This is not a tough one. First and foremost, workers are better off today because they overwhelmingly have jobs if they want them. They also are getting higher pay, even after adjusting for inflation. And they tell us they are much more satisfied at their jobs.

When President Biden took office, the unemployment rate was 6.4 percent. It is currently 4.3 percent. For most of his presidency the unemployment rate has been below 4.0 percent, a stretch of low unemployment not seen in more than half a century.

The story looks even better if we look at the percentage of people who have jobs, since many people are not counted as being unemployed if they don’t even look for work because of a weak labor market.

In January of 2021, the share of people in their prime working years (ages 25 to 54) who had jobs was 76.4 percent. In the most recent data, it stood at 80.9 percent, 4.6 percentage points higher.

This is not just an issue of millions more people being able to get jobs. When the labor market is as strong as it has been, workers can have their choice of jobs. They can leave jobs where the pay is low, the workplace is unsafe, or the boss is a jerk.

The United States is the only wealthy country where workers have seen substantial wage growth since the pandemic. In most countries wages have fallen behind inflation.

Workers switched jobs in record numbers in the years 2021-2023. Tens of millions of people quit their jobs and moved on to better ones. One result was that workers reported the highest rate of job satisfaction on record. This is a big deal, since most workers spend a large share of their waking hours on the job.

The tight labor market also gave workers the power to resist employers’ demands that they return to the office when the worst of the pandemic was over. As a result, the number of people who report being able to work from home has increased by 19 million from the pre-pandemic level.

This shift has been largely ignored by the media, but these workers are saving hundreds of hours a year in commuting time and saving thousands on transportation and other commuting-related expenses. It’s true that the option to work from home is mostly available to higher paid workers, but 19 million people is nearly one-eighth of the workforce, not some tiny elite.

If working from home was a benefit that mostly went to higher paid workers, the pay increases disproportionately went to those at the bottom, reversing the pattern that had been in place for more than four decades. An analysis from the Economic Policy Institute found that wages for workers in the bottom ten percent of the wage distribution increased by 13.4 percent from before the pandemic, after adjusting for inflation.

Wages for workers in the middle increased by 3.0 percent over this period, also after adjusting for inflation. This is not great, but it is better than what we saw over most of the prior four decades, when wages were often stagnant or falling.

And this wage growth occurred in spite of a worldwide pandemic that whacked growth and caused inflation everywhere. The United States is the only wealthy country where workers have seen substantial wage growth since the pandemic. In most countries wages have fallen behind inflation.

It is also important to realize the world-leading recovery was not something that just happened. It was not inevitable that the economy would bounce back quickly from the pandemic shutdowns. There was very rapid job growth in the summer of 2020, as most of the shutdowns ended. But job growth slowed considerably in the fall. In the last three months of the Trump administration, we were creating jobs at the rate of just 140,000 a month. At that pace it would have taken us more than five and a half years to get back the jobs lost in the recession.

The Biden administration’s recovery package got back these jobs in less than a year and a half. The rapid job growth has continued so that we now have 6.4 million more jobs than we did before the pandemic. With the economy still growing at a good clip and inflation back to its pre-pandemic pace, for workers the future is bright.

Before sparking outrage by refusing to let any Palestinian Americans speak at the Democratic National Convention last month, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris was on her way to winning back at least some of the voters who had rejected President Joe Biden's candidacy over the war on Gaza.

The vice president had spent weeks taking several small but positive steps that gave hope to young people as well as American Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, and other voters opposed to U.S. support for the war on Gaza.

She first refused to preside over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's predictably dishonest and dangerous speech to Congress. She also gave him a cold reception when they met one-on-one: She avoided smiling or shaking his hand during the standard post-meeting photo op and spoke alone to the press afterward.

Kamala Harris still has a very narrow opening to win over some of the voters who abandoned Biden but do not want to see Trump return to the White House.

During her remarks that day and in multiple campaign speeches, she has explicitly called for a cease-fire as part of a hostage deal and acknowledged Palestinian suffering in an empathetic way that President Biden rarely used.

She appointed a well-known and respected American Muslim attorney to serve as her liaison to Arab and Muslim voters and then stood by that official when she faced predictable attacks from pro-Israel groups.

She met with some Palestinian-American and Muslim community members on the sidelines of campaign events and gave the clear impression that she was far more sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians than her public remarks would indicate.

She initially deflected questions about whether she would support an arms embargo on the Israeli government, which was itself actually a positive sign given that any Democratic presidential candidate in years past would have responded to that question by simply saying, "No, I do not and never will support conditioning or limiting arms to Israel."

When leaders of the Uncommitted Movement later revealed that Harris had privately expressed a willingness to discuss an arms embargo, her national security adviser's cleanup statement said that she "does not support" an arms embargo in the present tense without making any pronouncements about the future.

She picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as vice president instead of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who had repeatedly gone out of his way to demonize college student protesters, Ben & Jerry's, and other advocates for Palestinian human rights in ways that no other VP candidate had.

Most recently, Harris approved a first-ever panel at the DNC focused on Palestinian human rights, allowing mainstream Arab and Palestinian leaders to speak freely to a packed audience about the genocide in Gaza.

Of course, none of these steps were enough. What voters opposed to the war on the people of Gaza want most is what U.S. law already requires: an arms embargo on the Israeli government that forces an end to the slaughter and starvation.

Although Vice President Harris had not been willing to break with President Biden or spark a backlash from her pro-Israel supporters by supporting an arms embargo, she had sent signals that she would at least be more open to discussing the various demands of anti-genocide voters than Biden—or Trump, for that matter.

Until, that is, the Democratic National Convention.

First, the party platform regurgitated most of the same pro-Israel talking points that AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel demand of candidates in their position papers, including dishonest attacks on the South Africa-inspired Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement; saber-rattling against Iran; and clear commitments to billions in promised funding for the Israeli government.

Second, the DNC gave a prime-time speaking slot to Israeli-American parents of hostages held captive in Gaza but then refused to give any speaking slot at all to any Palestinian Americans while making plenty of room for Republican politicians.

Even when prominent members of Congress, activists, and major unions called for the DNC and the Harris campaign to reconsider their decision, they refused. This decision insulted and infuriated Palestinian Americans and their supporters.

It also raised a very real policy concern: If supporters of Palestinian human rights could not even convince the Harris campaign to give one measly three-minute speaking spot to a Palestinian-American Democrat who would have endorsed Harris, how can we expect a Harris White House to listen when we lobby for changes in government policy?

In the weeks since the DNC speaker fiasco, the campaign has not expressed any regret for what happened. In a CNN interview, Harris also seemed to explicitly rule out supporting an embargo on even "some" arms to the Israeli government. This is remarkable given that even President Biden belatedly suspended shipments of 2,000-pound bombs.

Long story short, the Harris campaign has squandered much of the goodwill it initially built up with voters concerned about Gaza. For example, a new poll of American Muslim registered voters conducted from August 25 to 27 showed Harris winning only 29% of the vote. Jill Stein received identical support while 17% were undecided.

Despite these bleak numbers, all is not lost for Harris—yet.

Donald Trump is going out of his way to antagonize Americans who support Palestinian human rights: using Palestinian as a racist slur, promising to let Netanyahu finish the job in Gaza, speculating about ways to make Israel even larger and pledging to weaponize the federal government against college students and others who stand up for Palestine. Trump even implied that he might attack Gaza himself if the American hostages have not been released by the time he takes office.

That means Kamala Harris still has a very narrow opening to win over some of the voters who abandoned Biden but do not want to see Trump return to the White House.

What, if anything, can her campaign do now?

First, apologize for not including a Palestinian-American speaker at the convention and feature Palestinian-American speakers at a prominent campaign event.

Second, sit down with and listen to representatives of the Muslim, Palestinian, Arab, Jewish, Black, and other organizations that oppose the genocide in Gaza and use the upcoming presidential debate as an opportunity to clearly reject anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia here at home.

Third, pledge to enforce U.S. laws that already forbid arms sales and transfers to any foreign human rights violators, including the Israeli government.

Perhaps most importantly, Vice President Harris must convince President Biden to force Netanyahu to agree to the cease-fire deal that he keeps sabotaging. Harris says that she and President Biden are working around the clock to secure a cease-fire deal, but the truth is that the main barrier to a deal is Netanyahu's opposition to a permanent cease-fire and his insistence on partially occupying Gaza.

With nothing left to lose politically, Biden should leverage U.S. military aid to force Netanyahu to accept a permanent cease-fire deal that frees all hostages and political prisoners.

Taking these steps might allow the Harris-Walz campaign to win back some of the disillusioned voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and other swing states where every vote counts.

Time is running out, the path is narrow, and the missteps of recent weeks have made her journey all the more difficult. If Vice President Harris is going to do the right thing, the time to act is now.

On January 5, 2021, two Democrats won Senate runoff elections in Georgia. This flipped the Senate and resulted in an unexpected “trifecta”—Democratic control of the White House, the House, and the Senate.

Could a trifecta happen again in 2025?

The odds currently are against it, primarily because of the Senate races.

But if Democrats win the presidency, a trifecta is possible and, if that happens, historic democracy reforms that nearly passed in the last Congress would be on the doorstep for quick passage in 2025.

Whether the Democrats obtain a trifecta in November is in the hands of the voters, and possibly the courts if Trump refuses to accept the election results as he did in 2020.

The presidential race is currently close, with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris inching ahead of former President Donald Trump in recent polls.

A Harris victory could provide down-ballot support, especially in key House races, including races in California and New York. Democrats need to pick up just four seats to flip the House.

Holding the Democrats’ two-vote majority in the Senate, which includes four Independents who caucus with them, is much more difficult—but not impossible.

Of the 34 Senate seats up for election in November, 23 are currently held by 19 Democrats and the four Independents, and just 11 by Republicans.

Senate Democrats and Independents currently hold a 51-49 edge over Republicans.

It’s widely expected that Democrats will lose the seat currently held by retiring Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.). To maintain control of the Senate, Democrats would need to hold all of their remaining seats that are up this year, along with a Harris win to preserve the vice president’s tie-breaking vote.

Democrats and Independents running for reelection generally are polling ahead of their challengers, except for Sen. John Tester in Montana, who currently trails Republican businessman Tim Sheehy.

There are two crosscurrents at work in the Senate races, which include a handful of Democratic incumbents running in red and purple states.

On the one hand, ticket-splitting for President and Congress has become increasingly rare, and there are Democratic Senators seeking reelection in Ohio and Montana, states where Trump is expected to win easily.

On the other hand, incumbents typically enjoy an edge. In 2022, all 29 Senate incumbents won reelection. In 2020, 84% of Senate incumbents won.

The Democratic trifecta in 2021 resulted in Congress coming close to passing historic democracy reforms dealing with voting rights, money in politics, partisan gerrymandering, and other core reform issues.

If Democrats beat the odds and obtain a trifecta in November, Congress is expected to move quickly to pass the democracy reform measures.

In 2021, after the House passed early versions of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, Senate Democrats failed by just two votes to pass an exception to the filibuster rule that would have allowed the democracy reform legislation to pass the Senate with a simple majority and go to President Joe Biden for his signature.

Ironically, the two Democrats who voted against the filibuster rule exception, Sens. Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, voted just weeks earlier for an exception to the filibuster rule in order to pass an increase in the debt ceiling. And both senators were supporters of the democracy reform legislation.

But for these two Senators opposing the filibuster exception, historic democracy reforms would be protecting our democracy and our elections today.

Both Manchin and Sinema are retiring this year.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) recently said, “One of the first things I want to do, should we have the presidency and keep the majority, is change the [filibuster] rules and enact both the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Act.” Schumer said the Democrats will have the votes needed to “change the rules,” should Democrats keep control of the Senate.

“This is vital to democracy,” Schumer said, “This is not just another extraneous issue. This is the wellspring of it all.”

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) also has indicated that the two democracy reform bills would be an early House priority if Democrats flip the House. Indicating its top priority status, Jeffries assigned H.R. 11 to the Freedom to Vote Act in this Congress, the lowest number he, as House Minority Leader, could give to a bill.

Vice President Harris is a longtime supporter of these core democracy measures. At last month’s Democratic convention, Harris said in her acceptance speech: “[T]he freedom that unlocks all the others [is] the freedom to vote. With this election, we finally have the opportunity to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.”

For decades, there has been bipartisan leadership and support for numerous democracy reforms. They include the Watergate reforms of the 1970s; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its regular reauthorizations and amendments in 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006; and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.

Since the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision in 2010, however, congressional Republicans have almost unanimously opposed democracy reforms, leaving Democrats to support them alone.

Polls have shown these democracy reforms have strong public support among both Democrats and Republicans.

The Freedom to Vote Act would be the most comprehensive pro-democracy law enacted in decades. It would:

>> Reverse voter suppression laws that have flooded red states since the 2020 presidential election, using as justification Trump’s continuing false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

• Increase access to the ballot, including early voting requirements in all states for federal elections.
• Require each state to provide for no-excuse vote by mail.
• Provide for accessible voting by individuals with disabilities.
• Provide for automatic voter registration.
• Establish nonpartisan standards to prevent extreme partisan gerrymandering.
• End secret “dark money” contributions from being spent in federal elections.
• Establish a voluntary system of matching small donations with public funds, but not taxpayer funds, for House races.
• Strengthen enforcement of federal campaign finance laws.

The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would strengthen the legal protections against discriminatory voting policies and practices by restoring the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and repairing the damage done by recent Supreme Court decisions. It would:

• Revitalize the Voting Right Act’s preclearance provisions, after the Supreme Court gutted these rules, to require preclearance for new voting laws in certain states and localities to ensure they are not discriminatory.
• Provide a new way for determining which states and localities are covered by the preclearance provisions.
• Repair Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, also gutted by the Supreme Court, to allow voters to sue to block voting rules that are discriminatory or will create discriminatory results.
• Provide an expedited means for covered states to “bail out” of coverage to be released from the preclearance requirement if they have not engaged in discriminatory behavior for a specified period of time.

Whether the Democrats obtain a trifecta in November is in the hands of the voters, and possibly the courts if Trump refuses to accept the election results as he did in 2020.

But one thing is clear—we must repair and revitalize the rules of our democracy in order to reflect our democratic values, to ensure the opportunity for every eligible citizen to vote, and to protect against political money corruption of our democracy.

This begins with the enactment of the two historic democracy reform bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

During World War II, American leaders proudly proclaimed this country the “arsenal of democracy,” supplying weapons and related materiel to allies like Great Britain and the Soviet Union. To cite just one example, I recall reading about Soviet armored units equipped with U.S. Sherman tanks, though the Soviets had an even better tank of their own in the T-34 and its many variants. However, recent news that the United States is providing yet more massive arms deliveries to Israel (worth $20 billion) for 2026 and thereafter caught me off guard. Israel quite plainly is engaged in the near-total destruction of Gaza and the massacre of Palestinians there. So, tell me, how over all these years did the self-styled arsenal of democracy become an arsenal of genocide?

Israel, after all, couldn’t demolish Gaza, killing at least 40,000 Palestinians in a population of only 2.1 million, including thousands of babies and infants, without massive infusions of U.S. weaponry. Often, the U.S. doesn’t even sell the weaponry to Israel, a rich country that can pay its own bills. Congress just freely gifts body- and baby-shredding bombs in the name of defending Israel from Hamas. Obviously, by hook or crook, or rather by shells, bombs, and missiles, Israel is intent on rendering Gaza Palestinian-free and granting Israelis more living space there (and on the West Bank). That’s not “defense”—it’s the 2024 equivalent of Old Testament-style vengeance by annihilation.

As Tacitus said of the rampaging Romans two millennia ago, so it can now be said of Israel: They create a desert—a black hole of death in Gaza—and call it “peace.” And the U.S. government enables it or, in the case of Congress, cheers on its ringleader, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

The militarized American god, however, says: Suffer the children of Gaza to die courtesy of bombs and shells made here in the U.S.A. and shipped off to Israel at a remarkably modest price (given the destruction they cause).

Of course, anyone who knows a little American history should have some knowledge of genocide. In the 17th century, Native Americans were often “satanized” by early colonial settlers. (In 1994, a friend of mine, the historian David Lovejoy, wrote a superb and all-too-aptly titled article on exactly that topic: “Satanizing the American Indian.”) Associating Indians with the devil made it all the easier for the white man to mistreat them, push them off their lands, and subjugate or eradicate them. When you satanize an enemy, turning them into something irredeemably evil, all crimes become defensible, rational, even justifiable. For how can you even consider negotiating or compromising with the minions of Satan?

Growing up, I was a strong supporter of Israel, seeing that state as an embattled David fighting against a Goliath, most notably during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Forty years later, I wrote an article suggesting that Israel was now the Goliath in the region with Palestinians in Gaza playing the role of a very much outgunned and persecuted David. An American-Jewish friend told me I just didn’t get it. The Palestinians in Gaza were all terrorists, latent or incipient ones in the case of the infants and babies there. At the time, I found this attitude uncommon and extreme, but events have proven it to be far too common (though it certainly remains extreme). Obviously, on some level, the U.S. government agrees that extremism in the pursuit of Israeli hegemony is no vice and so has provided Israel with the weaponry and military cover it needs to “exterminate all the brutes.” Thus, in 2024, the U.S. “cradle of democracy” reveals its very own heart of darkness.

Looking Again at the World Wars That Made America “Great”

When considering World Wars I and II, we tend to see them as discrete events rather than intimately connected. One was fought from 1914 to 1918, the other from 1939 to 1945. Americans are far more familiar with the Second World War than the First. From both wars this country emerged remarkably unscathed compared to places like France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, China, and Japan. Add to that the comforting myth that America’s “greatest generation” pretty much won World War II, thereby saving democracy (and “Saving Private Ryan” as well).

Perhaps, however, we should imagine those years of conflict, 1914-1945, as a European civil war (with an Asian wing thrown in the second time around), a new Thirty Years’ War played out on a world stage that led to the demise of Europe’s imperial powers and their Asian equivalent and the rise of the American empire as their replacement. Germanic militarism and nationalism were defeated but at an enormous cost, especially to Russia in World War I and the Soviet Union in World War II. Meanwhile, the American empire, unlike Germany’s Second and Third Reichs or Japan’s imperial power, truly became for a time an untrammeled world militarist hegemon with the inevitable corruption inherent in the urge for near-absolute power.

Vast levels of destruction visited upon this planet by two world wars left an opening for Washington to attempt to dominate everywhere. Hence, the roughly 750 overseas bases its military set up to ensure its ultimate global reach, not to speak of the powerful navy it created, centered on aircraft carriers for power projection and nuclear submarines for possible global Armageddon, and an air force that saw open skies as an excuse for its own exercises in naked power projection. To this you could add, for a time, U.S. global economic and financial power, enhanced by a cultural dominance achieved through Hollywood, sports, music, and the like.

What an irony, in fact, that defeating European militarism in two world wars only accelerated the growth of American militarism and nationalism, making the world’s lone superpower for so many decades the scariest country for all too many peoples outside its borders.

Not, of course, that the United States emerged utterly unchallenged from World War II. Communism was the specter that haunted its leaders, whether in the Soviet Union, China, or Southeast Asia (where, in the 1960s and early 1970s, it would fight a disastrous losing war, the first of many to come, in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). Here, there, and everywhere, even under the very beds of Americans, there was a fear of the “commie rat.” And for a while, communism, in its Soviet form, did indeed threaten capitalism’s unbridled pursuit of profits, helping American officials to create a permanent domestic war state in the name of containing and rolling back that threat. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 erased that fear, but not the permanent war state that went with it, as Washington sought new enemies to justify a Pentagon budget that today is still rising toward the trillion-dollar mark. Naturally (and remarkably disastrously), it found them, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or so many other places in the case of the costly and ultimately futile Global War on Terror in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

And eternally losing (or at least not winning) its wars raised the question: What will replace it? What will happen as imperial America continues to decline, burdened by colossal debt and strategic overreach, and crippled from within by a rapacious class of oligarchs who fancy themselves as a new all-American aristocracy? Will that decline lead to collapse or can its officials orchestrate a soft landing? In World Wars I and II, Europeans fought bitterly for world dominance, powered by militarism, nationalism, racism, and greed. They suffered accordingly and yet did recover even if as far less powerful nations. Can the U.S. manage to curb its own militarism, nationalism, racism, and greed in time and so recover similarly? And by “racism,” I mean, for example, reviving the idea (however put) of China as a “yellow peril,” or the tendency to see the darker-skinned peoples of the Middle East as violent “terrorists” and the latest minions of Satan.

And then, of course, there’s always the fear that, in the future, a world war could once again break out, raising the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons from global arsenals that are always being “modernized” and the possible end of most life on Earth. It’s an issue worth highlighting, since the U.S. continues to “invest” significant sums in producing yet more nuclear weapons, even as it ratchets up tensions with nuclear powers like Russia and China. Though a winnable nuclear war among the great powers on this planet is inconceivable, that hasn’t stopped my country from pushing for a version of nuclear superiority (disguised, of course, as “deterrence”).

Making America Sane Again

The world wars of the previous century facilitated America’s global dominance in virtually all its dimensions. That, in fact, was their legacy. No other nation in history had, without irony or humility, divided the globe into military combatant commands like AFRICOM for Africa, CENTCOM for the Middle East, and NORTHCOM here at home. There are also “global” commands for strategic nuclear weapons, cyber dominance, and even the dominance of space. It seemed that the only way America could be “safe” was by dominating everything everywhere all at once. That insane ambition, that vainglory, was truly what made the U.S. the “exceptional” nation on the world stage.

Such a boundless pursuit of dominance, absurdly disguised as benefiting democracy, is now visibly fraying at the seams and may soon come apart entirely. In 2024, it’s beyond obvious that the United States no longer dominates the world, even if its military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) does indeed dominate its national (in)security state and so increasingly the country. What an irony, in fact, that defeating European militarism in two world wars only accelerated the growth of American militarism and nationalism, making the world’s lone superpower for so many decades the scariest country for all too many peoples outside its borders.

Think, in fact, of the U.S. emerging from World War II with what might be thought of as victory disease. The last nearly 80 years of its foreign policy witnessed the remarkable progression of that “disease,” despite a lack of actual victories (unless you count minor escapades like the invasion of Grenada). Put differently, the U.S. emerged from World War II so singularly an economic, financial, and cultural juggernaut that subsequent military defeats almost didn’t seem to matter.

When we look at facts, the pursuit of global dominance has been driving the American empire toward an early grave.

Even as America’s economic, financial, and cultural power has waned in this century, along with its moral position (consider President Obama’s curt “We tortured some folks” admission, along with support for Israel’s ongoing genocide), the government does continue to double-down on military spending. Pentagon budgets and related “national security” costs now significantly exceed $1 trillion annually even as arms shipments and sales continue to surge. War, in other words, has become big business in America or, as General Smedley Butler so memorably put it 90 years ago, a first-class “racket.”

Worse yet, war, however prolonged and even celebrated, may be the very definition of insanity, a deadly poison to democracy. Don’t tell that to the MICC and all its straphangers and camp followers, though.

Ironically, the two countries, Germany and Japan, that the U.S. took credit for utterly defeating in World War II, forcing their unconditional surrender, have over time emerged in far better shape. Neither of them is perfect, mind you, but they largely have been able to avoid the militarism, nationalism, and constant warmongering that so infects and weakens American-style democracy today. Whatever else you can say about Germany and Japan in 2024, neither of them is bent in any fashion on either regional or global domination, nor are their leaders bragging of having the finest military in all human history. American presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama have indeed bragged about having a matchless, peerless, “finest” military. The Germans and Japanese, having known the bitter price of such boasts, have kept their mouths shut.

My brother has a saying: no brag, just facts. And when we look at facts, the pursuit of global dominance has been driving the American empire toward an early grave. The “finest” military lost disastrously, of course, in Vietnam in the last century, and in Afghanistan and Iraq in this one. It functionally lost its self-proclaimed Global War on Terror and it keeps losing in its febrile quest for superiority everywhere.

If we met a person dressed in a military uniform who insisted he was Napoleon, boasted that his Imperial Guard was the world’s best, and that he could rule the world, we would, of course, question his sanity. Why are we not questioning the collective sanity of America’s military and foreign-policy elites?

This country doesn’t need to be made great again, it needs to be made sane again by the rejection of wars and the weaponry that goes with them. For if we continue to follow our present pathway, MADness could truly lie in wait for us, as in the classic nuclear weapons phrase, mutually assured destruction (MAD).

Another form of madness is having a president routinely implore God—yes, no one else!—to protect our troops. This is not a knock on Joe Biden alone. He’s just professing a nationalist piety that’s designed to win applause and votes. Assuming Biden has the Christian God in mind, consider the irony, not to say heresy, of functionally begging Christ, the Prince of Peace, to protect those who are already armed to the teeth. It’s also an abdication of the commander-in-chief’s responsibility to support and defend the U.S. Constitution while protecting those troops himself. Who has the biggest impact, God or the president, when it comes to ensuring that troops aren’t sent into harm’s way without a justifiable cause supported by the American people through a Congressional declaration of war?

Consider the repeated act of looking skyward to God to support military actions as a major league cop-out. But that’s what U.S. presidents routinely do now. Such is the pernicious price of pursuing a vision that insists on global reach, global power, and global dominance. America’s leaders have, in essence, elevated themselves to a god-like position, a distinctly angry, jealous, and capricious one, far more like Zeus or Ares than Jesus. Speaking of Jesus, he is alleged to have said, “Suffer the children to come unto me.” The militarized American god, however, says: Suffer the children of Gaza to die courtesy of bombs and shells made here in the U.S.A. and shipped off to Israel at a remarkably modest price (given the destruction they cause).

To echo a popular ad campaign, Jesus may “get” us, but our leaders (self-avowed Christians, all) sure as hell don’t get him. I may be a lapsed Catholic, not a practicing one like Joe Biden, but even I remember my catechism and a certain commandment that Thou shalt not kill.

The Associated Press reports that many of the recruits drafted under Ukraine’s new conscription law lack the motivation and military indoctrination required to actually aim their weapons and fire at Russian soldiers.

“Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire... That is why our men are dying,” said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade. “When they don’t use the weapon, they are ineffective.”

This is familiar territory to anyone who has studied the work of U.S. Brigadier General Samuel “Slam” Marshall, a First World War veteran and the chief combat historian of the U.S. Army in the Second World War. Marshall conducted hundreds of post-combat small group sessions with U.S. troops in the Pacific and Europe, and documented his findings in his book, Men Against Fire: the Problem of Battle Command.

One of Slam Marshall’s most startling and controversial findings was that only about 15% of U.S. troops in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In no case did that ever rise above 25%, even when failing to fire placed the soldiers’ own lives in greater danger.

We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends, and “allies” in other countries.

Marshall concluded that most human beings have a natural aversion to killing other human beings, often reinforced by our upbringing and religious beliefs, and that turning civilians into effective combat soldiers therefore requires training and indoctrination expressly designed to override our natural respect for fellow human life. This dichotomy between human nature and killing in war is now understood to lie at the root of much of the PTSD suffered by combat veterans.

Marshall’s conclusions were incorporated into U.S. military training, with the introduction of firing range targets that looked like enemy soldiers and deliberate indoctrination to dehumanize the enemy in soldiers’ minds. When he conducted similar research in the Korean War, Marshall found that changes in infantry training based on his work in World War II had already led to higher firing ratios.

That trend continued in Vietnam and more recent U.S. wars. Part of the shocking brutality of the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq stemmed directly from the dehumanizing indoctrination of the U.S. occupation forces, which included falsely linking Iraq to the September 11th terrorist crimes in the U.S. and labeling Iraqis who resisted the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country as “terrorists.”

A Zogby poll of U.S. forces in Iraq in February 2006 found that 85% of U.S. troops believed their mission was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,” and 77% believed that the primary reason for the war was to “stop Saddam from protecting Al Qaeda in Iraq.” This was all pure fiction, cut from whole cloth by propagandists in Washington, and yet, three years into the U.S. occupation, the Pentagon was still misleading U.S. troops to falsely link Iraq with 9/11.

The impact of this dehumanization was also borne out by court martial testimony in the rare cases when U.S. troops were prosecuted for killing Iraqi civilians. In a court martial at Camp Pendleton in California in July 2007, a corporal testifying for the defense told the court he did not see the cold-blooded killing of an innocent civilian as a summary execution. “I see it as killing the enemy,” he told the court, adding, “Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.”

U.S. combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan (5,429 killed) were only a fraction of the U.S. combat death toll in Vietnam (47,434) or Korea (33,739), and an even smaller fraction of the nearly 300,000 Americans killed in the Second World War. In every case, other countries suffered much heavier death tolls.

And yet, U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan provoked waves of political blowback in the U.S., leading to military recruitment problems that persist today. The U.S. government responded by shifting away from wars involving large deployments of U.S. ground troops to a greater reliance on proxy wars and aerial bombardment.

After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military-industrial complex and political class thought they had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” and that, freed from the danger of provoking World War III with the Soviet Union, they could now use military force without restraint to consolidate and expand U.S. global power. These ambitions crossed party lines, from Republican “neoconservatives” to Democratic hawks like Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.

In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in October 2000, a month before winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton echoed her mentor Albright’s infamous rejection of the “Powell Doctrine” of limited war.

“There is a refrain…,” Clinton declared, “that we should intervene with force only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time. To those who believe we should become involved only if it is easy to do, I think we have to say that America has never and should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right one.”

During the question-and-answer session, a banking executive in the audience challenged Clinton on that statement. “I wonder if you think that every foreign country—the majority of countries—would actually welcome this new assertiveness, including the 1 billion Muslims that are out there,” he asked, “and whether or not there isn’t some grave risk to the United States in this—what I would say, not new internationalism, but new imperialism?”

When the aggressive war policy promoted by the neocons and Democratic hawks crashed and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, this should have prompted a serious rethink of their wrongheaded assumptions about the impact of aggressive and illegal uses of U.S. military force.

Instead, the response of the U.S. political class to the blowback from its catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was simply to avoid large deployments of U.S. ground forces or “boots on the ground.” They instead embraced the use of devastating bombing and artillery campaigns in Afghanistan, Mosul in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria, and wars fought by proxies, with full, “ironclad” U.S. support, in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and now Ukraine and Palestine.

The absence of large numbers of U.S. casualties in these wars kept them off the front pages back home and avoided the kind of political blowback generated by the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The lack of media coverage and public debate meant that most Americans knew very little about these more recent wars, until the shocking atrocity of the genocide in Gaza finally started to crack the wall of silence and indifference.

The results of these U.S. proxy wars are, predictably, no less catastrophic than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. domestic political impacts have been mitigated, but the real-world impacts in the countries and regions involved are as deadly, destructive, and destabilizing as ever, undermining U.S. “soft power” and pretensions to global leadership in the eyes of much of the world.

In fact, these policies have widened the yawning gulf between the worldview of ill-informed Americans who cling to the view of their country as a country at peace and a force for good in the world, and people in other countries, especially in the Global South, who are ever more outraged by the violence, chaos, and poverty caused by the aggressive projection of U.S. military and economic power, whether by U.S. wars, proxy wars, bombing campaigns, coups, or economic sanctions.

Now the U.S.-backed wars in Palestine and Ukraine are provoking growing public dissent among America’s partners in these wars. Israel’s recovery of six more dead hostages in Rafah led Israeli labor unions to call widespread strikes, insisting that the Netanyahu government must prioritize the lives of the Israeli hostages over its desire to keep killing Palestinians and destroying Gaza.

In Ukraine, an expanded military draft has failed to overcome the reality that most young Ukrainians do not want to kill and die in an endless, unwinnable war. Hardened veterans see new recruits much as Siegfried Sassoon described the British conscripts he was training in November 1916 in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: “The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable.”

Several months later, with the help of Bertrand Russell, Sassoon wrote Finished With War: a Soldier’s Declaration, an open letter accusing the political leaders who had the power to end the war of deliberately prolonging it, which was published in newspapers and read aloud in Parliament. The letter ended:

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.

As Israeli and Ukrainian leaders see their political support crumbling, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are taking increasingly desperate risks, all the while insisting that the U.S. must come to their rescue. By “leading from behind,” our leaders have surrendered the initiative to these foreign leaders, who will keep pushing the United States to make good on its promises of unconditional support, which will sooner or later include sending young American troops to kill and die alongside their own.

Proxy war has failed to resolve the problem it was intended to solve. Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.

Neither the changes to U.S. military training since the Second World War nor the current U.S. strategy of proxy war have resolved the age-old contradiction that Slam Marshall described in Men Against Fire, between killing in war and our natural respect for human life. We have come full circle, back to this same historic crossroads, where we must once again make the fateful, unambiguous choice between the path of war and the path of peace.

If we choose war, or allow our leaders and their foreign friends to choose it for us, we must be ready, as military experts tell us, to once more send tens of thousands of young Americans to their deaths, while also risking escalation to a nuclear war that would kill us all.

If we truly choose peace, we must actively resist our political leaders’ schemes to repeatedly manipulate us into war. We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends, and “allies” in other countries.

We must insist that our mis-leaders instead recommit to diplomacy, negotiation, and other peaceful means of resolving disputes with other countries, as the United Nations Charter, the real “rules-based order,” in fact requires.

As much as politicians like Kamala Harris would like it, it’s not possible to compromise on an issue as dramatic as Israel’s war against Gaza. Either you’re in favor of aiding and abetting Israel, or you are not.

The post The Gaza War Is a Pass-Fail Course first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

A California-Google deal that would provide $250 million for local journalism and an “AI accelerator” program was announced by California Gov. Gavin Newsom as a “major breakthrough” to ensure the “survival” of newsrooms across the state. In exchange, the state has agreed to kill the California Journalism Protection Act, a bill that would have forced the tech giant to share revenues with news publishers and which was deemed to be more transparent than similar legislation in Australia and Canada.

News publishers and other advocates focusing on the good side of the deal (more money) have also been cautious about celebrating it. Journalists’ unions and associations have been more straightforward in decrying it. Altogether, newsrooms are feeling the toll of elongating their “survival” mode, especially if the trade-off is to continue handing their future to those who helped create their crisis.

By eliminating legislation enforcing revenue-share agreements, California has reduced Google’s financial liability compared with Australia and Canada, where news outlets, including broadcasters, are compensated for creating value for Google. In addition, Google got the state of California to pick up an important portion of the $250 million bill using public funding. More significantly, the deal allowed the corporation to avert disclosing how much value news generates for Google’s search engine, which estimates put at $21 billion a year in the U.S. based on searches using news media content.

Concentrated market power is hurting the chances for a free and financially independent press to thrive.

Let’s be clear: Google is the sole winner of this deal, and this should be an example of what not to do to redress power and financial imbalances between news media and large digital platforms. If anything, it should be a wake-up call to the harmful effects of digital monopolies on the news media industry. Governments can no longer spare Google and other tech giants from their role in the financial crisis of journalism.

The recent ruling from a federal district court confirming Google’s monopoly over search tells part of this story. Although that case didn’t address the corporation’s impact on newsrooms, we learned that Google’s grip on advertising demand couldn’t have been achieved without a key illegal practice: its multibillion-dollar contracts with phone makers that were designed to squash rival search engines. Today, search advertising continues to be the largest channel capturing ad spend in the U.S.

Most importantly, this stranglehold enabled Google to constrain media’s bargaining power and prevent any meaningful discussion about the dollar value news content provided to its search engine—as the looming threat of permanently turning off news access would have hurt the press even more. Without significant challengers to Google’s search engine, newsrooms are beholden to Google’s whims for news discoverability and distribution on search results.

A separate trial starting next week tackling Google’s monopoly over advertising technologies (ad-tech) is likely to complete the story of this corporation’s role in this crisis. The ad-tech industry, once thought to help news publishers make revenue from digital, has become extraordinarily complex, opaque, and concentrated. At the same time, it is the backbone that connects advertisers and publishers to buy and sell ads across the web—providing an alternative to search and social media ads, all of which drives a marketplace worth around $300 billion in the United States alone.

Besides controlling search ad revenues, Google also controls the ad-tech platforms upon which most ad sales by news publishers are made. Without getting too technical, in practice this means Google has eyes on the value of news publishers’ ad inventory, on advertisers’ preferences and perceptions about those publishers, and on the algorithms that connect the two to determine ad prices.

Also unchallenged, Google controls between 50% and 90% of transactions in each layer of this market, where it takes a cut of about 35% of each ad dollar spent. In the trial, the Department of Justice is expected to cut through the ad-tech complexity and show how Google has also manipulated ad prices to divert ad dollars away from news publishers into the tech giant’s own pockets. For the first time in many years, in this case the DOJ is seeking a breakup to redress Google’s harms.

As a counterargument, Google has been trying to push a story in which a “very competitive” market already exists, since multiple giants in various other sectors—Amazon, Walmart, CVS, etc.—are also competing for ad dollars. This view invites us to presume news publishers and journalists must be doing something wrong, so what else is there to do but to help them to “survive” in this brave, new world?

But nothing could be further from the truth. Newsrooms across the world have not stopped innovating, changing their revenue models, and adapting to audiences’ new habits. Journalists continue to defend their trade and the rights that ensure they can do their jobs safely. People still want to find reliable news. But when it comes to competition, how do we even call it that when a handful of players control not only where news is discovered and accessed, but also drive appetite to monetize audiences’ personal data, and ultimately assign value to a publisher’s ad inventory?

The fight for legislation in California that would redress these imbalances was the first step—not the ultimate fix—to coming out of the “survival” mentality that has been entrenched for far too long in journalism. Concentrated market power is hurting the chances for a free and financially independent press to thrive. As long as short-term fixes like the California-Google deal, obscure this reality, we will continue to allow the very same people we should be holding accountable to shape the future of democracy.

With nearly 18 million students on U.S. college campuses this fall, defenders of the war on Gaza don’t want to hear any backtalk. Silence is complicity, and that’s the way Israel’s allies like it. For them, the new academic term restarts a threat to the status quo. But for supporters of human rights, it’s a renewed opportunity to turn higher education into something more than a comfort zone.

In the United States, the extent and arrogance of the emerging collegiate repression is, quite literally, breathtaking. Every day, people are dying due to their transgression of breathing while Palestinian.

The Gaza death toll adds up to more than one Kristallnacht per day—for upwards of 333 days and counting, with no end in sight. The shattering of a society’s entire infrastructure has been horrendous. Months ago, citing data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, ABC News reported that “25,000 buildings have been destroyed, 32 hospitals forced out of service, and three churches, 341 mosques and 100 universities and schools destroyed.”

Not that this should disturb the tranquility of campuses in the country whose taxpayers and elected leaders make it all possible. Top college officials wax eloquent about the sanctity of higher learning and academic freedom while they suppress protests against policies that have destroyed scores of universities in Palestine.

The ongoing atrocities by the Israel “Defense” Forces in Gaza, killing a daily average of more than 100 people—mostly children and women—have galvanized many young people to take action in the United States.

A key rationale for quashing dissent is that anti-Israel protests make some Jewish students uncomfortable. But the purposes of college education shouldn’t include always making people feel comfortable. How comfortable should students be in a nation enabling mass murder in Gaza?

What would we say about claims that students in the North with southern accents should not have been made uncomfortable by on-campus civil rights protests and denunciations of Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s? Or white students from South Africa, studying in the United States, made uncomfortable by anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s?

A bedrock for the edifice of speech suppression and virtual thought-policing is the old standby of equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Likewise, the ideology of Zionism that tries to justify Israeli policies is supposed to get a pass no matter what—while opponents, including many Jews, are liable to be denounced as antisemites.

But polling shows that more younger Americans are supportive of Palestinians than they are of Israelis. The ongoing atrocities by the Israel “Defense” Forces in Gaza, killing a daily average of more than 100 people—mostly children and women—have galvanized many young people to take action in the United States.

“Protests rocked American campuses toward the end of the last academic year,” a front-page New York Times story reported in late August, adding: “Many administrators remain shaken by the closing weeks of the spring semester, when encampments, building occupations and clashes with the police helped lead to thousands of arrests across the country.” (Overall, the phrase “clashes with the police” served as a euphemism for police violently attacking nonviolent protesters.)

From the hazy ivory towers and corporate suites inhabited by so many college presidents and boards of trustees, Palestinian people are scarcely more than abstractions compared to far more real priorities. An understated sentence from the Times sheds a bit of light: “The strategies that are coming into public view suggest that some administrators at schools large and small have concluded that permissiveness is perilous, and that a harder line may be the best option—or perhaps just the one least likely to invite blowback from elected officials and donors who have demanded that universities take stronger action against protesters.”

From the hazy ivory towers and corporate suites inhabited by so many college presidents and boards of trustees, Palestinian people are scarcely more than abstractions compared to far more real priorities.

Much more clarity is available from a new Mondoweiss article by activist Carrie Zaremba, a researcher with training in anthropology. “University administrators across the United States have declared an indefinite state of emergency on college campuses,” she wrote. “Schools are rolling out policies in preparation for quashing pro-Palestine student activism this fall semester, and reshaping regulations and even campuses in the process to suit this new normal.

“Many of these policies being instituted share a common formula: more militarization, more law enforcement, more criminalization, and more consolidation of institutional power. But where do these policies originate and why are they so similar across all campuses? The answer lies in the fact that they have been provided by the ‘risk and crisis management’ consulting industries, with the tacit support of trustees, Zionist advocacy groups, and federal agencies. Together, they deploy the language of safety to disguise a deeper logic of control and securitization.”

Countering such top-down moves will require intensive grassroots organizing. Sustained pushback against campus repression will be essential, to continually assert the right to speak out and protest as guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Insistence on acquiring knowledge while gaining power for progressive forces will be vital. That’s why the national Teach-In Network was launched this week by the RootsAction Education Fund (which I help lead), under the banner “Knowledge Is Power—and Our Grassroots Movements Need Both.”

The elites that were appalled by the moral uprising on college campuses against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza are now doing all they can to prevent a resurgence of that uprising. But the mass murder continues, subsidized by the U.S. government. When students insist that true knowledge and ethical action need each other, they can help make history and not just study it.

The ongoing carnage wrought on ordinary Americans by this country’s bizarrely permissive gun laws dominated the cable news networks for hours on end Wednesday after a 14-year-old shooter killed four people and wounded nine at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.

Two of the dead were also 14-year-olds, destined never to grow older. The other two fatalities were teachers. As a teacher, I take their deaths personally. The teen shooter had spoken about killing people last year, but since Georgia does not have a red flag law, guns were not removed from his house. The deaths of the teens, and the wounding of eight other students, along with a teacher, underscore the horror of these mass shootings, their little lives cut unforgivably short, their parents’ lives blighted in ways that give nightmares to all parents of a child. Regular mass shootings are not permitted in actually civilized countries, whether Europe or Japan. They are as much an American peculiar institution as our form of plantation slavery was, and they are just as rooted in a valuing of property over humanity (in the case of slavery it involved turning humanity into property).

By the magic of empathy and identification, the news hits us in the gut when we hear of these strangers torn to pieces by hot bullets. They are also Americans. It shouldn’t matter, but the vigil-keepers and interviewees are blonde and white. They are like the majority of Americans.

Those who mouth “thoughts and prayers” and who clearly do not feel the deaths viscerally perhaps lack that empathy. Perhaps they are sociopaths, who cannot empathize with others. Some of the unsympathetic, though, distance themselves from the rawness of these murders by seeing them as a cost of living in a “free” society, by which they mean a society that has few effective regulations about the ownership and use of guns. They see the mass shootings the way many people see automobile deaths, as “accidents,” as a feature of life that they believe unavoidable. Many automobile deaths, too, however, are avoidable, and they are collisions, not accidents. Some 25% of them are from drunk driving, which is a conscious choice and not an accident at all. The most common cause of collisions is distracted driving, which also results from choices people make, and it is a problem that is getting worse. As for guns, it is odd that so intentional an act as premeditated murder should be classed as a natural disaster by so many Americans.

Sociologists use the notion of framing to understand the stories people tell themselves about events. Gun safety advocates see responsible gun ownership as requiring laws and regulations that protect owners and others. Those men who are insouciant about mass shootings think requiring gun safety detracts from their individual freedom (and possibly from their manhood, which frankly speaks poorly of them).

Although the cable news channels went into hyperdrive covering the sickening events in Georgie, they ignored other killings of children on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, Israeli bombardments killed 42 Palestinian victims in massacres of three families. The Gaza Ministry of Health said, “Many people are still trapped under the rubble and on the roads as rescuers are unable to reach them.”

Judging by past such bombardments, a majority of the victims, over 20 people, were children and women. The Israeli military allows an astonishing, and sickening, 20 civilian deaths for each militant of the Qassam Brigades that it kills with drones and rockets. No civilized military behaves in this way. It is creepy. U.S. officers would be rightly court-martialed for implementing such lax and inhumane rules of engagement. Officers have told me that the Geneva Conventions are their “Bible.” They are deeply angered when it is suggested that the Israeli military is behaving no worse than the American does.

The 22 or more women and children killed and the dozens of others injured or trapped beneath the rubble in Gaza did not receive even 15 seconds of air time on America’s multi-billion-dollar “news” screens on Wednesday.

I don’t understand why. Is it that they are not coded as “white?” But if you met many of them, you couldn’t tell them by skin color from many “white” Americans, including Italian-Americans. Is it because they aren’t Americans? But opinion polling shows tremendous U.S. empathy with Ukrainian victims of Russian bombardment.

For some, indifference is achieved by framing. “People die in war,” said President Joe Biden. Some people take seriously ridiculous Israeli army allegations of having killed 13,000 Hamas fighters, which makes the total dead of nearly 41,000 (though this is a vast underestimate) seem like par for the course. In fact, the Israeli military counts any young able-bodied male as a militant. And since they kill so many people from the air, the Israelis don’t really know whom they killed in many instances. The U.S. used to do that in Vietnam when it engaged in body counts. One of my late friends, a Green Beret, complained to me bitterly about such body counts or “kiting.” “If it was dead and it was Vietnamese, it was Viet Cong,” he said bitterly.

So the murdered children of Gaza (the Israeli military ROE amounts to mass murder in International Humanitarian Law) are put off stage. They aren’t configured as “news” as U.S. mass media conceive it. The carnage and suffering is daily, so it has ceased being reported on at all.

Boutique outlets like Middle East Eye, helmed by veteran Middle East correspondent David Hearst, show us the reality, which is not easier to take than the deaths in Winder, Georgia — that is, if we haven’t erected frames that prevent us from seeing and feeling it:

In Norman Solomon’s new Afterword in the paperback edition of his book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,, the author excoriates the White House for arming a genocide with assistance from a negligent press. Solomon tracks events following Hamas’ killings and kidnappings of Israelis on October 7, 2023, a few months after publication of the book in hardcover. The 31-page Afterword indicts the Biden administration for complicity in Israel’s genocide, a horror facilitated by Pentagon media stenographers who covered up, ignored, or under-reported U.S-Israel war crimes.

As executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, Solomon values truth in reporting, a rarity in a country where the press fails to report near trillion-dollar military budgets that defund urgent needs at home despite Americans living one paycheck away from desperation, even homelessness.

Solomon’s lucid “Afterword: The Gaza War” exposes the lies, half-truths, omissions, and pivots of U.S. President Joe Biden, Secretary of State “rules-based order” Antony Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan as they bemoan the “unintentional” killing and wounding of tens of thousands of Gazans, most of them women and children who had nothing to do with October 7.

Either the corporate media knew of the Biden administration’s culpability or chose not to know—both worthy of derision.

“After 10 weeks of the carnage, it was big news on December 12 when Biden got around to voicing some unhappiness with Israel’s ‘indiscriminate bombing,’” writes Solomon, explaining that during this time a duplicitous Biden was green-lighting and fast-tracking “enormous U.S. shipments of weapons and ammunition to Israel—including one-ton bombs—so that indiscriminate bombing could continue.”

Solomon’s addition to his War Made Invisible tells the truth in harrowing detail, reflecting the author’s commitment to accuracy in journalism and political discourse. A collection of Solomon’s “Media Beat” columns, published from 1992-2009, won the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. Solomon’s incisive analysis and scathing foreign policy critiques are also hallmarks of his other books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You (co-authored with foreign correspondent Reese Erlich) published in January 2003, two months before then-President George W. Bush ordered the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In “Afterword: The Gaza War,” Solomon demonstrates a knack for narration, offering a cringe-worthy snapshot of Biden’s callous detachment from the suffering in Gaza. Solomon describes the president in late February hosting a photo op at an ice cream parlor near Rockefeller Center, where Biden ruminated on the prospects for a cease-fire. “My national security adviser tells me that we’re close, we’re close, we’re not done yet,” Biden tells the press before strolling off holding his ice cream cone.

Meanwhile, the author points out, it was five months into Israel’s killing spree before a compliant Washington Post finally reported the U.S. was able to secretly deliver to Israel more than 100 separate weapons transfers without public debate since the transfers fell below the dollar threshold that required congressional notice and approval.

Apparently the Biden administration could read the tea leaves—the majority of Americans wanted an end to the killing—and so the weapons were transferred quietly lest the public throw stones at the White House or a shoe at President Biden. After all, according to Solomon, the U.S. was supplying Israel with 80% of its imported weapons to bomb Gaza’s hospitals, schools, United Nations refugee centers, and so-called “safe” zones to which the Israeli military directed tens of thousands of Palestinians to seek refuge.

Readers remembering New York Times stories about individual Palestinian suffering may judge Solomon as too harsh on corporate media and its guest pundits, but these stories, Solomon notes, rarely blamed the White House because “...the narratives of catastrophe were short on zeal for exploring causality—especially when the trail would lead to the U.S. ‘national security’ establishment.”

Either the corporate media knew of the Biden administration’s culpability or chose not to know—both worthy of derision.

In examining mass media complicity, Solomon reminds us of The Intercept’s findings: The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times coverage of the war’s first six weeks minimized Palestinian suffering, with editors and reporters employing 60-1 the term “slaughter” to characterize the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians and using “massacre” 125-2 to describe the murder of Israelis versus Palestinians.

Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction.org, a grassroots anti-war organization, chastises the press for ignoring Israel firing artillery shells loaded with white phosphorus at civilians in Gaza. White phosphorus can burn its victims down to the bone, cause them to blink spasmodically until blind, or struggle to breathe before dying from asphyxiation.

To the skeptic, Solomon offers abundant examples of media bias, including press failure to cover the declaration of U.N. experts who in March, 2024, issued a statement: “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys.”

The most inspiring passages—the pages that restore our faith in reporters on big media’s payroll—describe how courageous journalists, including those at CNN, risked their lives and careers to cover Israel’s bombardment and starvation of over 2 million people in Gaza, 9 out of 10 internally displaced where “trauma in Palestine is collective and continuous,” according to the chair of the mental health unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Solomon tells us that reporters at some of the largest news outlets—The Associated Press, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, McClatchy, the Chicago Tribune—signed a letter in November, 2023, denouncing their employers for “dehumanizing rhetoric that served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” A month later the Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concern over the Israeli military’s pattern of targeting journalists and their families, citing a journalist killed wearing press insignia and other journalists whose families were threatened by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Referencing a report in The Guardian, Solomon writes of internal dissension at CNN, where reporters, including star veteran correspondent Christiane Amanpour, decried editorial policies demanding disgraceful regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and censorship of Palestinian voices in what amounted to “journalistic malpractice.”

Broken up into sections, peppered with news quotes and congressional grilling of the secretary of defense, Solomon’s Afterword presents a rare and valuable synthesis of post October 7 events and bedfellows.

Presidents can get away with genocide as long as the press gives them a free pass.

Building on themes in his War Made Invisible, Solomon reveals the human toll of an imperial U.S. foreign policy. The new edition with “Afterword: The Gaza War” is a must-read for policymakers, academics, activists, and anyone wondering how war criminals in the White House can cry crocodile tears that pass for real anguish.

In her recent speech to the Democratic National Convention accepting the party’s nomination for president, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris drew one of her most thunderous applause lines when she called for an end to the violence and suffering Israel is inflicting in Gaza and for the long-denied fulfillment of Palestinian rights to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.

This enthusiastic reception, evinced by tens of thousands of die-hard Democrats at Chicago’s United Center, was a faithful reflection of where the base of the party stands on Palestinian-Israeli issues.

A May 2024 public opinion poll conducted by Data for Progress and Zeteo found that 83% of Democrats support the U.S. brokering a permanent cease-fire. A March 2024 Gallup poll found more Democrats sympathetic toward Palestinians than toward Israelis by a 10-point margin (43% to 35%) as Israel continues killing Palestinians in Gaza.

The U.S. is profoundly complicit in Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians.

While Harris’s rhetorical commitment to Palestinian freedom and self-determination is noteworthy, these will be yet more empty words unless they are accompanied by a commitment to tangible policy change. Most importantly, this means following U.S. law and ending weapons transfers to Israel. No other policy step would have as much of an impact in generating a permanent cease-fire and advancing Palestinian freedom.

For decades, Israel has denied Palestinians their freedom under a brutal system of apartheid and military rule, backed by the munificent support of U.S. taxpayers, who have provided Israel with more than $100 billion in weapons.

As Israel’s violence against Palestinians over the past 10 months has increased, so too has the amount of weaponry the U.S. is providing to Israel. The Biden administration has circumvented congressional oversight to rush to Israel the delivery of more than $6 billion in weapons, and the Pentagon recently notified Congress of $20 billion in potential new sales, which will undoubtedly be financed by U.S. taxpayers.

From fighter jets to missiles, bombs, tank shells, and mortars, U.S. weapons to Israel make us complicit in the war crimes and potential crimes against humanity Israel is inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza, as the death toll eclipses 40,000 people, including more than 16,500 children.

In her acceptance speech, Harris committed to “hold sacred” the principle of the rule of law. If elected president, her most immediate test of fidelity to this principle will emerge from her decision on whether to send additional weapons to Israel.

U.S. law is clear: No country can receive U.S. weapons to commit human rights abuses. The Foreign Assistance Act prevents the U.S. from furnishing any support to a country with a “consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” The Arms Export Control Act mandates that U.S. weapons be used “solely for internal security, for legitimate self-defense,” and for a few other scenarios not relevant to Israel’s attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. No sales or deliveries of any weapons are permitted to a country in “substantial violation” of these limitations.

In addition, current White House guidelines, embodied in its Conventional Arms Transfer policy, prohibit weapons deliveries to a country when it is “more likely than not that the arms to be transferred will be used by the recipient to commit, facilitate the recipients’ commission of, or to aggravate risks that the recipient will commit: genocide; crimes against humanity; grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, including attacks intentionally directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such; or other serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law, including serious acts of gender‑based violence or serious acts of violence against children.”

As attested to by myriad Palestinian and international human rights organizations, as well as United Nations agencies and judicial bodies, Israel is brazenly violating every single clause of the Conventional Arms Transfer policy, which is supposed to prevent U.S. complicity in atrocities.

Not only should Harris commit to ending weapons transfers to Israel because U.S. law and policy mandate she do so if elected president, stopping weapons to Israel is also a smart electoral strategy to adopt. A March 2024 public opinion poll conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that 62% of Biden 2020 voters support halting weapons shipments to Israel, whereas only 14% oppose.

In addition, an August 2024 public opinion poll of voters in the critical swing states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia, conducted by the IMEU Policy Project, found that Democratic and independent voters would be more likely to cast their ballot for Harris if she were to support an arms embargo on Israel. Thirty-nine percent of Georgians would be more likely to vote for Harris in this scenario, whereas only 5% of voters would be less likely to vote for her, with similar results obtained in Arizona (35% to 5%) and in Pennsylvania (34% to 7%).

Unfortunately, Harris appears wedded to Biden’s failed strategy of providing Israel with weapons. As she put it in an interview with CNN, she would not withhold weapons.

More than 75 years ago, in November 1947, as the U.N. debated partitioning Palestine against the wishes of its majority Indigenous inhabitants, the Truman administration imposed an arms embargo on all sides in Palestine for the commonsense reason, in the subsequent words of Secretary of State George Marshall, that to “permit American arms to go to Palestine and neighboring states would facilitate acts of violence and the further shedding of blood and thus render still more difficult the task of maintaining law and order.”

The Truman administration maintained its arms embargo against Israel after its establishment in May 1948, despite fierce lobbying from members of Congress, Zionist organizations in the U.S., and the Israeli government. Israel engaged in massive ethnic cleansing, driving more than 80% of Palestinians from their homes in what became Israel and turning them into refugees. But at least U.S. weapons did not contribute to this atrocity.

Today, as Israel continues its horrendous violence against Palestinians, which is in some respects even more deadly than the catastrophe of 1948, the obverse is true. The U.S. is profoundly complicit in Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians.

Because of her stated commitment to the rule of law, a permanent cease-fire, and Palestinian freedom, Harris must now end U.S. complicity by backing a renewed arms embargo against Israel.

The Israeli war on Gaza has become a war on Palestinian children. This was as true on October 7 as it is today.

On August 17, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for a seven-day ceasefire to allow children in Gaza to be vaccinated against polio. "I am appealing to all parties to provide concrete assurances right away, guaranteeing humanitarian pauses for the campaign," he said.

The first such case of the devastating epidemic was discovered in the town of Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.

“It is scientifically known that for every 200 virus infections, only one will show the full symptoms of polio, while the remaining cases may present mild symptoms such as a cold or a slight fever,” Palestinian Health Minister Majed Abu Ramadan said on that same day.

This means that the virus may have spread to all parts of Gaza Strip, where the entire healthcare system has been largely destroyed.

The ten-month-old Palestinian baby who was first to contract the poliovirus, like many more, never received a vaccination dose against the disease.

No child, let alone a whole generation of children, should endure this much suffering, regardless of the political reasoning or context.

To prevent an even greater disaster in war-stricken Gaza, the World Health Organization (WHO), along with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), said that they have to vaccinate 640,000 children throughout Gaza within a short period of time.

The task, however, is a difficult one, as the vast majority of Gazans are crammed into unsafe refugee camps - massive tent encampments, mostly in central Gaza with no access to clean water or electricity.

They are surrounded by over 330,000 tons of waste, which has further contaminated already undrinkable water which, according to experts, may have been the cause of the poliovirus.

The challenge of saving Gaza's children is complicated by the fact that Israeli bombs continue to be dropped on every part of Gaza, including the so-called 'safe zones', which were declared by Israel soon after the start of the war.

The other problem is that Gaza has, for months, subsisted without electricity. Without an efficient cooling system, the majority of the vaccines could become unusable.

But there is more to the suffering of Gaza’s children than the lack of vaccination.

As of August 19, at least 16,480 children have been killed as a direct result of the war, in addition to thousands more who remain missing, presumed dead. The number, according to the Palestinian Minister of Health in Gaza, includes 115 babies.

Many children have starved to death, and “at least 3,500 children in Gaza are facing (the same fate) amid a lack of food and malnutrition under Israeli restrictions on the delivery of food,” a ministry spokesman said.

Additionally, so far, more than 17,000 children in Gaza have either lost one or both parents since the start of the war on October 7.

One of the main reasons as to why Gaza's children account for the majority of victims of the war is that homes, schools and displacement shelters have been the main targets of the relentless bombardment.

According to a statement by the UN Experts last April, "more than 80% of schools in Gaza (have been) damaged or destroyed."

"It may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’,” they wrote.

The trend of targeting schools continues. On August 18, Palestine's Education Minister, Amjad Barham said that over 90 percent of all Gaza schools have been destroyed, the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA reported.

Of the 309 schools, 290 have been destroyed as a result of Israeli bombing. This has left 630,000 students with no access to education.

While homes and schools can be rebuilt, the precious lives of killed children cannot be restored.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, as of July 2, 8,572 students in Gaza and 100 in the occupied West Bank have been killed at the hands of the Israeli army. 14,089 students in Gaza and 494 in the West Bank have also been injured.

These are the worst losses suffered by Palestinian children within a relatively brief period of time since the Nakba, the destruction of the Palestinian homeland in 1948. The tragedy worsens by the day.

No child, let alone a whole generation of children, should endure this much suffering, regardless of the political reasoning or context.

International and humanitarian law has designated a “special respect and protection” for children during times of armed conflict, the international humanitarian law databases of the Red Cross resolve. These laws may apply to Palestinian children in theory, but certainly not in practice.

The betrayal of these children by the international community shall stain the collective consciousness of humankind for decades to come.

Indeed, this is a war on Palestinian children - a war that must stop before a whole generation of Palestinian children is completely erased.

          “Get a job!” That’s the clichéd response to panhandlers and anyone else who complains of being broke. But what if you can’t?

            That dilemma is the crux of an evolving silent crisis that threatens to undermine the foundation of the American economic model.

Two-thirds of gross domestic product, most of the economy, is fueled by personal consumer spending. Most spending is sourced from personal income, overwhelmingly from salaries paid by employers. But employers will need fewer and fewer employees.

You don’t need a business degree to understand the nature of the doom loop. A smaller labor force earns a smaller national income and spends less. As demand shrinks, companies lay off many of their remaining workers, who themselves spend less, on and on until we’re all in bread lines.

Assuming there are any charities collecting enough donations to pay for the bread.

The workforce participation rate has already been shrinking for more than two decades, forcing fewer workers to pay higher taxes. It’s about to get much worse.

Workers are already being replaced by robotics, artificial intelligence and other forms of automation. Estimates vary about how many and how quickly these technologies will kill American jobs as they scale and become widely accepted, but there’s no doubt the effects will be huge and that we will see them sooner rather than later. A report by MIT and Boston University finds that two million manufacturing jobs will disappear within the coming year; Freethink sounds the death knell for 65% of retail gigs in the same startlingly short time span. A different MIT study predicts that “only 23%” of current worker wages will be replaced by automation, but it won’t happen immediately “because of the large upfront costs of AI systems.” Disruptive technologies like A.I. will create new jobs. Overall, however, McKinsey consulting group believes that 12 million Americans will be kicked off their payrolls by 2030.

“Probably none of us will have a job,” Elon Musk said earlier this year. “If you want to do a job that’s kinda like a hobby, you can do a job. But otherwise, A.I. and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want.”

For this to work, Musk observed, idled workers would have to be paid a “universal high income”—the equivalent of a full-time salary, but to stay at home. This is not to be conflated with the “universal basic income” touted by people like Andrew Yang, which is a nominal annual government subsidy, not enough to pay all your expenses.

“It will be an age of abundance,” Musk predicts.

The history of technological progress suggests otherwise. From the construction of bridges across the Thames during the late 18th and early 19th centuries that sidelined London’s wherry men who ferried passengers and goods, to the deindustrialization of the Midwest that has left the heartland of the United States with boarded-up houses and an epic opioid crisis, to Uber and Lyft’s solution to a non-existent problem that now has yellow-taxi drivers committing suicide, ruling-class political and business elites rarely worry about the people who lose their livelihoods to “creative destruction.”

Whether you’re a 55-year-old wherry man or cabbie or accountant who loses your job through no fault of your own other than having the bad luck to be born at a time of dramatic change in the workplace, you always get the same advice. Pay to retrain in another field—hopefully you have savings to pay for it, hopefully your new profession doesn’t become obsolete too! “Embrace a growth mindset.” Whatever that means. Use new tech to help you with your current occupation—until your boss figures out what you’re up to and decides to make do with just the machine.

Look at it from their—the boss’s—perspective. Costs are down, profits are up. They don’t know you, they don’t care about you, guilt isn’t a thing for them. What’s not to like about the robotics revolution?

Those profits, however, belong to us at least as much as they do to “them”—employers, bosses, stockholders. Artificial intelligence and robots are not magic; they were not conjured up from thin air. These technologies were created and developed by human beings on the backs of hundreds of millions of American workers in legacy and now-moribund industries. If the wealthy winners of this latest tech revolution are too short-sighted and cruel to share the abundance with their fellow citizens—if for no better reason than to save their skins from a future violent uprising and their portfolios from disaster when our consumerism-based economy comes crashing down—we should force them to do so.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

 

 

 

The post We Need a Universal High Income first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On his eponymous TV show, Joe Scarborough pointed out this week how angry and toxic Xitter has become recently. I’ve seen the same thing, as have many others; quitting Xitter has become a thing, largely as a result of the venomous culture that’s taken hold there.

This seems to be more closely connected to it being taken over by a morbidly rich South African immigrant who seems to delight in bullying his own child (and others) than to the political season; previous election cycles didn’t see similar reports of such widespread hostility and bullying behavior that was driving people to quit particular social media sites altogether.

That’s probably because one of the first rules of social organization is that culture flows from the top down.

When dad is violent, the family tends to be violent (or damaged by that violence). When corporate CEOs are bullies, middle management generally emulate that bullying style. When teachers or professors delight in picking on vulnerable students, the entire class often joins in.

“A fish rots from the head down” is such a long-held truism that the cliché is claimed by Turks, Chinese, and British ethnohistorians.

And, of course, it’s also true in politics.

For bullies, nothing is sacred, not even a family in crisis. And certainly not a nation.

We all watched in amazement back in 2015 and 2016 as Donald Trump — a notorious bully when he was in elementary school who even tormented members of his own family — peeled the bark off the entire class of Republican presidential wannabees.

“Lil Marco,” “Low Energy Jeb,” “Horseface Carly,” “Lyin’ Ted,” and “Lightweight Lindsay” each came under withering attack, and not one managed to successfully retaliate. Rubio tried, with a comment on the size of Trump’s hands, but it didn’t even nick the New York media star; he just shrugged it off and turned it around.

Voters watched in slack-jawed amazement, many delighted that mealy-mouthed Republican politicians were finally getting taken down a peg. Others worried that this was an early sign of a coarsening of our political culture like other countries had seen just prior to authoritarian takeovers. How little we knew back then about how bad it would get.

There’s a long collection of scientific studies examining the emotional and psychological impact on victims of bullying.

— Children who are bullied are more likely to grow up with serious mental challenges that range from depression to an inability to make friends to suicide.

— Adults who are bullied — most of those studied have been in the workplace — often turn to drugs or alcohol, are more likely to end up divorced, and sometimes snap, violently “going postal.”

— Spouses married to bullies often collapse emotionally, surrendering so completely to the physical and emotional violence that they’re unable to leave without an external intervention.

And now, for the first time in American history, we’re learning what other countries that suffered under authoritarian bullies know: the damage runs deep, tears communities and families apart, and spawns its own mini-industry of strutting militia-type bullies intent on emulating dear leader.

Brownshirts, Blackshirts, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, you name it; they’re all mostly made up of men deeply insecure about their own masculinity or role in the world who find safety and meaning by joining the über-bully’s gang.

Most recently, notoriously shouty half-dressed bully Jim Jordan has initiated an “investigation” into the daughter of Juan Merchan, the judge assigned by the court system to oversee Trump’s trial for bank, insurance, and tax fraud.

James Comer and “alpha males” on Fox “News” and across rightwing hate radio led a similar bullying crusade against Joe Biden’s son as he struggled with addiction.

And this morning we learned that another grandstanding Republican bully, Rep. Michael McCaul, is demanding that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken pause his efforts to find peace in the Middle East so he can participate in a campaign stunt designed to dredge up Republican complaints about how president Biden withdrew from Afghanistan.

For bullies, nothing is sacred, not even a family in crisis. And certainly not a nation.

To some extent the groundwork for this bullying was laid by a group of rightwing billionaires who believed they could keep their own taxes low by bullying politicians and voters who wanted “nice things” for average Americans like a national healthcare system.

They funded astroturf groups like the Tea Party to harass “socialist” Democrats inclined to vote for President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, even though it was a massive giveaway to the insurance industry that was first written by the Heritage Foundation and put into place in Massachusetts by then-Governor Mitt Romney.

These, in turn, inspired other groups more closely aligned to the Klan — America’s first national bully group — to show up in the streets with torches and swastikas chanting, “Jews will not replace us” as they murdered a young counter-protestor, Heather Heyer.

And that, of course, led to the murder of three police officers and the death of five others — and the near death of our democratic republican form of government — at the hands of Trump’s mob on January 6th.

America is today suffering from a surfeit of bullying. It drained many of us of our hope and optimism, much as it did in the 1950s when Joe McCarthy last led a national bullying campaign. It was causing people to check out of the political process, to essentially give up like an abused spouse, or to retreat into sports, music, and hours of binge-watched TV dramas.

America, in other words, has been suffering for nine long years from being tortured by an unrepentant bully and the “tough guys” who attached themselves to him.

And now his partner in this emotional crime, JD Vance, is trying to bully women who are unable to have children or choose to pursue careers. And women who want or need an abortion. And poor people who don’t have billionaire patrons to lift them out of their struggling “hillbilly” lives that Vance now ridicules.

The best way to take on a bully, my dad told me when I was 7 years old, is to “kick him in the nuts.” (Mom was horrified!) Fight back, in other words, even if you must use the bully’s own weakest point against him in what may otherwise be thought of as an unfair fight.

If we don’t take on bullies — particularly fascist bullies — they keep going further and further until either they win or you fight back and defeat them. The best political example of this writ large was Hitler. He pushed around most of Europe and they kept giving in or trying to appease him, thinking at some point he’d have gotten “enough.”

Neville Chamberlain thought he could negotiate with a bully and came back from his meetings with Hitler believing he’d achieved “peace in our time.” But, of course, you can never actually negotiate with a bully: you can only defeat them. Which is what FDR, Churchill, and Stalin ended up having to do.

From that experience, Europe learned a lesson about dealing with fascist bullies, which is why the governments of the continent are united in their support of Ukraine against the murderous bullying of Russia’s fascist leader. And outspoken about their horror at the prospect of a second Trump term.

David Rothkopf writes that he believes America is suffering “battered nation syndrome.” That’s clearly true for many of us, and definitely true for much of the media (David elaborates on that) but, thankfully, it appears the Democratic Party is waking up and fighting back. Which, at this moment in time, is vitally important.

That’s because bullies never stop, unless they are stopped by somebody stronger than them. And, most importantly, every time they win they set their sights on the next conquest. Giving in to their demands only creates a newer and more elaborate set of demands. Responding to their bullying with anything other than a literal, verbal, or metaphorical punch in the face is a waste of time.

Thankfully, that’s a lesson not lost on a former prosecutor and a football coach. Vice President Harris and Governor Walz know exactly — from long years of experience — how to take on bullies and, odds are, Trump won’t know what hit him when he steps onto the debate stage next week.

Hopefully, the next two months will see the end of our “long national nightmare.” For the sake of both our democracy and our collective mental health, it can’t come soon enough.

A clip from an English-language Israeli podcast showing hosts Naor Meningher and Eytan Weinstein discussing the idea of eradicating all Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza has gone viral online.

In an episode of Two Nice Jewish Boys, which aired three weeks ago, host Weinstein said: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow. I would press it in a second.”

He claimed that “most Israelis” would do the same.

Meningher added that they would also want to wipe out Palestinians in “the territories.”

“Because that’s the reality we live in, it’s us or them, and it has to be them,” Weinstein said.

He added that Israelis want “full-scale war.”

“Full-scale war wouldn’t mean that we’re just in Gaza,” he added. “And it also wouldn’t mean what we’re doing in Gaza, because in Gaza, maybe there’s mass destruction but there's not massive death.”

“Forgive us if we don’t give a shit if everybody there dies. It’s just the way we feel. It’s just the way Israelis feel,” Weinstein said.

— (@)

In a later episode, the two discussed what they deemed to be Israel’s failures in its ongoing war on Gaza, with Weinstein saying that the government should stop “trying to get international acceptance” and “instill sovereignty over and annex the West Bank, Gaza… make it all Israel.”

Weinstein added that Israel’s “50-year plan” should involve conquering Lebanon. He also referred to Hezbollah and its allies as “goat fuckers.”

On the UN-led polio vaccination program currently underway in Gaza, Meningher said: “It’s unclear to me, why do we give this humanitarian relief when our hostages never saw a Red Cross?”

“The baby that’s born in Gaza is technically innocent, I could give zero fucks, I don’t care if he gets polio,” Weinstein said.

Radio Rwanda

The clip of Weinstein and Meningher lauding the idea of all five million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank being wiped out has drawn fierce criticism online.

“Radio Rwanda in full effect here. This is deeply disturbing,” journalist Samira Mohyedeen wrote on X, referring to the broadcasts that incited genocide against the Tutsis during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

CBC journalist Evan Dyer shared the clip on X, pointing to Meningher’s former media roles in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s last five political campaigns.

“This is not a fringe show or fringe people… the show is as mainstream as it gets,” Dyer wrote, citing a review of the podcast by Times of Israel that billed it as a “platform for free and open conversations.”

— (@)

Journalist Najat Abdi also shared the video on X, saying that she did so “because there will come a time where animals like @EytanWeinstein will deny saying this, particularly when they will be held legally accountable for the incitement of genocide”.

“Platforms like @YouTube will also have to answer to this,” Abdi added.

In response, the podcast posted a gif of a finger pressing a red button.

As we approach National Voter Registration Day this September, it's crucial to reflect on the significance of the right to vote—a fundamental pillar of democracy that many fought tirelessly to secure. Voting is more than a civic duty; it is an expression of your voice, your values, and your vision for the future. The fight continues to this day.

For centuries, the right to vote was restricted to a privileged few. In Early America, voting rights were reserved for white, land-owning men, excluding entire populations who were deemed unworthy of having a say in the government of their country. Women, Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups were systematically excluded from the political process, their voices stifled by laws and practices designed to maintain the status quo and preserve chattel slavery.

The fight for suffrage was long and arduous. Countless individuals marched, protested, and even risked their lives to demand a seat at the table. The 15th Amendment in 1870 granted Black men the right to vote, but their full participation as citizens with a say in their communities was short-lived. White supremacists enacted barriers to voting and enforced them with gang violence. The struggle continued, culminating in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—a landmark piece of legislation designed to eliminate the racial barriers to voting.

Registration is just the beginning. Voting requires commitment, especially in a system that can seem hostile.

Similarly, the road to women's suffrage was a century-long battle that finally resulted in the 19th Amendment in 1920. Even then, many women of color were still denied access to the polls due to discriminatory practices that persisted long after the amendment’s passage. The right to vote, once so fiercely sought, is now something many of us take for granted, to our own peril.

If voting didn’t matter, we would not be witnessing modern-day voter suppression by way of closing poll locations, limiting early and mail-in voting, and photo ID and proof of citizenship requirements. However, since 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, 29 states have enacted nearly 100 laws to limit adult citizens’ access to the vote. Rights and freedoms, unfortunately, have not moved in a steady and forward direction in America.

Voter participation in the United States remains alarmingly low. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only about 66% of eligible voters cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election. While this was a significant increase from previous years, it still means that one-third of eligible voters did not participate. In non-presidential election years, less than half of eligible citizens vote. When only a small number of Americans exercise their right to vote, the outcome of elections is unlikely to represent the true will and wellbeing of our vast and diverse country.

National Voter Registration Day, the fourth Tuesday of September, is an opportunity to reclaim our power. Whether you’re registering for the first time, updating your information, or helping others get registered, taking this first step is crucial to making sure your voice is heard.

But registration is just the beginning. Voting requires commitment, especially in a system that can seem hostile. That’s why we must educate ourselves about the issues, understand the stakes, and recognize the impact our votes can have. It’s easy to feel like one vote doesn’t matter, but history has shown us that collective action can lead to transformative change. That is why those who resist change continue to suppress the vote, more than 150 years after the 15th Amendment. When we all show up, the power of our voices combined can create a force that is impossible to ignore.

In 2024, we have the chance to continue shaping the future of our country. Voting is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have to shape our communities and our nation. It is a means of holding our leaders accountable and ensuring that our government reflects the will of the people. When we vote, we join the chorus that determines the direction of our country.

This September, commit to register or check your registration status, and help others register. Prepare to make your voice heard.

This op-ed was produced by American Forum.

As the country moves rapidly toward the 2024 elections, Black Americans are experiencing the best economic conditions they’ve had in generations. Record low unemployment rates, record low poverty rates, and record high levels of income and wealth paint a picture of Black prosperity.

Yet African Americans remain mired in great economic insecurity, reflected in their low opinion of the economy, widespread asset poverty, and ongoing economic inequality between Black and white households.

The best Black economy in generations, in short, isn’t enough. To overcome centuries of inequality, we’ll need dedicated public policy.

Black median income today is still nearly $30,000 lower than the white median—it’s not even caught up with the white median income of 1972.

Let’s look at some numbers from a new report we put out for the Joint Center and the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

From 1972 to 2022, the annual Black unemployment rate averaged 11.6%. Last year, it averaged 5.5%, a historic low. That’s good news, but it’s barely put a dent in the gap between Black and white employment.

We calculate that Black America would need an additional 1.4 million jobs for Black people to be employed at the same rate as white people. This employment gap cost Black Americans roughly $60 billion last year compared to what they’d have made if those jobless individuals were working.

So for African Americans, the racial employment divide remains quite costly. Other indicators tell a similar story.

For example, Black median household income is also at its highest point in a generation, growing from about $41,000 in 2011 to nearly $53,000 in 2022—a nearly 30% increase. That same year, median Black wealth also reached a new high of nearly $45,000, more than double the post-Great Recession low of about $17,000.

Still, Black median income today is still nearly $30,000 lower than the white median—it’s not even caught up with the white median income of 1972. And the average Black median wealth of about $45,000 means the vast majority of African Americans fall well short of the $190,000 to $570,000 estimated as necessary to reach middle-class status.

Will these disparities correct themselves on their own? Not likely.

As the Institute for Policy Studies and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found in their 2023 “Still A Dream” report, the nation is still moving at a glacial pace when it comes to bridging Black/white economic inequality. If the country continues at the rate it’s been moving since the 1960s, it will take over 500 years to bridge the racial income gap—and nearly 800 years to bridge the racial wealth gap.

So while Black Americans are experiencing significant economic gains, these advances are insufficient to overcome entrenched inequalities. The economic progress we see today is a foundation, not a finish line. It speaks to the need for comprehensive policies that address ongoing barriers to economic security and wealth-building.

Investment in quality education, access to affordable healthcare, affordable housing, job creation targeted to high-unemployment communities, and new publicly financed asset building opportunities like Baby Bonds are essential. These measures can help ensure that the economic gains of today translate into sustained prosperity and security for future generations.

As we approach the presidential election, let’s not make this election a contest between individuals but of policies that can heal our deep wounds of racial and economic inequality.

Addressing these issues with urgency and commitment will not only improve the economic outlook for Black Americans—it will create the basis for a more united country.

When former U.S. President Donald Trump announced he would speak in Howell, Michigan on Tuesday, August 20, the dog whistles could be heard loud and clear. It was a signal to the president’s white nationalist supporters that he was still on their side. Howell accrued a reputation for open racism and white supremacism when Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Robert E. Miles set up shop just north of the city. Although Miles died in 1992, cross burnings continued, and the house of a farmer who had spoken up for a proposed Drag Bingo event was vandalized with pro-Klan graffiti as recently as 2021.

During Trump’s speech, which was recorded although not open to the public, he fantasized about sending Livingston County police to Detroit to intimidate voters. “I’d love to have them working there [in Detroit] during the election.” Trump defended his appearance in Howell with a rhetorical question: “Who was here in 2021?” The answer was President Joe Biden. Be that as it may, Biden did not decide to campaign in the city a month after neo-Nazis had demonstrated their love for him in the same city.

One month to the day before Trump’s speech, on July 20, neo-Nazis and Klansmen marched through the city of Howell. Neo-Nazis sieg heiled and shouted “We love Hitler! We love Trump!” in a rally that coincided with the former president’s visit to Grand Rapids. On August 17, the day Trump announced his stop in Howell, a similar rally occurred in Brighton. Many Michiganders who saw pictures or videos of the rallies probably naively shook their heads at what they imagine is a purely Howell or Livingston County phenomenon.

The history of white supremacism and neo-Nazism in Michigan is not just Howell’s history, but all of our history.

Yet, those who say that neo-Nazis and Klansmen aren’t who “we” (here meaning Michiganders outside of Howell) are, could not be more incorrect, in fact, dangerously so. The Ku Klux Klan flexed its political muscles across the state throughout the 1920s. In 1925, the Klan-backed candidate Charles Bowles almost won the mayoralty of Detroit. The Michigan KKK pushed a statewide ballot issue that would have banned parochial schools in a fit of bigotry against Catholics. Prominent Michiganders such as Dan F. Gerber, founder of Gerber Baby Foods, were Klan members.

Although the 1920s Klan declined amidst sexual and financial scandal, its torch was picked up in Michigan by the Black Legion. The Legion, immortalized in a 1937 Humphrey Bogart film, launched violent attacks against Catholics, immigrants, Blacks, and labor unions. In his autobiography, Malcolm X states that his father was murdered by the Legion. The group was blamed for a total of around 50 murders. Prominent political figures were counted as members, including the mayor and chief of police of Highland Park. It was only a federal investigation brought about by the Legion’s murder of federal employee Charles Poole that ended the group’s reign of terror.

The German American Bund, founded in 1936, was dedicated to spreading the ideas of Nazism in the United States. Like the Legion, the Bund was memorialized in film: 1939’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy. In 2017, the Oscar-nominated documentary A Night at the Garden recounted the 20,000 strong rally the Bund held in Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. The Bund has multiple Michigan connections. Bund fuhrer Fritz Kuhn worked in a Detroit Ford plant before founding the group. The group also built summer camps for young American Nazis across the United States, including Camp Will and Might in New Jersey, Camp Siegfried in New York, Camp Hindenburg in Wisconsin—and Camp Eichenfeld, about 12 miles north of Pontiac, near US-10.

Camp Eichenfeld bustled during the summer months. The leader of the Detroit Bund John H.B. Schreiber said that the camp, which flew a flag with a Nazi swastika alongside the Stars and Stripes, hosted between 500 and 700 people every weekend. Bundists also packed into the German-American Restaurant on the northeast corner of E. Jefferson and E. Grand Boulevard in Detroit for monthly outings. Today, the story of Detroit’s Nazis is nearly entirely forgotten, buried in old issues of The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press. It was only with assistance from employees at the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library that I learned about it. The national Bund reeled under investigations from federal officials before finally closing up shop for good after the U.S. entered World War II.

This was not the end of fascist activities in Michigan, though. Demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin and Christian nationalist Gerald L.K. Smith preached the fascist doctrine in print and over the airwaves. Smith made an unsuccessful run for Senate that garnered over 100,000 votes. A new group, the National Workers League, continued where the Bund had left off. The League was one of the groups that incited a riot against the Sojourner Truth Housing Project, because most of the families living in the project were Black. Parker Sage, the head of the League, and Garland Alderman, the secretary, were arraigned after the riots. Those charges were dropped so that Sage, Alderman, and William Robert Lyman, also of the League, could be indicted in Washington D.C. for sedition. After a 1944 mistrial caused by the death of the presiding judge, the charges against the League members and their co-defendants on the far-right were dropped.

Even members of Congress from Michigan echoed pro-fascist sentiments. Congressman Roy O. Woodruff inserted a letter into the Congressional Record that included the alarming phrase: “We do not need to fear Hitler.” Another Congressman, Clare E. Hoffman, saw a beneficial side to Nazism. The U.S. “might now profit…” he advised, “from what Hitler has done by adopting at least some of his decent methods of production…” Hoffman’s speech was given as France was falling to the Nazis. Two months before Pearl Harbor, Congressman George A. Dondero said in Congress “The greatest danger menacing the United States today is not invasion or attack by the Axis Powers but the trend of socialism and communism.”

Running the license plates of the far-right demonstrators, Livingston police determined that several were not residents of Howell or Livingston County. That should give pause to those living outside of Howell who think they and their neighbors are paragons of tolerance. The history of white supremacism and neo-Nazism in Michigan is not just Howell’s history, but all of our history. We must now decide if it will be our future as well.

In the early morning of August 18, the safari cars that usually creep along the Ngorongoro-Serengeti highway, slowed by their sheer numbers, encountered a different challenge. Thousands of Maasai men and women, draped in red-patterned Shuka cloth and waving grass, a symbol of peace, were blocking the highway.

They were staging a peaceful protest against the Tanzanian government’s latest ruthless attempt to forcibly evict them from their ancestral lands. The police, wary of using violence in front of international tourists as they had in neighboring Loliondo in 2022, resorted to intimidation tactics instead, blocking vehicles carrying food and water from Karatu to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) to weaken the resolve of the demonstrators.

“We are not blocking this highway out of choice. We are doing it for necessity. For too long our voices have been ignored, and out rights have been trampled. This is our last resort.”—Statement of the Maasai Community, NCA, August 18, 2024

Losing Land and Life: A History of Displacement in the Name of Conservation

Since Tanzania’s colonizers established the Serengeti National Park in 1951—displacing Indigenous residents to Loliondo and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA)—the pastoralist Maasai in Northern Tanzania have faced relentless struggles against evictions and human rights abuses. For the past four years, their resilience has endured brutal attacks designed to expel them from their ancestral lands, transforming the region into a people-free zone to enhance safari tourism and hunting, as glorified in Western media like Planet Earth. These atrocities are masked as environmental conservation and protection.

In April 2021, the Tanzanian government announced the Multiple Land Use Management Plan (MLUM), posing a grave threat to the Maasai’s survival in the NCA. This followed the March 2019 joint monitoring mission by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre (WHC), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), which urged the government to control population growth in the NCA. The government responded by prioritizing tourism revenue, enacting the MLUM and a resettlement plan that expanded the NCA from 8,100 square kilometers to 12,083 square kilometers and created new restricted areas. In essence, this condemned nearly 80,000 Maasai to lives of destitution or death through forced evictions and the destruction of their livelihoods.

“The evictions and restrictions constraining tens of thousands of livelihoods are not about ensuring conservation but about expanding tourism revenues within the World Heritage Site. Tourism within the NCA has exploded in recent years with the number of annual tourists increasing from 20,000 in 1979 to 644,155 in 2018, making it one of the most intensively visited conservation areas in Africa. The number soared to 752,215 in 2023.”—The Oakland Institute

Maasai “Volunteering” to Move from the NCA to Flawed Resettlement Sites?

In response to international condemnation, the government falsely claimed that Maasai were volunteering en masse for resettlement at two relocation sites—Msomera village in Handeni district and Kitwai A and B villages in Simanjiro district. The flawed resettlement plans forced 11,000 Maasai community members from the NCA to send a letter to the government and its main donors stating their demand to remain in the NCA.

“This is not the first time that we are fighting to secure our rights and protect the lives of our people—we need a permanent solution and we need it now. We will not leave; Not Now, Not Ever!”—A Letter from Maasai Community to Tanzanian Government & International Donors, 2022

Despite the government’s claims that the Maasai’s relocation is voluntary, they have been forcibly uprooted by a systematic denial of essential social services, including education and healthcare. In May 2024, the government slashed nearly half of the budget for Endulen community hospital, the main healthcare provider for nearly 100,000 Maasai pastoralists in the NCA. These cuts ended vital support for facility repairs and community health initiatives. The grounding of the Flying Medical Service in 2022, after 39 years of critical emergency care, left over 24,000 children unvaccinated, deprived more than 5,700 pregnant women of necessary medical attention, and halted the delivery of life-saving HIV medications. While no official count of fatalities exists, it is undeniable that lives have been lost as a result.

Disfranchisement and Punishment: The Latest Attack

In August, after failing to forcibly remove the Maasai from the NCA, the government struck a severe blow to their political rights. Ngorongoro Division was removed from the voters’ register, disenfranchising tens of thousands of Maasai pastoralists ahead of the upcoming local and general elections in 2025. Those registered to vote saw their polling station moved hundreds of miles away to Msomera village—the site of their forced relocation—effectively stripping even more Maasai villagers of their right to vote.

Adding to this assault on their political rights, Government Notice (GN) 673, issued on August 2, 2024, delisted 11 wards, 25 villages, and 96 subvillages in Ngorongoro Division, affecting over 110,000 people, all without obtaining their Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. This blatant violation of their rights sparked the August 18 protest, where Maasai residents demanded the reversal of GN 673 and the restoration of their electoral rights by the National Electoral Commission.

“We urge the Minister of Local Government to revoke and cancel Government Notice No. 673 of 2024, as it violates the constitution, laws, and international and regional treaties that Tanzania has signed and ratified.”—Onesmo Olengurumwa, National Coordinator, Tanzania Human Rights Defenders Coalition

As images of the Maasai, armed with grass and placards, demanding justice, went viral on August 22, 2024, the Arusha High Court temporarily suspended GN 673, pending further instructions. However, community lawyers have condemned the ruling as a sham. The court’s decision followed an injunction supposedly filed by Ngorongoro resident Isaya Ole Posi, who denies any involvement. Allegations have surfaced that the government paid the lawyer who filed the injunction against itself, in a calculated move to divert international attention sparked by the protests.

Holding Those Responsible Accountable

While the Tanzanian government must undoubtedly be held accountable for violating the rights of its citizens, we must also scrutinize the role of two other key actors. The first are international conservation bodies like UNESCO, IUCN, and ICOMOS, under whose influence the government’s Multiple Land Use Model (MLUM) and resettlement plan were developed. It took an extensive global campaign to shift their stance. UNESCO’s website carries the government’s February 2024 report on the conservation status in the NCA, providing the false narrative that the relocation of local communities is voluntary, adheres to international best practices, and includes compensation measures. Yet, it also notes ongoing concerns from local communities, acknowledging the need for a human rights-based approach.

If designating areas like the NCA as World Heritage Sites endangers the survival of Indigenous peoples in African countries, UNESCO and IUCN’s outdated, colonial, and top-down approach to conservation—while boosting tourism—must be dismantled immediately. These institutions have reluctantly admitted that the NCA’s multiple land use model is appropriate, rather than altering its protected area category with disastrous consequences for residents. However, they have ignored calls for the NCA to be delisted from World Heritage sites and failed to pressure the government to stop its human rights violations.

As for the international tourists who continue to flock to Tanzania, lured by the chance to witness the “Big Five” or hunt trophies, the August 18 protests should serve as a wake-up call. The Maasai protesters and their global supporters have made their message clear: This is no longer a scene from “Out of Africa.” If there is no respect for Indigenous lives, then it must be “Tourism out of Tanzania!”

Kamala Harris is pushing the tactic of copying a rival’s policy ideas to new levels. She copied Trump’s idea to get rid of taxes on tips, increase tariffs on China and even to build a border wall with Mexico. What next?

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