Tag: Biden Administration

The US Destroyed the Nord Stream Pipeline / An Interview with Seymour Hersh by Fabian Scheidler

Seymour Hersh speaking at the Molly Awards banquet on June 10, 2010. (Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc / Getty Images)

Originally published in Jacobin on February 15, 2023

Last week, renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published an article claiming that the US was responsible for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline transporting natural gas to Germany from Russia. He spoke to Jacobin about the allegations.

On September 26, 2022, the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany was largely destroyed by several explosions in the Baltic Sea. Last week, the award-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published an article, based on information from a single anonymous source, arguing that the Biden administration and the CIA were responsible.

Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for the role he played in breaking the story of the Mỹ Lai massacre, an incident in which US soldiers killed between three and five hundred unarmed civilians. He spoke to Fabian Scheidler for Jacobin about the allegations he made in his most recent article and the influence that the CIA and the national security state has on American foreign policy.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

Please start to lay out your findings in detail. What happened precisely according to your source, who was involved, and what were the motives behind it?

SEYMOUR HERSH

What I’ve done is simply explain the obvious. It was just a story that was begging to be told. In late September of 2022, eight bombs were supposed to go off; six went off under the water near the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, in the area where it is rather shallow. They destroyed three of the four major pipelines in the Nord Stream 1 and 2.

Nord Stream 1 has been feeding gas fuel [to Germany] for many years at very low prices. And then both pipelines were blown up, and the question was why, and who did it. On February 7, 2022, in the buildup to the war in Ukraine, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, at a press conference at the White House with German chancellor Olaf Scholz, said that we can stop Nord Stream.

ABIAN SCHEIDLER

The exact wording from Joe Biden was “If Russia invades, there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2, we will bring an end to it.” And when a reporter asked how exactly he intended to do it, given that the project was within the control of Germany, Biden just said, “I promise we will be able to do it.”

SEYMOUR HERSH

His under secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, who was deeply involved in what they call the Maidan Revolution in 2014, used similar language a couple of weeks earlier.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

You say that the decision to take out the pipeline was taken even earlier by President Biden. You lay out the story from the beginning, chronologically from December 2021, when the national security advisor Jake Sullivan convened, according to your piece, a meeting of the newly formed task force from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the State and the Treasury departments. You write, “Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines.”

SEYMOUR HERSH

This group initially was convened in December to study the problem. They brought in the CIA and so on; they were meeting in a very secret office. Right next door to the White House, there’s an office building that’s called the Executive Office Building. It is connected underground through a tunnel. And at the top of it is a meeting place for a secret group, an outside group of advisors called the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. I only reported that to let the people in the White House know that I do know something.

The meeting was convened to study the problem: What are we going to do if Russia is going to war? This is three months before the war, before Christmas of 2022. It was a high-level group; it probably had a different name, I just called it the “interagency group” — I don’t know the formal name, if there was one. It was the CIA and the National Security Agency, which monitors and intercepts communications; the State Department and the Treasury Department, which supplies money; and probably a few other groups that were involved. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had representation as well.

The big task they had was to give recommendations about what to do about stopping Russia, measures that are either reversible, like more sanctions and economic pressure, or irreversible, kinetic things — exploding things, for example. I don’t want to talk specifically about any particular meeting because I have to protect my source. I don’t know how many people were at the meeting, do you understand what I mean?

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

In the article, you wrote that, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group and they said, “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”

SEYMOUR HERSH

They did have a way. There were people there who understood what we call in America “mine warfare.” In the United States Navy, there are groups that go into submarines — there’s also one command about nuclear engineering — and there is a mining command. Underground mining is very important, and we have skilled miners. Probably the most important place for training miners is in this little resort town called Panama City in the middle of nowhere in Florida.

We train very good people there and we use them. Miners are very important. You get clogged entries into ports; they can blow up things in the way. If we don’t like a certain country’s underwater pipelines for oil, we can blow them up too. It’s not always good things they do but they’re very secretive. For the group at the White House, it was clear they could blow up the pipelines. There’s an explosive called C-4, which is incredibly powerful, devastating particularly with the amount they use. You can control and operate it remotely with underwater sonar devices. They send very low-frequency signals.

So it was possible, and they told the White House that, by early January, because two or three weeks later, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said we can do it. I think this was January 20. And then the president as well, with Olaf Scholz, said on February 7 that we could do it. Scholz said nothing specific; he was vague. But a question that I would ask Scholz, if I had a parliamentary hearing, is this: Did President Biden tell you about this? Did he tell you at that time why he was so confident he could blow it up?

We didn’t have a plan yet, but we knew we had the capability to do it.

Gas emanates from the damaged Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the Baltic Sea, September 28, 2022. (Swedish Coast Guard via Getty Images)

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

What role did Norway play in the operation?

SEYMOUR HERSH

Well, Norway is a great seaman nation, and they have underground energy. They’re also very anxious to increase the amount of natural gas they can sell to Western Europe and Germany. And they have done that, they’ve increased their export. So, for economic reasons, why not join with the United States? They also have a residual dislike of Russia.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

In your article, you write that the Secret Service and the navy of Norway were involved, and you say that Sweden and Denmark were sort of briefed but not told everything.

SEYMOUR HERSH

The way it was put to me is: if you didn’t tell them, you didn’t need to tell them. In other words, you were doing what you were doing, and they knew what you were doing and they understood what was going on, but maybe nobody ever said yes. I worked on that issue very much with the people I was talking to. The bottom line is, to do this mission, the Norwegians had to find the right place. The divers that were being trained in Panama City could go to three hundred feet underwater without a heavy diving tank, only a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen and helium.

The Norwegians found us a place off Bornholm island in the Baltic that was only 260-feet deep so they could operate. They would have to return slowly. There was a decompression chamber, and we used the Norwegian submarine hunter. Only two divers were used for the four pipelines.

One problem was how to deal with those people who monitor the Baltic Sea. It is very thoroughly monitored, and there’s a great deal of openly available information, so we took care of this; there were three or four different people for that. And what we then did is really simple. Every summer for twenty-one years, our navy Sixth Fleet, which has control of the Mediterranean and also the Baltic Sea, has an exercise for NATO navies in the Baltic (BALTOPS). And we’d bring a navy carrier or large ships around. It was a very open thing. The Russians certainly knew about it. We did publicity. And in this one, for the first time in history, the Baltic Sea NATO operation had a new program. It was going to have an exercise in dropping mines and finding mines for ten or twelve days.

Several nations sent out mining teams, and one group would drop the mine and another mining group from their country would go hunt and blow it up. So you had a period where there are things blowing up, and in that time the Norwegians could recover deep-sea divers. The two pipelines run about a mile apart; they’re under the dirt a little but they’re not hard to get to, and they had practiced this. It didn’t take more than a few hours to plant the bombs.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

So this was in June 2022?

SEYMOUR HERSH

Yes, they did it around ten days into June, at the end of the exercise, but at the last minute the White House got nervous. The president said he’s afraid of doing it. He changed his mind and gave them the order that he wanted the right to bomb anytime, to set the bombs off anytime remotely by us. You do it with just a regular sonar, actually a Raytheon build. You fly over and drop a cylinder down. It sends a low-frequency signal — you can describe it as a flute sound tone, you can make different frequencies. But the worry was that one of the bombs, if left in the water too long, would not work, and two did not — they only got three of the four pipelines. So there was a panic inside the group to find the right means, and we actually had to go to other intelligence agencies that I didn’t write about.I don’t think that Blinken and some others in the administration are deep thinkers.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

And so what happened then? They placed it, they found a way to control it remotely . . .

SEYMOUR HERSH

Joe Biden decided not to blow them up. It was in early June, five months into the war, but then, in September, he decided to do it.

I’ll tell you something. The operational people, the people who do kinetic things for the United States, they do what the president says, and they initially thought this was a useful weapon that he could use in negotiations.

But at some point, once the Russians went in, and then when the operation was done, this became increasingly odious to the people who did it. These are well-trained people; they are in the highest level of secret intelligence agencies. They turned on the project. They thought this was an insane thing to do. And within a week, or three or four days after the bombing, after they did what they were ordered to, there was a lot of anger and hostility. This is obviously reflected in the fact that I’m learning so much about it.

And I’ll tell you something else. The people in America and Europe who build pipelines know what happened. I’m telling you something important. The people who own companies that build pipelines know the story. I didn’t get the story from them but I learned quickly they know.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

Let’s go back to this situation in June last year. President Joe Biden decided not to do it directly and postponed it. So why did they do it then in September?

SEYMOUR HERSH

The secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, said a few days after the pipeline was blown up, at a news conference, that a major economic and almost military force was taken away from Vladimir Putin. He said this was a tremendous opportunity, as Russia could no longer weaponize the pipelines — meaning that it was not able to force Western Europe not to support the United States in the war. The fear was that Western Europe would not go along any longer in the war. I think that the reason they decided to do it then was that the war wasn’t going well for the West, and they were afraid with winter coming. The Nord Stream 2 has been sanctioned by Germany, and the United States was afraid that Germany would lift the sanctions because of a bad winter.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

According to you, what were the motives when you look behind the scenes? The US government was opposed to the pipeline for many reasons. Some say they were opposed to it because they wanted to weaken Russia, to weaken the ties between Russia and Western Europe, Germany especially. But maybe also to weaken the German economy, which, after all, is a competitor to the US economy. With the high gas prices, enterprises have started to move to the United States. So what’s your sense of the motives of the US government, if they blew up the pipeline?

SEYMOUR HERSH

I don’t think they thought it through. I know this sounds strange. I don’t think that Blinken and some others in the administration are deep thinkers. There certainly are people in the American economy who like the idea of us being more competitive. We’re selling LNG, liquefied gas, at extremely big profits; we’re making a lot of money on it. I’m sure there were some people thinking, boy, this is going to be a long-time boost for the American economy.

But in that White House, I think the obsession was always reelection, and they wanted to win the war, they wanted to get a victory, they want Ukraine to somehow magically win.

There could be some people who think maybe it’ll be better for our economy if the German economy is weak, but that’s crazy thinking. I think, basically, that we’ve bitten deep into something that’s not going to work. The war is not going to turn out well for this government.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

How do you think this war could end?

SEYMOUR HERSH

It doesn’t matter what I think. What I know is there’s no way this war is going to turn out the way we want, and I don’t know what we’re going to do as we go further down the line. It scares me if the president was willing to do this.

And the people who did this mission believed that the president did realize what he was doing to the people of Germany, that he was punishing them for a war that wasn’t going well. And in the long run, this is going to be very detrimental not only to his reputation as the president but politically too. It’s going to be a stigma for America.

So what you have is a White House that thought it may have a losing card: Germany and Western Europe may stop giving the arms we want and the German chancellor could turn the pipeline on — that was always a fear. I would be asking a lot of questions to Chancellor Scholz. I would ask him what he learned in February when he was with the president. The operation was a big secret, and the president wasn’t supposed to tell anybody about this capability. But he does talk. He says things that he doesn’t want to.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

Your story was reported in Western media with some restraint and criticism. Some attacked your reputation or said that you have only one anonymous source, and that’s not reliable.

SEYMOUR HERSH

How could I possibly talk about a source? I’ve written many stories based on unnamed sources. If I named somebody, they’d be fired, or, worse, jailed. The law is so strict. I’ve never had anybody exposed, and of course when I write I say, as I did in this article, it’s a source, period. And over the years, the stories I’ve written have always been accepted. I have used for this story the same caliber of skilled fact-checkers as had worked with me at the New Yorker magazine. Of course, there are many ways to verify obscure information told to me.

And, you know, a personal attack on me doesn’t get to the point. The point is that Biden chose to keep Germany cold this winter. The president of the United States would rather see Germany cold [because of energy shortages] than Germany possibly not supportive in the Ukraine war, and that, to me, is going to be a devastating thing for this White House. For me, and I think also for the people on the mission, it was appalling.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

The point is also that it can be perceived as an act of war not only against Russia but against Western allies, especially Germany.

SEYMOUR HERSH

Let’s keep it simple. I can tell you that the people involved in the operation saw the president as choosing to keep Germany cold for his short-range political goals, and that horrified them. I’m talking about American people that are intensely loyal to the United States. In the CIA, it’s understood that, as I put it in my article, they work for the Crown, they don’t work for the Constitution.

The one virtue of the CIA is that a president, who can’t get his agenda through Congress and nobody listens to him, can take a walk in the backyard of the Rose Garden of the White House with the CIA director and somebody can get hurt eight thousand miles away. That’s always been the selling point of the CIA, which I have problems with. But even that community is appalled that he chose to keep Europe cold in support of a war that he’s not going to win. And that, to me, is heinous.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

You said in your article that the planning of the attack was not reported to Congress, as is necessary with other covert operations.

SEYMOUR HERSH

It also wasn’t reported to many places inside the military. There were other people in other institutions that should have known but were not informed. The operation was very secret.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

There was some critique of your article by people who are engaged in evaluating open-source intelligence (OSINT) on ships and airplanes in the Baltic Sea region, saying that no Norwegian plane was detected directly at the spot of the explosions on September 26 or the days before.

SEYMOUR HERSH

Any serious covert operation takes OSINT into account and works around it. As I said, there were people on the mission who took care of this issue.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

What role does courage play for you in your profession?

SEYMOUR HERSH

What’s courageous about telling the truth? Our job isn’t to be afraid. And sometimes it gets ugly. There have been times in my life, when — you know, I don’t talk about it. Threats aren’t made to people like me; they’re made to children of people like me. There’s been awful stuff. But you don’t worry about it — you can’t. You have to just do what you do.

Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American investigative journalist.

Fabian Scheidler is a Berlin-based journalist and the author of The End of the Megamachine: A Brief History of a Failing Civilization.

Ukraine War: Those who fail to call for negotiations, fail to understand the dangerous predicament that faces the planet! / by the U.S. Peace Council

The United States Peace Council

At no time since the Cuban missile crisis has our world has been so close to disaster. As the war in Ukraine approaches its first anniversary, it is being increasingly transformed by the Biden administration and the “collective west” into a war between NATO and Russia. The danger of turning into a nuclear confrontation is imminent.

The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was a wake-up call in the midst of Cold War, warning just how close a nuclear World War III could be. Unlike today, both sides sought accommodation. They understood that a retreat from war was in their mutual interest. The Anti-Ballistic Missile and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties, now scrapped, were negotiated.

Back then, an international peace movement with a robust US contingent amplified the demand for a peaceful world. Such voices are much diminished now. Unlike in the past, not a single Democrat in Congress spoke out for peace, leaving the ideological terrain for war virtually uncontested. Particularly unfortunate are the voices, including some in the U.S. “left,” who continue to beat the drums of war by calling for the continuation of war until the victory of Ukraine. That would only mean the victory of NATO in an all-out war with Russia.

Negotiated peace agreements are not based so much on trust as on the mutual understanding that the alternative is in neither side’s interest. Arguing as some on the “left” do that “Putin’s Russia cannot be trusted,” disregards the fact that no negotiation between warring parties has ever been based on trust.

The undeniable reality facing us should make us all aware of the urgency for negotiations and a diplomatic solution to this war.

The war in and around Ukraine must end. There should be no dispute about that. All wars end either with negotiations or with the victory of one side or the other. Given that this war is not merely between Russia and Ukraine but is between Russia and a Western-backed Ukraine, the first option — for victory — is impossible. Neither Russia (a major nuclear power) nor the Western powers (many of them being major nuclear powers) will tolerate anything near a defeat.

If a military victory is not possible, then the only way forward is for negotiations. War is not an answer. Escalating this war should not be promoted by those who believe in international cooperation and genuine peace. Those who fail to call for negotiations in the midst of this contentious period — with the war ongoing and its impact intensifying a cost-of-living crisis around the world — fail to understand the dangerous predicament that faces the planet. 

Contact: U.S. Peace Council, P.O. Box 3105, New Haven, CT 06515, Call:(203) 387-0370, Email: USPC@USPeaceCouncil.org

America’s theatre of the absurd / by Chris Hedges

“Macdeath.” Illustration by Mr. Fish.

This article originally appeared on ScheerPost.com on January 8, 2023

Our political class does not govern. It entertains. It plays its assigned role in our fictitious democracy, howling with outrage to constituents and selling them out. The Squad and the Progressive Caucus have no more intention of fighting for universal health care, workers’ rights or defying the war machine than the Freedom Caucus fights for freedom. These political hacks are modern versions of Sinclair Lewis’s slick con artist Elmer Gantry, cynically betraying a gullible public to amass personal power and wealth. This moral vacuity provides the spectacle, as H.G. Wells wrote, of “a great material civilization, halted, paralyzed.” It happened in Ancient Rome. It happened in Weimar Germany. It is happening here.

Governance exists. But it is not seen. It is certainly not democratic. It is done by the armies of lobbyists and corporate executives, from the fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street. Governance happens in secret. Corporations have seized the levers of power, including the media. Growing obscenely rich, the ruling oligarchs have deformed national institutions, including state and federal legislatures and the courts, to serve their insatiable greed. They know what they are doing. They understand the depths of their own corruption. They know they are hated. They are prepared for that too. They have militarized police forces and have built a vast archipelago of prisons to keep the unemployed and underemployed in bondage. All the while, they pay little to no income tax and exploit sweatshop labor overseas. They lavishly bankroll the political clowns who speak in the vulgar and crude idiom of an enraged public or in the dulcet tones used to mollify the liberal class.

Donald Trump’s seminal contribution to the political landscape is the license to say in public what political decorum once prohibited. His legacy is the degradation of political discourse to the monosyllabic tirades of Shakespeare’s Caliban, which simultaneously scandalize and energize the kabuki theater that passes for government. This burlesque differs little from the German Reichstag, where the final cri de coeur by a mortally ill Clara Zetkin against fascism on August 30, 1932, was met with a chorus of taunts, insults and jeers by Nazi deputies.

H.G. Wells called the old guard, the good liberals, the ones who speak in measured words and embrace reason, the “inexplicit men.” They say the right things and do nothing. They are as vital to the rise of tyranny as are the Christian fascists, a few of whom held the House hostage last week by blocking 14 rounds of voting to prevent Kevin McCarthy from becoming Speaker. By the time McCarthy was elected on the 15th round, he had caved on nearly every demand made by the obstructionists, including permitting any one of the 435 members of the House to force a vote for his removal at any time, thus guaranteeing political paralysis.

The internecine warfare in the House is not between those who respect democratic institutions and those who do not. McCarthy, backed by Trump and far-right conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, is as morally bankrupt as those trying to bring him down. This is a battle for control among con artists, charlatans, social media celebrities and mobsters. McCarthy joined the majority of House Republicans in support of a Texas lawsuit to void the 2020 Presidential result by preventing four states⁠—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia⁠—from casting electoral votes for Biden. The Supreme Court refused to hear the lawsuit. There isn’t much in the Freedom Caucus extremist positions, which resemble those of Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany and Fidesz in Hungary, McCarthy doesn’t embrace. They advocate greater tax cuts for the wealthy, further deregulation of corporations, a war on migrants, more austerity programs, champion white supremacy and accuse liberals and conservatives who do not line up behind Trump of treason.

“I want you to watch Nancy Pelosi hand me that gavel. It will be hard not to hit her with it,” McCarthy said in audio posted to YouTube by a Main Street Nashville reporter in 2021. Pelosi, for her part, called McCarthy a “moron,” after he said that a possible renewed mask mandate was “a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state.” This is what passes for political discourse. I yearn for the time when political rhetoric was geared to the educational level of a 10-year-old child or an adult with a sixth or seventh-grade education. Now we speak in imbecilic clichés.

This political vacuum has spawned anti-politics, or what the writer Benjamin DeMott called “junk politics,” which “personalizes and moralizes issues and interests instead of clarifying them.” Junk politics “maximizes threats from abroad while miniaturizing large, complex problems at home. It’s a politics that, guided by guesses about its own profits and losses, abruptly reverses public stances without explanation, often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized (e.g.: [the war in] Iraq will be over in days or weeks; Iraq is a project for generations).”

“A major effect of junk politics⁠—its ceaseless flood of patriotic, religious, macho and therapeutic fustian⁠—is to pull position after position loose from reasoned foundations,” DeMott noted.

The result of junk politics is that it infantilizes the public with “year-round upbeat Christmas tales” and perpetuates the status quo. The billionaire class, which has carried out a slow motion corporate coup d’état, continues to plunder; unchecked militarism continues to hollow out the country; and the public is kept in bondage by the courts and domestic security agencies. When the government watches you twenty-four hours a day, you cannot use the word “liberty.” That is the relationship between a master and a slave. The iron primacy of profit means that the most vulnerable are ruthlessly discarded. Supported by Republicans and Democrats, the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates to slow economic growth and increase unemployment to curb inflation, exacting a tremendous cost on the working poor and their families. No one is required to operate under what John Ruskin called “conditions of moral culture.”

But the second result of junk politics is more insidious. It solidifies the cult of the self, the amoral belief that we have the right to do anything, to betray and destroy anyone, to get what we want. The cult of the self fosters a psychopathic cruelty, a culture built not on empathy, the common good and self-sacrifice but on unbridled narcissism and vengeance. It celebrates, as mass media does, superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and an inability to feel guilt or remorse. This is the dark ethic of corporate culture, celebrated by the entertainment industry, academia and social media.

The essayist Curtis White argues that “it is capitalism that now most defines our national character, not Christianity or the Enlightenment.” He assesses our culture as one in which “death has taken refuge in a legality that is supported by both reasonable liberals and Christian conservatives.” This “legality” ratifies the systematic exploitation of workers. White excoriates our nationalist triumphalism and our unleashing of “the most fantastically destructive military power” the world has ever known with the alleged objective of “protecting and pursuing freedom.”

“Justice, under capitalism, works not from a notion of obedience to moral law, or to conscience, or to compassion, but from the assumption of a duty to preserve a social order and the legal ‘rights’ that constitute that order, especially the right to property and the freedom to do with it what one wants,” he writes. “That’s the real and important ‘moral assessment’ sought by our courts. It comes to this: that decision will seem most just which preserves the system of justice even if the system is itself routinely unjust.”

The consequence is a society consumed by excessive materialism, pointless soul-destroying work, suffocating housing developments closer to “shared cemeteries” than real neighborhoods and a license to exploit that “condemns nature itself to annihilation even as we call it the freedom to pursue personal property.”

The billionaire class, for the most part, prefers the mask of a Joe Biden, who deftly broke the freight railway unions to prevent a strike and forced them to accept a contract a majority of union members had rejected. But the billionaire class also knows that the goons and con artists on the far right will not interfere in their disemboweling of the nation; indeed, they will be more robust in thwarting the attempts of workers to organize for decent wages and working conditions. I watched fringe politicians in Yugoslavia, Radovan Karadžić, Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tudjman, dismissed by the political and educated elites as buffoons, ride an anti-liberal wave to power in the wake of widespread economic misery. Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Citibank, Raytheon, ExxonMobile, Alphabet and Goldman Sachs will easily adapt. Capitalism functions very efficiently without democracy.

The longer we remain in a state of political paralysis, the more these political deformities are empowered. As Robert O. Paxton writes in The Anatomy of Fascism, fascism is an amorphous and incoherent ideology. It wraps itself in the most cherished symbols of the nation, in our case, the American flag, white supremacy, the Pledge of Allegiance and the Christian cross. It celebrates hypermasculinity, misogyny, racism and violence. It allows disenfranchised people, especially disenfranchised white men, to regain a sense of power, however illusory, and sanctifies their hatred and rage. It embraces a utopian vision of moral renewal and vengeance to coalesce around an anointed political savior. It is militaristic, anti-intellectual and contemptuous of democracy, especially when the established ruling class mouths the language of liberal democracy but does nothing to defend it. It replaces culture with nationalist and patriotic kitsch. It sees those outside the closed circle of the nation-state or the ethnic or religious group as contaminants who must be physically purged, usually with violence, to restore the health of the nation. It perpetuates itself through constant instability, for its solutions to the ills besetting the nation are transitory, contradictory and unattainable. Most importantly, fascism always has a religious coloring, mobilizing believers around rites and rituals, using sacred words and phrases, and embracing an absolute truth that is heretical to question.

Trump may be finished politically, but the political and social decay that created Trump remains. This decay will give rise to new, perhaps more competent, demagogues. I fear the rise of Christian fascists endowed with the political skill, self-discipline, focus and intelligence that Trump lacks. The longer we remain politically paralyzed, the more certain Christian fascism becomes. The January 6 mob assault on the Capital two years ago, the polarization of the electorate into antagonistic tribes, the economic misery afflicting the working class, the rhetoric of hate and violence, and the current dysfunction in the Congress is but a glimpse of the nightmare ahead.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers University, and an ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 12 books, including the New York Times best-seller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. His other books include “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt,” (2015) “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best-selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). His latest book is “America: The Farewell Tour” (2018). His book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and has sold over 400,000 copies. He writes a weekly column for the website ScheerPost.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

The United States of America as a Sacrifice Zone / by Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis

“Fight Poverty Not the Poor.” (Photo: Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Despite the encouraging policy-making that hit the headlines this summer, America remains a significant sacrifice zone with economic policies that justify their painful impact on the poor and marginalized as necessary for the greater good.

In the American ethos, sacrifice is often hailed as the chief ingredient for overcoming hardship and seizing opportunity. To be successful, we’re assured, college students must make personal sacrifices by going deep into debt for a future degree and the earnings that may come with it. Small business owners must sacrifice their paychecks so that their companies will continue to grow, while politicians must similarly sacrifice key policy promises to get something (almost anything!) done.

We have become all too used to the notion that success only comes with sacrifice, even if this is anything but the truth for the wealthiest and most powerful Americans. After all, whether you focus on the gains of Wall Street or of this country’s best-known billionaires, the ever-rising Pentagon budget, or the endless subsidies to fossil-fuel companies, sacrifice is not exactly a theme for those atop this society. As it happens, sacrifice in the name of progress is too often relegated to the lives of the poor and those with little or no power. But what if, instead of believing that most of us must eternally “rob Peter to pay Paul,” we imagine a world in which everyone was in and no one out?

In that context, consider recent policy debates on Capitol Hill as the crucial midterm elections approach. To start with, the passage of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) promises real, historic advances when it comes to climate change, health care, and fair tax policy. It’s comprehensive in nature and far-reaching not just for climate resilience but for environmental justice, too. Still, the legislation is distinctly less than what climate experts tell us we need to keep this planet truly livable.

In addition, President Biden’s cancellation of up to $20,000 per person in student loans could wipe out the debt of nearly half of all borrowers. This unprecedented debt relief demonstrates that a policy agenda lifting from the bottom is both compassionate and will stimulate the broader economy. Still, it, too, doesn’t go far enough when it comes to those suffocating under a burden of debt that has long served as a dead weight on the aspirations of millions.

In fact, a dual response to those developments and others over the past months seems in order. As a start, a striking departure from the neoliberal dead zone in which our politics have been trapped for decades should certainly be celebrated. Rather than sit back with a sense of satisfaction, however, those advances should only be built upon.

Let’s begin by looking under the hood of the IRA. After all, that bill is being heralded as the most significant climate legislation in our history and its champions claim that, by 2030, it will have helped reduce this country’s carbon emissions by roughly 40% from their 2005 levels. Since a reduction of any kind seemed out of reach not so long ago, it represents a significant step forward.

Among other things, it ensures investments of more than $60 billion in clean energy manufacturing; an estimated $30 billion in production tax credits geared toward increasing the manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, and more; about $30 billion for grant and loan programs to speed up the transition to clean electricity; and $27 billion for a greenhouse gas reduction fund that will allow states to provide financial assistance to low-income communities so that they, too, can benefit from rooftop solar installations and other clean energy developments.

The IRA also seeks to lower energy costs and reduce utility bills for individual Americans through tax credits that will encourage purchases of energy-efficient homes, vehicles, and appliances. Among other non-climate-change advances, it caps out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs, reduces health insurance premiums for 13 million Americans, and provides free vaccinations for seniors.

As the nation’s biggest investment in the climate so far, it demonstrates the willingness of the Biden administration to address the climate crisis. It also highlights just how stalled this country has been on that issue for so long and how much more work there is to do. Of course, given our ever hotter planet and the role this country has played in it as the historically greatest greenhouse gas emitter of all time, anything less than legislation that will lead to net-zero carbon emissions is a far cry from what’s necessary, as this country burns, floods, and overheats in a striking fashion.

Pipelines and Sacrifice Zones

Earlier iterations of what became the IRA recognized a historic opportunity to enact policies connecting the defense of the planet to the defense of human life and needs. Because of the resistance of Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, as well as every Senate Republican, the final version of the reconciliation bill includes worrying sacrifices. It does not, for instance, have an extension or expansion of the Child Tax Credit, a lifeline for poor and low-income families, nor does it raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, even though that was a promise made in the 2020 election. Gone as well are plans for free pre-kindergarten and community college, in addition to the nation’s first paid family-leave program that would have provided up to $4,000 a month to cover births, deaths, and other pivotal moments in everyday life.

And don’t forget to add to what’s missing any real pain for fossil-fuel companies. After all, coal baron Manchin seems to have succeeded in cutting a side deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for a massive natural gas pipeline through his home state of West Virginia and that’s just to begin a list of concessions. Indeed, the sacrificial negotiations with Manchin to get the bill passed ensured significantly more domestic fossil-fuel production, including agreement that the Interior Department would auction off permits to drill for yet more oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska, and possibly elsewhere, all of which will offset some of the emissions reductions from climate-change-related provisions in the bill.

It’s important to note as well that, although progress was made on reducing fossil-fuel emissions, expanding health care, and creating a fairer tax system, for the poor in this country, “sacrifice zones” are hardly a thing of the past. As journalist Andrew Kaufman suggests, “One thing that does seem assured, however, is that the arrival—at last—of a federal climate law has not heralded an end to the suffering [of] communities living near heavy fossil-fuel polluters.” And as Rafael Mojica, program director for the Michigan environmental justice group Soulardarity, put it, the IRA “is riddled with concessions to the big carbon-based industries that at present prey on our communities at the expense of their health, both physically and economically.”

Keep in mind that Michigan is already anything but a stranger to sacrifice zones. Case in point: the water crisis in the city of Flint as well as in Detroit. The Flint Democracy Defense League and the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization have battled lead-poisoning and water shut-offs for years in the face of deindustrialization and the lack of a right to clean water in this country. Such grassroots efforts helped sound the alarm during the Flint water crisis that began in 2014 and have since linked community groups nationwide dealing with high levels of toxins in their water supply so that they could learn from that city’s grassroots organizing experience. Meanwhile, so many years later, Michiganders are still protesting potential polluters like Enbridge’s aging Line 5 oil pipeline.

And there are many other examples of frontline community groups protesting the ways in which their homes are being sacrificed on the altar of the fossil-fuel industry. Take, for example, the communities in the stretch of Louisiana between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that contain hundreds of petrochemical facilities and has, eerily enough, come to be known as Cancer Alley. There, among a mostly poor and Black population, you can find some of the highest cancer rates in the country. In St. James Parish alone, there are 12 petrochemical plants and nearly every household has felt the impact of cancer. For years, Rise St. James and other local groups have been working to prevent the construction of a new plastics facility near local schools on land that once was a slave burial ground.

Then, of course, there are many other sacrifice zones where the issue isn’t fossil fuels.  Take the city of Aberdeen in Grays Harbor County, Washington, once home to a thriving timber and lumber economy. After its natural landscape was stripped and the local economy declined, that largely white, rural community fell into endemic poverty, homelessness, and drug abuse. Chaplains on the Harbor, one of the few community organizations with a presence in homeless encampments across the county, has now started a sustainable farm run by formerly homeless and incarcerated young people in Aberdeen as part of an attempt to create models for the building of green communities in places rejected by so many.

Or take Oak Flat, Arizona, the holiest site for the San Carlos Apache tribe. There, a group called the Apache Stronghold is leading a struggle to protect that tribe’s sacred lands against harm from Resolution Copper, a multinational mining company permitted to extract minerals on those lands thanks to a midnight rider put into the National Defense Authorization Act in 2015. Along with a growing number of First Nations people and their supporters, it has been fighting to protect that land from becoming another sacrifice zone on the altar of corporate greed.

On the east coast, consider Union Hill, Virginia, where residents of a historic Black community fought for years to block the construction of three massive compressor stations for fracked gas flowing from the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Those facilities would have potentially subjected residents to staggering amounts of air pollution, but early in 2020 community organizers won the fight to stop construction.

Consider as well the work of Put People First PA!, which, in Pennsylvania communities like Grant Township and Erie, is on the tip of the spear in the fight against an invasive and devastating fracking industry that’s ripping up land and exposing Pennsylvanians to the sort of pollutants that leaders in Union Hill fought to prevent. Note as well that, in many similar places, hospitals are being privatized or shuttered, leaving residents without significant access to health care, even as the risk of respiratory illnesses and other industrially caused diseases grows.

Such disparate communities reflect a long-term history of suffering—from the violence inflicted on indigenous people, to the slave plantations of the South, to the expansion (and then steep decline) of industrial production in the North and West, to pipelines still snaking across the countryside. And now historic pain inflicted on low-income and poor Americans will increase thanks to a growing climate crisis, as the people of flooded and drinking-water-barren Jackson, Mississippi, discovered recently.

In a world of megadroughts, superstorms, wildfires, and horrific flooding guaranteed to wreak ever more havoc on lives and livelihoods, poor and low-income people are beginning to demand action commensurate with the crisis at hand.

Dark Clouds Blowing in from the “Equality State”

While reports on the passage of the IRA and student debt relief dominated the news cycle, another major policy announcement at the close of the summer and far from Capitol Hill slipped far more quietly into the news. It highlights yet again the “sacrifices” that poor Americans are implicitly expected to make to strengthen the economy. Just outside of Jackson, Wyoming, one of the wealthiest and most unequal towns in this country, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell committed his organization to take “forceful and rapid steps to moderate demand so that it comes into better alignment with supply and to keep inflation expectations anchored.”

Couched in typically wonkish language, his comments—made in the “equality state”—may sound benign, but he was suggesting capping wages, an act whose effects will, in the end, fall most heavily on poor and low-income people. Indeed, he warned, mildly enough, that this would mean “some pain for households and businesses”—even as he was ensuring that the livelihoods of poor and low-income people would once again be sacrificed for what passes as the greater good.

What does it mean, for instance, to “moderate demand” for food when more than 12 million families with children are already hungry each month? It should strike us as wrong to call for “some pain” for so many households facing crises like possible evictions or foreclosures, crushing debt, and a lack of access to decent health care. It should be considered inhumane to advocate for a “softer labor market” when one in three workers is already earning less than $15 an hour.

It is disingenuous to say that the economy is “overheating,” as if what’s being experienced is some strange, abstract anomaly rather than the result of decades of disinvestment in infrastructure and social programs that could have provided the basic necessities of life for everyone. Nonetheless, Powell continues to push a false narrative of scarcity and the threat of inflation to smother the powerful resurgence of courageous and creative labor organizing that we’ve seen, miraculously enough, in these pandemic years.

At this point, as a pastor and theologian, I can’t resist quoting Jesus’s choice words in the Gospel of Matthew about how poor people so often pay the price for the further enrichment of the already wealthy. In Matthew 9, Jesus asserts: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” The Greek word “mercy” is defined as loving kindness, taking care of the down and out. In Jesus’s parlance, mercy meant acts of mutual solidarity and societal policies that prioritized the needs of the poor, which would today translate into cancelling debts, raising wages, and investing in social programs.

Despite the encouraging policy-making that hit the headlines this summer, America remains a significant sacrifice zone with economic policies that justify their painful impact on the poor and marginalized as necessary for the greater good. It’s time for us to fight for a comprehensive, intersectional, bottom-up approach to the injustices that continually unfold around us.

© 2021 TomDispatch.com

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis is co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. She is the author of “Always with Us?: What Jesus Really Said about the Poor” (2017).

Common Dreams, September 15, 2022, https://www.commondreams.org/

Opinion: To Win a Political Revolution, We Need a New Mass Organization / by Jeremy Gong and Nick French

Since Bernie Sanders’s defeat in 2020 and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US left has been largely disorganized. The time is ripe for Bernie and the Squad to create a new mass organization to confront today’s crises.

It’s hard for leftists in the United States to find much to celebrate these days. After the excitement of Bernie Sanders’s victories in the early 2020 Democratic primaries, our hopes were dashed when the center consolidated around Joe Biden and handed him the nomination. The wave of inspiring uprisings against police brutality later that summer was followed by disappointment too, as demands for serious reforms to attack racial and economic injustice were co-opted or sidelined. The Left, as some have put it, finds itself in purgatory.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s administration has turned out to be what his most astute critics predicted: a presidency that, despite some early bright spots, has failed to meaningfully tackle economic inequality, the climate crisis, or much of anything else. Biden’s approval ratings are now at record lows as inflation batters the economy. (It’s unclear whether a last-minute compromise deal with West Virginia senator Joe Manchin on climate, health care, and taxes will salvage the administration’s popularity.) On top of that, the Supreme Court is rolling back abortion rights and threatening our democracy, and Biden and Democratic Party leaders are dragging their feet on any sort of response. The increasingly reactionary GOP now seems set for victory in the midterms.

There are some positive signs: Left-wing ideas are more mainstream than they have been in decades, in part thanks to Sanders’s presidential campaigns. Along with other insurgent politicians like “Squad” members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, Sanders has put policies like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and free public college into the mainstream. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has nearly one hundred thousand dues-paying members, four members in Congress, and dozens of elected officials at the state and local levels. The labor movement is stirring again, with this year’s successful Amazon warehouse unionization effort in Staten Island, the ongoing wave of Starbucks organizing, and the election of a strike-ready leadership to the 1.3-million-strong International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Still, the Left hasn’t been able to coordinate effective political interventions at the federal level, let alone exercise power. With leftists still a tiny minority in Congress, progressive priorities like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal are off the agenda, and even less ambitious reforms are consistently stymied by conservative Democrats like Joe Manchin. And despite growing their legislative presence, socialists and their allies have failed to expand beyond deep-blue districts.

Sanders’s presidential campaigns brought in tens of thousands of volunteers, millions of voters, and a huge number of small-dollar campaign contributions (many from working-class donors). But it wasn’t enough to win, and the underlying theory of the campaigns — that class-struggle rhetoric and a popular platform of wealth redistribution could turn out masses of working-class nonvoters to carry Sanders to the nomination — didn’t pan out. Despite the popularity of Sanders-style politics and mass discontent with the status quo, socialism remains largely the preserve of young, college-educated professionals in solidly Democratic districts — isolated from the broader working-class constituency it purports to represent.

In a phrase, Sanders’s “political revolution” simply never came.

There are many theories as to why Sanders didn’t win. Part of the explanation, though, must involve the lack of working-class organization (including unions) and left institutions. The defeat and disorganization of the Left and labor since the 1970s has deprived the working class of the struggles and organizations that undergird them — what Friedrich Engels called “schools of class war.” Having never felt the power of collective struggle, many voters were understandably skeptical that Sanders’s campaign would deliver. And with most Democratic voters taking their cues from the corporate media and party elites, Sanders simply didn’t have a strong enough media counterweight.

Today, the absence of mass working-class organization continues to haunt the US left. With the Right putting fundamental liberties like reproductive freedom on the chopping block and the Democrats asleep at the wheel, the time is ripe to build a mass organization that can make desperately needed political interventions. And we think that Sanders and the Squad need to take the lead in building such an organization.

Movements Need Organizations

The Left’s recent defeats — compounded by COVID-19, which has made in-person organizing much more difficult — have fostered demoralization and demobilization. But much of the post-2020 malaise can also be attributed to the inability of activists — let alone millions of ordinary people — to keep participating in a movement that has the power to change the world, especially at the national level, where the stakes are highest. While activists have supported impressive campaigns and righteous protests, millions of former Bernie supporters understandably feel helpless amid political and ecological crises.

Still, there are inspiring examples for the Left to build on. In Richmond, California, the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) has beaten landlords and Chevron to win city council majorities on and off for over a decade. The Vermont Progressive Party continues to be a significant force in state politics, even holding the office of lieutenant governor from 2017 to 2021. In New York City and Chicago, DSA-backed elected officials have formed socialist caucuses.

These efforts are exciting because they elevate the political process above individual candidates and fleeting election campaigns, fuse legislative fights with permanent membership organizations, and create clear and oppositional political identities distinct from the Democratic Party. As labor activist and RPA leader Mike Parker wrote earlier this year, building broader political organization is the “main task when it comes to political action,” not a “side issue.” Organization is how we make Bernie’s “Not me, us” more than a slogan.

Without organization, it’s hard to build, let alone sustain, the type of mobilization needed for Bernie’s political revolution. Massive protests wane without clear demands, let alone a compelling strategy of how to win them. Thousands of progressives either don’t know how to start building campaigns or lack the resources to do so. Movements around important issues get co-opted by corporate Democrats’ reelection campaigns, grant-seeking nonprofits, and prominent social media personalities who aren’t democratically accountable to any base. Ongoing organization is also essential to train onetime protesters into skilled, politically sophisticated, and lifelong movement cadre.

In electoral politics, progressive candidates face enormous pressure to avoid criticizing establishment Democrats. Once elected, lone progressives have few resources to push against the business-friendly common sense at every level of government: corporate candidates can rely on well-funded lobbyists to help write legislation, educate the public, and even mobilize supporters; anti-corporate candidates must do this all on their own. Without a broader organization at their back, it’s no wonder that the progressive politicians we support are not able to be constantly fighting on all fronts at once.

Only mass organization can bring together the resources and the people of the Sanders movement on a permanent basis. The idea of such a party-like organization has been popular on the Left since the end of Sanders’s 2016 campaign, popularized in a 2016 Jacobin article by Seth Ackerman and expanded on recently by many others.

If the Left had a mass party–like organization in 2020, the end of Sanders’s second presidential race wouldn’t have meant losing the feeling that, together, we could change the world. While supporters of Sanders and the Squad can donate to individual election campaigns when asked, there is no way to permanently join and help build the movement these elected officials appear to lead. Many of us called for Sanders to convert his 2020 campaign infrastructure into a permanent organization after the campaign, to no avail.

Such a party-like organization could have helped progressives in Congress and their many supporters win more of the progressive items in negotiations over Build Back Better since 2021. As Ben Beckett argued in Jacobin last fall, Sanders and the Squad could have built a powerful movement to pressure Manchin and Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema by mobilizing with activists, including DSA members, battle-hardened teacher unionists — who led historic mass strikes in West Virginia and Arizona in 2018 — and other progressives. Such a movement might also have pushed the Biden administration to use its bully pulpit or the power of executive action to enact sweeping change (like canceling student debt). The movement to defend abortion rights desperately needs this kind of mobilization today.

In a similar vein, Neal Meyer writes that “mass mobilizations require mass organization. We have to put the days of lone-wolf politicians acting on their own . . . behind us.” A Sanders-led party-like organization with permanent local chapters across the country could have coordinated this movement with progressive electoral challenges in West Virginia and Arizona and pressure campaigns against Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi in California and Chuck Schumer in New York. A mass organization could in turn bolster Sanders and the Squad to fight for a better deal in Congress, as well as support local and state-level candidates nationwide — including in purple or red districts where the Left does not yet have a foothold.

Ultimately, we need something like the organization described here to help convince millions of working people who are disconnected from politics that a better world is possible through collective action, and to sustain mass activity once it’s in motion. That’s how we can build the base that will elect Sanders-style progressives and democratic socialists by the hundreds across the country and grow a movement that can exert bottom-up pressure through mass disruption.

Build Back Bernie

It is premature to write a precise blueprint for what this party-like organization should look like. But there are a few principles that should guide us.

First, socialists and progressives should call on Bernie and the Squad to participate in building and leading this new organization. For better or worse, only these national political figures have the resources and legitimacy to bring together millions of supporters and many disparate threads of progressive activism into a single organization. Their leadership would make the project much more likely to succeed, and sooner.

Second, such an organization should be democratic and membership-based. Local and national leaders should be elected by the members, and members should be able to influence the policy platforms of elected officials like Sanders through conventions and internal debates. As Mike Parker and Martha Gruelle write in a different context, democracy is power: only democratic organizations can give their members a sense of ownership over strategies and campaigns, grow the sophistication and size of their activist base, refine their approach based on real-world experience, and deal with competing ideas without alienating the minority of activists who don’t get their way.

Third, the group should support progressive election campaigns, but also year-round organizing outside the halls of official politics. The history of progressive movements shows that mass disruption, outside of the normal political process, is critical to securing legislative wins. No anti-corporate political project will be successful if the Left isn’t also helping build fighting unions and social movements.

Fourth, a progressive party-like organization should be working-class-funded, primarily through membership dues. That means rejecting all corporate and billionaire donations, large unreported donations from anonymous sources, and donations from PACs, foundations, or other groups that launder capitalist cash. Campaign-finance statutes complicate efforts to coordinate election spending, but David Duhalde and Seth Ackerman have both explained how such a nonparty political organization could navigate the law.

Finally, this organization should be effectively nonpartisan, meaning it will support candidates running as Democrats and as independents, depending on what makes sense in a given local context. Sanders himself has run as an independent for Congress, but caucuses with the Democrats, and made his biggest impact by running in the Democratic presidential primaries. This flexibility will be needed both to build an independent political brand that resonates with voters sick of both corporate parties and to keep together leftists and progressives who might currently disagree about the long-term future of the Democratic Party. In the near term, though, the organization can appeal to voters who are still loyal to the Democrats or who are worried about the “spoiler effect” in districts where that is a concern.

Along with mobilizing to defend abortion and other rights, activists and groups that believe in this organizational vision should plan local and national convenings to discuss how to make it a reality. We’re members of DSA and believe DSA has an important role to play in backing this effort. But we also believe that a Sanders-led party-like organization must have a broader ideological base than DSA, since today’s fights are for near-term reforms, not for overthrowing capitalism. As with our election campaigns, unions, and protests, our mass political organizations should be open to the millions of people who want to defend democracy and support Sanders’s agenda but aren’t ready to join an explicitly anti-capitalist organization.

Other membership organizations and nonprofits like the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats, local or state-level political formations like the RPA and the Vermont Progressive Party, grassroots groups fighting for economic and social justice, and progressive unions like National Nurses United, which hosted the People’s Summit after Sanders’s first run in 2016, should also sign on to this project.

A New Political Moment

Sanders has attempted to start a mass membership organization before: Our Revolution, which sprung up in the wake of his 2016 presidential run. For all its accomplishments, though, Our Revolution isn’t suited to play the role of a mass party–like organization right now.

First, though at least some chapters had democratic mechanisms, members were not empowered to democratically determine the national organization’s strategy. Second, Sanders himself was not involved in the organization, which likely hindered the group’s appeal and political effectiveness. Third, as Duhalde noted in 2020, most of Our Revolution’s staff left the organization to work for Sanders’s 2020 campaign, and some of its key early leaders are no longer involved.

That points to another problem with Our Revolution: it was formed at a particular moment (post-2016), with many activists no doubt expecting another Sanders presidential run, and with a particular strategy of attempting to reform the Democratic Party from within. But that political moment is over: Sanders lost the 2020 primary, progressives have largely found themselves marginalized by the Democratic establishment, and we need everyone who was activated by the Bernie campaign and more — including Sanders himself and the Squad — to come together to devise a new strategy. We should reconsider Our Revolution’s strategy of running for internal Democratic Party positions, for instance, and think about establishing a political identity more independent of the Democrats.

The new left has much to be proud of since 2016, but the organizations and tactics that got us this far aren’t enough going forward. If we want to fight for democracy and justice, and build the power to make more ambitious changes in the future, we need to get serious about our strategy. Isolated protests, strikes, and election campaigns have brought many of us into politics. But we need these to add up to more than the sum of their parts so we can wage the struggle that establishment Democrats can’t or won’t.

We know the creation of the kind of group we’re calling for is a long shot. But we’ve seen the ability of Sanders and the Squad to inspire millions, and we believe they have the power to start building the effective, broad left organization that this moment demands.

Jeremy Gong is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America in California’s East Bay.

Nick French is an assistant editor at Jacobin.

Jacobin, August 6, 2022, https://jacobin.com/

Commentary: On the suffering of the masses for capitalist and imperialist gains / by Raina Overskride

Photo credit: Courtesy CPUSA

“Standing up for our values is not without cost”

The last couple of months have brought clarity to many within the masses, when it comes to the oppressive nature of capitalism and the lengths the ruling class will go to achieve its goals regardless of the suffering that is created in its path of destruction.

The rising cost of food, gas, oil, consumer goods and overall scarcity of products on shelves such as baby formula and women’s hygienic products have left many struggling in trying to keep themselves and their families fed or trying not to fall behind on bills and mortgages or rent.

This has led many people to skip meals or resort to buying heavily processed unhealthy foods that do not provide adequate nutrition and will eventually lead to health problems many of which will not be able to be properly addressed due to lack of insurance or access to safe affordable healthcare.

The current Biden administration has been nothing short of incompetent and unapologetic in dealing with this crisis.

The Biden administration has instead focused its priority onto assisting and funding Neo-Nazis in Ukraine, such as Azov Battalion, in various ways such as sending weapons, oil, gas, and money, while countless people suffer here in Maine and across thecountry. Rough estimates, at least as of May 2022, put the cost around $55 Billion Dollars with much more on the way.

Imagine for a moment what $55B could do for the countless people who are houseless or going hungry here in this country. This is a simply astonishing thing to imagine that while the masses here are suffering, the so called “leader of the free world” decides, ‘Yeah those neo-Nazis in Ukraine, let’s help them while the people here suffer.’

That is all just icing on the cake of oppression that many are facing today.
Recently, if we consider the destruction of women’s rights in this country and the absolute timid response by the democrats.

We can see that the democrats have no plan in place to fight against this. Instead they chose to send out emails and text messages asking people to donate money for their campaigns with the promise of protecting Roe v Wade.

This is an absolutely unacceptable response and a rather disgusting one to be honest.

The democrats had DECADES to codify Roe v Wade into law and literally chose not to do it because that was their big carrot on the stick to get you, the voter, into the voting booth. Well, that carrot is gone now, and the democrats have done NOTHING to materially change the conditions of the people. This includes many issues people voted them into office to do such as canceling student debt, Medicare for All, affordable housing, economic relief, climate crisis and so on and so forth.

When you take the war raging in Europe into account, which will never de-escalate as-long-as the United States and its criminal partners keep waging a proxy war against Russia, we are not getting out of this mess anytime or soon.

Some say we can “reform” our way out of this is a rather delusional idea. Let’s examine this fantasy, shall we? We currently have a Supreme Court, with a majority of conservative lifetime appointees. It is a court stacked in the far right’s favor. Some people will say, “expand the courts,” but this will just lead to a never ending back and forth of court appointees pushing their own agenda.

This is a nonsensical path. The other option I hear is: Well, we just gotta “vote harder.” This is also nonsensical and delusional considering current material conditions. Mind you, it’s a very easy thing to observe that all of this is happening under a democratically controlled House, Senate and Presidency, a political situation that has done nothing to help the masses-as-a-whole.

I must also note this is not a call to vote for the right-wing candidates or Republicans, as they are just as bad if not worse than the Democrats in many ways.

Many more issues could be added to this article, such as the rising threat of fascism or the rampant attempted transgender genocide happening across the country, especially in places like Florida and Texas. Also, the horrific threat that Black, indigenous, and peoples of color face here in this country due to all these issues touched on in this article and other subjects not raised for lack of space, like the public executions’ pigs carry out against black and brown bodies.

These are truly arduous times now, and ahead, but personally, from my analysis, at least in the short term there are some things the masses can do to fight this capitalist oppression.

  1. Join a progressive or socialist organization that is grass roots in dealing with the issues covered in this article.
  2. Get in the fight and join CPUSA and help build a better world.
  3. Read and learn communist theory that is out there, and put in the work in your local community, such as attending protests and organizing with those in your community, to put that theory into practice.
  4. Get involved with mutual-aid efforts in your area to help those vulnerable in your communities. If a mutual-aid project is not available in your area, try to start one.
  5. Lastly, for you the voter, you have some political leverage. The capitalists will not tell you about the power you possess. It is a leverage that they fear. The current administration wishes to stay in power and will sell you the world and offer you the platitudes they think you want to hear. But regarding a pressing issue like Abortion Rights, the masses could withhold their votes in November, until Roe v. Wade is codified into law. This sort of action would force the Biden Administration to either (A) make it law, or, (B) lose power, while less than impressive, would still send a message to the Democrats that the masses will not settle for idle talk while the people suffer.

I will admit I do not have the answers. But these are some of the pressing issues we all face. Sure, many will just call for revolution. While in the long term I agree 100%, that is not something we can just press a button to make happen. I feel this current struggle and the many more to come will be nothing more than waves leading to revolution. However, in the short term, the masses need to organize and mobilize not only around single issues but around the general struggle to destroy capitalism and imperialism and replace them with socialism.

I will leave you the voter a quote from Kwame Ture:

“The job of a revolutionary is, of course, to overthrow unjust systems and replace them with just systems because a revolutionary understands this can only be done by the masses of the people. So, the task of the revolutionary is to organize the masses of the people, given the conditions of the Africans around the world who are disorganized, consequently, all my efforts are going to organizing people.”

Raina Overskride is an activist who writes from Lewiston, Maine.

New Haven Declares an Emphatic No to US Blockade of Cuba / by W. T. Whitney Jr.

This resolution ​“speaks for itself,” Health and Human Services Committee Chair and Westville Alder Darryl Brackeen, Jr. said in support of the item as the New Haven Board of Alders Vote To End Cuba Embargo | Photo credit: New Haven Independent

A spirited and persistent campaign joined by peace activists in New Haven struck gold on July 6 as the Board of Alders of that large Connecticut city approved a resolution calling upon Biden administration to “to build a new cooperative relationship between the United States and Cuba and to immediately end all aspects of the United States economic, commercial and financial embargo against Cuba.”

The action this week followed testimony community members led by the New Haven Peace Coalition before the Board’s Health and Human Services Committee on June 24. That committee went on to recommend “without dissent” that the Board approve the anti-blockade resolution.

In written testimony read at the session, acting Peace Coalition head and veteran U.S. Communist Party activist Joelle Fishman, pointed out that. “As a city heavily invested in medicine, New Haven would gain from humanitarian exchanges about the most up-to-date treatments and medicines under development. Cuba is also pioneering in local sustainable food production.”

Cuba has gained enviable reputation internationally for its healthcare achievements, biomedical research, and ecologically sound agriculture.

The process toward the New Haven municipal authorities’ unanimous approval of their resolution had begun in September 2021 when the New Haven Peace Council and other groups first presented a proposed version of an anti-blockade resolution to the Board of Alders.

For many years, the Peace Council, affiliated with the New Haven-based U.S. Peace Council, and the New Haven Peace Coalition have jointly engaged in community-wide education and advocacy efforts on a wide range of human rights issues. The coalition enjoys the status of an official city commission.

In calling for an end to the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba, New Haven joins a bevy of other U.S. cities, and even states, in a grassroots campaign to get rid of this 60-year-old cruel, illegal, and immoral U.S. policy. The list now is long.

The most recent additions are Massachusetts cities Brookline on June 10 – a second time for that city – and Boston on May 16. The Bostonians defiantly called for “full restoration of trade and travel between the two countries.”

The Chicago city council’s unanimous passage of an anti- blockade resolution in February 2021 represented a major addition.  Chicago is the nation’s third largest city.

Other cities passing such resolutions are: Pittsburg, St. Paul Minneapolis, Cleveland, Detroit, Sacramento, and Hartford. The list includes Helena, MT; Cambridge, MA and Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond – all in California.  States whose legislative bodies have passed resolutions are Alabama, Michigan, California and Minnesota.

Henry Lowendorf, president of the Greater New Haven Peace Council, outlined how actions taken against the U.S. blockade of Cuba contribute to peace. Commenting on the Human Service Committee’s approval on June 24 of the proposed resolution, Lowendorf declared that. “Despite the blockade no Cuban families, unlike in New Haven, are homeless. Despite the blockade all Cubans, unlike New Haveners, enjoy fully covered first-class healthcare.”

He added: “We have much to learn from how Cuba manages to guarantee its citizens these rights despite the US noose around its neck. That noose is intended not only to reverse these rights in Cuba but to prevent us from visiting Cuba, seeing for ourselves and demanding the same rights for ourselves from our own government.”

W. T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.

‘Not a Justification but a Provocation’: Chomsky on the Root Causes of the Russia Ukraine War / by Ramzy Baroud

Photograph Source: Cityswift – CC BY 2.0

One of the reasons that Russian media has been completely blocked in the West, along with the unprecedented control and censorship over the Ukraine war narrative, is the fact that western governments simply do not want their public to know that the world is vastly changing.

Ignorance might be bliss, arguably in some situations, but not in this case. Here, ignorance can be catastrophic as western audiences are denied access to information about a critical situation that is affecting them in profound ways and will most certainly impact the world’s geopolitics for generations to come.

The growing inflation, an imminent global recession, a festering refugee crisis, a deepening food shortage crisis and much more are the kinds of challenges that require open and transparent discussions regarding the situation in Ukraine, the NATO-Russia rivalry and the responsibility of the West in the ongoing war.

To discuss these issues, along with the missing context of the Russia-Ukraine war, we spoke with Professor Noam Chomsky, believed to be the greatest living intellectual of our time.

Chomsky told us that it “should be clear that the (Russian) invasion of Ukraine has no (moral) justification.” He compared it to the US invasion of Iraq, seeing it as an example of “supreme international crime.” With this moral question settled, Chomsky believes that the main ‘background’ of this war, a factor that is missing in mainstream media coverage, is “NATO expansion”.

“This is not just my opinion,” said Chomsky, “it is the opinion of every high-level US official in the diplomatic services who has any familiarity with Russia and Eastern Europe. This goes back to George Kennan and, in the 1990s, Reagan’s ambassador Jack Matlock, including the current director of the CIA; in fact, just everybody who knows anything has been warning Washington that it is reckless and provocative to ignore Russia’s very clear and explicit red lines. That goes way before (Vladimir) Putin, it has nothing to do with him; (Mikhail) Gorbachev, all said the same thing. Ukraine and Georgia cannot join NATO, this is the geostrategic heartland of Russia.”

Though various US administrations acknowledged and, to some extent, respected the Russian red lines, the Bill Clinton Administration did not. According to Chomsky, “George H. W. Bush … made an explicit promise to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand beyond East Germany, perfectly explicit. You can look up the documents. It’s very clear. Bush lived up to it. But when Clinton came along, he started violating it. And he gave reasons. He explained that he had to do it for domestic political reasons. He had to get the Polish vote, the ethnic vote. So, he would let the so-called Visegrad countries into NATO. Russia accepted it, didn’t like it but accepted it.”

“The second George Bush,” Chomsky argued, “just threw the door wide open. In fact, even invited Ukraine to join over, despite the objections of everyone in the top diplomatic service, apart from his own little clique, Cheney, Rumsfeld (among others). But France and Germany vetoed it.”

However, that was hardly the end of the discussion. Ukraine’s NATO membership remained on the agenda because of intense pressures from Washington.

“Starting in 2014, after the Maidan uprising, the United States began openly, not secretly, moving to integrate Ukraine into the NATO military command, sending heavy armaments and joining military exercises, military training and it was not a secret. They boasted about it,” Chomsky said.

What is interesting is that current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “was elected on a peace platform, to implement what was called Minsk Two, some kind of autonomy for the eastern region. He tried to implement it. He was warned by right-wing militias that if he persisted, they’d kill him. Well, he didn’t get any support from the United States. If the United States had supported him, he could have continued, we might have avoided all of this. The United States was committed to the integration of Ukraine within NATO.”

The Joe Biden Administration carried on with the policy of NATO expansion. “Just before the invasion,” said Chomsky, “Biden … produced a joint statement … calling for expanding these efforts of integration. That’s part of what was called an ‘enhanced program’ leading to the mission of NATO. In November, it was moved forward to a charter, signed by the Secretary of State.”

Soon after the war, “the United States Department acknowledged that they had not taken Russian security concerns into consideration in any discussions with Russia. The question of NATO, they would not discuss. Well, all of that is provocation. Not a justification but a provocation and it’s quite interesting that in American discourse, it is almost obligatory to refer to the invasion as the ‘unprovoked invasion of Ukraine’. Look it up on Google, you will find hundreds of thousands of hits.”

Chomsky continued, “Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion. By now, censorship in the United States has reached such a level beyond anything in my lifetime. Such a level that you are not permitted to read the Russian position. Literally. Americans are not allowed to know what the Russians are saying. Except, selected things. So, if Putin makes a speech to Russians with all kinds of outlandish claims about Peter the Great and so on, then, you see it on the front pages. If the Russians make an offer for a negotiation, you can’t find it. That’s suppressed. You’re not allowed to know what they are saying. I have never seen a level of censorship like this.”

Regarding his views of the possible future scenarios, Chomsky said that “the war will end, either through diplomacy or not. That’s just logic. Well, if diplomacy has a meaning, it means both sides can tolerate it. They don’t like it, but they can tolerate it. They don’t get anything they want, they get something. That’s diplomacy. If you reject diplomacy, you are saying: ‘Let the war go on with all of its horrors, with all the destruction of Ukraine, and let’s let it go on until we get what we want.’”

By ‘we’, Chomsky was referring to Washington, which simply wants to “harm Russia so severely that it will never be able to undertake actions like this again. Well, what does that mean? It’s impossible to achieve. So, it means, let’s continue the war until Ukraine is devastated. That’s US policy.”

Most of this is not obvious to western audiences simply because rational voices are “not allowed to talk” and because “rationality is not permitted. This is a level of hysteria that I have never seen, even during the Second World War, which I am old enough to remember very well.”

While an alternative understanding of the devastating war in Ukraine is disallowed, the West continues to offer no serious answers or achievable goals, leaving Ukraine devastated and the root causes of the problem in place. “That’s US policy”, indeed.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

Counterpunch, June 28, 2022, https://www.counterpunch.org/

US wants to surround China with missiles – but can’t find Asian country to host them / by Benjamin Norton

US Army ballistic missiles

The United States plans to spend billions of dollars to surround China with missiles. But a US military-sponsored study concluded its Pacific allies South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia are unlikely to host the offensive weapons.

The United States plans to spend tens of billions of dollars to surround China with missiles. But it’s having trouble finding an Asian country willing to host the offensive weapons.

The US military commissioned a study from the RAND Corporation, a Pentagon-backed research group, to assess the feasibility of deploying intermediate-range missiles to the Pacific.

The study closely analyzed the US government’s relations with its five treaty allies in the region: Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand.

Citing “an inability to find a willing partner,” the RAND report concluded that the chance of these nations hosting US ground-based intermediate-range missiles “is very low as long as current domestic political conditions and regional security trends hold.”

The Donald Trump administration withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019. This means Washington can now deploy ground-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, RAND noted.

The study refers to these weapons as ground-based intermediate-range missiles, using the acronym GBIRMs.

“Finding an ally willing to host GBIRMs is more challenging than finding allies willing to host other types of U.S. military forces, such as air bases,” RAND wrote.

RAND conceded that this opposition is logical: “There are several reasons why U.S. allies could deny access to and use of their territories, including fears that hosting such systems could intensify a regional arms race with China; the risk of the deployment being seen as provocative, sparking harsh reactions from Beijing; and fears of entrapment in a conflict between the United States and China that does not directly involve the ally.”

Given this reality, the RAND report suggested other possibilities for the US to militarily encircle and threaten China, including by deploying ground-based intermediate-range missiles instead to Guam, which is a US colony in the Pacific.

RAND concluded that the most realistic approach would be for Washington to strengthen Japan’s military to counter China.

US military to spend $27.4 billion to surround China with missiles

The major Japanese media outlet Nikkei published an article on this RAND study. It noted, “In a six-year investment plan submitted to Congress in February last year, the U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Command made it clear that ground-based weapons will be crucial in breaking through China’s defense systems.”

In 2021, Nikkei exclusively obtained a copy of the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” that US Indo-Pacific Command submitted to Congress.

The strategy revealed that the US military plans on spending $27.4 billion over six years to install precision-strike missiles on the first island chain – the first chain of islands off of the coast of East Asia, which includes Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

The US military proposal lamented that Beijing is challenging Washington’s hegemony in the region, writing, “Without a valid and convincing conventional deterrent, China is emboldened to take action in the region and globally to supplant U.S. interests.”

Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, a former vice president of and lobbyist for weapons corporation Raytheon, said in 2019 that the United States sought to deploy intermediate-range missiles to the Pacific region “sooner, rather than later.”

Acknowledging that the Joe Biden administration has continued Trump’s aggressive policies against China, the RAND report emphasized, “The strategic logic that underlies this thinking did not change with the transition of administrations in Washington.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave a historic speech on May 26 making it clear that the US government is waging a policy of containment and siege against China, similar to the one that Washington pursued against the Soviet Union in the first cold war.

Country by country

The RAND report, which is titled “Ground-Based Intermediate-Range Missiles in the Indo-Pacific Assessing the Positions of U.S. Allies,” was commissioned by the US military’s Pacific Air Forces, and was written by political scientist Jeffrey W. Hornung.

It analyzes Washington’s relations with its five treaty allies in the Pacific region, and explained why they are unlikely to host US ground-based intermediate-range missiles.

RAND wrote, “It is highly unlikely that Thailand, the Philippines, or the Republic of Korea (ROK) would agree to host U.S. GBIRMs, and there is a small likelihood that Australia or Japan would do so, although the possibility that an agreement might be struck with Tokyo is only slightly greater.”

Thailand

“Thailand would be highly unlikely to accept,” the RAND study conceded. It noted that the Thai “government shows a propensity to pursue closer ties with China.”

Philippines

“The Philippines is extremely unlikely to accept the deployment of U.S. GBIRMs,” RAND wrote, adding that the “U.S. alliance with the Philippines is in a state of flux, although it is improving.”

RAND continued: “While the Philippine public and elites generally support the United States and the alliance, President Rodrigo Duterte has pursued policies that negatively affect ties. Specifically, Duterte has advocated closer ties with Beijing while pursuing policies that weaken core pillars of the U.S.-Philippine alliance.”

South Korea

South Korea, officially known as the Republic of Korea (ROK), “retains a close relationship with China,” RAND cautioned.

The study concluded that “a general deterioration of U.S.-ROK relations suggest that it is highly unlikely that the ROK would consent to host U.S. GBIRMs.”

Australia

“The U.S. alliance with Australia is strong. Australia also remains economically close to China, but their bilateral ties have been fraying,” RAND wrote.

Yet “Australia’s historical reluctance to host permanent foreign bases, combined with the geographical distance of Australia from continental Asia, makes this possibility unlikely.”

Japan

The RAND report assessed that “Japan is the regional ally that appears most likely to host U.S. GBIRMs.”

It acknowledged, however, that this possibility “remains low, heavily caveated by the challenge of accepting any increase in U.S. presence and deploying weapons that are explicitly offensive in nature.”

Multipolarista, June 3, 2022, https://multipolarista.com/

The Summit of the Americas Is an Instrument of US Hegemony in Latin America / by Kurt Hackbarth

US president Joe Biden delivers the commencement address during the graduation and commissioning ceremony at the US Naval Academy Memorial Stadium on May 27, 2022, in Annapolis, Maryland. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

The US has attempted to exclude several countries from next month’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. The move has only backfired, prompting a boycott of the summit and renewed calls for an alternative union of Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Earlier this month, the assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, Brian Nichols, gave an interview to the Colombian station NTN24. When asked whether the United States, host of this year’s Summit of the Americas in June, will be inviting Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to the event, Nichols replied:

It’s a key moment in our hemisphere, a moment in which we are confronting many challenges to democracy. . . and the countries you just mentioned . . . do not respect the Inter-American Democratic Charter and therefore, I do not expect them to be present.

Nichols was not the first member of the Joe Biden administration to say this; in March, Juan Gonzalez, a special assistant to the president and member of the National Security Council, had already floated the idea. But coming closer to the date and directly on a Latin American news program, Nichols’s remarks sank like a lead balloon across large parts of the continent.

The Mutiny Spreads

The first signs of incipient dissent arose in an area that might seem unlikely: the Caribbean. On May 5, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) announced that if any American country were excluded from the summit, its fourteen member nations would likely not attend. “The Summit of the Americas is not a meeting of the United States, so it cannot decide who is invited and who is not,” the ambassador for Antigua and Barbuda to the United States, Sir Ronald Sanders, said pointedly.

On May 10, it was the turn of one of the region’s big guns: Mexico. At his daily morning press conference, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) stated that in the event of countries being excluded, he would sit the summit out.

We are not in favor of confrontation; we are in favor of joining forces, of uniting, and although we have differences, we can resolve them, at the very least by listening to each other, through dialogue, but not by excluding anyone. Moreover, no one has the right to exclude [anyone].

AMLO’s high-road approach to boycotting the summit sent the wheels of diplomacy spinning in Washington. Within hours, US ambassador Ken Salazar went running to the National Palace to attempt to persuade AMLO to change his position, while at the daily White House press briefing, Press Secretary Jen Psaki stressed that “the invitations have not yet been issued” and “a final decision has not been made” as to who would be invited.

Such maneuvering, however, failed to quell the mutiny. That same evening, Bolivia’s Luis Arce — elected in the 2020 election that overturned the US-supported coup — announced that he, too, would not attend. The following day, Honduran president Xiomara Castro — whose husband, Manuel Zelaya, was run out of the country in the US-supported coup of 2009 — signaled her opposition.

In an unusual confluence of Left and Right, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro intimated, without stating why, that he would also be a no. A few days later, Guatemala’s Alejandro Giammattei joined them, followed by Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, who announced that even if the Biden administration were to change its mind, he wouldn’t be going anyway.

With critical articles sprouting up in the mainstream media, the Biden administration entered damage-control mode. Over two consecutive days, the administration announced the easing of certain restrictions on Cuba in areas such as flights, remittance limits, and consular services, as well as on Venezuela. A special committee, including former senator and summit advisor Chris Dodd, was tasked with trying to succeed where Salazar had failed in convincing AMLO to attend — but in an initial meeting, failed to do so. First Lady Jill Biden was then dispatched to the region for a six-day tour but to countries where nothing was at stake: Ecuador, Panama, and Costa Rica.

By May 20, the State Department, in the person of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Kerri Hannan, had been reduced to threatening recalcitrant countries that they would “lose an opportunity to engage with the United States” while in a fit of Cold-War paranoia blaming the whole thing on Cuba. And as the days ticked on, the uncertainty, lack of agenda, and lack of invitations remained.

A Grotesque Joke

The United States’ self-appointed authority to certify democracies is, to put it mildly, pretty rich. In the last twenty-five years, two of its presidents have been elected while losing the popular vote, one of whom was installed by five justices of the Supreme Court. Its electoral system allows oligarchs, corporations, and special interests to contribute unlimited sums of money through political action committees to elect congresspeople representing gerrymandered districts to a Congress with an 18 percent approval rating but a 93 percent reelection rate.

Its judicial system hounds whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and journalists like Julian Assange. Its police kill African Americans and other minorities with no pretext. On the day of the most recent presidential inauguration, a mob assaulted the Capitol, forcing those inside to block entryways to the chambers with heavy furniture. None of this is lost on people abroad.

Add the history of US interventionism, and the whole thing becomes a grotesque joke. There isn’t a country in Latin America and the Caribbean that has not suffered, in one form or another, from US-sponsored plots, coups, embargos, and interventions, in the vast majority of cases in order to support the emergence or continuity of pliable dictatorships.

By means of Operation Condor in the 1970s, the CIA and State Department helped spread terror, torture, and disappearances across the near entirety of South America; in the 1980s, it was Central America’s turn. And except for some isolated and carefully worded non-apologies, the US has not only failed to own up to its brutal, interventionist past, but as the recent examples of Honduras and Bolivia have shown, continues to pursue the same policies in a broadly bipartisan manner.

What is more, as has been amply pointed out, Cuba — together with its fellow boogeymen Nicaragua and Venezuela — participated in the 2015 edition of the summit held in Panama, in the wake of Brack Obama’s semi-opening with the island. So as things currently stand, Biden’s summit, in addition to rolling back the modest advances of the president he served under, may also wind up constituting a regression on the lamentable status quo he inherited: in the 2018 edition held in Peru and boycotted by Trump, every country was at least represented. This time, it’s anyone’s guess.

Nothing to Offer

Over and above the smiling high-handedness of Brian Nichols and co, another reason the summit is in such a precarious state is that many countries have succeeded in snuffing out a simple fact: there’s nothing in it for them. Exemplifying the mindset common to the US political elite, Biden — author of the Plan Colombia and the Alliance for Prosperity, which brought a similar “security” model to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — seems only able to conceive of Latin America and the Caribbean in terms of migration and militarization.

Countries throughout the region have watched his administration pour billions into Ukraine while giving short shrift to plans such as AMLO’s that, at a fraction of the cost, would extend two of his more popular social initiatives — the reforestation program Sembrando vida and the youth apprenticeship program Jovenes construyendo el futuro — into Central America.

In a larger sense, the lack of enthusiasm for the summit may be reflective of a broader problem: the exhaustion of the model itself. Born in 1994 in the wake of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Summit of the Americas, through its very Declaration of Principles, was established to “promote prosperity through economic integration and free trade.” The goal, within ten years, was to wrap all of the Americas (save Cuba, of course) into a “Free Trade Area of the Americas” (FTAA).

For this very reason, the 2001 edition of the summit in Quebec was met with fierce anti-globalization protests, building on the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” against the World Trade Organization (WTO). When the FTAA finally foundered among international protests, the work of social movements, and the opposition of pink-tide governments, the Summit of the Americas was stripped of its original raison d’être.

Moreover, the summits are an outgrowth of the Organization for American States (OAS), the Cold-War relic based in Washington and designed to ensure US hegemony throughout the region. While the organization turned a blind eye to the abuses of right-wing dictatorships in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, it was an enthusiastic supporter of the neoliberal free-trade agenda that became the weapon of choice in the ’90s and 2000s. And as the horrendous conduct of Secretary General Luis Almagro during the 2019 elections in Bolivia made clear, it continues to support a good coup whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Strength in Saying No

AMLO, to his credit, has repeatedly called for the OAS to be replaced by a new organization “that is not a lackey of anyone.” And at last year’s summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), he proposed just that: a sort of Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) for the new generation that would include the entire region. Under clear pressure, however, he has pivoted to suggesting that the proposed union should cover all of the Americas — that is, the United States and Canada as well.

This would be a historic error. While the workers, unions, and grassroots movements of the Americas have everything to gain by strengthening their ties, the imperial interests of the United States and Canada simply cannot fit within the same organization as Latin America and the Caribbean. With near inevitability, any such association of the Americas would combine the politics of the OAS with the economics of the FTAA, locking them into an airtight legal structure that no one would be able to escape. And without, in every likelihood, conceding an inch on the free movement of peoples.

In contrast, as the fracas over this year’s summit has amply demonstrated, what spooks the United States is the prospect of a region to its south with even a moderate degree of coordinated decisionmaking. The region should return to AMLO’s original proposal, building on the experience of its integration experiments over the last twenty years, and work to make a union of Latin America and the Caribbean a reality. Then, if it chooses to attend future editions of events like the Summit of the Americas, it can do so on its terms. Meanwhile, as the events of the last few weeks have demonstrated, there is strength in saying no.

Kurt Hackbarth is a writer, playwright, freelance journalist, and the cofounder of the independent media project “MexElects.” He is currently coauthoring a book on the 2018 Mexican election.

Jacobin, May 27, 2022, https://jacobinmag.com/