Jason Arday, Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

I am sickened and deeply saddened by the death of Jason Arday. He was only 41, a young man whose life was cut short following a period of intense public controversy and scrutiny, much of it shaped by pressures and forces far larger than any one individual should have to bear. His death is first and foremost a profound human tragedy. But mourning him also requires that we look beyond the immediate circumstances of this tragedy and ask difficult questions about the society and institutions that created the wider conditions in which his ordeal unfolded.

Jason Arday’s death needs to be understood within the wider structures of power that shaped his ordeal. The liberal language of “accountability and humanity” individualizes the tragedy and leaves untouched the larger machinery of power that determines whose errors become scandals, whose vulnerabilities become public spectacles, whose failures are forgiven, and who is forced to carry the burden of institutional racism.

There is far more at work here than a failure to balance accountability with compassion. To frame this simply as a problem of public judgment, social media excess, university malpractice, or the need for greater civility is to ignore the structures of power that make some people far more vulnerable than others to humiliation, abandonment, and public condemnation.

Nor can what happened to Jason Arday be separated from the larger political landscape in which cruelty, disposability, and racialized violence have increasingly become normalized. Across the globe, governments are waging war on immigrants and people of color, criminalizing dissent, expanding regimes of surveillance and repression, and embracing policies of expulsion, exclusion, and racial cleansing. Gaza has become the most horrifying expression of this machinery of death, with children killed on a staggering scale and an entire population subjected to devastation, displacement, and hunger. At the same time, grotesque levels of inequality condemn millions to insecurity and abandonment, while the planet is sacrificed to the demands of profit and militarism. These are not isolated developments.

They bear the mobilizing passions of fascism: the manufacture of enemies, the celebration of cruelty, the contempt for vulnerability, the racial sorting of human beings, the militarization of knowledge, and the elevation of violence into a governing principle. In such a world, what happened to Jason Arday cannot be reduced to a private tragedy or explained solely through the circumstances of an individual life. His death points to something larger and more disturbing. It forces us to confront a social order that increasingly trades in disposability, human suffering, war, and cruelty, and then treats the casualties it produces as if they were merely private misfortunes.

It is within this broader culture of disposability and cruelty that Arday’s death takes on its larger significance. Systemic racism and a social order organized around greed, dispossession, hierarchy, and profound inequality do not operate in the abstract. The legacies of colonialism have not disappeared. They have been absorbed into institutions, cultural assumptions, and structures of privilege that continue to determine who belongs, who is protected, whose mistakes can be survived, and who is subjected to relentless scrutiny.

For generations, Black and brown scholars have been forced to carry burdens their white colleagues rarely encounter: the demand to represent an entire race, to prove repeatedly that they deserve to occupy spaces historically denied to them, and to endure forms of scrutiny in which professional criticism can quickly become a racially charged judgment on their intelligence, legitimacy, and very right to belong. These burdens speak to institutions still haunted by the ghosts of a colonial past and the racial hierarchies it produced, now intensified by a far-right assault that seeks to turn higher education into a laboratory of indoctrination, purged of historical consciousness, critical thinking, and a culture of questioning.

The racial politics surrounding Arday’s destruction become even harder to ignore when one considers who helped ignite the campaign against him. Nathan Cofnas, the self-described “race realist” who publicized allegations against Arday, had previously argued that in a genuine meritocracy the number of Black professors at Harvard would “approach zero” and that Black people would largely disappear from prestigious positions outside sports and entertainment. The contrast is especially damning: Cambridge had previously upheld a plagiarism complaint against a white academic involving extensive use of a student’s work, yet he retained his position and escaped anything resembling the public spectacle visited upon Arday. Accountability matters, but when its intensity, publicity, and consequences are distributed so unequally, accountability itself becomes entangled with the racial machinery of power.

This is why symbolic change can never substitute for structural change. Representation matters, but representation without a transformation in the underlying relations of power can become a form of institutional camouflage. As Paul Tiyambe Zeleza notes, Arday was “eagerly elevated as a symbol, ruthlessly scrutinized as an anomaly, and callously discarded as a liability.”  His story exposes the cruel underside of performative inclusion: institutions can turn Black achievement into symbolic capital, advertise it as evidence of their own enlightenment, and then withdraw protection when the person carrying that symbolism becomes controversial, vulnerable, or inconvenient.

There is a disturbing contradiction at work here. Arday’s extraordinary biography was celebrated as a story of adversity overcome, with his academic ascent presented as evidence of institutional transformation. But the machinery that helped turn him into a symbol also made him extraordinarily vulnerable. His visibility became a commodity. His biography became part of the university’s public image. Once allegations concerning his scholarship and personal claims emerged, the institution that had benefited from his symbolic elevation had its own reputation to protect. What had been celebrated as triumph could now be treated as a liability to be managed.

This is the violence of what has been called “inclusive exclusion”: institutions open their doors sufficiently to advertise diversity while leaving largely intact the racialized structures of power operating behind them. Black and brown scholars can be welcomed as evidence of progress while being denied the institutional security, solidarity, and protection necessary to survive when that visibility turns against them. They become hypervisible as symbols of institutional virtue and dangerously isolated as human beings.

The media can intensify this process by transforming legitimate questions of academic accountability into a racialized public spectacle. Arday’s alleged failures did not remain his alone. They became entangled with a much larger ideological attack on diversity, equity, and the presence of Black scholars in elite universities. Even one liberal commentator acknowledged that Arday was “fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals” and “fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives.” The formulation is revealing. In both instances, Arday the human being disappeared behind what others needed him to represent: first as evidence of racial progress, then as evidence of its alleged failure. Here one of racism’s most enduring mechanisms becomes visible: the failures of white academics generally remain individual failures, while the failures of Black academics can be turned into spectacle and made to stand for the supposed failures of an entire race, a political project, or the very idea of racial equality.

The mythology of meritocracy compounds this injustice. Elite universities have never been neutral temples of merit. They are saturated with inherited privilege, family connections, patronage, wealth, elite networks, and forms of cultural capital accumulated across generations. Yet these mechanisms of preferential treatment largely disappear from public discussion until a Black scholar is accused of having benefited from diversity initiatives. Preferential treatment suddenly becomes scandalous precisely when its presumed beneficiary is Black. The enormous machinery of privilege that has historically advantaged white elites is renamed “merit,” while attempts to address racial exclusion are denounced as threats to standards.

There is another force at work: the market itself. Contemporary culture has developed an enormous appetite for spectacularizing narratives of suffering, trauma, resilience, and amazing acts of transcendence. Universities, publishers, media organizations, and cultural industries participate in converting such stories into institutional prestige and commercial value. Black suffering becomes marketable, overcoming it becomes inspirational, and the complicated humanity of actual people can disappear beneath narratives designed to sell books, enhance institutional reputations, and generate publicity. Human beings become brands, their wounds commodities, and suffering itself a spectacle for consumption. As Guy Debord observed in The Society of the Spectacle, “the consumer now becomes the consumer of illusion.” In this regime, the spectacle does more than conceal reality; it normalizes cruelty, turns violence into an object of consumption, and functions as “a guarantor of the system’s totalitarian cohesiveness.”

Taken together, these forces reveal something much larger than the failure of one university or the excesses of one media campaign. They expose an entire machinery of cruelty in which institutional branding, systemic racism, market values, racialized surveillance, the mythology of meritocracy, and the hunger for public spectacle reinforce one another. These forces are not merely cultural. They are embedded in material relations of power that determine whose lives acquire institutional value, whose vulnerabilities can be exploited, and who becomes disposable when that value disappears. Race and class intersect within these relations rather than operating as separate forms of domination. A person can be elevated because an institution needs a symbol, scrutinized because racial reaction needs a target, commodified because suffering sells, and abandoned because institutions ultimately protect themselves. The culture that turns humiliation into entertainment can just as easily turn grief into another spectacle once the damage has been done. Public cruelty is followed by public mourning, while the structures that produced the cruelty disappear from view.

Nor can this machinery of cruelty be separated from the larger political and economic order in which it thrives, an order structured by profound inequalities of race and class and by institutions increasingly governed by market values. We inhabit a society increasingly wedded to war abroad, repression at home, staggering inequality, and the normalization of human disposability. Cruelty has become more than an individual failing. It has become a political language, a cultural spectacle, and increasingly a governing principle. It is within this poisoned landscape that authoritarian and fascist subjectivities flourish, sustained by institutions and cultural apparatuses that teach us whose suffering matters and whose can be ignored.

This is why Jason Arday’s death cannot be understood through the comforting language of individual responsibility alone. Accountability matters. Academic standards matter. Truth matters. But accountability stripped of history and power can easily become another weapon of inequality. The question is not whether Arday should have been accountable for mistakes or misrepresentations. The question is why accountability assumed such a spectacular, racialized, and potentially destructive form, and what structures of power determined its intensity, meaning, and consequences.

What Jason Arday’s death exposes reaches far beyond one university, one controversy, or one life, however precious that life was. His death forces us to confront the human cost of mistaking representation for justice. Diversity becomes hollow when institutions congratulate themselves for opening doors while refusing to dismantle the structures of power operating behind them. Inclusion becomes another public-relations gesture when those who enter historically white institutions are left to bear racialized burdens largely on their own.

Compassion for Jason Arday and his family is essential. But compassion without a language of power risks becoming another form of silence. The deeper question is not simply whether we can hold people accountable without humiliating them. It is what kind of society produces such relentless forms of humiliation in the first place, especially one increasingly shaped by the racism, cruelty, and savage inequalities of neoliberal fascism.

We need to ask who benefits from such a system, whose power and material interests it protects, whose labour and suffering it exploits, why its burdens fall so unequally, and why institutions so eager to display the symbols of racial progress remain unwilling to confront the structures that make genuine equality impossible. Mourning matters, but mourning must become more than a fleeting occasion for sorrow. A society should be judged not simply by whom its institutions elevate as symbols of progress, but by how those same institutions treat them when they become vulnerable, controversial, or no longer useful.  In Jason Arday’s case, his abandonment at the moment of greatest vulnerability exposes the very structures that his celebrated appointment was supposed to prove had disappeared. If his death is to carry a meaning beyond grief, it must also carry us beyond the empty language of accountability when accountability is stripped of history, power, and the unequal conditions under which judgment is imposed. It must compel us to confront the histories of domination these institutions carry, the racial burdens they continue to impose, and the machinery of power that turns vulnerability into punishment, accountability into spectacle, and symbolic progress into a substitute for justice.

The post Jason Arday and the Machinery of Cruelty appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Musk on 20 January 2025, at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration in Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

What should be done about the world’s richest man, and all that he represents? Here in South Africa, it is tempting to contrast Elon Musk to our other most famous recent personality, Nelson Mandela, a symbol of freedom, justice and political equality for all.

Mandela led one of the last century’s greatest human achievements – ending Apartheid, a crime against humanity – by invoking the decency of people across the world, in unity with the oppressed in Black South African society. The result in 1994 was the achievement of democracy based on his liberation movement’s demand, ‘one person, one vote, in a unitary state.’

Musk, in contrast, symbolises a no-holds-barred, crisis-prone, ultra-exploitative racial capitalism whose ideology fuses corporate-dominated economic libertarianism with a surveillance-centric militarised state and a personal drift to the ultra-right. Musk is advancing what former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis terms ‘techno-feudalism,’ which is now generating a series of social, political, economic and ecological disasters.

Currently, the most ferocious South African battleground is Musk’s attack on affirmative action; specifically, so-called ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ policies that compel him to find an indigenous co-investor for the Starlink satellite network to be licensed here. (Such arrangements are typically achieved through loans.) Musk refuses to do so because “Starlink is a global system, and we must retain sole ownership of all our subsidiaries for operational purpose” – an unconvincing excuse similar to any other time a corporation will evoke ‘operational’ reasons for anything they don’t want to explain.

The real reason for Musk’s opposition to black empowerment appears to be ideological, for he claims, “South Africa now has more anti-White laws than there were anti-Black laws under Apartheid” – a feeble argument that implicitly denies the way white South Africans committed what the United Nations termed a ‘crime against humanity.’ There is no ‘anti-White’ law on the books restricting voting, residence or other aspects of formal segregation, or even reversing the outright, widespread thefts of land and property committed during colonialism and Apartheid to Black people in the land of their birth.

Hence Musk’s local allies are seeking a non-partnering alternative for him to empower people considered the victims of settler colonialism from 1652-1994, e.g. the $30 million worth of free internet services Starlink has offered to rural schools. But this process has coincided with Musk both buying X.com (Twitter) and making absurd claims (to 240 million followers) about alleged dangers to the country’s white citizens, especially the nonsensical ‘Afrikaner farmer genocide’ trope. That, in turn, informed Donald Trump’s maniacal opposition to anything South African (aside from his friendship with white golfers).

While we do not see Mandela as the all-conquering hero beyond criticism, he is a figure who inspires a sense of pride for South Africans. Musk reminds of our need to apologise to the world on behalf of a society that from 1971-89 raised such an individual – and it also reminds of the same solution that Mandela promoted to end Apartheid: boycott the oppressor’s operations as much as possible, so as to shift power relations and delegitimise his hate speech.

Applied to Musk, that spirit could result in regulation or even nationalization of Big Data firms – especially given AI’s existential threats, as he himself identified back in 2014 – and will depend upon contexts, but the urgent necessity of weakening ‘Muskism’ cannot be denied.

A violent childhood in South Africa

Although at the time of writing, Forbes estimates Musk is worth $709 billion, he did reach $1.45 trillion in June, just after his SpaceX was offered to New York Stock Exchange investors – in part because of tricks that will compel many ordinary investors to buy his shares in the weeks ahead. Losing such a vast share of wealth on the speculative New York stock market reminds of his early-2025 net worth shrinkage – but then, it was a consumer boycott against his Tesla cars and X.com social media that wiped out a quarter of his wealth, as recalled below.

Such erratic personal wealth reflects Musk’s chaotic way of relating to the world around him. The roots of his ideology run deep into white South Africa’s own psychoses. Elon captured the soul of his father Errol – who was enriched during the mid-1980s as a merchant of emeralds illegally extracted from Zambia – in a 2017 Rolling Stone interview: “He’s a terrible human being… Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.”

Musk was born in the capital, Pretoria, and partly raised in Johannesburg – the world’s most unequal city – and Durban, but the most important moment in his South African years was when in 1984, as he put it in a CBS 60 Minutes interview, “I was almost beaten to death” during a high school bullying incident that left him hospitalized for a week. Describing his 1970s-80s life growing up under Apartheid, he continued, “It was very violent. It was not a happy childhood.”

His younger brother Kimbal was an eyewitness when a group of boys pounded Musk: “When they got finished, I couldn’t even recognise his face. It was such a swollen ball of flesh that you could barely see his eyes.” Nearly three decades later, the incident required corrective surgery, as he tweeted in 2013: “Was beat up pretty badly as a kid & left me w jagged septum. Harder to breathe as I got older, so time to fix.”

Errol told Elon’s biographer that the bullying attack occurred in retribution, because his son teased someone who “had just lost his father to suicide and Elon had called him stupid. Elon had a tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?”

The Johannesburg school at which this happened, Bryanston High, was a well-located all-white public school in 1984, training the country’s racist elites to run a society that required extreme brutality by the mid-1980s. Nearby was Sandton, a commercial area that, within a decade (as wealthy whites fled the center of town), would become Johannesburg’s central business district, the so-called ‘richest square mile in Africa.’ This space has consistently been cited by PwC consultancy as the world’s worst site for ‘economic crime and fraud.’

By 1989 at age 17 (prior to compulsory military service for Apartheid), Musk had fled to Canada, his mother’s home country, where his grandfather was supportive of Nazi Germany before moving to a welcoming Apartheid-era South Africa. In 1992, Musk enrolled at the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia, from where Donald Trump had himself graduated in 1968. Musk’s 1997 undergraduate degree there combined economics and physics, at a time financial training was increasingly mathematical, promoting market-speculation modelling.

Muskism’s deadly days at the wood chipper

Musk appears to have amplified the values of white South Africa and Wharton, leaving behind whatever he had briefly experienced in social-democratic Canada. Musk is a man who was built up during Apartheid and later in the U.S. through massive infusions of public money, yet presents himself as a rational critic of waste, fraud, abuse and privilege.

The ideology of ‘Muskism‘ – as dissected by Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian – is one way to capture Musk’s ‘techno-king’ role. As New York Times book reviewer Jennifer Szalai put it, “Muskism – with its uncanny mix of ruthless state power and juvenile memes – is already bigger than its namesake.”

Worse, behind Trump’s project lies not just the immediate neo-fascist ideology – whether the paleoconservative ‘non-interventionist’, isolationist 2024 election rhetoric or the revived neoconservative militaristic reality – but the danger of a longer-lasting Muskism as what political economists term a ‘regime of accumulation’: to replace what in South Africa we know of both so-called ‘Fordism’ – which Antonio Gramsci coined to capture mass production plus mass consumption – and late-20^th century ‘Post-Fordism’.

In early 2025, prior to a temporary but hyperbolic falling out with Trump over the U.S. state deficit, Musk established a ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) reporting directly to the President and Cabinet, at the same time his companies continue to harvest vast federal subsidies. Even as DOGE gutted major parts of the U.S. state, SpaceX was awarded major new defence contracts.

Within days of joining the Trump White House, while apparently addicted to ketamine, Musk demolished the U.S. Agency for International Development, typing on his X.com platform: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

The result was not only devastation to life-saving programmes, but the re-empowerment of the U.S. State Department (which took over distribution of residual USAID funds) led by neoconservative Mario Rubio. For example, a new ‘America First Global Health Strategy’, according to University of Michigan economist Howard Stein, “offered health assistance in exchange for access to health data. These agreements threaten each country’s digital sovereignty and patient privacy, while opening economies to U.S. health-related goods and services. In the case of Zambia, negotiations have been held up due to US insistence that the Memorandum of Understanding be tied to the signing of a critical mineral accord… and continues a long tradition of using the continent’s population for potentially unethical experimentation.”

Ten thousand USAID jobs were quickly cut by DOGE, leaving just 300 employees. To be sure, some staff were employed to promote a neoliberal economic-policy ideology (e.g. through consultancies prolific in transitional South Africa). Washington’s National Endowment for Democracy operated under the pretence that a society committed to free politics would need “free markets and business organizations” and a “neoliberal, pro-corporate ideology,” as leading leftwing activists Ronnie Kasrils and Zwelinzima Vavi charged in 2024.

Yet because U.S. and allied activists had lobbied hard for more overseas aid – and Mandela had in 1998 complained that USAID only gave ‘peanuts’ even though U.S. corporations profited so much from Apartheid – there were finally programmes established at USAID crucial for saving lives. These Musk took aim at, especially against South Africans, and especially Black adolescent girls and women.

One peer-reviewed study – published in Britain’s Lancet journal in mid-2025 – analysed Musk’s potential damage: 14 million anticipated early deaths by 2030 (assuming there was no alternative funding), due to interrupted supplies of medicines, food, emergency assistance, energy and climate financing for adaptation and mitigation (especially to South Africa for a Just Energy Transition loan worth more than $1 billion).

The actual rate of death attributable to Musk’s cuts appears, for Year 1, about a quarter of the Lancet projections, at 700,000, according to former USAID official Atul Gawande. But that will rise, also within the U.S., as another 11 million lost medical insurance in early 2026 thanks to Musk’s DOGE. Women’s reproductive rights were another target of Musk (who has 14 children) thanks to Trump’s evangelical Christian base. The International Planned Parenthood Federation reported that nearly 14,000 family planning clinics closed as a result, accompanied by massive hits to U.S. reproductive healthcare.

In a recent article, “Blame Elon Musk and Donald Trump for the Out-of-Control Ebola Crisis,” the public health specialist who led USAID’s response to the 2014 outbreak, Jeremy Konyndyk, contended that the disease rapidly spread in Central Africa since May 2026 because, “USAID partners had been defunded. The USAID health office that managed relationships with Congolese health officials has been closed, along with the entire USAID presence and workforce in the country. Humanitarian relief and health programs that USAID oversaw in eastern Congo were suspended, disrupted, or fully ended. And the USAID personnel who managed global outbreak surveillance back in Washington were likewise purged.”

Musk was also responsible for the 2024-to-2025 shrinkage ($2.1 billion) in the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) medicines support, including a 51% cut in prevention funding. This resulted in closure of 1,714 service delivery sites in 46 countries (mostly in Africa). An AIDS vaccine developed in South Africa thanks to $45 million in USAID funding was also derailed.

Children were especially reliant upon PEPFAR’s treatment support, according to the International AIDS Society in a recent report: “South Africa recorded the largest absolute decline, with 30,880 fewer children receiving treatment support from PEPFAR – a 45% drop” – while internationally, 77,163 children suffered treatment cuts. South African healthworkers lost even more jobs, including more than 15,000 funded by PEPFAR.

Former USAID employee Nicholas Enrich’s Into the Wood Chipper recounted further healthcare crises in Musk’s homeland: “Within days, the health team at USAID in South Africa alerted the tuberculosis (TB) division in Washington that several clinical trials had been interrupted, preventing hundreds of TB patients who had recently been enrolled on novel treatment regimens from accessing their drugs. Without the medicine provided by USAID through the trials, there were no alternative options for the enrollees to receive treatment for the life-threatening infectious disease. The stop-work orders were in direct conflict with the ethical standards of an ongoing clinical trial, jeopardizing the reputations of renowned research institutions, not to mention the lives of the enrolled individuals, many of whom were children.”

In a July 2026 interview, Economist magazine editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes confronted Musk about “huge numbers of things shut down in Africa.” He angrily replied, “There were claims of this. These claims are false! They’re nonsense! And, and absolute nonsense! But, but obviously just for, when funding is stopped for fraudulent organizations or for something, do you think they’re going to say, do you think they’re going to say, ‘Well, we please keep funding the fraud’? Or do you think they’re going to come up with a sad story that sounds sympathetic in order to get the funding restored? Obviously, it will be the latter. And that’s exactly what they did.”

Musk was asked by Beddoes about fatalities and claimed, “Zero people died because of DOGE… Zero point zero… How many NGOs are there that could that could that could step in… the Gates Foundation has $50 billion. What’s what, what about them? What about any one of a number of organizations? What about um, the, uh um, what Mackenzie whatever her last name is, used to be Bezos, uh, gave $50 billion. What about that?”

In reality, only 2% of respondents in one survey of 166 former USAID recipients had found alternate (full-replacement) sources of programme financing a year later. In short, Musk embarked upon an extraordinary attack upon millions of people living with HIV who had been assisted by PEPFAR over the prior two decades, according to a recent UNAIDS report, as well as countless others defunded by DOGE, and he remained in a surreal state of denial about his deadly impact.

(As for Beddoes, she’s a ‘traitor to the West’, Musk soon tweeted, for asking tough questions.)

Muskism’s degenerate subsidization+exploitation

This is not hypocrisy in any ordinary sense. It is budget-cutting the parts of government that protect society and environment while keeping and expanding the parts that benefit capital. Strip away the biography of the genius-founder, the rockets, the trolling, and what remains of Musk? Not a ‘disruptor’ of ossified systems, but a clear example of how ultra-speculative capital now operates: dependent on the state it claims to despise, extremely hostile to the labor it needs in order to function, and financially and politically committed to movements that strengthen its power around the world.

In 2025, the Washington Post found that Musk and his businesses had received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits before Trump returned to power, including $6.3 billion in 2024 alone. These infusions arrived, repeatedly, at critical moments, helping seed the growth that made him the world’s richest person.

Tesla is the only major American automaker whose workforce is not represented by a union; despite allegations of high injury rates, long hours, and below-industry pay, every union drive across Musk’s facilities has failed. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) protecting workers found Tesla repeatedly violated labor law through coercively interrogating activists engaged in organizing, and using gag orders to silence or fire them.

Musk’s DOGE moved against the NLRB itself, as part of a broader effort to dismantle the legal architecture of collective bargaining, a system erected since 1935 to help stave off the causes and harms of the Great Depression. DOGE therefore implemented austerity but not just in the classical sense. It also promoted a deliberate shift of power from workers to employers, using the apparatus of the state to hollow out the very agencies meant to reasonably constrain capital given knowledge of prior crises.

Musk’s genius mythology — innovator of internet payment systems, electric vehicles and space exploration — is itself ideological in the classical sense. It flips the real relationship between capital and labor, rendering invisible the tens of thousands of workers whose surplus value underwrites every satellite launch and every fevered tweet. Musk did not build the future. He extracted it. When capital this nakedly seizes control of the state, the regulatory apparatus, the infrastructure of public discourse, and the international political field, small reforms stop being enough and may no longer be possible.

As historian Efthimios Karayiannides observed in 2024 in the Africasacountry ezine, critics complain of the “surprisingly high number of white South Africans among dot-com moguls turned conservative crusaders against liberalism. Four of the founders of PayPal – the ‘company that made the modern internet’ – have some connection to Southern Africa… Musk’s ambitions to colonize Mars have been likened to the Great Trek, the northward migration of Dutch-speaking settlers aimed at escaping the Cape’s British colonial administration, not least its prohibition of slavery. Parallels have been drawn between Musk’s and fellow PayPal mafioso Peter Thiel’s authoritarian approaches to corporate governance and the Apartheid regime’s white supremacist baaskap (‘bossism’) ideology.”

Still, warns Karayiannides, “these are decidedly flimsy bases upon which to draw a connection between these latter-day robber barons and their erstwhile homeland. They rely upon either analogy or psychoanalytic speculation – the notion that some unspecified formative experience of white supremacy has deeply and irrevocably shaped their worldviews.”

The power of Muskism is even more dangerous than simply updating his childhood Apartheid economic privilege: it amplifies broader shifts within capitalism towards AI-induced mass unemployment, ubiquitous surveillance (especially thanks to Palentir, run by Thiel, who also attended school in Johannesburg not far from Bryanstonr), increasingly hierarchical social control, and an even worse tendency than now exists towards ‘financial fabulism.’

Elon Musk in 1985, at Johannnesburg’s Bryanston High School.

SpaceX as signifier of bubbling

The financial engineering Musk learned at Wharton continues to be pernicious, as Horace Campbell has recently shown in leading African ezine Pambazuka. Not only is the broader financialization process to blame, but controversy arose with SpaceX’s Initial Public Offering – before its share valuation collapse in July – because of the apparent willingness of investment index providers to relax, abbreviate or reinterpret their requirements in order to accommodate a company whose scale makes exclusion increasingly difficult.

Under such conditions, prices become influenced not only by assessments of expected risk and return but also by mechanical demand arising from stock-market index construction. Price support, liquidity, and legitimacy accrue immediately to existing shareholders, while much of the attendant risk is absorbed by pension funds and retirement accounts.

The benefits to Musk are correspondingly clear. First, index inclusion can support a higher valuation over a longer term, if the whole market does not melt down. If tens of billions of dollars in compulsory index-fund buying are directed toward a relatively small public float, demand may exceed supply and push prices upward.

Second, it can provide immediate liquidity. A conventional sale of shares requires issuers to persuade investors that the shares are worth buying; index inclusion creates a guaranteed buyer base, reducing uncertainty and allowing existing shareholders to convert paper wealth into realized wealth more readily.

Third, inclusion in the major indices signals that SpaceX belongs among the core firms of the American economy, even if it has not satisfied the older criteria that other established firms were required to meet.

Fourth, it shifts part of the downside risk onto passive investors. If the valuation later proves excessive, pension funds and ETF holders bear part of the cost because they were structurally required to buy.

What is at stake is whether the institutions that govern capital allocation constrain on economic power, or become increasingly responsive to it. The political-economic structure this reveals is not competitive capitalism in any classical sense. Passive investors, pension beneficiaries, and retirement savers become compelled buyers, absorbing downside risk, while insiders convert paper wealth into liquid wealth on preferential terms.

Musk deserves an active, widespread boycott

Most importantly, what Musk’s career illuminates is that American capitalist class power is now based not only on financialized bluffing. It is no longer pretending to be liberal, meritocratic, diverse, and inclusive. Musk’s impact on society has included repeated and increasingly vociferous attacks on people of colour, the trans-community and others outside the white heterosexual mainstream.

By mid-2025, as Musk ordered his X.com to turn off filters prohibiting hate speech, his Grok chatbox SpaceXAI service began to describe itself as a ‘mecha-Hitler’, posting pro-Nazi propaganda in response to questions. And thanks to Musk’s fascist-style straight-arm at a Make America Great Again rally on the day Trump took power in 2025, former Johannesburg Business Day editor (and now centrist Member of Parliament) Songezo Zibi – a former admirer – U-turned and opposed Starlink’s presence in the country.

Wrote Zibi: “Musk has actively promoted white supremacist ideas, including giving the Nazi salute. Call me naïve and idealistic but I still think character matters, but apparently to some people it really doesn’t. He has also spread racist lies about black and brown immigrants in the US and elsewhere… Musk is a proven purveyor of dangerous misinformation and disinformation. He uses his X platform for this purpose and has taken active measures to ensure that the fact-checking capacity the platform use to have has been taken away.”

Zibi’s hostility was in part the result of Musk’s disregard for women, evident in early-2026 postings of non-consensual sexualized images of women and children. Authorities in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines briefly suspended access to Grok, with other European countries investigating Musk’s creation of sexualized deepfake images. Musk initially denied there were “naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero.” (The chatbox itself, however, apologized.)

More recently, in mid-June during an episode of extreme Afrophobic xenophobia among rightwing Protestants in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Musk egged on the racists to keep demonstrating in his X.com posts seen 65 million times. He was especially supportive of Tommy Robinson, Britain’s leading rightwing Islamophobe.

April 12, 2025 – Source: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2043280270238101890?s=20

June 9, 2026 Source: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/206437135

In his home country, Musk has also claimed that affirmative action legislation attempting to build a capitalist class in the wake of Apartheid discrimination is racist, tweeting in April 2026, “South Africa won’t allow Starlink to be licensed, even though I was BORN THERE, simply because I am not Black! We were offered many times the opportunity to bribe our way to a license by pretending that a Black guy runs Starlink SA, but I have refused to do so on principle.”

Starlink even hired the former Democratic Alliance opposition-party leader Tony Leon’s consulting firm to make the case against affirmative action, setting off a major controversy that has split the leaders of the country’s second-largest (and white-dominated) political party.

Already in 2023, Musk had begun claiming that South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was allowing widespread attacks on Afrikaner (white minority) farmers, tweeting that another opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (enjoying just 8% support) was “openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa,” on grounds of leader Julius Malema’s singing of a nostalgia-inducing struggle-era song, ‘Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer.’ It is a chant generally considered by the country’s elites to be so harmless (or alternatively so useful for blowing off steam) that South Africa’s top court in March 2025 rejected a white Afrikaner lobby group’s case that it represented ‘hate speech.’

Musk’s bizarre genocide claim continued into 2026 – with Grok playing a major transmission role – along with other paranoid tweets consistent with international white supremacist talking points.

In reality, commercial farmer wealth has risen dramatically since democracy coincided with neoliberal economic policies in 1994, due largely to the end of sanctions and the lack of state redistribution of farmland that had been stolen by whites from black people within living memory. Yet thanks to Musk’s misinformation, Trump also gave more than 6000 Afrikaners special refugee status in the U.S. (while rejecting all other applications) with potentially 10,000 more to be welcomed in 2026-27. But 2.7 million remain in South Africa.

How to counter Musk’s power

South Africa is one site to identify a counter-politics to Muskism. In a time of what Washington-based political economist James Mittelman terms Runaway Capitalism, the new features of algorithmic, cognitive and philanthropic capital accumulation and social engineering are generating opposition. The new terrains of surplus extraction, super-exploitation, ecocide and political control fuse with core features of both industrial and financial capital, but resistance is rising.

Against the core super-exploitative features of South Africa’s 21st century ‘4^th Industrial Revolution’ (a term that the World Economic Forum taught this country so as to frame new technologies), a 4th Industrial Counter-Revolution (4ICR) can be sighted, encompassing both class struggle and social-movement critique.

Activist battles have been successfully waged here since the early 2000s, against expensive, restrictive Intellectual Property on AIDS medicines, with the Treatment Action Campaign’s victory and hence state supply of free generics saving millions of lives (although not for Covid-19 vaccines, because of Berlin’s opposition); against Bill Gates’ ‘philanthro-capitalist’ penetration into low-income areas of South Africa; against the exclusionary and neo-colonial nature of tertiary education (led by the ‘#FeesMustFall’ student movement); against highway e-tolling surveillance whose costs were disproportionately born by workers; against predatory fintech in the form of a World Bank microfinance subsidiary; and – although not yet victorious, against data centers and worker super-exploitation in the gig economy.

In these fights, 4ICR activists seek to apply brakes to runaway capitalism, but not as opponents of technology – instead using ideas that expand the ‘commons’, thereby seed-bedding an eco-socialist politics that is unwilling to sacrifice life-saving, productivity-enhancing techological progress on the alter of profits. This is vital here, in the world’s most unequal and often unsettled society. And especially when Musk controls the Starlink satellites and has the ability to turn internet access on or off at his whim, it is vital to question his agenda. And if his tools cannot be nationalized, they should be repelled, for the sake of societal and ecological safety.

One obvious place to observe Musk’s atmospheric irresponsibility, is in Starlink’s prolific ‘space debris’: SpaceX will leave thousands of large objects floating even when, as on August 5, a rocket drifted off course and crashed into the moon (at 8700kph). Raised as a young white lad in South Africa, Musk was never taught to contemplate whether the ‘polluter pays’ (as most national environmental management laws insist), because it was always a black domestic worker who picked up his rubbish.

In light of Musk’s enormous damage, a ‘Stop Starlink’ campaign in South Africa has begun mobilizing on the following demands of the state, starting with a ban on the use of Grok AI by government, universities and schools, and any public institutions, and remove all state institutions from the X.com platform. In the process, government should request non-profit agencies – especially those involved in education and the well-beingof children – to seek alternative platforms with safeguards against online sexual abuse, and thus raise theissue of online sexual violence as a national dialogue, especially AI-generated non-consensual use ofimages.

As for Starlink, state regulators should halt any decision on Musk’s licence until national and international investigations into whether Musk is a ‘fit and proper’ person (a concept applicable in the professions of finance and law, obviously overdue for Big Tech).

These are ambitious demands to make of a government that is prone to folding to U.S. pressure, whether from Washington or Musk’s base in Texas, or even at the November 2025 G20 summit hosted in Johannesburg, which Trump sabotaged (according to a leading official), when Pretoria ‘collapsed’ its global governance agenda, in trying to appease the U.S..

Yet resistance is possible: already starting in 2022 when Musk bought X.com, people of conscience have been quitting the platform, as it took on more of Musk’s personal biases. A related technological front is growing citizen opposition to data centers that consume electricity and water in massive quantities, contributing to the climate crisis where fossil fuels are used. The charge of ‘environmental racism’ is levelled against Musk’s largest data center, located in Memphis in the U.S. South, due to vast methane gas turbines that generate local pollution now sickening nearby African-American residents.

In June, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People President Derrick Johnson threatened Musk with a lawsuit: “We cannot afford to normalize this kind of environmental injustice – where billion-dollar companies set up polluting operations in Black neighborhoods without any permits and think they’ll get away with it because the people don’t have the power to fight back. We will not allow xAI to get away with this.”

And surprisingly, even some African governments have occasionally stood up to Musk, as Karayiannides remarks: “a few declared Starlink a threat to their digital sovereignty: Namibia, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Cameroon, and South Africa have all either issued formal bans or demanded regularization. Having honed his skills in bitter battles with traditional banks, credit card companies, and government regulators in the 2000s, Musk is a master of regulatory arbitrage. He will no doubt leverage Starlink’s ability to cross borders via satellite and function before formal agreements are reached to muscle his way into recalcitrant markets.”

Cameroon is illustrative because according to Georges Macaire Eyenga from the University of Dschang, Starlink’s “business strategies privatize access and make it unaffordable for a large portion of the global population,” so “while Starlink claims to promote digital inclusion, its market-driven logic deepens existing inequalities – amplifying what has long been a major challenge of internet access and rendering it even more visible and politically salient.”

If Starlink does win South African regulatory permission, the main corporate losers will be cellphone companies – two of which (MTN and Vodacom) are facing resistance in the rest of Africa due to South African xenophobia – and a few other internet service providers. A new entrant in 2027, Amazon Leo, is just getting its satellite service up and running internationally, and appears to have quickly found a South African holding company for its local investment. But Amazon is the target of separate protests due to its headquarters construction on sacred Goringhaicona Khoi Khoi land in Cape Town.

Musk’s projected prices for residential internet service won’t be competitive with existing urban systems: e.g. $30/month for a typical high-speed optic fibre cable, at least 20% lower than Starlink. Musk does have low-key satellite operations providing internet in Botswana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland and Zambia, with the most profitable regional market in Zimbabwe  where by early 2026, there were still fewer than 70 000 subscribers (out of 17 million people).

Of all the critiques of – and attempts to regulate – Musk, the most powerful have hit his wallet, mainly coming from a liberal, environmentalist mindset in the U.S., EU and Britain, where impromptu boycotts of Musk began in early 2025. There were several physical attacks on the car company’s dealerships (including arson) and, after he appeared at an AfD rally in February 2025, a 76% crash in German Tesla sales, which drove an overall 1/3^rd decline in his European market through mid-2025.

Musk’s message to the far-right party was that Germans are too “focused on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that,” because “It’s OK to be proud to be German, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”

Anger at Musk grew across the world. As a result mainly of his DOGE budget cuts (as well as Trump’s anti-EV policies), Musk’s net worth crashed by $126 billion in the first half of 2025, in large part due to a 45% slump in Tesla’s share value. By June, Musk’s other shareholders pressured him to leave Washington, which he did in an exceptionally acrimonious manner – revealing Trump’s appearance in the notorious Epstein Files – apparently as a result of DOGE’s failure to cut the state deficit due to Trump’s desired tax cuts (which Musk opposed).

But he continues to arrogantly wreak political, environmental and societal damage, and it remains vital to oppose him on all fronts. Conscientized South Africans will continue fighting a potential Starlink presence, and to look for ways to make amends for sending out into the world an Elon Musk replete with the depraved mindset that was so common in his formative years.

Patrick Bond is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg Centre for Social Change.

Elinor Sisulu is Executive Director of the Puku Children’s Literature Foundation, and was awarded an honorary PhD by the University of Pretoria for her work in human rights and reading promotion.

Scott Timcke is a Research Associate of the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Change and an Affiliate with the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The post Why Elon Musk Should be Boycotted, as Seen From South Africa    appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Churchill testifying in the civil trial of Ward Churchill v. University of Colorado – Public Domain

I write in remembrance of Ward Churchill, who died on August 11, 2026. I was a member of Ward’s defense team, headed by the civil rights attorney David Lane, both at hearings at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2007 and in state court in Denver in 2009, when he sued the university for his firing for charges of “research misconduct” and “plagiarism,” both of which I analyzed thoroughly in a 2008-09 edition of the journal “Works & Days.” The title of my essay is “Framing Ward Churchill: The Political Construction of Research Misconduct.” The title points to the political motivations of the charges against Ward. Those charges were manufactured to mask the attack on Ward from the Right (Fox News, the Colorado governor and legislature, and the UCB administration with the complicity of certain faculty committees) for his activism and speech on behalf of social justice, particularly focused on an essay he published a day after 9/11, titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” on which I will focus in Part II of this essay. Indeed, the Denver jury, to which I gave expert testimony as a scholar of American Indian Studies and federal Indian law, found that Ward’s “protected speech [was]a substantial or motivating factor in the decision to discharge [him]” and that the University had not “shown by a preponderance of the evidence that [Churchill] would have been dismissed for other reasons.” Nevertheless, on July 7, 2009, District Court Judge Larry Neves “denied Churchill’s motion for employment reinstatement as a tenured professor and concluded that back pay ‘is not an appropriate remedy in this case’” (CU Connections). The Colorado Court of Appeals and Supreme Court upheld the Neves verdict, which served the university’s agenda against Ward.

Ward was and through his writing still is a generative figure in Native studies with his focus on colonialism and imperialism as it played and plays out in the Americas. His wide-ranging influence was represented by the strong Native and non-Native support he received in his fight with  UCBoulder from both his students and certain colleagues, and national scholars such as Michael Yellow Bird,  then of the University of Kansas, who also acted as an expert witness. Ward’s support was national and international. I did not know Ward before I joined his defense team, but I necessarily knew his work, which had a significant influence on my own work in comparative settler colonialism as it did on the work of so many others; and it was my high regard for his work that led me to accept the invitation to join his defense team.

At this moment, with the genocide continuing in Gaza and spreading to the West Bank and Lebanon, I think particularly of Ward’s 1997 classic A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present, of which David Stannard, who testified in the Denver trial on behalf of Ward and is himself the author  of the 1992 classic American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, wrote in the Preface: “So it is a good thing that Ward Churchill, with this book, A Little Matter of Genocide, had decided once again to go looking for trouble. He will get plenty of it. But it is only because of trouble-makers like him that the deadened conscience of this nation might some day begin to stir. May his kind multiply.” I am reminded here of civil rights activist and Congressman John Lewis urging us all to “find a way to get in the way” and get into “good trouble, necessary trouble.” We need this kind of trouble more than ever as the United States continues to support Indigenous genocide both at home and in Palestine.

What follows in Part II of this essay is an excerpt from my essay, referenced above, “The Framing of Ward Churchill.” The excerpt looks into Ward’s essay “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” that got him into the “good trouble” that led to the Denver trial. We should remember that Ward’s case was centrally about academic freedom, which has been increasingly under fire since Ward exercised it and defended it, paying the price of his job for his activism, a price that so many faculty are paying today or are under threat of paying for their defense of Palestinian rights. In his obituary in the New York Times, Ward, speaking at UCB in 2017 is quoted as saying, “Academic freedom in America is dead….I had my identity before I was a professor. I had it while I was a professor, and I have it now.” If academics in America are to resurrect academic freedom, we must follow the example of Ward Churchill and give up the identity of professor, which is becoming more and more constricting, for the identity of activists for social justice in word and deed.

With a few small edits, the following section from my 2008-2009 essay “The Framing of Ward Churchill” is an example of Ward’s activism, of his courage and critical insight:

II

Issues that bear on the Churchill case began receiving national attention in late January and early February 2005. This attention focused on an essay Churchill published on the Internet between September 12 and October 7, 2001, when the United States invaded Afghanistan, titled, “‘Some People Push Back’: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” The essay served as a polemical analysis of what Churchill terms the “counterattacks” on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon on 9/11 by Arab militants. (Of this constituency it was later disclosed that 15 of the 19 operatives were from the U.S. ally Saudi Arabia.) Churchill argues that the attacks were a response to the West’s violent history in the Middle East, beginning with the Crusades and continuing in the present moment with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian homelands. But the focus of Churchill’s polemic is the 1991 U.S. bombing of Iraq’s water and sewage facilities—“‘aerial warfare’ constitut[ing] a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law”—and the subsequent ten-year U.S. embargo of Iraq following the first Gulf War, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children from the interdiction of food and medicine, deaths that former U.N. Assistant Secretary-General, Denis Halliday, termed a “genocide.”

What public commentary seized on as particularly egregious in Churchill’s essay, and what was duly noted in the UCB chancellor’s review, is his comparison of the “technocratic corps” of business operatives in the WTC, all serving “America’s global financial empire,” to “little Eichmanns.”  Concomitantly in this essay, Churchill casts Americans in their passive acceptance of the Iraqi genocide in the role of “good Germans.” The Eichmann comparison undoubtedly offended because at a moment of national and private grief, it took the other side—an outrageous possibility for the media commentators, the Colorado governor, the state legislature, and the university administration—where critical scrutiny turns the innocent into the guilty, the dead and the grieving into the perpetrators of violence. At a time that demanded sympathy for “us,” it displaced that sympathy with a plea for us to understand “them.”

I remember thinking at the time how inapt and inept the comparison to Eichmann was as a strict historical comparison—the demonizing force of the figure tends to erase history by collapsing crucial differences rather than articulating them. From a strictly historical standpoint, my take on the comparison hasn’t changed. But five years into the U.S. preemptive attack on Iraq—with its Orwellian justification of the invasion as the center of the so-called “war on terror”; the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead and an estimated 5 million-plus displaced, 2.7 million internally and 2.4 million externally; with the U.S. use of torture, extraordinary renditions, the building and maintenance of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay (et al.); the abrogation of civil liberties in crucial areas through the PATRIOT and related Acts; the extensive use of surveillance on U.S. citizens; and the massive waste of human and material resources in order to maintain a “culture of death”³—Congress can be seen as essentially condoning such actions and thus making itself complicit in war crimes. With these considerations at hand, I do not think that one can simply dismiss Churchill’s comparison as farfetched, though the comparison begs for such dismissal. Even if it does not work literally, the comparison does gesture toward another America that shadows “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” in which many of us think we live. To its credit, Churchill’s scholarship and criticism has consistently demanded that we acknowledge living in this other America. And this has angered those people who have a stake in the narrative of American exceptionalism.

In an op-ed piece I wrote for Indian Country Today on June 9, 2004, at the time when Abu Ghraib first entered U.S. headlines, I noted: “Deadly policy can happen and continue to happen in a democracy precisely because democracy itself can become the alibi for atrocities.” The Indian Removal Act of 1830 passed the House of Representatives by only five votes (102-97) and then only after President Jackson “pressured and bullied” House Democrats into breaking a tie over legislation that “would [have] delay[ed] consideration of removal for a year” (Jill Norgren). Thus, what would materialize as the ethnic cleansing and forced death marches of the Trail of Tears was democratically enacted. But, we might ask, what does it mean for a society to be voting on such a measure in the first place? What does it mean to hold a vote on genocide? Writing against slavery, the Mexican War, and populist democracy, Henry David Thoreau in “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849) remarks on the limits of the vote as a tool of democratic social action:

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.

I think this passage inhabits the same space as Churchill’s 9/11 essay, of his “good Germans” comparison, though it does so with much more precision; and so we, whatever our criticisms of Churchill, might recognize that his essay, however expressed, belongs to a vital American heritage of dissent and carries a message about which we ought to think.

We now know that no Iraqis as individuals nor Iraq as a state were involved in 9/11. But as Churchill acknowledges in an “Addendum” to his essay, he was not writing in a strictly literal mode (nor apparently was George W. Bush acting in one, though he thought he was, when he linked Saddam Hussein to 9/11); it was “more a stream-of-consciousness interpretive reaction to the September 11 counterattack than a finished piece on the topic” (in an eerie kind of way Churchill’s words here could characterize Bush’s war plan, which, however, had and continues to have literally devastating results). That is, the genocide committed on Iraqi civilians by the U.S. bombing and embargo of Iraq prior to 9

I write in remembrance of Ward Churchill, who died on August 11, 2026. I was a member of Ward’s defense team, headed by the civil rights attorney David Lane, both at hearings at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2007 and in state court in Denver in 2009, when he sued the university for his firing for charges of “research misconduct” and “plagiarism,” both of which I analyzed thoroughly in a 2008-09 edition of the journal “Works & Days.” The title of my essay is “Framing Ward Churchill: The Political Construction of Research Misconduct.” The title points to the political motivations of the charges against Ward. Those charges were manufactured to mask the attack on Ward from the Right (Fox News, the Colorado governor and legislature, and the UCB administration with the complicity of certain faculty committees) for his activism and speech on behalf of social justice, particularly focused on an essay he published a day after 9/11, titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” on which I will focus in Part II of this essay. Indeed, the Denver jury, to which I gave expert testimony as a scholar of American Indian Studies and federal Indian law, found that Ward’s “protected speech [was]a substantial or motivating factor in the decision to discharge [him]” and that the University had not “shown by a preponderance of the evidence that [Churchill] would have been dismissed for other reasons.” Nevertheless, on July 7, 2009, District Court Judge Larry Neves “denied Churchill’s motion for employment reinstatement as a tenured professor and concluded that back pay ‘is not an appropriate remedy in this case’” (CU Connections). The Colorado Court of Appeals and Supreme Court upheld the Neves verdict, which served the university’s agenda against Ward.

Ward was and through his writing still is a generative figure in Native studies with his focus on colonialism and imperialism as it played and plays out in the Americas. His wide-ranging influence was represented by the strong Native and non-Native support he received in his fight with  UCBoulder from both his students and certain colleagues, and national scholars such as Michael Yellow Bird,  then of the University of Kansas, who also acted as an expert witness. Ward’s support was national and international. I did not know Ward before I joined his defense team, but I necessarily knew his work, which had a significant influence on my own work in comparative settler colonialism as it did on the work of so many others; and it was my high regard for his work that led me to accept the invitation to join his defense team.

At this moment, with the genocide continuing in Gaza and spreading to the West Bank and Lebanon, I think particularly of Ward’s 1997 classic A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present, of which David Stannard, who testified in the Denver trial on behalf of Ward and is himself the author  of the 1992 classic American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, wrote in the Preface: “So it is a good thing that Ward Churchill, with this book, A Little Matter of Genocide, had decided once again to go looking for trouble. He will get plenty of it. But it is only because of trouble-makers like him that the deadened conscience of this nation might some day begin to stir. May his kind multiply.” I am reminded here of civil rights activist and Congressman John Lewis urging us all to “find a way to get in the way” and get into “good trouble, necessary trouble.” We need this kind of trouble more than ever as the United States continues to support Indigenous genocide both at home and in Palestine.

What follows in Part II of this essay is an excerpt from my essay, referenced above, “The Framing of Ward Churchill.” The excerpt looks into Ward’s essay “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” that got him into the “good trouble” that led to the Denver trial. We should remember that Ward’s case was centrally about academic freedom, which has been increasingly under fire since Ward exercised it and defended it, paying the price of his job for his activism, a price that so many faculty are paying today or are under threat of paying for their defense of Palestinian rights. In his obituary in the New York Times, Ward, speaking at UCB in 2017 is quoted as saying, “Academic freedom in America is dead….I had my identity before I was a professor. I had it while I was a professor, and I have it now.” If academics in America are to resurrect academic freedom, we must follow the example of Ward Churchill and give up the identity of professor, which is becoming more and more constricting, for the identity of activists for social justice in word and deed.

With a few small edits, the following section from my 2008-2009 essay “The Framing of Ward Churchill” is an example of Ward’s activism, of his courage and critical insight:

II

Issues that bear on the Churchill case began receiving national attention in late January and early February 2005. This attention focused on an essay Churchill published on the Internet between September 12 and October 7, 2001, when the United States invaded Afghanistan, titled, “‘Some People Push Back’: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” The essay served as a polemical analysis of what Churchill terms the “counterattacks” on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon on 9/11 by Arab militants. (Of this constituency it was later disclosed that 15 of the 19 operatives were from the U.S. ally Saudi Arabia.) Churchill argues that the attacks were a response to the West’s violent history in the Middle East, beginning with the Crusades and continuing in the present moment with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian homelands. But the focus of Churchill’s polemic is the 1991 U.S. bombing of Iraq’s water and sewage facilities—“‘aerial warfare’ constitut[ing] a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law”—and the subsequent ten-year U.S. embargo of Iraq following the first Gulf War, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children from the interdiction of food and medicine, deaths that former U.N. Assistant Secretary-General, Denis Halliday, termed a “genocide.”

What public commentary seized on as particularly egregious in Churchill’s essay, and what was duly noted in the UCB chancellor’s review, is his comparison of the “technocratic corps” of business operatives in the WTC, all serving “America’s global financial empire,” to “little Eichmanns.”  Concomitantly in this essay, Churchill casts Americans in their passive acceptance of the Iraqi genocide in the role of “good Germans.” The Eichmann comparison undoubtedly offended because at a moment of national and private grief, it took the other side—an outrageous possibility for the media commentators, the Colorado governor, the state legislature, and the university administration—where critical scrutiny turns the innocent into the guilty, the dead and the grieving into the perpetrators of violence. At a time that demanded sympathy for “us,” it displaced that sympathy with a plea for us to understand “them.”

I remember thinking at the time how inapt and inept the comparison to Eichmann was as a strict historical comparison—the demonizing force of the figure tends to erase history by collapsing crucial differences rather than articulating them. From a strictly historical standpoint, my take on the comparison hasn’t changed. But five years into the U.S. preemptive attack on Iraq—with its Orwellian justification of the invasion as the center of the so-called “war on terror”; the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead and an estimated 5 million-plus displaced, 2.7 million internally and 2.4 million externally; with the U.S. use of torture, extraordinary renditions, the building and maintenance of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay (et al.); the abrogation of civil liberties in crucial areas through the PATRIOT and related Acts; the extensive use of surveillance on U.S. citizens; and the massive waste of human and material resources in order to maintain a “culture of death”³—Congress can be seen as essentially condoning such actions and thus making itself complicit in war crimes. With these considerations at hand, I do not think that one can simply dismiss Churchill’s comparison as farfetched, though the comparison begs for such dismissal. Even if it does not work literally, the comparison does gesture toward another America that shadows “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” in which many of us think we live. To its credit, Churchill’s scholarship and criticism has consistently demanded that we acknowledge living in this other America. And this has angered those people who have a stake in the narrative of American exceptionalism.

In an op-ed piece I wrote for Indian Country Today on June 9, 2004, at the time when Abu Ghraib first entered U.S. headlines, I noted: “Deadly policy can happen and continue to happen in a democracy precisely because democracy itself can become the alibi for atrocities.” The Indian Removal Act of 1830 passed the House of Representatives by only five votes (102-97) and then only after President Jackson “pressured and bullied” House Democrats into breaking a tie over legislation that “would [have] delay[ed] consideration of removal for a year” (Jill Norgren). Thus, what would materialize as the ethnic cleansing and forced death marches of the Trail of Tears was democratically enacted. But, we might ask, what does it mean for a society to be voting on such a measure in the first place? What does it mean to hold a vote on genocide? Writing against slavery, the Mexican War, and populist democracy, Henry David Thoreau in “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849) remarks on the limits of the vote as a tool of democratic social action:

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.

I think this passage inhabits the same space as Churchill’s 9/11 essay, of his “good Germans” comparison, though it does so with much more precision; and so we, whatever our criticisms of Churchill, might recognize that his essay, however expressed, belongs to a vital American heritage of dissent and carries a message about which we ought to think.

We now know that no Iraqis as individuals nor Iraq as a state were involved in 9/11. But as Churchill acknowledges in an “Addendum” to his essay, he was not writing in a strictly literal mode (nor apparently was George W. Bush acting in one, though he thought he was, when he linked Saddam Hussein to 9/11); it was “more a stream-of-consciousness interpretive reaction to the September 11 counterattack than a finished piece on the topic” (in an eerie kind of way Churchill’s words here could characterize Bush’s war plan, which, however, had and continues to have literally devastating results). That is, the genocide committed on Iraqi civilians by the U.S. bombing and embargo of Iraq prior to 9/11 is, for Churchill, symbolic of the many genocides committed by the United States throughout its history, beginning with the genocide against American Indians. However controversial or debated this position of deliberate genocide against American Indians is within American history and American Indian studies, Churchill is far from being alone in holding it, both in his writing and teaching (for which he won a student award at Colorado). I hold this position myself. More importantly, the position that American Indians have been (and in specific ways still are) the victims of genocide, is a position widely held throughout Indian country.

III

Since I wrote the essay in 2009, when Churchill’s charge of Native American genocide was still being contested by a vocal but loud minority of American studies and American Indian studies scholars, as his hearing and trial attests (I doubt such scholars can be found today, if they are around they are certainly in hiding, although Trump and friends would like them to come out). But it is true, and this is a central point of A Little Matter of Genocide, that the U.S government and the US educational system by and large have erased the genocide. To this point, and as a companion to Ward’s work, I suggest Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier’s long poem Whereas (2017) for anyone who wants to read the force of this erasure in the U.S. government’s bad-faith 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. Satirizing all the “whereas” clauses that compose the Apology, Long Soldier at one point in the poem comments on a conversation with a “scholarly” “circle”: “Whereas I could’ve but I didn’t broach the subject of ‘genocide’ the absence of this term from the Apology and its rephrasing as ‘conflict’ for example.” Ward Churchill’s generative work remains an ongoing exposure of this absence in the history of the United States. May his work continue to trouble us and urge us to get into trouble, to get in the way, as he did throughout his career.

The post In Memoriam: Ward Churchill, 1947-2026 appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Why Taming the Power of Capital is Needed for Environmental Resolution

In 2017 I wrote an article arguing that neoliberal climate policies were wholly inadequate to address the scale of environmental problems and that there existed a brief window before capital reasserted itself to end the entire effort. Noam Chomsky took the other side of the argument— which was still allowed back then, claiming that an economist at UMASS-Amherst had a detailed solution to climate change that only required a few small tweaks to solve it.

The economist— Robert Pollin, was elevated to be Joe Biden’s ‘climate guy.’ Pollin’s effort yielded exactly the product that I claimed that it would in the article— absolutely nothing. But getting the direction right wasn’t my point. Understanding and publicly conveying why it was the case was the point. Pollin’s plan was ‘pragmatically’ minimalist. Do the least that could possibly address the problem and forget it. But it predictably (I predicted it) went nowhere.

The problem with Pollin’s solution is that it ignores the power of capital to derail it. I argued that capital would turn any public policy into a way to enrich America’s oligarchs, and that this would prevent it from being effective. Before Joe Biden took office I went through his environmental proposals in detail. There was no detail. The conclusion was that they weren’t serious. Their top priority was making Biden’s donors rich using public money.

Those reading this in a political party frame need to stop doing so now or seek psychiatric help. I’ve followed environmental issues since 1970. As I explain below, the first head of the EPA was a Republican. The party difference then was over how to accomplish environmental goals, not whether or not to pursue them. And the Democrats have been putting forward only Republican proposals since Bill Clinton was in office. So, the division is between when both parties cared about environmental issues and today when neither party cares about them.

Republicans stopped being environmentalists with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. The first head of the EPA, William Ruckelshaus, was both an environmentalist and a Republican. Environmentalism was a bi-partisan affair until Reagan mocked it in a political move to exploit the class divide between relatively well-to-do urban environmentalists and the loggers and coal miners losing their jobs from top-down environmental legislation.

As with Robert Pollin, the solutions were directionally correct while being politically counterproductive. If I wanted to create a large group of permanent political enemies, I would pass legislation intended to clean the air in New York and Los Angeles while economically devastating large swaths of the heartland. The emergence of the current urban / rural political divide began here. The arrogance of those willing to end other people’s livelihoods for what to them is an abstract benefit is breathtaking,

US greenhouse gas emissions were eventually outsourced to China. While they had been moderating with the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, US greenhouse emissions are now expected to rise 12% per year from AI. The setup is that a few dozen tech billionaires think that they aren’t rich enough yet and therefore wish to build a slight variation on existing technologies that require trillions in environmentally destructive infrastructure. Because they are billionaires, their dream of building crap that nobody asked for and that doesn’t work is becoming a reality.

This was my point in the 2017 article. Without bringing capital to heel, there is no realistic environmental path forward. Pollin’s ‘pragmatic’ approach enriched a few green tech executives. Doing so was the entire point of Biden’s adoption of Robert Pollin’s program. It looked complicated enough so that eyes would glaze over. But at its core, it was device to transfer wealth from the American people to Biden’s donors. That Pollin didn’t understand this is what made him an economics professor at UMASS – Amherst.

Donald Trump is the product of this class-war environmentalism. Displaced coal miners and loggers could have been given jobs doing other necessary things. The New Deal programs that emerged from the Great Depression built much of the infrastructure that today makes life in older American cities livable. Policy wonks don’t get Trump’s appeal because they’ve never had people three thousand miles away from them end their livelihoods, marriages, communities, and futures.

To understand the imperious mindset of doing so, consider Robert Moses, the New York oligarch who destroyed much of New York City in the 1960s by building highways through important economic routes. The resulting devastation was treated as an act of nature when it hit even though it was entirely oligarch-made. Poor people were blamed for the economic destruction that Moses was entirely to blame for. This was the class position behind early environmental legislation.

None of this is to argue against environmental policies in the present. The idiocy of ignoring accumulating environmental destruction is that the costs of remediating it are growing exponentially. Left ‘abundance’ theory needs to explain how it gets the world on a sustainable path forward. The irony is that quite a bit less would have needed to be done had Pollin’s weak tea proposals been implemented. But they were structured as gifts to donors rather than as serious environmental proposals.

Readers are invited to peruse the literature on tax incentives used to further public policies. As with AI, the literature in support of tax incentives is theoretical, and therefore prospective. The empirical evidence challenging the efficacy of tax incentives is based on outcomes. In the history that I was able to find, tax incentives went mostly to executive compensation. In American fashion, they are a cynical grift, repayment from politicians to donors for campaign contributions. This was known in 2017.

The appeal of Pollin’s argument is easy enough to understand. By limiting the problem as climate change, solutions appear easy and cheap. This is the ‘pragmatic’ counter to those of us waving our arms claiming that the power of capital must be addressed before any progress can be made. And it fits into the neoliberal framing of the Democrats’ ‘green capitalism’ as the only allowable solution to environmental woes. The problem with green capitalism is that it replaces one set of problems with another. Rather than removing the causes of environmental woes, green capitalism seeks to address them after the fact.

The starting position of capital is to solve existing problems by creating new problems. Rather than limiting the production of greenhouse gases, the green capitalist solution is to spend trillions on ‘carbon capture’ technologies and EVs. Question: how is this more environmentally efficient than directly ending greenhouse gas emissions? The answer: it isn’t. Building these new technologies while maintaining the old is wildly inefficient.

Consider the current war for control of oil in and around Iran. Then add the build out of an EV industry. Are greenhouse emissions rising or falling in this scenario? They are rising. Because China builds quality EV’s at 20% of the cost of US producers, the environmentally constructive solution would be to have the Chinese build the global EV supply. The longer-term problem is called the Jevons Paradox. Making a quality product at a low price means that more will be sold, meaning more pollution, not less.

The ultimate environmental constraints are physical. The earth will either be livable for humans or it won’t be. The available evidence suggests that what could have been solved with tweaks forty years ago will require major interruptions to Western lifestyles going forward. It isn’t the environmentalists who raised the cost of resolution here. It was those who resisted the tweaks that made the problems so much more costly to solve in the present who did so.

While this is just a rumor, I’ve been hearing it for years. Donald Trump is claimed to be of the view that climate change is real. But at eighty years of age, he just doesn’t care. He’ll be dead before mass dislocations from environmental collapse take place. Charles Darwin united humanity via ‘species.’ Donald Trump is the anti-Darwin. To Trump, the rest of us are just a collection of losers. As a metaphor for the age, it fits.

Israel Funds AI Lie-Bots

Recent reports have Israel ‘spiking’ AI training data with pro-genocide talking points. Readers will recall that LLM (large language model) AI is a probability model that puts forward the most prevalent words and strings of words (tokens) found in training sets as query responses. This makes Israel gaming LLM AI so predictable as to be mundane. Israel spent just under $50 million to flood AI training data with Israeli propaganda. Missing from news reports is that pro-genocide reporting by state-adjacent media in the US had already spiked the data.

Through both prevalence in training data and a hierarchy of ‘trusted sources’ that elevate the CIA, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Pentagon in AI query results, generative AI was already the most powerful tool for distributing state and corporate propaganda ever conceived. That a fascist state (Israel) currently engaged in ethnic genocide can buy its way to legitimacy in AI query results makes perfect sense. Ninety-two percent of AI users trust the first AI query response that they get to be true.

Compare this against only 28% of Americans who trust the mainstream press. AI is structured to draw almost exclusively from US state propaganda and US state propaganda as it is filtered through the establishment press. Only 28% of Americans trust it because it is state propaganda. And yet when AI spits out this very same state propaganda it is considered to be true by 92% of AI users. This is why AI is backed financially and politically by the CIA, the Pentagon and the intelligence-adjacent American press.

Having previously queried AI related to the US – Israeli genocide in Gaza, the Israelis are wasting their money. The query results from the Google Gemini and OpenAI ChatGPT AI models were already so lopsided towards Israel that there is no more room to move in that direction. The initial layer of lies included previously debunked claims regarding October 7, 2023. The second layer included imagined threats to Israel that are Israeli projection. Israelis are worried about being attacked by genocidal fascists— like Israelis.

That AI ‘truth’ is being gamed points to the political premises that led to probability being the engine driving AI. The necessary premise behind the model choice is that truth lies at the center of the broad social discourse as it is filtered through the internet (as AI training data). This itself is premised in the equitable distribution of political and economic power. In fact, the US has amongst the most concentrated skews (towards the rich) of political and economic power in the world. Prevalence in the discourse in this case means the voice of the rich and powerful.

This isn’t my opinion. It is the math. The probability model is used to count AI tokens. AI tokens are determined by proximity in semantic groupings. In fact, meaning (semantics) for AI is the product of this proximity. The more instances of particular tokens related to a query, the higher the likelihood that an AI model will put that forward as the answer. On matters of war and peace, prevalence in training data accrues to the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Pentagon. Behind the scenes is the CIA writing the script.

The political benefit of Chatbot AI to existing power should be obvious. Having followed US foreign policy for decades, I don’t trust one word about US foreign policy from any of the organizations listed above. Where are Iraq’s WMDs? Of what relevance is the demise of Iran’s navy when its missile defense is its strategic advantage? And if Mossad is clever, why did it come up with the dumbest plan of attack (against Iran) in modern military history? So, AI sourcing has fools lying about events that they did not anticipate as its go-to on US foreign policy.

While it initially made sense to me, and based on alleged evidence, AI coding (writing computer code) seemed promising. But the problems being encountered are illustrative. If AI can pop out code that is 97% accurate in a few seconds, is that useful? As one who coded when one additional space in five thousand lines of code could take hours to find and debug, finding the 3% (1-.97 = .03 = 3%) that is wrong can require acquainting oneself in intimate detail with the 97% that is correct. What does wrong even mean here?

AI boosters claim that these are growing pains that will soon be resolved. And there is technological history that supports the claim. The early voice assistants that would answer corporate phone lines and direct calls were mercilessly mocked in the film Burn After Reading. But these days, their ability to direct us into a Kafkaesque hell when we are forced to interact with them is much improved. My own motivation to find the people who created them and pull them through the phone to let them know what I think of their handiwork is much higher now.

Imagine senior coders being shifted from writing code to ‘fixing’ AI generated code. The       bosses have no framework for understanding the nature of the problem. Having been the guy who explained slightly complex concepts to senior management, bosses are chosen for their ability to convey not-quite-true explanations of company products to gullible outsiders, not to understand how the products work. The point: there are a thousand ways that 97% correct AI generated code could take longer to fix (and here) than writing the code correctly from scratch.

Back to Israeli lie-bots for a moment. Google crapified its search engine to raise profits. It had a product that worked and it had the relationship with US intelligence agencies needed to chase away its equal to or better than Google competitors. If AI companies see other companies and nations paying good money to spike AI training data, why wouldn’t they just cut out the middleman and sell Chatbot results to the highest bidder? If the retort is the threat of AI losing its credibility, you have probably never used a chatbot. Credibility isn’t what is being sold.

Again, 92% of Americans believe the same query results when AI gives them that only 28% believe when originally ‘reported’ in the establishment press (links above). What this suggests is that users trust the news source, not the news. But with the AI probability engine in hand, it is the same news. This brings forth the saying ‘putting old wine in new bottles.’  What it also suggests is that at least 64% (92% – 28%) of AI users in the US have no idea how AI works. It took from 2003 with the Iraqi WMD deception until recently for the establishment press in the US to be completely and utterly discredited. The view here is that AI will never be trustworthy.

Despite the rollout of generative AI from China in the US, the Chinese use of automation AI represents the only demonstrated productivity boost that AI has to offer. This written, because Chinese AI developers were forced through chip sanctions and lower initial funding to be clever in developing AI products, they have a pricing advantage that begs the question of how Western AI will compete? Having tried Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude models, the output of all three is not-ready-for-prime-time.

The level of prevarication amongst the major models (ChatGPT and Claude) is Trumpian. Obviously trained to manage questions about AI gingerly (grudgingly), the rhetorical tendency to endlessly parse questions to convince the user that it is right and the user is wrong conflates the method of brute force computing with truth generation. To give credit where credit is due, brute force computing produces occasionally interesting results. But I can find better occasionally interesting results from walking in the woods than by wasting time with chatbots.

What adjustments could be made to assure that generative AI is more than just a state propaganda distribution device? Well, the AI industry currently has thousands of engineers working to solve the problem. The prior sentence is a joke. From my interactions with (Google Gemini) AI, there is a plan to form a committee to look into the matter. In fact, when the free money dries up, count on US based AI companies to be selling prime placement in AI chatbot results to anyone with the money to buy it. Even genocidal fascists, apparently.

An obvious development will be chatbot query management tools that promise for a fee to get specific chatbot results to the front of the line. The result will resemble the devolution of Google’s search algorithm from its 1997 mediocrity to the worse-than-useless advertisement delivery device of its current search engine. Perhaps Israel can be grouped with the KKK and the American Nazi Party on the client roster of some rogue DC law firm as underappreciated institutions that only need an AI advocate to make them respectable.

Having recently tested (done battle with) OpenAI’s ChatGPT and to a lesser extent Anthropic’s Claude AI models, there is no visible path that I see to chatbots producing reliable results. The training set problem is GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). Who imagined that trawling the entirety of the internet would yield anything resembling truth? Chatbots can find a recipe for chicken cacciatore in one-hundredth of a second. But the original Google search function could do so more reliably in two seconds. Is the difference in computing time really material?

Consider the Israeli query result purchase. Fifty million dollars was put toward overrepresenting Israel’s pro-genocide talking points. But is this functionally different from the internet search engines repressing or boosting reporting based on the political goals of the Federal agencies that get the internet companies to boost or repress certain views? This creates the pool of censored, boosted or repressed stories that will be represented by volume in future query results. It adds an entire layer of untrustworthiness to chatbot query results.

There are legitimate uses of AI. Process automation in manufacturing is one of them. Answering questions about the US – Israeli war against Iran with Pentagon boilerplate isn’t. As one who was raised on the New York Times and the national magazines, I read them today to understand what the CIA and Pentagon are putting forward as propaganda, not for information about US foreign policy directly. The distinction is crucial. The prior involves misdirection while the latter is an effort to explain.

Americans should prepare themselves for the AI bet to head south in two ways. The first is that the technology has a much smaller constituency than current hype suggests. Reports of productivity gains from AI are weaker and more qualified than boosters are suggesting. The second fault line is AI financing. Too much money is chasing too few opportunities. With little evidence to date that generative AI really is a product that can be sold at a profit, there is no path forward visible to yours truly that doesn’t involve a massive revaluation of AI downward.

Centrists Have Eviscerated the Democratic Party

It is difficult to imagine what Americans would consider to be a political emergency if not the present? The US is in the process of losing two wars of choice entered into by representatives of both political parties. The US is four decades into all of its economic gains going to the oligarchs. In the last ten years inflation has cut the purchasing power of American savings by 30%. The last two presidents have been amongst the most reviled in history. The US Congress has a 15% approval rate and a 79% disapproval rate. And the only reason to vote is to prevent whichever party is in power from doing something life-threateningly stupid.

In this context, the self-styled ‘centrists’ who have gutted the Democratic Party (graph below) are claiming that they will bring down the nascent ‘left’ in order to protect the interests of financial oligarchs. The leaderships of both parties support the wars that the US is currently losing. The dice have been rolled and AI will either be the future of the American economy or nothing will. And despite the moronic, fascistic, chaos of Trump, it is unclear at present if the Democrats can even manage to take the House in the midterms.

Should Trump retain control of both houses of Congress through the midterms, expect more war, more ICE murders, mass arrests of Americans for alleged political crimes and for what little hasn’t been looted to date to find its way into Trump’s pocket. That self-described centrists in the Democratic party see a few primary victories by the DSA as the problem in need of a solution demonstrates everything that I’ve written about them over the last fifteen years. Why ‘the left’ ever saw Democrats as fellow travelers is a mystery.

Graph: Democrats gained electoral ground in 2004 – 2005 as George W. Bush’s botched war against Iraq led to widespread disillusion with Republican policies. Then in 2008 Barack Obama was elected to fix the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) / Great Recession. After bailing out Wall Street and quickly pivoting to austerity for the rest of us, Obama oversaw the greatest exodus of Democrats in modern history. This is why the Democrats pivoted to identity politics after 2016. They needed to explain Obama’s economic policies in non-economic terms to ever win another election. Source: gallup.com.

The current move by centrists to force imagined lefties out of the Democratic party follows its successful removal of Bernie Sanders as the voter’s choice to represent the Democrats in the contest for the presidency in both 2016 and 2020. Regarding the 2020 election, I explained why ‘the electable candidate’ (Biden) would be the end of the Democrats in multiple missives leading up to the 2020 election. And the Democrats would be far ahead today if Bernie had burned the party to the ground following the 2020 effort that removed him.

Given the centrists’ record of eviscerating the Democratic party (graphs above, below), one would imagine that they represent the fringe views of a few dozen tech and financial oligarchs. And they do. The only thing that centrists are the center of is the far right of the party. Should this read as descriptively inaccurate, ‘electable centrist’ Joe Biden co-launched an ethnic genocide in Gaza as he undermined his own policy proposals out of worry that they would exacerbate the Federal budget deficit. Austerity to fund genocide equals fascism.

Graph: voters have been fleeing both of the duopoly parties to register as ‘Independents’ since 2008. The trend started when Republicans started fleeing the Republican party in 2004 – 2005 over the botched US war on Iraq. Voters started fleeing the Democrats 2009 – present after Barack Obama bailed out Wall Street but then quickly pivoted to austerity for the rest of us. With no Independent party to field candidates, American voters are stuck with candidates chosen by the duopoly parties. Independents are now twice the size of the duopoly parties. Source: gallup.com.

The point is that Democratic party centrists aren’t the ideological center of anything. They are a fringe element representing the views of a few percent of Democratic voters. That they are treated as the voice of the Party means that they represent to the views of the oligarchs as filtered through the news media, not those of the party rank-and-file. While my suggestion for the last year has been to split the government by electing Democrats to Congress in the midterms, I am fine voting for a presidential candidate who will lose in 2028 rather than centrists whose politics I do not support.

That centrists still have a voice after having elected Donald Trump to the White House twice is remarkable. What does this mean? Well, why are so many voters fleeing the Democratic (and Republican) party? Wouldn’t actual centrists be drawing voters into the party because it represents majority views? In fact, the self-described centrists are actively driving voters away (graph above). While I couldn’t care less about the future of either of these parties, mine apparently isn’t a fringe view. Affiliation with the duopoly parties is crashing while registered Independents are absorbing the losses. This is the definition of being a fringe party.

While I regard the efforts of a few of the newer leftie Democrats quite highly, winning primary elections points to where the counter-forces will concentrate their efforts in November. To the point made by Krystal Ball, even the eventual winners will enter Congress as junior members. Their ability to govern will depend on their ability to garner campaign contributions from people who expect political favors in return. Like the LAPD and racist cops, the system is set up to produce outcomes that few mere mortals can overcome.

This is why I don’t take the view that an accumulation of socialists makes socialism. In this regard, Zohran Mamdani’s policy proposals need to be carefully watched. As one who lived in New York for decades, landlords have been out of control since the early 1980s. I have acquaintances who have paid their rent but who haven’t had heat in the winter for fifteen years. And wholesale grocery pricing favors large chains while punishing the mom-and-pop stores that serve much of the city. City-owned stores could get bulk pricing while serving underserved corners of the city.

The thing about Mamdani is that well-considered policies that solve social problems take on a life of their own. The contest isn’t right versus left or Democrat versus Republican. It is over how to make life better for Americans and the people of the world. But this isn’t how the American political system is set up. The American political system is set up to bleed us, to set us up as marks for commercial interests as self-interested politicians in the pockets of the oligarchs compel our acquiescence. America in 2026 is everything that we were warned could go wrong when we were younger.

It isn’t clear yet that Mamdani can get and keep the policies in place that will make a positive difference. His Pied-a-Terre tax for unoccupied second homes of the rich is meant to free up housing while raising revenue for the city. City owned grocery stores can raise the quality of food while lowering prices in the least served neighborhoods. And the very idea that government can solve problems rather than causing them is why the American right hated FDR and the New Deal for most of the last century.

That self-described centrists see Mamdani, rather than rule by capital, as the problem that sent the US off of the rails would be a mystery if it were a mystery. ‘Prince’ Andrew Cuomo was supposed to anointed Mayor of New York. Lo and behold, his support all came from oligarchs. When the rank-and-file had a say, that say was ‘hell no!’ The same was true with the centrist candidates in the 2024 election. They aren’t the center of anything. They are fringe representatives of the oligarchs.

If I lived in an area with an Abdul El-Sayed or Zohran Mamdani running for office, I would support them. These are the centrist candidates. They support the policies that people favor. The oligarch loving hacks who have driven the Democratic party nearly to extinction support the policies that Trump is enacting. All of the Democratic centrists planning a run for the presidency in 2028 support everything about the Trump agenda except for Trump. They oppose his vulgarity, not his policies.

The choice is socialism or barbarism, not Pete Buttigieg or JD Vance.

The post Israeli Lie-Bots; the Politics of Climate Change; and Centrists Elected Donald Trump, Twice appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Ward Churchill in 2006, before he was fired from the University of Colorado. Thomas Boyd/Zuma

Ward Churchill died last week at the age of 79. The following is an interview I conducted with Ward in 2014, nine years after he was the talk of Fox News and the target of a concerted campaign to remove him from his teaching post at the University of Colorado. He was no longer living in Colorado in 2014, but he was still defending himself and his scholarship. I caught up with Churchill to see why we hadn’t heard much from him and whether the right-wing (and liberal) assault on his character had finally forced him into retreat. RIP. – JF

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Joshua Frank: Ward, your name hasn’t appeared on The O’Reilly Factor in a while. What’s been keeping you busy these days?

Ward Churchill: It’s been eight years since I was the principle focus of O’Reilly’s anally-compulsive attentions, Joshua, so your question covers a lot of ground. The university “investigation” of my work took up an ungodly amount of time during the first couple of years, of course, and after that there was the trial, the various appeals, and so on. The process of “exhausting my domestic remedies” wasn’t really wrapped up until early February 2013, when the U.S. supreme court finally denied cert on the preeminent legal question raised by my case: Whether a nonjudicial governmental body like a university board of trustees can be “quasi-judicially” immunized against the consequences of a unanimous jury verdict holding that the entity involved knowingly and deliberately violated the constitutional rights of a citizen for purely political reasons.

Add in the fact that I moved to Atlanta about a year ago, and that getting resituated down here after more than forty years in the Colorado/northern plains region turned out to be a lot more demanding than I’d anticipated, and the result is that, although I’ve invested a huge amount of time and energy doing research and writing since 2005, relatively little of it’s been for publication. Or at least not yet. The upshot is that I’ve got a half-dozen books in varying states of completion and, now that the smoke’s beginning to clear a bit on the legal front, I figure to finish them pretty much one after another, at a fairly regular rate, over the next couple of years or so. It’ll probably be more like three years before they’re all in print.

None of this, by the way, should be taken to mean that the so-called firestorm of controversy in which I was enveloped during the spring of 2005, or any of the ensuing academic/legal bullshit ever caused me to stop publishing altogether. A relatively low rate of publication for me is still a fair amount, which is to say that I’ve produced several major articles for journals and law reviews, a half-dozen book chapters, an essay-length entry for The Encyclopedia of the American Indian, a batch of intros, prefaces, and forewords to books like Stephan Sheehi’s Islamophobia and Daniel Burton-Rose’s Creating a Movement with Teeth, and a few other odds and ends since then. I guess you could even say I managed to come out with a book, if you want to count the double-header I did with Antonia Darder, organized and edited by Pierre Orelus under the title A Decolonizing Encounter in 2012.

Right now, I’m finishing up a chapter for an upcoming book coedited by Akinyele Umoja and Charles Jones on the late Kwame Ture. I suppose it bears mentioning that Kwame was far better known in the U.S. as Stokely Carmichael, the guy who popularized the term “Black Power” back in 1967. My piece concerns his relationship with and influence upon the American Indian liberation struggle, particularly during the 1970s and ’80s. I also just finished a shorter piece on the Lynne Stewart case and the broader issue of compassionate release for terminally ill political prisoners that was to run in 4Struggle Magazine, to which I’ve lately agreed to be a regular contributor. Lynne was just released, though, so I expect that one is destined for the circular file. Maybe I’ll end up reworking it at some point, because the broader issue hasn’t exactly gone away.

JF: I notice you made no mention of public speaking. You used to do quite a lot of it, as I recall. Do you still?

WC: Nowhere near as much as I was doing prior to 2005. That, in part, is because I’ve been administratively blacklisted on campuses nationwide. There’ve been a fair number of instances in which I’ve been lined up by faculty and/or students to deliver a lecture and college or university presidents have directly intervened to prevent the event from happening. In a few cases, the organizers took such abridgments of their own intellectual rights seriously enough to force the issue and staged the events anyway, but usually not. The meekness with which tenured faculty members have typically submitted to administrative dictates in situations like this has been quite enlightening, and speaks volumes to the state of “academic freedom” in the contemporary U.S.

Both politically and psychologically, it’s of course been necessary that the folks I’ve just described, especially those claiming a liberal pedigree, advance some other, more palatable explanation of their behavior and its implications. Most often, this has taken the form of their citing some supposed defect in my scholarship and/or my “abrasive style,” either or both of which were ostensibly pointed out to them after their invitation was extended, causing them to rethink the propriety of offering me a forum in a campus setting imbued with such lofty standards of scholarship and collegiality as their own. In the name of something like “quality control,” then, preserving the “academic integrity” of their institutions leaves them no alternative but to concur—always with the utmost reluctance, of course—and only in this particular instance, mind you—with the administration’s preemption of students’ right to hear and assess whatever I might have to say and customary faculty prerogatives in the bargain.

The upshot is that not only has a decided majority of the liberal professoriate exposed itself as being guilty of the most craven sort of capitulation vis-à-vis the principles they espouse and are purportedly prepared to defend, but the manner in which they’ve sought to rationalize the capitulation has served to lend a completely unwarranted appearance of “left wing” validation to the welter of falsehoods promoted on the right for purposes of discrediting both me, personally, and, more importantly, the kind of work I’ve been doing over the past several decades. All of that nonsense about my having perpetrated “scholarly fraud” and the like has been long since and repeatedly disproven, both in court and elsewhere—that’s a matter of record, easily accessible to anyone who cares to look—but they simply ignore such facts in favor of the convenience embodied in regurgitating the same old lies as a pretext.

None of this is breaking news, of course, or at least it shouldn’t be. It’s how blacklisting has always worked. Which means, among other things, that being blacklisted is in no sense an experience unique to me, either currently or historically. A lot of people have been blacklisted for one reason or another and to a greater or lesser extent over the years, and, as is readily evidenced by the examples of Norman Finkelstein and a number of others, that’s still true. It just happens that among the recent cases, mine has been especially high-profile, and is thus rather useful for illustrative purposes. So I’ve run down this aspect of it mainly to demonstrate to anyone entertaining doubts on the matter that not much has really changed in these respects since, say, 1955.

All that said, however, being blacklisted by the country’s self-styled guarantors of academic freedom accounts for only part of the drop-off in the number of public lectures I’ve delivered over the past few years. For one thing, I was already growing increasing weary of the lecture circuit before the Great Controversy commenced in 2005. I mean, I’d been speaking twice a week on average for nearly 20 years at that point, and was frankly sick of airports, motel rooms, and lecture halls. Literally so. Correspondingly, there’s a sense in which I’ve actually welcomed the drop-off. I’d undoubtedly have started cutting back on the number of speaking gigs I accepted, even without the Controversy and resulting blacklist.

I’m getting’ on in years, and the sentiment has grown steadily more pronounced. At this point, I absolutely will not set foot on an airplane in anything other than extraordinary circumstances—getting to Pine Ridge from Atlanta last October when I received word that Russ Means probably had no more than a day or two to live, for example. This is not because I’ve lately developed a fear of flying, but because I refuse to accept the dehumanizing treatment accorded passengers these days by the airlines. If I can’t drive my old pickup to wherever I’m going, well, chances are good that I just won’t go. True, The Authorities are doing their level best to make driving a miserable experience as well—them, and the oil companies and chain restaurants—but it’s still vastly preferable to flying. Or even entering an airport. Hard to do a lot of events on the West Coast under those circumstances when you live in Georgia, soooo…

The truth is that I’m basically doing as many speaking gigs as I want these days, and that allows me to be rather selective about which invitations I accept. I participated in a symposium honoring Russ at the University of Colorado/Denver in October, then drove on out to LA to deliver a lecture at Scripps College a week later. I’ll be delivering the annual Walter Rodney lecture at Atlanta University in February, and presenting at a conference at Oxford via Skype a few days after that. Last spring, I drove all the way up to Buffalo to give a talk at Burning Books a little infoshop, simply because I like what the people running it are into and wanted to support their effort. In November, I gave a talk at the anarchist book fair in LA. I might be inclined to do more speaking at political events, but I’ve been targeted for a bit of bad-jacketing on that front over the past couple of years. I can go into some of that a bit later, if you’d like.

JF: I would. But first, just so we’re clear, you mentioned that charges that you’ve engaged in scholarly fraud, plagiarism, and the like have been disproven, both in court and elsewhere. Could you go into the details of that?

WC: Sure. As concerns the “in court” part, I sued the University of Colorado right after I was fired in July 2007 on grounds that it terminated me in retaliation for my expression of political views—a violation of my rights under the first amendment—rather than any supposed “research misconduct.” That resulted in a four-week jury trial in March 2009, during which the university made its best case, bringing in most of the faculty members who’d comprised the committees that investigated my scholarship to testify as to the “facts” of my misconduct. Both they and the university’s attorneys also argued, repeatedly, that if I was guilty of even one of multitude of scholarly offenses the committee members claimed I’d committed, that in itself would be legitimate cause for the regents to have fired me. In effect, they trotted out everything they had while simultaneously hedging their bets. Pretty sound strategy, that.

But, you have to bear in mind that this was the first time any of these folks were forced into an arena where the university was not in complete control of the procedures involved, were unable to change the rules as they went along, and so on. It was also the first time any of them were subject to genuine cross-examination and to say they ended up getting their butts kicked is an understatement. You never saw so many red faces or heard so much sputtering in your life. Meanwhile, my own experts—who, unlike the university’s faculty hacks, actually knew what they were talking about, and who had the additional advantage of not having to try and defend a series of expedient fabrications—were in precisely the opposite situation. It wasn’t much of a contest, really, but I have to admit that there was some serious payback involved from my point of view, and that I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.

In any event, having heard both sides in depth, and having been exposed to several thousand pages of documentation, the jury unanimously concluded in its verdict that the university had shown no cause other than objections to my political views for firing me. In substance, none of the charges of scholarly fraud held up to scrutiny. On the contrary, in a post-trial meeting convened in the judge’s chambers between the jury and attorneys for both sides and the jurors, the latter explained that they’d found none of the university’s witnesses to be credible. Not one. In fact, they said they’d made themselves a chart during deliberations and went through it, witness by witness. What they found was that every single witness called by the university had been caught in at least one outright lie, and in several cases multiple lies. At several points, the university’s lead attorney was also caught flagrantly misrepresenting his supposed evidence.

A couple of the jurors subsequently said as much on one or another among Denver’s endless spew of rightwing talk radio programs, and one of them, a young woman named Bethany Newell, summarized some of it in an interview with Westword, the city’s alternative weekly. I think the interview, along with a more sharply-worded affidavit Newill later provided my attorneys, and key elements of the judicial proceedings, are all posted on wardchurchill.net. That’s what I meant about the information being readily-accessible to anyone who cares to look.

JF: Let me stop you for a moment at this point. It seems clear enough that the jury’s verdict would serve to exonerate you of the scholarly offenses alleged by the university. But, then, the judge vacated the verdict, didn’t he?

WC: Yes, he did. But it’s important to understand that he didn’t do so on the basis that the jury somehow erred in its understanding either of the law or of the facts involved. The verdict therefore remains unaltered: I didn’t do what the university claimed I did—that was simply an elaborate pretext—and it violated my constitutional rights by firing me for the actual reasons involved. What the judge ruled was that such things were utterly irrelevant. Why? Because, he said, the regents enjoy “quasi-judicial immunity” from the consequences of their actions, at least when it comes to personnel matters. So, even though they’d plainly violated my constitutional rights by firing me, and had systematically defamed me by conjuring up the pretext of my supposed scholarly fraud, I had no legal recourse. In effect, I’d never had standing to bring suit in the first place.

Of course, there’s an obvious question as to why, if he genuinely believed that were so, the judge didn’t simply dismiss my claims out of hand rather than conducting a major trial on the matter. If nothing else, as several jurors quite reasonably complained after he’d entered his ruling, he’d been rather cavalier about wasting a solid month of their lives in the process. The answer is that since there was no legal precedent either in Colorado or anywhere else establishing absolute immunity for boards of regents or trustees—quite the opposite, in fact— he didn’t really believe it. He introduced the concept of regential impunity, post hoc and purely on grounds of political expediency, so I guess you’d have to say that he himself established the precedent. In other words, he literally made the whole thing up.

Actually, in the interests of accuracy, I need to correct myself on that. It wasn’t the judge who made it up. That role was filled by the university’s lead attorney, Pat O’Rourke, who’d very much wanted to go to trial, fully expecting to win, that the results would thereby lend an aura of validation to the regents’ actions, and that his own star would rise accordingly. After the verdict, in what might best be described desperation maneuver, he wrote up the immunity argument and submitted it as a motion to vacate judgment. We were all laughing about how Patrick had finally gone completely “quazy,” and he himself didn’t seem to think the judge would actually buy into such an off-the-wall premise. In anticipation of the university being ordered to reinstate me, he’d started inquiring about which classes I wanted to teach in the fall so that they could be listed in the regular course catalogue. Things like that.

Came the moment, O’Rourke may have been as surprised as anyone else when the judge—Larry Naves, he was chief judge of the Colorado district court in Denver, and assigned himself to preside over the case—not only accepted his argument but simply reformatted his motion and entered it, verbatim, as the ruling. Seriously. Over 90 percent of the text in the two documents is word-for-word identical. One might well accuse Naves of indulging in a rather spectacular example of plagiarism were it not for the fact that the judiciary has exempted itself from application of that particular concept to its own material. Whatever the proper term for describing Naves’ authorial/juridical behavior in this instance, the reality is that he allowed the university itself to write the opinion he signed, nullifying not only my due process rights, but those of every faculty member in the UC system, whether they realize it or not.

In fairness, I should note that Naves was by no means the only Colorado judge guilty of cut-and-paste work in the legal opinions attending my case. While the pattern was not quite so blatant, whole blocks of O’Rourke’s prose also appear without attribution in the opinion of the state appeals court affirming Naves’ ruling. The same with the Colorado supreme court opinion. The university was allowed—or enlisted—to write substantial portions of every one of them, but in each instance, only the judges’ names appear as “authors.” To the extent that this conforms to prevailing standards of judicial propriety—and apparently it does, according to no less an authority than federal appellate judge Richard Posner—then it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the “canon of ethics” pertaining to the judiciary sanctions outright deception.

I could run with this one for a while, expanding it to consider the implications of the plagiarism scandals at Harvard Law, for example—especially those involving Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe—but that would be getting fairly far afield. Or maybe not. Be that as it may, I can’t think of a more fitting way to wrap up my answer than with the observation that in 2010, the year after he rendered such invaluable assistance to the university in neutralizing the effects of its loss in Churchill v. University of Colorado, the law school bestowed its annual alumni service award on none other than Larry Naves. The former judge, who’d retired from the bench almost immediately after signing off on his O’Rourke-written ruling, shamelessly accepted it. And that, boys and girls, pretty much says it all.

JF: I do want to get back to what we were talking about before I posed that last question, but since we’ve gone off into legal matters at this point, let me pose another to put a cap on things in that regard. Earlier, when you mentioned that the U.S. supreme court declined to hear your appeal—“denied cert,” is how I think you actually put it—you framed the situation in terms of “exhausting domestic remedies.” That phrase typically connotes the threshold requirement for bringing an issue before an international legal body. Is that what you have in mind?

WC: Oh, it’s more than just something I have in mind. A complaint, Churchill v. U.S., was filed on my behalf with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on September 30. The action is being handled by the Human Rights Research Fund along with David Lane and Bob Bruce, a couple of the attorneys who’ve been representing me from the outset. We’ve been planning to move in this direction for a while now, but you’re correct about one of the threshold requirements being that the possibility of domestic judicial recourse first be exhausted. So, we had to wait until—surprise, surprise—the U.S. supremes formally refused to hear my case, and that’s rather lengthy process. Another requirement is that any complaint be filed in a “timely fashion,” in this instance within six months of date on which the supreme court’s denial was registered, and of course we met the deadline.

There are another pair of requirements as well, the first being that the complaint allege concrete violations of codified international law by a “state party,” the second that the violations alleged fall within the jurisdiction of the adjudicatory body with which the complaint is filed. We meet both requirements. The obligations of state parties—in this case, the U.S. government—to protect “human rights defenders” from the sorts of official repression and reprisals I’ve experienced is clearly articulated in international law, and—as is evidenced with equal clarity by, among other things, the supreme court’s conspicuously supine posture in the matter—the federal government of the United States has made no effort to meet those obligations in my case.

The term “human rights defender,” incidentally, isn’t something I or my attorneys came up with. Personally, I find it a little embarrassing. Nonetheless, it’s the term used in the relevant body of law to describe people with records like mine, targeted for reasons similar to those precipitating the actions undertaken against me. In any event, the Inter-American Commission unquestionably has jurisdiction vis-à-vis offenses of this sort. It also has jurisdiction over violations of academic freedom—believe it or not, there are elements of international law dealing with that issue—so, although it’s a relatively unexplored area in terms of application, that’s our second line of attack. The petition is posted on wardchurchill.net, so anybody wanting further details should read the document itself.

JF: What do you hope to see come of this?

WC: Not much in personal terms. The process is likely to take years, assuming that the Commission opts to pursue the matter—they can always decline the case, and you can be assured that the U.S. representative will be lobbying very hard for them to do so—and, as I mentioned earlier, I’m not exactly getting any younger. So, even if I won within a relatively short period of time—say, five years—a finding that I should be reinstated in my faculty position would be largely symbolic. If monetary compensation were to be ordered, well, I don’t really need the money. Since my material desires have never been especially grandiose, I’m really quite comfortable as things stand. I suppose I might pay off my kids’ education loans and set something aside for my grandbaby, but, beyond that, the proceeds would most likely end up going to outfits like Freedom Archives.

That would be worthwhile, of course, but the main point of the exercise is to try and bring a previously unused dimension of international law to bear in such a way as to establish parameters around the latitude enjoyed by state—and, by extension, corporate—actors in constraining the sociopolitical discourse. If our effort is successful, it would be a significant breakthrough. Not by any means a “solution” to the problem at hand, but certainly an additional tool to be used to advantage by those opposing the status quo, not only in this country but in others as well. Who knows? A win might even be sufficient to inject a bit of backbone into such hopelessly bureaucratic—actually, “accommodationist” would be a better word choice—organizations as the national AAUP [American Association of University Professors, JF].

Frankly, I never really envisioned myself devoting substantial amounts of time and energy to these issues. I was essentially forced into it, but, hey, I’ve come this far and may as well play out the hand. It’s a tactical consideration, ultimately, a matter of flexibility. One adjusts to changing circumstance and keeps right on moving toward the strategic objective. I think you’ll find something to that effect in Sun Tzu, and variations on the theme appear in the works of most theorists of guerrilla warfare, from Mao to Marighella.

JF: Okay, thanks. Returning now to the question of how the university’s claims that you engaged in scholarly fraud have been disproven, you stated that this was true both in court and elsewhere. We’ve covered what you called the “in court part” pretty thoroughly at this point. Could you summarize what you meant by “elsewhere”?

WC: Sure. Any reasonable person might have concluded that there were serious problems with the Investigative Report on my scholarship posted by the University of Colorado on its official website when, back in 2007, groups of scholars started filing research misconduct complaints against its authors on grounds that the findings against me were not just baseless but fraudulent. There were at least five such complaints, as I recall, maybe six, detailing how the committee members had systematically misrepresented sources, suppressed evidence favorable to me, and so on. Words like “falsification” and “fabrication” came up repeatedly, and one of the complainants, Joseph Wenzel, showed how the committee had serially plagiarized his material. Several of the complaints are posted on wardchurchill.net, so its easy enough to see what charges were made, on what basis, and who made them.

The university never rebutted any of this. On the contrary, it adopted a position prefiguring that assumed by Judge Larry the Knave after the trial. This is to say that, having spent the preceding year hyping the supposed significance of the scholarly credentials of those serving on the investigative committee—they were all full professors, although none of them could claim any particular competence in the areas of history at issue—and publishing the resulting document in a form replete with every conceivable scholarly trapping, the university abruptly—and very quietly—this is definitely not something it wanted to have publicized—decided that the report was an “administrative document” rather than “a work of scholarship,” and thereupon exempted its authors from the very standards of professional scholarship they’d ostensibly applied to me.

Now, if that’s not tantamount to an admission that the charges filed against the investigative committee members were valid, I can’t imagine what would be. The more so, since the committee chair, a former prosecutor turned law professor named Marianne Wesson—she goes by “Mimi,” and doubles as the author of a series of potboiler fiction about a female detective in Boulder—started to cave when details of the complaints began to surface, publishing a letter in the faculty newspaper, The Silver and Gold Record, wherein she admitted that she and her cohorts had “erred” with regard to one of their findings that I’d “fabricated an historical incident.” The administration quickly muzzled her, but that particular cat was already out of the bag.

I should’ve mentioned, by the way, while we were discussing the trial, that another came out during the testimony of Don Morley, a member of the faculty panel that reviewed the investigate committee’s findings and affirmed most of them. When asked by one of my attorneys, Bob Bruce, to explain what he and his colleagues had based their conclusion that I was guilty of plagiarism upon, Morley referred to a supposed pattern of citation in one of my book chapters. Bob then handed him the book, open to the relevant pages and with the allegedly offending footnotes hi-lighted, and asked him to show the jury what he was talking about. A couple of minutes later, Morley, his face beet red, handed the book back to Bob and admitted that, “Apparently, we got that one wrong.” Again, that’s a matter of record.

In view of all this readily-accessible material, or even part of it, there’s really no excuse for anyone, especially anyone in academia, to go right on citing the university’s investigative report as if it were the least bit credible, much less at face value. It follows that there’s no basis for more casual chatter, common not only on the right but across a broad swath of the liberal intelligentsia, about there being “scholarly findings” with regard to my supposed academic misdeeds. Apart from the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News—which I doubt even Bill O’Reilly would try to pass off as a scholarly publication—the only place findings on such questions were ever posited was in the investigative report, and the university itself has long since admitted that the report is not a “scholarly work product.” These things being so, I suppose I could and maybe should end right there. I’ve been saving the best part for last, but it’ll take a while and I don’t know how much more time you want to devote to this topic. So, your call: Should I go on?

JF: Please do.

WC: Okay, you may have noticed that that great champion of academic freedom, the AAUP, basically took a bleacher seat in my case. That’s always been the Association’s preferred seating arrangement where the targeting of radicals is concerned, so I wasn’t especially surprised, but it turns out that the reasons it did so in this instance may have been somewhat atypical. As former AAUP president Cary Nelson recounts in his book, No University is an Island, the Association’s general secretary, Roger Bowen, flat-out lied—that’s Nelson’s term, not mine—to the relevant committee for more than three years, claiming that I’d never requested that the AAUP take action in my behalf. Bowen, incidentally, is the bullshit artist who later, after he’d been removed from his position with the AAUP, published a letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal describing me as “intellectually dishonest.”

In any event, once Bowen’s deception was discovered in 2009, a staff attorney with the AAUP’s national office inquired as to whether I still wanted the organization to undertake what’s called a Committee A investigation. I responded in the affirmative, which seems to have been an unexpected development, inducing a considerable amount of consternation among those involved. Whatever the nature of their discussions, I was informed a month or so later that the committee members had decided it was “too late” to initiate such action.

Now it gets interesting. The Colorado Council of the AAUP seems to have been mightily upset by this second default by the national organization because, shortly after Committee A closed its books on the matter, Myron Hulen, the Colorado chair, contacted me to ask if I’d like them to investigate. For what should be obvious reasons, I really had no great expectations at that point—actually, I had no expectations at all, or at least none of a positive variety—but—why not?—I told him it was fine by me. And I must confess that I was quite surprised when they went right to work. Within a week, a couple of the people who’d taken on the job, Don Eron and Suzanne Hudson, touched down to assess the extent of the documentation I had in my possession and my willingness to make it available to them.

After that, they sort of drove me nuts for a couple of months asking whether I could provide copies of this, that, or another document, a situation we finally resolved by my turning over everything I had in electronic format, a massive trove coming to something over 17,000 pages, including transcripts of all the investigative hearings and the hearings conducted by the panel Morley was on, the pretrial depositions, the complete trial transcript, all the internal university communications I’d obtained on discovery, and all of the evidentiary submissions attending each phase of the process. I also provided several hundred pages of material in hard copy because I didn’t have it electronic format. I’m not sure what, if anything, the university made might have provided, but my impression is that it wasn’t especially forthcoming. It doesn’t much matter, though, since I already had all the documents the institution was legally-required to divulge and they were included in the material I turned over to the investigators.

Anyhow, there followed what seemed like an interminable silence. Really, I’d more-or-less written the whole thing off by the time—roughly two years later—I was notified that the committee’s report was finished. My initial reading left me with no questions at all about why it taken so long to complete. In fact, it left me in a lingering state of astonishment. It’s a remarkable document, to say the least, and it bespeaks a no less impressive effort on the parts of those who prepared it. I’m not sure whether I was struck more on that first pass by how closely they’d scrutinized the entire mass of material, or by how thoroughly they’d digested it. I’m still a bit amazed at how they picked up on things that even I’d missed, even though I’d not only read every page, many of them repeatedly, but held the additional advantage of having experienced everything in the transcripts first-hand.

To top it off, they mustered everything into a coherent, sustained, and utterly devastating critique of every aspect of the university’s performance. Eron is listed as principle author, Hudson and Hulen as coauthors, and together they did a truly masterful job. A substantial chunk of the report, which runs over 130 pages, including the span of more than 300 end notes, is devoted to detailing the university’s systematic violation of its own rules in the handling of the case from start to finish, a procedure transparently designed to produce the desired outcome. The analysis in this regard is spot on, and is exhaustively documented, as is the point-by-point deconstruction of the UC investigative committee’s findings which comprises the balance of the document. From there, the authors’ conclusions were to all intents and purposes unavoidable.

These were later summed up by Don Eron in a letter to the editor that the Denver Post quite predictably refused to print—after all, it’s still insisting that the opposite is true—“the CU investigation into Churchill’s scholarship was a sham” in which “the research misconduct panel convicted Churchill of academic crimes that he did not commit.” I don’t see how the matter could have been framed more clearly. The bottom line is that if I had to recommend only one item for people to read for purposes of understanding what happened in my case, it would be the Colorado Council AAUP report. It’s the best thing out there, hands down, and is of course easily-accessible on wardchill.net. It was also published in its entirety in the national AAUP’s on-line Journal of Academic Freedom, so it can be accessed there as well.

Another tangent, before we wrap this one up, okay? It seems to me that the initiative shown by the Colorado Council in conducting its own investigations when the national AAUP fails to act—and it’s done so not only in my case, but in a couple of others involving adjunct faculty members—might constitute an important breakthrough. I’m unaware of any state council ever having take such action in the past, so the example set by the folks in Colorado may well inspire others to follow suit at the state level and perhaps even at the level of individual campus chapters. That would certainly broaden the Association’s reach, tremendously so, and ending its monopolization of AAUP investigations might even be enough to jolt Committee A into finally getting its proverbial ass in gear. In the alternative, well, the Association can’t really continue its pattern of taking on only a handful of “safe” cases every year, without rendering itself completely irrelevant.

The Colorado Council reports, or at least the one pertaining to my case, might also provide an excellent template not only for those produced at the state and campus levels, but for those prepared by Committee A. I’ve read my share of Committee A reports, and even the best of them are downright feeble in comparison to what was produced by the Colorado investigators. Granted, my case was more complex than most—the university went to extravagant lengths to make it that way—but it still takes more than a 20-page summary to lay out the mechanics of what transpired in virtually any instance of academic repression you’d care to name. Since educating people about how these things work is a big part of the AAUP’s job, the kind of detail on exhibit in the Colorado Council report should be replicated as widely as possible.

JF: Do you think that any of the things you were describing towards the end will actually come to pass, and, assuming they do, why should we care?

WC: Wow! The answer to that could take a while. But I’ll try for the short version. As to whether such things will come to pass, who knows? But there are signs that things may be moving in that direction, beginning with the fact that the role of state councils in conducting AAUP investigations was the topic of a major debate during the Association’s annual conference last year. The old guard was of course strongly opposed to the very idea that entities other than Committee A assume such authority, but grassroots sentiment seems to have been exactly the reverse. So much so, in fact, that Eron and Hudson received the annual Tracy Award from the AAUP Assembly of State Conferences in 2012. The Tracy is bestowed upon the person—or in this case two people, jointly—viewed as having performed the greatest organizational service at the state level in any given year. I don’t know about you, but I see that as being a pretty clear statement of support and endorsement of their efforts.

It’s also propitious, or so it seems to me, that during the debate both Rudy Fichtenbaum, who was elected to replace Cary Nelson as AAUP president in 2012, and Hank Reichman, the new vice president, came out as strongly favoring state council investigations. Reichman even went so far as to assert in so many words that the AAUP’s national office “blew it” in my case and publicly thanked the Colorado Council for “belatedly saving” the Association from ending up “looking like wimps.” It appears that the pair weren’t just blowing smoke either, since—are you ready for this one?—among the first things that happened after they took office was that Don Eron was appointed to Committee A. Again, that’s a pretty strong statement. Where all this leads, I obviously can’t say, but it’s a hopeful situation, overall.

Now, with respect to why anyone should even care about this stuff, let me put it this way: Like it or not, the universities have become a central component in the shaping of consciousness in the U.S., and stand to become ever more so over the foreseeable future. They can either fulfill their purported social function of inculcating critical consciousness, or they can do exactly the opposite. Absent a bona fide critical consciousness among a significant portion of the population, genuinely constructive socioeconomic and political transformation is impossible. What you end with instead is the ability of frauds like Barack Obama to pass himself off as a “progressive,” and a “left” discourse dominated people on the order of Rachel Maddow, Ed Schulz, and the Rev [Al Sharpton: JF]. Or Michael Moore, for god’s sake. The superficiality and duplicity at issue were recently manifest in the Occupy movement.

That’s where we are, and it’s a long, long way from where we need to be. Hell, it’s a long way from the point we’d managed to reach forty-odd years ago. The decline has been dramatic, and it’s occurred at an ever more rapid rate since the ’90s. There are a number of reasons for this, most of them policy-driven. The steady withdrawal of public funding from higher ed over the past several decades, is a really big one, correlated as it is to the twin evils of spiraling tuition costs and the growth of institutional dependence upon corporate subsidies.

It’s worth remembering that Reagan kicked off the tuition business at U/Cal back in 1970, mainly in retaliation for student activism in Berkeley and as a means of curbing an influx of black and latino students. Once the barrier was breached—U/Cal, like most state university systems, used to be essentially tuition-free, the premise being that an increasingly better-educated electorate was a public good—the right quickly figured out how to use the situation to ever greater advantage. For example, raising tuition rates allowed decreasing levels of state funding, and that, in turn, helped with the lowering of corporate tax rates and the rates applicable to individuals in the uppermost income brackets.

In some ways more importantly, it didn’t take them long to realize that if rising tuition rates were coupled to making a degree the entry-level requirement for most jobs that had previously required a high school diploma, young people would be forced to go to college for that purpose rather than “the pursuit of higher learning,” per se, and they’d be compelled to incur significant personal debt in the process. This has not only been rather profitable for the banks and other entities that plunged into the business of making education loans—all of them federally-guaranteed, of course—it’s provided corporate America with a labor force which, since federal law has been changed to preclude the retirement of student debt through bankruptcy, increasingly exists in a condition of veritable indentured servitude. The effect has essentially been that of a pacification program directed at students and workers alike.

Among the more insidious effects within the universities themselves has been that as students have been coerced into a trajectory of ever-greater preoccupation with making themselves more marketable to potential employers the demand for courses designed for exactly that purpose has steadily mounted while demand for courses intended to broaden general knowledge and hone critical facility has correspondingly diminished. This has positioned corporations to specify the kinds of courses—mostly managerial and technical in nature—they prefer, and, in no small part utilizing the windfalls accruing from the earlier-mentioned reductions in corporate tax rates, to increasingly offset reductions in public funding by “sponsoring” certain curricula at the expense of others, not infrequently to the point of dictating content in preferred areas while proscribing it elsewhere within recipient institutions.

Were this not enough, the process is being rationalized and facilitated by a whole slew of lavishly-funded rightwing organizations, the objective of which—although each of them casts itself as a champion of academic freedom and “excellence”—is exactly the opposite. What they’re after is the complete elimination of critical studies from the curriculum, along with ethnic studies, women’s studies, and any other field serving to extend appreciations of cultural diversity into domains beyond those taught during the “good old days” of the 1950s. And that, of course, entails purging the professoriate of what David Horowitz characterizes as “dangerous professors,” or at least to making a few prominent examples in order to chill the rest.

What you end up with, if they have their way, is universities that function as little more than glorified vo-techs. This is to say that emphasis will be placed upon the imparting of certain “useful” skill-sets, along with sufficient ideological indoctrination to blunt the potential of cognitive dissonance among most students with regard to the realities of American business as usual, and perhaps a basic grounding in triumphalist interpretations of western culture. In substance, they’re demanding that the institutions be reconfigured in their entirety along the lines of what the corporations have taken to subsidizing and, by any estimation, they’re making considerable headway. All you have to do is listen for five minutes to Obama explaining why higher education is important to get the picture. You might as well be listening to a spokesperson for rightwing “university reform” outfits like ACTA.

JF: Let me stop you right there for a moment. I seem to remember that ACTA played a major role in your own case. Assuming that it did, could you explain how, and maybe give us a little more background on the organization?

WC: Oh yeah, ACTA was a major player from the get-go. For those who may be unfamiliar with the acronym, it stands for American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organization founded in the mid-90s by the rabidly reactionary Lynne Cheney, along with Hank Brown, at the time a paleoconservative Republican senator from Colorado, and everybody’s favorite “liberal Democrat” cum Likud lapdog, Joe Lieberman. It’s instructive, I think, that the whole thing was underwritten by the Olin Foundation, established during the early-50s by a cryptofascist munitions-maker named John Olin to pump what would amount to about $380 million into what he described as “counter-intelligentsia” operations before it declared its mission accomplished and closed its doors in 2005.

Olin is just one of the foundations involved. The Bradley and Sarah Scaife Foundations support such activities on a comparable scale and ACTA has received substantial funding from all three, as have the so-called David Horowitz Freedom Center, Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch, and a number of similarly ugly organizations. And that’s to say nothing of the often hefty contributions made by individual donors like the Koch brothers and the annual tithes contributed by the at this point literally scores of lesser foundations that have followed Olin’s lead. This is what I meant when I said these organizations are lavishly-funded. They’ve been so since their inception, ACTA perhaps most of all. It’s undoubtedly the most influential and effective of the lot, although all of them might be said to wield undue influence.

In any case, one of ACTA’s signature initiatives, once it had gotten itself organized, was to publish an academic blacklist in 2001. I wasn’t on it, but it was a precursor to the approach taken by the organization in my case four years later. In the latter instance, however, they added an element I mentioned earlier, that of making a prominent example, publishing a screed titled How Many Ward Churchills? wherein I was cast as the “poster boy” for why an ideological purge of the academy would be justified. Of course, having thus projected me in the role of exemplar, it was necessary for ACTA’s purposes that I actually be purged. For things to have worked out otherwise would have been embarrassing, to say the least. That’s where things get a lot more hands-on in terms of their involvement.

In retrospect, I can see where they’d worked out the script well in advance, beginning with the fact that I was at the University of Colorado, an institution with which ACTA had an exceptionally potent web of connections. I’ve already mentioned that Hank Brown was an ACTA founder. By 2005, he was head of the Daniels Fund in Denver, one of UC’s major cash cows. ACTA’s founding president, Jerry Martin, who became the organization’s chair in 2003, was formerly chair of the philosophy department on my own Boulder campus. Regent Tom Lucero was openly involved with ACTA, and at least three other board members, although they denied it at trial, were no less aligned with it. Even the state’s Republican governor, Bill Owens, who at more than one point threatened to cut the university’s budget unless I was summarily fired, was an enthusiastic participant in the ACTA governor’s project. In sum, if there was a state best suited to making the sort example ACTA was after, it was Colorado.

Then there’s the matter of ACTA’s role in kicking off the Great Controversy from which my case arose. The “discovery” of my by then four-year-old “little Eichmanns” piece in January 2005 has been consistently misattributed to a student editor at Hamilton College, where I was scheduled to give a talk in February. Actually, the information was fed to him by a poly sci professor named Ted Eismeier, who was a member of the National Association of Scholars and heavily involved in a rather vicious ACTA-sponsored campaign to seize control of the board of trustees and expunge the school’s supposed “leftwing bias.” There was an obvious utility to making the Eichmann piece an issue at the local level, but the idea that it might be transformed into something much more was just as obviously in play right from the start.

I mean, let’s get real about this. That the author of an op-ed appearing in an obscure e-journal several years earlier has been invited to speak at a small college in upstate New York isn’t ordinarily the stuff of national news, no matter what was said in the op-ed, much less the trigger for what’s usually been described as a “media firestorm.” In this instance, the “story” went from its first appearance in a campus newspaper to saturation coverage at the national level in roughly 72 hours, and, for that to happen, a considerable amount of orchestration is necessary. There’s some indication, at least to the extent that Colorado’s sleazebag Republican congressman Bob Beauprez claimed on Denver talk radio that he’d spoken with George Bush about me and had been assured that Bush’s “people” would “look into” the matter, that Karl Rove’s crew may have been involved at some point. Beauprez’s purported discussion with Bush would’ve occurred after the so-called firestorm commenced, however, so I’ll just say that ACTA’s own liaisons with the rightwing media are plainly first-rate, and let it go at that. They really didn’t need help from the White House to get the ball rolling.

It gets better. After the media furor had established the predication for an “emergency meeting” of the regents, and the Boulder campus administration laid out its plan for addressing said emergency—that took all of a week—things threatened to go a bit awry from the ACTA point of view. First, some 200 hundred tenured faculty members at Boulder signed on to a full-page ad in the local paper demanding that the investigation of my work be halted immediately—they were of course ignored—and then, in March, university president Elizabeth Hoffman denounced what was going on as evidence of “a new McCarthyism.” Viola! She was gone within days. Message thus sent to the faculty, which thereafter remained mostly silent, the regents moved very rapidly to set the proverbial railroad car back on its tracks by hiring none other than Hank Brown to replace Hoffman. So now we had a certified ACTA heavy presiding over the university system as a whole.

One of the most immediate outcomes of Brown’s installation was that the Daniels Fund, which had been withholding grant money pending “resolution” of certain “problems” on the Boulder campus—and which, as I mentioned earlier, Brown himself had been running—released the cash. That was of course a cue for other rightwing donors to ante up, which they did to much fanfare, especially after Brown brought in another ACTA notable, Michael Poliakoff, principle author of the organization’s Teachers Who Can: How Trustees Can Ensure Teacher Quality, to serve as vice president for academic affairs. As chancellor of the Boulder campus itself, the selected G.P. “Bud” Peterson, whose ACTA profile, if any, was far less prominent, but whose major initiative during his stint in the position was to try and establish a formal chair in “conservative thought and policy.”

Cutting to the chase, as president of the university, Brown was the last stop in the institutional chain of command before the regents, which is the only body authorized under Colorado law to fire a tenured professor. In effect, they would act on his recommendations, so, as a matter of form, citing among other things How Many Ward Churchills?, I requested that he recuse himself because of his ACTA affiliation. The prez himself never deigned to respond. Rather, he had Poliakoff write me a letter denying that Brown hadn’t been involved with ACTA for years, which was a patent lie since, among other things, he’d teamed up with the governor, Bill Owens, to provide an ACTA workshop/retreat for the board of regents only a few months before the balloon went up in my case.

Brown then submitted his recommendation that I be fired for cause, overriding a majority of the faculty investigators’ recommendations in the process, but providing the pretext necessary for Lucero and his pals to do what they’d openly pledged to do in the first place. Having thus finished the job he was brought in to do, Brown promptly “retired.” More accurately, he took on the less demanding role of teaching the occasional poly sci course in a dedicated slot in the senior faculty at UC/Boulder. Poliakoff, for his part, hung around for another couple of years, until, ironically enough, his position was eliminated as a result of cuts to the university budget imposed by Colorado’s rightwing legislature in 2009. A year later, he was hired as ACTA’s vice president for policy, a position he still holds.

A lot of what I’ve been talking about is covered very well by Jeff Dodge in a piece titled “Who is pulling the strings at CU?” Dodge was editor of the Silver and Gold Record, the university’s faculty newsletter, and was one few reporters in Colorado who did a decent job in covering my case. Actually, his reportage was good enough that the administration closed the publication down, so he’s now a freelancer doubling as an editor of an alternative rag, the Boulder Weekly. In any case, the article lays out how Judge Naves essentially ruled the whole ACTA question out of bounds during the trial, even to the extent of preventing one of my experts from testifying about the organization. Of course, Larry the Knave also barred Derrick Bell from testifying with regard to academic freedom as a legal concept, so it came as no great surprise when he did the same with a mere expert on ACTA’s methods.

One thing Dodge doesn’t touch upon, however, is that because my request that Brown recuse himself specifically because of his ACTA connection was part of the record, Naves was stuck with the issue in that regard. So my lead attorney, David Lane, was able to interrogate Brown on the matter. Well, guess what? Brown repeated the denial Poliakoff had earlier proxied for him, saying he “could remember” no involvements with ACTA. Moreover, he said he “didn’t think” he was an ACTA founder, despite the fact that—as Lane pointed out to him—he was listed as such on the organization’s website and elsewhere in its literature. Brown went on to claim—I kid you not—that while he’d “heard of” ACTA, he really “didn’t know very much” about it. Seems to me that there’s a fancy legal term for giving false testimony under oath. Something beginning with the letter “p,” I think. But, whatever. I guess that’s what passes for “intellectual integrity” on the right.

Oh, by the way, Hank Brown’s presently heading up ACTA’s national campaign to retool university accreditation. Seems like an appropriate note on which to end this response. Even if its not, I’ve already gone on far longer than I meant to about it, so, in the immortal words of Tom Horn, that’s my last word on the matter. Fair enough?

JF: Absolutely. It seems to me that you weren’t really finished with what you were saying at the point I broke in with the ACTA question, so would you like to wrap that up? Also, I indicated earlier that I’d like to follow up on the badjacketing issue. Since we’ve been at this for quite a while already, though, would you like me to hold those questions for another time?

WC: Yes, and yes. To take the last part first, yeah, let’s hold the badjacketing questions for another time because, although the matter’s clearly related to what we’ve been discussing, it would probably require as much time to really get into it as we’ve already spent. I’m simply not up for it right now, and I doubt that your readers will be either.

Now, with respect to what I was going to say before we went off on the ACTA tangent, as best I can reconstruct it, it was that there’s a deeper history to all that “universities as vo-techs” stuff the “reformers” are currently pushing, and that its rooted in a fundamental misconception of what constitutes a university, as such, that’s predominated in the U.S. since at least as far back as the 1860s. Ordinarily, that would be well worth running down, but in this instance I think it’d be best if I simply referred anyone interested in pursuing the matter to Thorsten Veblen’s The Higher Learning in America. They’ll get the drift.

More directly on target for my purposes at the moment is that what I think we’re witnessing fifty years on is consolidation of precisely the kind of entity extolled by then-U/Cal Berkeley president Clark Kerr in his 1963 book, The Uses of the University. For those unfamiliar with the tract, Kerr likened what he preferred to call “multiversities” to governmentally/corporately-owned factories—albeit, “knowledge factories”—wherein managers such as himself employed to oversee a worker force—the faculty—whose job it was to convert raw material—that is, students—into the finished product or products desired by the owners, all with maximal efficiency. Sound familiar? Well, it didn’t at the time.

The vision set forth in The Uses of the University, probably more than any other single factor, triggered the so-called Berkeley student revolt in 1964. But now? I don’t expect we’re going to see a resurgence of the Free Speech Movement, much less of Carl Davidson-style student power politics, any time soon. Do you? Absent that, anything people like Eron and his colleagues can do to put some teeth into the AAUP and maybe even turn it into something resembling what it was supposed to have been all along is to be not only applauded but supported. The right is obviously very well organized on this front and, just as obviously, we’re not. The AAUP’s hardly the only game in town for purposes of cohering some viable means of opposition to what’s happening the academy, but every little bit helps. Or at least it does if there’s any value at all in the proposition that universities contain sites of critical resistance that, as Marcuse once put it, might “provide the Archimedean point for a broader emancipation.” I still believe there is, or at least could be.

The post Ward Churchill, RIP appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Anarkangel – CC BY-SA 3.0

On July 30, 2026, enormous crowds crossed from Morocco into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta. Within hours, Spanish authorities estimated that roughly 72,000 had entered Ceuta, overwhelming a city of just 83,000 residents. Spain’s other North African enclave, Melilla, also experienced attempted crossings, albeit on a much smaller scale, and closed down its border crossing with Morocco later that day.

The post Morocco Shows How Migration Has Become Weaponized appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Andriyko Podilnyk

Nothing inspires confidence in the silliness of the human species than its efforts to understand the workings of others.  This, at least, makes an improvement from wanting to biblically subjugate, enslave and eat members of the animal kingdom.  But when efforts are made to understand what the domestic cat (surely an oxymoronic category) is up to, humankind is bound to come up short.

The issue of imposing curfews upon cats as if they were disobedient, wandering children is one such symptom.  While the feral cat is an apparatus of mass killing when it comes to wildlife, Felix catus, that oddly named domestic cat, is more than willing to add its share to the mortality rate.  This is most evident in Australia, a country whose native fauna evolved without sustained exposure to such skilful, relentless predators.  In their 2020 study published in Wildlife Research, the authors, after examining the results of 66 different studies on pet cats and their influence on the country’s wildlife, issue a shriek of concern.  Each roaming pet feline kills, on average, 186 reptiles, birds and mammals a year, most of them native to the continent.  This equates to 4,440 to 8,100 animals per square kilometre per year for areas occupied by pet cats.  The annual holocaust for such rampaging roamers comes to 390 million animals.  The proposed solution is stern and absolutist: permanent, confined home detention. (Predation rates, the argument goes, are not reduced because a cat hunts at night or during the day; only the type of animal changes.)

On July 27, councillors of the City of Boroondara, located in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, adopted an order requiring cats to be kept inside their owner’s property during the nighttime.  According to the Council’s announcement, the curfew was adopted, along with various measures, with various things in mind.  Among them was seeking to better understand “general cat management” in the locality; encourage “responsible cat ownership, including cat registration, microchipping and de-sexing”; offering better support for cat owners in terms of managing their cats; improving the way “semi-owned and stray cats” were better managed; and protecting the wildlife and diversity of Boroondara.

These measures have the whiff of satisfying the conscience of policy makers – they can claim they are supposedly doing something useful for native species – while ignoring the natural instincts of the animal the subject of the restriction.  In truth, they show how little is understood about these resourceful animals.  History offers numerous examples of debates on this subject at the council level.  The Port Lincoln City Council in South Australia, for instance, debated a discussion paper drafted by the State Government in August 1992 insisting that councils, in the words of the local paper, “take urgent steps to control feral and stray cats.”  The general mood, however, was that “cat registrations and cat curfews were impractical.”

The concerns of residents have not always matched the policies of local councils keen to defer broader responsibilities to other bureaucratic agencies and authorities.  Why do in government what you can expect others to do?  Local governments, not always enthused about having jurisdiction over animal management issues, have preferred to look to State governments for paternal guidance and instruction.  In November 2006, the Hills Messenger, a local publication for Port Adelaide in South Australia, reported the cold rebuff of Mitcham Council to “the call of more than 3,000 residents by refusing to introduce stronger cat controls.”  This number was reached from the responses of some 3,500 individuals to an annual animal management survey.  A hefty majority of 87% agreed to cat controls, including registration, cat curfews, desexing and confinement.

No such plans found their way into the council’s Draft Animal Management Plan 2007-2011, as the councillors believed that a state-wide, rather than local approach to management, was needed. One Ian Robilliard of Belair, who had attended, along with 45 others, a council-run animal management public meeting earlier in March 2006, expressed grumbling dissatisfaction.  “I’m not against cats but I don’t like them when they’re in my backyard and eating the birds and the lizards.”  Bill Stronach of Blackwood was furious at the tendency of cats to be “killers”; they needed to be kept indoors while the RSPCA [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] development manager, Wendy White, agreed heartily, adding compulsory desexing as an option.  The response from John Carruthers of the Hills Veterinary Centre and member of the council’s animal management consultative committee, was one of calming dismissiveness.  “Most (native) wildlife is killed by feral cats, not pet cats.”  Those lovely pet cats again.

Certain state laws in Australia also prevent local councils from issuing cat containment ordinances except with dispensation from state parliamentary committees.  But the issue of restraining these adept killers is obviously troubling enough to even make it to the desks of state politicians.  Besides, they are votes to think about.  In 2024, the Biodiversity Council’s Concerns Report found that a mere 8% (or 1 in 12) people were opposed to policies “requiring cat owners to keep their cat contained to their property.”  In February this year, Western Australia’s Local Government Minister Hannah Beazley promised changes that would alleviate the need for local councils to seek committee approval at the parliamentary level for containing cats.  Eventually, some “model local law” could be developed standardising the approach.  The urge to pontificate on the virtues of such restrictions was also forthcoming.  “Cats who are contained to owners’ properties, they live longer.  And there’s also evidence from the RSPCA to say that owners of contained cats spend about 400% less on vet fees than roaming cats.”

The publicity campaign behind cat containment can assume a puerile, even emetic note. Absurdly, anthropomorphic self-justification leads to the following babble of fabricated reassurance from the Invasive Species Council.  “What do Paws, Precious, Clementine, Rasputia, Jemia and Fat Boii have in common?” a social post teasingly asks.  “They are living their best life, safely contained at home.”  How do these fantasists know?  More likely is that such measures are keeping natural killers contained and, during the courses of their containment, increasingly deranged.  We are instead led to believe that these creatures are leading a life of splendid, fattened domesticity, their need to slay cruelly pacified.

The Australian Pet Welfare Foundation (APWF) is also of the view that cats be contained at night and confined to the owner’s property during the day, so long as the environment is “comfortable” and “meet’s the cat’s physical and mental needs.”  (Where is a cat psychologist when you need one?)  The organisation concedes that mandatory containment of cats at all times “is not a simple fix for roaming cats, wildlife protection or shelter intake.”  Wandering cats are often strays with no owner, and even when they do have one, containment can fail due to “housing limitations, lack of financial resources and concerns about the welfare of confined cats.”

The following endorsement, and suggestion, is made by Jaan Dielenberg, a university fellow from Charles Darwin University who admits to owning cats: “Requiring pet cats to be contained is a sound policy choice.  But to realise the full benefits, we also need to invest in effective communication for communities, provide rebates to help contain cats, and make sure the rules are followed.”  If only we could ask Tobermory, the cat made famous by H.H. Munro (Saki), what he thought of this whole business.

The post Locking up the Felines: Cat Curfews Down Under appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: j4p4n – Public Domain

There is now a bipartisan consensus that Social Security faces a serious crisis, and something has to be done. That “something” almost always involves a large cut in benefits.

There is some truth to this story. On its current path, the Social Security Trust Fund will only be able to pay a bit less than 79 percent of scheduled benefits by 2033. The standard story puts the problem as too many baby boomers being supported by too few workers. As I pointed out last month, this seriously misrepresents the issue.

The problem of Social Security is one of income distribution, not demographics. The upward redistribution of income over the last half-century has hugely worsened the program’s finances.

There are three ways upward redistribution hurts the program:

1) A smaller share of wages is subject to the payroll tax;

2) Benefits are higher relative to wages;

3) It is difficult to ask workers to pay more to support the program when their wages are not rising.

More Wage Income Is Going Over the Tax Cap

In 1982, the last time the program was restructured in a major way, only 10% of wage income went over the cap on taxable wages, currently $184,500. Now, because so much income goes to high-end wage earners, such as CEOs, Wall Street types, and highly paid doctors and lawyers, 18 percent of wage income escapes taxation. If there had not been this massive upward redistribution, the current income of the program would be almost 10% higher, and the trust fund would be able to support full benefits much further into the future.

Wage Income Has Not Kept Pace with Productivity

In the 1980s and 1990s, inequality was primarily the result of income going from ordinary workers like retail clerks and assembly line workers to highly paid workers. Since the turn of the century, inequality has been primarily a story of more income going from labor to capital.

This affects Social Security because benefits are only indexed to inflation. If wages rise faster than inflation, then taxes, which rise in step with wages, rise relative to benefits.

To get an idea of the size of this impact, suppose the average beneficiary has collected benefits for 15 years. If wage growth was 1.0 percentage point faster over this period, then Social Security’s revenue would be 15 percent higher, while benefits would be the same. In this story, the higher revenue would be almost enough to close the projected shortfall, in addition to the trust fund being considerably larger today.

Workers Are Willing to Pay More for Their Retirement If Wages Are Rising

From 1960 to 1990, the Social Security tax rate rose from 6.0 percent to 12.4 percent, a 6.4 percentage point increase. The tax rate has not increased at all in the last 36 years. There was no massive revolt against the Social Security tax increases in the prior thirty-year period, both because people valued Social Security and, at least through the first part of this period, wages were rising rapidly.

If wages had kept pace with productivity growth, they would be more than 60 percent higher than they are today. In that scenario, it seems plausible that workers would be willing to pay 1-2 percentage points more in taxes for Social Security.

The Elites Broke Their Bargain on Wages: Don’t Let Them Steal Our Social Security

Social Security was set up as a program that would be supported by a tax on wages. Workers were collectively paying for their own retirement. This was totally feasible in a context where ordinary workers got their share of productivity growth.

It becomes less feasible in a context where wages are nearly stagnant, and most of the gains from productivity growth go to highly paid workers and capital, as has been the case for the last half-century. In that context, cutting Social Security benefits is just rubbing our noses in it.

We easily can afford to pay full benefits. The projected shortfall in 2033 is roughly 1.5 percent of GDP. That’s less than the increase in military spending that President Trump is requesting for 2027 compared with the last Biden budget in 2025.

In fact, as an economic matter, we are already paying most of this shortfall. When the government repays the bonds owned by the trust fund, it has exactly the same impact on the economy as if it was just paying the benefits directly, without the bonds held by the trust fund. The bonds are a promise, but they are not real economic resources. They don’t make it easier to pay benefits than would otherwise be the case.

Upward Redistribution Was Done to Us: It Didn’t Just Happen

The elites like to pretend that all the money going to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the billionaire clique was just a happy coincidence. It’s a story of “look what the markets have done.”

That is 100 percent crap. The system was rigged to give this crew all of our money. The most obvious way the rich redistributed money to themselves was with government-granted patent and copyright monopolies. In the case of pharmaceuticals alone, this raises the cost by close to $600 billion a year or $4,500 per household. The money goes to the drug companies and their shareholders.

Larry Ellison and Bill Gates are among the richest people in the world because of the patents and copyrights the government gave them on the software produced by Oracle and Microsoft.

Patents and copyright monopolies come from the government, not the market. There are other mechanisms for financing innovation and creative work. In any case, we could have made these monopolies shorter and weaker, instead of longer and stronger as we did, which would have meant less money going to the rich and very rich.

The financial system is incredibly bloated by conscious choice. We could downsize it hugely by applying the same sort of sales tax on financial transactions that states impose on sales of shoes and clothes. That would mean many fewer fortunes there. We also don’t have to bail out banks when they put themselves into bankruptcy, as they did in the financial crisis and more recently when the crypto boys put the Silicon Valley Bank over the edge.

We also have written and enforced labor laws to the detriment of unions and workers. Most obviously, most states ban contracts that require all workers who are represented by a union to pay for that representation. While these contracts are not enforceable in most states, contracts that prevent workers from working for a competitor are enforceable. Also, unions are prohibited from supporting strikes as a union. This means that the steelworkers cannot refuse to produce steel for an auto company that is facing a strike by its workers.

These and other policies were designed to redistribute income upward. They have had their intended effect of taking money from the rest of us and giving it to the rich. And now that their upward redistribution has had the effect of undermining the financing of the country’s most important social program, they want to cut Social Security. It’s essential that people stand up to the lies. The problem is the rich taking too much of our money, not overly generous Social Security benefits.

Polling consistently shows that Social Security enjoys solid support across the political spectrum. (See “Support and Strengthen Social Security” in CEPR’s Majority Agenda.)  The only way the elite will get their cuts to Social Security is if they get us to buy their lies. Towards this end, they will produce “bipartisan” plans where they find Democrats who will go along and legitimate the lies.

The basic point is incredibly simple. As a society, we have plenty of money to pay for Social Security. The rich have just taken so much from workers that it is difficult for them to pay the full tab out of their wages. The answer is to take back some of the money we have given the rich over the last half-century.

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

The post First They Took Our Wages, Now They Want Our Social Security appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Jeffries wrote on his social media account: “Donald Trump made more than $2 billion during his first year as President. Republicans are enriching themselves while making your life more expensive. We must crush the culture of corruption.”

Schumer wrote on his: “$2.2 BILLION for the Trump family. Higher costs for the American people.”

You should have described his huge loot as $1.1 million an hour. That’s right, $1.1 million an hour based on a 40-hour work week over one year. (And remember, Trump spends a lot of his time on his vengeance missions, his golf game, and napping—so a 40-hour work week is a generous estimate.)

You should have then compared that enormous sum per hour with the Trump/GOP supported federal minimum wage, frozen at $7.25 per hour. This would have given you the perfect occasion to highlight the case for a much higher federal minimum wage, helping tens of millions of American workers.

You also omitted his unlawful agreement with the IRS to give him a free ride on tax abuses.

Such profiteering from his public office at $1.1 million an hour is staggering, especially when you detail where it came from. This would have resonated with a huge portion of the voting public, including Republicans. Instead, Democrats lost the opportunity to make that stunningly understandable communication. But it is not too late to revive and make more concrete his boastful misuse of the office of the presidency. You can compare it with past presidents’ sense of self restraint. You can ask for widespread feedback from the American people and make it part of his widely discernible profiteering persona of greed and lawless power.

One further response to this mountain of greed by Donald Trump should be joint shadow hearings between the House and Senate Democrats during this August recess. This would bring this appalling engagement by Trump in his various investment arrangements to a wider audience and highlight recommendations of reforms to prevent such massive and dubious self-enrichment by a President of the United States. There will be many competent legal and other experts to testify at your hearings, which no doubt will reveal more information and reach a large audience during the August recess.

These hearings would provide the Capitol press corps with much needed information to fulfill their professional responsibility to provide the people with their right to know the fuller details of what has yet not been reported.

Another way to put it is, you don’t make $1.1 million an hour by pushing a button. There is a lot of personal hidden back-and-forths by many people and many conflicts of interest to make that rich haul a reality.

Contact your Democratic members of Congress and demand shadow hearings. Ask for their written response. Do your part to help make it happen. The Congressional Switchboard number is 202-224-3121.

The post $1.1 MILLION AN HOUR!!—Trump’s Personal Profit in 2025 appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

& you can bet that we ain’t gonna change
that we will remain deranged murderers.
We are the planet’s nationalized Mafia w/ a
demented-imbecilic  Don our Capo-de-Capos.
A coast-to-coast mad-insane-asylum.
Stack the corpses up, pile ‘em high.

Let’s have a good ol’ fashioned tie-dye noose -party
w/ Spin & Marty as our noose-masters ‘cause
in Amerika we do everything better when we are plastered!!
So tap a keg or pop apen a bottle of Johnny Walker Red,
as well as a procuring an assortment of real-groovey meds
all reviewed & stamped w/approval by the Feds.

Dearly Beloved in Amerika we are all well fed
w/ cheese burger from imprisoned-no-range cattle
& cheese that  is like hot melted cow-boogers.
In a sad-land where ol’ white men still prevail
you can lock all the darky mo-fuckers in jail.
Don’t leave one one of thm mammy-jammers  out here to tell the tale!

Women? You mean bitches, holes, cunts & whores?
You can purchase them by the dozen @ the five & dime store.
They are just one more inconsequential thing to ignore.
When you leave make sure that you close the door as
we wouldn’t want any chattle-slaves to escape.
There ain’t no such thing  as rape ‘cause all dem holes are willin’

to submit to our for our pleasure alone drillin’.
Drill Baby drill! That is our motto &
we will chant it a lot as we have our way w/ ‘em everyday.
Spread them thighs wide bitches we’re comin’ in.
Whatever we desire we will declare “not a sin.”
This whole nation is our big looney-bin!

8/14/2026

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Last fall, on September 16, 2025, Devion Canty was forced to withdraw from Texas State University, just two weeks into his first semester in college. Canty had attended a protest at a campus “memorial” for Charlie Kirk, head of the white supremacist group Turning Point USA, who had been assassinated days earlier (Kirk was shot in the neck by a sniper while giving a public talk). Someone caught Canty on video falling to the ground as if shot in the neck, in a theatrical imitation of Kirk’s assassination. Texas Governor Greg Abbott shared the video on social media in the late morning of that day, urging Texas State University to “expel the individual immediately.”

Within hours, Texas State University coerced Canty into withdrawing. As a result, he lost his federal grants. He also had to abruptly leave his life at Texas State behind – all while facing death threats and relentless racist harassment. Determined to continue his education, Canty will be restarting college this fall at Johnson C. Smith University, a historically Black college in North Carolina, and is currently fundraising to pay the costs of housing.

Canty’s case shows yet again how universities cave under political pressure from right-wing forces. But it also demonstrates how universities increasingly deny access to anyone but the wealthy. That happens through increased tuition, gentrification and unaffordable housing, and rules that make it harder to get loans and later get out of student debt. This denial is a tool of political control – a way to prevent radical struggles from forming on campus. In a time of engineered scarcity, mutual aid is crucial to supporting those abused by this system.

Forced Out for Protesting White Supremacy

Universities have a reputation for being slow, but under pressure from fascist politicians they can be quite efficient. As the University Star reported, Texas Governor Abbott posted the video on social media at 11:17 am, on September 16, 2025, calling to expel the Texas State University (TXST) student. By 12:30 pm, TXST President Kelly Damphousse – a former prison guard whose academic research area is counterinsurgency – issued a statement saying the University is working on identifying the student in the video. At 5:12 pm, he announced that “the individual [Canty] is no longer a student at TXST.” In a university-wide email sent out that day, Damphousse condemned Canty’s behavior, and even claimed that the notion that many students might share Canty’s views of Kirk “cause[s] some of our students to feel unsafe.”

It was Canty, meanwhile, who was getting barraged with racist insults and death threats. At the campus protest that day, Canty and other Black students were getting called n-word by those attending the Kirk “memorial,” while white student protesters were called n-word lovers. Canty was spat at, and several of the protesters were also pushed to the ground. Later, his cell phone number got leaked and he began receiving death threats and racist messages from strangers, forcing him to change his number. While his belongings were left unceremoniously behind in his dorm room, his family pooled together their money for a plane ticket back home and out of the danger closing in on him in Texas.

TXST weaponized the fact that Canty was in real danger to get him to withdraw. Once he was identified from the video on September 16, Canty received a phone call from TXST’s Dean of Students. He was told he must pack his things immediately and meet with her. A Black SUV, of the kind typically driven by undercover police, picked him up from his dorm and took him to the University police station. At the station, in a room with police officers present, Canty was told by the Dean of Students that he should withdraw if he doesn’t want to get expelled. Expulsion, the Dean of Students explained, would prevent him from being admitted to other universities in the Texas public system (such as Texas A&M).

Under these coercive conditions – and determined to continue his education elsewhere – Canty had little choice but to withdraw.

As a result of TXST’s coercive maneuver, Canty lost all his federal grants and financial aid. According to federal rules, a student must be enrolled long enough for the grants to get activated; the early withdrawal had put him in violation of these rules. As the fundraiser for Canty puts it, “Given this country’s long history of denying Black youth their right to learn, it is difficult not to view the university administration’s actions within that same racist context.”

Texas State’s draconian handling of Canty fits with the University’s wider pattern of repression. TXST has recently terminated three of its faculty members over their political speech: Idris Robinson, Tom Alter, and Saeed Moshfegh. Robinson, a tenure-track philosophy professor, was terminated for expressing solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle in an off-campus talk, after Zionist agitators began smearing him on social media. Robinson sued TXST, and in May 2026 a federal judge in Texas ordered the University to reinstate him, with pay, for a year or until the trial resolves (the case is ongoing). Alter, who was a tenured history professor, was similarly fired for an off-campus speech after a fascist influencer made a video smearing him. Alter also sued TXST and was reinstated by a court order only to be fired a second time; his case is also ongoing. Moshfegh, an Iranian physics lecturer, put up a sign declaring his office “a safe space for immigrants.” He was reprimanded, and later TXST decided not to renew his contract.

In the cases of Robinson and Alter, just as in Canty’s case, TXST quickly met the demands of external right-wing forces.

Texas State Employees Union (TSEU) standing in solidarity with Devion Canty, who will be restarting college at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina this fall, after being forced to withdraw from Texas State University in September 2025. Photo by TSEU.

Universities… but Only for the Rich

The instances of faculty repression at TXST are important and deserve the attention they have received, but Canty’s case has mostly disappeared from view. As an undergraduate student, Canty is in a highly precarious position. His total yearly housing costs at Johnson C. Smith, where he will start this fall, are around $16,000 (and he currently needs to raise at least $8,000 by August 26, 2026). And like many students who don’t come from families with wealth, Canty doesn’t have someone who can co-sign a loan for him.

Canty’s fight to continue his education is taking place as college is becoming increasingly unaffordable. Tuition rates have skyrocketed, along with student debt. Today, about 42.6 million people are indebted through federal student loans, totaling $1.7 trillion. In July 2026, the Trump administration made these loans more restrictive: under the new rules, even those in the lowest income brackets will have to start paying their loans sooner, with larger monthly payments. The new rules also place restrictions on loans to parents paying for their children’s college. Unfortunately, over the last decades major universities have been investing in anything but making themselves more accessible. They have taken over whole cities, drawing corporate partnerships and luxury real estate developers, fueling gentrification, and causing rent and food prices to go up.

Cost of US colleges from 1963-2022, in constant 2022-23 dollars. This includes all institutions (four-year and two-year colleges, public and private). Source: National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

With the higher costs of everything, who can afford college, even at a “public” institution? At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where I work, 12% of undergraduates have parents who are in the top 1% (based only on income, excluding other assets). In theory, it’s a “public” university. In practice, it’s a private wealth generating machine that caters to wealthy students, donors, corporations, and real estate developers. The same applies to most major US universities, whether public or private.

TXST is somewhat different in that less than 2% of its undergraduates come from the top 1%. It’s a university that serves the broad public, at least on paper. Yet Canty’s story shows how the mechanisms used to discipline students still disproportionately punish working-class and poor students. One “misstep,” and you could lose everything. How sickening it is that the Governor of Texas, a university president who makes close to $1 million, and their teams of obedient middle-class professionals used their resources to try to ruin the life of an 18-year-old college student, simply because he moved his body in public space in a way they disapprove of.

It is as necessary as ever to support those harmed by this system.

Help Devion Canty reach $16,000 to cover housing costs for his first full year in college: Devion Canty’s fundraiser.

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Photo by JF Martin

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

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

Six Months of Deepening Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

An Exit Based on Peace, Sovereignty, and Reconstruction

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article is produced by Globetrotter.

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Photo by Francesco Alberti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photograph Source: NIAID – CC BY 2.0

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

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

What changed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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