Image by Chris Yang.

The New York Times posted a long editorial last week to make the case against choosing Bill Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence.  That was not a difficult case to make, but it didn’t question whether we should even have an Office of National Intelligence.  The answer to that particular issue requires an understanding of why the intelligence failure of 9/11 took place and why the many investigations of the failure came up with the wrong answers.

There have been two major strategic intelligence failures over the past 85 years—Pearl Harbor and 9/11.  In each case, nearly three thousand lives were lost because of the intelligence failures that accompanied Pearl Harbor and 9/11.  In both cases, there was sufficient intelligence available to prevent—or at least mollify—the attacks.  In both cases, the intelligence analysis was unimaginative, divided, and diffuse.  The lack of intelligence sharing was central to the failure at Pearl Harbor, but the problem of sharing was exaggerated in the case of 9/11.

There was one major difference between Pearl Harbor and 9/11.  The surprise Japanese attack led to a major reform of the national security community in the form of the 1947 National Security Act, which created the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Sadly, all of these institutions have been politicized and weakened in the Trump era.

The Intelligence Reform Act of 2004, which followed 9/11, was totally inadequate to the task of reform, creating an intelligence tsar and centralizing intelligence analysis.  As a result, the White House and the Pentagon received enhanced roles in the structure of intelligence, making future intelligence failures and the politicization of intelligence more likely.  To make matters worse, the congressional oversight process has been broken, with little scrutiny of the intelligence community in the wake of the failures of 9/11 and the Iraq War.

Flawed assumptions and a lack of imagination accompanied the failures of Pearl Harbor and 9/11.  It was simply assumed that the Japanese lacked the moxie and the wherewithal to attack Pearl Harbor so far from Japanese waters and that the terrorist community would target vulnerable U.S. assets abroad and not the United States itself.  For years prior to 9/11, there was no cataloguing of information on weaponizing aircraft to be used against civilian targets, despite the intelligence on the Bojinka plot that outlined such targets as the Pentagon and CIA headquarters.  There was some concern at the CIA about possible attacks within the United States, but there was insufficient interest in the policy community.  The President’s Daily Brief never provided a strategic warning to the president.

The 9/11 Commission had a broad mandate for investigating the terrorist attacks, but provided little insight into the systemic problems within the intelligence community.  It focused on budgeting and funding, organizational problems, and structural issues within the community.  Less attention was given to the keys to the failure such as personal failure, accountability and bureaucratic cowardice.  The members of the Commission were primarily lawyers with little intelligence experience or insight.  They represented a balanced group of Democrats and Republicans who wanted to protect the blunders of the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, respectively.  As a result, their only “reform” was the creation of a new management structure under the Director of National Intelligence.

The staff director of the Commission, Philip Zelikow, had extremely close ties to the Bush administration.  He was politically, personally, and ideologically involved with many of the key individuals who should have been investigated.  The lack of interest within the Bush administration regarding domestic terrorism was insufficiently explored.  Even today, the Department of Homeland Security is politicizing the sources of domestic terrorism.

The Commission wanted a lean office of national intelligence, with a small but powerful staff.  Instead, the director of national intelligence has a huge budget with a large management staff that took too many officials from key intelligence agencies, thus weakening the overall intelligence apparatus.  The major task of the office of national intelligence should be making sure that an independent intelligence community tells truth to power.  Theoretically, the DNI was supposed to be able to shift resources as needs changed.  It was naive to think that office would ever have enough influence to move funds from one agency to another.

The centralized framework within the intelligence community weakens the importance of diversity and competition in the collection and analysis of intelligence.  Currently, we are operating with a system that is not sufficiently accountable and responsible.  To make matters worse, we are led by a president who has no interest in intelligence matters, which guarantees that the White House will not receive the alternative analysis and the contrarian views that are needed in dealing with threats to our security.

The post The Office of Director of National Intelligence Should Not Exist appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by David Vines.

When he ran for president in 2012, Mitt Romney famously declared that corporations are people. What brought laughter then has begun to be reality today, however. A little noticed court decision in Delaware confirmed that corporations have the right to vote in that state.

I wish this was a joke. But it’s not funny at all. Delaware corporations, however, won’t face the death penalty as Delaware abolished it more than a decade ago, so we won’t see a manifestation of one of the best signs at Occupy Wall Street: “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”

Business entities will be voting in local elections in Fenwick Island and a few other Delaware towns. This came to wider attention on May 26 when a Delaware Superior Court judge ruled that Fenwick Island allowing “artificial entities,” including corporations and limited liability companies, that own property in the town to vote in town elections is legal under state law. In handing down the decision in American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware vs. Town of Fenwick Island, Judge Craig A. Karsnitz wrote that the ACLU, which brought the lawsuit in conjunction with Fenwick residents, failed to find “clear and convincing evidence” that the plaintiffs overcame a presumption that what the Delaware Legislature enacts is constitutional. The judge did acknowledge there were concerns here, albeit dismissing them. He wrote:

“I appreciate that Plaintiff may disagree with Delaware’s policy of authorizing certain municipalities to allow voting on behalf of entity property owners., Visions of faceless large corporations or even HAL [the murderous computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey], controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction. However, Plaintiff has not demonstrated that this policy violates the policy of one person/entity/one vote. Plaintiff points to no other persuasive independent authority other than the Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution itself. And matters of policy are appropriately left to legislative bodies, not the courts.”

In other words, to put it in a somewhat less legalistic way: Tough cookies. The ACLU of Delaware had raised the claim — rather reasonably, all jokes aside — that allowing corporations to vote violated the principle of “one person, one vote” by diluting the votes of actual human beings. The ACLU noted that the number of corporate entities voting in 2024 was greater than the margin between the winner and the losing candidate with the most votes. The ACLU has already declared it will appeal to the Delaware Supreme Court, noting not only the precedent of allowing corporations to vote but the weakening of voting rights in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s gutting of the federal Voting Rights Act.

Thus far, this court decision only applies to local elections in Delaware towns that allow corporate voting. But could this be applied more broadly? Given the completely one-sided, pro-corporate political preferences of the U.S. Supreme Court’s far right majority and the all-out assault on anything with the potential to limit even slightly the pursuit of the highest possible profit by Corporate America, led by the Trump administration, feeling angry about this ruling is reasonable. It is possible the Delaware high court will reverse, but holding one’s breath here would not be prudent because Delaware has long been a corporate haven. And here we are not talking about a few out-of-towners owning a small business or vacation home but rather most of the country’s biggest corporate behemoths.

Delaware has long been the United States’ very own in-house corporate haven, a compliment to offshore tax havens such as the Cayman Islands. How much of a haven? Nearly two-thirds of the companies listed in the Fortune 500 — those are the 500 biggest in the U.S. — are incorporated in Delaware. So cozy are these that a two-story office building in Wilmington, the state’s biggest city, is the legal address of 285,000 companies!

Yes, you read that number correctly. And not just small companies. Google, Apple, Walmart, American Airlines, J.P. Morgan Chase and Coca-Cola are among the corporations who use this building, the Corporation Trust Center at 1209 North Orange Street, as their legal address. These companies don’t actually do business at this location; it is essentially a mail drop-off point where lawsuits and legal documents are accepted. Interestingly, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have entities registered to them that are domiciled in the building.

An Atlas Obscura report clarifies that it is Delaware law, very friendly to corporate interests, that is the draw:

“What draws companies to the Corporation Trust Center is not its drab, yellow brick exterior, but rather the Delaware General Corporation Law (DGCL). … The DGCL allows businesses based in other states to file their taxes in Delaware, whose unusually low corporate tax rate saves major corporations billions in taxes. The DGCL is so lucrative for big business that over 300 of the Fortune 500 are incorporated in Delaware. It’s so corporate friendly, in fact, that every year, 15% of all public corporations in the United States use the exact same building as their tax haven.”

There are more than 2 million corporate entities incorporated in Delaware, a state with a population of about 1 million. Harvard Business Services notes several reasons for why corporations choose to incorporate in Delaware: No corporate income tax on out-of-state revenue, no state sales tax, no personal income tax for non-residents and no inheritance tax. Nor does a corporation have to list its owners. Beyond that, Delaware has a special court, the Court of Chancery, to adjudicate business disputes. Judges decide cases there, not juries, and corporate litigants can avoid the regular trial courts. “Delaware is widely recognized as a corporate-friendly jurisdiction,” Harvard Business Services says, and there’s no argument there. And the Legislature is accommodating, too; when the Delaware Supreme Court handed down a ruling that many wealthy investors did not like, legislators quickly rushed through a bill that gives more power to controlling shareholders and insiders over ordinary shareholders.

It’s not as if corporations are headed elsewhere; 79 percent of U.S.-based initial public offerings listed Delaware as their home in 2022 and 81 percent did so in 2024.

As friendly as Delaware is, it is by no means the most corporate-friendly jurisdiction. As an offshore tax haven, few can compete with the Cayman Islands. There is a building in the Cayman Islands, Ugland House, where nearly 19,000 corporations have “subsidiary” offices. The Cayman Islands has a corporate tax rate of zero, but does impose taxes on imports, which hits the local residents as almost everything has to be imported. By having a subsidiary there, profits can be shifted there as if they were “earned” there and thus no taxes need be paid. A report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group explained how this works:

“Ugland House is a modest five-story office building in the Cayman Islands, yet it is the registered address for 18,857 companies. … Simply by registering subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands, U.S. companies can use legal accounting gimmicks to make much of their U.S.-earned profits appear to be earned in the Caymans and pay no taxes on them. The vast majority of subsidiaries registered at Ugland House have no physical presence in the Caymans other than a post office box. About half of these companies have their billing address in the U.S., even while they are officially registered in the Caymans.”

Tens of billions dollars per year are lost to the U.S. treasury through use of these tax-dodging gimmicks. But, so far, multinational corporations don’t have votes. Of course, it could be pointed out that giant U.S. corporations don’t need to vote, given their vast resources, control of mass communication outlets, ability to hand large sums of money to public office holders and continual threats to move somewhere else, taking jobs with them, are more than sufficient to give them domination over the economy and political processes. But there’s that thought that doesn’t go away: Corporations are people. Mitt Romney isn’t the only person who thinks so. And that’s before we get to the likes of Elon Musk and other tech billionaires who would much prefer we do away with pesky elections and democracy altogether. Maybe someday only corporations will vote. Such a nightmarish fascist dystopia is not imminent, and won’t come to pass if there is enough organized pushback against the eroding of what democratic rights are left to us.

But if Delaware allowing corporate votes in local elections expands, and someday in the future corporations vote in state and national elections, how many votes would they get? Keep in mind how the corporate world values democracy in their internal board of directors elections: the more shares you own, the more votes you get. Will ExxonMobil get a few millions votes for president while we each get one? This sounds absurd now, but our corporate overlords, especially those from Silicon Valley, see democratic political systems as one more thing to break. Could the Delaware voting decision be a precedent? I’d like to say no, but taking that for granted might not be wise.

The post Delaware Says Corporations Really are People appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Matt Palmer.

What a planet! I only wish I could tell my grandfather about it. He arrived in this country, an immigrant from what’s now Ukraine, in March 1888 — or so his daughter, my Aunt Hilda, wrote me once upon a distant time. Here’s how she began that long-ago message to me: “Your grandfather, Moore Engelhardt, a boy of 16, arrived in New York from Europe in March 1888. It was during the famous blizzard, and after a sea voyage of about 30 days. He had no money. He often said that he had a German 50-cent piece in his pocket when he landed. His trip had to be in the cheapest part of the ship — way down below steerage. Poor boy, I’m sure he was seasick a good deal of the time. Since he was alone, he sort of attached himself to a family of a lot of children and, for the first few months in America, I imagine he slept behind the stove in somebody’s kitchen.”

As a boy of 14, he had, my aunt reported, challenged the local rabbi where he lived to give him back some of the money his father had donated to the rabbi — money his mother had made and that they needed just to live. And when the rabbi refused, he evidently hit him and then ran away from home. The rest, as they say, is history.

I barely knew him. He died when I was about five years old and I have only the faintest memory of standing beside him, holding his hand, while he leaned on his cane. But in the end, he managed to turn that 50 cents into a business in Brooklyn, New York. He got clobbered in (but made it through) the Great Depression of the 1930s, and even built a couple of buildings in Brooklyn that he named after my dad and Hilda. Sometimes I wonder what he’d think about our strange Trumpian world today. After all, we’re on an increasingly disturbed planet, where, in some places, as the heat rises, the storms intensify, wildfires grow ever fiercer, sea levels rise, and… well, you get the idea… ever more people are finding that they simply can’t stay in their worlds anymore and migration of the sort my grandfather once engaged in is growing exponentially.

And President Donald J. Trump doesn’t like that one little bit. I have no doubt that, had he been president back in 1888, he would have wanted to chuck my grandpa, a wandering Jew from what’s now Ukraine, out on his ear.

And yet, you might also think of “our” president as a migration-causer extraordinaire. After all, whether he likes it or not, he is indeed the climate-change president. And give him credit, though he’s not the sun (not faintly), he certainly has proven himself distinctly capable of upping the heat in this world of ours exponentially and I don’t just mean by doing everything he can under the (yes!) sun to deny that climate change is even happening. Of course, he’s labelled it a “con job“ and claimed its potential threat to our health is a “scam.”

What he’s attempting to do on (and to) this planet of ours will, in the not-at-all-distant future, prove to be a disaster of an almost unimaginable sort — from trying to increase the use of coal, oil, and natural gas, to interfering in plans to use wind and solar power. In doing so, of course, he’s also turning our future over to that other great imperial power of the moment, the New Green Power of Planet Earth, China (despite the fact that it’s also still using record amounts of fossil fuels). Someday, without a doubt, Donald Trump will — yes! — undoubtedly be seen as the D(and a 1/2)P or Disaster (and a Half) President.

Even his fierce attempts to get rid of any immigrants (who aren’t, of course, White South Africans) by flying them first to deportation camps and then out of the country are only further heating this planet of ours, as Alexandra Villarreal of the Guardian pointed out recently. That staggering number of flights is “producing hundreds of thousands of metric tons of climate-damaging carbon emissions as officials shuttle unprecedented numbers of people to detention centers far from home and deport them to countries across the world.” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s air operations are estimated to have pumped 370,240 tons of carbon emissions into the air in 2025 alone, “up 88% from the year before.”

Imagine that! Fortunately, as the (remarkable) Guardian also reported, explain it as you will, red states actually seem to be leading Democratic-led states in the build-out of clean-energy capacity. Despite its powerful links to the gas and oil industry, Texas, for instance, is now the country’s leading clean-energy superpower because of its remarkable build-out of wind power. Recently, it even overtook California (yes, California!) when it comes to utility-scale solar power. (Yikes! Who would even believe it? Not Donald Trump, that’s for sure!)

Still, it is remarkable to have had a climate-change-denier elected president of the most powerful country on Earth not once, but twice! And that’s not all that he and his crew are denying. Only recently, for instance, Secretary of Offense (oops, sorry, Defense) Pete Hegseth compared the (non-White) immigrants now entering Europe to the soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, in June 1944 (one of whom I knew as a kid). As he put it recently, “Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?”

As I sit here sweating on an early June day in New York City that has almost hit 90 degrees in a world heating towards the boiling point ever faster, I’m all too aware that Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the rest of that grim clan have launched their own invasion — of planet Earth itself. They have indeed landed on the beaches of our world, armed to the teeth, and intent on turning this planet into a heat zone. (And we haven’t even noticed the half of it yet because our oceans have so far absorbed so much of that heat.)

Yes, there are obviously many, many problems when it comes to Trump, Hegseth, and crew, but in the end, none matters more than their urge to heat this planet to the boiling point. Their version of governing certainly gives the phrase “hell on earth” new meaning.

This piece first appeared on Tom’s Substack.

The post A Climatic Presidency appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Serb villagers taking refuge in the mountain of Kozara, mid 1942. Public Domain.

On 10 June 1942, the great German–Ustaše offensive against Kozara began, one of the largest anti-insurgency operations conducted in occupied Yugoslavia during the Second World War. Under the command of German General Friedrich Stahl, and involving approximately 40,000 German troops alongside the armed forces and Ustaše formations of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) – the Axis-sponsored fascist regime established in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina – a tightening ring of encirclement was gradually drawn around the Kozara and Prosara mountain regions.

The objective of the operation extended far beyond the defeat of the Partisan resistance movement. It was also intended to eliminate entire categories of civilians whom the occupation authorities regarded as politically unreliable or potentially sympathetic to the insurgency. In practice, this meant that thousands of Serbian villagers, together with other inhabitants of the region, found themselves trapped within an increasingly inescapable military cordon.

The campaign concluded in mid-July with German authorities proclaiming a “great success.” Yet behind the sterile, bureaucratic language of military communiqués lay one of the greatest human tragedies experienced by the Serbian population of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Second World War. According to figures cited by Croatian historian Nikica Barić, the fate of more than sixty thousand of the roughly eighty thousand people caught within the encirclement was directly shaped by the events that followed the closure of the Kozara ring. What military reports celebrated as a successful operation would be remembered by survivors and their descendants as a catastrophe marked by mass deportations, imprisonment, family separations, and immense human suffering.

The people trapped within the encirclement were not merely armed insurgents fighting against the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). They included peasants – elderly men and women, mothers carrying infants, children, and entire families who, fleeing the advancing enemy forces, had sought refuge in makeshift columns of refugees scattered through the forests, ravines, and rugged mountain wilderness of Kozara.

Thousands of men were executed as Partisans or suspected Partisan sympathizers. Tens of thousands of civilians – including women, children, and the elderly – were deported to the concentration camps of Zemun, Stara Gradiška, and Jasenovac, the largest camp complex operated by the Ustaše regime. Many others were sent to forced labour camps in Germany and occupied Norway, where they were effectively reduced to slave labourers serving the Axis war effort.

Particularly tragic was the fate of the children. Thousands were forcibly separated from their parents and dispersed among orphanages, reception centres, institutions, and camps, often with little or no possibility of ever finding their families again. Those who survived hunger, disease, neglect, and abuse were frequently absorbed into the assimilation policies of the Ustaše state, which sought to erase their original identities. According to various estimates, approximately thirty-five thousand people perished either during the operation itself or in its immediate aftermath.

In this sense, Kozara was far more than one of the many battlefields of the Yugoslav resistance war. It stands among those rare historical moments in which the destinies of entire generations converge—moments in which a nation can look into history as into a mirror and glimpse the defining features of its own century: a century marked by repeated collisions with the most powerful political and military forces of its age.

From the Austro-Hungarian and German offensives of 1914 and 1915 during the First World War to the Nazi–Ustaše encirclement of Kozara in 1942, the Serbian people endured, within less than three decades, two vast episodes of organized destruction. The lands inhabited by Serbs on both sides of the Drina River found themselves exposed to the same recurring historical dynamic: the attempt to subordinate the Balkans to the political, military, and economic interests of the great powers of Central Europe.

Across those wars, occupations, concentration camps, forced migrations, and campaigns of repression, approximately one million people lost their lives. For a large nation, such losses would constitute a profound wound. For a small nation, they represented something even more devastating: death carried away more people than some generations were able to bring into the world, leaving behind a demographic and human void that could not be repaired even by decades of peace.

Kozara reveals with remarkable clarity a pattern that shaped the fate of entire Serbian regions throughout the twentieth century. First came an overwhelming military power; then its local allies and administrators; then the destruction of settlements, the dismantling of the economic foundations of everyday life, the displacement of populations, the establishment of camps, the deportation or liquidation of able-bodied men and women, and the fragmentation of families. The specific actors and political banners changed from one era to another, but the sequence itself remained hauntingly familiar.

Yet perhaps the most difficult truth bequeathed to us by Kozara – and by the Serbian twentieth century as a whole- is that great suffering does not automatically produce wisdom. It can also give birth to bitterness, fear, and the temptation to transform one’s own historical wounds into a claim of moral exceptionalism. This is precisely why the moral collapse witnessed during the wars of the 1990s remains so tragic. Not only because it involved the dehumanization of victims whose only crime was that they were not Serbs, but because it represented a spiritual betrayal of the very meaning of the Serbian historical experience itself.

Let us state it bluntly, however uncomfortable the conclusion may be: the fact that the Serbian twentieth century was marked by repeated episodes of mass suffering and destruction cannot serve as an excuse for those moments when that same century was morally disgraced by crimes committed at places such as Srebrenica and other killing grounds of the Yugoslav wars. Historical victimhood does not confer moral immunity. If anything, it imposes a greater responsibility to recognize suffering in others.

An equally flawed interpretation, increasingly popular among admirers of Serbian collaborationist movements and their often unspoken conclusions, is the claim that resistance itself was futile or misguided – that there should have been no resistance at all. By this logic, history supposedly treats more kindly those who lower their gaze in time, accept a foreign-imposed order, and dutifully memorize the rules written for them by stronger powers. It is as though empires throughout history were charitable institutions that rewarded obedience and punished only insolence and defiance.

Such a view ignores the most basic lessons of history. Kozara, Mačva, Jasenovac, and countless other sites of suffering did not emerge because their victims pursued the wrong strategy or failed to adapt to geopolitical realities. They existed because entire populations found themselves in the path of powerful states and ideological projects that regarded them as expendable. The history of empires teaches the opposite of what the advocates of submission suggest: great powers rarely launch campaigns of conquest because certain peoples are disobedient. More often, peoples become disobedient when they realize that they have already been marked for conquest.

The flags, uniforms, and official languages of such projects change from century to century. Their underlying purpose, however, remains remarkably consistent: to place other people’s lands, other people’s labour, and ultimately other people’s futures in the service of interests not their own.

What, then, is the lesson of the Serbian twentieth century?

Kozara does not belong solely to Serbian memory, where it is gradually fading or surviving only in distorted forms. It also belongs to the larger and deeply tragic experience of all small nations that have found themselves, at one point or another, in the path of someone else’s conquests, someone else’s strategic designs, and someone else’s calculations. For that reason, Kozara helps us understand many other places where ordinary people awoke one morning to discover that their homes, fields, graveyards, and children’s playgrounds had suddenly become pieces on the chessboard of an imperial project.

In the end, the scenes are always the same. A terrified mother searching for her child. A column of refugees moving along dusty or muddy roads. A shelled and burning home left without those who once lived within its walls. A people struggling simply to survive a time in which their fate has been placed in the hands of distant rulers, generals, ideologues, and men devoid of ordinary human compassion.

When we forget how Kozara came into being, we also become less capable of understanding Vietnam, Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and countless other landscapes of past and present human suffering. In forgetting them, we do not merely forget the dead. We forget the knowledge they left behind about the nature of power, violence, and the world itself.

That is why remembrance of Kozara is truthful only if it does not imprison us within the circle of our own pain, but teaches us to recognize pain even when it belongs to someone else. A people that has passed through encirclements, concentration camps, refugee columns, starvation, and deportation should always be able to recognize the moment when another human being’s world begins to collapse – when roads that yesterday led in every direction suddenly lead only one way; when the horizon disappears behind barbed wire; when life is reduced to the narrow space between fear and survival.

This is where mature historical consciousness begins: not in competitions of victimhood, not in the cynical political trade of memories, but in the ability to recognize something of one’s own suffering in the suffering of others.

Only then do the roughly one million Serbs who perished through the wars, occupations, persecutions, and upheavals of the twentieth century cease to be a mute statistic of national tragedy. Only then do they become what they ought to be: a warning that transcends nations, borders, and generations—a reminder that memory is meaningful not when it teaches us whom to hate, but when it teaches us how to recognize the humanity of those whose suffering mirrors our own.

The post What is the Lesson of the Serbian Twentieth Century? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The Producer Price Index (PPI) showed that much more inflation is in the pipeline. The overall index rose 1.1 percent, bringing its increase over the last twelve months to 6.5 percent. The core PPI rose 0.8 percent. It is now up 5.1 percent over the last year.

I’ll have more to say on inflation on the weekend, but if we saw this sort of inflation under Biden, it would be hair on fire stuff. In fairness, Trump does have his war, his efforts to derail the fall elections, and his corruption scandals to distract us, but a big jump in inflation is ordinarily a big deal. (Even bigger, since Trump says he loves inflation.)

And this inflation is all of Trump’s own doing. Biden had to deal with a pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, problems that were not of his making. When Trump was elected, inflation had been headed downward to the Fed’s 2.0 percent target. But Trump’s tariffs, his mass deportations, and his war reversed the downward path and sent inflation sharply higher. That’s a pretty bad story.

Section 230 Immunity and Making the Billionaires Pay

Most people are probably clueless about what Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act is. That’s the way the tech billionaires like it. It is one provision of an obscure act, which is almost unknown outside of DC policy circles.

The deal with Section 230 is that it grants social media platforms — like Elon Musk’s X, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram, and Larry Ellison’s TikTok —immunity for damages caused by content posted on their sites. This means if someone wrongly says that a restaurant serves rotten meat, causing its customers to get sick and die, and millions read it on one of these platforms, none of the billionaires can be sued for defamation.

In principle, the person who posted the lie can be sued, but they may have little money to pay damages. It also may not even be possible to identify the person, since people often post anonymously on these sites.

Furthermore, the sites share responsibility for the harm caused by the post. A person standing on a street corner yelling about rotten meat is not likely to have much impact on the restaurant’s business. But if Elon Musk wholesales the lie to millions on X, it can have a very real impact on the restaurant’s business.

This is why print and broadcast media are held liable for spreading defamatory material. Fox News had to pay out $787 million for spreading lies about Dominion’s voting machines in the 2020 election. The issue was not simply whether Fox had directly lied with its paid reporters/commentators. The network was responsible for the lies said by people brought on its shows.

Section 230 protection means that the social media billionaires don’t have to be concerned in the same way about the lies they wholesale on their platforms. They are immune from damages as long as they themselves are not pushing the lies.

The argument for this protection is that social media platforms can’t possibly be expected to review the hundreds of millions of items that get posted daily. This is true, but also beside the point. Rather than reviewing material in advance, social media platforms can be required to respond to takedown notices, as is already the case with material that allegedly infringes on copyright.

I have been pushing this position for many years. To my view, this sort of requirement was largely common sense and just leveling the playing field between social media and traditional media. Why is it okay for X to carry all forms of defamatory material, but not CNN or the New York Times?

I had several exchanges with people who were ostensibly knowledgeable about the economics of social media, who insisted my idea was simply impractical. (I had proposed a carve out that would allow Section 230 protection to continue to exist for platforms that didn’t sell ads or personal information, with the idea that these subscription or donation-supported platforms would be smaller.)

Anyhow, I was told both that the loss of protection would force X and the rest to become subscription- based. (That’s okay by me.) I was also told that it wouldn’t make any difference to them; they would just hire a few more lawyers. (Also, okay by me.) Those are contradictory, but whatever.

Anyhow, a friend just called my attention to the fact that, since 2022, the European Union (EU) has had a system similar to what I proposed in effect. The Digital Services Act (DSA) requires large platforms to have a mechanism whereby users can easily file complaints over defamatory material. The platforms would have a week to remove the material, although less in cases where malice could be an issue (e.g., Elon Musk leaves up a fabricated post calling a Black political figure a pedophile). The EU actually has had this sort of system in place since 2000, although in a somewhat different form.

Anyhow, X, Facebook, TikTok, and the rest seem to operate just fine in the EU even without Section 230 protection. That might suggest that the disasters promised by opponents of Section 230 reform here might have no basis in reality.

I’m sure that the potential liability these platforms face in the EU increases their costs and lowers their profits, but so what? Anyhow, as people yell and scream about all the money these tech billionaires have and their efforts to take over politics and political debate, reforming Section 230 might be a good place to fight back.

I know these clowns would be prepared to kill to preserve their special privileges, but this seems a good place to have a battle. The social media centi-billionaires have no argument, just infinite money to buy media and politicians. But that will be true in any confrontation. It’s best to have the battle in areas where they are empty-handed when it comes to remotely plausible arguments for their position, and winning would matter.

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

The post Inflation and Revisiting Section 230: Make Musk and Zuckerberg Pay appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

French TV’s coverage of the ties between FIFA’s Gianni Infantino and Donald Trump. (Screengrab from France 24 video posted to X.)

The FIFA Men’s World Cup of 2026 was always going to offer visitors and spectators something different.  Shared between three countries – Mexico, Canada and the United States – the latter of the three was set to be the designated font of mischief and disruptive mayhem.  Add to this the rapacity of the world footballing body on ticket pricing, and we have a tournament foundering even before the first ball is kicked.

Of nagging concern are the various travel impediments that have been impressed upon ticket holders.  Previous tournaments have seen FIFA mint arrangements with host countries granting exemptions on various immigration and entry requirements. Brazil permitted free temporary visas for ticket holders for the 2014 tournament.  Russia and Qatar permitted entry with Fan IDs and Hayya cards, documentation sweetened with the offer of free public transport.

Analysis of US State Department data conducted by the BBC reveals a visa rejection rate greater than 40% for 11 of the 48 countries that have qualified.  (The 11 in question comprise Ecuador, Egypt, Haiti, Algeria, Uzbekistan, Cape Verde, Jordan, Iran, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana and Senegal.)  This percentage includes applicants of all types. The rejection rate for B1 business and B2 tourist visa applications for all countries – the type suggested for fans travelling to the tournament – comes in at a far from negligible 34%.

While citizens from 42 countries can travel to the US on the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA), a feature of the Visa Waiver Program (VWP), the status of some recipients has become hazy.  Despite receiving approval months in advance, a growing number of intending visitors now see their status as reverting to “pending”.  In some cases, revocation has taken place.  Scotland football supporter Michael Wright, for instance, found out an hour prior to his flight that his travel permit had ceased to exist, having moved from “approved” to “pending”, culminating at the gloomy terminus of “travel not authorised”.  No reasons for the change of heart were offered.  BBC Scotland News has also reported the same fate befalling a number of Tartan Army supporters.

Acting assistant secretary of US Homeland Security Lauren Bis explained in comments to the BBC that “the Trump administration is enforcing immigration laws”.  ESTA applications were “continuously vetted against law enforcement and security databases.”  Travellers were expected to “provide complete and truthful information, including all criminal history.”

Football supporters from over a quarter of the countries participating in the tournament are also facing onerous restrictions, if not complete travel bans.  Julien Kouadio Adonis of the Ivory Coast’s fan association, the National Committee for the Support of the Elephants, did not need any convincing about what such bans meant: “It’s a form of segregation that doesn’t dare speak its name, but the proof is there.”  Abu Kass, head of the football fans association for Jordan, could also add his name to the burgeoning number of rejections from his country.  “This World Cup,” he ruminated glumly, “is not ours.”

Celine Atallah of the Atallah Law Group, a Massachusetts legal firm specialising in immigration law relevantly callsthe visa system “the invisible gatekeeper of the World Cup.”  FIFA may well sell the tickets “but the US government decides who gets a visa, and CBP [Customs and Border Protection] decides who actually enters.”

That gatekeeper proved rather aggressive in holding up the Iraqi striker and vice-captain Aymen Hussein, who was detained for almost seven hours at Chicago’s O’Hare airport after arriving with his fellow teammates and staff entourage.  The team photographer, Talal Salah, was even less fortunate, denied entry following a detention period of 10 hours and a search of his phone.

Officials are also finding themselves blocked from making the visit.  Omar Artan, a referee from Somalia, was refused entry after arriving in Miami.  A terse statement from FIFA on the refusal suggested an absolute unwillingness to question the decision.  “FIFA is not involved in host country immigration processes, including visa adjudications … a host government ultimately determines who receives a visa and who is admitted to their country.”  FIFA President Gianni Infantino could only describe the barring of Artan as “unfortunate”.  “We are not the kings of the world who can rule over governments and police forces. We are a sports organisation.”  Artan proved far more diplomatic in his remarks to reporters on arriving in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. “What happened has happened and it was fate.  I am grateful for the support FIFA gave me.”

Andrew Giuliani, head of the White House World Cup task force, sought to muddy the waters with a dash of libel and some crass lingo. “Anyone who is communicating with bad actors that plan harm against the United States of America are not gonna be admitted entrance.”  An official of the administration, shielding behind the comforts of anonymity, claimed that Artan had consorted with “suspected members of terror organizations.”  Nothing by way of detail was provided, which did little to impress Ilham Gasser, a Somali parliamentarian.  “Many Somalians feel he has been unfairly treated.  If these were genuine concerns that an individual had links to terror organizations, many Somalians are asking, why were those concerns not identified in the visa process?”

This is a tournament deserving lofty dismissal for its shabby organisation, its extortionate pricing, and its ringing prejudices.  Former England and Arsenal striker Ian Wright is already convinced he is witnessing the “World Cup of Chaos.”  But Infantino, as he so often does, is reading a different script.  He extols a vision moribund if not altogether entombed.  “We want to unite the world,” he adamantly insists, seeing as its triumph the fact that the Iranian football team was permitted to participate in the tournament.  He will have to do better than that.

The post The FIFA World Cup: Caught on the Visa Snag appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The subminimum wage policy disproportionately benefits the full-service restaurant industry, which is the largest employer of tipped workers. It was their lobby, the National Restaurant Association, that used it as a bargaining chip that ultimately froze it in perpetuity through the 1996 Fair Labor Standards Act Amendment.  Thus, it is only through the passage of another amendment to the FLSA via Congress that this federal policy could be changed. Such an amendment may seem impossible given the political climate in the country. However, it does not have to be the case.

The federal subminimum wage was included among fourteen policy briefs featured in CEPR’s recently released Majority Agenda series. The Majority Agenda highlighted an array of policy issues where Americans express a significant degree of agreement regardless of party affiliation.

And here public opinion is clear. As a matter of fact, likely voters don’t want an increase in the $2.13 subminimum wage —they want it eliminated. A Data for Progress poll reported that nearly three out of four (73 percent) likely voters favored full elimination of the subminimum wage in favor of all workers being paid at least the regular minimum wage, including 82 percent of Democrats, 75 percent of Independents, and 62 percent of Republicans.

It is hard to imagine many issues that garner such broad support across the political spectrum. And yet there is little evidence that Congress is serious about addressing this issue. The Living Wage for All Act, introduced in April, calls for an increase in the minimum wage to $25 an hour and the eventual elimination of the subminimum wage.

This is encouraging news. The fact that Congress has not done enough to seriously consider ways to  address the now nearly meaningless $2.13 subminimum wage represents a breakdown of democracy and democratic values, and one that comes at a considerable cost to many hard-working Americans.

This first appeared on CEPR.

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Graham Platner is exactly the type of candidate our Congress has too many of already—on both sides of the aisle: people with little moral character; extreme views; homophobic; racist; and who cannot tell the truth with a straight face.

The New York Times has reported accounts from several of Platner’s ex-girlfriends describing physical abuse.  One woman, for example, described Platner grabbing her in ways that left marks, and on one occasion, locking her in a room.  It was also reported that he juggled sexting relationships with six different women while he was married.

Then there’s the matter of a tattoo on his chest resembling a Nazi death’s head symbol–something he denies as being fascist, and just something he got 20 years ago on shore leave as a drunk Marine.

Platner has posted that rural Americans are “racist and stupid” and that “all cops are bastards.”

Referring to his previously unearthed offensive posts, Platner stated: “But I think what’s really important to note here is that these are things that I talk about in my past — things that I am not proud of — but it is a past that I had to go through to get where I am today.”

Really!? One has to physically abuse women, engage in sexually perverted conduct and sport a racist, fascist tattoo to win a U.S. Senate race?  This should be a disqualifying past life not a qualifying one.

But the fact is, after Trump, apparently, nothing is disqualifying.  Trump got elected notwithstanding fomenting and being charged with crimes related to insurrection; after being convicted of 34 felonies related to falsifying business records; being liable for sexual abuse of a woman; mishandling classified documents; and being accused by 28 women of sexual misconduct. And, Texans just nominated former Attorney General Ken Paxton for the U.S. Senate despite his fraud and infidelity scandals.

Here’s the point:

Without name-dropping the usual suspects—starting at the top with the Jeffrey Epstein pedophiles—we already have too many Graham Platners in the executive and legislative branches of national politics.  And that is not to mention the incompetent and crooked members of the federal judiciary—many appointed by our current President.

Lamentably, that the parties promote and support these sorts of perverse candidates is grounded in the current partisan philosophy of “win at any cost.” Or, as Jersualem Demsas stated in The Argument: “. . . Democratic control of the Senate “is the best path forward for shoring up our democracy.” “Platner is a scumbag but he’s “a scumbag who Mainers should vote for.”

Yet, according to various polls, between 89% and 95% of voters say that a candidate’s moral character influences their vote in their evaluation of a candidate.  56% of Americans rate moral values in the U.S. as poor, up 12 points since last year, and 80% say moral values are getting worse.

Ironically, if those polls are valid, voter’s must be living in one of their own fever dreams, because Maine Democrats overwhelmingly advanced Platner through the Party’s primary and into the general election against Republican Susan Collins. Platner’s past is ignored; he is looked upon a regular guy—flawed–but one you’d meet with in a bar for a beer.  Basically, one of the good old boys.

While Collins has her partisan faults, those pale in comparison to Platner’s character flaws.

In my view, the Graham Platners of this world have no place in politics. Assuming that these sorts of morally decrepit individuals can support, protect and defend the Constitution, can govern by, of and for the people and can keep their hands off their female staffers, is like asking the leopard to change his spots and the skunk to change her smell.

 Indeed, when voters put these people into a position of power, their real character bubbles to the surface on steroids–like the scum in boiled fat. Power corrupts, and enough of it corrupts absolutely.

Once elected, the Graham Platners are emboldened to act out in accordance with their true character: fight with the press, sexually harass whomever they can get their hands on, ignore the voters’ needs in favor of their own pockets and priorities, and above all, adhere to the Blessed Trinity of Politics: Raise money; get elected; get reelected. Their only offer across the aisle, is the universal, one finger salute to the members of the other party. And, has been now proven in spades time after time, if the elected person is a Republican, he or she will also genuflect at the altar of Donald Trump and march lockstep with the decrees, dictates and alternate reality of the Dear Leader.

Furthermore, the philosophy of “win at any cost” discourages decent people of character from entering politics and running for office. It works this way: If one doesn’t have a past that would make a hooker blush, then there’s no story of redemption; there’s no sordid past against which to promise a shining future, there’s no “I found Jesus and salvation.” In short, there’s no meat for the press, the public and the opposition to chew into. A candidate with good character, no tattoos and no exes peddling relationship horror stories is just boring, beige, plain vanilla. As the old press saying goes, “if it bleeds, it leads;” and of course the corollary is also true: if it doesn’t, it won’t.

We Americans desperately need to salvage our democracy from the Graham Platners–and from the Trumpian cult of corrupt, perverted, incompetence. We must not elect these sorts of people in the first place, obviously! And, in acknowledging our mistake when we do, we must, “at any cost,” rid ourselves of those presently in office when we next vote.  A candidate’s bad character cannot be ignored or forgiven just to advance a partisan platform. We are—and will be–what we’ve lived.

We the People deserve better.  Character does matter!

The post Character Matters appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

For more than three decades after the democratic breakthrough of 1994, progressive forces often engaged each other through fragmented campaigns, issue-based coalitions and sectoral struggles. Never before had such a broad spectrum of left and progressive forces met collectively to deliberate on a common programme of action aimed at rebuilding working-class and popular power. For this reason alone, the Conference of the Left represents a historic turning point.

Yet the conference was not a ceremonial gathering. It was convened at a time when global and South African capitalism is experiencing a profound structural crisis. Mass unemployment, deepening poverty, worsening inequality, gender-based violence, de-industrialisation, corruption and growing social despair continue to shape the lives of millions. South Africa’s official unemployment rate stood at 32.7 percent in the first quarter of 2026, while the expanded unemployment rate remained above 43 percent. Poverty continues to affect more than half of the population using upper-bound poverty measures, while South Africa remains one of the world’s most unequal societies, with a Gini coefficient of approximately 0.67. These realities have reinforced a fundamental conclusion: political freedom alone is insufficient without economic emancipation. The Marxist tools of analysis remain critical, ownership and control of the means of production in South Africa cannot remain in the hands of capital.

From a Marxist-Leninist perspective, the central contradiction remains the concentration of ownership and control of the economy in the hands of monopoly capital which is significantly white in the South African context. The democratic breakthrough of 1994 was a major victory over apartheid and the colonial project, but the negotiated settlement at CODESA did not fundamentally alter economic relations to benefit the majority of the previously oppressed black South Africans. Political rights were secured, but economic power remained largely intact in the hands of established capitalist interests. The transition averted what could have been a blood bath or civil war, albeit that the period was marred by orchestrated violence. However, the land question and the economic question remain fundamental and critical to complete the Revolution.

Evidence of this structural continuity is reflected in ownership patterns, financial concentration and industrial decline. Manufacturing contributed approximately 23.7 percent of GDP in 1990 but had fallen to about 12.8 percent by 2024–2026. At the same time, finance, insurance, real estate and business services expanded substantially as a share of economic activity. This process of financialisation increasingly shifted economic accumulation towards financial markets and speculative activities rather than productive investment, job creation and industrial development.

This reality does not diminish the achievements of democracy. Rather, it highlights the unfinished tasks of the National Democratic Revolution. The struggle for national liberation must be advanced towards economic liberation. Land ownership patterns, financial power, industrial ownership and control of strategic resources remain largely concentrated in monopoly capital and its agents. Consequently, the national democratic revolution remains incomplete and remains as lip service if this structural crisis is ignored. The Conference of the Left therefore basically reaffirmed that the present period requires a renewed struggle for economic emancipation.

Importantly, the conference also undertook a process of self-criticism. Delegates acknowledged that while women constitute some of the most militant and capable organisers within progressive movements, they have not been adequately represented at the centre of leadership and organisational processes of the Conference of the Left. The conference resolved that this reality must change fundamentally. The gender question cannot be treated as an afterthought. The Marxist-Leninist understanding of South African society recognises the persistence of triple oppression: class exploitation, national oppression and gender oppression. These three dimensions continue to interact and reinforce each other. Working-class women continue to bear the heaviest burden of unemployment, unpaid care work, violence and economic exclusion whilst they remain at the centre of social reproduction, subsidizing capital. The commitment to greater representation of women is therefore not about tokenism or favour. It is about recognising leadership capacity, political experience and revolutionary potential. The Council of the Left, established by the conference, must embody this principle in practice.

The international character of the conference also deserves special recognition. Progressive leaders and solidarity representatives from Zambia, Ghana, India, Brazil, Mexico, the United States, and Venezuela participated in discussions and shared experiences from their own struggles against imperialism, neoliberalism and exploitation. Their contributions enriched the conference and reminded participants that the struggle for socialism remains international in character.

The resolutions are contained in the Final Declaration. The conference programme was organised around eight strategic clusters that provide a framework for implementation. These include economic transformation, social protection, land reform, public health, community safety, climate justice, international solidarity and democratic transformation. The intention is to move beyond declarations towards measurable action.

A stronger Marxist-Leninist perspective emerged throughout discussions. Delegates emphasised that capitalism cannot be reformed into serving the interests of the majority. While immediate reforms remain necessary, they must form part of a broader strategic project aimed at transformation and building the foundations for socialism.

The conference rejected the notion that austerity, privatisation and financialisation can resolve South Africa’s crisis. Instead, delegates called for democratic planning, industrial policy, developmental finance, public ownership and strategic state intervention. The conference further stressed that socialism cannot be reduced merely to state ownership. It must include worker participation, democratic accountability, social ownership and popular power.

International solidarity formed a major pillar of the conference. Participants reaffirmed their support for the people of Palestine and welcomed South Africa’s efforts to hold Israel accountable before international institutions. The conference called for intensified mobilisation, boycott campaigns and solidarity actions in support of Palestinian self-determination.

Equally strong solidarity was expressed with Cuba. Delegates condemned the decades-long blockade imposed against the Cuban people and reiterated support for Cuba’s sovereign right to determine its own future free from imperialist interference, also calling for urgent humanitarian support (food, medicines, energy) for Cuba in this period of induced regime change where countries are even barred from supplying oil to the island. Cuba’s achievements in healthcare, education and international solidarity continue to inspire progressive movements in Africa and across the world.

Support was also reaffirmed for the Bolivarian process in Venezuela and the right of the Venezuelan people to determine their own future without external intervention. The conference rejected sanctions, destabilisation campaigns and attempts at regime change and called for the release of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.

The liberation struggle of Western Sahara was similarly highlighted. Delegates reaffirmed support for the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination and independence and deemed it unfortunate that the most recent UN Security Council Resolution 2797 seeks to water down this right to self-determination. The conference further extended solidarity to anti-imperialist struggles across Africa and the Global South.

The conference also emphasised the importance of Pan-Africanism. Genuine African integration must serve workers, peasants, women and youth rather than multinational corporations. Continental integration should be based on industrialisation, food sovereignty, regional value chains, technological cooperation and economic sovereignty. Intra Africa trade and Pan African Payment System was emphasized in the discussions that ensued.

One of the most significant outcomes of the gathering was the establishment of the Council of the Left. The Council is not a political party and does not replace participating organisations. Rather, it provides a mechanism for coordination, political education, campaigning and collective intervention. If effectively implemented, it could become one of the most important instruments for rebuilding Left unity in South Africa.

The conference repeatedly returned to a central lesson from Marx, Engels and Lenin: organisation is decisive. The working class cannot simply resist exploitation. It must organise to exercise power.

The success of the Conference of the Left will therefore not be measured by speeches or declarations. It will be measured by whether workers become better organised, whether communities become more mobilised, whether women occupy leadership positions, whether youth become active agents of transformation, and whether the Left succeeds in rebuilding popular power to solidify freedoms.

The conference has opened a new chapter in South African politics. It has demonstrated that unity remains possible without sacrificing ideological diversity. It has reminded progressive forces that the struggle against capitalism, patriarchy, racism and imperialism requires coordinated action.

The Conference of the Left has issued a challenge to all progressive forces: move beyond fragmentation, deepen organisation, strengthen working-class leadership and advance the unfinished struggle for economic liberation.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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One of the frustrations I face as an advocate for forest protection is the continuous stream of misinformation from government agencies such as the Forest Service and state forestry, as well as from many conservation organizations like the Nature Conservancy.

For example, I received an article from the Forest Service titled “Multiple treatments are key to resilient Western Forests. In the opening paragraph, the article asserts: “Forests in the West used to be a lot more open, so wildfires were much less severe.”

The problem with this characterization is that only about 10% of western conifer forests were historically “park-like”, dominated by frequent low-severity blazes.

The primary tree that fits this model is ponderosa pine. However, even in these pine forests, high-severity blazes occurred, leaving many trees dead.

Most western forest types (and most non-forested areas like chaparral) tend to have much longer fire intervals, often many decades to hundreds of years between significant ignitions.

These trees include fir and spruce, hemlock, cedar, Douglas fir, western larch, some pines like lodgepole pine, whitebark, Bishop pine, Monterey pine, and white pine, as well as aspen. None of these trees fit the high-frequency-low-severity model. When these forests burn, they exhibit significant high-severity mortality.

In addition, most non-forest plant communities, like sagebrush and chaparral, are burned at long intervals and are not adapted to frequent fires.

In between these major fires, down logs, snags, and ground litter accumulate. However, this is all within the natural historical conditions, not some aberration as often suggested by the Forest Service.

And many national forests had few, if any, ponderosa pine. In the Northern Region of the Forest Service, which includes northern Idaho and all of Montana, only 4% of the forest type is ponderosa pine and other “dry conifer” forests.

For instance, ponderosa pine occurs only in the most eastern low-elevation portion of the Custer Gallatin NF (CGNF) in Montana. The CGNF typically characterizes all of its forest types as high-frequency, low-severity stands to justify logging.

A further problem, right up front in the opening paragraph, goes on to say, “We can actually see scars from old wildfires in cross-sections like this one. By cross-dating fire scars from multiple trees, scientists can reconstruct what past forests looked like, including how dense forests were.”

The problem ignored by pro-deforestation agencies to justify thinning and logging the forest is that there are serious methodological issues with such fire-scar studies that tend to exaggerate fire frequency.

For instance, the main way scientists obtain fire scars is by wandering through the forest in search of scarred trees. But this is not a random selection, which biases the studies from the very beginning.

For instance, if all your scarred trees are on a dry south-facing slope and more prone to burning, they may not represent the general forest condition.

It is analogous to going into a bar on a Saturday night, asking the crowd how many people like to drink alcohol, and getting nearly 100% agreement from the patrons that alcohol is good—then extrapolating that percentage to the community’s overall population.

Many fire-scar studies use a very small sample of trees to characterize entire national forests. One study of ponderosa pine found that nearly half of the fire-scar research examined only 1–2 trees, yet used these to characterize the landscape’s fire history. There are other problems that you can read about here.

By contrast, the use of other methods to determine past forest stand composition and fire frequency, including photo interpretation, sediment flow studies, pollen studies, charcoal studies, and government land office reports, nearly all report longer fire intervals and high-severity blazes as natural events rather than aberrations.

A study of “Spatially extensive reconstructions show variable-severity fire and heterogeneous structure in historical western United States dry forests” concluded that: “Park-like stands of large trees maintained by low-severity fire predominated only in parts of the study landscapes.” The main conclusions were: “forests were structurally variable, including areas of dense forests and understory trees and shrubs, and fires varied in severity, including 15–65% high severity fire.”

The typical justification given for the alleged departure from open forest is fire suppression and lack of Indian burning. However, neither of those explanations applies to most Western landscapes.

Native American burning was primarily localized and did not have a major landscape-scale influence, and fire suppression was only successful when climate/weather permitted it.

During the middle of the last century, the overall climate was cooler and moister, permitting glaciers to grow in the western mountains. At the same time, there were fewer ignitions and far less acreage charred by wildfires. In contrast, throughout the early part of the century, including 1910, we had the 3.5 million acres burn, and the dry 1920s, when as much as 50 million acres burned—all due to climate conditions. More recently, since the 1980s, as climate change has promoted more wildfires, fire suppression effectiveness has been overwhelmed.

In short, the idea that most western ecosystems frequently burnt, were characterized by open, park-like stands, and were “healthy” ignores both evolutionary and ecological realities. It is a narrative promoted to support more logging of our forests.

The way to protect homes and communities is to reduce the flammability of structures through home hardening. Home hardening is by far the most cost-effective means of reducing wildfire risk and has the fewest ecological and environmental impacts.

The post The “Most Western Forests Were Open and Park-like” Myth appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Bill Jelen.

A dramatic increase in SpaceX rocket launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base is planned. Residents may regularly feel the impact of sonic booms on their homes and bodies.

The California Coastal Commission denied approval for increased SpaceX launches because of concerns about coastal resources, wildlife, and compliance with state law. Yet federal authorities moved forward, and SpaceX responded by suing the Commission. A question to ask is: Who governs California’s coast—the people of California through environmental protections, or a private corporation backed by federal contracts?

California’s coast is home to whales, seals, sea lions, migratory birds, and sensitive marine ecosystems already under stress from warming oceans and habitat loss. More launches mean more sonic booms, more industrial activity, and greater disruption to birth cycles.

This debate is also about public accountability. SpaceX’s wealth originates from taxpayers and billions of dollars in government subsidies, yet it boasts profitability by weakening oversight designed to protect public resources, unapologetically degrading our quality of life.

A new arms-space race is here; the commercialization of low-Earth orbit by corporate contractors seeking trillionaire status from massive satellite deployments for surveillance and solar-powered AI data centers, is weaponizing space. Whether one views that future as profitable or as harmful, it deserves democratic scrutiny.

California established the Coastal Commission because some places are too important to leave to private interests. Our coastline is a public trust, not a sacrifice zone for corporate-military domination. Protecting it is common sense stewardship in an epoch of ecological limits.

Last month, Vandenberg postponed the Mission Update due to a ICBM test launch. The new date is June 22 (Mon), 4-6 pm at: Kent Hall Council Chambers (on City Hall Campus) 111 W Santa Ana St. Ojai, CA 93023 Come in person to speak. Check City Hall for virtual livestream.

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Sam Abu Haikal, killed by IDF.

Earlier this month in Hebron, in the southern West Bank, a seven‑month‑old Palestinian baby, Sam Abu Haikal, was killed when Israeli soldiers opened fire on his family’s car — a single bullet passing through the father’s hand before striking the infant and his mother. The car was carrying the boy and several relatives, including his grandmother, when they approached the soldiers.

This was yet another in a series of incidents in which Palestinian civilians were unjustifiably killed, revealing a daily architecture of violence and fear under Israeli occupation — a reality that statistics alone cannot convey. The Israeli military expressed “deep sorrow for any harm caused” and promised to investigate the incident.

However, almost none of those responsible for such grievous acts have ever been punished, despite repeated assurances of justice from Israeli authorities. Sam’s father, Mr. Abu Haikal, said, “There is no such thing as an investigation in Israel. They shoot and kill and there’s no punishment.” His grandmother lamented that the soldiers did not even fire a warning shot — a gesture increasingly withheld from Palestinians, who are treated as expendable victims of a grievous conflict.

In addition to those killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) the United Nations has documented systematic abuse, property destruction, and fatal attacks by armed settlers, leading to the displacement of herding and Bedouin communities from their homes. The United Nations reports that more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces and Israeli settlers in the West Bank since October 7, 2023, when Hamas carried out its deadly raid against Israeli civilians.

According to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, between 2018 and 2022 the IDF investigated 107 cases involving the killing of Palestinians by soldiers in the West Bank. Over that period, only one soldier was ultimately charged — for killing a Palestinian and severely wounding another — and he received a sentence of three months of community service as part of a plea bargain.

Describing indiscriminate killings in the buffer zone by a system that no longer sees Palestinians as people, Capt. Yotam Vilk, an Israeli armored corps officer, declared in 2025, “There ‘s no such things as ‘means, intent, and ability’ in Gaza…It’s just: a suspicion of walking where it’s not allowed.”

Statistics from the U.N. Human Rights Office show that between October 7, 2023, and October 2025, at least 213 children were killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the West Bank. The situation is even more dire in Gaza, where 21,289 children were killed and 44,500 were injured, from October 7, 2023 to February 3, 2026, according to UNICEF. The agency warns that Gaza has become “an affront to our shared humanity,” a place where children are “killed, maimed, and displaced” at a rate almost without precedent in modern conflict.

It is not possible to witness the mass killing of children and still speak of “managing” a conflict. One must confront the unbearable fact that politics and politicians have normalized the killing of the most vulnerable. More gravely, it suggests that a moral compass has been irreversibly broken.

Years ago, I met in New York Stéphane Hessel, who had come to the city as a member of the Russell Tribunal, which was assessing the actions of Israel’s government in Gaza and the West Bank. Hessel had been a Resistance fighter, a survivor of Buchenwald, and a diplomat who helped shape the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I asked him how, as a Jew, he could participate in a tribunal so critical of the Israeli government. Without hesitation he told me, “Because I love Israel.” Hessel reminded us that loving a people or a nation does not mean excusing its abuses; it means holding it to the standards it claims for itself.

The post Requiem for Sam Abu Haikal appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Neera Tanden from Center for American Progress at the White House, 2014. Photo Photo Courtesy of: Faye Evans, ATI.

Ideas do not float free of the people who hold them, and the abandonment of class has a sociological shape. The center of gravity of American progressive politics has shifted from the working class to the college-educated professional. The activists, staffers, donors, writers, and increasingly the voters who set the tone of the movement are drawn from a stratum secure enough to treat economic survival as a solved problem. For this group, politics can become what it cannot be for the precarious: a matter of values, expression, and culture rather than of rent, wages, and health.

This is a quiet betrayal of the tradition, because the democratic socialism of Harrington and Debs was rooted in, and accountable to, the people whose labor it sought to dignify. Dorothy Day did not theorize poverty from a distance; she lived among the poor in the houses of hospitality she founded. The point was not charity but solidarity, the insistence that the movement and the people it served were not two different things. When the movement’s personnel no longer share the condition of those they represent, the accountability snaps, and the agenda drifts toward the preoccupations of the comfortable.

The drift shows up in priorities. A professionalized left fluent in the vocabulary of the seminar room will reliably elevate questions of language, representation, and symbolic recognition, because those are the questions its members feel most acutely. The same left is strikingly quiet about union density, which has fallen to roughly a tenth of the workforce, because rebuilding labor power requires patient organizing among people the professional class rarely encounters. The issues that photograph well in a fundraising appeal crowd out the issues that would actually shift the balance of economic power.

Thomas Frank captured one face of this in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, asking why working people vote against their economic interest. But the deeper question runs the other way: why has the party of the left given them so little economic reason to vote for it? When a movement led by the credentialed offers the working class culture war on one side and means tested technocracy on the other, it should not be surprised when the working class drifts away. The professional left often reads that drift as evidence of false consciousness, which only confirms the distance.

There is a tone that comes with this capture, a moralism that treats political disagreement as a deficiency of enlightenment. The well educated activist, certain of positions arrived at among similar people, can mistake the work of persuasion for the work of correction. This is poison for a mass movement. Bernstein grounded socialism in an ethical imperative to treat every person with respect, an inheritance from the French Revolution’s promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Respect means meeting people as equals to be persuaded, not as pupils to be enlightened.

Consider how this capture reshapes the very form of left organization. The classic instruments of working class power, the union local and the mass party, were schools of solidarity in which people who were not alike learned to act together out of shared interest. The characteristic instruments of the professional left, the advocacy nonprofit and the issue campaign, are something else: staffed by graduates, funded by foundations and wealthy donors, and accountable upward to their funders rather than downward to a membership.

The shift in form is a shift in power. A movement that depends on donors will, however unconsciously, trim its ambitions to what donors will tolerate, and the one ambition no major donor will fund is the redistribution of their own power. So the structural demands quietly fall away, and what remains is the safely symbolic and the narrowly technocratic. The tradition built institutions that the working class owned; the new new left builds institutions that own the working class’s voice.

None of this is a brief against educated people in politics; the tradition is full of them, Harrington among them. It is a brief against a movement whose social base has narrowed to a single comfortable stratum and whose agenda has narrowed with it. The remedy is not to expel the professionals but to re anchor the movement in the working class majority, to make the labor organizer as central as the communications director. Until the left’s center of gravity moves back toward the people it claims to serve, it will keep mistaking the concerns of the few for the cause of the many.

This is the second of five essays on the state of the Left in the USA. 

The post What’s Wrong With the American Left: Captured by the Professional Class appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Hegseth’s D-Day speech. (Screengrab from video posted to X.)

This week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was on hand in Normandy for the eighty-second anniversary of the D-Day invasion. He made the usual remarks about U.S. dedication to defending freedom, just as he did last year on a similar occasion.

This time around, however, Hegseth veered off into controversial territory.

Not that you can figure this out from the War Department’s anodyne summary of Hegseth’s speech. Unlike last year, the U.S. government hasn’t seen fit to provide a transcript of Hegseth’s remarks. You have to nose around the Internet to find out what Hegseth said that raised so many eyebrows.

Did the Pentagon chief use the D-Day commemoration to denounce the current specter of fascism that is haunting Europe?

No.

Did he warn of the threat that Russia poses to the continent?

Hardly.

Hegseth denounced an invasion of an entirely different sort. “Today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” he said. “Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?”

Between his speech last year and the one this year, Hegseth has evidently gotten his marching orders. Ever since JD Vance lectured his elders and betters at the Munich summit last year, the Trump administration has united around the theme that immigrants threaten European “civilization.” Vance wasn’t even being original. Both his and Hegseth’s talking points come straight out of the mouths of the European far right. Unlike the usual game of telephone, where the message is garbled through misheard repetition, the fulminations of Trump’s henchmen are loud and clear.

The Trump administration is all about defending white “civilization” from the impertinent contributions of Black and brown people. At home, that means scrubbing all government websites, National Park inscriptions, and federal grants of any reference to “woke” ideologies, which used to be known as anti-racism, diversity, or just plain common sense. It has meant restricting refugee policy to the only group the Trump administration perceives as meeting the need-based criteria—white South Africans. It has meant an industrial-strength deportation campaign.

Abroad, the Trump administration is trying to “save” Europe from the immigrants that are in reality keeping European societies afloat in the face of demographic decline. In this effort, it has joined hands with the most repulsive extremists on the continent. Greg Bovino, who headed up Trump’s immigration crackdown in the United States as the commander-at-large of the U.S. Border Patrol, recently showed up in Europe to headline an event in Portugal populated by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The era of covert alliances and dog-whistling is long past.

But the D-Day speech was something different: a historical commemoration that has usually avoided contemporary politics. Prompted to reflect on present-day “invasions,” the European heads of state listening to Hegseth’s speech might have been thinking of an entirely different group of men and boats. The Trump administration has talked about the possibility of storming the beaches of Greenland to seize the island, an eerie echo of Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg seizure of Poland in 1939. On this anniversary of D-Day, Americans in boats are the last thing Europeans want to see approaching the fringes of the continent.

“Different dangerous ideologies, indeed,” the Europeans in the audience must have been thinking. Having been warned on numerous occasions, European capitals are certainly doing something to prepare for the impact of the ideologies dominating the Trump administration. It’s hard to know if Europeans really take seriously the prospect of an invasion coming from the West. But they are certainly worried about the failure of the United States to honor its D-Day commitments in the future.

The Immigration Obsession

The European far right has made its name by playing up the “threat” of immigration. Keeping out immigrants was a central plank in Viktor Orban’s platform in Hungary as well as that of Law and Justice Party in Poland, both of which have subsequently lost power. No matter: other parties are on the ascendant. The far right Alternative for Deutschland, having weaponized the issue of immigration, is on the verge of taking control of its first German region in elections in September in Saxony-Anhalt. Similar anti-migrant far-right parties are in coalition governments in Finland and Croatia and dominate the parliament in The Netherlands.

Then there’s Italy. Although she has diverged from the Trump administration on a number of issues, including their views of the current Pope, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni remains vehemently anti-immigrant, pushing ahead with the country’s expulsion of migrants and asylum-seekers to detention centers in Albania, despite legal pushback from Italian courts and EU bodies.

What might have once been a fringe opinion has now moved front and center in Europe. As a result of rising far-right influence, the EU is now using Italy’s detention centers in Albania as a model for “detention hubs” planned for Africa. “This deal will give governments much broader powers to detain and deport people,” Marta Welander of the International Rescue Committee told PBS. “It looks set to normalize immigration raids, expand the use of detention in prison-like facilities outside EU territory that are essentially legal black holes, and increase the risk of people being deported to countries where they could face persecution, torture or worse.”

So much for Europe stepping forward in the Trump era to uphold the rules-based order. At least on immigration policy, the EU is instead following Trump’s lead. Hegseth, in addition to his other failings, didn’t even read the newspaper before giving his D-Day speech. Even as he was channeling the rhetoric of the European far right, European capitals have already been channeling Trump’s immigration policies.

The Real Threats

It’s frankly astonishing that an American politician could discuss D-Day and invasions at this historical moment without mentioning the single most destabilizing invasion since World War II.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a deliberate attempt to remake the European order. Violating international law by disregarding Ukrainian sovereignty was unsettling to be sure, but that was just a means to an end. The incorporation of as much of Ukraine as he could digest was designed to expand Russian power at the expense of the European Union and its cohesiveness.

Although Putin and his mouthpieces have droned on about the threats of NATO expansion—and, to be sure, rapid NATO expansion eastward was a mistake—the real threat to Putin’s dominion has always been the accession of Eastern European and then post-Soviet states into the European Union. A model of economic prosperity, democratic governance, and unrestricted travel, if extended to Ukrainians, Moldovans, and Georgians, would inevitably get Russians to thinking: why not us? Putin has always worried more about the threat from within, like a color revolution, than threats from without, like NATO expansion.

Against the liberalism of the EU, Putin has offered instead a vision of ethnic counter-expansion that appeals to the aggrieved Russian sense of self. Adoption of the euro, the right to work in Paris, the freedom to gather outside the Kremlin to protest: none of these can compete against toxic masculinity, blood and belonging, and the appeal of an iron fist.

Putin’s alternate conception of illiberalism, with its emphasis on conservative values and ethnonationalist triumphalism, is now threatening Europe in turn. Some of Putin’s allies have gone down for the count, but his rhetoric still resonates in the speeches of far-right figures throughout the continent. A number of leaders are scrambling to be the next Viktor Orban—Robert Fico of Slovakia, Andrej Babis of the Czech Republic, and, most ominously, the frontrunner in next year’s French presidential race, Jordan Bardella of the National Rally.

Putin is not so dumb as to double down on his Ukrainian blunder by sending military forces into Poland or even the Baltic states. Cyberattacks and clandestine operations can be more effective since they don’t cross the threshold that mandates a NATO counterattack. Meanwhile, influence operations—disinformation campaigns, strategic political alliances, and the marketing of illiberalism—are even more effective in undermining the ideological underpinnings of the EU.

This latter campaign has more than double the impact when it’s mirrored on the Atlantic side by the actions of Trump, Vance, and Hegseth.

European Response

Europe is not in full-fledged revolt against Trump. The shift in EU immigration strategy demonstrates that some European leaders don’t want to just flatter Trump; they want to imitate him as well.

Still, there are pockets of resistance. A number of European countries defied the Trump administration in 2025 to recognize Palestine. Spain’s Pedro Sanchez refused to toe the U.S. line on Iran. Denmark has led the charge to beat back the administration’s efforts to secure Greenland.

European capitals are preparing in more institutional ways to address the much larger threat of Americans in boats, this time the ones that don’t arrive for a future battle as their counterparts did so reliably on D-Day. Trump has variously threatened to leave NATO or ignore U.S. Article 5 commitments to defend fellow NATO members in the event of an attack. This month, the Pentagon announced a decrease in the forces that the United States will make available—aircraft, ships—during a crisis in Europe.

Europeans have gotten the message. They’re not just increasing their military spending. They’re building up their capacity to produce their own weapons rather than rely on the U.S. military-industrial complex. They’re talking about creating an autonomous European army. They don’t want to be caught flat-footed by American ambivalence.

In the wake of Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran, Europeans are also eager to wean themselves of dependency on U.S. fossil fuels. Fresh from their campaign to reduce imports of Russian fossil fuels, more far-seeing Europeans want to make sure that they’re not yoking themselves to American gas and oil. The better option: full speed ahead on home-grown renewables.

“The European Union can’t fully trust US President Donald Trump to keep Europe out of the cold next Winter,” writes Linda Aziz-Rohlje of Renew Europe. “We are risking our democracy, our prosperity and our security if we do not take action. That’s why liberals and democrats call for an energy-independent Europe, with a more integrated energy market.”

Finally, Europeans are worried about their reliance on U.S. technology. “European leaders have become increasingly alarmed by the reliance on American technology in areas like artificial intelligence, cloud computing and semiconductors,” reports Adam Satariano in The New York Times. “Many worry the dependence creates a ‘kill switch’ that the Trump administration or future U.S. presidents could exploit to block access to essential tech services.”

On weapons, energy, and tech, Europe is groping toward a declaration of independence from America.

Against this background, Pete Hegseth has attempted to remind Europeans of how much the United States came to their aid during a time of crisis. And he has attempted to warn them of grave threats lying beyond their borders.

Mr. Hegseth: you are that threat.

Hegseth and everything he stands for, from the effort to grab Greenland to the attacks on European liberalism, should persuade the French to rescind any invitation to next year’s ceremonies in Normandy.

The post Pete Hegseth’s Invasions appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Still from Get Out.

Cornelia Gipson is trying to understand the hold that whiteness has on white people.

“I grew up black in Mississippi, and from the time I was 4, I knew I was black and what that meant,” she said. “How do white people come to understand they’re white? When did you first realize what it meant to be white?”

Gipson, who now lives and works in Nashville, asked me that question on a Zoom call that she initiated after reading my 2005 book, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege. My answer: I didn’t think seriously about being white until I was 30. Better late than never.

Gipson didn’t want to lecture me but was looking for honest conversation, which meant not just grilling me but reflecting on herself.

For example, she told me about pursuing a promotion and getting rebuffed by a white colleague. When Gipson pushed back, pointing out her qualifications, the colleague said, “You don’t know your place.”

“I think of it as the night Trump showed up at my house,” Gipson said, when she had to acknowledge how quickly subtle white supremacy can turn blatant.

Part two of that lesson came when she recounted the incident to a white friend who asked, “What do you think she meant by that comment?” Gipson said it was a warning that black people in the company shouldn’t aspire to leadership roles. Put more bluntly: Don’t get uppity. Her white friend’s response: “But Obama is president. Do you really think she meant that?”

Gipson said that at the time of that incident she was well versed in systemic racism and had no illusions about white power. But both interactions surprised her, a reminder that she had learned to ignore racial realities in everyday life for the sake of getting along.

“I’m unlearning internalized racism all the time,” she said. Even at 56, Gipson isn’t done unlearning.

Gipson had questions for me about my book, but I wanted to ask her questions. For example, what did she think of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) trainings in the corporations where she has worked? Gipson said she was always skeptical about their value, beyond allowing managers to check a box for HR. The trainings often were weighed down with jargon that didn’t speak to people’s struggles, she said. “In one sense, the attack on DEI is absurd since DEI policies and trainings didn’t accomplish all that much.”

The real goal in attacking DEI is to shut down honest education, she said. When Tennessee passed a law that basically prohibited any teaching that made white people feel bad, Gipson wrote in MS magazine, “What’s wrong with the truth? Absolutely nothing if one isn’t encased in fear with blinders to hold onto the past.”

We kept coming back to the fears—on all sides—in racial reckoning and decided it would be productive to put blunt questions to each other.

Jensen’s questions to Gipson

–What are you most afraid of when meeting white people?

Fear is never at the top of my mind, but I focus on understanding—as quickly as possible—the level of whiteness this person is dedicated to. I do a lot of observing and listening, and people usually reveal who they are, which tells me how safe I am. I want to know whether someone recognizes that whiteness was created to oppress. In my experience, most white people are generally good people who are clueless about the power imbalance around them because their world was shaped by whiteness. I am skeptical about white people until they have faced racial conflict and chosen to sacrifice themselves or use their whiteness to protect me. I have been down the path with several white so-called friends in the past, and unfortunately 99 percent failed in some way and are no longer in my community. I can’t take risks with my life and my family’s life, hoping someone will make the right decision.

–What do you think white people are most afraid of?

Not understanding racism and the social construct of race has been a safety blanket for American culture. Maybe 80 percent of white people have a toxic tie to whiteness that keeps them from really doing their own work to evolve. Your ancestors may not have been slave owners, but your skin color makes you the standard and my skin color was marked non-human. That’s why even modest attempts to improve living standards are resisted. Historically, when black people have pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps, we faced violence to keep us in our place. America was born in violence, and it appears violence is always on the menu to make sure whiteness continues to thrive.

–What has to change in society to eliminate those fears?

White people have to understand the cost of racism to get free of the addiction to whiteness. Only relationships and empathy can catapult one from knowing something is wrong to doing what’s necessary to right the wrong. That is what the idea of reparations means to me, repair. Something was broken and needs repair. But the most challenging part is acknowledging the wrong. That seems to be where most white people get stuck.

What makes you most angry about white people’s behavior?

White people’s delusions, the shock and surprise that whiteness exists and the complicity in supporting it.

What qualities in white people make you want to engage them?

I see human first, and so I am always engaging. The world is not set up for black people to disengage completely—we aren’t the segregationists. We just want to be treated fairly, to be safe. Unfortunately, the white majority too often sees that as a threat.

What qualities in white people make you want to avoid them?

I rarely avoid anyone, but I’m not stupid. I grew up in a state where then, and still now, my life was not valuable. That is the America I contend with daily.

Gipson’s questions to Jensen

What is up with the fear that critique will “humble our proud nation”?  

A lot of people have a lot invested in the idea that the United States is exceptional, the model for modern democracy. To suggest that genocide and slavery are central to how we became so wealthy and powerful, not just an unpleasant footnote, challenges that pride and makes people uneasy. In that phrase, humble is a negative, a synonym for humiliate. But real pride requires real humility, not defensiveness and denial. Without humility, pride is just arrogance.

Is empathy compatible with whiteness?

If whiteness means a commitment to the existing racial order, then whiteness makes empathy difficult, maybe impossible. Understanding how others suffer because of the structure of society makes it hard to enjoy your unearned advantages. I can look back at my own life and see how I suppressed empathy when I was younger, and how it came out as arrogance, all to protect myself from understanding the system and my place in it.

Why are white people so afraid of successful black people, even when those black people are self-isolating? 

When successful black people agree with the white people who believe racism is no longer relevant for social policy—Clarence Thomas might be the most obvious example—they aren’t a threat. But if black people who are successful in a white world—so that white people can’t write them off as whiners or losers—don’t back away from critiquing white supremacy, that’s scary for white people.

If you agree that whiteness is a kind of addiction, how would you characterize your experience of trying to “get clean”? How difficult is it to understand that repair is a never-ending project?

I don’t tend to use an addiction metaphor for social problems, though I understand how it can illuminate white psychology. But however the problem is framed, change requires a new understanding of the world and one’s own life, which requires accepting the discomfort that comes with honest self-reflection. And as you suggest, once we see the ways white supremacy shaped us and our world, it’s impossible to pretend that a few policy changes can solve the problem. It’s a lifelong struggle, personally and collectively.

When you realized whiteness gave you advantages, did you challenge this privilege?

At first, I wanted to believe that if I got involved in the right kind of political and community organizing with the right mix of non-white people, I could save myself, somehow transcend complicity. While I think those were good projects, eventually I realized that I couldn’t escape being white but that I could continue to try to leverage some of my advantages for social change, however small those changes might be.

Do you have any relationships with black people that are at the level of relationships you have with white people?

That’s possibly the hardest question you could have asked me, one that produces a bit of that discomfort. Today, all but three of my closest friends, the people with whom I share the details of my life, are white. I have a wider circle of friends that’s more multi-racial, mostly people I met in academic life or through political organizing, but those connections are not as intimate. I’m close to an incarcerated black man through my work as a volunteer editor in a prison writing program. I feel emotionally connected to him, talking on the phone and messaging not only about his writing but about our lives and struggles. I try to be open to new connections, but like a lot of white people, I live in a fairly segregated world, especially when I retired and moved to a rural area. It’s a lifelong struggle to avoid retreating into what feels familiar and comfortable, especially as I get older.

+++

Cornelia Gipson is a mom, grandmom, wife, and business professional on a life mission to use her voice, her experiences, and her painful dedication to transparency to undo harm and promote healing. She is a self-proclaimed hyper-extrovert who has never met a stranger.

The post Cornelia Gipson: Unlearning Racism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Screenshot

When the DNC finally released its 192-page “autopsy” of what went wrong in the disastrous 2024 election that propelled Donald Trump back into the White House, it was a poorly written document full of typos that offered few if any insights. As Michael Arria noted in “It’s the Genocide Stupid,” the report contained “virtually no analysis of the Democratic policies that might have helped propel Trump to another victory. If one were compiling such a list, support for the Gaza genocide would presumably be near the top, but the issue is not mentioned once in the massive report.”

The Biden, then Harris campaigns refused to change their position on Gaza even though the majority of Biden/Harris voters agreed with halting US weapon’s transfers to Israel. In an open letter to Kamala Harris, “Not Another Bomb” coalition pleaded with the candidate saying;

Consider the overwhelming sentiment among your constituents: 86% of Democrats support the proposed ceasefire deal in Gaza. This is the mainstream view of our party’s base, as evidenced by a recent poll that reveals that 52% of Americans and 62% of Biden/Harris voters agree with halting arms sales to Israel. In addition, 70% of democratic voters support withdrawing U.S. military funding to Israel if Israel rejects the proposed ceasefire deal, as Israel has continuously done.

In the midst of a brutal genocide being live-streamed on social media platforms, the refusal of the party to listen to its constituents and halt arms to Israel, or even condition those arms transfers, certainly had a major effect on voting and factored into the reason that many democrats simply refused to participate in the election, as Harris lost millions of votes that Biden won in 2020.

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 10, “Netanyahu’s Congressional Address as Unchecked Propaganda, and the US Political Establishment,” from the book The Complicit Lens, which details the struggle within the party to hold Israel accountable, and the untold damage done at the Democratic National Convention when the Harris-Waltz ticket wrote the Palestinians out of the party’s platform. It has been lightly edited.

Chicago 2024: The Democratic National Convention

On the morning of August 10, 2024, journalist Prem Thakker was on a bus with Party Delegates on their way to the DNC in Chicago, when he heard some of the delegates cheer as police cleared away pro-Palestinian demonstrators in the way of their bus. Thakker drew a comparison between this incident and the events of 1968, when Democrats also held their National Convention in Chicago. He observed with some disappointment that the genocide in Gaza could have been viewed as “a deep moral crossroads, a modern iteration of 1968 when mass protests against the Vietnam War were met with a brutal police response.” Instead, responding to those demanding justice for Palestinians in 2024 felt more like a “management of inconveniences.”

The party leaders actively supporting genocide were cheered on stage at the convention. This would be the most important event for Democrats before the November election. Although network anchors assured audiences that freedom of expression was tolerated at the DNC, The Intercept reported that three journalists holding camera equipment and wearing press badges were arrested while covering the Chicago convention protests.

The incident on the bus was just one of many political paradoxes that took place at the DNC. Another was the thunderous applause for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly” for a ceasefire. Later, the same crowd gave a fawning welcome to Hillary Clinton—the Secretary of State responsible for pushing then-President Barack Obama into the so-called “humanitarian war” against Libya, which led to more bloody destruction in the region. Clinton had also accused the students protesting the genocide of not knowing “very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or, frankly, about history, in many areas of the world.” Delegates both applauded calls to end the violence and to a speaker who derided that call. It was another moment when convention politics stopped making sense.

A Struggle “to Restore the Soul of the Democratic Party”

At the DNC, thirty uncommitted delegates pledged to Harris represented tens of thousands of anti-genocide constituents calling for a ceasefire. They had marked uncommitted on their ballots in protest of Biden’s role in arming Israel. These delegates came predominantly

from Minnesota, Michigan, and Washington. In the beginning, the Harris-Walz campaign of unity and good feelings was a needed reversal of the hate and anger emanating from Donald Trump, but the central problem raised during the primary remained; how would the party handle Israel’s crimes of war? For months, organizers in solidarity with Palestine fought to open a dialogue about Gaza, including pushing for a Palestinian speaker at the DNC. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor who saw the carnage after the Israeli assault on Gaza while volunteering at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, had hoped to “provide moral witness to the delegates.” But in a devastating blow that stunned organizers and delegates alike,

Democratic party operatives waited until the last day and then refused to let Haj-Hassan speak. Mehdi Hasan used the word erasure when referring to the 740,000 uncommitted voters denied a speaker. In response, organizers held a separate panel discussion with Haj-Hassan and Hala Hijazi, an activist who had lost almost 100 family members in Gaza. It was the first time that an official delegation at the DNC was devoted to defending the rights of Palestinians. Democracy Now! called this a struggle “to restore the soul of the Democratic party.”

But Vice President Harris seemed unaware of the party’s need to grapple with the US support of a genocide being live-streamed and demonstrably unpopular. Her speech at the DNC attempted a more empathetic tone as she described what was “happening” in Gaza as “devastating,” “desperate,” and “heartbreaking,” a lexicon that Middle East Eye identified as empty words by “pro-war liberal politicians” expressing a “meaningless facsimile of empathy.” Failing to distinguish between the crime of collective punishment and the slaughter of civilians and Israeli self-defense, Harris said, “I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself ” against “the horror of a terrorist organization called Hamas.” The extent of her failure to formulate a new policy vision could be heard in the echoes of Israeli hasbara fabrications, as she referred to the “unspeakable sexual violence” committed by Hamas. Harris repeated that there was “widespread,” “weaponized sexual violence,” committed by Hamas on October 7, 2024, a false claim for which no evidence existed, but was promulgated by The New York Times. As Mehdi Hasan pointed out on MSNBC, Harris went out of her way to condemn Hamas for sexual violence, with no mention of Israel’s documented sexual violence against Palestinians in detention. Had media accurately reported the facts of the genocide or offered any criticism of Netanyahu’s speech before congress a month earlier, the DNC might have been much different. The Harris-Walz ticket failed again and again to address the genocide, preferring to fill political spaces with superficial campaign messaging that went so far as to represent Harris on a Flower Power poster. The Pop-Cult peace and love coded candidate openly contradicted her unequivocal support for a genocide.

DNC media campaigns helped hide one important reality: Harris’s best chance of winning was to represent the will of the American people, and she wouldn’t do it.

The hesitant, muddled, ultimately failed logic of the DNC reflected Biden’s own mixed messaging on Gaza—mildly critical of Netanyahu while funneling more weapons to him. Biden gave lip-service to the thousands outside on the streets at the DNC, “Those protesters out in the street, they have a point; a lot of innocent people are being killed, both sides,” (Though by August 2024, the deaths tolls were not comparable, as 40,000 Palestinians had been killed since October 7, amounting to a ratio of 33-1870). Biden repeatedly gaslit the public, assuring them that a ceasefire was imminent. For example, on July 10, the US State Department said they were at the “10-yard line” for a ceasefire deal, a lie widely repeated in the US press. Though the ceasefire never materialized, neither The New York Times nor other legacy media held the administration responsible. Meanwhile the US was authorizing $20 billion in weapons sales, and promising 6,500 munitions to Israel, along with $3.5 billion to buy more US weapons, giving Netanyahu little to no incentive to negotiate a ceasefire. As Eugene Robinson warned in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, “Democrats are not going to be given any sort of free pass on Gaza. Many who care passionately about Palestinian suffering believe that “Donald Trump would be worse” sounds like an excuse, not a policy.”

Through surveys, the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) found that a large number of voters were more likely to cast a ballot for Harris if she would halt arms to Israel. But as election expert Nolan Higdon observed, “polling seems not to impact Democratic Party news media.” Indeed, a post-election poll showed that nearly a third of US voters who cast their ballots for Biden in 2020 did not vote for Harris in 2024 because of the party’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. “‘Vice President Harris lost votes because of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,’ IMEU said in a statement announcing the poll.” Though foreign policy is rarely a major factor in voter turnout, in 2024 the genocide in Gaza was an issue that surpassed the economy, immigration, healthcare, and abortion. One of the only mainstream outlets to point this out at the time was the UK Guardian, that ran this headline, “Not changing course on Gaza was a colossal mistake by Kamala Harris.” A pseudo ceasefire was achieved only after the Democrats lost to an unhinged convicted felon. What

seemed like a victory for Trump, was handed to him by Biden’s refusal to bring Israel to account.

From Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of the US Congress on July 24, 2024, an honor bestowed only upon highly respected dignitaries—Netanyahu has given four of them, more than any other foreign dignitary—to the floor of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the US political establishment, with the help of its mainstream media megaphone, failed to give voice to US citizens concerned that Palestinians were enduring the most brutal genocidal violence ever perpetrated thanks to weapons supplied by the US government. Though many mid-level government officials tried to sound the alarm and worked to bring the Democratic administration back to its policies promoting human rights and the principles of international law, the US actively supported the actions and followed the propaganda dictates of a rogue settler-colonial state it helped to shape. Commenting on the tone-deaf leaders of the Democratic Party, Rep. Ilhan Omar told Mehdi Hasan, “come November 6, if we are to lose this election, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.”

Conclusion

Criag Mokhiber wrote a scathing condemnation of the “Autopsy” and the Democrat’s refusal to account for their loss in 2024 in any meaningful way, its failure to represent the will of their constituents, and finally do the right thing and stop the genocide. He observed;

Did anyone really expect the Dem Party leadership, which has been directly and enthusiastically complicit in the genocide & apartheid in Palestine, to issue an honest mea culpa on the matter? Time to write an “autopsy” for the Party itself, and throw them, alongside the overtly fascist Republican Party, into the trash bin of history.

But this assessment may be too harsh, as there seems to be movement toward change in the Democratic Party. Zohran Mamdoni’s mayoral win with a campaign celebrating the diversity of New York City, and his unapologetic voice as a Muslim has opened the media frame as the Israeli narrative continues to crumble. AIPAC has become toxic in politics and Pro-Palestinian progressives have been surging in primary contests. Chris Rabb’s primary win in Pennsylvania’s 3rd district, as Mondowiess pointed out, can be attributed to his consistency on Palestine that resonated with voters. “who have felt betrayed by the Democrats’ approach to Israel and foreign policy.” Analilia Mejia won a special election in New Jersey’s 11th congressional district and is now in Congress. In New Jersey’s 12th District Dr. Adam Hawamy, a pro-Palestinian army combat veteran who volunteered in Gaza won the primary on Tuesday, and as of 2 days ago, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is pulling ahead in the Michigan Senate race. Gaza and Palestine have changed the political landscape, as democratic voters have become more clear-eyed about the state of Israel, and the politicians who refuse to hold them accountable for genocide.

The post The Democrats’ 2024 “Autopsy” and the Party’s Refusal to Halt Weapons to Israel appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by sina drakhshani.

The hardest question in American Middle East policy is no longer only what Washington wants from the region. It is who gets to shape that policy. That question has become impossible to ignore. During Donald Trump’s first term, Kushner played a central role in White House diplomacy, especially the normalization push that produced the Abraham Accords. Today, Trump has restored a hardline Iran posture, including a “maximum pressure” campaign, while Kushner has deep ties to Gulf capital and remains close to Middle East diplomacy. That overlap does not prove corruption. It does, however, make America’s Iran strategy harder to describe as a purely public policy project.

Kushner’s first-term role was not marginal. He was one of the most visible architects of an approach that tied Arab-Israeli normalization, Gulf relations, and pressure on Iran into one regional vision. The Iran policy around it relied on economic coercion and regional isolation. Washington was trying to build a regional order in which Israel and key Arab states aligned more openly, while Iran was pushed further out.

That is why what happened after Kushner left government matters. In 2022, House investigators opened a probe into the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s $2 billion investment in his private equity firm, Affinity Partners. By the end of 2024, Reuters reported that Affinity’s assets under management had grown to $4.8 billion after additional Gulf-backed capital. Kushner has defended his business dealings and argued that he followed applicable laws. But ethics in foreign policy is not only about criminality. It is also about whether the public can trust that major strategic decisions are being made for the country, not inside a political ecosystem where family proximity, sovereign wealth and personal access reinforce one another.

The more recent developments make the issue harder to dismiss as old news. Kushner has also discussed U.S.-Saudi diplomacy with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, including Saudi-Israeli normalization. In April 2026, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee opened a sweeping inquiry into Kushner’s foreign entanglements, arguing that diplomacy and private fundraising had become dangerously blurred. That same month, Axios reported that Kushner and Steve Witkoff were headed to Pakistan for Iran talks mediated by Islamabad. Allegations are not proof. Still, the concern is hard to shrug off: someone who helped shape the first Trump-era Iran posture is also a private fund manager backed by Gulf money and reappearing in Iran-related diplomacy.

This is where “privatization” becomes useful. The issue is not simply that Kushner has Saudi-linked money behind him. It is that a region once framed in terms of national interest is increasingly being managed through an overlapping web of state power, personal relationships and private capital. In that web, alignment with Saudi Arabia and Israel is not only formal strategy. It also sits beside the business incentives of people close to the president. That does not mean every anti-Iran move is “for” Kushner’s fund. It means the boundary between public policy and private opportunity is becoming harder to see.

The war with Iran makes this more than an ethics seminar. Trump’s latest Middle East posture still presents itself as a defense of order, deterrence and, at times, the Iranian people. Yet the surrounding architecture tells a different story. Saudi Arabia remains central to the wider regional design Trump wants, particularly if normalization with Israel can be revived. In that context, Kushner’s Gulf-backed capital is not an unrelated side story. It is part of the environment in which America’s Iran policy is being formulated and marketed.

A serious foreign policy cannot operate like this indefinitely without damaging its credibility. The problem is the narrowing of political imagination that follows when the same relationships keep reproducing the same instincts: tighter alignment with Saudi Arabia, closer alignment with Israeli regional priorities and more pressure on Iran. When public policy moves inside private networks, alternatives become harder to imagine, because the people with the most access are invested in a particular regional order.

The right conclusion is not that Kushner alone explains Trump’s Iran policy. American hostility toward Iran long predates him, and the U.S.-Saudi-Israeli triangle has deeper roots than any one family. But it is no longer convincing to treat Kushner’s Saudi ties as irrelevant to how Trump’s Middle East strategy operates. They suggest a model of policymaking in which family proximity, foreign sovereign capital and regional realignment sit at the same table. That is not merely bad optics. It is a warning that America’s Iran strategy may be becoming more private, less accountable and harder for the public to see.

The post Jared Kushner and the Privatization of America’s Iran Strategy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Vony Razom.

For decades, Russia and India have presented their relationship as one of the most durable strategic partnerships in international politics. From Soviet support during the Cold War to contemporary defence cooperation, Moscow has consistently regarded New Delhi as a trusted partner and an important pillar of the emerging multipolar order. Yet India’s expanding defence engagement with Ukraine raises important questions about the future of this relationship and the changing nature of strategic trust.

The issue is not the existence of Indo-Ukrainian cooperation itself. Contacts between the two countries’ defence sectors predate the current conflict. What has changed is the strategic context in which that cooperation now takes place.

In April 2026, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that Kyiv and New Delhi were finalizing a security cooperation arrangement. The statement followed a gradual expansion of bilateral defence contacts, including discussions on military-technical cooperation, defence-industrial collaboration, and access to technologies shaped by Ukraine’s wartime experience.

Therefore, these developments may appear routine. In the broader context of India’s foreign policy, however, they reflect what can be described as transactional multipolarity. Unlike traditional non-alignment, which sought distance from competing blocs, transactional multipolarity seeks to maximize benefits from multiple power centres while minimizing political commitments. India’s foreign policy increasingly reflects this approach: New Delhi purchases discounted Russian energy while deepening security ties with the United States, participates in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation while strengthening partnerships with Europe and Indo-Pacific democracies, and maintains defence cooperation with Russia while expanding ties with Israel, France, and Ukraine.

The Historical Foundations of Russia-India Trust

Historically, Russia has been among India’s most reliable strategic partners. Soviet support during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War, continued cooperation following India’s 1998 nuclear tests, and decades of defence-industrial collaboration created a foundation of trust rarely seen in international politics. Russian-origin equipment continues to form a substantial part of India’s military inventory, including Su-30MKI fighters, T-90 tanks, S-400 air defence systems, and the jointly developed BrahMos missile programme. Even today, large segments of India’s military infrastructure remain dependent on Russian maintenance, spare parts, and technical support. Against this backdrop, India’s growing engagement with Ukraine deserves closer attention.

While Indo-Ukrainian defence cooperation predates the current conflict, recent developments suggest a broader and more ambitious agenda. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Ukraine in August 2024 marked an important milestone. Both sides agreed to advance military-technical cooperation and convene the second India-Ukraine Joint Working Group on Military-Technical Cooperation in India. The visit signalled that New Delhi viewed Ukraine not merely as a diplomatic partner but increasingly as a potential source of defence-industrial cooperation.

Military-industrial links between the two countries are already well established. In 2019, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited entered into a trilateral arrangement with Ukraine’s SpetsTechnoExport and Romania’s Neves 77 Solutions involving equipment associated with India’s Su-30MKI fleet. HAL has also sourced support connected to RD-33 and R-25 engine systems used across segments of India’s Soviet-origin military inventory. In 2021, Bharat Dynamics Limited signed a contract involving optical sighting systems and refurbishment support for Igla-1M missiles.

Individually, these projects may appear technical in nature. Collectively, however, they illustrate a gradual effort by India to cultivate alternative sources of expertise within the broader post-Soviet defence ecosystem. What makes this trend more significant today is the transformation of Ukraine itself.

The war has turned Ukraine into one of the world’s most important laboratories of military innovation. Drone warfare, electronic warfare, battlefield networking, air-defence adaptation, and counter-UAS technologies are being refined under conditions of sustained combat. For India, access to such experience offers an opportunity not only to acquire battlefield-tested technologies but also to reduce long-term dependence on Russian suppliers for critical components, maintenance, and modernization programmes.

Reports indicate that India is exploring cooperation with Ukraine in areas including missile seeker heads, air-defence refurbishment, artillery modernization, An-32 spares, aero-engines, marine gas turbines, drones, electronic warfare systems, and counter-UAS capabilities. Such cooperation would expand India’s technological options while gradually reducing Russian leverage over segments of India’s Soviet and Russian-origin military inventory.

Is Ukraine Different from India’s Other Partners?

A reasonable counterargument is that there is nothing fundamentally new about this behaviour. Russia has already tolerated India’s participation in the Quad, its growing defence purchases from Western suppliers, and its expanding political engagement with Europe and the United States. From this perspective, cooperation with Ukraine is simply another manifestation of India’s long-standing commitment to strategic autonomy.

This argument carries considerable weight. Moscow has historically demonstrated a pragmatic understanding of India’s foreign policy and has rarely demanded exclusivity in the relationship. Russian policymakers have generally accepted that India’s rise as a major power requires diversified partnerships and strategic flexibility. Nevertheless, Ukraine occupies a unique position that distinguishes it from India’s other partners.

The United States and Europe may compete with Russia in various domains, but Ukraine remains directly engaged in a conflict that Moscow considers central to its national security interests. Ukraine’s defence-industrial sector is not simply another source of military technology. It is an ecosystem shaped by direct confrontation with Russian forces. The operational lessons, military innovations, and battlefield experience that India seeks to access are products of that confrontation.

For this reason, the significance of Indo-Ukrainian defence cooperation lies less in its immediate military value than in what it reveals about India’s evolving strategic calculations.

The Future of Multipolarity and Strategic Trust

Within Russian strategic circles, India has long been viewed as a key partner in the construction of a multipolar world order. Figures such as Sergey Karaganov have repeatedly emphasized India’s importance as one of the major centres of emerging Eurasian power. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has frequently described Russia-India relations as uniquely resilient because they are based on long-term trust rather than temporary geopolitical convenience. It is precisely this expectation of long-term strategic trust that makes the Ukrainian dimension noteworthy.

The issue is not whether India has the sovereign right to engage Ukraine. Nor is it whether New Delhi should abandon its pursuit of national interests. The more important question is whether traditional concepts such as strategic partnership retain the same meaning when states increasingly seek advantages across multiple and sometimes competing geopolitical relationships simultaneously.

India’s foreign policy has undoubtedly enhanced its diplomatic flexibility and international influence. By drawing resources, technologies, and opportunities from multiple centres of power, New Delhi has expanded its room for manoeuvre in an increasingly fragmented international environment. Yet this strategy also introduces new uncertainties into relationships that were once considered exceptionally stable.

For New Delhi, cooperation with Ukraine represents another opportunity to acquire valuable military expertise and technological capabilities. For Moscow, however, it raises broader questions about the future meaning of strategic partnership in an era of transactional multipolarity.

If India continues to derive strategic value from both Russia and Ukraine simultaneously, Moscow may eventually need to reconsider whether strategic partnership can truly be separated from strategic alignment. The future of Russia-India relations may depend less on decades of shared history and more on whether both sides continue to define multipolarity in compatible ways.

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It had been less than a year since new tenants moved into the first floor apartment of the house next door. We had barely ever seen them—only brief glimpses, apart from the young, overly-barky dog often tied out back last Winter. But one day a van was parked at the end of our shared driveway, blocking me in, and so I knocked on their door to explain the logistics of it all. She introduced herself,  apologizing profusely that he must not have known how it worked, and the van soon disappeared.  A couple of times, after the weather warmed, I saw the kids tossing a ball back and forth in their small backyard, adjacent to ours.  I rarely saw him at all.

Once, as we were backing out, she happened by with the dog on leash, as awkward and jumpy as the untrained young shepherd, gesturing for me to roll down the window. She wanted to apologize for the barking.  The van appeared once more, this time parked next to my car, but with its back end sticking out so much that I was again blocked in.  Not needing to go anywhere soon, I this time put a post-it on its window, politely (I hope) explaining the rocket science of pulling forward all the way.

The last time I saw her clearly was on Memorial Day. The parade passes down our street at about 9:30, and Vali and I watch, coffee in hand, from the front step. We are interested mostly in the high school bands and the watchers, who have brought folding chairs to the city-managed strip of grass between the sidewalk and street.  We (myself in particular) are mostly out of the loop, but there is always someone to talk to.  Ty and Kathleen at least, will arrive on their bikes and camp out front. There was the smiling and waving Outagamie County Sheriff, walking at pace in front of the occasionally-tooting “K-9 Unit” Sheriff-mobile, and there was one of the big military vehicles shared  by the Sheriff’s Department and the Appleton Police Department, a BAE Caiman MRAP.  Somewhere in there I saw her with the dog, trying to cross the street, flustered, looking for a thin spot in a parade she seemed to have no idea would occur. Below is a long-exposure picture I took of the parade, as seen from our house.

Throwing on some PJs and looking out the bedroom window, I could tell the noise came from a large, black armored vehicle parked askew on the front sidewalk next door—apparently the Lenco BearCat [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenco_BearCat] Outagamie County shares with the Appleton Police Department.  The much-larger Caiman MRAP I saw at the parade, with its three axles, would have extended most of the way across the street.   The makers of the BearCat and Caiman are based in Massachusetts and Virginia.  Whatever happened to “buy local?”  Oshkosh Defense LLC is only 20 miles down I-41 South. One of their models [https://www.defensenews.com/land/2023/12/01/israels-oshkosh-tactical-vehicle-buy-to-keep-line-open-longer/] has been eagerly bought up by the Israeli defense industry, kitted out for use in Gaza.  What’s good enough for the ID[sic]F should be good enough for Outagamie County.  Below is Oshkosh Has the Right to Defend Itself, a 3-color photographic print I made in 2024.  It shows a Google-Earth view of completed vehicles lined up on the grounds of Oshkosh Defense, with photogram objects added during the exposures.

Racing Kitty Tobias down the stairs, I started some coffee and then looked out the front door, which opens to the windowed-in porch. Arrayed on our front step outside were four men in full tactical gear, their assault rifles  facing the neighbors.  Still unclear to me what was going on, I slightly opened the front door.  “Stay inside, sir!”  Well that cleared things up.  Looking out back, through the sliding door, four more helmet-vest-rifle combinations were about 25 feet away in the back yard, using my car as cover.  One had what appeared to be a shotgun-like tear gas launcher.

The triple siren whoop and amplified message repeated every minute or so.  Back upstairs for a better view, an acute-angle glimpse through the bedroom window showed her one last time, being herded into a car with the kids.  There was a Sheriff guy nearby, emerging from what looked like the same K-9 sheriff car I’d seen two weeks earlier at the parade. Was it really the Sheriff, or only the Deputy? In the moment, I Googled, to determine if this Sheriff-like apparition was the real deal, and I swear to God I couldn’t tell.  They all looked the same to me.

The message from the BearCat changed from “the occupants” to “the occupant,” with an added, “We know you’re in there!”  Fortunately, they were patient and waited, instead of busting down the door.  After another half hour or so, he must have come out.  The siren stopped, the BearCat, guns and most of the vans left, and an evidence truck arrived.  “Can I help you?” I asked the young woman in a black vest marked “evidence”, busily photographing my car.

I thought of the cluster of cops on our front step, pressed against the porch window and screen door.  I suddenly realized that their helmeted heads had been only inches from Cat’s poster!   I was trapped inside, but Crystal across the street got some video, and here is a still that shows the police at my door, before they took up their tactical ready positions on the steps.  On the right is an unobstructed view I captured later in the day.

Appleton-based comedian and illustrator Cat Tervo designed the Ice Out poster back in February, at the request of Lauretta of  Amano Print House [https://www.amanoprintshop.com/].  The community project to print and distribute the posters was Lauretta’s idea.   Cat tells me:

I’m a bird nerd. I was struck by the imagery of loons (the state bird of Minnesota) carrying their babies on their backs.  Appleton is a family-oriented community, and it’s common to see mothers with their kids at protests. I used the image of a loon and her baby to highlight the role mothers have in the resistance movement.  My style can be very `cute’ but it was important to me that the loons looked angry in their declaration of ICE OUT.

If Martians ever come to study us they would certainly conclude, despite our protestations, that humans are humans. Cops are humans too, as a corollary, but also cops are cops. It wasn’t an ICE raid by ICE officers; neighborhood scuttlebutt suggests the search warrant related to some alleged illegal methods of sale and service.  But how did these County law enforcement employees feel about their roles in an over-the-top militarized approach to serving a search warrant?  And how did they feel about an ICE-OUT-mama-baby-loon breathing down their necks for the better part of an hour? I hope they at least felt uncomfortable, and I confess that my reasons for this are partly petty.

I feel uncomfortable 50 out of every 60 minutes I spend contemplating pretty much anything of importance. I like to think this low-grade, chronic queasiness helps keep me both honest and on my toes.  Nothing will ever get better until a lot of folks start to feel significantly more uncomfortable than they do at present. For 45 minutes anyway, Cat’s poster was far more in-your-face than I ever could have dreamed when I hung it back in February.  And that leaves me with a peaceful, easy feeling.

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Image by Marius Christensen.

Aside from basketball, this year’s NBA Finals showcased civic identity and political power. Shea Serrano, author of Expensive Basketball, once argued that data is outweighed by the unquantifiable. Basketball can be explained in the aesthetic, shared memory, or even the hidden statistic. For example, Sue Bird’s backpedal, Tim Duncan’s dominance, or Dwyane Wade’s total in blocked shots (885 — the most ever for a player 6:4 and under), all captured something beyond the numbers. Beyond this, pure analytics certainly matter. The World Champion New York Knicks of the 2026 NBA Finals topped the San Antonio Spurs in True Shooting Percentage, Points Per Possession, and a higher Value Over Replacement Player. Serrano’s methodology does not discount these tangibles but rather looks at the significance of the abstract. And although the Knicks set records for post-season wins and margins of victory, the team had obvious intangibles that the Spurs failed to match. Basketball cannot be reduced to numbers, and neither can the Knicks’ professional and social success story.

Journalist Ari Paul recently said that with the Knicks, “there’s a sense of thrill and connectedness I haven’t felt in some time.” As something changed in the air, he referenced how basketball was in the lifeblood of the city’s parks, schools, and YMCAs. Even for fans that don’t play it, or follow it closely, it carries an omnipotent pulse. Paul further stated, “too often on the political left, pro-sports are dismissed as bread and circus, [but] you don’t even need to like basketball to see how the Knicks are lifting a kind of New York City ‘patriotism’ that crosses class, race, and gender lines.” International relations scholar Stephen Zunes commented, “seeing reels of fans in bars and on the streets celebrating the Knicks’ winning the NBA championship is a reminder of how delightfully racially and ethnically mixed New York City is — which is why the rightwing hates it so much.”

Unfortunately, the victory was met by some with an uncomradely reaction; resulting in widespread and wanton destruction.

When Knicks owner James Dolan and Commissioner Adam Silver welcomed Donald Trump to Madison Square Garden for Game Three of the NBA Finals, Journalist Dave Zirin wrote that “it’s like having Bull Connor show up to the NAACP Image Award because he’s a fan of Misty Copeland.” Trump has trashed the NBA but still found the need to attend. As soon as he entered the picture, risking a hostile reception, fans were prohibited from having watch parties. After the United States Secret Service and New York Police Department were called in to ramp up security, there was a return to civic enjoyment for the remainder of the series. Even with democratizing watch parties, Josh Hart bemoaned the outrageous ticket prices that prevented generational fans from attending. They’ve waited decades for this moment, he emphasized.

In a sports league designed for individual players to navigate domestic, social, economic, and racial justice advocacy, NBA management struggles in distancing itself from human rights violators like Qatar, the UAE, Israel, and the current regime. As writer Roane Carey pointed out, “everyone needs to focus more on the UAE’s criminal role in so many different conflicts. And it’s atrocious that they’ve bought so many different athletic teams to wash their image.”

All the while, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has tried to harness the Knicks fandom to support his own form of progressive politics and cultural soft power in New York. Zirin might argue that Mamdani has made it easier to focus less on the team’s high society aura and more on The City Game, as he embarks on crafting the Knicks energy around a civically minded ethos. For the Finals, the Knicks preserved the image of the anti-team and placed their own team culture above ego as they rebelled against the prematurely anointed superstar of the Western Conference. The NBA Finals has also shown Mamdani’s ability to utilize social media in his favor. The team’s orange and blue colors serving as a backdrop, advertised other progressive candidates like Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez; all have important messages, ranging from blocking billionaire election interference, the abolition of ICE, and standing up to property speculation.

The New York Liberty won the WNBA in 2024. Although the Knicks might have a way to go in catching up to them — a WNBA franchise ahead of the curve in queer representation, codified social justice commitments, and fights for labor rights — something about this year’s Knicks feels authentic and grassroots. For example, long-time Knick diehard and filmmaker Spike Lee wore a keffiyeh patterned shirt in support of Palestine at the NBA All-Star game. It proved too much for a league tied tightly to American power. Karl-Anthony Towns plays a key role in voting rights restoration and serves on the board of the Social Justice Coalition. He was named the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion in 2024 and even further, was awarded the Bob Lanier Community Assist for helping to fund a sports facility in the Dominican Republic. Jalen Brunson serves as an ambassador for Covenant House, dedicated to serving unhoused youth in New York City.

In some ways, the Knicks and Spurs could not be more different. The Knicks are a large market in the north with gritty Philly college ball players and a celebrity entourage and legendary emeriti. The Spurs are a smaller market, built around the fundamentals, corporate knowledge, and an international and generational talent. The Spurs are not guided by a motivational culture but an operational one. But it is apparent that the Knicks inverted this script almost entirely.

But like the Knicks, the Spurs also have strong ties to progressive politics and are members of civil society. They participate in PeacePlayers International to bridge global divides at every level of society. Their team and organization, from the top down, have spoken on the tragedies surrounding Palestine. Stephon Castle even supplied vocal support for Gaza during live action. Further, the “Spurs nuns” of the Salesian order, educate disadvantaged youth and have followed Spurs basketball on the Westside of San Antonio at the St. John Bosco School since the 1990s. The Spurs’ organizational culture holistically develops coaches, athletes and people. The previous Head Coach, Gregg Popovich was the first NBA coach to hire a full-time woman assistant in the league, Becky Hammon. He also widely praised Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests and opposes the fascism of the Trump Administration.

As a former assistant with the Spurs, Knicks Head Coach Mike Brown learned to prioritize individual needs. When Brown and his wife separated in 2002, Popovich insisted he not travel but stay home with his sons. In a short time, Brown has helped Brunson develop even more as a leader. Brunson provided the team with hope while defining their reality. Moreover, Brown empowered his assistants and gave them a voice. In two instances, assistants Rick Brunson and Jordan Brink were difference makers in post-season outcomes.

Not since 1973 had the Knicks won a title. Even though they remained a classic underdog, they were the more experienced, deeper, talented, and tougher team. Aside from the Finals drought, Madison Square Garden, opening in 1968, has been a sports and entertainment mecca. It was a site of hard luck despite its enduring presence and unlike most stadiums, is a place of true urban integration. The “neighborhood walk-to arena” is a blessing in an era where outskirt stadium infrastructure models stretch fan bases further from their central hubs.

In effect, Mikal Bridges and OG Anunoby outplayed the young Spurs squad with their own version of the ball-controlled “Spurs way,” while valuing possessions and securing nearly every 50/50 loose ball. Victor Wembanyama struggled on the world stage when fatigue became a factor. Brown outcoached Spurs Head Coach Mitch Johnson and as Tim Legler stated, the best adjustment a coach can make is a substitution. The Spurs have famously asserted that it takes a player at least an entire season to learn their system with overseas players learning it much faster. In this contest, however, they might have taken a step backwards. Knicks starters and reserves competed in a way San Antonio historically found familiar; by using the bench, shrinking the court, and allowing no middle dribble penetration, second shots, or rebounding. Defensively, Tom Thibodeau’s handprints were still all over the Knicks’ half court effort, while Brown’s offensive approach (“sprays”) were a marked improvement in terms of spacing and execution.

Fans questioned whether the league seemingly selected officials more likely to extend the series despite Keldon Johnson and De’Aaron Fox’s apparent disinterest in that effort. Nonetheless, the Knicks excelled in floor balance and capitalized on rule changes that have made the NBA more perimeter and television oriented. In the NBA, the two hardest things to guard are the early push and second shots, according to Jeff Van Gundy. The Knicks outperformed in both. On the Saturday practice before Game Three, there was footage of Rick Brunson calling his son over to speak with Patrick Ewing at the Knicks shootaround. Brunson ran to Ewing. One of Jay Wright’s key principles at Villanova was: “players never walk when on the court; there must be a sense of urgency in everything you do.” In short, especially for the Finals MVP, the significance of these Finals was never confined to just basketball, as the Knicks and Spurs provide a vehicle for civic belonging in an age of autocracy.

The post The Politics of the NBA Finals appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

A DDG-51 destroyer ship on the water. U.S. Navy photo by Journalist 2nd Class Patrick Reilly.

The release of the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report got the usual suspects (a.k.a. “very serious people”) genuflecting about the large projected shortfall. As of 2034, the program is projected to be unable to pay full benefits. This would mean a 22 percent cut in benefits if no additional revenue is added.

There are three points worth making here.

1. As an economic matter, the projected depletion of the trust fund and resulting shortfall in the program means nothing;

2. The main reason for the projected shortfall is the upward redistribution of income over the last half-century;

3. The projected shortfall is far less money than the increase in military spending that Donald Trump is requesting for his 2027 budget.

Trust Fund Accounting 

On the first point, the spending to repay the bonds held from the trust fund in 2033 comes from the Treasury. Its impact on the economy would be the same as the spending in 2034, when the trust fund no longer holds any bonds.

There is an issue that the law gives the program a claim to the funds needed to repay the bonds it holds. Social Security does not have a claim to the money needed to pay full benefits once the last bonds are sold and the trust fund is depleted.

This is an important legal point, but from an economic standpoint, it is money from the Treasury in both cases. If the country could afford to pay full benefits in 2033 when the trust fund held bonds. It can afford to pay full benefits after it has sold all its bonds, however the law would need to be changed.

Upward Redistribution Hurt Social Security’s Finances

In 1982, the last time the program had a major overhaul, just 10 percent of wage income went to high wage earners whose income escaped taxation by being over the cap (currently around $185,000) for wages subject to the 12.4 percent Social Security tax. In the last quarter century, close to 17 percent of wage income went over the cap.

This upward redistribution of wage income, coupled with the redistribution from wages to profits in the last quarter century, has substantially reduced the amount of revenue going into the trust fund. It shouldn’t be surprising that the people who engineered the upward redistribution of the last half-century — through trade policy, stronger patent and copyright protections, bank bailouts, and tech policy —now want to reduce people’s Social Security benefits.

Donald Trump’s Increase in Military Spending is Twice the Size of the Shortfall Projected for 2034

The media seem to take pride in reporting huge budget numbers without providing any context that would make them meaningful to their audience. The projected Social Security shortfall is a great example. The usual group of budget hawks is being brought out to tell us that it is a huge program, which we can’t afford, and requires cuts.

Yet, we did not hear the same chorus in response to Donald Trump’s proposed increase in the military budget from $864 billion in the last year of the Biden presidency to $1,500 billion in 2027. Even adjusting for inflation between the two years, the increase would still be close to $590 billion. There was no rationale given for why the country suddenly needs to spend so much more on its military. Trump certainly did not propose this sort of massive increase in spending in his campaign.

The proposed increase in military spending dwarfs the shortfall projected in the Social Security program for 2034.

Adjusting for inflation (assuming 2.5 percent annually), Trump’s requested increase would be just under $700 billion in 2034 dollars. By contrast, the Social Security Trustees project that the program will face a $314 billion shortfall in its annual budget in 2034.

We can argue about what should be considered big and what should be considered small, but there is zero doubt that Trump’s proposed increase in military spending is hugely larger than the projected shortfall in Social Security. If anyone thinks that Social Security poses a big problem for the budget, they must believe that Trump’s military spending poses a much bigger problem, since it is more than twice as large.

And, as noted earlier, we are already paying the money for Social Security; it is just coming out of a different pocket. The proposed increase in military spending, at 1.6 percent of GDP, will be newly committed funds coming from the Treasury, which will impose substantial demands on the economy. Any honest person who says funding Social Security poses a serious budget problem must believe that Trump’s military spending poses a far bigger problem.

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

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Victims of U.S.-Israel airstrikes on Enghelab square, Tehran. Tasnim News Agency. CC BY 4.0

Like most of America’s wars in West Asia, the current joint U.S.-Israel attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran is about securing control over the region’s energy resources and preserving oil currency policies; practices that have fueled its expansive economy since the end of the Second World War.

The post The US-Israel Wars on Iran: Follow the Money appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This form of repression does not always manifest as direct blocking or public arrest. It operates through invisible algorithms and digital systems, reshaping the digital space in ways that determine what reaches audiences and what gets marginalized. With the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence, these mechanisms have grown increasingly complex and far-reaching. This raises a pressing question: how does this system work, and how can it be confronted?

Digital Control and Voluntary Self-Surveillance

Large digital corporations collect vast amounts of data systematically, using artificial intelligence to analyze it and classify users according to behavioral patterns, intellectual orientations, and political inclinations. Through carefully designed algorithms, left-wing, progressive, and human rights content can be restricted without any need for direct deletion. From the user’s perspective, low engagement appears to stem from audience indifference, when in reality it may be the result of algorithmic mechanisms controlling the level of reach and visibility.

Many have experienced this firsthand: a significant post is written and reaches only a limited number of followers. Numerous studies have examined the phenomenon of the filter bubble, whereby users are gradually isolated within information environments that reinforce their pre-existing views while limiting their exposure to critical or alternative content. The 2021 Facebook leaks revealed internal discussions concerning content management and the influence of algorithms on the public sphere. The Brookings Institution has documented how digital platforms contribute to deepening political polarization and entrenching ideological dominance.

Over time, many users begin practicing what might be called ‘voluntary self-surveillance,’ imposing restrictions on themselves out of fear of bans or declining reach. This fear reshapes the nature of public discourse and gradually transforms the digital space into a more controlled environment, one that serves the interests of the forces dominating the digital infrastructure.

Digital Frustration

Through the constant flow of content, algorithms contribute to generating a sense of helplessness and loss of hope in the possibility of change, by repeatedly emphasizing the failures of progressive experiments and presenting the existing capitalist order as the only viable option. At the same time, individualism and personal success solutions are promoted as the primary path for addressing social problems, while consumer culture and individual achievement are presented as the practical alternative to collective action and political organization. The result is the isolation of individuals, the weakening of collective bonds, and the transformation of shared social concerns into personal responsibilities.

Digital Arrest and Digital Assassination

When covert surveillance or frustration proves insufficient, the system reaches more explicit levels of digital exclusion. Activists and journalists suddenly find their accounts suspended or blocked without prior warning, with these measures justified by generic phrases such as ‘violating community standards,’ even though the targeted content is in many cases documentation of human rights violations or war crimes.

In other cases, the situation reaches what can only be described as ‘digital assassination’: the complete erasure of the digital presence of individuals or entire institutions. The targeting of Palestinian content stands as one of the most contested examples, with human rights organizations and researchers having documented numerous instances of post deletions and account restrictions linked to coverage of violations, alongside a striking inconsistency in the application of content rules across different parties.

What Can Be Done? Alternatives for Left-Wing and Progressive Forces

If soft digital repression seeks to limit the potential for resistance, organization, and free expression, then confronting it begins with reconsidering technology itself as an arena of social and political struggle.

This requires pushing for greater transparency and democratic oversight of large digital corporations, and enacting legislation that protects privacy, criminalizes political surveillance, and mandates disclosure of algorithmic decision-making mechanisms.

The response cannot be limited to legislation alone. There is also a need to build digital left-wing internationals and cross-border solidarity networks that expose digital violations and defend rights and freedoms in the online space. Users and civil society institutions can also exert pressure on companies involved in developing or selling surveillance technologies used against activists, journalists, and dissidents.

It is equally important to support free and open-source software, and to develop alternative platforms that are more transparent and subject to community oversight, so that technology is used to protect rights, expose violations, and strengthen democratic participation.

Left-wing and progressive organizations should also develop their own digital tools, ranging from encryption and privacy protection technologies to awareness campaigns that expose the inner workings of algorithms and their political and social impact.

Technology Between Domination and Liberation

If the recurring experiences of Palestinian content restrictions, alongside other cases that have targeted left-wing, progressive, and human rights voices across different parts of the world, reveal an important dimension of the problem, they also confirm that alternatives are possible.

The issue is not about rejecting artificial intelligence or digital technology. The question concerns who owns this technology, how it is governed, and in whose interest it operates. Transforming artificial intelligence into a tool that serves society and whose use is subject to democratic oversight can open new horizons for participation, organization, and solidarity.

The internet is not merely a global marketplace for advertising and data. It is a social, political, and cultural space that can contribute to building new forms of collective action and struggle for social justice.

For this reason, the battle over technology remains part of the broader struggle against domination and exploitation, and for democracy, equality, freedom, and a socialist alternative. Returning the human being to the center of digital decision-making remains a fundamental condition for building a future in which technology serves society rather than the accumulation of capital.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Coal mine blasting, BLM lands, northern Arizona. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Exactly 50 years ago lauded University of Montana professor and historian K. Ross Toole published The Rape of the Great Plains — Northwest America, Cattle and Coal.  As he wrote: “A pitched battle is being fought over the fate of 250,000 square miles of unspoiled wilderness in Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota. In pursuit of “Project Independence” (American energy self sufficiency), powerful coal-mining and utility interests are preparing to strip mine the Northern Great Plains into a desert; impassioned citizens of these states are fighting back. The outcome will have crucial implications for the entire American landscape. The issues are many and complex, and have long been obfuscated by the ‘developers’.”

If that sounds eerily familiar to the current desecration and rape of the West, there are very good reasons for that perception. The Trump administration is on a non-sensical anti-environmental crusade across every acre of undeveloped land left — and the West contains most of what remains undeveloped, putting Montana, once again, squarely in the crosshairs of the raper scrapers.

One need not look too hard to see what we’re facing. You can start with the “drill, baby, drill” mantra that is supposed to make us “energy independent.” But wait, isn’t that what was promised when Toole wrote a half century ago? Sure it is.  Only back then their goal for Montana was to turn it into “the boiler room for the nation” by strip mining and burning massive amounts of coal.

Of course Montana could never be the “boiler room for the nation” because we are far from the highly populated areas that consume the most energy. That inconvenient fact aside, the simple truth is that they ran Colstrip for 50 years, creating one of the largest sources of atmospheric pollution in the nation, and leaving behind a legacy of polluted groundwater from the coal ash settling ponds.

The far greater consequence of their “vision” is the ongoing and worsening climate crisis that has plunged the West into extreme drought bringing snowless winters, baking summers, drying rivers, and dead trout. Although the original developers have long been gone, the results of their perfidy live on.

Now, with a complicit Congress, they’re getting on with raping what’s left.

+ $700 million taxpayer dollars have now been promised to “save coal” while solar and wind projects are cancelled and defunded.

+ The “roadless rule” that saved 58 million undeveloped acres is gutted by executive order — and companion legislation.

+ The Wilderness Study Areas presciently designated by Montana’s famed Senator Lee Metcalf the same year Toole wrote his book, are under attack to be opened to multiple abuse by Montana’s retiring Sen. Steve Daines … one last insult on his way out the door.

+ The mis-named Forest Service continues to decimate our national forests by logging, burning, and road-building under the false premise of preventing wildfires … which are now driven by climate change, not “overgrown forests.”

+ Yet another huge gold mine is being proposed on the Blackfoot River, which is still recovering from the massive poisoning from a former mine’s failed tailings dam.

The list goes on and on, with far too many examples for one short column.  But make no mistake, the damage will be around long after the politicians and their corporate “partners” are dead and gone.

In effect, what’s happening right now amounts to stealing any options that future generations may have about what to take and what to leave for the generations that follow them.  Instead, they will face cleaning up what will be trashed, degraded, and ruined — thanks to the new Rape of the West.

The post The New “Rape of the West” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by René DeAnda.

In my past two columns, I made the case for the Democratic Party to take the lead in pushing for Trump’s Impeachment. The majority of people favor firing Trump and the massive number of blatant, impeachable acts by the lawless, corrupt, violent, unstable, dangerous Tyrant Trump increases by the day. If it helps the passive Democratic Party leadership, constitutional law specialists agree that were the Founding Fathers (who signed the Declaration of Independence and crafted the Constitution against would-be monarchs) here today, not one would oppose Impeachment.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Party’s leaders in the House and Senate respectively, know all the ways Trump is wrecking America. They know that the Democrats in the House and Senate overwhelmingly want to impeach Trump. So, what’s the problem with these two men, and their weak Democratic National Committee?

Why do they constantly whine, “Now is not the Time,” “We don’t have the votes,” “Wait until after the midterm elections” which they know Trump has his Trumpsters working overtime to disrupt? These are not the real reasons; they are pretexts. Trump, the burgeoning arsonist of our Republic and the Constitution for which it stands, should not be given one day more without being confronted by a fast-rising national impeachment movement. Along with a growing majority of Americans, the powerful New York City Bar Task Force declared in a March 9, 2026 report that Trump should be immediately impeached. (See report: “The Crisis Deepens: Congress Must Act Now to Address Escalating Abuses of Executive Power”). This from a Bar dominated by corporate lawyers, no less.

Why then is the Party leadership so cowardly and corrupt?

1. They are antidemocratic CONTROL FREAKS quite comfortable contracting out their campaigns to corporate-conflicted, incompetent consultants. This is a long-building drive of political immolation. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said “…The Democratic Party. It’s Dead,” after the 2000 election in a Washington Post op-ed.

These control freaks have excluded the input and voter turnout proposals of progressive citizen groups and progressive labor unions, which could have shown them how to landslide the worst GOP ever in election after election. (See the August 27, 2024, letter to Liz Shuler and winningamerica.net).

2. By definition, control freaks do not like electoral mandates from the public. These Democrats want to win elections THEIR WAY — raise lots of money, including from corporate PACs and Wall Street, run on a very few issues distinguishing them from the Republicans, and declare they are NOT Trump the vengeful, wild outlaw. People want candidates who are fighters, specifically for their rights and interests not slick politicians giving them double talk.

Imagine if Democratic candidates pushed for “Medicare for All” instead of inadequate Obamacare or fought for an adequate living wage instead of not even raising the federal minimum wage when the Dems controlled both houses of Congress and had a Democratic president?

3. The Articles of Impeachment (H.Res.1155) introduced by Representative John Larson (D-CT)—viewed hostilely by Jeffries—offer a mechanism to check Trump’s unbridled destruction of our democracy and “kitchen-table” necessities. Impeachment shines a spotlight on a host of reform agendas that the ossified Democratic leadership does not want to address, unlike restive younger Democratic candidates, some of whom are winning upset primaries. For example, Trump is starting his own wars, without the authority of Congress — a prime impeachable offense. However, AIPAC, the Israeli-government-can-do-no-wrong lobby embedded in the Party, and the giant weapons manufacturers like Boeing, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin support Trump’s war making abuses. While pocketing campaign donations from these lobbies, the Democratic Party has no interest in Mr. Larson’s Article of Impeachment regarding Trump unconstitutionally initiating war as a belligerent or co-belligerent against Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Nigeria, and Gaza without constitutionally required congressional authorization.

A similar aversion extends to the “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” clause of the Constitution. This would open up a can of worms for The Democrats because Democratic Presidents have failed to faithfully execute the law by ignoring waves of corporate crime, hundreds of billions of dollars in commercial billing fraud, including on Medicare and Medicaid, refusing to push for adequate corporate enforcement budgets, bankrolling huge corporate welfare schemes and allowing the tax code to be turned into Swiss cheese riddled with loopholes for the rich and powerful, and supporting the construction of nuclear power plants that are targets for terrorists, hazardous, and extremely costly compared to renewable wind, solar and geothermal energy.

The Democratic leadership doesn’t want the November election to be about the concentration of power abuses by plutocrats who have been inflicting so many injustices, crimes and anxieties on the American people, reducing their livelihoods and public services.

They have not publicly adopted a comprehensive corporate crime reduction agenda for Congress to address, leaving a bill by Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA) in isolation (see Corporate Crime Reporter). With then Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leadership rejected legislation favored by the majority of Congressional Democrats, led by Cong. John Larson, to raise Social Security benefits, frozen since 1971, by increasing Social Security taxes on higher-income people.

The Dems do not even take a loud, consistent campaign stand against Trump’s crazed tax exemptions for big corporations – many of which pay little or no income taxes on their immense profits. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) “The automaker Tesla reported zero federal income tax paid on almost $5.7 billion of U.S. income in 2025. Southwest Airlines avoided all federal income tax on $561 million of income last year; its competitor United Airlines achieved the same zero-tax result on almost $4.3 billion of U.S. income. The entertainment company Live Nation Entertainment paid zero federal income tax on $98 million of U.S. income. [and] Yum! Brands, the parent company of the fast-food chains KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut, paid no federal income tax on over $1 billion of U.S. pretax profits last year. (See: 88 Corporations, $105 Billion in Profits, Zero Federal Income Tax).

Small wonder that the huge number of Americans who despise Trump also do not trust the Democratic Party, which the media describes month-after-month as being in disarray. Repeatedly, people ask “What does the Democratic Party stand for?” The Party does not respond with a coherent COMPACT FOR AMERICA. The Democratic Party is led by political cowards which IS why it is in disarray.

The bright light comes from insurgent Democrats from Texas to Maine who are coming to Congress to join the progressive core there and may challenge the leadership posts of Jeffries and Schumer in January 2027.

More immediate is how feeble the Democrats are in opposing Trump’s intricate campaign to overturn election results. Trump has already said there should not be elections in November. He has spoken about invoking the Insurrection Act to unleash the police and the “Injustice Department” against state election officials, seizing ballots, obstructing mail-in ballots, sending intimidating police to the polls or election certification sites.

In April, Politico published SEVEN very useful, practical ways to keep the November elections free and fair. Best advice for active voters and state officials I’ve seen. (“The Clock Is Ticking to Secure the Midterms – Here’s What the Experts Say,” Politico Magazine, April 20, 2026). Stealing elections has to be done locally, where you are! Stand up to stop cold gangster Trump from committing his greatest impeachable crime this year. Don’t wait for the Democratic Party to show you the way.

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Cover art [detail] for Jean-Michel Jarre’s album, Equinoxe, by Michel Granger. CC BY 4.0

“Optimism is the philosophy of the past.”

– Marcel Proust, The Fugitive

+ Dante himself couldn’t have found a better spot in Hell to deposit James Dolan, maybe the worst owner in all of professional sports (and that’s really saying something), than to lock him in a box next to a farting, snoring, grunting Donald Trump as  24,000 Knicks fans jeer and boo them both, while watching his team lose to the young San Antonio Spurs, over and over again, night after night for all eternity…

Call it the revenge of Charles Oakley, one of the Knicks’ most legendary players, who Dolan, in true Trump-style, ordered armed security guards to haul out of MSG during a Knicks game, arrested, charged with assault and banished from the arena because he couldn’t handle Oakley’s spot-on critiques of Dolan’s incompetent management of the team.

+ Ann Coulter on Trump’s MSG escapade:

Of all the selfish, narcissistic things Trump has done, attending MSG to see the Knicks play in person Monday night is the absolute worst.  20,000 attendees will be MASSIVELY inconvenienced for all the extra security, the Knicks Watch Party at the Garden is canceled, thousands of extra law enforcement officers will be required (paid for by taxpayers), traffic will be a disaster — all so he can sit in the Garden rather than watch the game on TV. Presidents ought to be willing to sacrifice once in a while.

+ The New York Knicks last won the NBA championship in 1973, the same year Donald Trump made his debut appearance in the New York Times: “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in New York City.”

+ 97% of the country could be “busted-flat in Baton Rouge,” and Knicks tickets in the nosebleed section of MSG would still be selling for $12,000 a seat…

+ As ESPN’s Dan Wetzel pointed out, “In many cities these numbers would be a Zillow Listing.”

I checked home prices in Buffalo. Wetzel wasn’t joking…

+ Trump’s never been an “NBA guy.” Basketball is now a black sport and by definition political in its very nature. Trump: “Look at the basketball ratings. They’re down to very, very low numbers. People are angry about it. They don’t realize. They have enough politics with guys like me. They don’t need more as they’re driving down, going up for the shot. They don’t need it. There was a nastiness about the NBA the way it was done, too, so I think the NBA’s in trouble. I think it’s in big trouble, bigger trouble than they understand, and frankly, ice hockey, which is doing very well, they didn’t do that. They respected the mores. They respected what they’re supposed to be doing.”

+ As for who is really watching what…

Stanley Cup NHL Finals (2026) viewership: 5.05 million (Game 3)

NBA Finals (2026) viewership: 28.7 million (Game 4)

+++

 + The guy with the inflated ego, waistline and net worth loves the inflation!

+ Sen. Tim Scott took the bait:

Inflation ticked up to 4.2%, the highest in 3 years. The trend is not going in the right direction. But one of the things it signals is resiliency in our economy, which is, in fact, good news. Because of Donald Trump, we have more Americans with more money in their pockets.

+ Inflation hits 4.2 percent. Trump: “I love the inflation.” MAGA: “We love the inflation. Biden didn’t give us enough of the inflation! Only Trump gave us the inflation we need. Please give us more of the inflation! ” 30 percent of the country is living in their Own Private Jonestown, willing to swallow en masse whatever toxic nonsense Trump tells them.

+ Inflation is now officially ahead of wage growth (it’s been this way for most of us for a while now, since like, I don’t know, the 1970s…?)

+ Around 48% of Americans said their financial situation was worse in May than a year ago, the most since January 2023, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Survey of Consumer Expectations. Only half?

 + Bank of America reported that 70% of its bear-market indicators have now been triggered.

+ Michael Burry, one of the economists who predicted the 2008 housing collapse, describes the AI bubble as a “spending Fugazi,” and says that only three customers are responsible for more than 60% of Nvidia’s entire accounts receivable.

+ The concentration before the collapse…

+ Over to you, Bob…

Whosoever diggeth a pit
Shall fall in it, shall fall in it
Whosoever diggeth a pit
Shall bury in it, shall bury in it

+ According to the Financial Times, almost all returns from investments in hyperscaler AI are negative. Only Amazon has shown positive returns…

Amazon: +7.1%
Microsoft: -9.2%
Alphabet: -15.7%
Meta: -28.8
Oracle: -35.6%

+ The coming crash is going to be the economic equivalent of the Chicxulub asteroid…

+ According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, eight of the nation’s 10 largest occupations by employment have below-average wages, ranging from $32,150 for fast food workers to $46,590 for customer service representatives.

+ Despite the “good” May jobs report, planned job cuts hit the highest total for May since 2020. Most of the blame is attributed to AI.

+ Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s, warned this week that the US economy is on the “precipice of a recession.” Zandi said that lower and middle-class Americans are already “living paycheck to paycheck…Real disposable income — that’s after tax, after accounting for inflation — is no higher today than it was a year ago. So, there’s been no growth in purchasing power, and that’s going to get worse and start declining.”

 + Reuters: “US consumer sentiment has plunged to a record low, cost of living is a top concern and 57% of consumers cite high prices as the cause of erosion of their personal finances.”

+ The portion of Americans who said jobs are “plentiful” dropped to 25.5%, the lowest in three years.

+ Two-thirds of Americans are cutting back on spending.

+ WSJ: “The summer teen job market is the toughest in decades.”

+ From the Congressional Budget Office’s (not Thomas Piketty or Michael Hudson) report on income inequality…

+ Rising housing costs, climate-driven hurricanes, rising sea levels and high insurance prices seem to have killed off Florida’s population boom.  Census data released in March shows net domestic migration shrinking by 93% since 2022, from +310,892 to just +22,517 in 2025. The population flows into Tampa, Orlando, and Miami are all now shrinking.

+ Update on the Dollar General Stage of Capitalism: “Dollar General says its core customers are ‘financially constrained’ and cutting back on household expenses, including food.”

+ It’s one of the perversities of our economic system that good jobs reports (if you can believe the numbers, anymore) almost always promote panic on Wall Street…

+ There’s a reason Faulkner named one of the characters in The Hamlet, his funniest novel (maybe the funniest American novel give or take a couple by Mark Twain and Ishmael Reed), Wall Street Panic Snopes, a simple man who wanted to make money honestly, which of course really would start a panic on Wall Street…

Wall Street Panic knew where he wanted to go. He knew that he could get there provided he observed a few of the rules of the game, which he did, and he got there. I think that Wall Street Panic wasn’t really a Snopes, that probably, actually, he was not a Snopes, that—that his—his father’s mama may have done a little extra-curricular night work, and that he really wasn’t a Snopes. He was a—a—more of a simple human being than the other Snopes were. But he—he wanted to be independent, wanted to make money, but he had rules about how he was going to do it. He wanted to make money by simple industry, the old rules of working hard and saving your pennies, not by taking advantage of anybody.

[From Faulkner’s 1958 lecture at the University of Virginia]

+++

+ Remember when Trump claimed he launched his attack on Iran while feigning negotiations and refusing to give US allies any advance warning because he wanted to preserve the element of surprise (a war crime)? Well, now he’s telegraphing airstrikes and a possible invasion of Kharg Island a day in advance, in a desperate attempt to demonstrate that he’s doing something beyond daydreaming about building a triumphal arch to himself that will cast a sinister shadow across the graves at Arlington.

+ Trump to Fox News on Thursday morning: “I don’t know if America has the appetite to do what I would really much prefer doing. We’ve lost 13 soldiers in two wars. In Iraq– in Iran, we lost 13. In Vietnam, we lost hundreds of thousands. We didn’t have the right leadership, to be honest. If it were me, I would’ve had that war done in three months. Four months.”

The US lost 58,220 military service members in Vietnam from 1956 to 2006–47,400 from wounds suffered in combat. The US did kill more than 2 million Vietnamese…

+ Just minutes after making this belligerent boast on Fox News, Trump reversed course. Apparently, he didn’t have the “appetite” for what he wanted to do either. (But the Pentagon and arms-makers might have also informed him that he’d already shot his wad of smart bombs.) Trump claimed that he canceled the planned airstrikes because he’s close to a deal.

+ 39: the number of times Trump has said a deal is imminent to end the Iran war.  Does President False Alarm continue to move the market?

+ The International Atomic Energy Agency warns that the Iran war has created new nuclear threats that didn’t exist before Trump and Netanyahu began their bombing campaign. One of them that the IAEA probably didn’t anticipate: Trump threatening to nuke Tehran.

+ Here’s the chilling lede graph from Sy Hersh’s Wednesday column:

Four months into a difficult air war with Iran, President Donald Trump’s popularity is sinking among American voters. I have been told that in a recent secret meeting in the White House, he began speculating, albeit vaguely, about a nuclear option that could perhaps bring a quicker end to the war.

How would nuking Tehran or one of its nuclear research sites end the war or open the Strait of Hormuz?

+ Trump having what they used to call on the shock corridor ward of the state mental hospital, an “abreaction”…

First of all, I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?…I sent the B2 bombers in about nine, ten months ago. And they obliterated, totally obliterated, the site. And I saved it…Do I want to go along and have a country that’s doing really well, but somebody is going to try and kill us? Or do I want to put out that horrible threat? And I did. It put it out….We took over a very powerful country, Venezuela. Lot of soldiers. Big, strong military. We took over Venezuela in a matter of minutes. We destroyed the capability of Iran in a matter of days. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it…Now, I’m going to put it out permanently. I’m going to do it either through negotiation, where we’re very close to a deal, or I’m going to blow the hell out of them, to be honest with you. And it’s going to be very easy for me to do that. That’s actually the easier path…My red line would be if I think I wasn’t going to make a deal, or if I wasn’t going to make a deal fast enough. We’re having very good negotiations with the people that are leading the country now. It’s the third group that we’ve been dealing with. And they are different. And you could say it’s regime change, actually, because these are very different people. I find them to be more rational, very smart.

+ Reporter: How do you define a “ceasefire”?

Trump: In that part of the world, a ceasefire is when you’re shooting in a more moderate manner.

+ Trump describing, accurately for once, the actions of the US Navy as piratical, though not the kind of pirates you’ll find in the work of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker: “We took over the cargo, took over the oil. It’s a very profitable business. Who would have thought we were doing that? We’re like pirates.”

+ Trump’s sociopathic response to a question from the normally docile Peter Doocy reveals his complete lack of concern for his family, Khamenei’s or yours…

Trump: If I did meet with the new Ayatollah, I would be honored to meet him.

Doocy, Fox News: Do you think because Epic Fury killed his killed his dad and his wife and his kid that he has hard feelings?

Trump: I would say I’m not his favorite person, but with that being said, he’s probably a pro—I don’t know him—he’s probably a professional in some circles. He has a very good reputation, actually. You know, sometimes when people say “bad,” but a lot of people say “bad” about me. It’s totally false, of course.

+ JD Vance said the Iran war may go on another year, but he’s like totally confident it won’t go on much longer than that…

+ Trump’s war on Iran has already cost each American household $750, but that price is about to rise sharply if the war doesn’t end soon…

+ The Department of Transportation reported that US airlines paid a total of $6.5 billion in fuel costs in April 2025 (an increase of +78%), prompting airline fares to climb by 20.7% year-over-year in the April CPI inflation data. Globally, airlines are now facing $100 billion in additional fuel costs for 2026 alone, as a result of the fallout from the war on Iran.

+ Remember Michele Bachmann? She’s still out there, letting the Supreme Deity’s desire to see more mass death and destruction speak through her: “rump and Netanyahu were appointed for this task, destined for this task. This is a biblical moment. I truly believe that if President Trump takes care of this evil now, I think God will deliver the midterms as well.”

+++

+ The Defense Intelligence Agency raised Israel’s counterintelligence threat designation to “critical”—its highest internal level—amid evidence that Israeli espionage operatives have intensified their already habitual eavesdropping on U.S. officials. The targets of the Israeli spies include Washington’s internal deliberations, war strategies, and peace negotiations regarding the Middle East and Iran. The internal Pentagon assessment concluded that Israel has increased efforts to intercept communications of high-ranking American personnel, including Trump’s negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, as well as the US military commanders in the region. The report noted that U.S. personnel operating in Israel now rely on burner phones and disposable laptops to avoid eavesdropping.

+ Congressional hearings on reports of systemic Israeli espionage against the US would consist of members of Congress interrogating Pentagon officials on why they forced Israel to engage in covert spying for the secrets instead of just faxing them to Tel Aviv on request.

+ New York Post Columnist Miranda Devine: What do you say to people who claim Bibi Netanyahu tricked you into going into Iran?

Trump: They’re just the enemy. They’re dumbocrats. They want transgender mutilization [sic] of our children. He tricked me? I’m the one that started it. I’ll tell you what – if there wasn’t me, there would be no Israel right now.

+ “If there wasn’t a me…!”

+ Trump to Bibi: “I call the shots!” If he did, he wouldn’t feel compelled to say so…

+ It’s hard to believe the veracity of this reporting from Barak Ravid that a source told him Trump chewed out Netanyahu in a recent phone call over Israel’s ceaseless bombing of Lebanon: “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” A second source briefed on the call said Trump was “pissed” and at one point yelled at Netanyahu: “What the fuck are you doing?”

+ But if true, Netanyahu’s continued defiance of Trump only serves to illustrate his impotence. Given Ravid’s ties to the Israeli elites, perhaps Netanyahu leaked the story to show Israelis that he wasn’t Trump’s pawn.

+ This week, Israeli troops conducting raids in Hebron shot a seven-month-old, Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, in the head while he was held in his mother’s arms. The baby-killing sniper will probably get a medal from Ben-Gvir.

+ Israel has killed more Palestinian children in the last 3 years than Palestinians have killed Israelis of any kind over the last 80 years.

+ Murtaza Hussain: “Trump needs to stop the war for his own political purposes, but does not seem capable of standing up to Netanyahu. This leads to the natural question of whether he has been compromised in some way or the Israeli infiltration and takeover of US institutions is already too advanced.”

+ Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch: “For the first time in two decades of polling, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians (41%) than Israelis (36%), a reversal from 55% to 26% in Israel’s favor before the October 7th attacks. Even 57% of Republicans aged 18 to 49 now disfavor Israel.”

+ Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos, who was interrogated by British police for attending a pro-Palestinian demonstration:  “What’s happening in Gaza is a Holocaust, and what’s being designed by Israel is the final solution to the Palestinian problem. As a Holocaust survivor, my reaction is: not in my name… brave people can resist.”

+ Gwyneth Paltrow enters the Zone of (Self) Interest…

+++

+ The Senate approved an additional $70 billion for Border Patrol and ICE, despite the fact that these agencies already have a combined $100 billion in unspent funds that were part of a previous DHS spending bill. If the House follows suit, ICE will have a larger budget than the Russian military ($157 billion).

Jennifer Welch: “JD Vance is married to a woman of Indian descent. He has mixed-race children. So to all of the MAGA voters out there, if this man will not defend his wife and will not defend his kids, do you think he gives a crap about you?”

+ Dr Oz: “You’re not allowed to complain about Somalians, because that’s racist. And the worst thing you can be in Minnesota is a racist.”

I hate to say it, but Oz is right for once. Singling out Somalis (or any other ethnic group) is racist and being a racist is one of the worst things you can be and, he might be surprised to discover, not just in Minnesota…

Andy Hamerlinck: The worst thing you can be in Minnesota is an ICE agent.

+ While Trump administration flaks keep saying that the ICE detention prison in Newark, New Jersey, houses the “worst of the worst…killers and rapists,” data obtained by the New York Times shows that very few of the detainees have criminal records.

+ As the US prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence with cage fights on the White House lawn, the Trump administration is denying visas to fans of the Moroccan soccer team for its World Cup games. This rude treatment comes even though, in 1777, Morocco became the first country in the world to recognize the United States as a sovereign nation….

Rep. Lou Correa: “Are you keeping a database on US citizens?”

Markfortwaye Mullin: “Are we keeping a database?”

Correa: “Yes, a lot of your ICE agents have said there’s a database…”

Markfortwaye Mullin: “Well, that’s already out there.”

+ During his xenophobic rant marking the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion, U.S. Secretary of War (Crimes) Pete Hegseth compared the D-Day invasion with illegal immigration, stating, “Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies…When will European capitals do something about that invasion?”

It was the homegrown ideology that Hegseth now mimics, which annihilated millions and the US went to war to defeat, before soon adopting for its own malign imperial projects…

+ Only 11 percent of Europeans now view the US as an ally. Why would they? The fissure is long overdue for Europe’s own good.

+++

+ The Trump family has made at least $2.3 billion in their cryptocurrency enterprises since Trump began his second term, according to an investigation by Reuters, while more than a million people who invested in their schemes have suffered at least $2.3 billion in losses, losses which the Trumps were protected against. A 2025 deal between the Trump family’s crypto enterprise World Liberty Financial and the publicly traded company then called Alt5 Sigma guaranteed the Trumps’ $500 million, according to company documents. But since the deal was announced, Alt5 Sigma’s stock has nose-dived more than 90%. And now, the company (now called AI Financial Corp.) is warning investors about its ability to continue as a going concern.

+ Donors to Trump’s “ballroom” fund were rewarded with $50 billion in federal contracts and, according to a report by Public Citizen, “most of those same companies are facing federal enforcement actions over alleged wrongdoing or have had such actions suspended by the Trump administration since the start of Trump’s second term.” In addition, over two-thirds of corporate ballroom donors – 19 out of 27 – received government contracts over the last 5 ½ years, totaling $338 billion. According to John Golinger, Public Citizen’s Democracy Advocate and author of the report,

These giant corporations aren’t funding the Trump ballroom fiasco out of the goodness of their hearts. They have massive interests before the federal government and they hope to curry favor with, and receive favorable treatment from, the Trump administration.  Millions to fund Trump’s bizarre fever dreams are nothing compared to the billions they’re getting back in contracts and favorable government enforcement decisions.  The American people are paying the price.

+ Speaking of the Ballroom, lawyers for Trump’s Justice Department defending the razing of the East Wing told a federal judge that Trump could also legally demolish the Statue of Liberty without any oversight if he wanted to. It’s already been demolished in spirit. They might as well pack it up and send it back to France.

+ Yahoo Finance reported that a host of high-ranking officials in the Trump administration hold SpaceX stock in advance of its IPO, which will likely make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire: “Ten officials ranging from special envoy Steve Witkoff to Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler reported financial interests in Elon Musk’s rocket company or in xAI, the artificial intelligence and social media firm it merged with in February, according to their most recent public financial disclosures. In total, the federal staffers held SpaceX or xAI stock worth at least $9.9 million and as much as $43.8 million, according to the disclosures, which were made last year and list the value of assets in broad ranges. These officials could have sold all or part of their holdings since then without triggering additional disclosure requirements.”

+ China Miéville on human ambition in the age of Late Capitalism: “I don’t want to be a simile anymore. I want to be a metaphor!”

+ “Dr” Oz, who “made” his millions hawking snake oil on television, on Trump’s cruel new Medicaid requirements: “You have to work. You were not put on this planet to sit at home and watch television. The average person who’s on Medicaid, who’s able-bodied, watches 6.1 hours of television, or just hangs out, every day. That’s not why God put you here.”

Oz’s numbers are as bogus as some of his Oprah-approved patent remedies.  Oz pulled these numbers out of a contested 2025 report by the American Enterprise Institute and even then grossly exaggerated what the report claimed. The AEI study looked only at a specific and very narrow demographic of childless adults without disabilities who didn’t report having employment. Even then, the alleged 6.1 hours spent watching TV wildly distorts the claims in the report, which asserted that the non-working able-bodied Medicaid recipients spent 6.1 hours a day on all leisure or socializing activities, including sports, recreation, hanging with friends, playing video games or watching TV.  The report claimed that these people spent 4.2 hours a day either watching TV or playing video games. But this applies to a small minority of Medicaid recipients, most of whom have jobs or are caring for a family member.

+ While Trump continues to threaten to annihilate Iran over its small stockpile of enriched uranium, his pen pal, Kim, is testing missiles capable of striking the US mainland without a word from Trump. The lesson: Iran waited too long to acquire nuclear weapons.

+ I was 3600 pages into my long march through In Search of Lost Time, the end in sight, like the smoke from Moscow burning to Napoleon, when I came across this passage on the role of the imperial press during wartime. The year is 1914, the Germans have crossed into France and are on the outskirts of Paris, but many of the artistocrats, financiers and haute-bourgeoisie in Marcel’s circle are blissful, still attending soirées, strolling down the avenues, sitting on the ornate benches in the Parc Monceau reading Le Figaro, reassured that the threat, if there even was a threat, has been defeated or at least contained: “We read the newspapers as we love, blindfolded. We do not try to understand the facts. We listen to the soothing words of the editor as we listen to the words of our mistress: we are “beaten and happy” because we believe that we are not beaten but victorious.”

+ Imagine being the copy editor and typesetter who was handed 4000 of these manuscript pages, furiously written late at night in Proust’s cork-walled room, to compose for printing…

Two manuscript pages from Swann’s Way.

+ Robert Proust on the kind of people who tended to read his brother’s long and winding novel: The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have a broken leg to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time.” Better take my temperature…

+ Forgive me, but Proust has invaded my mind. That same neurotic voice chattering on for six months now for two hours a day, about war, death, sexual obsession and jealousy, illness, anti-Semitism, homosexuality and homophobia, sado-masochism, the degernation of the aristocracy, the paintings of Monet, the music of Chopin, the taste of a Madeleine cake after being dipped in warm tea, insomnia, grief, boredom, the sound of the ocean breaking on the rocks at Balbec, the color and shape of the clouds over Combray. So here’s a bit more of the loquacious Marcel, writing once again about that endangered species, the daily newspaper…

That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty thousand men, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don’t even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of cafe au last.

+ The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan on JD Vance’s “panicky” response to the Epstein files…

The vice president appeared panicked to others in the room about the way the subject of Epstein was already dividing the MAGA coalition. Some senior officials had the impression that Vance had bought into the darkest theories about Epstein and a cabal of predators hidden within the country’s ruling class. Wiles would tell others that the vice president had proved himself to be a major conspiracy theorist. Another top official said later that Vance had been pounding on the Epstein issue since the release of the memo. He was privately pressing for the administration to release all the Epstein files, everything in the Justice Department’s possession, even encouraging a congressional investigation.

Vance had also floated to colleagues an extraordinary P.R. gambit — that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison. It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein.

+ Haberman and Swan also report that the White House convened what one participant described as a surreal meeting to deal with nipple gate, the allegations in emails from Epstein accuser Sarah Ransome that detail Trump’s mazophiliac obsession and  abuse of her friend’s nipples:

“[A]nother friend … was one of the many girls that had sexual relations with Donald Trump … She confided in me about her casual ‘friendship’ with Donald. Mr. Trump definitely seemed to have a thing for her and she told me how he kept going on about how he liked her ‘pert nipples’. Donald Trump liked flicking and sucking her nipples until they were raw. One evening, when we were showering together, she showed me her nipples. They looked incredibly painful as they were red and swollen and I remember wincing when I looked at them.

At the meeting in the Situation Room, Vance apparently argued that Trump wouldn’t mind having these allegations about his crude sexual behavior made public…

The vice president said he thought the president would be OK with releasing the nipple-related documents, arguing that Trump had been accused of worse. “I think we should put it out,” he said. “It would cause people to say we’re going further than we need to.” Wiles quickly responded that the president would not, in fact, be OK with it. It was a point no one wanted to continue debating.

+ Check out this passage from Vance’s book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,  where JD shamelessly exploits his wife, Usha the Non-Believer’s miraculous conception, as if she had been impregnated by the passing shadow of Charlie Kirk’s holy ghost, as Mary was 2000 years ago…

For years, I had asked Usha to have another baby, and for years she had told me she was done—especially now that public service had elevated us into the national spotlight. But something changed for Usha, and not long after we buried my friend, she became pregnant with our fourth child, a boy. One life was stolen from us, but another was given.

+ The Christian Nationalists Hegseth prays, parties and bombs with have never considered Mormons “Christians”…whatever “Christian” means these days.

+++

+ An AP survey shows that on the 250th anniversary of the founding document of the US, fewer Americans than ever feel that “democracy” is central to the nation’s identity. Even fewer realize that it never was. The founders of the country feared nothing so much as a democracy. Democratic Athens wasn’t a model, but a case study for Hamilton and Madison of mob rule, a threat to the propertied interests that had to be managed and contained. The checks built into the US system of government weren’t against tyranny but against democracy.

+ Fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelly on how Bari Weiss demanded he reedit his report on ICE’s murderous tactics in Minneapolis to portray the protesters as violent: “It’s Sunday; we’re going on the air that night. And in the case of stories that are, as we say, crashing, our deadline on Sunday is noon. So, we work on all of these things. We get the piece approved by everyone. And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

+ According to a piece in Zeteo by Justin Barragona, CBS correspondent Cecila Vega (a fellow AU alum) was fired by Bari Weiss as she was preparing a profile of the heroic Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

+ Samantha Ruddy: “The girl in your freshman social studies class who raised her hand to ask why there’s no white history month is running half the major news outlets.”

+ There’s a reason the New York Times hired Bari Weiss to write editorials for the paper, even if the drama queen eventually (and predictably) departed the Times in a theatrical tempest, smearing her former colleagues as she went out the door. At root, Weiss shares the paper’s reactionary politics. This piece, for example, slamming Claudia Sheinbaum, perhaps the most popular leader in the Western Hemisphere, could easily have run on Weiss’s old grievance sheet, The Free Press, and probably will become a segment on 60 Minutes next season, if there is a 60 Minutes next season…

+ Trump on the US government taking stakes in AI companies: There are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public—where the American public essentially becomes a partner.

Reporter: Senator Bernie Sanders proposed this.

Trump: I’ve been talking about it for the past year. Many of his people voted for me.

He’s planning to invade Cuba because they did the same thing to sugar plantations and casinos.

+ Number of medical specialists seen by Presidents…

George HW Bush: 5
George W. Bush: 12
Joe Biden: 20
Donald Trump: 22

+ David Rush, the former CIA officer found with more than 300 gold bars in his home, along with $2 million in cash, and more than 30 luxury watches, worked closely with Stephen Feinberg, the second-highest-ranking Pentagon official, on a covert program to spy on China.

97:  Number of J6 rioters pardoned by Trump who have committed new crimes since J6. Recidivism is the hallmark of a true Trumper.

+++

+ El Niño has officially arrived. How super it will be is yet to be determined. But a 3.5˚C rise in central equatorial Pacific Ocean temperatures is possible by November, which would mark the strongest El Niño on record,  with dire consequences for global climate well into 2027.

+ Global sea surface temperatures have been hitting record highs, day after day, week after week and El Niño’s just warming up…

+ Scientists studying the Colorado River are warning yet again that the entire river basin and its three major reservoirs, which supplies water for 40 million people across the Southwest, are headed toward a “system crash:” “We’re trying to lay out, in the starkest terms, where we’re at so that everybody understands the significance of the cuts that lie ahead,” said the study’s lead scientist, Jack Schmidt. “We cannot go over the cliff.”

+ Even as Trump used the Iran war as a legal excuse to shovel a $700 billion bailout to the coal industry, solar generated 12.8% of all US electricity in May, topping coal for the first time.

+ A sprawling plume of Saharan dust has crossed the Atlantic from West Africa, stretching into the Caribbean toward the Gulf Coast of the US…

+ The Washington Post reported on the no-bid contracts going to Trump-linked firms to gouge up large swaths of the Southwest for Trump’s border wall: “The Department of Homeland Security has awarded more than $19.4 billion in contracts in the past six months — compared with $2.1 billion from 2016 to 2024. Most of it has gone to two firms that have ties to the White House and the Republican Party, according to a Washington Post analysis. The most recent contract, a $2.6 billion project, was issued on Wednesday.”

+ And this week, the Trump gang just waived all environmental laws to blast Trump’s border barriers and roads through Big Bend National Park, the first time in American history the federal government has gutted dozens of environmental and procedural laws for a massive (and quite useless) construction project in a national park.

+ Not satisfied with gouging a path of destruction across one of the country’s most spectacular national parks, Trump’s no-bid contracted wall will also pierce through the adjacent Big Bend Ranch State Park and the Rio Grande Wild and Scenic River corridor, even though less than one percent of all crossings happen in the Big Bend sector, where the river, canyons, mountains, and desert climate already act as a natural barrier to human migration. 

+ Sec. of Interior Doug Burgum on offshore wind turbine menace:

We have a report from Hegseth that it’s a national security threat. You could launch an attack on the US in with a bunch of drones coming through a wind tower field, it would undetectable until it was came through because the radar interference.”

Billions upon billions spent on early warning radar and air defense systems that can be defeated by drones using a few windmills as cover. (How the drones cross the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans is another question.) Can we get a refund? My memory is getting hazier and hazier with age, but I don’t recall the 9/11 hijackers needing to hide their murderous mission behind any windmills, except in the windmills of Trump’s mind, perhaps…

+ The dry season is just kicking in here in Oregon and 17 of the state’s 36 counties (and most of the biggest ones) are already in drought conditions.

+ The Barred Owl is the latest scapegoat for the ravages of the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest, where decades of relentless clear-cutting have created habitat conditions that favor the more adaptable barred owl over its close relative, the northern spotted owl, which almost exclusively inhabits old-growth forests. As Trump pushes to unshackle this rapacious industry, freeing it to once again start logging in spotted owl habitat, they are placing the blame for spotted owl’s declining fortunes on the barred owl instead of the chainsaw brigades and have initiated a disgusting plan to kill as many as 450,000 barred owls, the slaughter of which won’t do anything to save the spotted owl, as long as its habitat continues to be annihilated. 

+ In the US, spending on data center construction now exceeds spending on public transportation infrastructure — including airports, marine terminals, and all mass transit.

+ The rising opposition to data centers is the latest threat to the neoliberal technocrats who run the Democratic Party and they’re already working on ways to snuff it out the way they did the Medicare for All movement.

+ Police in Philadelphia copped to the fact they’re tracking “First Amendment activity” by citizens who are critical of AI.

It will probably require the construction of a new data center just to track all of the anti-data center posts on Social Media…

+ The Republicans already have an explanation for the opposition to AI and data centers: China! It’s not organic and local, some of this is foreign-sourced dark money,” claimed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, last month at an industry confab called “Harnassing America’s Power.”

+ 8 out of 10 Northern Fulmars, a seabird that feeds near the surface of the North Atlantic, have plastic in their stomachs…Plastic is everywhere, all at once, even now microdosing its way into our hearts, kidneys and brains.

+ Managers at BYD estimate that by next year, 80% of all car sales in China will be electric.

+ Climate Change News on the greening of Yemen, as the Gulf state turns to solar:

Over recent years, the country has imported solar systems totaling more than 1,000 megawatts of capacity, representing an estimated investment of about $250 million, al-Tuwaiti said. That accounts for almost a quarter of Yemen’s current electricity needs of 4,500 megawatts, he added. It has also given an unexpected boost to the climate-vulnerable country’s efforts to further shrink its tiny carbon emissions. Al-Tuwaiti estimates that solar generation now displaces the equivalent of 7,800 barrels of oil and more than 1.2 million litres of diesel per day. Recent estimates show Yemen contributes only around 0.03%-0.06% of global emissions, with most energy-related emissions coming from transport and power generation.

+ Nearly two-thirds of the planned data centers are slated to be built in drought-stricken parts of the country. ChatGPT probably could have told them that sighting these water-hogging monstrosities in the arid and getting arider West is a bad idea…

+ Rep Lizzie Fletcher (D-Houston):

The New World screwworm has been found in Texas. This flesh-eating parasite, previously eradicated from the U.S., poses a huge threat to our cattle. Last March, the Trump administration fired more than 15,000 USDA employees and eliminated a program to contain the screwworm in Central America. The threat of New World screwworm is just one consequence of the Trump administration’s reckless campaign to eliminate funding for government programs that Americans rely on.

+ Even Texas’s Ag commissioner Sid Miller blames Trump’s slow response to New World Screwworm for increasing beef prices: “You can look for higher beef prices because of the failure of the USDA to control this pest.” You can tell Miller knows what he’s talking about because he’s a real cowboy. Only real cowboys wear their Stetsons inside…

+ Among post-industrial nations, the US leads the world, by a considerable margin, in avoidable deaths…(H/t Adam Tooze)

+ Failed States of America Index: “Americans born after 1970 are already dying at higher rates from heart disease, cancer, and external causes than people born before them were dying at the same ages, a pattern researchers call alarming given how many years these cohorts still have ahead.”

+++

+ Nothing unravels Trump like having his fabulations exposed by a woman journalist. He melts down faster than a nuclear reactor whose cooling system has failed…

Kaitlan Collins, CNN: Just to clarify. Is the $1.8 billion DOJ fund dead or is it on hold?

Trump: I’d have to ask the lawyers. I don’t know. People like you have abused our people.

Collins: But Republicans—

Trump: Be quiet. You should be ashamed of yourself. You used to be conservative from Alabama. Can you believe it? CNN does such false reporting, but now they have new ownership, so maybe it’ll straighten it out. It’s hard to straighten garbage out.

+ Trump on Graham Platner (or is he engaging in a rare episode of self-reflection?): “This guy’s got a rap sheet, I’ve never seen anything like it.  He’s a low-level thug, and he’s running to be senator…He’s worse than any human being that’s ever run for office, probably.”

+ Not to be outdone, Fox News’s Jesse Watters played the white trash card: “Platner is a liar and he’s kind of a fraud, but he’s getting away with it because Maine is a poor white New England state.” I’m confused. I thought poor whites were MAGA’s base? Only when they do what the bosses say, I guess…

+ Here’s one of the reasons they’re coming after Graham Platner hard: “The fact that Jeff Bezos exists and the fact that I know someone in Sullivan who works three jobs and pays 60% of her monthly income in rent, those two things are directly connected. There is no metric of hard work that justifies a billionaire when people in Eastern Maine work three jobs just to put food on the table.”

+ Appearing before more than 1.2 million people in Madrid, Pope Leo from the Southside urged the crowds to live their Catholic faith by helping others in his sermon for the Mass. The Pontiff reminded his followers that “God identifies with the poor, the downtrodden, those who are alone and forsaken.”

+ A YouGov poll on the net favorables of public figures reveals that Tucker Carlson is, if not the anti-Christ of Peter Thiel’s nightmares, at least the anti-Pope, though even these polar opposites have found common ground in their opposition to the Iran War …

Pope Leo XIV (+37)
Jon Stewart: (+14)
Mark Kelly: (+10)
Jon Ossoff: (+6)
Glenn Youngkin: (+6)
James Talarico: (+5)
Ro Khanna: (+5)
Pete Buttigieg: (+1)
Josh Shapiro: (+1)

AOC: (-1)
Kamala Harris: (-3)
Thomas Massie: (-4)
Gavin Newsom: (-5)
JD Vance: (-8)
Marco Rubio: (-8)
Ron DeSantis: (-10)
Donald Trump: (-17)
Don Jr: (-27)
Tucker Carlson: (-36)

I bet most Americans couldn’t name the states Kelly, Ossoff, Youngkin, or Khanna represent, which is why they have positive ratings. And as my friend Tim Withee said, it wouldn’t be surprising if many of their people in their own states could pick them out of a police line-up.

+ Speaking of polls, here’s how one of the predictive markets in Vegas rates the 2028 race. Don’t look too closely unless you’re a political masochist. There’s no light at the end of this tunnel. Only, as the Youngbloods sang, “darkness, darkness”…

2028 Presidential Election

Gavin Newsom              7/2
Marco Rubio                  9/2
JD Vance                       11/2
A. Ocasio-Cortez          12/1
Jon Ossoff                     12/1
Kamala Harris              18/1
Donald Trump Sr.        25/1
Josh Shapiro                 28/1
Mark Kelly                     28/1
Tucker Carlson             28/1

+ Trump: “Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had. Rigged Elections!”

Why would the Democratic elites rig the primaries against the ridiculous Pratt? Wouldn’t they prefer him to run against Karen Bass, rather than have her face a popular Democratic Socialist attacking her from her left? This is LA, after all, an election Pratt had no chance of winning.

+ Trump threw a tantrum and walked–well, hobbled anyway–out of his interview with Kristen Welker after she pressed him for evidence to back up his claim that the California primaries had been rigged…

Welker: Just to be very clear, there’s no evidence of what you’re saying.

Trump: There’s a lot of evidence. There’s tremendous evidence. There’s nothing but evidence. The election was rigged. And it’s happening again in California. They’re cheating.

Welker: Do you have evidence?

Trump: All I have to do is look.

Welker: That’s not evidence. The local officials acknowledge that they are slow

Trump: They’re crooked. Just like you’re crooked…You’re either crooked or you’re stupid. Let’s call it quits. Because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling.”

Welker, as Trump storms off: “I traveled all the way to Wisconsin for this interview…”

+ Tina Brown struck the right note on the Welker/Trump spat:

For more in press humiliation week, let’s not forget NBC’s Meet the Press host Kristen Welker, who was so damn lame when Trump got into her face with a round of insults about her “crooked” network. After she challenged him over his claims about winning the 2020 election, he stormed out of an interview with the parting shot, “Thank you, darling. Have a good time.” Did Welker stand up and tell him, in polite TV terms, to back the fuck off? No. She whimpered, “ Mr President, let’s please, I traveled all the way to Wisconsin!” As if getting out of her DC bubble was some heroic sacrifice for the nation.

+  CNN: “But what evidence is there to prove the California election is rigged?”

MIKE JOHNSON: “Look, some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here.”

Look, everyone knows Satan rigged the California elections and his demons leave no trace, not even a single hanging chad!

+ Rep. James Comer: “What we’re seeing especially in the blue states is there is rampant fraud, especially in the minority communities.” Meanwhile, Trump issued “a full, complete, and unconditional pardon” to former Congressman Stephen E. Buyer, the Republican from Indiana, who was convicted of involvement in an insider trading scheme in 2023, where he made nearly $350,000 in illegal profits from the Sprint-T-Mobile and Guidehouse-Navigant mergers soon after leaving office. Buyer is white. If you search the database of Trump’s pardons and commutations, you’ll see convictions for “fraud” cited 72 times–almost all of the convicts were white.–almost all of the convicts were white.

+ From Reese Gorman’s account of how Trump dominates House Speaker Mike Johnson in NOTUS:

Last year, as Republicans were attempting to pass a measure for their reconciliation bill, Trump was on the phone with the GOP holdouts whose names were lit up on the board above the press gallery as having voted “No. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Indiana) was handed a phone with Trump on the other end of the line in the cloakroom off the House floor. Two sources described Spartz as trying to talk while noticeably crying during the call. After they were done and she left the cloakroom, Trump, who was on speakerphone, said: “I have no fucking idea what she just said.”

+ Marco Rubio: “President Kennedy announced that we were going to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely. We did it. We are a nation founded on doing what no one else dared to do. And at some level, that’s what this whole company, what UFC has been.” No, Rubio’s not talking about the coup-plotting United Fruit Company, but it’s sports equivalent, the cage-fighting enterprise, which will entertain Trump on his 80th birthday with their own brand of bloodsport waged in swim-trunk-style briefs on the lawn of the White House…

+++

Screengrab from a CBS profile of William Faulkner in 1952.

+ Floyd Stovall: I’m going to ask a question which you may think trivial. Suppose we had the ideal society, economic society, where everybody had leisure and comfort and all the Cadillacs we could use. What would that do, if anything, to literature or poetry?

William Faulkner: I think the poet would still be a poet. He’d prefer to be a poet than to have the Cadillac. There may be a culture which would compel him to have that Cadillac, but he would be a poor Cadillac owner, just like he’d be a poor doctor or lawyer because he’s going to be a poet first.

+ From Tyler Jagt’s essay “My Students Can’t Read” in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.”

+ According to Cloudflare, 57.4% of requests to a selection of websites it hosts are now automated bot requests, while only 42.6% are human-generated. As I told the estimable editor and CounterPunch contributor, Susie Day, I’m happy if bots read my columns and one day hope to have a bot-stalker, though not one that goes the full-Rushdie…

+ Jesse Walker: Fun fact: “Hanoi has been under Communist rule for longer than Moscow was.”

+ This clipping for the “Is Trump a Closet Case?” file finds the president gushing at the physique of NFL Hall of Famer Joe Thomas, whom the alleged super football fan didn’t recognize.

Look at this guy over here. I don’t know who the hell he is, but he is one hell of a specimen. This guy, this is one hell of a physical specimen…I thought I was big until I met you, Joe, you know. Fantastic, that’s what I like. Look at the size of this guy! Boy oh boy. He’s a good-looking man!

+ A lot of attention has been paid to the best opening lines of novels, but what’s the best closing line in American fiction? How about this one from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye: “I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.”

+ Apparently, the summer interns are programming the Criterion Collection this month…

+ First Jesus turned the water into wine and, then seeing his congregation become relaxed, flirtatious and demanding to hear a little Motown, realized his mistake and transformed the wine into sugar water infused with caffeine, taurine and guarana…“God put it on our hearts to specifically preach the gospel through an energy drink,” the creator of Yahweh says in an Instagram video defending the company against accusations that it exists mainly to turn a profit.

+ Jan St. Werner of the German group, Mouse on Mars, about their collaboration with the Sun Ra of dub/reggae, Lee “Scratch” Perry, on his final record, Spatial, No Problem: “We hardly spoke about what we were doing. We met and got going. He was laughing a lot and we laughed along. We also cooked and ate fish soup and papayas.”

+ Move over, Warren Beatty. Take the blue pill, Sean Penn! Madonna says JFK Jr was the “best dick down” of her life. I wonder if he would’ve rendered the same assessment about carnal relations with Madonna…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late
Cory Doctorow
(MCD)

The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America
Lauren O-Neill-Butler
(Verso)

How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words
Sophia Smith Galer
(William Collins)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Spatial, No Problem
Lee “Scratch” Perry and Mouse on Mars
(Domino)

A Sign in the Weather
Bella White
(Rounder)

Doctrine of Love
Jalen Ngonda
(Daptone)

Goya’s Way of Looking at a Massacre

“Why should an artist’s way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Why does it give us pleasure? Because, I believe, it increases our awareness of our own potentiality. Not, of course, our awareness of our potentiality as artists ourselves. But a way of looking at the world implies a certain relationship with the world, and every relationship implies action. The kind of actions implied vary a great deal. A work of art can, to some extent, increase an awareness of different potentialities in different people. The important point is that a valid work of art promises in some way or another the possibility of an increase, an improvement. Nor need the word be optimistic to achieve this; indeed, its subject may be tragic. For it is not the subject that makes the promise, it is the artist’s way of viewing his subject. Goya‘s way of looking at a massacre amounts to the contention that we ought to be able to do without massacres.” – John Berger

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Somali World Cup soccer referee, Omar Artan, who was banned from entry into the US. Photo: Omar Artan’s Facebook page.

I know Pete Hegseth put his foot in his mouth and took his eye off the ball on a beach in Normandy the other day when, during a D-Day anniversary gathering, he declared: “Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies.”

Critics described the speech as grotesque and inappropriate for such a solemn and commemorative occasion. Yet if Hegseth was trying to project an image of a vigilant and uncompromising America, events surrounding the World Cup have suggested that message is being heard rather more widely than intended.

A winger receives the ball on the touchline and, with three defenders converging, pirouettes through.

You know something is amiss when a World Cup referee is denied entry to the United States while Canada and Mexico appear to present no such obstacles.

That is what happened when Somali match official Omar Artan was refused entry because of “vetting concerns”. I do not know the details of the case, but after arriving at Miami International Airport on a diplomatic passport, Artan was stopped by US Customs and Border Protection. Nor was this any ordinary referee. Artan—widely regarded as Africa’s leading official—was the recipient of the 2025 CAF Men’s Referee of the Year award. He was an esteemed professional effectively shown the red card by one of the tournament’s host nations and held for eleven hours. Perhaps it was naive of him to think there would be no problems given that around eighty per cent of Somali visa applications are refused.

It did not end there.

Aymen Hussein, the Iraqi international nicknamed Abu Tubar, was reportedly subjected to more than six hours of questioning upon arrival in the United States. He was eventually allowed entry, but Iraq’s team photographer was not. This is not how to win friends and influence people. Every footballing nation follows its team to the World Cup. Support staff are part of that travelling football family too.

Elsewhere, Uzbekistan’s players faced much longer visa processing times than the Dutch players they happened to be playing in a pre-tournament friendly. Such unequal treatment breeds not only frustration but resentment. The online backlash was immediate.

A playmaker threads a pass through a forest of legs.

For a tournament that prides itself on bringing the world together, these incidents send precisely the opposite message. Football’s greatest competition is supposed to transcend borders, politics and prejudice. Instead, too many teams have found themselves confronting bureaucracy, suspicion and barriers before they have even stepped onto the pitch.

Even if this is intended to signal that America’s borders are secure and uncompromising, it is not a good look for any host nation. Nor is it in keeping with the spirit of the World Cup.

Nor were those isolated incidents.

Swiss striker Breel Embolo found his visa placed under review and was unable to join his teammates until several days after the rest of the squad had assembled. Perhaps less surprisingly, given renewed tensions between Washington and Tehran, the Iranian national team spent days navigating visa procedures through the US consulate in Turkey. Entry permissions were reportedly limited to match-day requirements, while a significant number of delegation members were denied visas altogether.

South Africa’s national team also arrived later than planned after visa complications affected members of its travelling party. The episode inevitably raised awkward questions. At a time when Washington was publicly welcoming selected groups of South African migrants and refugees, critics wondered whether footballers from parts of the Global South were being afforded the same urgency and consideration.

A full-back races shoulder to shoulder with an attacker and then, at precisely the right moment, hooks the ball away.

The stories kept coming.

Members of the Uzbekistan squad reportedly faced unusually intrusive security procedures, including searches involving bomb-sniffing dogs. Images and video footage of this circulated internationally, attracting considerable attention and criticism.

Supporters from Europe have not been entirely immune either. Some Scottish fans who qualified for visa-free travel under the ESTA programme saw their authorisations revoked shortly before departure. Others, having already purchased match tickets and accommodation, found themselves unable to travel after visa applications were delayed or rejected, leaving them substantially out of pocket.

The Senegalese delegation experienced repeated secondary inspections and extensive searches at ports of entry, disrupting preparations. Staff members complained of humiliating treatment and some openly alleged racial bias in the way they had been handled.

Behind the headlines were dozens of less-publicised cases. Coaches, medical staff, analysts, interpreters and team officials encountered visa delays that prevented them from travelling with their squads. Family members of players found themselves unable to attend the tournament because applications remained unresolved or were rejected outright.

A striker rounds the goalkeeper with a touch so measured.

Taken individually, each case could be dismissed as an administrative complication or security precaution. Collectively, however, they painted a different picture: a tournament in which access appeared unevenly distributed and in which nationality often seemed to determine how smoothly one crossed the border.

Whether that perception is entirely fair became almost beside the point. Perception matters in international sport. The World Cup is supposed to be football’s greatest celebration of openness and global participation. Instead, stories of delayed visas, lengthy interrogations, missed flights and disrupted preparations threaten to become an unwelcome subplot to the tournament itself.

For FIFA, the question is an uncomfortable one: what is the point of awarding the world’s biggest sporting event to a host nation if some of the world’s players, officials, staff and supporters struggle simply to get through the front door?

A winning goal arrives after twenty passes.

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