What is behind US clashes with ‘Iran-backed’ fighters in Syria?

Escalation comes after months of calm and amid productive ongoing talks to restore the Iranian nuclear deal.
A US military convoy rides at the countryside of Deir Az Zor in northeastern Syria

 [File: Baderkhan Ahmad/AP]

By Umut Uras
Published On 26 Aug 2022

Three separate days of skirmishes this week between the United States’s military forces and reportedly Iranian-backed militias in Syria have put the spotlight on the US presence in the country, just as indirect negotiations to salvage the Iran nuclear deal enter what appears to be the final stage.

US President Joe Biden said on Thursday that US attacks killed four fighters in eastern Syria, adding that Washington’s action aimed at protecting its forces from attacks by Iran-backed armed groups in the region.

“I directed the August 23 strikes to protect and defend the safety of our personnel … and to deter the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iran-backed militia groups from conducting or supporting further attacks on United States personnel and facilities,” Biden said in a statement to the US Congress over his decision to take military action.

Iran has denied the groups involved are backed by Tehran, or that the targets were linked to it and has called for US forces to withdraw from Syria.

Biden said the attacks had shelled a facility used by the groups for logistics and ammunition storage and were a response to raids on the US and its allies in the region.

Three US service members also suffered minor injuries on Wednesday, when armed groups launched rocket attacks at two military bases in northeast Syria, according to US Central Command, adding that US forces killed the four suspected fighters in response.

Jean-Loup Samaan, a senior research fellow at the Middle East Institute in Singapore, said the recent US raids look like tit-for-tat exchanges rather than a considerable military escalation.

“If we follow the statements from the US government, the logic so far does not seem to be to escalate but to restore some kind of status quo between both sides,” Samaan told Al Jazeera.

“I don’t think the idea was to connect the developments in Syria to the ongoing nuclear talks, in fact, it’s probably the opposite,” the analyst said.

“It also reminds us that the deal at stake won’t solve all the issues on the table, as we saw back in 2015 the deal had no effect on other regional issues,” he added.

The escalation between the two sides might threaten the talks to salvage the nuclear agreement between important world powers, led by the US, and Iran.

Negotiations to restore the agreement have ramped up in recent months, more than four years after former US President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled out of the deal, which aims to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons in return for the lifting of sanctions on the country.

The sides have been exchanging amendments to what is called a “final text” to the deal in the scope of the talks.

US internal politics

Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a professor at the University of Tehran believes that the recent escalation in Iran stems from domestic US politics ahead of upcoming mid-term polls in the country.

“Biden wants to be seen as a strong leader in front of the American political class and people before the upcoming [mid-term] elections, and also because now we are close to a nuclear deal,” Marandi said from Tehran, adding that the forces attacked are present in the country with the approval of the Syrian government to fight the ISIL (ISIS) group (ISIS).

As well as fighting ISIL, the militias fighting in support of the Syrian government played an active role in defeating the Syrian opposition across vast swathes of the country.

Marandi added that “the illegal US attacks” seem to be calculated as the reported damage caused by them was limited, and therefore not affect the ongoing nuclear talks with Iran.

“The American troops are careful not to overly escalate the situation without large damage or cost, which also shows that the move is more about internal politics than regional issues,” Marandi said.

The 2022 US mid-term elections will be held on November 8. The candidates will compete for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate.


SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

 

James Madison v. Originalism

Universal History Archive/Getty Images

Aug 26, 2022

ALISON L. LACROIX

Judicial conservatives in the United States frequently cite a caricatured James Madison to justify their "originalist" approach to constitutional interpretation. But the real Madison was a complex thinker who thought his successors should have the power to judge how his words would be interpreted.

CHICAGO – The US Supreme Court’s recent rulings on cases involving guns, abortion, climate change, tribal sovereignty, religion in schools, and individuals’ ability to sue government officials for rights violations have uncorked a torrent of commentary about the ascendance of “originalism” among the six-justice conservative majority. The text of the US Constitution, on this view, means only what its authors intended or what readers at the time it was written would have understood it to mean. “History Triumphs at Supreme Court,” declared one recent headline. “Supreme Court Again Nods to History, Tradition in Religion Case,” asserted another.

As a historian and constitutional law scholar, I am troubled by this framing. It is simply false to suggest that the Court’s conservative majority is doing anything that resembles “history.”

Originalists would have us believe that constitutional interpretation is quite simple. The late justice Antonin Scalia, one of originalism’s most influential exponents, argued that the Constitution “is not living but dead” – and “enduring.” The Constitution “means today not what current society, much less the courts, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.”

What, then, is meant by the Second Amendment’s reference to “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” or the Fourteenth Amendment’s language about “due process” and “equal protection of the laws”? Originalism insists that there is a single correct answer to such questions, and that the only alternative is to have judges simply making things up as they go. If we don’t want “current society” or “the courts” telling us what they think the Constitution ought to mean, Scalia warned, we must commit to “what it meant when it was adopted.”

The problem, of course, is that determining what the text of the Constitution meant when it was adopted is a complex undertaking. Historians have a word for this process: “research.” It involves a lot of reading and a lot of time, until the researcher has immersed herself in a context that is entirely different from her own. The people living through the drafting of the Constitution (1787), the ratification of the Bill of Rights (1791), or the Reconstruction amendments (1865, 1868, and 1870) saw things differently, and used words differently, from how their own predecessors did – and from how people do today.

History is an empirical discipline. Historians form hypotheses and test them based on the available evidence, not on theory or logic alone. To ascertain what a legal text meant at any point in time, one must examine how people talked about it at that time. In the case of the Constitution, we have ample evidence not only of how the founders talked about the text, but also of how they thought their handiwork and specific legal issues should be talked about.

Consider James Madison. Originalists and the conservative Federalist Society frequently cite a caricatured version of Madison as their ideal founding father. But the real Madison was a complex and contradictory thinker and politician who had concrete ideas about how constitutional interpretation should be undertaken.

In 1830, when Madison was 79 years old and living in retirement on his Virginia plantation, he conducted a remarkable correspondence with Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, who was advising and essentially speaking on behalf of President Andrew Jackson. These letters make clear that the father of the Constitution was no originalist.

Van Buren and Jackson had written to the elderly Madison because they wanted his advice, as the “last of the fathers” still living, on one of the most pressing policy debates of the day: federal funding for public works projects (“internal improvements”) such as roads and canals. Jackson had recently vetoed an appropriations bill that would have funded the federal government’s purchase of stock in a company that was building a road in Maysville, Kentucky. In an effort to justify his decision, Jackson laced it with references to previous presidents’ vetoes of similar legislation, including one by Madison in 1817. As the dutiful go-between, Van Buren sent the Maysville Road Veto Message to Madison.

The father of the Constitution responded to this show of respect from his successors by telling them that they had misunderstood him. Jackson’s veto message, Madison wrote, had “not rightly conceived the intention” Madison had in vetoing the 1817 bill. Madison’s intent on that earlier occasion had been to reject specific aspects of the bill that he considered to be beyond Congress’s power, including ones that Jackson now seemed willing to permit. Madison was able to explain what he had meant in 1817, demonstrating that Jackson’s plain reading of his predecessor’s words was wrong.

But even more important is what the Madison of 1830 thought should happen as a result of his correcting the record: nothing. Madison declined to instruct Jackson, and he rejected Van Buren’s offer to issue a “formal correction.” Instead, Madison explicitly stated that neither his own intention in 1817 nor “the general understanding at the time” of the earlier veto could or should control its meaning in 1830.

Only 13 years had passed, but Madison believed that the meaning of that legal text was now beyond the control of its author. “I am aware that the document must speak for itself, and that intention cannot be substituted for the established rules of interpretation,” he wrote. “Whether the language employed duly conveyed the meaning of which J.M. retains the consciousness” was “a question on which he does not presume to judge for others.”

Madison insisted that meaning was to be determined by a later community of readers, in a later context. The author disavowed the power to “judge for others” how his words would be interpreted. As We the People continue to digest the Court’s recent decisions, let us correct the soon-to-be historical record of our own moment. Instead of headlines trumpeting false victories for “history,” let us be real Madisonians. The last of the founders would tell us to abandon the fruitless, fatuous search for a singular fixed intention and urge us to take up the difficult work of interpretation.

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ALISON L. LACROIX
Writing for PS since 2022
1 Commentary
Alison L. LaCroix, a former member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, is Professor of Law and an associate member of the History Department at the University of Chicago and the author of the forthcoming The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalism (Yale University Press, 2023).

Fauci compares monkeypox outbreak to HIV epidemic, advises against making the same assumptions

BY JOSEPH CHOI - 08/25/22 

The White House’s chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci advised against making the same assumptions about the current monkeypox outbreak that were made during the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Fauci and H. Clifford Lane, deputy director for clinical research and special projects at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), published a piece in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday in which they reflected on the similarities between the monkeypox outbreak and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which both men spent much of their careers studying.

The two researchers noted the obvious similarities, namely that most monkeypox cases have so far been detected among men who have sex with men. While the main mode of transmission for monkeypox is believed to be through prolonged skin-to-skin contact, they observed that some early data has suggested sexual transmission may play a role in the spread of the virus.

Public health officials have repeatedly stressed that while many monkeypox cases appear to have been transmitted during sexual encounters, the virus itself is not considered to be a sexually transmitted infection.

“Given how little we know about the epidemiologic characteristics of the current outbreak, it is prudent to heed an observation made during the first year of the HIV/AIDS pandemic: ‘… any assumption that it will remain restricted to a particular segment of our society is truly an assumption without a scientific basis,'” Fauci and Lane wrote

To better understand the virus, the two infectious disease specialists called for further studies and surveys as well as continued surveillance of new cases. According to federal data, over 16,000 U.S. monkeypox cases have been confirmed so far.

In the piece, Lane and Fauci — who is stepping down from his positions in the White House and the NIAID in December — noted there are some characteristics of monkeypox that suggest recent changes that led to the current outbreak, but emphasized that the virus has been known of for decades, with readily available vaccines and treatments.

“Thus, the challenge to the public health and research communities during this time of emergency response is to ensure the efficient and equitable availability and distribution of existing countermeasures to those in need of them while at the same time conducting the rigorous studies needed to define what the clinical efficacy may be, understand any potential safety concerns, and guide proper utilization,” they wrote.

Pierre Poilievre’s dangerous dance with a Diagolon extremist
By Max Fawcett | Opinion, Politics | August 23rd 2022

Jeremy MacKenzie is at the forefront of an increasingly dangerous community of anti-government agitators, writes columnist Max Fawcett. Photo via Facebook

If you aren’t already familiar with something called the “Diagolon” movement, well, you will be. That’s because Pierre Poilievre, the prohibitive favourite in the Conservative Party of Canada’s leadership race, was photographed at a recent event with its founder, Jeremy MacKenzie. A far-right activist and former member of the Canadian military who was arrested earlier this year on numerous weapons charges, MacKenzie is at the forefront of an increasingly dangerous community of anti-government agitators. And for some reason, he wanted to have his picture taken with Poilievre.

The name Diagolon refers to the imaginary nation MacKenzie and his followers have created, one that runs from Alaska to Florida. As the Canadian Anti-Hate Network’s Peter Smith and Mathew Kriner noted in a piece on the movement, this imaginary nation is “unencumbered by the sinister burdens of communism, moral degeneracy, and the World Economic Forum.” But that’s more than just a bad joke. As they write, the online community of pro-Diagolon livestreamers and their audience “have grown into an anti-government movement with militant accelerationist overtones.”

“Militant accelerationism” is, according to Kriner, “a set of tactics and strategies designed to put pressure on and exacerbate latent social divisions, often through violence, thus hastening societal collapse.” Other similar militant accelerationists include the “Boogaloo Movement,” a group of American anti-government and anti-police agitators who believe in the inevitability (and necessity) of a future civil war, and the Atomwaffen Division, which the Southern Poverty Law Centre describes as “a series of terror cells that work toward civilizational collapse.”

When MacKenzie’s presence at a Poilievre event was brought to his campaign’s attention, he eventually released a predictably petulant statement about the encounter. “As I always have, I denounce racism and anyone who spreads it. I didn’t and don’t know or recognize this particular individual. Likewise, I can’t be responsible for Justin Trudeau’s many racist outbursts just because I’ve met him or shaken his hand.”

But the photo with MacKenzie wasn’t Poilievre’s first exposure to the Diagolon movement. On Canada Day, the Conservative leadership hopeful marched with James Topp, another Canadian Forces veteran who has appeared numerous times on MacKenzie’s podcast. That wasn’t an accident, and Poilievre and his staff must have done their due diligence on Topp before deciding to march with him. That they chose to do so in spite of his affiliation with someone like MacKenzie speaks volumes — and raises some uncomfortable questions about the Conservative movement’s persistent proximity to far-right groups.

So far, those questions have been answered in one of two ways: feigned ignorance or whataboutism. The first was perhaps best exemplified by Brock Harrison, the executive director of communications and planning for Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who insisted he’d never heard of MacKenzie. “Who?” he said in response to journalist Stephen Maher’s tweet asking if Poilievre wanted Diagolon’s support. But Harrison surely knows who MacKenzie is, given the four men arrested in Coutts, Alta., earlier this year and charged with conspiring to murder RCMP officers had direct and documented ties to MacKenzie’s movement.

The other popular response was modelled by Dimitri Pantazopoulos, a pollster and strategist for numerous conservative leaders, including Doug Ford, Kenney, Christy Clark and Stephen Harper. In his own series of tweets with me, he repeatedly tried to redirect the conversation back to Laith Marouf, an anti-racism consultant who has received $133,000 from the federal government — and who has a documented history of using racist and hateful language himself towards Jews and Israelis. When I pressed him about this whataboutism, he said: “The federal gov is literally paying this assclown. Please link me to the story or tweet you did about that.”

For what it’s worth, the news about Marouf only broke over the last couple of days. But let me be perfectly clear: his views are intolerable, especially in light of the role he serves and the funding he receives from our federal government. I’m a Liberal-leaning columnist who has supported the Palestinian people and their push for independence for more than 20 years, so I suppose I have some things in common with Marouf. But it’s not difficult for me to say that his comments and conduct are immediately disqualifying, and that the government must answer for how and why he was hired in the first place.

So why do Conservatives fall back on equivocation and deflection when it comes to people like MacKenzie and his fellow travellers? Maybe it’s because they think they need their votes. The Conservative movement in Canada right now seems consumed with winning back voters who defected to Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada in the 2021 election. We see that in Alberta, where the candidates to replace Kenney seem to be engaged in a contest to see who can flirt most aggressively with the province’s separatist movement. We see that in Ottawa, where Poilievre seems determined to transform the Conservative Party of Canada into the Convoy Party of Canada.

And while there are some conservative voices speaking out against this rightward drift, they aren’t exactly the successful ones. Jean Charest tweeted over the weekend: “Hate and intolerance have no place in Canada or in the Conservative Party … it’s long past time for @PierrePoilievre to loudly and clearly tell MacKenzie, Diagolon and their supporters they are not welcome. Some votes should not be courted.”

Meanwhile, Leela Aheer, who’s running well behind people like Danielle Smith and Brian Jean in Alberta’s UCP leadership race, denounced a debate co-hosted by Rebel News and a separatist group called the Prosperity Project. “If I become leader of our party & Premier of Alberta, there will be no room for those who support this agenda — Alberta has a set of core values, and they are in direct opposition to what’s on display here,” she tweeted.

These are good and important words, but they’re directed to versions of their parties that no longer really exist — or perhaps never did in the first place.

Either way, Canadians need to pay close attention to how their leaders react to these sorts of situations. It’s true that, as Poilievre’s campaign said, he meets thousands of people and can’t do background checks on each one. But it’s also true that he’s entirely in control of how he responds after the fact and the message that sends to the Jeremy MacKenzies of the world. That it’s anything other than an unqualified disavowal speaks volumes — and rest assured, Diagolon is listening.


August 23rd 2022

Max Fawcett
Lead Columnist
@maxfawcett

Rosa Luxemburg Was the Great Theorist of Democratic Revolution

A new edition of Rosa Luxemburg’s writings, most of which have never appeared in English before, gives us a unique perspective on her thought. Luxemburg believed that a socialist revolution would have to be democratic or else it would be doomed to failure.

Polish Marxist philosopher Rosa Luxemburg. (Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images)

BYPETER HUDIS
08.26.2022
JACOBIN

Generations of socialist thinkers and activists have grappled with the life and thought of Rosa Luxemburg. Yet there are many surprises still in store for those interested in her legacy, as seen in the recent publication of Volume Four of the English-language Complete Works. Along with the previously published Volume Three, the new collection brings together her writings on the 1905 Russian Revolution, one of the most important social upheavals of modern times.

Luxemburg’s analysis of 1905 in her pamphlet The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions is already well known (and appears in Volume Four in a new translation). However, more than four-fifths of the material in the new volume, covering the period from 1906 to 1909, is appearing in English for the first time. Most of her writings that were originally composed in Polish — about half of the volume’s 550 pages — have never appeared in any other language.

Learning to Speak Russian

Luxemburg, like most Marxists of her generation (as well as Karl Marx himself) held that a democratic republic with universal suffrage was the formation best suited for waging the class struggle to a successful conclusion. Like many of her contemporaries in the Second International, she saw no contradiction between fighting for democratic reforms within capitalism while reaching for a revolutionary transformation that would abolish capitalism — even as she relentlessly battled those who separated the two.Rosa Luxemburg distinguished between forms of struggle employed in ‘peaceful’ as against those used in revolutionary periods.

In doing so, Luxemburg distinguished between forms of struggle employed in “peaceful” as against those used in revolutionary periods. The aim in both scenarios was to enhance the consciousness and power of the working class. However, “in peacetime, this struggle takes place within the framework of the rule of the bourgeoisie,” which required that the movement operate “within the bounds of the existing laws governing elections, assemblies, the press,” trade unions, etc.

Luxemburg referred to this as “a sort of iron cage in which the class struggle of the proletariat must take place.” Hence, mass struggles in such periods “only very seldom attain positive results.” A revolutionary phase was very different, she argued:

Times of revolution rend the cage of “legality” open like pent-up steam splitting its kettle, letting class struggle break out into the open, naked and unencumbered . . . the consciousness and political power [of the proletariat] emerge during revolution without having been warped by, tied down to, and overpowered by the “laws” of bourgeois society.

For Luxemburg, the activity and reason of the masses during the 1905 Revolution, in which millions engaged in mass strikes aimed at bringing down the tsarist regime, was a clear example of such a moment. As she wrote in early 1906: “With the Russian Revolution, the almost-sixty-year period of quiet parliamentary rule of the bourgeoisie comes to a close.” The time had come for the socialist movement in Western Europe to begin to “speak Russian” by incorporating the mass strike into its political and organizational perspectives:

Social Democratic tactics, as employed by the working class in Germany today and to which we owe our victories up until now, is oriented primarily toward parliamentary struggle, it is designed for the context of bourgeois parliamentarianism. Russian Social Democracy is the first to whom the hard but honorable lot has fallen of using the foundations of Marx’s teaching, not in a time of the correct, calm parliamentary course of state life, but in a tumultuous revolutionary period.

Immediate Tasks

In the years since Luxemburg penned these words, numerous commentators have praised her efforts to push the rather staid social democratic parties in a more revolutionary direction, while others have criticized Luxemburg’s perspective on the grounds that it downplays the stark differences between the absolutist regime in Russia and Western liberal democracies. There are several points worth noting in this context.Luxemburg held that the immediate task in the Russian Empire was the formation of a democratic republic under the control of the working class.

Firstly, Luxemburg held that the mass strike “is and will remain a powerful weapon of workers’ struggle,” but went on to stress that it was “only that, a weapon, whose use and effectiveness always depend on the environment, the given conditions, and the moment of struggle.” Secondly, she held that the Russian proletariat was “not setting itself utopian or unreachable goals, like the immediate realization of socialism: the only possible and historically necessary goal is to establish a democratic republic and an eight-hour workday.”

In Luxemburg’s view, socialism could not be on the immediate agenda in Russia for two main reasons: the working class at the time constituted only a small minority of the populace of the Russian Empire (less than 15 percent), and it was impossible for socialism to exist in a single country:

The socialist revolution can only be a result of international revolution, and the results that the proletariat in Russia will be able to achieve in the current revolution will depend, to say nothing of the level of social development in Russia, on the level and form of development that class relations and proletarian operations in other capitalist countries will have achieved by that time.

In a lengthy essay addressed to the Polish workers’ movement, she further developed this point:

In its current state, the working class is not yet ready to accomplish the great tasks that await it. The working class of all capitalist countries must first internalize the aspiration to socialism; an enormous number of people have yet to arrive at an awareness of their class interests. . . . When Social Democracy has a majority of the working people behind it in all the largest capitalist countries, the final hour of capitalism will have struck.

A Workers’ Revolution

However, this did not mean that the Russian Revolution would be confined to a liberal or bourgeois framework. Much like Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik current — and in direct opposition to their Menshevik rivals — Luxemburg held that the immediate task facing revolutionaries in the Russian Empire was the formation of a democratic republic under the control of the working class. Since the liberal bourgeoise was too weak and compromised to lead the revolution, “the proletariat had to become the only fighter and defender of the democratic forms of a bourgeois state.”Luxemburg consistently upheld the need for majority support from the exploited masses in achieving any transition to socialism.

She stressed that conditions in Russia today were not like those existing in nineteenth-century France:

The Russian proletariat fights first for bourgeois freedom, for universal suffrage, the republic, the law of associations, freedom of the press, etc., but it does not fight with the illusions that filled the [French] proletariat of 1848. It fights for [such] liberties in order to instrumentalize them as a weapon against the bourgeoisie.

She further expanded on this point elsewhere:

The bourgeois revolution in Russia and Poland is not the work of the bourgeoisie, as in Germany and France in days gone by, but the working class, and a class already highly conscious of its labor interests at that — a working class that seeks political freedoms not so that the bourgeoisie may benefit, but just the opposite, so that the working class may resolve its class struggle with the bourgeoisie and thereby hasten the victory of socialism. That is why the current revolution is simultaneously a workers’ revolution. That is also why, in this revolution, the battle against absolutism goes hand in hand — must go hand in hand — with the battle against capital, with exploitation. And why economic strikes are in fact quite nearly inseparable in this revolution from political strikes.

Luxemburg consistently upheld the need for majority support from the exploited masses in achieving any transition to socialism, including those pertaining to freedom struggles in the technologically developed capitalist lands. As she later wrote in December 1918, on behalf of the group she led during the German Revolution: “The Spartacus League will never take over governmental power except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany, never except by the proletariat’s conscious affirmation of the views, aims, and methods of struggle of the Spartacus League.”

One Step Forward

Luxemburg’s perspective on the 1905 Russian Revolution raises a host of questions, which relate to the problems faced by revolutionary regimes in the non-Western world in the decades following her death. How can the working class maintain power in a democratic republic after the overthrow of the old regime if it represents only a minority of the populace? How can it do so if, as she claims, “Social Democracy finds only the autonomous class politics of the proletariat to be reliable” — since the hunger of the peasants for landed private property presumably puts them at odds with it? And how is it possible for such a democratic republic under the control of the proletariat to be sustained if revolutions do not occur in other countries that can come to its aid?Luxemburg’s perspective raises a host of questions which relate to the problems faced by revolutionary regimes in the non-Western world following her death.

Luxemburg addressed these questions in a remarkable essay written in Polish in 1908, “Lessons of the Three Dumas,” which has never previously appeared in English. By 1908, the situation in Russia had radically changed since the revolution was by then defeated. She surveyed the course of its development, encouraging Marxists to “redouble their commitment to subjecting every detail of their tactics to rigorous self-criticism.” She did so by evaluating the history of the three Dumas — the parliamentary bodies established in the Russian Empire from 1906 as a concession to the revolution, with a restricted franchise that became progressively more biased in favor of the upper classes:

The Third Duma has shown — and from this flow its enormous political significance — that a parliamentary system that has not first overthrown the government, that has not achieved political power through revolution, not only cannot defeat the old power (a belief the First Duma vainly held), not only cannot hold its own against that power as an instrument of opposition (as the Second Duma tried to do), but can and must become, on the contrary, an instrument of the counterrevolution.

She proceeded to look ahead in thinking about the possible fate of a future revolution that, unlike the one in 1905, did succeed in overthrowing the old regime:

If the revolutionary proletariat in Russia were to gain political power, however temporarily, that would provide enormous encouragement to the international class struggle. That is why the working class in Poland and in Russia can and must strive to seize power with full consciousness. Because once workers have power, they can not only carry out the tasks of the current revolution directly — realizing political freedom across the Russian state — but also establish the eight-hour workday, upend agrarian relations, and in a word, materialize every aspect of their program, delivering the heaviest blows they can to bourgeois rule and in this way hastening its international overthrow.

Revolutionary Realism

Yet the question remained: How could the workers maintain themselves in power in a democratic republic over the long haul if they constituted a minority of the populace? Luxemburg’s answer was that they could not — and yet the effort would still be worth it:


The revolution’s bourgeois character finds expression in the inability of the proletariat to stay in power, in the inevitable removal of the proletariat from power by a counterrevolutionary operation of the bourgeoisie, the rural landowners, the petty bourgeoisie, and the greater part of the peasantry. It may be that in the end, after the proletariat is overthrown, the republic will disappear and be followed by the long rule of a highly restrained constitutional monarchy. It may very well be. But the relations of classes in Russia are now such that the path to even a moderate monarchical constitution leads through revolutionary action and the dictatorship of a republican proletariat.

Shortly before writing this, in an address to a Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, she made the following remarks:

I find that it is a poor leader and a pitiful army that only goes into battle when victory is already in the bag. To the contrary, not only do I not mean to promise the Russian proletariat a sequence of certain victories; I think, rather, that if the working class, being faithful to its historical duty, continues to grow and execute its tactics of struggle consistent with the unfolding contradictions and the ever-broader horizons of the revolution, then it could wind up in quite complicated and difficult circumstances. . . . But I think that the Russian proletariat must have the courage and resolve to face everything prepared for it by historical developments, that it should, if it has to, even at the cost of sacrifices, play the role of the vanguard in this revolution in relation to the global army of the proletariat, the vanguard that discloses new contradictions, new tasks, and new paths for class struggle, as the French proletariat did in the nineteenth century.

She did not shy away from acknowledging the implications of this argument:

Revolution in this conception would bring the proletariat losses as well as victories. Yet by no other road can the entire international proletariat march to its final victory. We must propose the socialist revolution not as a sudden leap, finished in twenty-four hours, but as a historical period, perhaps long, of turbulent class struggle, with breaks both brief and extended.

This was a remarkable expression of revolutionary realism. Luxemburg was fully aware that even a democratic republic under the control of the working class — which is how she as well as Marx understood “the dictatorship of the proletariat” — was bound to be forced from power in the absence of an international revolution, especially in a country where the working class constituted a minority. And yet, even though the revolution would therefore have “failed” from at least one point of view, it would have produced important social transformations, providing the intellectual sediment from which a future uprooting of capitalism could arise.Luxemburg did not think that it made sense to sacrifice democracy for the sake of staying in power.

In short, Luxemburg did not think that it made sense to sacrifice democracy for the sake of staying in power, since the political form required to achieve the transition to socialism was “thoroughgoing democracy.” If a nondemocratic regime stayed in power, the transition to socialism would become impossible, since the working class would be left without the means and training to exercise power on its own behalf. Yet on the other hand, if a proletarian democracy existed even for a brief period of time, it could help inspire a later transition to socialism.

Self-Examination

This argument speaks to what would unfold a decade later, when tsarism was finally overthrown in the February 1917 Revolution, followed in short order by the Bolshevik seizure of power in October of the same year. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were fully aware at the time that the material conditions did not permit the immediate creation of a socialist society, even as they proclaimed the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was why Lenin worked so hard to foster proletarian revolutions in Western Europe.

However, two fundamental issues separated Lenin’s approach from that of Luxemburg. Firstly, his regime did not take the form of a democratic republic, as seen in its suppression of political liberties — a development that Luxemburg sharply opposed in her 1918 critique of the Russian Revolution. Secondly, Lenin held that once the Bolsheviks seized power, they intended to keep it — permanently. This was very different from Luxemburg’s statement that “the inability of the proletariat to stay in power” would not be the worst outcome, so long as the vision of liberation projected to the world through its creation of a democratic society based on the rule of the working class inspired others to take up the fight against capitalism.Luxemburg was fully aware that the bourgeoisie would always resort to violent suppression in the aftermath of a defeated revolution.

Luxemburg’s position is especially striking because she was fully aware that the bourgeoisie would always resort to violent suppression in the aftermath of a defeated revolution. Indeed, she lost her own life following the defeat of the January 1919 Spartacus League uprising in Berlin, which she initially opposed on the grounds that it lacked sufficient mass support. However, Luxemburg was equally aware that any effort to forge a transition to socialism through nondemocratic means was doomed to fail. In this sense, she anticipated the tragic outcome of many revolutions in the decades following her death.

Whatever one makes of Luxemburg’s reflection on these issues, one thing is clear: she developed a distinctive, though rarely discussed, conception of the transition to socialism (especially for developing societies, which is what the Russian Empire was at the time) that has received far too little attention. The publication of these writings in English will hopefully remedy that neglect.

Although many of Luxemburg’s ideas speak to issues that democratic socialists, anti-imperialists, and feminists are grappling with today, on at least one critical issue, her perspective has not stood the test of time. It is to be found in her oft-repeated insistence: “When the sale of workers’ labor to private exploiters is abolished, the source of all today’s social inequalities will disappear.”

Luxemburg’s contention that the abolition of private ownership of the means of production would provide the basis for ending “every inequality in human society” was not hers alone. Virtually every tendency and theorist of revolutionary social democracy in the Second International shared it, including Lenin, Karl Kautsky, Leon Trotsky, and many others. Yet it is hardly possible to maintain this view today.

Neither the social democratic welfare states, which sought to limit private property rights, nor the regimes in the USSR, China, and elsewhere in the developing world, which abolished them through the nationalization of property, succeeded in developing a viable alternative to the capitalist mode of production. A much deeper social transformation that targets not alone private property and “free” markets but most of all the alienated form of human relations that define capitalist modernity is clearly needed.

That is a task for our generation, which can be much aided by returning with new eyes to the humanist implications of Marx’s critique of the logic of capital. This entails a critical reevaluation of the meaning of socialism that may not have been on the agenda in Luxemburg’s time, but which the overall spirit of her work surely encourages. As she wrote in 1906:

Self-examination — that is, making oneself aware at every step of the direction, logic, and basis for the class movement itself — is that store from which the working mass draws its strength, again and again, to struggle anew, and by which it understands its own hesitation and defeats as so many proofs of its strength and inevitable future victory.

CONTRIBUTORS
Peter Hudis is professor of philosophy at Oakton Community College and the author of Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades.

Need for US Ethics Reform Is Far from History: Kushner-MBS Deal Reflects Broken System

by Virginia Canter and Gabe Lezra
August 26, 2022

Jared Kushner’s new “soulless and very selective” (New York Times) memoir, released this week, reveals deep problems with the U.S. government’s ethics laws that go far beyond his “self-aggrandiz[ing]” spin. The U.S. ethics system allows politicians to use their government positions for self-serving profit, continuing to reap benefits – financial, professional, and social – long after they have left office.

Kushner is the example par excellence of this legal failing. Throughout former President Donald Trump’s term, Kushner cultivated a strategic and personal alliance with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS (a relationship he defended in his book), which erupted back into the public eye in April, when MBS overruled the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s (PIF) expert investment panel’s decision not to invest $2 billion in Kushner’s private equity fund. MBS’s involvement in the deal, and particularly his rejection of the panel’s scathing review of Kushner’s fund and the risk it was asking the Kingdom to take on, is a stunning reminder that Saudi Arabia views Kushner as a strategic ally worth cultivating, seemingly both as payback for his work during the Trump administration, and as a potential bid for future favor should Trump be elected to a second term.

The PIF’s panel, which is charged with overseeing Saudi Arabia’s $620 billion sovereign wealth fund, left no doubt that an investment in Affinity Partners had no business justification, the New York Times reported. The panel panned the fund’s leadership for having little to no experience in private equity and were rightfully concerned that the structure of the proposed deal would leave the PIF holding “the bulk of the investment and risk,” while paying an “excessive” asset management fee. And, importantly, they underscored the potential “public relations risks” should they agree to enter a substantial business deal with Kushner due to his prior role in the Trump White House. Ultimately, they said, Kushner’s fund was “unsatisfactory in all respects.” That was an unacceptable conclusion for MBS, whom Kushner had befriended, protected, and aided throughout his time overseeing Middle East policy for his father-in-law.

This incident highlights the extent to which the U.S. legal system allows former high ranking government officials to engage in shady business dealings once they leave office, in part because MBS’s reported reasons for rejecting the panel’s advice appear so thoroughly corrupt. MBS justified the fund’s decision to ultimately invest, arguing that an investment in Kushner’s firm would help the Saudis capitalize on their “deep understanding of different government policies and geopolitical systems.” That sounds a lot like a decision based on outside political interests rather than a decision motivated by legitimate business considerations. And that’s why it’s not at all surprising that the House Oversight Committee has opened an investigation into Kushner’s dealings with the Kingdom and MBS.

MBS’s statements leave little doubt: the investment is due to the relationship Kushner cultivated with MBS when Kushner served as a senior White House advisor to President Trump a role he used to shelter the Kingdom from criticism and sanction. For example, Kushner reportedly played a key role in guiding the Trump administration’s response to MBS’s role in the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, protecting the Crown Prince from United States government sanctions, condemnation, and investigation. And, Kushner also reportedly encouraged Trump and Congress to forge ahead with weapons sales to the Kingdom, including an immense $110 billion deal that Kushner personally negotiated, despite the conclusion of international observers that Saudi Arabia likely had committed war crimes during its illegal war in Yemen, violations that humanitarian watchdogs believe are ongoing today. Former President Obama had previously refused to sell the Kingdom some of the weapons included in the $110 billion 2017 package out of now-realized fear that the Saudis would use them on civilians in Yemen.

For those who followed the Trump administration’s ethics entanglements from the earliest days, Kushner’s problematic relationship with Saudi Arabia and MBS comes as no surprise. Kushner’s foreign business entanglements were so deep that he was initially denied a security clearance – until his presidential father-in-law stepped in and overruled that decision. That intervention was also no surprise, as Trump has embraced corruption and foreign business entanglements and accepted political favors that help his business empire in violation of the Constitution.

These actions set the stage for Kushner’s own foreign business dealings. Ultimately, the fact that Kushner is legally allowed to operate with this level of barely-disguised corruption is a window into the United States’ own deficient government ethics regime.

Congress has enacted little, if any, legislation that effectively deters former senior government officials from exploiting foreign relationships they cultivated while in office for personal profit, even though a fear of corruption, particularly from foreign influence, lies at the foundation of the United States’ Constitutional framework.

Under the current ethics regime, former officials’ business dealings with foreign governments are largely unregulated by Congress, except for certain lobbying-related activities after leaving office. For example, the primary post-employment statute that pertains to dealings with foreign entities includes a one-year prohibition on former senior and very senior officials engaging in representational activities before the United States on behalf of a foreign government, or aiding and advising foreign governments behind the scenes, when these actions are knowingly undertaken with intent to influence a decision of any U.S. federal government officer or employee.

While these types of prohibitions may prevent a former government official from appearing to “switch sides,” that framework is woefully unable to address more sinister threats arising from longer-lasting conflicts of interest. Not only has the Department of Justice never reported prosecuting a single individual under that statute, the law does not address circumstances where senior White House officials seemingly undermine U.S. foreign policy and national security by adopting stances at odds with U.S. interests while in government to enhance their opportunities for personal financial profit after leaving office.

Additionally, unless it is proven that a government official had an actual or imputed financial interest, the primary conflict-of-interest statute would not bar them from participating in a particular matter involving a particular country while in office.

The $2 billion deal Jared secured from MBS may be a “bid for future favor.” In funding Kushner, the Saudis are taking steps to ensure they maintain close ties and access to his father-in-law, who is reportedly considering another run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Kushner could soon become subject to the Foreign Agent Registration Act’s (FARA)’s registration requirements applicable to agents of foreign principals who engage in political activities, public relations, and other specified activities. If he were to become a backdoor channel for the Saudis seeking to influence a future Trump presidential campaign or administration on U.S. domestic or foreign policy issues, Kushner would likely be required to register as a foreign lobbyist under FARA.

At the outset of his administration, Trump barred FARA covered activities on the part of his political appointees after they left office. However, just before he left office, former Trump revoked his Ethics Pledge. If the Trump Ethics Pledge had not been rescinded, Kushner, as a political appointee, would have been barred permanently from engaging in FARA covered activities on behalf of a foreign government or foreign political party.

Kushner, of course, is not the only former government official to obtain monies from the Saudis. Both Trump and former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin are also now in business with the Saudis. And other former government officials have been criticized for much, much less: former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were criticized after they disclosed in 2008 that Saudi Arabia donated between $10 million and $25 million to their charitable foundation. While a charitable donation undoubtedly seems more benign than a $2 billion cornerstone investment, critics, including many Republicans, nevertheless expressed concern that the donations “[gave] foreign donors a way to potentially gain favor outside the traditional political limits.”

Given the serious allegations against Kushner of “payback” for supporting MBS, and the real possibility that the Saudis’ entered into the $2 billion deal as a “bid for future favor,” it is in the United States’ best interest for Congress to expand and tighten the post-employment statute. In addition to exploring more expansive reforms to the Foreign Agent Registration Act and other statutes regulating how private citizens are allowed to interact with foreign powers, Congress should, at a minimum, prohibit former senior and very senior government officials from directly or indirectly soliciting or accepting funding for any purpose from sovereign wealth funds, foreign governments, or political parties of countries that fell under such officials’ official responsibility, for at least two years after they leave office. This two-year ban would be easy to implement, would deter powerful U.S. officials from engaging in corrupt foreign business deals, and would bolster confidence in the integrity of services being provided by senior government officials before they leave office.

IMAGE: White House Advisor Jared Kushner, watches alongside a member of the Saudi Delegation during a meeting between President Donald Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the Oval Office at the White House on March 20, 2018 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images)

About the Author(s)

Virginia Canter

Virgina Canter (@VirginiaRCanter) joined CREW as its Chief Ethics Counsel following a career in public service. Her prior experience includes serving as Ethics Advisor to the International Monetary Fund, White House Associate Counsel to Presidents Obama and Clinton, Senior Ethics Counsel for the Department of the Treasury and Assistant Ethics Counsel for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Gabe Lezra

Gabe Lezra (@GabeLezra) is the Federal Policy Manager and a Senior Counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), where he specializes in anti-corruption, democracy reform, and government ethics law.

Sanna Marin, from youngest elected leader to 'partying PM'
Agence France-Presse
August 27, 2022

Sanna Marin is Finland's youngest ever PM Gent SHKULLAKU AFP

Since Sanna Marin became Finland's youngest prime minister in December 2019, the "child from a poor family" has risen to become the Nordic country's most popular leader of government in the 21st century.

But the 36-year-old's reputation as a firm crisis leader -- deftly navigating her small nation through the Covid pandemic and a historic NATO membership application -- has been challenged in the last few days.

Marin has become entangled in controversies over her partying, earning her the nickname "Party Sanna" in Finland's tabloid press.

A poll published by leading newspaper Helsingin Sanomat on Friday showed that 42 percent of Finns had a worse opinion of their prime minister due to the scandals.

A video leaked last week -- which made headlines around the world -- showed Marin dancing and partying with a group of friends and celebrities.

That controversy was quickly followed by another, when Marin was forced to apologise for a photo taken at her official residence of two women lifting their tops to bare their torsos, as she hosted friends after attending a music festival.

In December 2021, Marin came under sustained criticism after it was revealed she stayed out dancing until the early hours despite having been exposed to Covid-19.

Humble origins

"Some of the general public consider that partying like that and appearing in such company does not fit the norm for a politician," professor Anu Koivunen told AFP.

Koivunen noted that while the leaks would likely have caused a stir with any prime minister, she believes that the fact that Marin is a young female politician played a role in the ensuing brouhaha.


"There's been a debate about her qualifications, whether she's up to the job," Koivunen said, suggesting that this probably would not have been the case with a male prime minister.

But for her, this "ignores Marin's history as a crisis leader and a competent actor."

"I am human. And I too sometimes long for joy, light and fun amidst these dark clouds", Marin said this week in an emotional speech where she appeared close to tears.

Battling controversies about her lifestyle or stereotypes is nothing new for Marin.

She was relatively unknown before she became prime minister, her rise to power a swift one.

The slender, dark-haired Marin grew up in the southern Finnish town of Pirkkala, in a "rainbow, low-income family, and lived in the municipality's rental housing", in her own words.

"My parents divorced because of my father's drinking problem when I was only a few years old," she wrote in her blog.

Although Marin's childhood with her mother and mother's female partner did not include "material abundance", it was full of "love and ordinary life," she described.

'Shop girl'

Marin was the first in her family to go to university, earning a Masters degree in Administrative Sciences.

She supported her studies by working as a cashier, something which her opponents have later used to discredit her.

When Marin became prime minister, Finnish daily newspaper Iltalehti called it "a remarkable rise from shop cashier to the top of Finland."

Even Estonia's then interior minister Mart Helme caused a row by labelling Finland's new prime minister a "shop girl".

The negative comments prompted many prominent Finns to reveal on social media their own "rise to the top" from humble beginnings as cashiers or cleaners.

The comments and frequent controversies about her lifestyle and looks are in stark contrast with how the young politician got noticed and how she is now perceived, analysts say.

"As a politician, she is well respected. She is both firm and also open to discussion," Emilia Palonen, a political scientist at Helsinki University, told AFP.

Her Social Democratic party, the SDP, "needed strong, responsible and charismatic people like her", she said.

Marin was first elected as an MP in 2015. But for many Finns, the first time she entered the spotlight was in 2016 when a Tampere city council debate she chaired went viral on social media.

On the video which has racked up nearly a million views, Marin keeps a marathon debate on Tampere's new tram lines on track, despite it dragging on for more than five hours as representatives came up with ever more hilarious and absurd arguments for and against the tram.

Many praised her professionalism in the face of bickering councilmen, earning her a reputation as "a fearless leader".

"Sanna Marin showed how to keep the hecklers in check", Helsingin Sanomat daily wrote.

© 2022 AFP

Leaked video confirms disturbing history of Amy Coney Barrett’s faith sect: ‘Women were always crying’

Travis Gettys

RAW STORY
August 26, 2022

Amy Coney Barrett (AFP)

Leaked video of a recent event hosted by People of Praise, a secretive Christian sect to which Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett belongs, shows one of its leaders admitting the group's teachings drove women into tears.

The video from the group's 50th anniversary celebration shows Dorothy Ranaghan, wife of founder Kevin Ranaghan, telling members that women who first made a "covenant" to join People of Praise in the 1970s cried intensely in response to teachings about their roles in relationships with men, reported The Guardian.

“Some of the women – who are still in my women’s group, as a matter of fact – were wearing sunglasses all the time, because they were always crying and would have to hold on to their chairs every time somebody started teaching, because ‘What are we going to hear this time?’” Ranaghan said. “But it all worked out just fine in the end.”

The video was leaked to The Guardian by a source who wished to remain anonymous, and it's the first time a statement from the group has been issued about women's response to teachings about men's "headship" of the family and dominance over women.

Barrett lived with the Ranaghans when she attended law school at Notre Dame, although she has never publicly disclosed or discussed her membership in People of Praise, where her father served in a leadership role and she served as a "handmaid," saying only that she is a devout Catholic and her faith would have no bearing on her duties as a judge.

A former group member stated in a sworn affidavit filed in the 1990s that Kevin Ranaghan exerted almost total control over her when she lived in the family's household and made all decisions about her dating relationships and finances.

 HEALTHCARE

Watchdog: VA mishandled one-third of Camp Lejeune contaminated water claims

BY ZACK BUDRYK - 08/25/22 

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) mishandled up to 1 in 3 veterans’ claims relating to water contamination at Camp LeJeune, according to a report released Thursday by the department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG). 

Some 1 million people may have been exposed to contaminated water at the training facility between August 1953 and December 1987, according to the OIG report. OIG investigators found that the department prematurely denied more than 17,000 of the claims before sending the claimants’ letters asking for further documentation of exposure.  

In another 2,300 cases, the department recorded incorrect effective dates for benefit eligibility, according to the report. Not all the mishandled cases would necessarily have resulted in benefit payouts, but veterans were underpaid by at least $13.8 million over a four-year period due to failure to assign the earliest effective date, according to the watchdog. 

The contaminants in question are associated with a number of medical conditions and complications, including kidney cancer, liver cancer, Parkinson’s disease and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The VA has also expanded eligibility for disability payments to people who have a different condition than the eight listed that they can prove is connected to exposure to contaminated water. 

“The OIG found that errors were less likely to occur at the Louisville Regional Office, which processes most Camp Lejeune-related claims; staff from other VA regional offices lacked experience processing these claims,” the report states. The watchdog recommended the Veterans Benefits Administration either develop a plan to reduce the processing errors at regional offices or centralize Camp Lejeune-related claims at the Louisville office. 

Earlier this month, President Biden signed the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act, which included $300 billion for benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits but also includes a provision allowing lawsuits against the federal government in connection with exposure to contaminated water at Camp Lejeune.  

 

A tractor running on ammonia was presented in the USA

26 August 2022

Source: ammoniaenergy.org\

Earlier this month, Amogy demonstrated a new ammonia-powered tractor in Stony Brook, New York. A 100 kW ammonia-to-power system was successfully integrated into a John Deere mid-size standard tractor, which can operate on liquid ammonia fuel for a period of several hours. The tractor conversion demonstration was made possible by significant seed funding secured in late 2021.

The unique system is comprised of a standard liquid-storage tank and highly efficient ammonia-cracking modules integrated into a hybrid fuel cell system, which can provide consistent primary power for several hours per refueling. Therefore, the pioneering vehicle maintains the functionality and duration requirements operators rely on to support farming tasks, which has never been offered with other alternative energy solutions. The ammonia-powered tractor was driven for separate periods, with a refueling session in between. Refueling a tractor with liquid ammonia is fast and simple, similar to gas or diesel refueling.

Details of the ammonia-powered tractor, from Amogy’s official press release, 1 June 2022

Ammonia is a viable zero-emission fuel for all heavy-duty vehicles, but especially farming and agriculture, where the readily-available chemical has been used as a fertilizer for decades. Amogy is at the forefront of efforts to establish zero-carbon ammonia as a leading fuel for these vehicles. Ammonia offers a high energy density and there are plentiful existing infrastructures, such as pipelines, terminals and storage methods, in the U.S. and globally, to support such a transition.

Amogy CEO Seonghoon Woo in his organisation’s official press release, 1 June 2022

In the press release, Amogy indicates that their focus for the next year is demonstrating an ammonia-powered Class 8 truck, a shipping vessel, and a compact, 1 MW ammonia-to-power system.