The post Parallel Worlds: An Interview with Artist, Gaku Tsutaja appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The post The Global Revolution of Thomas Paine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Screengrab from a video posted by Israel Channel 12 that appears to show the sexual assault of a Palestinian prisoner by Israeli guards at Sde Teiman prison.

Amal ’Ajlouni is twenty-five years old. She is a mother of four. In July 2023, Israeli soldiers stormed her home in the southern Hebron neighborhood of Khallat Al-Qaba. She testified:

The [female] soldier ordered me to undress. I started to take off my prayer clothes that I was wearing, and the necklace I had around my neck made some noise, and then the soldier loosened the dog’s leash, and it came right up to me. It really scared me and the children, and we all screamed. I begged the soldier to get it away, and I told her that we were afraid of dogs. She moved the dog away and ordered me to continue undressing and also to remove my undergarments. I told her I had nothing on me and that my clothes were light and there was no reason to take off my undergarments. I begged her not to make me do it in front of the children, but she threatened to release the dog again. I had no choice, and I took off everything, weeping. The soldier ordered me to turn around as my children watched, unable to stop crying and shaking with fear.

— Amal ‘Ajlouni, testimony taken by B’Tselem field researcher Manal al-Ja’bari on July 11, 2023, published September 5, 2023 (B’Tselem, 2023)

Most accounts stop there. Amal did not. She kept speaking:

I can’t forget what happened. The search and the humiliation I went through in front of the [female] soldiers, and the helplessness and shame I felt in front of my children. They are now afraid to sleep in their room at night and come to our bed. They don’t sleep well and wet the bed, and when they wake up, they are scared to go to the bathroom.

The soldiers left at 5:30 in the morning.

This is not an exceptional case. It is a pattern. The Palestinian Feminist Collective has issued a 200-page report documenting it across eight decades, in prisons, at checkpoints, during home raids, in detention facilities (Palestinian Feminist Collective, 2026). Five months of research. Testimony after testimony: women, men, children, elders, all saying the same things in different voices, from different prisons, in different generations.

This is what the murder of the soul, the family, the body, a people looks like:

It looks like Rasmea Odeh in 1969, stripped naked, chained, beaten with sticks and metal bars, raped by Israeli soldiers while her father was brought into the room and ordered to rape her himself. When he refused, they beat them both and raped her in front of him. She was bleeding, her father told the UN Special Committee ten years later, “from her mouth and from her face and from her end.” Then he lost consciousness. She was in her early twenties. A medical examination reviewed by the Committee corroborated her testimony.

It looks like a Bedouin teenager abducted from the Naqab in 1949, gang-raped on a three-day schedule arranged by her captor, executed when she resisted, buried in secret. David Ben-Gurion’s diary, made public half a century later, contains the entry: “It was decided and carried out: They washed her, cut her hair, raped her, and killed her.” He knew. He covered for the officers. No one was punished. Israeli historian Benny Morris, working from these same classified sources, concluded:

That can’t be chance. It’s a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. (Morris, as cited in Shavit, 2004; see also McGreal, 2003).

It looks like the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin, where a sealed British criminal investigation, unearthed decades later, held medical evidence corroborating survivors’ testimony, and where the British investigator assigned to the case, Richard Catling, attested that “many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered.” Zionist militias broadcast threats of rape on loudspeakers to drive the surrounding villages into flight. The rape was the instrument. The flight was the aim. The land was the prize.

It looks like Sde Teiman detention facility, 2023 and 2024, where Palestinian men were held in cage-like structures, forced to wear diapers, denied toilets, stripped naked, beaten on their genitals, electrocuted on the anus, raped with objects, and raped by trained dogs. Where a soldier pressed his crotch to a detainee’s face and said, “You are my bitch.” And in the detention camps where women abducted from Gaza were held, Israeli civilians were, according to the fieldwork of Kifeya Khraim of the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, invited in to watch Palestinian prisoners naked, photograph them, and mock them, “as if it’s a zoo” (UN Human Rights Council, 2025a).

None of this is metaphor. All of it is testimony, corroborated by the United Nations, Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, B’Tselem, Addameer, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and multiple independent commissions of inquiry.

Lana Fawalaha, 25, liberated from an Israeli prison, said:

I would subconsciously pull my shirt down as if there was a constant threat that something I don’t want to happen could happen at any moment. […] This is something that does not end in prison. It stays long after prison. We keep living like this because the body remembers the shock more clearly and accurately than the mind.  (Palestinian Feminist Collective, 2026).

She was describing what it means to carry, in your body, the knowledge that the system designed to protect you was instead designed to destroy you. That the world watched. And called it complicated.

There is more than one way to erase a nation. The crudest is killing. The other is to destroy the community and obliterate the self, body by body, until a people can no longer find itself. A Predatory State documents both. They rape the land through domicide, the deliberate destruction of hundreds of thousands of homes, the algorithmic obliteration of entire neighborhoods by AI targeting programs with names like “The Gospel” and “Where’s Daddy,” which one former Israeli intelligence officer described as a “mass assassination factory” (Abraham, 2023). They rape the people through state-sanctioned sexual torture across eight decades, from the Nakba to Sde Teiman, through esqat, the sexual blackmail that weaponizes Palestinian cultural norms to coerce informants, and through the desecration of the dead. They rape the mind through the suppression of testimony, the reclassification of archives, and the psychoanalytic institution’s maintenance of collegial relations with Israeli analysts while Palestinian mental health workers are killed at their desks. They rape the soul through reproductive genocide: the destruction of hospitals, the starvation of pregnant women, the killing of entire family genealogies, the assault on Palestinian futurity itself.

This is not war. This is erasure.

And the naming has been done. The report concludes, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Israel has perpetrated systematic sexualized and gendered violence against the Palestinian people, constituting the crime of genocide. It is not alone. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice found the claim of genocide plausible enough to order binding provisional measures against Israel. The International Association of Genocide Scholars named it as such. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded in March 2025 that Israel has “employed sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians to terrorise them and perpetuate a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination” and confirmed the finding of genocide in September 2025 (UN OHCHR, 2025b). Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s 2026 report to the Human Rights Council is titled, plainly, “Torture and Genocide” (Albanese, 2026). The UN Committee Against Torture, in December 2025, found that Israel applies a “de facto State policy of organized and widespread torture and ill-treatment” of Palestinians in detention, practices the Committee found “amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, and form part of the actus reus of genocide” (UN Committee Against Torture, 2025).

These are the findings of the international legal and human rights system that the Western liberal order built and claims to believe in. No charges have been lodged against any Israeli security official for any of it. The naming has been done, again and again. What has not been done is anything at all.

We are mawjudun la yujadun. We exist, but we are unfindable. The crimes against us are documented. We are hypervisible. And yet we are nowhere to be found: not in the conscience of empire, not in its laws, not in its statements. We have survived what was designed to make survival impossible. And still we are expected to come composed, to make our case in language that does not disturb, while being systematically humiliated, violated, and de-dignified. One body at a time. Since 1948.

The settler-colonial state never hid its goals. Erase the people. Dismember the bodies. Murder their sounds. What has changed since 1948 is not the intention. It is the technology. And the impunity.

I am writing this on a Wednesday morning with a lump in my throat and a scream I cannot release. The dreaded scream that wants to shatter everything in sight. I do not know what it will take for the world to act. What is maddening is that this is not the first report. There have been others. There will be others. We all have the inner machinery of forgetting, the way the mind seals over what it cannot hold. But we will not allow you to forget. Because we believe in your humanity. We believe in your conscience. And we know that conscience, when it is working, cannot survive what this report contains and remain unchanged.

No one reading this should remain the same.

Empire does not want Palestinians to take up arms to defend against this violence. Fine. Then heed the Palestinian civil society call that has been on the table since 2005: boycott, divest, sanction. Every time you order from Amazon because the delivery is faster, think about A.A., a 35-year-old father arrested at Al-Shifa Hospital in March 2024. He spent 19 months in Israeli detention. At Sde Teiman military camp, soldiers stripped him and a group of detainees, beat them, sprayed pepper spray in their faces, and brought in dogs. One dog raped him. He told PCHR’s field researchers: “The dog did it deliberately, knowing exactly what it was doing, and inserted its penis into my anus, while the soldiers kept beating and torturing us.” Afterward, a doctor stitched a wound in his head. Seven stitches, without anesthesia (Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 2025). Amazon does not fund Sde Teiman. It funds the economy that keeps Sde Teiman possible.

Albanese’s report calls this economy by its name, an economy of genocide, a joint enterprise in which the acts of each company feed a whole that drives, supplies, and enables the destruction. Amazon’s part is not small. Together with Google, it holds a $1.2 billion contract called Project Nimbus, largely funded through Israel’s Ministry of Defense, providing the state with its core cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. When the military’s own cloud overloaded in October 2023, at the height of the bombardment, the Nimbus consortium stepped in. An Israeli colonel described this cloud technology as “a weapon in every sense of the word” (Albanese, 2025). Your purchase does not buy the restraints. It sustains the company that sustains the state that runs the facility. That is how an economy of genocide works.

Think about M.A., eighteen years old, raped with a bottle four times while soldiers watched. He said: “I had wanted to continue my education; now I am lost after what happened to me.” Every time you book an Airbnb, know that Albanese’s report documents Airbnb increasing its listings in illegal Israeli settlements from 139 in 2016 to 350 in 2025, collecting commissions of up to 23% on property built on stolen Palestinian land (Albanese, 2025). The rent is channeled into a predatory state. It reaches the same system that trains dogs to rape humans. Airbnb knows. It continues.

Visit Albanese’s report. Read it. From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide. Every company named. Every supply chain traced. Every dollar followed to what it funds. There is no excuse for not knowing.

And if you are a mental health professional: ask yourself what your membership fees pay for. Ask what it means to belong to an association that condones, through its silence, what the UN calls a de facto state policy of torture. Then do something with that question. If your institution condemns torture, and most claim to, insist that it say so here, about these bodies, in this genocide. If your institution condemns crimes against humanity, and most claim to, demand that it name what the UN Committee Against Torture, the UN Commission of Inquiry, and the International Court of Justice have all named. Hold your institution to its own stated values. Write to your board. Raise it at your next conference. Make them answer. Silence is a position. Make them own it or abandon it.

What does that silence communicate to Lana Fawalaha, lying awake in her hijab on a prison floor, waiting? What does it communicate to the daughters and granddaughters of the women who ran from Deir Yassin, who transmitted what happened in their bodies to their children the way all unbearable things are transmitted: not in words, but in the nervous system, in the posture, in the way a mother’s hand tightens when soldiers are mentioned?

Read this report. Read it as a son, as a daughter, as a mother, as a father, as an uncle, as an aunt. Do not manage it from a safe distance. Let it reach you where you actually live.

Act. Follow this link for further action

Palestine is not a tragedy without an author. What is being done to Palestinians is targeted, state-sponsored, and deliberate. The rape of Amal ‘Ajlouni’s dignity in front of her children was an order carried out by a soldier who knew exactly what she was doing. The dog trained to rape human beings at Sde Teiman was a policy instrument. The AI system called “Where’s Daddy” that leveled homes with families inside was a procurement decision. The starvation of pregnant women is a logistics choice made daily. Every actor in this chain, the soldier, the commander, the government, the arms supplier, the corporation, the professional association that looks away, has made a choice.

That is what makes the silence of our institutions not merely a failure but a crime of its own kind. They are not helpless. They are choosing.

References

Abraham, Y. (2023, November 30). “A mass assassination factory”: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza. +972 Magazine. https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/ [VERIFY URL before publication]

Albanese, F. (2025). From economy of occupation to economy of genocide (A/HRC/59/23). United Nations Human Rights Council. h

Albanese, F. (2026). Torture and genocide (A/HRC/61/71). United Nations Human Rights Council.

B’Tselem. (2023, September 5). Soldiers enter homes of extended ’Ajlouni family with dogs, separate children from their parents and steal items. Female soldiers strip search women[Testimonies taken July 11, 2023].

McGreal, C. (2003, November 4). Israel learns of a hidden shame in its early years. The Guardian.

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. (2025, November 10). PCHR documents testimonies of systematic rape and sexual torture in Israeli detention.

Palestinian Feminist Collective. (2026). A predatory state: Israeli systemic sexualized and gendered violence against Palestinians. Progressive International.

Shavit, A. (2004). Survival of the fittest? An interview with Benny Morris. Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture.

UN Committee Against Torture. (2025, December 22). Concluding observations on the sixth periodic report of Israel (CAT/C/ISR/CO/6).

UN Human Rights Council. (2025a). Kifeya Khraim & Witness #3: Public hearings, COI Palestine [Video].

UN OHCHR. (2025b, March 13). “More than a human can bear”: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since October 2023.

The post “More Than a Human Can Bear:” On Israel’s Systematic Sexualized Violence and the Silence That Enables It appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Carl Mydans, The Japanese Surrender on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. September 2, 1945. Gelatin silver print. General Douglas MacArthur stands at the lower right, back to the viewer. General Yoshijirō Umezu leans over the table, signing the document of surrender. Courtesy Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Gift of the artist.  P1985.27.106. © Carl Mydans/LIFE Magazine, Time Inc.

Eyeworm

When President Trump, supported by Israeli Prime Minister Natanyahi, launched a war against Iran four months ago, he did so with an image of enemy surrender stuck in his head like a catchy tune, an earworm. It was probably the photo above by Carl Mydans, reproduced and widely distributed for decades after the war, of Japanese military and civilian officials gathered on the deck of the USS Battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, to sign the document of surrender ending war in the Pacific. General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, stands in front of a microphone to the right, with his back to the viewer.

Mydans’ viewpoint was from the front-right of a wooden platform built atop a gun turret, as can be seen in a photograph taken a few minutes earlier by another (unknown) photographer. The bag behind the dark haired, un-hatted Mydans was likely his kit, which included a spare 35 mm camera, Zeiss 50 mm telephoto lens, film, and a Rolleiflex.

Photographer unknown, The Japanese Surrender on the USS Missouri, Sept. 2, 1945, Wikimedia Commons.

Mydans was an excellent photographer. He worked for the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s, along with Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Dorothea Lange, and then for more than 30 years at Life, where his photo of the surrender was first published. Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, Chaplin-esque in his morning coat, top hat and cane, stands at center right in Mydans’ picture. At left, a diagonal line of naval officers leads the eye past two pairs of protruding ventilation cowls, crisply linear naval rifles, and hundreds of uniformed seamen, extending almost to the horizon. The guns establish a second set of diagonals that direct us toward the upper right margin of the image and another battleship, probably the USS Iowa. Of course, Mydans didn’t choreograph the scene. He only shot what was in front of him, but he knew enough to stand in the correct place, point his camera in the best direction, and press the shutter at the right time. The result is an image of Japanese abjection and U.S. invincibility.

Trump’s war on Iran on the other hand, did not end in enemy surrender. The president’s pal Steve Bannon put the best spin he could on the ceasefire deal, telling The New York Times: “[Trump is] a deal maker and a pragmatist;” he knows “he is not having a surrender ceremony on the battleship Missouri.” If anything, it’s Trump who offered at the Palace of Versailles the “unconditional surrender” he earlier demanded of his Iranian foes. Didn’t anyone tell him it was there, in 1919, that Germany formally capitulated to the Entente powers? Not even his confident, black, Sharpie signature on the “Memorandum of Understanding” — or the protective gaze of Marco Rubio – could lessen the appearance of defeat.  Just a year and a half before, things were different. Following his inauguration, the same Bannon described the tech billionaires Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos as “supplicants” bowing before the president. Bannon said to reporters: “I view this as September of 1945 – the Missouri – and you have the Imperial High Command … and he (Trump) is like Douglas MacArthur.”

President Donald J. Trump, seated beside French President Emmanuel Macron, signs a Memorandum of Understanding between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States at the Palace of Versailles, France on June 17, 2026. Above the presidents at left and right are Secretary of State Marco Rubio and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot. Photo: The White House.

The atmosphere at Versailles was anything but triumphant. For one thing, the Iranians didn’t show. Without them (they’d already signed electronically), the whole affair seemed a tad onanistic – Trump was the only player.  And then there were the terms of the MOU: Both parties agreed to a 60-day ceasefire followed by negotiations that could be extended indefinitely. Iran regained control of its oil sales and frozen assets, won the right to continue uranium enrichment at a yet undetermined level, kept control over the strait of Hormuz (no tolling authority, but fees for services), and got to maintain a stockpile of ballistic weapons. Sounding like an indulgent father, Trump told reporters: “If other countries have ​[ballistic missiles], it’s a little bit ​ unfair for them not to have some.” Same for uranium enrichment: “It’s a little hard when other people have it, other adjoining states have it…You have to use a little common sense.”

Just as Trump started to sign the document, he interrupted himself for a moment and admitted to nobody in particular, “That was not easy, I can tell you.” Did Mydan’s image of Japanese surrender flash through his mind? Perhaps instead of the Mydans photo, he remembered close-up film footage of Japanese General Umeza signing the surrender document. He’d seen that on television as a child and adolescent in his parent’s big house in Jamaica Estates, Queens. “Did you ever see ‘Victory at Sea’?” the president asked reporters in January 2026, while proposing a new “Trump-class” of battleships. “What a great thing that is to watch!”

General Yoshijirō Umezu signing the document of surrender. Victory at Sea, NBC Television, episode 26, broadcast May 3, 1953, (not copyright protected).

Trump was referring to the Emmy-winning American television documentary shown on NBC TV from October 1952 to May 1953. The last episode of Victory at Sea showed the Japanese surrender, including the profile close-up of General Umeza above. The series was conceived and produced by Henry Salomon, a Naval Lieutenant Commander in World War II and former research assistant to the famous historian, Samuel Eliot Morrison, author of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, a biography of Christopher Columbus (1942). The production was amply funded by NBC and received the full cooperation of the U.S. Navy, which likely saw it as a way to raise public support for a massive Congressional increase in military expenditure. In the two years following the outbreak of war with Korea in 1950, overall U.S. military spending increased from $13.5 billion to over $50 billion. Much of the money was used to reactivate hundreds of mothballed WWII battleships, as well as refurbish and rearm the Missouri.

Victory at Sea set the standard for subsequent compilation documentaries. Each 30-minute episode deployed hundreds of archived film clips, was narrated by actor Leonard Graves and scored by composer Richard Rogers. Segments were first broadcast on Sunday afternoons at 3:00 p.m; it was shown in syndication for decades. I first saw Victory as a child in Forest Hills, Queens, in the mid 1960s. It was by then an “evergreen” for WPIX (channel 11) in New York City, broadcast both during regularly scheduled slots and whenever there was an unexpected gap in programming. I remember watching it before and after New York Yankees baseball games, for example, if a contest was delayed or shortened by rain. Trump, a decade older than me, may have seen the culminating episode 26, documenting the Japanese surrender, when it was first broadcast in 1953, but certainly in the decades thereafter. It’s still available on YouTube.

During his first term, Trump indirectly recalled his youthful engagement with Victory. On February 27th, 2017, after announcing a supplemental increase in defense spending, he said to reporters: “We have to start winning wars again. I have to say, when I was young, in high school and college, everybody used to say we never lost a war. We never lost a war, remember?” He couldn’t have been remembering the actual wars of his lifetime – the Korean War was fought to a draw, and the Vietnam War was a notable U.S. defeat. He was thinking instead of World War II, the conclusion of which he repeatedly saw on WPIX television in Queens, and then again for decades after. Consider the following: An 80-year-old president was likely spurred to war against Iran by recollection of an 81-year-old photograph and a 73-year-old television documentary.  God save us.

Symptom and symbol

Trump knows little about World War II beyond what he has seen on TV or in the movies, and even less about art, but he knows what he likes: images of domination. In Mydans’ photograph and Victory at Sea, he saw diminutive Japanese men made to walk slowly across the steel deck of the Missouri, flanked by rows of U.S. seamen chosen for their height. The presence of hundreds of other seamen, many leaning over upper decks, plus dozens of reporters, photographers and cameramen increased the spectacle of American power.  The Japanese participants themselves described the oppressive impact of the signing ceremony.

Bending over the table on the USS Missouri must have felt to the Japanese like bowing before a superior. To deploy the terminology of the art historian E.H. Gombrich, the “symbol,” in this case signing the document of surrender, was barely distinguishable from the “symptom,” bending down, the natural manifestation of subordination. In other words, when Trump saw films and photographs of the surrender, he saw not only the completion of a contract – like the real estate deals closed by his father — but one group of men physically and psychologically dominating a second group. And domination – bullying – is for Trump the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Elision of symbol and symptom is surprisingly rare in historical images of surrender, except when the goal is to show the stronger power destroying the dignity of the weaker.  For example, on the Column of Trajan (113 C.E) in Rome, the defeated Dacians are seen kneeling before the victorious emperor Trajan, who is seated on a raised tribunal. Dacian shields are cast aside while the Romans carry signa, military standards that represent unit cohesion and past victories.

“Surrender of the Dacians,” scene 75, Column of Trajan, 113 CE, Rome.

The idea was to represent the Dacians as barbarians (barbari) lacking the language, costume, culture and even hairstyles (they are all bearded) of civilized Romans. They are depicted as subservient, dependent upon the mercy (clementia) of the emperor.

Francisco de Zurbaran, The Surrender of Seville (1634). Private collection. Photo: The author.

European medieval and early modern monarchies and absolutist states mostly eschewed such imagery. There’s little glory in defeating an unworthy foe. In addition, when geographically dispersed kings and queens have ties of blood or marriage, it’s foolish to utterly demean a nation with which you might one day wish to form an alliance. Wealthy merchants too were increasingly international in early modern and industrial Europe – why foreclose a future deal by dint of bad blood? Thus, Francisco de Zurbaran’s The Surrender of Seville (1634) depicts the Muslim governor of Seville, Achacaf, surrendering his shield and keys of the city to King Ferdinand III of Castile in 1248. Though kneeling, the Muslim ruler is resplendent in his brocaded robes. The reconquest of Spanish land, according to this painting, finally accomplished in 1492, was a legal transfer between kings, knights and friars; let’s all be friends.

Diego Velazquez, The Surrender at Breda, 1635. Prado Museum.

Diego Velazquez’s The Surrender at Breda marks the artistic apotheosis of this live-and-let-live war iconography. Inspired by Zurbaran’s contemporaneous Surrender (the two artists were friends and compared notes), Velazquez’s picture shows the Dutch leader at left, Justinus of Nassau, handing over the keys of the besieged city of Breda to the Spanish Ambrogio Spinola. At right, the victorious Spanish soldiers hold their lances erect, like the signia held by the Romans in the “Surrender of the Dacians” on the Column of Trajan.  Only here, the victorious side forfends the losing side’s abjection. “No need to bend, my dear friend,” Spinola seems to say to Justinus, “you fought bravely and we accept the keys to Breda in a spirit of reconciliation.” Never mind that 13,000 out of 17,000 Dutch civilians and soldiers died during the nine-month siege.  The survivors were permitted to march out of their city with their weapons and standards.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors at Fontainebleau (1861-64). Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles.

More to Trump’s liking, one suspects, would be French Salon painter Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors at Fontainebleau (1861-64). The giant canvas is an unconcealed effort by the artist both to ingratiate himself with his patron, the dictator Napoleon III, and to affirm the military as well as racial superiority of the French over the Siamese (Thai) nation. Seated at the far right beside the Empress Eugenie, Napoleon receives tribute from the first in a double line of Siamese ambassadors seen crawling in obscene supplication before their French master and mistress. The ambassadors’ gifts, rendered with painstaking exactitude, are piled up in the right foreground like the shields in the “Surrender of the Dacians” from the Trajan Column. Though the French Emperor hoped to seduce his guests to ally with France rather than Britain in the contest for colonies, there was no chance he would suspend his claimed superiority for reasons of state. The White House Oval Office is increasingly functioning like Louis Napoleon’s Fontainebleau Salle du Bal.

The Nazis, naturally, understood the practice and imagery of domination. Hitler made sure France’s 1940 surrender took place in the same Compiègne Wagon as the initial German surrender to France and the Entante powers in 1918. The Fuhrer has just left the train car, stationed a tall SS officer in the gangway, and told Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel (tried for war crimes, convicted and executed at Nuremberg) to ensure French officials were in every way humiliated. Keitel is shown handing the document of surrender to Huntziger who appears to lower his head to receive it – symbol becomes symptom.

Photographer unknown. Signing of the Armistice in the Compiègne Wagon. Compiègne, France, June 22, 1940. At the left is General Wilhelm Keitel and on the right is the French delegation with (left to right) General Jean Bergeret, General Charles Huntziger, and Vice Admiral Maurice Le Luc. Photo: Wikipedia Commons.

U.S. surrender images

In the post-war decades, surrender, whether imposed with closed fist or invited with open hand, has rarely concluded armed conflict. The Chinese communists led by Mao defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in 1949, but lacking an air force or navy, failed to take Taiwan. After that, the island was protected by the U.S. and its own considerable armed forces. The Korean War ended with cessation of armed hostility followed by division of territory, a demilitarized zone, and long-term, mutual antagonism. The American wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan ended “gradually and then suddenly,” to quote Hemingway. Invasion and destruction was followed by insurgencies followed by withdrawal. Israel’s wars against its neighbors (and vice versa) have mostly ended on former’s terms. But victory then became the platform for more Israeli war, occupation, apartheid and now genocide. There have been other genocides too – including in Cambodia, Bosnia, Bangladesh, Guatemala, and Rwanda.

When it comes to very large states, internal politics and raison d’etat, simply don’t permit surrender. U.S. presidents are loathe to accept defeat, regardless of the cost, because to do so would suggest weakness or that the cause was unjust. The lies that underly the American wars against Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran are open secrets, but unacknowledged by U.S. presidents. To do so would be to shatter governing myths of moral exceptionalism. And most Americans, lacking access to adequate healthcare, housing, education, transportation, and a healthy environment, are reluctant to surrender their ideology.

Surrender images today, therefore, don’t look like the old ones. The end of the war in Vietnam is marked by the Dutch photographer Hubert van Es’s famous photo of civilians boarding a CIA helicopter to evacuate Saigon. The last withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan was memorialized by Alexander Burnett’s night-vision photo of Major General Chris Donahue, boarding a C-17 transport aircraft at Hamid Karzai International Airport. (For his troubles, Donahue has just been cashiered by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.)

Under Trump, unfiltered photographic images from the Iran and other conflicts are difficult to obtain because these battles are mostly fought remotely or surreptitiously, with missiles, bombing runs, drones and special forces. The current administration has also taken active steps to prevent the photographic disclosure of damage to American military bases in the Middle East, going so far as to demand that Planet Labs—one of the largest U.S.-based commercial satellite imagery providers —withhold aerial photographs of Iran and surrounding Middle Eastern conflict zones. Finally, Trump himself, his White House minions, and corporate allies dominate social media with their own, self-serving narratives, aka lies.

But social media is a double-edged sword. And for now, at least, alternative narratives are available there and growing in number. The story of the American surrender in Iran and failure at home is visible in myriad inages by unaffiliated photographers, videographers (using phone cameras), digital artists and techno-activists. The Iranian government has supplied a few and so, inadvertently, has the White House.  Those are topics for other columns, but by way of conclusion, here’s a small suite of contemporary surrender images:

President Donald Trump, chief of staff Susie Wiles and Secretary of State Marco Rubio monitor US military operations in Iran from the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. U.S. bombs killed 150 children the day before in Minab, Iran. Photo: The White House.

Mourners dig graves during a funeral in Minab, Iran, on Tuesday, March 3, 2026. Iranian Press Center, released for press distribution.

Chad Davis, ICE agents and bystanders in Minneapolis after the January 07, 2026 shooting of Renée Good. Wikimedia Commons.

Joe Flood, Reflecting Pool Looks Like a Rothko Painting Now, Flickr, used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

The post Images of Surrender appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Hurricane Iwa bearing down on Hawai’i, 1982.

We’re in for it. At least that’s the dire warning from scientists about the El Niño conditions now brewing in the Pacific Ocean. What’s actually in store may be up for debate, but it’s clear the developing patterns may place this El Niño on par with the strongest in over a century, which hit in 1982-83, killing 2,000 and leaving few corners of the planet untouched. It was a devastating El Niño that struck before climate change had fully taken hold of our world.

But before we look back at the early ’80s, let’s get a handle on what exactly causes these extreme weather events.

Simply put, the so-called El Niño-Southern Oscillation (El Niño for short) occurs when ocean waters near the equator in the Pacific become unusually warm. In turn, these warmer waters weaken trade winds, which typically push ocean waters toward Asia and Australia. As these winds shift during an El Niño event, warmer water is hurled toward the Americas instead, shifting weather patterns across the globe.

While El Niño is a normal weather occurrence, when it’s combined with a rapidly warming climate, all bets are off. Depending on where you live, one weather extreme or another is likely in your future. Think record heatwaves, worsening drought, heavier rainfall, and wildfires galore. Farms will be destroyed. Homes washed away, and economies ravaged — more of what our warming planet has been experiencing, but on steroids.

Back in 1982-83, the El Niño blindsided the scientific community, which failed to predict its development in the Pacific. As a result, the world was wholly unprepared, and the destruction was immense. The trade winds that year collapsed entirely and, in fact, reversed. This led to sea-surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific reaching 5°C or more above normal. Here’s a bit of what this wrought. 

+ Drought struck Australia, turning out to be one of the continent’s worst in the 20th century. Lack of rainfall led to unprecedented brushfires and blazing heat. Black Summer, Australia’s last big wildfire in 2019-2020, burned 59 million acres and killed 3 billion animals. And it wasn’t even an El Niño year. With Australia already experiencing record-setting summer temps, what the forthcoming El Niño holds ought to have the entire country on edge, preparing for something akin to Black Summer. Hoping for the best, readying for the worst.

+ In 1982-83, Indonesia dried up. It was one of the most severe and unexpected dry spells in the country’s history. Tropical rains ceased. Agriculture collapsed, and 9 million acres of forest and farmland went up in flames. Like Australia, things are already very bad in Indonesia. Several regions across Java, for example, are currently experiencing climate-related drought conditions. El Niño is set to worsen these conditions, setting the country up for a mega drought unlike anything it has seen.

+ The ’82-’83 El Niño caused widespread drought, dust storms, crop failures, and cattle deaths across southern Africa while massive floods swamped the east. Most of the continent heated up and, amid climate chaos, has continued on this trajectory. Think more disease, less clean water, and less food. If any place is unprepared for what’s to come, it’s Africa.

+ South America experienced catastrophic mudslides in Peru and Ecuador during the ’82-83 El Niño. The northern Amazon dried, while the south flooded. Fisheries and farming crashed. The Argentine portion of the Paraná River experienced a once-in-a-century flood, swelling to 60% above normal and leveling entire villages. The ecosystems across Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia were dramatically altered. Hundreds of thousands were forced to evacuate, and billions of dollars in damage were recorded. It took a decade for the countries to recover.

+ Here in the United States, we didn’t fare well in the ’82-’83 El Niño, either. Hurricane Iwa, a rare super hurricane, hit Hawai’i, wrecking thousands of buildings and leaving at least 500 people without shelter. California saw record winter storms, and whole beaches were washed away. Thousands of homes and hundreds of businesses were destroyed. The Gulf Coast flooded, the Pacific Northwest experienced less rainfall, and the central U.S. saw warmer weather. Snowpack levels were down. With much of the West already experiencing severe drought, what this El Niño has in store may make matters much, much worse. 

It’s impossible to know exactly what’s in store for the world as this year’s El Niño takes shape, but some numbers may help put it in perspective relative to 1982-83.

Today, the world is 1.2-1.4 °C warmer than it was in the early 1980s. Worse yet, the oceans are hotter than they were 45 years ago, more than 0.50°C warmer overall. This means the current El Niño is developing under much warmer baseline conditions than in 1982. Of the three “super” or “very strong” El Niños that have developed since the early 1980s, this one is shaping up to be the largest yet.

Will the warmer climate supercharge this El Niño? It’s possible, but not certain, says Muhammad Azhar Ehsan, an associate research scientist at the Columbia Climate School. “El Niños are very unique in their development. Their impacts depend on the strength, timing and interaction with other climate patterns in the atmosphere and oceans.”

Computer models, however, aren’t looking as promising as Ehsan’s prognosis; a few are predicting this one to be more severe than any El Niño we’ve had since at least 1950.

+++

In other climate-related news, a damning ProPublica report exposes carbon capture and storage for the fraud it is.

And, as many of you know all too well, it’s heating up. Stay hydrated. 1,300 died of extreme heat in Europe’s latest broil.

What El Niño has in store for the West is anyone’s guess, but if it brings more drought, the Colorado River could be in greater peril. Lake Powell and Lake Mead are vanishing. Of course, it’s not only drought that has affected these reservoirs, but also the insane overuse by sprawling desert cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, and by alfalfa growers whose crops feed cattle. About half of the water that drains from the Colorado feeds fields of alfalfa. This needs to stop. Water is more vital to human survival than hamburgers.

+++

I just returned from visiting family in Montana. My mother has dementia and is slowly fading away. It’s hard to watch, but she remains in good spirits and hasn’t forgotten her friends and family.

While in Montana, Chelsea and I managed to sneak off for a day hike to a gorgeous place I used to frequent as a kid. The trail once followed the Stillwater River up to Sioux Charlie, a lake named after a boy who allegedly grew up with the Sioux and lived in a cabin nearby. In 2022, a devastating flood swelled the river, carving an entirely new path. The Stillwater now flows on the opposite side of the valley. The old river trail was washed out during those torrential rains, and crews are working to rebuild it.

The first time I backpacked as a little boy, my dad brought me here, to this special place in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. He grew up fishing the Stillwater and knew it well. I talked to him late into the night under the stars, next to the rumbling waters as our campfire crackled. I remember my father explaining the constellations to me, trying to calm me to sleep. I was scared, not so much of sleeping outside without a tent as of the expansive, mesmerizing universe above us.

He said, “Love is the same as the Milky Way, Josh, nearly infinite and nothing to be afraid of.”

As my mom slips further into dementia, I miss my father more each day. He was about the age I am now when we camped along the Stillwater. I wish I could tell him that after all these years, I now know exactly what he meant.

+++

Did you pre-order a copy of Bad Energy? Head over to Pilsen Community Books and do it, or call up your local library and ask them to carry it when it drops. Every little bit helps.

Stick a bottle rocket in it, and I’ll be back next week.

Chelsea along the Stillwater, a tributary of the Yellowstone River.

The post Vampire Planet: The El Niño From Hell appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Anti-Brexit protesters in Manchester. Photo: Robert Mandel, Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0

The tenth anniversary of the British vote to leave the European Union raises two immediate questions: Was it worth it? Can it be undone? The answer to the first is increasingly clear. Experts generally agree that the British economy has suffered for a decade, accompanied by political instability. The second question is more complex. Democracies are built on the assumption that citizens can change their minds. Elect a new government. Hold another referendum. Reverse course. But can a nation ever truly return to where it was before a fateful decision?

Philip Stephens described the “dismal verdict” about Brexit ten years after in the New York Times: “A decade later, the cost of that freedom — of the return, as Mr. Johnson repeatedly put it, of precious national sovereignty — is blindingly apparent. The vote to leave the European Union was a real cry of pain from a large section of the electorate that thought itself left behind by economic progress. The desperation remains. The ‘sunlit meadows’ were a mirage.”

In 2016, Britain voted 51.9% to 48.1% to leave the European Union. Ten years later, opinion has reversed. Most polls now show that, if given another referendum, a majority of Britons would vote to rejoin the EU.

Can Brexit be undone? Would rejoining restore Britain to its pre-Brexit condition? The answer depends on a distinction we do not often make: reversing a decision is not the same as restoring the world that existed before it.

Brexit is not unique. Democracies—and great powers in particular—repeatedly confront decisions that later generations wish they could reverse. Brexit is only the latest example of a larger historical puzzle. Every generation seems to have its irreversible moment—the event that commentators declare has changed everything forever.

There were two “last helicopters” in my lifetime: Saigon in 1975 and Kabul in 2021—moments that seemed to close a chapter. The question is whether they really did. The Vietnam War is now widely recognized as a mistake. Years later, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara admitted, “We were wrong, very wrong.” The sight of the last helicopter leaving Saigon on April 30, 1975, remains ingrained in many people’s memories as the defining image of American defeat.

What was the narrative that followed? The decline of the United States as a dominant world power. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick accurately described the moment: “America’s illusions of invincibility had been shattered, its moral confidence shaken.”

Yet the decline narrative proved remarkably short-lived. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Vietnam disappeared as the defining story. Francis Fukuyama proclaimed The End of History. Joseph Nye argued that the United States was Bound to Lead. Madeleine Albright called the United States the “indispensable nation.” Less than two decades after Saigon, euphoric triumph had replaced humiliation.

Then came Afghanistan. The United States again watched its final evacuation as the Taliban returned to power. Commentators once more declared the end of American primacy. “This was the greatest humiliation suffered by the United States since the fall of Saigon in 1975,” Victor Davis Hanson wrote. “Kabul 2021 is our Saigon,” Niall Ferguson observed.

Brexit, Vietnam, Afghanistan—and now Trump. “Future scholars will sift through Trump’s digital proclamations the way we now read the chroniclers of Nero’s Rome,” David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker. Will post-Trump resemble post-Vietnam, with America eventually recovering? Will Britain rejoin the EU? Can either country return to what it once was?

Or are there moments in political life that cannot be undone? When MAGA supporters promise to Make America Great Again, what exactly does “again” mean?

Gal Beckerman, in How to Be a Dissident, offers a different way of thinking about political renewal. He distinguishes reversal from reconstitution. “If death focuses the mind on the point of living,” he writes, “birth flips our thinking, so that what matters is all the possible permutations of life.”

He then quotes Hannah Arendt: “It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before.”

Beckerman’s point is that “A dissident lives with this sense of natality.” That insight suggests a different answer to the Brexit question. He concludes that Arendt “doesn’t believe that everything will turn out fine. It’s the feeling, rather, that you can always begin again.”

If Britain rejoins the EU, Beckerman’s argument suggests that it will be a different country. More than a decade of going it alone will have changed Britain’s understanding of both itself and Europe. Rejoining would mark the beginning of a new relationship, not a return to the old one.

The same principle may already be visible in the United States. Political renewal rarely comes from restoring an earlier consensus. Instead, it takes shape through political innovation. The election of the Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City and the success of younger progressive candidates in Democratic primaries suggest that American politics is generating something new rather than recreating the liberal order that preceded Trump.

This is not simply a return to an earlier American socialism. After all, Eugene Debs ran for president five times on the Socialist Party ticket, and Norman Thomas was the party’s nominee six times. Neither came close to winning the presidency. If a democratic socialist current is gaining influence today, it is doing so through different coalitions, different constituencies, and different political languages. It is another example of Beckerman’s point: democratic renewal comes through new beginnings, not the restoration of old movements.

History does not have an “undo” button. But neither is history irreversible. Beckerman suggests something more subtle than the view of history implied by Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000  as a simple pendulum. Kennedy sees history as recurring cycles of rise and fall. Beckerman sees history as the possibility of genuinely new beginnings.

A democracy can change direction, but it cannot recover the country it would have become had it chosen differently. Robert Frost’s traveler cannot return to the fork in the road and choose again. Democracies cannot either. If democracy is to be renewed in the United States, it will take generations. And it will not be like the glory years I grew up with after World War II.

Britain’s debate over rejoining the European Union points to something larger than Brexit. Democracies do not recover by returning to the past. They recover by becoming something new. History permits reversals. But it never permits restorations.

The post There is No Going Back: How Democracies Can Begin Again appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

A Delegation of the Creek tribe meets with the Trustees of Georgia by William Verelst. Public domain.

It took a single sentence in Ken Burns’ documentary series The American Revolution to change the way I thought about the American Revolution.

It was a passing reference to British agents living among the Cherokee.

The documentary quickly moved on, but I couldn’t. Who were they? Were they soldiers, diplomats, or traders? Did they wear uniforms? Did they speak Cherokee?

What I found showed me an often overlooked side of the Revolution. Away from the famous battlefields, it seems Britain’s war was also fought through secretive Indigenous alliances, intelligence networks, and frontier agents who looked more grizzled than polished.

These men carried influence into parts of a continent where red coats rarely ventured as readily as a drawstring purse of gold.

Throughout, these frontier agents waged a conflict that stretched all the way from the Great Lakes to the southern Appalachians and into Georgia. Nor were they the over-romanticised characters imagined later by James Fenimore Cooper, such as Natty Bumppo. They were more mysterious than that.

A traveller approaching a Cherokee town in 1776 might notice a stranger among the warriors. At first glance he hardly looks British at all. No bright red coat. No polished gorget. Instead, a hunting shirt, buckskin leggings, moccasins stained from weeks of travel, and a hat pulled low against the summer sun.

Yet this man represents the British Crown.

Before anyone talks war, gifts are laid out: blankets, powder, lead, vermilion, kettles. Each is accepted with formal thanks before the council begins. The exchange is more than generosity. It shows respect, friendship, and Britain’s willingness to honour a relationship that both sides know carries obligations.

But the gifts are only the beginning. The man carries letters from distant officials, promises of detailed support, and intelligence. Behind him stands a packhorse—one can almost hear it snort—laden with gunpowder, lead, muskets, blankets, and other trade goods for the next undeclared port of call.

Alexander Cameron was one such man, an intrepid Scot who emigrated to Georgia and spent years among the Cherokee. Cameron showed us more than anyone an aspect of the Revolution that many readers, even well-educated ones, may never have encountered.

I hear the Revolution is still commonly taught as a struggle between Patriots and the British, rather than as a multinational civil war of Loyalists, numerous Indigenous nations, enslaved people seeking freedom, and imperial agents.

Fluent in Cherokee politics and deeply familiar with the nation’s big families, Cameron became one of Britain’s most influential representatives in the southern backcountry.

Another was Henry Stuart, brother of John Stuart, a veteran Indian Department official who knew that frontier influence depended less on rank than on relationships.

Like Cameron, Stuart travelled constantly between settlements and Cherokee towns, distributing presents, gathering intelligence and maintaining Britain’s presence.

By 1775, London faced a tricky problem. Its empire stretched around the globe, but North America was immense. There were simply not enough regular troops to garrison every frontier settlement or to police the huge interior. British officials had to rely on a different strategy. They had to bolster old alliances and forge new.

They relied on the Cherokee in the South, the Haudenosaunee nations in the North, and Native communities across the Ohio Country, supported by those Loyalist rangers, traders, interpreters and frontier agents. Together, they extended British influence far beyond the reach of regular troops.

Nowhere was this more visible than among the Cherokee.

During 1775 and 1776, British agents travelled through Cherokee country, warning of continuing Patriot expansion. The British Crown always presented itself as the power more likely to hold back colonial expansion and preserve Indigenous territory, however imperfectly.

To be fair, the Cherokee’s chief concern would have been territorial survival, not the constitutional disputes dividing Britain and her colonies.

The British found keen listeners among leaders such as Dragging Canoe, who already knew what American settlers meant to Cherokee lands. When war came, British diplomacy and supplies reinforced a decision many Cherokee leaders were already moving towards as the number of settlements grew and grew. The resulting British-backed Cherokee offensive swept across frontier settlements in present-day Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

Yet these campaigns turned out to have been only one strand in a much larger British strategy.

Far to the north, another remarkable figure occupied a similarly unusual position.

Joseph Brant was Mohawk by birth, educated in English schools, familiar with both Native and British societies, and uniquely positioned to bridge the two worlds. To British officials he was priceless. To many frontier settlers he became one of the most feared men in North America.

The history of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy tells us that Brant’s warriors, again alongside Loyalists and other Indigenous allies, launched many raids across the New York frontier from bases along the Susquehanna, hitting settlements throughout the Mohawk and Schoharie valleys.

British supplies reached them through a strategic hub on the Niagara River. Fort Niagara served as the nerve centre of Britain’s northern frontier war, moving supplies, intelligence and diplomatic messages.

The Seneca Nation became one of Britain’s most formidable allies. In November 1778, Seneca warriors joined others in the devastating raid on Cherry Valley, one of the Revolution’s most notorious frontier attacks.

The violence became so severe that George Washington eventually ordered the Sullivan Expedition of 1779, a massive campaign intended to break the military power of the Haudenosaunee nations allied with Britain in New York.

Across thousands of miles of wilderness, the pattern remained remarkably the same: local allies fought for their own interests while Britain supplied the things that kept alliances alive—more gifts to honour old friendships, more powder and lead for war, more letters from distant officials, and more agents travelling from town to town with news, promises and instructions.

What makes the story especially fascinating to me is that many of the men holding the system together felt just as at home in Indigenous worlds as in British.

John Butler, commander of Butler’s Rangers and a skilled cultural broker, worked closely with Iroquois communities and could communicate in Mohawk, relying on interpreters when necessary.

Other British agents and traders married Native women, raised mixed families, and lived for years in Native towns, developing family ties that lasted generations.

Some spoke Cherokee, Mohawk or other Indigenous languages, while interpreters bridged the remaining gaps.

These were the indispensable go-betweens of Britain’s frontier empire.

What is more, successful frontier agents understood how Native politics worked. They knew who held influence, and that councils, ceremonies, kinship ties, and gift exchanges mattered just as much as military force. At the same time, the Americans faced a basic contradiction.

Many Patriot leaders waxed lyrical about liberty while their frontier settlers continued pressing westwards onto Native lands. For many Indigenous nations, that westward expansion posed the more immediate threat.

The American Revolution is remembered as one of marching armies, sieges and set-piece battles. Yet across the rich forests of eastern North America this other conflict kept unfolding.

The British representative most characteristic of such a hidden war was rarely the upright officer in a Costwolds-dyed red coat. More often he was the multilingual, deft and agile frontier agent, seated in a Cherokee council house or an Iroquois longhouse, listening far more than he spoke.

For all the forgotten intrigues and ingenuity of this frontier network, however, it could not alter the outcome of the war. The Crown’s agents succeeded in building remarkable alliances and extending British influence deep into the interior, but diplomacy and Indigenous partnerships proved no substitute for victory in the main theatres of the Revolution.

When Britain finally recognised American independence in 1783, many of the Native nations that had fought alongside Britain found themselves abandoned to an expanding United States, while frontier agents like Cameron, Stuart and Butler faded into the margins of history.

Britain lost the war, and with it the frontier system these men had spent years patiently building. That is precisely why they deserve to be remembered. They reveal to us today just how much larger, more complex and more deeply interconnected the American Revolution really was.

Happy 4th of July.

The post The Forgotten Brits Who Lived Among the Cherokee appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Illustration for James Bovard’s Playboy story “Overkill”, on the Ruby Ridge shooting, by Amy Crehore. (June 1995)

On June 30 1995, I helped shatter the coverup of federal killings at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.  For millions of Americans, those brazen killings epitomized how the U.S. government had become a deadly peril to their rights and liberties.

In 1991, an ATF informant entrapped Randy Weaver into selling him two sawed-off shotguns. After ATF officials lied to a federal prosecutor, Weaver was indicted and sent the wrong court date. On August 21, 1992, after numerous illegal intrusions onto Weaver’s Ruby Ridge mountaintop property near the Canadian border, three U.S. marshals dressed in Ninja outfits and carrying submachine guns ambushed Weaver’s 14-year old son and family friend Kevin Harris. One marshal shot the boy’s dog and a firefight erupted in which another marshal was killed. As Sammy Weaver ran from the scene towards the family’s ramshackle cabin, a marshal shot him in the back and killed him.

The next day, the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team arrived. Within an hour of its snipers taking position, every adult in the cabin was either dead or severely wounded – even though they had not fired a shot at the FBI. FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot Randy Weaver in the back as he stood outside his home, and then killed Vicki Weaver as she stood by the cabin doorway holding their 10-month-old baby. The bullet that passed through Vicki Weaver’s skull then badly wounded Kevin Harris.

The FBI proclaimed its Ruby Ridge operation a great success, but a federal jury found Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris not guilty on almost all charges. Federal Judge Edward Lodge condemned the FBI’s misconduct and fabrication of evidence.

I wrote about Ruby Ridge in my 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. But I knew I was missing so much key dirt on the case.

The debacle in federal court in Idaho spurred an investigation by a Justice Department task force investigation. On December 9, 1994, Deval Patrick, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, announced that he was rejecting the task force’s recommendations to punish federal agents. Patrick announced that the FBI had not used excessive force, whitewashing the entire operation. But Patrick kept secret the hefty report by the task force.

The following month, FBI chief Louis Freeh announced that the FBI had completed its self-investigation and confirmed that its agents performed wonderfully at Ruby Ridge, aside from a few minor technical infractions.

Freeh’s exoneration was the hook for my Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined, “No Accountability at the FBI.” I mocked Freeh’s assertion that the Ruby Ridge “crisis was one of the most dangerous and potentially violent situations to which FBI agents have ever been assigned.” The FBI’s camouflaged snipers were hiding in the woods hundreds of yards away when Randy and Vicki Weaver were gunned down. One FBI sniper that day had summarized the Rules of Engagement: “If you see ’em, shoot ’em.” Though Freeh insisted that the killing of Vicki Weaver was an accident, the FBI initially claimed that killing her was justified. Bo Gritz, the Vietnam War hero who helped negotiate Randy Weaver’s surrender, summarized a government profile on the Weavers: “If you get a chance, take Vicki Weaver out.” It sounded like homicide, not a misfire.

On January 26, 1995, the Wall Street Journal published a response from Freeh that derided “Bovard’s allegations that the FBI has sought to cover up any wrongdoing by the FBI or its employees” and asserted that I “compounded the tragedy by mischaracterizing the circumstances” of the killings. Freeh concluded: “I support the public’s right to know about the workings of its government…. I do not believe, however, that articles such as Mr. Bovard’s, which ignore or twist the truth, further the important objective of public accountability.”

A few days later, the Washington Times published a Freeh letter denouncing my  “inflammatory and unfounded allegations” in a Ruby Ridge op-ed I wrote for that paper. The FBI chief harumphed: “Mr. Bovard insults the courageous men and women agents of the FBI when he suggests that they would ‘wantonly shoot private citizens based on mere suspicion.” Freeh could prop up the official storyline on the federal killings at Ruby Ridge because nobody outside the Justice Department was permitted to view that 542-page confidential report.

A few old acquaintances called to say their last good-byes after they saw Freeh’s letters since they expected me to have an accident at any moment.

Republicans took over Congress in early 1995, and outrage over unjustified federal killings at Waco, Ruby Ridge, and elsewhere spurred calls for reform.  But the April 19, 1995, explosion at the Oklahoma City federal office building spurred a backlash against government critics.  When a top Wall Street Journal editor heard of the bombing, he told editorial team: “These are Jim Bovard’s friends!”  Hey – I had never even been to Oklahoma.

I kept dogging Ruby Ridge.  Late in June, I got hold of that confidential 542-page Justice Department report. In a long Wall Street Journal piece, I declared that report “reveals that federal officials may have acted worse than even some of their harshest critics imagined.” The report concluded that the FBI Rules of Engagement at Ruby Ridge flagrantly violated the U.S. Constitution and were practically a license to kill – regardless of whether the snipers’ targets posed any threat.  Every adult in the cabin was gunned down even though they never fired a shot at any FBI agent.  The Justice Department task force was appalled that the adults were gunned down before receiving any warning or a chance to surrender, thereby spurring charges that the feds were “setting Weaver up for attack.” The report blew Freeh’s claims to smithereens.

In the same week, the new issue of Playboy hit the streets with my Ruby Ridge article titled “OverKill” (with the iconic illustration from Amy Crehore atop this article). My piece concluded: “If Congress is not willing to look into such misconduct, who will protect the Constitution? Will Congress let the Justice Department and the FBI get away with murder?”

Two weeks later, on July 13, a Washington Post front-page headline signaled the  coverup was collapsing: “Justice Dept. Reopens Ruby Ridge Investigation.” A top FBI official was  suspended after admitting destroying documents on the killing of Vicki Weaver. On the same day, the Idaho Statesman reported that Chuck Peterson, Randy Weaver’s attorney, said that “he suspects the [Justice Department’s decision to re-open the investigation] is in response to an article to be published in the August edition of the American Spectator magazine that compares Freeh to J. Edgar Hoover.” The cover of that Spectator issue showed Freeh with a Nixon-like five o’clock shadow nuzzling a Beretta pistol against his cheek. My 6000-word article placed Ruby Ridge in the broader context of a lawless federal agency with vast power to ruin Americans’ lives. At that point, the Spectator had 300,000 subscribers and was the nation’s most popular political magazine.

A month later, Freeh suspended four top FBI officials for suspected perjury or destruction of Ruby Ridge-related evidence. On August 16, the U.S. government paid the Weaver family $3.1 million to settle their wrongful death lawsuit against the U.S. for killing Sammy and Vicki Weaver. The Justice Department announced, “By entering into a settlement, the United States hopes to take a substantial step toward healing the wounds the incident inflicted…. The United States does not admit wrongdoing or liability of the plaintiffs.” But the denial of federal wrongdoing was dicey to reconcile with the multimillion payout to government victims.

The following month, Sen. Arlen Specter’s Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Government Information commenced a series of hard-hitting hearings on Ruby Ridge. In his testimony, U.S. marshal Dave Hunt stressed that Randy Weaver had repeatedly publicly complained about “lawless government.” I wondered if federal agents felt obliged to snuff any citizen who doubted the government’s legitimacy. Five FBI agents, imitating 1950s-era accused communists, invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination at the hearings.  “Lying seems to have become part of the job description for federal lawmen,” I observed in a American Spectator piece on the congressional hearings.

Idaho prosecutors sought to nail FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi, but the Justice Department torpedoed their case to safeguard boundless federal supremacy. Clinton administration Solicitor General Seth Waxman absolved the sniper because “federal law-enforcement officials are privileged to do what would otherwise be unlawful if done by a private citizen.”  But what’s the point of the Bill of Rights if G-men are permitted to shoot private citizens on any pretext?  

FBI abuses at Ruby Ridge permanently tainted the agency in the minds of many Americans.  In 2022, a poll found that 53% of Americans viewed the FBI as “Joe Biden‘s personal Gestapo.” I wrote a New York Post piece citing that poll and former president Donald Trump re-tweeted my article – after the FBI raided his Florida home at Mar-a-Lago.

But now that Donald Trump and Kash Patel are in charge of the FBI, Americans have nothing to fear from G-men off the leash. And if you say otherwise, you might get hit by a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit.

An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute.

The post How I Busted the Ruby Ridge Coverup appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Stereoscope photograph of the slave quarters at Monticello, James C. Sawders, Keystone View Company, Keystone-Mast Collection, UCR/California Museum of Photography, University of California at Riverside.

The segregated American media spent the week leading up to the Fourth of July praising the founding fathers and paying tribute to other American heroes. Heroes to them. Monsters to us.

For CNN, Kit Carson is a hero. They showed a scene in which Carson walked miles, nearly barefoot, to rescue his men. We grew up watching the exploits of Kit Carson on cartoon shows. Our Settler education didn’t inform us that  Kit Carson committed atrocities against the Navajo. How did the Navajo regard the American hero, Kit Carson? From a site called Partnership with Native Americans.

In 1863, General James Carleton began a renewed effort to eradicate the Navajo. In charge of the operation was Colonel Kit Carson. Knowing he couldn’t defeat the Navajo militarily, Carson began to destroy the Navajo homes, crops, and livestock. More than two million pounds of corn, a staple of the Indian diet, were burned. Forced to survive on nuts and berries many families, starving during the long winter months, began turning themselves into the military. About 8,000 men, women, and children were forced to make the “Long Walk” to Basque Redondo, a reservation in New Mexico about 300 miles away. Many died on the way of hunger and cold. Others drowned when they were forced to cross the Rio Grande during the spring floods.

Douglass Brinkley is a good guy. I spent a couple of days with him in New Orleans under a grant he’d received to bring writers to New Orleans. But now, he’s become a TV historian instead of someone who would challenge the decadent old boy Historical establishment, now under attack from a generation of women, Black, and Native American historians. But he’s right at home in a media that considers Confederacy apologist Ken Burns a historian. On a Wed.TV show, he expressed his admiration for Theodore Roosevelt.In 2021 Brinkley was named the inaugural historian in residence at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.

  How do Blacks feel about Theodore Roosevelt?

America’s Black Holocaust Museum’s Post

On December 30, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge of 167 Black soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Regiment following what became known as the Brownsville Affair—one of the most consequential racial injustices in American military history.

The events that led to the order began months earlier, on the night of August 13, 1906, in Brownsville, Texas. A white bartender was killed and a police officer wounded by gunfire. Almost immediately, white residents accused Black soldiers stationed nearby at Fort Brown. Despite testimony from commanding officers that the soldiers were in their barracks at the time, and despite glaring inconsistencies in the physical evidence, local authorities focused exclusively on the regiment.

… No individual soldier was identified as a suspect, and no court-martial ever took place.

Nevertheless, under political pressure and citing a supposed “conspiracy of silence,” Roosevelt imposed collective punishment. His order stripped all 167 soldiers of their honor, pensions, and the possibility of future federal employment. Many of the men had served honorably for years, including during the Spanish-American War. Some were nearing retirement and lost the economic security they had earned through decades of service.

The consequences were lifelong. Families fell into poverty. Reputations were destroyed. The Army’s decision reinforced a painful contradiction: It was not until 1972 that the U.S. Army formally acknowledged the wrongdoing and exonerated the soldiers.”

 I asked one of Theodore Roosevelt’s biographers why he omitted Roosevelt’s role in the Brownsville incident. He said that he didn’t have space to include it. Booker T. Washington tried to persuade Roosevelt to give the soldiers a fair trial.

Francine Prose showed up in the Guardian on July 2nd, where she expressed her reverence for Thomas Jefferson,  a hypocrite who found slavery ”excreable,” yet bred Slaves like livestock and consigned them to cramped quarters that were unsanitary. He broke up families and had his slaves beaten. Indeed, he might have beaten them himself. A visitor from France said that he accompanied Jefferson as he reviewed his slaves and that while walking up and down, he slapped a riding crop in his hand. The slaves responded to this gesture by trembling. Though much has been made about his having a Black mistress, another oral tradition describes him as a promiscuous rapist. Why would feminists honor this man? I think Jefferson is admired for his Hollywood Raj look, the name given to Cary Grant and other British actors who acted in films that promoted British imperialism.

Benjamin Franklin was called “Old Double-Face; ” yet he was smarter than the other Founding Fathers. Franklin began opposing slavery in the late 1750s after visiting a school for Black children and realizing their lack of education was due to their environment, not nature. His opposition peaked at the end of his life. He became the president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1787. He petitioned Congress to end slavery in February 1790. While Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton advocated the extermination of Native Americans, Franklin protested the massacre of Native Americans.

Benjamin Franklin protested the 1763–1764 slaughter of 20 peaceful, unarmed Susquehannock (Conestoga) Indians by writing a fiery pamphlet titled A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County. He condemned the killers as a “barbarous mob” and passionately argued against collective racial punishment.

So if the country needs a founding father, maybe it should be Franklin?

The post 250th: Their Heroes Are Monsters to Us appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Portrait of George Washington (detail) by Charles Willson Peale (1776).

+ I excavated my way through Ron Chernow’s bulging, semi-woke (by the standards of the Texas Schoolbook Commission)  biography of George Washington. I say, “semi-woke,” because while it discreetly admits that Washington was a patrician dandy of no exceptional military or administrative genius, who abused his troops, committed war crimes, bought his first election to public office with booze, and held 100s of slaves, often treating them cruelly in response to his own ineptitudes as a gentleman planter, it is quick to balance any evidence of fault in the character of the founding father with a statement to the effect that “while this may sound extreme to our ears, it was fairly typical for the time.” Which is, of course, exactly the point.

+ While Chernow’s text is rather elliptical on these decisive episodes in Washington’s life (there’s little risk of it being pulled from libraries in most of the states, at this point), the book is generously foot-noted with primary sources, many of them in Washington’s own hand (he was a prolific self-promoter of his own exalted life), which fill-in the more tenebrous aspects of his character.

+ The first member of the Washington clan to step foot in Virginia was John, who came ashore in the Tidewater area in 1676. George’s great-grandfather wasn’t much of a farmer (after all, he only owned three slaves and some Irish “servants”), but he did amass thousands of acres of land along the Potomac and received a military commission to kill Indians in Maryland, where he earned a reputation for treachery and slaughter. In one notorious incident, Washington murdered five Indian leaders who had come to negotiate a treaty, then claimed their land. He was known by the Potomac tribes as Conotocarious, “destroyer of villages, devourer of homes.”

+ It turns out George Washington could have easily run a CIA black site or the Gitmo torture camp. As an officer of the VA Regiment in the French & Indian wars, he proved a sadistic disciplinarian inflicting as many as 1500 lashes a day for relatively minor offenses: “drinking in and informed another officer he “was determined to hang two or three at a time as an example to the others. (ie., his soldiers).” He kept his condemned prisoners in iron chains in total darkness. In a letter to Robert Dimwiddie, the Lt Governor of VA, with whom he would later clash in the revolutionary war, Washington wrote coldly: Your honor will, I hope, excuse my hanging instead of shooting them. It conveyed much more terror to others and was for example’s sake we did it.”

+”To live in Virginia without slaves is morally impossible.”

– Rev. Peter Fontaine, 1757

+ Though they can’t be blamed for its pompous and derivative neo-classical design, seven master black carpenters built most of the plantation house at Mount Vernon. They were all enslaved by Washington. The overseer of the construction, Humphrey Knight, wrote Washington, assuring the young land baron that he wasn’t light with the whip when he spotted a loose board or crooked plank: “As to the carpenters, I have minded ’em all I posably could and has whipt ’em when I could see a fault.”

+ Martha Washington kept her own sister, Ann Dandridge, as a slave. Ann was the daughter of Martha’s father John Dandridge and a young, enslaved woman, who was half-black, half-Cherokee. Ann lived as a slave at Mount Vernon until 1802, after first George, then Martha died.

+ Re: Pentagon contracts & high-tech weaponry, when Washington learned the Continental Army only had 300 barrels of gunpowder–not the 10k he’d been promised–Benjamin Franklin urged him to arm the troops with bows and arrows. “They’ve worked pretty well for centuries,” Franklin wryly noted. If only the bow-makers had had a PAC!

+ George Washington had a brilliant aide-de-camp during the final three years of the Revolutionary War. No, not Alexander Hamilton. His name was John Laurens. Laurens was that rare thing: a wealthy abolitionist from South Carolina. Even rarer, his father had amassed the family fortune through the slave trade, purchasing and selling as many as 10,000 people captured in Africa and shipped in chains to Charleston. Laurens had already developed plans to free his own family’s slaves and eagerly approached Washington with a daring scheme to shift the balance of power in a stagnating war, especially in the South, where British forces had just ransacked and torched Savannah. Laurens proposed emancipating at least 3,000 blacks who would be willing to serve in a South Carolina regiment to confront the marauding troops of Banastre Tarleton, who had terrorized the southern coast from Virginia to Georgia. Members of the Continental Congress warmed to the plan and some even wanted to go further, emancipating all slaves who’d be willing to serve in the American army.

After all, at that point, the Continental Army was already more integrated than any US army until the Vietnam War, with free blacks accounting for more than six percent of the total force. But Washington, who still owned or controlled as many as 300 slaves, recoiled at the idea of arming emancipated blacks in the South. He rejected Laurens’ plan and quietly contemplated a scheme, typically reactionary, of his own: sell off the slaves of Mt. Vernon and his other properties and loan the proceeds to finance the maintenance of his bedraggled army. In a letter to his plantation overseer (and distant cousin) Lund Washington, the general wrote that if the Americans lost the war

it would be a matter of little consequence to me whether my property is in Negroes or loan certificates, as I shall neither ask for, nor expect, any favor from his Most Gracious Majesty…the only points therefore for me to consider are…whether it would be most to my interest, in case of a fortunate determination of the present contest, to have Negroes and the crops they will make, or the sum they will fetch and the interest of the money.

So the war dragged on another three years, until finally the decisive blow was struck at Yorktown, where the nearly all-black First Rhode Island Regiment made one of the most audacious raids. As for Laurens, who dreamed of abolishing slavery across the Americas, he soon became one of the last casualties of the war, shot in the head during a skirmish with British troops pillaging a rice field along the Combahee River, a couple of weeks after the British fled Charleston.

+ George Washington’s First Inaugural Address was written by James Madison. Congress’s Response was written by James Madison. And Washington’s rejoinder was written by…James Madison. At the operational level, America’s politics has always been a charade.

+ Even George Washington drew the line at separating the families of the people he “owned”…

+ Baron Johann de Kalb, a German mercenary whom Lafayette recruited to aid the American Revolutionaries on Washington’s military acumen:

He is the most amiable, obliging, and civil man, but as a General he is too slow, even indolent, much too weak and is not without his portion of vanity and presumption. 

+ George Washington railed incessantly against the war profiteers and speculators during the Revolution, calling them “plundering scoundrels,” while today’s members of Congress (and sons of Trump) make millions trading in weapons and oil stocks, as their states and districts get gouged at the pump.

+ For all of his faults, Washington was no nativist. He encouraged mass immigration to the young Republic, writing  to the radical Dutch republican Francis Van der Kemp in 1788: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”

+ Tom Paine, that Che Guevara of the 18th century, in a letter to George Washington, May 1, 1790: 

Our very good friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, has intrusted to my care the key of the Bastille, and a drawing handsomely framed representing the demolition of that detestable prison. I feel myself happy, and being the person through whom the Marquis has conveyed this early trophy of the spoils of despotism, and the first ripe fruits of American principles transplanted into Europe….

Soon, the nation Washington was building would be putting its own dissidents into similar prisons, under the Alien and Sedition Acts.

+ During the war, Tom Paine served as George Washington’s chief propagandist. His fiery pamphlets kept the money flowing and the popular spirits elevated even as the Revolutionary Army stumbled and stuttered up and down the Atlantic seaboard. After the Brits called it quits and Washington assumed power, he turned his back on his old friend. When Paine, the trans-Atlantic rebel, faced the guillotine in Revolutionary France for refusing to endorse the execution of the King, Washington failed to intervene, ignoring the urgings of Jefferson and Franklin. (Paine survived the Terror by a freak accident, as the prison guards mismarked his cell door.) Paine came to consider Washington a “counter-revolutionary” (he coined the term), denouncing the former revolutionary-turned-imperious leader as either “an apostate or an imposter.” 

+ Washington wasn’t a religious man. He countenanced religion, but didn’t practice it. He saw himself, a little grandly perhaps, as a figure of the enlightenment, a man of reason and science. If anything, he was a Deist, who believed in a Supreme Being and saw Jesus as a moral teacher, not a god. Still, he wasn’t hostile to religion in the manner of his fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, who, in an 1816 letter to the writer Horatio Gates Spafford, described the divinity schools of Harvard and Yale as “seminaries of despotism.” For Jefferson, the Church was as oppressive as the monarchy.

Jefferson and Washington certainly were no Christian Nationalists. Jefferson wasn’t even a Christian. His biographer Joseph Ellis describes him as a secular humanist, though I don’t know what kind of humanism can rationalize holding other humans in bondage. Perhaps a future Supreme Court decision from Alito or Thomas will explain.

+ Hirsute historical note: The powdered wigs worn by European and American elites in the 17th and 18th centuries were originally designed to cover hair loss from syphilis and only later became such powerful symbols of status and high station that most of George Washington’s portraits depict him wearing one, though he never did. He did use scented powder on his hair, though that was mainly to prevent lice and to disguise the smell of the animal lard pomade used to flatten and sculpt his naturally red locks. (See: Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair by Emma Tarlo.)

+ In reading about Washington, I’ve become increasingly distracted by Peggy Shippen, wife of Benedict Arnold. Washington was so entranced by her that, even after evidence of her complicity in Benedict’s treason came to light, he refused to believe it. Shippen was reportedly the highest-paid British spy of the Revolutionary period. Aaron Burr was almost certainly right in charging that Shippen was not only central to the conspiracy but also enticed Arnold into becoming a British agent and surrendering West Point. This image of Shippen, whose coif would have shamed Madame Pompadour, gives you some idea of what charged the erotic fantasies of the nation’s first president, who called himself “a votary to love.” He remained in the thrall of a similar “Georgian era” English beauty, Sally Fairfax, who fled the nearby Belvoir plantation at the start of the Revolution for Bath, England, for most of his life…

+ Speaking of Burr, in Gore Vidal’s novel the slight that prompts the fatal duel on the Heights of Weehawken is Hamilton’s assertion that Burr regularly had incestuous relations with his daughter Theodosia, these maulings occurring at roughly the same time Burr’s other hated rival, Thomas Jefferson (who had manufactured evidence against Burr at his treason trial), was raping his enslaved house servant Sally Hemings. So when the Originalists piously ask about some Constitutional nuance, what was the intent of the Founders? It was probably something designed to indemnify their own felonious predilections.

+ There’s no question Washington obsessed over sex. On his bookshelves lurked two of the age’s most notorious sex tutorials, The Lover’s Watch: or the Art of Making Love by Aphra Benn and Daniel Defoe’s Conjugal Lewdness: or Matrimonial Whoredom. The question is why the father of the country failed to father any children by Martha or any of his hundreds of enslaved women? (Martha gave birth to four children in her first marriage, so the lack of fecundity in her relations with George probably didn’t originate with her.) Was it sterility or impotence? If you’d been able to peek inside Washington’s medicine cabinet at Mount Vernon, you’d have found it well-stocked with Spanish Fly, the sex potion made from dead blister beetles, purchased, like Viagra today, by mail order. In Washington’s case, it came from chemists in London in four-ounce jars.

+ But Spanish Fly often proved lethal, especially when administered to women orally. (Men tended to rub the mixture on their penises, hoping to swell and prolong their erections.)  In 1772, the Marquis de Sade fatally poisoned five Parisian prostitutes when, in anticipation of a weekend orgy (at which he longed to spend hours with his nose between their buttocks sampling their farts), de Sade compelled the young women to eat anise seed cupcakes liberally laced with Spanish Fly. Since Martha outlived George, we can perhaps assume that the orders of Spanish Fly were meant to fortify his own faltering Priapic ambitions.

+ While George Washington, the Father of the Country, didn’t have biological progeny that we know of, during his second term, his favoritism toward Alexander Hamilton led to charges that Hamilton was actually his illegitimate son. (This might give new subtext to “The Room Where It Happened.”) American politics has always featured this scurrilous element. It’s one of its most endearing features and, at least until Trump, has helped to serve as a check on the development of cult-like followings for American presidents. (See The George Washington Scandals by John C. Fitzpatrick.)

Washington’s false teeth, some of which were extracted from enslaved people. Photo: Mount Vernon.

The post Priapic Ambitions: Notes on George Washington appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: cspirtos – Public Domain

The ruling class appears shaken, their brains rattled, and their nightmare once thought vanquished—the Red Menace—appears reborn. Following the recent sweep of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in New York and Colorado elections, there has been a torrent of backlash and public meltdowns from President Trump claiming, “I’d be the greatest communist in history,” to humanity’s first billionaire posting the usual anti-communist nonsensical blather that communism has the “[h]ighest death count of any philosophy.” Elon Musk unabashedly cites inflated, unserious death counts that include in their tally of so-called “victims of communism” the Red Army’s liquidation of Nazis and fascists during the World War II.

Adding to the frenzy, one New York City council member even invoked the halcyon days of the FBI and the CIA, bragging that they would have “made sure unabashed revolutionaries” like the DSA National Political Community “were neutralized one way or another. In fact, that was basically the entire point of having them.” Vicki Paladino made a candid admission that domestic and foreign intelligence agencies were never designed to defend “democracy.” Rather, they were engineered as clandestine political police forces operating with lethal, counter-revolutionary violence.

And decades of disclosures and investigations reveal this. From the Church Committee convened five decades ago that investigated illegal intelligence operations to Florida Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna’s recent hearing on the CIA’s mind control program called MK-ULTRA, domestic and foreign intelligence agencies have been mired in deeply nefarious practices, from illegal surveillance and counterintelligence operations to outright assassination. Put bluntly, the CIA and FBI, during the glory days of Cold War Red Scare politics, acted in service of capital, alleviating real or imagined threats to the profits of an increasingly paranoid ruling class, and building their own pile of bodies along the way as they waged a protracted and often secret war against those seeking to build power for the many rather than the few.

Indian Country itself paid a heavy price. And only recently have we begun to come to terms with the consequences, with the commutation of Leonard Peltier’s two consecutive life sentences for the killing of two FBI agents during the federal reign of terror waged against the American Indian Movement on the Pine Ridge reservation. While Peltier walked out of a federal prison, many more never went home and still more await justice. While we have yet to heal from the wounds of the past, this generation faces a different battle.

Putting aside whether the recent DSA electoral wins pose an existential threat to the capitalist class, the underlying fear has a material basis. As the billionaire class, and now, grotesquely, the trillionaire class, reap record profits, the quality of life in the heart of global capitalism and imperialism appears to be in rapid decline. Among the top leading causes of death for young people in the United States are drug overdoses, death by suicide, and gun deaths. Life expectancy has cratered across the board. For American Indian people, the decline in life expectancy is particularly acute, falling in recent years from an already abysmal of 71 years down to 65—with South Dakota reporting a median age of death for American Indian people of death at a staggering 58 years. Despite more than a million COVID deaths in the United States, the drop in life expectancy is caused by more than the pandemic; it includes massive inequalities and social and economic factors.

It should be no surprise this generation has little hope in the system that robbed them of a future, to say nothing of a bleak present. A poll last year by the rightwing think tank the Cato Institute found that more than a third of people under the age of 30 in the United States had a favorable view of communism. Still more, nearly two-thirds, looked kindly on socialism. While the turn towards anti-capitalism may be partially a natural reaction to the death drive of capitalism, it doesn’t mean the embrace of left wing and liberatory politics translates directly into socialist and communist movements or just societies. In fact, revolutions are quite rare events, and when they succeed or fail, they can be quite deadly, with much of the violence often stemming from the forces of counter-revolution. What is often misunderstood is that this counter-revolutionary violence doesn’t necessarily happen in the context of, or in reaction to full-blown revolution. It instead should be understood a structural phenomenon, something that is expressed in policing and intelligence agencies ready to crush even the most benign forms of resistance, such as the most recent sentencing a Prairieland defendant to 30 years in federal prison for moving a box of antifascist zines.

As historian Gerald Horne has pointed out in his aptly titled book The Counter-Revolution of 1776, the founding of the United States was borne of a counter-revolution against the abolition of slavery. Most African people sided with the British against the colonists, viewing the British empire as a more favorable ally in the ending the tyranny of chattel slavery. One might add that this counter-revolution also included the genocidal assault on Native people, whom Thomas Jefferson described as “merciless Indian savages” in the Declaration of Independence. Indigenous wars against the United States often entailed allying with the competing empires such as Britain against the American colonists, whom Indigenous nations viewed as a greater threat. This was in an effort to stave off the white invasion of Indigenous homelands. While counterfactual history has its limits, it is a worthy pursuit to examine the freedom dreams of Black and Indigenous people—and to understand exactly how U.S. imperialism has suppressed those aspirations. Those aspirations have sometimes coalesced with socialist movements and often not, but the general ignorance of their liberatory impulses is a symptom of the larger miseducation project.

To start, most people in the United States are ill-equipped to discuss the actual social policies of past or present communist societies. Decades of anti-communist indoctrination have effectively blunted the public’s ability to conceptualize alternatives to capitalism. This mass ignorance is no accident; it is the result of a deliberate miseducation that reduces socialism to a caricature of authoritarian misery, while sanitizing capitalism as a beacon of personal liberty and market choice. Consequently, history is viewed through a double standard: the structural failures of socialist states are deemed unforgivable atrocities, while the global body count of capitalism is dismissed as the unavoidable friction of an imperfect but necessary system.

These myths are supposedly backed up by the numbers, which attribute 100 million deaths to communist societies, numbers that far exceed the Nazi and fascist body counts and do not begin to offer up comparable studies of colonial and capitalist societies. It is worth noting that these overblown statistics come from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was established by a unanimous act of Congress in 1993 and opened a museum in 2022. The foundation even counts deaths from COVID-19 as victims of communism. This asymmetric accounting leaves the capitalist empire entirely off the hook. If we apply the exact same rigorous, unforgiving metrics of state responsibility to U.S. capitalism alone, the narrative of Western benevolence completely collapses into an endless ledger of mass murder.

Factoring the true cost of U.S. capitalism and imperialism requires mapping what historian David Michael Smith terms the “endless holocausts” of U.S. empire. This global empire was built on the theft of a continent through Indigenous genocide and the theft of tens of millions of Black lives via the transatlantic slave trade. Smith places the total body count of the U.S. empire at close to 300 million dead. If we scrutinized global capitalism’s daily, preventable toll—from structural poverty and enforced starvation to imperialist wars and corporate healthcare monopolies—with the same metrics applied to communist societies, the free market might register 100 million deaths every few decades. Ultimately, the ruling class does not fear the Red Menace because they value human life; they fear it because they know their empire of accumulation by dispossession is fundamentally fragile, driving them to unleash the counter-revolutionary violence they have always weaponized to survive.

This piece first appeared on Red Scare.

The post Victims of Communism? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Colin Lloyd

The Democratic National Committee’s 192-page post-mortem on the 2024 election, titled ‘Build to Win. Build to Last,” failed to build, to win, or to learn. It never answered the only question that mattered: how did a twice-impeached, multiply-indicted former president walk back into the White House with more votes than prior to his indictments?

The report, authored by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera and released in May 2026 after months of stonewalling by DNC Chair Ken Martin, reads less as a serious political reckoning than as a confirmation-bias pamphlet drafted by people determined not to upset the party’s old guard. It calls for renewed focus on “Middle America,” criticizes years of disinvestment in state parties, and faults poor economic messaging. It is not wrong on any of these points. But these points alone did not cost the party America — not just Middle America.

The report boasts of conducting more than 1,200 interviews to assess the health of state parties in every state, district, and territory. While it seems to be an impressive number, it remains questionable if the interviews were of local party leaders, or general democratic voters? Did it include micro-level analysis of competitive districts? Or to account for 6.8 million voters who supported Biden in 2020, where they went, and why they left.

There was no breakdown of Harris’s collapse by age. No independent examination of what drove young voters away, particularly in university towns where Gaza protests defined the political atmosphere of 2024. How many of the 6.8 million were from Generation Z? And not a word on the Zionist bubble around Biden and how that funded and shielded Israel as it carried out a live-streamed genocide in Gaza.

This is not a methodological oversight. It is engineered by design. University towns and young voter precincts were precisely where the Democratic coalition was visibly disintegrating. Most likely the reason they lost states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Students who watched ‘genocide Joe’ enable the starvation of children in Gaza, did not stay home out of apathy. They made a calculated judgment: that on the question of war crimes, there was no daylight between the two candidates. The autopsy never acknowledged the question existed.

The autopsy is defined as much by its omissions as by its findings. Missing entirely is any serious examination of the “Uncommitted” movement that emerged during the 2024 Democratic primaries. A new political phenomenon that mobilized at least 700,000 of Democratic voters in protest of the Biden administration’s Gaza policy. Despite becoming one of the most visible grassroots insurgencies of the 2024 nomination process, the report neither analyzes its causes nor assesses its electoral consequences. It asks how Democrats lost public voters but avoids asking why so many of its own primary voters publicly warned the party months before Election Day that its support for Israel’s war in Gaza carried profound political and moral costs. An autopsy that omits one of the election cycle’s most significant internal rebellions is less an honest diagnosis than an exercise in belief perseverance and selective memory.

Instead, it retreated into campaign mechanics: Harris “was not well prepared,” Democrats assumed Trump was unacceptable, and the party deluded itself that undecided voters would hold their noses and choose the lesser of two evils. Observations about messaging and strategy, carefully constructed to avoid touching the one issue that led the Arab Americans vote in Michigan to split evenly between Harris and Trump when it favored Biden by a large margin in 2020.

The autopsy’s authors, like much of the Democratic establishment, prefer to frame the party’s youth problem as a generational disconnect, a cultural or communication failure that better social media spending might fix. That framing is both disingenuous and lazy. There is no generational disconnect. There is a massive divide between the old guard and the young generation — and the base at large — when it comes to Israel.

Recent primary results could not be clearer exposing the failure of the DNC autopsy. More than 80% of Democratic voters hold a negative view of Israel. That is not a fringe position within the party. That is the party. More than four out of five of the Democratic voters’ regard the long-held ‘sacred cow’ unfavorably, and the post-election study does not contain a single mention. That is dismissive of 80% of the Party. The analysis is not seeking lessons learned, it is a whitewash.

The Gaza omission was not an oversight. It was a cover-up. The IMEU Policy Project’s executive director was blunt, demanding the release of findings that the autopsy’s own author had reportedly acknowledged in private: DNC officials’ internal data showed Biden’s support for Israel was a net negative for Democrats in 2024. That finding never appeared in the report. It was buried. Former DNC Vice Chair David Hogg said publicly that he told Rivera directly, “We need to acknowledge the role that Gaza played in us losing younger voters.”

This is not an outlier critique. It is coming from people who participated in the process and are now openly saying its central finding was suppressed. When the contributors to an autopsy publicly declare that the finding is edited out, the document becomes a cover-up.

The autopsy’s Gaza omission collapses entirely when measured against what Democratic primaries have screamed in 2026. Candidates running on explicitly anti-Israeli-policy platforms have toppled incumbents and dethroned members of Congress backed by Democratic leadership and bankrolled by AIPAC. These are not noble protest campaigns falling short. They are winning Democratic voters, in Democratic primaries, on an explicitly pro-Palestine platform and making AIPAC a radioactive word and political liability.

The DNC must root out AIPAC money buying its primaries and align itself with the overwhelming majority of its own voters on Israel. It must confront the political cost of a foreign policy that millions of Americans no longer view as merely misguided, but as complicit in war crimes.

The autopsy did not diagnose the cause of failure, it smothered it. Without an honest accounting of the party’s failures in 2024, and without acknowledging the electoral success of anti-Israel Democratic candidates in the 2026 primaries, there can be no realistic path forward. The lesson is simple: votes count; money does not.

The post Democratic Primaries Reveal What the DNC Autopsy Buried appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Karsten Winegeart.

There comes a moment in every empire’s reign when the maps stop making sense.

Not necessarily because the borders move. But because there comes a time when the people who used to draw them no longer get to decide what the world looks like.

The World Cup has become that moment.

For weeks we’ve been force-fed the usual sentimental slop by broadcasters who sell every tournament as a Disney movie with shin pads. Childhood sacrifices. The little pitch where the captain learned to dream. Somewhere a violin is playing while a drone shot circles the dusty makeshift pitch where he scored his first triumphs. Every World Cup arrives wrapped in manufactured emotion sufficient to distract from the only story that actually matters.

They are all missing it.

The real story isn’t about one magical teenager or one heroic underdog (though there are plenty). The story is that Europe, and its colonial offspring in South America, have finally lost their exclusive claim to what they spent a century calling the beautiful game. Not ownership on paper. Ownership of the imagination. And the people losing that ownership are not handling it with any particular grace.

Listen carefully enough and you can almost hear the panic.

Germany’s captain Joshua Kimmich, a man paid approximately the GDP of a mid-sized African island nation to kick a ball into a net, lamented after his country’s elimination that they hadn’t even faced “world-class” opposition — yet Germany had deserved to go home because they’d been poor against everyone they met. It was remarkably candid. It was also accidentally hilarious in the manner of a man who complains that the cliff he walked off wasn’t tall enough to justify the fall.

It is entirely possible that Kimmich didn’t intend a racial hierarchy in his remarks. Intentions are a luxury that history rarely extends to the people on the receiving end of them. When a German captain casually dismisses opponents from Africa and the Global South as not “world-class,” certain historical resonances are simply unavoidable. Not because the son is responsible for the grandfather’s crimes, but because Europe has spent centuries confusing dominance with superiority, and the confusion did not evaporate when the flags came down. That is the peculiar tragedy of predominance. It demands that reality keep apologizing for contradicting it. When reality refuses, the superior man concludes not that he was mistaken, but that reality itself has become unreasonable.

The old football aristocracy cannot quite process what is happening. They still believe greatness comes with passports, UEFA coefficients, television contracts and a kind of protected designation of origin. They keep looking at the badge instead of the ball. The teams they spent decades treating as colorful, token guests have, not so quietly, become full members. History, that most patient and merciless of ironists, is at it again.

Football was supposedly invented on a damp little island whose greatest modern export seems to be nostalgia for when it mattered. The English wrapped the game in rules, measurements and Victorian certainty before exporting it alongside railways, missionaries and the assumption that everyone else would forever remain grateful wards. But the game, unlike empire, refused to obey. It escaped. It rolled downhill through oil towns in Algeria, fishing villages in Senegal, barrios in Colombia, refugee camps, favelas, concrete housing estates, mountain schools and beaches where the goalposts are flip-flops and the ball is held together with string, tape and stubborn optimism. Nobody asked permission. Nobody waited for a UEFA coaching license. Somewhere along the journey the colonies stole the lesson and improved upon it considerably.

That is what empires fear most. Not invasion. Iteration.

South America has always occupied a curious middle ground in Europe’s football imagination. Brazil and Argentina were reluctantly admitted to the royal family because their genius became impossible to deny. Pelé bent reality until racism briefly became inconvenient. Maradona humiliated England with a celestial hand and then with a goal so magnificent it should have been classified as a geological event. The acceptance, however, always came with unspoken conditions. South America was permitted to be magical because Europe remained respectable. One danced. The other governed. Even today, South American brilliance is packaged as inherited instinct while European success is explained as intelligence. One is poetry. The other is engineering.

Funny how engineering keeps getting dismantled by poets.

But this tournament has moved somewhere new. This is no longer merely South America’s rebellion. This is Africa’s arrival. Whether an African nation lifts the trophy is almost beside the point, because Africa has already won the argument. Nine of ten African nations who qualified for this tournament advanced to the Round of 32. The previous record was two. Nine. Morocco, South Africa, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cape Verde, Egypt, DR Congo, Algeria. A continent previously permitted to send a handful of teams to the party as exotic garnish on a European entrée has arrived this summer not as expendable parsley but as the entire menu.

The current president of one of the co-host countries once dismissed much of Africa, Haiti and parts of the developing world as “shithole countries.” It turns out quite a few of those places produce extraordinary footballers. Empires have always been remarkably efficient at extracting talent while dismissing the humanity attached to it. The plantation operated on exactly this principle.

Europe spent years congratulating itself on the wonderful diversity of football, provided that diversity continued winning trophies for France. It turns out the arrangement was considerably less popular in Dakar than in Paris. African brilliance was perfectly acceptable provided it arrived wrapped in a European passport and a national anthem approved by UEFA. The colonial relationship worked splendidly, right up until the colonies started eyeing the trophies directly.

This World Cup changes the equation. The sons of Dakar, Casablanca, Accra and Kinshasa are no longer simply reinforcing European dynasties. They are eliminating them.

Look at Spain. There may be few countries in Europe more publicly devoted to the mythology of purity while simultaneously existing as living proof that purity was always a story told by people who needed one. The Iberian Peninsula has spent thousands of years functioning as the migratory equivalent of Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing — Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, Jews, Berbers, Phoenicians, Celts, Africans, merchants, refugees, invaders, pilgrims — everyone came through, everyone left something behind, and the genetic result is a people who carry the whole argument of human movement in their faces. The country also runs a football league so magnificently predictable that it makes paint drying a more suspenseful spectacle — Real Madrid or Barcelona have between them colonized the title since titles began, with the reliability of tides and considerably less charm. And yet from within this monument to foregone conclusions emerged Lamine Yamal: a seventeen-year-old Barcelonan born to Moroccan and Equatoguinean parents, currently dismantling defenses and the last remaining fantasies of people clinging to the notion of a neatly defined Hispanic race. The boy isn’t challenging Spanish identity. He is Spanish identity. He simply reminds certain people of the parts they’d prefer to excise from the family record.

The Netherlands has, so far, offered the tournament’s most revealing after-party. As Morocco progressed, thousands filled Dutch streets waving Moroccan flags. Television cameras dutifully found the fireworks and the broken glass, because chaos always makes better television than sociology. But the real story was not broken glass. It was that several generations after arriving as “guest workers” — a phrase that contains, in miniature, the entire philosophy of European racism: come, be useful, do not belong — Moroccan-Dutch communities were openly celebrating a homeland that their critics insist they should have renounced. They are Dutch enough to pay taxes. Dutch enough to build roads. Dutch enough to play for Ajax. But the moment they celebrate Morocco, someone helpfully remembers they were never entirely Dutch after all. Football has an inconvenient habit of exposing the fiction that identity can only run in one direction, and that the direction is always determined by the host.

The scoreboard has no ideology. Possession statistics are gloriously indifferent to nationalism. Gravity remains undefeated by racism.

Which brings us, with a certain inevitability, to one of the countries hosting this tournament — a country conducting, simultaneously with the football, its own furious argument about who belongs on the pitch and who belongs in the stands and who should be turned away at the gate entirely. The World Cup arrived in North America already marinated in that argument, and the argument has not been courteous enough to wait outside.

Hours after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that birthright citizenship remains protected under the Fourteenth Amendment, Stephen Miller — the principal architect of the current regime’s immigration agenda, a man who has made the question of human belonging his life’s organizing principle — went on camera and complained that people arrive from “third world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel,” have a baby on American soil, and that child becomes a citizen. He compared it to boarding a Boeing 747 and thinking that makes you the pilot.

Let us pause, with the seriousness the claim deserves, on the wheel.

The wheel was invented in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, a country whose national team is at this World Cup. Writing was developed in Sumer and independently in Egypt. Algebra was named by a ninth-century scholar from what is now Uzbekistan, also present in this tournament. The numerical system Miller uses to count the families he splits up and deports was developed in India. Agriculture, the literal precondition of civilization, emerged across sub-Saharan Africa, the Fertile Crescent, and the Americas. The great medieval universities of Timbuktu were teaching astronomy, law and medicine while Europe was burning people for suggesting the earth moved. The 747 he referenced flies on aerodynamic principles developed in significant part by mathematicians from cultures Miller considers beneath his notice. Cape Verde, a volcanic archipelago whose entire population would rattle around inside MetLife Stadium, has qualified for the knockout rounds of this World Cup and faces Argentina.

The Fourteenth Amendment was written specifically to guarantee citizenship to the children of formerly enslaved people — Africans brought to America in chains, whose forced labor built the economic infrastructure of one of the countries now hosting this tournament. That is the birthright Miller is calling worthless. On the pitches where he would have their descendants excluded, those descendants are eliminating European football powers on penalties in front of the entire watching world.

Gustavo Alfaro, Paraguay’s coach, provided the tournament’s moral counterweight, to Kimmich, to Miller, to every person in a blazer who still believes excellence is fundamentally a product of the right postcode. After guiding Paraguay to the greatest result in the country’s football history, eliminating Germany 4-3 on penalties in Foxborough, Massachusetts, Alfaro held the post-match press conference for nearly fifty minutes, which is roughly forty-nine more than Bill Belichick ever managed in that room. He was not gloating. He was bearing witness.

“Our opponents are developed in the best academies in Europe,” he said. “We come from the red earth. We learned to play football barefoot, with parents making sacrifices so their children could pursue their dreams. That’s where we come from.” The president of Paraguay declared a national holiday. “The power of football is wonderful,” Alfaro said. “May everyone in Paraguay enjoy it.”

Two philosophies. One press room. One going home.

Football escaped because unlike cricket or polo or rowing, it demanded almost nothing. A wall. A street. A beach. A patch of dirt. Two stones for goalposts. Empire exported the rules. Poverty perfected the improvisation. And now the improvisation is winning, which is only a surprise if you spent the last century confusing the ownership of the game with the ownership of the gift.

Football was never really beautiful because of tactics or trophies or famous stadiums. It is beautiful because the ball possesses an almost supernatural contempt for hierarchy. It requires almost no infrastructure. It can make a billionaire cry. It can make a shepherd immortal. It can make the descendants of empire spend ninety minutes chasing shadows cast by children whose grandparents were told, clearly and repeatedly, that they belonged only at the margins of the story.

The final will be held at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Just across the river from the city where millions of immigrants arrived and received the full protection of an amendment that Stephen Miller would now like to declare worthless.

There would be something clarifying — not poetic, not ironic, clarifying, the way a plainly stated truth clarifies — if the last two teams standing included at least one nation from a place he considers beneath notice.

Somewhere on red earth right now a child is tying together rags because nobody can afford a proper football. Somewhere in Brussels or Rotterdam or Phoenix, another child with African parents is learning that he isn’t quite European until somebody needs a goal in the eighty-eighth minute. Somewhere a politician is explaining, with great confidence, why civilization belongs to one people and not another.

The ball, magnificently indifferent, keeps rolling toward whoever can control it.

That has always been football’s greatest insult to racism.

Talent refuses passports.

The post The Empire Loses the Ball appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

NATO defense ministers conference at NATO HQ in Brussels. Photo: U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Jerry Morrison, Dept. of Defense.

These are difficult times for anyone who has consistently criticised NATO. From the era of ‘defending the Free World’ against communism, through the age of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘Global War on Terror,’ to today’s supposedly existential struggle against almost the entire non-Western world, the Alliance has repeatedly reinvented the narratives that justify its existence. The language changes; the underlying logic does not. NATO remains indispensable, and every new enemy (whether discovered, exaggerated, or actively produced) becomes further proof of its necessity.

For decades, critics coming from anti-militarist, anti-hegemonic or left perspectives had to work hard to deconstruct this mythology against the combined efforts of political elites, mainstream media, academic institutions and security experts. The intellectual task itself was never particularly difficult. The contradictions, hypocrisies and devastating consequences of NATO’s interventions have remained visible long after the bombs stopped falling. What required courage was speaking against the prevailing consensus.

Ironically, today the Alliance’s own leaders have become its most effective truth-tellers. Donald Trump has repeatedly stripped away the moral language that traditionally surrounded NATO. Mark Rutte, the Alliance’s Secretary General, has become equally candid, while Germany’s Chancellor and France’s President increasingly speak with remarkable openness about Europe’s military future. Yet the privilege of telling the truth about what NATO has become belongs only to those in power. As the repression of protest movements ahead of the Ankara summit demonstrates, citizens may know the truth about this military giant—but they are not expected to organise against it.

The Ankara Summit has not even begun, yet its conclusions are already known. The phrase ‘historic summit’ has become so overused that it has almost lost its meaning. Some observers expect the ‘Europeanisation’ of NATO, with European allies assuming greater responsibility for financing and leading the Alliance. But this remains largely rhetorical. Europe cannot replace the United States as the Alliance’s military backbone. It can, however, willingly tighten the noose around its own neck—and perhaps around the world’s. While Atlanticists remain preoccupied with the Washington-Brusselsrelationship and whether Trump truly intends to reduce America’s commitment, a more significant transformation is taking place within Europe itself. New military coalitions are emerging inside NATO. The Baltic states and Poland increasingly pursue their own security agenda, driven by historical grievances and profound Russophobia. Sweden and Finland, once symbols of neutrality, have rapidly embraced militarisation, with Helsinki now evenpermitting the deployment of nuclear weapons on its territory (American weapons, naturally, making these states ever more deeply integrated into Washington’s strategic architecture). Similar regional military configurationsare quietly taking shape in the Balkans, where Croatia, Albania, Bulgaria and Kosovo increasingly speak of strengthening their own defence cooperation: NATO within NATO.

What truly distinguishes NATO 3.0, however, is not merely its willingness to name Russia and China explicitly as strategic adversaries or to proclaim its global ambitions. Rutte himself has explained that NATO is indispensable because it enables the United States to project power globally through Europe. Europe, in other words, functions as both a platform and force multiplier for American global strategy (as shown by the Epic Fury operation).

More revealing still is the language in which NATO now describes itself.Rutte proudly speaks of a ‘defence industrial revolution.’ The expression is revealing. Just as the First Industrial Revolution transformed production through factories and mechanisation, NATO 3.0 seeks to reorganise military production on an entirely new scale, not primarily for defence, but for permanent profitability. Behind the rhetoric of ‘collective security,’ ‘strategic autonomy,’ and ‘deterrence’ lies a far simpler reality: NATO increasingly functions as a mechanism for transferring unprecedented amounts of public money into private corporate hands.

Hence NATO 3.0 represents yet another mutation: an alliance whose principal historical mission increasingly appears to be the permanent militarisation of Western economies, and most probably, a new war with Russia.

The timing is remarkable. For decades, governments insisted that public finances required austerity. Hospitals, universities, pensions and social welfare supposedly had to accept painful budget discipline. Suddenly, none of these fiscal constraints apply to military expenditure. Deficits that were politically impossible for healthcare or education have become entirely acceptable for weapons procurement. Defence spending is no longer presented as a burden but as an investment strategy and an excellent possibility for job openings (they don’t mention the expanded graveyards that usually go along with warfare).

This raises further profound questions. If cloud computing, artificial intelligence, satellite communications and autonomous weapons are increasingly developed by private technology corporations, who ultimately controls national security? If governments become structurally dependent upon commercial providers, where does democratic accountability remain? When military procurement begins to resemble venture-capital investment, who actually benefits from permanent insecurity? These questions receive surprisingly little attention.

Instead, we hear only the language of emergency. Europe must rearm immediately. Industrial production must accelerate. Procurement rules must be simplified. Military investment cannot wait. Yet history teaches us that emergencies rarely remain temporary. Exceptional measures gradually become permanent forms of governance. Under conditions of continuous perceived threat, extraordinary military spending begins to appear normal, while demands for investment in education, healthcare or social justice suddenly become fiscally irresponsible.

Security colonises politics. What emerges before our eyes is a model in which war itself becomes increasingly privatised. Private defence contractors, technology firms, logistics companies and AI developers become indispensable actors within the military ecosystem. Even warfare itself becomes increasingly remote. Artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and digital infrastructures allow military operations to be outsourced, automated and commercialised in unprecedented ways. War does not necessarily require mass mobilisation; it requires investment portfolios.

For small member states that expected welfare instead of warfare, the implications are particularly sobering. Increasing defence budgets is presented as solidarity with the Alliance, but in reality, it often resembles compulsory participation in a vast military-industrial investment scheme. Citizens finance weapons they neither produce nor control, purchasing protection against threats that are frequently amplified by the very geopolitical logic that sustains the system.

NATO has never been merely a military alliance within the UN-based international order. It has always been an expression of the Western strategic worldview. Today it is becoming something even more complex: a system where security policy, industrial policy, technological power, and capital accumulation increasingly merge. The Ankara summit will not only discuss defence and deterrence; it will reveal how deeply the future of capitalism, technology and organised violence has become intertwined. It will be yet another chapter in the political economy of permanent mobilization for warfare.

The post NATO 3.0: Alliance or Military-Industrial Investment Fund? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Iranian woman in chador and blue jeans. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Absorbing the revelations in the book Regime Change by journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, I posed a question to my American colleague:  why do figures like Donald Trump continue to get elected?  With his signature measured calm, he offered a chilling truth.  He suggested that Americans have not felt history’s harsh winds blow with hurricane force since the Civil War, which has left our society dangerously naive and perilously unserious.

On the global front, many Americans are poorly informed about the geopolitical realities of other countries, particularly regarding West Asia.  Consequently, they have historically been susceptible to Israeli-aligned narratives, allowing Zionist and pro-Israel influencers to disproportionately shape U.S. public opinion and foreign policy in Israel’s favor.

The post Iran: The Veil, the Beard and the Bomb appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin meeting in Beijing for bilateral talks, May, 2026. (Screengrab from video posted to YouTube.).

Since the early 1990s, the Russian city of Blagoveshchensk, located on the Amur River, has steadily reemerged as one of Russia’s most important “border trade hubs.” Sitting directly across from the Chinese city of Heihe, migration for work, commerce, and education has become a routine occurrence between these two cities. Now, the world’s first cross-border cable car system, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2026, will further connect Blagoveshchensk and Heihe.

The vast majority of the shared Russia-China border runs along the Amur River and its main tributaries, including the Argun and Ussuri. Several other cross-border infrastructure projects are underway, including a road-railway bridge at the Dzhalinda mixed checkpoint, also scheduled to open this year. While sanctions and the war in Ukraine have cut into much of Russia’s civilian economy, its Far East has benefited from the expanding trade and infrastructure links being constructed with China.

Mutual trade, much of it routed through these border crossings, increased by two-thirds from 2022 to 2024, reaching $240 billion. Meanwhile, the trade activity between Russia and China grew by 23 percent between January and May 2026. In March, the Chinese ambassador to Russia called for additional border crossings to cut logistics costs.

This level of economic integration is a far cry from the militarized frontier of the 1960s, when hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Soviet troops engaged in deadly clashes in 1969 during the Zhenbao Island incident. The affair pushed both Moscow and Beijing to seek greater ties with Washington in the aftermath. Some American strategists continue to see the border as a potential fault line, with a 2021 monograph from the US School of Advanced Military Studies calling it “ripe with historical tensions and potentially susceptible to an information campaign by the United States.”

Today, however, neither Russia nor China has any reason for renewing hostility. Both view Washington as a greater strategic concern and have benefited from the stability that a settled border has provided.

It is crucial to remember, however, that the present border arrangement is less than 20 years old, having been finalized only after nearly four centuries of intermittent contact, competing claims, and flashes of violence. Exploring that history is essential to understanding how China and Russia have ensured current stability along their border and why it remains a distinctive and important part of their burgeoning relationship.

Expanding Empires Meet

The Tsardom of Russia and the Qing Empire first encountered each other as they expanded into the Amur River Basin in the 1640s, with limited local geographic knowledge and differing concepts of imperial governance. Russian officials approached the region through European notions of fixed boundaries and territorial control. Qing rulers relied more on a tributary system that provided a strategic buffer. Moreover, Qing maps and administrative claims also treated the region as their domain, historian James A. Millward notes.

Clashes in the 1650s and an inability to communicate directly complicated efforts to define a frontier between Russia and China. Finally, in 1689, the Qing employed two Jesuit advisers, whose command of Latin helped bridge negotiations with the Russians’ Polish interpreter, resulting in the Treaty of Nerchinsk.

Russia agreed to withdraw from much of the Amur region, a concession made easier by its retention of territory west of the Argun River, expansion opportunities in Siberia, and trading rights with the Qing. In return, the Qing secured the frontier and consolidated control over Mongolia. As historian James Carter notes in the China Project, a combination of “shared common interest, willingness to compromise, trusted intermediaries, the threat of force, and even some desperation” helped produce the settlement.

The experience taught the Qing Empire to place greater emphasis on surveying and mapping. Under the Kangxi Emperor, Jesuit missionaries helped compile the Kangxi Atlas between 1708 and 1721, combining European surveying methods with Chinese cartography to produce a more accurate map of the empire and reinforce imperial claims. China and the newly proclaimed Russian Empire signed the Treaty of Kyakhta in 1727 to clarify the frontier through Mongolia and establish a regulated trading hub at Kyakhta.

This frontier held steady for over a century, demonstrating the durability of the agreements and the established balance of power between Russia and China. However, by the mid-19th century, an array of foreign powers, alongside internal unrest that erupted into the Taiping Rebellion, massively weakened the Qing Empire and created an opening for Russia to return to the Amur Basin.

Already under pressure from maritime threats from European powers and Japan, China faced a different challenge from Russia’s overland expansion. Many of China’s “unequal treaties,” which provided foreigners with “privileged status” and forced the Chinese to make concessions, were based on access to Chinese ports and commercial markets. This was also the case with the treaties Beijing had with Russia, which resulted in the expansion of territory for Moscow. The Russia-China Treaty of Aigun in 1858 transferred the northern bank of the Amur, and the 1860 Treaty of Peking ceded all territory between the Ussuri River and the Pacific Ocean to Russia, including what would later become Vladivostok.

Political Crises and the Communist Era

Railway construction extended Russia’s informal reach into Manchuria by the end of the 19th century. This development continued during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, which targeted foreign infrastructure in China. Russia joined a multinational intervention to crush the unrest and also seized additional Chinese territory in Manchuria. Its forces were later pushed out in defeat following the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–1905.

The fluidity of the region’s borders grew following political upheaval in both the Russian and Qing empires. The 1911 Revolution in China and the 1917 Russian Revolution were followed by civil wars and instability, including a brief conflict in 1929 between the Soviet Union and a Chinese warlord over control of the Chinese Eastern Railway.

China’s civil war continued intermittently after the 1929 clashes until the communist victory in 1949, which helped establish a short-lived Sino-Soviet alliance. Political pragmatism by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Chinese leader Mao Zedong led to the border issue being set aside. Chinese officials repeatedly said that “the issue was not worth discussing” in the 1940s and 1950s.

Stalin’s death in 1953 and the ensuing ideological tensions between Moscow and Beijing brought border disputes back to the surface. China increasingly challenged the legitimacy of the 19th century’s unequal treaties, which led to a military buildup on both sides until the deadly Zhenbao Island incident on the Ussuri River in 1969. “Mao engineered a fierce conflict with the Soviet Union along the border in the Soviet and Chinese Siberia region in early March 1969, which escalated to a series of intermittent skirmishes for more than half a year,” states the Hoover Institution.

The border became even more militarized in the aftermath. Hundreds of thousands of troops, supported by air bases, missile sites, and armored formations, were deployed by both sides in preparation for war. Seeing an opportunity to exploit the Sino-Soviet split and improve its position against the Soviet Union, Washington moved to normalize relations with China and established official diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979.

By 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was, as scholar Neville Maxwell notes, “seeking to ease the exhausting burden of the huge military concentrations in the Far East as well as the war in Afghanistan,” and initiated the modern border negotiations, accepting that “the claim to ‘exclusive right of possession and sovereign jurisdiction’ over the border rivers was unsustainable.”

The Soviet collapse in 1991 left a diminished Russian Federation to inherit the dispute, giving Moscow added incentive to stabilize relations with China. Agreements reached during the 1990s and 2000s divided or transferred the last contested islands, a process formally completed in 2008.

Today, the river boundary largely follows the main navigable channel, with specific treaty demarcations for islands and junction zones. Joint Russian and Chinese commissions monitor river changes, as well as fishing and transportation rights across much of the world’s fifth-largest international border.

Post-Border Normalization

While the border between China and Russia has not seen any overt confrontation since the signing of the 2008 agreement, the tense history of the border has not disappeared entirely. It resurfaced in 2023, when China’s Ministry of Natural Resources revised guidelines encouraging the use of historical Chinese names for places in other countries, including in Russia’s Far East.

The maps drew greater attention to China’s ongoing territorial disputes with countries such as India, Vietnam, and Malaysia. But the inclusion of Russian locations prompted a response from the Russian Foreign Ministry, which stated that “the Russian and Chinese sides adhere to the common position that the border issue between our countries has been finally resolved,” saidMaria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the ministry, according to Newsweek.

While Russia is now clearly the junior partner in the Sino-Russian relationship and increasingly strained by its war in Ukraine, it has found ways to preserve its influence in the Far East. The Khasan-Tumangang bridge over the Tumen River, which is expected to be open soon, for example, connects Russia and North Korea by road and increases their control over China’s access to the Sea of Japan from its northeast. At its closest point, the Chinese border is around 10 miles from the sea, but it cannot be reached without passing through Russia or North Korea first.

Observers periodically speculate that China’s larger population could eventually alter the balance across the Amur Basin by simply overwhelming the Russian population. However, Chinese migrants tend to prefer opportunities elsewhere in China rather than in Russia’s Far East.

The two countries tend to view the region through a different economic lens, with Russia prizing the Amur “for the security and transportation opportunities it provides, while China is more inclined to harness the river’s power for energy and agriculture,” according to an article on the platform RANE Worldview. These differing priorities have so far, however, proven more complementary than competitive.

The Russia-China border dispute was as much about national prestige and historical legitimacy as it was about territory, and today neither side has a strong incentive to revisit it. Growing economic integration and reducing uncertainty in the Amur River Basin have improved their strategic positions and turned a once militarized boundary into a cooperative working zone. The flow of Russian energy exports and Chinese investment and manufactured goods has made stability increasingly profitable for both sides, significantly raising the cost of renewed confrontation. Much the same can be seen along the US-Canada border, where extensive trade and shared infrastructure have helped keep lingering territorial disagreements politically insignificant.

As both Russia and China seek alternatives to the US-dominated maritime order, the two countries have, over the last 40 years, transformed one of Eurasia’s long-contested frontiers into one of its most stable and constructive regions.

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

The post How Russia and China Learned to Love Their Border appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Still from The Skulls.

Three years ago, a major Supreme Court ruling struck down affirmative action in higher education admissions. Well, that is what they would like people to believe. In fact, there are still many preference policies in elite college admissions — especially if the student is rich and White. As the Trump administration continues to campaign against universities it claims are using race-related admissions policies that disadvantage White students, it has been silent about the many ways that White students are granted preferential treatment.

It is not hard to find high-profile examples. By his own admission, President George W. Bush was a C-student at Yale; he liked to remind people that even a C-student can become president. Bush also was a C-student in high school, and his SAT score was below the median for his class at Yale. Why might an academically mediocre student gain admission to an Ivy League university?

Bush had many characteristics that gave him advantages. The most important one is that he was a legacy — his father and grandfather both graduated from Yale. This meant that his chance of admission would be higher than other similar students without legacy status. And because of the history of racial discrimination, White students are more likely to have this type of legacy status.

Another admissions advantage is having a parent willing to make a hefty donation. The father of Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, donated $2.5 million to Harvard in 1998. Kushner was then accepted there, even though reports suggest that he did not have an impressive high school academic record. The economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues found that being from a family in the richest 1 percent increases the odds of a student’s admission to an elite college by 34 percent.

This preference for the very wealthy has clear racial implications. Despite the visibility of a few rich Black celebrities, Black families are significantly underrepresented among the ultra-rich. While about 13 percent of high school students are Black, only 3 percent of the richest 1 percent of families are Black. Meanwhile, about half of high school students are White, but over 80 percent of the richest 1 percent of families are White. The admissions preference for the richest 1 percent functions as a White preference.

There are other policies that serve the same ends. Students at elite colleges aredisproportionately from the Northeast. To diversify their enrollment, elite schools give a preference to applicants from underrepresented states. As one admissions consultant stated, “You have a much better chance of getting in if you’re in a state that might be in a more rural area” rather than a major city. An analysis of data from Brown University found that applicants from the very White states of North Dakota and Montana had an admissions rate more than twice that of applicants from New Jersey, a much more racially diverse state. This kind of preference could have benefited someone like Vice President JD Vance, who may have gained an advantage in admissions to Yale Law School because he is from a small town in Ohio.

Or consider athletic recruiting, which has been called “the biggest form of affirmative action in American higher education.” Elite schools like Harvard recruit for sports such as skiing, sailing, water polo, rowing, squash, fencing, and golf, and the recruited athletes are overwhelmingly wealthy, White students. Elite colleges also rely more heavily on ‘early decision’ admissions programs that require a student applicant to agree to attend the school if accepted. The acceptance rate for such applicants is higher than for regular admissions, and the pool of applications tends to skew White and wealthier. As the journalist Jeffrey Selingo reasons, “Students from upper-middle-class and wealthy families are willing to trade the ability to compare financial aid offers for an increased chance of getting in.”

Using the Supreme Court decision as its guide, Trump’s Justice Department is working to make sure that Black and Hispanic students are extremely underrepresented in elite medical schools. The department claims to be working to prevent the use of “racial proxies”—policies that are race-neutral but that provide a disproportionate benefit to a particular racial group.

Although legacy, donor, geographic, athletic, and early decision admission preferences all tilt in favor of White applicants, the Justice Department does not have an interest in preventing the use of these proxies for White students. It only has an interest in proxies for Black and Hispanic students and in blocking these students’ admission into elite education. In other words, the Trump Justice Department is practicing racial discrimination, not fighting it.

This originally appeared on CEPR.

The post Affirmative Action is Alive and Well . . . If You are Rich and White appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Conference room of the Supreme Court, where cases are decided. Photo: Supreme Court.

The Roberts Supreme Court is determined to earn the contempt with which it is viewed by most of the public. Its ruling this week essentially gave Donald Trump free rein to fire anyone in the government who doesn’t do what he wants. As corrupt as his administration has been to date, the Court’s ruling removed pretty much all remaining restraints.

Coupled with its recent ruling on revoking temporary protective status for immigrants from Trump’s list of “shithole” countries, the Court is effectively allowing Trump to make this a government of white Christian nationalists and for white Christian nationalists. The immigration ruling said that a long list of openly racist comments about people from the countries in question cannot be taken as evidence that Trump is motivated by racial animus in his immigration decision. In the same vein, Trump could fire every non-white or non-Christian person in the government as long as he insists his decisions were not based on race or religion.

But leaving Trump’s racism aside, let’s go back to the corruption that the Supreme Court felt it was important to unleash. As it stands now, agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are supposed to be staffed by professionals who make decisions on approving prescription drugs for public use, or airplanes for flying, based on a careful examination of the evidence on their safety.

The Supreme Court just ruled that Donald Trump can fire the people overseeing these agencies for any reason whatsoever, or no reason at all. In their “unitary executive” theory, the writers of the Constitution felt it was essential that the president have the authority to fire anyone who makes decisions based on evidence or who refuses to lie for them.

This means that if the head of the FDA refuses to approve a drug based on the analysis of the experts who have examined the evidence, Trump can fire them. Similarly, if the FAA doesn’t greenlight a plane because it has failed safety tests, Trump can fire the FAA administrator.

Now, let’s bring Donald Trump’s family into the picture. (I’m always hesitant to mention a new grift on the possibility that the Trumpers would do it, if they had only thought of it.) Suppose Don Jr. has a 10 percent stake in a drug company that is pushing an ineffective, or even harmful, drug as a cure for cancer. The Supreme Court has ruled that Trump can tell the FDA commissioner that they must ignore the judgment of the experts who have examined the evidence and approve Don Jr.’s drug.

The same applies to planes. Eric can take a stake in an airplane manufacturer and demand that the FAA approve its latest plane, or his daddy will fire the commissioner. And if the commissioner happens to be a principled person who refuses to jeopardize public safety to keep their job, the Supreme Court says Trump can fire them and appoint an acting commissioner who will approve Eric’s plane.

If these stories sound far-fetched to you, then you haven’t been paying attention. Trump and his family are openly using the government to steal money in every way imaginable. The Supreme Court just gave them even more ways.

Of course, as the dissenters pointed out, it would not even make sense for Congress to have created these agencies in the first place if the president could put his political hacks in all the positions with any authority. What’s the point of having an FDA if it only approves the drugs of companies that make payoffs to the president’s family?

Trump has said he wanted to downsize government, and the Supreme Court has just come out strongly in favor of that view. Since it has ruled that federal agencies should all be cesspools of corruption, they might as well be shut down. Drug approvals based on payoffs to the Trump family are meaningless. Let’s just save the money and let drug companies push whatever crap they want in whatever way they want. At least no one will be fooled by a federal agency certifying the drugs as safe and effective.

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

The post The Supreme Court Opens the Door to White Christian Only Government appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Still from “The Socal Dilemma.”

As large language models (LLMs), a new generation of AI chatbots, and other forms of generative AI (artificial intelligence) become more widely used as information sources, it’s no surprise that many people are taking advantage of the convenience of AI search engine overviews. According to a June 2026 Pew Research Center report, roughly 60 percent of Americans read AI search engine summaries, 30 percent reported that they don’t, and 10 percent said they “were not sure if [they’d] done so.” But what is more alarming is that many users may not realize that these prominent, commanding summaries are generated by AI and can be incomplete or biased. Moreover, they may not know that they can opt out.

AI summaries are designed to sound polished and authoritative, which obscures the inherent inconstancy behind them. After all, these responses are not produced through independent verification of facts and accounts, which becomes even more concerning when a user is searching for information about current news events.

AI overviews mediate between users and the information they’re actually searching for. Just as a picture window or a camera viewfinder highlights some elements of a scene, while leaving others outside the frame, AI overviews direct our attention in certain ways—but with the added twist that, in this case, the framing is largely invisible to the user. One challenge that careful users of AI summaries must address is how to recognize the limits of what they’re reading.

Project Censored’s Beyond Fact-Checking guide originally examined the power of journalistic framing to shape our understanding of news events, through sourcing decisions, language choices, and contextual omissions. But now, a growing number of Americans use chatbot assistance or other generative AI tools to get their news, which presents some of the same challenges mentioned above, but without any equivalent transparency about how the information is generated and by whom.

Who’s responsible for erroneous summaries?

In June 2026, the Munich Regional Court issued a preliminary ruling that Google is “liable for a series of false statements generated by its AI Overviews feature.” The German court’s decision, Wired reported, could “make this case a historical precedent.” The court’s analysis revealed that instead of only displaying relevant links based on users’ prompts, Google’s AI summary tool generated “‘independent, new, and substantial statements’ based on a misinterpretation of information available on the internet.”

The German court’s conclusion is especially troubling when coupled with the findings of two recent studies. In January 2026, the Center for News, Technology and Innovation (CNTI) reported that many respondents had concerns about political bias in traditional news sources but viewed AI chatbots as “neutral.” This trust in AI was not shaken by either the bots’ “chronic factual errors” or their occasional inability to “provide up-to-date information.” Although this study’s data size was relatively small, the patterns emerging among “habitual” AI users are clear and threaten to permanently destabilize journalism, not only economically but as a cornerstone of democracy. Second, based on an investigation of news reports from 22 public service media outlets in 18 countries, the BBC and the European Broadcasting Union reported in October 2025 that the most popular AI assistants—including ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini—misrepresented news content 45 percent of the time.

How input determines output

AI chatbots rely heavily on well-formed questions or prompts, but users often forget important details, conflate events, or “take a contested premise as a given,” creating imperfect or biased responses. This means that our own framing, our limited understanding of a news event, could produce a narrow and misleading result.

Many users report feeling a sense of control when using chatbots, but a February 2026 MIT study found that chatbots provided less accurate, less truthful responses to users with lower English proficiency, less formal education, or non-US origins. LLMs “may actually exacerbate existing inequities by systematically providing misinformation or refusing to answer queries to certain users,” the study’s lead author, Elinor Poole-Dayan, warned.

In November 2025, Project Censored covered how hallucinations are not hiccups in the programming of AI chatbots; they are built into these systems. According to Science, LLMs “bluff” because “their performance is ranked using standardized benchmarks that reward confident guesses and penalize honest uncertainty.” Basically, chatbots are know-it-alls who don’t know it all.

Terms like “hallucination” and “glitch” effectively frame these occurrences as ephemeral bugs that are an inevitable, but inconsequential, side effect of greater technological advancement. Corporate media often prefer to hype progress, rather than challenge these assumptions. For instance, the Wall Street Journal recently framed AI “hallucinations” as an insignificant tradeoff for detailed and neat research, and that a user’s best defense against AI errors is “more AI” for “a round of fact-checking.” And in 2024, the Washington Post Creative Group launched a Generative AI Explorer’s Guide, paid for by Amazon Web Services.

AI-generated text is even invading the pages of legacy newspapers. In spring 2026, The Atlantic alleged that the New York Times published AI-generated text in its opinion pages. And after the Chicago Sun-Times laid off 20 percent of its staff, the paper published an AI-generated summer reading list. Unfortunately, several of the recommended books didn’t exist.

Dueling frames

Generative AI tools might seem convenient for accessing digestible news, but they’re hindering users’ curiosity and driving them away from independent news outlets and toward narratives generated by biased technology systems. A Stanford University study that audited six commercial chatbots for their ability to answer news questions concluded, “As more users encounter journalism through AI lenses rather than directly through publishers’ sites, differences in [context], attribution, and source selection will increasingly shape whose reporting reaches the general public, under what terms, and how.”

So now we see dueling framing issues: generative AI and chatbots constructing flawed responses based on how users phrase their questions and the assumptions embedded in their search terms, while AI itself is framed in public discourse as either fallible technology prone to error or, more frequently, a trustworthy tool capable of delivering reliable information.

What can we do about AI gatekeeping?

Most obviously, avoid search engine AI overviews. For news, seek reporting directly from reputable independent news outlets.

Use your web browser’s settings to disable or hide its automated overviews. If that’s difficult in your current browser, consider switching to one that supports that preference, such as Brave.

These are good, but limited first steps, since they keep you lodged in a consumer role. More significant change is likely when we coordinate our actions with others. Journalists can make sure to avoid reporting that reinforces common mindsets many people unconsciously employ when thinking about AI—including equating AI systems with progress, treating them as “objective” tools that work independently of human influence, and focusing on them primarily as consumer products whose main purpose is to improve users’ quality of life. Instead, journalism that aims to promote algorithmic literacy and the public good should give at least equal attention to how AI systems often reflect and reproduce existing biases, thus amplifying social and economic harms, especially to already marginalized communities.

Members of those communities and their allies can join forces with independent news outlets and digital rights organizations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to ensure that new technologies promote freedom, justice, and innovation for everyone. A March 2026 report from FrameWorks found that framing new AI tech in terms of social justice, using specific real-life examples, helped people break free from the individualistic, consumer mindset and appreciate how future AI systems could be developed to promote inclusive public goods rather than exclusive private benefits.

Super PACs (political action committees) focused on promoting AI, such as Leading the Future, are already raising and spending millions of dollars to influence politicians in the upcoming midterm elections. The message to politicians is clear, The Guardian reported, “Regulate AI, and we will find you, wherever you are.”

We probably cannot hope to outspend the AI Super PACs, but we may be able to challenge the predominance of AI boosterism by working to reframe the public’s understanding of what AI systems, such as Google’s Overview, can—and can’t—actually do.

When we take time to frame-check AI-generated overviews and chatbots’ interpretation of news events, two things happen. First, we realize that those summaries are not as authoritative or trustworthy as they appear at first; and, second, we remind ourselves of our own capacities for critical, independent thinking.

The future of AI is not as inevitable as Big Tech’s cheerleaders would have us believe. Instead, by looking critically at what’s left out of frame—including the reproduction of systemic inequalities and the massive amounts of money being directed toward promoting new AI-powered systems—we can chart a different course, one that centers social justice and public good in every discussion of AI.

This first appeared on Project Censored.

The post Frame-Checking Generative AI’s Role in Transmitting News appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Conditions on 26 June 2026 as per ERCC – CC BY 4.0

Europe is on fire. Record-shattering heat waves have gripped the continent, pushing temperatures above 40°C (104°F) in multiple countries, buckling infrastructure, overwhelming hospitals, and claiming thousands of lives. This is not a natural disaster. It is the foreseeable, profitable outcome of decades of fossil fuel addiction and capitalist extraction.

According to a sobering analysis by The Economist, the late-June heat spike could cause around 12,000 excess deaths across Europe. The study, covering 854 cities, shows that human-caused climate change has made the event far more lethal than it would have been otherwise. France alone has already reported over 1,000 excess deaths, with Spain, Italy, and Germany also suffering heavy tolls, and northern countries — that are often less prepared for the heat — facing temps well over 30°C degrees. The elderly and the poor are paying the highest price. The World Health Organization has confirmed more than 1,300 excess deaths linked to the heat since June 21.

The oceans tell an even darker story. In June 2026, global sea surface temperatures reached a new all-time record, hitting averages of 21.0°C according to the EU’s Copernicus Marine Service — surpassing previous records set in 2023 and 2024. Scientists warn we are entering “uncharted territory,” with marine heat waves expanding and intensifying. A supercharged El Niño has thrown more fuel on an already burning planet, but the root cause is clear: decades of unchecked carbon emissions by the fossil fuel industry.

This is not misfortune. This is mass murder by profit.

The fossil fuel giants — ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, Italy’s ENI — have known for half a century that their products were cooking the planet. They lied, they lobbied, they delayed, and they continued drilling, fracking, and expanding. In 2025 alone, ENI reported adjusted net profits of around €5 billion, while European oil majors collectively posted obscene windfall gains. Greenpeace and other reports have repeatedly exposed how these companies continue to prioritize extraction over survival, even as they greenwash their images with token “transition” investments that amount to a fraction of their fossil fuel spending.

ENI has been deeply entangled in energy deals tied to Israel’s operations in occupied Palestinian waters, supplying crude oil that powers the military apparatus carrying out what many legal experts describe as genocidal actions in Gaza. Fossil capital doesn’t just warm the planet — it fuels the wars and occupations that accelerate ecological collapse.

Nowhere is this more obscene than in the fusion of war and ecological destruction. The world’s militaries — led by the United States and its allies — are among the largest institutional emitters on Earth. The ongoing genocides in Gaza and the Sudan, and wars in Ukraine, Iran and elsewhere pour tens of millions of tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere through fuel-guzzling jets, tanks, bombs, and reconstruction. Every missile fired, every drone launched, every city reduced to rubble accelerates the very climate breakdown that makes these heat waves deadlier. War is not separate from the climate crisis — it is one of its most vicious engines.

The new priests of the digital age — the hyperscale data centers powering Artificial Intelligence — are adding massive new heat to an already overheating planet. Data centers consumed about 415 TWh globally in 2024, roughly 1.5% of world electricity, and are projected to nearly double by 2030. In Europe, demand is exploding. A single large AI training facility can consume as much power as 100,000 households, while the heat they generate raises local land surface temperatures by an average of 2°C, with some areas seeing spikes as high as 9°C. The AI boom is not “clean tech” — it is another ravenous consumer of fossil energy in a system that cannot stop growing.

Even more terrifying is the human body’s hard limit. Scientists define a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C (95°F) as the theoretical survivability threshold — the point at which, even in shade with unlimited water, the human body can no longer cool itself through sweating. Recent studies show that deadly heat stress is already occurring at lower wet-bulb levels, especially for the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions. During this heatwave, large parts of southern Europe approached or breached dangerous thresholds, where mortality spikes dramatically. We are not just losing comfort. We are losing the basic environmental conditions required for human survival.

Skeptics still trot out tired arguments: “It’s just natural cycles,” “The models are wrong,” or “Alarmists like Guy McPherson have been predicting doom for years.” McPherson, the controversial ecologist who has long warned of near-term human extinction, continues to argue that we are witnessing abrupt, irreversible collapse driven by feedback loops — Arctic methane release, permafrost thaw, and accelerating warming. While his exact timeline remains debated, the underlying science he cites — runaway warming and tipping points — is increasingly validated by mainstream observations. The deniers’ real record is one of consistent failure: every prediction of “cooling” or “stabilization” has been falsified by relentless temperature records, melting ice, and rising seas. Their skepticism is not science — it is ideological defense of a dying profit model.

Europe likes to call itself a climate leader. In reality, it remains dangerously unprepared. Most cities lack proper cooling infrastructure. Heat action plans are inadequate. Vulnerable populations are abandoned to suffer and die while governments prioritize corporate profits and military budgets over human survival.

The message of this heat wave is brutally simple: we are no longer approaching the abyss. We are in free fall. Every additional fraction of a degree means more corpses, more suffering, and more irreversible damage to the only home we have.

The time for half-measures and greenwashed promises is long past over. We need a ruthless, immediate dismantling of the fossil fuel economy, an end to the wars that feed it, and a radical reorientation toward genuine justice — for people and for the planet.

The heat is not coming. It is here. And even with the dismantling of the criminal system driving it, it is only likely to get worse — until it becomes unsurvivable. Strategies exist that could help provide some temporary relief if the world collaborated and cooperated to implement them. The struggle for human existence has begun. The question is whether we will fight with the urgency this moment demands to prioritize our common humanity and our planet above allowing business as usual to steam ahead.

The post Europe Is Burning: The Deadly Heatwave That Exposes the Criminality of Fossil Capitalism and the Economy of Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe – CC BY-SA 4.0

Whether Israelis will ever comprehend the irreparable damage inflicted upon their country’s reputation by their UN Ambassador, Danny Danon, is a moot point. The damage Israel has done to itself through its barbaric practices in occupied Palestine is simply impossible to overcome.

Danon, however, utilizes a peculiar approach to defending Israel within international institutions: he relies on bullying, intimidation, and an overt attempt to silence anyone who dares to challenge the official Israeli narrative—particularly women leaders. Yet, what makes his behavior most outrageous is his deployment of these abrasive tactics to suppress an issue that demands the utmost sensitivity: the systemic use of sexual violence and human rights abuses against Palestinians.

The confrontation took place during a UN General Assembly session convened to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict. Senior UN officials were presenting harrowing findings documenting sexual violence against Palestinian detainees.

True to form, Danon refused to engage with the substance of the reports. For Israeli diplomacy, the enemy is never merely the armed adversary; it is the judge, the independent human rights observer, and the UN investigator whose sole mandate is to document violations of international law.

The immediate target of Danon’s wrath was Pramila Patten, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict. Instead of reflecting on the grim findings, Danon demanded Patten’s resignation. He accused her and the broader international community of harboring an “obsession” with targeting Israel.

When Vanessa Frazier, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, attempted to intervene on a point of order per established protocol, Danon unleashed a vitriolic verbal assault. Refusing to yield, he shouted over her, ordering her to “be quiet” and drowning out the chamber with his outbursts. “Shame on you. You are part of this obsession,” Danon bellowed.

While such unruly behavior should have resulted in Danon’s immediate removal from the chamber, the diplomatic asymmetry of the UN prevailed. It was Frazier who found herself trying to de-escalate, politely clarifying that her procedural request was “not personal.” Danon shot back with typical defiance: “You will not be allowed to bully us.”

Herein lies the supreme irony of Israel’s diplomatic relationship with the UN and international law. Israel stands as one of the most egregious, serial violators of international law in modern history—a decades-long pattern of behavior left unpunished by Western vetoes, which ultimately emboldened it to carry out an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Yet, Israeli officials persistently claim the mantle of the ultimate victim, alleging they are the targets of antisemitism, unfair bias, and now, “bullying” by the very institutions they defy.

But the mountain of evidence cannot be shouted away. According to an extensive report issued by Patten’s office, there are verified patterns of systemic abuse, sexual degradation, and psychological torture weaponized against Palestinian men, women, and children in Israeli detention camps like Sde Teiman.

The weight of this evidence reached such an undeniable threshold that the UN Secretary-General’s office formally added Israel to the global ‘List of Shame’—the blacklist of states committing grave violations against children in armed conflict.

None of this exposure is enough to convince Danon or the broader Israeli political establishment that Israel does not possess a sovereign right to violate international law. In their view, merely pointing out these crimes constitutes an act of aggression.

This systemic denial extends to every facet of the conflict. A comprehensive UN investigation recently concluded that Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian children in Gaza as a core component of its military campaign. The numbers are staggering: Between October 7, 2023, and October 7, 2025, an estimated 20,179 Palestinian children were killed—about 30 percent of all Palestinian deaths.

“The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” stated commission chair Srinivasan Muralidhar, noting that Israeli authorities have systematically continued to commit the crime of genocide.

While these findings provide another layer of ironclad legal proof regarding genocidal intent, the true significance of the report lies in its exposure of the rationale behind targeting youth. Typically, the disproportionate slaughter of children and women is dismissed by Western apologists as “collateral damage”. The UN inquiry shattered this defense, offering a far more consequential conclusion: the targeting of Gaza’s children is part of a calculated strategy to destroy the biological continuity and future existence of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

As Muralidhar bluntly summarized: “By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist.”

It remains a profound disappointment that the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice—often swift to indict war crimes committed elsewhere—continue to move at a glacial pace regarding Israel. Tragically, the catastrophe continues unabated because there is still no meaningful international mechanism willing to enforce sanctions or employ genuine pressure to halt it.

This is precisely why Danny Danon wants the world to be quiet. His outbursts are not merely directed at UN diplomats; they are directed at global civil society, ordinary citizens, and anyone refusing to look away. Israel demands absolute silence while Palestinians are starved, raped, and murdered. According to its twisted logic, committing these atrocities is an inherent right, and objecting to them is an act of malice.

If this logic is allowed to prevail, it becomes the blueprint for every future aggressor who wishes to kill, rape, and starve a population for geopolitical gain. Palestinians and Lebanese are already forced to inhabit this dystopian reality. Our collective responsibility is clear: we must refuse to be quiet. We must speak out, ensuring our voices drown out the shouts of Danon and his peers, so that murder and systemic violence are never normalized as tools of military necessity.

The post Monsters Playing Victims: Danny Danon’s Twisted War on the Truth appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Forrestal arrives at the White House for a Cabinet meeting, c. 1945 – Public Domain

My guess is not many Americans know that in 1947 our first Secretary Of Defense believed a Jewish state in the Middle East was a bad idea for the United States, let alone that he met his death falling from a 16th story window.

But James Forrestal should be of interest to anyone who is repulsed by the ruthless timidity of the Democratic Party, excited by the possibilities of the Democratic Socialists, and eager to push back on the fictional narrative of Israel as our eternally indispensable ally.

Fortunately, no matter how mislaid and dust-covered, history is always shouting at us, always desperate to start a conversation. So it was with a genuine sense of amazement that, after spending 4 bucks at a used book sale, I let James Forrestal talk to me.

Who was James Forrestal?

Like the new American nation of 1776, the new American empire of 1945 also had its Founding Fathers of bankers, diplomats and lawyers. Forrestal, a Princeton grad, bond salesman and ardent capitalist, toiled beside the Harrimans, Kennans, Bohlens, Lovetts, Achesons and McCloys to invent a conqueror’s foreign policy. These were men who lunched and drafted white papers and sent cables as they transformed the United States military from one which trained with broom handles prior to 1941 into an atomic superpower.

One of my favorite books about World War II is Winston Churchill’s “The Hinge Of Fate”. The entire thing is about logistics. How the Allies’ superior ability to move men and material around the globe enabled them to defeat the Nazis.

That was Forrestal – an efficient administrator who spent his days trying to figure things out. As a special assistant to FDR he oversaw industrial mobilization and procurement during the war, then, as Secretary of the Navy under Truman, he oversaw demobilization after it.

Yet nothing came calmingly. Where Dean Acheson was pleased enough with himself to magisterially title his memoir “Present at the Creation”, Forrestal analytically scribbled a diary. It combined gnawing unsureness about the future with extraordinary prescience about the problems contained in what these wise men were creating.

Some of the diary is charmingly dated. For Forrestal, the difficulty of government work was that it “not only has to be well done, but the public has to be convinced that it is being well done.” Today’s Democratic leadership, having managed to streamline that process into appearing-to-govern-by-saying-words-at-realities, would chortle at such sincerity.

Then too, much of the diary is personally annoying. I have always believed that the Pentagon does not exist to promote freedom – it exists to protect monied interests from the consequences of their avarice. Forrestal, on the other hand, wasn’t merely a cold warrior, he was cryogenic.

A passionate foe of Henry Wallace and ever fearful of the Soviet menace, Forrestal was more than willing to champion Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s immortal and perpetually followed advice to Harry Truman on how to acquire defense appropriations: “The only way you are going to get what you want is to make a speech and scare the hell out of the country.” And, truth be told, there are entries in the Forestall Diaries which certainly scare the hell out of me.

For instance, years after Hiroshima, no one in the evolving security structure of the United States, including Secretary Of Defense Forrestal, seems to have had any conception of the destructive power of the atomic bomb. The bomb itself was just another optional weapon to quell geopolitical disturbances, and individual branches of the service wanted control of their own nuclear arsenals.

The situation produced a Forrestal diary note which is positively Hegsethian in its casual derangement:

27 October 1948 General Notes on the Question Navel Air – Air Force

5. I do not believe that air power alone can win a war any more than an Army or naval power can win a war, and I do not believe in the theory that an atomic offensive will extinguish in a week the will to fight.

By now, you might be asking yourself why I’m asking you to read what James Forrestall has to say when I myself disagree with much of it?

Simple. It’s because when he pushes back against Zionists and Israel, Forrestal is both a kindred spirit and an honest breath of never-mentioned air.

On Israel these days, only certain people are required to explain their positions by jumping through inquisitory hoops: Platner in Maine. El-Sayed in Michigan. Mamdani-backed candidates. Any voters horrified enough by the butchery in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank to vote accordingly.

Meanwhile, all the wrong people are under no such obligation. Frauds who portray the Diaspora as a Dantean level of hell profit handsomely while going unchallenged: Deborah Lipstadt, a dingbat whose racist ravings somehow qualified her to be Joe Biden’s Antisemitism Czar. Mark Levin, the “Lord Haw-Haw of Fox News”, and an out-and-out propagandist for a foreign country who does not even pretend to aspire to dual loyalty. Bill Maher, a duplicitously hectoring prick who somehow managed to receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on the extraordinary grounds of never having uttered a challenging satirical thought.

For these people, Palestine and Palestinians do not exist. But they did for Forestall. And his diary reminds us of a time when they existed for many. In fact, views on Zionism and Israel’s founding, for which Democratic Socialists are attacked today, were held by members of the cabinet during Israel’s founding!

I’ll let the diary speak.

1 December 1947

Cabinet Lunch

…Lovett reported on the result of the United Nations action on Palestine over the weekend. He said he had never in his life been subject to as much pressure as he had been in the three days beginning Thursday morning and ending Saturday night.

[Herbert Bayard] Swope, Robert Nathan, were among those who had importuned him…The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which has a concession in Liberia, reported that it had been telephoned to and asked to transmit a message to their representative in Liberia directing him to bring pressure on the Liberian government to vote in favor of partition.

The zeal and activity of the Jews had almost resulted in defeating the objectives they were after. I remarked that many thoughtful people of the Jewish faith had deep misgivings about the wisdom of the Zionists’ pressures for a Jewish state in Palestine, and I also remarked that the New York Times editorial of Sunday morning pointed up those misgivings when it said, “Many of us have long had doubts concerning the wisdom of erecting a political state on a basis of religious faith.” I said I thought the decision was fraught with great danger for the future security of this country.

Here, talking with the former Secretary Of State, he discusses Israel in terms of the money and political considerations which prevented a one state solution. His closing sentence would work in any DSA campaign today.

3 December 1947

Lunch–Mr. Byrnes

Lunch today with Jimmy Byrnes. We talked Palestine. Byrnes recalled the fact that he had disassociated himself from his decision of a year ago to turn down the Grady report which recommended a federated state for Palestine or a single Arabian state. He said the decision on the part of the President to reject this recommendation and to criticize the British for their conduct of Palestinian affairs had placed Bevin and Attlee in a most difficult position: He said that Niles {David K. Niles, administrative assistant to the President] and Sam Rosenman were chiefly responsible for the President’s decision; that both had told the President that Dewey was about to come out with a statement favoring the Zionist position on Palestine, and that they had insisted that unless the President anticipated this movement New York State would be lost to the Democrats.

I asked Byrnes what he thought of the possibility of getting Republican leaders to agree with the Democrats to have the Palestine question placed on a nonpolitical basis. He wasn’t particularly optimistic about the success of this effort because of the fact that Rabbi Silver was one of Taft’s close associates and because Taft followed Silver on the Palestine-Haifa question. I said I thought it was a most disastrous and regrettable fact that the foreign policy of this country was determined by the contributions a particular bloc of special interests might make to the party funds.

3 February 1948

Meeting-Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr.

Visit today from Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. who came in with a strong advocacy of the Jewish state in Palestine, that we should support the United Nations “decision,” and in general a broad, across the board statement of the Zionist position.

I pointed out that the United Nations had as yet taken no “decision,” that it was only a recommendation of the General Assembly, that any implementation of this “decision” by the United States would probably result in the need for a partial mobilization, and that I thought the methods that had been used by people outside of the Executive branch of the government to bring coercion and duress on other nations in the General Assembly bordered closely onto scandal. He professed ignorance on this latter point and returned to his general ex-position of the case of the Zionists.

He made no threats but made it very clear that the zealots in this cause had the conviction of trying to upset the government policy on Palestine. I replied that I had no power to make policy but that I would be derelict in my duty if I did not point out what I thought would be the consequences of any particular policy which would endanger the security of this country. I said that I was merely directing my efforts to lifting the question out of politics, that is, to have the two parties agree they would not compete for votes on this issue. He said this was impossible, that the nation was too far committed and that, furthermore, the Democratic Party would be bound to lose and the Republicans gain by such an agreement.

I said I was forced to repeat to him what I had said to Senator McGrath in response to the latter’s observation that our failure to go along with the Zionists might lose the states of New York, Pennsylvania and California – that I thought it was about time that somebody should pay some consideration to whether we might not lose the United States.

In the end, his lack of calm caught up with Forrestal. Five weeks after resigning as Defense Secretary, while undergoing psychiatric observation, he took his own life by jumping from a 16th floor window at the National Naval Medical Center. His New York Times obituary is here and worth reading in its entirety as both a story of personal anguish and a far more honest account of political realities than would ever be published today: “He was widely denounced by persons who felt that he favored the Arabs over the Jews, and Mr. Forrestal was said to be particularly distressed by a statement that “he cared more for oil than he did for the Jews.” Mr. Forrestal also felt he was being deserted by his former friends in business as well as unjustly attacked by so-called liberals who misunderstood his role on the Palestine question.”

As anyone who ever opposed the official narrative on Israel can tell you, there’s a price to be paid for your efforts. Forestall paid his in full. Having read the Diaries, the last line of the obituary is poignant – showing Forrestal still trying to figure things out: “On the window sill from which Mr. Forrestal jumped were marks suggesting he might have changed his mind and tried to climb back into the window.”

Fortunately, James Forrestal left something more than marks on a window sill. He left this nation a diary containing indispensable advice on how a decent political party should decide what it stands for.

The post Lessons From The Forrestal Diaries appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Johannes Plenio.

Whew! it’s hot out there, and the more the planet heats up, the more geoengineering appeals to billionaire types willing to bankroll projects to reflect sunlight to outer space.

But solar radiation management (SRM) is a touchy subject that’s yet to make an impact on global warming. Who knows, maybe it never will… meaning, not in enough time. Alas, the unexpected rapid rate of global warming has shortened the time frame that’s available to do something constructive. And SRM, like a dangling participle, needs a lot of work.

The harsh reality of today’s climate change has snuffed out years of theatrics by climate advocates failing to convince world governments and the public of how real and dangerous it really is as a threat to life on Earth. Nowadays, global heat itself is proving climate change is a real threat to life. This is a new phenomenon that’s never happened before to this extent throughout all of human history.

How can anybody fail to recognize global heat setting new records year-by-year for 11-12-straight years? That is according to the World Meteorological Organization. Europe certainly recognizes it; people die in botched attempts to escape heat. The extreme heat makes the nightly headlines with EU roads buckling, trains suspended, tracks bending, schools closing, nuclear plant shutdowns, power cables breaking. This is climate change challenging economic infrastructure. It’s likely to get worse.

This is not normal.

Don’t fall for climate deniers in the U.S. that cook-up stupid stories to diminish the threat of climate change, e.g., “more people die from winter cold than from summer heat” recently stated by a senior administration official. Oh please!

Meanwhile, there’s an element in society, known as technocrats, that boldly, hubristically believe human ingenuity via geoengineering will challenge and defeat climate change before it defeats them. They’re probably wrong.

MIT on Geoengineering

MIT recently weighed in on the subject: Geoengineering Faces Major Practical Challenges, MIT d/d June 18, 2026. Subtitled: “There’s a lot to figure out about the controversial climate tech.”

For example: “Solar geoengineering is often portrayed as a sort of emergency brake. Something along the lines of ‘Pull in Case of Climate Emergency’ to scatter light-reflecting particles to bounce sunlight out of the atmosphere and cool the planet… But it might be less like a simple brake and more like a complicated, entirely unsolved puzzle,” Ibid.

Accordingly, attempting to alter the climate to save our collective butts from horrific global heat might be a lot harder than anybody realizes. And according to the study underlying the MIT article, “to actually actively cool the planet in a significant way, and to make sure we understand exactly what effect we’re having, there’s a lot that researchers still need to learn… There are major concerns about what effects might come from large-scale attempts to cool the planet. The effects could be positive for some parts of the globe and negative for others.”

The impact of our rapidly changing climate that’s directly influenced by too much fossil fuel CO2 spewing into the atmosphere is found on the nightly news. Cars tumble down flooding city streets and black ash from Canada’s biblical wildfires have sprinkled across America’s Great Lakes in the recent past, a casualty of global warming drying out the boreal forest and dangerously destroying a powerful carbon sink. During 2025-26 record-setting fires hit Florida, California, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Nebraska all shattering historic records for burned acreage and unheard-of insurance losses.

None of this is normal.

Major insurance companies have been regularly speaking out about extreme climate change as a risk to the functioning capitalistic system. Some have gone so far as to express outright destruction risks, see: Climate Crisis on Track to Destroy Capitalism, Warns Top Insurer.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, in private, geoengineering of the planet’s atmosphere increasingly catches the attention of billionaire money. All of which brings to surface an upcoming controversial issue that’s certain to turn heads. In fact, geoengineering has quietly but assuredly drawn fierce battle lines for years. It brings out the brightest and the best in academia as well as the lowest of conspirators into a clashing of interests with sparks flying.

The Chemtrail Conspiracy Theory has a long history of claiming airplane contrails have been releasing solar radiation management chemical agents for purposes of weather modification or some other purpose. This has been met by strong pushback by federal agencies and the scientific community, finding no signs of legitimate evidence. Interestingly, ex-CIA employee and famous whistleblower Edward Snowden, who had no axe to grind at the time, in a Joe Rogan interview said he used his “ridiculous access to the networks of the NSA, the CIA, the military, all these groups. I couldn’t find anything… no evidence of aliens or mysterious chemtrails.” Nevertheless, RFK, jr. endorsed chemtrail conspiracy theories. And there are serious students of chemtrails that maintain it is real. This remains a big ball tossed into the air that hasn’t landed yet.

Now, it’s coming to light that private entities have been taking pokes at geoengineering the atmosphere in the spirit of mitigating global heat, which has dramatically increased to a new higher level suddenly and unexpectedly. Climate scientists have addressed this new danger of a “fundamental shift” as global warming jump-shifted 10-times normal, in only one year, along with surprisingly massive and extensive ocean heat waves across almost the entire oceans lasting over 500 days, confounding scientists (see- Ocean Heat Goes Ballistic).

Ocean Heat Content (OHC) has been setting new records, every year, for nine consecutive years. This all adds up to one hell’uva scary climate onslaught with a new regime of heat in the offing. This festering problem has been identified by elite scientists, and it’s downright scary. Human activity is negatively impacting the complexion of the planet via a massive acceleration phase of extreme heat with Antarctica on edge.

Some billionaires have taken notice. A recent Politico article, Researchers Quietly Planned a Test to Dim Sunlight. They wanted to ‘Avoid Scaring’ the public d/d July 27, 2025, exposes behind the scenes activity to influence (geoengineer) the atmosphere, which sparks enormous international attention. Is it morally kosher, will a Frankenstein climate haunt civilization, will it disrupt nature more so than it helps, will it work?

The Politico article flushes out an aborted attempt a year ago on a retired aircraft carrier to test a device to create artificial clouds. Come to find out, their intentions went well beyond that initial experiment. The bigger plan involved spaying salt water to dim the sun’s rays over a stretch of ocean larger than Puerto Rico.

According to the article: “The details outlined in funding requests, emails, texts and other records obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News raise new questions about a secretive billionaire-backed initiative that oversaw last year’s brief solar geoengineering experiment on the San Francisco Bay,” Ibid.

As further stated, human tinkering with the climate has drawn political backlash as well as generating conspiracy theories all of which adds to challenges of even small-scale tests. The test referenced by the article lasted all of 20 minutes run by the University of Washington intended to last months. It was shut down by Alameda city officials that did not buy into secretive testing without prior public notice.

The university’s Marine Cloud Brightening Program has much bigger plans than the Alameda pilot test on the carrier deck in Alameda. The Program had received some federal funding and wanted to gain use of government ships and planes. The Program in concert with a geoengineering advocacy group Silver Lining and the scientific nonprofit SRI International has its eyes set on big dealings to “fill in gaps” of safety and effectiveness of the technology.

“Alameda was a steppingstone to something much larger, and there wasn’t any engagement with local communities,” said Sikina Jinnah, an environmental studies professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz. “That’s a serious misstep,” Ibid. Meanwhile, the University of Washington maintains innocence of any intention to alter the climate, rather, their only goal was to research the technology, not deploy it. Sarah Doherty, an atmospheric professor at the university said: “There are no plans for conducting large-scale studies that would alter weather or climate.”

With global warming coming of age much sooner than even most negative warnings predicted and stronger, sooner than climate scientists expected, geoengineering to deflect incoming solar radiation is assured to get much more attention, begging the ultimate question of whether humans should mess around with nature; although, greenhouse gases like CO2 have already demonstrated human interference causes too much heat. In a very real practical sense, fossil fuel emissions (CO2) have already geoengineered the climate for over 200 years, resulting in a haywire climate system characterized by unprecedented events almost every year. “Unprecedented” is fast losing its impact as a statement of alarming fact. It’s become a routine fact.

Still, the million-dollar question: If we broke it, can we fix it?

Critics of SRM are adamant and abundant, for example, Solar Geoengineering Could Wreak Havoc on the Planet, Sierra d/d September 21, 2023: “Dimming the sun to slow down global warming might buy us some time. But it would also come with significant risks. The impact would not be uniform across the globe and cause serious disruption of established weather patterns that agriculture relies upon. And a moral hazard would exist as it encourages fossil fuel polluters to ignore needed cuts in CO2 emissions. And, what if it becomes necessary to stop, to turn it off, then what? And who gets control of tampering with the global thermostat may be impossible to reconcile.”

Big question marks remain as serious obstacles to practical geo-engineering of solar radiation, anytime soon.

‘Hopeful’ Credible Solutions

For those interested in pursuing detailed information about potential practical solutions, there are some early-stage private organizations that command attention, e.g., Climate Restoration, which advocates iron-fertilization of ocean ‘eddies’ to initiate a process to absorb and rebalance CO2.

Additionally, a recent article: “Letter: Greenland Meltdown and the Reasons It Matters” in Financial Times d/d January 25, 2026 by John Nissen, Chair of the Planetary Restoration Action Group, London: “A pressing need exists to start lowering the Arctic temperature while it is still just possible using the most powerful, available cooling technique, stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI))”

The above-mentioned organizations base their solutions on historic evidence of nature’s volcanic eruptions affecting the global climate system.

As stated by The Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program (SGRP), solar geoengineering is not a replacement for reducing emissions or adapting to climate impacts. In other words, SRM is only one tool in a very big fixit box. It does not remove what’s already been done. Scientists say this must be done to fix things, but direct air capture (DAC) of CO2 is immature, inadequate, and laughable, like taking a peashooter to a war zone. In part, this is why polar scientists at recent scientific meetings insist CO2 emissions must stop now or Antarctica is assured of acting out.

Monitoring the Sky

It should be noted that NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Lab monitors the sky for renegade sunlight dimmers: “Every few weeks, researchers in Boulder, Colorado, release a balloon that rises 17 miles into the sky. Similar balloons are launched with less frequency from sites in Alaska, Hawaii and New Zealand; Reunion Island, near the coast of Africa; and even Antarctica. They make up the building blocks of a system that would alert American scientists to geoengineering.”

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, as of May 21, 2026, the Trump administration has proposed a 32% cut in NOAA’s funding.

“Since September of 2024, federal science agencies in the US have axed nearly 120,000 employees, in a stinging loss for public research. Some of the heaviest impact was felt by scientists studying the climate.” (source: Futurism, June 25, 2026)

Meanwhile, global warming is not waiting around for stupid humans to figure out how to fix a problem they’ve created, but ignored, for more than a couple of centuries. After 200 years of feeding the beast, the fuse has finally been lit, and it’s burning like a house afire. For evidence, just ask any major home insurance company.

A bigger question is whether there’s enough time to organize the world to agree to attempt dimming sunlight. This hasn’t even begun to coalesce yet, but there is plenty of discord.

The post The Mad Scramble to Dim Sunlight appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Truthful Fiction

Buster Keaton sat atop the locomotive coupling rod in The General. Unexpectedly, the unexpected surprised. What followed was a hilarious adventure and a transcendental calm. For a moment, my eyes melded into Buster’s. For a mere few seconds of moving celluloid, our eyes shared a meditative pause, and the entire universe was explained. I became acutely aware of the places between the worlds of fiction and nonfiction.

Universes ablaze, everything that looks like harmony poses before my single reflex. Photography has never been about where I arrive at. I am telling a story that has not been seen yet. I sit, watching quietly and solemnly the world go by, on my way to a destination. It is the middle ground that I see. The fantasies of what may become excite the camera’s lens. It is the lush life for the curious. It invites all eyes to hear the key (if you listen for the magic) of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.” It is a place I can play in.

If you could see what my eyes think while en route to a capture–I often repeat these lines to myself as if I am alone with me, me, me. There is no eye in me, just me. There is often a bit of frivolity at play. I unintentionally try to freeze-frame every shift of light on the horizon. I unintentionally try to freeze-frame my life. I unintentionally absorb the meaning of every shapeshifter between here and there. I hold hostage one thousand stories to dream about on another day, in another repose, in a life ahead.

When I arrived at David Hockney’s home, my mind went blank. For too many days, before I tried to imagine the photograph I would snap. The opportunities to meet fame head-on are rare. “What will I ‘do’ with David? What will I do?”

I remember the architectural photographer Julius Shulman (who mentored me for a number of years) told me he could see David Hockney naked from his home. To this day, I doubt it. Julius had a bit of a children’s playpen in his mind. Plus, I have never seen the picture he claimed to have made.

I remember standing at the front door waiting for David to bring me in. As one might imagine, I was thinking about the Shulman naked pic. I was thinking about every photographer I had admired. I was lifting my brain to the north just to understand what I would do with David.

The universe is a funny place to live in. It is impossible to know what will happen in the next moment. So when this pale, pale sweet man greeted me, all and any of my worst fears vanished. He was, for the next few hours, a prince.

As with just about everyone I have ever photographed, he wanted to hear about my experiences and the people we had in common. We talked about his friend R.B. Kitaj for an hour or so. We must have covered many more names and places, too – maybe another hour or more. I felt more like a button buck deer than an equal. He was charming , articulate and just the most friendly of subjects. I was an ordinary person with a camera.

We eventually entered his studio. He was very excited to show me a Chinese scroll on which he essentially based a significant body of work.

He had little interest in explaining anything about the dozen paintings in view. He wanted to unscroll this delicate eighteenth-century or earlier Chinese scroll. His voice was extraordinarily passionate. He pleaded with me to touch the imagery. I slightly caressed the scene. It was a guilty pleasure. “Do it again,” he laughed. My nerves danced. He laughed some more. The Chinese art was as beautiful as anything I had ever seen. Fragile and deliciously ornamental.

My natural light was almost hidden at this point. I asked David if it was time for me to leave. The day was long. I framed maybe a dozen pictures with my camera. There were many details and reflective moments of repose. They were for another time, possibly before they disappear from my memory.

A great morning and afternoon came to a close. As he walked me to my car, we shook hands. Before we parted, he surprisingly gifted me some needed oxygen. He handed me a cassette tape of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Op.64. He whispered some generous and profound parting thoughts. I accelerated and found my way cruising atop the Hollywood canyons.

Today I played a Spotify version of Mendelssohn’s Concerto. I wanted to remind myself of what picture-perfect sounds like in my eyes.

The post Remembering Artists From Another Time: David Hockney appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by mohammed al bardawil.

There is no shortage of things that should astonish us about the West’s indifference to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but the treatment of children stands apart. In ordinary life, care for children is the deepest moral reflex we have: parents structure their days around it, laws and institutions exist to enforce it, and even distant or imagined threats to our children are enough to produce panic, outrage, and decisive action. When one of our children is hurt – physically or emotionally – we feel it in our own bodies; a small injury can be agonizing, a night of fear can undo us, and the death of a child is rightly understood as the most shattering loss from which families often never fully recover. And yet, when Palestinian children are killed, maimed, starved, orphaned, displaced, detained, or psychologically traumatized in the tens of thousands, this supposedly deeply-ingrained instinct no longer obtains. What is treated as sacrosanct everywhere else becomes contingent here, revealing a moral collapse that no amount of rhetoric can conceal.

The Unchilding of Palestinian Children

A landmark report released in June 2026 by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concludes that Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, finding that these acts constitute evidence of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Examining the period from October 2023 through October 2025, the Commission records at least 20,179 children killed and 44,143 injured, while emphasizing that these figures almost certainly underestimate the true toll.

More fundamentally, the report argues that the deliberate targeting of children is not incidental to Israel’s military campaign but a calculated strategy and one of the principal indicators of genocidal intent, observing that “by targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and to determine their future.” The report documents repeated cases of children killed by rifle and drone fire or suffering gunshot wounds to the head and torso, alongside the systematic destruction of schools and hospitals and the eradication of the conditions necessary for children’s survival and development. Worse still, documented accounts from medical personnel and witnesses describe the intentional, surgical targeting of children by Israeli soldiers, including reports of systematic sniper fire in which different days were allegedly devoted to shooting children in different parts of the body – “like a game of target practice.” The scale of this assault on Palestinian children is almost impossible to comprehend.

This devastation is reflected in the official numbers. According to the Commission’s findings, children account for roughly 30 percent of all those killed, while UNICEF and other humanitarian agencies estimate that thousands more have been injured, orphaned, displaced, or psychologically traumatized. Yet even these staggering figures conceal the true scale of the devastation. Numerous humanitarian organizations have stressed that the total overall casualty data – across the entire population – almost certainly represents a substantial undercount, perhaps by as much as 35-40 percent. UNICEF has also warned that every child in Gaza now requires intense mental health support, with widespread trauma, sleep disorders, and fear responses across the entire child population. In Gaza City, large-scale surveys have found overwhelming levels of severe psychological distress among children living through repeated bombardment, displacement, and loss.

This psychological fracturing is exacerbated by the collapse of family and societal networks, occurring despite the endurance of Sumud – the deeply ingrained practice of courageous and steadfast resilience rooted in mutual care, collective identity, and familial cohesion. Indeed, the ongoing calculated assault is aimed precisely at the social fabric that makes such collective resistance possible. More than 58,000 children have reportedly lost one or both parents, while thousands more are unaccompanied or separated in destroyed family networks. In hospitals, clinicians have coined the term WCNSF – “Wounded Child, No Surviving Family” – for children pulled from rubble as the sole survivors of their households. Many arrive unnamed – too young, too traumatized, or too injured to identify themselves, with no surviving relatives able to claim them.

The assault on childhood survival is nowhere more painfully visible than in the catastrophic rate of pediatric bodily trauma. UNICEF reporting has documented children undergoing amputations at extraordinary rates, often without anesthesia, with some estimates describing multiple children per day losing limbs under conditions of relentless bombardment and medical collapse. Gaza now has the highest per capita population of child amputees in the world, a statistic that has no parallel in recent history. This physical destruction is compounded by a deliberate Israeli policy of medical denial, which systematically blocks thousands of these amputees from leaving the Strip to receive the urgent reconstructive surgeries and rehabilitative care unavailable within Gaza’s collapsed healthcare system.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, in her reports on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has described this structural erasure as the “unchilding” of Palestinian children – the systematic destruction of the societal conditions that make childhood possible at all. Her subsequent work, including Anatomy of a Genocide, documents how mass death, starvation, displacement, detention, and psychological trauma function as part of a deliberate and systematic assault on the conditions necessary for children’s survival and development, threatening the very possibility of a Palestinian future and their right to self-determination.

The Bereavement Multiplier

The demographic concept of the bereavement multiplier helps clarify what raw casualty figures conceal. Developed by demographers during the COVID-19 pandemic, the bereavement multiplier refers to the number of close family members and loved ones who experience significant grief and loss following a death. A child killed does not represent a single loss but a cascading network of bereavement – parents, siblings, grandparents, caregivers, classmates, neighbours, and extended kin – often resulting in ten or more deeply affected individuals per death. Applied conservatively to Gaza’s reported child death toll alone, this suggests that several hundred thousand people have already been afflicted by the deep grief associated with the death of children. But in Gaza’s dense familial and social networks, these layers of mourning overlap to compound the impacts: families lose multiple children, survivors mourn entire households, and communities experience repeated exposure to widespread death. The result is not isolated bereavement, but population-wide psychological devastation extending far beyond the official death and injury totals. When the trauma borne by Palestinians in the West Bank and the wider diaspora is added, the number of people living under conditions of sustained traumatic stress likely reaches into the millions.

The Psychology of Unchilding

The psychological consequences of life in Gaza cannot be understood by conventional models of post-traumatic stress, which typically assume that traumatic events have ceased and recovery can begin. For Palestinian children, the threat itself has become relentless. More than fifteen years of blockade, repeated military assaults, and forced displacement have been compounded by the destruction of homes, schools, hospitals, and cultural institutions, the loss of parents and caregivers, and the deprivation of food, clean water, healthcare, and education. The result is an environment in which danger is not episodic but continuous. As psychologist Triantoro Safaria argues, Gazan children are living under conditions of “continuous traumatic stress” – a state characterized by unremitting and inescapable threat rather than exposure to discrete traumatic events.

A comprehensive synthesis of the recent research by Anies Al-Hroub likewise concludes that conventional psychiatric models are fundamentally inadequate for understanding the psychological condition of Palestinian children. Instead, it calls for a framework that integrates continuous traumatic stress with structural violence, recognizing that children’s mental health is inseparable from the political, historical, and material conditions in which they live. The evidence consistently demonstrates extraordinarily high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, death anxiety, existential distress, and complicated grief, with many studies reporting clinically significant symptoms in 70–90 percent of children assessed. Because bombardment, displacement, and deprivation continue unabated, children rarely experience the safety necessary for healing and recovery. Cumulative exposure to war-induced trauma multiplies the risk for long-term harmful effects, creating what researchers now describe as a “continuum of trauma.”

The Destruction of Childhood Itself

The sustained environment of violence directly lays bare the psychological dimension of Albanese’s “unchilding” framework. Orphanhood, repeated displacement, and the collapse of family and community life compel children to prematurely assume adult responsibilities for daily survival long before they are developmentally capable of doing so.

Play, learning, exploration, and socialization are entirely displaced by hyper-vigilance, scavenging, child labor, family caregiving, and the daily struggle to secure basic necessities. Emerging research suggests that these extreme conditions will permanently affect children’s neurological, emotional, and social development, underlining what Safaria describes as a collective “crisis of childhood itself.”

Intergenerational Trauma and Complicated Grief

The mental health consequences of these devastating conditions extend well beyond children’s direct experiences of the violence. Caregivers themselves are coping with overwhelming trauma, grief, displacement, and deprivation, giving rise to what researchers describe as secondary traumatization, whereby children’s emotional suffering is intensified through the distress of parents and other caregivers. The result is an intergenerational cycle of perpetual trauma in which post-traumatic stress responses are systematically transmitted through entire family systems.

Clinical grief literature uses the term “complicated grief” to describe mourning that becomes prolonged or destabilized following sudden or violent death, the loss of a child, suicide, fractured relationships, or circumstances in which grieving and mourning cannot be safely processed. These are already among the most devastating forms of human bereavement, encompassing both the emotional experience of grieving and the cultural expressions of mourning. In Gaza, however, such circumstances are no longer exceptional – they have become the ordinary conditions under which significant loss and deprivation occur.

Thus, viewed through the lens of grief and trauma studies, Gaza presents not merely a crisis of bereavement but one of complicated grief and complex trauma on a population-wide scale. Death occurs amid displacement, starvation, and destroyed homes, with children witnessing the deaths and disappearances of siblings and parents. In this same wreckage, parents search through rubble for the remains of their children, sometimes recovering only fragments of their bodies. Deprived of even the dignity of a proper burial, families are denied the conditions necessary to process their grief and integrate profound loss into their continuing life narrative. Trauma is sustained because the conditions producing it do not cease, ultimately fracturing the family and community connections that normally shelter and protect children during crises.

Western Complicity and Moral Collapse

The brutal murder of Hind Rajab was never an isolated atrocity. As Lama Khouri recently observed, there are “tens of thousands of Hind Rajabs” in Gaza – children whose names will never be recognized, but whose undocumented suffering is the very foundation of this assault on Palestinian childhood. While we may show fleeting sympathy for the few children whose stories break through to the outside world, countless others disappear without witness, memorial, or public reckoning. It is this exact silence that allows the machinery to keep moving. We look away when the news cycle shifts, but as Khouri notes: “Our forgetting is not innocent. It is the thing the killing needs from us, and it is being counted on.”

None of this is to deny the suffering of children in other war zones – including Sudan, Yemen, Congo – where violence against civilians persists amid profound international indifference. Gaza, however, occupies a distinct place within Western political life. Israel is not an isolated or marginal actor; it is armed, funded, diplomatically protected, and rhetorically defended by the very governments that most loudly proclaim their commitment to human rights, international law, and the protection of children. Yet these high-minded principles collapse with startling ease in the case of Palestinians.

More concerning still, this extraordinary deference to Israel has increasingly been accompanied by efforts at home to curtail civil liberties, suppress protest, and narrow the boundaries of acceptable political dissent. The pain and suffering of these young victims are not simply ignored; they are justified, normalized, and often suppressed from public view to preserve a strategic alliance with a rogue regime. Through this domestic enforcement, citizens in North America and Europe become not merely observers of these crimes against Palestinian children, but accomplices – however unwillingly or unwittingly – in the political structures that sustain them.

To maintain their facade of moral enlightenment, Western societies do not simply fail to respond; with the aid of complicit media, they have learned how to “forget” while the killing continues. Reality is permitted to appear only in fragments – briefly visible before the next wave of headlines. We witness the slaughter, mutilation, and starvation of Palestinian children as if it were no more than an unsettling news story – shocking to look at, but detached from any claim upon our conscience or sense of compassion. The total abandonment of these innocent lives takes place amid a resounding silence that persists even within many progressive humanitarian organizations, suggesting not just hypocrisy, but something more disturbing: a profound erosion of our shared humanity.

Our complicity and failure to act force a disturbing question upon us: how will we explain to our own children that we stood by and watched the “slow erasure of a people“ through the annihilation of its children?

James Baldwin articulated a moral truth that speaks directly to this situation: “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

The post Mass “Unchilding” and “Forgetting” of Palestinian Children appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Federico Scarionati

Interview with João França

Building movements is an arduous and involved process. It takes organising people, building morale, and grit, and that isn’t even half of it. Don’t you wish you had a positive blueprint for how to move forward, to draw inspiration from, to continue the fight? Look no further than João França’s Yes, It’s Possible! A Handbook from Building Power from Below (Common Notions, 2026). Based on the success of the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH), a movement in Spain that has stopped evictions, kept people in their homes, and changed perceptions of housing and financial institutions. França explains how PAH showed, through small everyday victories, that “yes, it’s possible.” This is a critical mindset needed now more than ever, given the context of rising fascism and the need to continue to be inspired to build movements today.

Ly: What first compelled you to write this book?

João: I used to work as a journalist and the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) was one of the strongest movements occurring. It was really inspiring to see how effective it was, actually responding to the real life problems that people had. The PAH was tangibly keeping people in their houses and blocking evictions. People connected really well to this movement, as they felt they were doing something real. It was really inspiring and moving to see how it transformed people’s lives.For me, who got involved in movements later, it was my main political school, of a different way of doing politics.

As a journalist, I felt that I was supporting the struggle through my work to communicate what was occurring to a wider audience. For this book, I approached the movement, to see if they wanted to work on this together, and that got me more involved, so it was a collaborative endeavor.

Ly: At what point in the journey did it really feel, Yes, It’s Possible? In what way is that a positive and encouraging mantra?

The most amazing thing about the PAH is that you see everyday that Yes, It’s Possible. Because everyday you are making a big difference for the family that lives in that house. So every time we go to an eviction, and stop the family getting evicted, you see it can be done. This movement changed the perception of housing and financial institutions, for example people used to trust the banks, and now they do not.

It has made an impact in other movements, and all the different organisations that, even when they have differences with the PAH, they are inspired by the mutual aid model that the PAH created.

One of the lessons that the people that the PAH started, who came from other social movements, they always had big goals, and it’s difficult to see the world to come. Within the PAH, they realised the importance of the small everyday victories, so when you have these, you are showing the movement that we do win things, and we know we can build bigger things.

External communication was extremely important to the PAH organisers. For the very first eviction that PAH blocked, it was a small village far from Barcelona, they had to rent a bus to go there, and they weren’t sure what the impact would be, but they still went with two or three cameras and the video they published later had a huge impact, and it showed that people can stop the bank from kicking people out of their houses. The shift of narratives has also to do with other ways of telling things, and making fun of those in power, having fun while fighting, and these are also connected. Trying to simplify bigger problems in our system and explain them in a simple way, and make them fun and appealing. There are fun PAH videos of doing parodies of famous songs which do really well on social media.

There was a person who was previously involved in anarchist organising and used to wearing black, and always being quite serious and a woman brought him to dance, inside the takeover of the bank – showing that you can do movements differently. People are always having so much fun.

When people are having fun week after week, it makes it sustainable for the long-term. When I read the book Joyful Militancy, it really made me think about the PAH.

If there is no joy in struggling, it’s very hard to get the people who need it the most, to get involved in the struggle.

Ly: I was struck by the fact that the PAH welcomed all people, from the far left to the far right, even when some members questioned this. What does that show about the need to work together across political lines?

J: What’s interesting about the PAH is that it’s not too ideological. The PAH was meant to get to the individuals who are actually struggling, so they had to listen to them. It is a movement based on mutual aid. Sometimes when you have a staff of organisers, they are probably more ideological, and might have more specific political projects. When it’s based on mutual aid, and it’s horizontal and all the decision making is democratic and involves everyone who is part of it, the person who is dealing with the housing issue can focus less on ideological divides. If there is someone struggling with a housing problem, maybe coming to this organising group will change their political views in the long run. But that’s not the main goal.

In other spaces you might say this person has infiltrated the movement and we have to get rid of them, but in this space, you welcome people based on the issue they need support with, and it can change people’s views over time.

Ly: Why is it so critical to build power from below?

J: Most of the people who were not activists or organisers before the PAH, but are now. Most people highlight the empowerment they feel from being part of this movement. The movement helps people realise they have power when they act together and when they organise.

There is something characteristic of many Spanish movements, is autonomy from institutional power, so there is a fear here of co-option, by power, or political powers. So “building power from below” is not about the institutions, but building a powerful actor that can influence politics and fight against the powerful from outside. It’s about autonomy and non-partisanship.

Ly: Can you explain how PAH operates differently compared to organising in the US?

J: A lesson to learn from PAH is that you can organise without money, and for a lot of organisations in the US it is hard to imagine. There does have to be a lot of unpaid work and hours.When you have a space where people come and share their problems, there are those with more experience and less experience, they can help others, and this makes the movement sustainable. If you build a strong enough base for a movement like this, if you can’t make the meeting, it’s ok, because everyone can keep the movement going.

A lot of the PAH chapters are run by people who got there from having a housing issue, with no organising background.

Ly: How do you see the role of civil disobedience in making change? How critical is it to grassroots movements, and what can we learn from the PAH in this regard?

J: It’s key in the PAH experience, and it isn’t the same around the world as the laws are different everywhere, so the power to sit and negotiate, to shift narratives and perceptions, shift common sense, these are all part of the process of building legitimacy. When the PAH does civil disobedience, it’s saying we have done everything that the system has offered us to solve this problem, then we must do civil disobedience because we have no other option. So for evictions, we can prove and show that this family cannot afford to pay for a different house, and we have spoken to the bank or the landlord, who haven’t offered any other alternatives, we have spoken to the system, gone to court to try to find a solution there etc, so that’s why we are now standing in front of the door and the police to block it. This is showing the building of legitimacy, and this is one of the main lessons we can learn from the PAH.

Ly: Can you talk about the role of care in sustaining grassroots movements?

J: Something that I find really important that changes people’s subjectivities, is how people are coming from an individualistic life of what the system and the powers impose on us, so they come to the PAH looking for a solution to their specific problem and they learn how to be together, how to be in common, how to build things together that can improve their life and help think about a different better life. There is the part of being together. The other mantra of PAH is that you are not alone, so when you cross the door into the PAH, you are not alone anymore, you will have support.

There are other practices that others may not see as political, but it’s about celebrating birthdays, and festivities. When you stop an eviction, people cook something, and bring it to the meeting. It ties people to the movement and keeps it sustainable. Making sure that everyone has something to do. Recognising that it’s being a spokesperson, and writing a press release, is just as important as cooking and having a collective lunch etc., recognising that all these different tasks are necessary and needed in the movement and is part of the care work that makes the movement sustainable.

Ly: Can you talk about creative resistance?

J: Building alliances and collaborations with other people in other movements, so you can ask people who are in an artists collective that will make the media put attention on it. When the movement was getting less media attention over time, it would be harder to get the banks to meet with them etc., so they would have to constantly reinvent new ways of communication to get attention, and it’s also more fun to always be doing new things together. When you always have to reinvent yourself, as the PAH is good at, though it’s very exhausting. In the book, it’s about actually showing how the PAH does things, with the QR codes embedded within it that are mostly videos, for example, the parody of Fresh Prince of Bel Air song, while occupying a bank branch.

I tried to transmit all that has moved me about the PAH, but I think seeing it is always stronger.

Ly: Do you have a final message to leave with readers?

One of the things most inspiring in the movement, is to see how common people with no organising or activist background, but who are struggling with really hard problems like risk of homelessness, come together. It’s really inspiring to see that through mutual aid and organising that in common they have power, and can really change things.

The post Yes, It’s Possible! A Handbook from Building Power from Below appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Trieste Herencia (Sad Inheritance) by Joaquín Sorolla, 1899. Public Domain.

Few ideas command more universal agreement than the belief that children must be protected. Across cultures, religions, and political traditions, they are regarded as uniquely deserving of care, safety, and opportunity. Yet a glaring contradiction emerges when we look closely at the conditions under which millions of children actually live.

Around the world, childhood is routinely fractured by war, hunger, pollution, displacement, and poverty. Even within the United States, children face food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, environmental hazards, failing infrastructure, and unequal educational opportunities. We usually discuss these realities as separate crises—economic, political, or environmental. Rarely do we recognize them as interconnected symptoms of a larger pattern.

To a child, however, these bureaucratic distinctions matter little. The consequences accumulate in bodies, minds, and futures. This reality forces an uncomfortable question: if societies profess such deep concern for children, why does so much preventable harm persist? Why are conditions we would find intolerable in an individual case so easily accepted when they occur at scale?

The answer is not necessarily a lack of empathy. It is something more troubling: many forms of harm to children have become normalized. They persist not because societies openly endorse them, but because they have been quietly absorbed into the ordinary operation of institutions, policies, and social systems.

Consider how many of the gravest threats to children are discussed. War is typically analyzed in terms of territory, security, military strategy, or geopolitical interests. National debt is debated in the context of budgets, interest rates, and fiscal policy. Environmental disasters are measured through property loss, infrastructure damage, and economic costs. Immigration enforcement is discussed in terms of law, borders, and political conflict.

Yet children often experience these events differently. They encounter them not as policy questions but as disruptions to safety, stability, health, education, and belonging. The consequences can persist long after the original crisis has faded from public attention. Different in form, these crises share a common feature: the well-being of children is rarely the measure by which they are judged, even when children bear a disproportionate share of the harm.

Around the world, the pattern is remarkably consistent. Whether the source is armed conflict, environmental disaster, economic instability, forced migration, or political repression, children frequently bear consequences they neither created nor can control. The details vary from one society to another, but the underlying dynamic remains the same: the costs of collective failures are often carried by those with the least power to influence them.

Public expressions of concern for children are nearly universal. News reports on wars, famines, environmental disasters, and epidemics routinely highlight the number of children harmed. Yet these acknowledgments often remain symbolic rather than transformative. Concern is expressed, tragedy is recognized, and attention moves on, while the underlying conditions that produced the harm remain largely unchanged.

The suffering of children is often invoked as evidence of a crisis, yet it rarely becomes the standard by which the success or failure of public responses is judged.

The same pattern appears in the United States. While hunger is often debated through the lens of federal budgets and public spending, millions of children quietly rely on school meal programs as their primary source of daily nutrition. Similarly, environmental contamination is routinely assessed using regulatory thresholds and economic costs, even as emerging research documents developmental harms from pollution across childhood and adolescence. Immigration enforcement, too, is often discussed through the abstract language of borders and legality, while children endure the immediate fear, instability, and trauma of family separation. In each instance, the language of policy can obscure the lived realities of childhood.

The Evidence Is Already There

We do not lack evidence. We lack organized will. Year after year, global organizations such as UNICEF, Save the Children, and Oxfam document the scale of systemic harm inflicted on children. The data is neither hidden nor ambiguous. Yet a profound disconnect persists between public concern and institutional action. Societies routinely pass sweeping laws, sign international declarations, and voice collective outrage, but consistently fail to build the systems needed to turn concern into protection.

A stark, contemporary manifestation of this gap is found in the 2026 Global Out of the Shadows Index. Developed by Economist Impact alongside Together for Girls, the index benchmarked how 60 countries address child sexual abuse and exploitation. Its findings point to a familiar pattern. Many countries have developed legal protections for children, but far fewer have built the institutions, systems, and public commitments needed to make those protections meaningful in everyday life. Across the global index, governance and prevention emerged as the absolute weakest areas.

This points to a difficult truth. The failure to protect children is rarely a failure of knowledge. We know far more about the causes of harm than we did a generation ago. We know how poverty affects development. We know how violence shapes mental health. We know how environmental toxins accumulate in growing bodies. The question is no longer whether the evidence exists. The question is why societies continue to tolerate conditions that produce predictable harm.

The pattern extends across national boundaries and political systems. Wealthy countries and lower-income countries alike often struggle to translate concern into prevention. Some fail because of limited resources. Others fail despite having substantial resources at their disposal. The recurring challenge is not simply capacity, but the willingness to organize institutions around children’s long-term well-being.

Part of the answer lies in the unequal conditions into which children are born. Long before children make choices of their own, geography, family circumstances, health, environment, and social status begin shaping the opportunities available to them.

The Biology of Inequality

To understand how policy impacts a child, we must expand our definition of “biology” beyond mere genetics. A child’s biology is inextricably bound to a social reality: where they are born, to whom they are born, and the specific burdens they inherit and are expected to bear. Poverty, race, disability, environmental pollution, generational trauma, and social exclusion are not abstract social concepts, nor are they inescapable destinies. Instead, they are environmental realities that become physically embodied over time.

Society quite literally writes itself into children’s bodies. What once sounded like a metaphor is now supported by decades of developmental research. We see it in Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) research and toxic stress models, which demonstrate how prolonged hardship alters a child’s neurological development and immune system. We even see it in the physical record preserved in children’s shed primary teeth. Studies of so-called “milk teeth”suggest that the microscopic layers of those teeth can serve as a biological record of prenatal and early childhood environmental exposures, offering a window into the conditions that shape development.

Evidence of this process appears across multiple dimensions of childhood development. Research on respiratory health suggests that lung damage sustained during childhood can persist throughout life. At the same time, studies of environmental exposure continue to reveal how pollution, conflict, and deprivation leave lasting marks on developing bodies. Whether the source is war, poverty, or environmental contamination, the effects of childhood conditions often extend far beyond childhood itself.

When systemic inequality is allowed to persist, it begins to shape a child’s biological trajectory. Chronic stress associated with instability, deprivation, and neglect can alter how children process the world, affecting cognitive development, emotional regulation, and physical health. Over time, these effects influence everything from learning and attention to self-image, trust, and future opportunity. What begins as a social condition can become a biological one, transforming unequal circumstances into unequal outcomes.

The consequences do not end with the individual child. Childhood trauma can shape relationships, communities, and even future conflicts as unresolved harm is carried into adulthood.

The significance of these findings extends beyond health and development. If social conditions can become biologically embedded, then the question is no longer whether harm occurs. The question becomes why societies continue to accept conditions that predictably produce it.

How Harm Becomes Normal

The normalization of harm does not require overt cruelty; it requires only routine. Societies manage to tolerate the suffering of children by systematically dismantling it into manageable, administrative pieces. When a crisis is broken down into separate departments, budgets, jurisdictions, headlines, and eligibility categories, the human reality vanishes. Children are quietly transformed into statistics, cases, costs, risks, or collateral damage. Because bureaucratic fragmentation ensures that no single actor or agency appears fully responsible, the system continues to operate without any single institution fully accountable for its cumulative effects.

This normalization is sustained by psychological distance and economic abstraction. When child poverty is reduced to a budgetary line item or environmental contamination to a cost-benefit calculation, it becomes easier to focus on managing a problem than on the lived experience of the children affected by it. This abstract mindset is further sustained by policy drift and weakened enforcement. Existing protections are rarely abolished overnight; instead, they are steadily weakened through executive or legal actions that erode regulatory oversight and reduce institutions’ capacity to protect vulnerable populations.

When accountability is diffused across a labyrinth of agencies, inaction becomes the default setting. The institutions that shape children’s lives—schools, healthcare systems, child welfare agencies, environmental regulators, and immigration authorities—often operate according to different mandates, funding streams, and measures of success. Each addresses a piece of a child’s experience, while no institution is responsible for the whole child. The greatest danger to children is not a sudden wave of malice, but the quiet efficiency of the everyday. The result is not merely administrative failure. It is a culture in which preventable harm can persist for years, even decades, without provoking the sustained public response it would demand if children remained fully visible.

Children and the Moral Foundation of Civil Rights

The expansion of modern civil rights in the United States has never been a purely abstract legal exercise, and some of the most consequential moments of American democratic progress occurred when the nation was forced to confront the harm being done to children. It was the televised horror of children being attacked by police dogs and fire hoses during desegregation struggles. It was also the recognition in Brown v. Board of Education—supported in part by research on children’s self-image—that segregation harmed not only educational opportunity, but a child’s sense of self and place in society.

Historically, protecting children has not merely shielded the vulnerable—it has expanded democracy itself. When the law recognizes the rights of a child, it compels the state to acknowledge a deeper obligation. The struggle for civil rights has always been about defining who counts as a full human being in the eyes of the law. By centering the child, these movements successfully argued that a society’s legitimacy is measured by how it treats those who cannot vote, lobby, or protect themselves.

The restoration and strengthening of civil rights protections should not be viewed as a secondary political concern. If children become invisible within public institutions, they are more easily reduced to statistics, categories, or symbols in larger political debates. A society that recognizes children as full human beings affirms that dignity, healthy development, and opportunity are not privileges to be distributed selectively, but conditions necessary for democratic life itself.

What Can Be Changed

To confront the systemic neglect of children, we must move from diagnosis to responsibility. The structures that normalize harm were built by human choices, which means those same choices can dismantle them. Transforming how society treats its youth requires shifting from reactive intervention after trauma has occurred to a proactive, sustained architecture of prevention.

In the immediate term, the most important task is restoring the protections that help prevent predictable harm. School nutrition programs, early childhood services, public health initiatives, civil rights enforcement, and international assistance are often treated as discretionary expenditures. Yet, they form part of the social infrastructure that allows children to develop safely. Prevention rarely attracts the attention that accompanies a crisis, but its effects are often more profound. The strongest systems of care are those that reduce the likelihood of harm before intervention becomes necessary. Protecting children also requires the enforcement and strengthening of civil rights protections, helping to shield young people from systemic discrimination and institutional displacement. Finally, breaking down bureaucratic silos to build coordinated systems of care that integrate healthcare, education, and social services into unified networks can prevent harm before it manifests.

In the medium term, overcoming the psychological distance that insulates us from distant suffering becomes a central task. Sister-city programs, cities of refuge, and other forms of civic partnership demonstrate that communities can assume responsibility for one another across geographic and political boundaries. When people develop sustained relationships with places beyond their own, distant suffering becomes harder to ignore and easier to address collectively. This framework transforms abstract global crises into concrete local obligations, fostering cross-border solidarity and direct mutual aid.

Cultural change also depends on public rituals that remind societies of their obligations to future generations. The relative invisibility of Children’s Day is itself revealing. Societies routinely profess concern for children, yet devote comparatively little public attention to reflecting on their well-being. International Children’s Day receives only a fraction of the attention devoted to observances such as Earth Day, Mother’s Day, or Father’s Day. Yet it could serve as a focal point for schools, communities, and civic institutions to reflect on children’s well-being and compare approaches across regions and nations. Just as Earth Day helped elevate environmental awareness, a more visible Children’s Day could reinforce the idea that protecting children is a shared social responsibility rather than a private concern.

Ultimately, the most enduring change is not institutional but cultural. Modern societies measure success through economic growth, productivity, and financial performance. Yet these indicators reveal little about whether children are safe, healthy, or able to flourish. A society committed to children would ask a different question: Are young people developing the capacities they need to live meaningful lives? When children’s well-being becomes a central measure of success, policy priorities begin to change as well.

America Making America Whole

This effort requires a posture of candid self-examination rather than celebratory rhetoric. The United States cannot credibly present itself as a global beacon for human rights or children’s well-being while failing to confront its own domestic record. Within its own borders, millions of children contend with systemic poverty, food insecurity, deep-seated educational inequality, and toxic environmental exposure. This vulnerability is compounded by weakened labor protections that expose young people to exploitation, the ongoing trauma of family separation and detention at the border, and a glaring legal omission: the United States remains the only United Nations member state that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Yet ratification alone is not a guarantee of success. Many nations that have formally embraced the Convention continue to struggle with poverty, conflict, exploitation, and inadequate protection for children. The challenge is not simply adopting principles, but translating them into culture, institutions, and daily practice.

At the same time, some countries have demonstrated that meaningful progress is possible. The Economist Impact 2026 Global Out of the Shadows Index found examples of lower- and middle-income nations strengthening prevention efforts, improving accountability, and expanding protections for children despite limited resources. Such examples suggest that political commitment and institutional design can matter as much as national wealth.

The argument here is not that America should lecture the rest of the world on moral responsibility. It is that America needs to repair itself. True leadership on the global stage cannot be projected outward while systemic neglect is tolerated at home.

If the United States were to organize its laws, budgets, institutions, and communities around the well-being of children, it could offer the world something more persuasive than rhetoric: evidence that democratic societies are capable of confronting their own failures and repairing them. Such an achievement would not solve every problem, but it would demonstrate that accountability, prevention, and long-term investment in human development remain possible in a complex modern society. By addressing the structural conditions that undermine children’s well-being, the nation would reinforce the principle that democratic institutions are ultimately judged by their capacity to support human flourishing.

The Standard We Choose

Ultimately, we must return to the central question that anchors this series: Does your community care about children?

When we ask this, we must deepen our understanding of what “care” actually means. The true measure of a society’s commitment to its youth is not sentiment. It is not found in political speeches, corporate slogans, or cycles of selective outrage after a tragedy. The genuine measure is structural: whether a society organizes its resources, institutions, and legal protections around a child’s right to live, learn, grow, and belong.

The condition of our children is never incidental; it is diagnostic. It does not exist in a vacuum, separate from our economic successes or political debates. Instead, the well-being of the youngest among us provides one of the clearest indicators of a society’s overall health. It reveals exactly what a society values, what kinds of suffering it is willing to tolerate, and what kind of future it is actually prepared to build.

We can no longer treat the harm inflicted on children as an unfortunate byproduct of a complex world. It is a direct consequence of the standards we choose—and it remains within our power to choose a higher standard. Doing so will require countries, working both together and independently, to revisit their budgets, strengthen protections for children, and establish effective systems of accountability and enforcement. International agreements and declarations matter, but their promise is fulfilled only when they are translated into daily practice.

Yet the responsibility does not rest solely with national governments or international institutions. The well-being of children must also be advanced community by community, school by school, neighborhood by neighborhood. Public policy can establish protections, but communities give those protections life. Every level of society has a role to play, and every adult has a responsibility to help create the conditions in which children can thrive. The question that anchors this series is whether a community cares about children. The answer must be demonstrated not only through words, but through action. Every child counts.

This article was produced bythe Independent Media Institute.

The post Why Do Societies Normalize Harm to Children in War, Poverty and Public Policy? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Trump speaking at the Faith and Freedom Coalition. Screengrab from video posted to X.

Watching Trump behave like a maniacal wrecking ball every day, one can be forgiven for wondering why Democratic presidents always appear so comparatively docile. Obama uses the utmost finesse to barely pass the (wretched and corporate-subsidizing) Affordable Care Act? Trump backdoor defunds it with some executive orders. Biden spends much of his term unsuccessfully attempting to implement a small bit of student debt relief? Trump wipes out the entire Department of Education with a wave of his hand. Why, then, are Republican presidents seemingly so much more effective at doing what they want? A common temptation is to conclude that this is primarily a matter of leadership, and that if our side could just get an ideologically committed street brawler in the White House we would finally get some meaningful improvement around here.

William Howell and Richard Moe’s Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency provides a different answer to the question. Examining the development of the modern presidency and the different ways that it constrains Republicans and Democrats, Howell and Moe make two major points. The first is well-known and largely uncontroversial. The executive branch has gotten massively stronger in the modern era. The only ones who still deny this only do so by focusing on one specific arena of presidential power: the president’s diminished effectiveness in lawmaking. While it’s true that, particularly within a polarized and closely divided Congress, it’s become harder for presidents to get laws passed due to countless veto points and interest group capture (Trump 1.0 couldn’t even get a Republican Congress to fund his wall or repeal Obamacare), the larger story is that the presidency has amassed dramatically more power in nearly every other capacity, particularly trade, foreign relations, and the ever-expanding realm of so-called national security. As Howell and Moe show, this expansion has been achieved largely through the president’s increased control of the federal bureaucracy, enabling presidents to both expand their reach and act unilaterally, increasingly ignoring Congress altogether.

Notably, the executive’s expanded power has been a largely bipartisan affair. Faced with the growing crises produced by an increasingly sophisticated industrial global economy, the national government, and specifically the executive branch, began to expand in size and scope at the turn of the century during the Progressive Era, and then most notably during the New Deal and the Great Society. More recently, Nixon expanded the president’s control over the bureaucracy by bringing oversight and decision-making into the Executive Office of the President via his Domestic Council while also expanding the Office of Management and Budget, a “super department with enormous authority over all of the activities of the federal government” that Trump is using to wreak havoc today. Clinton, notably, used Nixon’s Domestic Council as the model for his own National Economic Council, which no president, irrespective of their politics, has disbanded since.

This expansion of executive breadth and scope was not merely a power grab. As often as not, Congress, particularly during crises such as the Depression, dodged its collective action problems by forfeiting its power to an executive designed for decisive and quick action. And when presidents did attempt to jettison their power it tended to end badly for them. Attempting to depoliticize presidential appointments, Carter reduced the power of the White House personnel office before realizing that in disconnecting his presidency from the bureaucracy, instead of centralizing it under his command, he had “’given away the store’” and undercut his own ability to govern, a mistake he would work to undo later in his term. In the story of the president’s expanding power, Carter’s experience is the exception proving the rule that the presidency either follows the logic of expansion or atrophies.

Howell and Moe’s second major point is only slightly less obvious than the first. Namely, Republican presidents since the New Deal have been committed to destroying the liberal administrative state. While Eisenhower assumed that the administrative state and its plethora of progressive programs could be rolled back only by Congress, Nixon saw that due to its tremendous entrenchment it could only be eliminated via unilateral action at the presidential level. Republican presidents since Nixon, and particularly since Reagan, have then paradoxically sought to expand presidential power precisely in order to destroy the administrative state. Because “changing an institutional status quo almost always requires much more power than protecting it,” Democratic presidents have in this regard largely stood pat while Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Trump have created what has now turned into a supercharged, lawless, and authoritarian “strongman presidency.”

Such a presidency, however, is not only defined by the negative power to destroy. Instead, Republican presidents have invoked the rationale of unitary executive theory to also expand the president’s affirmative power in, among other areas, foreign policy and over the Department of Defense, the NSA, and the State Department. The conservative courts, as anyone reading the news knows, have invoked the pseudo-historical ideology of originalism to justify their acquiescence to Republican executive power, while the Christian Right and a virulently reactionary media conveniently emerged to further advance the project.

To use the language of the book, modern presidential power has, in short, followed a general “symmetrical” expansion benefiting both Democratic and Republican presidents but has simultaneously followed an “asymmetrical” expansion that has solely empowered Republican presidents, and the GOP more broadly, at Democrats’ expense. The result has been a Republican presidency that is qualitatively different from Democratic ones, which is why the former presidents, regardless of their personal idiosyncrasies, all appear to be nihilistic psychopaths while the latter come off as pathetic duds. To be more generous, Republicans are playing a very different game, one whose logical endgame is the elimination of all opposition.

Howell and Moe’s account is particularly useful in showing that, beneath his freakish narcissism and volatility, Trump is remarkably conditioned by the presidencies of his predecessors as well as a predictable institutional trajectory. Indeed, if you didn’t know that Arthur Schlesinger had died in 2007, you might guess that his description of the George W. Bush Administration’s conduct as “’the most dramatic, sustained, and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history’” was referring to the Trump years.

The authors additionally provide some helpful reminders that the type of partisan sabotage, shutdowns, and gerrymandering we’ve been seeing of late transcend Trump and were all part and parcel of the Gingrich Revolution of the 1990s. One can argue that, beyond Bush v. Gore (a precursor to January 6th and the principle that the GOP no longer honors election outcomes), one decisive “wheels have come off” moment was the impeachment of Clinton, a desperate and bad faith measure emerging from the fact that, while he was an abysmal president, he had been deemed illegitimate merely because he had power while the Republicans did not. While Obama was not stupid enough to get into trouble for committing adultery or perjury, he was nevertheless also delegitimized by the right (for being “foreign born”). Meanwhile, Trump has broken every rule in the book to no effect while rapidly building upon the authoritarianism of Bush, and, for the same reason that a rock thrown off a hill falls down, future Republican presidents will very likely be even more authoritarian than Trump.

There is, however, a counter to Howell and Moe’s argument that GOP presidential rabidness and Democratic timidity are attributable primarily to the GOP’s opposition to the liberal administrative state. After all, Trump has shifted, at least rhetorically, the GOP’s traditional stance on Social Security (which Clinton and Obama both flirted with weakening) and has modified the party’s position on a number of other policies, showing that there is nothing predetermined in GOP presidents’ opposition to the administrative state (Republican governors have certainly embraced Obamacare in addition to other forms of federal support for liberal programs). And are we to conclude that if Trump were merely on good terms with the administrative state he would not be trying to steal elections and persecute his enemies?

What might be more useful here than the question of ideology, which is far more susceptible to historic flux, is the simpler question of economics. Within the context of worldwide capitalist crisis, the GOP can afford to be vigorous and coherent in pursuing its policies since its unrestrained support of capitalism is in line with the domestic and global system’s demand for unending accumulation. The GOP does not typically have to reconcile any serious contradictions between its rhetoric and positions and the demands of governance. They have the structural winds at their back. By contrast, the Democrats are in a bind that has badly tightened since the 1970s, the dawn of the postwar global slump and neoliberalism. Unlike the GOP, the Democrats continually walk into headwinds when their rhetoric and positions on labor, the environment, and trade confront the realities of cutthroat global competition and the demands of the state. It follows that, in office, one party would be unified, purposeful, and aggressive while the other would be internally divided, mealy mouthed, and incoherent.

These interpretations, of course, are not mutually exclusive. In either event, it’s useful to be reminded of the importance of structure, without which our discussions of Democratic leadership (which somehow always fails) and strategy (which is somehow always stupid) aren’t destined to get far.

The post The Era of the Strongman Presidency appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

1 Mbit high-speed CMOS pseudostatic RAM, made by Toshiba. Photo: © Raimond Spekking, Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0

Three years ago, Washington bet that restricting China’s access to advanced semiconductors would preserve American technological dominance. That bet is not paying off the way its architects imagined. A February 2026 analysis in American Affairs Journal found that China’s semiconductor manufacturing equipment sector has reached a level of maturity that would have seemed implausible just a few years ago.

Huawei is building advanced fabrication facilities in Shenzhen targeting 7-nanometer commercial-scale production as early as this year. SMIC, the state-backed foundry, has repeatedly pushed foreign equipment past its rated specifications to achieve manufacturing nodes that the export controls were specifically designed to prevent. This is the uncomfortable logic of economic coercion: the more you restrict, the more you incentivize the other side to build what you’re withholding.

To be clear, the export controls imposed since 2022, and progressively tightened through 2025, have had real effects. They disrupted China’s semiconductor supply chains, caused price spikes, and delayed access to the most advanced fabrication nodes by multiple years. Independent analysts broadly agree that the United States retains a meaningful lead in frontier chip design and production.

But a May 2026 CSIS assessment found a consistent pattern: every tightening of restrictions has prompted China to double down on state-backed domestic investment. China’s target is roughly 50 percent self-sufficiency in semiconductor equipment by 2025, up from 13.6 percent in 2024. Export controls have not halted that trajectory. By some measures, they’ve accelerated it.

Semiconductors generated $627.6 billion in global sales in 2024. China is one of the largest single markets. American chipmakers barred from selling there lose revenue that would otherwise fund the research and development cycles that keep them ahead. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s economic modeling found that sustained revenue losses reduce R&D investment, slow innovation cycles, and weaken the long-term competitive position of US firms. The controls are designed to protect American technological leadership. But by cutting into the revenues that fund American chip research, overly broad restrictions may erode the very lead they claim to be defending.

China’s state-backed firms do not face the same constraint. Beijing can backstop losses that market forces would punish. This is not a neutral observation. It points to a structural asymmetry in how the two sides are playing the game, where blanket commercial restrictions impose real costs on private firms while doing relatively little to slow a state-directed industrial policy with a decades-long time horizon.

Washington has begun to recognize this. A December 2025 policy reversal included a significant concession: allowing NVIDIA to resume shipping H200-class chips to China under a case-by-case licensing review, reversing the blanket denial posture that had been in place. National security hardliners objected. But the move reflects a pragmatic acknowledgment that restricting commercially available chips with broad civilian applications carries limited security benefit while imposing real costs on American industry.

What the walk-back reveals is that the original policy was not as carefully calibrated as its architects suggested. Controls that made sense for cutting-edge military-relevant systems were bundled with restrictions on hardware with legitimate commercial uses. The result was a blunt instrument presented as precision policy.

The semiconductor question does not exist in isolation. In healthcare, Chinese manufacturing is deeply embedded in supply chains for medical devices, pharmaceutical ingredients, and diagnostic equipment. A 2025 disruption in active pharmaceutical ingredient supply underscored just how much of American drug manufacturing depends on Chinese chemical production. No export control regime has addressed this dependency.

In AI and digital infrastructure, Chinese firms are deploying sector-specific models in logistics, healthcare diagnostics, and manufacturing across Southeast Asia and other fast-growing markets. They are competing not on headline model performance, but on embedded, industry-specific integration. The technology competition is not only about who has the largest model. It is about whose systems are most deeply woven into the infrastructure of the world’s fastest-growing economies. No chip export control addresses that either.

If the goal is genuinely to protect American technological capacity—rather than to perform strategic anxiety through trade restrictions—three things need to change. First, export controls should be calibrated by actual security risk, not by the nationality of the buyer. A Chinese civil engineering firm purchasing legacy semiconductors for infrastructure control is not the same security concern as the People’s Liberation Army acquiring GPU clusters for weapons simulation. Policy that treats them identically is not rigorous but reflexive.

Second, domestic investment in research capacity needs to be sustained—and scaled. CHIPS Act funding was a meaningful start. But it cannot substitute for the revenue base being eroded by overbroad restrictions on the very firms it is meant to support. One cannot simultaneously cut the funding streams and promise to out-innovate.

Third, the framework needs to distinguish between managed engagement and capitulation. In legacy semiconductors, industrial AI, and healthcare technology, U.S. and Chinese capabilities are often genuinely complementary. Treating all technology trade as an extension of military competition forecloses arrangements that could serve both economic and stability interests.

The semiconductor rivalry between the United States and China is real, consequential, and will shape the technological landscape for the next decade at minimum. CSIS analysts argue that the United States holds genuine leads in frontier chip design, advanced manufacturing equipment, and the research ecosystem that generates next-generation capabilities. The question worth asking is whether current policy is protecting that lead—or gradually undermining it by cutting revenues, accelerating Chinese domestic investment, and conflating commercial competition with existential threat.

A November 2026 policy deadline offers an opening to move from reactive restriction to something more strategic: a framework that distinguishes between the technologies and transactions that genuinely threaten security and those that simply compete. The difference matters. So far, U.S. policy has not consistently made such a distinction.

This first appeared on FPIF.

The post The Chip War Against China is Failing appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

American house, 29 Palms, California. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Something unusual happened last week in Washington, DC. In a rare showing of bipartisan support during the Trump era, both chambers of Congress passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a package incorporating provisions from more than 60 pieces of legislation to help address housing affordability in the US. But then, in a moment that better reflects what Americans expect from the federal government, Trump canceled the bill signing, saying he would hold up the bill until Congress passed his controversial voter ID bill, the SAVE America Act. On Monday, Speaker Mike Johnson sent the housing bill to Trump for signing, but the president called it “a big yawn” and “so unimportant.”

There’s not enough space here to go through all the important sections of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — including a provision that would limit the number of single-family homes that private equity firms can purchase. But with hurricane season upon us and extreme storms and heat waves blanketing the country, one section that stands out is the three-year reauthorization of the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR), which would maintain assistance for lower-income families in the wake of disasters.

So what is CDBG-DR?  When people think of disaster recovery and mitigation, they tend to think of programs associated with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). But a variety of other government agencies and departments also participate. The Small Business Administration, for instance, grants low-interest financing to help survivors rebuild. And the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) administers programs such as CDBG-DR. When a disaster is declared, HUD opens CDBG-DR grants to state, local, and tribal governments to assist with disaster relief, recovery, rebuilding infrastructure, housing assistance, and economic revitalization. Right now, you’re probably thinking, “How is that different from FEMA assistance?” While FEMA grant programs address immediate post-disaster needs, CDBG-DR addresses long-term needs that are either unmet by FEMA funding or by insurance.

Like many other vital government programs, CDBG-DR has historically been reauthorized and funded sporadically through supplemental packages, leading to inconsistent support. Many groups, including the Appalachian Flood Resilience Coalition, have called on Congress to permanently reauthorize the program to create stability. While the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act does not do that, the three-year reauthorization is at least a step in the right direction. And as previously noted, the legislation retains the strict threshold that at least 70 percent of a CDBG-DR grant must be used to directly support low- to moderate-income communities, unless HUD provides a formal justification to the contrary. In the past, Congress and HUD have simply asked communities to “make a good faith effort” to meet the requirements or set the threshold to 50 percent.

That Trump has called provisions of the housing bill like this “unimportant” shows how little he thinks of the needs of communities struggling to rebuild. Congress’ rare bipartisan effort to solve an affordability issue stands in stark contrast to the administration’s current priorities, which seem to value spectacle over substantive relief. The president has been focusing on vanity projects like his ballroom, an arch that will block the sightline between Arlington Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial, and his Great American State Fair, which brings a Ferris wheel to a region that already has a larger observation wheel 14 minutes away. There’s also the war that’s not a war despite the fact that the US and Iran are still firing missiles at each other.

Ultimately, disaster survivors waiting for money to rebuild don’t care about ballroom renovations or “American flag blue” reflecting pools. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a unique political moment in the Trump era, with Congress finally stepping up to represent the people. This is an opportunity for Trump to show real leadership and do the same. But like all those vanity projects and his war, he’s mishandling it.

This first appeared on CEPR.

The post Trump Dismisses Key Housing, Disaster Recovery Reform as ‘Unimportant’ appeared first on CounterPunch.org.