LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

2026-08-15T07:04:17.027-07:00

Courage for Peace, Not for War

August 14, 2026

Photo: Swedish Red Cross.

Can we escape the terrors of our time?

In September of 2025, during a Saturday vigil in Stockholm’s Odenplan Square, Isak Hernández, age nine, asked if he could recite a poem he wrote. Deeply troubled by images he saw, day and night, from Gaza, he resolved not to be silent. “Their lives are not numbers,” Isak declared. “Their dreams are not ashes.” His refrain repeated: “I won’t be silent,” and he begged the world, “Listen to me.”

Isabella Lundgren, a Swedish jazz vocalist, heard Isak deliver his poem. She felt his words had reverberated throughout Sweden. No one could possibly turn away. Everyone, she said, bore the responsibility of witnessing. She and Isak collaborated to turn his poem into a song entitled “Their dreams are not ashes.”

Their witness is crucial for counteracting decisions on the part of countries which have newly decided to enter NATO.

We should acknowledge that NATO has done nothing to stop the U.S. provisioned Israeli genocide or to restrain Israel.

On the contrary, NATO seeks fuller integration of Israel’s “security” into NATO strategies. What’s more, tradebetween Israel and European countries continues.

The Swedish government ought to argue that NATO must force Israel to end their genocide of Palestinian people.

We should note that Israel possesses at least ninety-one thermonuclear weapons which it refuses to declare. Each of these weapons would cause the death of at least six million people – a Holocaust – in a can, waiting to be opened on human civilization’s last day. A planetary omnicide comprising every conceivable genocide, military analysts agree, is almost certain to occur days, hours, or even minutes after any of these weapons are ever again used.

Sadly, Sweden’s hurried entry into NATO in 2024, alongside the rise of armaments industries and even support for nuclear weapons acquisition, compromises Sweden’s historic capacity to resist the rush into unimaginable genocides.

What are the major threats we all face? Surely, the list must begin with the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Next, we must reckon with possible ecological collapse. Following this, we must prepare for outbreaks of new pandemics. And, achingly, we must oppose genocide. War is not the answer. Militarism exacerbates each of these threats.

Now, as corrupt political leaders extract the hard-earned resources of people throughout Europe and pour those resources into bulging coffers of, primarily, U.S. military contractors, it’s crucial to hear Isak Hernández’s pledge not to be silent. We also can learn from the legacy of Sweden’s heroic diplomat, Count Folke Bernadotte.

As Vice President of Sweden’s Red Cross, during World War II, he witnessed first-hand how prisoners in concentration camps suffered. He resolved to negotiate with SS leader Heinrich Himmler for the release of prisoners. Bernadotte collaborated with Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian relief groups to create the White Buses campaign. Ultimately, they managed to free over 17,000 thousand prisoners from concentration camps.

During World War II, Adolph Hitler, eager as current European leaders for war with Russia, plainly aimed to eliminate the Jews in Europe. He wanted to create “Grossedeutchland,” – “Greater Germany.” The SS had turned into an immense bureaucracy under Himmler’s control, systematically enacting Hitler’s hideous “final solution.” Amid chaotic and extremely dangerous conditions Bernadotte and his team steadily negotiated liberation and transport of prisoners.

Sune Persson records, in Escape from the Third Reich: Folke Bernadotte and the White Buses, the minutes from the May 13, 1945, gathering of the Jewish Stockholm Community. The chairperson thanked the Swedish Red Cross and Count Bernadotte:

“When the assembly now gathers here today, it is with a strong sense of entering a new epoch. These recent times, darker than humanity has ever known them, have reached a climax, so desperately coveted, and we stand –yearning, inquiring, hopeful – on the threshold of a new world…We would like to think at this moment of the admirable rescue operation undertaken by the Swedish Red Cross, bringing thousands of people – among them a considerable number of Jews – here to our country, to liberation from the horrors of the concentration camps and a terrible demise.”

But Bernadotte’s work on behalf of refugees and mediation wasn’t finished. After World War II, the United Nations Security Council unanimously chose Bernadotte to be the UN Security Council mediator in the Arab–Israeli conflict of 1947–1948.

Count Folke Bernadotte’s first report to the Secretary General outlined the desperate plight of Palestinian refugees, nearly a quarter of whom, he wrote, “are simply camped out and living under trees. In most places there was absolutely no sanitary accommodation, and since water was drawn from surface collections, and typhoid was endemic, grave possibilities in this regard at this season of the year were likely.”

He surveyed destroyed Palestinian villages and witnessed long lines of people waiting for food, scarce medical aid, and an ongoing humanitarian disaster. He and U.S. diplomat Ralph Bunche wrote a proposal to meet short-term and long-term needs of refugees. Their plan would allow for fixed boundaries between the Israelis and the Palestinians, with an economic union between the states and assurance that Palestinian refugees could return.

“It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice,” Bernadotte wrote, “if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine.”

Boldly and truthfully, Bernadotte drew links between meeting humanitarian needs and creating an environment in which peace could take hold. He insisted the UN must respect the refugees’ “unconditional right to make a free choice.”

Bernadotte’s and Ralph Bunche’s report was submitted to the UN on September 18, 1948, but Bernadotte did not live to present it in person. On September 17, terrorists from an extremist Zionist group, the Stern Gang, ambushed Bernadotte’s motorcade. They fired six bullets into Bernadotte’s body. His colleague, the French Colonel André Sérot was killed by seventeen bullets.

Count Bernadotte’s principled humanitarian work may have cost him his life, but we can choose to continue his legacy.

It’s encouraging to know that the 2026 Stockholm Forum for Peace and Development has recognized a fundamental reality: “many modern security risks, from climate shocks to pandemics and cyber threats, do not have hard security solutions and do not stop at borders. They are, however, further exacerbated when geopolitical rivalries undermine cooperative solutions.”

I hope Count Bernadotte’s inspiring life and Isak Hernández’s compassionate insistence: “I won’t be silent,” will steer us as we reckon with what Dr. King called “the fierce urgency of now.”

Kathy Kelly (kathy@worldbeyondwar.org), Board President of World BEYOND War, co-coordinates the November 2023 Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal. She is the author of Other Lands Have Dreams, published by CounterPunch/AK Press.

2026-08-15T07:03:25.579-07:00

800+ USA Today Journalists Demand Paper End Deal With Palantir to Collect Reader Data

Not only does the partnership “create an inherent conflict of interest,” it “fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests.”

Protesters hold a banner reading, “ICE Kills, Palantir Profits” during a January 20, 2026 demonstration in Palo Alto, California.
(Photo by Dov Baum/American Friends Service Committee)

Brett Wilkins
Aug 14, 2026

COMMON DREAMS

More than 800 unionized journalists and other media workers at USA Today Co. demanded this week that the nation’s largest newspaper chain abandon a newly announced partnership with surveillance tech giant Palantir to collect and analyze reader data, warning that the deal threatens privacy, public trust, and newsroom independence.

USA Today Co. chair Mike Reed told investors during an August 6 meeting that the company, formerly known as Gannett, is working with Palantir to “drive more effective and faster monetization across our platform” by using its software to collect and analyze reader data. Reed did not say how long USA Today had been using the software.

In a statement released earlier this week, workers represented by The NewsGuild-CWA said they were “shocked” by the company’s decision to partner with the controversial data analytics firm. Thirty-one unions representing employees across USA Today Co. publications have called on management to immediately terminate the agreement.

“We have significant ethical issues with Palantir, whose artificial intelligence (AI) software has been used to advance widespread surveillance and power immigration crackdowns,” the union said. “Not only does partnering with Palantir, a major player in the news we cover, create an inherent conflict of interest, but it fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests.”

“USA Today Co. has provided minimal details about this partnership and the parameters of its agreement with Palantir,” the statement continues. “We have serious concerns and questions about how readers’ personal information and data will be used under this partnership and how their data would be protected. Without answers, how can journalists encourage readers to subscribe to our news outlets?”

The journalists noted that billionaire Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel—who “once said freedom and democracy were not compatible”—is responsible for products tied to human rights abuses and privacy violations.

“Technologists and even former employees have warned that it’s not far-fetched to imagine a future where Palantir’s AI technology is used to surveil American citizens and target dissidents,” their statement notes. “And throughout history, journalists are often the first to be targeted.”

“These concerns should be reason enough for USA Today Co. to steer clear,” the journalists asserted. “This partnership with Palantir arrives as USA Today Co. executives dive headfirst into AI without sufficient regard for workers or the public after decimating newsrooms across the country.”

“We will continue pushing back on ill-planned attempts to force AI into our newsrooms and onto our readers, who deserve quality, human-led journalism,” they added. “We will advocate for the responsible use of new technologies when it emboldens our journalists and their work instead of shamelessly promoting AI to support profit-driven corporate edicts.”

News organizations increasingly operate not just as publishers, but as data collection businesses. The USA Today journalists’ concerns come against a backdrop of increasingly sophisticated tracking across digital news. USA Today Co.'s own public Data Collection Explorer shows that the company already operates an extensive system for collecting, routing, and analyzing user data across its publications and platforms, including through third-party analytics vendors.

Mike Davis, a reporter for the Asbury Park Press—a USA Today Co. newspaper in southern New Jersey—told NiemanLab that “part of the problem” with the Palantir partnership “is that we know very, very little” about how the company’s software is being used.

“It’s pretty surprising that our company would unilaterally decide to bring in such a controversial partner like Palantir without providing a complete explanation to its employees, most of whom are naturally skeptical journalists,” Davis said.

“An investigative reporter who keeps a ton of sensitive notes, source information, and confidential documents on their devices is going to be naturally concerned about protecting that information, and who could blame them?” he added. “It’s pretty hard to trust management’s intentions when the goalposts shift so often that there’s always a fear that what’s true today won’t be true in six months. We’ve all seen the years of disinvestment in local news, especially in the name of going all-in on AI.”

2026-08-15T07:01:34.433-07:00

Green Groups Sue Trump EPA for Approving Toxic Semiconductor Chemicals Amid AI Data Center Boom

“The rush to build more and more data centers is causing harm far beyond the data centers themselves.”

An aerial view shows cooling vent fans on the roof next to generators on the lower level of a Digital Realty data center in Ashburn, Virginia on November 12, 2025.
(Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Aug 14, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A trio of green groups on Friday sued the US Environmental Protection Agency over its approval of two new chemicals for semiconductor manufacturing, arguing that the EPA allowed potentially dangerous substances to be sold despite acknowledging significant gaps in its understanding of their health risks.

CHIPS Communities United and the Sierra Club, represented by Earthjustice, filed suit in the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco challenging the approvals. The groups contend that the EPA violated the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) by permitting the chemicals’ use without adequately assessing their risks to employees in semiconductor plants and the communities in which they are located.

According to Earthjustice, the EPA identified potential hazards including cancer, neurological damage, and even sudden death, but also acknowledged that it lacked sufficient information to determine the full extent of those risks. The names of the chemicals are redacted in the complaint—in which they are identified by their EPA premanufacture notice numbers, P-26-0029 and P-26-0045—because the agency has designated their identities as confidential business information.

“The Trump administration is rushing dangerous chemicals to market without the review or the protection that the law requires,” Earthjustice senior attorney Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “Here, EPA admits that it has not evaluated the full extent of these chemicals’ health risks, yet it is still sending them into communities across the country and leaving the public to discover their effects one doctor’s visit at a time.”

CHIPS Communities United coalition director Judith Barish said: “Neighbors and workers are exposed to toxic chemicals in semiconductor factories. Over decades, workers in chip [factories] have been harmed by workplace exposure and residents of nearby communities have been impacted by hazardous air or water that is contaminated by these chemicals.”

“We call on the EPA to stop approving chemicals that can harm public health without understanding the risks,” Barish added.

As Earthjustice noted:
Semiconductor manufacturing is a major ongoing source of [per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances], a large class of toxic “forever chemicals,” along with other industrial manufacturing sources. PFAS don’t easily break down and can persist in our bodies and the environment for decades or more. Semiconductors are also foundational hardware for artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, affecting many communities in addition to those surrounding the massive polluting chip factories.

The groups’ lawsuit comes over a month after the EPA under President Donald Trump—who campaigned on what critics say was a largely empty promise to “make America healthy again”—and agency Administrator Lee Zeldin approved a fifth “forever chemical” pesticide pushed by industry lobbyists.

“EPA’s approval of these unstudied chemicals is just the latest example of the Trump EPA refusing to follow the legal risk assessment processes under TSCA and prioritizing industry profits over public health,” Earthjustice said on Friday. “Last year, the agency proposed shifts to how it conducts risk evaluations for chemicals already in use and on the market that would let it ignore the real-world risks posed by toxic chemicals.”

Harmful chemicals associated with data center cooling, fire suppression, and production of semiconductors and other electronic components include refrigerants such as Freon and Opteon, Teflon coatings for cable insulation, Krytox for pumps and robotics, and Viton for sealing.

Additionally, as the Natural Resources Defense Council explained, data center cooling systems “can consume vast quantities of water and pollute large quantities of water, depending on the type of cooling system used. For example, evaporative cooling consumes large quantities of water while some immersion cooling techniques rely on harmful chemicals such as PFAS.”

While much critical attention on the lack of guardrails on unchecked AI development has focused on the risks of the technology itself and its economic implications—which experts say includes the shorter-term danger of mass unemployment and the long-term threat that superintelligent machines could one day subjugate or even wipe out humanity—the green groups are highlighting environmental and health hazards amid the worsening climate emergency.

“The rush to build more and more data centers is causing harm far beyond the data centers themselves,” Jane Williams, chair of the Grassroots Network National Clean Air Team at Sierra Club, said Friday.

“From the plants where toxic chemicals are used to make semiconductors, to the roads these chemicals are transported on, and finally to the incinerators where they are disposed, EPA’s approval of these dangerously unstudied chemicals places the public at risk,” Williams added. “These chemicals are suspected to be persistent bioaccumulative toxins, a category of chemicals that contaminate breast milk, cord blood, and the next generation. This action is an assault on the future.”

2026-08-15T06:59:27.788-07:00

When the AI Bubble Bursts, Who Will Be Left Holding the Bag?

Eileen Appelbaum

August 14, 2026

Photo by Juan Pablo

A new paper making a stir in the financial press spells out the dangers to which private equity-owned life insurance companies are exposed by private credit funds with large portfolios of loans to software and AI companies. It’s a complicated story that could have enormous consequences.

Pranjal Drall and Andrew Granato, the report’s authors, argue that some of these insurance companies could become insolvent if these loans crash. And an unanticipated consequence of a 60-year-old rule that protects insurance company policy holders from losing all of their life insurance benefits or annuity payments could leave taxpayers holding the bag.

Let’s step back to understand some of the backstory. In 2022, I wrote about private equity firms gobbling up life insurance companies, and in 2026 about the risky, high-fee investments these companies were making with people’s life insurance and annuity premiums. Private equity firms are best known for the private equity (PE) buyout funds they sponsor. These funds buy up anything from doctor’s practices to single-family homes to youth sports leagues. PE funds use money committed by their investors as the down payment (the equity) on these acquisitions, and they use lots of debt to acquire companies in what are known as leveraged buyouts (LBOs).

As PE firms diversify their holdings, life and annuity insurance companies are an attractive target because they amass premium income, but may not need to pay out benefits for years or even decades. PE’s interest in owning life insurance companies emerged in earnest in 2009 following the Great Financial Crisis, and accelerated in the early 2020s.

While traditional insurance companies mostly invested premium income in corporate and Treasury bonds, PE firms count on earning high fees for managing risky investments made with these assets, and on profiting from the spread between what it owes policyholders and what its investments earn. There are no legal barriers to private equity-owned insurance companies using their assets to support struggling companies also owned by their PE owner, and no prohibition on selling poorly performing loans of a PE-owned company to an insurance company owned by the same PE firm. PE-owned life insurers also extract value by transferring assets and liabilities to a shadow reinsurer it owns or is affiliated with. This can reduce the insurance company’s tax liabilities, lower its capital requirements and hide the extent of the risk it is exposed to.

Private Credit Funds Make Big Bets on Software and Data Centers

Stricter financial regulations put in place following the Great Financial Crisis were intended to prevent similar catastrophes in the future. The regulations limited the amount of debt that regulated financial institutions could put on a company, crimping the ability of PE funds to use as much debt in LBOs as they wanted. Banks were restricted from making riskier loans, and this resulted in small- and medium-sized companies finding it difficult to get bank financing. Immediately, private equity firms stepped into the breach and created private credit funds to make direct loans to companies frozen out of public financial markets Private credit funds are sponsored by investment firms, including PE firms. They are not subject to the regulations intended to make the financial system safer. They operate in the shadows, making risky loans to companies, many of whom don’t qualify for bank loans. Today, private credit funds hold $3 trillion in largely unregulated, high risk, opaque loans — many made to companies owned by PE firms.

Private credit funds have been a hot investment for the last 16 or so years. These loans are not subject to the rules that govern corporate bonds. Because the loans are risky, lenders demand a premium and borrowers pay high interest rates — a profitable situation that rewards investors in these funds. The funds have bet big on software firms that create code and develop management tools that businesses subscribe to, providing them with multi-billion-dollar loans. The software tools manage various business operations — customer relationships, workflow and corporate spending — and are collectively known as Software as a Service (SaaS). Private credit funds are also behind the multi-billion-dollar loans to the huge data centers that AI firms are building to train their latest AI models.

Where do these billions of dollars come from? While there are multiple sources of funding for private credit funds — including investment banks like Goldman Sachs that are barred from making these loans directly, and pension funds looking for lucrative payoffs — private equity-owned insurance companies figure prominently as a source of capital for these funds. Investments in SaaS have been the bread and butter of private credit funds. The recurring income these companies generate from business subscribers have enabled them to make payments on their massive loans; default rates have been low.

But share prices of these software companies cratered in 2026 under pressure from Claude, AI company Anthropic’s code-writing frontier model and other similar models. As a whole, these AI tools are undermining the SaaS business model and challenging the “assumptions around software growth, pricing power and borrower durability.“ Investors in private credit funds worry that many of the SaaS companies will not be able to repay their loans.

Similar doubts are being raised about the construction of super expensive data centers that private credit funds are financing amid rising concerns about an AI bubble and anxiety about what will happen if the bubble bursts. Will many of the data centers become white elephants, deserted by the AI firms that planned to use them to develop new AI models? Will the return on investment in models trained in these expensive data centers justify business spending on these high-cost AI models? Will the much cheaper Chinese AI models out compete the US models and take market share away from American AI companies? These questions are raising doubts about whether all of these loans can be repaid. And if the loans can’t be repaid, what then?

Insurance Regulations Could Bail Out Risky PE Bets

PE-owned life insurance companies will see their investments in private credit funds crushed, marked down substantially or even wiped out. Private credit default rates above 15 percent may lead some insurance companies to become insolvent and unable to make good on the life insurance payouts or annuity payments promised to beneficiaries.

At that point, state Insurance Commissioners will step in. Rules put in place decades ago to protect beneficiaries of insurance companies enable the commissioners to require the remaining life insurance companies in the state to pay into a special guaranty fund that will make good on the policies held by the beneficiaries of the defunct company, up to a cap of about $300,000 on life insurance and about $250,000 on an annuity. That varies by state. Insurance companies not affiliated with a PE firm and that didn’t make risky bets on private credit will be required to bail out the failed insurance companies that did. And the PE firm that owned the insolvent company will get off scot-free and not have to pay anything. That creates a moral hazard and seems to be a miscarriage of justice.

But the story doesn’t end there. In 44 states, these payments are fully creditable over five years against state taxes on premium income. That means that, ultimately, it is taxpayers in those states that provide the backstop when software and/or AI companies can’t repay their loans to private credit funds, and a private equity-owned insurance company that invested in private credit funds becomes insolvent. The result is, as the report’s authors point out, “a system that socializes losses.”

First published by CEPR.

2026-08-15T06:55:44.493-07:00

Vampire Planet: Hey DiCaprio, Bezos Ain’t Our Friend

Joshua Frank

August 14, 2026

Amazon AWS data center, image Wikipedia.

Most would agree that the animals suffering as the world burns need our help. So Jeff Bezos and Leonardo DiCaprio’s $200 million commitment to the Phoenix Species Project to revive 100 endangered species around the world should be welcome news.

Leo believes it is.

“I could not be prouder to announce this,” DiCaprio wrote joyously in an Instagram post. “Save these species, and we protect everything around them. The forests, the rivers, and the climate itself.”

I sincerely hope that’s true and that these creatures, including a lemur in Madagascar, a pink iguana in the Galápagos, a pancake tortoise in Tanzania, see tangible benefits from conservation efforts.

Yet I can’t help but sense a perversity in all of this.

The initiative is being funded with Bezos’s blood money, as was his 2020 launch of the $10 billion greenwashed Earth Fund. All the cash Bezos is throwing at the environment is nowhere near enough to offset the damage caused by the creation of his obscene wealth, which places him in the top three richest people on the planet. Amazon, the company that made him all that money, is one of the world’s largest corporate climate polluters.

Even under the company’s own accounting (which critics contend is far from accurate), Amazon’s 2025 carbon emissions surpassed its 2024 record, reaching 80 million metric tons, a 16% increase. Its electric purchases, primarily for data centers, jumped by 34%, and emissions from Amazon’s fleet of delivery and transport vehicles increased by 20%, accounting for over 76% of its total carbon footprint.

This doesn’t even take into consideration the emissions from Bezos’s lavish lifestyle and excessive investment portfolio. He owns two private jets and a $500 million, 417-foot superyacht, which together emit about 10,000 tons of CO2.

According to a damning Oxfam report, Bezos is responsible, through his corporations, investments and consumption, for a million times more carbon pollution than the average person.

“The world’s poorest communities, those who have done the least to cause climate change – those who are least able to respond and recover – are the ones who are suffering the worst consequences. This is unfair and immoral,” Oxfam International’s inequality policy adviser Alex Maitland told The Guardian.

Bezos’s contribution to climate change is about to get a whole lot worse.

A proposed data center in Pecos County, Texas, is so large that its 35 gas-burning turbines, operating at 7.65 gigawatts, will make it the country’s single largest source of fossil fuel emissions. It will emit an insane 33 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution each year.

“That’s a stunning amount of carbon exhaust, putting that single data center in a league with entire countries including Switzerland, Ireland, and Bulgaria,” writes Joe Wilkins at Futurism.

This is just one more example (and I detail many more in the forthcoming Bad Energy) of why renewables can’t keep up with our ever-increasing demand for electricity, thanks in no small part to billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Big Tech’s appetite for data center destruction.

Amazon is relying on gas to run its fleet of servers because solar and wind would require an immense amount of land to build out.

A solar farm requires up to 7,000 acres to supply 1 GW of electricity. For Amazon’s future data center in Texas (if we don’t stop it), the company would need 49,000 acres of land covered with solar panels to generate 7 GW of electricity. That’s over 76 square miles, roughly the size of Madison, Wisconsin.

Sorry, Leo, I know you think you’re doing a good thing here by trying to save imperiled species from extinction, but your buddy Jeff Bezos can’t buy his way out of the destruction he’s manifested.

Oh, and while you’re closing the door on Bezos, could you divest from that disgusting eco-resort you’re helping finance in Israel, too?

Thanks.

+++

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You can bundle Bad Energy with this cool t-shirt, designed by CounterPuncher and artist Roger Peet, available at Pilsen Community Books (US shipping only).

The shirt and a signed book will ship September 8, while supplies last.

JOSHUA FRANK is co-editor of CounterPunch and co-host of CounterPunch Radio. He is the author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, and the forthcoming, Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who are Selling Off Our Future, both with Haymarket Books. He can be reached at joshua@counterpunch.org. You can troll him on Bluesky @joshuafrank.bsky.social

2026-08-15T06:53:47.755-07:00

Fauci Chose to “Take the Fifth” and Left Too Many Questions Unanswered

Daniel Warner

August 14, 2026

Photograph Source: NIAID – CC BY 2.0

We all make choices. Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, invoked the Fifth Amendment over 100 times when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on July 29. Subpoenaed to testify about his handling of the COVID pandemic and the questions surrounding the origins of the virus, Fauci declined to answer the committee’s substantive questions, a striking departure from his previous appearance before the House in 2024, when he answered questions for hours and defended his actions and decisions during the pandemic.

Fauci began his testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic with,“Thank you for this opportunity to testify.” Two years later, before the Senate Committee, he said: “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect that I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

What changed?

Fauci’s decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment before Congress put him in an unusual but well-established American tradition. Government officials like Oliver North have relied on the constitutional protection when congressional questioning threatened to expose them to possible criminal liability. Many Hollywood figures such as Abraham Polonsky and Carl Foreman “Took the Fifth” before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the “Red Scare” when faced with congressional questioning about associations with the Communist Party. Donald Trump once famously asked, “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth?” He later invoked the Fifth Amendment hundreds of times during a 2022 civil deposition, explaining that his lawyers had advised him he had no practical alternative.

But the good Dr. Fauci taking the Fifth? “To many,” Katie Rogers wrote in the Times, “this was a tacit admission of guilt from the 85-year-old, who retired from public service in 2022.” David Wallace-Wells, also writing in the Times, called it “cowardly.”

Fauci was not always “cowardly.” Before Fauci even began speaking before the House in 2024, Republican Chairman Brad Wenstrup said: “First, I want to thank you for decades of public service. You served your country through multiple epidemics, pandemics, and health crisis.” He continued: “Regardless of any disagreements we may have, you chose to serve and I want to extend our appreciation and gratitude. I also want to thank you for your willing cooperation with the Select Subcommittee.”

Wenstrup added: “You have voluntarily sat for more than 14 hours of testimony and are appearing voluntarily today. This is more than we can say about other witnesses we have called, and we appreciate it.”

In 2026, Fauci began his testimony on very different terms: “However, given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently, his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary, aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something—anything—that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”

In 2026, Fauci clearly believed that Rand Paul and the Republicans on the committee were out to get him. Trump has called Fauci an “idiot,” a “phony,” and a “terrible ‘athlete’.” Paul and the committee were following the same line of attack.

Fauci was later lambasted by RFK Jr. on CNN August 2: “Now we know that Anthony Fauci, who was the expert, was lying about everything, about masks, about the social distancing, about natural immunity, about the transmission from the vaccine, about the source of COVID,” said the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Committee voted along party lines on August 6 to hold Fauci in contempt and referred the matter to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. It is unclear whether the Department will take up the case.

Beyond the criticisms of Fauci, the major change between 2024 and 2026 may have been the image of Fauci himself. During the pandemic, he was the medical expert as well as the kindly family doctor. He had the nation’s respect and confidence.

The recently released diary material has given critics a very different view of Fauci’s private personality. The Washington Post, for example, reported that the entries showed him reflecting on his fame and media coverage, including references to spending time with A-listers such as Julia Roberts. The diary changed the public image of Fauci, but it doesn’t answer the substantive questions that Congress was asking.

Why did Fauci take the Fifth and refuse to answer the committee—and the public—about his actions during the pandemic?

Perhaps the answer is as simple as the one he gave: his lawyers advised him that answering could expose him to criminal liability. Perhaps he genuinely believed that Senator Paul’s repeated calls for prosecution made it impossible for him to testify without putting himself at risk, despite the pardon issued to him by Joe Biden.

In an article in The New Yorker, Amy Davidson Sorkin also questioned Fauci’s decision not to answer. “Yet Fauci’s silence was a loss. Paul may have come at the matter with theatrics and ill will, but some of his questions, in their most basic forms, are worth exploring, because the debate about where the novel coronavirus came from is ongoing, divisive, and important.” David Wallace-Wells made a similar point in the Times.

And after everything Americans and the world were told about—and suffered through—during COVID, perhaps asking those questions is not unreasonable. The virus, the vaccines, lockdowns, masks, social distancing and the people making those decisions all affected millions of lives.

Beyond asking why Fauci changed between 2024 and 2026, I would like to know more about the choices he made before and during the pandemic. Is he holding back until he writes a best-selling tell-all? Why he took the Fifth is only one question. He made choices that affected millions of people. Those choices need explanations as well.

Daniel Warner is the author of An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations. (Lynne Rienner). He lives in Geneva.

2026-08-15T06:49:43.345-07:00

Usury is Politics, Not Economics

David S. D’Amato

August 14, 2026

Photo by Francesco Alberti

Last fall, Pope Leo made an address in which he stated that “[t]he phenomenon of usury points to the corruption of the human heart,” condemning the practice as bringing crisis to families and enslaving the poor and powerless. Though it is almost never discussed today by those who comment on matters public and political (they are afraid to offend their captors), usury is among the defining features of our entire social, political and economic system.

Recent court cases have put a spotlight on usury and state laws meant to combat it. Earlier this month, for example, the Fourth Circuit denied an attempt by the lender TitleMax to stop a consumer protection lawsuit, opening the way for a Pennsylvania government agency to pursue over $50 million in penalties for the unlawful practice of usury. In one of the instances covered by the case, TitleMax issued a loan of $7,751.39 to a Pennsylvania man, charging an interest rate of over 132%, with the result that his interest on the loan was over $33,000. He took out the loan in Delaware, but under Pennsylvania’s usury law, the interest on the debt would have been less than $1,000.

A case out of Colorado, currently before the Tenth Circuit, implicates a similar fight over a state usury law that sets a cap on interest rates; the case involves state-chartered banks partnering with fintech companies to give personal loans all over the country. These banks and companies argue that they have a right to export interest rates applicable and legal within their own states, and that Colorado’s local usury rules cannot apply. One of the implicated banks, FinWise Bank, approved loans with interest rates of 160%, legal in Utah, for example, but a felony in Colorado.

Importantly, one need not accept the Pope’s Christian faith in order to oppose usury as a social relationship of unjust, exploitative power. And it is a relationship of power rather than one of mere economics, as if the latter exists in a sphere separate from the former. It may surprise some that one of American history’s most ardent and consistent proponents of free markets and individual liberty was also one of its greatest critics of usury. The anarchist Benjamin Tucker set forth to confront “a most momentous question,” the question of who receives “the surplus wealth that labor produces and does not consume.” For Tucker, usury was the key characteristic of capitalism, but it was the result of political power, not economic relationships of free and voluntary exchange.

The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously wrote a lengthy Defence of Usury near the end of the eighteenth century. For Bentham, usury was not a proper subject of legal prohibition, because, he argued, free adults should be able to engage in whatever kinds of economic activities and exchanges they like. Yet Bentham reckoned only half of the whole story, much like those who still today misguidedly defend capitalism on the grounds of freedom and strong individual rights. They are not sufficiently careful to keep context; their mistake is to believe that the relations described by this apparently innocuous term, relations of domination and coercion, emerge from conditions of mere voluntary exchange for mutual benefit. But it would be very strange indeed for such an authoritarian arrangement to grow up out of libertarian ideals and means. In fact, historically, the usurious conditions of our system of political economy, whatever called, are right in line with bygone systems of power and privilege, with those of feudalism and mercantilism, for example.

Defenders of capitalism seem to be able to apply the much-vaunted economic law of supply and demand to everything but capitalism itself. The defenders of usury are not liberal in any meaningful sense; they deploy the language and concepts of economic rights and freedom in the service of a system that is akin in its actual, material dimensions to forced labor. That is, they stand liberalism on its head and make it a cynical, ideological cover for what is actually a program of political extraction and indentured servitude. This state of affairs passes unremarked upon because the right wing of our current politics says that this is a system of freedom with which the state must not interfere, and the left wing of our politics insists that only the state can hold capital at bay. Both of these narratives are fundamentally confused, preventing a proper understanding of the system’s history and dynamics.

To wrap a violent system such as capitalism in the language of freedom and “free markets” is a high crime, based on the confusion of useful idiots and the malice and contempt of the ruling class, always shrinking relative to the size of the population, always distancing themselves from the people. Very few of today’s liberals have cared to notice what Benjamin Tucker and other anarchists did, because they are often members of a class of laptop “professionals” who serve to protect the power of that ruling class. This is sadly among the major structural reasons that Donald Trump was able to pull the wool over the eyes of so many in the working class. Liberalism on its face became less about justice, freedom, and equality than about protecting the unearned social prestige of the puppets of a billionaire ruling class—a class that has never had any use for free markets and uses the state however and whenever it can.

If the objective and mechanism of actual free markets might be something like equilibrium and the efficient allocation of resources, then capitalism historically has meant the endless and auto-reproductive accumulation of surplus value. If free markets would mean that rent, interest and profit always tend toward a zero value, then capitalism means they must always grow and accumulate without end or limit. If free markets would mean no barriers to market entry and infinite substitutes of products and services, then capitalism has always seen high, state-manufactured barriers and deep structural and legal moats around powerful capital.

If the role of the law in a free market is to play the exogenous and neutral referee, then in capitalism it is to be an endogenous and active architect of legal inequality. If in a free market, information and ideas cannot be owned and belong to humanity as a natural birthright, then in capitalism they are made the exclusive property of a privileged few through so-called intellectual property rights. And if participation in any organization or firm is fully voluntary in free markets, then under capitalism, participation is structurally coerced by extra-economic violence (peasant dispossession and land monopoly, police and private security attacks on strikers, etc.). If risk in free markets is borne by those who create it, then in capitalism it is foisted through the state onto the population at large, with only benefits concentrated. In short, these systems, freedom and capitalism, are opposites, if we care to take the historical record at all seriously. In genuine free markets, the presence of usurious profits itself acts as an immediate signal and spur to eager competitors. Capitalism is a system that outlaws competition, as Tucker once said. Capitalists work “by abolishing the free market,” not working fairly within it.

A free market is measured, in the final analysis, by one’s right to leave it, as a truly voluntary system could only be one it is possible to exit at will. In our political and economic system, the state prohibits, or limits, or licenses, or otherwise meddles with any shred of a possibility of independent survival or self-sufficiency. Its laws cover everything and draw power to organized capital and corporate special interests. Subsidies, privileges, restrictions and professional licenses give the individual no power and no choice but to participate in a centralized, financialized corporation economy that is fully the creation of state power. Even the most cursory examination of the history of the corporate system reveals that its reason for being was and remains the prohibition of free-market competition for the benefit of a small privileged class.

Participation being mandatory for survival, there is no free market as such, and the relationship between the individual and the corporate system is not in the nature or form of a real contract. It is a relationship of political capture and submission. Defending capitalism with the language of pure economics or liberal freedoms is a ridiculous and cynical narrative for a ridiculous and cynical system. We must notice again what Tucker did, that liberty and equality—and thus libertarianism and socialism—are natural complements. Perhaps it would be appropriate to adopt Bentham’s defense of usury in a free-market system. But we don’t have such a system. We have capitalism.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others.

2026-08-15T06:47:19.440-07:00

TRUMP'S OTHER WAR

Cuba after Six Months of the Oil Blockade: Crisis and the Road to Recovery

Vijay Prashad

August 14, 2026

Photo by JF Martin

For more than six decades, the United States has attempted to make the Cuban people pay for their decision to pursue an independent, socialist path. The latest phase of this economic war has targeted the island’s most vulnerable artery: its energy supply. Six months after Washington intensified pressure on countries and companies supplying oil to Cuba, the policy has not produced democracy or improved the lives of ordinary Cubans. It has produced darker homes, immobilised buses, interrupted hospitals, and greater difficulty in moving food from farms to cities.

The immediate task is to prevent a humanitarian disaster. The larger task is to replace coercion with sovereign cooperation and to help Cuba build an energy system that cannot again be strangled by a foreign power.

Six Months of Deepening Crisis

On 29 January 2026, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order establishing a mechanism for additional tariffs on goods from any country that directly or indirectly supplied oil to Cuba. Washington presented the measure as a defence of US national security. Its practical purpose was unmistakable: to force third countries to choose between a small, economically distressed Caribbean nation and access to the enormous US market.

The tariff actions authorised under this, and several other emergency orders were terminated on 20 February. But the declared emergency remained in force, as did the wider sanctions system, threats against suppliers and uncertainty surrounding ships bound for Cuba. The result has been described as an effective oil blockade: not necessarily a permanent line of US warships, but a system of secondary pressure capable of frightening governments, banks, insurers, shipping companies, and traders away from legitimate commerce with Cuba. The blow fell on an economy already under extraordinary strain. Cuba had long depended on imported petroleum, particularly from Venezuela, while producing only part of its requirements. Venezuelan deliveries declined after the US attack on that country on 3 January 2026, Mexican supplies came under US pressure, and Cuba lacked the foreign exchange to buy sufficient fuel elsewhere. Ageing thermal plants, delayed maintenance, hurricanes, inflation and the loss of tourism income compounded the damage.

Fuel scarcity spread through every part of social life. Technical failures in the fragile grid repeatedly became island-wide blackouts. Electricity cuts stopped water pumps, while refrigerators failed, spoiling scarce food and medicines. Families were forced to cook, study, and sleep in extreme heat without dependable power.

Transport was similarly paralysed. Fewer public buses operated, petrol stations closed or rationed supplies, and workers struggled to reach their jobs. When diesel is unavailable, crops cannot easily be harvested, and food cannot be transported from rural producers to urban consumers. Garbage collection and sanitation deteriorate. Ambulances, hospitals, and clinics must ration generator fuel even as shortages of medicines and basic supplies grow. Flights were cancelled or rerouted because Cuban airports could not guarantee aviation fuel, further damaging tourism – one of the country’s principal sources of hard currency.

The burden is unequal. Households with dollars can sometimes obtain food, transport, batteries or solar equipment; workers and pensioners dependent on pesos have far fewer options. Women carry much of the additional unpaid labour of finding food and water and caring for relatives. Rural communities, persons with disabilities and patients requiring refrigerated medicines face particular risks. The central victims of the US policy are all the Cuban people.

An Exit Based on Peace, Sovereignty, and Reconstruction

The way out must begin with an immediate humanitarian energy arrangement. Cuba requires predictable deliveries, not occasional cargoes dependent on political permission. The United Nations, together with willing Latin American and Caribbean governments, should establish a monitored fuel corridor. Shipments could be earmarked for power generation, hospitals, water and sanitation, food production, public transport, and disaster preparedness.

An exemption is meaningless if banks do not process payments, insurers do not cover vessels, and shipping companies fear punishment. Participating governments should provide payment guarantees, insurance and legal protection for humanitarian suppliers. The United States should issue durable, general licences rather than case-by-case waivers.

Second, emergency relief must open the door to negotiated de-escalation. Washington and Havana should begin structured talks, supported where useful by CARICOM, CELAC, Mexico, and other trusted intermediaries. The principle must be reciprocity without coercion. The United States should suspend measures that punish third-country trade and set out a verifiable timetable for lifting sanctions. Negotiation cannot mean demanding regime change as the price of allowing a population to meet its elementary needs. Nor should humanitarian necessities be held hostage to every unresolved dispute between the two governments.

Third, Cuba has already begun to diversity its suppliers and energy system. Contracts with several producers, joint purchasing with Caribbean partners and regional storage reserves could reduce costs and cushion sudden interruptions. Technical cooperation could help stabilise old generating equipment while new capacity is built. Over the medium term, the most durable answer lies in renewable and decentralised energy. Cuba has abundant sunlight and significant potential for solar power, biomass and carefully located wind generation. Rooftop solar systems on clinics, schools, farms and apartment buildings, coupled with batteries, would reduce demand on the national grid. Community microgrids could keep water pumps, refrigeration and communications operating when a major plant fails. Bagasse from the sugar industry and agricultural residues can contribute to generation if projects are managed sustainably. Renewables must not become a slogan that ignores material constraints: projects need finance, spare parts, trained technicians, batteries, and recycling systems.

For countries of the Global South, Cuba’s predicament is not a distant bilateral quarrel. Secondary sanctions and tariff threats establish the dangerous principle that a powerful state may dictate the lawful trading partners of every other nation. Defending Cuba’s right to purchase energy is therefore part of defending a democratic international order. The Global South should oppose extraterritorial coercion, support humanitarian supplies and renewable-energy cooperation, and work with other states to insulate legitimate trade from unilateral sanctions.

The Cuban people have survived six decades of pressure through social organisation, international solidarity and remarkable endurance. Endurance, however, should not be romanticised. No people should be required to live indefinitely without reliable electricity, transport, food or medicine to prove their commitment to sovereignty. The just exit is neither capitulation nor isolation. It is the lifting of collective punishment and international cooperation based on equality. That path can bring the lights back on while preserving Cuba’s right to determine its own future.

This article is produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. His most recent book (with Grieve Chelwa) is How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa (from Inkani Books).

2026-08-15T06:40:57.198-07:00

The Wrong Lever: Europe, Ukraine, and the Refugee Question

Thursday 13 August 2026, by Adam Novak

EU leaders are moving towards removal of asylum rights for Ukrainian men aged 23-60, to improve conscription and functioning of essential services in the fifth year of Ukraine’s fight against Russian imperialist aggression. The Zelenskiy government asked for this change. But that does not make the policy right.

On 26 June 2026, the European Commission proposed extending the EU’s Temporary Protection Directive (TPD) to March 2028, while excluding newly arriving Ukrainian men aged 23 to 60. [1]

The TPD confers rights: immediate residence in any EU country, labour-market access, healthcare and schooling, without the backlogs, possible detention and restricted permits that characterise standard asylum processing. The proposal removes these rights for new male arrivals, redirecting them into the slow, uncertain, individually assessed procedures that govern everyone else who seeks asylum in the EU.

About 4.4 million people displaced from Ukraine have temporary protection status in the EU. Most are women and children: adult men account for 27%. The proposal targets only those who have crossed the border irregularly since the restrictions came into force — fewer than 1,000 persons a month according to Frontex.

This is not the only pressure being applied. Several member states have been systematically reducing the social support that makes temporary protection much better than asylum seeker status. Germany has moved new beneficiaries from the standard citizen’s benefit level down to the lower asylum-seeker payment rate. Ireland has cut weekly cash payments and capped state accommodation stays at 30 days. Norway has restricted payments to those in state dormitories. Poland has tied child payments to verified school attendance. Czechia removes benefits if Ukrainians don’t find work within 150 days. Not easy when most adult arrivals are women accompanied by children or vulnerable dependents.

Czech journalist Saša Uhlová has documented the effects of this erosion over four years of reporting. Lawyers and doctors working unqualified jobs; elderly and chronically ill beneficiaries excluded from public support; social workers burning out as state provision shrinks. And unregulated kandlords proposing accommodation in exchange for domestic and sexual services.

The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Michael O’Flaherty, released an observations paper on the same day as the EC proposal warning that "policies promoting premature returns" and "reductions in social support" are undermining protection for displaced Ukrainians, noting that civilian casualties in 2025 reached their highest levels since 2022 and that "the current realities on the ground in Ukraine do not meet the conditions for a safe and dignified return."

Conscription is Ukraine’s decision; refugee law is not the instrument to enforce it

According to EU Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner, "this is what Ukraine has asked us to do, and this is what we are doing."

Ukraine has the right to decide its own mobilisation policy. But using the TPD — a mechanism of international protection — to enforce Ukrainian conscription on those already outside the country is a different matter.

The class dimension of who actually evades conscription is documented by Sotsialnyi Rukh, the Ukrainian socialist organisation: a medical exemption costs $US 37,000; two Kyiv Oblast enlistment officers were detained in August 2024 having accumulated over $1.2 million in bribes. Those crossing the Carpathians on foot or wading across the Tisza into Romania are not, in the main, those who had $37,000 available. Ukraine’s oligarchs continue to move freely as they hide their cash and make their deals. For them, European doors are always open.

Not all EU member states have agreed to the exclusion. Slovakia and Hungary — both with large Ukrainian migrant populations, and almost no refugees and asylum seekers from Africa or Asia — oppose it. France, whose National Court of Asylum has recognised conscientious objection as a possible ground for refugee status, is also opposed.

The Commission’s proposal requires a qualified majority of 15 of 27 states representing 65% of EU population; it is not yet adopted.

What deportation produces: the documented record on Russian asylum seekers

The human and political failure of EU asylum policy is most clearly visible not in the treatment of Ukrainian men but in the systematic rejection of Russian asylum seekers fleeing the war.

Germany has rejected 95% of applications from Russian men of military age since 2022. Germany’s Federal Migration Office cites Putin’s 2022 claim that mobilisation is "complete" — a claim that was false when applied and is false now: Russia’s Criminal Code amendments of late 2025 removed judicial discretion over suspended sentences for deserters who left the country, meaning returned failed asylum seekers face near-certain imprisonment.

The Baltic states have adopted blanket restrictions. Finland now turns away asylum seekers, from any country, on its land border with Russia. Estonia refuses entry to anyone with prior Russian military service, regardless of desertion status.

The United States has provided a concrete demonstration of what deportation in these conditions produces. In December 2025, 64 Russian nationals were deported on a single flight to Moscow. All the men on board were handed military summonses on arrival; two were arrested at the airport — one anti-war activist charged with "justifying terrorism," one deserter charged with abandonment of his unit. The deportation lists had been submitted in advance to the Russian consulate. Near-monthly deportation flights have continued since.

Meanwhile, over 1,800 people are imprisoned in Russia on politically motivated charges, and more than 1,288 face criminal prosecution specifically for anti-war activities. OVD-Info, the organisation that monitors these cases, was designated "extremist" by Russian authorities on 4 June 2026, meaning anyone inside Russia who supports it now faces criminal prosecution. It continues to operate in exile, maintaining the monitoring database that forms the evidential basis for most asylum cases.

The organisations doing what governments will not

The European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU) demands "the right to asylum for Russian and Belarusian refugees, and asylum seekers from other conflict zones"; and opposes "reductions in the social benefits for Ukrainians under temporary protection [while ensuring] a fair and equal system of social benefit."

Connection e.V. and Pro Asyl in Germany have built the legal framework for conscientious objector and deserter protection. Connection e.V. is currently seeking church sanctuary for Nikita Zvezdov, a 19-year-old Russian deserter at risk of deportation.

Idite Lesom (Get Lost) operates through an anonymous Telegram bot to advise men inside Russia on avoiding conscription and to help deserters reach safety. Around 60% of those it helps remain inside Russia in hiding, unable to obtain the international passports needed to cross borders.

A Farewell to Arms (Proshchai Oruzhie), based in France and founded by Russian deserters, supports those who have reached Europe. Russie-Libertés in Paris works with deserters stranded in Kazakhstan and Armenia who cannot obtain EU entry visas.

The deserters.org network calls for recognition of desertion as an asylum ground across all EU member states, and for laissez-passer documents for those without passports — covering both Russian and Ukrainian deserters.

What the policy should be

Temporary protection status should be maintained for all beneficiaries from Ukraine. The benefit reductions that are compressing that protection into a degraded form should be reversed rather than extended. Maintaining temporary protection for Ukrainian men does not weaken Ukraine; it maintains a population of qualified workers, carers and professionals in host countries who contribute to those economies and whose connections to Ukraine will matter for reconstruction.

The same collective, fast-track instrument should apply to Palestinians displaced by Israeli bombardment. There is, across European publics, significant sympathy for Palestinians and real anger at governments’ half-hearted reduction of cooperation with a regime whose conduct the International Court of Justice is examining for genocide. That political sentiment has not translated into policy. No EU government has activated the TPD for Palestinians, no mainstream politician is calling for it.

Russian and Belarusian nationals fleeing the war — deserters, anti-war activists, conscientious objectors — should be granted asylum, based on the documented reality of what Russia does to those it gets back.

Granting protection to Russian war refusers is directly damaging to Putin’s war machine. Making Europe a genuinely hostile environment for the Russian war effort means taking in those who refuse to be part of it.

28 June 2026

Source: ESSF

Footnotes

[1] The Temporary Protection Directive (TPD), activated in March 2022 under Council Directive 2001/55/EC, grants immediate collective protection to displaced persons without requiring individual asylum assessment. "Refugee" in international law refers specifically to a person granted protection under the 1951 Refugee Convention following individual determination; "asylum seeker" refers to a person whose claim is pending.

2026-08-15T06:39:49.596-07:00

Spanish State Anticapitalistas on the Forest Fires of Summer 2026

Communiqué

Sunday 9 August 2026, by Anticapitalistas

Once again, we face a summer plagued by fire. Tens of thousands of hectares, earlier than in any other year, have already burned, and a devastating season is expected in terms of forest loss, fertile soil destruction, and above all, loss of life.

In Madrid, the criminal government of Ayuso [1] and her cronies have tried to shift the crisis onto the central government by forcing the declaration of a Level 3 alert, which compels the Ministry of the Interior to take command. The objective of this manoeuvre is clear: to place the blame on the Sánchez government and immediately begin accusing them of a lack of resources.

As so often happens, Ayuso plays at taking the initiative, launching insults and forcing her political rivals to go on the defensive against the avalanche of media outlets that the right wing showers with public money and that are eager to point the finger at the supposedly progressive central government. However, we cannot be swayed by the escalating rhetoric of Madrid’s ruling class or by the contrived responses of Sánchez’s government, which continues to engage in climate posturing without taking real action. The best proof of the irrelevance of its transition policies is the disappearance of the minister and vice president of the government who should be in charge of these actions.

The powers to deal with this issue belong to the regional government, and this is not a matter of legal discussion, but of facts and means: it is the regional government that has the resources, the budget and the knowledge of the territory; Ayuso and her team are responsible for the fact that the Madrid region is burning.

This does not absolve the central government of guilt: its green progressivism is completely incapable of taking control of key sectors, including land use, and has turned the fight against climate change into a puppet show where the usual suspects win. Real estate and commercial interests are undeniably paramount, and the supposed policy of ecological transition is merely a veneer that blesses electric cars and rejects a rational and democratic use of land.

Let’s not fool ourselves: climate change has progressed too far, and wildfires are now a part of our reality. Some of them, like those ravaging the southwest of the region or the recent fire that consumed thousands of hectares, have reached levels that are beyond human control. The real resources, beyond the rhetoric of many, cannot contain the firepower that the flames have reached in a context of climate chaos and a constant rise in temperatures.

But things can still be done: actions can be taken on the land, a construction moratorium can be imposed and companies that profit from tourist housing can be expelled while demanding new constructions, soil and forest conservation can be intensified and private vehicle travel can be legally reduced. The working conditions of forest firefighters, who are under-resourced and subject to a seasonal system that makes them precarious instead of providing a stable and well-equipped workforce to combat the fires that are now a part of our lives, can be improved. Tragsa [2] and other similar companies can be removed; these are organisations with public capital that are dedicated to creating precarious work instead of hiring with guarantees and rights.

The climate emergency is permanent, but the response to the fires currently ravaging the region must be immediate and massive, utilising all available operational and management resources. The focus must shift in the opposite direction from current policies: socially and politically sanctioning those who trivialise climate change and prosecuting those responsible for ecocidal policies.

It is possible, of course, to expropriate unused land in private hands and give it a social use to avoid the abandonment that awaits only for speculative use and that, meanwhile, leaves the land as cannon fodder for fires. Control of economic activity, expropriation, and collective management are the recipes for a common policy that truly tackles the problem of the land and provides collective solutions to the imminent challenges of climate change. An active policy is needed that unites the popular and working classes to give substance and strength to an antagonistic political project that challenges the dominant common sense in favour of a common political project.

2 August 2026

Translated and annotated by David Fagan for International Viewpoint.

Footnotes

[1] Isabel Díaz Ayuso is the president of the Communist of Madrid as well as president of the conservative Partido Popular (Peoples’ Party or PP) of Madrid.

[2] Tragsa is made up of two state owned companies whose official remit is “Supplying basic services for rural development and the Environment”.

2026-08-15T06:30:23.262-07:00

Spanish State

Ceuta: the boundary of the right to have rights

Friday 14 August 2026, by Miguel Urbán Crespo

Last Friday [31 July], thousands of people swam across the border to reach the autonomous city of Ceuta. This enclave of some 83,000 people received, in a matter of 24 hours, just over 50,000 more people, exhausted from a migratory journey that has caused the deaths of at least 100 in the last two days. In summer, arrivals in Ceuta and Melilla by sea increase significantly, as sea fog hinders early detection on the coast by the Civil Guard. But no one in the government seemed to foresee a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude, with significant political repercussions that extend far beyond the usual media headlines.

In fact, it is important to remember that mass arrivals by sea to the autonomous cities are far from new. In February 2014, some three hundred people attempted to swim across from Castillejos to Ceuta via Tarajal beach and were repelled by the Civil Guard, who used riot gear against those who were in the water, resulting in the deaths of at least fourteen people. But this massacre has by no means deterred attempts to migrate by swimming. Every year, dozens of people die anonymously on these border beaches, swelling the numbers that make the Mediterranean the world’s largest mass grave. This time, at least, we know that around one hundred people have died in just under forty-eight hours: people, not data or numbers, as they are often treated in institutional and journalistic accounts.

People fleeing poverty – we cannot forget that we are facing one of the most unequal borders in the world. No one risks their life if they don’t understand that they have no future in their own country. These deaths are directly linked to a border regime that criminalises the freedom of movement of impoverished people, turning Europe into a veritable fortress. This dynamic, as Tomasz Konicz points out, is inherent to the crisis-ridden imperialism of the 21st century, which is no longer merely a phenomenon of resource plunder, but also strives to hermetically seal off the centres of superfluous humanity that the system produces in its death throes. Thus, protecting the remaining islands of prosperity constitutes a central element of imperialist strategies, reinforcing security and control measures that fuel a rising authoritarianism.

In this sense, we must contextualise the bellicose rhetoric of “barbaric invasions” that has been adopted by everyone from the right to certain sectors of progressivism, presenting the arrival of thousands of people as an “attack on territorial integrity” or even as an invasion. They thus avoid, at all times, acknowledging the social crisis that the situation reflects and instead call for a military, rather than a humanitarian, response. This situation is by no means new. A few years ago, the EU-NATO European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats did not hesitate to classify the migration flow from Belarus to Poland as part of a so-called hybrid warfare. A debate even arose within the Atlantic Alliance about whether Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which stipulates mutual defense, could be invoked in the face of such hybrid acts.

It is certainly paradigmatic of this bellicose rhetoric that, instead of ensuring safe passage for thousands of victims fleeing war, poverty, or climate change, European institutions and governments are responding by strengthening security policies and externalising borders. Because the first question in the face of this week’s massive influx of people into Ceuta is clear: if there were safe and regular ways to enter Europe, would anyone risk their life swimming to Ceuta?

Since the first barbed wire fence was built in Ceuta in October 1995, following attempts by groups of migrants to enter, walls, fences and concertina wire have continued to be erected, condemning the autonomous city to become a kind of open-air prison for migrants who seem forced to remain stranded in transit – lost in transition – without a home to return to and with a destination that closes its doors to them. But we would be mistaken to think that the ultimate goal of all the mechanisms of Fortress Europe is to prevent the arrival of migrants. Because Europe needs migrants.

Fortress Europe is, in reality, a strategy of exclusion from full citizenship that seeks to weaken a group—migrants—in order to further fragment the population as a whole. This is an operation inherent to the war among the poor, the class struggle of the second-to-last against the last, where competition between natives and foreigners for access to increasingly scarce resources—jobs and social welfare benefits and services—is paramount. The militarisation of migration routes, surveillance devices, the externalisation of borders, immigration detention centres, and the increasing curtailment of migration rights do not seek to prevent migrants from arriving, but rather to ensure that only those needed by the European production system arrive, but also that they are already broken, frightened, stripped of rights, aware of the fragility of their stay and the risks of not assuming their role in the secondary niches of European capitalism.

In fact, the humanitarian crisis that has unfolded in Ceuta in recent days has been exploited by the right wing, both domestically and internationally, with Meloni and Trump at the forefront, talking about a "pull factor" resulting from the regularisation of migrants in our country in recent months. Italy has even gone so far as to temporarily suspend the Schengen Area agreement with Spain regarding the free movement of people. A measure that, in practice, since we don’t share a land border, will only be applied through additional checks on passengers arriving in Italy from Spain. Pure political propaganda from the far right to undermine policies expanding rights. Because Fortress Europe is not only built with razor wire, but also through a deliberate, calculated, and deliberately racist institutional policy that undermines the legal and social protections of migrants. This process results in migrants losing not only a specific set of rights, but their very right to have rights.

Thus, the regularisation of migrants – by granting them certain citizenship rights – clashes with the legal degradation policies of Fortress Europe, which favour downward competition in the labour market. A widespread concept of "there is not enough for everyone" fosters exclusionary mechanisms that, as Habermas wrote, are characteristic of a "welfare chauvinism" and concentrate the latent tension between citizenship status and national identity, which the far-right Vox party has been appealing to lately.

Whilst some on the right and in progressive circles have pointed to the Moroccan monarchy and ruling class as the real culprit behind the images seen in Ceuta these days, by controlling migratory flows according to their own whims and interests, acting as the gendarme of the southern European border, everyone remembers May 2021, when the Moroccan government withdrew its border controls and allowed some 8,000 people to enter the city of Ceuta in just two days. On that occasion, it appears that the medical care provided to Brahim Ghali, leader of the Polisario Front, at a hospital in Logroño, Spain was the pretext that sparked Morocco’s anger and subsequent retaliation. Tensions only eased after the Prime Minister modified Spain’s historical position on Western Sahara and met the following year with King Mohammed VI of Morocco.

This time, the excuse for the Moroccan dictatorship’s reprisals could range from Pedro Sánchez’s trip to Algeria a few days ago to the negotiation of the new EU trade agreement, the processing of the Sahrawi nationality law in Congress, which grants Spanish nationality to Sahrawis — whose territory is curently claimed by Morocco— born when the African territory was still a Spanish colony or even Morocco’s interest in annexing the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla with the support of Trump’s United States. While I don’t think we’ll ever truly know the Moroccan government’s motivations for neglecting its duties as the European border police during this period, what is beyond doubt is the immense power that Spain and the EU have granted to dictatorships like Morocco’s by outsourcing border control.

Alongside the militarisation of the borders of Ceuta and, later, Melilla, the cooperation agreement on border control between the Spanish State and Morocco was signed in 1992, the first formal step in the externalisation of the borders of an EU member state. From that moment on, the Alawi dynastic dictatorship was hired to reduce by all means – the murder of fifty people at the Melilla fence in 2022 is the most palpable example – the number of people crossing the borders of Ceuta, Melilla and the Strait of Gibraltar.

But this externalisation of borders was far from free. Between 1995 and 2006, Morocco received €1.64 billion from the EU’s Mediterranean-Europe programme (MEDA) for cooperation with third countries on the Mediterranean coast. In January 2007, the MEDA programme was replaced by the European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument (ENPI), without any reduction in funding: €722 million between that year and 2010. In addition to European funds, there were also substantial Spanish public funds and incentives allocated to this externalisation of borders in Morocco, often using development cooperation as a pretext for implementing projects or to hide budget items that actually served this other purpose.

Since it was decided to externalise European borders, Morocco has used and continues to use the migration issue as a pressure valve, tightening or relaxing the control of its borders depending on the funds it receives or the political benefits it can obtain at any given time. It is certainly curious that the most frequent criticism from both progressives and the right is that Morocco is not fulfilling its part of the agreement that makes it the enforcer of our borders, or even that they are outraged that the Moroccan monarchy is using its role as manager of migration flows geopolitically. But no one questions the criminal policy of externalising borders, which not only represses people who decide to migrate, but also makes us complicit with the dictatorship and its policy of occupation.

It is still repugnant that, once again, with more than one hundred deaths on the back of our migration policy, the people who were crowded together in Ceuta continue to be treated as inconvenient problems that should be expelled or eliminated as soon as possible: subjects without rights. Therefore, it is essential to understand the current migration situation not only as a humanitarian crisis, but also, and above all, as a human rights crisis and, consequently, a political crisis. A crisis that questions who has the right to have rights in Europe and that challenges us all.

2 August 2026

Translated by David Fagan for International Viewpoint from Viento Sur.

2026-08-15T06:27:18.556-07:00

Iranian feminism, between war and the regime

By Firoozeh Farvardin, Carmín Rios Fukelman & Miranda Hochman

Published 15 August, 2026

First published in Spanish at Nueva Sociedad. Translation by International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies.

The war in Iran has reshaped the political landscape that emerged from the 2022 uprising: it has strengthened the Islamic Republic, given new momentum to monarchist right-wing forces in the diaspora, and narrowed the space for an autonomous feminist politics. In this interview, Iranian scholar Firoozeh Farvardin examines how to oppose the regime without supporting foreign intervention, and how to sustain networks of care, resistance, and internationalism from below.

In September 2022, the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini — a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman who had been detained in Tehran by the so-called “morality police” for allegedly violating mandatory hijab regulations — triggered one of the largest uprisings in Iran since the establishment of the Islamic Republic. Under the Kurdish slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” (“Woman, Life, Freedom”), protests against state control over women’s bodies quickly evolved into a broader challenge to the regime, its repressive apparatus, and the forms of social and political inequality that run through Iranian society.

Nearly four years later, the landscape has changed dramatically. State repression dismantled activist networks, imprisoned militants, and forced many activists into exile. At the same time, the military offensive carried out by Israel and the United States reshaped the political terrain: it enabled the Islamic Republic to present itself as a defender of national sovereignty, strengthen narratives of internal unity, and deepen the criminalization of those who oppose the regime. Meanwhile, monarchist and right-wing sectors, particularly active within the diaspora, gained visibility through a discourse that links regime change to foreign intervention and seeks to establish itself as the legitimate voice of the Iranian opposition.

In this interview, conducted by Carmín Rios Fukelman and Miranda Hochman, Firoozeh Farvardin — an Iranian feminist scholar currently affiliated with the University of Vienna and an associate researcher with the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies at the University of Potsdam, and affiliated with the Berlin Institute for Empirical Research on Integration and Migration (BIM) — reflects on the place of feminism in a context marked by internal repression, war, and struggles over who speaks for the Iranian opposition.

Much of the international coverage of the Iranian crisis is organized around a geopolitical lens: the United States, Israel, the Islamic Republic, Russia, China, regional powers. Within that framework, the voices of Iranian feminists are often pushed aside. What is lost when Iran is viewed only from that perspective? And how are the attacks by Israel and the United States interpreted by those struggling inside the country?

The narratives we encounter in the media and in much of public debate are almost always geopolitical. I am not suggesting that this dimension is unimportant. Of course it matters. But when people talk about this region, and Iran in particular, the conversation becomes almost entirely captured by that framework. The focus is on states, alliances, military balances, and strategic interests. What disappears is Iranian society itself.

I am interested in beginning from a different place: looking at what is happening inside Iran through the experiences of ordinary people. This means asking how domestic politics and external events relate to one another. They are not separate spheres.

For those living in Iran, the question is not only which international actor gains or loses power, but what possibilities remain for organizing, resisting, speaking out, and imagining a different life.

The first thing to understand is that war functions as a counterrevolutionary moment. Since 2016, Iran has experienced a cycle of revolutionary movements, reaching a peak in 2022 and another important moment in January 2026. Like many other Iranian feminists, I believe that war blocks the most progressive dimensions of that cycle. Whether the Islamic Republic wins or loses, war is a blessing for the regime because it allows it to suppress the opposition movement and gain legitimacy both inside and outside the country.

What is happening outside Iran is deeply concerning. In certain circles that see themselves as progressive or left-wing, the regime is beginning to be viewed almost automatically as a legitimate force simply because it confronts the United States and Israel. People forget that only a short time ago there was a massacre in which thousands were killed within a matter of days. Now the Supreme Leader and military commanders who were unlawfully assassinated are being praised, while it is overlooked that they themselves were also responsible for killings and repression.

Meanwhile, inside Iran, executions continue every day. Many people are arrested on accusations of espionage, opposing the war, or supporting the United States and Israel. To be clear, I believe the country was illegally invaded. Whether or not I agree with the regime is irrelevant. It was an illegal invasion. I cannot accept the assassination of a foreign country’s leader without consequences. But that is one problem. The other is that the regime uses that aggression as a pretext for even greater repression.

Nationalist sentiments are also growing. That does not mean everyone supports the Islamic Republic. However, many people begin to feel that in the face of an illegal war they should support the Iranian state as the protector of the nation. I do not agree with that position, but I understand how polarization pushes some people to believe that supporting the state is less harmful than supporting foreign intervention.

I say this not only as an academic living outside Iran, but as a feminist who remains closely connected to what is happening there and who continues, as much as possible, to work and conduct research with Iranians and on their experiences. The missing voice in the public sphere is that of those seeking a third path. That voice exists, both inside Iran and in the diaspora. It comes from people sustaining grassroots networks, practicing politics of care, and rejecting both the regime and the war. Yet these voices receive very little media attention. They are often the same people trying to rebuild or keep alive the networks that emerged during the 2022 uprising.

The Islamic Republic has been preparing for war for years. It has missiles, weapons, and a militarization program that kept running despite international sanctions. But it never prepared to protect its own population: it built no shelters, there is still no shelter for ordinary people, and there is no long-term plan for a war economy. The economic recession now under way is extremely severe. In that context, it is these same groups and circles that were politicized back in 2022 who provide concrete support at the level of everyday life. They keep trying to sustain daily life for ordinary people, for workers, and for political prisoners — to support them and to give people inside Iran a voice, despite everything.

A major problem now is that the internet has almost disappeared. It is extremely difficult to stay in contact. There is an internal, national internet, but the connection to the outside world has been cut off. A special, very expensive VPN exists, but only a small number of people — those who can afford it — are able to access it. This makes it very hard to know what is actually happening inside Iran. But from the news that comes out from time to time, through tweets or fragmented messages from comrades, it seems that people are still trying to keep these cells and communities alive and to work out what they can do next. It is, however, a mode of minimum survival. There is almost no political positioning happening right now.

In 2022, the opposition movement against the regime seemed to be marked by a strong feminist and emancipatory character. Now, however, monarchist, militarist, and openly pro-intervention discourses appear to be gaining ground. How has the landscape changed between the 2022 uprising and the more recent mobilizations, both inside and outside Iran?

When I say that the regime’s legitimacy has increased, even within Iran, I do not mean that it has become popular. There is still very strong opposition. Many ordinary people continue to protest against the Islamic Republic. There are even people who say they want war because living under the regime is worse than war. I do not want to judge them or deny their agency. But I also believe we need a concrete understanding of what war actually is. Now that war is taking place, fewer people openly say that they prefer war to the Islamic Republic. The situation is extremely polarized.

The new monarchist wave and support for war should be understood as a counterrevolutionary reaction. The monarchist far right already existed before. It was present during the 2022 uprising as well. As in any broad social movement, not all participating forces were progressive. But in 2022 monarchists did not possess political or discursive hegemony. Feminist voices, marginalized communities, and progressive positions had much greater capacity to shape public meaning.

By January 2026, however, monarchists had gained considerably more space. This is due, first of all, to repression. Many of the people who had been active in 2022 were either imprisoned or had left the country. But it is also explained by the support monarchist groups receive from Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia. It is visible through satellite television channels, social media, TikTok, and large-scale efforts aimed at promoting the idea that monarchical restoration is the only real alternative to the regime.

That position has become more popular. The language and rhetoric of the January 2026 protests were not the same as those of 2022, either inside or outside Iran.

At the same time, unlike other observers, I would not simply label that movement “fascist.” I do not see it that way. I believe there was continuity with the cycle of protest that began in 2022 after the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini. The evidence lies in those networks, in the participation of progressive forces in the streets, and in the forms of organization that persisted. Yet, especially outside Iran, the discourse that succeeded in organizing the political scene was the monarchist one.

This affects how the war is interpreted. From the outside, someone might conclude: “The Iranian people are mostly monarchist and therefore want war.” That interpretation helps justify an attack on Iran. Monarchists certainly exist and continue to have a presence. But after months of seeing that war does not bring regime change but rather the destruction of the country and the collapse of the state, I believe many people are beginning to understand something else. War is not directed solely against the Islamic Republic. It makes life inside Iran impossible. For that reason, I think that many people, both inside and outside the country, are becoming less supportive of this type of intervention.

One of the consequences of war, beyond destruction, trauma, and the impossibility of sustaining daily life, is that the Islamic Republic now possesses greater power. But it is also wounded. And that may make it even more dangerous. Tragically, ordinary people lose regardless of the regime’s fate. Before the invasion, thousands were killed through state repression. Now, with the invasion, there are also thousands of deaths and hundreds of children killed.

What I keep asking myself is why it has become so difficult to mourn all of these people. Politically, it has become almost impossible to say, “I oppose the killing of these people,” without someone responding, “Then you support the other side.” Perhaps the Iranian case is an extreme expression of something more general, but this is the condition of our world: a brutal polarization in which human lives matter less than the political camp one is expected to belong to. It is a very sad story.

In this context of extreme polarization, how do feminist movements intervene? What forms of organization and care survive when the regime represses, war blocks political action, and the loudest voices in the diaspora seem trapped within the binary opposition between the Islamic Republic and foreign intervention?

Describing what is happening inside Iran today necessarily involves a degree of speculation. Information is extremely limited. Everyone seems to be taking sides within this polarization. Yet those who are actually doing something inside Iran are civil society activists — many of them feminists — and networks devoted to sustaining everyday life that were already active in different cities. They amplify the voices of prisoners, people facing death sentences, and affected families. They help the wounded and the imprisoned, share information, and provide support.

That is where real politics is taking place. Not among those outside Iran calling for war, nor among those claiming to represent the Iranian people through diaspora media. It is being carried out by these activist groups, many of them feminist in practice even when they do not explicitly identify themselves as such.

At the moment, people are largely in survival mode. Some groups are raising money to support workers who lost their jobs because many factories were destroyed. Iran also has a huge number of platform workers. That work has disappeared as well. It is difficult to imagine how many people have become unemployed. And there is no state plan to address the situation. As a result, these groups are beginning to create small alternative economies, mutual-aid structures, and ways of producing and sustaining themselves collectively.

Another example is assistance for those wounded during the January 2026 uprising. Many could go to hospitals because they risked being arrested or even killed there. Some still have pellets or small bullets lodged in their bodies. The people helping them are members of groups formed during the Jina uprising, networks that still know one another, remain connected, and continue to mobilize when needed.

First, because internet access has been cut and they cannot communicate. Second, because outside Iran, the loudest voices belong either to circles close to the regime or to various monarchist currents.

Women's rights have often been used to justify foreign intervention in the Middle East: the notion that the West must “save” women from Islamic extremism. At the same time, the Islamic Republic attempts to appropriate certain feminist demands and use them for its own propaganda. How do these competing appropriations of women’s rights operate today?

Whenever war occurs, a particular form of hegemonic masculinity re-emerges: the heroic man who protects the nation. Many cisgender men, including some who identify as left-wing and have recently aligned themselves with the Islamic Republic, frame the war in exactly these terms. They say, “We are protecting our territory just as we protect our women.” That image is present in Iran, but also in many other places.

We know that wartime conditions tend to increase gender-based violence and domestic violence. I do not have direct statistics on what is currently happening in Iran, but reports and testimonies suggest that this increase in violence is indeed taking place.

The Islamic Republic also instrumentalizes the issue of the hijab. Through years of struggle and sacrifice, women won certain forms of autonomy over their bodies. Today the regime attempts to claim: “We do not have a problem with the hijab.” At some pro–Islamic Republic demonstrations, women without hijab can even be seen participating. But this is propaganda. It is aimed at international audiences and seeks to demonstrate that women support the Islamic Republic. In other words, the regime takes rights won through women’s struggles and uses them for its own purposes.

Something similar happens from the outside. We saw Israel writing “Woman, Life, Freedom” on missiles, attempting to appropriate that struggle. It is a battle of narratives. Both sides seek to appropriate not only women’s rights but also Indigenous, anti-colonial, and anti-racist struggles.

That saddens me deeply. In the Iranian context, people who oppressed the Iranian people, Iran’s Indigenous peoples, Kurds, Baluch communities, minorities, and women are now transformed into heroes of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles outside Iran. The logic seems to be: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Once again, the lives of people on the ground are forgotten.

The savior narrative exists on both sides. Yet I think it is used less than it was twenty years ago during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After everything that happened, including the Taliban’s return to power, the United States seems to have partially abandoned the language of “exporting democracy” or “women’s rights” as a central justification. Today the rhetoric is much more openly about economic interests, oil, business, and preventing Iran from becoming too powerful. The idea of bringing democracy or liberating women still appears, but it no longer occupies the central place it once did.

In Latin America, we are also witnessing a resurgence of aggressive masculinities, often linked to the precarization of life. How do you understand the relationship between social powerlessness, reactionary masculinities, and the new right?

It is a reaction to powerlessness. All of us, in one way or another, feel that we lack agency. But the responses to that lack of agency differ. The far right, as well as some Iranian monarchist sectors, offer a very appealing promise: they tell people that they can regain power, become part of a winning project, that they are doing something meaningful. That promise is not real, but it produces very concrete effects.

Progressive sectors, by contrast, are losing the battle when it comes to offering a tangible promise about the future. Very often, the future appears as something overly abstract, as mere speculation. Some people might think we should abandon it altogether and focus only on the present. But in order to overcome fear and live a normal life, people need the promise of a normal life. We cannot ask people to sacrifice everything for an unknown future or for future generations. People need something concrete for the present and the near future.

We have greatly underestimated that need. We bear responsibility for not taking it more seriously. We need to think about how to make our projects more attractive to ordinary people, to people who simply want to live better, feel secure, and have some degree of control over their lives.

You recently moderated a conversation titled “Fascist Pleasures,” about the affective dimension of authoritarianism and the far right. In Latin America, this struggle also plays out in everyday life: in the face of precariousness, debt, and declining expectations, promises of individual autonomy proliferate — from entrepreneurship to financial speculation, cryptocurrencies, or simply the idea of “doing something” with one’s money. The right seems better able to understand the desire to regain control over one’s life. What should the left learn from this struggle over emotions and the sense of power?

I think this is a central issue. We are living through a very difficult moment for people in Iran, but we should not treat it as an exception. In recent years, we spoke about the genocide in Gaza as if it were something happening “over there,” in an exceptional place. Now something similar is happening with Iran. But this is the logic of the contemporary world: a regime of war and a process of fascization advancing on multiple fronts. We need to understand that this can reach all of us.

For that reason, we should not treat Iran as an exception, nor should we ask only how it is possible that part of the Iranian diaspora — or people inside the country — might support war or accept the destruction of their own territory. That tendency exists, but it is not uniquely Iranian. There is a destructive desire present across the world: people know that they too will be harmed by what they desire, and yet they desire it anyway. This is not disconnected from the rise of post-fascist and far-right movements. Nor is the extreme polarization of politics something unique to Iran.

I do not want to end on an overly pessimistic note. As I said, this entire movement of war and oppression is a counterrevolutionary attempt to prevent the waves that emerged in 2016 and 2017 from producing something genuinely new. But struggles for life continue. They experience interruptions, advances, and defeats, yet they continue. My hope is that something can emerge from them.

At the same time, I know that a purely national solution cannot succeed. All the authoritarian states in the region were frightened by what was happening in Rojava, in Kurdistan, in Iran since 2022, and during the second wave of the Arab uprisings. Despite their differences, those processes had much in common. And those states helped one another suppress the region’s progressive movements.

That forces us to rethink political strategy. Taking to the streets and mobilizing en masse no longer means the same thing it did ten years ago. It does not function in the same way, nor does it produce the same effects, because we are living through a different configuration of relations between states and societies. I am not saying we should abandon the streets, but street mobilizations alone are no longer enough.

Now, with war, everything is worse. The discourse of the most radical far right has become normalized. People can openly speak of the annihilation of entire civilizations without facing consequences. In that context, popular feminisms possess a more nuanced understanding and a broader repertoire of action than simple protest, because they connect everyday life with politics. But even feminism needs renewal. Feminist movements are also experiencing something of a recession. Not everywhere — Kenya, for example, still has a very powerful movement — but generally speaking, we are no longer in the same moment we were a decade ago, nor at the high point of the cycle that opened in Iran after the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini.

That is why I believe we all need to rethink the ways in which we practice politics. If we are to find solutions, they will not emerge at the national level. The question is how to build a new internationalism from below. Feminist movements can play a fundamental role in that process. As Verónica Gago has argued, they possess a unique capacity to connect very different struggles. That remains a light at the end of the tunnel.

War, technological transformations, precarity, and the growing power of capital are rapidly reshaping capitalism. At the same time, many institutions once considered progressive now seem captured by reactionary dynamics. Do you see any space within this crisis for new forms of socialism, internationalism, or emancipatory politics? And what would you like Latin American feminists to know about Iranian feminisms today? What kind of solidarity or conversation is needed at this moment?

I believe this is a profound crisis operating on multiple levels. Among other things, war reveals that the United States no longer possesses the hegemony and power it once had. There is no guarantee of a bright future, but that does not mean every door is closed.

That is why it is important to foster conversations across different regions. Power structures try to make us feel distant from one another: Argentina and Iran, Latin America and the Middle East, cultures and religions supposedly separated by insurmountable differences. But the similarities are greater than the differences. We are connected by precarity, gender-based violence, the rise of authoritarian right-wing movements, the sense that we can no longer live this way, and the need to imagine different futures.

I would like to see a real and honest conversation with Latin America. In some progressive and left-wing circles, I see very little empathy for the people of Iran. Because the Islamic Republic confronts the United States and Israel, they conclude that the regime must therefore stand with the people. They interpret the situation as an anti-imperialist struggle, but they fail to see what is happening at the grassroots level.

Among feminists, I would say this problem is less pronounced, although it is not entirely absent. There is a different sensitivity because, through the politics of everyday life, it is easier to understand what is happening, despite all the cultural differences. All of us experience gender-based violence, and that alone should be enough to understand what we mean when we say that the current state structure is harmful to feminized bodies.

We need a form of solidarity that does not force a choice between the regime and the war. A solidarity capable of listening to those who sustain life, care for others, and resist from below. Opposing imperialism cannot mean closing our eyes to the violence of the Islamic Republic. And opposing the Islamic Republic cannot mean supporting the destruction of the country. That is the conversation we need.

2026-08-15T06:27:03.095-07:00

Malaysia: Reflections on the Rahang election

By S. Arutchelvan

Published 15 August, 2026

[Editor’s note: Kirisna Veni Singham, of the Socialist Party of Malaysia (PSM), will be speaking at Ecosocialism 2026, September 11-13, Magan-djin/Brisbane, Australia. For more information on the conference visit ecosocialism.org.au.]

First published at Think Left.

As expected by many, Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM, Socialist Party of Malaysia) lost its deposit in the Rahang state election, securing just 3% of the total votes cast. Yet, an article that appeared in The Sun a week before the polls noted that PSM remains relevant despite its electoral defeats. A party inspired by ideology does not fade away simply because of electoral losses; our motivation is derived from other, deeper factors.

PSM candidate Cikgu Tina received 400 votes, or 3.0% of the total ballots cast in Rahang. This is a slight improvement from the 1.4% we garnered in Skudai, Johor, during the previous election. While this shows some progress, there is clearly much more work to be done.

PSM contested in Rahang, an urban seat with approximately 21,000 voters and 9 polling districts. Within the first week, our moderate but dedicated machinery managed to cover the entire constituency. In the second week, we focused intensively on house-to-house campaigning — a strategy that likely secured our 400 votes. The only consolation was that we beat BERSATU and doubled our percentage from Johor.

Observations from the ground

While PSM was doing the hard work of door-to-door engagement, the bigger parties were hosting large jamuan (feasts) and distributing cash handouts. One resident told me she was paid RM 80 just to attend an event where Anwar Ibrahim apologised to the Indian community. She even indicated that the person who promised her the sum was probably paid RM 120 to RM 200, of which she received RM 80.

According to her, the event was packed and massive but many in the crowd were outsiders. There was plenty of food and money being spent. Yet, she also told me that even though she took the money, she was not voting for Harapan. She questioned why the apology came only months after the incident.

It was a strategic misstep on Anwar’s part if he thought a last-minute apology could sway Indian voters. I don’t know who advised him, but it was too little, too late. Making an apology during the election campaign only seemed to add salt to the wound. If he had not apologised at all, it might have been better. I do not entirely blame Anwar — he may have been pressured by Indian leaders to do it.

Recently, Anwar said he would personally oversee Indian affairs. Does this mean that there are no Indian leaders capable of doing the job? Or that those in position are not up to the task? Most of the Indian leaders surrounding Anwar appear to be “yes men” more inclined to praise their leader than to tell him the truth. It is also obvious that critical Indian voices are being sidelined by those who are close to Anwar.

Another woman told me she had hired a taxi to go to Labu, where she was promised RM 300, only to be disappointed when the promise fell through. I asked why she needed the money, and she said it would at least help her pay part of her rent.

A man at the temple told me that both PH and BN were giving cash handouts. He said PH gave the most, followed by BN, and then the “Abah” party — though he could not recall its name. When I asked him if he was telling the truth, he replied that he does not lie from the temple.

Spoilt votes and youth education

Another observation was the high number of spoilt votes, especially among younger voters. Perhaps there is insufficient education on how to vote. Schools should consider teaching secondary school students the proper voting process, or even organising mock elections to familiarise them with the democratic process. I have observed this consistently in Johor as well, many votes are classified as “undi ragu” (doubtful votes).

The racial divide

Overall, the majority of voters on both sides of the political divide cast their ballots along racial lines. “Malay unity” is used as a rallying cry to bring together the Malays. It is also the rallying cry to unite the non-Malays to “beat the Malays.” Whichever way you look at it, all major parties play the same game, accusing each other of racial politics while engaging in it themselves.

This trend will continue unless we adopt a better electoral system. such as a proportional representation system where smaller parties like PSM, MUDA, and others can have a place in the House of Representatives. Under the current first-past-the-post system, it is nearly impossible for any third force or third party to win an election, or even to get back its deposit.

Why we contest?

For a small party like PSM and for parties like Parti Orang Asli merely contesting in an election is already a significant achievement. Unless the electoral system is changed to a proportional representation system, there is no way a third party or independent candidate can win back its deposit.

Knowing this and still contesting is what Rafizi Ramli would call “kamikaze” politics. Yet for PSM, elections serve a different purpose. They are an avenue to test party machinery and organisational capacity, activate our volunteer base, train members in electoral work, and put forward an alternative agenda to the public.

As Engels noted centuries ago, participation in elections from a left party serves as:
• “One of the sharpest weapons” to fight state institutions and expose other parties to the masses
• An effective method of reaching the masses with the ideas of the party
• A useful platform to express the party’s ideas and attack its opponents
• A gauge of the party’s strength and support among the masses
• A means of legitimising the party before the public, and putting the party in a stronger position to resist any attempts to outlaw it

The party’s election campaigns remain powerful weapons in the struggle for the right to exist and the right to be heard.

Moving forward

Having said that, it is not too late for the Progressive Bloc to explore becoming a larger coalition and contesting in more seats — so that it can be seen as a real alternative to the existing mainstream political parties. Our politics should transcend issues of race and religion, and instead focus on substance and programme-based approaches to meet the needs of the people. It will be difficult but not impossible.

PSM and the Progressive Bloc must build on this experience and move forward.

S. Arutchelvan is Deputy Chairperson of Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM)

2026-08-15T06:26:34.977-07:00

INTERVIEW

Kohei Saito on degrowth, Marx and the future of the left

By Kohei Saito & Antonin Horcica

Published 13 August, 2026

First published in Czech in Alarm. Translation from Notes of a Stubbornly Naive Leftist.

At a time when the world is grappling with deepening ecological and social crises, the search for alternatives has never been more urgent. In this context, the work of Kohei Saito, professor at the University of Tokyo and author of Marx in the Anthropocene and Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, stands out. Saito focuses on the ecological and ecosocialist dimensions of Marx’s thought, arguing that Marx’s work contains ecological insights that have long been overlooked or misread. Although Marx did not explicitly advocate ecosocialism, Saito argues that his ecological thinking can inspire and support contemporary ecosocialist movements and policies aimed at addressing social and ecological injustice.

I met Kohei in Zagreb, where he was one of the keynote speakers at the 9th International Degrowth Conference, which brought together hundreds of participants from around the world, including scientists, academics, activists and politicians, to explore sustainable and just models of economy and society. His talk, titled “Marx and Degrowth: Is It Possible?,” set the tone for a wide-ranging discussion on the relationship between the degrowth movement and political approaches to the climate crisis. For me personally, this discussion was a key starting point in shaping a vision of post-growth democratic ecosocialism as a concrete direction for today’s left-wing politics, one rooted in the tradition of democratic socialism that has its origins in the Prague Spring.

How are you finding the international degrowth conference here in Zagreb, especially given its broad scope and the diverse audience it attracts?

It’s been great, especially due to the participation of many young people. That’s something very different from Japan, where discussion about Marx’s ideas often involve older people. I am very inspired by how this idea of degrowth is spreading among the younger generations and I’m very optimistic that we can build a new future together.

It also has a very broad background. Not just Marxists and activists, but also people from different disciplines: natural scientists, economists, philosophers. And it’s good that the degrowth concept is becoming so attractive to so many people. This is very important for mobilizing people. After all, it is a political idea, and this kind of attractiveness is something that we are actually looking for, right?

While it’s encouraging to see such a wide audience, don’t you feel that there’s a lack of clear direction on implementing the “degrowth” idea?

We are all learning from each other. Degrowth is a relatively new idea and often faces criticism for its inconsistency. I understand your concerns about the lack of direction. What should we do now? It is a very tough question. But we are not here to establish a single political party. The aim of this conference is to exchange new ideas, get to know each other, and build international relationships. I think the conference is successful in this regard. However, I understand that we also need to focus on building new strategies, changing politics and transforming the economic system. And that’s something we should work on right now.

And in relation to that, how do you see the role of ecosocialism and eco-Marxism in positively influencing this movement?

Marxism has been here for many years. If we can overcome the antagonism between ecosocialism and degrowth, I think that Marxism, with its political activism, can contribute in various ways. Addressing your point about the missing strategy, I believe Marxism can concretise the degrowth policies, especially concerning the working class, which currently is not very attracted to the degrowth idea. By integrating Marxist principles with degrowth, we can develop strategies that appeal to a broader alliance and a wider movement against the capitalist system and for climate justice.

During your lecture, you mentioned that some eco-socialists promote growth. Isn’t it contradictory for someone identifying as an eco-socialist to advocate for growth, perhaps in the form of green socialism? How should ecosocialism address this inconsistency?

Like degrowth, ecosocialism is also a very broad category. I recognize that some people are more optimistic about technological progress, and then they can have ecological socialism more associated with growth. But after reading various literature from the degrowth side, I came to realize that kind of eco-socialist growth is too optimistic. And so now I’m actively trying to convince my Marxist friends and colleagues to abandon that kind of technological optimism and try to look for another solution, which is degrowth communism. So, I think ecosocialism is a broader category where some people are more like growth-oriented ecosocialism, but I’m for degrowth communism, a vision of society without growth.

Do you know that in Eastern Europe, especially in Czechia, the terms socialism and communism have negative connotations? Some of my friends are trying to restore the original meaning of these terms. Do you think it’s worthwhile to do so, or should we seek alternative terminology?

Yes, I know. I come from Japan, where communism and socialism have different implications from those in Eastern Europe. When I talk to some people from Eastern Europe, like Czechs, they often criticize the use of the terms socialism and communism. It’s a complicated situation. People should find something that is attractive to them and also historically and politically meaningful. My primary audience is Japanese. However, when I came here to Croatia to share my ideas with people from different parts of the world, the reaction was rather positive. But I also understand that some people are like “no socialism, no communism, that’s like Stalin, it’s very authoritarian” and so on. So, if you think in that way, I respect it. The main thing is that we have to overcome capitalism, and then the post-capitalist society can be called whatever we want. I’m not dogmatic and I remain open to new ideas.

In the Czech Republic, we have some historical experience from the ‘60s, particularly from 1968 when the Russian army, along with other Warsaw Pact forces, intervened to suppress the attempt at “socialism with a human face”. One of the primary ideas was to democratise the economy to better serve the people. Do you think that it is still relevant today?

Of course, democratizing the economy is very important. When I talk about the necessity for more planning, we cannot leave everything to the market, competition and price mechanism. We are currently in a very difficult situation due to the climate crisis. And we must invest in what is necessary and avoid what is unnecessary. So, we need planning, but planning is also the term that reminds people of this old Soviet kind of dictatorship. However, when I say communism, socialism, and planning, it’s more about democratizing the economy. Today’s capitalist economy is not democratic either. We should really seek a new vision of democratising the economy and in doing so, we shouldn’t be afraid to criticise capitalism.

Based on this experience from the ‘60s and also with the new coming ideas, including yours, there is a group of people in the Czech Republic aiming to introduce the concept of democratic ecosocialism to the public as something that is really needed to change society. What’s your take on this?

I had a discussion with someone from the Czech Republic and he was quite critical of socialism. It was a very long debate and then when I talked about socialism, he criticized me for going back to the Soviet Union and that kind of thing. I believe that democratic ecosocialism aligns closely with my views. I want to make it clear that democratic ecosocialism will not aim for infinite growth but focuses on satisfying basic human needs and environmental protection. We don’t necessarily need to label it as “degrowth communism.” There can be various names, and I’m open to suggestions. The key is moving away from a capitalist system centered on constant expansion. When we have socialism, we should not pursue this constant expansion anymore. So, it is basically degrowth.

The focus on the word “democratic” is crucial in promoting systemic revolutionary change. Active public participation is essential for change to be sustainable. Degrowth economics or other alternative economic models, such as the doughnut economy, require institutional transformation. While movements can engage people and exert pressure on existing institutions, they cannot replace them. So, the real question is: how can we effectively bring about institutional change?

That sounds quite rigid. We mentioned democratic ecosocialism in the context of degrowth. Currently, what we primarily have is a movement. We certainly need to institutionalize our demands. But I still think the movement itself is too small. Given the environmental crisis and the pervasive character of neoliberalism, especially post-pandemic, people are realizing that our society prioritizes profit over human lives. I think we have a chance. This experience of the Soviet Union made our future grim for many years. But after the economic crisis of 2008, we’re now embracing new post-capitalist ideas without being burdened by memories of the Soviet era. As I mentioned earlier, a significant number of young people are unhesitant, if not eager, to support post-capitalist ideologies, marking a departure from past sentiments.

We often use GDP as the primary pro-growth indicator; it’s almost like a magic word that currently dominates everything. Do you believe there’s another way to evaluate societal progress?

There are already many indicators, such as the Human Development Index, Genuine Progress Indicator, and many others that actually take into account our happiness, education, equality, environmental impact, and so on. Maybe we can come up with a new one. I’m not an economist so I cannot make something by myself but it’s relatively easy to imagine making things like that. It’s just a political choice. If the government decides to put more importance on these new indicators than GDP, we have a different world. And I’m actually advocating for this in Japan because Japan has been stagnating in terms of GDP for more than 30 years so people are worried but actually, if you look at education, if you look at security, like safety, food, culture, these things are quite good in Japan. So why don’t we use these measures and then promote them outside Japan? And some people are attracted to this kind of idea. So, I mean, we will try.

Finally, I would like to focus on your work. How did you discover the relation between Marx and ecology? I know that it is mostly described in your two books, but can you summarise?

I went to Germany and I started to look at Marx’s notebooks. These notebooks, especially before and after Capital, contain a lot of material on natural sciences. And then I was wondering why Marx had read natural science in order to complete Capital? Capital is about capitalism and critical political economy. It has nothing to do with natural science. Of course, I thought in that way. But then, looking at these notebooks, I realized that he was actually pretty much interested in the issues of ecology, sustainability, and how capitalism actually undermines those conditions. And so, I realized, reading these notebooks, that Marx was quite interested in ecological issues and then especially that dimension we didn’t take into account in the 20th century. By integrating that kind of ecological insight into socialism, I think we can have a more democratic and sustainable type of post-capitalism. That’s something we should do now, and we can have more development and more interaction with the degrowth people, learn from each other, and then build a bigger movement and then institutionalize our demands for the future.

I would like to ask one last question. What will your next book be about?

My next book? So, I’m thinking about the issue of planning. Planning is very important because we cannot leave everything to the market. So, how do we plan? We want to avoid the Soviet kind of planning, right? We need democratic planning or what is it? That’s something that we should consider.

Is this meant as involving people directly in the planning process? The key is to leave some room for people’s initiative, to find the right balance so that we don’t repeat our negative experiences.

Yes, exactly.

Thank you very much.

2026-08-15T06:26:14.258-07:00

The spectre of the far right is haunting Latin America

Saturday 15 August 2026, by Eduardo Lucita

Far-right movements have come to power in numerous countries across the region. They are linked to Trumpism; resisting them requires the broadest possible coordination of these resistance movements at both local and regional levels.

At the end of 2022, I published an article in this very column entitled: ‘Latin America: The far right is already amongst us’. [1] Today, this fact is undeniable. Looking at the period 2023–2026, far-right victories can be seen in 13 of the 16 presidential elections held during that time. However, it is since Donald Trump took office as President of the United States 18 months ago that this political shift has intensified, with far-right candidates winning the region’s last seven presidential elections.

Whether due to the simultaneity of these processes or the depth of the regressive reforms and structural changes they propose, one might consider this to be a new kind of political phenomenon that may not be merely episodic. In any case, its effects will be long-lasting.

A strengthened right wing

These new right-wing movements are far more radical and far-reaching in the structural changes they promise, in the dismantling of the democratic consensuses achieved in the previous period, and far more conservative. They promote the most extensive deregulation of capital flows, the curtailment, if not the elimination, of social and political rights (the removal of protections for workers, women, peasants, indigenous peoples, the commons and nature; the dismantling of education and health policies; the dispossession of indigenous peoples and their identities; and the use of public debt as a justification for policies of permanent austerity). And they are far more market-driven. It is an all-out attack on working people and in favour of capital, seeking to establish a long-term, regressive balance of power

Junior partners of Trumpism

This is a group of leaders who have attained political power in their countries through liberal democracy by capitalising on popular frustrations stemming from previous periods and governments. All of them have adopted as their own—despite their differences and heterogeneity—the style, rhetoric and agenda of Trumpism (authoritarianism, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-environmentalism, the reconstruction of patriarchy, and hatred as a form of politics).

This shift towards right-wing extremism is entirely in line with the US’s New National Security Strategy (November 2025), which has been implementing a far more aggressive imperialist policy, launched under the pretext of combating drug trafficking and the indiscriminate bombing – without evidence and in breach of international agreements – of small vessels in the Caribbean. The military invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of the president and his wife (a member of the national parliament) on 3 January this year were a continuation of that offensive. At the same time, it threatened to annex Greenland until it secured the establishment of three military bases on the island, and to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of the Americas. He succeeded in getting Panama to expel Asian companies from the canal, forced Chile to suspend the project for a submarine fibre-optic cable from Concón to Hong Kong, whilst Argentina suspended the agreement to build a radio telescope in the province of San Juan…

Trump has realised that the era of unilateralism in the world has come to an end, and with it the US’s role as a hegemonic power. He is therefore seeking to redraw the global map, reorganising it into spheres of influence and security dominated by the major powers (the US, China, Russia), whilst retreating to the Western Hemisphere (from the Arctic to Antarctica). Through this withdrawal, he aims to address issues he considers strategic: blocking China’s access to the region, ensuring political stability for his allies (both subordinate and unconditional), and securing free access to the region’s natural resources – which are essential for his value chains and the energy transition.

However, this retraction does not mean turning a blind eye to its interests in other regions of the world. On the contrary, it seeks to strengthen control over its ‘backyard’ so that, from there, it can implement a policy that addresses its strategic weakness in the face of an emerging power such as China. The Milei government, in a state of total subordination to the US, is at the forefront of this process and aspires to lead a regional bloc of countries aligned with Trumpist policies. The current diplomatic crisis with Brazil is an expression of this intention, whilst also forming part of the global China–US conflict.

Of course, much depends on the outcomes of the forthcoming elections in Brazil and the US, which may influence the region and, in particular, next year’s presidential elections in Argentina.

The future hangs in the balance

Most of these electoral victories were decided in run-offs and by a very narrow margin, meaning that governments take office in deeply polarised societies, which casts doubt on future governability. So far, they have focused more on dismantling the achievements of the previous period and on altering the role of the state than on charting a course for the future.
The fact is that the extreme ultraliberalism they espouse faces serious difficulties in relaunching the process of capital accumulation and reproduction; they are increasingly dependent on foreign investment, which demands ever more concessions (tax breaks, legal guarantees and capital mobility) that undermine the sovereignty of peoples and nations.

Thus, these projects are caught up in the contradictions of the current situation, with the particularity that the long progressive decade established a baseline of social and democratic rights which workers and the popular sectors do not seem willing to relinquish without a fight (Bolivia, Chile and Argentina are examples of this resistance). However, workers’ and popular struggles against these far-right forces and imperialist domination remain fragmented and scattered – not only at the level of individual countries but also on an international scale. This places solidarity and the combination of anti-fascist and anti-imperialist resistance with the defence of national and popular sovereignty at the forefront.

Faced with an utterly radical agenda from the far right and the failure of progressive movements—which lack the courage to transcend the limits of capitalism—a space is opening up for the ideas of anti-capitalism and socialism. We see this in New York and other American and European cities. We also see it in our own country with the rise in popularity and voting intentions for Myriam Bregman, the leading political figure of the Argentine left.

A perspective

At the end of last March, thousands of people from more than 30 countries, gathered “…to combat imperialist and colonial aggression and to coordinate the struggles of the peoples resisting them”, met in Porto Alegre, Brazil, giving rise to the 1st International Anti-Fascist, Anti-Imperialist and for the Sovereignty of the Peoples Conference, seeking to share analyses, strengthen ties and agree on concrete actions.

This work will be continued by the Regional Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Fascist Conference of Latin America, to be held in Buenos Aires in December this year, followed by another in Mexico, possibly in March 2027.

The path of resistance and proposals has been mapped out, along which the anti-capitalist left can and must play a role by initiating debates and practical actions. It will be difficult to achieve, but not impossible.

4 August 2026

Translated by International Viewpoint from Huella del Sur.
This article is a summary of a longer piece that will form part of a forthcoming book.

Footnotes

[1] Huella del Sur 16 Januaey 2023 “América latina: la ultraderecha está entre nosotros”.

2026-08-15T06:22:02.354-07:00

Tying a new knot

Reaction is in the ascendancy. We’re living in a time of monsters and pogroms.

By Paul Murphy

Published 13 August, 2026

First published at Rupture.

A far-right administration rules in the most powerful capitalist country in the world. Trump’s assistance is a key factor in electoral victories for the far-right in Latin America — with Peru and Colombia this year joining Argentina and Chile. In Europe, the far-right is in government in Italy, the Netherlands, Croatia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, while almost one in four voters support the far-right in opinion polls. The far-right Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, emerged to national prominence as a result of murderous pogroms he supported as governor of Gujarat.

These pogroms are now in our own country. The political pendulum has swung so far to the right that establishment parties have raided the wardrobes of the far-right when it comes to rhetoric and policies on migration, climate and oppression.

But millions of people worldwide are also being radicalised to the left as capitalism bares its ugly teeth. A backlash to the backlash is underway, particularly strongly amongst women and young people.

The Democratic Socialists of America, in the belly of the imperialist beast, has grown to over 120,000 members and scored impressive electoral victories. 800,000 expressed interest in Your Party in Britain before the opportunity was squandered. Die Linke in Germany has been partially renewed on the basis of a strong opposition to the far-right. Catherine Connolly won the Presidential election on a clear left programme with massive majorities amongst women and young people.

Each of these developments has their political weaknesses and limitations, but they nonetheless illustrate the growing space for socialist ideas and organisation.

But Marxist forces are largely in disarray. Splits, rather than fusions, have been the order of the day across most of the revolutionary left. Many Marxists, disillusioned with sect life, have abandoned the project of building distinctly revolutionary groups in favour of broad work. Other trends have retreated to recruiting self-identifying communists and educating them in study groups with precious little relation to the existing class struggle.

This article makes the case for Marxists to be organised as Marxists, even while working constructively within broader formations. It also argues for a regroupment process among revolutionaries on the key questions of today.

These arguments are informed by the work of RISE within People Before Profit (PBP) in Ireland. However, we hope revolutionaries operating in Europe and internationally will find the analysis and strategy outlined helpful.

The case for Marxist organisation

There is a limited amount of time available to any committed socialist. Why should any of it be devoted to building an organisation of Marxists, as opposed to work in broad left parties, trade unions or social movements? Why sit at branch meetings and conferences discussing the lessons of the Russian Revolution, the applicability of the united front today, or developing an analysis of social reproductive labour? Why not just be a good activist?

In short, because all the experience of history suggests that unless we develop a mass organisation made up of critical thinking Marxist cadre rooted in the working class, we will not be able to seize the opportunities posed by a revolutionary moment. Much of that history is evidence in the negative, occasions where the working class and oppressed struggled heroically but were betrayed or failed by reformist leaders — France ‘68, Chile ‘73, Greece 2024. The outstanding positive example, of course, is the Russian revolution of 1917.

This is because of the centralised and powerful nature of the capitalist state, combined with the heterogenous character of working class consciousness and activity. It will take a mass revolutionary party rooted in every community and workplace, to make the right strategic and tactical decisions that can lead the working class to power.

But, as Barry Conlon points out:

... once we accept that a mass revolutionary party is a desirable goal, it is assumed that organising as such a party in miniature is the appropriate immediate task. This does not in fact follow. In practice, when an activist group of dozens or hundreds organises itself as a miniature scale model of a mass party, what tends to result is a kind of parody.
It is disorienting to start thinking of your small organisation as a temporarily embarrassed mass party, or even as the embryo of a mass party. It leads to a tendency to place too much importance on the organisational advancement of your activist group. It is a classic sectarian mistake.

So building towards this necessary party cannot be done simply by proclaiming a revolutionary party, studying the classics of Marxism and pronouncing that the answer to any problem is building this party. In the words of Rosa Luxemburg, it can only be done “by the living political school, by the fight and in the fight”.

Working class consciousness and organisation, as well as revolutionary organisation, have all been pushed back. One of the founding principles of RISE is to understand that a dual task is posed to revolutionaries today — to help rebuild the broader workers’ movement as well as a distinct Marxist force. The majority of RISE members’ time and energy is not spent on developing RISE, but rather on building People Before Profit as well as the social movements, tenants’ unions, and trade unions our members are involved in. But we maintain that Marxists meeting, organising, and democratically debating and deciding is essential.

We need to take seriously the reorganisation of the working class movement. Organising workers, organising tenants, organising communities and social movements, but also organising as Marxists to help train new Marxists and spread Marxist ideas. Therefore, just like we need to invest time in organising in the unions, tenants union, united fronts and mass parties, we also need to invest time in building revolutionary organisations, which can do that work. Why?

Firstly, the bedrock of any future mass revolutionary organisation is large numbers of revolutionary cadre. In other words, people who have an understanding of Marxist analysis, can independently analyse the world and use that to organise people into campaigns and movements and win people to socialist ideas. While revolutionary parties can recruit on a mass scale in a revolutionary period, cadres have to be politically and organisationally steeled in advance.

Becoming a cadre fundamentally requires two things — experience in class struggle and Marxist education — in other words, assimilating the accumulated lessons of the workers’ movement and learning to apply them. This political development is very difficult to achieve outside of a collective space of reflection and debate. It is only by engaging with other Marxists that we sharpen our own analysis and deepen our understanding.

Secondly, being organised in a Marxist current within a broader project allows us to make better decisions about what Marxists and our broader project should say and do. It is a real strength of People Before Profit that it is engaged in the day-to-day cut and thrust of politics and that it works to build and deepen working class roots.

But in a non-revolutionary moment, that undoubtedly creates a pressure to the right - to say (or not say) something because of its potential unpopularity among sections of our base today. Being able to have a real open discussion amongst other Marxists who share the same basic understanding of the world can, as Conlon argues: “help act as a counterpressure, helping socialists to keep our longer-term objectives in mind, and place our day-to-day activism in a strategic framework.”

Being organised as Marxists enables us to try to represent “the interests of the movement as a whole”, as The Communist Manifesto puts it. In other words, to rise above sectional or immediate interests and pressures. A Marxist organisation enables us to collectively recognise opportunist pressures that arise from our roots in particular geographic areas, or among particular parts of the working class.

A Marxist worldview also enables socialists to commit and recommit to the marathon struggle of overthrowing capitalism, through the ups and downs of waves of struggle and movements, with a perspective rooted in the potential power of the working class and the possibility of revolution.

The counter to these arguments would be that Marxists will best develop by functioning independently within a broader ecosocialist party like People Before Profit and that they should have their debates within the framework of PBP, not in separate networks.

Certainly, Marxists should openly put their views within PBP, and the norm should be for Marxists not to be bound by any network discipline within a broader party and therefore to be free to argue against the members of their own network. And certainly too, engaging in broader work, including in a broader party like PBP, is a key part of political development.

But without collective organisation, without a Marxist publication, without a space where the starting point is Marxism, the outcome will be less sharp. The process will be less developmental. Over time, without the check of collective discussion, the tendency will be to slide into centrism or reformism.

The case for regroupment

I am not making the case for all self-proclaimed Marxists to come together in one organisation. Putting Marxists with agreement on the most basic generalities, but diametrically opposed understandings of the state of the world and strategies for changing it, would produce an organisation less than the sum of its parts. We want to change the world - and for that we have to act on it.

Forming an organisation of Marxists who disagree on ecosocialism, on socialist feminism or on mass politics would not be a step forward. It would likely paralyse us in debate after debate, leaving little time for actually acting on the world and then reflecting on the experience and sharpening our analysis in turn. Or it could become an irrelevancy because each trend within it might instead just implement their own strategy, undermining the potential benefit of being in a joint group.

For a Marxist group to be effective in developing cadre and in developing programme, strategies and tactics to intervene in wider movements, it must have a shared basic analysis and understanding of the tasks flowing from that. There should, nonetheless, be space for individuals or networks within PBP who disagree on these issues. Within a broader party like PBP, such debates are inevitable and, if handled fraternally, can be constructive and developmental.

The problem is not that the revolutionary left is divided. It’s that the current division is based on historic disagreements and the evolution of different political cultures, rather than the key programmatic and strategic questions for today.

The different trends of revolutionary Marxism in Europe today have their origins in important disagreements dating back many decades. Issues like the character of the Soviet Union, the Chinese revolution, Yugoslavia, guerillaism, and whether or not to work within social democratic parties had meaningful implications for their work. Although in some cases, the internal debates were exacerbated by unhealthy internal regimes, often the political issues justified organisational separation. Having one part of an organisation consider that the Soviet Union was state capitalist and the raging Korean War was an inter-imperialist conflict, while another part defended the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state and opposed US imperialism in Korea would have presented significant challenges to effective functioning at the time.

With organisations on separate tracks, developing separate political cultures and analyses, often trained on distrust and criticism of each other, these splits persisted and deepened. New generations of socialists were recruited, often because they were the first or most energetic organisation they met, and then educated in a comprehensive world view without much exposure to the views of other parts of this revolutionary tradition.

Similar real world questions have been posed to each separate organisation: how to respond to the feminist movement, how to relate to broad left parties; how best to integrate the ecological crisis into Marxism? Many Marxist organisations were also confronted with darker issues of abuse and safeguarding and the problems posed by internal power imbalances. However, these debates on these important questions took place internally and separately, often at huge expense to those who pioneered the way (women, queer people), leaving those with similar instincts and approaches separated by organisational walls and decades of distrust.

Ten core ideas as basis for regroupment

This is therefore an argument for Marxists to regroup on the basis of the main programmatic and strategic questions for the current period as well as a common conception of how a revolutionary group should function. Below are ten core areas to consider.

To go beyond generalities and truisms, these are concrete proposals that arise from the perspective of building a revolutionary group in Ireland. Hopefully the underlying method is still useful for Marxists operating in different contexts.

I also ask readers to focus on the content of the ideas presented, rather than the exact formulae used. In many cases, different trends have adopted different languages to express similar ideas. It is the content, rather than the form, which is essential.

1. The working class as the force to change the world

The working class has the power to change society. Ten years ago, at the height of the water charges struggle, most activists could see the potential for the working class to be a revolutionary agent. This is much less obvious to those who have been drawn to socialist politics in recent years, when the working class’ heterogeneity is in sharp relief and is largely inactive and disorganised.

Winning a new generation of socialists to an active orientation to the working class in both communities and workplaces is an essential task for Marxists. The weakness of the trade union movement in general, and of socialists within the movement, is obvious. This won’t be primarily addressed by declarations or activities from outside of the movement. Instead, it needs a consistent approach to encourage members to become active in their unions and to work as conscious socialists to rebuild them into fighting organisations.

2. Revolutionary socialists doing mass politics

Revolutionary socialists should not be satisfied existing in small circles on the fringes of social movements. It is possible, and necessary, to do mass politics in a principled way. To speak to and attempt to organise large numbers of working class people, while putting forward Marxist ideas and building a Marxist organisation.

A mass orientation in Ireland has meant taking elections seriously, without thinking that elections are how fundamental change will be won. It has also meant popular agitation and advocacy for a left government. Done in a principled way, this can creatively apply the traditional workers’ government slogan and popularise the necessity of ecosocialist rupture.

3. Organising rather than tailing

The limitations of a ‘mobilising’ approach have been put in stark relief by the retreat in working class activity. When there was an upsurge of working class struggle like around the water charges, this weakness was partly covered up. Even then though, a lot more than that was necessary to build rooted local campaigns, promoting the boycott and blocking water meters, and developing activists as organisers and winning them to left wing ideas.

If we want to effectively build roots in working class communities or workplaces, an organising approach is necessary. That means a consistent and strategic approach to party building, rather than freneticism. This does not displace or diminish the centrality of politics. Rather it supplements it and enables us to act more effectively on it.

4. Connecting to the socialist horizon

The temptation for an organisation genuinely involved in day to day struggles at a moment of low class consciousness and confidence is to reduce ourselves into being good left reformists in practice. To rarely if ever raise the necessity of fundamental socialist change.

We have a duty to intervene in day to day struggles while consciously trying to link them to the need for a socialist revolution. A written programme, while not a vaccine against reformism, can ensure that our positions are decided openly and democratically, rather than cobbled together on the fly by paid organisers or elected representatives, where opportunist pressures can be the strongest. Together with appropriate transitional demands this can help provide guidance and educate our activists.

5. Ecosocialism as more than a slogan

A thoroughgoing ecosocialism requires a rejection of equating the development of the productive forces with producing more goods and services and using more energy and raw materials. We need to place an understanding of the ecological crisis at the centre of what we are doing. We are not just eco-socialists when we are campaigning about the environment and socialists the rest of the time. We are ecosocialists when we are trade unionists, cost of living and housing activists.

Programmatically, it means advocating for a good life for every person on the planet, within the planetary boundaries. That does not mean a superabundance of material private goods. Instead, we want high-quality public goods, the decommodification of the commons and all aspects of life, and the healing of the rift between humanity and nature.

6. Socialist feminism and consistent opposition to oppression

Too many Marxists reacted with anxiety to the emergence of a new wave of radicalisation of women, LGBTQ and anti-racist struggles. Class reductionists portray various oppressions as simply a “divide and rule” tactic of the ruling class. But gender, race and LGBTQ oppression and discrimination are persistent ideological structures that can’t be reduced to conscious machinations of the capitalist class. From the very beginnings of capitalism, race was the primary “rationalization for the domination, exploitation, and/or extermination of non-’Europeans’.” Colonisation, imperialism and the slave trade were central building blocks of this emerging economic system — not secondary features.

Both gender and LGBTQ oppression have their roots in the defence of rigid, sexist gender roles. These roles, like racism, are functional for capitalism. They generate unpaid and undervalued socially reproductive labour, overwhelmingly done by women. Marxists should foreground unconditional opposition to oppression and consciously seek to create space for oppressed groups to organise, within both PBP and in Marxist networks.

7. Anti-imperialism of socialists

The brutal horror of imperialism has been exposed to millions of people over the past three years of genocide in Palestine. It has resulted in the only sustained mass movement in the recent period. Many are asking how imperialism can be defeated. Marxists have a unique answer.

The bottom line conclusion is that we unconditionally back those who are resisting imperialism, but without prettifying those forces, or hiding our political or strategic differences with them. As I argued in an analysis of the inter-imperialist war over Ukraine:

We are not just activists who seek to be on the ‘right side’ of conflicts – we are socialists who are seeking to end all wars through global socialist revolution. For that, the independence of the working class, with an emphasis on working class power and a socialist position, is essential.

8. The Connolly tradition

Just as we oppose imperialism abroad without tailing nationalism or losing our independent working class position, we must oppose British imperialism in the North while seeking to build a socialist working class movement. We campaign for an end to partition within the Connolly tradition of fighting, not to unify two reactionary states, but to found a new 32-county socialist Ireland.

Avoiding or “both-sidesing” sectarian discrimination as sections of the revolutionary left in Ireland historically did, is not a recipe to unify the working class. It can only paper over differences temporarily, only for these to be used later to divide. Just as the working class can only be unified on the basis of a struggle against racism, queerphobia and sexism, a powerful working class movement in Ireland can only be built on the basis of an uncompromising class stand against British imperialism and sectarianism.

9. A vibrant and democratic internal life

A revolutionary organisation must have a thoroughly democratic internal life if it is to develop a critical-thinking cadre and arrive at useful strategic and tactical conclusions. This is not just a formal question of conferences, an absence of leadership-selected slates, votes and faction rights - although that is all vital. It is, above all, a cultural approach that normalises the expression of different opinions and encourages these to be openly and politically discussed rather than finding half expression in personal or localist groupings.

As Trotsky puts it, the “level of a revolutionary organization rises all the faster, the more immediately it is brought into the discussion of all questions, the less the leaders try to think, act and behave as guardians for the organization.”

10. PBP as a broad ecosocialist and pluralist party

The road to a mass revolutionary party is not a straight line. Given the crises of consciousness and organisation, it likely leads through the building of broader organisations, which are part of the redevelopment of consciousness and organisation within the working class as a whole, and within which revolutionary forces can grow and be steeled. People Before Profit is a part of that road.

For the next period PBP should be a party where branch meetings are primarily based on issues arising from day to day struggles in Ireland and internationally, rather than being too heavy on Marxist history and theory. It should be a space where revolutionaries fraternally challenge the reformist ideas that are inevitably present. It means the battle for a consistently ecosocialist approach is never going to be finished, but will constantly present itself with every new issue and every new opportunist pressure.

Conclusion

Trotsky in My Life writes about travelling to Zimmerwald for the gathering of socialists opposed to World War I:

The organization of the conference was in the hands of the Berne socialist leader, Grimm, who was then trying his utmost to raise himself above the philistine level of his party, which was also his own inherent level. He had arranged to hold the meeting in a little village called Zimmerwald, high in the mountains and about ten kilometres distant from Berne. The delegates, filling four stage-coaches, set off for the mountains. The passers-by looked on curiously at the strange procession. The delegates themselves joked about the fact that half a century after the founding of the first International, it was still possible to seat all the internationalists in four coaches. But they were not sceptical. The thread of history often breaks then a new knot must be tied. And that is what we were doing in Zimmerwald.

The open betrayal of the Second International and complicity in the horrific slaughter of World War I underlined the necessity of a new organisation. Despite being dominated by moderates like Grimm, who opposed a clear break with the Second International, Zimmerwald marked a step forward. The morning after the close of the conference, the left caucused with eight out of 38 delegates. This Zimmerwald Left was effectively the embryo of what was to become the Third International.

We have neither the mass organisations of the Second International, nor the dramatic betrayal of 1914. But we do have the possibility of regroupment based on common work and shared analysis. The precondition for this is the creation of spaces for a process of political clarification. To engage with each other in a way that gets at the real issues and establishes agreement and disagreement. This can lay the basis for a qualitative leap forward in the construction of revolutionary forces, which can in turn act as a magnet for those looking for radical change.

2026-08-15T06:19:58.045-07:00

United States: This summer, DSA enters a new period

By Neal Meyer

Published 15 August, 2026

[Editor’s note: Ella Teevan, of the National Political Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America, will be speaking at Ecosocialism 2026, September 11-13, Magan-djin/Brisbane, Australia. For more information on the conference visit ecosocialism.org.au.]

First published at The Call.

There are elections where nothing happens — this is usually the case — but every once in a while there are elections where big things happen. The back-to-back primaries in New York on June 23 and in Colorado on June 30 were both the latter kind of event.

The scoreboard

The slate backed by the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America triumphed across the board in the state’s Democratic primary on June 23. Both of the chapter’s endorsed congressional candidates won decisive victories. Union organizer and state assemblymember Claire Valdez won her election to represent the “most left-wing district in the country,” which straddles the border of Brooklyn and Queens. She defeated progressive Democrat Antonio Reynoso, a Brooklyn politician, 56 to 36 percent. Palestine solidarity movement activist Darializa Avila Chevalier won a shocking upset victory (49 to 46 percent) against another “progressive Democrat” and long-standing leader of one of the city’s Democratic machines, Adriano Espaillat. DSA’s congressional foothold was further strengthened on the last day of June with the victory of Melat Kiros in Denver, Colorado, who defeated a long-term Democratic incumbent by almost 10 percentage points.

DSA also won big in the New York state legislature. NYC-DSA candidates Aber Kawas, Christian Celeste Tate, David Orkin, Eon Huntley, Illapa Sairitupac, and Samantha Kattan all won, in almost all cases with close to 60 percent or more of the vote (Sairitupac’s was closer, but the vote was also split six ways). Conrad Blackburn was the chapter’s only loss, though Blackburn came close to winning. Outside of NYC, Adam Bojak, a member of Buffalo DSA, also won his election to the State Assembly. They will join a bench of existing socialist legislators — three senators, five returning assemblymembers — all of whom won reelection. Assuming there are no surprises before the General Election, this means that DSA will now hold 4 of 63 seats in the State Senate and 10 of 150 seats in the State Assembly.

The recent slew of victories at the federal and state level are just the latest wins in a banner year for DSA’s electoral project. DSA-endorsed candidates have made breakthroughs in state and city elections across the country — including in Louisville, Kentucky, where Bread & Roses member Robert LeVertis Bell won his race for state assembly.

Big impact

The victories in NYC by Valdez and Avila Chevalier were international news, making headlines from Germany to Brazil, Colombia, the UK, Spain, Pakistan, Singapore, and more. They are a major morale boost for DSA, and the organization is growing rapidly in their wake: nationally DSA added 4,000 members in the first 72 hours after the election, and the NYC chapter now has more than 15,000 members — over 800 of them who joined in the week after Tuesday’s election. No doubt Kiros’s win will only add to this momentum.

The victories and the response to them are also proof that the organization has truly “come of age,” almost exactly ten years after its rebirth in November 2016. The Left in the United States, with DSA at its center, is now a national force that can’t be ignored or treated as a marginal player. At the federal level, Valdez, Avila Chevalier, Kiros, and Chris Rabb, who won his Philadelphia primary in May, will join fellow DSA members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib to bring DSA’s foothold in Congress to 6 members. DSA could add a further seat depending on what happens in the election contested by Oliver Larkin in Florida on August 18 (though Larkin will then have to go on to win a competitive general election). At 6 members, DSA’s hold in the House surpasses the high point in the 20th Century for an organized left-wing presence that was achieved by the Farmer-Labor Party in the mid-1930s.

More important than numbers is the program on which the DSA candidates were elected. All won, not in spite of, but because they supported a clear platform: Medicare for All, strong unions, taxing the rich, abolishing ICE, an end to Trump’s War on Iran, and an arms embargo on Israel.

How it was won in NYC

Three factors were decisive in DSA’s victory in the Big Apple (others will have more to say about the results in Colorado and upstate New York).

First, the mounting sense of disgust among the Democrats’ base with the party’s leadership has reached a new high. The party is currently led by Senator Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, both of Brooklyn. Their timidity in the face of Trump’s relentless assault on civil liberties and his wars abroad, coupled with their support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and Lebanon and their inability to offer a positive program has lost them the support of their base. The vast majority of establishment Democratic politicians who follow them have fallen into disrepute with Democratic voters, too, for much the same reason. DSA has been able to make the argument to growing numbers of activists and voters that a much bolder course is needed. Critically, the base for a new kind of politics — while still limited for the most part to the big cities — has included both middle-class and working-class voters of all racial backgrounds.

Second, Zohran Mamdani has successfully used his role as Mayor of New York City to prove that an alternative political program and strategy is not only desirable, it also can work in practice. In the first six months of his administration, Mamdani fulfilled two of his three major campaign promises: he expanded the city’s childcare program and froze the rent for almost half the city’s renters. He has also not been shy about promoting these victories, and he has used his bully pulpit to take on the city’s landlord class and its most exploitative employers. As a result, Mamdani’s endorsement of Valdez and Avila Chevalier was a major boost for their campaigns. Mamdani gambled big, going all out to support both candidates and putting his reputation on the line. That wager paid off.

Finally, NYC-DSA’s own contribution — combined with the support of the United Auto Workers and a host of smaller reformed unions and community groups — deserves major credit. The army of volunteers from DSA overwhelmed the opposition all over the city. As Alex Pellitteri described in The Call earlier this week, if you walked through some neighborhoods on election day, you would have seen a DSA activist on almost every major intersection. NYC-DSA also built a strong socialist identity for our candidates that proved to be a boon to our ability to link all these different races together.

Blowback from Democratic leadership

Victory for the Left also meant defeat for the Democratic Party leadership. This time, they did not take it in stride. Outraged Democratic leaders denounced the rise of DSA. Many of course also fear for their own careers: Schumer and Jeffries, to start with, could face serious primary challenges in two years. Other leaders representing big cities will — if all goes well — face similar challenges.

The days are gone when Democratic leaders could ignore DSA’s growing strength. What this will mean for the future is unclear. But it seems reasonable to think that Democratic leaders will no longer take a “ strategic silence” approach to a growing democratic socialist movement.

Some Democratic leaders — current (see Neera Tanden, president of the party’s leading think tank, the Center for American Progress) and former (see Jamie Harrison, past chair of the Democratic National Committee) — have begun to suggest that DSA has a “parasitical” relationship with the Democrats. DSA is fiercely critical of the party, and rightly so, but makes use of the opportunity Democratic primaries provide to win elections.

There’s a sense in which the “parasitical” accusation is correct, though the solution would be for Democratic leaders to back reforms like proportional representation for House elections and ranked choice voting for presidential and Senate elections. Socialists should welcome reforms to electoral rules that would allow us to get a “divorce” from centrist Democrats and their business class backers. That’s why Rashida Tlaib is right to support the Fair Representation Act, which would transform US elections. Hopefully DSA’s new congressmembers will follow suit. But so long as Democratic politicians support an electoral system that 1) makes forming an independent party difficult and 2) leaves the path open for socialists to make major electoral advances in primary elections, there’s no reason for DSA to abandon that tactic. Running independents and experimenting with fusion ballot lines also make sense as electoral tactics depending on which of the six different party systems in the US that DSA is working with, but — given the hand dealt us — it would be a mistake to abandon work inside Democratic primaries.

A new period in DSA’s history

The elections weren’t just a defeat for the leaders of the Democratic Party. They were also a blow to the progressive Democratic wing that occupies the middle space between party leaders on the one hand and the democratic socialist left on the other. Valdez, Avila Chevalier, and Kiros all ran against progressive Democrats who had the support of many of that wing of the party’s leaders and organizations. In Valdez’s district, the progressive Working Families Party helped lead the Reynoso campaign. Their stunning defeat revealed how small their social base actually is in the city. The leading group on the Left, for now and at least in New York City, is DSA.

These breakthrough victories took place as many speculate that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will launch a presidential campaign next year. But compared to all the positive developments so far this year, AOC’s role in the primary elections has been a major disappointment. Despite being arguably DSA’s highest-profile member, AOC maintained strict neutrality in all the congressional races DSA contested. By contrast, Mamdani and Bernie Sanders both endorsed different combinations of the socialists. AOC herself endorsed two other candidates for Congress this year who were to the right of DSA’s candidates and came to Hakeem Jeffries’ defense days after the New York election, just as more people began to question whether or not he should be the Democrats’ leader in the House.

AOC has repeatedly demonstrated a tactical conservatism and an unwillingness to rock the Democratic boat, qualities that are a major liability in a party still dominated by its pro-business wing. It was this tactical conservatism and desire to “unify” the party that also led her to defend Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s inexcusable support for the genocide in Gaza. AOC will decide whether or not to run for president independently of DSA. If she does run, DSA will have to decide whether or not to support her. But her overly-cautious approach to internal party politics raises serious doubts about her ability to lead an insurgent movement in the presidential election, not to mention her ability to lead the party and the federal government were she to win.

DSA’s more contentious relationship now with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the emerging challenge of how to handle the presidential campaign are just a taste of the challenges that await DSA in this new period. Since its rebirth in 2016, DSA has slowly built up a presence in the labor movement, in social movement campaigns, and in state and local governments. But it has remained relatively distant from national politics because its weight in Congress has been so minimal. As important as Tlaib and AOC have been to the Left, they have also maintained a greater independence from DSA, in large part because they could credibly claim to have an independent power base.

But DSA’s involvement in national political fights will have to increase significantly now as candidates enter Congress who are much more “of” the organization. Valdez especially is a serious, long-term DSA activist who was previously an elected member of NYC-DSA’s chapter leadership. To adapt to this new situation, DSA’s members and caucuses will have to demonstrate a new level of maturity. We will also have to take national debates much more seriously. The National Political Committee will have to debate and take positions on emerging political questions on a much more regular basis, and we will need a stronger communication operation to promote our ideas and build off our recent breakthroughs to strengthen our organization.

All this is doubly important because DSA also has a new level of responsibility in the fight against Donald Trump and MAGA. Mamdani’s win in 2025 and the new string of victories this year prove that there is a growing base of both working- and middle-class voters who are ready to support democratic socialist politics. DSA can’t just be critics on the sidelines, we have to take seriously our role as a national force. For example, DSA’s position on the 2028 presidential elections will matter much more than it ever has before. That means that it will no longer be possible for the organization to abstain from choosing a side in the General Election, unless it really views both the Democratic and Republican candidate as “two sides of the same coin” — something that is hard to imagine will be the case.

This, in short, is the stuff that turns a routine election cycle into something else entirely. A new period for democratic socialists in the US has arrived.

Neal Meyer is an editor for The Call and a member of NYC-DSA. He is doing a PhD on the transformation of the Democratic Party in the neoliberal era at NYU Sociology. He also co-writes the Left Notes newsletter.

2026-08-15T06:09:06.685-07:00

Paper Tiger: The Failure of America’s Trillion-Dollar War Machine

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies | Aug 13, 2026 | ANTIWAR.COM

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the United States spent $21 trillion on its military between 2001 and 2024 (in constant 2024 dollars), equal to the combined military spending of the next eighteen countries. Iran barely made that list at all, spending only 2% of what the US did, and SIPRI estimated Iran’s 2025 military budget at only $7.5 billion. So how is Iran holding its own against the multi-trillion-dollar US war machine?

A critical difference between the US war on Iran and previous US and allied bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Gaza, is that the US and Israel have failed to destroy Iran’s air defense system and cannot fly warplanes over Iran without risking the loss of planes and pilots to enemy fire. Iran has wisely built its critical defense infrastructure underground, with arms factories, weapons stockpiles and launch sites sheltered safely beneath its impenetrable mountainous terrain.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claimed on March 10th that the US had “total air dominance” over Iran, but that is still not true. Instead, US forces are mainly attacking Iran with stand-off weapons from outside Iran’s borders, radically depleting US stockpiles of extraordinarily expensive weapons.

Even though US warplanes avoid entering Iranian airspace, the Congressional Research Service has reported that the US has lost at least four F-15 fighters, an F-35, an A-10, seven KC-135 refueling planes, an E-6 AWACS plane, two MC-130J special operations aircraft, a helicopter, a high-altitude Triton drone and 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones.

By contrast, during the full-scale invasion of Iraq in 2003, US forces lost only one A-10 and six helicopters, after systematically destroying much of Iraq’s air defenses through a low-intensity bombing campaign conducted under cover of the so-called no-fly zones, which the US, UK and France unilaterally imposed after the First Gulf War in 1991.

In 2003, the US Armed Forces dropped 13,000 tons of bombs and missiles on Iraq in the first 30 days of the war. But only 800 tons, or 6%, of those munitions, were cruise missiles and other stand-off weapons like the ones the US is now relying on against Iran.

The US has already depleted a third of its stand-off and air defense weapons stocks, including JASSM and Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-2, -3 and -6 anti-aircraft missiles, as well as half its stocks of Patriot and THAAD interceptors and the new Precision Strike Missiles that are replacing the shorter-range ATACMs. These missiles range in price from $700,000 each for JASSMs up to $12 million each for THAAD interceptors, and many will take years to replace.

So the US is using multi-million dollar missiles that are irreplaceable in the short term to try, and often fail, to intercept Shahed drones that cost Iran between $20,000 and $50,000 each. This is a stark contrast from Iraq in 2003, when the US weapon of choice was its 500 lb. GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb, which costs only $22,000, and the 7,000 bombs used to attack Iraq were easily restocked.

To make up for the Navy’s dwindling missile stocks in the war zone, the US is flying B-1 bombers from a British airbase at Fairford in England to fire Tomahawk missiles at Iran. So many planes are now flying from so far away to attack Iran that the US has also had to send dozens more aerial refueling planes to reinforce the sixty it already had stationed in Israel.

The Russians have demonstrated in Ukraine that the capacity to quickly ramp up production of relatively inexpensive artillery shells and drones can be more critical in a war than spending trillions on big-ticket weapons programs. Meanwhile, the corrupt US military-industrial complex has built a gold-plated revolving door between the US arms industry, the Pentagon top brass and a captive, co-opted civilian government. It has produced ever more expensive weapons, but it has lost nearly every war it has fought.

The only wars the US has won since 1945 were three short wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, as the US took advantage of the weakening of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Otherwise, from Korea in the early 1950s to Iran today, the U.S. armed forces have lost every single war, while inflicting mass destruction on countries and people the US government claimed to be liberating. As the saying goes, “With friends like us, who needs enemies?”

Like many US industries, the post-Cold War US arms industry has become consolidated around a cabal of five firms (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon (now RTX), General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman), whose continued growth depends on ever-greater profits from increasingly expensive warships, warplanes and weapons, while endless wars and “threats” serve to justify siphoning more and more of America’s national wealth into their coffers.

The US government and corporate media have told Americans for decades that these extraordinary military expenditures and endless wars are something to be proud of, and many Americans have swallowed this perverted myth of US military prowess. The Pentagon works hard to bolster its public image, spending $2 billion per year on recruitment and retention, and $1.14 billion on advertising contracts in 2023 alone.

But that narrative is beginning to crack. As with many aspects of the US political and economic system, more and more Americans are questioning what they have been taught about the US military, and veterans themselves are often the most outspoken critics.

Writing in Business Insider about the problems facing US military recruiters, Kelsey Baker reported that many veterans of the “Global War on Terror” now discourage their own children from joining the military. Three of the recruiters Baker spoke to said guns had been drawn on them by the parents of teenagers they were targeting for recruitment, and one recruiter recalled an irate parent calling him a “baby killer” and a government slave.

In Iran, the United States is caught between escalating a catastrophic, unwinnable war it should never have started and the urgent need to rethink the illegal, corrupt, policy of aggressive war it has pursued since 2001.

The September 11 attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda hijackers – not by the countries that the United States went on to invade and occupy. Yet our leaders responded to those horrific crimes with a multi-trillion-dollar investment in new weapons and imperial military expansion – a decision driven by precisely the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell speech in 1961.

US occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq were defeated by lightly-armed resistance forces defending their own countries. Yet America’s leaders ignored their own failures and defeats, continuing to blindly climb the escalation ladder – first confronting Russia through the war in Ukraine and now taking on Iran in its own territory.

We should note that it was under Democratic administrations that the US backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and then rejected a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in April 2022, while Trump, a Republican, assassinated Iran’s top military leader in 2020 and launched wars on Iran, in cahoots with Israel, in 2025 and 2026. The US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, like the illegal occupation that spawned it, still enjoys bipartisan support in Congress, but not from the American people its members claim to represent.

Many Americans understood the dangers of the United States’ militarized response to the crimes of September 11th, 2001, even before the Pentagon embarked on its spending spree and unleashed mass destruction on country after country.

Chalmers Johnson wrote his prescient and widely-acclaimed book, Blowback, in 1999, explaining how US militarism and imperialism inevitably sow the seeds for cataclysmic events like the 9/11 attacks. He followed it with three more books in his American Empire Project before his death in 2010.

Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz told NPR a week after 9/11, “It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done…We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t approve of what has happened.”

By the time the United States was preparing to invade Iraq in 2003, international outrage was so widespread that it produced the largest global street protests in history, with up to 36 million people protesting in 60 countries. But US leaders ignored the world’s rejection of their lies, both at the UN and in the streets, and insisted on pretending that Iraq had chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons, and was somehow responsible for the crimes of September 11th.

The brainwashing of US occupation troops in Iraq was so complete that, even three years into the war, in February 2006, 85% of US occupation forces in Iraq told a Zogby poll that their main mission there was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.”

The lies, brainwashing, torture, civilian massacres and other war crimes that have corrupted the last 25 years of American military history – together with the outrageous cost – have turned the American people squarely against more new wars. But incredibly, they have failed to persuade Members of Congress to exercise their constitutional responsibility to stop feeding the out-of-control US military-industrial complex with record amounts of money, weapons and false pretexts for war.

Trump has requested a record $1.5 trillion in military spending for FY2027. The House-passed NDAA authorizes $1.15 trillion in discretionary military spending, with additional funding outside the NDAA bringing the administration’s overall military-spending plan to $1.5 trillion. The Senate has so far blocked its version of the NDAA.

The draft NDAA also includes unprecedented provisions to further integrate US and Israeli weapons production and intelligence sharing.

Trump’s frustration over the US-Israeli failure to defeat Iran stems from the same delusion of US military supremacy that infected his predecessors, especially since the end of the Cold War.

But in his 2018 book Losing Military Supremacy: the Myopia of American Strategic Planning, Andrei Martyanov warned that huge US investments in aircraft-carriers and other big-ticket warships and warplanes were rapidly being rendered obsolete by a new generation of Russian and Chinese missiles capable of traveling much faster and farther than the most advanced missiles in the US arsenal.

Now Iranian missiles and drones have fundamentally altered the military balance in the Middle East. They have driven the US military out of its bases in the Persian Gulf and are forcing US aircraft carriers to stay 1,000 miles from the coast of Iran. US Central Command has had to relocate its regional headquarters from Qatar to Jordan, but Iran has attacked it there too.

Now the United States is repositioning more of its forces in the Middle East to Israel. This raises the stakes, and increases the risks, of any future escalation in the war on Iran, and it further expands the entangling US military alliance with the genocidal state of Israel, which most Americans now oppose.

On August 8, Iran reiterated six points from the Memorandum of Understanding that Trump already signed on June 17, and insisted that the United States must comply with them before it will reopen the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping.

Western commentators have described these as tough new conditions, but they are neither new nor tougher than before. They simply make explicit what was already implicit – for example, by specifically mentioning Palestine and Yemen, whereas the original memorandum merely called for ending the war “on all fronts, including Lebanon.” The United States and Israel started this war, and the United States has the power to end it by negotiating in good faith, based on the memorandum it already agreed to.

The American people have sacrificed enormously to pay for this obsolete, overpriced, and ineffective war machine. Many have paid with their lives, their limbs or their health. All of us pay the opportunity cost of our leaders’ warmongering and reckless squandering of our national wealth, leaving us without the basic support systems that our neighbors in other developed countries take for granted, from universal free healthcare and quality public education to living wages and paid vacation time.

The US government’s corrupt priorities leave our most serious problems unaddressed, while undermining global efforts to address them, from the destruction of the climate and the natural world to the ever-present danger of nuclear war.

As this year’s primary election results suggest, most Americans want a society that cares for its people, with a government that addresses our most urgent needs. That must surely include dismantling this failed, corrupt, out-of-control and absurdly expensive war machine.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a revised, updated 2nd edition.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

2026-08-15T06:06:15.768-07:00

The Secret Marriage: How Arab States Betrayed Palestine While Denouncing Gaza

by Richard Edain | Aug 13, 2026 | ANTIWAR.COM

Someone had to organize the catering; that’s the detail that got me.

From the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, Arab states have issued a steady stream of condemnation – labeling it genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing – even as they’ve been secretly deepening their military ties with the very state carrying it out. The secrecy, however, hasn’t protected them.

That was the conclusion of a leak obtained by the Washington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists – published in October 2025, months before the United States and Israel’s own war on Iran began: five CENTCOM PowerPoint presentations documenting an entity called the “Regional Security Construct” – a secretive network, operating since 2022, tying Israel to six Arab states: Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, with Kuwait and Oman standing by as “potential partners.” Every one of these governments has at some point in the last three years stood up and condemned the genocide in Gaza. Every one of them has also helped keep Israel’s military machine running. It’s a staggering betrayal.

The condemnations at the UN in September 2025 were strong: Qatar’s emir called it genocide; the Saudis said starvation and ethnic cleansing; Egypt and Jordan agreed.

Now look at what those same states were getting up to in private. In May 2024, high-level Arab and Israeli military officials met to coordinate – at Al Udeid Air Base, the US facility located inside Qatar. Traveling the usual way – the airport at Doha, passport and diplomatic controls – would leave a paper trail, hence the Israelis bypassed formalities and instead flew directly onto the base.

The internal planning document for the meeting contained a section with the heading “MUST NOT DO”, and strictly forbade photographs and any media contact. Beneath the itinerary, a note reminded staff they should observe culinary restrictions for both Muslim and Jewish delegates: “No pork / crustaceans.” Someone still had to sort the catering for this shadowy military alliance. Mirrors, Cocteau said, are the doors through which Death comes and goes. In this case, it was the catering memo.

Governments lie, everyone understands this. However, these documents are about a lot more than that. The slides state clearly that the partnership “does not form a new alliance” and that meetings are to be “held in confidence.” Concealment was part of the blueprint, and of course they all played along.

As Palestinians in Gaza were being bombed, the men whose governments claimed to speak for Palestine were coordinating regional air defenses with Israeli military officials down the hall – discussing radar coverage against Iran over lunch, while the genocide continued next door. By 2024, CENTCOM had linked most of the seven partners – the six Arab governments plus Israel – into a joint radar and air-defense picture focused on Iranian missiles and drones.

A detail in the slides that catches the eye: a 2025 meeting at which a Saudi representative and a US intelligence official jointly delivered an “intelligence overview” – Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, Islamic State – one of the two briefers from a kingdom with no formal diplomatic relations with Israel.

All of this elaborate scheming failed spectacularly when Doha was struck on 9 September 2025 in a sneak assassination job on Hamas officials. The complex air-defense system the Arab-Israeli network had just spent three years building amounted to nothing. The American radar was pointing in the wrong direction, since the attack didn’t come from Iran – but from Israel. Qatar’s separate air defense systems missed it too. The Trump administration reportedly leaned on Netanyahu, who apologized three weeks later.

The network’s failure wasn’t limited to Doha. On 28 February 2026, the day the US and Israel opened their war of aggression on Iran by killing its Supreme Leader, Iran’s retaliation went for the network’s jugular – ballistic missiles and drones struck the US Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain, while simultaneous strikes smashed a THAAD missile-defense radar at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan and a phased-array radar in Qatar, with widespread damage reported across the UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Following a brief pause, hostilities resumed in early July, and on 23 July Iran’s military said it had destroyed a second radar and a Patriot system at another US base near Azraq, in Jordan. Every partner state named in the CENTCOM documents except Egypt has now had its radar coverage hit, disabled, or claimed destroyed.

On 29 July, Iran returned to Muwaffaq Salti – the same US/Jordanian base it struck earlier in February – launching ballistic missiles in what CENTCOM had the cheek to call a “surprise attack.” CENTCOM did not clarify whether it came before or after the US and Saudi Arabia struck Iran-backed militias in Iraq that same morning. Trump’s response was characteristically restrained: “We are going to beat the f**king sh*t out of them.”

Fresh strikes were hinted at for the first weekend in August but did not materialize – according to reports that came to light during the pause, Washington’s munitions stockpiles, both defensive and offensive, have been significantly depleted since the start of its war on Iran in February. The secret network that these Arab states built in collaboration with Israel and the US to guard the Gulf is in ruins. The global hegemon that built it with them is running low on ammunition.

The system is crumbling under the threat it was built to stop.

So why the secrecy? Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies identified the answer: it allowed everyone involved to sidestep the bitter pill of the political argument. Working covertly with Israel’s generals is more palatable than being seen as direct collaborators. But, he said, the network masks how profoundly these states distrust each other and Israel – a distrust the Qatar strike exposed. “A key member of the American effort has attacked another,” he said, “with America seen as complacent, complicit, or blind.”

Mainstream media coverage has largely framed this as merely embarrassing – hypocritical Arab leaders caught out, business as usual. Except that is not what the documents are about, and it lets the governments involved off far too lightly. The same regimes that normalized ties with Israel have essentially reduced the Palestinian cause to lip service – and the CENTCOM documents show exactly how far that abandonment extends, as The Electronic Intifada has argued. This goes way beyond leaders occasionally crossing paths with their Israeli counterparts on the sidelines of a conference. Built by the United States, this three-year-old network has its own dedicated bureaucracy – a cyber center, an encrypted messaging network, information-operations planners, even special dietary instructions and a “MUST NOT DO” slide – all of it built to hide an alliance that Israel’s genocide in Gaza had already made politically toxic.

The Palestinians are not an incidental factor; they are the reason for all the secrecy. The Gaza genocide is built into this, with each government named in these documents consciously choosing to sustain it.

Richard Edain is a teacher and writer based in the UK and Vietnam. His long-form historical journalism appears on Substack as the Ulysses Files and has been published on Antiwar.com. Contact: edainrichard@gmail.com.

2026-08-15T06:04:17.140-07:00

When ‘Victory’ No Longer Justifies the Iran War

The question for Washington is not whether it can keep fighting, but whether the mission still warrants the lives, munitions, and future military readiness being spent on it.

by Timothy Hopper | Aug 13, 2026 | ANTIWAR.COM

CNN reported this weekend that Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has privately urged senior Trump administration officials to look for an “off-ramp” from the war with Iran. According to three sources familiar with the discussions, Caine has warned that further escalation could backfire and that airpower alone is unlikely to achieve President Donald Trump’s stated objectives. His team declined to discuss confidential conversations, and the White House emphasized that Caine provides the president with options rather than policy prescriptions. That distinction matters. Caine is the president’s senior military adviser, not the official who decides where the war should end.

But the report exposes the question Washington can no longer avoid: not whether the United States has enough power to continue fighting, but how much of its future power it should spend on a mission whose political endpoint remains uncertain. A powerful country can continue a war. A strategically disciplined one must also know when further fighting begins to reduce, rather than increase, its security.

The Cost of Consuming Power

The U.S. military exists to achieve political objectives, not to make the continuation of military activity an objective in itself. A mission therefore needs a defined purpose, a measurable standard of success, and a reasonable relationship between expected gains and costs. When additional strikes no longer improve the chances of producing the desired political outcome, the ability to keep striking is not, by itself, a strategy.

Reuters reported last week that the United States has used much of its inventory of highly accurate long-range missiles during the five-month conflict, while advanced air-defense inventories have also come under pressure. President Trump has disputed suggestions that the military is short of munitions, saying the United States has more than it needs. The disagreement over exact stockpile levels does not erase the underlying strategic issue: high-end weapons take time to replace.

Not every military cost can be treated the same way. Money can be appropriated. Some weapons can eventually be replaced. But rebuilding inventories takes time, and the lives of American service members cannot be restored. Every operation therefore has an opportunity cost: resources committed to Iran are resources that cannot simultaneously be held at the same level of readiness for another contingency.

That matters because the United States does not maintain a military only for today’s war. Its own 2026 National Defense Strategy places major emphasis on deterring China in the Indo-Pacific while maintaining commitments and partnerships in Europe and the Middle East. A prolonged war of attrition in one theater can therefore affect deterrence in another. The relevant measure of strength is not simply how much force America can employ today, but what military options remain available tomorrow.

This is why asking whether the mission is worth American lives and scarce military capacity is not an anti-military argument. It is an argument for using the military with discipline. Service members should be placed in harm’s way when there is a clear political purpose, a genuine security requirement, and a reasonable prospect that military action can achieve the intended result. Continuing a war primarily to demonstrate that the United States will not “back down” risks substituting political symbolism for strategy.

Define the End Before Escalating Again

The administration’s own public descriptions of the war illustrate the problem. At the outset of Operation Epic Fury, the White House identified several objectives: eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat, destroying its ballistic-missile arsenal, degrading proxy networks, and crippling its naval forces. These are not identical goals, and each demands a different measure of success.

If the objective is to eliminate a nuclear threat, Washington needs a credible standard for determining what capability has been destroyed and what can be rebuilt. If the objective is to change Tehran’s behavior, the relevant question is whether additional attacks make a change in behavior more or less likely. If the objective is a negotiated settlement, Washington must judge whether military pressure is improving its bargaining position or hardening Iranian resistance. And if the objective has expanded during the war, the administration owes the public an explanation of what the new endpoint is.

Supporters of continued pressure can make a serious case. De-escalating while Iran continues to resist could be read in Tehran as evidence that endurance works. It could reduce American bargaining leverage, reassure Iran that Washington lacks staying power, and make future coercive threats less credible. Those risks should not be dismissed.

But that argument only works if further military action is actually moving the United States toward a defined political result at an acceptable cost. Resolve is not measured by the duration of a war. If additional attacks consume scarce capabilities without materially improving the probability of achieving the objective, continuing them can weaken the leverage they are meant to demonstrate.

This is where the idea of an “off-ramp” should lose its stigma. An off-ramp is not necessarily surrender. Negotiation is not necessarily weakness, and reducing military operations is not automatically defeat. If core objectives have been achieved, or if military action has reached the point of diminishing strategic returns, changing course can preserve rather than squander American power.

The alternative is the logic of sunk costs: because lives, money, and munitions have already been spent, Washington concludes that it must spend more so the earlier costs will not appear wasted. That logic has prolonged wars before. Past sacrifice can explain why a decision feels difficult; it cannot by itself justify future sacrifice.

The real test of Trump’s Iran policy will therefore not be the number of targets destroyed or the length of time the United States remained willing to fight. It will be whether America emerges from the conflict safer, strategically stronger, and better prepared for the next threat.

The United States is powerful enough to continue the war. That is not the same as having a sufficient reason to do so. The standard should be objective, outcome, and cost. If American lives, hard-to-replace munitions, and future military readiness are being spent, the administration must show that the strategic return justifies the price. If it cannot, searching for an off-ramp is not an admission of weakness. It is an exercise in judgment.

Timothy Hopper is an international relations graduate of American University and a freelance foreign policy writer.

2026-08-15T06:02:48.497-07:00

The Two Terrorists: Britain Jails Tweets While the West Crowns al-Qaeda’s Man in Damascus

by Thomas S. Karat | Aug 14, 2026 | ANTIWAR.COM

Two men, one word. Next Monday, at Kingston Crown Court in London, a 72-year-old grandfather goes on trial for terrorism; the evidence is a tweet of seven words, and the maximum sentence is 14 years. Nine months ago, a man who founded al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch and carried a $10 million American bounty on his head became the first Syrian head of state ever received at the White House. Tony Greenstein and Ahmed al-Sharaa have never met. Between them they define what the word “terrorist” now means – and for American readers there is a further twist: the seven words that may cost the pensioner his freedom are fully protected speech in the United States, which is why Washington has developed other methods for its own dissidents.

Take the pensioner first, and take his record in full, because the prosecution will. Greenstein was expelled from the Labour Party in 2018; he lost a libel action against the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which had called him a “notorious antisemite,” the court finding the phrase protected as honest opinion; he accepted a suspended sentence over a Palestine Action attack on an Elbit arms factory. He is abrasive, litigious and unrepentant – a Jewish socialist from Brighton, a carer, the son of an Orthodox rabbi who marched against Mosley’s Blackshirts. None of that is the charge. The charge is that in November 2023, goaded by an anonymous account demanding he declare himself, he posted: “I support Hamas against the Israeli army.” Five weeks later, at 6:30 in the morning, counter-terrorism officers took his computers and phones, held him for nine hours, and released him under conditions that banned him from posting about the war at all. “This is Orwellian,” he told the arresting officers. He undersold it.

Now the other man, whose record requires no libel lawyer to establish, because the United States government wrote it down. Ahmed al-Sharaa – then Abu Mohammad al-Jolani – joined al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2003, was captured by American forces and imprisoned for five years, then crossed into Syria to found al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, pledging allegiance on video to Ayman al-Zawahiri. The State Department’s own wanted notice recorded that under his leadership the group “carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria, often targeting civilians” – and itemized them: roughly 300 Kurdish civilians abducted from a checkpoint; 20 residents of the Druze village of Qalb Lawzeh massacred in Idlib; suicide bombings claimed in Damascus, Homs and Quneitra. In 2014 he called for retaliatory attacks on the American-led coalition itself. For this the UN froze his assets and banned his travel, and the $10 million bounty placed him among the five most wanted jihadist leaders on earth, on the same short list as Baghdadi and Zawahiri. That is the conduct the word “terrorist” was coined for: emptied villages, detonated city centers, a decade of American soldiers and Syrian civilians in the ground.

While the state prepared its case against the tweeter, it laid siege to the man. Eleven months to charge him; a trial date pushed back the better part of a year; thirty-two months, in the end, between the dawn raid and the jury. And one by one, his banks left him. In a statement published two weeks before trial, Greenstein described being cut off by five institutions since his arrest: Nationwide after a quarter-century, HSBC and First Direct – closing, among others, the account kept for the care of his autistic son – then Santander, which froze his personal accounts and those of a registered charity he serves as treasurer, then a savings bank that shut out his family entirely. None gave a reason; none has to, since banks warned about a customer are forbidden by law to tip him off. Nor is his suspicion of state involvement far-fetched: the government’s own Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation warned in 2023 that proscription enforcement would push banks toward jettisoning clients – “de-risking,” the trade calls it. When Coutts closed one account belonging to Nigel Farage, the affair drew condemnation from the prime minister and toppled a chief executive. A pensioner debanked six times en route to a terror trial has drawn silence. A defendant is presumed innocent; his accounts are not.

And while the pensioner’s accounts froze, the warlord’s thawed. Damascus fell on December 8, 2024; twelve days later an American delegation sat with al-Sharaa and announced the $10 million bounty was being dropped – the file unchanged, the graves at Qalb Lawzeh exactly where they had been. Britain’s prime minister said deproscription was “far too early” to consider; his government then spent 2025 considering it at speed. In March 2025, as government-aligned militias swept the Alawite coast, Amnesty documented the deliberate sectarian killing of civilians and demanded a war-crimes investigation; al-Sharaa’s own fact-finding committee would eventually confirm 1,426 dead, most of them civilians. Two months after those massacres, Trump received him in Riyadh and reviewed him for the cameras: “Young, attractive guy, tough guy, strong past.” In June came an executive order lifting sanctions to “give Syrians a chance at greatness”; in July, Washington revoked the terrorist designation of the organization he built. Britain’s Foreign Secretary flew to Damascus that same July to shake his hand – while HTS was still proscribed under the Terrorism Act as an alias of al-Qaeda, the identical legal status Hamas holds in Greenstein’s indictment. Only in October did Parliament tidy up, erasing the proscription on the stated ground that it “serves the national interest.” By November al-Sharaa was in the Oval Office, enrolling Syria in the anti-ISIS coalition while the Treasury halted most remaining sanctions. No jury weighed the graves. No dawn raid preceded the handshakes. The men who wrote the wanted poster simply took it down – and wrote into Hansard, in their own words, what proscription is: an instrument of the national interest, adjustable by ministerial order.

Hold the two files side by side and the statute confesses. Under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act, as amended in 2019, a person commits an offense by expressing an opinion supportive of a proscribed organization, reckless as to whether anyone is encouraged – an offense Parliament created precisely because the courts had ruled the old law could not touch opinions. By its literal terms, a Foreign Secretary renewing relations with the commander of a then-proscribed organization sits closer to the offense than anything Greenstein typed; nobody suggests prosecuting him, and that is the point. In the United States such a statute could not exist at all: even Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court’s furthest reach into “material support,” held that “any independent advocacy in which plaintiffs wish to engage is not prohibited.”

Britain criminalized exactly what America’s highest court fenced off, and then demonstrated, through Damascus, that the criminal category is edited by hand. The Terrorism Act carries a clause no draftsman wrote: it binds the powerless and dissolves on contact with the useful.

The state’s own ledgers show which of the two uses is the real one. Across fourteen years to mid-2025, the Ministry of Justice records 55 people prosecuted under the Act’s membership and support sections – four a year, through the entire era of ISIS. Then the subject changed from bombs to opinions. In the twelve months to September 2025 the Home Office counted 1,886 terrorism arrests – up 660 percent – and 86 percent of them were for supporting Palestine Action, a group proscribed for spray-painting warplanes weeks after HTS’s rehabilitation began. The share of arrests producing a charge collapsed from 47 percent to 17: five of six people seized under terror law are never meant to face trial, because the arrest is the product. The UN human rights chief called the ban “disproportionate and unnecessary”; more than 2,700 arrests followed anyway, 522 in a single day, pensioners and priests led off over cardboard signs. When the High Court ruled the ban unlawful in February, police paused, then resumed – “We must enforce the law as it is at the time,” a commissioner explained, arresting 18 more on the steps of Scotland Yard – and the Supreme Court will rule in November on whether any of it was ever legal. The government’s own reviewer confirms that terror prosecutions now run at record levels, “dominated by documentary offences and proscription related charges.” An apparatus built against the authors of Qalb Lawzeh is processing placards – while the author of Qalb Lawzeh signs coalition documents in the Oval Office.

The American half of the mirror completes itself. The administration that lifted the bounty cannot, thanks to the First Amendment, prosecute its own citizens’ words – so it deports the speakers instead. Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder, was seized by plainclothes ICE agents over his campus advocacy, held 104 days in Louisiana, made to miss the birth of his first child, never charged with a crime – detained on the Secretary of State’s certification that his presence compromised American foreign policy. Rümeysa Öztürk was taken off a street by masked agents and jailed 45 days over an op-ed; a judge found the whole policy unconstitutional, her case was thrown out, and she left for Turkey anyway, while Khalil’s protections were stripped on appeal and his fate rides on the Supreme Court.

Hold that against Damascus: the same State Department that certified a student op-ed a threat to American foreign policy spent the year unwinding the terrorist status of a man it once ranked beside Baghdadi. The department’s terror lists and its visa lists are, it turns out, the same list, kept for the same purpose – sorting the useful from the inconvenient.

The inconvenient include the press. Richard Medhurst, an independent journalist covering Gaza, became the first reporter arrested under the statute now aimed at Greenstein – 14 months under investigation, no charge, his files handed to Austria so the ordeal could continue abroad. Ten officers raided the home of Asa Winstanley of The Electronic Intifada over his posts; a court found the warrants improperly obtained and ordered his devices returned. No conviction anywhere; months of seized equipment and fear everywhere – a fair description of the function. Even in Kingston, the instinct holds: by Greenstein’s account, prosecutors have fought to keep his published writings out of the jury bundle, the judge citing an old rule that “courts are not sounding boards for anybody’s political views” – in a trial where the defendant’s political views are the offense.

So the ledger closes where it opened, with two men and one word. One commanded an organization that committed atrocities at scale, and the two governments that hunted him have concluded, in Hansard’s own language, that his rehabilitation serves the national interest. The other posted seven words, and those same two governments – one with its Terrorism Act, one with its immigration code – have spent three years demonstrating what happens to the powerless who say the wrong thing about the wrong war. Greenstein has argued that his verdict will set the price for everyone arrested behind him: acquittal imperils the campaign, conviction licenses it. Perhaps. But the deeper verdict is already in, delivered in Riyadh and sealed in the Oval Office: terrorism, as governed practice, is a description of usefulness. Al-Sharaa became useful, and the word released him. Greenstein and 2,700 placard-carriers remain inconvenient, and the word descends on them with dawn raids and frozen accounts. The trial at Kingston is listed for five days. The word on trial has already been acquitted of meaning anything at all.

Thomas Karat writes investigative work published at karat.substack.com and the Libertarian Institute, drawing on a corporate career and academic training as a behavior analyst to examine how institutions manufacture consent and influence.

2026-08-15T06:00:40.470-07:00

The Right To Be Left Alone

by Andrew P. Napolitano | Aug 14, 2026 |

“The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness… They conferred against the Government the right to be let alone — most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” ~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941)

The rapid spread of public surveillance cameras represents something far more consequential than a new piece of police technology. It represents a fundamental change in the relationship between the individual and the state.

These cameras allow government agents to record, identify, catalog and retroactively track the movements of people who have committed no crime, are suspected of no wrongdoing and have done nothing to invite government scrutiny. That’s not public safety. It’s an assault upon individual privacy.

Privacy is not a privilege granted by government. It is an aspect of personal liberty that government exists to protect. It is a natural human right protected from the government in the Bill of Rights. The fact that a person leaves his home and travels upon a public road does not mean that he has surrendered that right.

There is an enormous moral and constitutional difference between a police officer who happens to observe a person in public and government surveillance that automatically and systematically records that person’s vehicle, location and movements; and stores that information for future use.

A free society doesn’t just protect people from crime; it protects them from arbitrary government. The presumption is liberty. Government is the negation of liberty. A person should not have to establish his innocence before the government leaves him alone. The burden always belongs to the government to justify all intrusions into personal liberty. Police cameras reverse that principle. They collect information about everyone the camera views and leave it to individuals to challenge the collections afterward.

The Constitution requires articulable suspicion connecting the person being surveilled to a legitimate law-enforcement objective to justify public surveillance. A vague assertion that the technology might someday help solve a crime or enhance public safety does not meet that standard.

The view that personal privacy and public safety are in equipoise — that they are merely two competing interests of equal moral and legal weight from which government officials are entitled to choose subjectively their preferred balance — is the core of authoritarianism.

Safety is one of the legitimate purposes for which government exists. Privacy is among the personal liberties that government exists to protect. It cannot be taken away without judicial approval. Government cannot justify violating a natural right merely by asserting that doing so might make people safer. If that were so, there would be no meaningful boundary on any governmental power.

There is a profound difference between investigating a specific crime through constitutionally authorized surveillance and constructing a permanent infrastructure of suspicionless surveillance. The former begins with evidence and seeks information relevant to a particular governmental purpose. The latter begins with everyone and waits for the evidence.

When 7,000 American police departments have these systems with no legislative approvals, we have the police making policy judgments. They are deciding that the government should possess a new capacity to observe innocent people, what information should be collected, how long it should be retained, who should have access to it and what purposes may justify searches; all this irrespective of the Constitution.

Those are not merely administrative questions. They are questions about personal liberty.

If elected legislators believe that such surveillance is necessary, they should publicly debate it, enact specific legislation mandating warrants, establish meaningful limitations and accept responsibility before the voters. The decision should not be buried in a police procurement process or treated as an ordinary equipment purchase.

Liberty cannot depend upon the benevolence, restraint or good intentions of government employees. The premise of the Constitution is that government power must be limited, checked and divided because government officials are human beings who possess power and will inevitably have incentives to abuse it.

The answer is not better government surveillance. The answer is what the Fourth Amendment requires: No government surveillance without search warrants.

The constitutional question cannot be reduced to whether someone was physically standing in a public place. A police officer seeing a car pass by is one thing. A government database capable of reconstructing months of a person’s movements is something fundamentally different.

The difference is the difference between observation and surveillance.

A free people should be profoundly suspicious of any governmental system that makes surveillance the default position. No person should have to fear that every trip down the street is being permanently recorded, whether his movements can later be reconstructed or whether a government official can search his history without individualized suspicion.

The Constitution mandates that government leave people alone unless it has a legitimate, articulable reason to interfere with their liberty. That principle is not an obstacle to public safety. It is one of the defining characteristics of a free society.

Police cameras embody the opposite philosophy: Collect first, investigate later; monitor everyone, suspect someone later; expand governmental capacity and trust officials to exercise restraint afterward. That’s not the philosophy of a constitutional republic. It’s the philosophy of a surveillance state.

The constitutional objection is not that fighting crime is unimportant. It is that government must fight crime chained down by the Constitution, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson. Safety cannot become the magic word that dissolves every constitutional limitation. Privacy cannot be treated as a luxury available only when government determines that it is convenient. And police departments cannot be permitted to acquire, deploy and normalize technologies that fundamentally alter the balance of power between individuals and the state.

If the police could track all movements, stop anyone on a whim, search and photo as they pleased, would we have less crime? Perhaps. But who would protect us from the criminals in uniform? And who would want to live in such an authoritarian state?

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the US Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2025 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO – DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

2026-08-15T05:54:48.876-07:00

Historic Site of Queer Resistance to Cops Is Now Owned by Private Prison Firm

Organizers in San Francisco are fighting to reclaim Gene Compton’s Cafeteria from GEO Group.

By Nick Fulton ,

Truthout

PublishedAugust 14, 2026

Fire trucks and an ambulance are parked outside Compton's cafeteria, in San Francisco, California, in June 1970. Four years earlier, the cafeteria had been the site of a LGBTQ-related riot, one of few such events that preceded the arguably more well-known Stonewall Riot in New York

.Clay Geerdes / Getty Images

The first recorded instance of militant resistance to police harassment by queer people in the country turns 60 this month, but it isn’t widely known. Three years before the infamous Stonewall uprising, trans women and queer people responded directly to repeated bullying and targeting by police at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood.

The Tenderloin has historically been a vital place for queer people, trans people, sex work, community, and organizing, according to leaders working in the neighborhood today.

“It’s been housing for people kind of living on the margins of society. And I think people on the margins of society are in a place to question the kind of status quo that’s rejected them,” said Katie Conry, executive director of the Tenderloin Museum, a cultural institution that produces a play commemorating the riot. “And I think that’s why you see a lot of early social justice movements have roots in organizing in the Tenderloin.”

In August 1966, queer people, trans people, and “queens” gathered at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria on the corner of Turk and Taylor Street, as they had so many nights before. At the time, trans people and queens could be arrested for charges including “female impersonation” and “obstructing the sidewalk.” When a police officer attempted to make an arrest, it was the final straw for those who had faced similar instances of harassment for decades. Instead of complying, a “street queen” launched a cup of coffee at the officer, beginning a violent and united display of resistance. Officers were hit with purses, sugar shakers — anything that queer and trans people in Compton’s could find. While the night at Compton’s ended with a burning newsstand, broken cop car windows, and lots of arrests, the resistance started the momentum necessary for an entire movement, according to historians.

(“Queens” or “street queens” were identifying terms used predominantly for feminine-presenting people who were assigned male at birth. While not all “queens” or “street queens” engaged in sex work, it was a common hustle in the Tenderloin at the time. The term “queen” has evolved to be most commonly associated with drag artists; however, not every reference to “queens” or “street queens” in the 1960s was to identify someone in drag.)

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“Compton’s is extraordinarily relevant because at the heart of what that story is about is also what the contemporary story of trans people is about,” said Isaac Fellman, director of archives and special collections at the GLBT Historical Society. “I think like all of the other fights that trans people have had to take up, it comes down to: Are you going to acknowledge my dignity and therefore give me all of the other things that as a human being with dignity, I need and have a right to?”

Compton’s uprising predates Stonewall, and so many other notable milestones in LGBTQIA+ history, but it has received significantly less recognition. There remains no agreed-upon date for the riot. Until a historian found isolated news headlines referencing it, the uprising was basically buried.

“The reason I think why there has been so little contemporary documentation of the riot is that night, the cops got their asses handed to them on a plate,” said Dr. Susan Stryker, the historian who brought Compton’s into mainstream historical coverage.

After initially discovering sparse coverage of Compton’s from the 1960s, Stryker dug deeper. In recognizing the critical gaps in where the movement began, Stryker worked with partners to create a documentary of the riot, titled Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, which was released in 2016.

“The basic motivation for what happened that night was people just hit a limit, and they erupted,” said Stryker. “It is radical, direct, basic, and militant. Any treatment of the riot, historically or artistically, that does not capture how basic the act of resistance was and how powerful it was, is selling the story short. That kind of militancy of the resistance often gets lost in representations or discussions of Compton’s.”

Stryker’s record of the events inspired further celebration and acknowledgement of Compton’s, both in San Francisco and for the LGBTQIA+ community more broadly.

“Compton’s completely changes the narrative of the queer liberation movement starting at Stonewall,” said Conry. “It really gives San Francisco and specifically the Tenderloin back its rightful place in history as the vanguard and leader of the movement. And trans women back their rightful place in history as the vanguard of the movement as well.”

Murals located in the first legally recognized transgender district in the world, in San Francisco’s Tenderloin Neighborhood.The Transgender District

Compton’s and the history of the Tenderloin continue to inspire organizing and change today. In 2017, three Black trans women founded The Transgender District, six blocks of the Tenderloin legally recognized as a first-of-its-kind cultural hub for trans people. The Transgender District is not only acknowledged and celebrated by the community, but also receives recognition and funding from the mayor’s office — funding that San Francisco leadership recently proposed cutting by about $500,000.

“Because of the history of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, we have built our programs around the empowerment and uplifting of trans and non-binary people,” said Breonna McCree, co-executive director of the Transgender District.

Like Stonewall, Compton’s was led by trans women, which, according to McCree, is a part of the movement that can’t be overlooked.

“I think the history of the movement is just always built on the backs of Black and Brown trans people, and those are the people that are always often erased within the movement, but continue to fight to shift the foundation not just for trans and non-binary people, but for everyone,” said McCree.

That fight for liberation led by trans people is a consequence of the resilience of the community and the obstacles the community has historically been forced to overcome, according to historians.

“A lot of demographics of trans people are more vulnerable due to their visibility, and often because of that vulnerability, the extraordinary economic marginalization of trans people, they find that they have less to lose and more to fight for,” said Fellman. “I think it’s also not a coincidence that we’re talking about trans people, working-class sex workers, people of color, all of the various people who found it more difficult to disappear intentionally.”

A production of The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play produced by the Tenderloin Museum in San Francisco.The Tenderloin Museum

San Francisco specifically has been the backdrop for so much of the historical and modern movement for queer and trans liberation. It is where Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 as the first openly gay person elected to public office in California. It is also the hometown of José Julio Sarria, the activist and performer who founded the International Court System, one of the oldest, largest grassroots LGBTQIA+ charitable organizations in the world. And now it is home to organizations like the Transgender Law Center, the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, and so many others. What makes San Francisco special is the movement history in the city.

“The foundation of San Francisco is kind of built on liberation movements,” said McCree. “San Francisco has a long history of grassroots organizing, and so I think that is why it continues to be at the forefront of the movement, and people are always looking to San Francisco as the leader.”

Still, 60 years later, San Francisco is not immune to the same police violence and discrimination that ignited the resistance at Compton’s.

The building that was formerly Gene Compton’s Cafeteria is now owned by the GEO Group, a private prison firm. The firm is currently using the building as a transitional reentry facility. The GEO Group also owns and operates facilities used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency known to target trans people and people of color with violent policing efforts. Most notably, the group operates Delaney Hall in New Jersey, a facility with a reputation for deadly and inhumane conditions — but also a place where migrants fought back through hunger strikes.

“Trans women rioted against the police at Compton’s at the corner of Turk and Taylor Street, and that building is now owned by a private prison company that is building detention facilities for ICE; you don’t have to get abstract to talk about the intersectional justice issues there,” said Stryker.

Local organizers are building a response to the GEO Group’s ownership of the historic space. Recently, Bay Resistance, a local movement organization, held a rally near the building objecting to the private prison operator’s ownership of the site and its role in enabling ICE violence, as well as protesting recent police violence in the city.

On June 26 at the annual Trans March, police arrested several trans and queer people just blocks from the corner of Turk and Taylor. According to videos captured by locals and posted to social media, officers escalated the situation and detained, pepper-sprayed, and pulled guns at trans and queer attendees.

While trans and queer liberation remains a priority for organizers in San Francisco, the legacy of progress made in the city should also impact the larger story of liberation, according to national organizers.

The Transgender District

“I think that we have a duty that when we are enjoying more peace, we need to show the rest of the world that it can happen,” said Cecilia Chung, senior adviser at the Transgender Law Center. “We cannot make every city the same as San Francisco. But we can show them that when there’s enough momentum and when there’s enough organizing, change happens.”

The resistance at Compton’s continues to inspire both the local and national movement for trans and queer liberation, and the hope that charges those movements.

“Hope comes in many different forms, but we know that hope is that light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how dark we’re experiencing right now,” said Chung. “We need to just keep driving forward because the community behind us is relying on us to do that.”

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Nick Fulton

Nick Fulton is a queer social movement journalist who has covered politics, protests, elections, and culture for over a dozen outlets, including Salon, Prism, Common Dreams, and Queerty. Nick is also the editor of The Fourth Estate, a publication covering the journalism industry’s fight for survival.

2026-08-15T05:48:10.841-07:00

If Trump Has His Way, 20,000 Kids Could Face Immigration Court Without Lawyers

The federal government is withholding funding for legal representation and diverting it to dubious alternatives.

By Sonali Kolhatkar ,

Truthout

PublishedAugust 14, 2026

Children wait outside of an immigration court at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building on July 31, 2026, in New York City.Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images

As part of its relentless project of mass deportation, the Trump administration has taken particularly brutal aim at the most vulnerable population of immigrants: children. If the federal government has its way, about 20,000 unaccompanied minors will soon face immigration court hearings without legal representation.

For decades, Congress has allocated funding for unaccompanied immigrant minors via the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), as the result of the Flores Settlement, struck after a 1993 Supreme Court decision. That agreement — established in 1997 and still in effect — made it the federal government’s responsibility to ensure that unaccompanied children arriving in the U.S. are treated with a certain baseline of care.

The agreement was cemented under Republican President George W. Bush, who signed a 2008 bipartisan anti-trafficking bill into law and directed the federal government to ensure the care and safety of unaccompanied migrant children, including funding their legal representation.

During his first term, President Donald Trump aggressively targeted this and several other federal programs supporting unaccompanied migrant kids. When Trump took office for a second time in early 2025, he resumed those attacks by ending a contract with Acacia Center for Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization that subcontracts with hundreds of legal advocates to represent children in immigration courts.

“The Trump administration really, from day one, tried to terminate this contract and the ability of children to have their legal rights understood, evaluated, and honored,” said Shaina Aber, Acacia’s executive director, in an interview. She added, “We still don’t have confirmation on what is going to be the government’s plan [going forward] for ensuring that children have the ability to meaningfully participate in their process and have their rights vindicated.”

While the contract termination is being challenged in court, ORR last December refused to reimburse Acacia for services already rendered. This means the organization is more than six months in arrears, unable to pay its subcontractors. “They come up with novel excuses every week for why they are not paying us,” said Aber.

Then, in July 2026, ORR announced it would not pay Acacia until the organization turned over confidential and sensitive data about its clients. According to NBC news, “ORR said it offered Acacia the opportunity to extend the contract if Acacia provides data about its clients and bills ORR when it submits applications for immigration relief.” This undermines the most basic tenet of legal representation: attorney-client privilege, effectively ensuring no lawyer will touch a case unless they want to risk being disbarred.

The Trump administration has also moved to strip funding for local shelters where unaccompanied migrant children are housed, and instead increased funding for migrant jails — such as the notorious Dilley detention center in Texas, where hundreds of children are held in horrific conditions.

Six years ago, an attorney from Colorado who goes by JG*, having had a life-threatening experience with pregnancy, decided to grow her family through fostering. She was granted custody of two unaccompanied minors from Guatemala through Lutheran Family Services. At the time, the two girls were 16 years old and had experienced neglect and abuse. One was found to have been trafficked and the other had survived serious sexual abuse.

“Our girls didn’t speak any English,” explained JG. “They weren’t familiar with any ways of living or the laws in the U.S. They certainly didn’t understand how they could even get any sort of status.” Although JG is an attorney, her specialty is not immigration law and she admitted that the intricacies of immigration law are beyond her expertise. “Had they been in a courtroom all by themselves, speaking Spanish, not English, and having it translated, there’s no way they would’ve understood what was happening,” she said.

When the two girls underwent their immigration proceedings, they were appointed a lawyer through the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, which is one of Acacia’s subcontractors. Given the abuse and neglect they had endured, both young women obtained approval for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, which affords them legal residency in the U.S.

“They qualified immediately,” said JG. “We wouldn’t have had any idea what to look out for because we weren’t familiar [with the program], and we had to have a lawyer tell us what we needed to be looking for in order for there to be any sort of status.”

It’s precisely this sort of legal representation — and the outcomes it can offer — the Trump administration appears to be targeting in order to ensure swift deportation of children who would otherwise qualify for legal immigration status under U.S. laws.

“We’re seeing kids [being] told that they have to file an application for asylum within 15 days with no lawyer, and that it’s on them to get a lawyer.”

“We’re seeing them line up kids in a group of 40, push them forward to pleadings, and order them removed the same day,” said Aber of the current state of chaos in immigration courts. “We’re seeing kids [being] told that they have to file an application for asylum within 15 days with no lawyer, and that it’s on them to get a lawyer.”

Not only is the federal government withholding funding for legal representation that Congress allocated, it’s also diverting it into dubious alternatives. News broke in mid-August that ORR unexpectedly granted a Utah-based anti-trafficking nonprofit called Our Rescue more than $244 million in funding for a contract it never applied for to provide legal services for unaccompanied minors. The organization’s founder, who formerly worked at the Department of Homeland Security, had resigned from his position at the organization in 2023 after multiple women accused him of — ironically — trafficking and abuse.

Another $150 million in funding was granted — also reportedly without advance notice — to a small law firm in Texas whose founder served in the first Trump administration. The Houston-based Burke Law Group — which did not ask for the funding, and has only two lawyers of the 26 it employs with expertise in immigration law — has reportedly declined the government’s offer.

Meanwhile, hundreds of legal aid organizations with the expertise and capacity to represent unaccompanied minors have been stripped of funding. “Courtrooms are inhospitable to adults,” explained JG. “To put a child who has no idea of what a courtroom is, with a judge dressed in a robe and a bunch of lawyers speaking in a language that’s not adjusted for them is just cruel.”

She attributed the cruelty to racism. “The Trump administration is doing this as a result of our kids being Brown, and it’s easier to dehumanize a Brown kid than a white kid.” (Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, JG’s two foster daughters are still awaiting the legal residency they were approved for two years ago, and had to give up good jobs after their work permits expired.)

“What the government is trying to do right now is to deport as many kids as possible, even if they, under the law, should benefit from protection,” Aber said. She recommends people sign onto a petition demanding the restoration of funding.

“I’ve seen children who entered this country alone go on to become poets and teachers and doctors and cherished community members,” she said. “Every one of those kids had someone fighting in their corner. And that is what is at stake right now.”

* The name of the foster parent is being withheld to protect her identity and that of her foster children.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Sonali Kolhatkar

Sonali Kolhatkar is a monthly contributor to Truthout. She is an award winning multimedia journalist and author. She is the host and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali, a nationally syndicated weekly television and radio program airing on Pacifica stations and Free Speech TV. She was most recently Senior Editor at YES! Media covering race, economy, and democracy, and is currently Senior Correspondent for the Economy for All Project at the Independent Media Institute, and a monthly columnist for OtherWords, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies. Her writings have been published in LA Times, Salon, The Nation, In These Times, Truthdig, and more. Her books include Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World is Possible (Seven Stories, 2025), Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights, 2023), and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (Seven Stories, 2006). Her first novel, Queen of Aarohi will publish in 2027 by Red Hen Press. Her website is www.SonaliKolhatkar.com.

2026-08-15T05:45:07.295-07:00

ROBERT REICH

Trump’s ultimate comeuppance lies in the blueprint for a massive surge

REUTERS/Nathan Howard

Robert Reich

August 12, 2026 |

ALTERNET

Today I’m seeking your guidance about the message progressive Democrats should lead with in a few weeks when the midterm elections begin.

Yes, I know: It’s a big tent and Democratic candidates will tailor their messages to voters in their own states or congressional districts, who may be swayed by slightly different ones.

But rarely before in American history has the choice been so stark and so clear. The current occupant of the Oval Office is a malignant sociopath who’s gotten America into a losing war in the Middle East, turned much of our country into a police state, caused prices to soar, and pocketed billions off his office. He’s backed by a bevy of billionaires who have bet the house on AI, and congressional Republicans have been spineless zombies.

This is, or should be, the progressives’ hour. (Also, remember that the Democratic message in the midterms can influence the message in 2028.)

So what, in your view, should progressive Dems lead with? What’s the core message you’d like to hear from them in coming weeks?

I’ve canvassed people I consider savvy political advisers and observers, and grouped their responses below. Please share your own view.

1. The economy is s-----. We will make it work for you.

Unemployment is rising, prices are soaring, and wage gains have slowed. The affordability crisis is real. We’ll raise your wages and lower the prices you pay. We’ll offer Medicare for all and affordable childcare, make housing more affordable, and make the economy work for you and your family.

2. Our democracy is on life support. We will reinvigorate it.

Trump and Republicans are close to turning America into a dictatorship. They’re trampling on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and usurping the powers of Congress and the courts. We will strengthen American democracy and make this a government of, by, and for the people rather than Trump and his cronies.

3. Trump and his Republican enablers have disdained human rights in America and around the world. We will respect human rights.

We will not allow Trump’s ICE agents to cause mayhem and murder in our cities; his Homeland Security to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants; his air force to bomb defenseless fishermen; his military to abduct foreign leaders, start wars of choice that kill thousands, or enable Israel to engage in genocide. We will respect human rights.

4. Big corporations and the wealthy now run everything. We will take them on and restore integrity to American politics.

Giant corporations and a billionaire class are making out like bandits while you’re struggling. We’ll amplify workers’ voices, empower unions, bust up monopolies, regulate AI, and raise taxes on the wealthy and big corporations. We’ll restore the rule of law and turn our criminal justice system against the big corporations and white-collar hoodlums who are raiding your pockets.

Hence, today’s Office Hours question: What should be the core of the progressive Democrats’ message?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Private Credit Funds Make Big Bets on Software and Data Centers

Insurance Regulations Could Bail Out Risky PE Bets

Attached documents

Footnotes

Adam Novak

Footnotes

Anticapitalistas

Attached documents

Miguel Urbán Crespo

Malaysia: Reflections on the Rahang election

Observations from the ground

Spoilt votes and youth education

The racial divide

Why we contest?

Moving forward

Kohei Saito on degrowth, Marx and the future of the left

A strengthened right wing

Junior partners of Trumpism

The future hangs in the balance

A perspective

Footnotes

Eduardo Lucita

The case for Marxist organisation

The case for regroupment

Ten core ideas as basis for regroupment

1. The working class as the force to change the world

2. Revolutionary socialists doing mass politics

3. Organising rather than tailing

4. Connecting to the socialist horizon

5. Ecosocialism as more than a slogan

6. Socialist feminism and consistent opposition to oppression

7. Anti-imperialism of socialists

8. The Connolly tradition

9. A vibrant and democratic internal life

10. PBP as a broad ecosocialist and pluralist party

Conclusion

United States: This summer, DSA enters a new period

The scoreboard

Big impact

How it was won in NYC

Blowback from Democratic leadership

A new period in DSA’s history