Blacks for Trump: Columnist asks 'have you lost your mind'

Sarah K. Burris
December 31, 2023 

Atlanta "Blacks for Trump" (Photo by John Stanton/Twitter)

St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Janet Y. Jackson is questioning how young people of color could consider joining Donald Trump's 2024 campaign.

Writing Sunday, the Black columnist explained that young voters never fully experienced the world that Trump wants to usher back into the United States. While some are out celebrating Jackson explained she's injured her foot and is stuck at home instead of dancing.

But as the new year begins she implores readers to renew their fight to protect American democracy and look deeper into why 74 million Americans were willing to support Trump in 2020. The group she wants to focus on is "Blacks for Trump," which she calls an "unfathomable... oxymoron."

"There are the one-issue voters for whom abortion or the economy is their main focus," writes Jackson. "There are those in the upper echelons who seek to preserve the revised tax codes that reduced their current taxes and future estate taxes. Some folks are so enamored of the riches Trump continually brags about that they ignore the financial devastation his multiple bankruptcies (i.e., Trump casinos and Trump University) caused for ordinary people."

She argues that many many voters want to eliminate the Civil Rights era and go back to a White America. There are even people who believe that Trump can somehow stop immigrants from coming into the U.S. "Although short of executing them en masse, I cannot imagine how."

When she first saw the sign she recalled thinking, "Have you lost your mind." But then realized there's a generation of Black voters who never experienced the Civil Rights Movement.

"Most younger Black Americans have never felt the racial animus today that we older people experienced, as recently as 50 years ago," Jackson explains. "These people may never have experienced being ignored at a store counter simply because a white person appeared at the counter subsequently, but I have.

"Nor could they believe the consequences of daring to object to this slight. Few could imagine being expected to step off a sidewalk simply to avoid coming face-to-face with a white person — I have. If these Black Trump supporters were always welcomed in any school or at any public pool, it’s the sacrifices we older people made that are responsible."

She explains that most of us want to believe that life is no different for a person of color than a White person, but all one must do is look at the dozens of unarmed Black people who were shot and killed by police.

"Black lives will not be better under a racist misogynistic bully," she explains. "which the former president clearly is, despite his protestations. In rally after rally, Trump is quoted saying something to the effect of They’re taking our country."


She closes by reminding folks that there were many who died for their rights to succeed, to live, to love and vote. Young folks would do good to remember that.

Wall Street Journal editor schools Fox about Biden's 'better and better' economy

Sarah K. Burris
December 31, 2023 

Joe Biden (Brendan Smialowski AFP/File)

The Wall Street Journal is known for its far-right leanings, but on New Year's Eve associate editor John Bussey revealed to Fox viewers that the top issue in 2024 will likely be the economy, and Joe Biden is winning.

He began by citing former President Donald Trump's criminal prosecutions he'll be facing in 2024 after already being found to have sexually abused E. Jean Carroll by a civil court.

"This may also weigh on the undecided voters," said Bussey. "But primary — first and foremost issue for voters is going to be the economy. It always is — pocketbook issues. And in that regard, President Biden is going to have a better and better story to tell as the year unfolds. It's a strong economy now. Inflation is coming down. The interest rates are coming down. The job market is strong. They're going to be pounding on that over the next ten months."

The host tried to cut him off, asking if the numbers would get better fast enough for everyday Americans to feel them," implying that most families don't detect the positive turn in the economy.

"Yeah, that's the critical question, isn't it? I mean, the presumption is that six months before an election, the voter has kind of made up their mind. While we're not quite there at six months. And inflation caused by the pandemic, not by the Trump administration nor the Biden administration, but by the supply-chain shortages from the pandemic — that inflation is still with us. Prices are 19 percent higher than they were before the pandemic hit, caused by those pandemic-related supply chain problems. So that's going to weigh on the voters' minds. But they're also going to see more discounts in stores. Gas prices are way down. Inflation is one-third of what it was at its peak. Interest rates dropping. Mortgage rates dropping. We'll see if four months is going to be fast enough."

See his comments in the video below or at the link here.

The link between climate change and a spate of rare disease outbreaks in 2023

Zoya Teirstein, Grist
December 31, 2023 

Transmission electron microscope photo of vibrio bacteria / Creative Endeavors / Shutterstock

A 16-month-old boy was playing in a splash pad at a country club in Little Rock, Arkansas, this summer when water containing a very rare and deadly brain-eating amoeba went up his nose. He died a few days later in the hospital. The toddler wasn’t the first person in the United States to contract the freshwater amoeba, Naegleria fowleri, this year. In February, a man in Florida died after rinsing his sinuses with unboiled water — the first Naegleria fowleri-linked death to occur in winter in the U.S.

2023 was also an active year for Vibrio vulnificus, a type of flesh-eating bacteria. There were 11 deaths connected to the bacteria in Florida, three deaths in North Carolina, and another three deaths in New York and Connecticut. Then there was the first-ever locally transmitted case of mosquito-borne dengue fever in Southern California in October, followed by another case a couple of weeks later.

Scientists have warned that climate change would alter the prevalence and spread of disease in the U.S., particularly those caused by pathogens that are sensitive to temperature. This year’s spate of rare illnesses may have come as a surprise to the uninitiated, but researchers who have been following the way climate change influences disease say 2023 represents the continuation of a trend they expect will become more pronounced over time: The geographic distribution of pathogens and the timing of their emergence are undergoing a shift.

“These are broadly the patterns that we would expect,” said Rachel Baker, assistant professor of epidemiology, environment, and society at Brown University. “Things start moving northward, expand outside the tropics.” The number of outbreaks Americans see each year, said Colin Carlson, a global change biologist studying the relationship between global climate change, biodiversity loss, and emerging infectious diseases at Georgetown University, “is going to continue to increase.”

That’s because climate change can have a profound effect on the factors that drive disease, such as temperature, extreme weather, and even human behavior. A 2021 study found water temperature was among the top environmental factors affecting the distribution and abundance of Naegleria fowleri, which thrives in water temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit but can also survive frigid winters by forming cysts in lake or pond sediment. The amoeba infects people when it enters the nasal canal and, from there, the brain. “As surface water temperatures increase with climate change, it is likely that this amoeba will pose a greater threat to human health,” the study said.

Vibrio bacteria, which has been called the “microbial barometer of climate change,” is affected in a similar way. The ocean has absorbed the vast majority of human-caused warming over the past century and a half, and sea surface temperatures, especially along the nation’s coasts, are beginning to rise precipitously as a result. Studies that have mapped Vibrio vulnificus growth show the bacteria stretching northward along the eastern coastline of the U.S. in lockstep with rising temperatures. Hotter summers also lead to more people seeking bodies of water to cool off in, which may influence the number of human exposures to the bacteria, a study said. People get infected by consuming contaminated shellfish or exposing an open wound — no matter how small — to Vibrio-contaminated water.

Mosquitoes breed in warm, moist conditions and can spread diseases like dengue when they bite people. Studies show the species of mosquito that carries dengue, which is endemic in many parts of the Global South, is moving north into new territory as temperatures climb and flooding becomes more frequent and extreme. A study from 2019 warned that much of the southeastern U.S. is likely to become hospitable to dengue by 2050.

Other warmth-loving pathogens and carriers of pathogens are on the move, too — some of them affecting thousands of people a year. Valley fever, a fungal disease that can progress into a disfiguring and deadly illness, is spreading through a West that is drier and hotter than it used to be. The lone star tick, an aggressive hunter that often leaves the humans it bites with a life-long allergy to red meat, is expanding northward as winter temperatures grow milder and longer breeding seasons allow for a larger and more distributed tick population.

The effect that rising temperatures have on these diseases doesn’t necessarily signal that every death linked to a brain-eating amoeba or Vibrio that occurred this year wouldn’t have happened in the absence of climate change — rare pathogens were claiming lives long before anthropogenic warming began altering the planet’s dynamics.

Future analyses may look at the outbreaks that took place in 2023 individually to determine whether rising temperatures or some other climate change-related factor played a role. What is clear is that climate change is creating more opportunities for rare infectious diseases to crop up. Daniel R. Brooks, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto and author of a book on climate change and emerging diseases, calls this “pathogen pollution,” or “the accumulation of a lot of little emergences.”

State and local health departments have few tools at their disposal for predicting anomalous disease outbreaks, and doctors often aren’t familiar with diseases that aren’t endemic to their region.

But health institutions can take steps to limit the spread of rare climate-driven pathogens. Medical schools could incorporate climate-sensitive diseases into their curricula so their students know how to recognize these burgeoning threats no matter where in the U.S. they eventually land.

A rapid test for Naegleria fowleri in water samples already exists and could be used by health departments to test pools and other summer-time hot spots for the amoeba. States could conduct real-time monitoring of beaches for Vibrio bacteria via satellite. Cities can monitor the larvae of the mosquito species that spreads dengue and other diseases and spray pesticides to reduce the numbers of adult mosquitoes.

“If we were looking proactively for pathogens before they caused disease, we could better anticipate local outbreaks,” Brooks said. In other words, he said, we should be “finding them before they find us.”

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Business of War Is Booming as Orders Surge at Top Global Arms Firms

"The order books of the world's biggest defense companies are near record highs," a new Financial Times analysis reveals.

Visitors look at the BARAK (top), PAC-3 MSE (middle), and THAAD (bottom) missiles from Lockheed Martin on day one of the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) fair at ExCel on September 12, 2023 in London.
(Photo: Leon Neal/Getty Images)

BRETT WILKINS

COMMONDREAMS
Dec 28, 2023

Orders at many of the world's biggest arms companies are "near record highs" due to rising geopolitical tensions in recent years, an analysis published Wednesday by Financial Times revealed.

The London-based newspaper analyzed the order books of the world's 15 top arms makers and found their combined backlogs were $777.6 billion at the end of 2022—a 10% increase from 2020.

According to FT:
The trend's momentum continued into 2023. In the first six months of this year—the latest comprehensive quarterly data available—combined backlogs at these companies stood at $764 billion, swelling their future pipeline of work as governments kept placing orders.

The sustained spending has spurred investors' interest in the sector. [Member of Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment's] global benchmark for the industry's stocks is up 25% over the past 12 months. Europe's Stoxx aerospace and defense stocks index has risen by more than 50% over the same period.

Private equity firms including BlackRock, Vanguard, Capital Group, and State Street are dominant or major shareholders in most of the weapons companies analyzed by FT. These Wall Street speculators are "the ones driving the perpetual wars to maintain their bankrupt financial system," according to the International Schiller Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

"In the U.S., the defense budget was $858 billion in 2023, and it is rapidly heading towards $1 trillion per year," the institute said last week. "Meanwhile our highways and railroads, our bridges and tunnels, our hospitals and schools are crumbling. And the rest of the world also desperately needs American technology and capital goods to help their development, working with China and Russia, rather than driving the planet towards World War III against them."



The West's scramble to arm Ukraine's homeland defense against ongoing Russian invasion and occupation played a significant role in surging arms orders.

For example, Hanwha Aerospace, South Korea's largest weapons manufacturer, recorded the biggest increase in new orders—FT says its backlog soared from $2.4 billion in 2020 to $15.2 billion at the end of last year—largely due to sales of K-9 self-propelled howitzers to countries supplying arms to Ukraine.

Rheinmetall, a German firm that makes Panther main battle tanks, nearly doubled its backlog from $14.8 billion to $27.9 billion, also in large part because of Ukraine-related sales.

However, many of the company's swollen backlogs predate the Ukraine war, which began in February 2022.

"The reality is lead times for policymaking, budgets, and placing orders are so long that the invasion of almost two years ago is only just appearing in orders and barely in revenues, except for a few shorter-cycle specialists such as Rheinmetall," Nick Cunningham, an analyst at the insurance firm Agency Partners, told FT.

Israel's assault on Gaza—which began in October and is already one of the most devastating in modern history, with an average of 1,000 bombs dropped daily on the densely populated strip—is not included in FT's analysis, but is a boon to arms-makers and a large part of the reason why last year's record backlogs are expected to reach new heights in 2023 and beyond.

As Common Dreams reported earlier this year, global military spending rose to an all-time high of over $2.2 trillion last year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Israel’s War Spending

BY BINOY KAMPMARK

DECEMBER 29, 2023
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Photograph Source: Michael Shvadron, Israel Defense Forces – CC BY 2.0

The Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron is worried.  He is keeping an eye on the ballooning costs of his country’s war against Gaza and the Palestinians.  Initially, the Netanyahu government promised to increase its defence budget by NIS 20 billion (US$5.48 billion) per annum in the aftermath of the war.  But a document from the Finance Ministry presented to the Knesset Finance Committee on December 25 suggests that the number is NIS 10 billion greater.

The Finance Ministry is also projecting that the war against Hamas will cost the country’s budget somewhere in the order of NIS 50 billion (US$13.8 billion).  NIS 9.6 billion will go towards such expenses as evacuating residents close to the borders of the country’s north and south, buttressing emergency forces and rehabilitation purposes.

The increased military budget is predictable and in keeping with the proclivities of the Israeli state.  What is striking is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has regarded Israeli defence expenditure as generally inadequate when looked at as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP).  Between 2012 and 2022, military expenditure as a percentage of GDP fell from 5.64% to 4.51%.   Doing so enables him to have two bites at the same rotten cherry: to claim he was blameless for that very decline in military expenditure, and to show that he intends to rectify a problem he was hardly blameless for.

Even in war time, Netanyahu is proving oleaginous in his policy making.  The mid-December supplementary budget for 2023, coming in at NIS 28.9 billion, was intended to cover the ongoing conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah.  But its approval was hardly universal.  Opponents of the budget noted the allocation of hundreds of millions of shekels towards “coalition funds” intended for non-war related projects relevant to parliamentarians and ministers.  Benny Gantz’s National Unity party, a coalition partner, would have nothing to do with it.  Intelligence minister Gila Gamliel was absent from the vote, while Yuli Edelstein of Netanyahu’s own Likud Party abstained.  Opposition leader Yair Lapid pointed the finger at the rising budget deficit.

On December 18, Yaron gave vent to some of his concerns.  “During this period, more than at any other time, and as investors, rating agencies, financial markets and the public as a whole are carefully examining policymaking in Israel, it is necessary to manage economic policy – fiscal and monetary – with great responsibility.”

Body counts interest Yaron less than budget figures and reputational damage in the markets, though killing Palestinians is proving an expensive business.  “The government will have to find the right balance between financing war expenses and the expected increase in the defence budget and the need to continue investing in other civilian budgets, which are already low, in particular in growth engines such as infrastructure and education.”

Yaron has every reason to assume that costs will continue to balloon.  For one thing, Netanyahu’s idea of peace in the current conflict reads like a blueprint for ongoing, lengthy massacre, accompanied by permanent mass incarceration: the destruction of Hamas itself, the demilitarisation of Gaza and a Palestinian society free of radical elements.  This is a nightmare to both humanitarians and the belt-tighteners in the Finance Ministry.

Notably, the plan says nothing about Palestinian statehood, which, in the scheme of Israel’s aims, has been euthanised. Gaza, the designated monstrosity Israel nourished as a supposedly useful tool to keep Palestinian ambitions in check, is to be turned into a prison entity that seems awfully much like it was prior to the October 7 attacks by Hamas.  (The cruel, in such cases, lack imagination.)

A “temporary security zone on the perimeter of Gaza and an inspection mechanism on the border between Gaza and Egypt” will be established in accordance with “Israel’s security needs”.  The zone will also serve to prevent “smuggling of weapons into the territory”, which sounds much like the original blockade, lasting 14 years, that was meant to achieve the same purpose.

The Israeli PM is, however, promising that the destruction of Hamas will take place “in full compliance with international law”, begging the question what sort of international law he is consulting.  Given various official statements from Netanyahu’s cabinet and the Israeli Defence Forces, it must be either a law of jungle provenance or one applicable to animal kind.  That same standard of legal analysis has permitted the generously expansive massacre of over 20,000 Palestinians, a staggering number of them children, the ongoing flattening of Gaza, and the utter destruction of critical infrastructure.

Given that Israeli law, alongside military and administrative policy, does nothing other than encourage the radicalisation of Palestinians and the fertilising of the Jihadist soil, this is charmingly delusionary.  The current war will simply prove to be the same as previous ones, protean, adjustable, and shape changing.  Conflict will simply continue by other means, a continued growth of flowering hatreds, leaving Israel a butcher’s bill of shekels and casualties it is only now chewing over.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption

The $1.5 trillion in military outlays each year is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.


US ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield abstains during a vote to approve a resolution that "demands" all sides in the Israel-Hamas conflict allow the "safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale" at UN headquarters in New York on December 22, 2023.
(Photo by Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images)

JEFFREY D. SACHS
Dec 26, 2023

Common Dreams

On the surface, US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population.

In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders.

Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton.

What gives?

The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money.

As a result, the American people are losing big. The failed wars since 2000 have cost them around $5 trillion in direct outlays, or around $40,000 per household. Another $2 trillion or so will be spent in the coming decades on veterans’ care. Beyond the costs directly incurred by Americans, we should also recognize the horrendously high costs suffered abroad, in millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars of destruction to property and nature in the war zones.

The costs continue to mount. US Military-linked outlays in 2024 will come to around $1.5 trillion, or roughly $12,000 per household, if we add the direct Pentagon spending, the budgets of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, the budget of the Veteran’s Administration, the Department of Energy nuclear weapons program, the State Department’s military-linked “foreign aid” (such as to Israel), and other security-related budget lines. Hundreds of billions of dollars are money down the drain, squandered in useless wars, overseas military bases, and a wholly unnecessary arms build-up that brings the world closer to WWIII.

Yet to describe these gargantuan costs is also to explain the twisted “rationality” of US foreign policy. The $1.5 trillion in military outlays is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House, Pentagon and CIA.

Each division uses public power for private gain through insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying outlays. Interestingly, the Health Industry division rivals the Foreign Policy division as a remarkable financial scam. America’s health outlays totaled an astounding $4.5 trillion in 2022, or roughly $36,000 per household, by far the highest health costs in the world, while America ranked roughly 40th in the world among nations in life expectancy. A failed health policy translates into very big bucks for the health industry, just as a failed foreign policy translates into mega-revenues of the military-industrial complex.

The more wars, of course, the more business.

The Foreign Policy division is run by a small, secretive and tight-knit coterie, including the top brass of the White House, the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate, and the major military firms including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. There are perhaps a thousand key individuals involved in setting policy. The public interest plays little role.

The key foreign policy makers run the operations of 800 US overseas military bases, hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, and the war operations where the equipment is deployed. The more wars, of course, the more business. The privatization of foreign policy has been greatly amplified by the privatization of the war business itself, as more and more “core” military functions are handed out to the arms manufacturers and to contractors such as Haliburton, Booz Allen Hamilton, and CACI.

In addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, there are important business spillovers from the military and CIA operations. With military bases in 80 countries around the world, and CIA operations in many more, the US plays a large, though mostly covert role, in determining who rules in those countries, and thereby on policies that shape lucrative deals involving minerals, hydrocarbons, pipelines, and farm and forest land. The US has aimed to overthrow at least 80 governments since 1947, typically led by the CIA through the instigation of coups, assassinations, insurrections, civil unrest, election tampering, economic sanctions, and overt wars. (For a superb study of US regime-change operations from 1947 to 1989, see Lindsey O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change, 2018).

In addition to business interests, there are of course ideologues who truly believe in America’s right to rule the world. The ever-warmongering Kagan family is the most famous case, though their financial interests are also deeply intertwined with the war industry. The point about ideology is this. The ideologists have been wrong on nearly every occasion and long ago would have lost their bully pulpits in Washington but for their usefulness as warmongers. Wittingly or not, they serve as paid performers for the military-industrial complex.

There is one persistent inconvenience for this ongoing business scam. In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth. (A similar contradiction of course applies to overpriced healthcare, government bailouts of Wall Street, oil-industry perks, and other scams). The American people rarely support the machinations of US foreign policy when they occasionally hear the truth. America’s wars are not waged by popular demand but by decisions from on high. Special measures are needed to keep the people away from decision making.

In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth.

The first such measure is unrelenting propaganda. George Orwell nailed it in 1984 when “the Party” suddenly switched the foreign enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia without a word of explanation. The US essentially does the same. Who is the US gravest enemy? Take your pick, according to the season. Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hugo Chavez, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, Hamas, have all played the role of “Hitler” in US propaganda. White House spokesman John Kirby delivers the propaganda with a smirk on his face, signaling that he too knows that what he is saying is ludicrous, albeit mildly entertaining.

The propaganda is amplified by the Washington think tanks that live off of donations by military contractors and occasionally foreign governments that are part of the US scam operations. Think of the Atlantic Council, CSIS, and of course the ever-popular Institute for the Study of War, brought to you by the major military contractors.

The second is to hide the costs of the foreign policy operations. In the 1960s, the US Government made the mistake of forcing the American people to bear the costs of the military-industrial complex by drafting young people to fight in Vietnam and by raising taxes to pay for the war. The public erupted in opposition.

From the 1970s onward the government has been far more clever. The government ended the draft, and made military service a job for hire rather than a public service, backed by Pentagon outlays to recruit soldiers from lower economic strata. It also abandoned the quaint idea that government outlays should be funded by taxes, and instead shifted the military budget to deficit spending which protects it from popular opposition that would be triggered if it were tax-funded.

It has also suckered client states such as Ukraine to fight America’s wars on the ground, so that no American body bags would spoil the US propaganda machine. Needless to say, US masters of war such as Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, and McConnell remain thousands of miles away from the frontlines. The dying is reserved for Ukrainians. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) defended American military aid to Ukraine as money well spent because it is “without a single American service woman or man injured or lost,” somehow not dawning on the good Senator to spare the lives of Ukrainians, who have died by the hundreds of thousands in a US-provoked war over NATO enlargement.

This system is underpinned by the complete subordination of the U.S. Congress to the war business, to avoid any questioning of the over-the-top Pentagon budgets and the wars instigated by the Executive Branch. The subordination of Congress works as follows. First, the Congressional oversight of war and peace is largely assigned to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which largely frame the overall Congressional policy (and the Pentagon budget). Second, the military industry (Boeing, Raytheon, and the rest) funds the campaigns of the Armed Services Committee members of both parties. The military industries also spend vast sums on lobbying in order to provide lucrative salaries to retiring members of Congress, their staffs, and families, either directly in military businesses or in Washington lobbying firms.

It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon.

The hacking of Congressional foreign policy is not only by the US military-industrial complex. The Israel lobby long ago mastered the art of buying the Congress. America’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid state and war crimes in Gaza makes no sense for US national security and diplomacy, not to speak of human decency. They are the fruits of Israel lobby investments that reached $30 million in campaign contributions in 2022, and that will vastly top that in 2024.

When Congress reassembles in January, Biden, Kirby, Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, McConnell, Blumenthal and their ilk will tell us that we absolutely must fund the losing, cruel, and deceitful war in Ukraine and the ongoing massacre and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, lest we and Europe and the free world, and perhaps the solar system itself, succumb to the Russian bear, the Iranian mullahs, and the Chinese Communist Party. The purveyors of foreign policy disasters are not being irrational in this fear-mongering. They are being deceitful and extraordinarily greedy, pursuing narrow interests over those of the American people.

It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon. This overhaul should start in 2024 by rejecting any more funding for the disastrous Ukraine War and Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Peacemaking, and diplomacy, not military spending, is the path to a US foreign policy in the public interest.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


JEFFREY D. SACHS is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of "A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism" (2020). Other books include: "Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable" (2017) and "The Age of Sustainable Development," (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

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Haley Shows the GOP Base Is All About Racism and Oligarchy


As Nikki Haley well knows, the Confederacy rose up not simply to preserve slavery and the Southern oligarchy, but to extend that oligarchy to the rest of the United States.


Former UN ambassador and 2024 presidential hopeful Nikki Haley speaks at a campaign town hall event at Hilton Garden Inn in Lebanon, New Hampshire on December 28, 2023. 

(Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP) 


THOM HARTMANN
Dec 30, 2023ThomHartmann.Com

First, a curious person in her New Hampshire town hall this week asked Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, “What caused the Civil War?”

You could almost see the gears turning in her head, as she backs away from the questioner and takes a long pause, knowing that if she says “slavery” she’ll offend the white racist base of the GOP.

Ron DeSantis, after all, had to go so far as to change the curriculum in Florida’s public schools to assert that enslaved people “learned skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Haley, of course, is no idiot. She was governor of South Carolina, the first state to secede from the union after Abe Lincoln was elected president in 1860. Her state’s December 20, 1860 Declaration of Secession lays it out clearly:
The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.

We affirm that these ends for which this government was instituted have been defeated, and the government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the nonslaveholding states.

Those states have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in 15 of the states and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other states.

They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.


So, lamely, Haley recites the ancient Southern excuse, that slavery was merely capitalism, that “freedom” means the freedom of white people to own other human beings:
I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run—the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.

I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people.

Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life. They need to make sure that you have freedom. We need to have capitalism. We need to have economic freedom. We need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.


When she was called out on it by the questioner, who said he was “astonished” that her answer didn’t mention slavery, she tried to be glib, asking rhetorically, “What do you want me to say about slavery?”

When the gaffe went viral, Haley tried to clean it up by saying that “of course” slavery was a cause of the Civil War, and, later, blaming the “gotcha” question on a “Democratic plant” who’d sneakily inserted himself into her town hall.

The simple reality is that the pro-slavery South is still very much with us, and is still—after 163 years—trying to make the case that democracy should be replaced with a strongman white supremacist oligarchy.

As I wrote in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, the South had ceased to be a democracy by the 1830s and by the time of the Civil War was a full-blown police state run by a few thousand morbidly rich families who lived and acted like the feudal lords of ancient Europe.

And, most interesting, a disruptive new technology—the invention of the cotton gin—drove the process.

Just as the agricultural revolution birthed humanity’s first documented oligarchies, the invention of the cotton gin and its widespread use by 1820 birthed the first American oligarchy, one that eventually rose up and challenged democracy itself in a bloody Civil War.

The backstory is fascinating, and helps us understand Nikki Haley’s blithering. Today’s Republicans are using the new technology of social media to try to impose a 21st century version of the Confederate oligarchy and its exploitation of poor people.

From the century of the American Revolution until the early 1800s, the main sources of power that fueled America were twofold: wood and human labor.

In the North, that labor was often supplied by European convicts or indentured European immigrants who committed to a certain number of years of free labor in exchange for transportation from Europe, or simply by poor immigrants willing to do pretty much any job for very low pay.

As transatlantic commerce exploded through the late 1700s and early 1800s, the increasing numbers of ships brought with them a dramatic decrease in the cost of the trip for a new immigrant from Europe to America.

More and more people could avoid an indenture and simply pay their own way, so during this period, indentured servitude in the North pretty much faded away, replaced in some areas by prison labor but most often replaced by cheap immigrant labor.

In the South, these forms of labor existed, but on the plantations where the only way to pick and clean cotton was with fingers and hands, the labor was mostly supplied by enslaved people of African ancestry.

Then came a technological change that had as much impact on the South as Gutenberg’s printing press did on Europe centuries before and social media is having on us today.

It transformed the economics of the South from a hardscrabble existence into one of opulence and great wealth in a very few hands; changed the culture of the South from one that was apologetic for slavery and oligarchy into one that openly called both good things that should spread across the rest of the nation and around the world; and changed the politics of the South from a mostly democratic republic into an openly tyrannical autocracy.

Where Cotton Is King, Cotton Makes Kings

Cotton could be a reliably profitable crop for the Southern plantation owners; it was easy to grow, it could be stored for years if necessary, and there was worldwide demand for it. Its biggest problem was the seeds.

What we call cotton is a fibrous part of the “fruit” of the cotton plant. After the flower is pollinated, the seeds form and mature in a pod or boll along with a protective superstructure of thin fibers that we call cotton.

Picking cotton is work that in the period from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War was never automated, so it required a fair amount of human labor. Far more difficult, though, was the process of disentangling the cotton seeds from the cotton fibers that surrounded them. It could take an entire day for a person to clean a single pound of cotton by hand.

In 1794, Eli Whitney figured out how to make a drum into which raw cotton could be dumped, then spun with hundreds of tiny hooks that would pull the cotton fibers out through a mesh. The mesh was too fine for the seeds to pass through, so as the drum turned, the cotton accumulated outside it, leaving behind in the drum nothing but seeds.

Whitney wrote to his father:
One man and a horse will do more than fifty men with the old machines.... Tis generally said by those who know anything about it, that I shall make a Fortune by it.


His “cotton gin” (“gin” was short for “engine”) took the South by storm in the first two decades of the 1800s. Its biggest impact, though, was on the fate of democracy in the South.

Now that one machine could clean as much cotton as 50 people, every cotton plantation faced the possibility that it could produce 50 times as much cotton (and profit), if only it had 50 times as much land to grow the cotton on and 50 times as many people to pick it.

The wealthiest among the Southern plantation owners began to buy up small farms and plantations the way big agricultural corporations would later buy out American Midwestern farmers when Reagan stopped enforcing America’s anti-monopoly laws in the early 1980s.

The smaller farmers who couldn’t afford a cotton gin were faced with financial ruin from their giant competitors, and they didn’t have Willie Nelson to sing “Farm Aid” fundraising concerts to help them buy equipment to compete.

Like Midwestern farmers in the 1980s, the smaller Southern cotton farmers either sold out or were bankrupted and driven off their land; many became tenant farmers on what had previously been their own property.

Illinois’ Rep. John Farnsworth noted the trend in his 1864 speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives:
[With t]he invention of the cotton gin, the cultivation made it profitable to raise men and women for the Southern market. The price of slaves was enhanced; from being worth $250 they went up to $1,200 and $1,300.

Then the greed for power took possession of the slaveholders, and the avarice of these men overleaped itself and they became clamorous for the extension of slavery. The bounds were too narrow for them. They became ambitious of a nation that should be founded upon ‘the cornerstone of slavery.’

Then it was, Mr. Speaker, that the slave power got the control of the Government, of the executive, legislative, and judicial departments. Then it was that they got possession of the high places of society. They took possession of the churches. They took possession of the lands. Then it became criminal for a man to open his lips in denunciation of the evil and sin of slaveholding.

Then followed... the attempt to expel John Quincy Adams; the throttling of the right to petition; suppressing the freedom of the press; the suppression of the freedom of the mails; all these things followed the taking possession of the Government and lands by the slave power, until we were the slaves of slaves, being chained to the car of this slave Juggernaut...

Then came the conventions of the rival political parties, in which they declared that the agitation of this vexed question should cease. But it would not cease, for the slave power was still clamoring for more, more, more!

Then came the [Dred Scott] decision of the Supreme Court. Why, sir, the spirit of slavery took possession of that court and instigated the palsied arm of a judge upon the brink of the grave to attempt to snatch the charter of human liberty from the throne of the Almighty.


The Southern oligarchs were on the rise.

The Oligarchs’ War

By the 1830s, with the recent death of nearly every member of the Founding generation and the rise of plantation oligarch Andrew Jackson’s vice president, John C. Calhoun, and his nullification crisis, the South was firmly in the economic, political, and social hands of a small number of uberwealthy plantation-based oligarchs made fabulously rich by the invention of the cotton gin.

In 1913, looking back on the 1787 Constitutional Convention, historian Henry Leffmann wrote:
Some of the members of the Convention doubtless believed that the question [of slavery] would settle itself thru the evolution of labor conditions. Ellsworth, of Connecticut, said, ‘Let us not intermeddle. As the population increases, poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless.’ This result might have been attained much earlier than it was if the cotton-gin had not been invented.


As Forrest A. Nabors wrote in his brilliant book From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction:
A new generation of rulers reshaped the South around their new ruling principle... The development of Southern oligarchy portended the rupture of the union, regardless of the ties that bound them together, because no ties, physical, legal, or otherwise, can overcome the difference between fundamentally opposed types of political regimes.


And it was the technological revolution that Eli Whitney had birthed that gave them the wealth and power to try to pull it off.

Wisconsin Sen. Timothy Howe laid it out in an 1864 speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives:
If the cotton gin had not been invented, slaveholding would not have been profitable. If slaveholding had not been profitable, slaveholders would not have been rich. If slaveholders had not been rich, they would not have been arrogant. If they had not been arrogant, four hundred thousand slaveholders would not have presumed to challenge dominion over 20 million freemen.

Slavery without the cotton gin would have been a monster wrong, but it would not have been dangerous to the republic. The cotton gin without slavery would have been of twice the value it has been and still would not have been dangerous to anyone. Together they have proved fatal to the peace of the nation.


On December 18, 1860, Tennessee Sen. Andrew Johnson (soon to be vice president and then president) said on the floor of the Senate, speaking in favor of the right of the Southern states to secede:
When the Union was formed, 12 of the 13 states were slaveholding; and if the cotton gin had not been invented, there would not probably today have been an African slave in North America.


Historian Forrest Nabors extensively cites (and informed me of) Rep. John Farnsworth of Illinois, as well as Sen. Timothy Howe of Wisconsin, who argued that the oligarchy in the South had become so strong that they weren’t just trying to be left alone in the lead-up to the Civil War—they actually wanted to dominate the North.
"Such, then, I find to be the cause and the purpose of the rebellion,” said Howe. “It was not to secure toleration for slavery within the seceding Slates, but to compel the adoption of slavery by the nation.”


In other words—as Nikki Haley well knows—the Confederacy rose up not simply to preserve slavery and the Southern oligarchy, but to extend that oligarchy to the rest of the United States.

The South has, since the 1830s, been the epicenter of an anti-democratic, anti-American plot to replace our representative government with rule by the morbidly rich.

And they’ve been doing it by creating a caste system in America and using new technologies to keep it in place so they can exploit the labor of non-white, imprisoned, and poor workers.

Which explains why Nikki Haley had such a struggle with the question, and the media largely dances around efforts to explain it: oligarchy is the ultimate work today’s Republican Party, relying heavily on the new technology of social media owned by rightwing billionaires.

Unless we stop them at the ballot box this coming November.

© 2023 Thom Hartmann

THOM HARTMANN
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
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Scientist pays homage to Egyptian icon Imhotep


Physics lecturer and DJ Dr Mark Richards is on a mission to boost the numbers of Black STEM academics

MISSION: Scientist and DJ Dr Mark Richards

SCIENTIST AND DJ Dr Mark Richards credits ancient Egyptian Imhotep as his inspiration for taking his physics career to the next level. Physician, musician, and astronomer Imhotep, who lived in Nubia, southern Egypt, over 4,500 years ago, invented the first step pyramids.

Dr Richards insists Imhotep, who served under pharaoh Djoser as his high priest, is proof that Black people made huge strides in science “from the very start”.

These historical achievements stand in stark contrast to the present day, in which there are officially no Black chemistry or physics professors in the UK.

Dr Richards, physics lecturer at Imperial College London, is on a mission to change this and has helped drive forward a Royal Society fellowship scheme to take Black postgraduates to the next level.

“I read about Imhotep when I was doing my PhD and when I read about this guy doing all these things, even though it was from 4,500 years ago, it’s quite clear that we’ve been involved in science from the very beginning[1]ning”, Dr Richards told The Voice.

Founder of The Blackett Lab Family, a network of Black scientists, Dr Richards also DJs under the name DJ Kemist.

INSPIRATIONS: Imhotep, who lived in Egypt over 4,500 years ago, invented the first step pyramids

“I was an undergraduate chemist, but for a long time people just assumed I was a ‘street chemist’”, he laughs. “But no, I’m actually a chemist!”

He added: “We are natural scientists in many ways. Even on the music side, I’ve done workshops around how sound system innovation has worked its way into modern PA systems now.

“It was sound system culture that innovated it. Even sound effects in music, like the foghorns and the sirens.

“In Hip Hop culture there’s also been lots of technical innovation, like the crossfader on a mixer to mix from one disk to another, which was developed by Grandmaster Flash, and he did electronics at high school. Now every mixer has a crossfader.

“The slip-mat is the same sort of thing, to reduce friction so you can scratch and mix records etcetera; that was developed again by Grandmaster Flash.

“His mum was a seamstress, and he got the right type of material and put starch on it to make it more slippery… but what we’re not so good at is saying ‘ah this is a novel idea, let me get this patented so that when everyone else adopts it we make the money from it.’ As a community, we do innovate, we do create; we just don’t seem to own much of what we create.”

In 2021, the Royal Society released a study of Black academics in STEM subjects over a ten-year period, which found that White students were twice as likely as Black students to graduate with First class honours. Black students were also three times more likely than White students to pick up a third-class degree.

The degree results contrast with the fact these Black students had got similar grades as their White counterparts to study the courses in the first place.

Experiment

Dr Richards, who was on the Royal Society working group that led the study, commented: “As a scientist, if you’re expecting one result and you’re always getting another result which is consistently below what you’re expecting, then you know that there’s some kind of systemic bias in the system. They’d call it a systemic bias if it was an experiment.

“That bias is not there because Black students are genetically disposed to under-performing, so it must be something.

“There is higher attrition rate as you go through the pipeline; the more you go into these elite spaces, the less likely you are to see yourselves in those spaces.”

According to the Higher Education Statistics Authority there are no Black chemistry or physics professors in Britain, however Dr Richards says there are a couple. However, the figures are rounded down to zero when numbers are less than five to avoid people being identified.

Grandmaster Flash, who studied electronics at high school, developed the crossfade

The Royal Society initiative aims to tackle these disparities by offering five fellowships per year worth £680,000 per recipient, which will allow them to establish their own research teams.

Dr Richards paid homage to African American professor James ‘Jim’ Sylvester Gates, an expert in string theory physics — the study of subatomic string particles holding the universe together — for using west African Adinkra symbols in his work, to ensure the footprint of historical African advances lives on.

Conversation

He added: “It was Marcus Garvey who said nearly a hundred years ago: ‘To parents, you must teach the higher developments of science in your homes, for with science and religion is our only hope of withstanding the evil designs of modern materialism.’

“Now if you look at where we are today, if we think about the role that science and technology plays increasingly in pretty much every aspect of our lives, if we are not part of that conversation, then we’ll just end up becoming consumers or slaves to technology, and that’s it.

“It’s almost like another form of slavery, technological slavery, with things imposed on us and we have no real idea of what it’s really doing. “But if we are part of that conversation, we can at least stand a chance of doing what’s good for us.”