Management Trainee Blues

by Philip A. Faruggio / May 31st, 2025

In 1973, I was still a somewhat naive college senior ready to face the business world. My major had been in Speech and Theater, with a minor in Sociology. As the year was ending and the new one upon us, I was engaged to be married and needed to find secure employment. Graduation was really just a formality… I needed a steady income. My then job was as a commissioned telephone salesman working in what had been labeled a “boiler room operation.” We sold office supplies over the phone, using the infamous “going out of business, 40% off” pitch. I was actually very good at this rap, but the weekly returns were too inconsistent. So, with urging from my parents and my fiancée, out came the Sunday Times want ads. Not too many jobs in recreation, as the ’73 recession hit hard on most programs for youth. What could I do?

The ad said “Management trainee, college degree necessary, no experience needed.” I called the place, The **** Linen Corporation, and got an interview. Their plant was in downtown Brooklyn, maybe a 30 minute commute from home. After I finished all the paperwork, the sales manager interviewed me for maybe just 20 minutes. He was Italian American like myself, wore a suit that was too tight for his expanding paunch, and had this (pardon the French) greasy look to him. Basically, what he said to me should have signaled all that I would really need to know about this company: “Listen kid, the way it works is that the more you save the company, the more you can earn… period!” He told me of my duties, which were basically to “Hold the whip over all the workers and drivers.” Then, he walked me into the GM’s office to meet him. This guy, a bit older than the sales manager at maybe fifty years of age, gave me the once over and repeated what the other guy had said. He then told the sales manager to give me a tour of the facility.

When we walked into the tremendous area of the plant where the linens were washed and dried, I thought I was back in the days of the plantations. Here we were, two white guys strolling into a two tiered area, hot as hell (and this was mid January), and noisy enough to force us to shout in order to hear each other. The giant plant was filled with all black faces, with the women wearing outfits that looked like Aunt Jemima from the pancake box. The men all wore white pants and tops, and when we arrived there, it seemed like all I could see was a myriad of “the whites of eyes” peering at me. Everything seemed to just stop for perhaps 30 seconds. I felt like I was the new overseer at a plantation in the colonial South. The sales manager shouted into my ear: “You gotta keep an eye on these birds or they’ll goof off every chance kid.” He then took me back to his office for my work instructions.

The next morning, I was to report to the giant garage area to meet up with the delivery drivers. I was to spend one full day on the road with a driver, and then repeat this the next day with another driver until I went through the lot of them. In the AM, very early, maybe at 6 o’clock, I showed up at the garage area, and man was it frigid cold in there. The driver’s foreman greeted me and introduced me to the first guy to take me out with him. We got going in a truck was so old it must have had arthritis! The heater wasn’t working too well, and the ride was like a jeep in the jungle! The driver was pleasant, chain smoking one ciggie after another. He had the Bronx territory, so we were able to chat for awhile. I learned that the union was what they called a “Sweetheart union,” whereupon the union officials were basically “in the pocket” of the corporation. This guy pulled no punches. We began making stops, and man there were so many of them. These were bakeries, butcher shops, food stores and restaurants mostly. He told me I could wait in the truck, but I needed to see how things went. After all, in reality I was his boss, yes? At the first stop, which was a bakery, the driver greeted the owner with a few funny hellos about the frigid weather. Then, the mad scramble began. After dropping off the fresh linens, he had to search the premises for the old, dirty ones. I mean, they were everywhere! “Is this the way it always is?” I asked him. He nodded as we went down the basement stairs. I really got nervous when I could sense that something down those steps was fixed on me. “Don’t get too scared kid, those rats are as scared of us as we are of them. They won’t hurt ya,” he laughed.

One day on that job was enough for me. I went home and didn’t show up the next day. What really hurt me was the fact that those workers didn’t have the luxury that I still had. I lived at home and could move on whereas many of these folks couldn’t. Those black faces from the Caribbean in that plant had little formal education or formal skills training, and the few jobs they could secure were similar to this shit. The drivers, going by the two or three I had met, were not formally educated men, and thus another shitty driving job would be the same. The workers in the plant had NO union at all, and I already was alerted to the driver’s lot. Sadly, forty five years later nothing has changed, except perhaps for the worst! A Neo feudalistic society is what the corporate predators want… and still get!!

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Philip A Farruggio is regular columnist on itstheempirestupid website. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 500 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the It’s the Empire… Stupid radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net. Read other articles by Philip.

 

Science Decommissioned!

Ronald Johnson’s Appointment Sparks Outcry Over U.S. Interference

by Robert Hunziker / May 31st, 2025

“But truth’s a menace. Science is a public danger.” (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932). Huxley’s “World State” promotes stability and social harmony over scientific progress. According to the dystopian World State, science is a threat that challenges existing beliefs, which leads to “questioning the established order.”

2025 – America Decommissions Science

 The decommissioning of government-funded science appears to be a directive calling for: “Decommission but leave just enough of a shell to make it appear to be operational.”

In reaction to deep budget cuts, America’s most respected science journal, Nature, reports, “Trump Proposes Unprecedented Budget Cuts to US Science,” May 2, 2025: “Huge reductions, if enacted, could have ‘catastrophic’ effects on US competitiveness and the scientific pipeline.” Excusez-moi! What about Making America Great Again?

Or is America’s premier science journal “making stuff up about competitiveness?” Here’s where science becomes a nuisance by exposing haphazard wussy illogical policy decisions that serve to diminish the economy, unless, of course, Nature is erroneously making stuff up, but nobody can Make America Great Again by undercutting ‘competitiveness’. That’s backwards, not forwards.

Looking forward: “Federal funding for basic scientific research delivers demonstrable returns on investment. A recent economic impact study found that every dollar invested in federal biomedical research funding generated nearly $2.56 in economic impact, supporting more than 400,000 jobs and catalyzing nearly $95 billion in new economic activity nationwide in 2024. Economists have also found that government investments in scientific research and development have provided returns of 150% to 300% since World War II.” (The Science Coalition)

Science Budget Cuts Will Target US GDP, Down!

Over the past 50 years, science research and development (R&D) have contributed significantly to economic growth, with estimates ranging from one-quarter to one-half of the total growth (Source: Association of American Universities). Sorrowfully, the Trump administration budget cuts, as well as proposed additional cuts, to federally funded science research are certain to cut GDP growth, based upon 50 years of statistics.

Indeed, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists picked up on the damage caused by outrageous, unnecessary budget-cuts to science: “Decommissioned, Retired, Paused: The Weather, Climate, and Earth Science Data the Government Doesn’t Want You to See,” May 20, 2025: “On May 12, the Unidata program paused most of its operations due to a lapse in funding from the National Science Foundation… Shuyi Chen, a professor of atmospheric and climate science, told the Bulletin that virtually any university faculty member who teaches oceanography, atmospheric science, or climate science uses Unidata for research and educational purposes. But it’s not just researchers, in the United States and abroad, who depend on Unidata. These are also tools used for weather forecasting and preparing for extreme events, like floods, winter storms, hurricanes, and wildfires. She also has had students go on to work in the insurance industry, many of whom use Unidata for risk analysis.”

But Unidata is only one of many data sources vastly cut by the new administration. NOAA recently announced that it is retiring the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, which has tracked the damage from floods, hurricanes, and other large disasters since 1980. Twenty-two other NOAA data products have likewise been retired or decommissioned over the past month.

The DEI Sham

 The Trump administration has made radical reductions in staffing and funding in U.S. science-related agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (the nation’s crown jewel of healthcare research) and the Food and Drug Administration. The elimination of key NIH programs based on concerns about DEI will severely damage effective solutions for health research. It is bone-headed.

 “Over the past two decades, the NIH has, as the Trump administration decries, prioritized expanding the scope of populations considered in the research it funds. It did so for very good, evidence-based reasons.” (“The Trump Administration’s NIH and FDA Cuts Will Negatively Impact Patients,” Brookings, May 14, 2025).

The key to effective healthcare research has universally moved away from discoveries and treatments based upon restricted, homogeneous sample populations that disregard diversity of populations; rather, recognizing DEI for its value proposition as previous discoveries/treatments based upon narrowly defined homogeneous samples once introduced to the real world proved to be inadequate, hence the term “efficiency effectiveness gap.” DEI makes research much more effectively broad reaching and profitable.

“DEI is not some free-floating ideology that considers a range of backgrounds, treatment differentials, and geographical gaps as ends in themselves. In practice, the NIH infrastructure shifted toward a prioritization of conditions and approaches that evidence indicated were more likely to close the gap between technological development and effectiveness in practice,” Ibid.

America’s Crippled Interior DoD

 Cuts to agencies within the United States Department of Health and Human Services such as FDA, CDC, and NIH are cuts to the “interior department of defense” much as the Pentagon is the Department of Defense against foreign attack. Yet, the Pentagon budget at $850 billion hasn’t seen a foreign invasion since Pearl Harbor (1941). Meanwhile. the department of interior defense, where budgets are being heavily slashed at FDA, CDC, NIH met the challenge of 103,000,000 Americans hit by Covid-19 with 1,200,000 deaths five years ago by performing a “medical miracle,” orchestrating/funding a vaccine within one year to save millions of lives. Previously, the record time to bring a vaccine to market was four years for the mumps outbreak in the 1960s

Indeed, interior department of defense agencies should be on the same budgetary footing as the Department of Defense for the Pentagon. Yet the budget for the nation’s interior department of defense, NIH, FDA, CDC is unbelievably slashed. For example, the largest most important of the three agencies for internal defense, NIH’s budget for 2025 was/is $48.5billion but Trump proposes cutting to $27 billion for 2026. This is the “crown jewel” of biomedical research in America. Former NIH employees, anonymously, claim the next pandemic or epidemic will be the disaster of all disasters. Meanwhile, the Pentagon ($850 billion), twiddling its thumbs, patiently waits, and waits, and waits for the next “Pearl Harbor.”

Repeating the obvious: That’s $850 billion to prevent the next Pearl Harbor versus $48 billion (soon dropping to $27 billion) for NIH interior defense against diseases.

Already, the NIH has $2.4 Billion in canceled and frozen grants and contracts, fired 1,200 employees, plus induced retirement and resignations from a yet unspecified number. The Trump administration’s 2026 Budget proposes a 37% further cut to the agency. Meanwhile, over 3,500 jobs at the FDA have been eliminated, and the administration has hinted at further restructuring of the agency. The former head of the FDA claims the FDA ‘as we know it’ is gone for good.

Eureka! Ninety-three years since Huxley’s epigram, “Truth is a menace. Science is a public danger” resurfaces in full living color in the year 2025, as America’s interior department of defense for healthcare is ironically crippled, and the country reverts to principles espoused in literature on the heels of the Roaring Twenties (1920-29) at the doorstep of the Great Depression (1929-39) in a time of indecisive decisions, once again, history repeating itself. How’d that work out?

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Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.

 

 

AI deciphers plant DNA: language models set to transform genomics and agriculture

Maximum Academic Press

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image: 

Similarity between genome sequence and language sequence.

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Credit: The authors

By leveraging the structural parallels between genomic sequences and natural language, these AI-driven models can decode complex genetic information, offering unprecedented insights into plant biology. This advancement holds promise for accelerating crop improvement, enhancing biodiversity conservation, and bolstering food security in the face of global challenges.

Traditionally, plant genomics has grappled with the intricacies of vast and complex datasets, often limited by the specificity of traditional machine learning models and the scarcity of annotated data. While LLMs have revolutionized fields like natural language processing, their application in plant genomics remained nascent. The primary hurdle has been adapting these models to interpret the unique "language" of plant genomes, which differ significantly from human linguistic patterns. This study addresses this gap, exploring how LLMs can be tailored to understand and predict plant genetic functions effectively.​

A study (DOI: 10.48130/tp-0025-0008) published in Tropical Plants on 14 April 2025 by Meiling Zou, Haiwei Chai and Zhiqiang Xia’s team, Hainan University, details how LLMs, when trained on extensive plant genomic data, can accurately predict gene functions and regulatory elements.

In this study, researchers explore the potential of LLMs in plant genomics. By drawing parallels between the structures of natural language and genomic sequences, the study highlights how LLMs can be trained to understand and predict gene functions, regulatory elements, and expression patterns in plants. The research discusses various LLM architectures, including encoder-only models like DNABERT, decoder-only models such as DNAGPT, and encoder-decoder models like ENBED. The team employed a methodology that involved pre-training LLMs on vast datasets of plant genomic sequences, followed by fine-tuning with specific annotated data to enhance accuracy. By treating DNA sequences akin to linguistic sentences, the models could identify patterns and relationships within the genetic code. These models have shown promise in tasks like promoter prediction, enhancer identification, and gene expression analysis. Notably, plant-specific models like AgroNT and FloraBERT have been developed, demonstrating improved performance in annotating plant genomes and predicting tissue-specific gene expression. However, the study also notes that most existing LLMs are trained on animal or microbial data, which often lack comprehensive genomic annotations, showcasing the versatility and robustness of LLMs in diverse plant species. To address this, the authors advocate for the development of plant-focused LLMs trained on diverse plant genomic datasets, including those from underrepresented species like tropical plants. They also emphasize the importance of integrating multi-omics data and developing standardized benchmarks to evaluate model performance.​

In summary, this study underscores the immense potential of integrating artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, into plant genomics research. By bridging the gap between computational linguistics and genetic analysis, LLMs can revolutionize our understanding of plant biology, paving the way for innovations in agriculture, conservation, and biotechnology. Future research will focus on refining these models, expanding their training datasets, and exploring their applications in real-world agricultural scenarios to fully harness their capabilities.

###

References

DOI

10.48130/tp-0025-0008

Original Source URL

https://doi.org/10.48130/tp-0025-0008

About Tropical Plants

Tropical Plants (e-ISSN 2833-9851) is the official journal of Hainan University and published by Maximum Academic Press. Tropical Plants undergoes rigorous peer review and is published in open-access format to enable swift dissemination of research findings, facilitate exchange of academic knowledge and encourage academic discourse on innovative technologies and issues emerging in tropical plant research.

Funding Information

The research was supported by Biological Breeding-National Science and Technology Major Project (2023ZD04073), the Project of Sanya Yazhou Bay Science and Technology City (SCKJ-JYRC-2022-57), and the High-performance Computing Platform of YZBSTCACC.

---

Journal

Tropical Plants

DOI

10.48130/tp-0025-0008 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Artificial intelligence-driven plant bio-genomics research: a new era

How AI and the Deep State Are Digitizing Tyranny

The Algocracy Agenda

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / May 29th, 2025

If one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world. At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.

—Elon Musk

The Deep State is not going away. It’s just being replaced.

Replaced not by a charismatic autocrat or even a shadowy bureaucracy, but by artificial intelligence (AI)—unfeeling, unaccountable, and immortal.

As we stand on the brink of a new technological order, the machinery of power is quietly shifting into the hands of algorithms.

Under Donald Trump’s watch, that shift is being locked in for at least a generation.

Trump’s latest legislative initiative—a 10-year ban on AI regulation buried within the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—strips state and local governments of the ability to impose any guardrails on artificial intelligence until 2035.

Despite bipartisan warnings from 40 state attorneys general, the bill passed the House and awaits Senate approval. It is nothing less than a federal green light for AI to operate without oversight in every sphere of life, from law enforcement and employment to healthcare, education, and digital surveillance.

This is not innovation.

This is institutionalized automation of tyranny.

This is how, within a state of algorithmic governance, code quickly replaces constitutional law as the mechanism for control.

We are rapidly moving from a society ruled by laws and due process to one ruled by software.

Algorithmic governance refers to the use of machine learning and automated decision-making systems to carry out functions once reserved for human beings: policing, welfare eligibility, immigration vetting, job recruitment, credit scoring, and judicial risk assessments.

In this regime, the law is no longer interpreted. It is executed. Automatically. Mechanically. Without room for appeal, discretion, or human mercy.

These AI systems rely on historical data—data riddled with systemic bias and human error—to make predictions and trigger decisions. Predictive policing algorithms tell officers where to patrol and whom to stop. Facial recognition technology flags “suspects” based on photos scraped from social media. Risk assessment software assigns threat scores to citizens with no explanation, no oversight, and no redress.

These algorithms operate in black boxes, shielded by trade secrets and protected by national security exemptions. The public cannot inspect them. Courts cannot challenge them. Citizens cannot escape them.

The result? A population sorted, scored, and surveilled by machinery.

This is the practical result of the Trump administration’s deregulation agenda: AI systems given carte blanche to surveil, categorize, and criminalize the public without transparency or recourse.

And these aren’t theoretical dangers—they’re already happening.

Examples of unchecked AI and predictive policing show that precrime is already here.

Once you are scored and flagged by a machine, the outcome can be life-altering—as it was for Michael Williams, a 65-year-old man who spent nearly a year in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. Williams was behind the wheel when a passing car fired at his vehicle, killing his 25-year-old passenger, who had hitched a ride.

Despite no motive, no weapon, and no eyewitnesses, police charged Williams based on an AI-powered gunshot detection program called ShotSpotter. The system picked up a loud bang near the area and triangulated it to Williams’ vehicle. The charge was ultimately dropped for lack of evidence.

This is precrime in action. A prediction, not proof. An algorithm, not an eyewitness.

Programs like ShotSpotter are notorious for misclassifying noises like fireworks and construction as gunfire. Employees have even manually altered data to fit police narratives. And yet these systems are being combined with predictive policing software to generate risk maps, target individuals, and justify surveillance—all without transparency or accountability.

It doesn’t stop there.

AI is now flagging families for potential child neglect based on predictive models that pull data from Medicaid, mental health, jail, and housing records. These models disproportionately target poor and minority families. The algorithm assigns risk scores from 1 to 20. Families and their attorneys are never told what the scores are, or that they were used.

Imagine losing your child to the foster system because a secret algorithm said you might be a risk.

This is how AI redefines guilt.

The Trump administration’s approach to AI regulation reveals a deeper plan to deregulate democracy itself.

Rather than curbing these abuses, the Trump administration is accelerating them.

An executive order titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” signed by President Trump in early 2025, revoked prior AI safeguards, eliminated bias audits, and instructed agencies to prioritize “innovation” over ethics. The order encourages every federal agency to adopt AI quickly, especially in areas like policing and surveillance.

Under the guise of “efficiency,” constitutional protections are being erased.

Trump’s 10-year moratorium on AI regulation is the logical next step. It dismantles the last line of defense—state-level resistance—and ensures a uniform national policy of algorithmic dominance.

The result is a system in which government no longer governs. It processes.

The federal government’s AI expansion is building a surveillance state that no human authority can restrain.

Welcome to Surveillance State 2.0, the Immortal Machine.

Over 1700 uses of AI have already been reported across federal agencies, with hundreds directly impacting safety and rights. Many agencies, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services, are deploying AI for decision-making without public input or oversight.

This is what the technocrats call an “algocracy”—rule by algorithm.

In an algocracy, unelected developers and corporate contractors hold more power over your life than elected officials.

Your health, freedom, mobility, and privacy are subject to automated scoring systems you can’t see and can’t appeal.

And unlike even the most entrenched human dictators, these systems do not die. They do not forget. They are not swayed by mercy or reason. They do not stand for re-election.

They persist.

When AI governs by prediction, due process disappears in a haze of machine logic.

The most chilling effect of this digital regime is the death of due process.

What court can you appeal to when an algorithm has labeled you a danger? What lawyer can cross-examine a predictive model? What jury can weigh the reasoning of a neural net trained on flawed data?

You are guilty because the machine says so. And the machine is never wrong.

When due process dissolves into data processing, the burden of proof flips. The presumption of innocence evaporates. Citizens are forced to prove they are not threats, not risks, not enemies.

And most of the time, they don’t even know they’ve been flagged.

This erosion of due process is not just a legal failure—it is a philosophical one, reducing individuals to data points in systems that no longer recognize their humanity.

Writer and visionary Rod Serling warned of this very outcome more than half a century ago: a world where technology, masquerading as progress under the guise of order and logic, becomes the instrument of tyranny.

That future is no longer fiction. What Serling imagined is now reality.

The time to resist is now, before freedom becomes obsolete.

To those who call the shots in the halls of government, “we the people” are merely the means to an end.

“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become obsolete, undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that, in the words of Serling, “has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom.”

In this sense, we are all Romney Wordsworth, the condemned man in Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man.”

“The Obsolete Man,” a story arc about the erasure of individual worth by a mechanized state, underscores the danger of rendering humans irrelevant in a system of cold automation and speaks to the dangers of a government that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State. Yet—and here’s the kicker—this is where the government through its monstrous inhumanity also becomes obsolete.

As Serling noted in his original script for “The Obsolete Man,” “Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man…that state is obsolete.”

Like Serling’s totalitarian state, our future will be defined by whether we conform to a dehumanizing machine order—or fight back before the immortal dictator becomes absolute.

We now face a fork in the road: resist the rise of the immortal dictator or submit to the reign of the machine.

This is not a battle against technology, but a battle against the unchecked, unregulated, and undemocratic use of technology to control people.

We must demand algorithmic transparency, data ownership rights, and legal recourse against automated decisions. We need a Digital Bill of Rights that guarantees:

• The right to know how algorithms affect us.
• The right to challenge and appeal automated decisions.
• The right to privacy and data security.
• The right to be free from automated surveillance and predictive policing.
• The right to be forgotten.

Otherwise, AI becomes the ultimate enforcer of a surveillance state from which there is no escape.

As Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, warned: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about. Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.”

An immortal dictator, indeed.

Let us be clear: the threat is not just to our privacy, but to democracy itself.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the time to fight back is now—before the code becomes law, and freedom becomes a memory.

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John W. Whitehead, constitutional attorney and author, is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He wrote the book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015). He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Read other articles by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Watch This New Hollywood Movie About Gaza

by David Swanson / May 30th, 2025

Our society doesn’t always stand out for its values, but damn well does for its production values. There may be nothing more powerful in the world than a film — or even a commercial — with high production values. So I’m deeply appreciative when a well-made movie actually says something that needed saying, when you can watch the closing credits feeling wiser, rather than dirtier, more aware of what’s worst in the world and yet inspired to change it, rather than outraged at the normalization of violence or stupidity.

A good place to go for such rarities is Brave New Films, where the latest release is Gaza Journalists Under Fire. The page at that link lists public screenings and let’s you download the film to screen it for a small or large gathering. It also provides fact sheets and action ideas to further enrich your post-screening discussion. One idea is to share the film on social media where paid ads for it (on Facebook and Instagram) have been censored.

I’ve seen an awful lot of movies, not to mention news reports and social media posts, about Palestine. It’s a topic that can easily lead to weeping and withdrawing. It’s also a simple story (the Israeli government is slaughtering people) that can easily be complicated in unhelpful ways. This new 41-minute film avoids those dangers by being a stand-out work of journalism not simply about Gaza but about journalism about Gaza, and specifically the killing of journalists.

At 178 at the time of publication — and now higher — the count of journalists and media workers killed by the Israeli military was already higher than the count of journalists killed on all sides of the U.S. Civil War, the two world wars, the Korean and Vietnam wars, and the war on Afghanistan combined — not to mention 93 journalists wounded, 84 journalists arrested and locked up, and 70 media facilities turned to rubble in Gaza — all while people in western corporate media are deemed brave simply for announcing that they’ve noticed there’s a genocide happening.

The record number of killings is not because Gaza is being flooded with the world’s journalists. On the contrary, they’ve been shut out by Israel, along with human rights organizations. It’s not because the local people are disproportionately journalists. Perhaps they are if you consider their use of social media, but these statistics refer to professional journalists. It’s not because Israel has killed so many people that this many journalists are simply a portion of that larger massacre. No, it’s because the Israeli military has been specifically targeting journalists for assassination, including tracking them with drones, often just following a particularly powerful report produced by one of them. Journalists are dying disproportionately, and this means that they can be a danger rather than a protection to those they are near. Their PRESS jackets and vests are treated as targets. Their families have been killed with them when they have been targeted.

One of the journalists particularly featured in the film trained many young people to use social media — an invaluable service as it has turned out. She was killed along with her five-year-old daughter. But many of the journalists we see in this film are responsible for much of what we know about Gaza. It’s disturbing to imagine what horrors we would not have learned of without them, and what we have in fact not learned because of this killing spree targeting journalists. Even more disturbing is how many journalists we see reporting on the attacks on journalists prior to themselves being killed — as well as some we see reporting just as a missile hits nearby.

I do not, and this film does not, suggest that killing a journalist is worse than killing anyone else. I, in fact, diverge from popular opinion in maintaining that killing a civilian or a child or any human being is no worse and no better than killing any other human being. The significance of this unprecedented slaughter of journalists is that it helps to hide the war and facilitate lies about the war. The film includes a few choice lies as spoken by Israeli and U.S. officials, and provides the context for the film’s particular focus, including the context of the provision of much of the weaponry to the Israeli government by the U.S. government.

The Israeli government has, of course, held not one person accountable for the killings of journalists that voice after voice in this film — and not only in this film — calls a “war crime.” Over and over: “war crime,” “war crime,” “war crime.” Forgive me please if I quibble. The entire war is a crime. It is the crime of war in violation of the UN Charter. It is the crime of genocide in violation of the Convention on Genocide — “plausibly” in the pre-ruling ruling of the International Court of Justice, but obviously to anyone not living under a rock or within a pro-genocide media bubble. The Nazis were prosecuted for their various actions based on the argument that their war was illegal under Kellogg-Briand and therefore every bit of it illegal. To say never again to genocide and war, we have to say yes again to war being a crime in its totality.

Part of that totality is now the targeted murders of journalists. And just as we must continue asking “Where is the solidarity of the world’s people?” we must also ask “Where is the solidarity of the world’s journalists?”

First published at Progressive Hub.

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David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and War Is a Crime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook. Read other articles by David.