Nuclear War

 Henry Kissinger: US Responsible for Bringing Itself to ‘Edge’ of War With China and Russia

 Dave Decamp

August 14, 2022

The 99-year-old former secretary of state warned against stoking tensions with the two powers

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned of the dangers of the US policy toward Russia and China in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that was published on Friday.

“We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to,” Kissinger said.

All Our Systems Are Built To Elevate Viciousness

Caitlin Johnstone

August 12, 2022

There’s a scene in The Usual Suspects where Kevin Spacey tells the fable of the mysterious Keyser Soze and how he became a crime lord.

“One story the guys told me, the story I believe, was from his days in Turkey,” he says. “There was a gang of Hungarians that wanted their own mob. They realized that to be in power, you didn’t need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn’t.”

In Honor of Salman Rushdie

Juane Cole

August 13, 2022 

Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize-winning novelist, was repeatedly stabbed on Friday at a literary event at Chautauqua Institution in western New York, where he was arguing that the U.S. should give asylum to persecuted writers. Allegedly one Hadi Matar of New Jersey, wearing a black mask, leaped up onto the stage before 2,500 people and repeatedly stabbed Mr. Rushdie before being taken down by security. As I write, Mr. Rushdie is in intensive care. He will likely lose an eye, nerves in his arm have been severed, and his liver was damaged by he knife blade. Ruhollah Khomeini (d. 1989) had in 1988 issued a fatwa of death against Rushdie over his novel, Satanic Verses, which Khomeini had not read. The fatwa was lifted by the government of President Mohammad Khatami, a translator of modern German sociologist Jürgen Habermas and a proponent of civilizational dialogue, in 1998. On this occasion I am reprinting the one essay I ever wrote about Mr. Rushdie, which I read to him and an audience of about 1,000 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the occasion of the 2003 staging of the play based on his novel, Midnight’s Children at the proscenium theater of the Power Center on the central campus of the University of Michigan. The Republic of Letters has suffered a horrifying assault, an assault on all thinking people. I wish him the fullest possible recovery, and extend to him and his loved ones my deepest sympathies.

If We Tax Share Buybacks, Can We Also Tax Stock Returns?

Dean Baker

August 12, 2022

The Inflation Reduction Act includes a remarkable innovation. If it becomes law in its current form, share buybacks will be taxed at a 1.0 percent rate. This is a huge deal, not only because it taxes money that was often escaping taxation at the individual level, but it is a move away from basing the corporate income tax on profits, to taxing returns to shareholders.

Is There a Red Line Biden Won’t Cross?

Ted Snider

August 11, 2022

Recent events in Ukraine and Taiwan have presented President Biden with an opportunity to showcase his statesmanship. Both situations presented Biden with a red line. Both times he crossed it.

Giving Biden a red line not to cross does not seem to be a good idea. Seemingly demonstrating the psychology less of a statesman and more of a school yard bully, red lines seem to challenge Biden to show that no one can tell him what he can and cannot do.

When Will Foreign Leaders Start Asking To Speak To America’s REAL Government?

 Kaitlin Johnstone

August 8, 2022

During the furor over Nancy Pelosi’s incendiary Taiwan visit last week, I was watching an appearance by Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp on the show Rising which brought up the under-discussed point that US officials going to Taipei is actually a continuation of a trend that had already been happening under the Trump administration.

DeCamp pointed out that China began regularly flying planes into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone after Trump administration officials made similar visits to Pelosi’s.

Biden Says He’s ‘Proud’ of US Support for Israel After Gaza Bombardment Kills 45, Including 16 Children

Dave DeCamp

Aug. 8, 2022

President Biden released a statement on Sunday night after a ceasefire was announced for Gaza following a three-day Israeli bombing campaign, which left at least 45 Palestinians dead, including 16 children.

The bombing campaign started on Friday when Israel targeted a leader of the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad in Gaza. The initial strike killed an Islamic Jihad leader, as well as a five-year-old girl, a 23-year-old woman, and seven other Palestinian men.

Socialism and Ecological Survival: An Introduction

John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark

July 1, 2022

The issue of survival can be put into the form of a fairly rigorous question: Are present ecological stresses so strong that—if not relieved—they will sufficiently degrade the ecosystem to make the earth uninhabitable by man? If the answer is yes, then human survival is indeed at stake in the environmental crisis. Obviously no serious discussion of the environmental crisis can get very far without confronting this question.

—Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (1971)1

Roaming Charges: The Mad-Eyed Lady of Pac Heights

 Jeffrey St. Clair

August 5, 2022

 

I suppose there are more risible politicians on the scene today than Nancy Pelosi, but few come clad in her power accessories or with as much potential to inflict carnage on a global scale. Even the banshee of the backwoods Marjorie Taylor Greene is a mere pipsqueak compared to the malevolent lunacy we’ve seen lately from Pelosi.

Global Reform and How the US Hurts Itself

Ted Snider

July 25, 2022

Two of the biggest international crises confronting the US today are Russia’s war in Ukraine and the comatose renegotiations of the nuclear agreement with Iran. From an American foreign policy perspective, nothing could be more desirable than reform in the leadership of those two countries. But both Russia and Iran have, in the past, offered the US the reform it desires. And in both cases, the US undermined those attempts and destroyed what it most desired.

Putin, until recently, was never anti-West. Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at Kent, who has written extensively on Putin, has called Putin “the most European leader Russia has ever had.” Putin continued in a recent line of reformers who sought partnership in a "greater West" and who, Sakwa says, attempted “to forge a closer relationship with the European Union.” Stephen Cohen, who was Professor Emeritus of Russian studies and politics at Princeton, has pointed out that Putin “long pursued negotiations with the West over the objections of his own hardliners.”

Why Socialism?

 By: Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein is the world-famous physicist. This article was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949). It was subsequently published in May 1998 to commemorate the first issue of MR‘s fiftieth year.—The Editors 

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has—as is well known—been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

Biden Should Remove Cuba from the Infamous State Sponsors of Terrorism List

 By: Medea Benjamin and Natasha Lycia Ora Bannab

July 28, 2022

As the Cuban government celebrates the July 26 Day of the National Rebellion–a public holiday commemorating the 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks that is considered the precursor to the 1959 revolution–U.S. groups are calling on the Biden administration to stop its cruel sanctions that are creating such hardship for the Cuban people. In particular, they are pushing President Biden to take Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Being on this list subjects Cuba to a series of devastating international financial restrictions. It is illegal for U.S. banks to process transactions to Cuba, but U.S. sanctions also have an unlawful extraterritorial reach.  Fearful of getting in the crosshairs of U.S. regulations, most Western banks have also stopped processing transactions involving Cuba or have implemented new layers of compliance. This has hampered everything from imports to humanitarian aid to development assistance, and has sparked a new European campaign to challenge their banks’ compliance with U.S. sanctions.

Dangerous Times

We are living in a dangerous world. The world by itself is not dangerous. It becomes dangerous by some people living in it. Those who can push a button that annihilates existence as we know it, and those who have the power to destroy the environment for profit, are the same, a few, and in power.

When the United States government gained access to nuclear power, tested it in Hiroshima and Nagasake and as a result, killed and injured near half of the population of those cities. Of course, the casualties of nuclear bombs continue through the generations to this day. On the other hand, environmental depredation of the current years are wake up calls to those who seek profits for a few corporations, over humanity at large.

As Faith Flags in U.S. Government, Many Voters Want to Upend the System

Reid J. Epstein

July 13, 2022

Desire for structural changes cuts across both parties, a Times/Siena College poll found, but for starkly different reasons. Even Democrats now question if the government is a force for good.

Biden, Lapid Sign Joint US-Israel Declaration Against Iran

Dave DeCamp

July 14, 2022

The declaration says the US will use all of its 'national power' to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid on Thursday signed a joint declaration in Jerusalem on Thursday that included strong language against Iran.

The document, officially called the Jerusalem US-Israel Strategic Partnership Joint Declaration, says the US would use all of its “national power” to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.

Imperial Detritus

Andrew J. Bacewich

July 12, 2022

“The American Century Is Over.” So claims the July 2022 cover of Harper’s Magazine, adding an all-too-pertinent question: “What’s Next?”

What, indeed? Eighty years after the United States embarked upon the Great Crusade of World War II, a generation after it laid claim to the status of sole superpower following the fall of the Berlin Wall and two decades after the Global War on Terror was to remove any lingering doubts about who calls the shots on Planet Earth, the question could hardly be more timely.

“Empire Burlesque,” Daniel Bessner’s Harper’s cover story, provides a useful, if preliminary, answer to a question most members of our political class, preoccupied with other matters, would prefer to ignore. Yet the title of the essay contains a touch of genius, capturing as it does in a single concise phrase the essence of the American Century in its waning days.

Ukraine Could Tear Europe Apart

Doug Bandow

July 7, 2022

Last week the U.S. and Europe loudly proclaimed their everlasting support for Ukraine at both the G7 meeting and NATO summit. So far money and arms continue to flow to Kiev.

However, just as Ukraine’s backers were pleasantly surprised at that nation’s stout defense against Russian aggression, they are increasingly discomfited by the failure of sanctions to wreck Moscow’s economy. The push to end Russian energy exports has proved especially counterproductive, slowing European economies while raising both global energy prices and Moscow’s export earnings.

Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster

Jeffrey Sachs

June 27, 2022

The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement.  The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons.  As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these US foreign policy debacles.

Whitewashing the Murder of Shireen Abu Akleh

Daniel Larison

July 8, 2022

Ensuring that client governments can do whatever they want with impunity matters more to Washington than the lives of American citizens and residents.

Gideon Levy condemns the State Department’s whitewashing of the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh:

"It’s difficult to imagine a more clumsy, unprofessional, ridiculous and even insulting mobilization in the service of Israeli propaganda. Once again it has been proven that America is willing to do anything, absolutely anything, to protect its precious darling; to conceal all its crimes, to make itself an object of ridicule, to disregard moral, legal and professional standards – all to cover up for Israel. America is telling Israel: Keep on killing journalists, as far as we’re concerned it’s fine. We will always say you didn’t mean to, that tragic circumstances killed Abu Akleh and not soldiers in the Duvdevan counterterrorism unit."

Candidate to Lead Israeli Military Wants to Ramp Up Assassinations of IRGC Leaders

Dave DeCamp

July 6, 2022

One of the leading candidates to take over as the chief of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has called for Israel to step up assassinations of leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

IDF Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir made the case in a 74-page paper for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel American think tank based in Washington. He said the assassinations were necessary to stop Iran from further entrenching itself in Syria.