Economic Overlords Are Destroying Democracy — and Our Lives

Economic power is political power. We spoke with Peter Phillips, author of Titans of Capital, about how the capitalist class is subverting democracy and controlling the lives of billions through massive investments in everything from food to war.

By Peter Phillips

August 11, 2024

Source: Jacobin



Titans of Capital: How Concentrated Wealth Threatens Humanity, the upcoming book from Peter Phillips, professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, explores the influence of the “titans” — the board members of the top ten investment management firms who control nearly $50 trillion in assets. In conversation with Jacobin’s David Moscrop, Phillips explains how these 117 corporate overlords wield unparalleled economic and political power, shaping global policies and deepening economic inequalities. They exploit crises like global warming and rising food prices, using institutions like the World Economic Forum (WEF) to promote their interests.

Despite their immense power, they remain wary of mass politics and social movements, recognizing the potential for resistance from below.
Beware the Titans

David Moscrop

Who are the titans, and what makes them titans?

Peter Phillips

The titans are a kind of working sociological category, representing the board of directors of the top ten investment management companies in the world: BlackRock, Vanguard, UBS, Fidelity, State Street, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Amundi in France, Allianz SE in Germany, and Capital Group.

I chose ten companies to create a manageable sample size, resulting in 117 people whom I call “titans.” These are the most powerful people in the world — they decide where almost $50 trillion worth of capital is going to be invested.

That wealth controlled by these 117 people is unprecedented. When I wrote my book Giants five years ago, it was already staggering, but it has since more than doubled. So it’s quite a transformation.

David Moscrop

Economic power is political power. Political power can be used to reinforce and grow economic power, and vice versa. How do the titans manage this process of using their political power to boost their economic power and their economic power to boost their political power?

Peter Phillips

It’s not that they have direct political power. The US government, military, and intelligence agencies are designed to protect the vital interests of the United States and global capital. While they do accommodate the needs of the Titans and may have direct communication with them, it’s not like they stake direct marching orders. It is more a matter of influence.

The titans participate in a number of policy groups, the Atlantic Council being one of the most powerful. At least half of them go to Davos every year, further extending their reach into corridors of power. Ultimately, capitalist governments are structured to protect capital, which is why the wealth of the titans continues to increase.
Investing in Misery

David Moscrop

These people exist to accumulate capital. They pressure the state to set rules that facilitate accumulation of capital. You write that the titans profit from the climate crisis, from war, and from addictions. What’s the strategy here? Is it simply that they’re nihilists — they don’t care where they get their money? If there’s an opportunity, they’re going to seize on and exploit it?

Peter Phillips

Well, one of their biggest problems is finding sufficient safe investment opportunities. They have more capital than there are secure places to invest, which pushes them into speculative investments. They must continually find new opportunities or push political agendas that open up different areas for new investment. They would love to see the authoritarian patronalism of Putin’s Russian Federation replaced by a pro-capitalist government to crack open the country’s vast natural resources.

Their need to grow and achieve returns in the 6, 7, 8 percent range or higher means they constantly need new investment opportunities. This relentless pursuit often leads to speculative investments, which can sometimes go wrong, or investments into areas that have negative consequences, such as fossil fuels contributing to global warming. They have $400 billion invested into the world’s top gas- and oil-producing companies, a commitment they can’t easily reverse. That’s one of the biggest reasons that global warming continues — because of that capital investment. There’s no effort to undo that. There would be no way to take that $400 billion and put it somewhere else that would continue to provide similar growth.

David Moscrop

The titans won’t waste a crisis if they can exploit it. You argue that the affordability crisis has been good business for them. How have, for instance, rising food prices boosted their bottom line?

Peter Phillips

Well, they’re widely invested in the biggest food companies. They have $85 billion in Archer-Daniels-Midland. They have $165 billion invested in Cargill. The consequence of inequality and rising food prices is dire: several hundred million people in the world live on just $2.15 a day, and 80 percent of people in the world live on less than $10 a day. This vast inequality continues to grow, leading to twenty-five thousand deaths daily from malnutrition alone.
Davos: Shield for the Rich

David Moscrop

Big finance is very good at creating and using institutions to support their ends or to whitewash their records or to run PR for them. You write about Davos and the World Economic Forum specifically as examples. How do the titans use Davos and the WEF as a PR machine?

Peter Phillips

They’ve embraced the World Economic Forum because it provides a platform to promote the idea of good governance and universal security. But it’s largely propaganda aimed at defending capitalism. The titans recognize the growing inequalities and resulting resistance that top-down capital accumulation can provoke among global populations. So they’re trying to mitigate that. By participating in forums like Davos, they attempt to portray capitalism and their activities as beneficial and equitable. Nothing could be further from the truth.

They claim that extreme poverty has been declining, and it had been until the pandemic hit, causing it to rise back up by a couple hundred million people. However, even before the pandemic, the decline in extreme poverty was primarily due to progress in one country: China. China deliberately eliminated extreme poverty, defined as living on $2.15 cents a day. While China still has several hundred million people living on $5 a day, it has successfully eliminated extreme poverty according to the UN’s definition. In contrast, extreme poverty has not been eliminated anywhere else in the world and has actually increased in several capitalist countries.

David Moscrop

Do the titans have a weakness? They seem so tremendously powerful that the long-term project of undoing the plutocratic order and struggling for economic democracy and justice seems extraordinarily difficult. Do you see any points at which they’re vulnerable?

Peter Phillips

They’re vulnerable to mass politics and social movements of any kind: civil rights movements, anti-poverty movements, and urban unrest, even though such unrest can be violently repressed by governments worldwide. This vulnerability is one of the reasons Davos meets annually — to accommodate or make changes that can preempt any potential social movement developments that might threaten them.

They’re afraid of revolution from below because they’re just a small minority of people with extreme wealth trying to maintain this inequality — and it’s growing ever greater. Following [Karl] Marx’s understanding, it does seem inevitable that these underclasses will eventually resist, saying, “we’re not going to play anymore.” The titans are constantly aware of this and trying to mitigate it as best they can.

We Are The Bad Guys

By Craig Murray

August 12, 2024

Source: Craig Murray Blog


Sirte, Libya, after Nato “liberation”.

In Murder in Samarkand I describe how as a British Ambassador, when I discovered the full extent of our complicity in torture in the War on Terror, I thought it must be a rogue operation and all I had to do was make ministers and senior officials aware and they would stop it.

When I was reprimanded and officially told that receipt of intelligence from torture in the “War on Terror” was approved from the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary down, and it became clear to me that there was a deliberate promoting of false intelligence narratives through torture which exaggerated the Al Qaida threat to justify military policy in Afghanistan and Central Asia, my worldview was severely shaken.

Somehow I mentally compartmentalised this as an aberration, due to overreaction to 9/11 and the unique narcissism and viciousness of Tony Blair. I did not lose faith in western democracy or the notion that the western powers, on the whole, were a positive force when contrasted with other powers.

It is a hard thing to lose the entire belief system in which you were brought up – probably particularly hard if like me, you had a very happy life right from childhood and were highly successful within the terms of the governmental system.

I have however now finally shed the last of my illusions and I am obliged to acknowledge that the system of which I am a part – call it “the West”, “liberal democracy”, “capitalism”, “neo-liberalism”, “neo-conservatism”, “Imperialism”, “the New World Order” – call it what you will in fact, it is a force for evil.

Gaza has been an important catalyst. I am not lacking in empathy, but my knowledge of the horrid butchery by the Western powers in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya was an intellectual knowledge, not a lived experience.

Technology has brought us the Gaza genocide – which has so far killed fewer people than any of those earlier NATO member perpetrated massacres – in gut wrenching detail. I have just been looking at 75kg bags of mixed human meat handed over to relatives in lieu of an identifiable corpse, and am in shock.

That is not the worst we have seen in Gaza.

If only the people of Mosul and Fallujah had had modern mobile phone technology, what horrors we would know.

Incidentally, I tried to find you some images of the massive US destruction of Mosul and Fallujah in 2002‒4 and Google won’t give me any. It will, however, offer thousands of images from fighting there with ISIL in 2017. Which rather underlines my point about the extraordinary lack of imagery of the Second Iraq War.

Of the current genocide in Gaza, again I found myself naively thinking at some point this will stop. That Western politicians would not in fact countenance the total destruction of Gaza. That there would be a limit to the number of Palestinian civilian deaths they could accept, the number of UN facilities, schools and hospitals destroyed, the number of little children torn into shreds.

I thought that at some stage human decency must outweigh Zionist lobby cash.

But I was wrong.

The Ukrainian attack into Kursk also has a profound emotional resonance. The Battle of Kursk was arguably the most important blow struck against Nazi Germany, the largest tank battle in the history of the world by a wide margin.

The Ukrainian government has destroyed all the monuments to the Red Army which achieved this, and denigrates the Ukrainians who fought against fascism. By contrast, it honours the very substantial Ukrainian components of the Nazi forces, including but not limited to, the Galician Division and their leaders.

Kursk is therefore a place of great symbolism for Ukraine to attack now into Russia, including with German artillery and armour.

German politicians seem to have an atavistic urge to attack Russia, and support the genocide of Palestinians to an astonishing degree.

Germany has effectively ended all freedom of speech on Palestine, banning conferences of distinguished speakers and making pro-Palestinian speech illegal. Germany has intervened on Israel’s side in the genocide case before the ICJ, and intervened at the ICC to object to an arrest warrant against Netanyahu.

I do not know how many civilian dead would assuage German lust for the expiatory blood of Palestinians. 500,000? 1 Million? 2 Million?

Or perhaps 6 Million?

The West are not the good guys. Our so-called “democratic systems” give us no ability to vote for anybody who may get into power who does not support the genocide and imperialist foreign policy.

It is not an accident and it is not genius that makes a man-child like Elon Musk worth 100 billion dollars. The power structures of society are deliberately designed by those with wealth to promote massive concentration of wealth in favour of those who already have it, exploiting and disempowering the rest of society.

The rise of the multi-billionaires is not a fluke. It is a plan, and the misallocation of more than adequate resources is the cause of poverty. The attempt to shift blame onto the desperate constituents of waves of immigration forced into life by Western destruction of foreign countries, is also systematic.

There is no longer any free space for dissent in the media to oppose any of this.

We are the Bad Guys. We resist our own governing systems, or we are complicit.

In the United Kingdom it falls to the Celtic nations to try to break up the state which is a subordinate but important imperialist engine. The paths of resistance are various, depending where you are.

But find one and take one.

Putting War And Peace On The Ballot

By Robert Koehler

August 12, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.





The corporate media report on elections — especially the biggie coming up — as though they were sporting events. If you win, hurray! You get the gold cup or whatever. The election process is a matter of shrewd strategy combined with, uh, likability.

Thus, as per the New York Times: “Tim Walz is going to bring big Midwestern dad energy to the presidential campaign.”

That sort of thing — whatever that means. And I note this with a shrug of acceptance. OK, yeah, I get it. Elections are very much a matter of strategy and tactics, combined often enough with sheer trivia (Nixon should have shaved before that first debate with Kennedy), But nonetheless, considering that the future of humanity is essentially at stake in the American election, a scream of desperation keeps rising up from somewhere deep in my soul. Are we going to continue playing war with the world? Ignoring climate change?

Excuse me, but the way we choose to address the immediate future . . . matters.

It matters enormously. So as I read about the burgeoning Kamala Harris campaign, as she prepares to face off against Donald Trump, the question that assaults me the most deeply is not so much whether she can win, but whether she will run with transcendent values — values beyond the pro-war centrism of Joe Biden and the mainstream Democrats. Strategy matters, but values matter first.

A few months ago, when Biden was still the looming Democratic nominee, I was thrashing in anguished uncertainty, stuck “having” to vote for the lesser-evil guy who, among whatever else, refused to stop funding and supporting the Israeli genocide on Gaza. I wrote: “I may go lesser-evil when I vote in November, but right now I remain uncertain. I’m still waiting to see Biden’s courage emerge, as he stands up to further militarism.”

Well, his courage emerged in the form of dropping out — and suddenly Harris penetrated the country’s collective awareness. Wow, a female, black presidential candidate. Big excitement. Horns started honking.

But what does she stand for? What values will she run on? The first serious indication of this was her choice of VP running mate. Yeah, it’ll have to be a white guy to “balance” the ticket, but beyond that — just a basic pro-war Dem? The likely choice seemed to be Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a guy very much in favor of continuing to arm Israel and help it “finish the job” in Gaza. He had, for instance, infamously compared campus protesters of U.S. support to the Ku Klux Klan.

But something shifted. She chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz instead — who is described, my God, as a “pragmatic progressive.” His social positions and legislative acts include: supporting LGBTQ rights; increasing social spending (for such things as education, housing, childcare, renewable energy); driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants; background checks for gun purchases; legalizing marijuana . . .

Walz’s political stance, Peter Bloom writes, “seeks to position traditionally left-leaning policies as common-sense solutions that align with the values and needs of the majority of Americans.”

OK, sounds great, but what about . . . dare I even ask? What about militarism? Ross Barkan put it this way in the New York Times: “On policy matters, in particular the Israel-Hamas war, Mr. Walz assuages, momentarily at least, the restive progressive wing of the Democratic Party.”

He’s assuaging the restive lefties? That hardly sounds reassuring. It sounds more like political game-playing than deeply held values emerging into policy. But I continued digging, beyond the corporate media, trying to understand who Walz really is and whether I share any of his actual values. I was surprised. Is it possible — when it comes to an issue as profound and future-significant as war and peace — that the Harris campaign will be running beyond “we’re the lesser evil”?

As Sanjana Karanth pointed out at Huffington Post, Walz expressed “empathy and understanding” toward the Minnesota Democratic voters who cast their ballots for “uncommitted” — as protests against Biden’s support for Israeli militarism.

Speaking to CNN in March, she noted, Walz said: “The situation in Gaza is intolerable” and supported the search for a ceasefire. This is what the uncommitted voters are asking for “and that’s what they should be doing.”

Karanth also pointed out that the Institute for Middle East Understanding was enthusiastic, at least tentatively, about Harris choosing Walz as her running mate. After his selection, the organization issued this statement:

“Today was another sign that our collective power can create a historic shift in the Democratic Party: away from militarism and impunity for Israel’s war crimes, and toward peace, justice and equality for all people—including the Palestinian people. Too many lives have already been lost, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza now face not just bombing but starvation and disease. While we welcome Vice President Harris’ choice, we will continue to push on the Harris-Walz campaign to commit to real and substantive policy change to reflect the will of the American people and to save countless lives.”

Will Harris and Walz transcend lesser-evilism? Are they offering voters a real choice — on the deeply embedded issue of militarism? We must demand — demand! — that this be so.


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Robert Koehler

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. Koehler has been the recipient of multiple awards for writing and journalism from organizations including the National Newspaper Association, Suburban Newspapers of America, and the Chicago Headline Club.

The Pentagon Church Militant and Us

The Top Five Questions We Should Ask the Pentagon

By William J. Astore

August 12, 2024

Source: Tom Dispatch



When it comes to our nation’s military affairs, ignorance is not bliss. What’s remarkable then, given the permanent state of war in which we find ourselves, is how many Americans seem content not to know.

Citizens of courage will surely choose the path of challenge.

There are many reasons for this state of affairs. Our civilian leaders encourage us to be deferential toward our latest commander/savior, whether Tommy Franks in 2003, David Petraeus in 2007, or Stanley McChrystal in 2010. Our media employs retired officers, most of them multi-starred generals, in a search for expertise that ends in an unconditional surrender to military agendas. A cloud of secrecy and “black budgets” combine to obscure military matters, ranging from global strategy to war goals to weapons procurement. The taxpayer, forced to pony up about one trillion dollars yearly to fund our military, national security infrastructure, and wars, is sent a simple message: stay clear and leave it to the experts in uniform.

The powerlessness of ordinary Americans in military matters is no accident. Recall the one-word reply — “So?” — Dick Cheney offered in March 2008, when asked to comment on popular opposition to the war in Iraq. The former vice president was certainly far blunter than Washington usually is, and for that we may owe him a measure of thanks. By highlighting the arrogant dismissiveness of Washington’s warrior-elite when it comes to American public opinion, he revealed more than he intended.

Time for Vatican II at the Pentagon

If military power is the church at which we worship and the Pentagon is our American Vatican, then it is desperately in need of the equivalent of Vatican II which, in the early 1960s, opened the Catholic Church to greater participation by the laity, a vitally important change in ethos. Instead of continuing to pray at the altar of their particular services, we need our Pentagon “priests” to turn to the laity — us — and seek our input and sanction. Instead of preaching in unintelligible Pentagonese, with its indecipherable acronyms, secret doctrines, and spidery codenames, it’s long past time for them to talk to us in a language that reasonably informed adults can understand.

Think about this: last year, our country held innumerable public hearings on health-care reform. Congress continues to fight about it. It’s constant news. There’s a debate alive in the land. All this for a program that, in ten years, will cost the American people as much as defense and homeland security cost in a single year.

Yet runaway defense budgets get passed each year without a single “town hall” meeting, next to no media coverage, and virtually no debate in Congress. Indeed, you’d think each Pentagon budget was an ex cathedra pronouncement, given the way Congress genuflects before them and Americans accept them without so much as a peep of protest.

Those “Crazy” Kiwis

Imagine, for a moment, if Pentagon officials, supposedly toiling in our name, actually condescended to ask us for our thoughts. What do we think about global military strategy, garrisoning the planet, the ways in which our forces are structured, and how, where, and for what they should be deployed abroad?

Sound crazy? Here in the U.S.A. it most distinctly does, but not to the citizens of New Zealand. A Kiwi friend of mine recently sent me “Defence Review 2009,” a publication of New Zealand’s Ministry of Defence (MoD). And catch this: it includes a survey soliciting the advice of ordinary New Zealanders with respect to military affairs. It actually asks for the counsel of civilians on a “top ten” list of questions whose topics are remarkably comprehensive, including what the priorities of the country’s Defence Force should be, both now and in the future. Citizens can even present their views on military matters at a public hearing attended by MoD representatives, all in the name of public consultation. And the Defence Minister responds to the people in clear English sans the cobwebs of jargon that typically entangle our military pronouncements.

In case you haven’t noticed, here in the U.S.A., requests from the Pentagon for citizen feedback aren’t flooding our email boxes. So I thought — since no one in that five-sided fortress on the Potomac has asked a thing of me — the least I could do was ask a few questions on my own. Here, then, is my own top-five list of questions that we, the American people, should ask the Pentagon, even if none of its officials want to hear from us. Maybe they’re a tad more pointed than those in the Kiwi survey, but that shouldn’t be surprising. After all, they’ve been a long time in coming.

1. Our military is supposed to be a means to an end: national security. Due to its immense size and colossal budget, has our military not become an end as well as means?

2. In World War II, Americans could explain “Why We Fight” in part because the government provided a clear and compelling rationale for war. Why are the goals of today’s wars so opaque to most Americans?

3. If our military provides us with our way of “nation building” abroad, won’t countries and peoples be more likely to copy our military ways and weaponry than our democratic teachings?

4. America is facing painful budgetary belt tightening. Why is the military immune?

5. Why does “support our troops” seemingly end when they leave the service, leading us to tolerate such inequities as an unemployment rate of 21% for young veterans?

Keep in mind that there are 10, 20, 30 more questions where those five came from — and our military badly needs to hear and respond to them all.

Every recruit is taught to stretch, to go the extra mile, to push until you can go no further. Our military needs some stretching and push-back: this time, from us. Unfortunately, most of us don’t think our opinions matter when it comes to our military — unless, that is, they consist solely of slavish adoration. The fact is most of us are detached from military affairs precisely because we know in our hearts that the Pentagon serves its own needs, that it may be interested in listening in on us, but certainly not in listening to us.

Challenge the Pentagon Church Militant

Kiwis have the reputation of being practical types with an admirable dash of humility, and I like to think that their Ministry of Defence solicits the views of its citizenry not just because it’s required by statute, but because their officials don’t believe they have a monopoly on good ideas.

Perhaps the MoD recognizes as well the difficulty military professionals have in thinking outside the box. Despite its gargantuan size and its endless advisory committees and boards, our Department of Defense is, in essence, a well-insulated church of likeminded believers, administered by tightly-wound power-brokers. It sees the world only as an arena of, and for, conflict. Wherever it looks, even within its own ranks, it sees rivals and enemies. It cannot help dividing the world into believers and heretics, friends and foes.

And it’s true that the world is a dangerous place. The problem is: the Pentagon is part of that danger. Our military has grown so strong and so dominates our government, including its foreign policy and even aspects of our culture, that there’s no effective counterweight to its closeted, conflict-centered style of thinking.

In fact, the Pentagon’s heft gives new meaning to the term “full spectrum dominance” and helps explain the lack of change in war policy since the 2008 elections. A vote that constituted an unmistakable call to end our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — and so lessen the military’s influence — has led only to fresh war “surges” and mushrooming Pentagon budgets. And yet, as the Pentagon charges forward, debate is nearly nonexistent and Congress can muster just 65 votes for a resolution to curtail the endless conflict in Afghanistan.

It’s shameful that only a so-called far left congressman like Dennis Kucinich has enough sense (and guts) to insist on Congressional debate about our forever-war in Afghanistan. Equally shameful: that Congress allotted only three hours to that debate on matters of life, death, and even financial well-being. Do we really need reminding that debate makes democracy stronger? Evidently so. Take it from me as a retired Air Force officer: our troops won’t be demoralized by more debate and greater citizen participation.

Let’s face it, all of this represents a long-term sea change in American consciousness. Sadly, the old idea of the citizen army is dead, and because of this, most of us lack any direct connection to the military (and seemingly could not care less). In the name of safety, security, and solidarity, we’ve buttoned our lips. We worship, but don’t partake.

Centuries from now, historians will look back on American history and wonder how so many gave away so much to so few. It should be our right to have a say in what defines the “defense” of our country. That right has been surrendered to the few. Our future may depend on genuine input from the many.

How about it? Are you ready to challenge the Pentagon church militant? Or are you content to mouth the usual catechism, while continuing to dump billions each week into the collection basket?

The Geneva Conventions At 75: Do The Laws Of War Still Have A Fighting Chance In Today’s Bloody World?

By Marnie Lloydd

August 12, 2024

Source: The Conversation


A facsimile of the signature-and-seals page of the 1864 Geneva Convention, which established humane rules of war.



Today marks 75 years since the adoption of the Geneva Conventions on August 12 1949. In theory, these rules of war are universally agreed by every nation. In practice, they are routinely violated everywhere.

With an estimated 120 armed conflicts worldwide, more than 450 armed groups and 195 million people living in areas under their control, the protection of the vulnerable is as vitally important as ever.

As the news headlines remind us daily, however, international humanitarian law can seem like too little, too late when faced with military might and political indifference.

This year also marks other, less hopeful, anniversaries: ten years since the genocide against the Yazidi by ISIS in Syria, and ten years of war in Ukraine. Geopolitical tensions are escalating in the Middle East and the South China Sea.

Given the modern technologies used on today’s battlefields (and in cyberspace), and the violation of even basic humanitarian protections, is there much to celebrate in 2024? Are the Geneva Conventions still fit for purpose for today’s wars – and tomorrow’s?

Humanitarian values

All societies have cultural, religious or legal rules of some kind around war. But in the aftermath of World War II’s extreme horrors, the world agreed to a detailed set of codified rules governing armed conflict.

Despite differing political views and experiences of war, countries agreed to the Geneva Convention rules by striking a balance between military need and humanitarian ideals for the treatment of civilians, captured enemy soldiers and the dead.

The 1949 Conventions remain the core of international humanitarian law, or the laws of armed conflict. This body of law has been expanded over the years by other treaties and protocols dealing with civil war, chemical weapons, antipersonnel landmines, torture and enforced disappearances.

Designed to help prevent a spiral of tit-for-tat atrocities, many of the rules work due to reciprocal respect between combatants: treat our soldiers well when captured and we will do likewise.

But they also demand the humane treatment of people caught up in war, even if one warring party has breached those rules or started the war in violation of the United Nations Charter that prohibits aggression.
Four conventions, 400 articles

The Geneva Conventions include more than 400 articles, setting out detailed rules for the treatment of prisoners, protecting hospitals and medical staff, allowing humanitarian aid, and prohibiting torture, rape and sexual violence.

In fact, four conventions were adopted in 1949. The first three’s provisions built on existing laws protecting wounded soldiers on the battlefield, at sea and when captured as prisoners.

The key fourth convention sought to protect civilians living under the power of an adversary, such as in occupied territory.

A single article provided fundamental rules about the humane treatment of people during a civil war – the first time international law had dared to regulate violence occurring within a country rather than between two or more.
War and peace

Some say international humanitarian law took the wrong approach back in the 1860s when the very first Geneva Convention was adopted, because it accepted war and gave up on insisting on peace.

As the scholar Samuel Moyn has argued, this has forced us to choose between the ideal of opposing war in the first place and opposing the crimes that take place within it.

Humanitarian law also accepts a minimum level of harm to civilians as “collateral damage” during an attack on a military target. In other words, not all civilian deaths are war crimes.

And some articles in the conventions seem old-fashioned today – tobacco is mentioned together with food and water for prisoners of war, for example.

But in my own experience working with the International Committee of the Red Cross, I have seen international humanitarian law in action. When respected, it can save and improve lives.
Eternal vigilance

Warring parties everywhere still allow the Red Cross to visit thousands of detained people, and to negotiate about improving their treatment.

Combatants make agreements for prisoner swaps, hostage release, return of the dead, and the provision of medical care to wounded enemy soldiers.

Sometimes, countries investigate war crimes allegations. And the conventions make it possible for warring parties to make other agreements for even greater protections.

And while the Geneva Conventions, and international humanitarian law more generally, are far from perfect, the rules seek a basic limit on the worst humanity has to offer, insisting on some fundamental human dignity.

To ensure they are at least not actively breached, and ideally their protections extended, countries must do three key things:focus on collective responsibility, comply with the law themselves, and ensure respect by others
stop using technical legal arguments to legitimise large-scale devastation in ways that ignore the fundamental humanitarian purpose of the rules
and resist any claim by a nation state that exceptional national security threats (including terrorism, insurgency or new technologies) justify the rules being abandoned.

It is precisely in the gravest situations, when politics and other laws have failed to prevent war, that these rules are most needed. Greater respect for them would go a long way to saving lives and preventing the horrors we see in today’s conflicts.

The Incompetence of Masters of War

Western defense giants tout cutting-edge tech, but their “state-of-the-art” systems often fall short in asymmetrical warfare. From faulty missile defense systems to overpriced carriers, the only thing that consistently works is the profit machine.

By Samuel Geddes

August 12, 2024

Source: Jacobin


USS Dwight D. Eisenhower



The ineffectiveness of “cutting-edge” military technology shown in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the spillover conflicts undermines the notion that the military-industrial complex aims to win wars. Instead, it reveals its true objective: profiting from ongoing conflicts.

Since its crushing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, one of Israel’s primary functions as a US-European client state has been that of a weapons laboratory. Throughout eight decades of repressing, invading, and annexing the territory of regional countries, it has served as a proving ground for arms manufacturers.

This continuous opportunity for such demonstration has enabled Israel, starting in the 1980s, to develop its own highly globalized military-industrial complex. From tanks to drones, “Israel” became a byword for the technical superiority and unbeatable effectiveness of western hard power over those on its receiving end.

Since the turn of the millennium, however, and especially since the Hamas-led Palestinian offensive against Israel on October 7, the region has become a weapons lab of a very different kind. It now showcases the armaments of its enemies and their ability, for a fraction of the cost and technical complexity, to render its space-age technology uneconomical and, by extension, obsolete.

The spread of cheap, cost-effective arms among asymmetric opponents of the West has significantly blunted the power of conventional weapons systems. The rational thing to do is accept this and redirect these hundreds of billions of wasted dollars to social programs and infrastructure. Almost anything would be more defensible than the status quo.

Costly Defense, Cheap Defeat

By no means is this the first time the efficacy of Western armaments has been called into question. A near-identical situation unfolded more than three decades ago during the US-led war on Iraq over its occupation of Kuwait. Official outlets gloried in the technical prowess of the weaponry brought to bear against the Ba’athist armed forces, with the media marveling at the proclaimed effectiveness of the Patriot missile defense system. Its success rate at shooting down Iraqi ballistic missiles was almost immediately challenged. A subsequent US government study into the Patriot system’s performance revised the initial claims of an 80 and 50 percent interception rate in Saudi Arabia and Israel respectively to 70 and 40 percent. The report further notes that, according to the “strongest evidence,” the overall success rate of the Patriot system during Desert Storm dwindled to 9 percent.

In the intervening three decades, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus Theodore Postol has been one of the most consistent critics of missile defense systems, compellingly arguing they routinely fail to intercept their targets and are regularly known to misfire. A stark example of this occurred on April 13 of this year, when, after bombing the Iranian consulate in Damascus and killing several senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, Israel faced the largest combined drone and missile barrage in history as Iran and its regional allies responded.

Although Israel claimed to have intercepted “99 percent” of the ordnance, the Iron Dome system relied heavily on the support of US, French, British, Saudi, and Jordanian militaries to prevent Iranian munitions reaching their targets. Despite this, and despite Tehran’s warnings that a strike was imminent, some missiles evaded the combined Israeli air defenses and struck critical military targets such as the Nevatim air base in the Negev desert. The total cumulative cost of this seemingly impressive feat of missile defense (assuming we take Israel at its word) has been estimated at more than $1 billion for all of the interceptor munitions fired, whereas the cost of the Iranian operation was at most $80 to $100 million — one-tenth of the price.

In a related theater of the conflict, the Yemeni political and military movement Ansar Allah began launching drones and missiles at commercial ships in the Bab al-Mandeb channel, in solidarity with Gaza. Instead of addressing the Houthis’ stated objectives, the West responded with armed force. Anticipating a US-led blitzkrieg against Yemen, one of the poorest Arab countries, online hawks warned Yemenis that they were “about to find out” why Americans “don’t have universal healthcare.” After eight months of the fiercest naval combat experienced since World War II, the unintended truth of that hollow bluster is more apparent than its authors could ever have intended.

Billion-Dollar Blunders

In June, the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, a supreme example of American hard power, was withdrawn from the Red Sea waters bordering Yemen. Conflicting reports emerged as to whether Ansar Allah had in fact successfully struck and damaged the vessel or whether it had simply exhausted its interceptors against the relentless barrage of disposable Shahed drones launched by the Yemeni movement. Regardless of the exact reason, the situation demonstrated that fielding the most powerful navy in history — and potentially losing its most powerful vessel — was prohibitively more expensive, in pure monetary terms, than the cost to its opponents of attacking it.

A relatively “low-tech” drone with a sufficient payload needs only to evade a carrier’s defenses and hit its target once, whereas these dollar defense systems must be successful every time. Comparing the cost of an interceptor missile (ranging from a minimum of $2 million apiece to as much as $28 million) to that of a Shahed drone ($20,000 to $50,000), this is a losing proposition in the long run. On top of this, the presence of this overwhelming firepower has done nothing to prevent Ansar Allah from strangling maritime traffic through the Red Sea and imposing yet another supply chain crisis on the global economy.

It may even be that the current spike in tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, possibly presaging a full-scale war, was brought on by exactly the kind of technical malfunction that Professor Postol has warned of. Israel’s July 30 assassination of the lead Hezbollah commander Fu’ad Shukr, which is expected to prompt imminent retaliation from Hezbollah, was claimed by Tel Aviv to have been in response for a missile strike on July 27 that killed twelve children in Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights.

This claim overlooks the fact that the area is Israeli-occupied Syrian territory and its residents have refused Israeli citizenship along with the “sympathy” of the Benjamin Netanyahu regime. Furthermore, the narrative surrounding this “attack” quickly buried suspicions that the missile involved was an Iron Dome interceptor that veered wildly off course, striking the very territory it was supposed to be shielding. If this hypothesis proves true, then the potentially calamitous war that may result will have been triggered by an errant missile fired by a prohibitively expensive and dangerously unreliable missile defense system.

Squandering Public Supports

If all this technical wizardry isn’t meant to win wars, one wonders about its purpose. It’s reminiscent of Boeing’s plea deal with the US government to avoid legal consequences for substandard manufacturing, which at its worst, killed more than three hundred passengers in two separate crashes. The priority is to sell planes, not to make sure they stay in the air.

One of the few sectors seemingly impervious to the stock market crash at the start of this August has been the defense industry. Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics have all been in a sustained uptrend over the past year, spiking very conspicuously around October 7. Clearly the large-scale and repeated demonstration of their products’ ineffectiveness is no obstacle to long-term profitability.

The most notorious example of wastefulness in military spending is undoubtedly the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet. From the program’s inception in 2006 to the present, the F-35 was projected to cost over $1.7 trillion over its lifetime. Persistent cost overruns and development woes have angered even the Pentagon itself, which opened the program up to competitive bidding in 2012. More than a decade later, the rapid spread of drone technology has made it possible for unmanned craft, sometimes referred to as “loitering munitions,” to perform many of the tasks traditionally handled by fighter jets — with little overengineering and none of the risk to an actual pilot. That the total budget of this program could eradicate all American student loan debt or cover half the cost of a national health system only adds to the obscenity of it all.

It is well-known that the military-industrial economy is dependent on public subsidy. The technology in mobile phones, computers, and the internet — essential to modern life —was not “invented” by figures like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, but was instead developed by public investment. The initial funding came from decades of American taxpayer dollars.

Capitalism is not designed to be ethically consistent, but if it were, companies whose business model depends on state supports would be paying out dividends to every single American as a return on their initial investment.

In 2024, the US military budget reached an incredible $841 billion. If even a fraction of these funds were to be spent on restoring the education system to a level befitting the richest country on earth, canceling university tuition debt, or creating a national health system, it would achieve far greater benefits. While $1 trillion might not result in effective missile shields, it is very likely capable of creating a functioning health or educational system.

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Free Palestine From German Racism Dressed Up as Guilt

A German judge claimed this week that a protester broke the law by chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” It’s the latest attempt to criminalize the speech of Palestinians by the supporters of mass killing in Gaza.

By Daniel Finn

August 10, 2024

Source: Jacobin

When it comes to authoritarianism, it seems you can always rely on a German state official to go the extra mile. We saw a classic example of that on Tuesday, August 6, as a Berlin magistrate convicted a woman for an imaginary crime.

According to the judge, Birgit Balzer, a German Iranian woman called Ava Moayeri was guilty of “condoning a crime” when she chanted “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in October of last year. As with all the attempts to delegitimize this slogan throughout Europe and North America, Balzer relied on the idea that she can discern a secret meaning behind it that has nothing to do with the words actually used.

The Rule of Vibes

What was the nature of the crime Moayeri was said to have “condoned”? Did she express support for Hamas, which is considered to be a terrorist organization in Germany? No: the slogan does not mention Hamas, or any other Palestinian group. Did she call for Israelis to be killed? No: the slogan says nothing about violence, whether directed against Israeli soldiers or civilians.

Balzer brushed aside previous German court rulings that found the meaning of the slogan to be “ambiguous,” claiming that it unquestionably “denied the right of the state of Israel to exist.” Even if we were to grant the false premise that “denying Israel’s right to exist” is a criminal offense, this argument won’t stand up to scrutiny either.

If a Palestinian state were to be established in the territories Israel has occupied since 1967, it would reach all the way from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The literal meaning of the slogan does not exclude the “two-state solution” that is supposed to be the position of German foreign policy, at least in theory.

In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift describes a land where the authorities are obsessed with hunting down supposed traitors. One trick they have for doing so is known as the “anagrammatic method”:

By transposing the letters of the alphabet in any suspected paper, they can lay open the deepest designs of a discontented party. So, for example, if I should say, in a letter to a friend, “Our brother Tom has just got the piles,” a skillful decipherer would discover, that the same letters which compose that sentence, may be analysed into the following words, “Resist — a plot is brought home — the tour.” And this is the anagrammatic method.

George Orwell highlighted this passage as an uncanny premonition of twentieth-century totalitarianism. But the anagrammatic method is positively liberal when compared with Balzer’s approach to identifying thought crimes, which is not constrained by the need to reshuffle letters into a semicoherent sentence.

To find a true point of comparison, we have to reach beyond the literary canon to a scene from The Castle, a cult Australian movie. An unsympathetic judge asks a shambolic, disheveled lawyer what particular section of the constitution he is invoking in support of his argument. “There is no one section,” he replies. “It’s just the vibe of the thing.”

Violent Desires

Balzer’s vibe-based approach to the criminalization of speech acts builds on months of effort by politicians and other public figures throughout Europe and North America. The US university administrators who were hauled in for a congressional show trial got themselves in trouble because they were afraid to challenge the absurd claim that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call for genocide.

In Britain, the Conservative home secretary Suella Braverman issued a diktat urging the police “to consider whether chants such as: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world.” Soon afterwards, Braverman was sacked in disgrace after inciting a druggy mob of fascists to attack police officers in London.

Another Tory politician, Robert Jenrick, sought to provide rhetorical cover for the racist thugs who have been terrorizing British Muslims over the past week by endorsing the inflammatory myth of “two-tier policing”:

I thought it was quite wrong that someone could shout “Allahu Akbar” on the streets of London and not be immediately arrested, or project genocidal chants onto Big Ben, and that person not be immediately arrested.

Jenrick rightly faced a backlash for suggesting that a greeting used by Muslims all over the world should be deemed a criminal offense. But the second part of his intervention was equally sinister: it was a clear allusion to the moment earlier this year when activists projected “from the river to the sea” onto the exterior of the British parliament during a protest in solidarity with Gaza.

In Germany itself, interior minister Nancy Faeser claimed that “from the river to the sea” was a Hamas slogan — a demonstrably false statement, since the slogan predates the very existence of Hamas — while justice minister Marco Buschmann suggested that it could be understood as “condoning the killings committed in Israel.” Like Birgit Balzer, Buschmann saw no need to refer to the actual words of the slogan: it’s just the vibe of the thing.

The Sound of Silence

What makes the manufactured controversy about “from the river to the sea” especially repugnant is the context in which it is unfolding. The critics of the slogan don’t actually take issue with what it says — they take issue with what it doesn’t say. But they would never dream of applying the same methodology to catchphrases about “Israel’s right to defend itself” or “Israel’s right to exist” that are never far from the lips of its supporters.

“From the river to the sea” does not spell out explicitly what the future status of the Israeli Jewish population is to be in the context of a free Palestine. This is not at all surprising, since it is a slogan rather than a detailed manifesto or the text of a peace agreement.

The wording of the slogan allows for the partition of historic Palestine into two states, or for the creation of a single democratic state based on equality for all those who live there. The idea that it necessarily implies the killing or forced expulsion of all Israeli Jews is plainly false and relies on the crudely racist view of Palestinians as a people motivated by insatiable bloodlust.

On the other side of the discursive barricades, the phrase “Israel’s right to defend itself” does not say what methods of “self-defense” are legitimate for Israel to use. Its close cousin, “Israel’s right to exist,” does not say what form a Palestinian state should assume alongside Israel, or even whether there should be a Palestinian state at all.

At this moment in time, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that anyone who talks about “Israel’s right to defend itself” condones the mass murder of Palestinian civilians, since that is the way in which the slogan has typically been used by government officials in Europe and the United States over the last ten months. There is far more basis for that hostile interpretation than there is for the delegitimization of “from the river to the sea.”

But the idea that any public figure would be prosecuted for speaking about “Israel’s right to defend itself” in the context of a genocidal massacre is plainly absurd. There have been far more explicit declarations of support for violence against Palestinian civilians over the last ten months without any political consequences for those making them, let alone legal repercussions.

Despicable Demands

Birgit Balzer’s ruling comes shortly after the Israeli parliament voted overwhelmingly to reject the formation of a Palestinian state under any circumstances. That obdurate denial of Palestine’s right to exist, the settled consensus of the Israeli political class, is enforced by the region’s most powerful military machine. It is the reality that Palestinians experience every day of their lives.

The ruling also comes after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) confirmed the obvious fact that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is a permanent exercise in colonization that has imposed a system of racial apartheid from the river to the sea. The response of German chancellor Olaf Scholz was to pretend that he agreed with the ICJ while categorically opposing any sanctions on illegal West Bank settlements:

A government under my leadership will not support a boycott of goods, services, and commodities from Israel. In fairness, I find such demands despicable.

Scholz’s remarks only make sense if he considers the settlements to be an integral part of the Israeli state, which of course they are. Scholz also insisted that his state would continue to supply weapons to the Israeli armed forces as they transform Gaza into a charnel house.

Balzer claimed that her ruling was necessary to ensure that German Jews feel “safe and comfortable” in the country. In reality, its only purpose was to shield war criminals and their enablers, allowing them to feel “safe and comfortable” in the knowledge that they can get away with murder while the state polices the language of their critics.

Western Media, Leaders Slammed for ‘Deafening’ Silence Over Israeli Torture Revelations

"Can you imagine the response if Palestinians were holding Israelis in mass rape camps and torturing them to death?" asked one critic..

By Brett Wilkins

August 10, 2024

Source: Common Dreams


A leaked photograph obtained by CNN shows a blindfolded man with his arms over his head at the Sde Teiman detention facility. (Photo: CNN)

Human rights defenders are calling out Western news outlets and political leaders for their conspicuous lack of coverage and vocalized condemnation after leaked video footage appeared to show Israeli soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian detainee in the notorious Sde Teiman prison and the release of a new report documenting systematic torture of prisoners held by Israel.

Earlier this week, Israel’s Channel 12 aired a video showing Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reservists assaulting a Palestinian man at Sde Teiman, which is often called “Israel’s Guantánamo.” The victim was reportedly hospitalized with a severe anal injury, ruptured bowel, broken ribs, and lung damage. In addition to torture, former Sde Teiman detainees have described rampant rape and sexual abuse, allegedly often committed by female soldiers.

Instead of avoiding the Sde Teiman rape story, Israeli media have aired an interview with one of the IDF suspects—who are being hailed as “heroes” by far-right Israelis including multiple Cabinet ministers—and panel discussions including one in which a journalist called for “institutionalized” rape of Palestinian prisoners. This, as Israeli leaders demanded an investigation of the rape video to find and punish whoever leaked the footage, and as Israeli lawmakers argue that it’s permissible to rape Palestinian prisoners.

Meanwhile, there has been very little coverage of Sde Teiman on U.S. broadcast media, which have come under fire for allowing Israeli officials to censor their coverage of the Gaza onslaught. This stands in stark contrast to the myriad—and sometimes outright false—reports of Hamas militants raping Israeli women during the October 7 attack, which have prompted embarrassing corrections.

“Can you imagine the response if Palestinians were holding Israelis in mass rape camps and torturing them to death? Every U.S. politician would condemn it, there would be congressional resolutions, countless CNN segments, and celebrity outrage,” Palestinian American poet Remi Kanazi said Thursday on social media. “But the victims are just Palestinians.”

Dazed politics editor James Greig said on social media Wednesday that “it feels redundant to complain about double standards at this point but still, the contrast between the silence about Sde Teiman and the months of lurid, detailed, and at best factually dubious reporting published when Hamas was accused of sexual violence is extremely stark.”

Syrian British journalist Richard Medhurst wrote Thursday on social media that “the silence by mainstream media on the IDF’s rape culture is deafening.”

“These journalists are literally covering for the most violent form of rape, recorded on camera, and documented by doctors,” he added.

When there is coverage of alleged Israeli crimes in the U.S. media, it is often presented in a manner that casts doubt upon the veracity of Palestinian claims—which are increasingly beyond doubt amid an avalanche of evidence.

On Monday, asCommon Dreamsreported, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem released a detailed report, ominously titled “Welcome to Hell,” which documented widespread torture and abuse of Palestinians across Israeli’s detention apparatus. The report found that “there is no room to doubt” that Israel’s torture methods are a systematic, organized policy of its prison authorities.

Israeli whistleblowers have described having to frequently amputate Sde Teiman detainees’ limbs due to damage from constant shackling. IDF officers have admitted that dozens of Palestinians have died at the prison. IDF soldiers allegedly murdered one detainee by shoving an electric baton in his anus. United Nations experts and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem have confirmed what the latter described as the “systematic” torture of detainees “that amounts to a war crime and even a crime against humanity.”

Meanwhile, Israeli protesters have rallied for the right to rape Palestinians, and a far-right mob whose members included a Cabinet minister and multiple Knesset lawmakers stormed two military bases last month in an attempt to free the alleged IDF rapists after nine suspects were arrested.

Yet “there is still no international outcry,” journalists Lubna Masarwa and Peter Osborne wrote in a Middle East Eyeopinion piece published Friday. “This collective omerta from politicians and the media about Israel’s monstrous conduct is hard to comprehend, given that we are talking about systematic war crimes committed on a horrifying scale by a country already under investigation at the International Court of Justice for potential genocide.”

“Their silence amounts to complicity,” the authors continued. “As for Israel, the majority of the political and media classes do not appear to think there is much wrong in the torture and abuse of prisoners, with some ministers actively defending the abusers.”

“These are the signs of a very sick society indeed—one that has passed through an invisible barrier into savagery,” they added. “There are no red lines, no respect for international law, and no accountability. The silence of the West shows that we, too, have entered the same nightmare universe.”