Widening War

Israel has expanded the war in the Mideast by bombing the center of the the city of Beirut. The Biden Administration's first response was to reaffirm the US's total commitment to Israel, citing the tired and weary "right defend itself" argument. The only problem is that a high proportion of those from whom Israel seems to be defending itself are children and other civilians. (Israel is now bombing Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen, as well as killing an increasing number of West Bank residents, not to mention American journalists)

The Administration's other response was to announce that the US would be enhancing its military presence in the Mideast. Hurray for Forever Wars. (Remember that Biden's pick for Secretary of Defense is from Raytheon, one of our bigger war profiteers.) I have been reading story after story over the past year in main stream media about how Biden is trying to keep this from spreading to a region-wide war. This, of course, is total bullshit. Israel wants such a war. Not only is he doing nothing to contain it; the US continues to fund the genocide and carnage, with no strings.

The United States--and most disturbingly the Democratic Party--is absolutely complicit in this. I don't even want to hear about how it would be worse if Trump were president. He's not president, but as far as our Mideast policy is concerned, he might as well be. Absent some sort of strong statement from Kamala Harris, I can't vote for her.

 

Short Post about Our Most Important Ally

I keep hearing how Israel is our most important and dearest ally. Here's the script:

US to Israel: We need a ceasefire in Lebanon (and Gaza).

Israel to US: Fuck you.

US to Israel: Here's another $8.3 billion.

Some ally. (Not to mention almost no support for our Ukraine policy.)

In the News

• Waiting for the Biden administration's statement on Israel's closing of Aljazeera in the West Bank. Maybe also from the faux free-speech warriors like Bari Weiss. Maybe Biden's Press Secretary who said anti-genocide protesters were antisemitic will have something to say. Crickets.
  
• Another mass shooting, in Birmingham. Just remember, this is the America that the Supreme Court wants. (They also believe the Founders wanted it this way.)
  
• The Biden administration continues its lurch to the right and its incresing Cold War with China. Now they're talking about banning Chinese cars over the fear that they might be spying on Americans. Hey guess what? American car companies (not to mention every single US tech company) is already spying on Americans and selling the info to data brokers without consequence. Seems kind of a phony issue.
• Reported in today's Guardian: "Seven people have been killed after an Israeli airstrike hit a school housing displaced people in western Gaza City, Palestinian health officials said, amid fears that Gaza’s worsening humanitarian crisis might be forgotten as tensions boil between Hezbollah and Israel." I am sure that is Netanyahu's strategy: widen the war to draw attention away from his genocide. 
    

Pessimism on the Last Day of Summer

• Biden and Trump are in total agreement on Gaza (and until I hear something to the contrary from Harris, I will assume she is also in agreement). The only difference is that Biden pretends to care about Palestinians. Who's being more honest here?
• Why are these pager explosion murders by Israel not treated like the terrorist attack that it is? Instead, it's treated like some clever trick and entirely acceptable.
• I just read the transcript of an interesting discussion in the online edition of n+1. One of the participants raised the question of why didn't they carve out a section of Germany or Italy or France to form the country of Israel? After all, that's where the actual Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust lived and operated.
• It's pretty clear that Netanyahu's goal is to embroil itself and the US in a war over the entire Mideast.

 

 

Nothing New under the Sun

What's new today? Nothing much. Doesn't seem to matter who is in the White House or Congress, 80-90% of things is this country don't change.

Before Obamacare, the US had the worst healthcare in the world. After Obamacare, it's a little less horrible but still the worst in the world.

Israel has now killed over 41,000 Palestinians (certainly an undercount) and the sitting Democratic president is all in. The money and weapons continue to flow uninterrupted. Some people among the inner circle of Democrats assure us that all that will change if Kamala is elected but that's bullshit. She invited a bunch of Republicans and a crazy-ass sheriff to speak at the Democratic Convention, but vetoed an elected Democratic legislator from doing the same. The big donors are in full support of the genocide and that's who decides. Both parties are controlled by rich people, just different ones. Harris has said almost nothing about what her policy would be in Gaza or the West Bank. The Dems have shown zero empathy, much less solidarity, with the anti-genocide protesters. (Cornel West is the only presidential candidate I know of who has. He was actually there among the protesters.) Establishment Democrats have actually gone out of their way to label people oppsed to genocide as antisemitic. (Might as well lock arms with Elise Stefanik.)

Border and immigration policy is essentially unchanged from Trump, the Dems just speak more softly about it, but the policy is just as cruel. Our idiotic Cuba policy is the same as before Biden came into office. Israel and Saudi Arabia assassinate American journalists. Neither Trump nor Biden have held anyone accountable.

We get lectures from the centrists and the Hillary Clintons of the world about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Well, that's the reason we end up with crappy policies like those above. If a Trump presidency would be dangerous (and I agree that it would), that's all the more reason to do more than say "I'm not Trump".

Reprise of a Couple Quotes

Here are a couple quotes from some old posts. Some favorutes of mine worth revisiting every now and then

 First one was written in the 1930s, published in the early 1940s:

"A civilization which for any reason puts a human life at a disadvantage; or a civilization which can exist only by putting human life at a disadvantage; is worthy neither of the name nor of continuance. And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea."

James Agee,  Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Written in the 1930s but could just as well describe today's 1%: 

"For these men were all the victims of an occupational disease--a kind of mass hypnosis that denied to them the evidence of their senses.  It was a monstrous and ironic fact that the very men who had created this world in which every value was false and theatrical saw themselves, not as creatures tranced by fatal illusions, but rather as the most knowing, practical, and hard-headed men alive.  They did not see themselves as gamblers, obsessed by their own fictions of speculation, but as brilliant executives of great affairs who at every moment of the day 'had their fingers on the pulse of the nation.' So when they looked about them and saw nothing but the myriad shapes of privilege, dishonesty, and self-interest, they were convinced that this was inevitably 'the way things are."

Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

 

Re: Open Borders

Quote from an excellent book review in "The Nation" about how American/European policies have created the so-called border crises around the world. The example cited is probably quite typical.

This “pernicious and paradoxical concoction of both limitlessness and strict limits” can be clearly seen, Washington [the book's author] argues, in the “bizarre disruption of the tomato industries between Italy and Ghana.” Ghana is one of the world’s largest importers of tomato paste, with the imports increasing over 1,000 percent between 1996 and 2015. But prior to this stunning rise, Ghana was home to a large, stable tomato industry. So what happened? “Free trade” happened. The rapid destruction of Ghana’s tomato industry came “after the World Trade Organization (WTO) pushed Ghana…to dramatically lower import tariffs,” which opened “space for subsidized foreign vegetables to decimate the local industry.” The structural adjustment forced Ghanaian farmers to seek work elsewhere, many in Italy. These farmers who once grew tomatoes in Ghana now grew them in Italy, to be shipped back home to further erode the country’s domestic agricultural market. Many of these migrants, Washington notes, “live in segregated clusters of shacks outside of towns where they have limited or no access to running water, electricity, or health care.”

The gutting of the Ghanaian tomato industry not only resulted in the expansion of the Italian and Chinese markets (the two main exporters of canned tomatoes to Ghana) into new territory, but also, and equally as important, resulted in a fresh supply of cheap, hyper-exploitable labor in the form of dispossessed and unemployed Ghanaian farmers. This “modern form of peonage,” as Washington calls it, depends on the harsh enforcement of the border system for its functioning: Workers from the Global South who migrate to the Global North in search of opportunity, like the Ghanaian tomato farmers, are kept in check by the threat of deportation, “shackled to their work permits, which bosses can use as a form of blackmail.”

 

 

Mid-Month Miscellany

• They talk about--and rightly so--big universities really being hedge funds (and money launderers for that matter) who happen to own a college. Something similar can be said for sports channels like ESPN: they have beccome gambling businesses that happen to show sporting events now and then.
• It's hard to fathom why Biden-Harris move so hard to the right on fracking and pursuing a cold war with China and going MAGA on the border in order to appeal to some imaginary Republican crossovers; and at the same time going out of their way to antagonize their actual voters by supporting genocide in Gaza and labeling those who protest it as antisemitic.
• It's worth noting that Israel--characterized by both Parties as our most important ally--has been at best a tepid supporter of American policy in Ukraine. Seems like this alliance is mostly a one-way deal.
• The brazenness of Trump's (and JD Vance's) racism vis-a-vis Haitian (legal) immigrants in Ohio is not surprising. The mainstream media's hohum-ness about it is more surprising (although less so than it should be).

 

 

Friday the 13th

Not much new in the Gaza front. So far, Kamala Harris has reiterated her support for America's arming of Israel's genocide. Lots of blah blah blah about Israel's right to defend itself. (Apparently, lots of dead children are necessary to accomplish this "defense".)

I very much want to vote for Harris. But she has not in any way signaled any departure from Biden's policy. Even the murder of an American citizen is deemed as a necessary component of Israel "defending itself". The administration's reaction to this murder is basically, "Oh well, accidents happen."

In my mind, the most important issue of 2024 is the ongoing genocide in Gaza (which is also spilling into the West Bank). On this issue, Biden gets a solid F, and so far Harris shares that F. I am tired of the voter scolds basically telling me that in order to keep Donald Trump out of the White House, it is necessary to support Netanyahu, who is just Israel's version of Donald Trump. The Dems need to do better, If the election was today my vote would go to Cornel West. Harris still has time to change my mind.

A Good Rule of Thumb

 A good rule of thumb on leading one's life with empathy for others: