US-backed Venezuelan Opposition Never Tried to Win the Presidency

Now, a New York Times Hagiography of its Leader

by Roger D. Harris / November 21st, 2024

“On the campaign trail, she [María Corina Machado] was received almost as a religious figure, often wearing white, promising to restore democracy and reunite families torn apart by an economic crisis and mass migration. ‘María!’ her followers shouted, before falling into her arms,” the New York Times reverently reported.

Indeed, Machado’s personally chosen surrogate to contend in last July’s Venezuelan presidential election, Edmundo González, did fall into her arms. But that was because her infirm disciple had trouble, both literally and figuratively, standing on his own two feet.

Machado was the main Venezuelan opposition figure backed by the US. Her platform of extreme neoliberal shock therapy was rejected by the electorate. Most Venezuelans oppose her call to privatize nearly all state institutions serving the people – schools, hospitals, public housing, food assistance, and the state oil company, which funds social programs. Nor is there any popular appetite for Machado’s plan to radically reorient foreign policy to subordination to Washington and support of US imperial wars in Ukraine and Palestine.

A hagiography, such as this one by the Times, includes an investigation into the life and miracles attributed to the would-be saint. The article on Machado, penned by one Julie Turkewitz, does just that and more. The article also unintentionally reveals that the far-right opposition advocates foreign intervention to overthrow the democratic will of the Venezuelan people. Its title clearly states: “Trump to Save Her Country.”

It took the US until November 19, nearly four months, to declare González as the legitimate president-elect of Venezuela. The recognition likely signals a shift in the lame-duck Biden administration’s policy from negotiation to all-out hostility towards Venezuela, paving the way for a smooth handover to the new Trump team. Previously, Washington simply called for a “peaceful transition.”

The miraculous opposition primary

Turkewitz reported that Machado won “an overwhelming victory in a primary race.” She uses the weasel-construction “a primary” rather than “the primary,” because Machado’s “primary” was not one conducted by the official Venezuelan electoral authority, the CNE. Rather, it was a private affair administered by the NGO Súmate. That NGO, as the article admits, is funded by the US.

Machado prevailed in a crowded field of 13 candidates with a miraculous 92% of the vote. When some of the other candidates called fraud, Machado had the ballots destroyed. She could do so because Súmate is her personal organization.

The Times intimates that Machado “galvanized a nation” around an opposition agenda. That is something Uncle Sam has so far failed to achieve despite a quarter of a century of meddling in Venezuela’s internal affairs.

The empire’s newspaper of record reports that Machado is “wildly popular.” But that’s in the halls of the US Congress, where she was vetted and then anointed “leader of the opposition” even before the so-called primary in Venezuela. Unfortunately for Machado that popularity with the Yankee politicos did not travel as well back home. In Venezuela, even within her corner of the far-right, Machado is resented. Far from unified, the opposition in Venezuela is today ever more divided.

Contested election results

The official Venezuelan electoral authority (CNE) declared incumbent President Nicolás Maduro the winner with 52% of the vote. That outcome was subsequently audited and confirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court (TSJ).

González, the person whom the Times declared the winner, came in second with 43% of the vote, according to the official count. González claimed that he had evidence that proved he won the presidency, but he refused to show it to the TSJ, even when he was summoned to do so.

Moreover, the Times reports that the US-backed opposition has tallies from some 80% of the precincts, which were published on a private blog site. Sources supporting the Venezuelan government then published analyses showing that evidence to be bogus, while counter claims from those favoring regime change purport to confirm their validity.

The problem of privately posting evidence, while refusing to submit it to official channels, is that it leaves the Venezuelan authorities no constitutional path for accepting it even if it were valid. The question ignored by the article is: If “their team collected and published vote-tally receipts” proving its victory, why did they not settle the matter by submitting them?

The answer, not one that the Times would admit to, is that the far-right opposition and its US handlers never made a good faith attempt to win the election.

Washington’s strategy was to delegitimize the election, not to win it

The opposition’s platform could never be a winning ticket, which they knew. The only way to achieve it would be an extra-legal regime-change operation predicated on delegitimizing the democratically-elected government. And that is precisely what is being played out today in Venezuela.

There were a number of more moderate opposition figures with experience and popular followings. Had the US been interested in simply an electoral defeat of the ruling Socialist Party, they could have backed a less extreme candidate and offered to ease their punishing “sanctions” on Venezuela. Instead, Washington backed the far right, which took the supremely unpopular position of advocating for yet more sanctions on their own country to precipitate regime-change.

With nine other contenders on the presidential ballot, name recognition was important. Literally nobody had heard of González until Machado personally chose him as her surrogate. She had been disqualified from running back in 2015 for constitutionally mandated offenses.

Machado’s political party, Vente Venezuela, lacked ballot status because her party had boycotted recent Venezuelan elections in keeping with the far-right’s stance that the Venezuelan state is not legitimate. Once the party decided to again participate in the electoral arena in 2024, she could have petitioned for recognition of her party. But she didn’t bother.

González, who had been in retirement, had no political following or experience. He had been a Venezuelan diplomat to El Salvador back in the 1980s, where he had been implicated in supporting US-backed death squads.

Maduro crisscrossed the country in an all-out campaign effort, exhaustingly visiting over 300 municipalities. His ruling Socialist Party, in power since 1999, had cadre in every corner of the country who were mobilized. They didn’t need to be told that an opposition victory could mean not only loss of a job, but they might face retribution from the far right.

In contrast to Maduro’s strong ground game, the US-backed opposition was weak in the streets. González himself sat out the campaign in Caracas, while Machado barnstormed the hinterlands with a paper poster bearing his visage. Indicative of popular following were the turnouts at political rallies, both during the campaign and after, where Maduro attracted many times more supporters than González.

Forecast

 The Times not only maintains that González “won the July vote by a wide margin” but he “should be taking office in January.” González, too, claims he’ll be back in Caracas for the inauguration. After the election, he voluntarily left Venezuela for Spain in a transfer negotiated with Caracas and Madrid governments.

The Times further reports that Machado predicts Maduro will voluntarily “negotiate his own exit.” Even more fantastic, the Times asserts González “garnered almost 70 percent of the vote.”

In a revealing lapse from her otherwise editorializing, Turkewitz correctly reported that Machado “has spent roughly two decades trying to remove Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, from power.” Conveniently omitted is that effort included a number of coup attempts, including the 2002 US-backed coup that temporarily deposed then President Chávez. Machado signed the infamous Carmona Decree then, which voided the constitution and disbanded the courts, the legislature, and executive.

That 2002 coup lasted less than 48 hours because the people of Venezuela spontaneously rose up and confronted the traitorous military. If Machado indeed had the backing of 7 in 10 Venezuelans, she too could have taken the presidential palace regardless of the official election report.

The Times calls her Venezuela’s “Iron Lady” for her “steely resolve.” Meanwhile Hinterlaces, reporting from Venezuela, speculates Machado has fled the country:

The failure of the insurrectionary strategy in the absence of a social explosion or a rupture in the Bolivarian civic-military alliance, the lack of convincing evidence on Edmundo González’s alleged electoral victory, since they do not really have the minutes to demonstrate it, convinced Machado to leave the country.

Nicolás Maduro will be inaugurated on January 10. As confirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court, the majority voted for him to continue Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution .

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Roger D. Harris was an international observer for Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election. He is with the US Peace Council and the Task Force on the Americas. Read other articles by Roger.

 

Trump, AUKUS, and Australia’s Dim Servitors

by Binoy Kampmark / November 22nd, 2024

There is something enormously satisfying about seeing those in the war racket worry that their assumptions on conflict have been upended.  There they were, happily funding, planning and preparing to battle against threats imagined or otherwise, and there comes Donald Trump, malice and petulance combined, to pull the rug from under them again.

What is fascinating about the return of Trump to the White House is that critics think his next round of potentially rowdy occupancy is going to encourage, rather than discourage war.  Conflict may be the inadvertent consequence of any number of unilateral policies Trump might pursue, but they do not tally with his anti-war platform.  Whatever can be said about his adolescent demagogic tendencies, a love of war is curiously absent from the complement.  A tendency to predictable unpredictability, however, is.

The whole assessment also utterly misunderstands the premise that the foolishly menacing trilateral alliance of AUKUS is, by its nature, a pact for the making of war.  This agreement between Australia, the UK and the US can hardly be dignified as some peaceful, unprovocative enterprise fashioned to preserve security.  To that end, President Joe Biden should shoulder a considerable amount of the blame for destabilising the region.  But instead, we are getting some rather streaky commentary from the security wonks in Australia.  Trump spells, in the pessimistic words of Nick Bisley from La Trobe University, “uncertainty about just what direction the US will go”.  His policies might, for instance, “badly destabilise Asia” and imperil the AUKUS, specifically on the provision of nuclear-powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy.  On the last point, we can only hope.

The Australians, being willing and unquestioning satellites of US power, have tried to pretend that a change of the guard in the White House will not doom the pact.  Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong expressed a “great deal of confidence” that things would not change under the new administration, seeing as AUKUS enjoyed bipartisan support.

Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, is also of the view that AUKUS will survive into the Trump administration as it “strengthens all three countries’ ability to deter threats, and it grows the defence industrial base and creates jobs in all three countries”.

Another former ambassador to Washington, Arthur Sinodinos, who also occupies the role of AUKUS forum co-chair, has pitched the viability of the trilateral pact in such a way as to make it more appealing to Trump.  Without any trace of humour, he suggests that tech oligarch Elon Musk oversee matters if needed.  “If Musk can deliver AUKUS, we should put Musk in charge of AUKUS, and I’m not joking, if new thinking is needed to get this done,” advises the deluded Sinodinos.

The reasoning offered on this is, to put it mildly, peculiar.  As co-head of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, Musk, it is hoped, will apply “business principles” and “new thinking”.  If the Pentagon can “reform supply chains, logistics, procurement rules, in a way that means there’s speed to market, we get minimum viable capability sooner, rather than later”.

These doltish assessments from Sinodinos are blatantly ignorant of the fact the defence industry is never efficient.  Nor do they detract from the key premise of the arrangements.  Certainly, if an anti-China focus is what you are focusing on – and AUKUS, centrally and evidently, is an anti-China agreement pure and simple – there would be little reason for Trump to tinker with its central tenets.  For one, he is hankering for an even deeper trade war with Beijing. Why not also harry the Chinese with a provocative instrument, daft as it is, that entails militarising Australia and garrisoning it for any future conflict that might arise?

Whatever the case, AUKUS has always been contingent on the interests of one power.  Congress has long signalled that US defence interests come first, including whether Australia should receive any Virginian class submarines to begin with. Trump would hardly disagree here. “Trump’s decisions at each phase of AUKUS cooperation will be shaped by zero-sum balance sheets of US interest,” suggests Alice Nason of the University of Sydney’s US Studies Centre rather tritely.

If Trump be so transactional, he has an excellent example of a country utterly willing to give everything to US security, thereby improving the deal from the side of Washington’s military-industrial complex.  If there was one lingering, pathological complaint he had about Washington’s NATO allies, it was always that they were not doing enough to ease the burdens of US defence.  They stalled on defence budgets; they quibbled on various targets on recruitment.

This can hardly be said of Canberra.  Australia’s government has abandoned all pretence of resistance, measure or judgment, outrageously willing to underwrite the US imperium in any of its needs in countering China, raiding the treasury of taxpayer funds to the tune of a figure that will, eventually, exceed A$368 billion.  Rudd openly acknowledges that Australian money is directly “investing into the US submarine industrial base to expand the capacity of their shipyards.”  It would be silly to prevent this continuing windfall. It may well be that aspect that ends up convincing Trump that AUKUS is worth keeping.  Why get rid of willing servitors of such dim tendency when they are so willing to please you with cash and compliments?

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.

 

The Possible Beginning of The End

by Frank Scott / November 22nd, 2024

Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the only thing intellectually lower than Trump is his opposition, he was re-elected by a more solid margin than last time. After one of the dumbest and most slanted hit jobs on American consciousness, with tens of thousands of photos of Harris beaming as in contemplation of dinner dishes filled with food instead of animal waste, and Trump in an equal number looking as though he has not had a comfortable bowel movement in thirty or forty years, the public was expected to react as their keepers, in their incredibly bigoted stupidity, expected. The most dreadful outcome for the owners and operators of market democracy is that actual working people may be closer to some power than ever since the new deal, though one should hardly expect anything nearly that good since there were socialists and communists in the government back in those days and now we’re lucky to have a handful of “progressive” reps left of the American Nazi party. At least slightly.

As further proof of complete failure for privileged class expressions of our great democracy Trump was even outspent in the electoral market which is where Americans shop for the illusion of some constitutional or biblical expression of a supposed gift to the world brought by Europeans who savagely attacked indigenous people here hundreds of years ago and transformed earth into real estate while introducing freedom and other good stuff even before Israelis thought of it hundreds of years later in Palestine. Rejoice, be glad and continue taking drugs, spending trillions to brutalize humanity and destroy nature while the ruling class continues teaching us that swallowing sewage is a form of healthy dining and having our heads filled with mental puss makes us worthy of therapy.

While the USA sinks more deeply in a global political economic cesspool and the rest of the world rises and moves in the direction of a global and cooperative real democracy, a relative handful of capitalist commissars here and in colonial corporations desperately try to hang on to power and in so doing threaten the entire human race and not just their tiny if incredibly wealthy ruling class and are bringing us closer to ruin. The professional servant class which has served as supporting capital in its fading time now assumes even more desperate behavior and the media air contaminated by consciousness controllers becoming more dimwitted and murderous with each passing second threaten to speed up messages of blatant idiocy that may serve to make Trump look less ignorant if that is possible.

Those who speak of losing something that has never existed since euros got here – democracy – strengthen the foolish idea that voting assures the existence of majority rule no matter the fact that in America and as in most other market electoral arenas those with the most heavily financed products/candidates usually win though this case was a slight blip on the blurred screen of a degenerate form of democracy to make the one by which Nazis took power in Germany look close to ideal. While a popular comic-book formed conception might be that evil Germans took control of the country by marching in with guns and taking over that is fiction. They were elected to power in a more democratic, though hardly ideal, form of elections in which achieving a minority vote got you at least some power while here in narcoleptic-inspired America less than 50 percent gets you booted out with nothing.

But lest we become more deeply submerged in oceans of blather about fascism and not notice that millions of us live under it without it being given that name we might consider that millions of Americans are poor, without health care and hundreds of thousands of us have no place to live. This while we spend trillions on war and mass murder and tens of billions on the health and well being of our pets with many of us sleeping in their warm embrace due to lack of any human intimacy in our lives. Meanwhile Trump and many of his innocent supporters speak of Democratic Party members as Marxists thereby proving that he and they have no idea of Grouch’s thoughts on humor let alone Karl’s on political economics. But whether motivated by biblical tales of chosen people and virgin births or modern and less believable nonsense about celebrities and other influencers who make Trump seem almost thoughtful by comparison, news from the material world is that capitalist economics are destroying nature in all its forms and while the obliteration of air, water and other stuff in existence from long before we came along, the threat of nuclear destruction of all of us all at once grows with each new expression of mindless private profit seeking with more murderous policies and weapons that bring billions of dollars to some while offering to destroy billions of lives among the enormous majority of humanity made to absorb the murderous bill until such time as we create real global democracy and end the system before it destroys all of us.

Most recently the outgoing president, who has long left any hint of intelligence for the dung heap, warmly offered Ukraine the use of weapons to attack Russia and now, as often, we have to rely on Putin’s humanity and intelligence not to unleash nuclear weapons on the USA when such weapons are used on Russia. But, of course, good and decent Americans are reduced to claiming Putin is horny for world domination while the U.S. has hundreds of military bases surrounding Russia, China and much of the world but these are all about democracy and peace. Of course, and rapists are only concerned that their victims not be sexually frustrated. Trump’s election may well be another sign of the end of American imperial domination of the planet and whether his blatant ignorance and honesty assure positive or negative result, America and the planet will possibly benefit much more than great masses of us were lead to believe.

Meanwhile the usual suspects will fill the air with mental smog accusing any and all of fascism, genocide and even newer synonyms for whatever has been going on before our eyes while they learned memes and performed mimes and qualified as capital’s professional class of well paid servants whose checks may begin bouncing sooner than 2025 gets old.

Frank Scott writes political commentary which appears online at the blog Legalienate. Read other articles by Frank.

 

The Brutalization of Education and the Closing of the American Mind

by David Penner / November 22nd, 2024

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

― Aeschylus, Agamemnon

One of the most disturbing trends I have witnessed over the course of my forty-nine years is the hijacking of American education by unholy anti-democratic forces, and its transformation into a battering ram used to assault solidarity, literacy, and reason without which democracy cannot survive. In any reasonably humane society, school is a sanctuary where students read great books and learn to distinguish right from wrong, and yet in 21st century America it has become a place where the ruling establishment foments a war of all against all while forging the class of “deplorables,” along with an army of ruthlessly ambitious careerists.

American public schools in impoverished communities consistently dumb down to the lowest possible level, and the vast majority of these students typically graduate high school with a terribly primitive knowledge of American letters and classics of Western civilization. On the other side of the coin are the more competitive schools which often inculcate their students with skills that have significant pre-professional value yet churn out vast numbers of unscrupulous, overspecialized, and profoundly amoral creatures.

When I taught English and English as a Second language at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, NY, I was able to get away with saying certain blasphemous things which would have landed me in hot water had I been teaching at a more competitive institution, but this is because the majority of my students didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. At the competitive universities it is far less likely that students will be exposed to ideas that in any way challenge the status quo, as the professors at these schools tend to be constrained by a shorter ideological leash. Suffice it to say, this is very intellectually unhealthy, and serves to perpetuate the many lies and myths promulgated by the ruling establishment while ensuring that the next generation of leaders share their values.

As the humanities are increasingly debased due to their infiltration by identity politics dogma, college students increasingly read jargon rather than great literature, biographies, memoirs, or works of history and intellectual history. The dangers of jargon were understood all to well by George Orwell who realized that its purpose was not to liberate the mind and cultivate critical thinking but to cognitively straitjacket the citizenry, and through the inculcation of a mind-numbing conformity, facilitate their transformation into subjects. In fact, jargon is neither meant to communicate nor to even be intelligible and explicitly seeks to confuse, obfuscate, and induce apathy. Academically, students are taught to regurgitate ready-made phrases which they seldom understand and are encouraged to look to their golden-tongued professors to read and interpret these arcane texts for them. As Orwell so presciently observed in 1984, jargon can play a role in subconsciously and perniciously molding people’s thoughts: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

Academic jargon, and its journalistic equivalent, euphemistic language, anesthetize the brain rendering contradictory concepts, such as the idea that the Russian military is performing poorly while simultaneously threatening to take over all of Europe, somehow compatible with one another. Another example of this paradoxical thinking is the nonsensical notion that the Putin and Assad governments were slaughtering Syrian civilians who were yearning to be free, while the Pentagon was nobly liberating Syrians from ISIS and Al Qaeda – the very jihadists that the Russians and Syrians were actually fighting.

In fact, the very word “education” has become a euphemism for highly specialized job training and indoctrination into the cults of Zionism, unfettered capitalism, biofascism, humanitarian interventionism and identity politics. There are also instances where job training and indoctrination overlap to such a degree that they become synonymous with one another, such as the indoctrination that routinely occurs in military academies and in the academic departments of business, finance, economics, medicine, political science, identity studies, psychology, or any field in the humanities or social sciences which has been contaminated by identity politics dogma.

During the early Covid lockdown days I had a disturbing conversation with a formerly bright friend of mine who is enrolled in a biomedical PhD research program, and was startled to see that she had become a fanatical Branch Covidian, as all the professors in her department were reinforcing precisely the same nefarious talking points as the legacy media and “the public health agencies.” When I think back on this exasperating quarrel, what stands out the most to me is not even the brazen immorality of what she was espousing, but her unmitigated arrogance, as she was talking to me as if she were a senior lecturer in astrophysics at MIT while I was reading about UFOs in the National Enquirer. I also couldn’t fail to notice how much smarter she used to be as a junior and senior in high school – both morally, and with regards to critical thinking skills. This is a perfect example of the sinister merger that regularly takes place between job training and indoctrination.

(This fallen spirit is currently jockeying for a position in the pharmaceutical industry while dating a guy that works in the military industrial complex, indeed proving that “the more you learn, the more you earn.”)

As things presently stand, it is virtually impossible to get tenure or a tenure-track position at an American university if one contradicts any of the unhallowed tenets of neoliberalism: the vilification of the latest imaginary Hitler, multiculturalism (inextricably linked with unfettered capitalism and ghettoization), and the wonders of neo-Nazi medicine. Until recently there was a tinge of ideological room to maneuver with regards to the issue of Zionism; and provided the professor is using copious amounts of Marxist jargon, there is a little leeway offered on the issue of unfettered privatization. But with regards to biofascism, Putin bashing, uncontrolled immigration and identity politics no dissent is tolerated by university administrators. Consequently, students are often trapped in an echo chamber where their professors fail to challenge the lies of the legacy media, and more disconcerting, these degenerate ideas have become imbued and intertwined with a sense of prestige.

The myth of the meritocracy is ceaselessly invoked in American academia, inculcating young people with the notion that the best and the brightest always get the best jobs, and that one should always “trust the experts,” a problem glaringly on display with the Branch Covidians who would believe that two plus two equaled five if FDA, CDC, and the WHO said it did. Regarding Washington’s destruction of Libya, most of Syria, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Iraq, etc., the “smartest people” (New York Times, New Yorker, NPR, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, political science and economics departments at Ivy League schools) are saying we’re nobly battling evil dictators, hence we must be battling evil dictators. How could all these geniuses be wrong? John Kerry’s recent remark at the World Economic Forum that the ruling elites should be allowed to determine “what’s a fact and what isn’t a fact” could be the motto of virtually every educational institution in America.

The inimitable Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda asked random Palestinians in Gaza what they thought of the recent American election, and they said it didn’t matter as both candidates supported Zionism, revealing a better understanding of Beltway devilry than all American presstitutes and the majority of American political science professors put together. This unrelenting emphasis on blind obedience and the false meritocratic paradigm fosters a deep-seated infantilization amongst college students. Alas, legacy media acolytes remain as children all their lives.

Imagine a scenario where a political science or Russian studies professor in an American university stands before a class and informs their students that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was not unprovoked, that post-Euromaidan Ukraine is not a democracy, and that Moscow intervened in a regional civil war to protect the Russian speaking Ukrainian population from Banderite fascists and to prevent NATO from establishing a permanent foothold in the country which would pose an existential threat to the Russian Federation. Assuming they were untenured, such a professor would be fired immediately.

And the saddest part is that their own students would likely be the ones who would go to the department demanding such an outcome. Most professors are adjuncts and can be dismissed as easily as turning a key in a lock. Even if a professor should utter such heresies and be tenured, there are ways that the university can retaliate against the heathen by subjecting them to a toxic work environment and by preventing them from teaching classes which could allow for such intellectual discourse to occur in the first place.

In conjunction with this pitiable state of affairs, students that wish to pursue a field in the humanities are routinely mocked and ridiculed by their peers, yet these are the very subjects that constitute the foundational pillars of knowledge, enlightenment, and civilization itself. As popular Nazi writer Hanns Johst wrote in his 1933 play Schlageter, “Whenever I hear the word culture…I release the safety-catch of my Browning.” (Also sometimes translated as, “Whenever I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.”)

By enforcing ideological taboos set forth by presstitute puppeteers, academia has violated its sacred duty to uphold academic freedom and betrayed its historical, cultural, and moral purpose.  For colleges that pursue an open admissions posture and which warehouse students that typically hail from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, the humanities are often completely nonexistent, with these schools sometimes only offering majors in exanimate fields such as human resources, marketing, hospitality management, sports management, and criminal justice – essentially anti-subjects from which zero intellectual growth can emerge.

Urban public school students in particular are growing up in a post-nation state world where their level of dehumanization goes beyond mere illiteracy, as they are increasingly raised in an anti-society, a nihilistic void that has obliterated its past. This fate can befall not only immigrant youth and hyphenated Americans but Americans themselves (vividly on display in the dark film Martha Marcy May Marlene), who have likewise been given a terribly poor knowledge of the humanities, are raised in an economically ravaged post-industrial wasteland with neither communities, nor heroes nor canon, and who have lost any semblance of who they are and what their heritage is.

Academia’s penchant for sculpting international students into particularly compliant and docile workers, which is done by deliberately confining their English language instruction to the specialized jargon of their field making it almost impossible for them to understand anything in the US outside of their area of study, is likewise significant. When undergraduate international students that hail from high schools where English is not the language of instruction take writing-intensive classes in an American university to fulfill a liberal arts requirement they are invariably given easy A’s and B’s, and passed on with inflated marks when their papers are littered with grammatical errors and they are seldom able to understand the assigned readings. In this way, they are deceived into believing that they have learned English when their “education” is confined to learning the specialized English language lexicon of their major. Add to this the fact that many of these students will be on a guest worker visa upon graduation which ties them to a specific employer, and this further exacerbates their extremely vulnerable and exploitable position.

If a ski instructor gives his/her blessing for a student to do something which is known to be beyond the student’s abilities and a disastrous accident ensues, is the teacher not responsible? This happens countless times every day in American education, except the wounds are more difficult to see, as they are not physical injuries but injuries to the soul.

The biggest problem in the US is not that trillions are spent on unnecessary wars and maintaining a system of hundreds of bases around the world while millions of Americans suffer from poverty and indentured servitude, a lack of education, joblessness, broken families and communities, mass incarceration, and the absence of a single-payer health care system that upholds the informed consent ethic, but rather, that a vast swath of the population fails to see this as a problem. This pervasive moral and intellectual bankruptcy is American education’s grisly legacy.

Unlike with lower income students who are frequently denied any knowledge of the past, the ruling establishment wants the more selective mills to churn out students that are capable of writing grammatically correct sentences and possess at least a basic liberal arts education. However, the knowledge they are inculcated with is carefully scaffolded so as to rob them of logic and ethics, and any book, lecture, or field of study that could potentially cultivate these things will be identified as a threat and treated accordingly.

Setting fire to the humanities and teaching students to identify themselves by their ethnicity, sexual orientation, and occupation greatly advances the ruling establishment’s goals of alienation, tribalism, philistinism and illiteratization. Imaginary identities breed blindness and delusion, and the oligarchy deems peasants who have rejected ties to American history and the Western canon as well-trained pets. A population that has fallen into a morass of such extreme atomization that it is no longer bound together by a shared heritage and common language with which to discuss cataclysmic political and socio-economic problems and which is wallowing in the most abject political ignorance is on a runaway train to slavery.

This rabid anti-intellectualism is a pox on American society and allows the plutocrats to distract the masses from grave domestic problems while engaging in endless orgies of sadism and brutality, of which the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East are quintessential examples.

Long discarded amongst the ranks of worthless white guys, Benjamin Franklin understood the vital importance of freedom of speech and its inextricable connection to liberty. Writing in The New-England Courant in July, 1722, he underscored the connection between democracy and what would later become the First Amendment:

“That Men ought to speak well of their Governours is true, while their Governours deserve to be well spoken of; but to do publick Mischief, without hearing of it, is only the Prerogative and Felicity of Tyranny: A free People will be shewing that they are so, by their Freedom of Speech.”

Furthermore, Franklin understood that freedom of speech could not survive without an educated and informed population – a population that could think:

“Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech….”

Regrettably, it is not that one periodically encounters Americans with the most advanced degrees who have a kindergartner’s understanding of politics and the world in which we live, but that this has in fact become normalized. In actuality, these creatures are not so much educated as they are credentialed.

In conjunction with this pathological compulsion to destroy human cultures starting with one’s own, our education system presently exists to not only dismantle liberty of thought but to destroy the very capacity to think.

Just as American education is crying out for a restoration of a proper humanities syllabus that will inculcate the younger generation with a reverence for art, literature, a knowledge of the past, and a rejection of segregation, militarism, and materialism there are politicians in the Kremlin who would define victory in Ukraine, not as a destruction of the nationalist army per se, but as a new curriculum; i.e., the establishment of a new Ukrainian education system where the Russian and Ukrainian languages are taught side by side and which is devoid of Russophobia and Banderite indoctrination.

Insensate man – sometimes illiterate, frequently aliterate – is a being devoid of common sense, empathy, and the ability to methodically analyze extremely serious political and socio-economic problems – in a word, man devoid of consciousness. Relentlessly bombarded by a ruthless and omnipresent propaganda apparatus while simultaneously enveloped by an education system whose raison d’être is brainwashing and increasingly specialized vocational training, millions of impressionable minds are being severed from reason and the realm of human morality. Subsumed under a nihilistic oblivion and trained to mindlessly trust their leaders and do what is best for their careers, these hapless souls are molded into unthinking malleable shells in the hands of an oligarchy that has grown weary of democracy.

David Penner’s articles on politics and health care have appeared in Dissident Voice, CounterPunch, Global Research, The Saker blog, OffGuardian and KevinMD; while his poetry can be found at Dissident Voice, Mad in America, and redtailedhawk.substack.com. Also a photographer, he is the author of three books of portraiture: Faces of The New Economy, Faces of Manhattan Island, and Manhattan Pairs. He can be reached at 321davidadam@gmail.com. Read other articles by David.

 

Hands Off Haiti

Dan Cohen addresses the UN Security Council

by Uncaptured Media / November 22nd, 2024

Uncaptured Media founder Dan Cohen spoke at a Nov. 20 UN Security Council meeting on a U.S. proposal for a UN military intervention in Haiti.

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Uncaptured Media is a multi-media investigative journalism. Exposing the permanent war state, domestic and abroad. Founded by Dan Cohen. Read other articles by Uncaptured Media, or visit Uncaptured Media's website.

 

Anti-Palestinian Racism

by Visualizing Palestine / November 22nd, 2024

Special thanks to G. Laster for research and design on these visuals.
Last month, a year into an unending genocide against our loved ones in Palestine, my daughter, a senior in a public high school in the U.S., told me that she, along with a group of students, were planning a humanitarian walkout in solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon.

I felt a sense of conflicting emotions at this proclamation: I was proud of my daughter and her friends for speaking up against injustice, something we should all be doing all the time until we see an end to the genocide and colonial oppression of Palestinians. At the same time, for the entire week before the walkout, I felt a pit in my stomach, fearing and knowing what was about to unfold (based on the repression experienced by students a year ago when they planned a similar walkout at the school): intimidation, discrimination, and silencing of students by school administrators.

Indeed, I was not surprised when the night before the walkout, student organizers received an email from the school principal, with directives prohibiting the use of certain phrases and actions at the walkout. The banned phrases and actions, which the school system had classified as de facto “hateful,” included: chants for freedom, such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” actions such as “red hands,” and signs with maps that recognize Palestine.

These directives sent panic across the body of student organizers. Students felt afraid, discriminated against, undermined, and silenced. Instead of providing children with support and a safe space to practice free speech at school, and to process the trauma of watching their friends and families being killed in Palestine and Lebanon, students were met with bigoted and discriminatory restrictions. School systems across the U.S. are responding to pressure from Zionist parents, administrators, and organizations, resulting in schools prioritizing the comfort of some students over the rights, well-being and humanity of students like my daughter, who are calling for an end to genocide and ethnic cleansing.

On the day of the walkout, the principal and school administrators falsely accused students chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” of using “antisemitic language,” dangerously slandering the intention of students protesting genocide and exposing them to further harassment and harm from the school community.

Indeed, instead of focusing on calling for an end to a genocide, students like my daughter now had to turn their energies towards defending their right to express their opinions and to assert who they are. Even though the school system continuously claims to value the rights of every student “to feel safe and affirmed in our schools,” as proclaimed in the message that the school principal sent to the school community following the walkout, it is clear that these values do not extend to Palestinians or students who express solidarity with Palestinians.

According to a new study released by the Institute for the Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism, students and educators’ surveyed indicated that “74% of students and 75% of educators experienced silencing, exclusion, harassment, physical threat or harm, and defamation while advocating for Gaza and/or Palestinian human rights.”

Anti-Palestinian racism is one of many tools that is enabling a broader trend of right-wing attacks on public education. When school administrators submit to pressure to silence Palestinian narratives, they not only actively engage in the erasure of Palestinian experiences and history, but they also embolden further attacks aimed at preventing students from learning about racism and oppression.

In her brilliant piece, Anti-Palestinian Racism in Canadian Schools and What We Can Do About It, Nassim Elbardouh says: “These types of inconsistent applications of policy and procedures indicate that the problem isn’t the action itself (wearing a keffiyeh or critiquing the actions of the Israeli government), it’s the fear of how the action will be perceived. In doing this, we are modelling that we will break where and when people apply pressure. This is profoundly destabilizing and scary for young people who require consistency to feel safe enough to ask critical questions and meaningfully engage in the world around them.”

Schools are supposed to provide students with safe spaces to be themselves, express their views, and to engage with the world they live in critically. Instead, schools are one of many actors across the United States and other countries that are perpetuating anti-Palestinian racism and harm. The least we can do is to expose this systemic racism (from schools, to universities, to mainstream media, to government officials) that is playing a role in enabling the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian and Lebanese communities.

Anti-Palestinian Racism in Schools is the first in a series of visuals that will explore manifestations of this distinct form of racism in various settings.

Visualizing Palestine is the intersection of communication, social sciences, technology, design and urban studies for social justice. Visualizing Palestine uses creative visuals to describe a factual rights-based narrative of Palestine/Israel. Read other articles by Visualizing Palestine, or visit Visualizing Palestine's website.

COP29 & Climate Crisis: 

Greed of Rich Vs Needs of People

Prabir Purkayastha | 14 Nov 2024

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Irreversible climate changes seem more and more likely, but this is not a priority for rich countries, who are willing to sacrifice our future by investing in wars/conflicts to stretch their dominance.

Image Courtesy: Flickr

COP 29, the UN Climate Change Conference, started on November 11 in Baku, Azerbaijan, and is slated to end on November 22. It is taking place under the shadow of significant temperature rises this summer across the globe, and the clear warning of what it means for us. It is also taking place at a time when the US has elected a President, Donald Trump, who, among other things, is also a climate change denier and is unlikely to accept any global consensus in COP 29.

Global warming, even for the countries in the freezing North, is no longer in the realm of scientific debates. It is no longer a bunch of climate scientists sounding warnings about the impact of global warming on all of us. The results are already visible, with temperature records being broken in North India this summer. So also, in Europe.

The target of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 Degree Celsius is failing, as many regions across the world have already seen a rise of 1.5 Degree C this year. We do not say we have breached the 1.5 Degree C mark because of the technicality that, as per the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), temperature rise is computed over a 20-year average. However, to decide 20 years later that we did cross the 1.5 Degree C mark in 2024 is not very helpful for us today.

Therefore, we have to take action today, considering that we are on the verge of irreversible climate change that will make large parts of the world unliveable. It will also cause enormous damage not only to low-lying areas but also to the rest of the world through extreme weather events.

Just to put this in perspective, the world knew a temperature of this magnitude only about 125,000 years back, when modern homo sapiens were leaving Africa, crossing over into Eurasia. That means the world's climate is now tipping over into completely uncharted territory.

High summer temperatures have a huge impact on agriculture, people's livelihood and those forced to work in the fields, factories, or in occupations where people are exposed to heat. The problem is no less severe when much higher than usual winter temperatures lead to the melting of Arctic and Antarctic ice, causing a rapid rise in ocean levels. But what has been striking over the past few years is that rising temperature has also been accompanied by extreme weather events.

The Global North, meaning the US, Canada and Europe, has always believed that global warming is a problem in Africa, Asia and, at worst, Latin America. A Canadian colleague once told me, "Canada could do with a little global warming".

Unfortunately for the people in the Global North, this optimism regarding global warming and climate inaction has shown the rich are not immune to climate change either. The US, the hotbed of climate deniers, has seen 400 climate disasters with losses greater than $1 billion per event since 1980.

Heavy rains, floods, high temperatures, and forest fires are all increasing as we encounter temperature changes that existed only tens of thousands of years ago. We also have the danger of melting permafrost in the polar regions, releasing huge amounts of methane and flipping ocean currents with completely unknown consequences.

The COP29 started with an announcement of an agreement on carbon credits and the hope that it would revive carbon markets. While this path may have had something going for it when the world debated on how to fund green energy strategies, it has very little value today. We already know that most carbon credit projects are only on paper and, at best, help in generating some income for poor countries with forest cover. For example, 90% of carbon credits sold by Verra, the world's biggest certifier of carbon credits, did not reduce any emissions but made a lot of money for Verra.

Back to what we know, that really works. It is replacing the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas with green energy. That means producing electricity for the grid with solar and wind, for which the costs have come down dramatically in the last decades. Also, transport, particularly cars, has seen a rapid increase in battery storage capacity and lower battery prices, making electric vehicles competitive with petrol-driven ones. We still have problems on long haul goods transport by road and replacing processes that release greenhouse gases in certain industrial processes, such as steel, cement, and fertiliser production,

This year has seen major changes. China, the largest current producer of carbon emissions, appears to have reached its peak emissions in 2023-24 though its commitment to meet this target was given as 2030. The magnitude of the investment that China has made in renewables can be seen from its investment in solar power and emerging as the leading supplier of solar cells and panels. India has also expanded its renewable sector significantly and has ambitious plans for the future.

The question earlier was how to store electricity from renewables, given their variable output and our fixed daily demand profile. Building pumped hydro storage for storing variable renewable energy has addressed this problem. The grid-level batteries proposed earlier had high costs and limited storage duration. The Purulia Pumped Storage Project in West Bengal, built under the Left Front government, was the first such scheme in India.

Unlike multi-purpose hydroelectric projects, which cause large submergence of land for storing water for the seasonal needs of irrigation, meeting the daily fluctuations of energy needs requires a much smaller storage and, therefore, very little submergence.

The solar energy sector is clearly leading the energy transition in the world. But what is surprising is not the scale of China building up its solar energy sector but the slow speed of others. According to New York Times (September 16, 2024) China installed a total of 425GW of new solar power. The world without China installed only 162 GW, with the US, the biggest economy in the world, accounting for a measly 33 GW!

India has set itself an ambitious target of 500 GW of renewable energy, with 80% of that planned to come from solar by 2030, which is doable if we invest not simply in solar energy but also our capacity to build the entire supply chain for solar energy. This includes production of silicon wafers and solar cells, not just solar panels and solar plants.

If the electricity sector is the major emitter of greenhouse gases, the next one is the transport sector. Electric vehicles—EVs or Battery Electric Vehicles or BEVs—are at the forefront today in personal transport and in combating greenhouse gas emissions from burning petrol or diesel.

Again, China, with its focus on fundamental technologies, in this case, battery technology, has emerged as the global leader. CATL, which supplies Tesla with its batteries, and BYD, the other major battery maker in China, have emerged not only as the leading battery makers globally but are also now entering the EV market as car makers. BYD has become a major car manufacturer, while CATL is partnering with other manufacturers. CATL is also the major supplier of grid-level battery storage in China.

In India, we have a few indigenous battery suppliers, like Amar Raja Batteries. Indian car makers are also actively entering the EV sector. Again, the laggards seem to be the US, where the Elon Musk mystique blinded them to the reality that 50% of the cost of an electric vehicle is the cost of batteries alone. Musk’s Tesla's focus on the elite market meant missing the mass market segment, and believing that the Chinese battery manufacturers would not be any competition for Tesla. This has meant that Tesla is not a competitor for the mass market, which is by far the bigger segment.

Chinese battery makers along with their cars like BYD, or other Chinese battery makers who have teamed up with car manufacturers, have made heavy inroads into the European market. The response of the US and the EU has been tariff barriers to protect their carmakers at the cost of sacrificing climate goals, even if their own carmakers do not match the Chinese in cost or battery quality.

The COP29 is unlikely to address any of the real issues of how to expand renewable electricity production and its use in transport and other industries. We are not even talking about carbon equity and the rich countries taking some responsibility for the climate damage they have done. We simply want them to take some responsibility for the future. We are no longer willing to give the rich countries a pass, by their shelling out some money in the name of climate finance.

The globe today is teetering on an edge, where irreversible climate changes seem more and more likely. This is not a priority for rich countries. Their focus is on how to defeat Russia militarily in Ukraine, ring-fence China economically, use Israel to control the oil-rich West Asia, even if it means genocide in Palestine, and continue to rule over the rest of the globe. This is the global "Rule-Based order", where only they get to make the rules!

In the case of global warming, the G7 has come up not only against what other countries want, but also against the laws of nature. This is our challenge today: how to build a better world in spite of a handful of rich countries who are willing to sacrifice our future so that they can stretch their world dominance for a few more years. This is the key challenge of COP 29.