Palestinians massacred in “rescue” operation lauded by US

by Maureen Clare Murphy / June 10th, 2024

Damage in Nuseirat refugee camp following an Israeli attack on 8 June 2024 (Omar Ashtawy APA images)

While Israelis celebrated the release of four captives secured by the military in Gaza on Saturday, Palestinians mourned hundreds of people killed during the daytime operation.

Palestinian officials said that more than 210 Palestinians were killed and 400 injured in central Gaza on Saturday, including in the area where the Israeli military says it rescued the four captives from two separate apartments blocks in a residential area of Nuseirat refugee camp.

The fresh horror in Nuseirat comes two days after Israel bombed a UN school in the refugee camp where thousands of displaced people were sheltering, killing at least 33.

As of 5 June, the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza had recorded more than 36,500 fatalities and 83,000 injuries since 7 October.

The actual fatality count is likely much higher, with thousands of people missing under the rubble. An unknown number of Palestinians in Gaza have died in a secondary wave of mortality as Israel has destroyed water and sanitation facilities in the territory, giving rise to diseases, all while engineering a famine and destroying the healthcare system.

In Nuseirat refugee camp, “Gazan paramedics and residents said the assault killed scores of people and left mangled bodies of men, women and children strewn around a marketplace and a mosque,” Reuters reported on Saturday.

Abu Obeida, the pseudonymous spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, said that some captives were killed during the operation. Israel has not reported any fatalities among the captives during the raid.

“By committing horrifying massacres the enemy was able to liberate a few of its prisoners but at the same time it killed some of them during the operation,” Abu Obeida said.

“This operation will constitute a major danger to the enemy’s prisoners and will have a negative impact on their conditions and their lives,” he added.

Perfidy

Footage from the raid indicated that Israeli forces infiltrated Nuseirat refugee camp disguised in civilian trucks:

A wounded eyewitness described walking in the street and seeing what he thought was a truck carrying humanitarian aid before armed forces emerged from the vehicle and shot him in the chest and arm:

Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of hiding among civilians to justify its targeting and destruction of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, in Gaza, while apparently using trucks disguised as humanitarian aid to carry out an operation that killed scores of civilians. Feigning civilian or non-combatant status, as Israeli forces appear to have done, and hardly for the first time, may constitute the war crime of perfidy under international humanitarian law.

The plan for the US pier on the Gaza shoreline was revealed in a surprise announcement by President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address in early March and was framed as an effort to increase humanitarian aid into the besieged territory, despite its limited capacity in comparison to the already established land crossings.

The pier took its first delivery on 17 May and only functioned at partial capacity, on and off, for a few days before a storm damaged the modular pier around a week later.

The controversial pier is part of a corridor that the Israeli military has cut through the center of the Gaza Strip, south of Gaza City, effectively splitting northern and southern Gaza and allowing Israeli forces to more easily carry out raids in the center of the Gaza Strip.

The US Department of Defense said on Friday that repairs to the pier had been completed with the assistance of the Israeli military, raising questions whether the Nuseirat operation was delayed until after the pier was rebuilt.

American role

Barak Ravid, the Axios writer who is frequently fed information by Israel’s military and intelligence apparatus, reported that Nuseirat operation “was supposed to happen a few weeks ago but was canceled for operational reasons,” citing unnamed Israeli officials.

Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said that hundreds of soldiers were involved in the Nuseirat operation and a police officer was critically wounded during the raid; he was later reported to have died from his injuries.

Axios revealed that “the US hostage cell in Israel supported the effort to rescue the four hostages,” citing an unnamed US official.

The White House released a statement from national security advisor Jake Sullivan in which he said that Washington “is supporting all efforts to secure the release of hostages still held by Hamas, including American citizens.”

“This includes through ongoing negotiations or other means,” Sullivan added.

Sullivan’s statement on the “successful operation” commends “the work of the Israeli security services that conducted this daring operation” and makes no mention of the scores of Palestinians killed.

The White House statement was only one of many from Western leaders celebrating the rescue of the four Israeli captives without any mention of the Palestinians killed in the process.

Hamas condemned what it called a “horrific massacre against innocent civilians” in Nuseirat camp and other locations in central Gaza and the reported American involvement.

In a statement published on its Telegram channel, Hamas said that it “proves once again the complicity of the US administration” the complicity of the US in war crimes in Gaza.

“Doomsday” in central Gaza

Palestinians residing in the areas of central Gaza attacked on Saturday described “doomsday” scenes like those from a horror film, with quadcopters shooting at civilians in Deir al-Balah while Israel drops bombs from the sky.

Video recorded in Nuseirat refugee camp shows Israeli-fired missiles striking a residential area.

One graphic video shows around a dozen dead and injured people lying on a street in Nuseirat refugee camp, and other videos show people arriving with severe injuries to overcrowded medical facilities.

Yet another graphic video shows a man holding a young boy with a severe head wound standing among shrouded corpses outside a hospital. When the child suddenly moves, the surprised man runs with the boy in his arms towards the hospital entrance.

Videos and photos show that another boy was killed with his last meal still in his mouth and a man was shot dead while cooking on a stove.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, one of the few still functioning in Gaza, was overwhelmed with casualties from Nuseirat and was being run by a sole generator on Saturday while Israeli bombing further threatened its ability to provide urgently needed medical care.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said that it was transporting injured people from hospitals in central Gaza to a field hospital due to the threat of Israeli bombing:

Freed captives “in good health”

The four rescued captives – Noa Argamani, 25, Almog Meir Jan, 21, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 40 – were all captured at the Supernova music festival during Hamas’ raid on 7 October last year.

During her captivity, Hamas released two videos showing signs of life from Argamani. The most recent video, published on 31 May, features Argamani’s voice imploring Israelis to put pressure on Netanyahu’s war cabinet, warning that “time is running out.”

The four former captives “were taken to hospital for medical checks and were in good health,” Reuters reported, citing the Israeli military.

This is in stark contrast to Palestinians from Gaza who have been arbitrarily detained by Israel in recent months and released with newly amputated limbs removed without anesthesia and their bodies bearing marks of torture.

Around 250 people were captured in Israel on 7 October and brought to Gaza. More than 100 were released by Hamas as part of a prisoner exchange deal in November.

Two Israeli-Argentinian men were rescued by Israeli forces in Rafah, southern Gaza, in February.

Some 75 Palestinians were killed during that operation as Israel pounded Rafah, where people displaced from other areas of Gaza had sought shelter, in order to create a diversion from the military raid.

A captured Israeli soldier was reportedly rescued by the military in late October.

With the rescue of the four captives on Saturday, a total of seven Israelis and foreign nationals held in Gaza since 7 October have been freed by the Israeli military. Far more regained their freedom through an agreement negotiated with Hamas.

Many families of the captives who remain in Gaza are urgently pressing the Israeli government to secure another exchange deal.

Of the 116 captives who are believed to remain in Gaza, Israeli authorities have declared around a third of them dead, without acknowledging that the most likely cause of death is Israeli bombing.

Analyst Tariq Kenney-Shawa said that the lives of the children killed in Nuseirat on Saturday could have been spared.

“Israel could [have agreed] to a permanent ceasefire and hostage exchange at any time” during the past eight months, Kenney-Shawa stated, “but dead Palestinians are their main objective.”

Some observers said that Saturday’s rescue operation would endanger the captives who remain in Gaza, since Netanyahu’s government has signaled that Israel will not engage in another prisoner exchange and will only secure the captives’ release by force.

“For Hamas, this approach means the captives are becoming a net loss: they have to allocate great resources to keep them but with no potential upside,” according to the Israeli writer Alon Mizrahi.

“They know by now, as [does] everybody else, that the purpose of Israel’s operation is to exterminate and ethnically cleanse the entirety of Gaza’s population” before doing the same to Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank.

Biden’s “Israeli” proposal

The US State Department announced on Friday that Antony Bliken, Washington’s top diplomat, would return to the region in the coming days to push Israel and Hamas to accept a three-phase ceasefire and prisoner exchange proposal put forward by President Joe Biden last week.

The US has also circulated a draft resolution backing Biden’s proposal at the UN Security Council, where it has vetoed multiple resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

Hamas has not agreed to the plan outlined by Biden, saying that it required clear guarantees that the deal would result in a complete end of the war in Gaza and a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from the territory.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, told Reuters that while the group welcomed “Biden’s ideas,” the draft resolution circulated at the Security Council “has no mention of ending the aggression or the withdrawal.”

Reuters paraphrased Abu Zuhri as saying that “Hamas was committed to its 5 May proposal which was based on an end to the fighting and an Israeli withdrawal, a swap deal and a lifting of the blockade of the enclave” – demands consistently maintained by the group throughout the past several months.

Meanwhile, Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz postponed the anticipated announcement of his resignation from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet on Saturday.

Gantz had given Netanyahu a deadline of 8 June to deliver a “day-after” strategy for Gaza, where Netanyahu vows to press on until it achieves “total victory” – a goal criticized as “unidentified” (he may have meant to say “undefined”) by Biden during the announcement of his proposal last week.

In an interview published by Time magazine on Tuesday, Biden said there was “every reason for people” to draw the conclusion that Netanyahu was prolonging the war in Gaza for his own aims.

•  Jon Elmer contributed background reporting on the US pier.

• This article was first published in The Electronic Intifada

 

Beyond Two State Solution – Why Recognizing State of Palestine Is Important

by Ramzy Baroud 

Posted onJune 11, 2024

In politics, context is crucial.

To truly appreciate the recent decision by Ireland, Spain and Norway to recognize the state of Palestine, the subject has to be placed in proper context.

On November 15, 1988, Yasser Arafat, then Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, declared Palestine as an independent state.

The proclamation took place within important and unique contexts:

One, the Palestinian uprising of December 1987 which ignited international support and sympathy with the Palestinian people.

Two, growing expectations that the Palestinian leadership needed to match the popular Intifada in the Occupied Territories with a political program so as not to squander the global attention obtained by the uprising.

There were other issues that are also worth a pause, including the growing marginalization of the PLO as the main political front of the Palestinian struggle.

This irrelevance was the natural political outcome of the forced exile of the PLO leadership from Lebanon to Algeria in 1982, which largely severed the connection between this leadership and an influential Palestinian constituency.

Though Arafat’s announcement was made in Algiers, Palestinians in occupied Palestine and across the world rejoiced. They felt that their leadership was, once more, directly involved in their struggle, and that their Intifada, which, by then, had cost them hundreds of precious lives, had finally acquired some kind of political horizon.

The countries that almost immediately recognized the state of Palestine reflected the geopolitical formation at the time: Arab and Muslim countries, which fully and unconditionally recognized the nascent state. Additionally, there were countries in the Global South which expressed their historic solidarity with the Palestinian people.

A third category, which also mattered greatly, was represented by countries in Asia and eastern Europe – including Russia itself – which revolved within the Soviet sphere, posing a direct challenge to American hegemony and Western militarism and expansionism.

Soon after the Algiers Declaration, the geopolitics of the world received its greatest shock since World War II, namely the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent fragmentation of pro-Soviet states, thus the isolation of the Global South amid growing Western hegemony.

That, too, had a direct impact on Palestine. Though Arafat and his PLO made their fair share of mistakes and political miscalculations – leading to the Oslo Accords, the formation of the Palestinian Authority and the fragmentation of the Palestinian front itself – the Palestinian leadership’s options, from a strict geopolitical analysis, were quite limited.

Back then, the PLO had one out of two options: either to continue with the struggle for freedom and independence based on the national liberation model or to adopt a purely political approach based on negotiations and supposed ‘painful compromises’.  They opted for the latter, which proved to be a fatal mistake.

Political negotiations can be rewarding when the negotiating parties have leverage. While Israel had the leverage of being the occupying power and receiving unconditional support from the US and its Western allies, the Palestinians had very little.

Therefore, the outcome was as obvious as it was predictable. The PLO was sidelined in favor of a new political entity, the PA, which redefined the concept of political leverage altogether, to essentially mean direct financial benefits to an Israeli-sanctioned ruling class.

Since 1988, more countries recognized the state of Palestine, though that recognition remained largely confined within the geopolitical formations at each phase of history. For example, between 2008 and 2011, more South American countries recognized Palestine, a direct outcome of new and assertive political independence achieved in that part of the world.

In 2012, Palestine was voted by the United Nations General Assembly as a non-member observer state, allowing it to officially use the name ‘State of Palestine’ for all political purposes.

All Palestinian efforts since then have failed to overcome the power paradigm that continues to exist at the UN, separating the UNGA from those with veto power at the Security Council.

The events of October 7, and the genocidal war that followed, have certainly ushered in a massive global movement that challenged the pre-existing geopolitical paradigm regarding Palestine.

If the war, however, had taken place, say ten years ago, the global response to the Palestinian plea for solidarity may have been different. But this is not the case, since the world is itself experiencing a major state of flux. New rising global powers have been boldly challenging, and changing, the world’s status quo geopolitics for years. This includes Russia’s direct confrontation with NATO in Ukraine, China’s rise to global power status, the growing influence of BRICS and the more assertive African and South American political agendas.

For its part, the Gaza war has also challenged the concept of military power as a guarantor of permanent dominance. This is now obvious in the Middle East and also globally.

The latter realization has finally allowed for new, significant margins to appear, allowing Western European countries to finally accept the reality that Palestine deserves to be a state, that the Palestinian aspirations must be honored and that international law must be respected.

Now, the challenge for Palestinians is whether they will be able to utilize this historic moment to the fullest degree. Hopefully, the precious blood spilled in Gaza would prove more sacred than the limited financial gains by a small group of politicians.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out. His other books include My Father was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.

The Government’s War on “Backyard” Farms

by Robert Malone / June 8th, 2024

On the front page of the CDC website is the following headline:

Which then opens into the following:

• Are you ready to give away your chickens?
• Move from the country?
• Wear gloves and a mask when caring for backyard chickens?
• Stop buying eggs from your local farmer
• or, all of the above?

But hold your horses, reading further into the report – here are the numbers:

Out of 330 million people in the USA in 2024, 109 have gotten sick from Salmonella and have some association with backyard poultry this year.

A further dig into the CDC archives reveals that for the past six years, the CDC has conducted successive investigative “reports” on Salmonella outbreaks linked to backyard poultry. In fact, they write numerous articles on the subject each year.

Something fishy is going on here…

A search for poultry and salmonella on the CDC website reveals no such investigations or public reports for commercial poultry operations. There are NO reports for 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020 or 2019 (the archives stop at 2019).

The CDC estimates that Salmonella bacteria cause about 1 million illnesses, 19,000 hospitalizations, and 380 deaths each year in the U.S

Below are the numbers for salmonella cases linked to backyard poultry, according to the CDC webpages:

An extensive search on the CDC website could not find how many people are sickened by commercial poultry each year.

So I went to various AI services, which spat out answers about risk of transmission and statistics about being sickened backyard poultry. The exact same pablum that I had found on the CDC website.

So, then I went the USDA website, and from there I was able to extrapolate the answer.

Therefore, according to the USDA, 1 million x .23% = 230,000 people are sickened by Salmonella associated with the consumption of chicken and turkey each year.

Out of those 230,000 infected with Salmonella from poultry a year, about a thousand people are sickened from backyard poultry (from the CDC).

THIS MEANS THAT ONE OUT OF EVERY 230 POULTRY-RELATED SALMONELLA CASES IN THE USA IS RELATED TO BACKYARD POULTRY!

One out of 230 salmonella cases, yet the CDC is completely focused on the risk of salmonella associated with backyard poultry in its public messaging and warnings.

You can’t make this stuff up.

But it gets worse; recently, North Carolina State University conducted a study that documented backyard and small farm poultry operations are infected with salmonella at a much lower rate than commercial plants.

So, the CDC’s website has nothing to say about salmonella-related illnesses for the 229,000 people infected from commercial operations, but the website is literally flooded with dire warnings about backyard poultry for the 1067 cases per year infected from backyard flocks.

How could this be anything but intentional?

Of course, the issue of regulatory capture again raises its ugly head.

Who hires someone after they have worked for the CDC? Industry, of course. Does the person who researches the high levels of salmonella in commercial poultry houses get hired?

“As far as making people sick and posing economic threats to the meat and poultry industry, it is at the top, it is the most widespread foodborne pathogen,” said Jonathan Campbell, PhD, extension meat specialist and associate professor of animal science at Pennsylvania State University, in University Park, Pa.

Salmonella is among the most widespread foodborne pathogens in part because there are so many types, referred to as serotypes, said Jasna Kovac, PhD, assistant professor of food safety and food science at Penn State. It also easily moves from animal hosts to people.

“It can survive pretty much everywhere in the environment, but its main harborage is in warm-blooded animals,” she explained.

So, salmonella will always be a risk in our food supply, including salmonella found in plant-based foods. But why has the CDC chosen to go after backyard flocks and small farmers? Of all the health-related news in the United States, why is the minuscule number of people infected from backyard poultry news on their front page year after year after year?

By omitting the true statistics about salmonella infections derived from the commercial poultry sector and highlighting backyard birds, the CDC intentionally misrepresents the danger of salmonella found in commercially produced poultry products. Commercial poultry farming is a big business, so is the CDC protecting that industry by throwing small farmers and homesteaders under the bus?

The government does not like what it can not control or regulate. When we create our own independent food supply networks, this triggers the government.

It is also hard to tax what they can not regulate.

But beyond that, this is a war by our government on personal sovereignty.

Thank you for reading Who is Robert Malone. This post is public so feel free to share it.

On a personal note, we have quite the pea-baby production going on here.

We collect one or two peacock eggs a day, save them up and then place them in the incubator each week. On Sunday, they get put into the brooder area for hatching.

So, far we have three weeks of hatchlings, for a total of 15+/- birds – with eight more due to hatch tomorrow.

Most of the babies will be given away to friends or sold.

(For those that didn’t know it, Jill and I are huge fans of aviculture, and Jill worked at the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park as well as the Brookfield Zoo in the 1980s. So for us, having these amazing avian creatures strolling around the farm is a joy. And as to answer the oft-asked question; no – the noise really doesn’t bother us. The exotic sounds of pea and guinea fowl sing to my soul.

Behold, a just-hatched baby pea.

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Robert W Malone MD, MS is president of the Malone Institute whose mission is to bring back integrity to the biological sciences and medicine. The Malone Institute supports and conducts research, education, and informational activities. Contact: info@maloneinstitute.org. Read other articles by Robert, or visit Robert's website.

 

The Overlooked Truths of US Retirement Accounts

by Gerald E. Scorse / June 10th, 2024

Nearly half a century ago, on Labor Day 1974, President Gerald Ford signed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. The bill created Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and essentially paved the way for 401(k)s, 403(b)s, and a host of imitations.

Retirement experts have been beating up on the accounts ever since. Two fresh examples aim specifically at 401(k)s, easily the most common of the type.

One was an in-depth article asking a serious question, “Was the 401(k) a Mistake?” The answer, equally serious, was an emphatic “yes”. By coincidence, the second critique also asked a serious question and delivered a “yes” answer: “Should Your 401(k) Be Eliminated to Save Social Security Benefits?”

The primary fault of 401(k)s and all comparable accounts—undeniable fifty years ago and undeniable today—is that they simply can’t compare to pensions. Employers put up the money for pensions, investing it on behalf of their workers. The workers collect when they retire, getting fixed monthly amounts (and often cost-of-living increases as well) for the rest of their lives.

At some point those workers will also be drawing Social Security, so they’ll be savoring financial double-dips for all of their later years.

Retirement plans are almost the exact opposite of pensions. Workers put up their own money (though employers, especially in more recent years, have kicked in something as well).  There are no guaranteed monthly returns down the road. There’s actually no guaranteed anything: the value of the accounts goes up one day and down the next, and where it ends nobody knows.

No wonder, then, that retirement experts have never been fans of IRAs, 401(k)s and the like. And yet, and yet: maybe the picture isn’t quite as bleak as it’s long been painted.

Maybe the bill that President Ford signed 50 years ago deserves to be called “the most important piece of retirement legislation” in American history.

Just for a change, let’s look at the bright side (and maybe the right side?) of retirement accounts. How they perform will hugely impact the coming decades for tens of millions of workers—and their spouses, children and grandchildren as well.

To begin at the beginning, President Ford and Congress had their heads and their hearts in the right place when they first created retirement accounts. It’s true that what they created would never provide the security of pensions—but most workers didn’t have pensions, and never would have.

Retirement accounts, though, gave them a vehicle they never had before: an easy way to invest, an easy way to create their own personal supplement to Social Security.

The accounts also came with a tax break that pensions never offered to workers. Account holders pay no taxes on any of the money they put into the accounts, or on any of the gains, until they begin withdrawals. The timetable for withdrawals would later get bonus tax breaks as well. The starting age has always been 59 ½, but the age for mandatory withdrawals has been pushed back twice. It’s now 73, headed toward 75 in 2033.

(Roth accounts are an outlier: contributions are taxed, but withdrawals are tax-free and there’s no mandatory withdrawal during the owner’s lifetime.)

From a modest beginning, retirement tax breaks have grown to become the biggest tax favor of all. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, they’ll cost $251.4 billion in fiscal year 2024. That’s $251.4 billion that doesn’t go to the Treasury, that stays instead in the pockets of taxpayers. Admittedly, those breaks heavily favor America’s high-, higher- and highest-income workers. (So do pensions, government and private industry alike.)

The fate of retirement accounts is directly linked to the stock market, and the link could hardly have been more rewarding. Of course, there are bad times; as recently as 2022, all the major indexes suffered huge losses.

But the market has always come back. This May 17th, for the first time in its 139-year history, the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 40,000. There’s a pass-along plus too; unlike pensions, retirement accounts can be left to any generation.

Wall Street’s performance underlines a notable about-face by Alicia H. Munnell, a prominent retirement expert. Ms. Munnell heads the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. She once believed that pensions outperformed 401(k)s—until the Center’s own research proved otherwise.

Asset accumulation, though, is just one measure of retirement plans. Ms. Munnell remains a critic: she co-authored the paper, mentioned earlier, that proposes scrapping 401(k)s to save Social Security.

For the final words on America’s 50-year-old retirement plans, let’s go back roughly 250 years to the French philosopher Voltaire. To paraphrase, never let the perfect (pensions) be the enemy of the good (IRAs and all their brethren).

• This article originally appeared in The New York Daily NewsFacebookTwitter

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Gerald E. Scorse helped pass a bill that tightens the rules for reporting capital gains. He usually writes on taxes. Gerald can be reached at: scorse@gmail.com. Read other articles by Gerald.

 

The Weaponization of Health Care and Education is Incompatible with Democracy

by David Penner / June 10th, 2024

Terror: noun
ter· ror ˈter-ər  ˈte-rər
plural: terrors

Violence or the threat of violence used as a weapon of intimidation or coercion

— Merriam-Webster, 1828

While the Western elites continue to pour money and materiel into their terrorist proxies in Kiev and Tel Aviv American society is grappling under the iron heel of a different kind of siege. Indeed, two of the deadliest truncheons in Washington’s war on the American people are the weaponization of heath care and the weaponization of education. The hijacking of these two indispensable institutions by demonic corporate forces is antithetical to democracy and has played a critical role in spawning this anarchic dark age of neoliberal barbarism.

In any civilized society it must be accepted as self-evident that good public health care and education are rights and not privileges. Once these two institutions fall under the aegis of the latter democracy is no longer sustainable. As it is presently constructed, American education exists to cultivate indentured servitude through the generation of student loan debt (currently in excess of 1.7 trillion dollars) while relentlessly fomenting philistinism, tribalism, blind obedience, consumerism, overspecialization, Zionism, biofascism, humanitarian interventionism, Russophobia, unfettered capitalism, the cult of careerism and the myth of the meritocracy.

As Samuel Beckett warned in Gnome, the growing utilitarian trend in education portends a profoundly ominous future:

Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.

Without an education system anchored in the humanities students are increasingly raised in a culturally, intellectually, and morally impoverished world where nothing is valued except money and one’s career.

The multicultural curriculum and identity studies have usurped the position of the humanities and constitute an anti-humanities curriculum, as the foundational building blocks of America’s heritage are now routinely vilified as “racist,” a ruse for the cultivation of extreme forms of anti-intellectualism and sectarianism. However, just as a broken clock is right once during the day, the neoliberal obsession with “white supremacy” has backfired with regards to the Zionist entity, as in this particular instance this is, in fact, a classic case of white supremacy where an authoritarian settler colonial regime relentlessly oppresses natives of color.

One of the most striking aspects of the multicultural society is the prevalence with which one encounters Americans with prestigious degrees who can speak at length about a highly specialized thing in the visual arts, performing arts, medicine, academia, STEM, or finance yet are incapable of seeing the forest for the trees outside of their narrow area of focus. This phenomenon is readily observed with physicians who can speak tirelessly about a subspecialty such as brain tumors or hematology without having even the most rudimentary understanding of the deplorable state of informed consent and the absence of single-payer, let alone the Ukraine war, or the recent wars in Libya, Syria, or Yugoslavia. This transforms what was once a reasonably educated middle class into an army of technocratic automatons.

I once attended a wedding during the George W. Bush years and bumped into an acquaintance who was working as a corporate lawyer at the time. The Military Commissions Act had recently been passed and I asked him what he thought of it, to which he replied, “I haven’t been following it.” This is someone who has degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Chicago. Lamentably, overspecialized sociopaths with the most advanced degrees that are operating intellectually at the level of a kindergartner has become an integral feature of neoliberal America.

That the most indoctrinated Americans often have the most elite degrees should come as no surprise if we acknowledge the fact that blind obedience is extolled and rewarded while the humanities and critical thinking are relentlessly heaped with scorn, ridicule, and contempt. The violence that has been meted out to the anti-Zionist college protestors, often with the full support of their universities to which they pay obscene tuitions, underscores academia’s disdain for the peasantry and these brave students that have heretically strayed from their ideologically designated reservations.

Between the destruction of the humanities, horrendous overcrowding, and the loss of any semblance of discipline the inner city public schools have been degraded to the point where many of these schools function more as juvenile detention centers rather than centers of learning. Upon arriving at the front gate students routinely encounter metal detectors and armed guards. How can “education” take place in such an environment? It is no coincidence that these schools invariably fail to teach their students classes in civics.

Increasingly, American youth are immersed in an appalling environment of moral degradation, nihilism, and historical erasure, a prison of the soul where students are inculcated with the pernicious idea that success can only be measured with regards to dollars and cents leading to a dissolution of reason and compassion, without which a human being is nothing more than a burned-out husk, an amorphous phantom in the night.

Deleterious health outcomes and serious socio-economic problems tied to a lack of a humane nationalized health care system include millions of medical bankruptcies, patients postponing care they cannot afford, an ever-present fear of losing one’s job and one’s insurance along with it, Americans trapped in toxic marriages where one spouse is dependent on the other for their health insurance, doctors taking money and gifts from drug companies leading to an erosion of informed consent, the regulatory capture of health care agencies and medical journals by pharmaceutical companies, patients forced to work with doctors they do not wish to work with, Medicaid patients that are not allowed to earn more than a few thousand dollars per year, a deranged system of hundreds of different health insurance plans exacerbating alienation and atomization, millions of Americans that are compelled to abandon their health insurance each year as their jobs and incomes change leading to incessant disruptions in doctor-patient relationships and patients that are suddenly unable to obtain medicines indispensable to their well-being.

Regarding this last point: try talking to almost any American doctor about your fear of losing your insurance or of being chronically under-insured. You are speaking with someone who is living on another planet, as they are accustomed to always having one of the very finest plans, rendering the world in which the average American inhabits utterly alien to them. Can a country with such extreme forms of inequality even be called a real society?

One of my high school classmates has become the director of one of the biggest human rights NGOs, and I see her posting Russophobic propaganda on Twitter from time to time. The point here is that her keeping this prestigious position is contingent on her parroting whatever the mass media says. Who in such a coveted job wants to learn all about the Banderite putsch and the siege of the Donbass, start openly questioning NATO designs in Eastern Europe, and then lose a great income along with one of the best health insurance plans? The same could be said of the doctors who intuitively sensed that “the science” behind the Branch Covidian coup was nonsense, but were afraid to risk their jobs which they need to pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans while maintaining their excellent health care coverage. In neoliberal America, the line between “success” and selling hot dogs in Central Park is very fine indeed.

The perversion and defilement of these two healing professions, so vital to solidarity, knowledge, and the cultivation of the human spirit into instruments of subjugation and control has destroyed any semblance of a humane society and serves to further terrorize a population already reeling from grievous assaults on the First Amendment and bodily autonomy, along with a catastrophic crisis of household debt.

It is noteworthy that the authorities in Donetsk and Lugansk maintained nationalized health and education systems during their eight year war with the Banderite junta prior to the Russian military intervention, and this was achieved at a time when they existed in an existential no man’s land, being neither a part of Russia nor Ukraine. This deep state hijacking of education and health care, institutions which have been crying out for nationalization for decades, is indicative of a ruling class that has abdicated any sense of social responsibility towards its citizens.

Ultimately, American health care and education are not run by incompetents but by rapacious and despotic oligarchic forces. That these hallowed institutions have been transformed into tools of oppression is a monstrous demonstration of their barbarism. The horrors this has unleashed threaten civilization itself.Facebook

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

The Hydropower Industry Is Facing an Existential Threat

Felicity Bradstock - Jun 09, 2024, 


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• Droughts linked to climate change are reducing water flow in rivers and reservoirs, causing significant drops in hydropower production worldwide.
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• Countries heavily reliant on hydropower, like China, Canada, and those in the Middle East and Africa, face potential energy shortages if droughts become more frequent.
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• The decline of hydropower highlights the need for a more diverse energy mix that includes alternative renewable energy sources to ensure reliable electricity generation.

Clean hydropower is produced in several parts of the world with around 60 percent coming from China, Brazil, the United States, Canada, Russia, India, Norway, Venezuela, Sweden, and Japan. Now, more countries want to exploit their hydropower potential as governments worldwide push for a green transition. However, the industry faces a multitude of challenges, mainly associated with climate change. Recent periods of drought in several countries around the globe have driven down hydropower production rates and threaten future output.

Hydropower is one of the oldest forms of renewable energy production. It uses the flow of water to power a generator and produce electricity. Companies traditionally place hydroelectric power plants on or near a water source. The volume of the water flow and the change in elevation from one point to another determines the amount of energy available in moving water. The greater the flow of water or the greater the elevation change the greater the quantity of electricity that can be produced.

There are two types of conventional hydropower operations. The first is the run-of-the-river system, which relies on the force of the river’s currents to power a turbine. Some of these operations use a weir to divert the water towards the turbines. The second is the storage system, which uses reservoirs created by dams on streams and rivers to collect water that can then be released through turbines, providing a high level of pressure. Pumped-storage hydropower facilities are an example of a less conventional hydropower system where water is pumped from the source to a storage reservoir higher up. The water can then be released from an upper reservoir to hydro turbines below. However, this process requires more electricity than conventional facilities. 

The amount of available water greatly affects hydropower production. For example, the quantity of rainwater that drains into rivers and streams in any particular area determines the amount of water available for hydropower production. This varies by season and can also shift long-term as precipitation patterns change. Droughts, therefore, can have an extremely negative impact on hydropower production.

The energy analyst Ember believes around 8.5 percent of hydroelectricity generation loss is associated with droughts. This is most common in China, which accounted for around three-quarters of the global decline last year. China is the largest producer of hydroelectricity in the world in terms of capacity. The U.S. also experienced a six percent reduction in hydropower output last year. The U.S. Energy Information Agency said that it was largely due to “above-normal temperatures” rapidly melting the snow in the northwest of the country, where most hydroelectricity is generated. Although drought conditions improved in California, which helped it boost production levels. 

As hydropower production has been falling in Canada it has become more reliant on the U.S. for energy imports, with U.S. electricity exports to Canada reaching their highest level since 2010 in March this year. A recent decrease in the amount of rain and snow in Canada has driven down production at its hydropower plants. While some are hopeful that this is a temporary phenomenon, climate experts believe that it could be owing to a long-term shift in weather patterns due to climate change. Chris O’Riley, the CEO of the British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority, stated, “We’ve all got to be humble in the face of more extreme weather… We manage from year to year the ups and downs of water, and when we have the downs like we’re having, the lower levels, it’s common for us to import power, and we expect to continue that this year.” Large hydroelectric facilities were once considered a stable source of electricity. However, in recent years, low reservoirs in California, around Hoover Dam and recently in Canada have made hydropower electricity production less certain. 

The Middle East is experiencing a long-term decline in hydropower capacity due to widespread drought. The Euphrates-Tigris River basin is one of the fastest-drying regions on earth, meaning that both agriculture and electricity production in Turkey, Syria and Iraq are being hit hard. There has been around a 25 percent decrease in electricity generation at three hydropower dams in Turkey over the last 30 years. Dursun Yildiz, the president of the Turkish NGO the Hydropolitics Association, explained, the diminishing precipitation and snowfall is linked to climate change, and will ultimately lead to a 30 to 40 percent reduction in Euphrates River flows by the end of the century. 

Meanwhile, in the African region, hydropower is the largest source of renewable energy on the continent, contributing almost one-quarter of the total electricity generation in sub-Saharan Africa. Several countries are more at risk than when it comes to a decrease in hydropower generation due to climate change, as they have few alternative energy sources available. These include the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda, Zambia, Mozambique and Sierra Leone. This demonstrates the severe need for the development of a more diverse energy mix across the continent. 

There is significant potential to develop more hydropower in several regions of the world, particularly in Africa. However, the worsening effects of climate change are threatening the previously reliable renewable energy source. If droughts happen more frequently, those countries affected will have a reduced hydropower capacity, meaning they may come to rely on alternative energy sources or energy imports from other countries. 

By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com