the economy and transgender issues didn’t contribute to Trump’s narrow victory in 2024.

He also faulted the initial resistance to Trump for being “organized around issues of identity,” citing as examples the 2017 Women’s March, the backlash to the Muslim ban, the 2017 counter-protest against a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, and the 2020 racial justice protests. But the fact that the Women’s March drew people of all genders, most participants in the 2020 racial justice protests were white, and Black Lives Matter may have been the largest protest movement in US history suggests that many Americans find issues of “identity” galvanizing rather than alienating.

And it is likelier that direct threats to people’s lives—say, those posed by mass deportations and abortion bans—will inspire more re-engagement than vague appeals to issues like preserving democracy.

Reformulated opposition

Truthout (11/16/24): “As we step out of our grieving and look ahead, there are reasons to believe that a new social movement cycle to confront Trumpism can emerge.”

It’s true that while Trump’s 2016 victory came as a horrific shock to millions, in part because Hillary Clinton was widely expected to win, the outcome of the 2024 election was less surprising, since no candidate seemed assured of victory. But torpor is just one aspect of an unfolding story; opposition to Trump’s agenda is not muted so much as it is being reformulated in response to changing conditions.

Thousands continue to protest Israel’s ongoing genocide, despite elite media outlets’ and universities’ war on free speech and student protesters. Two days after the 2024 election, more than 100,000 people joined a call organized by a coalition of 200 progressive groups, including the Working Families Party, Indivisible, United We Dream and Movement for Black Lives Action, and thousands signed up for follow-up actions.

As it did in and after 2016, Trump’s recent election has spurred thousands to join organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, to which I belong. Public support for organized labor remains extremely high—70% of Americans approve of labor unions—and the US continues to experience an uptick in militant labor actions, including recent strikes at major companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Finally, many organizers are focused on developing strategies to combat Trump policies, like mass deportations, as soon as he attempts to impose them.

‘Get somebody else to do it’

“How Powerful Leaders Crush Dissent, Demobilizing Millions,” might have been a more appropriate headline for this New York Times piece (11/20/24).

The New York Times has also been obsessed with the allegedly neutered 2024 resistance. “In 2017, [anti-Trump voters] donned pink hats to march on Washington, registering their fury with Donald J. Trump by the hundreds of thousands,” reporter Katie Glueck (2/19/24) wrote, adding, “This year, [they] are grappling with another powerful sentiment: exhaustion.”

Weeks after the election, the paper published “‘Get Somebody Else to Do It’: Trump Resistance Encounters Fatigue” (11/20/24). The subhead read, “Donald J. Trump’s grass-roots opponents search for a new playbook as they reckon with how little they accomplished during his first term.”

In the piece itself, reporter Katie Benner offered a balance of voices of both the exhausted and the motivated, accompanied by a fairly nuanced assessment of the situation facing the anti-Trump resistance, describing “a sharp global reversal in the power of mass action” that may be partly due to governments’ authoritarian drift and declining willingness to change course in response to public pressure. But the paper’s headline writers erased that nuance and the role of repression, leaving only a sense that activists are personally failing. As headlines go, “How Powerful Leaders Crush Dissent, Demobilizing Millions” might have been more accurate.

In December, New York Times columnist and Trump critic Charles Blow (12/18/24) offered weary progressives absolution: “Temporarily Disconnected From Politics? Feel No Guilt About It.” Though he cautioned that it would be “a mistake for anyone to confuse a temporary disconnection for a permanent acquiescence,” he suggested that there were, at the moment, few ways to fight back.

After all, Blow wrote, “there is very little that average citizens can do about the way the administration takes shape”—seeming to forget that cabinet members must be confirmed by the Senate, which is an elected representative body. Even efforts to counter Trump’s agenda led by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he noted, are “largely beyond the involvement of average citizens.” (That would probably be news to the ACLU, which is often seeking volunteers, and always seeking donations.)

Even columnists like Blow, who has called Trump an “aberration and abomination,” are apparently more interested in chronicling progressive fatigue than in contending with two troubling shifts noted by the New York Times: a global decline in the power of mass action, and self-proclaimed champion of democracy President Joe Biden’s refusal to respond to the majority of Americans who oppose Israel’s war.

When large groups of Americans cannot sway their leaders via forceful dissent, mass action or electoral campaigns—when participating in politics feels, and often is, useless—some degree of disengagement is inevitable.

‘In no mood to organize’

The Washington Post (11/10/24) presented the mood of today’s activists: “I’m feeling like I want to curl up in the fetal position.”

The Washington Post (11/10/24), under the headline, “A ‘Resistance’ Raced to Fight Trump’s First Term. Will It Rise Again?” noted in its subhead that some who had been a part of that resistance were “exhausted and feeling hopeless,” and “say they need a break.” The piece described an activist, who’d been “shocked into action” by Trump’s 2016 victory, as “in no mood to organize” in 2024. Although many had been “jolted” into opposing Trump in 2016, today’s resistance leaders “must contend with a swirl of other feelings: exhaustion, dejection, burnout.”

Yet despite their exhaustion, ordinary people around the country and world are still organizing, because they know how much worse things can get if they don’t—and because it’s their bodies, families and communities on the line. Having seen how hard it is to make change, even when a policy or cause has majority popular support, it’s no wonder that some are taking a short- to long-term break from politics.

It’s not the public but elite journalists, chastened by their tarnished reputation and their contributions to Trump’s rise, who have shrunk from challenging the powerful, whether those in power are genocide-supporting Democrats like Biden, or planet-betraying authoritarians like Trump.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Raina Lipsitz.

Ryu lived in an apartment complex in Pyongyang where all of his neighbors were high-ranking North Korean officials. In an interview with RFA Korean, Ryu explained that life as an elite is like already having “one foot in hell” because of the constant surveillance their lives are under, and how easily they are discarded if the leader needs someone to take the blame.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

RFA: Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Ryu: I was born in Pyongyang. I graduated from the Pyongyang Foreign Language Institute and Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies, majoring in Arabic. I then joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and worked there for over 20 years. After working as a diplomat in Syria and Kuwait, I came to South Korea in September 2019. I have settled in and I am living well in South Korea.

RFA: When you were in North Korea, you lived in and exclusive area of Pyongyang, correct? Do all the elites live in the same area?

Ryu: The administrative district name is Uiam-dong, Taedonggang district, Pyongyang. This place is also called Eundok village, and it is the residence of many officials. There are six major buildings in the residence. The generals of the North Korean People’s Army live in four of the buildings. One building is for high-ranking officials in the Central Committee. The remaining one is where high-ranking officials of the administrative department live.

RFA: We often hear about North Korea’s chronic shortages of electricity. Did the elevators on these buildings cut out from time to time like they do for everyone else living in apartments?

Ryu: You’re right. North Korea has a poor power supply system. Because of it, the elevator sometimes stops working. However, there are times when it operates normally. For example, during commuting hours, it is guaranteed. Nevertheless, the electricity often drops even during commuting hours. 

My house was on the 4th floor. Oh Guk Ryol, the head of the operations department, lived on the 5th floor, and Director Kim Yang Gon lived on the 3rd floor. The former head of the United Front Work Department and Oh Guk Ryol came down from the floors above, and my father-in-law (Jon Il Chun, the former head Office 39, the secretive organization that manages the slush funds of the Kim family) and I would get on to the elevator. As we were going down, Kim Yang Gon got on. 

Then just as the elevator was going down to the second floor, it suddenly stopped. I was the youngest of everyone there, so I had no choice but to open the escape hatch on the ceiling of the elevator. It’s like a vent. I climbed up to the third floor and I saw something that looked like a latch that opens the elevator door. I opened the door with it, contacted the management, and rescued the other officials in the elevator. The electricity situation was so bad.

RFA: Can living in that area of Pyongyang be seen as a matter of pride for its residents?

Ryu: It can be interpreted as having a lot of trust and high loyalty. However, there are pros and cons. Once you enter this place, you are subject to wiretapping, stalking and strong surveillance. You can’t say anything inside your house. 

For example, wasn’t Chief of Staff Ri Yong Ho shot to death? It was because he was at home making slanderous remarks about Kim Jong Un with his wife. He was purged and disappeared. My mother-in-law kept pointing to her mouth whenever I tried to complain about something. She told me to be quiet and not to say anything because they listen to everything. 

To that extent, they wiretap 24 hours a day. That’s why there is a different way to share thoughts. My in-laws would wake up around 5:30 in the morning. I would wake up around 6 o’clock. Then we go for a jog or walk together. That’s the time my father-in-law would ask me questions and I would also talk to him. 

For example, while I was in Syria, I heard a South Korean refer to my father-in-law as ‘Kim Jong Il’s safekeeper,’ so I passed that on to my father-in-law.

RFA: You told your father-in-law about something that came out in the South Korean media?

Ryu: I told my father-in-law that in South Korea, he is referred to as ‘Kim Jong Il’s safekeeper.’ My father-in-law laughed. I told him those things, secret things that should not be caught by wiretapping. We exchanged stories like that while taking a walk or in a place where wiretapping does not work.

RFA: Was there ever any frightful incident you witnessed while living there?

Ryu: The household we were closest to was Park Nam Ki, director of the Planning and Finance Department of the ruling party of North Korea. Do you remember the currency reform in 2009? 

(That was when North Korea introduced new versions of its paper currency, but allowed the people to exchange only a certain amount of their old currency, thereby wiping out most people’s savings.)

As a result of that incident, Park Nam Ki was shot to death in January 2010. In February of the same year, Park Nam Ki’s entire family members went to a political prison camp. I remembered it was around 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning. There was a truck from the Ministry of State Security. The big military trucks came and loaded all the luggage and the family. 

I felt like the whole town was going to wake up from the sound of women and children crying. My heart was trembling. We stayed up all night. It occurred to me that we too could face a similar fate. Would Park Nam Ki have been able to carry out currency reform at will? How could he possibly do so without Kim Jong Il’s instructions? Even though Kim Jong Il did it, he turned the condemnation and curses of the people towards Park Nam Ki.

RFA: Are retired high-ranking officials managed separately?

Ryu: If you are a person who holds a lot of secrets, for example, if you work in Office 39, you know everything about the flow of funds, Kim Jong Un’s relationship with his funds, how large the fund is, and what happened to the fund. For example, (former minister of state security) Kim Won Hong knows 100% how the director of Ministry of State Security purged the opposition, how he wiretaps, and everything else. So, we cannot guarantee that these people won’t expose what they know if they are released into society.

RFA: People like that have to keep their secrets. Do North Korean authorities treat them well so that they remain silent?

Ryu: Not at all. They only provide a house, and the house is guarded by armed guards. You can’t come and go as you please. In February 2019, my father-in-law underwent surgery for a myocardial infarction. My wife heard the news when we were in Kuwait. My father-in-law retired after that. 

My wife said she needed to go home to tend to him, so I told her to go. My wife went home for a month from July to August 2019. When she went and looked at the house my father-in-law received, there was no closet. She went to the distribution center with my mother-in-law and she received 2 kilograms of potatoes as a six-month food ration. So, together they received a total of 4 kilos for the entire six months.

If I were to live my life again, I would want to live as an ordinary person. High-ranking officials already have one foot in hell. You don’t know when you will die. Living in peace is better. 

We were constantly bugged, monitored, and followed. What kind of freedom is that? What kind of life is that? My father-in-law left work at 11:00 p.m. I once asked why officials regularly left work that late. He said he was waiting because the marshal (the sitting leader) might call. You have to be consistent in waiting all the time. He said, “When the great leader is calling you, how can you just answer that call at home?”

RFA: But aren’t there benefits and privileges to being in the elite? 

Ryu: People think that North Korea’s high-ranking elites and Kim Jong Un share a common of destiny, but that’s not true. The first people to be executed are the North Korean elite when they make a tiny mistake against Kim Jong Un. 

Hyon Yong Chol, minister of defense, was executed by firing squad for dozing off a little at a convention. Does that make sense? He was about 70 years old. After walking around and inspecting the military base, wouldn’t it be normal to doze off a bit? It doesn’t make sense to shoot someone in his 70s just because he fell asleep. I think it is a misconception to think the elites have a similar destiny as the leader.

Of course, we must strike down the main culprits (of the North Korean government’s crimes), who take the lead in executing and oppressing North Korean residents along with Kim Jong Un. But we cannot strike down all the elites all together. 

These people did not do it because they wanted to. There are some among these people who are instigators and others who reluctantly follow instructions from above. People like this are pulling more people to their side.

I think it is very important to advance unification and achieve a peaceful settlement on the Korean Peninsula after unification. In that respect, I would like to emphasize once again that the lives of officials are not very luxurious. 

Translated by Claire S. Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong.

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

The Burdensome Reign of King John

John I (1199-1216) was dubbed “Lackland” because, as Henry II’s fourth and youngest son, he was not expected to inherit any land. On becoming his father’s favorite, he was assigned land in Ireland and France, which led to ongoing warfare after his brother Richard I died in 1199. This conflict was financed by loans that John paid by raising taxes on England’s barons, churches, and monasteries. John fought the French for land in 1202, but lost Normandy in 1204. He prepared for renewed war in France by imposing a tallage in 1207; as S.K. Mitchell details in his book on the subject, this was the first such tax for a purpose other than a crusade.

By the 13th century, royal taxes to pay debts were becoming regular, while the papacy made regular demands on European churches for tithes to pay for the Crusades. These levies created rising opposition throughout Christendom, from churches as well as the baronage and the population at large. In 1210, when John imposed an even steeper tallage, many landholders were forced into debt.

John opened a political war on two fronts by insisting on his power of investiture to appoint bishops. When the Archbishop of Canterbury died in 1205, the king sought to appoint his successor. Innocent III consecrated Stephen Langdon as his own candidate, but John barred Stephen from landing in England and started confiscating papal estates. In 1211 the pope sent his envoy, Pandulf Verraccio, to threaten John with excommunication. John backed down and allowed Stephen to take his position, but then collected an estimated 14 percent of church income for his royal budget over the next two years—£100,000, including Peter’s Pence.

Innocent sent Pandulf back to England in May 1213 to insist that John reimburse Rome for the revenue that he had withheld. John capitulated at a ceremony at the Templar church at Dover and reaffirmed the royal tradition of fealty to the pope. As William Lunt details in Financial Relations of the Papacy with England to 1327, John received England and Ireland back in his fiefdom by promising to render one thousand marks annually to Rome over and above the payment of Peter’s Pence, and permitted the pope to deal directly with the principal local collectors without royal intervention.

John soon stopped payments, but Innocent didn’t protest, satisfied with having reinforced the principle of papal rights over his vassal king. In 1220, however, the new pope “Honorius III instructed Pandulf to send the proceeds of the [tallage of a] twentieth, the census [penny poll tax] and Peter’s Pence to Paris for deposit with the Templars and Hospitallers.”1 Royal control of church revenue was lost for good. The contributions that earlier Norman kings had sent to Rome were treated as having set a precedent that the papacy refused to relinquish. The clergy itself balked at complying with papal demands, and churches paid no more in 1273 than they had in 1192.

The barons were less able to engage in such resistance. Historian David Carpenter calculates that their indebtedness to John for unpaid taxes, tallages, and fines rose by 380 percent from 1199 to 1208. And John became notorious for imposing fines on barons who opposed him. That caused rising opposition from landholders—the fight that Richard had sought to avoid. The Exchequer’s records enabled John to find the individuals who owed money and to use royal fiscal claims as a political lever, by either calling in the debts or agreeing to “postpone or pardon them as a form of favor” for barons who did not oppose him.

John’s most unpopular imposition was the scutage fee for knights to buy exemption from military service. Even when there was no actual war, John levied scutage charges eleven times during his 17-year reign, forcing many knights into debt. Rising hostility to John’s campaign in 1214 to reconquer his former holdings in Normandy triggered the First Barons’ War (1215-1217) demanding the Magna Carta in 1215.

Opposition was strongest in the north of England, where barons owed heavy tax debts. As described in J.C. Holt’s classic study The Northeners, they led a march on London, assembling on the banks of the Thames at Runnymede on June 15, 1215. Although the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langdon, helped negotiate a truce based on a “charter of liberties,” a plan for reform between John and the barons that became the Magna Carta, the “rebellion of the king’s debtors” led to a decade-long fight, with the Magna Carta being given its final version under the teenaged Henry III in 1225.

Proto-Democratic Elements of the Magna Carta

There were proto-democratic elements in the Charter, most significantly the attempt to limit the king’s authority to levy taxes without the consent of a committee selected by the barons. The concept of “no taxation without representation” appears in the original Chapter 12: “No scutage or aid is to be levied in our kingdom, save by the common counsel of our kingdom,” and even then, only to ransom the king or for specified family occasions.

The linkage between debt, interest accruals, and land tenure was central to the Charter. Chapter 9 stated that debts should be paid out of movable property (chattels), not land. “Neither we [the king] nor our bailiffs are to seize any land or rent for any debt, for as long as the chattels of the debtor suffice to pay the debt.” Land would be forfeited only as a last resort, when sureties had their own lands threatened with foreclosure. And under the initial version of the Charter, debts were only to be paid after appropriate living expenses had been met, and no interest would accrue until the debtor’s heirs reached maturity.

Elite Interests in the Charter

The Magna Carta typically is depicted as the birth of England’s fight to create democracy. It was indeed an attempt to establish parliamentary restraint on royal spending, but the barons were acting strictly in their own interest. The Charter dealt with breaches by the king, but “no procedure was laid down for dealing with breaches by the barons.” In Chapter 39 they designated themselves as Freemen, meaning anyone who owned land, but that excluded rural villeins and cottagers. Local administration remained corrupt, and the Charter had no provisions to prevent lords from exploiting their sub-tenants, who had no voice in consenting to royal demands for scutages or other aids.

The 13th-century fight was to establish what would become the House of Lords, not the House of Commons. Empowering the nobility against the state was the opposite of the 19th-century drive against the landlord class and its claims for hereditary land rent. What was deemed democratic in Britain’s 1909/10 constitutional crisis was the ruling that the Lords never again could reject a House of Commons revenue act. The Commons had passed a land tax, which the House of Lords blocked. That fight against landlords was the opposite of the barons’ fight against King John.

Notes.

1. William Lunt, “Financial Relations of the Papacy with England to 1327. (Studies in Anglo-Papal Relations during the Middle Ages, I.),” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1939) pp. 597-598 and pp. 58-59.

This article was produced by Human Bridges.

The post How Elite Infighting Made the Magna Carta appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

It is a historical fact that powerful elites do not wish to be diverted from pursuing their selfish interests by the public. Minimal, unthreatening expressions of dissent may be tolerated in ostensible ‘democracies’. But public opinion needs to be managed, manipulated or, if necessary, simply ignored.

After all, as Noam Chomsky has said, real ‘democracy is a threat to any power system’. He noted that Edward Bernays, one of the founders and leading figures of the huge public relations industry:

reminded his colleagues that with “universal suffrage and universal schooling… even the bourgeoisie stood in fear of the common people. For the masses promised to become king.” That unfortunate tendency could be contained and reversed, he urged, by new methods of “propaganda” that could be used by “intelligent minorities” to “[regiment] the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.

(Preface to The Myth of the Liberal Media, Edward S. Herman, Peter Lang Publishing, 1999, pp. x-xi.)

Elite shaping of public opinion is not 100 per cent foolproof, of course, but it is often highly effective. As Peter Beattie, an assistant professor in political economy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, observed:

‘While the media is far from a brainwashing “influencing machine” or a hypodermic needle capable of injecting ideas into our minds, it is nonetheless the greatest influence on public opinion, as it is the conduit through which the building blocks of public opinion are transported.’

(Beattie, Social Evolution, Political Psychology, and the Media in Democracy: The Invisible Hand in the U.S. Marketplace of Ideas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 8)

In fact, one could argue that the media is ‘a brainwashing “influencing machine”’, as demonstrated, for example, by the power and success of the propaganda blitz against Jeremy Corbyn, and the deliberate conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism in establishment attempts to smear critics of Israel. However, if public opinion remains stubbornly immune from establishment pressure, it can simply be rejected or overridden.

Consider a YouGov poll last October showing that 66 per cent of the British public support reinstating public ownership of energy companies. Likewise, a 2022 survey by campaign group We Own It revealed that a majority want to see public ownership of utilities such as energy and water.

We Own It director Cat Hobbs said:

Privatisation has failed for nearly 40 years. Politicians can’t ignore the truth any longer: these monopolies are a cash cow for shareholders and we need to take them back.

We need energy companies that don’t rip us off, public transport that works for passengers and water companies that don’t pour sewage into our rivers.’

The poll also showed very strong support for public ownership of buses, the railways, the National Health Service and Royal Mail. These findings were echoed in an Ipsos poll last August.

None of these popular policies are consistent with the extremist, corporate agenda of the Tory government or the ‘opposition’ Labour party. Nor do they feature much in ‘mainstream’ media reporting and commentary. This sums up the reality of British ‘democracy’: a state that suppresses the wishes of the majority and is run for the benefit of a very rich minority.

None of this is unique to the UK; it is an endemic feature of capitalist societies. Justin Lewis, professor of communication at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture, wrote that:

Majorities [in the US and other western countries] consistently support increased government spending in traditionally “liberal” areas such as healthcare, education, environmental protection, and even – when the word “welfare” is not used – programs for assisting the poor. This has been well documented in a number of comprehensive studies. And yet the media’s interpretative frameworks tend to suppress the leftist leanings of opinion poll responses, creating a picture of a moderate to conservative citizenry that matches a moderate to conservative political elite.

(Lewis, Constructing Public Opinion: How Political Elites Do What They Like And Why We Seem To Go Along With It, Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 44.)

Of course, the notion that power is held to account by a ‘free press’ in a modern ‘democracy’ is a discredited myth. Patrick Lawrence, formerly a foreign correspondent for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, noted that the US:

does not have a press by any serious definition of the term. It has a government that, over the course of many decades, has turned the press into an appendage responsible for the manipulation of public opinion.

For instance, US political journalist Glenn Greenwald observed of Ukraine war coverage:

Every word broadcast on CNN or printed in The New York Times about the conflict perfectly aligns with the CIA and Pentagon’s messaging.

Journalists with successful careers in the major Western news media would never dare make such a cogent remark in public. Instead, attention has to be directed towards the propaganda operations of whoever the current ‘Official Enemy’ happens to be. To give just one example: on 27 February 2022, Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, stood outside the Kremlin and declaimed live on BBC News that evening:

In Russia, television remains the key tool for shaping public opinion. So, if you control TV, as the Kremlin does, you control the messaging. But not 100 per cent, because today many Russians do get their news and information online. And there they see a very different picture.

Likewise, a BBC ‘Live’ webpage about the Ukraine war on 24 February last year included a supposed analysis by Francis Scarr of BBC Monitoring titled, ‘The evolution of Russian propaganda at home’. It began:

A year since the invasion of Ukraine, coverage of the war on Russia’s state-controlled TV channels has shifted as the Kremlin attempts to shape public opinion at home.

Scarr continued:

Two-thirds of Russians receive most of their information from TV, where the messaging is under tight Kremlin control.

What about the ‘tight control’ of government ‘messaging’ via BBC News? It does not necessarily require direct instructions from Whitehall or Downing Street. But senior BBC managers and editors have certainly risen to their positions by thinking the right thoughts and saying the right things.

You will therefore struggle to find a BBC journalist pointing to the disparity between state-mandated BBC News ‘messaging’ and informed sources challenging establishment ideology via non-corporate media. A vanishingly rare exception is Rami Ruhayem, a BBC Arabic and BBC World Service journalist and producer since 2005, who was scathing about the BBC’s coverage of the current phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (see our recent alert). Ruhayem has essentially been ‘disappeared’ with no public response from the BBC and virtually zero coverage in state-corporate media.

Nor will BBC News inform its audiences that government policy is largely determined by the wishes of business elites, as independent studies have shown. Chomsky referred to one of these studies in his 2010 book, ‘Hopes and Prospects’:

In a rare and unusually careful analysis of the domestic influences on U.S. foreign policy, Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page find, unsurprisingly, that the major influence on policy is “internationally oriented business corporations,” though there is also a secondary effect of “experts,” who, they point out “may themselves be influenced by business.” Public opinion, in contrast, has “little or no significant effect on government officials,” they find. (p. 47.)

For example, opinion polling in Germany and France revealed that most people there blame the United States and/or NATO for the war in Ukraine. US political analyst Ben Norton commented:

These results suggest that many average Europeans can see clearly that the conflict in Ukraine is not merely a battle between Kiev and Moscow, but rather a proxy war that the NATO military alliance, led by the United States, is waging against Russia.

Such unacceptable public opinions are dismissed routinely by political leaders. Germany’s hawkish Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock insisted NATO must ‘stand with Ukraine as long as they need us’, pledging military support ‘no matter what my German voters think’.

Israel’s Claims Against Unrwa: “No Evidence”

Meanwhile, the massive public opposition to Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza is generating concern at senior levels in western capitals. Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte reportedly even asked the country’s legal affairs ministry:

What can we say to make it look like Israel is not committing war crimes?

Here in the UK, a recent YouGov opinion poll starkly highlighted just how out of step both the Tory government and Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party are with British public opinion on Israel and Palestine. 66 per cent of Britons believe Israel should stop attacking Gaza and agree to an immediate ceasefire. Only 13 per cent of Britons think Israel should continue with its ‘military action’.

On 20 February, with the death toll in Gaza at almost 30,000, and more than four months after the Israeli carnage began, Labour finally called for ‘an immediate humanitarian ceasefire’, under parliamentary pressure from a Scottish National Party (SNP) motion. However, in the end, a formal vote on a ceasefire did not take place with the Commons debate descending into chaos. There were accusations that the House of Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, and Starmer had colluded to block Parliament voting on the SNP motion, thus avoiding a mutiny among Labour MPs who have been demanding a less barbaric stance from the Labour leader. SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn said:

This should have been the chance for the UK Parliament to do the right thing and vote for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Israel – instead it turned into a Westminster circus.

Much of the public, as well as legal experts and informed commentators, regard Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal; not least the majority of judges who heard the recent South African case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Netherlands.

The cynical and premeditated response of Israel to the ICJ ruling was to make unsubstantiated claims that Unrwa employees, the UN agency which provides relief for six million Palestinian refugees, were involved in the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year. News media, notably including BBC News, gave the claims wall-to-wall coverage. The staff – 12 people out of 13,000 employees – named by Israel were summarily dismissed, without an investigation, by Unrwa. This did not prevent many countries, including the US and the UK, suspending vital humanitarian contributions to the relief agency.

To its credit, Channel 4 News investigated Israel’s allegations and broadcast a report showing that Israel had provided ‘no evidence’ of its claims against the Unrwa staff, other than details identifying the employees alleged to have been involved. As Peter Oborne observed, it appears that, in immediately suspending aid, Britain’s foreign secretary David Cameron had:

jumped to attention solely based on claims made by a government which has long had a strong interest in discrediting Unrwa.

Oborne expanded:

As Israeli television has reported, based on a “high-level classified foreign ministry report”, Israel plans to push Unrwa out of the Gaza Strip.

The plan involves three stages: the publication of a report alleging Unrwa cooperation with Hamas; followed by the promotion of alternative organisations to provide welfare services; and finally, the removal of Unrwa from Gaza altogether.

He continued:

It’s not as if Israel deserves to be automatically believed. The Israeli military has repeatedly been caught out making false and fabricated statements about events in Gaza and elsewhere. This means that every claim emanating from Israel should be treated sceptically. (The same applies, of course, to Hamas.)

Compare this with the UK government’s response to the evidence-based ICJ judgment that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza:

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Cameron trashed the court even before it had reached its judgment, and have continued to do so since.

By contrast, Britain responded at once to allegations regarding Unrwa produced by Israel and suspended funds to the one agency capable of delivering aid in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe.

The huge public protests in the UK, and around the world, highlight the great divide between the public and governments on Israel and Palestine, and wider foreign policy. This has been the case historically.

Establishment Alarm At Public Protest

In February 2003, when a massive global movement attempting to stop the impending Iraq war took to the streets, the New York Times wrote:

The huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.

A similar phenomenon is occurring now, with international grassroots pressure demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. But coverage in the state-corporate media does not reflect the power or importance of public protest. As Des Freedman, a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, observed:

Mainstream [sic] media like the BBC will not represent this movement nor hold to account those governments who are complicit in the destruction of Gaza because they are overwhelmingly tied to an imperial world view.

Instead, the BBC and other news media endlessly platform Israeli propaganda, notably the apartheid state’s repeated claims to be ‘defending itself’ in ‘responding’ to the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year.

It is important to emphasise, however, that elite power is not invulnerable to public opinion. In the years following the Iraq war, much of the public came to realise it had been deceived. The US-led invasion-occupation was not about disarming Saddam of mythical ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or about bringing ‘democracy’ to Iraq. It was about oil and western hegemony in the Middle East.

In 2014, a huge 71 per cent of Americans said that the war in Iraq ‘wasn’t worth it’. Likewise, three opinion polls conducted from 1990-2000 found that about 7 in 10 Americans believed that the US war against Vietnam was a ‘mistake’. Many no doubt would have said that the Vietnam war, like the Iraq war, was an international war crime, not merely a ‘mistake’.

On the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq last February, journalist Ian Sinclair published an important analysis in the Morning Star. He pointed out that, although the enormous Stop the War marches did not prevent the war going ahead, or the UK’s participation in it, the anti-war movement did have significant impacts. It helped to inform public opinion and mobilise public action that challenged British foreign policy. Sinclair wrote:

As a politician, Blair was fatally wounded over Iraq, with a 2010 ComRes poll finding 37 per cent of respondents thought he should be put on trial for the invasion.

He added:

The anti-war public mood was also likely a constraining influence on British forces in Iraq. In a 2016 RUSI Journal article, Major General Christopher Elliott noted there was “a cap on numbers, driven by political constraints rather than military necessity.

Milan Rai, editor of Peace News, argued that the UK anti-war movement came close to derailing Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war:

Wobbly Tuesday is one of the great secrets of the Iraq war, kept secret not by state censorship and repression, but by media and academic self-censorship.

‘Wobbly Tuesday’ was Tuesday, 11 March 2003, the date when the British government began to panic that it might lose a parliamentary vote on the war, given the massive public protests. The Sunday Telegraph reported that on that day, Geoff Hoon, the Minister of Defence, was ‘frantically preparing contingency plans to “disconnect” British troops entirely from the military invasion of Iraq, demoting their role to subsequent phases of the campaign and peacekeeping.’ In the end, the government won the Commons vote and the UK shamefully took part in the invasion-occupation of Iraq which led to the deaths of around one million Iraqis.

A 2019 YouGov survey showed that 52 per cent of respondents now oppose British military interventions overseas. This new reality was already evident in August 2013 when MPs voted against a government motion to support planned US air strikes on Syria. Public opinion had been strongly opposed to military action, with a YouGov poll just before the vote showing opposition at 51 per cent, and support at just 22 per cent. This was the first time a British prime minister had lost a vote on war since 1782.

Sinclair observed that:

This defeat generated significant alarm within the Establishment. Speaking two years later, Sir Nick Houghton, Britain’s chief of defence staff, worried “we are experiencing ever greater constraints on our freedom to use force” due to a lack of “societal support, parliamentary consent and ever greater legal challenge.

Julian Assange: Persecuted For Reporting The Truth

One of the biggest establishment campaigns in recent times to manipulate public opinion has been the attempted smearing of WikiLeaks co-founder, Julian Assange, as we have repeatedly highlighted in media alerts (for example, see here and here).

The latest stage of this campaign has been the final High Court hearing in London this week to decide whether Assange will be sent to trial in the US under the 1917 Espionage Act, a first for the prosecution for any journalist or publisher. And all for the supposed ‘offence’ of publishing the truth about US war crimes.

Nina Cross, an investigative reporter for The Indicter website, noted that ‘the defamation of Assange’s character by the British government is institutional’ and that ‘only through the complicity of the corporate media has this abuse been possible.’

She added:

Without its sustained collusion and servility, the powerful would not have impunity; they would not dare attempt what appears to be the slow assassination of a journalist in full public view for exposing their crimes.

Noam Chomsky and Alice Walker pointed out how the media bowed down to the US government’s dictate that they focus on Assange’s personality, and not on the principles of the case:

Assange is not on trial for skateboarding in the Ecuadorian embassy, for tweeting, for calling Hillary Clinton a war hawk, or for having an unkempt beard as he was dragged into detention by British police. Assange faces extradition to the United States because he published incontrovertible proof of war crimes and abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, embarrassing the most powerful nation on Earth. Assange published hard evidence of “the ways in which the first world exploits the third”, according to whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the source of that evidence. Assange is on trial for his journalism, for his principles, not his personality.

They added:

By drawing attention away from the principles of the case, the obsession with personality pushes out the significance of WikiLeaks’ revelations and the extent to which governments have concealed misconduct from their own citizens. It pushes out how Assange’s 2010 publications exposed 15,000 previously uncounted civilian casualties in Iraq, casualties that the US Army would have buried. It pushes out the fact that the United States is attempting to accomplish what repressive regimes can only dream of: deciding what journalists around the globe can and cannot write. It pushes out the fact that all whistleblowers and journalism itself, not just Assange, is on trial here.

Whatever the outcome of this week’s High Court hearings, the valiant example of Assange and WikiLeaks in exposing power serves as inspiration for what can be achieved through the power of truth, humanity and compassion.

Elite power may, at times, seem overwhelming, bordering on invincible. It is an oft-quoted line, but a vital truth that: ‘We are many and they are few’. At root, elite interests fear public power. Therein lies hope.

The writer Maria Popova highlighted David Byrne, former frontman of Talking Heads, as:

one of the last standing idealists in our world — a countercultural force of lucid and luminous optimism, kindred to Walt Whitman, who wrote so passionately about optimism as a mighty force of resistance and a pillar of democracy.

In ‘One Fine Day’, co-written with Brian Eno, Byrne sings a ‘buoyant hymn of optimism [that] ripples against the current of our time as a mighty countercultural anthem of resistance and resilience.’

The song observes movingly:

Shouts and battle cries, from every part
I can see those tears, every one is true

It concludes on an uplifting note:

Then a peace of mind fell over me —
In these troubled times, I still can see
We can use the stars, to guide the way
It is not that far, the one fine —

One fine day

That one fine day is still within our reach.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

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For years, an elite team of lawyers at the Texas attorney general’s office went toe-to-toe with some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, on a mission to weed out fraud and abuse in the Medicaid system.

And the team was wildly successful, securing positive press for the attorney general’s office and bringing in money for the state — lots of it. In a little more than two decades, the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division has helped recover a whopping $2.6 billion. Of that, $1 billion went to the state’s general fund, which pays for critical services like education and health care.

The cases the team handled weren’t necessarily the kind to rouse the conservative base of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who gained prominence for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and for regularly suing the Biden administration. But still, they were legal victories Paxton touted amid a host of scandals that have dogged him since he was first elected in 2014.

“Paxton Recovers $26 Million for the State of Texas, Medicaid Program,” read one 2021 press release from his office, after the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division settled with the pharmaceutical manufacturer Apotex for reporting high drug prices to the state’s Medicaid program.

He praised the team again last fall, a couple of months after state senators acquitted him in a widely watched impeachment trial in which Paxton faced allegations of corruption and bribery.

“Our Civil Medicaid Fraud Division has done an outstanding job holding these pharmaceutical companies accountable,” a November news release quoted Paxton saying, about a lawsuit his office had filed against pharmaceutical giants Pfizer Inc. and Tris Pharma Inc. The suit accuses the companies of giving an ADHD drug to children on Texas Medicaid, despite evidence the substance had failed quality control tests. (Pfizer said in a statement it believes the state’s case has no merit; a spokesperson for Tris said the company does not comment on pending litigation.)

But over the last year, the team of lawyers responsible for pursuing this and other big lawsuits like it has shrunk to its smallest size since Paxton took office.

Nearly two-thirds of the lawyers who were on the team a year ago have quit. Despite some replacements, the division is down from 31 attorneys last January to 19 at the beginning of this year, according to an analysis of staffing records by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Together, those departing lawyers represented a combined 180 years of experience with the attorney general’s office.

The departures followed the ouster of the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division’s longtime and beloved chief, Raymond Winter, in November 2022. What precisely led to his departure was not made clear to his team. A December 2022 email from an associate deputy attorney general to the agency’s head of human resources, obtained by the news organizations, said Winter was notified that “a decision was made to change leadership” in the division. Winter was given the option to take a demotion and serve in either the agency’s Transportation Division or its Law Enforcement Defense Division. He instead chose to retire, the email said.

However, a former attorney from the division said agency higher-ups told Winter if he didn’t resign or take the demotion, he’d be fired. The attorney, like the multiple former Civil Medicaid Fraud attorneys interviewed for this story, asked ProPublica and The Texas Tribune not to use their name for fear of professional retaliation.

The news organizations spoke to 10 attorneys who worked in the division with Winter. They said his ouster came as a shock. Months earlier, Winter had received a $5,000 bonus “for consistently performing at a level of excellence,” a manager wrote, according to his employee file, which the news organizations obtained through a public information request. Gov. Greg Abbott has since appointed Winter to be the state’s inspector general.

Several attorneys said the exodus that followed Winter’s ejection is a sign of a state agency at a crisis point. The 19 lawyers who left the division last year constitute a significantly higher number than the seven who departed in 2022, one of whom moved to another unit within the attorney general’s office, the news organizations found.

The attorney general’s office did not respond to multiple interview requests or written questions.

Paxton’s agency has been beset by operational struggles in recent years. Last year, ProPublica and the Tribune reported on Paxton’s repeated refusals to defend state agencies in court. Austin-based television station KXAN disclosed how dysfunction in the office’s Crime Victims’ Compensation unit has resulted in significant payment delays to crime survivors. The Associated Press has covered the agency’s decision to drop human trafficking and child sexual assault cases because investigators lost track of a victim, as well as numerous other attorneys quitting because of internal dysfunction.

Paxton himself has been the subject of a whistleblower lawsuit filed by his former lieutenants, as well as a securities fraud investigation ongoing since before he was elected attorney general. Paxton recently moved to settle the whistleblower lawsuit, saying he no longer contests the facts, as part of his ongoing effort to avoid testifying in the case. He has pleaded not guilty in the securities fraud case, which is set to go to trial in April.

The attorney general has so far survived these personal and professional challenges, becoming even more emboldened since his impeachment acquittal in September. Days after his reinstatement, he publicly pledged to help unseat some of the lawmakers who voted to impeach him and has supported numerous primary challengers to sitting Republican legislators.

The personnel losses in the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division carry a different consequence because it is one of the departments at the attorney general’s office that generates money. In fiscal year 2000, the team’s first in existence, lawyers there helped bring in a little more than $5 million in recoveries. A decade later, the division regularly had years when it helped bring in more than $100 million. In fiscal year 2012, when Abbott was still attorney general, the division helped recoup more than $400 million in wasted Medicaid dollars. (The civil division is distinct from the attorney general’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, which conducts criminal investigations into fraud and abuse allegations against Medicaid health care providers.)

Besides the money that went to the state general fund, Paxton’s office also benefited, getting to keep a portion of attorney’s fees from its cases, money that goes to the agency as a whole. In fiscal year 2023, the division helped collect more than $14 million in those fees, almost triple the Civil Medicaid Fraud division’s annual budget, according to records ProPublica and the Tribune obtained through a public information request. The previous year, Civil Medicaid Fraud collected more in attorney’s fees than all other attorney general divisions combined.

Without the full crop of lawyers, achieving those kinds of wins will be significantly harder, former lawyers for the division said.

“When a lawyer who’s been there for years and has handled multiple lawsuits and built relationships with the feds, with other states, all of that — when that walks out the door, you start over, and that is not easily regained,” said Margaret Moore, a former Travis County district attorney who previously worked in the division under Winter.

Medicaid fraud cases can take years to complete, and money from legal settlements coming in this year is most likely the result of cases investigated and litigated under Winter’s leadership, a former attorney said. So it is too soon to know how the division’s ability to secure financial settlements will be affected by the loss of so many experienced attorneys. Last fiscal year, however, the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division opened only 56 cases, the lowest number since at least 2013, according to a review of annual reports jointly issued by the attorney general’s office, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission and the Office of Inspector General. The next lowest number of civil Medicaid fraud cases filed in that time frame was 73, in fiscal year 2022.

Winter declined to be interviewed for this story. The Office of Inspector General, which he now leads, regularly works with the attorney general’s Civil Medicaid Fraud unit on investigations. In a statement, Winter called the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division a “valued partner” and said that together they will “continue to aggressively fight Medicaid fraud using all available tools under the law.”

Medicaid fraud litigation is complex and requires a sharp understanding of state and federal law. The attorneys regularly take on big pharmaceutical companies with deep pockets. Often, the state faces off against multiple white-shoe law firms in a single case.

Another former Civil Medicaid Fraud attorney, who left the division last year, predicted it could take a decade to rebuild the unit because of the institutional knowledge that was lost.

“As a Texas citizen who happens to know more about the shady things that pharmaceutical companies and other entities do because of my job, I do feel less safe as a citizen knowing that CMF is not what it used to be and does not have the ability to hold those entities accountable in the way that they were,” she said.

Winter was the kind of hands-on leader who inspired uncommon admiration among his staff. In his earlier life, he’d been a member of Texas A&M University’s storied Corps of Cadets, then a paratrooper in the Army National Guard, all experiences that seemed to drive home his “team first” philosophy.

And it was a close-knit team in Civil Medicaid Fraud.

In 1999, then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn, now a U.S. senator, started the unit as a small section inside the agency’s Elder Law and Public Health Division with the goal of stopping abuse of the Medicaid program. To do so, lawyers in the unit would use a state law passed in 1995 that empowered the attorney general’s office to prosecute fraud within the Medicaid system, a state and federal program that provides health care to financially needy individuals.

When Winter first started working on Medicaid fraud cases in 2000, there were only two other people on the team. They had few resources. Cynthia O’Keeffe, who was hired to work for the unit two years later, remembered a defense attorney asking her to send something to him by overnight mail. She told him she couldn’t because her team’s overnight mailing budget was already used up for the year. “He lost his mind,” she remembered. “He thought I was lying to him.”

But that quickly began to change. In 2000, Texas became the first state in the country to go after a pharmaceutical company for improperly reporting drug prices to the Medicaid program, according to a press release the attorney general’s office issued in 2013. This and subsequent lawsuits highlighted how pharmaceutical companies would sometimes misrepresent the prices of their products to the Medicaid program.

In 2003, the Civil Medicaid Fraud unit settled with Dey Inc. for $18.5 million in a drug-pricing case related to albuterol sulfate, which is used to treat asthma. At the time, O’Keeffe couldn’t fathom being part of a settlement for that much money. Then the next year, the division settled another drug-pricing case, this time with Schering-Plough Corp., for $27 million.

As the settlements grew, so did the unit’s reputation across the country, said Lelia Winget-Hernandez, a lawyer who previously worked with the attorney general of Virginia.

Texas Medicaid fraud attorneys were always willing to help and provide Winget-Hernandez guidance when she called with questions about pursuing similar Medicaid fraud lawsuits in her state. “I know they say Texas leads the way and don’t mess with Texas. That [Civil Medicaid Fraud] unit exhibited that all the time,” Winget-Hernandez said.

By 2007, Winter was the unit’s acting chief. The following year, Abbott, who was the state’s attorney general from 2002 to 2014, made it its own division.

The Civil Medicaid Fraud Division landed some of its biggest headlines when its attorneys joined a whistleblower lawsuit against health care behemoth Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary ​​Janssen Pharmaceutical LLC. The lawsuit accused the companies of fraudulently marketing the schizophrenia drug Risperdal for use in children and adolescents, including those on the Texas Medicaid program, though the U.S. Food and Drug and Administration had not yet approved it for pediatric patients. The Food and Drug Administration had also sent warning letters to the company over the years about its marketing practices and failures to disclose data to doctors about possible side effects of the drug. In children, those included diabetes, permanent uncontrollable movement disorders and the growth of lactating breasts in boys, O’Keeffe said.

The case went to trial in January 2012. In her opening statement to the court, O’Keeffe accused the companies of having engaged in a “systematic looting” of the state’s Medicaid program.

After roughly a week of the plaintiffs’ case, Johnson & Johnson agreed to settle for $158 million, the state’s largest ever Medicaid fraud recovery from a single defendant at the time. As part of the agreement, Johnson & Johnson admitted no wrongdoing.

Tommy Jacks, one of the private attorneys who worked on the case alongside the attorney general’s office, said in a recent interview with ProPublica and the Tribune that it was clear the important role Winter played for his team.

He “led by example, and was just completely trusted by the individuals who worked in the division,” Jacks said.

The team’s successes were a calling card for top-tier legal talent. The Civil Medicaid Fraud unit attracted law school stars and experienced private attorneys willing to take pay cuts in order to work for the state and for a mission they believed in, O’Keeffe said. “They wanted to come and work for us because we were on the right side of cases,” O’Keeffe said. “It was complex, high-profile work, and we were incredibly successful.”

When Abbott was still attorney general, job candidates sometimes asked in interviews about the politics of the agency and how that affected their work. “And we would say, ‘Hey, Greg Abbott doesn’t let that get to us,’” O’Keeffe said.

In November 2014, Abbott was elected governor. To replace him as attorney general, voters chose Paxton, another Republican and a state senator from McKinney.

Paxton’s first election didn’t initially change things in Civil Medicaid Fraud. The team kept securing settlements, and there was still a sense of a separation between the agency’s day-to-day operations and the politics, said Susan Miller, who led the division’s investigative unit from 2007 until 2020. She and her fellow attorneys didn’t have many interactions with Paxton, which was typical of the office.

The atmosphere started to shift sometime after Paxton was elected for a second term in 2018.

The differences were small at first. O’Keeffe, who also became a deputy chief in the unit, recalled higher-ups in the attorney general’s office asking her to meet with a woman whose health care company the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division was investigating, though lawyers had not yet decided whether to pursue the case in court. The woman wanted to know why lawyers were looking into her business. “She made it very clear she wanted me to back off,” O’Keeffe said.

Ultimately, nothing came of the interaction, and O’Keeffe said she doesn’t believe a case was ever filed against the woman’s company. Still, she couldn’t believe leadership at the attorney general’s office would even call such a meeting in the first place because of the potential precedent it could set. Lawyers don’t meet directly with potential defendants because it could influence the course of a case or investigation and because “it gives the person who’s being investigated the impression they are in charge, not you,” O’Keeffe said.

“I thought, ‘Greg Abbott would have never let this happen. John Cornyn would have never let this happen,’” O’Keeffe recalled.

Previously, the team had felt free from political pressure, Miller said. The lawyers were working for Republican attorneys general yet were still able to take on big business. Under Paxton, however, she said the higher-ups started asking more questions about certain cases the attorneys chose to pursue and how long they took. “We had to start justifying things more,” Miller said. O’Keeffe noticed Winter being cut out of discussions about certain matters and that executives weren’t always heeding his legal advice — partly, she believes, because he wasn’t in Paxton’s inner circle.

O’Keeffe left the agency in fall 2019, followed by Miller in August 2020. Shortly after, several of Paxton’s top deputies went to the FBI alleging the attorney general had misused the office in trying to aid his friend and donor, real estate investor Nate Paul. Paul, who now faces multiple charges in federal court that include making false statements to financial institutions, has denied bribing Paxton and pleaded not guilty to the charges.

One of the whistleblowers, David Maxwell Jr., later told Texas House of Representatives investigators that anyone who’d been close to him became a target at the agency — and that included Winter.

Maxwell, a former Texas Ranger, had been the attorney general’s director of criminal law enforcement. Part of Winter’s job with the state, separate from his leadership of the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division, was to defend Maxwell’s ratings of law enforcement officers who were terminated from the attorney general’s office.

Paxton ultimately fired Maxwell and gave him a general discharge, according to court filings, which indicates some kind of work performance problem or disciplinary issue. When Maxwell challenged the rating, wanting to upgrade to honorable discharge, the attorney general’s office asked Winter to defend its decision. Winter declined, according to Maxwell’s February 2023 interview with the House investigators, which was included in exhibits released ahead of Paxton’s impeachment trial. “He refused, and so they fired him,” Maxwell said, according to a transcript of that interview.

Maxwell declined an interview request for this story.

“Paxton has totally devastated the agency with good people that he’s gotten rid of because the criteria to get hired in the executive level is to plead your allegiance to him, not to the agency or not to the law,” Maxwell told the investigators.

Ultimately, Paxton fired four other whistleblowers. Another three of them quit, among them Paxton’s second in command, First Assistant Jeff Mateer. In the aftermath of his top deputies reporting him, Paxton “hired a whole new executive crew,” whistleblower Mark Penley told House investigators, “and sealed off access to the executive floor.”

Among Paxton’s new lieutenants was Brent Webster, a private practice lawyer the attorney general hired to replace Mateer as first assistant. Webster had previously come under scrutiny when working in Williamson County, where he was accused of failing to serve citations in dozens of asset forfeiture cases. Webster told the Austin American-Statesman in 2017 he did so because the office was short-staffed and so he prioritized criminal cases.

His first day with the state, Webster kicked out one of the other whistleblowers, Blake Brickman, from a meeting with Paxton, a lawsuit filed by the whistleblowers alleged. Later, Webster went to Brickman’s office escorted by an armed officer. Other employees complained that the armed officer “was an unprecedented attempt by Mr. Webster to intimidate senior members of OAG staff,” according to an internal whistleblower complaint filed by Brickman in October 2020 that was a precursor to the lawsuit he and others later pursued. Webster has never publicly addressed these allegations.

Unlike his predecessor in the first assistant role, Webster was far less enamored with Winter and his team, according to one attorney who used to work with the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division. Other officials in the agency suspected Webster didn’t appreciate any level of pushback on his ideas, the attorney said. But Winter was direct, the attorney said, and wouldn’t necessarily hold back his legal opinion about a case if he thought it necessary to share it.

Webster did not respond to requests for comment.

Winter did his best to shield the division from politics and turmoil in the executive offices, several attorneys said. But in 2022, the attorney general’s office and the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division joined a whistleblower lawsuit against Planned Parenthood, alleging the sexual health organization had improperly received Medicaid reimbursements while Texas’ challenges to its use of those funds were underway. Two attorneys interviewed by ProPublica and the Tribune said there were disagreements between Winter and the higher-ups about what legal approach to take on the $1.8 billion lawsuit, which threatens to bankrupt Planned Parenthood nationally. Planned Parenthood has called the lawsuit meritless.

One of the attorneys told the news organizations that in the months leading up to Winter’s ouster, there was a building sense of scrutiny, pressure and interference coming from the top of the organization, particularly when it came to the Planned Parenthood litigation. Executives were extremely focused on the case, a lot of resources were devoted to it and the entire tone of the division changed for the worse as a result, the attorney said.

The team kept trying to do its work. Then, in mid-November 2022, a handful of Paxton’s top deputies called the Civil Medicaid Fraud attorneys into a room. Word had already spread that Winter had been pushed out. The deputies confirmed the news. The room filled with an icy silence, but the anger was palpable, attorneys present said.

“Anyone who was being honest with themselves in the moment knew things were about to be really bad,” another former Civil Medicaid Fraud attorney said.

Winter’s departure was a seismic event. If he wasn’t safe, some of the division attorneys agreed, no one was.

By January 2023, six attorneys from the division resigned, three of them on the same day. Four more announced in February that they were quitting. The rest of the departures trickled in throughout the subsequent months and included an investigator, a legal assistant and an office manager. After Paxton’s acquittal but before year’s end, another three attorneys quit.

These reductions will hurt the division’s ability to detect Medicaid waste, said Charles Silver, the McDonald chair in civil procedure at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.

“That’s the only effect it can possibly have,” Silver said. “The number of potential cases out there greatly exceeds the ability of either the states’ AG departments or the federal government to police it all.”

Some of the departing lawyers followed Winter to his new job at the Office of Inspector General. Others retired or went to work for other state offices.

Now, there are only a handful of attorneys left in the division with experience litigating Medicaid fraud cases.

And the resignations haven’t stopped. On Jan. 17, another Civil Medicaid Fraud attorney quit.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune’s investigative unit has covered some of the most important issues facing Texas residents. We’ve looked into security practices along the U.S.-Mexico border, revealed the state attorney general’s failure to defend other state agencies in court and uncovered a loophole in the gun background check system. Our team is always looking for good sources and stories. If we have questions about issues relevant to your state agency or state government area of expertise, your perspective and experience could help us do more of this work. Please fill out the form if you’re open to one of our journalists contacting you when we’re reporting on a subject matter you might know about.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Vianna Davila.

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For years, an elite team of lawyers at the Texas attorney general’s office went toe-to-toe with some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, on a mission to weed out fraud and abuse in the Medicaid system.

And the team was wildly successful, securing positive press for the attorney general’s office and bringing in money for the state — lots of it. In a little more than two decades, the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division has helped recover a whopping $2.6 billion. Of that, $1 billion went to the state’s general fund, which pays for critical services like education and health care.

The cases the team handled weren’t necessarily the kind to rouse the conservative base of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who gained prominence for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and for regularly suing the Biden administration. But still, they were legal victories Paxton touted amid a host of scandals that have dogged him since he was first elected in 2014.

“Paxton Recovers $26 Million for the State of Texas, Medicaid Program,” read one 2021 press release from his office, after the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division settled with the pharmaceutical manufacturer Apotex for reporting high drug prices to the state’s Medicaid program.

He praised the team again last fall, a couple of months after state senators acquitted him in a widely watched impeachment trial in which Paxton faced allegations of corruption and bribery.

“Our Civil Medicaid Fraud Division has done an outstanding job holding these pharmaceutical companies accountable,” a November news release quoted Paxton saying, about a lawsuit his office had filed against pharmaceutical giants Pfizer Inc. and Tris Pharma Inc. The suit accuses the companies of giving an ADHD drug to children on Texas Medicaid, despite evidence the substance had failed quality control tests. (Pfizer said in a statement it believes the state’s case has no merit; a spokesperson for Tris said the company does not comment on pending litigation.)

But over the last year, the team of lawyers responsible for pursuing this and other big lawsuits like it has shrunk to its smallest size since Paxton took office.

Nearly two-thirds of the lawyers who were on the team a year ago have quit. Despite some replacements, the division is down from 31 attorneys last January to 19 at the beginning of this year, according to an analysis of staffing records by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Together, those departing lawyers represented a combined 180 years of experience with the attorney general’s office.

The departures followed the ouster of the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division’s longtime and beloved chief, Raymond Winter, in November 2022. What precisely led to his departure was not made clear to his team. A December 2022 email from an associate deputy attorney general to the agency’s head of human resources, obtained by the news organizations, said Winter was notified that “a decision was made to change leadership” in the division. Winter was given the option to take a demotion and serve in either the agency’s Transportation Division or its Law Enforcement Defense Division. He instead chose to retire, the email said.

However, a former attorney from the division said agency higher-ups told Winter if he didn’t resign or take the demotion, he’d be fired. The attorney, like the multiple former Civil Medicaid Fraud attorneys interviewed for this story, asked ProPublica and The Texas Tribune not to use their name for fear of professional retaliation.

The news organizations spoke to 10 attorneys who worked in the division with Winter. They said his ouster came as a shock. Months earlier, Winter had received a $5,000 bonus “for consistently performing at a level of excellence,” a manager wrote, according to his employee file, which the news organizations obtained through a public information request. Gov. Greg Abbott has since appointed Winter to be the state’s inspector general.

Several attorneys said the exodus that followed Winter’s ejection is a sign of a state agency at a crisis point. The 19 lawyers who left the division last year constitute a significantly higher number than the seven who departed in 2022, one of whom moved to another unit within the attorney general’s office, the news organizations found.

The attorney general’s office did not respond to multiple interview requests or written questions.

Paxton’s agency has been beset by operational struggles in recent years. Last year, ProPublica and the Tribune reported on Paxton’s repeated refusals to defend state agencies in court. Austin-based television station KXAN disclosed how dysfunction in the office’s Crime Victims’ Compensation unit has resulted in significant payment delays to crime survivors. The Associated Press has covered the agency’s decision to drop human trafficking and child sexual assault cases because investigators lost track of a victim, as well as numerous other attorneys quitting because of internal dysfunction.

Paxton himself has been the subject of a whistleblower lawsuit filed by his former lieutenants, as well as a securities fraud investigation ongoing since before he was elected attorney general. Paxton recently moved to settle the whistleblower lawsuit, saying he no longer contests the facts, as part of his ongoing effort to avoid testifying in the case. He has pleaded not guilty in the securities fraud case, which is set to go to trial in April.

The attorney general has so far survived these personal and professional challenges, becoming even more emboldened since his impeachment acquittal in September. Days after his reinstatement, he publicly pledged to help unseat some of the lawmakers who voted to impeach him and has supported numerous primary challengers to sitting Republican legislators.

The personnel losses in the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division carry a different consequence because it is one of the departments at the attorney general’s office that generates money. In fiscal year 2000, the team’s first in existence, lawyers there helped bring in a little more than $5 million in recoveries. A decade later, the division regularly had years when it helped bring in more than $100 million. In fiscal year 2012, when Abbott was still attorney general, the division helped recoup more than $400 million in wasted Medicaid dollars. (The civil division is distinct from the attorney general’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, which conducts criminal investigations into fraud and abuse allegations against Medicaid health care providers.)

Besides the money that went to the state general fund, Paxton’s office also benefited, getting to keep a portion of attorney’s fees from its cases, money that goes to the agency as a whole. In fiscal year 2023, the division helped collect more than $14 million in those fees, almost triple the Civil Medicaid Fraud division’s annual budget, according to records ProPublica and the Tribune obtained through a public information request. The previous year, Civil Medicaid Fraud collected more in attorney’s fees than all other attorney general divisions combined.

Without the full crop of lawyers, achieving those kinds of wins will be significantly harder, former lawyers for the division said.

“When a lawyer who’s been there for years and has handled multiple lawsuits and built relationships with the feds, with other states, all of that — when that walks out the door, you start over, and that is not easily regained,” said Margaret Moore, a former Travis County district attorney who previously worked in the division under Winter.

Medicaid fraud cases can take years to complete, and money from legal settlements coming in this year is most likely the result of cases investigated and litigated under Winter’s leadership, a former attorney said. So it is too soon to know how the division’s ability to secure financial settlements will be affected by the loss of so many experienced attorneys. Last fiscal year, however, the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division opened only 56 cases, the lowest number since at least 2013, according to a review of annual reports jointly issued by the attorney general’s office, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission and the Office of Inspector General. The next lowest number of civil Medicaid fraud cases filed in that time frame was 73, in fiscal year 2022.

Winter declined to be interviewed for this story. The Office of Inspector General, which he now leads, regularly works with the attorney general’s Civil Medicaid Fraud unit on investigations. In a statement, Winter called the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division a “valued partner” and said that together they will “continue to aggressively fight Medicaid fraud using all available tools under the law.”

Medicaid fraud litigation is complex and requires a sharp understanding of state and federal law. The attorneys regularly take on big pharmaceutical companies with deep pockets. Often, the state faces off against multiple white-shoe law firms in a single case.

Another former Civil Medicaid Fraud attorney, who left the division last year, predicted it could take a decade to rebuild the unit because of the institutional knowledge that was lost.

“As a Texas citizen who happens to know more about the shady things that pharmaceutical companies and other entities do because of my job, I do feel less safe as a citizen knowing that CMF is not what it used to be and does not have the ability to hold those entities accountable in the way that they were,” she said.

Winter was the kind of hands-on leader who inspired uncommon admiration among his staff. In his earlier life, he’d been a member of Texas A&M University’s storied Corps of Cadets, then a paratrooper in the Army National Guard, all experiences that seemed to drive home his “team first” philosophy.

And it was a close-knit team in Civil Medicaid Fraud.

In 1999, then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn, now a U.S. senator, started the unit as a small section inside the agency’s Elder Law and Public Health Division with the goal of stopping abuse of the Medicaid program. To do so, lawyers in the unit would use a state law passed in 1995 that empowered the attorney general’s office to prosecute fraud within the Medicaid system, a state and federal program that provides health care to financially needy individuals.

When Winter first started working on Medicaid fraud cases in 2000, there were only two other people on the team. They had few resources. Cynthia O’Keeffe, who was hired to work for the unit two years later, remembered a defense attorney asking her to send something to him by overnight mail. She told him she couldn’t because her team’s overnight mailing budget was already used up for the year. “He lost his mind,” she remembered. “He thought I was lying to him.”

But that quickly began to change. In 2000, Texas became the first state in the country to go after a pharmaceutical company for improperly reporting drug prices to the Medicaid program, according to a press release the attorney general’s office issued in 2013. This and subsequent lawsuits highlighted how pharmaceutical companies would sometimes misrepresent the prices of their products to the Medicaid program.

In 2003, the Civil Medicaid Fraud unit settled with Dey Inc. for $18.5 million in a drug-pricing case related to albuterol sulfate, which is used to treat asthma. At the time, O’Keeffe couldn’t fathom being part of a settlement for that much money. Then the next year, the division settled another drug-pricing case, this time with Schering-Plough Corp., for $27 million.

As the settlements grew, so did the unit’s reputation across the country, said Lelia Winget-Hernandez, a lawyer who previously worked with the attorney general of Virginia.

Texas Medicaid fraud attorneys were always willing to help and provide Winget-Hernandez guidance when she called with questions about pursuing similar Medicaid fraud lawsuits in her state. “I know they say Texas leads the way and don’t mess with Texas. That [Civil Medicaid Fraud] unit exhibited that all the time,” Winget-Hernandez said.

By 2007, Winter was the unit’s acting chief. The following year, Abbott, who was the state’s attorney general from 2002 to 2014, made it its own division.

The Civil Medicaid Fraud Division landed some of its biggest headlines when its attorneys joined a whistleblower lawsuit against health care behemoth Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary ​​Janssen Pharmaceutical LLC. The lawsuit accused the companies of fraudulently marketing the schizophrenia drug Risperdal for use in children and adolescents, including those on the Texas Medicaid program, though the U.S. Food and Drug and Administration had not yet approved it for pediatric patients. The Food and Drug Administration had also sent warning letters to the company over the years about its marketing practices and failures to disclose data to doctors about possible side effects of the drug. In children, those included diabetes, permanent uncontrollable movement disorders and the growth of lactating breasts in boys, O’Keeffe said.

The case went to trial in January 2012. In her opening statement to the court, O’Keeffe accused the companies of having engaged in a “systematic looting” of the state’s Medicaid program.

After roughly a week of the plaintiffs’ case, Johnson & Johnson agreed to settle for $158 million, the state’s largest ever Medicaid fraud recovery from a single defendant at the time. As part of the agreement, Johnson & Johnson admitted no wrongdoing.

Tommy Jacks, one of the private attorneys who worked on the case alongside the attorney general’s office, said in a recent interview with ProPublica and the Tribune that it was clear the important role Winter played for his team.

He “led by example, and was just completely trusted by the individuals who worked in the division,” Jacks said.

The team’s successes were a calling card for top-tier legal talent. The Civil Medicaid Fraud unit attracted law school stars and experienced private attorneys willing to take pay cuts in order to work for the state and for a mission they believed in, O’Keeffe said. “They wanted to come and work for us because we were on the right side of cases,” O’Keeffe said. “It was complex, high-profile work, and we were incredibly successful.”

When Abbott was still attorney general, job candidates sometimes asked in interviews about the politics of the agency and how that affected their work. “And we would say, ‘Hey, Greg Abbott doesn’t let that get to us,’” O’Keeffe said.

In November 2014, Abbott was elected governor. To replace him as attorney general, voters chose Paxton, another Republican and a state senator from McKinney.

Paxton’s first election didn’t initially change things in Civil Medicaid Fraud. The team kept securing settlements, and there was still a sense of a separation between the agency’s day-to-day operations and the politics, said Susan Miller, who led the division’s investigative unit from 2007 until 2020. She and her fellow attorneys didn’t have many interactions with Paxton, which was typical of the office.

The atmosphere started to shift sometime after Paxton was elected for a second term in 2018.

The differences were small at first. O’Keeffe, who also became a deputy chief in the unit, recalled higher-ups in the attorney general’s office asking her to meet with a woman whose health care company the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division was investigating, though lawyers had not yet decided whether to pursue the case in court. The woman wanted to know why lawyers were looking into her business. “She made it very clear she wanted me to back off,” O’Keeffe said.

Ultimately, nothing came of the interaction, and O’Keeffe said she doesn’t believe a case was ever filed against the woman’s company. Still, she couldn’t believe leadership at the attorney general’s office would even call such a meeting in the first place because of the potential precedent it could set. Lawyers don’t meet directly with potential defendants because it could influence the course of a case or investigation and because “it gives the person who’s being investigated the impression they are in charge, not you,” O’Keeffe said.

“I thought, ‘Greg Abbott would have never let this happen. John Cornyn would have never let this happen,’” O’Keeffe recalled.

Previously, the team had felt free from political pressure, Miller said. The lawyers were working for Republican attorneys general yet were still able to take on big business. Under Paxton, however, she said the higher-ups started asking more questions about certain cases the attorneys chose to pursue and how long they took. “We had to start justifying things more,” Miller said. O’Keeffe noticed Winter being cut out of discussions about certain matters and that executives weren’t always heeding his legal advice — partly, she believes, because he wasn’t in Paxton’s inner circle.

O’Keeffe left the agency in fall 2019, followed by Miller in August 2020. Shortly after, several of Paxton’s top deputies went to the FBI alleging the attorney general had misused the office in trying to aid his friend and donor, real estate investor Nate Paul. Paul, who now faces multiple charges in federal court that include making false statements to financial institutions, has denied bribing Paxton and pleaded not guilty to the charges.

One of the whistleblowers, David Maxwell Jr., later told Texas House of Representatives investigators that anyone who’d been close to him became a target at the agency — and that included Winter.

Maxwell, a former Texas Ranger, had been the attorney general’s director of criminal law enforcement. Part of Winter’s job with the state, separate from his leadership of the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division, was to defend Maxwell’s ratings of law enforcement officers who were terminated from the attorney general’s office.

Paxton ultimately fired Maxwell and gave him a general discharge, according to court filings, which indicates some kind of work performance problem or disciplinary issue. When Maxwell challenged the rating, wanting to upgrade to honorable discharge, the attorney general’s office asked Winter to defend its decision. Winter declined, according to Maxwell’s February 2023 interview with the House investigators, which was included in exhibits released ahead of Paxton’s impeachment trial. “He refused, and so they fired him,” Maxwell said, according to a transcript of that interview.

Maxwell declined an interview request for this story.

“Paxton has totally devastated the agency with good people that he’s gotten rid of because the criteria to get hired in the executive level is to plead your allegiance to him, not to the agency or not to the law,” Maxwell told the investigators.

Ultimately, Paxton fired four other whistleblowers. Another three of them quit, among them Paxton’s second in command, First Assistant Jeff Mateer. In the aftermath of his top deputies reporting him, Paxton “hired a whole new executive crew,” whistleblower Mark Penley told House investigators, “and sealed off access to the executive floor.”

Among Paxton’s new lieutenants was Brent Webster, a private practice lawyer the attorney general hired to replace Mateer as first assistant. Webster had previously come under scrutiny when working in Williamson County, where he was accused of failing to serve citations in dozens of asset forfeiture cases. Webster told the Austin American-Statesman in 2017 he did so because the office was short-staffed and so he prioritized criminal cases.

His first day with the state, Webster kicked out one of the other whistleblowers, Blake Brickman, from a meeting with Paxton, a lawsuit filed by the whistleblowers alleged. Later, Webster went to Brickman’s office escorted by an armed officer. Other employees complained that the armed officer “was an unprecedented attempt by Mr. Webster to intimidate senior members of OAG staff,” according to an internal whistleblower complaint filed by Brickman in October 2020 that was a precursor to the lawsuit he and others later pursued. Webster has never publicly addressed these allegations.

Unlike his predecessor in the first assistant role, Webster was far less enamored with Winter and his team, according to one attorney who used to work with the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division. Other officials in the agency suspected Webster didn’t appreciate any level of pushback on his ideas, the attorney said. But Winter was direct, the attorney said, and wouldn’t necessarily hold back his legal opinion about a case if he thought it necessary to share it.

Webster did not respond to requests for comment.

Winter did his best to shield the division from politics and turmoil in the executive offices, several attorneys said. But in 2022, the attorney general’s office and the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division joined a whistleblower lawsuit against Planned Parenthood, alleging the sexual health organization had improperly received Medicaid reimbursements while Texas’ challenges to its use of those funds were underway. Two attorneys interviewed by ProPublica and the Tribune said there were disagreements between Winter and the higher-ups about what legal approach to take on the $1.8 billion lawsuit, which threatens to bankrupt Planned Parenthood nationally. Planned Parenthood has called the lawsuit meritless.

One of the attorneys told the news organizations that in the months leading up to Winter’s ouster, there was a building sense of scrutiny, pressure and interference coming from the top of the organization, particularly when it came to the Planned Parenthood litigation. Executives were extremely focused on the case, a lot of resources were devoted to it and the entire tone of the division changed for the worse as a result, the attorney said.

The team kept trying to do its work. Then, in mid-November 2022, a handful of Paxton’s top deputies called the Civil Medicaid Fraud attorneys into a room. Word had already spread that Winter had been pushed out. The deputies confirmed the news. The room filled with an icy silence, but the anger was palpable, attorneys present said.

“Anyone who was being honest with themselves in the moment knew things were about to be really bad,” another former Civil Medicaid Fraud attorney said.

Winter’s departure was a seismic event. If he wasn’t safe, some of the division attorneys agreed, no one was.

By January 2023, six attorneys from the division resigned, three of them on the same day. Four more announced in February that they were quitting. The rest of the departures trickled in throughout the subsequent months and included an investigator, a legal assistant and an office manager. After Paxton’s acquittal but before year’s end, another three attorneys quit.

These reductions will hurt the division’s ability to detect Medicaid waste, said Charles Silver, the McDonald chair in civil procedure at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.

“That’s the only effect it can possibly have,” Silver said. “The number of potential cases out there greatly exceeds the ability of either the states’ AG departments or the federal government to police it all.”

Some of the departing lawyers followed Winter to his new job at the Office of Inspector General. Others retired or went to work for other state offices.

Now, there are only a handful of attorneys left in the division with experience litigating Medicaid fraud cases.

And the resignations haven’t stopped. On Jan. 17, another Civil Medicaid Fraud attorney quit.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune’s investigative unit has covered some of the most important issues facing Texas residents. We’ve looked into security practices along the U.S.-Mexico border, revealed the state attorney general’s failure to defend other state agencies in court and uncovered a loophole in the gun background check system. Our team is always looking for good sources and stories. If we have questions about issues relevant to your state agency or state government area of expertise, your perspective and experience could help us do more of this work. Please fill out the form if you’re open to one of our journalists contacting you when we’re reporting on a subject matter you might know about.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Vianna Davila.

Photograph Source: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv – CC BY 2.0

A very strange vision for these uncertain times appeared on stage in Washington, DC on Nov. 14: House Speaker Mike Johnson joined hands with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. They stood together, along with Sen. Jodi Ernst, to celebrate Israel’s genocidal war on and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza. The handholding underlines the lack of daylight between bourgeois parties at each other’s throats in this era of partisan polarization. An eerie understanding arises that perhaps the last unifying force in America is not just war, but war crimes. Awash in media that portrays the political leadership of the United States as mortal enemies, to see them without the mask, holding hands and celebrating the heinous acts of an imperial client state, is incongruous with the spectacle we routinely consume.

Especially difficult to understand, at least using conventional political wisdom, is the lockstep nature of the political elite on this issue opposed to the vast majority of Americans. Polls taken recently show support for a ceasefire across the ideological divide^[1]: 68% of all Americans, 82% of Independents, 77% of Democrats, and 53% of Republicans. Willingness to ignore the overwhelming majority of public opinion on a volatile issue is confusing in an era where elections, and electoral college votes, hang on slim majorities. Unlike much of our polarized era, this seems to be a situation in which the median voter theorem should work: both Democrats and Republicans should be shifting their positions to attract the vast majority of voters whose views on this issue overlap. Yet, they are doing just the opposite and choosing to ignore or shame their constituents that call for a ceasefire.

Confusion over Washington’s endorsement of Israel’s genocide seems to stem less from the historical continuity of American foreign policy than the dawning recognition from a broad section of the population that the American government is happy to condemn aggression from official enemies (China, Russia) but to accept the war crimes of an ally. American citizens witnessing war crimes perpetrated against civilians on a horrific scale in real-time have rightfully demanded their representatives acknowledge and do something – anything – about it. If the precepts of liberal democracy are to be believed, the overwhelming revulsion from the American public at the horrific pummeling of Gaza and the Palestinian people should spur at least a short-term realignment within the Democratic and Republican parties on the issue of ceasefire. And yet, as of writing, only 18 members^[2] have signed onto a non-binding ceasefire resolution, primarily House Democrats whose symbolic shift cannot move legislation on the floor, with 63 in total^[3] calling for a ceasefire in some way; but President Biden remains unyielding alongside Donald Trump – the likely Republican nominee – and the bulk of both parties in Congress and statehouses.

Voters believe their opinions are influential because it is a foundational myth taught within bourgeois democratic states. The ether around us is permeated from childhood with endless paeans to the virtuous citizen-voter. Non-voters appear as fools at best, willingly refusing their chance to influence government, and at worst as unsavory characters that have renounced their birthright. Those that vote for the wrong candidate or party – heaven forbid – are the spoilers and the snakes, a kind of fifth column to be rooted out by democracy’s champions. Countless scholars produce endless reams of articles and books on every aspect of voting, and even the turn within political theory towards endless discussion on deliberative legitimation has of late begun to include work on political parties. There is clearly a shock, even if not entirely unexpected, that elected officials can ignore the will of their voters so blatantly while demonstrating willingness to support the interest Israel – a foreign state – so definitively. John Fetterman and Ritchie Torres may now be the most notorious for this, but they are only the most strident and obnoxious voices within Congress.

This myth derives from the reality involved in two centuries of suffrage struggles that underlay the broad fight over the last two centuries by a succession of groups to be included in the definition of what it meant to be human, to have rights, and to be a citizen. This was no less true for African-Americans in the United States as it was and is worldwide for colonized peoples, women, and the working class. Liberalism, long wary of positive rights, was grudgingly forced to accept the right to vote as an important stabilizing force in the world-system. Inasmuch as this has occurred, the incorporation of formerly excluded groups into the bourgeois parliamentary institutional structure has tended to neuter their most anti-systemic tendencies: this most famously occurred in the socialist movement in the early twentieth century, and while there were clearly economic factors that led to a privileged portion of the working class accepting a rapprochement with the bourgeoisie, successive victories in extension of suffrage rights to the working class were what solidified the social-democratic position. Even if, as Marx long ago wrote, voting rights within capitalism do not directly challenge the rule of the bourgeoisie, the struggles and inclusion of the groups that won them were real, and if the system of bourgeois domination could not be overthrow via elections there certainly were class and group demands that were perceived as being met through voting.

To understand the near unity within the Democratic and Republican parties on support of Israel, it is time to discard the notion that the voting public matters to elected officials or that political parties exist as a transmission belt carrying the will of the voters upwards to parties-in-government. Rather, voters should be seen as at best a tertiary concern to officials and parties. The opinions of the average voter, even if we assume their ideological coherence, nearly always have virtually zero impact on legislation passed and policies adopted. Party maneuvering on political issues is bounded not by voter opinion but rather the interests of large campaign donors and industry blocs that are, less euphemistically, the capitalist class.^[4] A model then emerges which fits the behavior of bourgeois parties and the function they play within modern society. This model explains well why Speaker Johnson and Majority Leader Schumer shared a stage on November 14 while simultaneously providing a holistic image of the function parties fulfill within the capitalist state. It will also provide the cause of Palestinian solidarity with the necessary tasks vis-à-vis the current political coalition and those of a future, anti-systemic revolutionary movement.

It is, of course, not particularly novel to point out the influence the pro-Israel Lobby^[5] has on U.S. politics; Mearsheimer and Walt presented that case in detail.^[6] That there is a significant pro-Israel donation bloc that mobilizes quickly against critics of Israeli policies and cuts across the Democratic and Republican parties is clear, though its extent may surprise those tangentially aware of the campaign donor world.^[7] Rather, political donations are the lifeblood of politics in the United States and allow the capitalist class to set the boundaries of acceptable political behavior by parties, their candidates, and elected officials. Parties do not usually receive direct marching orders from the bourgeoisie, but we can generally understand what is out of bounds for anyone but marginal members of parties to elevate to a topic of discussion or legislation: single-payer universal healthcare is a classic example of this boundary line. When supporters have had the requisite votes, even supermajorities as in New York State where most Democrats in the legislature had signed on to a single-payer bill as recently as 2021^[8], it is never brought up for a vote; similarly, in California, supermajorities of Democrats control the legislature, but the single-payer bill has never passed.^[9]

We may also ask what US industries, or even individual companies, have supported Palestinian liberation movements, such as BDS? Besides Ben and Jerry’s, which decided to stop selling its ice cream in Gaza and the West Bank (but not Israel), what notable business has joined BDS? Since there is no industry bloc that has joined the protest movement, we can safely assume they are best indifferent to US foreign policy towards Israel, and far more likely supportive given the profit to be made either directly in Israel or via contracts with the US military-industrial complex. BDS provides^[10] a list of companies it is actively targeting for boycott, which must pale in comparison to the real number of corporations profiting in some way from US Israeli policy. If parties navigate the whims of the capitalist class via donors, if those business blocs are either active in supporting pro-Israel policies or not actively breaking with them, and if the BDS segment of donors is so miniscule as to be nearly irrelevant, then we have arrived at an initial answer to why there is such fervent cross-party support of Israel during such allegedly polarized times regardless of whether a majority of voters would prefer a permanent ceasefire and are horrified at the genocidal acts committed by the IDF against Palestinians.

As Marx noted, the “executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” This definition is expandable to the larger permanent institutional apparatus of the contemporary state, and as such it is impossible to see bourgeois parties now as anything else but quasi-state institutions. They give broad articulation to the demands of the capitalist class and its role within the container of the U.S. state. These “common affairs” sharply orient towards maintaining U.S. status as global hegemon, and this requires state investment in the military-industrial complex^[11] (and serving as the primary world arms dealer), securing and retaining alliances, and to the extent possible turning developing allies into symbiotic client states. Thus (bourgeois) parties are dramatically limited: both in their room to articulate positions contrary to donors and in maintenance of imperial state interests.

If then, voter wills have virtually no impact on legislation and if party policies are bound by the capitalist (donor) class, why have political leaders closed ranks so violently and reacted with viciousness towards most people horrified at the continuous broadcast of genocidal acts in Gaza by Israel? The answer is twofold, but I think not overly complicated to understand. Conflicts over surplus distribution are the primary struggle within the bourgeois state superstructure. The persistence of the parliamentary form in bourgeois states long after the defeat of the aristocracy as a political power in the West is owed partly to the size of bourgeois forces with disagreement on how best to distribute said societal surplus. In capitalist states (current or historical) with one or two hegemonic blocs of bourgeois industries, especially where those blocs have found a rapprochement, the parliamentary form tends to be weak (or nonexistent). In states with a more Madisonian dispersal of political factions, the form dominates. Of course, class and subaltern group struggle in the 19^th and 20^th centuries forced an expansion of suffrage and produced a tension within the bourgeois parliamentary state: these groups, whose views would never direct (bourgeois) party policy, were technically necessary and their choice of party could impact surplus distribution.

Mass parties exist as a technical solution to this tension. Parties socialize voters into partisans; their culture and pronouncements, echoed through the media, amount to ideological socialization sessions. Simultaneously, parties tend to move towards limiting the potential for wild shifts in surplus distribution through party cartel formation, gerrymandering, and changes to electoral law that make it far more difficult to cast a vote or build a new political party. We are told our vote matters greatly, even when it rarely does, and that we must vote to have our will heard, though our will is irrelevant. What matters is that voters believe these things to be true, and anyone willing to question or break from said paradigm is castigated relentlessly as an enemy of democracy. The will of the capitalist (donor) class is transmitted downwards to voters through the transmission belt of parties and their media allies. Thus, when the bourgeoisie and elected officials are united over a policy, but the public is largely ignorant or uninterested, there may be faux verbal sparring (or not), but no mobilization of party socialization tools will occur.

On the contrary, political caste shrieking over Israel is not just conveying donor desires but also a reaction to the broad dislike of Israel’s genocidal policies, mass protests, and growing demand that the US put a halt to the actions of its client state. It is an attempt to whip voters back into line, coupled with a fear and hatred of the possibility that there might be an attempt to organize a mass movement that could disrupt economic and political life. Thus, the extremely vicious nature of the political assault on Palestinian solidarity groups and anti-Zionist forces like Jewish Voice for Peace. It is the tension of mass suffrage and elections expressed via mass political parties inside a capitalist dictatorship. Our voices are irrelevant, except they are relevant just once – on Election Day – provided voters do what they are told. To engage in disruptive activity that might force contradictions to a breaking point: mass civil disobedience, strikes, and political education is verboten. For it is not that the capitalist dictatorship cannot be forced through class struggle (or threat of) to change course; indeed, it lives in fear of this.

Incidentally, this is also why Bernie Sanders, the “Squad” and the politics of groups like the DSA and WFP^[12] have been exposed in the last two months: the faux opposition of the Democratic “left” has always served to bind voters, prevent alternatives, and present illusions that their will could be represented within government (and provide jobs and cash for those organizations). AOC, Sanders, et al have been placed in an untenable position: speak out against genocide and US policy towards Israel and actively agitate against US imperialism or save their careers and fall into line with their party. AOC made her name with a toothless Green New Deal resolution and with fake opposition to Nancy Pelosi, but she was allowed to equivocate on those issues and seem like a radical. Yet, there is no middle ground on genocide. That they have largely failed comes as no surprise to those who have long understood their real role, but it is nonetheless a sobering political lesson for the rest: you cannot oppose imperialism within an imperialist party.

The answer to the second reason for political caste hysterics on Israel relates to the tenuous nature of the US political system in an era where its hegemonic decline is clear. Neither Biden nor (likely) Trump offer inspirational or programmatic visions forward, with the real decay of societal infrastructure, and general decline of working-class living standards having massively accelerated since the beginning of 2020. Jill Stein and the Green Party and Cornel West on the left have mounted presidential campaigns that are gaining traction, and RFK Jr. remains popular in national presidential polls. Political dissolution of the socializing infrastructure constructed by the mainstream bourgeois parties is quickening, and the potential that independent parties which represent working class interests, with a desire to engage in open class struggle on parliamentary terrain, is not outside the scope of possibility. This, of course, leads the bourgeois parties to first close ranks around imperial policies (Israel) and, if necessary, eliminate threats via election law changes, criminalization of dissent and – in the extreme – threaten to eliminate parliamentarism and replace it with authoritarian government (all of which have been either upheld by or contributed to by the court system of late).

If forced, bourgeois parties will become even more furious against Palestinian solidarity groups. HUAC-style hearings, anti-free speech legislation, mass arrests, and blacklisting are all visible in embryo today. They will get worse if protests show any signs of spreading. This will become even more furious if more voters begin to show signs of breaking away from the established ideological pronouncements. Verbal swerves may occur (and fissures in the coalition) if there is a serious threat, but with no real changes in foreign policy unless the complete failure of the pro-Israel coalition seems in the offering, and even then, there is no real assurance any change will occur.

What are our tasks, then? Firstly, political education is necessary around the true nature of the pro-Israel sentiments of the bourgeois parties, the structure of the system, and its function in socializing us in our role maintaining capitalist control. Secondly, this is only possible with a counter-hegemonic organization, and likely organizations, that provide a safe space to generate a counter-hegemonic ideological culture. Finally, this counter-hegemonic coalition must accept that ideological commitment to independent politics foregrounding the need to smash capitalism is a pre-condition for assembling a larger coalition that advocates against Israeli genocide, for de-colonization of Palestine, and on the domestic issues that will build a broad base of workers and subaltern groups in the imperial core. There should be no social-democratic illusions: the road will be long, and difficult indeed, but we will not find succor within the parties currently abetting genocide, nor will reform be enough to end the American empire. Of course, this is not easy – politics is long, slow boring through tough boards^[13] – but it is necessary.

NOTES

1. https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/reuters-ipsos-israel-hamas-war-2024-election ↑

2. Of course, the symbolism of the resolution’s cosponsors and those that have called for the ceasefire verbally is important, but a resignation en masse from parties embracing a genocidal imperialist foreign policy would be even moreso. ↑

3. See the ceasefire tracker. ↑

4. The political scientist Thomas Ferguson calls this the investment theory of party competition, detailed in his book Golden Rule. ↑

5. https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/democratic-majority-for-israel/C00710848/donors/2022; https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/american-israel-public-affairs-cmte/C00797670/summary/2024 ↑

6. Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby. ↑

7. See: https://theintercept.com/2023/11/27/israel-democrats-aipac-book/; https://theintercept.com/2023/11/18/aipac-congress-israel-trips-donors/; https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2023-08-06/ty-article/.premium/gop-megadonor-gives-1m-to-aipac-superpac-likely-to-fuel-friction-with-democrats/00000189-cb1f-ddac-a3cd-ef7f8a910000; https://www.jpost.com/us-elections/us-jews-contribute-half-of-all-donations-to-the-democratic-party-468774; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/04/aipac-pro-israel-groups-primary-race; https://mondoweiss.net/2020/06/the-arms-race-between-dems-and-gop-for-pro-israel-donors/ ↑

8. https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2021/06/07/new-york-health-act-has-the-votes-but-will-it-pass- ↑

9. https://calmatters.org/politics/2022/02/california-single-payer-legislature/ ↑

10. https://bdsmovement.net/Act-Now-Against-These-Companies-Profiting-From-Genocide ↑

11. https://responsiblestatecraft.org/venture-capital-defense-companies/ ↑

12. The Working Families Party is a political club in New York (and a few other states) that has a ballot line it primarily uses to cross-endorse Democrats, though it has done so with Republicans as well. ↑

13. See Max Weber’s Politics as a Vocation. ↑

The post Democratic Illusions: Elite Unity on Israel appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

Civil society groups wanting to see an end to destructive logging practices by foreign companies in Papua New Guinea, say these companies are being given forest clearance authorities and then misusing them.

The PNG advocacy group, Act Now!, and Jubilee Australia said the forest clearance authorities (FCAs) are intended to allow limited pockets of forest to be cleared for agricultural or other use.

Eddie Tanago of Act Now! said a case study they conducted into West Sepik’s Wammy Rural Development Project, which is run by Malaysian logging company Global Elite Ltd, was meant to result in the planting of palm oil and rubber trees.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Large scale logging continues in PNG despite Govt opposition
• READ MORE: Other PNG illegal logging reports

“Instead, it used it as a front. And we’ve seen hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of round logs being exported. Now, this particular operation has been going on for almost 10 years, and this company has sold more than US$31 million worth of round logs,” he said.

Tanago said there was no sign of any attempt to rehabilitate the land for other use.

ACT Now! said the Wammy project was also breaking other laws because the land was subject to the SABL (Special Agricultural Business Leases) Commission of Inquiry in 2013 and it was evident then that the landowners’ free, prior and informed consent had never been given, so there should not have been any logging on it.

Tanago said Wammy was just one of about 24 logging operations making use of an FCA licence, resulting in huge quantities of logs being exported.

“Together this activity exploiting FCAs covers about 61,800 hectares of forest, and that’s equivalent to about 11,000 football fields. So that’s really, really massive,” he said.

Act Now is “calling on the Forest Board and the PNG Forest Authority to extend the current moratorium on the new FCAs”.

“There was one that was announced in the beginning of this year that says that they were not going to issue any new FCAs. We want that to extend. We want logging in all the existing FCAs to be also suspended. And there should be a comprehensive public review of these projects.”

The PNG government has previously stated it wanted to end round log exports by 2025, but Act Now! points out that in the first six months of the current year exports have totalled 1.1 million cubic metres.

“The export log volumes now are currently very high. And the PNG Forest Authority is really failing to meet the reduction targets as set down in the medium term plan,” he sid.

“This is in breach of the targets that are set out by the government, plus, all the promises that we’ve seen, like the recent one bill made by Prime Minister [James] Marape when the French President was around.”

On the visit to PNG, President Emmanuel Macron and Marape visited a lookout in the Varirata National Park picnic area, renaming it the Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frederic Macron lookout point.

The Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) reports that the walk through the lush national park was underlined by the signing of a new environment initiative — backed by French and European Union financing — that will reward countries that preserve their rainforests.

Marape said the country’s rainforest was the third largest and undisturbed tropical rainforest in the world and preserving its integrity was of the utmost importance.

Act Now! would agree, saying PNG has to be looking to preserve the rainforest and reduce deforestation, but the current signs are not good.

RNZ Pacific contacted Global Elite Ltd for comment on this story but there was no response.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. The audio was first broadcast on Friday, 15 September 2023.

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

We spend the hour with acclaimed journalist and author Naomi Klein, whose new book Doppelganger out this week explores what she calls “the mirror world,” a growing right-wing alternate universe of misinformation and conspiracies that, while identifying real problems, opportunistically exploits them to advance a hateful and divisive agenda. Klein explains her initial motivation for the book was her own alter-ego, the author Naomi Wolf, for whom she has often been mistaken. Both Naomis entered public consciousness in the 1990s with books critiquing corporate influence, but in recent years Wolf has become one of the most prominent vaccine deniers and purveyors of COVID-19 misinformation — making the ongoing confusion about their identities a source of frustration. “It’s very destabilizing,” says Klein, who still urges people to seriously engage with the dangerous ideas propagated in mirror worlds, rather than simply look away. “It’s so hard to look at the reality that we are in right now, with the overlay of endless wars and climate disasters and massive inequality. And so whether we’re making up fantastical conspiracy theories or getting lost in our own reflections, it’s all about not looking at that reality that is only bearable if we get outside our own heads and collectively organize.”

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

The post Elite Twits: A Pinteresque Walk on the Wild Side appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ed Rampell.

Although many policies related to the global war on terror and the pandemic certainly have fascistic and totalitarian impulses, there are key differences. Whereas the fascist and totalitarian rely on a single despot, and the marginalization of minority groups, postmodern tyranny operates according to the flows of late capitalism: diversity and inclusion are encouraged; power is spread through a corporate oligarchy, as well as political, military, and now medical hierarchies; and devastating economic and social effects are engendered by “absent causes”; i.e., abstract engines of capital: stock fluctuations, algorithms, financial instruments and various Finance/Insurance/Real Estate (FIRE) sector bubbles and scams. The public is predictably bewildered by a revolving cast of bureaucrats and elites with varying amounts of sociopathic and narcissistic traits; however, the personal attributes of the cast members are extraneous to capital accumulation, imperialism, and the liquidation of nature. It is fine to use phrases like fascist or totalitarian in response to government policies for rhetorical effect; however, most Americans do not feel that way or use that terminology, which harkens back to a simpler era of boot stamping. We are rather enmeshed in a dictatorship of capital.

A related aspect of what we may call postmodern tyranny is the absence of metanarratives. The establishment props up whatever narrative suits their interest in the moment, but is able to cast them off at the first serious grumblings from the public. From about 2001-2011, the global war on terror dominated; from 2011-2016, it was “regime change” in Syria and Libya with a little ISIS and feigned horror at Russia taking Crimea sprinkled in; from 2016-2020, the overblown Russiagate connection; from 2020-2022, Covid-19; and now the Ukraine-Russia war, in which we are told NATO and the US are completely innocent allies who did not start, provoke, and manipulate the geopolitical chessboard going back decades, and who only want to assist the helpless Ukrainians.

Yet after two years of being subjected to the tyrannical orders of an authoritarian medical panic orchestrated by the ruling classes, transnational political puppets, as well as the establishment medical “experts” who espoused fraudulent and laughable claims over and over, people worldwide are waking up to the health scare as well as the US proxy war in Ukraine. There are many striking similarities between the 9/11 false flag attack and the Covid-19 global health freak-out. Both events led to mass hysteria and a globalized form of ostrich syndrome, where denial and collective hallucination became the norm, paving the way for deeper imperial tyranny and mass obedience. Recently, many who supported government policies and narratives including lockdowns, travel bans, vaccine mandates, and health passports are asking for “Pandemic Amnesty” regarding their panic-inducing and tyrannical behavior; and admitting they were dead wrong, even as they championed ridiculous and deadly policies and demonized anyone who tried to stand in their way.

Revisiting the “Catalyst”

The parallels between government reactions to 9/11 and the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic are uncanny. Prior to 9/11, a sizable chunk of US citizens would not have put up with domestic mass surveillance. Similarly, prior to the health crisis of 2020, populations would have been very skeptical of mandatory lockdowns, absurd masking rules, and coercive vaccine mandates and propaganda; as well as blocking off access to travel, public spaces, and businesses with vaccine passports. Most interpret this as government exploiting a crisis, rather than governments’ prior knowledge and pre-planning of the events. However, from the start, the ready-made, manufactured hysteria and propaganda suggests a collusion of military-intelligence, industrial, financial, and medical forces of industry and government.

The economic indicators had been blinking red for months before even January of 2020, going back to the repo crisis of September 2019. Quoting an investor in CNBC from March 2020:

‘The virus was the catalyst but it’s not the cause,’ said Christopher Whalen, founder of Whalen Global Advisors. ‘Both bonds and equities were inflated rather dramatically by our friends at the Fed. You’re seeing the end game for monetary policy here, which is at a certain point you have to stop. Otherwise you get grotesque asset bubbles like we saw, and the engine just runs out of fuel.’ [Emphasis mine]

Reuters concurs, with a major figure at the Fed blurting the quiet part out loud: “Pandemic aid was also ‘banking bailout‘”. The liberal/left site The Intercept sums up the game quite well, explaining that the CARES Act of March 2020 allows for:

Direct purchases of corporate debt — the first nongovernment bond-buying in the Fed’s history — would now be allowed. Companies have swelled their borrowing in recent years, and experts have identified this as a source of serious economic risk. A sudden shock like the pandemic that wiped out revenues would not only cause bankruptcies, but also accelerate bond defaults, broadening stress throughout the financial system.

Further on in the piece, the author notes how the CARES Act calls for an “Exchange Stabilization Fund”. Worth 454 billion, the money is leveraged just like a major bank, allowing for:

A $4.5 trillion slush fund would be created, equity markets ballooned. The total value of the stock market cratered to 103 percent of GDP, about $21.8 trillion, on March 23. By April 30 it was back to 136.3 percent of GDP, or $28.9 trillion. By that metric, $7.1 trillion in stock market wealth has been created in that period.

In other words, the US saw the writing on the wall coming from China: the economic slowdown and shuttering of factories which began in January 2020 was finally affecting the US stock market, which had cratered by mid-March 2020. Only the exaggeration of a pandemic, a sloughing off of millions of jobs, and new spigots opening for the banking sector, would allow for corporations to maintain profitability. Debt restructuring was inevitable and the only way to accomplish this was to railroad legislation through Congress, not a difficult task considering our lawmakers are essentially lobbyists for major multinational corporations. Large companies got billions in aid while workers and small businesses fell into ruin.

Once the medical agenda was set, panic set in, and it turns out overcrowding nursing homes, firing one million medical workers and 40 million total US workers, blaring apocalyptic propaganda non-stop, censoring any talk of vitamin and supplement use, imposing stressful lockdowns, and turning patients away from doctors can have an effect on worldwide mortality. Hardly anyone in the medical community was willing to confront those inconvenient truths, and those that did were censored further.

It was known very soon after March 2020 what the infection fatality rate would be: a very low percentage, perhaps twice the rate from seasonal influenza. World elites did not care- they had an agenda in hand.  Regardless of the seriousness, capitalist elites wouldn’t have put 40 million Americans out of work and imploded the economy without a plan. And they had one ready-made: a 5 trillion dollar plan. Later on, US elites would not have advocated for coercive vaccine mandates – get the shot or lose your job – unless the word came down from the very highest echelons of the elite, and although many, if not most, of the establishment bought it wholesale, it’s clear that the federal government was not going to leave states to make decisions based off the inputs of local county and state health officials. The word came down from on high; there certainly was obvious collusion to centralize and organize the Covid dogma, yes, a “conspiracy”, because asking the public to “trust the science” only takes you so far when conflicting and contradictory data about the danger of the virus is staring them right in the face.

Given the unreliability of the initial tests for Sars-CoV-2, the deliberate use of too many PCR cycles per test, and the simple fact that it’s quite probable that multiple benign strains and variants of coronaviruses resulted in positive tests, it’s easy to see how a global pandemic was manufactured at the outset. From the very beginning, government propaganda emanating from the medical, military, and intelligence establishments were obviously coordinated, centralized, and directed to coerce and cow citizens into submission to a globalized, medical cult. Local and national news all parroted the same line, and a global groupthink biosecurity agenda was pushed to the forefront of society. It’s important to remember that before the declared emergency, to “quarantine” involved restricting access to the sick, not the whole of society.

The language was not only Orwellian, but was written from scripts in the Department of Defense and Intelligence community. We were told to “shelter in place”, and doctors and nurses were on the “frontlines” of the fight. These were certainly designed to conjure images of war and create an impassioned atmosphere where dissent was marginalized, repeating the lockstep ideological conformity that occurred after 9/11. Phrases like social distancing and contact tracing entered the lexicon with barely a grumble. Hilariously, after more than a year of putting up with absurd and ever-changing laws, Britain toyed with the idea of offering its citizens “Freedom Passes” for those compliant enough to test frequently, their reward being the “freedom” to leave their own home.

Canadian and British reporting confirms the unethical propaganda to coerce, scare, and guilt-trip civilian populations. One UK psychologist dubbed their government program “totalitarian”. Every mainstream news outlet in the US from March 2020 to February 2022 resembled a liberal version of the Sinclair broadcasting scandal from 2018, where the media conglomerate, which has a known right-wing bias, made 193 local news anchors repeat the same minute-long script, word-for-word, warning of “false news” and “fake stories” proliferating on social media and mainstream news, echoing Trump’s rhetoric at the time.

Natural immunity was scoffed at, gathering in public was outlawed, visitors to households were forbidden, a vaccine was deemed to be the only response to the threat, and even health advocates who gave common-sense reminders to take vitamins and supplements were derided as unserious crackpots.

A pertinent question to think about is this: given the uptick in supposed deaths from Sars-CoV-2 around March 2020, was a global upheaval of lockdowns, travel restrictions, limited movement outside one’s home, and caps on gatherings justified? With hindsight, many if not the majority of Americans now say no. However, the fact remains that many astute observers were calling the bluff of the World Health Organization, the CDC, and the medical and national security establishments from the beginning. Those voices were censored and silenced by a corporatist oligarchy bent on imposing pain on small business and the average citizen. Millions lost their livelihoods and small businesses never recovered.

Another related question: how and why was the medical establishment so driven to combat an acute health threat caused by the virus Sars-CoV-2, but lies dormant when global poverty is clearly the number one cause of death in the world, followed by cancer and heart disease? We were led to believe the world could be turned upside down to fight a virus, yet nothing can be done to alleviate the leading causes of death, poverty: structural, chronic health issues are off the table, as they are caused by capitalism’s inexorable drive to profit, pollute, and impoverish the majority of the Earth’s inhabitants.

Even the WHO admits that ¼ of total deaths today are attributable to “unhealthy environments”; i.e., conditions of extreme poverty, preventable disease, starvation, and malnutrition. In 2012 that was 12.6 million deaths per year, but the total is undoubtedly higher today, probably about 20 million.  The WHO also concedes about 2 million people in China alone die from air pollution every year, with about 6.7 million deaths per year worldwide. Where is the outcry and global mobilization to stop these much deadlier problems?

Could there have been a more rational path, where people over the age of say, 60 or 65, the most likely to be affected, could have been shielded with voluntary plans to restrict interpersonal contact, as well as given access to the best care and medicine, while the rest of the world would be allowed to carry on without draconian measures? Surely medical professionals in the US could have developed a plan in conjunction with governments which allowed for freedom of movement, as in Sweden and Japan. The path, however, was blocked by the national security state in conjunction with unelected health authorities, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and global capitalists eager to institute repressive measures and rake in trillions from a restructuring of the world economy. The global economy needed a “Great Reset” to centralize and buy-up small businesses for pennies on the dollar, and the financial system was reeling going back to September of 2019. Disturbingly, this sequence of events is reminiscent of the last time the national security state remade the world, after 9/11.

The Mask Comes Off

Many leftists pointed out that the work stoppage from the lockdowns would allow us time to reflect on the inhumanity, overproduction, alienation, and exploitation inherent to capitalism. No doubt this was true. What most overlooked, however, was the ridiculousness of having the poor and working classes keep on working while the remote-working, white-collar privileged classes were offered a respite from the grind of work culture. There was, and is, an inherent inequality and power imbalance in having restaurants and drivers deliver packages and food to one’s doorstep while chastising those same people who refused to mask (even outdoors, absurdly).

The middle and upper class guilty pleasures of living in a consumerist society cocooned at home with streaming TV and take-out overwhelmed the need for solidarity with the poor and working classes, who were in many cases unable and unwilling to shelter or get an experimental injection from a government that has treated the poor and minorities as human guinea pigs or worse for the entirety of its history.

The felt need for security against an acute contagion, while resisting to grapple with the complexities and culpability of being part of a global-imperial-capitalist death machine, epitomized the Western Left position. Other than the obvious responses: “This is why we need universal health care!” etc., there was barely anyone talking about the number one cause of real pandemics: our proximity to inhumane and unsanitary animal agriculture. The collective, fear-based knee-jerk response was to inhumanely slaughter tens of millions of animals: estimates suggest more than 10 million hens, perhaps 5-10 million pigs, and 17 million mink were killed due to “overproduction”, and in the case of mink, to the possibility of the spread of Sars-CoV-2.

A Brief Recap of our 21^st Century Dystopia

Twenty three years ago, many people around the world had high hopes as a new millennium dawned. The year 2000 was ushered in, and to untrained eyes, the global outlook looked rosy. The Fukuyaman “end of history” narrative still dominated after nearly a decade of unopposed US dominance in world financial markets and military and political hegemony. There were no major wars among world powers and the global economy provided new avenues of wealth for the middle classes around the world.

The party didn’t last long. It turned out that globalization, that catch-all term trotted out over and over by both liberal internationalists and conservative realists to defend the seemingly interminable reign of capitalists, had plenty of cracks in the foundation. The notion that Western states were “democratic republics” caring for citizens’ interests began to crumble. The diminishing returns of capitalism as well as brazen corporate and government corruption began to disrupt the confidence of the global middle classes. The consent of the governed could no longer be assured; and as the façade of democratic legitimacy collapsed, Western governments, headed by the US, began to look for a new ideological force to justify neoliberal capitalism.

World events took a swift turn for the worse starting from the very first months of the new millennium. In March 2000 the dot-com bubble burst, with losses eventually reaching 1.75 trillion in the US alone; this rippled through the world economy. The total loss in market capitalization was estimated to be 5 trillion by the end of the recession in 2002. Over 2.2 million jobs were lost in the US and unemployment continued to climb into mid-2003.

In November of 2000 the contested Bush-Gore election ran into a stalemate. A judicial coup in the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bush 5-4, effectively stopping the recount. There was relatively little public push-back, and the lack of any real resistance from the Democratic party machine solidified the coup, and the “Bush-Cheney junta”, as the late Gore Vidal called it, steamrolled into power.

The true events of September 11^th, 2001 may always remain partially shrouded in mystery, yet some tell-tale signs point to the obvious: a conspiracy in which the US government played an active role in orchestrating the sequence of events we call 9/11. Any cursory look at the “conspiracy theories” and the 9/11 truth movements’ findings shows the glaring holes in the official story. Examining and absorbing all the evidence leads to the inevitable conclusion- the events of 9/11 was a false flag, orchestrated by our own government, and the perpetrators are still at large, much like the JFK assassination.

Most everyone over thirty remembers what came next, even though most are loath to recall. The Bush regime blamed Al Qaeda before the end of the night, news broadcasts showed the towers falling non-stop, and color coded terror alerts became our “new normal” (we’ll get to the next iteration shortly). An axis of evil was rolled out; any country who vaguely opposed US imperialism was put on the naughty list, and a new “crusade” was decreed, with explicit threats “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Shortly after, the mysterious anthrax attacks swept the nation, and captivated the US, even as it became crystal clear that the type of anthrax used was a highly weaponized version coming from a US biolab, which could only mean it was deliberately stolen and released by high elements within our own government.

The state of emergency became normalized immediately. A new surveillance state was constructed, the Patriot Act and AUMF allowed for extra-judicial assassination, torture, and spy programs began to expand globally. Officially war was declared against Iraq and Afghanistan; unofficially, Special Forces and black ops spread to approximately 130 nations. The empire was expanding and on the move- especially in the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa, where control over access to fossil fuels alongside the continuing supremacy of the petrodollar is paramount in maintaining global hegemony today.

The Permanent State of Emergency/Exception

Power loves catastrophe: the running theme here being that when non-natural disasters occur, Western governments quickly rally and conspire in order to procure quick profits, maintain control, and flex power over weaker nations.

In our era, authoritarian regimes have argued for the permanent suspension of the rights of their own citizens, as well as human rights and international law. This concept was popularized by Giorgio Agamben in his 2005 book, State of Exception. Agamben uses the example of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty: the sovereign is the one who decides on the exception. By abrogating the rights of their own citizens in response to an emergency, both nominally democratic and dictatorial regimes can use the threat of future catastrophes to install permanent police states, declare martial law, and normalize what used to be considered extralegal into the framework of law in the name of national security.

The imperial core settled on a tried and true model: programming the public to accept that every catastrophe caused by the capitalist global system is an emergency that must be responded to with an increasingly authoritarian society. Police state tactics, lifted from Nazi Germany, became normalized as the economic, political, and ideological forces backing the War on Terror saw little resistance from a mystified and fearful citizenry. This process is known as a state of exception, originally codified in law by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. A succinct definition can be found here:

[The state of exception] defines a special condition in which the juridical order is actually suspended due to an emergency or a serious crisis threatening the state. In such a situation, the sovereign, i.e. the executive power, prevails over the others and the basic laws and norms can be violated by the state while facing the crisis.

Nearly every major significant political flash point of the last twenty two years was used as an excuse to broaden and deepen the national security state and corporate rule. This process has effectively disempowered the western masses to such a degree that the majority of Western populations, including many in the middle classes, have effectively neo-feudal, debtor relationships to state and market forces.

The author Naomi Klein described the new, globalized, neoliberal model quite well in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, where disaster capitalism becomes a force for “creative destruction”, leading entire continents into debt spirals with World Bank and IMF loans while at the same time militarizing and financializing Western economies to serve the interests of Wall Street and the Pentagon while destroying small businesses and parasitizing off the working classes.  Soon after, President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, said the quiet part out loud discussing the financial crisis, when he referred to the trillions in public money used to prop up our unregulated banking system. He blurted out:

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.

How can we define our time? Again, the phrase postmodern tyranny fits better than describing the present moment as totalitarian or fascist. Those two words have become so overused, interchanged, that they’ve lost much meaning and luster for people today. Although many of the various government responses to 9/11 and Covid certainly have elements of totalitarian, fascist, and dictatorial regimes, the terminology is outdated in a sense. It no longer fits the historical moment and hardly anyone really sees Joe Biden or Emmanuel Macron as totalitarian leaders. No single despot is necessary for the system to continue. We are facing is a dictatorship of money, an oligarchy dedicated to ensuring the smooth movement of capital. We live in a pyramid scheme, economically and socially: a system of petty tyrants consisting of your boss, your mayor, your landlord, your HOA president, etc. In fact, added together there are millions of petty tyrants in the US alone; the bourgeoisie and their millions of enforcers: judges, the police and military, politicians, lawyers, all who serve private property, an unjust hierarchy of labor, and, as we’ve seen, most doctors who were eager to impose and rubber-stamp the petty diktats we’ve enshrined into law.

2019: Global Protests Mushroom

Besides well-documented evidence such as US funding of coronavirus research, Event 201, and many other suspicious activities, there is one other piece of circumstantial evidence that ties into prior knowledge and pre-planning the pandemic. In 2019, global protests reached a height unsurpassed in modern history, with one commentator dubbing that year “The Age of Mass Protests”. On December 30, 2019, Robin Wright published a column in The New Yorker entitled: “The Story of 2019: Protests in Every Corner of the Globe”. One highlight from the piece claims:

“‘People in more countries are using people power than any time in recorded history. Nonviolent mass movements are the primary challenges to governments today,’ Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard, told me. ‘This represents a pronounced shift in the global landscape of dissent.’”

The Washington Post dubbed 2019 “The year of the global street protest”. Bloomberg proclaimed that “A Year of Protests Sparked Change Around the Globe“. Massive disruptions to governments occurred in Iraq, Iran, Hong Kong, Sudan, Algeria, Chile, and many other nations. Ordinary people were becoming a nuisance to the smooth movement of capital. Governments were forced to face challenges they’d been ignoring for decades, as rising food, housing, heating, and materials costs skyrocketed globally. All of a sudden, in January 2020, the looming specter of a “global pandemic” put a stop to all of it, instantaneously.

The positives for governments were obvious. No more protests. No public gatherings. No more pesky citizens demanding lower prices on goods, for more social programs, and protesting unjust taxes and authoritarian rulers. Without any in-person organizing, the momentum of people power from 2019 quickly died out.

Shifting the Goalposts: From “Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve” to Biosecurity State

Similar to 9/11, the justification for and continued adherence to official government propaganda rested on total obedience and social conformity: peer pressure at the familial, community, workplace, and public levels all contributed to an atmosphere of hysteria, panic, and paranoia. Shortly after 9/11, the US government shifted priorities from an invasion of Afghanistan and ousting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, to an invasion of Iraq in 2003 which cost perhaps 1 million Iraqi lives, then to a global war on terror (remember US General Wesley Clark’s admission that the Pentagon’s intention was to invade nation’s dubbed as the “axis of evil” and take out “seven countries in five years”). Torture and mass surveillance was sanctioned and cheered, the Patriot Act and AUMF rammed through Congress.

As soon as the pandemic was announced in March 2020, the goalposts kept moving, from a period where we were told two weeks of isolation would be enough to flatten the curve of infection to nearly two years of absurd rules for masking, lockdowns, public gatherings, household gatherings, vaccines, and passports. The hokum kept piling up, as increasingly illogical “expert opinions” were rolled out to “protect” us, or so we were told. It soon became clear that the lockdowns themselves were killing plenty of people. Many credible “medical experts” who believed in the seriousness of the pandemic were blunt about the lockdowns: they were a form of democide”, with many estimating that approximately one-third of the excessive deaths were caused by the lockdowns. Routine checkups were avoided, nursing homes were overcrowded, the elderly were being neglected, and unnecessary, and over a million healthcare workers were laid off precisely when they would have been most useful, at least according to the official narrative.

The irrational masking mandates were completely unscientific, especially the outdoor masking requirements in major cities, and, ludicrously, beaches as well as various outdoor recreation areas. Regardless, it wasn’t until December 2021 that a major mainstream medical figure admitted the obvious: “cloth masks are useless” and little more than facial decorations. The mask was the signifier of the good citizen for two years; anyone who disagreed was tarred and feathered without regard for the actual science. Many analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were done with previous viruses. Not to mention the basic fact that the infection and fatality rates were basically the same for the 39 US states that imposed mask mandates versus the 11 that did not.

The conflation of case fatality rate (CFR) with infection fatality rate (IFR) in the mainstream media made the disease appear far more deadly than it actually was. The actual chance of young and healthy adults dying from Covid-19 was minuscule.

Social distancing became de rigueur among the ruling classes, as well as the upper-middle chattering class effete liberals (and sadly, many leftists) even as the chance of moderate to severe illness in health young or even middle-aged people was almost nil. The specter of the postmodern alienated, affluent Western subject, with all their bundles of anxieties and neuroses, began to unspool, implode; a process of involution nurturing the solipsistic narcissism inherent in late capitalism.

The sociopathic tendencies of our elites, heightened and distilled through centuries of class war in Western culture, spilled out into the open. The upper-middle professional classes, alert to the tendencies of their overlords’ desires to distance themselves from the rabble, were eager to parrot the diktats of their rulers. The upper-class winners condemned themselves to a path of neo-Victorian purity politics. The clean must be segregated from the dirty. The educated believers in “science” are clearly rational; the anti-vax hordes certainly must be acting out of pure self-interest and resentment.  Needless to say, little to no self-examination was made of the panicked overreaction of the well-to-do liberal authoritarians, which frankly fell within a spectrum of agoraphobic and hypochondriac behavior.

The death rates were complete junk science, overestimated for the sake of juicing up the atmosphere of pandemonium, not to mention the monetary rewards for hospitals and healthcare corporations. As many know by now, “dying with” Covid became conflated with “dying from” the virus, with doctors pressured to include Sars-CoV-2 on death certificates.

Pushing the experimental vaccine onto healthy children and young adults was completely unnecessary, and harmful. The risks of heart problems outweighed the negligible benefits of the vaccine for the young. This was obvious from the beginning and the medical establishment continued its role as a propaganda arm of Big Pharma rather than objectively viewing the facts. One study showed a laughable, embarrassing efficacy of 12% for 5-11 year olds.

UN Estimate of Extreme Hunger, Food Insecurity, and Starvation

Shortly after the lockdowns began in March 2020, the UN World Food Program put out a warning:

The number of people facing acute food insecurity (IPC/CH 3 or worse) stands to rise to 265 million in 2020, up by 130 million from the 135 million in 2019, as a result of the economic impact of COVID-19, according to a WFP projection. The estimate was announced alongside the release of the Global Report on Food Crises, produced by WFP and 15 other humanitarian and development partners.

In effect, the government and private architects of lockdowns were fully prepared to sacrifice hundreds of millions of younger, poorer minorities in less-developed countries to shield older, richer, whiter populations in developed nations from the very low potential of sickness, and yes, possible death. While many leftists are quick to point out economic “sacrifice zones” where labor violations are the norm and economic exploitation is rampant, they were mainly silent regarding the potential of mass death, starvation, and the explosion of extreme poverty due to lockdown policies. In fact, many leftists gleefully supported lockdowns and restrictions against the unvaccinated; and were either completely unaware or feigned ignorance of the economic devastation they unleashed.

The Africa  Paradox

The obvious data sets to look at regarding the efficacy of the experimental vaccines would be the West, with very high levels of vaccination, versus Africa, which had extremely low percentages. While obviously many countries had incomplete information due to lack of resources, it becomes obvious that the vaccines had zero effect on transmission or reduction in deaths. In fact, the mortality rates in African nations are so low that experts simply shrug them off. A holistic view would put the excess deaths from “Covid-19” squarely on the unhealthy lifestyles, toxic food supply, the unregulated chemical industries, and stressful conditions endemic to Western living.

Agamben’s Laments

Right off the bat, Giorgio Agamben questioned the motives behind the lockdowns, rightly pointing out that the fear of death and the elevation of science as the new religion had reduced communities and governments to quantifying basic survival – “bare life” – as more valuable than tangible human freedoms. As he put it in a March 2020 blog post:

Fear is a bad advisor, but it brings up many things you pretended not to see. The first thing that the wave of panic that has paralyzed the country clearly shows is that our society no longer believes in anything but bare life. It is clear that Italians are willing to sacrifice practically everything, normal living conditions, social relationships, work, even friendships, affections and religious and political convictions at the risk of falling ill. Bare life – and the fear of losing it – is not something that unites men, but blinds and separates them.

In May 2020, Agamben expands on the notion of medicine as a modern cult- and its many parallels with Christian dogmas.

It is immediately evident that we are dealing here with a cultic practice and not with a rational scientific requirement. By far the most frequent cause of mortality in our country is cardio-vascular disease and it is known that these could decrease if a healthier lifestyle were practiced and if one adhered to a particular diet. But it had never occurred to any doctor that this form of life and diet, which they recommended to patients, would become the subject of legal legislation, which decreed ex lege [as a matter of law] what one must eat and how one must live, transforming the whole existence into a health obligation. Precisely this has been done and, at least for now, people have accepted as if it were obvious to give up their freedom of movement, work, friendships, love, social relationships, their religious and political convictions.

Even the mealy-mouthed World Health Organization was forced to admit in October 2020 that lockdowns were extremely detrimental to poor and minority communities globally and should be used as a “very, very last resort”. This did not stop governments and medical advisors from clamoring for more restrictions and shutdowns for seventeen more months, even as Agamben and many others, including many experts who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, were speaking out against political overreach.

Latour’s Dress Rehearsal: Right for the Wrong Reasons

In a widely cited article from March 2020, French sociologist Bruno Latour asked an interesting question regarding the lockdowns: “Is This a Dress Rehearsal?” The problem in his formulation, of course, is that he believes governments innocently imposed the lockdown protocols in response to a clear and present danger; as well as his belief that governments will, in the future, impose lockdowns in response to climate change with reductions in carbon emissions in mind. Rather, we should realize that governments, colluding with the mega rich and multinational corporations, imposed lockdowns in order to profit off the collapse and resurgence of the stock markets, discipline the public in order to accept draconian “new normal” policies, and accelerate the process of biometric IDs, all-encompassing surveillance, a drop in living standards, and advance a social credit system based on rewards and punishments.

The old panem et circenses method of distracting the masses can no longer hold together an increasingly polarized society breaking into “post-truth” enclaves where distrust and paranoia spawn out of late-capitalist alienation and exploitation. A society in which two of the biggest overarching political narratives are as ridiculous as Q-Anon and Russiagate has no business dismissing the obvious conspiracy and collusion involved in promulgating an exaggerated and manufactured pandemic.

Latour is correct in claiming that this is a sort of dress rehearsal. Sadly, like many a typical liberal, he assumes governments had our best interest at heart, and are reacting to objective facts and medical realities. In the near future, governments will probably enact travel restrictions and lockdowns not only to reduce carbon emissions, but rather to train citizens to accept food rations, lack of fossil fuels due to high prices and supply issues, lower living standards, and lack of goods and provisions. In this process of disciplining and punishing masses, many will be forced to accept whatever government edicts are enacted, at the risk of job loss, social isolation, or worse, just as we witnessed during the pandemic. The next lockdown could be designed and pre-planned precisely to stave off protests, rebellions, and revolutions which will spring up as the rot in capitalism deepens.

Medical Tyranny? WHO’s asking?

A recent report shows that a private foundation set up to finance the World Health Organization, called the WHO Foundation, explains that 40% of donations came from anonymous donors. The potential for conflicts of interest is inevitable, as obviously only individuals and groups connected to Big Pharma would want to anonymize where their slush funds go to.

A global Pandemic Treaty is being formulated by the WHO in order to force nations to accept the next pandemic, if global elites are so foolish as to try and institute another round of medical authoritarianism.

Much like 9/11, the lead-up to the Covid-19 “event” as well as its early stages remain clouded in secrecy, misinformation, and a web of lies. We were all shown images of dead Chinese citizens lying in the streets, although it’s unclear if this was from the virus, or even from the city of Wuhan or Hubei province in some cases. We were told the virus originated in a wet market in the city center, although now we know that link has never been proven, and was most likely thrown out as a hypothesis to satisfy public opinion, but more likely was a cynical intelligence ploy, a classic case of misdirection, especially since we know now that a secretive US medical intelligence unit admitted to tracking Covid in November 2019, and possibly much earlier.

When a global pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, there were around 118,000 global cases and under 5,000 declared deaths. Relatively speaking those numbers were quite low and there was no reason to declare Sars-CoV-2 a public health emergency based on the figures. The estimated death rates were pulled completely out of thin air by a complete fraud, Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College of London, who broke lockdown rules which he helped to implement.

PCR tests were declared the gold standard even though Kary Mullis, one of its inventors, declared publicly that the tests were not made to prove the existence of active infections. Further, the cycling for the tests was deliberately set too high, which resulted in untold amounts of false positive cases. Death rates miraculously shot up for “Covid-19” because doctors and coroners were pressured to list the disease as a cause of death even without a positive test; any “suspected case” could be listed. Flu, pneumonia, and every other respiratory disease magically disappeared and Covid filled in the gap, boosting the figures.

Not to mention, the effect of declaring a global pandemic necessarily induced a stress response from the global population, which, along with the late-winter (March-April) time frame in the northern hemisphere, definitely contributed to the excess deaths. In fact, many established medical organizations freely admit that the lockdowns were responsible for a significant percentage (many say up to one third) of excess deaths, yet somehow have managed to absolve themselves of responsibility for clamoring for the lockdowns like trained seals. Along with the loss of jobs, home confinement, and lack of community, it should be noted that just as yelling fire in a crowded movie theater is almost certain to cause some sort of violent event, screaming “pandemic” through a 24/7 news cycle will do the same.

Much like the daily reporting in the aftermath of 9/11, with nightly news explaining the nation’s risk of terror attacks as red, orange, or yellow, the daily cases, hospitalizations, and deaths; we all remember the 24/7 circus designed to frighten the population and maintain obedience. In this deliberately instilled, panic-stricken environment, the ruling class fundamentally altered the landscape: following a short downturn in the stock market, the digital economy and tech firms quickly rebounded and boomed- the tech sector, Big Pharma, web services companies, and basically all major corporations tangentially related to providing services on the internet struck gold.

Within weeks, the need for a vaccine was trotted out. Many seasonal viruses come and go within months, yet somehow the medical establishment was able to figure out that only a vaccine would be able to stop this disease. The pharmaceutical companies were simply trying to profit off a new media-hyped and establishment-protected exaggerated pandemic. The fact that so many corners were cut, with no long-term studies, all to market unproven mRNA technology did not seem to faze at least half of the public, who openly clamored for lockdowns, vaccines, passports, and authoritarian measures which would be unthinkable a few years prior.

Ridiculous masking mandates came into effect- masking outdoors was mandatory in many cities globally. No scientific basis was ever presented. Vaccine passports were likewise implemented even though natural immunity was found to be 27 times greater in some instances. Were health authorities simply trying to be overly cautious, or were there more sinister agendas at play? Were institutional medical practices imposed simply to make profits for pharmaceutical corporations?

The simple fact that an unproven, dangerous vaccine was pushed and mandated at various levels- and that it was swallowed so comfortably by so many- simply shows how effective modern propaganda can be. No guns were needed- but you could lose your job, standing in the community, your friends, family, and social relations. A vast social experiment was conducted and anyone who dared to question “the science”, instead of blindly placing trust in a capitalist health system where profits have always taken precedence over people’s interests, was demonized.

The frenzy around Covid-19 may indeed have had a bit of luck, at least here in the US. It was, of course, President Trump that downplayed the virus at the start. Therefore, anyone else aligning with his views on Covid was seen as a repugnant narcissist, an uncaring dullard willing to put corporate profits over human life. Imagine an alternate universe where Trump or a right-wing, authoritarian, US presidential figure like him took the virus extremely seriously, with Chinese-style lockdowns. Would people still have clamored for mandatory shots, and for friends, family, and co-workers to be excommunicated from society? Probably not, but we’ll never know.

Vaccine passports threatened to segregate society based on a frankly fascist vision of the clean versus unclean. Anti-vaccine activists and regular people who refused to take an experimental injection were wrongly vilified. As many pointed out, the lack of reduction of transmission in the vaccinated made the whole prospect of compulsory vaccination pointless, unscientific, counterproductive, and just plain wrong.

In November 2021, the conflict came to a head as Biden, speaking to the unvaccinated, remarked: “We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” He proposed a plan for weekly testing or vaccination of all workers in every US company with over 100 employees, as well as a mandate for around 17 million health care workers.

The Postmodern Subject: Manufacturing the Hyperreal

The parallels between 9/11 and Covid-19 go far beyond their initial propaganda campaigns. Ultimately, part of the reason contemporary propaganda is so effective lies in the psychological structure of postmodern consciousness. Safety, stability, and security are seen as the final end products of mass civilization. Even one of the great charlatans of the 1990s, Francis Fukuyama, was astute enough to note the parallels between the postmodern subject and Nietzsche’s notion of the “last man”.

Today, the veneer of idealistic concepts such as freedom, democracy, and equality which were supposed to undergird and inspire the collective to greater heights is wearing off in the face of massive global inequality, environmental disasters, climate catastrophe, and vicious media propaganda campaigns. As material living standards stagnate and crumble even in the developed world, increasing numbers of people are forced to compete for the same resources, perpetuating a scarcity-based mindset in the populace. Nearly all socioeconomic questions are framed as zero-sum, binary, black-and-white contests between good and evil where little nuance or questions of morality are allowed into the public arena.

In this fragile social environment, it’s not surprising that citizens flock to ready-made narratives and propaganda campaigns. Ruling class propaganda is swallowed uncritically, precisely because it obfuscates, masks, and numbs the pain of living in late-stage capitalist collapse. One of the reasons Western liberals and even most of the “Left” fell for the farce that was the over-hyped, medical global Psy-op we call the Covid-19 pandemic is because the postmodern subject has now delved so far into the hyperreal; where symbols, social relations, and even science become cheap imitations of themselves. This is precisely why so many people, at the beginning of the lockdowns in March 2020, remarked that they “felt like they were living in a movie.” Media-induced pseudo-events can no longer be distinguished from severe medical emergencies today, just as twenty two years ago the mass panic after 9/11 produced the same fog of war and irrational hatred of the other.

Imbued with meaning and purpose, the mask-wearing, jab-taking, “papers-please”, vaccine passport-bearing citizen could now feel a common cause with others in the community; artificially induced feelings of well-being conjured up through media organs and distilled into catchy slogans like “trust the science”. The sign-value of “doing the right thing” became a potent force; and this was weaponized by the establishment to suit various agendas.

Many of these agendas were, in fact, actual conspiracies to: establish a permanent biosecurity state; set up a soft version of martial law where people’s movements are restricted and tracked; manufacture a false narrative of safe vaccines to bankroll a new industry for mRNA technologies, create a pathway to health passports, digital IDs, central bank digital currencies, and social credit systems; destroy the working class and middle class small businesses, and psychically prepare the global populace for a fall in living standards, a fall in access to goods, services, and resources, as well as rationing; provide an excuse to ban protests; continue the broad militarization of society, as well as the implementation of a global regime of ideological compliance and obedience.

Big Pharma, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the military and intelligence communities were colluding to fleece the poor and working classes- the fact that one can’t find a smoking gun for each of these interlocking and moving parts of the economy and government doesn’t refute this basic fact. All the while, corporate America continued enriching the one percent who gained trillions during the pandemic. Medical-authoritarian edicts were issued without any actual science behind them. Surveillance and population control have always been at the forefront of elite agendas for managing 21^st century life. Global flows of people, information, goods, and revolutionary thought can no longer be stage-managed by tyrannical capitalist elites as conditions deteriorate around the planet. A show must be put on every ten to twenty years.

The many faces and branding strategies of the global elite come into full view: the “new normal”, “own nothing and be happy”, “mask up”, “follow the science”, and the “lockstep” scenario for implementing planetary tyranny are seen by the ruling class as necessary steps to secure profits and control in increasingly unstable economic and political landscapes. Their techno-feudal dreams are our nightmares as the drudgery of capitalist labor and the vagaries of imperial war continue on. Our masters offer little respite for the masses of humanity, as they’ve imposed a totalizing spectacle. Cult-like behavior dominated after 9/11; overblown fears of terrorism and anti-Muslim racism permeated the country, just as a year or two ago, overblown fears of the virus and authoritarian-based dislike and instant dismissal of anyone skeptical of Big Pharma and the government continued to dominate.

Even as the narrative has shifted, and the farce that was the reaction to a relatively mild virus receded, the potential for propaganda and fear campaigns against the global collective remains. It is precisely the qualities of postmodernity, such as the end of meta-narratives, de-realization of the subject, hyperreality, the nature of the spectacle, and pseudo-events, guided by ruling class interests, and imposed on us by capitalism, which allow for the recurrence of these paradigm-shifting forces to dominate social life. The parallels of two of the biggest geopolitical events of the 21^st century, 9/11 and the Covid-19 health scare, reveal the foundations of global regimes of cruelty, domination, and oppression. And there certainly isn’t much “new” or “normal” about any of it.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William Hawes.

In Guatemala, progressive presidential candidate Bernardo Arévalo has won a landslide victory in a runoff election against former first lady Sandra Torres. Arévalo, a member of the Semilla party, took nearly 60% of the vote Sunday after months of political persecution. In June, Arévalo stunned many in Guatemala when he placed second in the first round of voting after running on an anti-corruption platform. Soon after, the attorney general’s office suspended Arévalo’s Semilla party, and police raided their offices. In Guatemala City, we speak with Guatemalan human rights lawyer Frank LaRue and award-winning investigative journalist Allan Nairn about this historic election. LaRue and Nairn agree this election proves that Guatemalans want a change from the country’s history of corruption and military dictatorships, but the situation remains tense in the country as oligarchs will most likely attempt to disrupt Arévalo’s transition to power. “This could be the beginning of a turn in Guatemalan history,” says Nairn, who predicts the next phase of this election process will be people demonstrating popular support to force a transition of power. “They may have to take to the streets to defend the results of this vote.”

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

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy Theory!”

“Power elite of war industry in collusion with the US government (i.e., the “corpocracy”) killing hundreds of millions of people for profit, plunder, and more power.”

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”

“The power elite cause widespread poverty.”

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”

“911 tragedy was an inside job.”

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”

“US operates a criminal injustice system.”

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”

 “Covid-19 was a CIA operation.”

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”

“US industry buys and bribes politicians’ votes.”

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”

“US corpocracy “dumbs down” Americans via contrived public education, mass media propaganda, etc., etc.”

“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”

And just who is this denial and conspiracy choral group? America’s power elite, and their functionaries, that’s who! Especially the CIA. It “plausibly denies” responsibility and aims to  divert attention away from its evil actions.

The True Cause Scale

Consider referring to the following “true cause scale” if you haven’t yet decided who exactly and solely is doing all the ruling, ruining, and ridding:

1. Intuition. Aka “gut feelings.”

2. Circumstantial evidence. A causes B because B is always associated with the true existence of A.

3. Eyeball evidence. If I saw what caused A, I know what caused A.

4. Hypotheses and scientific theory. Rigorous and replicable production and testing of data in attempts to discover probable causes. Relatively applicable.

5. Causal inference. A complex and sophistical statistical analysis of data to tease out probable causes. Rarely applicable.

6. Empirical, scientific evidence. Produced from the findings of testing hypotheses and causal inferences. Rarely applicable.

7. Website reports from professional investigative reporters.

I rely on 1, 2, 3, and 7!

“Plausible Deniability”

A CIA Escape Hatch

According to Douglas Valentine, author of three revealing books on the CIA based on his rare access to the agency’s officials, the CIA does not launch any clandestine operation such as engineering a bloody regime change without creating and being able to show “plausible deniability” of their actions. ¹ For example, the CIA underwrites massive killings to install friendly (i.e.. submissive) regimes in foreign countries, and then issues its plausible denials. The public is then spoon fed this fiction via the corporatized news media.

In Closing

Do not believe the plausible denials of America’s corpocracy!

Notes

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Brumback.

In Guatemala, election officials have rejected an attempt by the ruling business and political elite to overturn the results of last month’s first round of the presidential election. Sandra Torres, the former first lady, accused of corruption, and her allies challenged the results of June’s first-round elections, which saw the progressive, anti-corruption candidate Bernardo Arévalo win second place and force a runoff. On Thursday, an electoral court said the final results of the first round had not changed after the review. Protests erupted in Guatemala City after the review suspended certification of election results. “It was really difficult for us to compete in this election, and now they are saying we manipulated the results,” says Samuel Pérez Álvarez, a Guatemalan congressmember who leads the progressive political party Movimiento Semilla. “​​This regime is not only corrupt, but authoritarian.” The runoff election will be held in August between Torres and Arévalo.

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

A defiant Foreign Affairs Minister Justin Tkatchenko says he will not resign over the furore surrounding his daughter Savannah’s TikTok video that has angered Papua New Guineans across the country.

In an interview with the PNG Post-Courier, Tkatchenko said: “I will not be resigning over something she has not done or used public funds for.”

“Yes what she did was not appropriate at the time. However, what she did for PNG in representing the country was welcomed by all who met her.”

• READ MORE: PNG foreign minister defends daughter over ‘flaunting’ coronation trip video
• Other Coronation trip controversy reports

In two separate videos shared on social media platforms, Savannah Tkatchenko was seen as “flaunting and showing off” by many who viewed the videos in the midst of recent news of the spending of taxpayers’ money amounting to K3 million (NZ$2.7 million) on the trip to the King Charles III Coronation last week.

When asked on the spending money allocated to the travelling team from the Foreign Affairs office, Tkatchenko said: “K25,000 is equivalent to £5000. That money is given for accommodation, food, and other necessities that may be needed.

“The daily allowance given to everyone who travels and is regulated by the Public Service,” he added.

“Let me remind everyone that three months ago, I have banned travel by any other Foreign Affairs personnel unless it has been approved by the Secretary or my office.

Calls for PNG foreign minister Justin Tkatchenko to be sacked and have his citizenship stripped after labeling critics of his daughter’s TikTok video “primitive animals”.

It comes less than 2 weeks before US President Joe Biden visits PNG. https://t.co/QMJnHgXjTP

— Marian Faa (@marianfaa) May 11, 2023

Foreign Affairs contingent
“I had with me my daughter, my bodyguard and my protocol officer. We travelled as part of the Foreign Affairs contingent and not as part of the Governor-General’s contingent.”

Tkatchenko further explained the circumstances surrounding the trip and how his daughter joined him.

When it was made known that Prime Minister James Marape would not be travelling, a notice was given to Buckingham Palace that I would take his place. An invitation was sent for myself and my spouse to travel,” Tkatchenko said.

“However, my wife could not travel with me, and thus, I took my daughter. We advised Buckingham Palace of the changes and Buckingham Palace approved my plus one,” he added.

“There is nothing wrong with what happened, my daughter did not misuse any public funds and that has all been totally misrepresented.”

“She is traumatised and her character has been defamed. She understands what she has done, and I did speak to her and told her it was not appropriate for her to take that video,” the minister added.

Minister Tkatchenko said: “It was upon my advice that she deleted her TikTok account and she is aware of what she has done.”

“Again, I reiterate I will not resign.”

Miriam Zarriga is a PNG Post-Courier journalist. Republished with permission.

Publicly funded Hilton Hotel at the centre of a financial black hole | PNGi

“It was APEC Minister, Justin Tkatchenko’s landscaping company, PNG Gardener that reportedly supplied many of the plants that adorn the site.” https://t.co/KYe0gaIfuG

— Stret Pasin (@Stret_Pasin) May 10, 2023

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

Papua New Guinea’s foreign minister has vehemently defended his daughter against a furious backlash to a Tik Tok video she posted as part of PNG’s official delegation to King Charles III’s coronation.

The video posted by Savannah Tkatchenko flaunts extravagant meals in first class airport lounges and “elite” shopping experiences at luxury brands on the taxpayer-funded trip.

“We did some shopping around Singapore airport at Hermes and Louis Vuitton. For those of you that don’t know, Singapore airport shopping is so elite,” she said in the clip.

• READ MORE: Other King Charles III coronation reports

Savannah Tkatchenko attended the coronation in London alongside her father, Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko, and two other officials.

The video has garnered widespread criticism in PNG, with commentators saying money for the trip should have been spent on improving healthcare, education and other services in the impoverished county.

Speaking to ABC’s Pacific Beat, Minister Tkatchenko said critics of the video were “primitive animals” with “nothing better to do”.

He said his daughter did not actually purchase anything at some shops featured in the video.

Speaking to ABC’s Pacific Beat, Mr Tkachenko said critics of the video were “primitive animals” with “nothing better to do” https://t.co/lO1wEpBJkd

— Ben Packham (@bennpackham) May 10, 2023

‘My daughter is devastated’
“My daughter now is totally devastated. She is traumatised by some of the most ridiculous and useless comments that I’ve seen,” he said.

“Jealousy is a curse. And, you know, these people clearly show that they have got nothing to do in their lives.”

About 40 percent of Papua New Guineans live below the basic needs poverty line, according to World Bank data published in 2020.

Tkatchenko said his daughter was selected to attend the coronation in the place of his wife, who could not make the event.

“The best next person in my family was my eldest daughter, who is a qualified lawyer by profession,” he said.

“We went to London, we attended all the meetings and events, and she represented her country without fear or favour to the highest degree and honour.”

PNG social justice advocate and former election candidate Tania Bale said the minister’s response was “tone deaf”.

Fuuurious online backlash in PNG after FM Justin Tkachenko’s daughter posted a TikTok video of her (taxpayer funded) trip to London to attend the King’s Coronation. FM has responded angrily, saying his daughter has copped online abuse from “useless” people and “primitive animals” https://t.co/e6f7GCswOJ

— Stephen Dziedzic (@stephendziedzic) May 10, 2023

‘Completely offensive’
“It’s completely offensive to the people of Papua New Guinea and the suffering that we’re going through. It shows complete contempt for us,” she said.

“There’s just a big disconnect with what I’m seeing in this video of super luxury . . . and you contrast that with how our people actually live.”

According to local media, the coronation cost PNG taxpayers 6 million kina (NZ$2.7 million) — half of which was spent on an in-country celebration attended by Prime Minister James Marape.

Tkatchenko said he could not confirm reports that PNG Governor-General Bob Dadae also took a delegation of between 10 and 30 people to the coronation, saying the trips were “completely separate”.

“We attended the coronation because of our connection with the monarchy, the connection with the Commonwealth. It’s very straightforward. It’s nothing to hide,” he said.

Lae resident Laurence, who did not want to use his last name out of fear of reprisal for speaking out, said the spending did not seem justified.

Facing ‘a lot of issues’
“The country is facing a lot of issues and that sort of money should be spent on other services in a country instead of for just a single event or trip,” he said.

The video has now been removed from Tik Tok and Savannah Tkatchenko appears to have deleted her account.

Minister Tkatchenko said the coronation visit was a success for PNG.

“I hold my head up high. We had a fantastic coronation. Papua New Guinea was represented at the highest order. The King was so impressed,” he said.

The ABC has contacted Savannah Tkatchenko for comment.

Republished from ABC Pacific Beat with permission.

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

A whistleblower from the legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa says Jane Sullivan Roberts, the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, earned $10.3 million in commissions over seven years from her job as a headhunter at the company, where she placed attorneys with law firms—including at least one that argued a case before the Supreme Court after the placement was made.

Sullivan Roberts earned the money between 2007 and 2014, having taken a job with the company two years after her husband was confirmed to the Supreme Court, according to a report out Friday from Business Insider.

The whistleblower, Kendal Price, said in a sworn affidavit in December that he believed "at least some of [Roberts'] remarkable success as a recruiter has come because of her spouse's position."

Price's complaint was reported on earlier this year byPoliticoand The New York Times, and Insider published new documents regarding the case.

"When I found out that the spouse of the chief justice was soliciting business from law firms, I knew immediately that it was wrong," Price, who worked alongside Sullivan Roberts from 2011-2013 at Major, Lindsey & Africa, told Business Insider. "During the time I was there, I was discouraged from ever raising the issue. And I realized that even the law firms who were Jane's clients had nowhere to go. They were being asked by the spouse of the chief justice for business worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there was no one to complain to. Most of these firms were likely appearing or seeking to appear before the Supreme Court. It's natural that they'd do anything they felt was necessary to be competitive."

Insider noted that a spokesperson for the Supreme Court told The New York Times in a prior statement that all nine of the court justices are "attentive to ethical constraints" and obey federal financial disclosure laws.

However, Price's whistleblower complaint was released weeks after ProPublica reported that Justice Clarence Thomas financially benefited for years from gifts from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, and sold property to him—none of which was previously disclosed to the government as is required by law.

Earlier this week, Politico revealed that days after his confirmation, Justice Neil Gorsuch sold his share of a property to the CEO of a major law firm—and disclosed the sale, but not the buyer.

Sullivan Roberts' $10.3 million commission at her legal recruiting firm was listed as "salary" on Roberts' financial disclosure forms.

"The balance of Roberts' income did not come at a steady rate from a single employer, as 'salary' suggests," reported Insider. "It was paid by the deal and based on a sizable cut of her clients' salaries—a compensation model which varies from year to year depending on her ability to capitalize on her network. The ultimate sources of her income were the firms hiring Major, Lindsey & Africa-backed candidates. Their identities and the specific amounts that they paid Roberts for her services remain unknown."

Price called the justice's characterization of his wife's commissions "misleading."

"Characterizing Mrs. Roberts' commissions as 'salary' is not merely factually incorrect; it is incorrect as a matter of law," Bennett Gershman, a law professor at Pace University, wrote in a memo supporting Price's claims. "The legal distinction between these terms is clear, undisputed, and legally material. If the chief justice's inaccurate financial disclosures were inadvertent, presumably he should file corrected and amended disclosures."

Considering the recent reports on Gorsuch and Thomas, court observers suggested the latest news is more evidence that the Supreme Court is "suffering a massive, systemic ethics crisis."

"What's the public confidence in a system," asked Joshua Dratel, an attorney for Price, "when the firms which are appearing before the court are making decisions that are to the financial benefit of the chief justice?"

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“And death shall have no dominion.

Though they go mad they shall be sane” Dylan Thomas

“Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.” Nietzsche [1]

There are now cascading interacting factors that bring massive human suffering and death. In a number of powerful and influential groups there are skewed perceptions of reality and grandiose schemes that are inflicted on societies worldwide. Interrelated emergencies are obviously complex tragedies but are often incorrectly attributed to abstract single causes like human nature, the system, the media. Many other factors figure in, and secretive elite groups are one cause. These socially cohesive unelected groups instigate, aid and abet implementation of vast destruction.

What is meant by “skewed perceptions of reality”? Freud identified the illogical mechanisms of dream formation, but also the capacity to be objective and to perceive reality correctly. Dreams and early childhood thinking illogically distort time, confuse animate and inanimate and human and non-human, distort cause-effect relationship, conflate words with things and reverse the meaning of words. Words in current common usage words confuse human and non-human, animate and inanimate, such as artificial intelligence and corporate personhood. Representing humans as a number or a cost (e.g. the cost of killing a person) are examples of conflating people with things. A distorted sense of time comes with the diffuse, illogical time frame for reducing greenhouse gas concentration to 350 ppm. In the groups of people described below, representations of real, actual people do not seem to be part of their thought process or emotional feelings. They lack the maturational capacity to feel concern about other people, the capacity to feel guilt, and to comprehend the reality of death. These capacities are absent or intermittent in the elite powerful groups described here. Instead of realism there are presumptions of omnipotence, omniscience, and entitlement. [2]

Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine: confessions of a nuclear war planner, is about the elite military/security and nuclear weapons scientist groups, and about Ellsberg’s own maturing ability to see the reality of the nuclear project, to feel personal guilt, and to investigate and disseminate key ‘doomsday’ facts: 1) thermonuclear, or H-bombs, are thousand times larger in yield than the atom bombs of WWII (original italics); this was known since the late 1950s but kept from the public. 2) that the irreversible military strategy is to launch on hair trigger alert and simultaneously bomb all Russian and Chinese cities, exterminating the entire populations. Fall-out would cause massive death in Europe, and retaliatory nuclear strikes would result in human extinction. 3) the loose chain of command randomly allows many to push the button and launch a nuclear war.

Ellsberg first describes the ambiance at the RAND Corporation where he started working when he was a young adult: he felt it was “apparent from the beginning that this was as smart a bunch of men as I had ever encountered” [he was educated at Harvard and Cambridge]. He felt especially at home when Herman Kahn (Dr. Strangelove), “brilliant and enormously fat”, told young Ellsberg that one of his ideas was “absolutely wrong”. He felt a “warm glow spread throughout my body…. This was the way that fellow brilliant Jewish students routinely interacted.” Ellsberg thought “I’ve found a home.” He loved Rand. He described a “secular priesthood”, of being in “the middle of, living and working with others for a transcendent cause.” They had knowledge of the secrets of the universe, not to be shared with laity, a sense of being insiders. RAND consultants moved invisibly across bureaucratic boundaries opaque to others.

As a RAND expert, he interacted and was privy to the top secret military planning echelon. His direct quotations shockingly display omniscient and omnipotent attitudes that take no account of the tremendous carelessness and strategic flaws of plans that would be “virtually impossible to implement for technical and bureaucratic reasons.” Two examples should terrify. Ellsberg asked Vice Admiral Kivette how long it would take to change orders, in the event of war, to execute plans against the Soviet Union only and not China. “There was a long silence in which it appeared that Admiral Kivette was almost holding back an urge to vomit. Then he said, enunciating each phrase separately, almost gasping, as if in pained incredulity, ‘You have…to assume…some…modicum…of rationality…in higher authority…that they would not do something…so insane as to go to war…against one Communist power…while letting the other one off…scot-free.’” (p. 84-85). A second example is the willingness of the Manhattan Project scientists, including Fermi, Oppenheimer, and Teller, to gamble with the possibility of incinerating the Earth, leaving it to a wholly speculative estimate of a ‘1 in 3 million’ chance whether a hydrogen and nitrogen chain reaction would ignite the entire atmosphere and ocean. This is rocket-scientists’ faith in a so-called facts- evidence- mathematic- based order. On their way to the test-site, Fermi laid bets on whether this would happen and Ellsberg described how the scientists at the test site obviously believed this was a possibility. (p. 274-285).

There is a maturational capacity to maintain a constant sense of other people as real. In an earlier article, I quoted Manhattan Project physicist Richard Feynman saying that he never regretted his work on the atom bomb. At the end of his life and for the first time, he wondered what would happen in a nuclear attack on the U.S. He had an image of a destroyed Brooklyn Bridge but not an image of people. After the first atomic test at Alamogordo New Mexico, he organized a triumphalist snake dance and said the ‘gadget’ worked. People do not seem to be part of his thought process. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were called Little Boy and Fat Man, land the massive Soviet bomb was called Big Ivan. Like boyish jokes.

Groups are varied and complex, but the following elite groups, primarily made up of men, reflect cohesiveness around specific delusions of ‘grandeur’, entitlement and omnipotence.

The National Security Council with a core group of several hundred officials, is described by Michael Glennon [3] as the network that has the power to kill and arrest and jail, to instill fear and suspicion, to shape public debate. These men seldom appear on TV and seek neither celebrity nor wealth. Their pride lies in being in the big meeting, reading key memo, being part of the big decision. They are ‘in’ because they are smart, hard-working, reliable, and unlikely to embarrass their superiors. Love of country draws them to their work but so too the adrenaline rush of urgent top=secret news flashes, hurried hallway briefings, emergency teleconferences, knowing the confidential subplot, and their authority. They must appear tough, hard hitting, basically military.

Glennon also describes how the NATO Council provides “credibility, flexibility, and anonymity…. It has no substantive written rules of procedure. It issues no legal guidance or guidelines that might restrict member-states.” It does not reveal which state participated in any given military operation, kills and lies with impunity. Louise Arbour, chair of the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia (ICTY) refused to investigate NATO war crimes. [4]

The following three groups are not official bodies but are closed societies that establish secretive social bonds between wealthy and powerful mainly white Protestant men.

The Order of Skull and Bones, formally known as the Brotherhood of Death, dates back to 1832 at Yale University , and until recently only admitted white Protestant men. Members include the Bush and Rockefeller family dynasties, John Kerry, government and military leaders , bank and media executives. The club “deepens the fraternal bonds between initiates, sanctifies the legacy of the ‘patriarchs’ that came before them, and indefinitely perpetuates this network of power.’ The society’s iconography and rituals occur inside a building known as “The Tomb”, and society secrecy prevents verification of alleged racialized and sexual rituals.

The Bohemian Club, founded in 1872, located in California, is highly secretive and male, and is dominated by business and government leaders such as Kissinger, Reagan, Colin Powell, Rockefeller and Bush dynasties, S.D. Bechtel (Bechtel Corporation), IBM Thomas Watson, World Bank A.W. Clausen. The Manhattan Project (constructing the first atom bomb) was conceived and informally set into motion at the Bohemian Grove at a meeting hosted by Robert J. Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence. “The club becomes an avenue by which the cohesiveness of the elite class is maintained… the function of defining major directions of policy is served by exclusive groups, in and out of government that are designed specifically to come up with ideas to steer national and global policy”. (P155)

A two-week summer event at the Bohemian Grove begins with the Cremation of Care ceremony in which members in red robes and pointed hoods carry a coffin containing a human effigy symbolizing the Body of Care. The effigy is thrown onto a funeral pyre, fireworks explode, and a band plays “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Lectures called ‘lakeside chats’ are presentations on world issues such as military budgets and free trade. A lecture in 1994 by a political science professor warned of the dangers of multiculturalism, Afrocentrism, and the loss of family boundaries. The “unqualified” masses cannot be allowed to carry out policy and elite values must be translated into ‘standards of authority’” 154. There are unconfirmed descriptions of crude behavior at this summer camp.

The Bilderberg Group is also completely secret, its members selected mainly from the NATO countries’ network of corporate and military power. In addition to these clubs and groups, there are similar powerful networks with these values in think tanks, academic groups, roundtables, commissions, advocacy boards, and councils, often with overlapping membership.

Emergencies threatening human extinction are not caused by human nature or because of an indifferent, uncomprehending public. People globally are fighting for daily survival, many losing their lives in opposing the real purveyors of evil. This brief sketch is about unconscionable, dangerous people and their power and influence. The system doesn’t force people to act this way – people have choices and comply and collude for many reasons. Laws are degraded into rules that are infinitely bendable. Michael Ignatieff, former leader of the Canadian Liberal political party, a leading ethicist who taught at Harvard, obviously had choices. He formulated the principle of the ‘least possible evil’, meaning it’s ok for the state to torture people, who said that he was not “losing sleep” over Israel’s killing 28 family members in a Lebanese village.

Silence is another complexity and is influenced by cultural norms. Academic Steven Salaita was blacklisted by American universities for expressing horror and grief about Israel’s slaughter of children in Gaza; he speaks about the cultural tyranny of civility that aims to silence expressions of rage. This era has its own pathology of evil in which perpetrators can wear a veil of innocence or of brilliance, while they are willing and able to destroy far more than all past perpetrators. Silence is shameful about the extent of deaths caused by climate change and nuclearism. [6]

Notes

[1] Epigraph from Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine: confessions of a nuclear war planner. Bloomsbury Publishing, New York, 2017. I have used extensive material from his book.

[2] On thought processes, Freud The Interpretation of Dreams Chapter 7, The Standard Edition Vol 5, Hogarth Press, London, 1900-1901. On maturational capacities Anna Freud Normality and Pathology: assessments of development, International Universities Press, New York, 1965. An eloquent statement on morality, Freud “The Moses of Michelangelo”, Standard Edition Vol 13, 1914.

[3] Michael.Glennon, National Security and Double Government, Oxford University Press, New York, 2015.

[4] Michael Mandel, How America gets away with Murder: illegal wars, collateral damage and crimes against humanity, Pluto Press, London, 2004.

[5] Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Achord Rountree, The Hidden Structure of Violence: who benefits from global violence and war, Monthly Review Press, New York ( 2015).

[6]Hanna Segal, “Silence is the Real Crime”, International Review of Psychoanalysis, 1987, Vol. 14, p. 3-12

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Judith Deutsch.

Memphis police have revealed a sixth and a seventh officer have been placed on administrative leave in addition to the five fired officers over the death of Tyre Nichols, after Nichols was brutally beaten at a traffic stop. On Saturday, Memphis disbanded the police unit responsible for the killing, known as SCORPION, which stood for “Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhood.” We look more closely at these so-called special police units in cities nationwide that operate with little oversight with investigative reporter Radley Balko, author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces” and of the criminal justice newsletter, The Watch. His opinion piece for The New York Times is headlined “Tyre Nichols’s Death Proves Yet Again That 'Elite' Police Units Are a Disaster.”

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

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Paul Rogers.

Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg took aim at those profiting off of the climate emergency Thursday on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's annual summit in Davos, Switzerland.

The Fridays for Future leader has previously attracted global attention for delivering impassioned speeches at earlier summits, urging the Davos elite to "act as if you loved your children above all else" and calling on policymakers to stop "basing your 'pledges' on the cheating tactics that got us into this mess in the first place" and start to "implement annual binding carbon budgets."

Early into a panel discussion Thursday with fellow climate activists and an international energy expert, Thunberg said that "we are right now in Davos, where basically the people are who are mostly fueling the destruction of the planet, the people who are at the very core of the climate crisis, the people who are investing in fossil fuels... somehow these are the people that we seem to rely on solving our problems when they have proven time and time again that they are not prioritizing that."

"The changes that we need are not very likely to come from the inside, rather I believe they will come from the bottom up."

"They are prioritizing self greed, corporate greed, and short-term economic profits above people and above planet," she charged. "We seem to be listening to them rather than the people who are actually affected by the climate crisis, the people who are living on the frontlines, and that kind of tells us the situation, how absurd this is."

"The people who we really should be listening to are not here," she said of the yearly meeting that brings people from around the world to the Swiss resort town. "Instead, we are bombarded with messages from people who are basically the people who are causing this crisis."

After the moderator asked Thunberg—who was detained at a protest against coal mining in Germany earlier this week—why she is talking "outside" the summit rather than with high-profile figures "inside" as she has before, she said that "there are already activists doing that, and I think that if there should be activists inside speaking to these people, it should be those on the frontlines and not privileged people like me who are not experiencing the firsthand consequences of the climate crisis."

"I think that right now, the changes that we need are not very likely to come from the inside, rather I believe they will come from the bottom up," the 20-year-old added. "Without massive public pressure from the outside—at least, in my experience—these people are going to go as far as they possibly can."

"As long as they can get away with it, they will continue to invest in fossil fuels, they will continue to throw people under the bus for their own gain," she stressed. "We need to build and create a critical mass of people who demand change, who demand justice."

DAVOS LIVE: Greta Thunberg takes part in a WEF event with IEA's Fatih Birolwww.youtube.com

Thunberg—who twice has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for climate activism that has included global school strikes—said that "we know that the changes we are advocating for are not going to happen overnight, and that is why we have to stay strong during a longer period of time" and grow the movement of people demanding an end to the fossil fuel era.

"The people standing up and raising their voices against all that is happening—that's the hope right now. The hope comes from the people," Thunberg concluded—a sentiment echoed by the other young climate activists on the panel, Vanessa Nakate of Uganda, Luisa Neubauer of Germany, and Helena Gualinga of an Indigenous community in Ecuador. They were joined by Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, which has also highlighted the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

Thunberg, Nakate, Neubauer, and Gualinga are also spearheading a "cease-and-desist" letter demanding that fossil fuel CEOs attending the summit in Davos "immediately stop opening any new oil, gas, or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need." As of press time, it had been signed by over 921,000 people.

The activists aren't the only ones taking aim at the fossil fuel industry and their corporate and political allies in Davos this week. As Common Dreamsreported, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres also did so in a speech Wednesday.

"This insanity belongs in science fiction, yet we know the ecosystem meltdown is cold, hard scientific fact," he said of continuing to burn fossil fuels despite the catastrophic consequences. "We must act together to close the emissions gap. To phase out coal and supercharge the renewable revolution. To end the addiction to fossil fuels. And to stop our self-defeating war on nature."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

We speak with philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, who has recently written two widely acclaimed books: “Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)” and “Reconsidering Reparations,” which focuses in part on the climate crisis. He says identity politics is a concept that was stripped of its radical power to build solidarity and is now weaponized to split people into ever narrower categories that hamper movements for racial and social justice. “Elite capture is what happens when the advantaged few in a group steer the resources and political direction of organizations or movements or parts of our social structure like the justice system toward their narrower interests and aims,” Táíwò says.

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

As the world's corporate and political elite convened in Davos, Switzerland for the first winter World Economic Forum in three years, an analysis published Monday by Oxfam International found that the global rich have captured nearly two-thirds of all wealth generated since 2020—a period marked by a devastating pandemic, worsening costs of living crises, and continued fallout from the climate emergency.

In a new report titled Survival of the Richest, Oxfam shows that the top 1% worldwide grabbed $26 trillion of the $42 trillion in new wealth created, close to twice as much as the bottom 99% of the global population.

Billionaires, in particular, have seen their wealth explode since 2020, adding around $1.7 million to their net worth for every $1 in wealth gained by a person in the bottom 90% of the global income distribution. According to Oxfam, billionaires' fortunes have grown by an average of $2.7 billion per day since 2020.

Meanwhile, nearly 2 billion workers across the globe likely saw inflation rise at a faster pace than their wages, resulting in a real pay cut that has increased poverty, hunger, and other hardships.

"While ordinary people are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams," said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International. "Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires—a roaring ‘20s boom for the world's richest."

Oxfam's report also spotlights how corporations have taken advantage of crises such as pandemic-induced supply chain woes and Russia's war on Ukraine to drive up prices for consumers around the world, making it more difficult for billions of people to afford basic necessities.

The analysis finds that at least 95 food and energy corporations more than doubled their profits in 2022, bringing in $306 billion in windfall profits and dishing out 84% of it to their shareholders.

"The Walton dynasty, which owns half of Walmart, received $8.5 billion over the last year," Oxfam notes. "Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, owner of major energy corporations, has seen this wealth soar by $42 billion (46%) in 2022 alone. Excess corporate profits have driven at least half of inflation in Australia, the U.S., and the U.K."

"Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn't lift all ships—just the superyachts."

To combat skyrocketing inequality produced by excess corporate profits and the disproportionate wealth gains of the ultra-rich—who also contribute far more to the climate crisis than the rest of humanity—Oxfam argues that governments around the world should institute "a systemic and wide-ranging increase in taxation" targeting billionaires who often pay astonishingly low tax rates.

The new report cites the example of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who—according to Internal Revenue Service documents obtained by ProPublica—paid a true tax rate of just over 3% between 2014 and 2018.

By comparison, Oxfam observes, "Aber Christine, a flour vendor in Uganda, makes $80 a month and pays a tax rate of 40%."

The aid group's report makes clear that Musk is hardly alone among billionaires in reaping massive wealth gains—much of it unrealized stock appreciation—while paying little tax.

"Every billionaire is a policy failure," the report says. "The very existence of booming billionaires and record profits, while most people face austerity, rising poverty, and a cost-of-living crisis, is evidence of an economic system that fails to deliver for humanity. For too long, governments, international financial institutions, and elites have misled the world with a fictional story about trickle-down economics, in which low tax and high gains for a few would ultimately benefit us all. It is a story without any basis in truth."

It's unclear whether the Davos summit—dominated by individuals and corporations committed to preserving and growing their wealth—will feature discussion of anything close to the tax policy that Oxfam recommends. Specifically, the group calls on policymakers to "permanently increase taxes on the richest 1%... to a minimum of 60% of their income from both labor and capital, with higher rates for multi-millionaires and billionaires."

Oxfam also urges governments to "tax the wealth of the richest 1% at rates high enough to significantly reduce the numbers and wealth of the richest people, and redistribute these resources. This includes implementing inheritance, property, and land taxes, as well as net wealth taxes."

Taxation is not mentioned in an overview of the World Economic Forum's central topics.

In a statement, Bucher said that "taxing the super-rich and big corporations is the door out of today's overlapping crises."

"It's time we demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the richest result in their wealth somehow 'trickling down' to everyone else," said Bucher. "Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn't lift all ships—just the superyachts."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Freight trains running between Dandong, China, and Sinuiju, North Korea, operate every day except weekends, bringing loads of fake luxury items into the country, said a source in North Pyongan province, which lies across the Yalu River from China and is a major trade route between the two countries.

“Chanel brand bags, perfumes and alcoholic beverages are being imported in large quantities on Dandong-Sinuiju freight trains that are assigned to trading companies affiliated with the party,” the source said.

The brand-name goods – some genuine but mostly counterfeits – are sold at about 10 department stores in the North Korean capital, including the Pyongyang Department Store No.1, the Rakwon Department Store and the Kwangbok Department Store, sell foreign brand clothing, bags and cosmetics, including fake goods, they said. 

The stores offer products at market prices mainly in foreign currency, though some may be purchased for North Korean won.

The department stores are also importing large quantities of counterfeit goods to prepare for the suspension of trade with China for more than 15 days amid the Lunar New Year on Jan. 22, the source said.

The wealthy elite

The counterfeit brand-name goods cater to Pyongyang’s donju, or wealthy class who make up a sliver of the population, most of whom are quite poor. 

The donju have emerged over the past 20 years, becoming rich by playing roles in the creation of informal markets called jangmadang, which became part of the economy after the famine that hit North Korea in the 1990s. 

 The markets of varying sizes sell legitimate items, though prohibited transactions of goods, such as Chinese-made cell phones, and foreign currency, can occur in some places. North Korean authorities initially forbid jangmadang, but they gradually allowed the markets because they provided a means for people to survive.

The new rich accumulated wealth from rent on spaces used by merchants or by charging high-interest rate loans. Others have made money by loaning authorities money to build large apartments, who in turn give the lenders units as part of the repayment, which they then rent out.

They also linked up with trading companies operated by the government to get a cut of the proceeds or through smuggling goods from China.

“The department stores are trying to take advantage of the demand by the donju,” said the source, who declined to be named so as to speak freely.

“They intend to earn foreign currency by selling counterfeit goods such as branded clothing, bags, alcohol and cosmetics at high prices for New Year's Day and Lunar New Year’s Day,” he said.

The counterfeit products are being distributed through Pyongyang department stores after passing through the Uiju Quarantine Facility near North Korea’s northern border with China amid a recent increase in coronavirus cases in China, he said.

Mink coats

Mink coats imported by ship from China that have entered North Korea through the port in Nampo are being distributed to department stores in Pyongyang in the run-up to Jan. 1, said a trade official in the city, who declined to be identified so as to speak freely.

An important seaport in the isolated country, Nampo lies about 50 kilometers, or 31 miles, southwest of the capital city at the mouth of the Taedong River. 

“Imported mink coats entering department stores in Pyongyang bear the famous brand name ‘Hermes,’ but all are counterfeits made in China,” said the source.

Though local prices for coats are 200-500 yuan, or U.S.$29-72, depending on the type, department stores in the capital are selling the mink coats for more than U.S.$500, he said.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee and Leejin J. Chung for RFA Korean. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hyemin Son for RFA Korean.

But in reality the young people – mostly from poor families or those who grew up as orphans – are forced to do the grueling work to help shore up an economy battered by the pandemic and international sanctions for the country’s nuclear program.

“The truth is that the authorities are forcing them,” said a resident of Hoeryong in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong on condition of anonymity for fear of being punished. “There is no young person who would willingly volunteer to go to such a place.” 

And rich kids or those with political connections can get out of the hard labor, sources in North Korea told Radio Free Asia.

“The children of powerful and wealthy families have a way out. But children of powerless workers, and also orphans are sent to coal mines and rural areas,” a resident of Hamhung in the eastern province of South Hamgyong said on condition of anonymity.

The practice is not new. North Korea routinely forces citizens to provide free manual labor for government projects, farm work and industry, and lionizes them as volunteers sacrificing themselves for the country.

But over the past two years, the government has sent young workers to the mines and farms around seven or eight times. Estimates on numbers are virtually impossible to obtain, but they likely number in the thousands, sources say.

‘Volunteer lists’

The young dread seeing their names on so-called volunteer lists, the Hoeryong resident said.

“The Central Committee urges the province, and the province urges the city, and the city urges each factory and company to submit a new list of volunteers,” the source said.

Enterprise officials select workers who have no power to resist, who have no connections to officials or other powerful figures, he said. 

“Everyone knows that the mines and rural farms are the most difficult jobs. And people know that it is a place that everyone hates to go to, and once you go, you can’t get out,” he said.

Many of the graduates from local schools for orphans were “volunteered” over the past two years, the Hamhung source said.  

“Most of the 70 or 80 orphan students who graduated this year and last year were placed in work groups bound for those difficult areas,” the source from Hamhung said, adding that this month more than 100 young people from all over the province were sent to work in a power station, a livestock farm, and a goat ranch.

“They say these young people volunteered but, in fact, they were forcibly sent away,” he said.

Last April, representatives from the Socialist Patriotic Youth League, the country’s main youth organization modeled after the Soviet-era Komsomol, traveled to every school, factory, and enterprise to force the young workers to sign a petition stating that they volunteered to be sent to work anywhere the party needs them, according to the source.

“Who could refuse to sign in a situation like this?” the source said. “Occasionally, when signers refuse to go to a coal mine or other hard labor, the authorities retort with questions like, ‘Didn’t you already sign the volunteer petition?’ or ‘Are you against the will of the party?’”

Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chang Gyu Ahn for RFA Korean.

The post Elite Lapdogs Always Welcome in the Corporate Media appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nolan Higdon.

The return of Chris Cuomo to television is the latest reminder that there is little accountability to speak of in corporate news media. Chris was ousted at CNN in late 2021 amidst an ethics investigation that claimed he utilized his position at the cable news juggernaut to consult his brother, then governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo. At the time, the governor was facing a series of sexual misconduct allegations. Chris was using his professional connections to identify what reporters knew about the allegations, and then using that information to consult Andrew on how to respond, all while hosting Andrew on his daily CNN program. In July 2022, Cuomo returned to television to promote his podcast The Chris Cuomo Project. Cuomo appeared on Dan Abrams show on NewsNation (where Cuomo recently secured a position and I have served as an expert guest) and Real Time with Bill Maher.

Cuomo’s appearances – both of which were with close friends, Maher and Abrams – were clearly an attempt to rebrand himself from unethical propagandist to fearless journalist. Cuomo explained that he was an optimistic person who was not bitter about what had happened at CNN. Looking back on his departure from CNN he said “I feel like I lost a sense of purpose for a while because of how things ended.” Cuomo’s recollection concealed that he was clearly bitter, so much so that he threatened a lawsuit against CNN and demanded $125 million in restitution for the damages to his reputation. 

Nonetheless, Cuomo claimed that he wanted to serve the American people with his podcast and broadcast program by breaking the hyper-partisan frame used in most reporting. This is rich coming from someone whose success is owed to a CNN program that preached to the Democratic Party choir by ritually lampooning Trump.

Chris also took the opportunity to rewrite the historical record on what happened at CNN. Chris’ version of events is that he used his professional contacts to consult his brother, it was unethical, but anybody would do the same for their family. Fair enough, but still unethical, and that is not the entire story. He also utilized his platform – with the approval of CNN leadership – to effectively campaign for his brother. Andrew appeared frequently on Chris’ show where they performed lighthearted sketches that humanized Andrew, such as debating who their mother loved more or Chris bringing in a giant Q-tip as a prop to mock the size of his brother’s nose. This fed into media narratives at the time that claimed that Andrew was “America’s governor” during the COVID-19 pandemic and a potential presidential contender in 2020.

The jovial segments were propaganda, distracting from the corruption of Andrew Cuomo’s reign as governor. At the time, Andrew was forcing nursing homes to take COVID-19 patients when hospitals were full. This raised the chances of spreading the virus to the most vulnerable – older and sick people. Moreover, Andrew was concealing from the public the actual number of deaths that this policy caused. To make matters worse, Andrew granted immunity to nursing homes – known as a liability shield – for their mismanagement of care after they donated to his campaign. The cute segments with his brother concealed the deadly crisis Andrew’s corruption had wrought on New York’s most vulnerable citizens. In addition to re-writing history about the impact of his CNN reporting, Chris failed to report that CNN fired him, in part, due to his sexual misconduct.

Sadly, Chris Cuomo’s return to news media after being exposed as a propagandist does not make him an outlier. For example, Judith Miller was rewarded for lying to New York Times readers to garner support the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq with a job at Fox News Channel. Brian Williams, who manufactured stories of being shot down in a helicopter in a war zone, was given a brief respite before returning to MSNBC. Similarly, Bill O’Reilly remained at Fox News Channel after falsely claiming he was an earwitness to the gunshot suicide of Lee Harvey Oswald associate, George de Mohrenschildt. Rachel Maddow was rewarded with a $30 million annual contract from MSNBC after fear mongering about Russia, often baselessly for years, known as Russiagate. Even those who made a career out of lying in government are often welcomed guests in corporate media: Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame (Fox News Channel), and Karl Rove who perpetuated the Weapons of Mass Destruction lie (Fox News Channel).

Audiences lack of faith in news media has not been lost on the industry. Case in point, in an effort to address the credibility gap in news media, the New York Times ran a July 2022 series titled “I Was Wrong About” which actually underscored rather than addressed the problem. The series saw opinion writers admit they had been wrong about somethings. Paul Krugman apologized for his work on inflation. Michelle Goldberg did the same about Al Franken, David Brooks on Capitalism, Zeynep Tufekci wrote about The Power of Protest, Farhad Manjoo wrote about Facebook, and Gail Collins wrote about Mitt Romney.

Rather than restore faith in legacy media, the articles reveal the ways in which dominant legacy media manufacture consent of the public for elite opinion, even when it is baseless. For example, Bret Stephens professed that his sin was chiding Trump supporters rather than understanding the disruption to their communities. In the article he admits that his judgment was clouded by the groundless claims regarding Russiagate. While it is great that someone in dominant legacy media admits that the Russia fear mongering was overblown, it does nothing to repair the careers of those who were shunned for holding the same opinion four years earlier. Nor does it alleviate the fact that four years of Russia fear mongering distracted from other stories – including substantive ones regarding corruption in the Trump administration. Worse, Stephens‘ atonement does not change the fact that baseless Russian conspiracies remain acceptable and digestible excuses to dismiss and marginalize pundits and policy makers from the left and the right of the ideological spectrum.

In terms of manufacturing consent for elite opinion, Stephens cannot hold a candle to Thomas Friedman. With four decade’s worth of options, one has to wonder how Friedman chose only one topic for the “I Was Wrong About” series. He has been wrong about so many issues from domestic policy to education to the international economy. In 2000, he incorrectly proclaimed that Colin Powell would not be challenged or overruled in the George W. Bush Administration. In 2001, he encouraged readers to “keep rootin’ for Putin” because he would lead Russia to be a democracy and U.S. ally. Within the first months of the Afghanistan invasion, Friedman told readers that “America has won the war in Afghanistan,” “the Taliban are gone,” and the talk of civilian casualties was nonsense. Discussing what Friedman has been wrong about is more of a dissertation topic than an op-ed.

In his article for the “I Was Wrong About” series, Friedman admitted that he was too optimistic in believing that China would become a free and open society once they adopted the free market and global trade. Friedman’s article was not exactly revelatory as others in news media had noted previously that he was wrong on the issue of China. Regardless, Friedman’s articles primed readers to accept free trade and other global policies that not only failed to deliver a more democratized world as promised – indeed democracy is threatened around the globe – it also did not improve and in some cases worsened economic conditions for the majority of U.S. citizens. Rather than hold writers like Friedman accountable for the damage caused by misleading the public to adopt elite opinion, they are lauded for admitting they were wrong. 

These articles and Cuomo’s homecoming illustrate that corporate media personalities are not accountable to the public. They are accountable to the elites they serve. It is elites, not the public, who can provide them with a privileged platform and improved material conditions regardless of the magnitude or frequency of their errors, corruption, or ineptitude. To be clear, errors in journalism are expected and that is why corrections are a standard part of reporting. However, errors should only be excused when the circumstances mislead the reporter, not when the reporter misleads the people, gets caught, and feigns surprise. This is what happened to Chris Cuomo. Cuomo was not ousted for temporary lapse in judgment or an error that any rational person would make. He was ousted for abusing his privilege and position to serve elite interests. That does not make him a reputable media figure in the tradition of respectable journalism, but it does make him a quintessential prototype for corporate media.

The post Elite Lapdogs Always Welcome in the Corporate Media appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

Noam Chomsky's opening remarks to the World Social Forum, April 29, 2022: 

For 20 years, the motto of the world social forum has been another world is possible… As we meet today that question is overshadowed by another one. Is this world possible? And the answer is "no." This world is not possible. This world is hurdling to self-annihilation. And only the creation of another world can reverse this course. Luckily, another world is still possible, though the chances of achieving it are diminishing at an ominous rate.

The fate of humanity is at a crossroads. Humanity is confronted with two imminent existential crises: climate catastrophe and nuclear war. The corporate capitalist system is producing an assault on the earth's ecology, perpetual war, ever-widening inequality, an attack on democracy, and a rise in fascism. If humanity does not address these crises NOW, human civilization is unlikely to survive for future generations.

To save the future, the People of the world must defeat a capitalist ruling class led by the United States which is hell-bent on destroying the Earth.

Capitalism is complex and produces a multitude of oppressions. There are thousands of liberatory organizations working on important issues. But we cannot assume these projects are going to organically coalesce into a whole capable of taking power from greed-driven corporate capitalists. In the face of these existential crises, our time for "organizing the organized" is short.

The fundamental question facing humanity is: "how can ordinary working people organize on the mass scale necessary to contest for power with the corporate capitalist elite and force the change needed to save the future?"

This essay is a beginning attempt to answer the question with a focus on organizing in the U.S.  In addition, it is a call for a "Left" dialog regarding the "organization-to-scale question."  We need to imagine the mass organizing institutions needed both nationally and internationally for working people to contest for power.  

Corporate Capitalism, The Existential Threats, and the Common-Sense Solutions Not Taken… Yet

Global corporate capitalism led by the hegemonic state, the United States, is a fundamentally immoral and irrational system.  In capitalism, both states and corporations are designed to maximize short-term power and profits for the super-wealthy corporate elite.  The ideology assumes the benefits will trickle down to working people.  In practice, capitalism prioritizes short-term profits for the wealthy over the well-being of the people and even the survival of the human species.  In all realms of society, corporate capitalism is unable to take common-sense actions to prevent predictable crises when doing so undermines short-term power and profits (e.g., fortifying the sea wall in New Orleans to prevent flooding when hurricanes hit, regulating factory meat production to prevent the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, organizing a strong global public health system to prevent pandemics, outlawing automatic and semiautomatic guns to prevent massacres, eliminating debt-driven speculation that has repeatedly crashed the global economy, using diplomacy to prevent foreseeable wars).  Likewise, the apocalyptic threats of climate catastrophe and nuclear war are worsening, and capitalism is not taking the bold action necessary to stop humanity's march towards species self-annihilation.

Global warming is destroying the capacity of the earth to support humans and other life.  Distinguished climate scientist James Hansen recently summarized the science from an expert report he had prepared for the court case Juliana v. United States, in which a group of young plaintiffs sued the government for not protecting their right to a livable future.  Man-made greenhouse gasses, mostly CO2, are trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere at an accelerating rate.  A 2022 report by United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated that humanity must take swift action.  To limit global temperature rise to 2°C (3.6°F), global greenhouse emissions must start declining before 2025.  The longer humanity delays decisive action, the greater the risk that progressive climate warming will become irreversible.  There are almost daily reports of dramatic changes in the earth's environment indicating that the climate catastrophe is accelerating now.    

The possibility of an omnicide nuclear war has also been increasing.  There are currently nine countries with nuclear weapons.  The launch of one nuclear weapon can trigger a series of retaliations resulting in a global nuclear holocaust.  Over the last 70 years, there have been multiple close calls, in which the decision of one person averted nuclear war.   With both Democratic and Republican support, the United States has committed to modernizing its nuclear weapons arsenal triggering a new global nuclear arms race.  At the start of 2022 before the Ukraine War, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which maintains the "Doomsday Clock," warned, "the Clock remains the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse because the world remains stuck in an extremely dangerous moment." Moreover, the current proxy war between the United States and Russia greatly increases the likelihood of the accidental or purposeful use of nuclear weapons.  A nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia would end human civilization.  Undoubtedly, the doomsday clock will tick closer to "midnight" in 2023.    

The good news is humanity can prevent these crises and in doing so create a more democratic, loving, caring, and sustainable society.  IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee reported "We are at a crossroads.  The decisions we make now can secure a livable future.  We have the tools and know-how required to limit warming."

The solution to the climate catastrophe is a government-led third industrial revolution that quickly transitions the oil, gas, and coal-powered economy to a solar and wind-powered economy.  The principal technological challenges to implementing a global Green New Deal (GND) are (1) building the solar and wind energy generation capacity to power society, (2) creating a digital energy grid for managing intermittent energy across the system, (3) upgrading buildings, transportation, and other infrastructure to support and be compatible with the new green energy system, and (4) dismantle the old oil, gas and coal industries while safeguarding a just transition for workers in those industries.  The GND is potentially the basis for a high-wage full-employment economy empowering workers for decades to come.  Many authors have described the possible nuts-and-bolts implementation of the GND.

The solution to preventing a nuclear war omnicide is developing international peace agreements and institutions for implementing the agreements based on the concept of common security, "the idea that nations and populations can only feel safe when their counterparts feel safe." The ultimate goal is nuclear disarmament.  International peace groups have recently released a Common Security 2022 Report which details many common-sense steps that can be taken to achieve common security.  During the Cold War, pressure from the international peace movement pushed the U.S. and U.S.S.R. to negotiate a series of nuclear arms control treaties that reduced the risk of nuclear war.  Part of the context of the build-up to the current war in Ukraine was the U.S. unilaterally withdrawing from several of these nuclear arms control treaties.  Possibly, the war in Ukraine could have been averted if the U.S. and E.U. would have been willing to reach a negotiated settlement that took into consideration Russia's security concerns.

The Attack on Democracy and the Politics of Inaction

Despite the available common-sense solutions, politicians and corporate elites are not taking the necessary steps to avert catastrophe.  The United States, the dominant nation-state in the world system, is leading humanity down a path of self-destruction.  The two-party political system in the U.S. is controlled by a very rich corporate capitalist ruling class.  The ruling class, in particular factions associated with the fossil fuel, military, and financial industries, oppose addressing the climate and nuclear war crises because it would undermine their wealth and power and possibly the dominant position of the U.S. in the global capitalist system.

At this historical moment, the Republican Party's top concern is its own perceived existential threat.  The demographics of the U.S. are changing.  Republican strongholds such as Georgia and Texas are hitting the tipping point in which Whites are no longer the majority.  The Republicans fear that their coalition of the rich, White Christian nationalists, and White populists is not large enough to maintain their power democratically.  Consequently, they are committed to dismantling democracy and institutionalizing a form of minority rule.  The January 6, 2021 coup attempt was just the most dramatic manifestation of a party-wide commitment to ending democracy in the U.S.

As described by voting rights reporter Ari Berman in Mother Jones, since 2020, the Republicans have been implementing a "slow coup."  Emboldened by the ultra conservative supreme court which declared political gerrymandering legal, in Republican-controlled states, the Republicans are creating the legal foundations for a "New Jim Crow" minority rule with four primary strategies: allowing the rich and corporations to spend unlimited money in elections literally buying politicians, extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression laws making it more difficult for people of color and other disenfranchised groups to vote and ensuring that election counts are under the administration of Republican-appointed election officials.  With a rigged electoral system and control over the Supreme Court for at least the next several decades, Republicans are emboldened to remake the U.S. in their image.  The repeal of Roe v. Wade is just a step towards their goal to dismantle human and civil rights. A series of supreme court rulings over the last decade has been building the legal foundation for authoritarian rule in the U.S.   

To many Democrats, the Republicans appear crazy and disconnected from reality.  QAnon, Stop-the-Steal, Anti-Masks, Anti-Vaccinations, and White Supremacist History Denial are all obviously factually wrong.  Even crazier, the Republican anti-public health stance seems self-defeating, causing tens of thousands of deaths among Republicans.

However, the Republican culture of crazy is a political choice.  It immunizes Republican opinion from counterfactual information and creates a narrative in which the Republicans, specifically White people, are the defensive victims.  It is an ideological framework that energizes high citizen engagement and justifies radical action, including violence.  

Tragically, the Democratic Party is not a clear alternative to the Republican Party for promoting multicultural multiracial working-class interests, defending democracy, or protecting the Earth.  The Democratic Party coalition is made up of Silicon Valley and Wall Street elite, the suburban professional-managerial class (white-collar workers), and a multicultural working-class base.  The essential contradiction of the Democratic Party is that the rich fund and run the party while its voting base is the multicultural working class.  Thus, the common dynamic in the Democratic Party is that the progressive wing pushes for legislation to empower the working class while the corporate wing cooperates with Republicans to stop reform.  Gridlock prevails, frustrating working-class voters.

This dynamic has played out again under the Biden administration.  When Biden was elected, there was hope his administration would address working-class priorities.  Senators Manchin and Sinema refused to overturn the Senate filibuster to pass the Build Back Better bill.  Working people would have benefited from Build Back Better in many ways. The bill created over 7 million jobs over 10 years, funded free pre-school for children and free community college, expanded Medicare and Medicaid, lowered prescription drugs costs, made child tax credits permanent, created 12 weeks of paid family leave, invested in affordable housing, and gave incentives for buying electric cars and other climate initiatives.  Without the passage of Build Back Better, at the end of 2021, a pandemic child tax credit that was giving 35 million families 250 to 300 a month expired. 

Regarding inflation, according to progressive economist Robert Pollin, the Federal Reserve's recent interest rate hike is another example of government policy that prioritizes the interests of the rich over the working class.  The FED interest rate hike is designed to increase the unemployment rate which will decrease workers' bargaining power and thus lower worker wages.  This policy undermines labor organizing and increases the likelihood of a recession.  It also does not address corporate causes of the inflation including disruptions in poorly planned supply chains and monopoly price-gauging, particularly by oil companies.  

The corporate Democrats are not organizing a serious fight back against the Republican attack on disenfranchised groups and democracy.  A Republican senate filibuster killed two voting rights bills.  Many voter rights advocates have expressed frustration with the Biden Administration's refusal to forcefully lead on the defense of voting rights.  Again, the problem is that robust voting rights would empower the multiracial working-class majority, thus threatening the interests of the corporate elite in the Democratic Party.  The corporate Democratic elite cannot create the political condition in which voters could actually demand that the Democrats deliver on policies that are highly popular among its base (e.g., universal healthcare, 15-dollar minimum wage, voter rights, the right to unionize, finance regulation) because those policies are opposed by their rich donors. Even on core values such as the right to an abortion, corporate Democrats have a long history of prioritizing collegial cooperation with Republicans over fighting for fundamental rights. 

The corporate Democratic elite view Bernie Sanders' attempt to unify the party based on a multiracial working-class agenda as an existential threat to their power.  In the 2022 primaries, corporate Democrats and Republican political action committees have worked hard to defeat progressive candidates.

As an alternative to class politics, corporate Democrats have promoted a unifying Cold War-like narrative demonizing Russia, glorifying militarism, and "defending democracy" (U.S.  hegemony) globally.  The corporate Democrats believe they are more responsible stewards of the global capitalist system than Trump.  From their perspective, this is evident in their willingness to "stand up to Russia." Demonstrating this "resolve," the Biden administration refused to negotiate regarding the possibility of Ukrainian neutrality in the lead-up to the Ukraine War.  We don't know if a settlement could have been reached, however, a diplomatic effort that addressed Russia's primary security concern was not even tried.

The Ukraine War is a disaster for global peace and security, and U.S. democracy.  With high-minded moralistic and triumphalist rhetoric, the Biden administration has transformed the conflict into a proxy war with the goal of regime change in Russia.  Pursuing a war to defeat Russia creates the situation in which nuclear weapons are most likely to be used thereby ending human civilization.  The Democratic Party is transmuting itself into the War Party and the war is making the day-to-day stress of working people of all races and nationalities worse in the midst of a pandemic.  A quagmire war in Ukraine increases the likelihood that the Republicans will win the elections in both 2022 and 2024.

In sum, the two-party system functions as a racist divide-and-conquer strategy that breeds conflict, anger, cynicism, and alienation.  Because neither party clearly represents the multicultural multiracial working class's interests, politics is dominated by the Republican "cultural war," scapegoating people of color, immigrants, the LBGTQ community, and women.  Many working people never see their interests represented in the system and stop voting and participating in politics.  Over the last 40 years, the country has moved rightward. 

In a speech given in 2018, Angela Davis reminded us that an alternative politic centered in the common interests of the multicultural multiracial working class is possible.  She stated:

Feminist theories and organizing approaches have helped us understand the deep connections that link… struggles.  Given the demagoguery emanating from our current government and the explicit exploitation of racism and xenophobia to persuade poor, working-class white populations that their interests call for an attack on racialized communities.  It is important to point out that the suffering of poor, White, and working-class communities has been caused pretty much by the same economic phenomena that are responsible for the rise of mass incarceration, the prison industrial complex, and for the reasons that lead people from Central America, Mexico, elsewhere in the global south to migrate to other countries.

Toward A Multicultural Multiracial Working Class United Progressive Front and the Campaign to Save the Future

This moment demands the formation of a United Progressive Front (UPF), a unified coalition of progressive civic, human rights, and labor groups, independent of the Democratic Party to launch a Campaign to Save the Future.  Both the Republicans and the Democratic Party are pushing the world towards self-annihilation.   Only a movement organized in a mass democratic institution committed to representing the interests of the super-majority multicultural multiracial working class can inspire the hope, participation, discipline, and solidarity necessary to force system change now.

The great challenge the "Left" must take on is to develop a mass unifying social change strategy in the context of the sclerotic two-party system designed to preserve capitalist power and prevent social change.  Historically, the U.S. Left has failed this task.  It is this generation's historical mission to try again… and succeed.  As Marx wrote, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."

The 2022 and 2024 elections are incredibly important.  Without a massive Democrat turnout to stop the Republicans in 2022 and 2024, the Republicans will further rig elections and solidify their domination of government for at least a generation.  With Republicans in power, humanity has little hope of stopping the climate catastrophe.  In early primaries, Republicans are turning out at a higher rate than Democrats.

In the short run, the UPF must focus on organizing the mass voter turnout necessary to defeat the Republicans.  People will act if they understand the stakes in 2022 and 2024 and if they believe the multiracial working class has the mass institutional capacity and solidarity necessary to be effective.  In 2020, many voters said, "I like Bernie's ideas, but I don't think he can win." What they were saying is "I don't think the multiracial working class has the institutional capacity and solidarity necessary to battle capital." Mass action and a common political agenda inspire hope and participation.  For example, millions of people acted in the Black Lives Matters protests.  We need to institutionalize that spirit, so "the People" can act in unison day in and day out.  Everyone must understand that mass voting is a necessary but not sufficient tactic for defending democracy and saving the world.  The multiracial working class is the majority.  If we vote en masse, we win.

The UPF will need to democratically decide on clear demands, a media campaign, a get-out-the-vote campaign, and a street-mobilization strategy.  Clear demands will put pressure on both the Democratic and Republican parties.  For example, the UPF can have mass rallies demanding that the government and FED maintain a full-employment economy and fight inflation by stopping monopoly price gouging.  

There needs to be a clarion call to action. The UPF will need to create a detailed plan for coordinating on-the-ground organizing in urban, suburban, and rural working-class neighborhoods.  Coalition partners should reach out personally to activists who participated in Black Lives Matter protests and the Bernie and Warren campaigns but who stopped participating in activism during the pandemic.  Coalition partners should ask them to get active again and help lead the UPF.  The alternative media will have to report daily on the Campaign to Save the Future as relentlessly as the Right trumpets "Stop the Steal." There are already many local grassroots groups working on getting out the vote for 2022.  There needs to be a common website to go to where activists can figure out how they can plug into campaigns and the get-out-the-vote effort. In sum, the goal is to create an institutional home for a self-conscience multiracial working class to come together and organize as a democratic mass movement.  A unified competent organization will inspire hope and participation.    

As a mass multiracial working-class voting block independent from the Democratic Party with a street presence, the coalition will have the power to pressure the Democratic Party to address core working-class demands.  If the multiracial working class regularly voted en masse, it would dramatically change U.S. politics.  In 2016, "unmarried women, Millennials (aged 18–34), African Americans, Latinos, and all other people of color" represented 59.2 percent of the eligible voting population." In 2004, it was 44.6%.  A study of the 2016 presidential election by the Poor People's Campaign found that if the low-income population voted at the same rate as the high-income population and they voted against the winning party, they could have flipped the winner in 15 states.

I hope the UPF will also demand that the U.S. negotiate directly with Russia to end the Ukraine War.  Wars end either in negotiated settlements or the complete defeat of one side.  The current Biden policy of pushing for the defeat of Russia increases the likelihood of a nuclear war, a long quagmire war, and exponentially more death and destruction in Ukraine.  To resolve the climate/nuclear war crisis, the U.S. needs a new foreign policy based on diplomacy and compromise, not global military hegemony.

Some will argue that it is useless to organize for the election because the Democrats are not much better than the Republicans or the Left should focus on labor instead of electoral organizing.  There is some truth in these arguments.  However, we need to organize in the world as it is.  There is no possibility that the Republicans will ever address the climate/nuclear war crises.  The Republicans are fundamentally committed to climate change denial, militarism, racism, attacking immigrants, and replacing democracy with authoritarian rule. Also, it is difficult to imagine how organized labor can make gains under a Republican administration.  Historically, mass people's movements have been able to pressure the Democrats to pass some progressive policies.  

In the two-party system, the multicultural working class has two main enemies, the corporate Democrats and the corporate Republicans.  The Left does not have the power to beat them at the same time.  The strategy implemented by Sanders and the Squad is to take the corporate Democrats on in the primaries and the Republicans in the general election.  It means making defensive votes (voting for the lesser of two evils) when an offensive vote option (voting for candidates that you really want) is not available.  It is harder to motivate people to vote in defensive elections.  Working people are more likely to turn out for every election if they understand that mass voting is part of the UPF's long-term strategy for contesting for power with the capitalist class.  In the long run, if the UPF can organize a super-majority multiracial working class voting bloc, it can then decide whether the best strategy is to take over the Democratic Party or form a third party.   

Building the Institutional Capacity and Solidarity Necessary to Save the Future

The first step to a collective agreement to form the UPF is collective acceptance of the fact that as currently organized, the Left cannot build the power necessary to avert the climate catastrophe/nuclear war crises.  Historically, the Left in the U.S. is fractured.  We have thousands of organizations working on many important issues.  But we have never had an umbrella coalition or institution to form a united multicultural working-class identity grounded in a common political project.

There is no workers' party in the U.S. due to both repression and the straight jacket of the two-party system.  The good cop, bad cop winner-take-all system prevents the development of a mass third party.  In parliamentary systems with proportional representations, third parties can grow organically over years accumulating power from election to election.  In a two-party system, even a tiny third party can act as a spoiler taking enough votes from the lesser evil party to give elections to the more evil party.  Most voters do not want to gamble on a third party.

On the Left, there is a practical comfort with fragmentation.  It is easy to default to an ethos of "Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom." There are many types of oppression.  It makes sense for an activist to focus on issues that hit "closest to home."  Activism and democracy are hard, even in small groups of like-minded people.  Developing a uniting political project is fraught with difficulty.  There will be conflict.  Working through it and staying united will be challenging.

Yet, over the last 10 years, there has been a palpable yearning for a common political project of a united multicultural working class.  The Occupy Wall Street slogan was, "We are the 99%."  The 2016 and 2020 Sanders presidential campaigns and 2020 Warren campaign were exciting because they contested for multiracial working-class power at the national level.  Millions of people donated to and joined the campaigns.  After 2016, motivated by Bernie Sanders' success in the primary and the threat of Trump, there was an upsurge in Left organizing in the U.S.  New national groups such as Indivisible, Our Revolution, and Justice Democrats formed and established groups such as Democratic Socialists of America and Working Families Party grew and became more active.  In the wake of the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, Black Lives Matter organized the largest street mobilization in U.S. history.  One study found that the Black Lives Matter, labor, and other protests played a role in motivating people to vote for Biden in 2020.

Historically, there are many examples of the Left's fractured organizational structure limiting its ability to contest for power and win.  The 2020 Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren primary campaigns never united.  The corporate Democrats united behind Biden and won.  After the election of Biden in 2020, the Left did not organize an independent mass mobilization to demand the multiracial working-class agenda (e.g., the Green New Deal, voter rights, Protecting the Right to Organize Act, student debt relief, a $15 minimum wage, Medicare for All, etc.) Instead, progressive groups deferred to the Democratic Party's inside-Washington DC deal-making political strategy.  No long-standing multiracial working-class priorities passed.  The activist base was demoralized or turned their attention to local struggles.

Hopefully, the UPF coalition can evolve into a permanent uniting organization, a proto-party.  In an essay entitled "A Blueprint for a New Party," Seth Ackerman presented a strategy for building a nationwide multicultural working-class proto-party.  He discussed the long history of the Left's inability to organize a uniting institution in the two-party system.  He argued that a new party could incorporate as a social welfare organization, a 501(c)(4), democratically adopt a platform, and then make case-by-case decisions about running candidates in a major party primary or as an independent.  Adopting this strategy, the new party could minimize the possibility that their candidates would be "spoilers."

A new proto-party would give the united multiracial working class an institutional home that could take on the crises of climate catastrophe, nuclear war, and democracy head-on.   It could operate independently of the Democratic Party and compete for power in the Democratic Party.  It would give working people a democratic forum to work through differences and craft a united political strategy distinct from the corporate agenda.  The proto-party could do both grassroots and electoral organizing and have a street presence.  If millions of working people joined the party, it could raise the big money necessary to compete in politics in the U.S.  Moreover, it could hire hundreds of organizers to build on-the-ground solidarity and action.

There will be many challenges.  The proto-party will have to address the current "race vs. class" debate on the Left.  The corporate capitalist elite use racism to "divide us against each other."  A divided multiracial working class cannot contest the capitalist elite's monopoly on both business and political power which subordinates all working people, Black, Brown, and White.  The party will have to develop an independent foreign policy and take on U.S. militarism and imperialism.  The people cannot be free or safe at home if the U.S. spends trillions of dollars trying to rule the rest of the world with coercion and violence.  The party will have to organize with activist groups globally to forge a new people's international and devise global actions to pressure capital to save the future (e.g., international boycotts or strikes targeting the U.S.).  Globally, the people must demand that climate catastrophe, war, and inequality end now.

To Have a Future, We Must Organize to Scale and Claim the Future

To save the future, the People of the world must defeat a capitalist ruling class led by the United States which is hell-bent on destroying the Earth. Unfortunately, this is not hyperbole. In the U.S. that means organizing the multiracial working-class unity necessary to stop the authoritarian Republican Party from taking power and killing democracy, and an imperialist Democratic Party which is prioritizing U.S. global hegemony and militarism over saving democracy and the planet.

I will end with an example of an on-the-ground call for unity.  In 2022, dark money political action committees such as a PAC tied to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have spent historic amounts of money to defeat progressive candidates in competitive Democratic primaries.  For example, in Pennsylvania Congressional District 12, PACs spent over 3 million dollars in a failed attempt to defeat progressive candidate, Summer Lee.  Lee won by less than a percentage point.  Summing up lessons learned from the campaign, in an episode of the podcast Bloc Party (5/24/2022), Justice Democrat Campaign Director Geoff Simpson stated,

The biggest lesson we can take away from this is there is very little margin for error if we are going to get millions of dollars spent against us on the Left.  And it took the whole Left throwing down for Summer in order to get her across the line… That is what it is going to take in future races all of us working together to defeat the other side that has an endless bank account.  They can spend unlimited amounts of money… On what can we do better?...  The Left … needs to commit earlier in races.  Early money is worth so much more than getting money in the last two weeks.  It allows you to build campaign infrastructure.  It allows you to plan out how you are going to spend those dollars talking to voters across the different mediums that are available.  We need the Left to get in sooner on races and invest early and that is going to make us more successful at the end of the race…

Facing our current reality is terrifying. It is understandable that as individuals and communities we struggle with isolation and hopelessness and focus on day-to-day survival and distractions to get by. After two and half years of the pandemic and a criminally negligent corporate and government response, people feel disheartened and alienated. 

But our private lives are not a respite from reality. We are living through a pivotal moment in human history.  We are responsible to our children's children's children to organize a united liberation movement despite the odds. The antidote for our collective existential fear is a mass unified organizational plan to defend democracy and to force the implementation of known technical solutions to the climate and nuclear war catastrophes.  Victory will be found in mass institutionalized solidarity.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by John Lawrence.

Beginning on May 24, the World Economic Forum is gathering in Davos, Switzerland for an in-person meeting, discussing the global tax system and financial inclusion. Thanks to protests and new research, however, participants will not be able to avoid the elephant in the room: the surging inequality of wealth during the pandemic.

National governments should levy both windfall wealth taxes and annual wealth taxes to ensure the wealthy pay their fair share and that societies are able to make urgent investments in health and social protection.

As the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Inequality.org have documented over the last two years of a global pandemic, billionaire assets have surged while millions lost their lives and livelihoods.

A new report from Oxfam dramatizes how hundreds of millions of people around the world have slid further into poverty during this time period. In a detailed examination of the food and agriculture industry, Oxfam found that billionaires in that industry saw their wealth increase by $382 billion during the pandemic. An emergency windfall tax on their wealth increase alone (to say nothing of their pre-pandemic billions) could end world hunger and double the incomes of 545 million small-scale farmers.

In January, an analysis by the Fight Inequality Alliance, Institute for Policy Studies, Oxfam, and the Patriotic Millionaires found that an annual wealth tax starting at just 2 percent for those with more than $5 million, 3 percent for those with over $50 million, and up to 5 percent for billionaires could generate upwards of $2.52 trillion a year. That's enough to lift 2.3 billion people out of poverty, fund vaccines for everyone in the world, and deliver universal healthcare and social protections for all the citizens of low-and lower-middle-income countries.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Chuck Collins.

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