FASCISTS OF A FEATHER STAY TOGETHER

Elon Musk to Host X Event Promoting Neo-Nazi AfD Party Ahead of German Elections

The billionaire Musk has downplayed the party’s extremist views in posts on X and in an op-ed in a German newspaper.

By Chris Walker

January 4, 2025

Source: Truthout


Image in public domain

Mega-billionaire Elon Musk, owner of the social media site X, plans to hold an online audio discussion on the platform with the leader of a far right German party, amplifying the party’s fascist and neo-Nazi ideology.

The discussion between him and Alice Weidel, a leader for Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the party’s candidate for chancellor in the February 23 snap elections, will take place”very soon,” a spokesperson for Weidel said, indicating that it will “definitely” happen before the elections. The German-based newswire agency dpa reported that the talk between Weidel and Musk would occur on January 10.

Musk signaled his support for AfD in mid-December, writing in a post on X that “only the AfD can save Germany.” He also penned an op-ed in a German newspaper last week, describing the party as the “last spark of hope” for the country.

Musk’s announcement that he will engage in a discussion with the party’s leader indicates that he may insert himself further into German politics in the coming weeks — much like he did in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, spending over a quarter of a billion dollars of his own money to help elect Donald Trump.

AfD is an extreme right, neo-Nazi organization. The party is vehemently anti-immigration and is particularly bigoted against Muslim migrants. Its leaders have also expressed antisemitic sentiments, and have downplayed the atrocities by Nazi German leaders, going so far as to demand museums and schools change how the Holocaust is taught in schools.

Some AfD leaders have minimized or outright denied the Holocaust. Others have attended neo-Nazi events, including two leaders who appeared at a gathering of neo-Nazis in Switzerland just last month.

Musk has downplayed the party’s extremist views, claiming in his op-ed that a singular instance of one of the party’s leaders being in a same-sex relationship negated its other actions — a dubious suggestion, given that AfD is also opposed to marriage equality in Germany.

Polling indicates that AfD is not currently winning the race in Germany, but is gaining popularity — and other parties may consider forming a coalition with the far right one in order to create a government.

Lawmakers, including current Chancellor Olaf Scholz, are encouraging voters to thwart Musk’s endorsements and to vote for their own interests.

“Where Germany goes from here will be decided by you — the citizens. It will not be decided by the owners of social media channels,” Scholz said in a New Year’s message, a not-so-subtle jab at Musk.

Scholz added that “it won’t be the person who yells loudest who will decide where Germany goes from here,” but instead, it will “be up to the vast majority of reasonable and decent people.”

Washington’s (not so) Strong Man in Seoul is Defying Arrest

Ahead of Donald Trump's return to the White House, Yoon Suk Yeol's thwarted martial-law decree has thrown South Korea and the surrounding region into chaos

By In Jeong Kim

January 4, 2025

Source: Drop Site




On January 3, three days after a South Korean court issued an arrest warrant for suspended president Yoon Suk Yeol on charges of leading an insurrection and abusing authority, investigators from the Corruption Investigation Office went to the presidential residence to execute the warrant—the first against a sitting president in Korean history. When investigators tried to arrest Yoon, they were confronted by hundreds of his supporters who had camped out to shield him. Following a dramatic five-hour standoff with the presidential security team, who had formed a “human wall” to block the path to Yoon, the investigators eventually retreated. The warrant remains valid until January 6.

What the Biden administration knew of Yoon’s plan to declare martial law on December 3 remains unclear. “We learned about this from the announcement on television, the same way the rest of the world did,” Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, said on December 4 during an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. While that may be true, skepticism of Sullivan’s claim seems warranted. To help counter the threat posed by a nuclear-armed North Korea, 28,500 U.S. troops are based in South Korea through U.S. Forces Korea; the countries’ intelligence services also maintain close ties.

Experts believe Yoon’s attempt to invoke martial law came in response to intensifying political pressure. Members of the political opposition had been pushing for budget cuts and calling for the impeachment of the chief state auditor and top prosecutors in connection with probes into the relocation of the presidential office and allegations of involvement in stock price manipulation surrounding Yoon’s wife.

Emerging evidence also suggests Yoon’s power grab had been in the works for some time. According to statements made during a subsequent investigation, the prosecution has obtained testimony suggesting that Yoon attended several gatherings over the past year with military leaders who would later take part in the plot, in which he raised the subject of martial law. In private conversations Yoon reportedly had mentioned certain “problematic” individuals whose names later appeared on an arrest list prepared for the former chief of counterintelligence by Yoon’s then-defense minister. The list included the leader of the opposition Democratic Party, a journalist critical of Yoon’s administration, and one-time ally and ruling party leader Han Dong-hoon, who fell afoul of Yoon after backing an investigation into the allegations against the First Lady.

North Korea also appears to have figured into Yoon’s plans. He had reportedly embraced a far-right conspiracy theory that hackers from the north had interfered with South Korea’s parliamentary elections last year, in which his ruling People Power Party lost seats. Ahead of the martial-law decree, Yoon’s then-defense minister allegedly instructed military intelligence officials to infiltrate the commission’s headquarters, kidnap its staff using cable ties and hoods, and detain them in an underground military facility. Conspiracy theories aside, the National Intelligence Service has found no evidence of election fraud.

Yoon and his co-plotters may have also sought to incite Kim Jong Un. Since the thwarted coup, authorities have discovered evidence in the notebook of one of the coup plotters suggesting a plan to provoke North Korea into conflict at the Northern Limit Line—the de facto maritime boundary and military demarcation line between North Korea and South Korea—which police suspect was intended to create a pretext for declaring martial law and seizing power.

Korean military officials have neither confirmed nor denied suspicions of drone infiltration. “It is not true that the military conducted activities to provoke the enemy,” Colonel Lee Sung-jun, spokesperson for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a press briefing on January 2.

Whatever Yoon’s motivations may have been, he appeared ready to use lethal force on the night of his decree. According to the Ministry of National Defense, around 10,000 live rounds of ammunition were made available to the 1,500 troops ordered to enforce the order, along with machine guns, sniper rifles, pistols, and hollow-point shotgun slugs, which are banned under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Even an elite division of special forces troops, trained for clandestine guerrilla operations and tasked with assassinating key North Korean figures during wartime, was deployed for the coup, according to a top defense official.

Bloodshed was averted thanks to the courageous actions of Koreans. In the dead of night, thousands of citizens rushed to block the military in front of the National Assembly, as opposition lawmakers quickly climbed the building’s restricted walls to intervene. “After a few moments of disbelief and hesitation as I heard the news of martial law being declared, I felt I had to go to the National Assembly,” Daehoon Lee, one of the citizens who rushed to the assembly gates on the night of December 3, told Drop Site News. “If chaos broke out, I thought the least I could do was help evacuate people or assist the injured.”

On December 14, the National Assembly narrowly passed a motion to impeach Yoon. Demands for Yoon’s impeachment also led to the removal of Acting President Han Duck-soo, who refused to fill three vacant seats on the Constitutional Court, which will decide whether to permanently remove Yoon from office. Choi Sang-mok, who succeeded Han as acting president, appointed candidates to fill two of the three vacancies on December 31, pledging to fill the remaining seats once the ruling and opposition parties could agree on the nominees. The decision to remove Yoon will require agreement from at least six justices, including the newly appointed members. (The opposition Democratic Party is pushing to finalize the impeachment trial after filling the vacancies.) If the court upholds the impeachment, Yoon will become the second conservative president in South Korean history to be ousted, following former President Park Geun-hye.

Even amid mounting pressure, Yoon’s People Power Party continues to back him, warning that if he were permanently impeached, the party would likely struggle to win the next presidential election. Despite a poll revealing 75% of citizens supported his impeachment, the party collectively boycotted the first impeachment vote and officially opposed the second—yet it failed to prevent 12 of its own members from defecting.
“Go with who’s winning”

Washington has long favored conservative South Korean presidents as security partners, often turning a blind eye to human rights violations. In 1979, former President Park Chung-hee, who ruled South Korea for 18 years with the support of the U.S. after seizing power in a military coup, was assassinated in a plot led by Kim Jae Kyu, the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. At his trial, Kim would later claim that he had sought to rid the country of dictatorship and foster democracy.

But democracy would be stalled yet again by Park’s successor, military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, who seized power in a rolling coup that began in December 12, 1979, culminating with a declaration of martial law on May 17, 1980. That month, citizens in Gwangju, a southern city of South Korea, rose up in resistance; in response, Chun ordered a brutal crackdown in which martial-law troops slaughtered 166 citizens, forcibly disappeared another 179, and wounded 2,617.

In the years after the massacre, once-secret U.S. government documents later showed that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department had prior knowledge of paratrooper movements to Gwangju and other cities but did nothing to stop them. Instead, the Carter administration, citing the protection of U.S. national security interests, approved U.S. surveillance and command-and-control assistance to Chun’s forces to help them snuff out the uprising in South Cholla province.

In a crucial meeting at the White House on May 22, 1980, hours after learning that Chun’s forces had shot over 60 people to death and wounded 400 people in Gwangju’s streets, then-Secretary of Defense Harold Brown said the U.S. had no choice but to help the Korean military restore order. “Koreans will go with who’s winning,” he remarked, according to the then-Deputy Assistant Secretary. He added: “If Chun is in the Blue House, we will have to accept him.” The general and the Korean military were finally forced to relinquish control in another massive show of people power in 1987.

Independent journalist Tim Shorrock obtained a collection of 4,000 declassified documents that revealed the Carter administration’s complicity with Chun. “One of the most immoral acts of Carter’s presidency was to back Chun’s martial law army to suppress the Gwangju Uprising of 1980,” Shorrock said. While South Korea officially recognized Gwangju as a legitimate uprising that paved the way for its democratization, “Carter never offered a formal apology for being on the wrong side of Korea’s struggle against military rule,” he added.

“The memory of the 1980 Gwangju Massacre triggered a wave of panic and auditory hallucinations when I heard military helicopters approaching,” protestor Daehoon Lee said. “But, to my surprise, the military’s armored vehicles were blocked by citizens and forced to turn back. For the first time, I began to believe that we might actually be able to stop this coup.”
“We are guests”

A former prosecutor without any prior political experience, Yoon won the presidency in 2022 by only 0.8% over Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party. Halfway through his five-year term, Yoon’s support base collapsed, thanks in part to his promotion of “anti-feminism,” suppression of critical media outlets, and unrelenting scandals surrounding the first lady. By the time of Yoon’s suspension, a Gallup poll revealed that his approval rating had plummeted to 11%, its lowest level since he took office.

Yet Yoon remained a favorite of Washington. Known for his sharp rhetoric against North Korea and for delivering a rousing rendition of Don McLean’s “American Pie” during a state visit to the White House, Yoon was seen in Korea as “Biden’s man.” Dating back to the Obama administration, the U.S. had sought a trilateral military alliance with South Korea and Japan—and Yoon was eager to help. Yoon chose not to push the Japanese government for reparations over the comfort women, the estimated 200,000 girls and women, mostly South Koreans, who were forced into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers during World War II. In August of 2023 Yoon’s strategy paid off with the Camp David Declaration, in which leaders of the U.S., Japan, and South Korea announced the formation of a security pact to counter North Korea and China.

In the wake of Yoon’s attempted coup, the White House responded with notable restraint. Biden’s official response came only after the passage of the impeachment motion. During a call with former acting President and Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, Biden praised the resiliency of South Korea’s democracy and reaffirmed “the ironclad commitment” of the U.S., while notably neglecting to criticize the coup attempt.

Some analysts believe that the United States had at least some awareness of Yoon’s plans, even through unofficial channels. Chun Kwang-ho, a specialist in military strategy and former professor at the Defense Academy of the United Kingdom, said it was unlikely that the U.S. had specific intelligence about Yoon’s plans. But reports from October of South Korean drones flying over Pyongyang likely suggested to U.S. officials that South Korea was deliberately escalating military tensions with North Korea, he added.

On December 4, the day after the martial-law decree, U.S. Forces Korea urged caution. “We are guests in the Republic of Korea, and I ask all individuals affiliated with the Department of Defense mission to give time and space to our host country and its citizens, as they work to resolve their differences,” General Paul J. LaCamera, commander of United Nations Command, Combined Forces Command, and U.S. Forces Korea, said in a Guidance for the Force statement. Chun said that this cautious stance “might stem from the trauma of failing to prevent the December 12 coup in 1979.”

Following the martial-law decree, data on reconnaissance-plane flight paths across South Korea and its surroundings suggest the U.S. was keeping close watch. For eight consecutive days after Yoon’s declaration, two RC-135S Cobra Ball aircraft, which the U.S. uses to monitor missile trajectories, were tracked flying over the Korean Peninsula, according to the aircraft tracking service Flightradar24. RC-135V/W Rivet Joint reconnaissance planes, which are used for real-time, on-scene intelligence collection, were also tracked flying over the Seoul metropolitan area, the Yellow Sea, and the East Sea on three separate occasions in December.

Reflecting on the aftermath of the failed coup, Chun noted, “Even four weeks later, USFK remains in a state of heightened caution, which is highly unusual.” U.S. Forces Korea did not respond to requests for comment regarding the events on the day martial law was declared.

“The U.S. usually prefers right-wing or centrist governments, but the overall concern of the U.S. government is stability,” said Don Baker, a professor of Korean history and civilization at the University of British Columbia. “If Yoon had been successful in carrying out his coup without much resistance, the U.S. would not have objected. However, once it was clear that the National Assembly and the people were resisting the coup, the U.S. decided not to support him and instead hoped for a quick resolution to this political crisis,” he added.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, who had previously condemned Yoon’s martial law declaration as “deeply problematic” and “illegitimate,” adopted a more measured tone following his impeachment. “It’s clearly in the interest of the United States to sustain forward momentum in trilateral engagement despite some domestic headwinds,” Campbell said on December 19 at an event at the Foreign Press Center in Washington, D.C.
Trump’s Response

How Donald Trump will respond to events in South Korea is unclear. He may be indifferent to Yoon’s fate: Notably, Yoon chose not to meet with Donald Trump Jr., during his two visits to South Korea last year.

While Trump has nominated ambassadors to China and Japan, the post for ambassador to South Korea remains vacant. On December 14, he announced via a post on Truth Social that he would be appointing his confidant Richard Grenell as a special envoy to North Korea.

In his first post-election press conference on December 16, the president-elect discussed North Korea, China, and Japan, but not South Korea. In a recent interview with Time, Trump said his relationship with Kim Jong Un positions him to handle North Korea’s reported involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, but made no reference to Yoon or South Korea.

Trump has long been a critic of Washington’s relationships with east Asian nations. Defense cost-sharing and the partial withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea are likely to emerge as major points of contention. He has frequently complained about the high costs of U.S. defense commitments in South Korea and Japan, arguing that Seoul should pay $10 billion a year to host U.S. troops.

With Trump’s return to the White House and ongoing turmoil in the South, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is treading carefully. During the annual meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party held from December 23 to 27, Kim described the U.S. as “the most reactionary state that regards anti-communism as its invariable state policy” and vowed to adopt the “toughest” anti-U.S. measures, though he did not elaborate on the specifics, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.

Experts suggested that with tensions already high, Pyongyang sees little strategic advantage in escalating the situation further. Amid its backing of Russia’s war in Ukraine—an alliance that could complicate future dialogue with the United States—Kim appears to be making a calculated diplomatic move, strategically biding its time.
“Why aren’t they afraid of us?”

In the end, Yoon sought to bolster ties with international allies while failing to gain a domestic foothold, leaving chaos in his wake. If his impeachment is confirmed, his successor will inherit the formidable task of restoring internal stability and reclaiming South Korea’s strategic regional role.

For Koreans, thwarting Yoon served as both a reminder both of their collective power as well as the limits of that power.

Ahead of the impeachment vote, a protest of two million people, spearheaded by young women in their 20s and 30s, filled the streets in front of the National Assembly. Outraged citizens sent funeral wreaths bearing sharp criticism of the People Power Party, a symbolic protest declaring the death of trust in the party. “The fact that girls are becoming more visible as political subjects is, I’m sure, empowering for many women,” said Kyunghee Eo, 40, a protester.

Following the impeachment vote, citizens standing in the bitter cold in front of the National Assembly to protest Yoon erupted in cheers, chanting for the dissolution of his People Power Party for its overwhelming opposition to the motion.

“My voice was hoarse from chanting slogans, but I couldn’t stop,” said Jinseon Yu, a 32-year-old protester. “We were happy, of course. But the number—96 votes, including objections, abstentions, and invalid ballots—kept haunting me. It made me question, again and again: Who do these representatives actually serve? Why aren’t they afraid of us, the people?”

Nations Are Exiting a Secretive System That Protects Corporations. One Country’s Story Shows How Hard That Can Be

Bolivia was the first nation to begin leaving a legal system that allows foreign companies to sue governments behind closed doors. Now, other countries are following.

INTRODUCED UNDER THE MAI FREE TRADE AGREEMENT FROM THE 1990'S

By Katie Surma, Nicholas Kusnetz 

January 4, 2025

Source: Inside Climate News


La Paz, the administrative capital of Bolivia, is the world’s highest capital city at 13,000 feet. 

Credit: Katie Surma/Inside Climate News

In January 2000, thousands of Bolivians flooded into the streets of the city of Cochabamba. The region’s water services had just been privatized and sold to an American-led consortium, which hiked rates sharply.

The protests roiled the country for months and forced the national government to cancel the contract, returning water services to public control.

But after the consortium filed a legal claim against the Bolivian government in 2002, seeking up to $50 million, the popular uprising transformed into a broader fight against the legal system that allowed this. Investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, lets foreign companies bypass national courts and sue governments before international panels of arbitrators.

These tribunals have awarded hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars to companies, even in cases where they flouted national laws, polluted the environment or were accused of violating human rights. Most of these cases have been filed by companies from wealthy nations against developing countries, prompting critics to say ISDS acts like a form of modern-day colonialism.

Bolivia wanted out of the system. Within a few years, it started a movement that has spread around the globe.

From the United States to Europe, Colombia to Indonesia, governments are re-examining a cornerstone of international trade and investment that has held strong for decades. Many elected leaders, activists and legal experts from the political left and right have come to see ISDS as a threat to government policymaking and national sovereignty.

The system has also emerged as a hurdle for climate action: Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, Spain, the Netherlands and the United States have collectively faced billions of dollars in claims prompted by policies to limit fossil fuels or promote renewable energy.

“ISDS is highly problematic, to put it mildly,” said Surya Deva, United Nations special rapporteur on the right to development. “An investor telling a government, ‘We will bring an arbitration case if you try to protect a local community or give them access to water or limit our mining operations,’ that is crippling.”


Yet even as opposition to ISDS has spread, the system is not going anywhere soon. In some cases, wealthy nations have started to eliminate foreign investor protections among themselves while insisting that poorer nations maintain them.

Many business groups and some academics continue to advocate for ISDS, saying it helps drive foreign investment, especially to small and politically unstable countries like Bolivia.

In these places, investor-state settlement protections serve as a guardrail, said Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Its presence, she said, sends a signal to prospective investors: “They have ISDS, so if something goes wrong, I’m protected.”

Research on this question has been notoriously inconsistent. Analyses of dozens of studies show no conclusive evidence that these protections increase investment.

Any nation seeking to extricate itself from investor-state arbitration faces an uphill battle: The protections are built into more than 2,600 treaties and countless contracts that would need to be renegotiated or canceled, a daunting task.

Bolivia spent more than a decade snipping the threads tying it to those legal agreements. And yet, it’s still not quite free.
“We Want Partners, Not Bosses”

Like many developing countries, Bolivia bound itself to ISDS in the 1980s and 1990s. The nation was emerging from a period of military dictatorship that had left debilitating debt and hyperinflation.

When the civilian government looked for help overseas, World Bank officials and other global financiers promoted a set of policies, known as the “Washington Consensus,” that included market-friendly reforms like privatization, deregulation and lower taxes. Investor-state arbitration, the officials said, would attract foreign investment, which in turn would lead to prosperity. Bolivia signed 22 investment treaties with ISDS clauses from 1987 to 2002.

The policies brought down inflation and stabilized the economy. But they did little to improve people’s standards of living or reduce inequality. For the majority of Bolivians still living on less than $2 a day, prosperity never came. It was those Bolivians’ formidable social movements that in 2005 propelled an outsider to the presidency who promised to “end the colonial state and the neoliberal model.”

Evo Morales, a former coca farmer who’d stood with water protestors in Cochabamba years earlier, pledged to renationalize natural resources and disentangle the country from Washington, D.C.

“We want partners, not bosses,” became his tagline. The government took control of oil and gas and other industries. On his 100th day in office, Morales led a military contingent to a gas field operated by a Brazilian-Spanish consortium in southern Bolivia to announce that foreign companies had six months to renegotiate their contracts. After he spoke, a soldier unfurled the red, yellow and green Bolivian flag from atop a processing plant.

In 2007, Bolivia withdrew from the treaty tying the country to the World Bank’s arbitration arm, the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes, which administers most ISDS claims.

The Washington-based center is the most prominent embodiment of the ISDS system, which Bolivia was intent on opposing for several reasons, said Pablo Solón, a former Morales trade adviser in charge of the withdrawal. Cases can only be initiated by transnational investors against states, and not the other way around. Proceedings are conducted behind closed doors despite having public consequences. And there is no binding code of ethics for arbitrators, who can act as both judges and counsel within the system.

But leaving that World Bank treaty was largely symbolic. It merely shut off one forum for arbitration disputes, albeit a well-known one seen as especially friendly to investors. Until Bolivia terminated the treaties with other nations, companies could continue to bring new claims using other forums, like ones administered in London and The Hague.

Bolivia began pulling out of those treaties in 2009, after enacting a new constitution banning ISDS. Still, there was a catch. Most of these agreements contain “sunset clauses,” which allow companies who invested before termination to bring new claims for five to 20 years afterward unless all parties to the treaties agree to abolish the provision. Nearly all of Bolivia’s treaty partners, including the United States, did not consent.

The last of Bolivia’s sunset clauses will end in 2035, according to U.N. data. So far, the nation has faced 19 publicly known claims, though former government officials and lawyers say another 10 or 20 have been filed in secret.

It took the government eight years after its 2007 withdrawal from the World Bank treaty to enact national legislation as a replacement for ISDS. The rules require disputes to be arbitrated in Bolivia and give Bolivian courts final say over awards.

For ISDS supporters, that is exactly the problem. Human Rights Watch has called the Bolivian judiciary “broken” and highlighted how Morales weakened judicial independence over his 14 years in office. The current president, Luis Arce, has pursued similar policies. Neither a Morales spokesperson nor the Bolivian embassy in Washington or its New York City consulate responded to requests for comment.

Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé, who served as the president of Bolivia’s Supreme Court from 2004 to 2005, said in an interview at his home in June that past efforts to reform the country’s judiciary have been unsuccessful. He’s not optimistic that will change any time soon.

“Justice is a sad story in this country,” he said.

Yet just because a country’s justice system may be deficient, said Deva, the U.N. special rapporteur, that doesn’t mean foreign corporations should be given exclusive rights to bypass them.

“When people say that investors cannot trust the legal system, I say even communities might not trust the legal system of their own country either,” Deva said, adding that ISDS exacerbates what is already an imbalance of power between foreign companies and local communities.

That argument has attracted unlikely supporters, including Donald Trump’s former trade representative. In 2018, Robert Lighthizer told Congress that the U.S. government ought to be skeptical of ISDS and questioned why a foreign national should have more rights in America than an American.

“A U.S. person goes into a court system, goes through the system and they’re stuck with what they get,” he said. “A foreign national can do that and then at the end of the day say, ‘I want three guys in London to say we’re going to overrule the entire U.S. system.’”
The Unraveling

Bolivia’s pivot away from ISDS helped spark a wave of other withdrawals.

South Africa was already reviewing its investment treaties at the time. One claim had been filed in response to the nation’s post-apartheid policies to share mining wealth with Black citizens. The country’s leaders had signed ISDS treaties in the 1990s without realizing their scope, according to Randall Williams, a former legal advisor to the government. The investment treaties gave all the rights to foreign companies, he later wrote, while the government was given all the obligations.

“Obviously, if this were a personal contract, no one would sign it in their personal lives,” Williams wrote. “This then begs the question—why would officials enter into such agreements on behalf of their countries?”

South Africa sent a delegation to Bolivia to learn about its ISDS withdrawal, according to one person involved, and began withdrawing from its own investment treaties in 2013. At the same time, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Venezuela and other nations were taking similar steps as a flurry of arbitration claims challenged governments’ regulations on tobacco packaging, oil and gas drilling, gambling and other matters of public health and safety.

Other countries opted to quietly let their treaties expire out of fear of being perceived as anti-investment, according to people who have studied and worked in the system. These moves began building a case against investor-state arbitration.

Yet withdrawal can be fragile. In 2021, Ecuador’s then-President Guillermo Lasso rejoined the World Bank treaty that helps administer arbitrations, though many experts have questioned whether that move violated a prohibition on ISDS written into the country’s 2008 constitution. The nation signed a free trade agreement with Costa Rica, only to have it struck down by Ecuador’s high court because of its inclusion of ISDS.

Last year, President Daniel Noboa placed a ballot question on a referendum that would have reversed that constitutional ban. Noboa was negotiating a new investment agreement with Canada, which was seeking to include investor-state arbitration, according to debates in the Canadian parliament.

Ecuadorians rejected the ballot measure by a wide margin.

As Ecuador, Bolivia and other countries have pulled out, other nations have instead sought to reform the system. Some countries have “new generation” treaties that include carve-outs meant to protect certain types of regulations from arbitration claims, for example.

It’s unclear whether these new agreements are having the intended effect, however. Colombia has faced three claims from Canadian companies following a ban on mining in a sensitive ecosystem, despite the environmental carve-out in its free trade agreement with Canada. Though the Colombian government prevailed on two of the three claims, its costs for the three suits totaled $11 million, which taxpayers will finance.

Earlier this year, the Colombian government announced that it will attempt to renegotiate its trade and investment agreements to remove ISDS, though doing so would require the cooperation of the other parties.

María Claudia Lacouture, executive president of the Colombian American Chamber of Commerce, whose members include major multinational corporations, warned against this move. In an email, Lacouture said investment protections help provide the certainty foreign businesses seek and that arbitration’s “separation from the national legal system enhances investor confidence by guaranteeing neutrality and predictability in the resolution process.”

Colombia has faced at least 23 ISDS claims in the past decade.
“Who Is Winning?”

One of the most puzzling questions about ISDS is why it still exists. Several wealthy nations that constructed it and are its biggest beneficiaries—the United States chief among them—have begun turning against it. For the countries more often on the losing end, activists and academics are pointing the way to the exits.

Opponents have campaigned against the system since the early 1990s, said David Gantz, an ISDS supporter and the Will Clayton fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “And to put it very bluntly,” he said, “they’ve won.”

Many countries, including Spain and Italy, have reconsidered ISDS after damaging energy-related claims. In the United States, officials in both political parties now dislike it because of a view that it infringes on sovereignty, discourages governments from adopting regulations and hurts American workers.

“I think it’s gone,” Gantz said of ISDS. “Or it’s almost gone.”

Still, dismantling it could take decades.

“The system is designed to be as sticky as it gets,” said Josef Ostřanský, a policy adviser at the International Institute for Sustainable Investment who is critical of investor-state arbitration. “Super easy to get in, but it’s very difficult to get out.”

Some industry groups continue to promote investor-state arbitration protections; the American Petroleum Institute tried, with some success, to have it included in NAFTA’s replacement agreement.

Yet many experts say ISDS is rarely if ever the key factor for whether a foreign company invests in a country. A 2020 meta-analysis, published in the Journal of Economic Surveys, looked at 74 studies that examined this question and determined that the “effect of international investment agreements is so small as to be considered zero.” The authors left open the possibility of positive effects that studies weren’t able to capture.

Ecuador released an audit of its investment treaties in 2017 that concluded that its top sources of foreign investment came from countries it had no investment agreement with. An earlier study in South Africa came to similar conclusions. And Brazil, which never signed on to ISDS in the first place, has been a magnet for foreign investment.

While experts say foreign investment data for Bolivia is unreliable, U.N. figures suggest an increase after 2007, when the country withdrew from the World Bank treaty, and then a decline after 2013. But linking economic trends with ISDS is difficult because of the many variables involved. Bolivia’s rise and fall in foreign investment was tied most closely to commodity prices, said de Bolle, of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Still, de Bolle argued that given Bolivia’s small size and political upheavals, the lack of ISDS protections are part of the reason for the country’s recent economic struggles. “It is certainly contributing to the problems that they’re having,” she said.

Within the small world of academics and lawyers who study and work on ISDS, many say that its most vocal supporters are not investors but the law firms and lawyers who argue, arbitrate and profit off the cases. Whether a company wins or loses its claim, “you have to pay your lawyers and you have to pay the tribunal,” said J. Benton Heath, an associate professor at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, who worked as an arbitration lawyer in private practice and an attorney-adviser at the U.S. Department of State until 2018. Those payments generally amount to millions of dollars for each claim, with arbitrators receiving up to $3,000 each day they work on cases.

“Who is winning?” Heath said. “The house always wins.”

Supporters like Gantz argue that the turn against ISDS could jeopardize the transition to cleaner energy. Even if ISDS is not a decisive factor in driving investment, he said, removing it would create one more roadblock to drawing the trillions of dollars needed to build renewable energy systems across the globe.

Ostřanský is working on a new model for international agreements to address this, one that would replace investor protections with mechanisms meant to encourage investments and the transfer of technology.

And companies have other options for operating in challenging markets. Foreign investors can purchase political-risk insurance to protect themselves, for instance.

Meanwhile, in El Alto, a bustling city on a plateau above Bolivia’s capital city La Paz, the country’s solicitor general is defending Bolivia’s last publicly known ISDS case. A Swiss insurance company filed the claim in 2020 over nationalization of the pension system.

In an interview earlier this year, Solicitor General César Adalid Siles Bazán called the nation’s ISDS exit an “intelligent decision.”

With the country’s independence from ISDS, foreign investors who think they’ve been wronged will have to take their chances in Bolivian courts, just like Bolivians.

The Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) was a draft agreement negotiated in secret between members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) between 1995 and 1998.^[1][2] It sought to establish a new body of universal investment laws that would grant corporations unconditional rights to engage in financial operations around the world, without any regard to national laws and citizens' rights. The draft gave corporations a right to sue governments if national health, labor or environment legislation threatened their interests. When its draft became public in 1997, it drew widespread criticism from civil society groups and developing countries, particularly over the possibility that the agreement would make it difficult to regulate foreign investors. After an intense global campaign was waged against the MAI by the treaty's critics, the host nation France announced in October 1998 that it would not support the agreement, effectively preventing its adoption due to the OECD's consensus procedures.

WIKIPEDIA

AMERIKA

“We Have to Act”: Taxpayers Suing Congressmembers for Funding Genocide Speak Out

Plaintiff Tarik Kanaana says the lawsuit “has given people something to rally behind and a renewed sense of hope.”

By Marjorie Cohn

January 4, 2025
Source: Truthout


Wikimedia Commons



On December 19, more than 500 federal taxpayers from 10 northern California counties filed an unprecedented class-action lawsuit against their congressional representatives. Seth Donnelly et. al. v. Mike Thompson, and Jared Huffman charges that the defendants — two Democratic congressmembers — illegally abused their tax and spend authority on April 20, 2024, when they voted for the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, which authorized $26.38 billion in military aid to Israel.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, alleges that Thompson and Huffman violated the U.S. Constitution, the Genocide Convention and several U.S. laws.

“I am a Palestinian Lebanese American, and I am suing my California congressman, Mike Thompson, for misusing my federal tax dollars and supporting the genocide in Gaza,” Maria Barakat, a class representative, told Truthout. “As a Palestinian and a person of conscience, Thompson has forced me to be complicit in the murder and genocide of my own people.”

Taxpayers who brought the suit come from a wide variety of backgrounds. They include young people, the elderly, educators, health care workers, Jewish and Palestinian Americans, and others. Members of the class are defined as: “All persons who were federal taxpayers during the year 2024 who reside within the federal Second or Fourth Congressional District of California and have suffered moral and emotional/psychic injury from being made complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
Congress Can Tax Only for the Common Defense and General Welfare

Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution establishes Congress’s power to lay and collect taxes only for the common defense and general welfare of the United States. When taxes are collected and allocated for unlawful purposes, the general welfare is not served.

The complaint — the charging document in the lawsuit — notes that the $26.38 billion for which the defendants voted includes $3.5 billion for the procurement of advanced weapons systems, defense articles (items or technical data designed for a missile, satellite or other military use) and defense services; $1 billion for the production and development of artillery and critical munitions; and $4.4 billion to replenish defense articles and defense services provided to Israel.

As this article goes to press, more than 45,500 Palestinian people have been killed by Israel’s genocidal campaign using weapons provided by the U.S. government.

In Donnelly v. Thompson, the taxpayers cite violations of the Genocide Convention, which the U.S. has ratified, and the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, which establishes the crime of “complicity in genocide.” Customary international law, which is part of federal common and statutory law, also prohibits complicity in genocide.

The complaint alleges violation of the Leahy Law, which prohibits aid to foreign security forces that have committed a gross violation of human rights. In addition, it charges that the congressmembers violated the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the Arms Export Control Act, which prohibit U.S. assistance to countries whose governments engage in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights. Lastly, the complaint alleges violation of the Conventional Arms Transfer policy, which prohibits U.S. weapons transfers if they risk facilitating human rights violations.
Class Members Asked Their Congressmembers to Halt Military Aid to Israel

Many class members repeatedly contacted their representatives, Thompson and Huffman, urging them not to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza — to no avail. “We have called and written our representatives for over a year begging them to halt military aid to Israel,” Barakat told Truthout. “Some of us call them every single day.” But both congressmembers voted for military assistance to Israel, knowing that it was committing genocide, the complaint asserts.

“We are inspired by the lawsuit Defense for Children International — Palestine v. Biden, filed in November 2023, that attempted to hold the Biden administration legally accountable for direct involvement in the genocide in Gaza,” class representative and lead plaintiff Seth Donnelly told Truthout. In the case against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a federal district judge in Oakland, California, found that Israel’s conduct in Gaza amounts to a plausible case of genocide.

Although the Biden case was dismissed based on the “political question” doctrine, which reserves foreign policy decisions to the political branches of government (executive and legislative), not the judiciary, the two lawsuits raise different issues, attorney Dean Royer, who filed Donnelly v. Thompson, wrote in an email to Truthout: This case “is premised on taxpayers having their constitutional rights violated when their [c]ongressional representatives voted in favor of military aid to Israel despite knowing Israel was committing genocide and would continue to do so with the aid.”

The complaint in Donnelly v. Thompson cited the International Court of Justice’s January 26 ruling that some of Israel’s actions in Gaza appeared to constitute genocide. On March 24, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, published a comprehensive report which concluded that the Israeli government had unequivocally crossed the “threshold” and was actively committing genocide in Gaza. Her findings were also cited in the taxpayers’ lawsuit.
Taxpayers Described Moral Injuries They Suffered From the Vote to Arm Genocide

The taxpayers are asking the district court to certify the proposed class and declare that defendants Thompson and Huffman violated the Constitution’s tax and spend authority as well as federal statutes when they voted for the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act. They also ask the court to restrain the defendants from providing further military aid to Israel. And they are requesting compensatory damages for the emotional trauma, mental health problems and depression they have suffered as a result of the ongoing genocide.

Carol Bloom, a class member from Sonoma County, stated in a release for the Institute for Public Accuracy, “The moral injuries that I and countless other constituents of Representative Huffman have suffered resulting from his vote to arm the genocide in Gaza are immeasurable.”

In media statements, class representatives described the emotional and moral injuries they suffer as a result of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians:

“I have witnessed the destruction of parts of my history and parts of the beautiful culture which I am a product of. I have witnessed the bombing of hospitals and schools, churches, mosques, playgrounds and seaside promenades. I have seen the desecration of burial grounds and have seen the remains of forbearers being unearthed so that refugees have nothing to return to,” Tarik Kanaana, a Palestinian American who lives in Santa Rosa, said in the statement. “The United States is not only allowing this genocide to happen; but is an active participant in it.”

Pamela Brown from Humboldt County said, “My life emotionally and intellectually fell apart in October 2023. As I witnessed and read about the horror inflicted on innocent children, women, and men in Gaza over days, then weeks, then months, and now more than a year, I continued down a dark hole that my friends began to remark on. The distress and despondency I experience have been profound, unlike any other time in my life.”

“I feel I’ve been living in a traumatized state for over a year. I cry every day, multiple times a day, my heart is beyond broken, it’s shattered. I wake up each morning worrying about the genocide that is happening in Gaza, knowing that if it wasn’t for my government’s partnership with the Israeli government, this couldn’t continue,” said Leslie Angeline from Marin County. She tried in vain to meet with Rep. Jared Huffman on the 25th day of her hunger strike/fast, which she ended when the lawsuit was filed on December 19, after 31 days.

“It is literally breaking my heart day by day, night by night, to be complicit in this ‘collective punishment’ of Palestinians of both Gaza and The West Bank,” said Francesca Ciancutti from Mendocino County.

Linda Helland, also from Mendocino County, said, “The psychological distress and moral injury I experience from being forced to pay for genocide has caused me irreparable harm, manifested in depression, anxiety, distractions from work, lack of joy in daily activities, and inability to sleep peacefully.”

Helland, a public health professional, described images seen on phones every day:


Children shot in the head by Israeli snipers; Palestinian women who are too hungry and thirsty to breastfeed their babies because Israel uses starvation as a weapon; rotting babies in incubators after the Israeli military took over the hospital and turned off the electricity; teenagers burned to death still hooked up to their hospital IVs when the Israeli military bombed the hospital; toddlers crushed when Israel bombs schools; and parents collecting plastic bags of unidentifiable children’s body parts so they’ll have something to bury after Israel bombs refugee shelters.
One Struggle, Many Fronts

The taxpayers are clear-eyed about the challenges the lawsuit faces. But they are resolute.

“We see it quite clearly that there are legal and constitutional limits on what U.S. tax dollars can be used for, and our congressmen have broken the law,” Barakat told Truthout. “Our eyes are wide open about the federal courts. It’s an uphill climb, but we have to act. We are responsible to act.”

“I have no faith that the U.S. government will do what is right, especially after 15 months of … supporting Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people, including financing and providing Israel with the political cover it needs,” Kanaana said in an interview with Truthout. “I am sure that the court will find a way to dismiss this case. If, however, it does continue and we get a ruling in our favor, it will have huge ramifications on what the U.S. can do to support Israel. That said, we have already achieved so much of what we set out to do.”

Kanaana added that the lawsuit “has given people something to rally behind and a renewed sense of hope.” Since the genocide started, the taxpayers have “been protesting in the streets, going in front of city councils and other political bodies to convince them to call for a ceasefire, protesting national politicians and university encampments (which were violently suppressed) and anything else we could think of to change our government policies.” However, Kanaana says, the situation in Palestine “is getting much worse.”

“This struggle will take sustained efforts on many fronts, with the lawsuit being a means to shine the spotlight on the role of U.S. tax dollars in the genocide. We anticipate a vigorous effort by the defendants to dismiss the case on various grounds and understand that the legal battle will be challenging but we believe we can ultimately succeed,” attorney Royer told Truthout. “While Congress has great latitude to decide how to spend tax money, the line is crossed when the spending results in complicity in genocide and human rights violations.”

Since the filing of Donnelly v. Thompson on December 19, “we have gotten media attention beyond what we had anticipated locally and nationally,” Kanaana told Truthout. As a result, “people and groups from around the country have been reaching out to us offering us support and, more importantly, to get information on how they can replicate our lawsuit in other areas against other Congress members who have shown support for Israel’s war crimes.”

“If we persuade the court that we are correct, this lawsuit could be replicated throughout the U.S. with other congressional representatives as defendants,” attorney Royer added. “In fact, there is already interest in the case by other constituencies in California and other states.”

Class members are encouraging all taxpayers in Marin, Sonoma, Solano, Napa, Lake, Yolo, Mendocino, Trinity, Humboldt and Del Norte Counties to sign onto the lawsuit.

Taxpayers Against Genocide NorCal, which organized the taxpayers’ lawsuit, will soon be offering a webinar for activists across the U.S. who want to replicate their action. For more information, interested parties can contact classactionagainstgenocide@proton.me.

“This unprecedented lawsuit gives these Congresspersons pause that their constituents, from all 10 counties in northern California, have joined together. Their power is seated in keeping us apart,” Anna Marie Stenberg, a long-time activist and key leader of the coalition, whose family is from Lebanon, told Truthout. “This coalition will also be invaluable over the next four years when the targets are put on immigrants and the LGBTQX communities.”



Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, dean of the People’s Academy of International Law, and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She sits on the national advisory boards of Veterans For Peace and Assange Defense and she is the U.S. representative to the continental advisory council of the Association of American Jurists. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.

Tears of Our Children

From Palestine to Sudan, imperialist wars are destroying the lives of innocent children, leaving long-term physical and psychological wounds on those who survive.

By Vijay Prashad

January 4, 2025

Surce: Tricontinental Institute


Malak Mattar (Gaza, Occupied Palestinian Territory), Prematurely Stolen, 2023.



A study came out in December that made me cry. Titled Needs Study: Impact of War in Gaza on Children with Vulnerabilities and Families, it was conducted by the Community Training Centre for Crisis Management (CTCCM) in Gaza. Written in a clinical style, nothing about the language should have impacted me in the way that it did. But the study’s findings were shocking. Here are some of the cold facts:79% of the children in Gaza suffer from nightmares.
87% of them experience severe fear.
38% report bedwetting.
49% of caregivers said that their children believed that they would die in the war.
96% of the children in Gaza felt that death was imminent.

Put simply, every single child in Gaza feels that they are going to die.

Galal Yousif Goly (Sudan), Untitled, 2024.

This newsletter, the first of 2025, could have ended after that last line. What more needs to be said? But there is more to say.

In March 2024, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child released a sharp statement on the war in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, both backed by a range of foreign powers. That statement had its own powerful facts:24 million children in Sudan – nearly half of the country’s total population of 50 million – are at risk of ‘generational catastrophe’.
19 million children are out of school.
4 million children are displaced.
3.7 million children are acutely malnourished.

The first point refers to the totality of Sudan’s children, all of whom are at risk of a ‘generational catastrophe’. This concept, which was first used by the United Nations to describe the trauma and setbacks that children experienced due to COVID-19 lockdowns, means that the children of Sudan will not recover from the ordeal that the war has inflicted upon them. It will take generations before anything resembling normality returns to the country

.

Pacita Abad (Philippines), Water of Life, 1980.

A scientific study from 2017 found that deep childhood traumas can mark a person both physically and psychologically. Trauma reroutes children’s developing nervous systems, causing them to be highly alert and anxious even decades later. This process, the authors write, generates a mechanism called ‘enhanced threat processing’. No wonder studies of children who lived through earlier wars show that they disproportionately suffer from medical conditions, including heart ailments and cancer.

In March 2022, five doctors from Afghanistan, India, Ireland, and Sri Lanka wrote a heartfelt letter to The Lancet in which they reminded the world of the plight of the children of Afghanistan. As of 2019, every child in Afghanistan was born and raised during war. Not one of them had experienced peace. The authors noted that ‘studies on psychotherapeutic interventions in Afghan children and adolescents are rare, and the evidence they have produced is low quality’. So, they proposed an integrated healthcare plan for Afghan children that relied upon telehealth care and non-medical professionals. In another world, the plan could have been debated. Some of the funds that had enriched the arms merchants during that war would have instead been expended to realise this plan. But this is not the way forward in our world.

Mahoud Ahmad (Iraq), Title Not Known (Ahmad 9), 1976.

The statement about arms merchants is not made idly. According to a December 2024 fact sheet from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the world’s top 100 largest arms-producing and military services companies increased their combined arms revenues by 4.2% in 2023, reaching a staggering $632 billion. Five US-based companies accounted for nearly a third of these revenues. These 100 companies increased their total arms revenues by 19% between 2015 and 2023. Though the full numbers for 2024 are not yet available, if one looks at the quarterly filings from the main merchants of death, their earnings have spiked even further. Billions for warmongers, but nothing for children who are born into warzones.

Ismail Shammout (Gaza, Occupied Palestinian Territory), We Will Not Leave, 1987.

In 2014, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza resulted in the death of innocent children. Two incidents in July struck a special chord. First, Israel fired a missile that hit the Fun Time Beach Café (Waqt al-Marah) in Khan Younis at 11:30pm on 9 July. In the café, which was a makeshift structure about thirty metres from the Mediterranean Sea, several people had gathered to watch the 2014 FIFA World Cup semi-final match between Argentina and the Netherlands. They were all serious football fans. The Israeli missile killed nine young people: Musa Astal (age 16), Suleiman Astal (age 16), Ahmed Astal (age 18), Mohammed Fawana (age 18), Hamid Sawalli (age 20), Mohammed Ganan (age 24), Ibrahim Ganan (age 25), and Ibrahim Sawalli (age 28). They never got to watch Argentina win the match in the penalty stage or see Germany win the tournament in a tense match a few days later.

Israel’s bombing, meanwhile, was unabated. Three days later, on 16 July, several boys were playing football – as if replaying the World Cup on Gaza’s beach – when an Israeli navy ship fired first at a jetty and then, as the boys ran from the explosion, at the boys. Israel killed four of them – Ismail Mahmoud Bakr (age 9), Zakariya Ahed Bakr (age 10), Ahed Atef Bakr (age 10), and Mohammad Ramez Bakr (age 11) – and wounded others.

The 2014 Israeli barrage on Gaza killed at least 150 children in total. When the human rights group B’Tselem produced an advertisement to broadcast the names of the children on Israeli television, the Israel Broadcast Authority banned it. The British poet Michael Rosen responded to the killings and the ban with the beautiful poem ‘Don’t Mention the Children’.


Don’t mention the children.
Don’t name the dead children.
The people must not know the names
of the dead children.
The names of the children must be hidden.
The children must be nameless.
The children must leave this world
having no names.
No one must know the names of
the dead children.
No one must say the names of
the dead children.
No one must even think that the children
have names.
People must understand that it would be dangerous
to know the names of the children.
The people must be protected from
knowing the names of the children.
The names of the children could spread
like wildfire.
The people would not be safe if they knew
the names of the children.
Don’t name the dead children.
Don’t remember the dead children.
Don’t think of the dead children.
Don’t say: ‘dead children’.

Yes, the children have names. We will continue to name all those whose names we can remember. We will not forget them. In September 2024, the Palestinian Ministry of Health released an updated list of the names of Palestinians killed in the US-Israeli genocide from October 2023 to August 2024. On that list are 710 newborns whose ages are listed as zero. Many of them had only just been named.

Though the list is too long to reproduce here, the story of Ayssel and Asser Al-Qumsan is emblematic. On 13 August 2024, Mohammed Abu Al-Qumsan left his apartment in Deir al-Balah, within central Gaza’s ‘safe zone’, to register the birth of his twin children Ayssel and Asser. He left the twins with their mother, Dr. Jumana Arfa (age 29), who had given birth to them three days earlier at Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat. Dr. Jumann Arfa was a pharmacist trained at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. A few days before giving birth to her children, she posted on Facebook about Israel’s targeting of children, citing an interview with Jewish-American surgeon Dr. Mark Perlmutter on a powerful CBS News segment called Children of Gaza. When Mohammed returned from registering the twins, he found that their home had been destroyed and that his wife, newborn children, and mother-in-law had all been killed in an Israeli strike.


Ayssel Al-Qumsan.
Asser Al-Qumsan.

We must name the dead children.

Malak Mattar (Gaza, Occupied Palestinian Territory), Tiger Embracing the Boy, 2024.



Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. Tings Chak is the art director and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and lead author of the study “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.” She is also a member of Dongsheng, an international collective of researchers interested in Chinese politics and society.

Brazilian Judiciary Orders Investigation of Israeli Soldier-Tourist for War Crimes in Gaza

By Juan Cole

January 5, 2025

Source: Informed Comment


Rio de Janeiro

According to Junio Silva at the Brazilian newspaper Metrópoles , on December 31, Federal Judge Raquel Soares Charelli directed the Federal Police to open an immediate investigation into Israeli soldier vacationing in Brazil who is alleged to have perpetrated war crimes in Gaza.

The court was petitioned by the Hind Rajab Foundation, an organization based in Belgium and operating globally to expose crimes against humanity, war crimes, and human rights violations in Palestine. The foundation and other sources provided 500 pages of legal documentation connected to the case, gathered through open-source investigation. A lot of Israeli soldiers have posted videos to Telegram and other outlets boasting of their atrocities, which allow organizations like the Hind Rajab Foundation to build a case.

The foundation’s petition included a plea for the detention of the Israeli national lest he flee the country.

Junio writes that the accused Israeli national is alleged to have participated in demolishing a residential complex in the Gaza Strip with explosives in November 2024. This act reportedly occurred outside an active combat zone. The demolished homes had served as refuge for internally displaced Palestinians within the enclave following the onset of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Junio quotes the Hind Rajab Foundation’s attorney, Maira Pinheiro, who clarified that the decision leverages the Rome Statute, a treaty that Brazil ratified. The Rome Statute established the International Criminal Court (ICC) and has been in effect since 2002.

Pinheiro said, “Since Brazil is a signatory to the Rome Statute [Como o Brasil é signatário do Estatuto de Roma], universal jurisdiction also applies within Brazilian territory [vale também em território brasileiro a jurisdição universal]. This means any member state must act to ensure crimes outlined in the Statute – war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide – are investigated and prosecuted. Based on the extraterritoriality principle in Article 7 of the Brazilian Penal Code, Brazil has jurisdiction to investigate criminal offenses committed abroad when they arise from international treaties and the perpetrator enters Brazilian territory.”

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Camila França at Brasil 247 notes, “The decision is considered a landmark in the application of international law within national territory.”

She notes that a similar case is unfolding in Chile, where 620 attorneys have filed a case against a member of Israel’s 749th Combat Engineering Battalion who was vacationing in Chilean Patagonia. Lawyer and former ambassador Nelson Hadad in Santiago also called for the immediate arrest of that individual. She writes that the complaint is supported by Chilean Senator Francisco Chahuan, who said that the Public Prosecutor’s office was in receipt of mounds of evidence, including videos and photos from the accused’s Instagram account, which allegedly depict his involvement in the destruction of neighborhoods, civilian infrastructure, and cultural sites in Gaza. She notes that Senator Chahuan alleges that these actions violated the Geneva Conventions and constitute war crimes and genocide.


Juan Cole
Juan R. I. Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three and a half decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context, and he has written widely about Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and South Asia. His books include Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires; The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East; Engaging the Muslim World; and Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East.

AI and Us—Wake Up and Smell the Guillotine

By Michael Albert

January 5, 2025

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


Credit: Jérémy Barande (Flickr)

AI is already very nearly everywhere. So far, it is no big deal, right? It assembles data, controls this or that machine, writes and/or edits lots of messages and even articles, and who knows, maybe even a book or two. It produces songs, short films, and of course lots of software. It talks, it watches, it will read a book or watch a video and summarize it for you. It’s a time saver, a pattern revealer. But has it turned life upside down and inside out? Not really—unless you think we have ubiquitous mistrust and pervasive lying in part due to AI though I would say Social Media is more implicated in that mess. In any case, it has technological side effects? So what. The main effects are gloriously exciting. Goodbye cancer. Hello immortality.

A poll of Ivy League college students that asked how many books students surrounded by ivy walls read a year revealed that many of them don’t read books anymore at all. Many doubt if they could even manage to read a whole book. It doesn’t matter much because they prefer to get a summary lickety split. So why was I worried in some earlier essays that I offered on this topic? I play Go with an AI that trounces me unless I opt for it to play less well than it can. Same for chess. Great opponent. So? So far, no big deal. No?

Let’s look down the road a bit. Five years off, ten years, whatever. Consider the top 100 songs of 2030. Suppose eighty five were written by AIs. Not just the lyrics, but also the music. Even played by AI. Maybe ninety five. Great listening. Hooray. Headphones get better too. Al engineers at work. Same for new novels, best sellers, and for my reading glasses too, supposing I still read. We have so much to enjoy. And of course it’s the same for software, in spades. Likewise for architectural designs and new product proposals. And oh yes, do you need to go to the doctor? Looks like a person, talks like a person, but it’s an AI that has fantastic bed-side manners. The thing makes brilliant diagnoses. And it is so pretty/handsome—you choose. Even out in the boonies, a therapist in every home. Surgery galore. Longer life. Fabulous.

Meanwhile, your daughter is in high school with all AI teachers. They are very patient with her. Indeed, from day care on is all AI territory. Your son has an AI life partner. A perfect soulmate. No need for angst. No more breakup songs. Everyone has a convenient AI agent. It plans for us, shops for us, cooks for us, cleans for us, read for us, writes for us, reads for us, talks for us, hears our woes, shares our ecstasies (supposing we have any). You want my week’s plan, what I feel? Have your AI me a call. My AI will answer. It will reply as I would, in my voice, with my personality. With no forgetfulness, no errors. I’m in my den. On my couch. Watching AI entertainment. A happy idiot.

The news gets delivered each day by AIs who tell us all is great. All is wonderful. We have somehow avoided AIs being misused by nefarious profit-seeking owners to lie, cheat, steal, and manipulate (despite that of late, in our time, there is steadily less attention to such concerns). We have also somehow avoided AIs going rogue to do their own preferred deeds no matter the human costs (despite that in our time we rush to give them independent ability to make their own decisions and implement their own plans). AIs provide all kinds of calculations, prognostications, and creations. They help us like we used to help our pets. What’s to worry about? What’s to regulate? After all, we can always pull the plug.

Well, one answer goes back a step and says that most of that can’t happen. AI’s won’t ever do the things I mentioned. But just months back the most frequent basis for such a claim was that we were running out of data to train AIs with. There is only one internet, after all. So there is only so much data. And lots of it is garbage. But then came a brainstorm. Why not generate new data with AIs? What could go wrong? Is it a solution or cyber in breeding? Off we go.

But still comes the next answer. even if they keep developing these AIs are just machines. Life partners? Give me a break. Nonsense. Humans won’t fall for that. Teachers, doctors, agents who we converse with, who we get instructions from, who we get life advice from, who we have dinner with? Come on. You might as well marry a pretty rock. And then they are going to write, sing, paint, and film better than flesh and blood writers, singers, painters, and film-makers? Surely not. It is all industry hype to get investments.

Hang on. An AI interviews you for two hours. Yes, you. Tomorrow. It asks you diverse questions. It ruminates on your answers. It winds up with your personality. It grabs your voice too. Your look. Your feel. Think about that. It can act as you would act in 85% of all cases now, today, already. Is that hype? Maybe, but what if it isn’t? In five years, 98%? Except it answers way faster and has infinitely more facts to offer. More insights. Will that mean it is 120% you?

There are dozens of AI products right now and more arrive monthly. Soon, AIs will design new AIs. Even with humans designing, it is largely trial and error. We don’t really know how the hell AIs do what they do so well or often even at all. But with AIs designing? For the most part, nowadays mainly only tech bros extensively use them. AI’s are still a bit too clumsy for you and me. But soon anyone will be able to use them. Easy peasy. What fun. Just ask and you shall receive. No more frustration. No more pathos. No more tedium. No more, no more.

Yes, of course one possible worry is bad actors who will misuse AI to manipulate millions via lies and fear. Read that again. Not exactly a little worry. Another kind of worry is AIs that themselves not only decide how to fulfill requests we make of them, but also decide how to fulfill requests they make of one another regardless of collateral damage for cats, dogs, and people. Also serious, no? But I think there is a third kind of worry. Cheered on by us, AIs become able to do all that humans do, not only faster but also valued more by humans than when humans do those things. Hey robot, I appreciate you. This proceeds until humans prefer AIs to other humans for getting things done, meeting needs, being entertained, and even for intimacy. It proceeds until humans become steadily less social, less productive, less initiating, less discerning, and less creative, and AI-guided life-like robots become more of all of that. Until, that is, we become less human-like and they become more human-like.

At this point, for evidence I might start listing AI products that already exist. I might describe their capabilities, compare them to one year ago, and report what people in the field say is in the works. And I might detail how their use would reduce our time sent in diverse pursuits, progressively atrophying our capacities regarding those pursuits. Or I could ask an AI to do that research and to write it up for me, even in my wordy style. But I bet you won’t be surprised that I would rather suggest that you assemble whatever evidence you think relevant and think it through for yourself to a wonderful or to a God-awful conclusion. What you need is just a Google search away. You don’t want to search? Too much work? Too disturbing? I get that, but consider the implications of that answer coupled to the rest of this brief article for what it says we won’t want to do five years from now.

P.S. I in no way mean to suggest that AIs that do more and more and faster and faster translation, programming, transporting, constructing, designing, care-taking, teaching, doctoring, cooking, planning, and conversing don’t pose serious problems for employment and economy more broadly. I am instead suggesting that even if we deal with those problems and also with nefarious use problems and also with rogue AI mayhem problems, we may still confront a social relations problem that threatens what it is to be a person. Like social media has done a spirited tap dance on what it means to be friends, to pay attention, and to find truth, AI may elephant tromp on what it means to be a person.

P.S.S. I also don’t mean to suggest that we should drop everything else and become Luddites or even just well informed critics of AI mania who demand extensive AI oversight and restrictions. Nope. Global heating and ecological suicide are still around. So too is a surging fascist trend. And nukes. I am instead suggesting that along with developing a movement of movements to address those undeniable dangers, we should also have an emerging movement of movements address AI dangers.

Ugly possibilities. Is there some way out of here? Is there an orientation, a mind set, some values, a vision or perhaps mixture of visions that taken all together can fuel resistance to all our impending horrors right up to our winning a world in which none of that persists? Apocalypse avoided. A better world attained. I think we need a bit more attention to conceiving such a worthy viable shared mindset, values, and visions to then act in accord with in 2025.


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Michael Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His political involvements, starting then and continuing to the present, have ranged from local, regional, and national organizing projects and campaigns to co-founding South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, and ZNet, and to working on all these projects, writing for various publications and publishers, giving public talks, etc. His personal interests, outside the political realm, focus on general science reading (with an emphasis on physics, math, and matters of evolution and cognitive science), computers, mystery and thriller/adventure novels, sea kayaking, and the more sedentary but no less challenging game of GO. Albert is the author of 21 books which include: No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World; Fanfare for the Future; Remembering Tomorrow; Realizing Hope; and Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Michael is currently host of the podcast Revolution Z and is a Friend of ZNetwork.