Sunday, July 5, 2020
The Killing of Ahmad Erekat by Israeli Police Puts Western Media Bias on Full Display
https://citizentruth.org/the-killing-of-ahmad-erekat-by-israeli-police-puts-western-media-bias-on-full-display/
At a time when the world is crying out for justice, it behooves Israel to reverse its destructive policies toward Palestinians – and responsible journalism to ignore the bullies and tell the truth.
Menifee, CA (By: Kathryn Shihadah, IAK, Mintpress) — Reuters reported Wednesday on the latest “alleged car-ramming incident” in which a Palestinian was killed at an Israeli military checkpoint. The news story – from the outlet that reaches “more than one billion people every day” – was brief, yet included statements from both an Israeli police spokesperson and a relative of the Palestinian man who was killed.
While this may suggest that the coverage of the incident was balanced, in reality, it was not.
This is part of two ongoing – and longstanding – trends: impunity on the part of Israel in its violent policies toward Palestinians, and a strong pro-Israel bias in American mainstream media (MSM).
Below is a look how Reuters reported the alleged car-ramming incident. Original (abridged) text is in italics; additional details are from (MSM source) Associated Press, and (alternative news sources) Mondoweiss, the New Arab, Democracy Now!, Palestine News Network, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), as well as two Israeli online newspapers (two articles from Ha’aretz and one from Times of Israel) and Twitter.
Concluding remarks on the coverage of the Palestinian issue follow.
The alleged car-ramming
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli police on Tuesday shot dead a Palestinian man who they said had tried to ram his car into an officer at a military checkpoint in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the 27-year-old [Ahmed] Erekat lightly injured an officer when he drove his vehicle into a barrier at a checkpoint near the town of Abu Dis, east of Jerusalem.
Palestinian officials questioned the police’s account of Ahmad Erekat’s death. They said he was rushing to nearby Bethlehem to pick up family members from a hair salon on his sister’s wedding day.
“(He) got out of the car and approached officers who responded by shooting” him.
PCHR, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, includes details that paint a clearer, more accurate picture of the incident, as well as providing background information on the victim – factual information that gives the reader a completely different perspective on Ahmed Erekat:
“On Tuesday, 23 June 2020, Israeli occupation forces (IOF) killed a Palestinian civilian after opening fire at his vehicle, which collided into the traffic island in the center of al-container military checkpoint, east of Bethlehem.
“According to PCHR’s investigations and eyewitnesses’ testimonies, at approximately 15:53 on Tuesday, Ahmed Mostafa Mousa Erekat (26), from Abu Dis village in occupied East Jerusalem, was waiting in queue at al-container military checkpoint in eastern Bethlehem, to cross into Bethlehem where he was supposed to pick up his mother and sisters from a beauty salon in the city and return to Abu Dis village to attend his sister’s, Eman, wedding.
“At approximately 15:55, when Erekat vehicle approached the checkpoint, it deviated from its path and collided into the traffic island opposite the glass room where Israeli border guard soldiers stationed. The soldiers immediately opened fire at the vehicle, wounding Erekat with several live bullets in his upper body.”
The aftermath
“[H]e died at the scene,” [Israeli police spokesperson] Rosenfeld added.
Video showed Israeli troops placing a plastic sheet over the man, who lay shirtless on the ground next to his vehicle.
Again, PCHR provides missing information: “They pulled him out of the vehicle, threw him on the ground and prevented Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS)’s medical crew from approaching him or providing first aid; leaving him to bleed to his death on the dirt at the checkpoint.”
The Israeli paper Ha’aretz corroborates, “Video footage obtained by Haaretz shows Erekat was left to bleed to death for at least 30 minutes, sources say, and was not given immediate medical treatment.”
Ha’aretz also adds that the Israeli police officer “who was injured lightly” was “evacuated to a Jerusalem hospital.”
Elsewhere, a Ha’aretz op-ed by a relative adds the detail that Erekat’s body was taken away by the Israeli police, and has been since withheld from his family.
Comments on the incident
Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said the man killed was his relative, and that his wedding was set for next week.
“This young man was killed in cold blood. What the occupation army (Israeli military) claims, that he was trying to run someone over, is a lie,” he said.
On Twitter, Noura Erekat, the well-known Palestinian American attorney, author, and human rights activist echoed her relative’s sentiment as she addressed Israel’s accusation that Ahmed Erekat was a terrorist: “You lie. You kill. You lie. This is my baby cousin,” adding, “The only terrorists are the cowards who shot to kill a beautiful young man and blamed him for it.”
Palestinian Center for Human Rights again brings in critical details about the checkpoint killing: “PCHR stresses that IOF used disproportionate force, especially that the victim posed no real threat to the soldiers’ lives in light of the heavy fortifications at the checkpoint.”
Context
Tensions have risen in recent weeks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet due on July 1 to begin discussing annexation of the West Bank, territory Israel captured in a 1967 war and that Palestinians seek for a state.
Palestinians vehemently oppose the annexation plan, as do most world powers.
(The annexation plan is illegal under international law, and seeks Israeli sovereignty over land illegally captured in 1967. Israel has relocated – again, illegally – hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews on this Palestinian land. Its annexation would result in Palestinian “bantustans” and the permanent loss of self-determination and justice for the Palestinian people.)
MSM giant Associated Press adds, “In recent years, Israel has seen car-ramming attacks, shootings and stabbings carried out mostly by lone Palestinian attackers with no apparent links to armed groups.”
This statement from AP is loaded: Palestinians are labeled “attackers,” – not even using the word “alleged,” or acknowledging the many instances, like Ahmed Erekat’s, when there is doubt about Israeli claims. The IDF has allegedly planted weapons on or next to dead Palestinians, apparently to justify their deaths. A notable example: in 2015, a 16-year-old boy was killed at the same checkpoint where Erekat was killed; after the incident, Israeli police are believed to have planted a knife on him.
(In instances where a Palestinian clearly does attack an Israeli, the context of a decades-long brutal occupation, part of an ongoing genocide, is key to understanding the incident.)
In an interview with Democracy Now!, Noura Erakat reminded viewers of the bigger questions behind the killing: “Why is there a checkpoint between Bethlehem and Abu Dis, two Palestinian cities? Why are there checkpoints anywhere? Just think about those questions as we answer this broader question of the context that Ahmed was killed in.” (See her full interview here.)
PCHR continues the thought: “It should be noted that al-container military checkpoint separates villages located in south-eastern occupied East Jerusalem from eastern Bethlehem.”
Times of Israel references a leader of the Abu Dis Popular Resistance Committee member: “[Dr. Abdullah] Abu Hilal claimed that the Container Checkpoint, where Ahmad was shot, was notorious in Abu Dis for the degree of harassment Palestinian residents received by Israeli soldiers while crossing.”
The New Arab quotes several Palestinian sources, including Omar Shakir, the director of Human Rights Watch for Israel-Palestine, who said that Erekat’s death was part of a series of “daily gut-wrenching outrages” that “stem from decades-long failure of [the international] community to hold Israel to account for serious abuses.”
Palestinian academic Yara Hawari tweeted, “Palestinians live in a space-time continuum of trauma. Just as we start to move on from one loss, another happens almost immediately. It’s a space of constant grieving and hurt. Imagine what that does to our bodies. It’s exhausting.”
Hanan Ashrawi, a PLO top leader, released a statement condemning the killing and demanding an end to Israel’s “kill first, justify later” policy. She added, “[Israel] attempted to slander Ahmad and excuse his murder. It is part of a tragically familiar pattern, where Israel habitually uses false pretexts that are all too familiar now to justify the murder of Palestinians by trigger happy soldiers.”
Palestine News Network points out that Ahmed Erekat is the 316th Palestinian body to be withheld from its family. Most are buried in “cemeteries of numbers,” where they are reserved for Israel as bargaining chips. This is a violation of international law.
A pattern of misrepresentation and underrepresentation
Early in 2018, If Americans Knew presented a study on how the Associated Press reports the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians. The study showed that AP had completely different ways of reporting on the two groups (much the same is true of other news outlets, as IAK has shown elsewhere). Inaccurate reporting on the Ahmed Erekat incident is an example of the trend that is at least half a century old:
In AP’s 2018 news reports on deaths, the headlines reported on on Israeli deaths at a rate nearly four times greater than they reported on Palestinian deaths.
The articles themselves similarly focused more on Israeli deaths than on Palestinian deaths, with news reports on Israeli deaths averaging 471 words in length, while reports on Palestinian deaths averaged 171 words.
Reports on Israeli deaths included statements by high ranking officials condemning the attacks. These were often strongly worded, politically charged statements that conveyed the Israeli narrative: “[Israel will] do everything possible in order to apprehend the despicable murderer”; “There is no justification for terror…This is not the path to peace!” “Hamas praises the killers and PA laws will provide them financial rewards. Look no further to why there is no peace.”
By contrast, these AP reports rarely included statements by Palestinian officials condemning the killing of Palestinians, which would have provided another perspective for readers…
Such Palestinian viewpoints, largely accurate and readily available, were never reported in the AP articles on deaths.
AP reports often leave out critical facts.
Perhaps more significant, essential facts about the greater issue are virtually never included.
Nowhere in these reports does AP tell readers that the U.S. gives Israel over $10 million per day. Without this information, American readers will incorrectly feel this is a foreign issue that has nothing to do with them.
Basic information that would give the reader an understanding of the context of the hostility is absent.
This phenomenon of poor journalism even in world-class news outlets may partly be blamed on pro-Israel manipulation of reporting.
At a time when the world is crying out for justice, it behooves Israel to reverse its destructive policies toward Palestinians – and responsible journalism to ignore the bullies and tell the truth.
Second QAnon Supporting Candidate Wins House Primary
Alec Pronk July 1, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/second-qanon-supporting-candidate-wins-house-primary/
Republican Lauren Boebert previously made headlines for illegally reopening her gun-themed restaurant during the coronavirus lockdown
While some progressive Democratic outsiders have booked victories against stalwart incumbents, outsider Republicans have also produced upset victories over members of Congress.
Lauren Boebert, owner of Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colorado, beat five-term incumbent Scott Tipton in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District Republican primary. President Donald Trump endorsed Tipton, but Boebert ran a campaign questioning the congressman’s conservative credentials.
Boebert is a newcomer to politics and is the second Republican running for the House to have expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory. QAnon followers believe ‘Q’ is exposing a deep state plan that is working against the wishes of President Trump.
On QAnon, Boebert said, “I hope that this is real because it only means America is getting stronger and better and people are returning to conservative values… Everything that I have heard of this movement is only motivating and encouraging.”
Boebert became the second Republican primed for the House to be connected to QAnon after Marjorie Taylor Greene received 41% of the vote in her Republican primary in Georgia. Green still has to win a second runoff election against a candidate she beat by 20 points.
Gun-Themed Restaurant
Boebert’s restaurant vaulted her into the news on several occasions after involving herself in several hot-button political discussions.
She is an avid gun-rights activist, and all of her waitstaff wear holstered and loaded firearms while they serve barbecue at her restaurant. Her western-themed grill is decorated with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and many menu items have firearm-themed names.
Boebert’s interaction with then presidential-hopeful and outspoken proponent of gun control Beto O’Rourke made national headlines when she told him he would not take her guns away.
The second time her business made headlines was during the height of the coronavirus lockdown. Boebert opened her restaurant in defiance of public health orders and was subsequently shut down after opening to dine-in customers.
When Boebert opened her restaurant during the coronavirus shutdown, Bikers for Trump were some of the first patrons to return.
Trump Supporter with No Endorsement
Trump endorsed Boebert’s competition, but she has remained a steadfast supporter of the President. Bobert said that Trump was not aware of all of the facts of her campaign when he endorsed her opponent.
Despite his endorsement for Tipton, Trump congratulated Boebert on her victory.
Trump did not comment on Greene’s run in Georgia, and high-ranking Republicans distanced themselves from the Georgian for racist videos and comments.
Boebert’s gun-toting is much less controversial within the Republican Party, and no Republicans have yet distanced themselves from her despite her comments on QAnon.
Continued Right-Wing Push
Boebert’s victory in Colorado and Greene’s ascendance in Georgia indicate that despite Trump’s low polling numbers, many Republican voters still support candidates with similar politics to the President.
Madison Cawthorn, a 24-year-old from North Carolina, won his primary against another Trump-endorsed candidate last week. Similar to Boebert, the losing Trump-endorsed candidate seems less like a vote against Trump and more like an extension of his brand of politics.
Cawthorn listed Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, as one of his idols, and he is also a fan of the right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro.
While Cawthorn may not have been endorsed by Trump, his campaign promises tick all the boxes for a right-wing candidate in a similar vein as Trump. He rails against Congress and he plays into a growing nationalism on the right.
Major news outlets often frame wins like those of Cawthorn and Boebert as rejections of Trump endorsements, but their candidacies strongly rely on Trump’s brand of right-wing politics and are often a rejection of more established Republicans.
While column space continues to be wasted on ‘Never Trump’ Republicans, an insurgent right wing continues to book victories in primary elections.
Trump’s Record on Foreign Policy: Lost Wars, New Conflicts, and Broken Promises
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies July 1, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/trumps-record-on-foreign-policy-lost-wars-new-conflicts-and-broken-promises/
Donald Trump claims he’s ending the “era of endless wars.” But over the course of his first term, he has come closer to starting new wars than ending the wars he inherited.(Jacobin) On June 13, President Donald Trump told the graduating class at West Point, “We are ending the era of endless wars.” That is what Trump has promised since 2016, but the “endless” wars have not ended. Trump has dropped more bombs and missiles than George W. Bush or Barack Obama did in their first terms, and there are still roughly as many US bases and troops overseas as when he was elected.Trump routinely talks up both sides of every issue, and the corporate media still judge him more by what he says (and tweets) than by his actual policies. So it isn’t surprising that he is still trying to confuse the public about his aggressive war policy. But Trump has been in office for nearly three and a half years, and he now has a record on war and peace that we can examine.Such an examination makes one thing very clear: Trump has come closer to starting new wars with North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran than to ending any of the wars he inherited from Obama. His first-term record shows Trump to be just another warmonger in chief.
A Bloody Inheritance
First, let’s look at what Trump inherited. At the end of the Cold War, US political leaders promised Americans a “peace dividend,” and the Senate Budget Committee embraced a proposal to cut the US military budget by 50 percent over the next ten years. Ten years later, only 22 percent in savings were realized, and the George W. Bush administration used the terrorist crimes of September 11 to justify illegal wars, systematic war crimes, and an extraordinary one-sided arms race in which the United States accounted for 45 percent of global military spending from 2003 to 2011. Only half this $2 trillion spending surge (in 2010 dollars) was related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the US Navy and Air Force quietly cashed in a trillion-dollar wish list of new warships, warplanes, and high-tech weapons.President Barack Obama entered the White House with a pledge to bring home US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and to shrink the US military footprint, but his presidency was a triumph of symbolism over substance. He won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize based on a few speeches, a lot of wishful thinking, and the world’s desperate hopes for peace and progress. But by the time Obama stepped down in 2017, he had dropped more bombs and missiles on more countries than Bush did, and had spent even more than Bush on weapons and war.The major shift in US war policy under Obama was to reduce politically sensitive US troop casualties by transitioning from large-scale military occupations to mass bombing, shelling, and covert and proxy wars. While Republicans derisively dubbed Obama’s doctrine “leading from behind,” this was a transition that was already underway in Bush’s second term, when he committed the United States to completely withdrawing its occupation troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.Obama’s defenders, like Trump’s today, were always ready to absolve him of responsibility for war crimes, even as he killed thousands of civilians in air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria and drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, including the gratuitous assassination of an American teenager in Yemen. Obama launched a new war to destroy Libya, and the United States’ covert role in the war in Syria was similar to its role in Nicaragua in the 1980s, for which, despite its covert nature, the International Court of Justice convicted the United States of aggression and ordered it to pay reparations.
Many senior US military and civilian officials deserve a share of the guilt for America’s systematic crimes of aggression and other war crimes since 2001, but the principle of command responsibility, recognized from the Nuremberg principles to the US Uniform Code of Military Justice, means that the commander in chief of the US armed forces, the president of the United States, bears the heaviest criminal responsibility for these crimes under US and international law.
Is Trump Different?
In January 2017, as Donald Trump prepared to take office, US forces in Iraq conducted their heaviest month of aerial bombardment since the “shock and awe” bombing during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This time, the enemy was the Islamic State (IS), a group spawned by the US invasion of Iraq and Obama’s covert support for Al Qaeda–linked groups in Syria. Iraqi forces captured East Mosul from the Islamic State on January 24, and in February, they began their assault on West Mosul, bombing and shelling it even more heavily until they captured the ruined city in July. A Kurdish Iraqi intelligence report recorded that more than forty thousand civilians were killed in the US-led destruction of Mosul.
Trump famously summed up his policy as “bomb the shit out of” the Islamic State. He appeared to give a green light to the military to murder women and children, saying, “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.” Iraqi troops described explicit orders to do exactly that in Mosul. Middle East Eye (MEE) reported that Iraqi forces massacred all the survivors in Mosul’s Old City.
“We killed them all,” an Iraqi soldier said. “Daesh (IS), men, women, children. We killed everyone.” An Iraqi major told MEE,
After liberation was announced, the order was given to kill anything or anyone that moved . . . It was not the right thing to do . . . They gave themselves up and we just killed them . . . There is no law here now. Every day, I see that we are doing the same thing as Daesh. People went down to the river to get water because they were dying of thirst and we killed them.
By October 2017, Raqqa in Syria was even more totally destroyed than Mosul in Iraq. Under Obama and Trump, the United States and its allies have dropped more than 118,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq and Syria in their campaign against the Islamic State, while US HIMARS rockets and US, French, and Iraqi heavy artillery killed even more indiscriminately.
The wholesale destruction of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and other major cities in Iraq and Syria cannot be legally justified under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, any more than the destruction of entire cities in past wars, like Hiroshima or Dresden. Despite the total lack of accountability, it is clear that American bombs, rockets, and shells killed thousands of civilians in each city and town captured. Obama and Trump share responsibility for these terrible crimes, but they are an escalation of the systematic war crimes the United States has committed since 2001 under three presidents.
In Afghanistan, as the Taliban gradually takes control of more of the country, Trump has resisted the temptation to send in tens of thousands more US troops, as Obama did, but he instead approved a major escalation in US bombing that made 2018 and 2019 the heaviest and deadliest years of US bombing in Afghanistan since 2001.Trump has shrouded his war-making in even greater secrecy than Obama. The US military has not published a monthly Airpower Summary since February 2020, nor official troop deployment numbers for Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria for nearly three years. But the United States has dropped at least twenty thousand bombs on Afghanistan since Trump came to power, and there is no evidence of a reduction in bombing under the peace agreement the administration signed with the Taliban in February. Some US troops have been withdrawn under that agreement, but the remaining 8,600 are still being replaced as their tours end, keeping US troop strength at about the same level as when Obama left office.Trump made a great show of repositioning US troops in Syria in October 2019, leaving the United States’ Kurdish allies in Rojava to confront the Turkish invasion alone. But there are still at least 500 US troops in Syria, and Trump deployed 14,000 more US troops to the Middle East in 2019, including to a new base in Saudi Arabia.Trump has vetoed every bill passed by Congress to disengage US forces from the Saudi war in Yemen and to halt the sales of US-made warplanes and bombs, which the Saudis use to systematically kill Yemeni civilians. He created a new conflict with Iran by pulling out of the nuclear deal, and in January 2020, he capriciously flirted with a full-scale war on Iran by ordering the assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi military commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in Iraq.
Trump’s bizarre decision to move the US Embassy in Israel to a plot of land that is only partly within Israel’s internationally recognized borders — and partly on Palestinian territory that Israel is illegally occupying — quite literally took US international relations into uncharted territory. Then Trump unveiled a so-called peace plan based on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ambition to annex the rest of Palestine into a “Greater Israel” with vastly expanded — but still unrecognized and illegal — international borders.
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Trump has also backed a coup in Bolivia, staged several failed ones in Venezuela, and targeted even the United States’ closest allies with sanctions to try to prevent them from trading with US enemies. Trump’s brutal sanctions on Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Cuba are not a peaceful alternative to war, but a form of economic warfare just as deadly as bombs, especially during a pandemic and its accompanying economic meltdown.
A Boon to the Merchants of Death
Once the large-scale US military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan ended under Obama, the US military budget fell to $621 billion by 2015. But since then, military spending for procurement, research and development (R&D), and base construction has risen by 39 percent. This has been a huge windfall for the Big Five US weapons makers — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — whose arms sales revenues rose 30 percent between 2015 and 2019.
The 49 percent increase to more than $100 billion for R&D on new weapons systems in 2020, part of the enormous $718 billion Pentagon budget, is a down payment on trillions of dollars in future revenue for the merchants of death unless these programs are stopped.
The pretext for Trump’s huge investment in big-ticket, high-tech weapons, including a new Space Force with a $15 billion price tag for 2021, is the New Cold War with Russia and China that he officially unveiled in the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Obama was already trying to shift away from the United States’ lost counterinsurgency wars in the greater Middle East through his “Pivot to Asia,” the US-backed coup in Ukraine, and the expansion of US land and naval forces encircling Russia and China.
But Trump has the same problem as Obama as he tries to wriggle out of the “forever wars”: how to bring US troops home without making it obvious to the whole world that this chronically weak imperial power and its extravagant multitrillion-dollar war machine has been defeated everywhere. Even the most expensive weapons still only kill people and break things. Establishing peace and stability require other kinds of power and legitimacy, which the United States does not possess and which cannot be bought.
Before President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in 1961, he remarked, “God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” Trump is obviously as dazzled by chests full of medals and whizz-bang technology as every other president since Eisenhower, so he will keep giving the Pentagon everything it wants to keep spreading violence and chaos around the world.
Just as Obama co-opted and muted liberal opposition to Bush’s wars and record arms spending, Trump has co-opted and muted conservative opposition to Obama’s wars. Now, with the outpouring of protests against domestic police repression and calls for defunding the police, there is a growing chorus to also defund the military. That is certainly not a call Trump would listen to, but would Joe Biden be more receptive to public calls for peace and disarmament than Obama and Trump?
Probably not, based on his long record in the Senate, his roles in authorizing war on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, his close ties to Israel, and his failure to rein in US war-making as vice president, despite personally opposing Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan. Biden is also trying to outdo Trump in his opposition to China. Like Obama and Trump, Biden would be mainly a new manager and salesman in chief to sell the military-industrial complex’s latest strategy for war and global military occupation to the corporate media and the American public.
We will not rescue our country from the iron grip of the military-industrial complex by picking the lesser evil and hoping for the best. That has not worked for sixty years, since Eisenhower defined the problem so clearly in his farewell address.
On the other hand, a civil society coalition, led by the Poor People’s Campaign and including CODEPINK, is calling for a $350 billion cut in the military budget to fund human needs and public services, and representatives Barbara Lee, Pramila Jayapal, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced a resolution in Congress to do just that.
At the margins, this campaign could have more impact on Biden than on Trump, but not if people sweep up the bunting on election night and think their job is done, as liberals did with Obama and anti-war conservatives did with Trump. Unless and until the American public applies overwhelming pressure to dismantle the US war machine and its futile bid for “full spectrum” global dominance, the US military will keep losing wars on its own terms, bleeding us dry (metaphorically), and bleeding our neighbors overseas dry (literally), until it loses a major war with mass US casualties or destroys us all in a nuclear war.
The US peace movement has always had huge passive public support, but it will take mass collective action, not just passive support, to secure a peaceful future for our children and grandchildren. Public outrage and activism are starting to take away the license to kill black and brown people with impunity from the militarized RoboCops on our streets. The same kind of collective political action can defund and disarm the US military and take away its license to kill black and brown people everywhere.
Building a new anti-war movement that is connected to the domestic anti-police struggle is the only thing that can rein in US militarism. Because reelecting a president with as much blood on his hands as Trump — or simply transferring the command of the war machine to Joe Biden — certainly won’t.
Trump Threatens to Veto Military Spending Bill Over Confederate Base Names
Daniel Davis July 1, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/trump-threatens-to-veto-military-spending-bill-over-confederate-base-names/
“The bases were named during the Jim Crow South era and it wasn’t done to respect the African Americans of the South. It was to appease the Jim Crow governments of that era.”
The annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) usually is passed with minimal politicalization as it contains funding for the the American military. This year, however, US President Donald Trump is threatening to veto it over the naming of military bases. Specifically, the president is demanding the military retain the names of Confederate leaders, The Associated Press reported.
Senates Leaders Aligned Against Trump
An amendment for the NDAA was sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D–Mass., and was passed with support from both parties on the senate floor. Trump attacked Warren in a tweet, using his nickname for her.
“I will Veto the Defense Authorization Bill if the Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren (of all people!) Amendment, which will lead to the renaming (plus other bad things!) of Fort Bragg, Fort Robert E. Lee, and many other Military Bases from which we won Two World Wars, is in the Bill!,” the president tweeted.
There are 10 Army bases that would be required to be renamed under the current draft of the NDAA, CBS News reported. Furthermore, the bill would require the Department of Defense to remove Confederate statues, symbols, and monuments by 2024.
Although Trump railed against the move to portray it as a Democrat initiative, Republican legislators are supportive of the idea as well. Among them is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R–Ky.
“I would hope the president really wouldn’t veto the bill over this issue,” McConnell said in a Fox News interview. He added that he would not lead a battle in the Senate over the issue.
McConnell’s Democratic colleague, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D–N.Y., criticized Trump’s threat as jeopardizing the salaries of American soldiers.
“Let me make a prediction,” Schumer said. “First, that provision will not change in this bill as it moves through the House and Senate. Second, let me predict President Trump will not veto a bill that contains pay raises for our troops and crucial support for our military.”
‘I Didn’t Think It Was Right’
The amendment already cleared the Senate, but a vote on the entire bill has the potential to become a partisan issue if Trump can rally GOP senators to take a stand with him. So far, that doesn’t appear likely as several Republicans came out in support of Warren’s amendment, POLITICO reported.
“It was expected,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, R–S.D., an Armed Services Committee member. “You always want to be able to show your support for our military men and women, and that’s what this is about — providing protection for them.”
Armed Services Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe, R–Okla., however, provided a dissenting voice to the chorus of approval. He admitted the issue could become controversial and clarified that the bill is still in its infancy, but expressed dismay at Warren’s amendment, NPR reported.
“Let’s preserve our history,” Inhofe said.
In the House, similar legislation is being pushed forward. Rep. Don Bacon, R–Neb., a Marine veteran, coauthored a proposal similar to Warren’s amendment in the Senate.
“I always didn’t think it was right,” Bacon said before Trump threatened a veto. “Particularly, the bases were named during the Jim Crow South era and it wasn’t done to respect the African Americans of the South. It was to appease the Jim Crow governments of that era. So again I think to be respectful to our minority population in our country, I think it’s the right thing to do.”
BLM Movement Ripples Through Congress
That history has been increasingly called into question of late. Although the Confederacy is an indisputable part of history, however, the fact remains that the Confederate states were separatists and waged war with the union. Furthermore, the ideals behind the Confederacy have given reason for many, including the Black Lives Matter (BLM), to raise objections with statues of Confederate leaders, a majority of which were installed in the early to mid-1900’s, decades after the Civil War ended.
Trump’s threat of a veto over Confederate base names comes as BLM forces cities and states to reconsider their Confederate symbolism. His defense of the separatists also comes as his poll numbers tumble, which suggests Trump may be attempting to shore up support among his conservative base.
Last week, he signed an executive order in attempt to protect statues on federal land as he blamed: anarchists and left-wing extremists” who promote “a fringe ideology.” Destruction of federal property was already a crime and the president’s order urged prosecuting vandals with possible sentences up to 10 years in prison, CBS News reported.
Could U.S. Capitalism Turn Nationalist?
Richard Wolff July 2, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/could-u-s-capitalism-turn-nationalist/
The Trump administration has turned sharply toward economic nationalism. It attacks and undermines the World Trade Organization, NATO, and the UN. Trump and other top officials explicitly insult many world leaders. He imposes high tariffs. Official statements renew and sustain Cold War-type attacks on China, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran. Trump flirts openly with nationalists who also stress white supremacy and anti-Muslim activity.
The Trump regime defines its nationalism largely negatively by focusing on three components: Obama, Obamacare, and globalization. These are what it blames most for what ails U.S. society, for the “un-Americanism” that it most opposes. The Trumpian opposition wraps itself in thin “philosophical” rationales. One of those is racism expressed through an obsessive rejection of Obama and all things Obamian. The racism must simultaneously be explicitly denied the better to cover its implicit, repetitive operation. The second is a primitive libertarianism. It rejects Obamacare as government intrusion upon individual liberty. The third (derived in part from ideologues like Steve Bannon) is a rejection of globalization. This emerges from Trump’s hostility toward immigrants and China and also his many invocations of “America first.”
Trump’s nationalism is clear, but is U.S. capitalism turning nationalist too?
Broadly, U.S. employers neither think nor care much about racism. Some use it to divide employees, keep them from unifying around workplace issues, labor unions, unwanted political initiatives, etc. Most ignore it unless and until gross racism brings victims and anti-racists into the street in ways that threaten their commerce or the economic status quo. Then lip service against racism flows. Corporations make mostly cosmetic adjustments hyped by major public relations efforts. At best, a few genuine, usually marginal improvements are achieved in racial integration and the excruciatingly slow decline of institutional racism.
U.S. employers care less about Obamacare. They know and appreciate that it was a compromise endorsed by the medical-industrial complex. On the one hand, they worry a bit, as usual, about enhancing the government’s position in private health care markets. But also as usual, when government intervention profits private capitalists, they are very interested and supportive. If Obamacare can help shift health care costs from employers onto the general public and onto employees, most employers will support it. Once again, fickle corporate support for laissez-faire, conservative, libertarian ideals can and will irritate the advocates of those ideologies.
Employers are much more concerned and agitated about the Trump regime’s turn toward economic nationalism. It threatens the profitability of the already huge U.S. corporate investments in the production of goods and services overseas and in global supply lines. It risks advantaging foreign competitors in overseas markets over U.S. multinationals active or interested there. Globalization meant profit-making capitalism practiced internationally (with limited government intervention) by private capitalist corporations, state capitalist enterprises, and partnerships between and among them. The beneficiaries of globalization lament when nationalist economic policies disrupt global supply lines, provoke trade and tariff “wars,” and rationalize government attacks on individual corporations. U.S. multinationals may allocate donations to Trump vs. Biden, GOP vs. Dems—and likewise their vast media spending—according to what best supports the globalization they favor.
So far, the Trump regime has wobbled ambivalently between base-pleasing nationalist rhetoric and a necessary subservience to globalized U.S. capitalism. The regime hoped that a massive profit-oriented corporate tax cut in late 2017 would buy global corporations’ acquiescence in a nationalist turn. That hope has not been realized. Instead, we have herky-jerky Trump policy. First it promises global compromise and resurgent world trade and investment, then it rails against untrustworthy, evil trade and investment partners. It raises and lowers both tariffs and threats to impose tariffs, often in dizzying sequence.
Only parts of the U.S. business community are focused exclusively on the domestic market or do not depend on imported inputs. Those parts remain too small by themselves to sustain a Trump turn to nationalism. Consider one statistic: tariffs as a share of the value of U.S. imports fell from almost 50 percent right after the Civil War to 1.2 percent in 2008. The protectionism so central to economic nationalism was largely abandoned across recent U.S. history. Therefore, the political project of shifting the United States toward economic nationalism poses a heavy lift for any government. The key question becomes whether enough U.S. corporations might change their many-layered investments in globalization and become backers of a nationalist turn.
The answer hinges on capitalist competition. U.S. corporations’ competitive growth opportunities since the 1970s focused heavily on technical change and foreign investments in the context of increasing free trade globalization. Telecommunications, the internet, social media, robots, and artificial intelligence continue to drive very profitable industries. Relocating formerly U.S.-based production abroad and producing for fast-growing foreign markets have been and are very profitable. Globalization has been the reality and the consequent policy imperative especially over the last half-century.
But the U.S. global capitalist leadership of the last 50 years is now ebbing. A recent Foreign Affairs article flatly declares that U.S. hegemony is now ending and “isn’t coming back.” China is the chief competitor, but other countries too are fielding or threatening soon to field effective competitors. If a U.S. multinational is losing its competitive edge in a global market, it might support nationalist measures giving it privileged, discriminatory access to a still large U.S. market. U.S. multinationals might be willing to leave to others the competition to capture a fast-growing Chinese market if those U.S. firms got privileged access, via nationalism, to a slower-growing U.S. market and/or if U.S.-China hostilities sharpen. If a nationalist turn in U.S. policy were combined with massive new U.S. government subsidies and further tax cuts for U.S. multinationals, the latter might support that nationalist policy turn. If they did, it would signal a high degree of U.S. corporate desperation.
A nationalist turn in the United States would provoke more or less matching and retaliatory nationalist turns elsewhere. In that case, all participating countries would likely lose economically. The world’s other major economies—their business communities and their leading politicians—are watching closely as Trump’s foreign trade and investment policies evolve. They hesitate to incur the large costs of possible nationalist turns inside their countries. They are waiting to see if what Trump has so far done ambiguously will harden into the dominant U.S. policy over the coming years, with or without Trump. A Biden victory might abandon the nationalist turn and renew the largely pro-globalization consensus before Trump. Then again, if confronted with corporate pressures the other way, centrist Democrats would likely bend.
Perhaps the plan (even if not yet explicit and conscious) is to rebuild U.S. hegemony. This time “multilateralism” would not be the mechanism that sustained it. That worked well over the last 75 years, but it may now be exhausted. A new U.S. nationalism might then aim to subordinate each other part of the world (country or region), bi-laterally, as a “partner.” Perhaps such a plan could obtain the loyalty of nationalists without compromising the basic interests of globalists.
In short, more than a viral pandemic, a global capitalist crash and climate change weigh on world trade and investment. So too does the question of whether globalized capitalism produced so many victims and critics that it cannot survive no matter how it might be reconfigured. If so, will the consequent transition hold on to capitalism but drop “globalization” to become instead a tense, dangerous world of contending nationalist capitalisms? Or, alternatively, will we see a transition to a post-capitalist global system of quite differently organized enterprises, political institutions (including nation-states), and movements of productive resources and products across its geography?
Revolutionary possibilities loom.
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