Friday, January 06, 2023

Netanyahu Ushers in the Most Anti-Palestinian Government in Israel’s History

January 5, 2023
Z Article
Source: TruthOut


Benjamin Netanyahu has been sworn in for his sixth term as prime minister of Israel. While his prior tenures resulted in the commission of war crimes against the Palestinian people, Netanyahu’s new regime promises to be the most right-wing and religiously conservative in Israel’s history.

Netanyahu won reelection despite facing criminal charges for bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

In order to secure a sixth term, Netanyahu made a devil’s bargain with the extreme right-wing religious elements in Israel. Aside from Netanyahu’s largely secular Likud Party, all other parties in his new coalition are religious, with two of them representing ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis, or Haredim.

“The ministers of Netanyahu’s new government have been salivating for weeks at the thought of what they will change once in power,” Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, told Truthout. “Now that they’ve been sworn in, there is no doubt plans are already afoot for massive settlement expansion, establishment of de facto (albeit illegal) annexation of large parts of the West Bank, widespread increases in house demolitions and forced evictions of Palestinian families, all aimed at escalating what earlier governments also called the ‘Judaization’ of occupied East Jerusalem and most of the West Bank.”

Netanyahu’s coalition declared the Jewish people’s “exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.” This goes even further than the 2018 “basic law” — which enshrined apartheid in Israeli law — by stating that only Jews have the right to self-determination.

Under the new government, Palestinians “will face even more horrific discrimination. Military assaults on Gaza, arrests and detention of children, collective punishments — all will escalate,” Bennis said, adding that “the violations will get worse, not only quantitatively but qualitatively as well.”

Israel’s new national security minister is extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was convicted of supporting terrorism and inciting anti-Arab racism. He will oversee Israel’s police force.

Five days after Netanyahu was sworn in, Ben-Gvir entered Islam’s third holiest site, the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, infuriating Palestinians. Hazem Qassem, spokesperson for Hamas, told Al Jazeera that Ben-Gvir’s action is “a continuation of the Zionist occupation’s aggression against our sanctities and its war on its Arab identity.”

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry referred to Ben-Gvir’s “storming” of Al Aqsa as an “unprecedented provocation and a dangerous escalation of the conflict.” Indeed, Al Jazeera noted, “Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s entrance to the site in 2000 sparked the second Palestinian Intifada or uprising.”

Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionism Party, will serve as minister of finance. He will appoint the military unit that supervises border crossings and permits for Palestinians. Smotrich has advocated eliminating the authority to indict public servants for breach of trust and fraud, a change that could make charges against Netanyahu disappear.

The coalition also plans to amend the current anti-discrimination law to allow businesses and service providers to refuse services that violate their religious beliefs. It would permit them to discriminate against LGBTQ people and women.

Palestinians are not surprised at the escalation of repression promised by the new government. “Its annexationist agenda of Jewish supremacy is now very blunt and clear,” Husam Zomlot, Palestinian ambassador to Britain, told The New York Times.

Several Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations, including Adalah, B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, Peace Now and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, signed a joint statement warning that “the occupation and apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories have made Jewish supremacy the de facto law of the land and the new government seeks to adopt this into their official policy.”

More than 100 retired Israeli ambassadors and senior Foreign Ministry officials signed a letter to Netanyahu expressing “profound concern” about possible damage to Israel’s foreign relations.

Hundreds of rabbis in the United States issued an open letter protesting the coalition’s intention to erode the rights of LGBTQ people and women, allow the Knesset (Parliament) to override decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court, annex the West Bank without allowing Palestinians to vote, expel Arab Israeli citizens who question the government, and limit the Law of Return to Orthodox Jews. (The Law of Return, enacted in 1950, provides every Jew with the right to come to Israel. Its purpose was to solidify Israel as a Jewish state.)

“When those who tout racism and bigotry claim to speak in the name of Israel, but deny our rights, our heritage, and the rights of the most vulnerable among us, we must take action. We must speak out,” the rabbis wrote.

For the United States’ part, Bennis says, what is needed is “a shift in U.S. policy towards one that reflects the growing public and media opinion in this country — recognition of Israeli apartheid, and the need to challenge the longstanding levels of uncritical military, diplomatic and economic support for apartheid.”

The U.S. government is Israel’s chief enabler, to the tune of $3.8 billion in annual military assistance. Indeed, President Joe Biden reiterated his great affection for Netanyahu, “who has been my friend for decades, to jointly address the many challenges and opportunities facing Israel and the Middle East region.” Biden is implementing Donald Trump’s illegal recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital by building a permanent embassy on land stolen from the Palestinians.

Thomas Nides, U.S. ambassador to Israel, echoed Biden’s praise for Netanyahu. “He’s a very talented and very experienced prime minister. We want to work closely with him on mutual values we share, and at this point not get distracted by everyone else,” Nides said. “Here’s to the rock solid US-Israel relationship and unbreakable ties,” he tweeted.

Meanwhile, on December 30, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution urging the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to issue an advisory opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. The ICJ, also known as the World Court, is the judicial arm of the UN. It deals with disputes between UN member countries.

The General Assembly resolution seeks an ICJ opinion on the “legal consequences arising from the ongoing violation by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, from its prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and from its adoption of related discriminatory legislation and measures.”

In 2004, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion which concluded that Israel’s barrier wall built on occupied Palestinian territory violated international law and ordered Israel to dismantle it and pay reparations. Israel ignored the ICJ’s ruling.

There is an effective way to pressure Israel to end its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory and violation of the rights of the Palestinians. The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, an initiative of Palestinian civil society, consists of “non-violent punitive measures.” This includes academic, cultural and economic boycotts; divestment from Israeli and allied companies; and sanctions such as ending military trade agreements.

These measures will last until Israel recognizes the Palestinian people’s “inalienable right to self-determination” and fully complies with international law by: (1) ending the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the barrier wall; (2) recognizing the fundamental rights of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and (3) respecting, protecting and promoting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their land as required by UN General Assembly Resolution 194.

“The domination of an unabashedly racist, Jewish fundamentalist, genocidal, and homophobic strand of Zionism in the current Netanyahu far-right government makes the ground even more fertile for the BDS movement to further isolate Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid at all levels,” Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the BDS movement for Palestinian rights, wrote in an email to Truthout. “But fertile grounds alone do not yield fruit; we still need the passion and the strategic labor of many around the world to plant seeds of change, to amass people’s power and strategically direct it to dismantle systems of oppression.”

Barghouti added, “With this unmasked Israeli fascism in power, it is high time to demolish the colonial hypocrisy of the U.S. and its European allies. They have imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia because of its months-long illegal invasion of Ukraine, yet they’ve continued to enable, fund and defend Israel’s decades-long system of violent oppression of the Indigenous Palestinian people.”

BDS has had a measure of success such that Israel sees it as an existential threat. (Those who wish to learn more about the BDS movement can seek information here.)


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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and a member of the national advisory boards of Assange Defense and Veterans For Peace, and the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. A prominent scholar and lecturer, her books include Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law; and Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues She provides commentary for local, regional, national and international media and is co-host of “Law and Disorder” radio.


Israel Was Never a Democracy: So why is the West Lamenting End of ‘Liberal’ Israel?


BY RAMZY BAROUD
 JANUARY 6, 2023
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Image by Taylor Brandon.

Even before the new Israeli government was officially sworn in on December 29, angry reactions began emerging, not only among Palestinians and other Middle Eastern governments, but also among Israel’s historic allies in the West.

As early as November 2, top US officials conveyed to Axios that the Joe Biden Administration is “unlikely to engage with Jewish supremacist politician, Itamar Ben-Gvir”.

In fact, the US government’s apprehensions surpassed Ben-Gvir, who was convicted by Israel’s own court in 2007 for supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism.

US Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reportedly “hinted” that the US government would also boycott “other right-wing extremists” in Netanyahu’s government.

However, these strong concerns seemed absent from the congratulatory statement by the US Ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, on the following day. Nides relayed that he had “congratulated (Netanyahu) on his victory and told him that I look forward to working together to maintain the unbreakable bond” between the two countries.

In other words, this ‘unbreakable bond’ is stronger than any public US concern regarding terrorism, extremism, fascism, and criminal activities.

Ben-Gvir is not the only convicted criminal in Netanyahu’s government. Aryeh Deri, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, was convicted of tax fraud in early 2022 and, in 2000, he served a prison sentence for accepting bribes when he held the position of interior minister.

Bezalel Smotrich is another controversial character, whose anti-Palestinian racism has dominated his political persona for many years.

While Ben-Gvir has been assigned the post of national security minister, Deri has been entrusted with the ministry of interior and Smotrich with the ministry of finance.

Palestinians and Arab countries are rightly angry, because they understand that the new government is likely to sow more violence and chaos.

With many of Israel’s sinister politicians in one place, Arabs know that Israel’s illegal annexation of parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories is back on the agenda; and that incitement against Palestinians in Occupied East Jerusalem, coupled with raids of Al-Aqsa Mosque will exponentially increase in the coming weeks and months. And, expectedly, the push for the construction and expansion of illegal settlements is likely to grow, as well.

These are not unfounded fears. Aside from the very racist and violent statements and actions by Netanyahu and his allies in recent years, the new government has already declared that the Jewish people have “exclusive and inalienable rights to all parts of the Land of Israel”, promising to expand settlements, while distancing itself from any commitments to establishing a Palestinian State, or even engaging in any ‘peace process’.

But while Palestinians and their Arab allies have been largely consistent in recognizing extremism in the various Israeli governments, what excuse do the US and the West have in failing to recognize that the latest Netanyahu-led government is the most rational outcome of blindly supporting Israel throughout the years?

In March 2019, Politico branded Netanyahu as the creator of “the most right-wing government in Israeli history,” a sentiment that was repeated countless times in other western media outlets.

This ideological shift was, in fact, recognized by Israel’s own media, years earlier. In May 2016, the popular Israeli newspaper Maariv described the Israeli government at the time as the “most right-wing and extremist” in the country’s history. This was, in part, due to the fact that far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman was assigned the role of the defense minister.

The West, then, too, showed concern, warned against the demise of Israel’s supposed liberal democracy, and demanded that Israel must remain committed to the peace process and the two-state solution. None of that actualized. Instead, the terrifying figures of that government were rebranded as merely conservatives, centrists or even liberals in the following years.

The same is likely to happen now. In fact, signs of the US’s willingness to accommodate whatever extremist politics Israel produces are already on display. In his statement, on December 30, welcoming the new Israeli government, Biden said nothing about the threat of Tel Aviv’s far-right politics to the Middle East region but, rather, the “challenges and threats” posed by the region to Israel. In other words, Ben-Gvir or no Ben-Gvir, unconditional support for Israel by the US will remain intact.

If history is a lesson, future violence and incitement in Palestine will also be blamed mostly, if not squarely, on Palestinians. This knee-jerk, pro-Israeli attitude has defined Israel’s relationship with the US, regardless of whether Israeli governments are led by extremists or supposed liberals. No matter, Israel somehow maintained its false status as “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

But if we are to believe that Israel’s exclusivist and racially based ‘democracy’ is a democracy at all, then we are justified to also believe that Israel’s new government is neither less nor more democratic than the previous governments.

Yet, western officials, commentators and even pro-Israel Jewish leaders and organizations in the US are now warning against the supposed danger facing Israel’s liberal democracy in the run-up to the formation of Netanyahu’s new government.

This is an indirect, if not clever form of whitewashing, as these views accept that what Israel has practiced since its founding in 1948, until today, was a form of real democracy; and that Israel remained a democracy even after the passing of the controversial Nation-State Law, which defines Israel as a Jewish state, completely disregarding the rights of the country’s non-Jewish citizens.

It is only a matter of time before Israel’s new extremist government is also whitewashed as another working proof that Israel can strike a balance between being Jewish and also democratic at the same time.

The same story was repeated in 2016, when warnings over the rise of far-right extremism in Israel – following the Netanyahu-Lieberman pact – quickly disappeared, and eventually vanished. Instead of boycotting the new unity government, the US government finalized, in September 2016, its largest military aid package to Israel, amounting to $38 billion.

In truth, Israel has not changed much, either in its own self-definition or in its treatment of Palestinians. Failing to understand this is tantamount to tacit approval of Israel’s racist, violent and colonial policies in Occupied Palestine over the course of 75 years.

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




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US-Palestinian Congresswoman: Congress must stop funding Israeli apartheid

US-Palestinian Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib.

WASHINGTON, Friday, January 6, 2023 (WAFA) – US-Palestinian Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, stressed in a tweet that the US Congress must stop funding Israeli apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories.

"Congress must stop funding apartheid,” said the US congresswoman.

Tlaib noted that the year 2022 was one of the deadliest years for Palestinians on record, adding that “Israeli forces and settlers killed more than 200 Palestinians, including more than 50 children, injured thousands more, and demolished over 800 Palestinian homes.

She also shared a tweet from the U.S.-based group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), showing video footage of Israeli occupation forces destroying homes and other infrastructure in Masafer Yatta, in the southern occupied West Bank district of Hebron.

“Just days after the new Israeli government is sworn in, families in Masafer Yatta are already facing more ethnic cleansing,” she tweeted.

“The Israeli military's ongoing expulsion of Masafer Yatta residents will now be accelerated at an even faster rate. Don't look away. Save Masafer Yatta,” she added.

"Not even one week into 2023, the new far-right apartheid government is moving to ethnically cleanse entire communities, which would displace more than 1,000 Palestinian residents, including 500 children," Tlaib tweeted. "All with American backing, bulldozers, and bullets," she said.

T.R.

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Cuba Says Biden Applies Blockade Even More Aggressively Than His Predecessors

Biden has maintained many of Trump’s sanctions against Cuba. He must fulfill his promise to reverse Trump’s actions.

January 6, 2023
Z Article
Source: TruthOut

End the Embargo Against Cuba!


“The current U.S. government, the one of Joseph Biden, of all those that the Cuban Revolution has known, is the one that has most aggressively and effectively applied the economic blockade,” Carlos Fernández de Cossío, vice minister of Foreign Affairs of Cuba, declared in a speech on December 14. “It is the one that punishes the most, the one that causes the most damage to the daily life of Cubans and the economy as a whole.”

Fernández de Cossío cited the disruption of Cuba’s fuel receipt by sea, and economic depression resulting in the “extraordinary flow of Cuban migrants” as examples of the severe harms that Cubans have faced due to the Biden administration’s implementation of the blockade.

In his address at a conversation series on “Cuba in the Foreign Policy of the United States of America,” held on December 14 at the Higher Institute of International Relations in Havana, Fernández de Cossío took aim at the Biden administration’s enforcement of the blockade against Cuba, stating, “there can be no doubt that the economic blockade is the defining factor in the bilateral relations” between the United States and Cuba.

Biden pledged during his 2020 presidential campaign that he would “try to reverse the failed Trump policies that inflicted harm on Cubans and their families.” In 2021, he claimed, “We stand with the Cuban people.”

But Biden’s actions belie his words. Fernández de Cossío said that Biden has applied “with absolute and surprising loyalty … the policy of maximum economic pressure that was designed by his predecessor, Donald Trump.”

In 2015, the Obama administration restored full diplomatic relations with Cuba, released Cubans imprisoned in the U.S. for trying to deter further terrorist attacks against Cuba, relaxed restrictions on Americans traveling to Cuba, and ended some economic prohibitions between the U.S. and Cuba. It also facilitated the export of U.S. internet hardware and telecommunications and established increased cooperation between the United States and Cuba in intelligence-gathering, drug interdiction, scientific research and environmental protection.

Trump undid the progress Obama had made and imposed 243 onerous new sanctions — known as unilateral coercive measures in international law — on Cuba as part of his “maximum pressure” strategy.

The Embargo Was Imposed to Cause Cubans Hunger and Desperation

More than 60 years ago, following the triumph of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the U.S. government imposed an economic embargo on Cuba. The rationale for the embargo was detailed in a State Department memo that advocated the “disenchantment and disaffection” of the Cuban people through “economic dissatisfaction and hardship” so they would overthrow the Fidel Castro government. The memo recommended the denial of “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

The embargo (which the Cubans call a blockade) “is not a single law, but a complex patchwork of laws, presidential proclamations, and regulations that Fidel Castro once called ‘a tangled ball of yarn,’” American University professor and Cuba scholar William M. LeoGrande wrote in the National Security Archive. “It has evolved over the sixty years since President John F. Kennedy put it in place, loosening and tightening from one administration to the next, depending on the president’s preference for using hard power or soft power in dealing with Cuba.”

Since the Cuban Revolution, the United States “has waged an unceasing assault, both military and economic, against the Cuban people, organizing an invasion, assassinations, terrorist attacks against civilians and systematic economic sabotage,” Isaac Saney wrote at Resumen. The blockade has cost Cuba more than $130 billion in damage, according to the United Nations.

Some Positive Bilateral Steps Taken Last Year

Despite this rocky history, Fernández de Cossío acknowledged that some positive bilateral steps were taken between the United States and Cuba last year. He cited migration cooperation; U.S. grants of 20,000 visas annually; a return to U.S. embassy services in Havana; cooperation between Cuban Border Guard Troops and the U.S. Coast Guard for interception on the high seas and return to Cuba; an agreement to hold exchanges on law enforcement, oil spills, health and the environment; and commercial flights from the United States to different Cuban provinces. The United States has again authorized “people to people” educational group travel to Cuba, but individual travel for education is still prohibited.

Fernández de Cossío also praised U.S. offers of humanitarian aid to Cuba “without political conditions” after a fire at the supertanker base in Matanzas last August and $2 million for repairs after Hurricane Ian. But Cuba still has not received that assistance.
Negative Steps Taken by the Biden Administration

The vice minister of foreign affairs also listed “developments in the opposite direction.” These include the recent U.S. designation of Cuba as a country of special concern in matters of religious freedom “without any real basis, on grounds that are dishonest.”

“In late 2022, the Biden administration took the unprecedented action to list Cuba as a nation of ‘special concern’ regarding religious freedom — which even the Trump administration did not do, and which was not recommended by the related commission created by U.S. law. This is absurd,” Art Heitzer, co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild’s Cuba Subcommittee, told Truthout.

“Members of my Methodist church were prosecuted by the U.S. government for visiting their sister Methodist church’s centennial in Havana,” Heitzer said. “The late Cardinal Jaime Ortega, then head of Cuba’s Roman Catholic Church, told me after mass at the cathedral that he favored ending the U.S. embargo; and because of religious objections, the Cuban government delayed by several years the referendum process which has now granted constitutional protection to same-sex marriage.”

Fernández de Cossío also mentioned the Biden administration’s commitment in May to allow remittances to Cuba, but said that still has not happened and there is no “commitment to dismantle the measures announced by the Trump administration to disrupt the remittances.”

In addition, although the U.S. government announced measures to boost internet penetration and interconnection in Cuba, the United States still prohibits access for Cubans to more than 200 private commercial websites, according to Fernández de Cossío. This includes sites for education, health, science and technology, art, culture and innovation.

The U.S. government, Fernández de Cossío stated, admits that it “intends to promote the Cuban private sector, not to contribute to the development of the Cuban economy, not to improve the standard of living of the population, not to help a majority sector of the population, but rather identifies it as an instrument of political subversion … a political weapon.”

What Biden Could Do to Relax the Blockade

Fernández de Cossío described steps Biden could take “to deliver on his declared priority of promoting human rights and caring for the welfare of the Cuban people.”

Biden could remove Cuba from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. In 2015, the Obama-Biden administration removed Cuba from the list. But at the end of Trump’s term, his State Department added Cuba back onto the list. Within weeks, Fernández de Cossío noted, “45 banks and financial institutions with long-standing relations with Cuba severed their ties with our country.” This impacted Cuba’s trade and access to credit. “It is a devastating impact,” he said. “And even today, on account of its presence on that list, Cuba is still encountering trade and financial organizations that refuse to interact with us for fear of retaliation by the U.S. government.”

Dozens of lawyers have signed an open letter to Biden, stating, “There is no legal or moral justification for Cuba to remain on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list.” They wrote, “Biden has the power to remove Cuba from [the list] and reverse many Trump-era sanctions through executive action. However, Biden has chosen to defend Trump’s aggressive policies.”

Trump also stiffened the economic and travel blockade and activated Title III of the Helms Burton Act, which was enacted to discourage foreign investment in Cuba. Trump’s activation of Title III greenlighted thousands of lawsuits that will discourage tourism and investment in Cuba. In one such lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom issued an order on December 30 against four Florida-based cruise shipping companies that sailed to Cuba, requiring them to pay more than $400 million in damages. Fernández de Cossío pointed out that Biden could have suspended Title III like Trump’s predecessors. Activating Title III has had “a deterrent impact on our developmental purpose of attracting foreign capital,” he added.

In addition, “[The Biden] administration could have ceased the practice of pressuring governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to refuse medical cooperation provided by Cuba,” Fernández de Cossío said. “This U.S. action, of course, is intended to prevent dozens of thousands of people from receiving medical services, which is what Cuban doctors provide.”

Biden could also have ended “punitive measures, threats, and persecution against fuel exporting companies, shipping companies, port agencies, insurance and reinsurance agencies all aimed at depriving Cuba of fuel supplies that our country requires to function,” which “has had an extremely severe impact on the economy and the lives of the Cuban people,” according to Fernández de Cossío.

The Purpose of the Blockade Is Regime Change

The blockade, the vice minister said, “has an impact on everything.” That includes electrical service, transportation, the availability of medicine and material for medical services, and the ability to obtain supplies for food production and building materials.

“The U.S. government cannot pretend to treat Cuba as if it were part of its territory or treat Cuba as if it were a colonial dominion, or treat Cuba as if it were an adversary defeated in a war. We are none of the three,” Fernández de Cossío declared. He cited Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s observation that the intention of the United States is “to strangle the Cuban economy and thus try to provoke social collapse and a political crisis in Cuba.” Although the U.S. has failed in that purpose, it has led to “economic depression” in Cuba and “the extraordinary flow of Cuban migrants.”

Biden himself has called Cuba a “failed state,” and his administration “is doing virtually all that it can to make it so,” Heitzer said.

“The embargo’s overt purpose is to strangle the Cuban economy to promote regime change,” according to the Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect (ACERE), a coalition of organizations working to end the Cuba blockade. The United States spends more than $25 million each year to fund regime change programs against Cuba.

On November 3, for the 30th time, the United Nations General Assembly called for an end to the illegal U.S. blockade against Cuba. The vote was 185 in favor, two opposed (the U.S. and Israel), and two abstentions (Brazil and Ukraine). The resolution affirmed “the sovereign equality of States, non-intervention and non-interference in their internal affairs and freedom of international trade and navigation, which are also enshrined in many international legal instruments.”

Joe Biden must make good on his promise to reverse Trump’s actions tightening the blockade against Cuba, return to the measures taken by the Obama-Biden administration, and work to dismantle the illegal and immoral blockade once and for all.

Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

W.T. Whitney -- November 08, 2022



Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and a member of the national advisory boards of Assange Defense and Veterans For Peace, and the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. A prominent scholar and lecturer, her books include Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law; and Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues She provides commentary for local, regional, national and international media and is co-host of “Law and Disorder” radio.
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“Latinos, Race and Empire”: A Talk by Juan González

Democracy Now! co-host Juan González recently spoke at the CUNY Grad Center in the final of his three “farewell” speeches in New York before he moved to Chicago. In a speech titled, “Latinos, Race and Empire,” Juan talked about his time with the Young Lords, the future of Puerto Rico, corporate America’s embrace of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), and more.
January 6, 2023
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This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.





JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Good evening. My thanks to the Graduate Center of the City University of New York’s Public Programs and to its director, Karen Sander, for sponsoring my talk tonight, and especially to Johanna Fernández, history professor at Baruch College, who worked feverishly, in a very short time, to put this event together and for graciously agreeing to moderate the discussion afterward.

I can’t say enough in praise of Johanna, whom I first met many years ago when she was a graduate student at Columbia’s School for International Affairs. Over the decades, she has made her mission to research, rescue and champion the legacy and history of the Young Lords Party, an effort that culminated several years ago in her curating simultaneous exhibitions about the Lords in three different museum spaces, and then in the release of her epic book, The Young Lords Party: A Radical History, the result of more than 15 years of her research. Her book was showered with multiple national academic prizes, including the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. But her teaching at CUNY and her scholarship on the Lords are just two facets of her work. She has been for years a tireless advocate of the campaign to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, one of the country’s most famous political prisoners, even producing a wonderful documentary, Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. And she’s also been the host of her own radio show, a talk show on WBAI.

As many of you know, I’m leaving New York this week — tomorrow, actually — departing permanently from the city I have called home for most of my life, the place where I grew up, where I was educated and shaped professionally and politically, and will instead be relocating to Chicago, the hometown of my wife, Lilia Fernández, who is a terrific professor of history now at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

It’s not an easy thing to do at my age. I just turned 75 a few years ago — a few weeks ago, excuse me. A few weeks ago. Those of us lucky enough to be somewhat lucid at that age have a tendency to reflect frequently on the past and wonder, “Where did all the time go? Did we manage to achieve some greater good, beyond just security and success for ourselves and our loved ones? Did our lives make a difference?”

I decided the best way to answer such questions for myself, while also bidding goodbye to many friends, comrades and colleagues, was with some farewell talks that would try to sum up the insights I’ve gained from my considerable battles as a radical activist, as a journalist and as a student of history, maybe to reveal in the process some incidents from those battles I had never had the chance to mention publicly but which could provide lessons to a younger generation who are still determined to practice good journalism and still devoted to making a better world possible. Consider these remarks the first draft of a possible memoir, or simply chalk them up to my inability to shake off my old role in the Young Lords as minister of education.

My first talk at Columbia Journalism School on November 18th centered on journalism and the media, looking back on my decades of using advocacy journalism as a means of challenging racial and class stereotypes, and my lifelong effort to deconstruct the myth of objective journalism. The second, at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies on December 9th, explored my little-known, behind-the-scenes experiences as a labor organizer, and my many eyewitness news reports and columns on working-class movements throughout the United States and Latin America. Tonight, in this final talk, “Latinos, Race and Empire,” I hope to use the lens of my work in a variety of grassroots Latino organizations that fought to achieve social and racial justice, to oppose colonialism and imperialism, with a special focus on what they can teach today’s generation.

In retrospect, this area was perhaps my most important life’s work. It eventually led to my writing of Harvest of Empire, which, to my complete surprise, became perhaps the best-selling work in the United States on Latino history of the past 20 years. The book’s main thesis is that the massive Latino presence in the United States today — more than 62 million people and growing — is a direct result of the late 19th and early 20th century penetration and pillaging of Latin America by U.S. banks, corporations and the military. Latinos, quite simply, are the harvest of the empire — an unintended harvest, for sure, but one nonetheless. Tonight’s event is meant, in part, to commemorate the release earlier this year of a new and updated edition of Harvest, and also the publication, as Johanna mentioned, just a few weeks ago of the first Spanish-language translation of the book, titled La cosecha del imperio.

But there’s another reason why I feel the need to speak out now, before my departure, a deep concern that an unhealthy trend has begun to take hold in recent years among some sectors of Black and Latinx progressives, especially among intellectuals and academics, a trend that needs to be challenged directly through a principled but respectful debate, one that draws vital lessons from the Latino community’s long and heroic history of grassroots struggles. I’m referring to a false fixation in many progressive circles with anti-Black racism as the burning political question of the day, to the point that some well-meaning but misguided folks now claim the concept of Latinos itself or the existence of Latin America are anti-Black and white supremacist in essence.

This fixation has dovetailed perfectly with a new strategy by America’s neoliberal capitalists to finance a sprawling new diversity, equity and inclusion industry — they call it DEI — in our universities, in corporate workplaces and in the foundation world, all meant to systematically coopt any movements for radical change, to further divide and deviate the masses of the people from uniting against the real source of our common oppression — American capitalism and imperialism — and to avoid any acknowledgment of the persistence of class conflicts among people of color. It is a project the philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò exposed quite exhaustively in his recent book — and I highly recommend the book — Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else).

We who founded the New York Young Lords more than 50 years ago also confronted and rejected similar efforts. I’ve often been amazed how the image and actions of the Lords as militant revolutionaries continue to spark enduring fascination among young activists, yet too often the content of what we stood for gets lost.

It was July 26, 1969. A few dozen of us, most barely out of our teens, gathered together in Tompkins Square Park in purple berets and green field jackets and announced to the world that the Young Lords were here, determined to become the Puerto Rican arm of a social revolution that was then sweeping the world. I was 21 then, barely the oldest member of the original Central Committee. The average age of our membership was 17.

Over the next few years, we astonished ourselves and everyone around us with what we managed to accomplish, how we freed our minds, taught ourselves history and politics, changed our ways of relating to each other, forced those in power to respond to our community’s demands for systemic change, how we consciously shaped and controlled our own narrative through our own newspaper, Palante, our own radio show on WBAI, and our deft handling of the commercial and corporate press. In almost no time, we awakened an entire generation of young Latinos. I have always felt immensely privileged to have been part of this most talented, dedicated and committed group of people, at all levels, not just leadership, and still marvel at how young we were when we did all these things, how fearless in the face of all those who were older and more skeptical, who kept telling us we wouldn’t accomplish much.

For a brief period, we naively believed nothing could stop us, that a revolution was around the corner. Then came the reaction by those in power, as it always does — the police repression, the COINTELPRO campaigns of the Nixon era, the sectarianism and infighting that weakened us from within and turned us against each other, all of it made worse by our own youthful arrogance, a conceit fueled by all the initial success and all the fawning media attention that went to our heads. Mao Zedong called that death by “sugar-coated bullets.” That was followed by the counterrevolution of the Reagan-Bush era, all-out attempts to bury the memory of everything that radical groups like the Young Lords or the Black Panthers or Los Siete or La Raza Unida or SNCC represented.

But it wasn’t just the daring actions of the Lords that are important to remember — our garbage offensives, our healthcare programs, our occupations of institutions, our confrontations with the police who were terrorizing our neighborhoods, our organizing of prison inmates to demand better conditions, our protests advocating for Puerto Rican and Black studies programs at the universities. Even more significant was our analysis of race, class and empire, an analysis that stemmed from the very composition of our group. We were, after all, the sons and daughters of working-class migrants from the U.S.’s largest colonial territory. Long before decoloniality became a popular school of thought in academia, the Lords began exposing not just the political and the economic facts of colonialism, but its psychological effect, the colonized mentality first identified by Frantz Fanon. Our primitive political manifesto, written in 1972, entitled The Ideology of the Young Lords Party, expressed it best, and I quote: “We can only unchain our minds from the colonized mentality if we learn our true history, understand our culture, and work towards unity.”

The Lords were also perhaps the first Latino political group in the United States whose leadership was primarily Black. And this rarely gets acknowledged. Of the six early members of our Central Committee, three were Afro-Puerto Rican: Felipe Luciano, Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán and Juan “Fi” Ortiz. One was African American: Denise Oliver. And two were light-skinned Puerto Ricans: David Pérez and myself. More than 25% of our total membership was African American or Afro-Latino. Thus, our very existence directly challenged racial prejudice within our own communities.

In that 1972 manifesto, an essay by Denise Oliver eloquently explained what we referred to as the “non-conscious ideology” of racism among Latinos, one that had been instilled in us by colonialism. “We should not be afraid to criticize ourselves about racism,” Denise wrote. “We are all racists, not because we want to be, but because we are taught to be that way, to keep us divided, because it benefits the capitalist system. And this applies to racism toward Asians, toward other Brown people, and toward white people. White people are not the oppressor — capitalists are. We will never have socialism until we are free of these chains on our mind.” That was Denise Oliver in 1972.

Back then, we always distinguished between the individual racial biases imbued in us by colonialism and capitalism, what we referred to as “contradictions among the people,” and the systematically racist policies of the society’s major institutions, which we called “antagonistic contradictions” between classes. How different and clear that analysis is compared to all the claptrap we hear these days about diversity, equity and inclusion, with employee training sessions proliferating everywhere, that supposedly aim at rooting out anti-Black bias among individuals, but only result in confusion, mistrust and division among their participants, sessions run by so-called diversity consultants paid as much as $1,000 per hour by the very forces that perpetuate systemic racial and class oppression.

As a natural outgrowth of the Lords’ analysis, we developed close and excellent working relationships with a variety of radical groups of that era, including the Panthers, the Republic of New Afrika, the Congress of African Peoples, I Wor Kuen, the Union of Democratic Filipinos, Students for a Democratic Society, the Revolutionary Union and the Young Patriots. And we were also founding members of the original Rainbow Coalition created by the late great Panther leader Fred Hampton. In short, we never sought to focus on what divides racial and ethnic groups, but instead to elevate what unites us.

After the Lords fell apart, many of us moved on to other movements and causes, but we always held fast to the slogan, “Unite the many to defeat the few.” By the 1970s, I was working with the African Liberation Support Committee in Philadelphia, helping to raise financial and political support for the liberation movements in Africa against white minority rule in Rhodesia, South Africa and Mozambique.

This was also the era of Frank Rizzo, a notorious, racist, dictatorial mayor and former police chief of Philadelphia, who attempted in 1978 to remove term limits so he could remain mayor for life. In an effort to build the widest possible movement against this power grab, I took a job as co-coordinator of something called the Stop Rizzo Coalition, and, within that broader group, spearheaded Puerto Ricans United Against Rizzo. There, I worked closely not only with liberal Democrats — Paul Tully, for example, the Kennedy Democrat who would later become the chief strategist of Bill Clinton’s presidential victory, was my co-coordinator — but with Republicans, as well, with several ex-members of the Black Panther Party, like Reggie Schell in the Black United Front, housing activists like John and Milton Street, legendary DJ and civil rights leader Georgie Woods at WDAS. And all of us together managed in a few short weeks to register more than 100,000 new voters in the Black and Puerto Rican communities and engineer a massive turnout that overwhelmingly defeated Rizzo’s referendum ploy and paved the way for modern Black political power in Philadelphia government.

One of the early movement’s most inspiring moments was a militant march organized by the Street brothers into the heart of Rizzo territory, South Philadelphia’s Whitman Park area, where a coalition of right-wing whites had prevented the building of a federal public housing project for 25 years. More than 2,000 of us from the city’s Black and Puerto Rican community marched straight through the middle of South Philadelphia to Whitman Park, even as hundreds of angry residents tossed bottles and eggs and shouted racist obscenities at us. More than any single event, the Whitman Park march became a symbol that the era of legally sanctioned racism in Philadelphia was over. Milton Street would eventually become a state senator. His brother John Street would go on to be the president of the Philadelphia City Council and a two-term mayor of that city.

Those of us in the Latino community who took part in that march soon formed the Puerto Rican Alliance, a broad umbrella group of grassroots organizations. Like the Street brothers were doing in the Black community, the Alliance began to organize Puerto Rican families in Philadelphia to take over or squat in abandoned homes owned by the federal government, of which there were thousands in the city at the time. We soon had more than 150 squatter families just in the Puerto Rican community. We orchestrated repeated protests at HUD’s offices to demand the titles to these properties. We held a surprise occupation with the families and their children at Philadelphia’s famous Independence Hall, and an even more dramatic occupation of President Jimmy Carter’s Pennsylvania campaign headquarters on the day before Carter was to face Ted Kennedy in their tight 1980 primary for the Democratic presidential nomination. Carter’s people were so desperate to get our people out of their building, because they needed it for the primary the next day, that his aides secretly agreed to grant the squatters title to their homes if we would just leave before the opening of the polls. It was an enormous victory, a concrete victory that bettered the lives of hundreds of the lowest-income Puerto Ricans in the city. And it came about only because of bold Young Lord-like actions, and thanks to our close work and class solidarity with major African American radical activists, because neither the upper strata of Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community nor that of the Black community gave a damn about or had any connection to the plight of homeless families back then.

Between 1971 and 1973, Black and Latino community organizations across the United States filed more than 340 challenges at the Federal Communications Commission against the radio and television licenses of stations in virtually every major city in America, all demanding that people of color be hired in greater numbers and that programming better reflect the composition of the communities those stations served. A succession of racial discrimination lawsuits roiled the major news organizations, such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Associated Press and the Daily News. The result was the first great democratic revolution in the American media, with a sudden influx of young Black and Brown journalists into the nation’s newsrooms who posed the first significant challenge to the reigning narratives about Puerto Ricans, Chicanos and other people of color.

After the Lords disintegrated, several of us in the organization’s original leadership drifted toward careers in the media. I ended up being hired as a young reporter at the Philadelphia Daily News in 1978, right after we defeated Rizzo. At the time, I was the only Latino journalist with a full-time job in the city’s mainstream media, including all the radio and television stations and the four daily newspapers. Then, in the early 1980s, a handful of Puerto Ricans landed jobs as producers or on-air reporters. They began producing reports for local TV, as I did in the newspaper, on the resistance by the Fishermen’s Association of Vieques to the U.S. Navy bombing of their island. Such stories would never had made the news back then were it not for the handful of journalists who were cognizant of Puerto Rico’s history and understood their responsibility to assure a new kind of coverage about the island’s colonial status.

My most vivid recollection in that regard came in January of 1981 with the campaign against the racist Hollywood movie, Fort Apache, the Bronx. Richie Pérez, an old comrade from Young Lords days and later to be a fellow member of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, was then leading the Committee Against Fort Apache in a militant boycott movement against the film that had spread across the country. The editor-in-chief at the Philadelphia Daily News was well aware of my history as an activist, and he insisted that I had to view the film before daring to criticize it in print. So he assigned me to attend an invitation-only press junket and screening that Time-Life Films, the production company, had quietly scheduled for the nation’s movie critics. The film’s producer, David Susskind, its director, Dan Petrie, and its two main actors, Paul Newman and Ed Asner, all enjoyed reputations at the time as Hollywood liberals. Petrie and Newman were scheduled to participate in a Q&A with all the critics during the event.

I immediately telephoned Richie Pérez in New York and alerted him to the date and place of the screening at the hotel in Atlanta — a city apparently chosen by Time-Life to avoid any possible protests. Richie purchased an airplane ticket and booked a room at the same hotel. Once we arrived in Atlanta, I shared with him a copy of the agenda of the two days. It called for a luxurious reception the first evening, after which the reporters would board a bus in front of the hotel for a ride to a nearby movie theater for the screening. But when the reporters filed into the buses, they encountered Richie standing at the door in a suit and tie and handing out glossy press packets, except the packets were not touting the film. They contained literature against it from the Committee Against Fort Apache and press clippings of all the protests. Before the Time-Life security guards even became aware of what was happening, Richie had boarded the bus, introduced himself and made a quick speech to the assembled critics about the campaign. He then announced the hospitality suite in his hotel room after the screening to further discuss the racist anti-Puerto Rican nature of the film. More than a dozen reporters subsequently took him up on his invitation.

The following morning at the press conference with Paul Newman and Petrie, Richie was outside the conference room, again distributing literature. Hotel security guards attempted to remove him, whereupon a short scuffle ensued, with Richie insisting that as a paying guest at the hotel, he had every right to be in the hallway. During the actual press conference, Newman and Petrie were visibly shaken by the commotion outside.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the generally negative reviews of Fort Apache that subsequently appeared in the nation’s newspapers when the film opened the following month were due in no small part to the massive community opposition to the film, and to that contentious press junket in Atlanta that Richie had crashed. For one brief moment, the distorted narrative about Puerto Ricans in America had not simply been challenged; it had been delegitimized.

Richie and I were soon working together again in the newly formed National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, an extraordinary mass organization with several thousand members that functioned throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, combining many former members of the Young Lords, of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, of El Comité, as well as young labor activists and community organizations and elected officials, into statewide groups in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and for a time in Florida. Members of the Congress achieved real political advances for Puerto Ricans in places like Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia, Vineland, New Jersey, and other smaller towns.

Through its Justice Committee, the Congress became the leading group exposing the epidemic of police brutality against Latinos, in cases like the murder of David Baez, of Hilton Vega and Anthony Rosario, of Federico Pereira. Richie, in particular, became known throughout the country for his work leading the Justice Committee, and he often was the main person in the Latino community working side by side with Reverend Al Sharpton, Charles Barron and other Black leaders on police abuse cases in the Black community.

But as the Latino population of the U.S. grew, and as the Puerto Rican population of the Midwest and Northeast became more dispersed throughout the nation, the ethnic groups within the Latino community that composed the lower strata of the working class changed. Today, even on the East Coast, it is Mexican and Central American migrants who increasingly fill the lowest-paying and most oppressive jobs in society. At the same time, migration from the middle and upper classes of Latin America has accelerated over the past few decades from countries such as Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and even Puerto Rico, with many Latin Americans from well-to-do families often traveling to the U.S. to study, then staying to fill professional and academic jobs in this country. In the universities, that has led to the phenomenon of wealthy Latin Americans having disproportionate influence over ethnic studies programs that were originally created from the battles of working-class Puerto Ricans and Chicanos raised in the barrios of the United States. Yet the current students of those programs are increasingly Mexican, Salvadoran and Guatemalan children of peasant and working-class migrants. In other words, class differences have sharpened dramatically within the Latino community.

I witnessed this directly when I began teaching at Rutgers University in 2017. The population of New Brunswick, the city where Rutgers’s main campus is located, is about 50% Latino. But that population is largely Mexican and Central American, since the city’s historic Puerto Rican community declined ages ago due to previous waves of gentrification and outmigration. In late 2019, my wife and I became involved in a major community struggle against displacement of low-income Latino families. Neighborhood parents were determined to prevent Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, part of the state’s largest hospital chain, and the Rutgers Cancer Institute from purchasing and demolishing one of the city’s best-performing public schools, Lincoln Annex, to make way for a huge new hospital expansion. Of the school’s 750 pupils, 94% were Latino, mostly from immigrant Mexican and Central American families, with many of the parents unable to vote, so the city’s political elite figured it would be easy to remove them from the rapidly gentrifying downtown area around the hospital.

A broad coalition arose of community residents, progressive Rutgers faculty and students to oppose the sale. The movement spearheaded repeated militant protests and rallies by hundreds of people, social media campaigns, repeated disruptions of Board of Education and City Council hearings, and several lawsuits filed by LatinoJustice PRLDEF. It quickly emerged as a textbook example of oppressed working-class Latinos demanding basic respect and of a university community opposing injustice from its own hierarchy.

Amazingly, at these government meetings, many of the officials backing the gentrification were from the city’s Puerto Rican, Dominican and African American community — excuse me a second here. Can’t separate these pages here. Here we are. From the city’s Puerto Rican, Dominican and African American elite. They were people who had long ago been integrated into local political machines, and who functioned as mouthpieces and defenders for it.

In the midst of the campaign, the coronavirus pandemic erupted, followed by the national economic shutdown, all of which forced the Coalition to Defend Lincoln Annex to adopt new tactics of resistance. Since the city’s immigrant households had been devastated by the pandemic and were receiving no government assistance, as most officials retreated to the safety of their homes and remote work, we in the coalition launched a mutual aid effort and a GoFundMe page to assist those families. We managed, within a few short weeks, to raise more than $23,000 and to rapidly distribute cash grants of $300 to $500 to nearly 70 families. It was a remarkable show of grassroots perseverance and unity in the face of public health crisis and economic collapse.

But what struck me most in the Lincoln Annex battle was not just the betrayal of those Black and Latino officials. It was that the coalition attracted greater participation from the university’s white and African American progressive faculty and students than it did, with a handful of notable exceptions, from the faculty and students of the Latino Studies Program at Rutgers, who in prior decades would have been at the forefront of such a struggle.

And my fear is that this is no anomaly. Across the country, ethnic studies departments, born out of community activism of the 1960s, that once championed publicly engaged scholarship, and which still claim to be the voice of the marginalized and oppressed, are increasingly disconnected from the working-class Latino populations that often reside just steps from their ivy-covered walls. At some of these universities, Black and Latino scholars eagerly line up to apply for new diversity, equity and inclusion grants, that will increase their personal prestige, bring them greater pay or win them release from teaching loads, while they remain eerily silent about their own universities’ neoliberal policies of cutting teaching expenditures, and ignoring or displacing the low-income communities around them, or endlessly raising student tuition. Many of those students, meanwhile, are forced to burden themselves with ever-growing debt, while receiving instruction largely from part-time, poorly compensated and contingent lecturers, who themselves face little job security and inadequate working conditions.

Quite simply, the inconveniences, injustices or racial slights of academia and other professional sectors do not compare to the magnitude of the very real social and economic problems confronting more than 60 million people of Latin American descent in the United States, or that of the more than 3 million Latino students in higher education today.

Little wonder that Kwame Nkrumah, the legendary Pan-African socialist and first president of Ghana, noted in his last book, Class Struggles in Africa, quote, and I’m quoting Nkrumah, “The intelligentsia always leads the nationalist movements in its early stages. It aspires to replace the colonial power, but not to bring about a radical transformation of society. The object is to control the system rather than to change it, since the intelligentsia tends as a whole to be bourgeois-minded and against revolutionary transformation.”

My references tonight to Fanon and Nkrumah and the evolution of class struggle among colonial peoples is for a reason. In the Young Lords, the colonial condition of our homeland was always central to our identity. Our iconic button featured a map of the island and the slogan, ”Tengo Puerto Rico en mi corazón,” “I have Puerto Rico in my heart.” And an end to U.S. colonial control was a key plank of our program. The lessons of that for today are important to grasp.

Fifty years ago, we used to say that the Puerto Rican people were a divided nation, one-third of us living in the United States, and two-thirds in Puerto Rico. Today, those statistics have been dramatically reversed. Some 5.8 million Puerto Ricans now reside in the United States, while just 3.2 million reside on the island, according to the 2020 census. Five-eighths of our population, in other words, is now here. There are today four Puerto Ricans in Congress with a vote: Nydia Velázquez, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ritchie Torres from New York and Darren Soto from Central Florida. There is only one in Congress from the island, Resident Commissioner Jennifer González. She has no vote. The bulk of the political power of the Puerto Rican people, in other words, is now here in the United States.

All of these changes affect how activists and scholars approach the real-world solutions to Puerto Rico’s colonial condition, especially in the wake of the debt crisis, PROMESA, Hurricane Maria, a series of earthquakes, all of which have combined to bring unprecedented calamity to the island’s residents.

As I have urged repeatedly for years, there’s an urgent need for more anti-imperialist scholars to dedicate themselves to analyzing how changes in the world capitalist economy have manifested themselves in Puerto Rico over the past 20 or 30 years. It is time we acknowledge that globalization has rendered historic concepts of national independence almost meaningless. You no longer need foreign armies to control the population, when you can read everyone’s mail, tap everyone’s phone, empty a country’s coffers and paralyze its economy from afar through satellites, instant wire transfers and simple cancellations of bank credit lines. Today, small nations need more creative and flexible tactics to defend themselves from bullying by larger ones, to assert national sovereignty in an increasingly interdependent world. And Puerto Rican activists will never successfully tackle such problems with rote references to conditions 50 years ago.

I don’t claim to have all the answers, only that we must work harder than ever to find solutions, and that we must never forget to ask what class interest is served by any solution. My observations tonight are not meant to needlessly cast fault on anyone, only to emphasize that the crucial test of our ideas and actions, no matter how high-sounding the words, comes in the crucible of popular struggle, especially if that struggle requires confrontation with the very institutions to which you belong or that employ you. That is how it was more than 50 years ago when I first became a Young Lord. And judging by the widespread youth rebellions across the nation, the Black Lives Matter, immigrant rights and climate change movements, that is how it will continue to be in the future, because all the accumulated knowledge and experience of radicals and progressives and revolutionaries mean nothing unless we draw the right lessons, unless they lead us to a freer, more just world, one where the fight against class oppression and empire remains at the center of everything we do.

So, that’s the sum of my remarks. I’m certainly open to discussion with Johanna. Thank you.

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Oxford Study Warns Extreme Heat and Drought to Hit 90% of World Population

The frequency of compound drought-heatwave events is "projected to increase by tenfold globally under the highest emissions scenario."

January 6, 2023
Z Article
Source: Common Dreams


As interlinked extreme heat and drought events grow in intensity and frequency amid the ruling class’ ongoing failure to adequately slash planet-heating fossil fuel pollution, over 90% of the global population is projected to suffer the consequences in the coming decades, according to peer-reviewed research published Thursday in Nature Sustainability.

Compound drought-heatwave (CDHW) events are “one of the worst climatic stressors for global sustainable development,” states the paper, but their “physical mechanisms” and “impacts on socio-ecosystem productivity remain poorly understood.”

“Using simulations from a large climate-hydrology model,” nine scholars—working at universities in China, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan—found that “the frequency of extreme CDHWs is projected to increase by tenfold globally under the highest emissions scenario, along with a disproportionate negative impact on vegetation and socio-economic productivity by the late 21st century.”

According to the study: “Terrestrial water storage and temperature are negatively coupled, probably driven by similar atmospheric conditions (for example, water vapor deficit and energy demand). Limits on water availability are likely to play a more important role in constraining the terrestrial carbon sink than temperature extremes.”

Put plainly, drought and extreme heat are intertwined. Increasingly arid and hot conditions are undermining the capacity of land-based ecosystems to absorb carbon dioxide, with a lack of water considered even more consequential than higher temperatures.

Not only are CDHWs hurting the ability of biodiverse regions to absorb a key greenhouse gas but these increasingly intense and frequent events also threaten to exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities.

The study estimates that even under the lowest emission scenario, “over 90% of the global population and gross domestic product could be exposed to increasing CDHW risks in the future, with more severe impacts in poorer and more rural areas.”


Lead author Jiabo Yin, an associate professor of hydrology at Wuhan University and visiting researcher at Oxford University, explained in a statement that quantifying “the response of ecosystem productivity to heat and water stressors at the global scale” shows that the joint threats of dangerously hot temperatures and drought pose substantially greater risks to society and the environment when assessed together rather than independently.

The effects of rising temperatures and declining terrestrial water storage combine to weaken the capacity of “carbon sinks” to absorb heat-trapping emissions and release oxygen, Yin noted.

Co-author Lousie Slater, associate professor of physical geography at the University of Oxford, said that “understanding compounding hazards in a warming Earth is essential for the implementation of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular SDG13 that aims to combat climate change and its impacts.”

“By combining atmospheric dynamics and hydrology, we explore the role of water and energy budgets in causing these extremes,” said Slater.

The new research, which is aimed at “assessing and mitigating adverse effects of compound hazards on ecosystems and human well-being,” comes in the wake of record-breaking extreme heat and historic droughts around the world in 2022.

The life-threatening impacts of the global climate emergency have only continued to reverberate in 2023, underscoring the need to expedite the clean energy transition, among other necessary transformations.

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Tech Giants Are Building a Dystopia of Desperate Workers and Social Isolation

Tech companies like Amazon and Uber are creating a society divided between the served and their servants, where the “friction” of in-person interaction is eliminated. That friction is the stuff of social connection — a world without it is nightmarish.
January 6, 2023
Z Article
Source: Jacobin


Five years before COVID-19 lockdowns forced people to stay home as much as possible, journalist Lauren Smiley was already writing about how a new wave of companies was creating a “shut-in economy.” These shut-ins weren’t people involuntarily stuck inside or shielding themselves from an unprecedented health crisis; they were tech workers who spent so much time working that they felt they had little time for anything else.

Instead of cutting back and finding a healthier work-life balance, they started using on-demand services for just about everything. They had their meals delivered so they didn’t have to cook for themselves. They got people to go pick up their groceries and sometimes even stock the cupboard. They relied on Amazon and a selection of apps, instead of running out to do errands or pick up their necessities.

Most of these on-demand services were made by people in the tech industry to serve the needs of other people like themselves while taking advantage of an increasingly precarious workforce. But the venture capitalists funding them would never be content just serving that niche market: the companies had to strive for monopoly, and that meant reaching a much wider market.

The big five US tech giants — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft — pulled in a combined revenue of $1.2 trillion in the first twelve months of the pandemic — more than 25 percent higher than the year before. The pandemic also pushed many people to try on-demand services and become more reliant on Amazon. When we look back, we will likely view the pandemic as a key moment in accelerating the shift toward an on-demand economy: one that will have consequences for how we live, how we work, and how our communities function.

The Birth of the On-Demand Economy

The on-demand economy was made possible by the convergence of new technologies and the consequences of the 2007–8 financial crisis. In 2002, Amazon created Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing platform to provide cheap on-demand access to server resources, making it much easier for people and companies to launch new online services. By the end of the decade, other companies like Google and Microsoft were launching cloud solutions of their own, drastically changing the way people interfaced with the internet and the services built on it.

In 2007, months before the financial crash, Apple released the iPhone. The device took a more fully functioning internet away from the desk and placed it in the palm of people’s hands. Initially, developers were constrained by what they could do with the iPhone, until Apple launched the App Store in 2008. That, just as Western countries were coming out of the recession and looking for new ways to drive economic growth, set off a frenzy to create companies that would stake their claims in the rapidly growing app economy.

The so-called sharing economy emerged from that moment; it benefited immensely not just from the new technologies, but other factors created by the postrecession conditions. Newly formed companies had much easier access to capital because of rock-bottom interest rates, which ensured they could lose money hand over fist as they underpriced their services in pursuit of monopoly. Meanwhile, as the economy returned to growth, it didn’t serve everyone equally.

While founders could get financing relatively easily, and tech workers were in high demand, most workers had lost out in the recession. The companies crowding into the sharing economy crafted a message targeted at those people: they could earn a living while retaining control over their hours. The company that defined this new “flexible” space was Uber. It began as a means to hire a private driver in 2009 but quickly pivoted to take on the taxi industry by letting virtually anyone sign up to become a driver — while evading the regulations that applied to the industry.

These companies surrounded themselves with language about sharing and community, but the reality was that they were businesses like any other, though with one important exception: they had the freedom to burn money for years, as long as they could show they were bringing in more customers. In pursuit of that growth, they took advantage of whoever they could — the workers providing the service and the other businesses they relied on.

How Convenience Masked Exploitation

The services powering the on-demand economy looked great from the consumer side: they were relatively affordable, incredibly convenient, and could be accessed right from your phone. But through their marketing and their design, they also abstracted how the service was delivered and what that meant for workers and the wider community.

Soon, the on-demand economy developed far beyond app-based services. Amazon became a key part of it, offering rapid delivery for Prime members as it built out its own delivery network. But its infrastructure is dependent on worker exploitation: Amazon’s warehouse workers in the United States suffer serious injuries at a rate nearly double the industry average, while their pay is well below what competitors offer. There are complaints about being unable to take bathroom breaks: the company’s delivery workers have reported having to pee in bottles and even defecate in bags because the delivery targets are so high. That’s just one cost of convenience.

Food delivery services like Uber Eats and Deliveroo rely not only on poorly paid workers but also on restaurants to prepare the food they deliver, with the result that as more customers have turned to app-based services, especially during the pandemic, restaurants have had to offer their menus through them. Yet as the delivery services gained more customers, they also gained more power to extract higher delivery fees, sometimes up to 40 percent of the total cost. As fees have risen, many restaurants have had to raise their prices or shut down entirely.

Although the on-demand economy was marketed as serving the common good, that was never truly the case. The services were designed to meet the needs of overworked professionals, and so they have always served a disproportionately well-off group of people while taking advantage of the labor of precarious workers who had little control over their work, were paid quite poorly, and were usually denied the rights and benefits of worker status.

In 2015, Smiley saw this too. “In the new world of on-demand everything,” she observed, “you’re either pampered, isolated royalty — or you’re a twenty-first-century servant.” The rich have always had an array of staff to do the tasks they didn’t want to do, but on-demand services promised to allow a slightly larger group of well-off people to more easily farm out their chores too, taking advantage of a growing class of struggling workers. But in the process, the companies also began transforming the world around us.

Removing the “Friction” of Interaction

During the early stages of the pandemic, many people became “shut-ins” as they were instructed to stay home to minimize the spread of COVID-19. But not everyone had that luxury. Health, transport, and supermarket workers were recognized as essential, but while delivery workers were serving a necessary function, they didn’t always get the same recognition. As people lost their jobs when the economy slowed down, more people flooded onto the apps in search of the money they needed to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. The dynamic that Smiley was writing about in 2015 was further cemented, and the on-demand services that enabled it were further entrenched in our lives.

In the first three months of 2021, Amazon’s sales had grown by 44 percent compared to the same period in 2020, as people turned to online shopping instead of going to local stores where they might risk catching COVID. But even as that threat dissipated, more people became accustomed to shopping online and will likely continue doing so in the future. The supply chain chaos driving inflation across our economy today is intimately linked to this process of reordering how goods and services are provided.

And it has only just begun. After years of testing cashierless shopping in Amazon Go and Fresh stores, the company has also begun rolling out its “Just Walk Out” system in some Whole Foods stores in the United States. The goal is to replace the human cashier or self-checkout with a surveillance system that tracks every item you pick up, then charges it to your Amazon account when you leave the store.

Once again, this can sound appealing and convenient, if you choose to ignore the array of cameras that track everything you do in the store and Amazon’s ability to keep track of your purchases. But it’s also exclusionary. To properly use the technology, you need a smartphone with an internet connection and an Amazon account with a linked payment method — typically a credit card. When Amazon opened one of its Fresh stores in Ealing, West London, in March 2021, the Independent observed an elderly man trying to go in, but after being told of the steps that were necessary, he replied, “Oh f*** that.”

The desire to eliminate human interaction — which is considered a form of unacceptable “friction” by tech companies — is at the core of many of these innovations, even as humans are still working behind the scenes to stock shelves, fulfill online orders, or deliver food. During the pandemic, many companies even introduced contactless delivery so customers could avoid interacting with the human worker at all.

Given how delivery apps are changing the economics of restaurants, there’s a growing push to create “dark kitchens” too: places to prepare food for delivery that offer no option for seating or even for customers to walk in and place an order. They’re purely designed to serve delivery apps and present the potential to ensure people spend less time eating out in favor of ordering in. It’s highly likely that this process will eventually lead many takeouts to abandon storefront locations, further transforming our high streets and our connection with the places that produce our food.

Who Gets to Shape the Future?

People on the political right often criticize public investment as wasteful and corrupt, but the reality is that the retreat of the state hasn’t resulted in some idyllic “free” market — it has just left wealthy, powerful, and ultimately unaccountable people in charge of shaping the economy.

The on-demand economy represents a concerted effort to remake important aspects of how we live so that they align with the ideas of the tech industry’s power players — regardless of whether they’re economically rational or socially just. Meanwhile, it has the happy coincidence of shifting ever greater amounts of control into their hands. (In the case of dark kitchens, it should come as no surprise that one of the leading people pushing that vision is none other than Uber cofounder and former CEO Travis Kalanick.)

In the years to come, we will have an important choice to make: Do we continue to allow powerful capitalists to shape our lives for their benefit, or do we take back the power to determine our collective future? The tech industry’s economic dream is building a nightmare for the rest of us: a society more firmly divided between the served and their servants, where the “friction” of human interaction is replaced with digital interfaces. It’s an antisocial future — but it’s one that we still have time to stop.

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Liberty for Julian Assange
By B. Nimri Aziz
January 6, 2023
Z Article
Source: Counterpunch

Source: Matt Hrkac – CC BY 2.0

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s vindication seems– maybe, perhaps, imaginably—achievable. It’s enough for me to publish my singular New Year resolution– not a wish, but a firm resolution– to more actively contribute to growing pressure to free Julian Assange, the mistreated, vilified and imprisoned, brave and brilliant founder of WikiLeaks.

It’s a finite issue, unlike negotiations to end a raging war or a global agreement on climate controls. Yet freeing Assange had appeared almost insurmountable not long ago. Whereas, given the painstaking pursuit to free Assange by a pitifully small coterie of determined supporters, some success may be at hand.

Their movement’s goal is clear: the U.S. government must drop its extradition order. Then, Assange should be released from Britian’s notorious Belmarsh prison,where he’s held only on a charge of dodging a bail hearing. Then, if faced with further legal action, his lawyers argue, he should be detained in his own country, Australia.

During these four years in Belmarsh, Assange’s situation looked bleak. Particularly because his struggle for justice was essentially ignored by the press and thereby by the public, including many human rights groups. The very newspapers which so righteously published WikiLeaks’ documents revealing Washington’s criminality in Iraq and elsewhere, maligned him. Then they abandoned the principle of press freedom which he represents. In 2019 when a new Ecuadorian leader revoked Assange asylum in their London embassy, British authorities forcibly removed Assange from the embassy and slapped him into Belmarsh prison. Then the U.K. government initiated hearings regarding Washington’s request for his extradition to the U.S. A series of challenges by Assange’s legal team yielded little hope of success.

With diminishing legal options, freedom of journalists and publishers to expose government wrongdoings became an increasingly louder argument for Assange’s release. That seemed to garner new attention. More journalists joined the free-Assange movement, perhaps realizing the implications that a successful indictment of Assange might hold for themselves.

A few weeks ago, the world heard Assange’s name after a decade-long blackout. Unexpectedly, on Nov 28th those same press giants largely responsible for that blockade and for defaming Assange, decided to speak against his prosecution by U.S. authorities.

Their plea became headline news—as if the case was just discovered. The New York Times, joined by its peers in the U.K., France and Germany, published an open letter headlined “The U.S. government should end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets”. Their brief statement made its appeal on the principle of press freedom. “This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press. Holding governments accountable”, it said, “is part of the core mission of a free press in a democracy.”

Too often, the same public who’d cared little about Assange’s fate or interpretations of press freedom which his prosecution raises, suddenly had a change of heart. The voice of those news giants is so frightening in its power to singlehandedly transform public opinion and government policies. Although we still don’t know how that appeal will affect Washington’s extradition order.

I will not join those who applaud the media giants’ new posture. What we ought to refect on is the real source of this ideological change: the quotidian struggle to win his freedom, year-after-year, against seemingly impossible odds. It was not human rights organizations or our supposed-free press who did this. It was individuals. The changed public mood derives from painstaking efforts by a small group of lawyers, family, and media critics who themselves became unpopular and marginalized for their support of the imprisoned man. I have no doubt that the breakthrough represented in that highbrow open letter wouldn’t have been possible without the tireless, persistent educational and legal campaigns by that committed team.

I was aware, having followed their legal appeals and public events for more than a decade, of a remarkable by little publicized October 9th London protest, perhaps a watershed in the campaign: more than 5,000 individuals linked hands, forming a human chain around the British parliament building to call for Assange’s release. A glowing, living example of support.

Not long before that, the film Ithaka was released – a video document of the campaign led by Assange’s family members, most notably his 76-year-old father John Shipton. (The elder Shipton’s eloquence and compassion are deeply moving.) During the U.S. tour portrayed in Ithaka, Shipton and Assange’s brother Gabriel often drew hardly more than a dozen listeners. (Audiences were larger in Europe and Australia.)

On December 1st, the Australian government which had hitherto made no effort to aid Assange, indicated a new position. “Enough is enough”, proclaimed Australia’s recently elected Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

In recent weeks, celebrated press freedom campaigners like Daniel Ellsberg announced—“Indict me too”, since he himself had released government secrets. Guests who’d visited Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy learned that their phones and other items submitted to embassy security had been turned over the CIA; they are now suing former CIA director Pompeo along with others for violating their rights.

How much more is needed to force the U.K. and U.S. governments to reverse their policy and free Julian Assange? Given the apparently successful efforts of that slight but resolute group of supporters, we should be encouraged to personally lend our weight, however modest, for the final push.

B. Nimri Aziz is a New York based anthropologist and journalist. Her latest book is “Yogmaya and Durga Devi: Rebel Women of Nepal.” Find her work at www.barbaranimri.com.

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