How the Mohawk Valley Popularized a Brutal Method of Strikebreaking

by J.N. Cheney / August 6th, 2024

Labor unrest has been a part of history for generations. Some sources even point to the first ever recorded strike taking place in 1170 BCE Egyptover delays in receiving building materials. With the emergence of organized labor, it was a dialectical inevitability that the bourgeois class would take on their own efforts to undermine the organizational endeavors of the working class by any means. From the Pullman Strike of 1894 to the PATCO Strike of 1981 to the union-busting efforts of Starbucks in the 2020s, the forces of capital have tirelessly fought to keep the worker in conditions of subordination.

New York State’s Mohawk Valley is generally an untapped area when it comes to the historical struggle of labor. Textile workers, trolley and bus drivers, teachers, all sects of the working class that have engaged in some sort of organized struggle within the region since at least the 19th century, if not even earlier. In the mid-1930s, workers in Ilion, New York, in addition to two other NY cites as well as towns in Ohio and Connecticut were engaged in a strike that would ultimately spark the invention of the blueprint for modern strikebreaking and union busting.

From 1936-1937, workers at various plants of the Remington Rand Company initiated a strike, demanding a 20% wage increase, the rehiring of 17 unjustly fired workers, as well as protesting the potential of closing the plant in Syracuse, NY in favor of moving production to a newly acquired plant in Elmira, about two hours away from the prior. Upwards of 6000 Remington Rand employees put their boots on the ground for this fight. The response from the capitalists in some ways was typical of the rich classes, they weren’t happy seeing workers organizing in solidarity. Industrialist and owner of the company, James Rand Jr., let his disdain for unions be put on full display as he sought to crush the efforts of the six striking plants. After the workers were able to unionize in 1934, Rand made it his mission to harass and attack the union with the goal of dissolving anything even resembling a union.

Rand’s anti-union character reached a peak during the 1936-1937 strike. The Remington Rand company was able to file an injunction that temporarily limited the strikers’ ability to engage in pickets, and likewise filed an additional injunction that briefly blocked the National Labor Relations Board from holding hearings on the dispute between Rand and the workers in July of 1936. The pinnacle of Rand’s anti-labor rhetoric and actions came in the midst of the strike, with Rand and other higher ups in the company composing what became known as the Mohawk Valley Formula.

The Mohawk Valley Formula gets its name because it was initially introduced at the Ilion, NY plant, a village in the region. Sources vary on exactly how many points there are to this formula, but the number typically sits between 8-10 different tenets of this anti-worker, anti-union formulation. Rand’s formula would go on to become the blueprint used for strikebreaking and union-busting up to the modern day. Though in some form it does encompass the use of violence, the MV Formula is described more so as a strategy built on a framework of propaganda as described by Noam Chomsky. Others have written about the structure of this formula, such as Robert G. Rodden of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in his work The Fighting Machinists: A Century of Struggle as well as CIO organizer John Steuben in his work Strike Strategy, but for our purposes, a detailed and concise outline of the tenets of this capitalist formula published in The Nation in 1937 will be used for reference.

Described in the article as “big business vigilantism” as well as the “scab ten commandments,” journalist Benjamin Stolberg lays out what each piece of this formula is designed to in supporting the narratives and endeavors of the capitalist ruling class.

The first step in this anti-strike program is to refer to union leaders and other strikers as “agitators,” often times being called “outside agitators” to prey on the xenophobia entrenched within much of the US populace. In tandem, the capitalists and their allies will spread propaganda against the union designed to trivialize their grievances and infantilize them, painting them as having arbitrary demands or claiming that those who decided to strike were only a minority that was upsetting the livelihoods of the rest of the workers.

Step two is to place economic/financial pressure on the striking masses. This includes moving or at least threatening to move plants, continued refusal of a raise, and other similar actions. An additional effort of this step is to create an astroturfed group design to oppose the strike in a smaller-scale example of enforcing capitalist hegemony. This is typically through the creation of “citizens committees,” made up of bankers, landlords, business men, and others benefiting from privately owned means of production and living.

The third step is a precursor to a political tactic that gained prominence in the late 1960s. Before Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan espoused it as a significant aspect of their presidencies, the MV Formula called for an adherence to “law and order” based on false narratives of violence being carried out by strikers. As with the future use of it, this instance of “law and order” is used to attack the civil liberties of the striking workers through legal attacks and further arming the police.

Step four connects to step two in that the “citizens committee” will begin to try to rally the general community in being against the strike in a mass propaganda campaign. Historically this has been done through using leaflets and utilizing the local press to publish pieces condemning the struggling masses.

The fifth step, acting in conjunction with step three, is where the most potential for violence lays. At this point the capitalists will increase their cooperation with police to build up a police vanguard against the union. Local police, sometimes even state police, will lead the charge, with both institutions utilizing privately hired deputies and security to create a loosely trained militia designed to intimidate the workers and crack skulls if they feel inclined to do so. This is especially prevalent in the Little Falls Textile Strike of 1912-1913, a precursor to the official establishing of the formula, when police violently broke up the picket line and wantonly raided the strikers’ headquarters, resulting in a mass of arrests on unfounded charges.

Once again seen in the example of the strike in Little Falls, as well as several others similar struggles, the sixth step in the Mohawk Valley Formula is to orchestrate a phony “back-to-work” movement. Such a movement is designed to deteriorate the morale of those actually on strike, attempting to guilt the strikers into ending their fight early and creating more propagandistic ammunition for the various media outlets to demonize them. The Stolberg article cites the use of a “puppet association” of people acting on the whim of the company owner. In the case of Little Falls, this was done by the mill owners working with the American Federation of Labor. The AFL was claiming to be the true representative of the workers and negotiated a settlement to “end” the strike, all while the actual strikers working with the Industrial Workers of the World remained on the picket line.

Step number seven is perhaps the biggest application of capitalist propaganda. In conjunction with the citizens’ committee and the supposed supporters of the “back-to-work” movement, the company owners set a date for officially “reopening” the plant, and in preparation they ensure that the plant and its surrounding areas are well equipped with police and security in the event that the “agitators” tried anything.

Step eight is simply an extension of the previous step, to put as many theatrics into the reopening as possible. News stories, flyers, TV or internet ads in the modern day, and using whatever other media to promote the reopening.

The ninth step is likewise a simple extension of previous steps. Keep putting pressure on the strikers through the police force and the illegitimate citizens’ committee, and using the same methods to ensure that those who have may actually chosen to leave the picket line stay off the picket line.

The final piece of this barbaric formula is to say that the plant, or really whatever institution is being picketed, is back up and running at full operation. Returning to the first step, the trivializing and dismissing of the demands of the strikers as a minority are reinforced by the capitalists, furthering the accusations of being “agitators” by claiming that they were interfering with people’s “right to work.”

With so many adopting elements of this formula without even knowing it, such as when reactionaries decry unions as “useless,” or when they speak ill of service workers fighting for some genuine representation and say in their workplace, the propaganda campaign of James Rand Jr. is shown to be extremely effective. Rand celebrated the effectiveness of his campaign, still feuding with the Remington Rand workers well after the NLRB required him to recognize their union. The Mohawk Valley Formula became revered by his fellow capitalists, and became the standard for strikebreaking and union busting.Facebook

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J.N. Cheney is an aspiring Marxist historian. His research primarily focuses on New York State labor history, branching into other facets of the history of socialism in the United States as well as the global socialist movement. He’s written for Midwestern Marx and has been published in their Journal of American Socialist Studies under both a penname and his given name. He is currently writing a book on the Little Falls Textile Strike of 1912. Read other articles by J.N..

 

Big Tech’s Trump Censorship Exposed

by Redacted / August 3rd, 2024

You might be shocked to learn that Big Tech is already censoring information about America’s presidential race… I know it’s SHOCKING!

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Redacted, former Fox News anchor Clayton Morris and his wife Natali, look at the legal, social, financial, and personal issues to save the truth, preserve information, and fight propaganda. Read other articles by Redacted, or visit Redacted's website.

 

How Unelected Regulators Unleashed the Derivatives Monster and How It Might Be Tamed

by Ellen Brown / August 4th, 2024

It was not the highly visible acts of Congress but the seemingly mundane and often nontransparent actions of regulatory agencies that empowered the great transformation of the U.S. commercial banks from traditionally conservative deposit-taking and lending businesses into providers of wholesale financial risk management and intermediation services.

— Professor Saule Omarova, “The Quiet Metamorphosis, How Derivatives Changed the Business of  Banking” University of Miami Law Review, 2009

While the world is absorbed in the U.S. election drama, the derivatives time bomb continues to tick menacingly backstage. No one knows the actual size of the derivatives market, since a major portion of it is traded over-the-counter, hidden in off-balance-sheet special purpose vehicles. However, when Warren Buffet famously labeled derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction” in 2002, its “notional value” was estimated at $56 trillion. Twenty years later, the Bank for International Settlements estimated that value at $610 trillion. And financial commentators have put it as high as $2.3 quadrillion or even $3.7 quadrillion, far exceeding  global GDP, which was about $100 trillion in 2022. A quadrillion is 1,000 trillion.

Most of this casino is run through the same banks that hold our deposits for safekeeping. Derivatives are sold as “insurance” against risk, but they actually add a heavy layer of risk because the market is so interconnected that any failure can have a domino effect. Most of the banks involved are also designated “too big to fail,” which means we the people will be bailing them out if they do fail.

Derivatives are considered so risky that the Bankruptcy Act of 2005 and the Uniform Commercial Code grant them (along with repo trades) “super-priority” in bankruptcy. That means if a bank goes bankrupt, derivative and repo claims are settled first, drawing from the same pool of liquidity that holds our deposits. (See David Rogers Webb’s The Great Taking and my earlier articles here and here.) A derivatives crisis could easily vacuum up that pool, leaving nothing for us as depositors — or for the “secured” creditors who are junior to derivative and repo claimants in bankruptcy, including state and local governments.

As detailed by Pam and Russ Martens, publisher and editor, respectively of Wall Street on Parade, as of December 31, 2023, Goldman Sachs Bank USA, JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A., Citigroup’s Citibank and Bank of America held a total of $168.26 trillion in derivatives out of a total of $192.46 trillion at all U.S. banks, savings associations and trust companies. That’s four banks holding 87 percent of all derivatives at all 4,587 federally-insured institutions then in the U.S.

In June 2024, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Federal Reserve Board jointly released their findings on the eight U.S. megabanks’ “living wills” – their resolution or wind-down plans in the event of bankruptcy. The Fed and FDIC faulted all of the four largest derivative banks on shortcomings in how they planned to wind down their derivatives.

How Banks Guarding Our Deposits Became the Biggest Gamblers in the Derivatives Casino

Banks are not just middlemen in the derivatives market. They are active players taking speculative positions. In this century, writes Professor Omarova, the largest U.S. commercial banks have emerged “as a new breed of financial super-intermediary—a wholesale dealer in financial risk, conducting a wide variety of capital markets and derivatives activities, trading physical commodities, and even marketing electricity.” She notes that the Federal Reserve has allowed several financial holding companies to purchase and sell physical commodities (including oil, natural gas, agricultural products and electricity) in the spot market to hedge their commodity derivative activities, and to take or make delivery of those commodities to settle the transactions.

It was not Congress that authorized that expansive definition of permitted banking activities. It was the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), part of the “administrative deep state,” that permanent body of unelected regulators who carry on while politicians come and go. As Omarova explains:

Through seemingly routine and often nontransparent administrative actions, the OCC effectively enabled large U.S. commercial banks to transform themselves from the traditionally conservative deposit-taking and lending institutions, whose safety and soundness were guarded through statutory and regulatory restrictions on potentially risky activities, into a new breed of financial “super-intermediaries,” or wholesale dealers in pure financial risk. …

Moreover, some of the most influential of those decisions escaped public scrutiny because they were made in the subterranean world of administrative action invisible to the public, through agency interpretation and policy guidance.

The OCC’s authority to regulate banks dates back to the National Bank Act of 1863, which grants national banks general authority to engage in activities necessary to carry on the “business of banking,” including “such incidental powers as shall be necessary to carry on the business of banking.” The “business of banking” is not defined in the statute. Omarova writes:

Section 24 (Seventh) of the National Bank Act grants national banks the power to exercise all such incidental powers as shall be necessary to carry on the business of banking; by discounting and negotiating promissory notes, drafts, bills of exchange, and other evidences of debt; by receiving deposits; by buying and selling exchange, coin, and bullion; by loaning money on personal security; and by obtaining, issuing, and circulating notes.

No mention is made of derivatives trading or dealing.

The powers of banks were further limited by Congress in the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which explicitly prohibited banks from dealing in corporate equity securities, and by other statutes passed thereafter. However, the portion of the Glass-Steagall Act separating depository from investment banking was reversed in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000. Omarova writes that this allowed the OCC to articulate “an overly expansive definition of the ‘business of banking’ as financial intermediation and dealing in financial risk, in all of its forms, and … this pattern of analysis allowed the OCC to expand the range of bank-permissible activities virtually without any statutory constraint.”

What Then Can Be Done?

The 2008 financial crisis is now acknowledged to have been largely a derivatives crisis. But massive efforts at financial reform in the following years have failed to fix the underlying problem. In a Forbes article titled “Big Banks and Derivatives: Why Another Financial Crisis Is Inevitable,” Steve Denning writes:

Banks today are bigger and more opaque than ever, and they continue to trade in derivatives in many of the same ways they did before the crash, but on a larger scale and with precisely the same unknown risks.

Most of this derivative trading is conducted through the biggest banks. A commonly held assumption is that the real derivative risk is much smaller than the “notional amount” stated on the banks’ balance sheets, but Denning observes:

[A]s we learned in 2008, it is possible to lose a large portion of the “notional amount” of a derivatives trade if the bet goes terribly wrong, particularly if the bet is linked to other bets, resulting in losses by other organizations occurring at the same time. The ripple effects can be massive and unpredictable.

In 2008, governments had enough resources to avert total calamity. Today’s cash-​strapped governments are in no position to cope with another massive bailout.

He concludes:

Regulation and enforcement will only work if it is accompanied by a paradigm shift in the banking sector that changes the context in which banks operate and the way they are run, so that banks shift their goal from making money to adding value to stakeholders, particularly customers. This would require action from the legislature, the SEC, the stock market and the business schools, as well as of course the banks themselves.

A Paradigm Shift in “the Business of Banking”

In a September 2023 paper titled “Rebuilding Banking Law: Banks as Public Utilities,” Yale law professor Lev Menand and Vanderbilt law professor Morgan Ricks propose shifting the goal of banking so that chartered private banks are “not mere for-profit businesses; they have affirmative obligations to the public.” The authors observe that under the New Deal framework, which was rooted in the National Bank Act of 1864, banks were largely governed as public utilities. Charters were granted only where consistent with public convenience and need, and only chartered banks could expand the money supply by extending loans.

The Menand/Ricks proposal is quite detailed and includes much more than regulating derivatives, but on that specific issue they propose:

While member banks are permitted to enter into interest-rate swaps to hedge rate risk, they are not allowed to engage in derivatives dealing (intermediation or market making) or take directional bets in the derivatives markets. Derivatives dealing and speculation do not advance member banks’ monetary function. Apart from loan commitments, member banks would not be in the business of offering guarantees or other forms of insurance.

Would that mean the end of the derivatives casino? No – it would just be moved out of the banks charged with protecting our deposits:

The blueprint above says nothing about what activities can take place outside the member banking system. It says only that those activities can’t be financed with run-prone debt [meaning chiefly deposits]. In principle, we could imagine a very wide degree of latitude for non bank firms, subject of course to appropriate standards of disclosure, antifraud, and consumer and investor protection. So securities firms and other nonbanks might be given free rein to engage in structured finance, derivatives, proprietary trading, and so forth. But they would not be allowed to “fund short.”

By “funding short,” the authors mean basically “creating money,” for example, through repo trades in which short-term loans are rolled over and over. In their proposal, only chartered banks are delegated the power to create money as loans.

Expanding the Model

University of Southampton business school professor Richard Werner, who has written extensively on this subject, adds that banks should be required to concentrate their lending on productive ventures that create new goods and services and avoid inflating existing assets such as housing and corporate stock.

Speculative derivatives are a form of “financialization” – money making money without producing anything. The winners just take money from the losers. Gambling is not illegal under federal law, but the chips in the casino should not be our deposits or loans made with the backing of our deposits.

The Menand/Ricks proposal is for private banks, but banks can also be made “public utilities” through direct ownership by the government. The stellar model is the Bank of North Dakota, which does not speculate in derivatives, cannot go bankrupt, makes productive loans, and has been highly successful. (See earlier article here.) The public utility model could also include a national infrastructure bank, as proposed in H.R. 4052, which currently has 37 co-sponsors.

The “business of banking” can include making money for private shareholders and executives, but that business should be junior to the public interest, which would prevail when they conflict.

Unfortunately, only Congress can change the language of the controlling statute; and Congress has been motivated historically to make major changes in the banking system only in response to a Great Depression or Great Recession that exposes the fatal flaws in the existing system. With the reversal of “Chevron deference,” however, the OCC’s rules can now be challenged in court. A powerful citizen’s movement might be able to catalyze needed changes before the next Great Depression strikes.

A financialized economy is not sustainable and not competitive. The emphasis should be on investment in the real economy. That is the sort of paradigm shift that is necessary if the U.S. is to survive and prosper.

• This article was first posted as an original to ScheerPost.comFacebookTwitterReddit

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Ellen Brown is an attorney, co-chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 400+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. Read other articles by Ellen.

 

Open Letter to Israel: I Want My Country Back

by Paul Larudee / August 4th, 2024

To: The State of Israel, AIPAC and the International Zionist Movement

I write as an American citizen. You have stolen my country, and I want it back.

I did not ask for my country to be complicit in the ongoing genocide and attempted eradication of the people of Gaza and Palestine. I do not want to be complicit in the genocide of anyone. I do not want this crime to stain the name of the United States of America whenever it is spoken for the next century and for all eternity, and to bring shame upon me and my descendants, and to all others who hold American citizenship.

The American people are as yet only partially aware of this crime. This is because you have been very successful in exerting a powerful influence on the media, the government, and other pillars of American society. I’m not saying you have done anything illegal. You may have, but you clearly prefer to use legal means as much as possible. And it is possible. US law allows anyone with the necessary means to own media, and – within very broad limits – to control who gets elected to government office and who gets appointed to other public offices.

For better or worse, this is the American way, and it can be made better or worse than it is. But you have abused and corrupted it. You have strangled the political process so that any candidate who criticizes Israel and opposes aid to Israel cannot be elected, because you control the funding as well as the funders in a system which depends entirely on private campaign funds, and where corporations and other wealthy associations are permitted to participate.

You have also strangled academic freedom to debate or protest Israel on American campuses through control of funding, resulting in harassment and removal of faculty and punishment of students. You have hijacked American film, news organizations, and other media so that only the information and views that you permit are widely available to the public.

You use such influence to pass laws at all levels, requiring allegiance to Israel in order to obtain licenses and permits. You apply censorship to social media to prevent free expression of views, information and opinion that might reflect negatively on Israel. You mobilize posting of libel and slander against persons and businesses that criticize Israel and defend Palestinians and their allies.

Your job, and that of the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, and the global network of sayanim (collaborators) is to assure, by these and any other available means, that Israel dominates all narratives, all public policy and decision making, and that all actions in both the public and private sphere are to the benefit of Israel. You have been enormously successful in capturing almost unlimited military and financial support from the US government, in controlling U.S. government policy, and in shaping American minds to accept and support a massive civilian genocide, including starvation and infection of hundreds of thousands and ultimately probably millions of innocent people.

How can this happen? The American people have spoken and protested in many ways and in large numbers, and polls show that, in spite of your manipulations of US society, a majority of Americans do not support continued aid to Israel, and want an immediate ceasefire. Members of Congress have been deluged with letters, phone calls and email messages.

But part of the system of controlling our government includes your parallel organization of shadow “advisors” or “minders” whose job it is to remain in the face of our elected and appointed officials, and to “recommend” what to say and how to vote, and to provide draft legislation and public announcements that the official can introduce and promote on behalf of Israel. Otherwise, you will threaten to find someone to replace her/him in the next election cycle.

I feel helpless appealing to my members of Congress for anything that you oppose, no matter how many of my fellow citizens might join me. But I now realize that my members of Congress feel the same way. They really don’t have a choice any more than I do. In effect, therefore, they are mere avatars for you and your allies. You are our government.

What can I do about this? I’m not sure, but a start might be to require AIPAC and other actors on behalf of Israel to register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, like all other representatives of foreign governments. Israel is a foreign government, isn’t it? As I recall, that was last tried by Sen. J. William Fulbright’s committee in 1963, but when Lyndon B. Johnson came to the presidency by assassination that year, the option faded. But, of course, it’s never too late.

Second, we can overturn Citizens United, by whatever legal means necessary, if possible. Even better, we can prohibit or severely curtail private financing of elections, overturning Citizens United in the process, but going beyond, to eliminate some of the most obvious sources of public corruption. We can also legislate greater protection for free speech and the press, punish use of private donations to deny free speech and other civil rights, and enact similar measures.

The problem with all such remedies, of course, is how to get them passed by institutions that are already under your corrupt control. I’m not sure I have an answer for that, but someone else might. Because even genocide will not save Israel, which is not defeating – and cannot defeat – Hamas. Perhaps Hamas and its allies will liberate both Palestine and the United States.FacebookReddit

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Paul Larudee is a retired academic and current administrator of a nonprofit human rights and humanitarian aid organization. Read other articles by Paul.

 

Political Pretence: The Democrats and the Palestinians

by Binoy Kampmark / August 5th, 2024

The fact that the Democrats currently occupy the White House has done little to ruffle the equation of blood and gore in the Middle East, notably regarding the fate of the Palestinians.  The ongoing Israeli campaign of stunning ruthlessness against the Gaza unfortunates is certainly a worry for some Democratic strategists, if only because certain voters are finally expressing an opinion on the subject.  Israel, right or wrong, is no longer an entirely plausible proposition.

In swing states such as Michigan, the cranky and disgruntled on the issue, certain given the potential role of Arab American voters, is not negligible.  In May, a published Arab American Institute (AAI) poll revealed that support for President Joe Biden among Arab Americans had collapsed to a mere 20%.  This was telling, given that Biden had won 60% of the same voting bloc in 2020.

The potential consequence of that shift has not gone unnoticed among pro-Israeli voices keen to arrest any potential tide.  On the electoral battleground, Representative Jamaal Bowman can count himself as one of the first Democratic figures to lose a primary for his stance against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.  (It should be said that his stance on Israel has not always been a consistent one.)  Bowman had previously defeated the hawkish Eliot Engel in New York’s 16th congressional district in the Bronx and southern Westchester County, the latter known for his cosy relationship, not only with Israel but with weapons manufacturers.

Last month, it was Bowman’s turn to taste defeat, a fate more or less assured by the muscular support offered by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to his centrist opponent George Latimer, which came to a stunning US$14 million.  The scandalously hefty spending in that primary made it the most expensive in the history of the House of Representatives.

At the highest levels, the scene is set for the pudding of mawkish insincerity.  The presumptive Democratic nominee for the White House is certainly offering this in spades.  Kamala Harris’s comments on the slaughter in Gaza and Israel’s overall policy towards Palestinians suggest political moulding and shifting, a ploy intended to stave off electoral threat.  Votes are at hand, and Israel’s tenacious brutality is not going down well in certain parts of the constituency.  But the usual acknowedgments and doffing the cap to supporting Israel always follow.

The Vice President persists in reasserting her “unwavering commitment” to Israel’s sacrosanct right to defend itself.  This is then coupled with the concern – as she expressed to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu – of “the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians”.  (Harris-speak suggests that innocent civilians will always die in the cause.)

Cheap, calculated language follows.  “The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety – sometimes displaced for a second, third, or fourth time – we cannot look away in the face of these tragedies.  We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.”

Eman Abdelhadi of the University of Chicago finds such sentiments from Harris parch dry, arguing that a lack of “an actual commitment to stop killing the children of Gaza” invalidates any claims to empathy.  “To be empathetic to someone that you’re shooting in the head is not exactly laudable.  We don’t need empathy from these people.  We need to stop providing the weapons and the money that is actively killing the people that they’re supposedly empathising with.”

Within the Democrats, there is some movement of disgruntlement, though this is the sort that rarely rises above the gravitas of paper ceremony and gesture.  Thomas Kennedy, a figure who co-founded the Miami-Dade Democratic Progressive Caucus in early 2017, wrote for The Intercept earlier this year explaining why he had left the Democratic campaign in disgust. “I am submitting my resignation in large part because of the Biden administration’s inexcusable support of Israeli war crimes and the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza”.  He also adds another reason: “the DNC’s role in protecting President Joe Biden from a democratic process that could check that complicity.”

A survey available from the Brookings Institution suggests that electoral tremors among Democratic voters regarding support for Israel’s ongoing campaign will be manageable.  Bowman’s remarks that Israel is responsible for genocide tend to figure among a mere 7% of Democratic candidates.  From the survey work done by the thinktank, 18% of the candidates took what was described as “a more moderate position, saying that the US should make support for Israel conditional and call for a ceasefire.”

The survey continues to note “a divide in the Democratic party, but the anti-Israel candidates compose only 2% of the primary winners.  Outside the most extreme position, the party is split fairly evenly, with most candidates displaying sympathy for Israel, but hesitancy to voice full-throated unconditional support.”

In this show of performative grief for the plight of Palestinians, the Democrats can feign concern while still continuing the military and political support Israel has become so accustomed to.  The result is one of theatre that does little to alter the catastrophe taking place in Gaza, leaving the political furniture virtually untouched.FacebookTwitter

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

 

Only a Failing US Empire Would Be So Blind as to Cheer Netanyahu and his Genocide

Every empire falls. Its collapse becomes inevitable once its rulers lose all sense of how absurd and abhorrent they have become

by Jonathan Cook / August 5th, 2024

There is only one country in the world right now, in the midst of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is guaranteed dozens of standing ovations from the vast majority of its elected representatives.

That country is not Israel, where he has been a hugely divisive figure for many years. It is the United States.

On Wednesday, Netanyahu was back-slapped, glad-handed, whooped and cheered as he slowly made his way – hailed at every step as a conquering hero – to the podium of the US Congress.

This was the same Netanyahu who has overseen during the past 10 months the slaughter– so far – of some 40,000 Palestinians, around half of them women and children. More than 21,000 other children are reported missing, most of them likely dead under rubble.

It was the same Netanyahu who levelled a strip of territory – originally home to 2.3 million Palestinians – that is expected to take 80 years to rebuild, at a cost of at least $50bn.

It was the same Netanyahu who has destroyed every hospital and university in Gaza, and bombed almost all of its schools that were serving as shelters for families made homeless by other Israeli bombs.

It was the same Netanyahu whose arrest is being sought by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, accused of using starvation as a weapon of war by imposing an aid blockade that has engineered a famine across Gaza.

It was the same Netanyahu whose government was found last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to have been intensifying Israel’s apartheid rule over the Palestinian people in an act of long-term aggression.

It was the same Netanyahu whose government is standing trial for committing what the ICJ, the world’s highest judicial body, has termed a “plausible genocide”.

And yet, there was just one visible protester in the congressional chamber. Rashida Tlaib, the only US legislator of Palestinian heritage, sat silently grasping a small black sign. On one side it said: “War criminal”. On the other: “Guilty of genocide”.

One person among hundreds mutely trying to point out that the emperor was naked.

Cocooned from horror

Indeed, the optics were stark.

This looked less like a visit by a foreign leader than a decorated elder general being welcomed back to the Senate in ancient Rome, or a grey-haired British viceroy from India embraced in the motherland’s parliament, after brutally subduing the “barbarians” on the fringes of empire.

This was a scene familiar from history books: of imperial brutality and colonial savagery, recast by the seat of the imperium as valour, honour, civilisation. And it looked every bit as absurd, and abhorrent, as it does when we look back on what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

It was a reminder that, despite our self-serving claims of progress and humanitarianism, our world is not very different from the way it has been for thousands of years.

It was a reminder that power elites like to celebrate the demonstration of their power, cocooned both from the horrors faced by those crushed by their might, and from the clamour of protest of those horrified by the infliction of so much suffering.

It was a reminder that this is not a “war” between Israel and Hamas – let alone, as Netanyahu would have us believe, a battle for civilisation between the Judeo-Christian world and the Islamic world.

This is a US imperial war – part of its military campaign for “global, full-spectrum dominance” – carried out by Washington’s most favoured client state.

The genocide is fully a US genocide, armed by Washington, paid for by Washington, given diplomatic cover by Washington, and – as the scenes in Congress underlined – cheered on by Washington.

Or as Netanyahu stated in a moment of unintentional candour to Congress: “Our enemies are your enemy, our fight is your fight, and our victory will be your victory.”

Israel is Washington’s largest military outpost in the oil-rich Middle East. The Israeli army is the Pentagon’s main battalion in that strategically important region. And Netanyahu is the outpost’s commander in chief.

What is vital to Washington elites is that the outpost is supported at all costs; that it doesn’t fall to the “barbarians”.

Outpouring of lies

There was another small moment of inadvertent truth amid Netanyahu’s outpouring of lies. The Israeli prime minister stated that what was happening in Gaza was “a clash between barbarism and civilisation”. He was not wrong.

On the one side, there is the barbarism of the current joint Israeli-US genocide against the people of Gaza, a dramatic escalation of the 17-year Israeli siege of the enclave that preceded it, and the decades of belligerent rule under an Israeli system of apartheid before that.

And on the other side, there are the embattled few desperately trying to safeguard the West’s professed values of “civilisation”, of international humanitarian law, of the protection of the weak and vulnerable, of the rights of children.

The US Congress decisively showed where it stood: with barbarism.

Netanyahu has become the most feted foreign leader in US history, invited to speak to Congress four times, surpassing even Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill.

He is fully Washington’s creature. His savagery, his monstrousness is entirely made in America. As he implored his US handlers: “Give us the tools faster and we’ll finish the job faster.”

Finish the job of genocide.

Performative dissent

Some Democrats preferred to stay away, including party power broker Nancy Pelosi. Instead, she met families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza – not, of course, Palestinian families whose loved ones in Gaza had been slaughtered by Israel.

Vice President Kamala Harris explained her own absence as a scheduling conflict. She met the Israeli prime minister, as did President Joe Biden, on Thursday.

Afterwards, she claimed to have pressed Netanyahu on the “dire” humanitarian situation in Gaza, but stressed too that Israel “had a right to defend itself” – a right that Israel specifically does not have, as the ICJ pointed out last week, because Israel is the one permanently violating the rights of the Palestinians through its prolonged occupation, apartheid rule and ethnic cleansing.

But the dissent of Pelosi – and of Harris, if that is what it was – was purely performative. True, they have no personal love for Netanyahu, who has so closely allied himself and his government with the US Republican right and former president Donald Trump.

But Netanyahu simply serves as an alibi. Both Pelosi and Harris are stalwart supporters of Israel – a state that, according to the ICJ’s judgment last week, decades ago instituted apartheid rule in the Palestinian territories, using an illegal occupation as cover to ethnically cleanse the population there.

Their political agenda is not about ending the annihilation of the people of Gaza. It is acting as a safety valve for popular dissatisfaction among traditional Democratic voters shocked by the scenes from Gaza.

It is to deceive them into imagining that behind closed doors, there is some sort of policy fight over Israel’s handling of the Palestinian issue. That voting Democrat will one day – one very distant day – lead to an undefined “peace”, a fabled “two-state solution” where Palestinian children won’t keep dying in the interests of preserving the security of Israel’s illegal settler-militias.

US policy towards Israel has not changed in any meaningful sense for decades, whether the president has been red or blue, whether Trump has been in the White House or Barack Obama.

And if Harris becomes president – admittedly, a big if – US arms and money will continue flowing to Israel, while Israel will get to decide if US aid to Gaza is ever allowed in.

Why? Because Israel is the lynchpin in a US imperial project for global full-spectrum dominance. Because for Washington to change course on Israel, it would also have to do other unthinkable things.

It would have to begin dismantling its 800 military bases around the planet, just as Israel was told by the ICJ last week to dismantle its many dozens of illegal settlements on Palestinian territory.

The US would need to agree a shared global security architecture with China and Russia, rather than seek to bully and batter these great powers into submission with bloody proxy wars, such as the one in Ukraine.

The coming fall

Pelosi, remember, smeared students on US campuses protesting Israel’s plausible genocide in Gaza as being linked to Russia. She urged the FBI to investigate them for pressuring the Biden administration to support a ceasefire.

Netanyahu, in his address to Congress, similarly demonised the demonstrators – in his case, by accusing them of being “useful idiots” of Israel’s main foe, Iran.

Neither can afford to recognise that millions of ordinary people across the US think it is wrong to bomb and starve children – and to use a war with an unachievable aim as the cover story.

Hamas cannot be “eliminated” through Israel’s current bout of horrifying violence for a very obvious reason: The group is a product, a symptom, of earlier bouts of horrifying Israeli violence.

As even western counter-terrorism experts have had to concede, Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza are strengthening Hamas, not weakening it. Young men and boys who lose their family to Israeli bombs are Hamas’s most fervent new recruits.

That’s why Netanyahu insisted Israel’s military offensive – the genocide – in Gaza could not end soon. He demanded weapons and money to keep his soldiers in the enclave indefinitely, in an operation he termed as “demilitarisation and deradicalisation”.

Decoded, that means a continuing horror show for the Palestinians there, as they are forced to continue living and dying with an Israeli aid blockade, starvation, bombs and unmarked “kill zones”.

It means, too, an indefinite risk of Israel’s war on Gaza spilling over into a regional war, and potentially a global one, as tripwires towards escalation continue to grow in number.

The US Congress, however, is too blinded by championing its small fortressed state in the Middle East to think about such complexities. Its members roared “USA!” to their satrap from Israel, just as Roman senators once roared “Glory!” to generals whose victories they assumed would continue forever.

The rulers of the Roman empire no more saw the coming fall than their modern counterparts in Washington can. But every empire falls. And its collapse becomes inevitable once its rulers lose all sense of how absurd and abhorrent they have become.

• First published in Middle East EyeFacebookTwitterReddit

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Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.