I canceled my Washington Post subscription Friday evening. Jeff Bezos, Mister “Democracy Dies In Darkness” (the Post’s slogan on their masthead), by blocking his editorial staff from endorsing Harris chose darkness over his nation’s future, and I can’t support that.
The big mistake John D. Rockefeller made back in the day—that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk appear committed to not repeating—was not buying a media outlet like a newspaper. Had John D. had that sort of a vehicle to mold public opinion, American history may be very different.
By 1880, Rockefeller’s Ohio-based company controlled over 90 percent of the nation’s oil, owned 4000 miles of pipelines, and employed over 100,000 people. As Rockefeller’s oil empire got larger and larger, eating alive hundreds of smaller operations, ruthlessly driving up prices, destroying his competitors, and throwing workers out of a job, public outrage grew.
In 1887, Ohio sued him, arguing that he was operating in ways that were detrimental to the state and its citizens and businesses; in 1892 the Ohio Supreme Court ordered his company dissolved. As I lay out in detail in Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People,” this led Rockefeller to move Standard Oil to New Jersey after that state changed its corporation laws to allow for his monopolistic behavior.
Which brought in the federal government; in 1890, Ohio Senator John Sherman introduced and saw passed into law the Sherman Anti-Trust Act which provided not just fines but jail sentences against people like Rockefeller who were committed to destroying competition and owning entire markets. The law was flawed with a few loopholes and ambiguities, so it was amended in 1914 with the Clayton Anti-Trust Act.
Nonetheless, in 1906 progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt’s administration filed an antitrust action against Rockefeller that went to the Supreme Court in 1911 during the administration of progressive Republican President William Howard Taft. The behemoth was broken up into 34 separate companies, an action that, like the breakup of AT&T by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, led to an explosion of competition in the marketplace and a dramatic increase in shareholder value.
But back to Jeff Bezos and his 2013 purchase of The Washington Post.
It was reporters and editors for the hundreds of independent newspapers during the First Gilded Age (1880-1900) era that led the crusades against Rockefeller and his fellow monopolists. Investigative journalism was all the rage then, and it fed public demand for a return to competition and the de-throning of that age’s oligarchs.
The vast majority of workers were struggling and they worked for a very small 10 percent of the population who controlled most of the nation’s wealth (a situation we’re at again).
The result was constant strife, strikes, and the murder of labor leaders; entire towns were in arms (and sometimes ablaze) with labor conflict. The “problem of labor”was the number one issue of the day. As President Grover Cleveland — the only Democrat elected during that period — proclaimed in his 1887 State of the Union address:
“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”
There was a broad consensus across American society that those “Robber Barons” were feathering their own nests at the expense of the American public, hurting both working class people and small businesses. The Supreme Court endorsed breaking up Standard Oil in 1911, and even broke up the Associated Press in 1944.
The law was so rigorously enforced — so the game of business could be played by all comers, not just the “big boys” — that in the 1960s the Supreme Court barred the merger of the Kinney and Buster Brown shoe companies because the new combined company would control a mere 5 percent of the shoe market.
Back in the ’60s every mall and downtown in America was filled with small, locally-owned businesses; there might be a Sears to anchor the shopping center or a retail part of town, but most shops, restaurants, and hotels were family-owned.
But then Reagan, in 1983, ordered the DOJ, SEC, and FTC to stop enforcing the Sherman Act, which is why today Nike, for example, controls about a fifth of the entire nation’s shoe market. It’s the same across industry after industry, from retail to grocery stores to railroads to computer software to social media to chip manufacturing to airlines to hotels…and on and on. In virtually every industry, a handful of massive companies control 80 percent or more of the market.
The Biden administration is the first to seriously try enforcement of the nation’s anti-trust laws since Carter broke up AT&T, going after Google and blocking mergers in multiple industries. It’s led a bunch of American billionaires to demand that the Federal Trade Commission’s head, Lina Kahn, be fired.
Kahn and her FTC went after Bezos last year, suing Amazon for running a monopoly that price-gouges customers and blocks out competition. The trial is scheduled for 2026 if Kahn keeps her job; a Trump administration would fire her immediately, and pressure from major corporate donors and billionaires is building on Harris to do the same.
Bezos also must remember well when he got on the wrong side of then-President Trump because of the Post’s coverage of the orange oligarch’s lies and crimes; Trump, in a fit of pique, awarded a $10 billion Pentagon contract for cloud computing to Microsoft, shocking analysts across the industry.
Bezos is also working for his Blue Origin spaceship company to get more billions in NASA and Pentagon contracts. He and his companies also own billions in Google and AirBNB stock as well as owning outright almost a hundred other companies.
Might be a good time to own one of the two most influential newspapers in America, eh?
— Tesla is fighting the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over union-related issues, with Musk taking a lawsuit to the Supreme Court alleging government protections of unions are unconstitutional. — SpaceX is battling the NLRB over employee firings. — The SEC is investigating Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) and his “funding secured” tweets about taking Tesla private. — The FTC is investigating X’s compliance with a $150 million privacy settlement. — The Federal Communications Commission recently denied SpaceX’s Starlink a $886 million rural broadband award. — The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing Tesla over alleged racial harassment. — The FAA is in conflict with SpaceX over launch licensing and environmental reviews. — The EPA has fined SpaceX for water-related violations. — The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened multiple investigations into Tesla’s vehicle safety and Autopilot system. — SpaceX faces scrutiny over its environmental impact at its Texas launch site.
To avoid the Rockefeller mistake, Musk — with the apparent help of two Russian oligarchs and the leader of Saudi Arabia — purchased Twitter, the online digital equivalent of our nation’s largest newspaper.
And he’s now using it to try to get Trump and Republicans into office, presumably so they can gut the FTC, FCC, SEC, NLRB, and any other regulator that might take him on to protect workers, the public, and the national interest.
We took on the superrich with success during the First Gilded Age, and our enforcement of antitrust laws lasted all the way to 1983, when Reagan blocked them, leading to the “merger mania” of the 1980s and bringing us today’s oligarchic business empires across multiple industries.
Now that we’re in America’s Second Gilded Age — with today’s billionaires vastly richer than Rockefeller’s wildest dreams — we confront a similar crossroads to that of previous generations.
Is it okay, for example, for billionaires to own media properties they can use to manipulate politics and government agencies to amplify their other business interests? Or that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have ruled that our morbidly rich plutocrats can own judges and politicians? Most Americans would probably say “No” to both.
At some point, America is going to have to confront its oligarch problem. And the sooner the better, if we don’t want darkness to entirely subsume our democracy.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
By Brett Wilkins, used with permission from Common Dreams
As the Biden administration pushes Congress to approve an additional $18 billion arms sale to Israel even as it wages what much of the international community considers a genocidal war against the people of Gaza, Palestine defenders on Friday urged U.S. senators to support an effort by Sen. Bernie Sanders to block weapons transfers to the key Middle Eastern ally.
The Biden administration is urging congressional lawmakers to sign off on the sale of a package involving as many as 50 McDonnell Douglas F-15 fighters, as well as munitions, training, and other support, to Israel. The sale cleared a key hurdle last month when two holdouts—Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), the ranking Democratic member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), the top Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrat—agreed to support the transfer.
If given final approval, the sale would be one of the largest to Israel since it began its nine-month assault on Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas-led October 7 attacks. More than 137,500 Palestinians have been killed, maimed, or left missing by Israel’s onslaught, which is the subject of both an International Court of Justice genocide case and International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan’s bid to arrest Israeli and Hamas leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas Chief Yahya Sinwar.
The Biden administration has approved billions of dollars in U.S. military aid and more than 100 arms sales to Israel since October. This, atop the nearly $4 billion Israel already got from Washington annually.
“While much of the media is focused on the drama of the U.S. presidential election, we must not lose sight of what is happening in Gaza, where an unprecedented humanitarian crisis continues to get even worse,” Sanders said Friday.
“Nine months into this war, more than 38,000 people have been killed and 88,000 injured—60% of whom are women, children, or elderly. The full toll is likely higher, with thousands more buried beneath the rubble,” he continued. “Nine in 10 Gazans—1.9 million people—have been driven from their homes.”
“Many people have been displaced four or five times, and most do not have homes to return to, with more than 60% of residential buildings damaged or destroyed,” he added.
“Israel continues to restrict the entry of [United Nations] humanitarian aid trucks into Gaza, prevent the entry of key humanitarian items, and obstruct aid workers’ access to many areas,” the senator noted. “These restrictions have prevented aid organizations from setting up a sustained, effective response.”
Sanders stressed:
Yet, in the midst of this horror and violations of international law, the United States continues to send billions of dollars and thousands of bombs and other weapons to support this war. We, as Americans, are complicit.
We must end our support for Netanyahu’s war. Not another nickel to make this horrific situation even worse. I intend to do everything I can to block further arms transfers to Israel, including through joint resolutions of disapproval of any arms sales. The United States must not help a right-wing extremist and war criminal continue this atrocity.
Palestine defenders backed Sanders’ effort.
“Every single senator should be supporting Sen. Sanders upcoming joint resolution of disapproval against an $18 billion weapons giveaway to Israel, which would further enmesh and implicate the U.S. in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” Institute for Middle East Understanding policy director Josh Ruebner said on social media.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
By C.J. Polychroniou, Common Dreams, Used with Permission
If we are to expect the frustrated and badly battered working-class people to turn their backs on the false promises of the far right and join instead the struggle for a more humane order based on socialist ideals and values, we need to take winning hearts and minds much more seriously.
For radical socialists, one of the most frustrating political experiences in the post-Cold War era is witnessing the dramatic deterioration of socio-economic conditions throughout the developed world and, at the same time, the failure of the Left narrative to convince the citizenry about the root causes of the problems at hand and that alternative socio-economic arrangements are in turn urgently needed. This is a paradox that open-minded radical socialists should not be hesitant to confront. A critical examination of the failure of the Left narrative to make inroads with the laboring classes in contemporary capitalist society is a must if the political pendulum is to swing back from conservative control.
The Left has always offered solid critiques about the state of capitalism. Armed with a class-driven perspective (“the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”) which has become increasingly complemented by a multi-level analysis that also brings into play the role of race, gender, culture and ethnicity, the Left narrative about the nature of the problems facing contemporary capitalist societies has no equal among politico-economic discourses. It explains economic inequality on the basis of the dynamics of a profit-driven system geared toward serving almost exclusively the interests of the dominant classes instead of treating it as an outcome of individual failures (the right-wing version of economic inequality); understands racism as a force of its own, instead of trying to sweep it under the carpet as the Right does, but also recognizes that it’s continuation in present-day society is a consequence of specific institutional arrangements and both implicit and explicit biases; and advocates a succession of policies that aim toward the attainment of the common good instead of catering to the needs and interests of a tiny coterie of corporate and financial elites as conservative policies tend to do.
The Left narrative is intellectually rigorous but also couched in deeply humanistic terms. Since the French Revolution, the Left worldview has always been one that values the common good over narrowly defined private interests, progress over tradition, democracy over authoritarian rule. As such, it favors cooperation over competition, solidarity over rugged individualism, and science over religion and superstition. It is of little surprise, therefore, that the world’s greatest intellectuals, artists and writers in the modern age — from Victor Hugo to Arturo Toscanini and from Pablo Picasso to Jean Paul Sartre — have been to the left of the political spectrum. Indeed, in a continent where ideas have always been taken very seriously, one of the great grievances among 20th century European conservatives was over the fact that so few artists and intellectuals were to be found to the right of the ideological spectrum.
Nonetheless, no matter how intellectually and morally powerful it may have been, the Left narrative about the brutal realities of the capitalist system and the alternative values that should be guiding societal development was never the dominant political paradigm. The forces of reaction have always been a formidable opponent, relying both on the ideological and repressive apparatuses of the state to block radical change initiatives. From the brutal suppression of the Paris Commune by French and Prussian troops during the “Bloody Week” (21-28 May 1871), where some 30,000 Communards were killed, to the role of the CIA in promoting anticommunism in Europe in the period immediately following the Second World War to today’s strategic co-optation of once radical groups into mainstream political forces (the German Green Party, Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, to name just a few), the powers that be have almost always found ways to create barriers to radical social transformation.
The Left narrative has also been undermined by the experience of “actually existing socialism.” Socialism, as practiced in the former Soviet Union and its satellite states, was undemocratic and had little tolerance for individual liberties and freedoms. The political system in place actually sabotaged the social, cultural, and economic achievements of “actually existing socialism,” which were in fact quite extensive, and it was a key factor in people turning away from embracing socialism as an alternative socio-economic order.
Formed in the periphery of the global capitalist system, where neither economic nor political development had yet to reach capitalist maturity (Russia was largely an agrarian society that had never before experienced democracy when the Bolsheviks took power in 1917), the type of socialism introduced functioned on the basis of the centralization of economic resources and institutions in the hands of the state and on single party governance. Workers had no say in economic decisions even though they were touted as co-owners of the means of production. This form of system became entrenched in the “motherland” of socialism after Stalin became an autocrat (1929-1953) and remained pretty much intact even during the so-called liberalization period that was ushered in by Nikita Khruschev (1956-1964), while even less changed under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982). In the land of “actually existing socialism,” the rulers possessed no wealth and had no private property of their own but made all the decisions for the rest of society. The USSR was at best a “deformed workers’ state.”
Still, socialist and communist parties in the western world were quite popular with the masses both during the interwar years and for much of the postwar period. Communist parties carried a great deal of influence in trade unions and student movements and socialist parties were in power in numerous European countries after World War II. Indeed, the future did seem to belong to the Left.
All this changed for the worse with the collapse of “actually existing socialism” and the end of the Cold War. Instead of feeling liberated by the collapse of authoritarian state-socialism, the western Left felt a loss of identity and entered a long period of intellectual confusion and political paralysis. Many of its intellectuals abandoned their long-held ideas about socialism and communism and turned instead to mainstream political discourses, while others fell into depression and retreated altogether from political and ideological struggles. Subsequently, postmodern philosophers emerged on the scene who not only challenged the ideals of socialism but, in one of the vilest interventions in the history of intellectual discourse, identified socialism and communism with the crimes of Stalinism. The works of Marx were either ignored or completely distorted. By the mid-1990s, the intellectual paradigm shifted from Marxism and socialism to postmodernism. Media outlets to the very left of the political spectrum saw their readership decline in substantial numbers, and communist parties fell out of favor with intellectuals, workers, and students alike. By the early 2000s, most western communist parties ended up in the dustbin of history while trade unions lost entirely their political character and turned ever more toward economism. The end result was that the vision of socialism suffered a tremendous blow and the Left narrative about capitalism became quite marginalized, having little impact on the laboring populations that were experiencing declining standards of living, growing economic insecurity, and a shrinking social state under the auspices of neoliberalism.
And this is where things still stand today. Socialism remains in deep crisis in the developed world, with the only exception being the United States, the only country in the developed world that doesn’t even have a left-wing political party.
Indeed, in the metropolis of the neoliberal capitalist universe, socialism is enjoying considerable popular support, especially among the youth. For the first time, socialism in the U.S. has ceased being a taboo. Yet, one could argue that some of the political figures most responsible for the rebirth of socialism in the United States (such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders) are not socialists per se and that their fight is on behalf of a light version of European social democracy.
To stress this point further, the progressive struggle in the U.S. is over a series of selected economic and social issues (universal healthcare, student debt elimination, unionization, and defending social security and Medicare) when Europe’s postwar left-wing movements and parties, especially from the 1950s through the mid-1980s, were aiming for nothing less than the radical transformation of the entire capitalist system. Social rights such as free higher education and free healthcare had already been realized in western European countries, thus making the struggle for socialism not issue-oriented but a holistic project. For example, demands for the socialization of the means of production were on top of the political agenda of all radical left parties and organizations in western Europe. The French communist party did not shy away from labelling the socialist revolution and the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as its key strategic objectives. Yet, indicative of how sour things have gone for the socialist project since the end of the Cold War, popular forces in many European countries find themselves today fighting for the mere protection of basic social rights as the wrecking ball of neoliberalism is in full swing, seeking to destroy the last vestiges of the social state.
The Left narrative is failing to convince the bulk of the citizenry in today’s western world not because the analyses advanced about the consequences of neoliberal capitalism are incorrect but because the vision of socialism itself rarely enters the equation. Leftist intellectuals shy away from making a case for socialism. Critiques of neoliberal capitalism are not in themselves a case for the radical transformation of capitalism and its eventual replacement with a socialist socio-economic order. Critiques of neoliberal capitalism without the ideological underpinnings of a socialist vision ingrained into the analysis suggest that there is no alternative to capitalism, only a better version of capitalism. And today’s Left narrative is overwhelmed with critiques of neoliberal capitalism, which are of course very much needed, but remain largely silent about the question of a future beyond capitalism.
If we are to expect the frustrated and badly battered working-class people to turn their backs on the false promises of the far right and join instead the struggle for a more humane order based on socialist ideals and values, then the ideological battle for the minds and hearts of the laboring populations must be resumed. The vision of socialism must return in full force to the public arena. Ideological belief systems matter in politics. They are what motivates people into political action.
There are, however, also systemic factors responsible for the failure of the Left narrative to convince the laboring population in the developed countries. On the one hand, the ideological apparatuses of late capitalism have elevated the art of political apathy to such great heights that they have succeeded in making an increasingly large segment of the citizenry feel totally helpless about the possibility of making a meaningful change through participation in political struggles. At the same time, they are creating the illusion that success and failure are a matter of character, and that self-realization can be attained based on the pursuit of purely self-centered activities rather than through engagement with other human beings in common struggles for a better future for all. Whether it is the entertainment industry or marketing strategies for consumers, the prevailing mode of reference is the “self,” the individual as an isolated unit with “unique” experiences. Social injustices are virtually never brought into light by the system’s ideological apparatuses, including public education which acts under capitalism as a mechanism for creating social consensus around mainstream values and beliefs. The corporatization of higher education, with its overwhelming emphasis on market skills instead of critical pedagogy for the betterment of society and the enhancement of the democratic ethos, has also contributed immensely to the politics of apolitical culture.
On the other hand, the political agencies and the cultural institutions that are needed for the enhancement of working-class consciousness and for activating the Left narrative into action have been extensively weakened and, in some cases, even become extinct. As stated earlier, communist parties in western Europe are mostly gone while their socialist counterparts have moved so far to the right that they are now virtually indistinguishable from Christian Democratic and conservative parties in general. As for today’s radical left parties, they are anything but radical and reflect the ideological confusion that is the hallmark of multiculturalism and the politics of identity. In sum, the working classes in the developed world find themselves today without mass-based political parties that represent the interests of labor. Little wonder then why working-class people are drawn to the far-right as the leaders of those parties claim to be fighting for the primacy of workers’ interests.
Until a few decades ago, the working-class people throughout the developed world could not only rely on mass parties representing specifically their own interests but also had their own cultural institutions whose mission was to foster ideological awareness and forge proletarian culture. Socialist and communist newspapers made an immense contribution to working-class consciousness and raised the level of radicalism. Trade unions performed an equally important role by organizing various educational and social activities that enhanced solidarity. With the collapse of “actually existing socialism” and the onset of a socialist crisis, all working-class institutions experienced a dramatic fallout. In Italy, l’Unità, which had been founded by Antonio Gramsci and was the official newspaper of the Italian Communist Party, went under. In France, the venerable L’Humanité has been struggling for years with financial woes and low circulation. As for workers’ clubs, they are a thing of the past.
In conclusion, the Left narrative, no matter how accurate and intellectually powerful it may be, cannot expect to catch the imagination of the citizenry without including a vision for a real alternative future. Moreover, working-class cultural institutions need to be reinstituted for the enhancement of class consciousness and authentic socialist parties need to be rediscovered for the Left narrative to become politically effective. Social movements are important, but their actions rarely have lasting effects. Only political parties can succeed in forging the Left narrative into the policy agenda and turn it into a programmatic plan for radical social change. Understandably enough, this is quite a tall order, but the Left needs to win once again the hearts and minds of the laboring classes. But it needs the necessary political agencies and cultural instruments to do so. It cannot accomplish it on intellectual grounds alone, especially with the politics of identity acting as a spearhead for social transformation. The Communist Manifesto would have remained just a mere political document if it wasn’t for the existence of radical political parties across the globe to embrace it as their guide and vision for the emancipation of the working class from the yoke of capital.
In conclusion, the Left narrative, no matter how accurate and intellectually powerful it may be, cannot expect to catch the imagination of the citizenry without including a vision for a real alternative future. Moreover, working-class cultural institutions need to be reinstituted for the enhancement of class consciousness and authentic socialist parties need to be rediscovered for the Left narrative to become politically effective. Social movements are important, but their actions rarely have lasting effects. Only political parties can succeed in forging the Left narrative into the policy agenda and turn it into a programmatic plan for radical social change. Understandably enough, this is quite a tall order, but the Left needs to win once again the hearts and minds of the laboring classes. But it needs the necessary political agencies and cultural instruments to do so. It cannot accomplish it on intellectual grounds alone, especially with the politics of identity acting as a spearhead for social transformation. The Communist Manifesto would have remained just a mere political document if it wasn’t for the existence of radical political parties across the globe to embrace it as their guide and vision for the emancipation of the working class from the yoke of capital
The Left has always offered solid critiques about the state of capitalism. Armed with a class-driven perspective (“the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”) which has become increasingly complemented by a multi-level analysis that also brings into play the role of race, gender, culture and ethnicity, the Left narrative about the nature of the problems facing contemporary capitalist societies has no equal among politico-economic discourses. It explains economic inequality on the basis of the dynamics of a profit-driven system geared toward serving almost exclusively the interests of the dominant classes instead of treating it as an outcome of individual failures (the right-wing version of economic inequality); understands racism as a force of its own, instead of trying to sweep it under the carpet as the Right does, but also recognizes that it’s continuation in present-day society is a consequence of specific institutional arrangements and both implicit and explicit biases; and advocates a succession of policies that aim toward the attainment of the common good instead of catering to the needs and interests of a tiny coterie of corporate and financial elites as conservative policies tend to do.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Last year, my client Susan called me to discuss her immigration case.
During our conversation she referenced the news that immigrants were being bused from the southern border to cities in the North, often under false promises, only to be left stranded in an unknown city.
In confusion and fear, Susan asked me: “Why do they hate us so much?”
While I couldn’t answer Susan’s question, her underlying concern highlights a startling escalation of public aggression against migrants over the past year.
Many outlets describe recent migration through the Americas as a “flood,” “influx,” “wave,” or “surge”—language that reinforces the notion that migration is akin to an imminent, uncontrollable, and destructive natural disaster.
There seems to be a growing “us” versus “them” mentality towards immigrants. This divisive language serves no purpose other than to divide our country, undermine the legal right to seek asylum in the United States, and cultivate a fear of the most vulnerable.
A clear example is showcased in recent media coverage of northbound migration across the U.S.-Mexico border. Many outlets describe recent migration through the Americas as a “flood,” “influx,” “wave,” or “surge”—language that reinforces the notion that migration is akin to an imminent, uncontrollable, and destructive natural disaster.
Woven into this framing is the near-constant use of the term “illegal” or “unlawful” to describe unauthorized crossings. As an advocate for immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual violence, and trafficking, I’m alarmed by the use of this language to describe a migrant’s attempt to survive.
Moreover, it’s often simply incorrect. A non-citizen who has a well-founded fear of persecution in the country from which they’ve fled has a legal right—protected under both U.S. and international law—to enter the United States to seek asylum.
When mainstream media wield the term “illegal” as though it were synonymous with “unauthorized,” they misinform readers and falsely paint asylum seekers as criminals.
Worse still, they encourage politicians who call immigrants themselves “illegals,” a deeply dehumanizing term. And the more dehumanizing language we use, the more likely it is that we will see immigrants as the “other” to justify cruel immigration policies.
We must retire the use of this inflammatory rhetoric, which distracts from real solutions that would actually serve survivors arriving at our borders.
Migrants expelled back to their home countries are at grave risk of severe harm or death at the hands of their persecutors. Those forced to remain in Mexico as they await entry to the United States are increasingly vulnerable to organized crime or abusive and dangerous conditions in detention.
The words we use in everyday discourse mean something—they can spell out life or death for those among us who are most vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Now more than ever, I’d urge the public and the media to retire the use of sensationalizing, stigmatizing, and misleading imagery and rhetoric surrounding immigration.
Now is the time to apply accuracy and humanity in our depictions of migrants. Let’s not repeat the errors of our past.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
“It is time,” President Biden announced in April 2021, “to end the forever war” that started with the invasion of Afghanistan soon after the tragic terror attacks on this country on September 11, 2001. Indeed, that August, amid chaos and disaster, the president did finally pull the last remaining U.S. forces out of that country.
A year and a half later, it’s worth reflecting on where the United States stands when it comes to both that forever war against terrorism and war generally. As it happens, the war on terror is anything but ended, even if it’s been overshadowed by the war in Ukraine and simmering conflicts around the globe, all too often involving the United States. In fact, it now seems as if this country is moving at breakneck speed out of the era of Forever War and into what might be thought of as the era of Eternal War.
Granted, it’s hard even to keep track of the potential powder kegs that seem all too ready to explode across the globe and are likely to involve the U.S. military in some fashion. Still, at this moment, perhaps it’s worth running through the most likely spots for future conflict.
In Ukraine, as each week passes, the United States only seems to ramp up its commitment to war with Russia, moving the slim line of proxy warfare ever closer to a head-to-head confrontation between the planet’s two great military powers. Although the plan to avoid a direct confrontation with Russia clearly remains in effect, once taboo forms of support for Ukraine have over time become more acceptable.
As of early March, the United States, one of more than 50 countries offering some form of support, had allocated aid to Ukraine on 33 separate occasions, amounting to more than $113 billion worth of humanitarian, military, and financial assistance. In the process, the Biden administration has agreed to provide increasingly lethal weaponry, including Bradley fighting vehicles, Patriot missile batteries, and Abrams tanks, while pressure for even more powerful weaponry like Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMs) and F-16s is only growing. As a recent Council on Foreign Relations report noted, Washington’s aid to Ukraine “far exceeds” that of any other country.
In recent weeks, the theater of tension with Russia has expanded beyond Ukraine, notably to the Arctic, where some experts see potential for direct conflict between Russia and the U.S., branding that region a “future flashpoint.” Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin recently raised the possibility of storing tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus, perhaps more of a taunt than a meaningful gesture, but nonetheless another point of tension between the two countries.
Leaving Ukraine aside, China’s presence looms large when it comes to predictions of future war with Washington. On more than one occasion, Biden has stated publicly that the United States would intervene if China were to launch an invasion of the island of Taiwan. Tellingly, efforts to fortify the U.S. military presence in the Asia-Pacific region have ratcheted up in recent months.
In February, for example, Washington unveiled plans to strengthen its military presence in the Philippines by occupying bases in the part of that country nearest to Taiwan. All too ominously, four-star Air Force General Mike Minihan went so far as to suggest that this country might soon be at war with China. “I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me [we] will fight in 2025,” he wrote in a memo to the officers he commands in anticipation of a future Chinese move on Taiwan. He also outlined a series of aggressive tactics and weapons training maneuvers in preparation for that day. And the Marines have been outfitting three regiments for a possible future island campaign in the Pacific, while war-gaming such battles in Southern California.
….
Congress seems to be seconding the move from Forever War to Eternal War without significant opposition. In fact, when it comes to funding such a future, its members have been all too enthusiastic. As potential future war scenarios have expanded, so has the Pentagon budget which has grown astronomically over the past two years. In December, President Biden signed the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, which granted the Pentagon an unprecedented $816.7 billion, 8% more than the year before (with Congress upping the White House’s suggested funding by $45 billion).
And the requests for the 2024 budget are now in. As Pentagon expert William Hartung reports, at $886 billion dollars, $69 billion more than this year’s budget, Congress is on a path to enacting “the first $1 trillion package ever,” a development he labels “madness.” “An open-ended strategy,” Hartung explains, “that seeks to develop capabilities to win a war with Russia or China, fight regional wars against Iran or North Korea, and sustain a global war on terror that includes operations in at least 85 countries is a recipe for endless conflict.”
….
Disturbingly, American calls for peace and diplomacy have tended to further embrace the ongoing war. The New York Timeseditorial board, while plugging future peace diplomacy, suggested that only continued warfare could get us to such a place: “[S]erious diplomacy has a chance only if Russia accepts that it cannot bring Ukraine to its knees. And for that to happen, the United States and its allies cannot waver in their support [of Ukraine].” More war and nothing else, the argument goes, will bring peace. The pressure to provide ever more powerful weapons to Ukraine remains constant on both sides of the aisle. As Robert Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee put it, “[T]his approach of ‘more, better, faster’ would give the Ukrainians a real shot at victory.”
Whether in Ukraine, in the brewing tensions of what’s being called a “new cold war” in Asia, or in this country’s never-ending version of the war on terror, we now live in a world where war is ever more accepted as a permanent condition. On the legal, legislative, and military fronts, it has become a mainstay for what passes as national security activity. Some of this, as many critics contend, is driven by economic incentives like lining the pockets of the giant weapons-making corporations to the tune of multibillions of dollars annually; some by what passes for ideological fervor with democracy pitched against autocracy; some by the seemingly never-ending legacy of the war on terror.
Sadly enough, all of this prioritizes killing and destruction over life and true security. In none of it do our leaders seem to be able to imagine reaching any kind of peace without yet more weapons, more violence, more conflicts, and more death.
Who even remembers when the First World War was known as “the war to end all wars”? Sadly, it seems that the era of Eternal War is now upon us. We should at least acknowledge that reality.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. – Matthew 5:9
In a brilliant op-ed published in the New York Times, the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi explained how China, with help from Iraq, was able to mediate and resolve the deeply-rooted conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, whereas the United States was in no position to do so after siding with the Saudi kingdom against Iran for decades. The title of Parsi’s article, “The U.S. Is Not an Indispensable Peacemaker,” refers to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s use of the term “indispensable nation” to describe the U.S. role in the post-Cold War world.
The irony in Parsi’s use of Albright’s term is that she generally used it to refer to U.S. war-making, not peacemaking. In 1998, Albright toured the Middle East and then the United States to rally support for President Clinton’s threat to bomb Iraq. After failing to win support in the Middle East, she wasconfronted by heckling and critical questions during a televised event at Ohio State University, and she appeared on the Today Show the next morning to respond to public opposition in a more controlled setting. Albright claimed, “if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see here the danger to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy, and the American way of life.”
Albright’s readiness to take the sacrifices of American troops for granted had already got her into trouble when she famously asked General Colin Powell, “What’s the use of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Powell wrote in his memoirs, “I thought I would have an aneurysm.”
But Powell himself later caved to the neocons, or the “fucking crazies” as he called them in private, and dutifully read the lies they made up to try to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq to the UN Security Council in February 2003.
For the past 25 years, administrations of both parties have caved to the “crazies” at every turn. Albright and the neocons’ exceptionalist rhetoric, now standard fare across the U.S. political spectrum, leads the United States into conflicts all over the world, in an unequivocal, Manichean way that defines the side it supports as the side of good and the other side as evil, foreclosing any chance that the United States can later play the role of an impartial or credible mediator.
Today, this is true in the war in Yemen, where the U.S. chose to join a Saudi-led alliance that committed systematic war crimes, instead of remaining neutral and preserving its credibility as a potential mediator. It also applies, most notoriously, to the U.S. blank check for endless Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, which doom its mediation efforts to failure. For China, however, it is precisely its policy of neutrality that has enabled it to mediate a peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the same applies to the African Union’s successful peace negotiations in Ethiopia, and to Turkey’s promising mediation between Russia and Ukraine, which might have ended the slaughter in Ukraine in its first two months but for American and British determination to keep trying to pressure and weaken Russia.
But neutrality has become anathema to U.S. policymakers. George W. Bush’s threat, “You are either with us or against us,” has become an established, if unspoken, core assumption of 21st-century U.S. foreign policy. The response of the American public to the cognitive dissonance between our wrong assumptions about the world and the real world they keep colliding with has been to turn inward and embrace an ethos of individualism. This can range from New Age spiritual disengagement to a chauvinistic America First attitude. Whatever form it takes for each of us, it allows us to persuade ourselves that the distant rumble of bombs, albeit mostly American ones, is not our problem.
The U.S. corporate media has validated and increased our ignorance by drastically reducing foreign news coverage and turning TV news into a profit-driven echo chamber peopled by pundits in studios who seem to know even less about the world than the rest of us.
Most U.S. politicians now rise through the legal bribery system from local to state to national politics, and arrive in Washington knowing next to nothing about foreign policy. This leaves them as vulnerable as the public to neocon cliches like the ten or twelve packed into Albright’s vague justification for bombing Iraq: freedom, democracy, the American way of life, stand tall, the danger to all of us, we are America, indispensable nation, sacrifice, American men and women in uniform, and “we have to use force.”
Faced with such a solid wall of nationalistic drivel, Republicans and Democrats alike have left foreign policy firmly in the experienced but deadly hands of the neocons, who have brought the world only chaos and violence for 25 years.
All but the most principled progressive or libertarian members of Congress go along to get along with policies so at odds with the real world that they risk destroying it, whether by ever-escalating warfare or by suicidal inaction on the climate crisis and other real-world problems that we must cooperate with other countries to solve if we are to survive.
It is no wonder that Americans think the world’s problems are insoluble and that peace is unattainable, because our country has so totally abused its unipolar moment of global dominance to persuade us that that is the case. But these policies are choices, and there are alternatives, as China and other countries are dramatically demonstrating. President Lula da Silva of Brazil is proposing to form a “peace club” of peacemaking nations to mediate an end to the war in Ukraine, and this offers new hope for peace.
During his election campaign and his first year in office, President Biden repeatedly promised to usher in a new era of American diplomacy, after decades of war and record military spending. Zach Vertin, now a senior adviser to UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, wrote in 2020 that Biden’s effort to “rebuild a decimated State Department” should include setting up a “mediation support unit… staffed by experts whose sole mandate is to ensure our diplomats have the tools they need to succeed in waging peace.”
Biden’s meager response to this call from Vertin and others was finally unveiled in March 2022, after he dismissed Russia’s diplomatic initiatives and Russia invaded Ukraine. The State Department’s new Negotiations Support Unit consists of three junior staffers quartered within the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. This is the extent of Biden’s token commitment to peacemaking, as the barn door swings in the wind and the four horsemen of the apocalypse – War, Famine, Conquest and Death – run wild across the Earth.
As Zach Vertin wrote, “It is often assumed that mediation and negotiation are skills readily available to anyone engaged in politics or diplomacy, especially veteran diplomats and senior government appointees. But that is not the case: Professional mediation is a specialized, often highly technical, tradecraft in its own right.”
The mass destruction of war is also specialized and technical, and the United States now invests close to a trillion dollars per year in it. The appointment of three junior State Department staffers to try to make peace in a world threatened and intimidated by their own country’s trillion-dollar war machine only reaffirms that peace is not a priority for the U.S. government.
By contrast, the European Union created its Mediation Support Team in 2009 and now has 20 team members working with other teams from individual EU countries. The UN’s Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs has a staff of 4,500, spread all across the world.
The tragedy of American diplomacy today is that it is diplomacy for war, not for peace. The State Department’s top priorities are not to make peace, nor even to actually win wars, which the United States has failed to do since 1945, apart from the reconquest of small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama, and Kuwait. Its actual priorities are to bully other countries to join U.S.-led war coalitions and buy U.S. weapons, to mute calls for peace in international fora, to enforce illegal and deadly coercive sanctions, and to manipulate other countries into sacrificing their people in U.S. proxy wars.
The result is to keep spreading violence and chaos across the world. If we want to stop our rulers from marching us toward nuclear war, climate catastrophe, and mass extinction, we had better take off our blinders and start insisting on policies that reflect our best instincts and our common interests, instead of the interests of the warmongers and merchants of death who profit from war.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
By Jake Johnson, a staff writer for Common Dreams. Used by Permission
Progressive lawmakers on Thursday voiced dismay that President Joe Biden is requesting a nearly $30 billion increase in U.S. military spending just months after the Pentagon failed its fifth consecutive audit, admitting it could not properly account for more than half of its trillions of dollars in assets.
Biden’s budget framework for fiscal year 2024 calls for $886 billion in overall military spending—up from the current level of $858 billion—with $842 billion going to the Pentagon. More than half of the $1.7 trillion of discretionary spending in Biden’s proposal is reserved for the military, which would get $170 billion for weapons procurement and $38 billion for nuke modernization.
Defense Newsreported that the president’s budget would boost spending on “new drones, combat jets, hypersonic missiles, and submarines.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a statement late Thursday that the president’s Pentagon blueprint requests “$26 billion more than Congress allocated in the previous budget—which itself was $63 billion more than the $773 billion the President requested for FY2023.”
“This is a never-ending cycle of increased funds without accountability,” said Jayapal. “There is simply no reason for taxpayers to continue to pay for outrageously high budgets rife with waste, fraud, and abuse. A recent CBO study confirmed that the Pentagon could cut $100 billion per year without compromising on national defense. This is long overdue. Progressives in Congress have been at the frontline of this fight for decades, and we will continue to push for sensible, targeted defense policy that prioritizes our national security over profit-hungry military contractors.”
Given that roughly half of the Pentagon’s annual budget has historically gone to military contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, the National Priorities Project (NPP) noted Thursday that around 25% of Biden’s total discretionary budget would likely wind up in the coffers of private companies.
“This military budget represents a shameful status quo that the country can no longer afford,” said Lindsay Koshgarian, NPP’s program director. “Families are struggling to afford basics like housing, food, and medicine, and our last pandemic-era protections are ending, all while Pentagon contractors pay their CEOs millions straight from the public treasury.”
Led by Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), progressive lawmakers have been working for years to enact modest cuts to the Pentagon budget and redirect the savings toward healthcare, education, and other social investments.
But those efforts have repeatedly fallen short in the face of bipartisan opposition.
In 2022, Lee’s proposal to cut $100 billion off the military budget’s top line was defeated by an overwhelming vote of 78-350, with 141 House Democrats joining nearly every Republican in voting no. (NPP points out that $100 billion would be enough to send every U.S. household a $700 check or hire a million elementary school teachers.)
In a statement Thursday, Lee said she is “disappointed” that the president’s new budget “continues the regressive trend of increasing our bloated, wasteful defense budget year after year with little oversight.” Last month, Lee and Pocan reintroduced legislation that would reduce the U.S. military budget by $100 billion.
Top Republicans, meanwhile, signaled Thursday that they will try to pile more money on top of Biden’s historically large military budget request as they simultaneously pursue cuts to Medicaid and food benefits.
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chair of the House Armed Services Committee, lamented that Biden’s budget “proposes to increase non-defense spending at more than twice the rate of defense.”
“The president’s incredibly misplaced priorities send all the wrong messages to our adversaries,” said Rogers. “On the House Armed Services Committee, we are focused on building an NDAA that provides our warfighters with the capability and lethality to deter and, if necessary, defeat the grave threats facing our nation.”
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) sent a similar message, calling Biden’s military budget request “woefully inadequate” and a “serious indication of President Biden’s failure to prioritize national security.”
But analysts argue that ballooning military spending does little to bolster U.S. national security. As William Hartung of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft wrote Thursday, “We can make America and its allies safer for far less money if we adopt a more realistic, restrained strategy and drive a harder bargain with weapons contractors that too often engage in price gouging and cost overruns while delivering dysfunctional systems that aren’t appropriate for addressing the biggest threats to our security.”
“The Congressional Budget Office has crafted three illustrative options that could ensure our security while spending $1 trillion less over the next decade,” Hartung noted. “A strategy that incorporates aspects of these plans and streamlines the Pentagon budget in other areas could be sustained at roughly $150 billion per year less than current levels.”
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made clear in his concurring opinion regarding the overturning of Roe v. Wade that the high court has no intention of stopping its rollback of Americans’ rights, naming cases that centered on marriage equality and the right to obtain contraception as previous rulings that should be revisited.
“It does not end at abortion. Republicans will not stop until they have stripped away every freedom they can’t load with bullets,” said MoveOn Executive Director Rahna Epting, referring to this week’s ruling by the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority that New York’s restrictions on carrying concealed weapons were unconstitutional.
In his concurrence, quoting Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion, Thomas wrote, “I agree that ‘nothing in [the court’s] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.'”
“For that reason,” Thomas wrote, “in future cases, we should reconsider all of the Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.“
The 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut ruling affirmed that the government cannot interfere in people’s procurement of contraceptives, while Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 overturned a Texas law which had effectively made sexual relationships between people of the same sex illegal in the state. Obergefell v. Hodges, decided in 2015, affirmed that same-sex couples can legally marry.
Like the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on Friday, the overruling of the decisions listed by Thomas would be deeply unpopular with the American public.
That is unlikely to stop the right-wing majority from overturning those rulings, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
“It is clear he and the court’s majority have no respect for other precedents that have been won in recent decades,” said Jayapal. “This Supreme Court is out of touch with the American people and increasingly suffers a legitimacy crisis.”
The three liberal justices who dissented against the ruling denounced Alito’s claim that the decision would not have an effect on other rights previously protected by the court.
“They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decision-making over the most personal of life decisions,” the dissent reads. “The lone rationale for what the majority does today is that the right to elect an abortion is not ‘deeply rooted in history.'”
Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen Breyer added:
The same could be said, though, of most of the rights the majority claims it is not tampering with… So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.
Economist Umair Haque said the ruling handed down Friday was “just the beginning, sadly, of the theocratic fascist project reaching its culmination in earnest now.”
As progressives called for legislative and executive action to codify the right to abortion care into federal law, attorney and Democratic U.S. House candidate Suraj Patel called on Congress to “move now” to ensure the right to contraception, same-sex relationships, and marriage equality are protected.
“Congress has that power right now. Hold the vote,” said Patel. “For 50 years Republicans told us their playbook, they attacked Roe at the edges, we didn’t codify it. Let’s not be naive and not anticipate what’s coming.”
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
