The encomiums have flowed voluminously for Henry Kissinger, and there have been some condemnations too. But even in the latter, little attention has been paid to his efforts to prevent peace from breaking out in the Mideast — efforts which helped cause the 1973 Arab–Israeli War and set in stone the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This underappreciated aspect of Kissinger’s career adds tens of thousands of lives to his body count, which is in the millions.

Kissinger, who died at 100 on Wednesday, served in the U.S. government from 1969 to 1977, during the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations. He began as Nixon’s national security adviser. Then, in Nixon’s second term, he was appointed secretary of state, a position he held on to after Ford became president following Nixon’s resignation.

In June 1967, two years before the start of Nixon’s presidency, Israel had achieved a gigantic military victory in the Six-Day War. Israel attacked Egypt and occupied Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, and, following modest responses from Jordan and Syria, also took over the West Bank and the Golan Heights. 

In the following years, the ultimate fallout from the war — in particular, what, if any, of the new territory Israel would be able to keep — was still fluid. In 1968, the Soviets made what appeared to be quite sincere efforts to collaborate with the U.S. on a peace plan for the region.

The Soviets proposed a solution based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. Israel would withdraw from the territory it had conquered. However, there would not be a Palestinian state. Moreover, Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War would not return to Israel; rather, they would be resettled with compensation in Arab countries. Most importantly, the Soviets would pressure their Arab client states to accept this. 

This was significant because at this point, many Arab countries, Egypt in particular, were allies of the Soviets and relied on them for arms supplies. Hosni Mubarak, who later became Egypt’s president and/or dictator for 30 years, started out as a pilot in the Egyptian air force and received training in Moscow and Kyrgyzstan, which was a Soviet republic at the time.

When Nixon took office in 1969, William Rogers, his first secretary of state, took the Soviet stance seriously. Rogers negotiated with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., for most of the year. This produced what American diplomat David A. Korn, then assigned to Tel Aviv, Israel, described as “a comprehensive and detailed U.S. proposal for a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” 

One person prevented this from going forward: Henry Kissinger. Backstage in the Nixon administration, he worked assiduously to prevent peace.

This was not due to any great personal affection felt by Kissinger for Israel and its expansionist goals. Kissinger, while Jewish, was happy to work for Nixon, perhaps the most volubly antisemitic president in U.S. history, which is saying something. (“What the Christ is the matter with the Jews?” Nixon once wondered in an Oval Office soliloquy. He then answered his own question, explaining, “I suppose it’s because most of them are psychiatrists.”)

Rather, Kissinger perceived all the world through the prism of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Any settlement at the time would require the involvement of the Soviets, and hence was unacceptable to him. At a period when it appeared in public that an agreement with the Soviets might be imminent, Kissinger told an underling — as he himself recorded in his memoir “White House Years” — that was not going to happen because “we did not want a quick success [emphasis in the original].” In the same book, Kissinger explained that the Soviet Union later agreed to principles even more favorable to Israel, so favorable that Kissinger himself didn’t understand why the Soviets acceded to them. Nevertheless, Kissinger wrote, “the principles quickly found their way into the overcrowded limbo of aborted Middle East schemes — as I had intended.”

The results were catastrophic for all involved. Anwar el-Sadat, then Egypt’s president, announced in 1971 that the country would make peace with Israel based on conditions in line with Rogers’s efforts. However, he also explicitly said that a refusal of Israel to return Sinai would mean war.

On October 6, 1973, it did. Egypt and Syria attacked occupied Sinai and the Golan Heights, respectively. Their initial success stunned Israeli officials. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was convinced Israel might be conquered. Moreover, Israel was running out of war matériel and desperately needed to be resupplied by the U.S.

Kissinger made sure America dragged its feet, both because he wanted Israel to understand who was ultimately in charge and because he did not want to anger the oil-rich Arab states. His strategy, as another top diplomat put it, was to “let Israel come out ahead, but bleed.”

You can read this in Kissinger’s own words in the records of internal deliberations now available on the State Department website. On October 9, Kissinger told his fellow high-level officials, “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] without a disaster is the best.”

The U.S. then did send huge amounts of weaponry to Israel, which it used to beat back Egypt and Syria. Kissinger looked upon the outcome with satisfaction. In another high-level meeting, on October 19, he celebrated that “everyone knows in the Middle East that if they want a peace they have to go through us. Three times they tried through the Soviet Union, and three times they failed.”

The cost to humans was quite high. Over 2,500 members of the Israeli military died. 10,000-20,000 were killed on the Arab side. This is in line with Kissinger’s belief — recorded in “The Final Days” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — that soldiers are “dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns in foreign policy.

After the war, Kissinger returned to his strategy of obstructing any peaceful settlement. In another of his memoirs, he recorded that in 1974, just before Nixon resigned, Nixon told him to “cut off all military deliveries to Israel until it agreed to a comprehensive peace.” Kissinger quietly stalled for time, Nixon left office, and it didn’t come up with Ford as president.

There’s much more to this ugly story, all available at your local library. It can’t be said to be the worst thing that Kissinger ever did — but as you remember the extraordinary bill of indictment for him, make sure to leave a little room for it.

The post On Top of Everything Else, Henry Kissinger Prevented Peace in the Middle East appeared first on The Intercept.

Israel has been widely condemned for its brutal response to the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas. With the coming expiration of the ceasefire, this will only become more vociferous. But many U.S. supporters of Israel have responded to the criticism with a question: What else is the beleaguered country supposed to do?

The answer is simple. Israel should do what it has never done before: agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state, based on international law.

This straightforward statement is scarce in mainstream U.S. political culture. In the speeches of politicians and in newspaper op-eds, it’s a matter of faith that Israel has always yearned for peace but has been constantly rebuffed by the Palestinians. The Palestinians, according to this narrative, prefer holding onto a dream of destroying Israel. 

This is not quite 180 degrees the opposite of reality, but close. In the actual world outside of high-level American political rhetoric, Israel could have had peace at many times in the past 75 years. However, such a peace would have required Israel giving up most of the Palestinian land — specifically, Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem — it conquered in the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel has always preferred conflict with stateless Palestinians to that.

Amos Malka, one-time head of Israeli military intelligence, explained it straightforwardly in 2004. “It is possible to reach an agreement,” he said, “under the following conditions: a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and sovereignty on the Temple Mount; 97 percent of the West Bank plus exchanges of territory in the ratio of 1:1 with respect to the remaining territory; some kind of formula that includes the acknowledgement of Israel’s responsibility for the refugee problem and a willingness to accept 20,000-30,000 refugees.”

In polite circles of U.S. power, these facts are considered preposterous. Anyone describing them exiles themselves from serious discussion of the issue. It’s similar to the situation before the invasion of Iraq, when there was uniform agreement across the political spectrum that Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction. Any claims to the contrary were seen as self-evidently ludicrous, as ludicrous as now saying that Israel is a huge obstacle to peace.

From the Beginning

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not unfathomable. It’s a fight over land.

The British Peel Commission was tasked with investigating violent clashes between Arabs and Jews in Mandatory Palestine. It proposed in 1937 that the historic area of Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state, making up about 17 percent of the area, and an Arab state, granted 75 percent. The remainder, including Jerusalem, would be under intentional supervision.

In 1947, following World War II and the Holocaust, the United Nations approved another partition plan. This gave Israel-to-be 56 percent of the area, and a Palestinian nation 43 percent.

In the standard U.S. story, the Zionist movement accepted both two-state solutions, and the Arab world rejected both. In fact, neither side accepted either. 

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not unfathomable. It’s a fight over land.

The Arab side formally rejected the plans. The Zionist movement rejected the specifics of the Peel proposal and accepted the U.N. plan — but only in public. The founders of Israel privately agreed that once the country came into being, they would consolidate their power and then take over as much additional land as possible. David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, put it this way in a famous 1937 letter to his son: “A Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning. … The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country.” 

In any case, the U.N. adoption of the partition plan in November 1947 led to a moderate civil war between the Jewish and Arab populations. Then during the Arab–Israeli War of 1948 following Israel’s declaration of independence, the new country conquered 78 percent of Palestine, leaving 22 percent in Arab hands. Egypt controlled Gaza, and Jordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinians experienced the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” in which 700,000 people were expelled or fled, and 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed.

Subsequent history shows Ben-Gurion and other Israeli leaders meant what they said. In 1956, Israel joined with France and the U.K. to invade Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, though it was ultimately forced to withdraw by the Eisenhower administration. In the 1967 war, Israel took over Sinai and Gaza again, as well as the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights in Syria.

Israel would eventually be forced to return the Sinai Peninsula following the 1973 Arab–Israeli War but has held onto everything else since.

The Early Years

It’s generally believed in the U.S. and Europe that after Israel’s founding, the Arab world spent decades devoted to destroying it. This is not so. There were absolutely factions in Arab politics who wished to reverse the establishment of Israel, and a great deal of blood-curdling Arab rhetoric on this subject. But various leaders of the relevant countries at various times — including Syria, Egypt, and Jordan — showed they understood the balance of forces and were willing to consider a compromise.

However, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary in 1949 that Abba Eban, the Israeli ambassador to the U.N., “sees no need to run after peace. The armistice is sufficient for us; if we run after peace, the Arabs will demand a price of us: borders or refugees or both. Let us wait a few years.” That year Ben-Gurion also told his cabinet, as paraphrased by British–Israeli historian Avi Shlaim: “With the passage of time, the world would get used to Israel’s existing borders, and forget about U.N. borders and the U.N. idea of an independent Palestinian state.” 

The U.S. pushed Israel to participate in a peace conference in Switzerland during the middle of 1949. The Arab position was that Israel’s borders should be not the armistice lines giving it 78 percent of Palestine, but the partition plan’s borders granting it 56 percent. The Arab participants also demanded that refugees from areas designated for an Arab state be able to return to their homes. Israel rejected both concepts. One of the Israeli delegates privately noted that his country’s government “think they can achieve peace without paying any price, maximal or minimal.” A cable from a U.S. State Department delegate asserted, “There never has been a time [during negotiations] when a generous and far-sighted attitude on the part of the Jews would not have unlocked peace. … As an advocate of the new state I hope they come to it eventually. Otherwise there will be no peace in the Middle East.” 

The Emergence of the PLO

The Palestinian Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 and represented the increasing coherence of Palestinian national consciousness.

Following the 1967 war, the international consensus gradually came to be that peace would require the creation of a Palestinian state. At the same time, the PLO accepted internally that the overall war was over, and they had lost: They were therefore willing to make peace in return for a state on the 22 percent of Palestine constituting Gaza and the West Bank. A 1976 draft resolution at the U.N. Security Council called for this and stated that Israel should “withdraw from all the Arab territories occupied since June 1967.” The PLO supported the resolution. Every country on the Security Council except the U.S. — including the U.K., France, Italy, Japan, and Sweden — voted for it. But Israel had no interest in it, and the U.S. vetoed it. Instead of encouraging further moderation from the PLO, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 with — according to Zeev Maoz, an Israeli historian who served in the military during three of the country’s wars — several goals. The first was to destroy the PLO and hence Palestinian nationalism.

Bill Clinton’s Catastrophic Failure

In 1981, the PLO formally endorsed a Soviet proposal calling for a Palestinian state and “the security and sovereignty of all states of the region including those of Israel.” In 1988, the PLO officially recognized Israel and accepted its right to exist in peace and security.

Israel still had no interest in the establishment of a Palestinian state. And by the beginning of the Clinton administration in 1993, the PLO was not what it once had been. It was headquartered in Tunis, and little respected by younger Palestinians who had led the first intifada of the late 1980s. Then the PLO’s leader, Yasser Arafat, made the unfortunate decision to back Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War.

The PLO’s weakness made Arafat eager to accept a terrible deal in the 1993 Oslo Accords. While they were greeted with rapture in the U.S. media, there was nothing in them that would necessarily lead to the creation of a Palestinian state and peace. Indeed, one of the signatories, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, soon explicitly explained, “We do not accept the Palestinian goal of an independent Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan. We believe there is a separate Palestinian entity short of a state.” 

What happened then was exactly what anyone paying attention would anticipate: The PLO essentially took over security for Israel in some 18 percent of occupied territories — Israel solely controlled about 60 percent and shared responsibility for the remainder — and enriched itself, while the occupation and Palestinian misery continued unabated. But by the end of President Bill Clinton’s second term in the summer of 2000, he was eager to leave a legacy other than his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He cajoled Arafat to come to Camp David to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in hopes of conjuring a conflict-ending agreement.

The Palestinian attitude was that they had already made a gigantic compromise by accepting just the 22 percent of historic Palestine for their state. They were willing to compromise still more — but not much more.

Barak had no understanding of this. At Camp David, he offered the Palestinians what were essentially three disconnected bantustans — i.e., the equivalent of the separate black “homelands” in apartheid South Africa — in the West Bank, with Israel occupying and controlling the border with Jordan for some long period of time. Clinton tried to pressure Arafat to accept this; he did not. Long afterward, Shlomo Ben-Ami, a key Israeli negotiator at the talks, said, “Camp David was not the missed opportunity for the Palestinians, and if I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected Camp David as well.”

Clinton had promised Arafat that he would not blame him if the talks failed. He then reneged after the summit ended. Nonetheless, the Israelis and Palestinians continued to negotiate through the fall and narrowed their differences. 

Clinton came up with what he called parameters for a two-state solution in December 2000. Several weeks afterward, Clinton proclaimed, “Both Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat have now accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts. Both have expressed some reservations.”

In the 22 years since, Bill Clinton has lied over and over again about what happened, claiming that Arafat was the one who rejected a settlement.

The Israelis and the Palestinians kept talking in late January 2001 in Taba, Egypt. It was not the Palestinians but Barak who terminated the discussions on January 27, a few weeks before Israeli elections. The negotiators issued a joint statement that the two sides had “never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations.”

This was in fact true: The records of the Taba talks show the Israelis and Palestinians had come agonizingly close to specific solutions to what the territory of a Palestinian state would be and whether and how any Palestinian refugees could return to Israel, with less progress on who would control which parts of Jerusalem.

But Barak was defeated by Ariel Sharon, who did not want a Palestinian state and did not restart the talks. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that the Clinton parameters “are not binding on the new government to be formed in Israel.”

Clinton then made a fateful, disastrous decision. In the 22 years since, he has lied over and over again about what happened, claiming that Arafat was the one who rejected a settlement. This has convinced both Israelis and Americans that Clinton made every effort to give Palestinians a state. But it was impossible, because — in what became a standard formulation — there was “no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side. Hillary Clinton, who was elected to the Senate in 2000 and later became secretary of state, also joined in this key deception.

The Arab Peace Plan

In 2002, Saudi Arabia proposed a solution to the conflict known as the Arab Peace Initiative. The API called for a settlement along the standard lines that had been known for decades: an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories with some small adjustments, a fair division of Jerusalem, and “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.” The 22 members of the Arab League endorsed it, as did the 57-state Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Israel, with Sharon leading the country, simply ignored it.

The Olmert Offer

The two sides again came close after Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke and Arafat died. Ehud Olmert became the Israeli prime minister. Olmert was right-wing but had become convinced that Israel had to settle the conflict with Palestinians for its own safety. 

In the standard U.S. narrative, Olmert made a wonderful offer to Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, and Abbas either rejected it or never responded. In reality, Olmert and Abbas held 36 secret meetings between 2006 and 2008. 

However, Olmert, under investigation for accepting bribes, resigned from his position in 2008. He later said, “If I had remained prime minister for another four to six months, I believe it would have been possible to reach an agreement. The gaps were small.” 

Olmert was succeeded as prime minister by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has consistently opposed a Palestinian state throughout his career and had no interest in continuing the talks with Abbas.

Lost Opportunities With Hamas

In the U.S., Hamas is considered anathema, for understandable reasons. Its original 1988 charter is explicitly antisemitic and calls for the obliteration of Israel. (A new Hamas charter was issued in 2017 and states that “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.”)

However, there have long been clear signs that factions within Hamas were moderating and open to long-term agreements with Israel. In 1997, Khaled Mashal, then the top Hamas leader, offered a 30-year ceasefire to Israel. Israel did not respond — but did immediately try to assassinate Mashal in Jordan.

In 2004, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s chief religious leader, called for a 10-year truce with Israel if it returned to its pre-1967 borders. Israel assassinated him two months later.

In 2006, Hamas won Palestinian elections over the PLO-affiliated Fatah. The new Palestinian prime minister, Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh, wrote secretly to President George W. Bush. Haniyeh told Bush, “We are so concerned about stability and security in the area that we don’t mind having a Palestinian state in the 1967 border and offering a truce for many years.” Haniyeh also wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, in which he said Palestinians priorities “included resolution of the refugee issue from 1948; reclaiming all lands occupied in 1967; and stopping Israeli attacks.” The Bush administration did not respond.

Around the same time, Mashal said Hamas would not oppose the Arab Peace Initiative. An Israeli spokesman responded that this was irrelevant “verbal gymnastics.”

In 2009, Efraim Halevy, the former head of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, wrote that Hamas has recognized “its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future,” but “Israel, for reasons of its own,” was not interested in such a discussion.

The same year, the U.S. Institute of Peace, a think tank funded by the federal government, reported that Hamas had “sent repeated signals that it may be ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel.”

There are many more examples of this, along with Israeli disinterest demonstrated in the most extreme ways possible. In 2012, according to an Israeli peace activist, the head of Hamas’s military wing had become convinced that Palestinians should negotiate a long-term truce with Israel. On the same day Ahmed Jabari, Hamas’s military chief, was reviewing a draft proposal for such a truce, Israel assassinated him.

It is, of course, possible that this has all been a PR operation by Hamas, and that it has been making the same calculation as the Zionist movement originally did — i.e., that it could accept a partition of Palestine and then later expand to take the whole thing. But given the relative power of the two sides, this seems unlikely — and even if true, largely irrelevant.

Where Things Stand Now

It’s true that it may now be, from a political standpoint, impossible for Israel to make peace. Thanks to decades of nationalist propaganda, most left-of-center Israelis believed even before October 7 that there was no way to make peace with Palestinians. Meanwhile, right-wing nationalists and religious conservatives simply want to keep the West Bank and so wouldn’t make peace even if they thought it were possible. 

Now, after last month’s shocking Hamas assault, the situation appears insoluble. Any Israeli leader who tried to do what’s necessary for a two-state solution, especially withdrawing settlers from the West Bank, would face the possibility of a revolt from a faction of the Israeli military and would personally be in great physical danger.

Nevertheless, we are where we are. What hope there is lies in the fact that the world — at least, the world minus the U.S., Israel, and the tiny island of Nauru — recognizes the incredible urgency of peace. The appalling suffering of Palestinians remains what it has been for 75 years: a sanguineous wound, both literally and metaphorically, at the center of the Middle East. If it is never healed, we will continually face the possibility of regional or even larger wars. Long ago, James Baldwin observed that “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” We don’t know if this horrendous tragedy can be ended, but if it can be, the first thing Americans and everyone else have to do is face reality.

The post All the Times Israel Has Rejected Peace With Palestinians appeared first on The Intercept.

In both 2021 and 2022, I wrote a Thanksgiving article listing 10 things for which Americans should be grateful. Now I have 10 more things, 21 through 30, for which we can give thanks this holiday.

Scientific studies have found that focusing on gratitude doesn’t just make you more pleasant to be around. It’s good for you, physically and psychologically. It even makes you sleep better.

One thing for which I’m personally grateful is that I can get away with writing pieces like this. I’m actually paid money to do it, which I then exchange for broccoli seeds. (See No. 3 below.) Did you know there are approximately 137,600 individual seeds in one pound of broccoli seeds? Please write to my editors and tell them how much you value this kind of information, so I can continue producing these pieces and buying broccoli seeds indefinitely.

References to the First Thanksgiving

The “first Thanksgiving” took place in 1621, when 90 Wampanoag and 52 English settlers came together in present-day Massachusetts to celebrate a successful harvest by the colonists — one made possible by the Wampanoag sharing their knowledge. The English always fondly remembered this assistance, although not so fondly that they didn’t kill 40 percent of the Wampanoag later in the 17^th century and then sell many surviving Wampanoag into slavery.

For this reason, positive references to the first Thanksgiving are bleakly funny. For instance, Yale academics Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian are big supporters of the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords. In the midst of the current Israeli assault on Gaza, they just organized an attempt in New Haven, Connecticut, to revive the agreements between Israel and various Arab states. As they describe it, “Yale hosted an Arab-Israeli diplomatic dialogue on campus that harkens to the first Thanksgiving, a dialogue that promoted harmony across cultural divides.”

You can imagine how excited people across the Mideast will be to learn they are playing the role of Native Americans circa 1620 and what this portends for their bright future ahead. With leaders as wise and self-aware as Sonnenfeld and Tian, we are surely on the right course.

Inverse Vaccines

Vaccines prime your immune system to recognize bacteria or viruses as foreign bodies to be destroyed. But humanity also suffers from autoimmune disorders, such as Type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis, in which our immune system mistakenly believes some of our own cells are foreign, and so attacks them.

Right now, there are promising “inverse vaccines” that remove the immune system’s conviction that the relevant tissue is its enemy. This kind of human creativity and intelligence makes me want to run up to the scientists responsible and embrace them. Then I will awkwardly stand nearby so I end up in pictures taken of them when they win a bunch of prizes.

The Health Smoothie

I have a family member whose blood pressure was much too high, even though they’re on medication. So I started making them a daily smoothie with every food I could find that reportedly can reduce hypertension: broccoli sprouts, moringa powder, flax seeds, and blueberries. 

The results were dramatic. Their systolic blood pressure number dropped quickly by about 40 points. Their blood pressure is now so low that their doctor may take them off some of their prescription drugs. Moreover, some of these ingredients also appear to have cancer-suppressive properties. Don’t take it from me; take it from researchers at Johns Hopkins.

I would like to become the world’s most peculiar dictator and force everyone to drink this every day. But there’s a problem with my potential reign of terror: Broccoli sprouts are hard to find in stores and expensive, about $5 per daily dose. The good news is that you can buy broccoli seeds and easily grow your own at home for one-tenth the cost. Please contact me if you’d like to have an intense, detailed conversation on this subject.

Flaco

Flaco is a Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from Manhattan’s Central Park Zoo last February after a lifetime of captivity. Zoo personnel initially tried to recapture him but failed, and he’s been living in the 843-acre park ever since (with a short detour to the Lower East Side). I like to imagine him belting out “Free Bird” as he swoops around his new domain. 

Flaco appears extremely wise, but owl brains only weigh two grams and have limited processing power. However, he is strikingly beautiful. If you are a tourist visiting New York who sees Flaco, remember that while he is one of the city’s many celebrities, he is also just a Eurasian eagle-owl like any other Eurasian eagle-owl. Please try to be cool and don’t hassle him.

Oral Histories

Regular history concentrates on nations and kings and therefore misses 99.9 percent of most people’s experience of being alive. On the other hand, oral histories capture what normal humans think of as they live through shattering catastrophes. It’s generally less about shifting geopolitical alliances and more about starving and/or having severe diarrhea. 

For instance, if you want to understand World War II, skip the History Channel and try the Nobel Prize-winning work of Svetlana Alexievich. Her oral histories “The Unwomanly Face of War” and “Last Witnesses” will convince you that war is an extremely bad idea that should be avoided at almost any cost.

Siblings

I have one older sister, plus a longtime friend whom we recently forcibly incorporated into our family without asking. We decided that, while he may not be genetically related to us, we are all spiritually and intellectually related and he should be our brother. Whether this adoption turns out to be a positive thing for him remains to be seen, but it’s too late for him to do anything about it now.

My sister supported this despite the fact she felt one brother, me, was already too many brothers. During family gatherings, she prefers to quietly read a book or teach herself Hungarian via her phone’s Duolingo app. But I have A LOT ON MY MIND that I need to interrupt whatever she’s doing to tell her. I suspect our family’s future will involve her and our new brother forming an alliance against me.

The point here is that siblings are wonderful because they’re stuck with you, so you can irritate them to the end of all of your lives and there’s nothing they can do about it.

Words

John Ralston Saul is a Canadian writer whose books are passed around in obscure corners of the world like samizdat. I first heard of his odd masterpiece “Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West” from my fellow temp word processor at a giant, evil law firm in midtown Manhattan as we both worked the midnight to 8 a.m. shift finalizing a weapons contract between the federal government and Lockheed Martin.

In it, Saul argues, “It seems the word is a fragile blossom. But one step back from this immediacy is enough to reveal the power of language. Nothing frightens those in power so much as criticism. … Even the fool has been banished from the castles of modern power.”

That’s why it’s important to learn how to use words. The process of doing that will also make you sensitive to how the powerful hate words and try to empty them of meaning to control you. 

Jokes

My personal favorite form of words is jokes. Everyone’s head is full of white noise about getting their 6-year-old to a doctor’s appointment, how much their elbow itches, and something intensely embarrassing they did in eighth grade. You may hear perhaps one out of every four words other people say to you.

Jokes are unique because if you can make someone laugh, you know you’ve pierced the mental haze in which we’re all enveloped and successfully communicated with them. Real laughter is involuntary and can only happen if other people understand what you’re saying and have had their worldview suddenly shifted.

Forgiveness

In an 1820 letter, Thomas Jefferson said this about slavery: “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” This is a universal attitude among “enlightened” people committing great evil: What we’re doing may be bad, but we can’t stop doing it, because our victims will then immediately seek revenge.

One of the most incredible things about human beings is that this is wrong. People who’ve been hurt have an almost infinite capacity for forgiveness — if those who hurt them stop doing it, genuinely consider what they’ve done, and repent. Go ahead and let the wolf go. You’ll be fine, as long as you recognize that this wasn’t a wolf after all, but just people like yourself.

Humans must have this capacity in order to survive, because every single one of us, if you go back far enough, is the descendant of both perpetrators and victims of genocide.

Having No Alternative

It’s true that we’re a hard species to get behind. The unique creativity and intelligence that we use to come up with inverse vaccines also makes it possible for us to create 20-foot long tungsten rods to drop on other people from space. 

The good news, sort of, is that we don’t have any alternative but to endorse humanity. There’s only one option on this menu. Moreover, we’re at our most inventive when our backs are to the wall, which is where they are right now. This Thanksgiving, let’s be grateful for that, and get started.

The post 10 More Things to Be Grateful for This Thanksgiving appeared first on The Intercept.

On Tuesday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton published an opinion piece in The Atlantic headlined “Hamas Must Go.” Why does she believe this? The subhead explains: “The terror group has proved again and again that it will sabotage any efforts to forge a lasting peace.” 

The article is the latest chapter of Clinton’s press tour following the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, including an appearance on the daytime talk show “The View.” Both in The Atlantic and on “The View,” Clinton explained why a ceasefire in Israel’s current war on Gaza would be a terrible mistake.

Everything Clinton has said is part of a peculiar genre of self-defeating “liberal” propaganda on the topic of Israel–Palestine. Clinton is rational and informed and understands, as she writes in The Atlantic, that “the only way to ensure Israel’s future as a secure, democratic, Jewish state is by achieving two states for two peoples. … There is no other choice.”

She cannot acknowledge, however, the historical events that have led to the present situation, which clearly show that the primary obstacle to a two-state solution is not any Palestinian faction: It’s the government of Israel.

She repeatedly claims that it’s been Palestinians who have stood in the way of any kind of permanent peace. Of course, this makes her call for a two-state solution appear like the worst kind of liberal naïveté — and is therefore a huge gift to the U.S. and Israeli right. After all, if even the extremely liberal Hillary Clinton admits that Palestinians don’t want peace, why should Israel even try?

If even the extremely liberal Hillary Clinton admits that Palestinians don’t want peace, why should Israel even try?

The degree to which Clinton’s Atlantic essay is riddled with historical inaccuracies is startling, especially given that she brags about her “decades of experience in the region.” The article begins in November 2012 with a tale of her knocking on the door of President Barack Obama’s hotel room early in the morning during a visit to Cambodia. “Then, like now,” Clinton writes, “the extreme Islamist terror group Hamas had sparked a crisis by indiscriminately attacking Israeli civilians.” She and Obama debated whether she should fly to the Middle East and try to broker a ceasefire in what Israel had dubbed Operation Pillar of Defense. 

This was a difficult decision, she writes, because she and Obama “knew Hamas had a history of breaking agreements and could not be trusted.” Nevertheless, they decided she should go. She succeeded in negotiating a halt to the conflict, after about 100 Palestinian and two Israeli civilians died, along with military personnel on both sides. 

Clinton says she was left uneasy. “I worried that all we’d really managed to do was put a lid on a simmering cauldron that would likely boil over again in the future,” she writes. “Unfortunately, that fear proved correct. In 2014, Hamas violated the cease-fire and started another war.”

This is close to the opposite of reality. 

Sparking a Conflict

Israel had, in collaboration with Egypt, imposed a brutal blockade on Gaza since 2007. Blockades are arguably acts of war, and one place you can find it argued is on the website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “The blockade is by definition an act of war, imposed and enforced through violence. Never in history have blockade and peace existed side by side.”

This is an excerpt from a June 1967 speech by Abba Eban, then the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, right after the end of the Six-Day War. Eban was explaining why Israel had not started the war, despite the fact that it had struck Egypt first. Because Egypt had imposed a blockade on the Straits of Tiran the month before, Eban said, it was actually Egypt who was responsible for the war.

In the years leading up to Operation Pillar of Defense, Hamas leaders said over and over that they were willing, at a minimum, to accept a long-term truce with Israel. Even the U.S. Institute for Peace, a think tank funded by federal government, acknowledged that Hamas had “sent repeated signals that it may be ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel.”

This did not interest the Israeli government. On November 14, 2012, Israel assassinated Ahmed Jabari, the head of Hamas’s military wing. 

Gershon Baskin, an Israeli peace activist, had been in communication with Jabari long before the assassination. According to Baskin, Jabari had come to believe that it was in the best interest of Palestinians for Hamas to negotiate a long-term truce. Jabari, Baskin asserted, had on several occasions acted to prevent Hamas from firing rockets at Israel. In Baskin’s telling, just before the assassination, he gave Jabari a draft proposal for such a truce to review and approve. The draft was agreed to by Baskin and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, and Baskin also said he had previously shown it to Ehud Barak, then the Israeli minister of defense.

After Israel assassinated Jabari, Reuven Pedatzur, a military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported: 

Our decision makers, including the defense minister and perhaps also Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, knew about Jabari’s role in advancing a permanent cease-fire agreement. … Thus the decision to kill Jabari shows that our decision makers decided a cease-fire would be undesirable for Israel at this time, and that attacking Hamas would be preferable.

Baskin himself told the story in a column for the New York Times. “Israel has used targeted killings, ground invasions, drones, F-16s, economic siege and political boycott,” he wrote. “The only thing it has not tried and tested is reaching an agreement (through third parties) for a long-term mutual cease-fire.”

While there had been tit-for-tat attacks, Israel’s assassination is widely seen as the proximate cause of the eight-day flare-up of violence in November 2012 — the one Clinton left Cambodia to deal with.

Breaking the Ceasefires

Clinton’s claim that “Hamas violated the cease-fire and started another war” in June 2014 is also highly misleading. 

The period from November 2012 to June 2014 was generally presented in U.S. media as one of quiet in the Israel–Palestine conflict, because in this time only seven Israelis — three soldiers and four civilians, of which three were West Bank settlers — were killed by Palestinians. During the same year-and-a-half period, over 60 Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza were killed by Israelis.

Among those killed were two Palestinian teenagers who were shot by Israeli forces on May 15, 2014, during a West Bank commemoration of the Nakba, the mass dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 at the founding of Israel. Then, in June, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped by Palestinians from a West Bank settlement.

To this day, it’s unclear what connection, if any, Hamas had to the abduction. At the time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed, “Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay.” An Israeli intelligence officer, though, anonymously said that there was no evidence for this, and “we have come to conclude that these men were acting on their own.”

Hamas proposed a 10-year ceasefire. Israel studiously ignored this proposal and went on to kill over 2,000 people in Gaza.

In response to the kidnapping, Israel launched Operation Brother’s Keeper, during which it arrested hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank — most of whom were members of Hamas — and tortured many of them. It also killed seven civilians. It was all for naught: The teenagers were found dead several weeks after they were taken.

Escalations followed — Hamas fired rockets, doing little damage — until Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, another bombing and invasion of Gaza, on July 8. 

Several days later, Hamas proposed a 10-year ceasefire, on the condition that Israel would release the Palestinian prisoners, and the blockades of Gaza in the Mediterranean Sea and along its border with Egypt would be lifted. Israel studiously ignored this proposal and went on to kill over 2,000 people in Gaza, about two-thirds of whom were civilians. Seventy-two Israelis died during the operation, nearly all of them soldiers.

Revisionism

Clinton’s appearance on “The View” last week was propagandistic in all the same ways, with an added wrinkle of nonsense regarding President Bill Clinton’s involvement in the conflict. According to Hillary Clinton, “My husband with the Israeli government at the time in 2000 offered a Palestinian state to the Palestinians at that time run by [then head of the Palestinian Authority Yasser] Arafat. … Arafat turned that down.” She added, “There would have been a Palestinian state now for 23 years if he had not walked away from it.”

In reality, it was Israel that walked away from what was possibly the best chance there will ever be for a resolution to the conflict.

Bill Clinton did propose what he called parameters for a two-state solution in December 2000. In early January 2001, with less than a month to go in his presidency, Clinton announced, “Both Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat have now accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts. Both have expressed some reservations.”

Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians continued later that month in Taba, Egypt. But they were terminated by Barak on January 27, ahead of upcoming elections in Israel. The negotiators issued a joint statement that the two sides had “never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations.”

Barak, however, was defeated by Ariel Sharon, who opposed a two-state solution and did not restart the talks. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs put out a statement that the Clinton parameters “are not binding on the new government to be formed in Israel.”

Bill Clinton has since lied over and over again about what happened, contradicting his own words at the time, claiming that Arafat was the one who rejected a settlement. 

There’s much more detail to this story, of course, but together Hillary and Bill Clinton have done an extraordinary amount of damage to any hope for peace in Israel and Palestine. If they really care about the lives of Israelis and Palestinians, they should both correct their farragoes of deceit — or, at the very least, just stop talking.

The post Hillary Clinton Is Lying About the History Between Hamas and Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Today America faces a profound choice: Should we analyze the Israeli-Palestinian conflict using our large human brains, or instead respond to it with the enraged hooting and screeching of baboons?

Much of the U.S. political class has decided to take the hooting and screeching approach. One popular method they use to oppose thinking, especially as Israel’s attack on Gaza has intensified, is to call all actions supporting a ceasefire “pro-Hamas.” Given the Hamas atrocities of October 7, which killed about 1,400 Israelis, this is simultaneously vicious, dangerous, and extraordinarily stupid.

This primate-like shrieking appeared over and over again during Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared that students in his state are making “common cause with Hamas.” Nikki Haley spoke about “everybody that’s protesting on these college campuses in favor of Hamas.” Vivek Ramaswamy was slightly more generous, explaining that student demonstrators were “fools” who “have no idea what the heck they’re even talking about when they’re siding with Hamas over Israel.” Meanwhile, 22 Democrats voted for a resolution censuring Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib for having “defended” Hamas’s October 7 attack.

You can learn elsewhere about the many, many people on earth who are pro-Hamas because they want Israel to cease military actions that are mostly killing women and children. There’s protesters generally, foreign students, colleges, Google employees, South Africa, Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, Jordan, Bolivia, Colombia, Honduras, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, and (obviously) Joe Biden.

It’s exhausting to say anything about this deeply inane subject. Anyone involved in the protests against the Iraq War in 2003 can remember being called “pro-Saddam.” 

In retrospect, of course, it’s clear that protesters were not in fact “pro-Saddam,” but rather “anti-pointless carnage that will help take the lives of 4.5 million people.” Nonetheless, the same factions that used this tactic before are bringing it back for a return engagement, at a moment when over 10,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s bombing campaign, with many more destined to die.

But of course, this embarrassing nonsense is not unique to America. In 2015, when an Egyptian court defined the military wing of Hamas as a terrorist organization, some Gazans denounced Egypt as “pro-Zionist.” When a meeting was held in Iraqi Kurdistan two years ago to discuss normalizing relations with Israel, the Iraqi Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr denounced it as “terrorist-Zionist.”

What makes today’s “pro-Hamas” accusations especially preposterous is that we know for a fact who in the West was pro-Hamas for many, many years. These miscreants did not just call for a ceasefire or ostentatiously wear kaffiyehs, but provided Hamas with lavish funding and support. This was, of course, the government of Israel.

What makes the “pro-Hamas” accusations especially preposterous is that we know for a fact who in the West was pro-Hamas for many years: Israel.

First Israel busily went about helping to create Hamas in Gaza as a counterweight to the secular Fatah. Then more recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained to his party’s caucus that he permitted Qatar to send huge amounts of money to Hamas because this would separate Gaza and the West Bank and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Likewise, Saddam Hussein’s biggest supporters had once been U.S. Republicans, especially during Iraq’s war with Iran in the 1980s. Everyone’s seen the photograph of Donald Rumsfeld sharing a chummy handshake with Saddam in 1983 when he was Ronald Reagan’s special envoy to Iraq. When Iraqi jets attacked the USS Stark in 1987, killing 37 sailors, this was not a problem for the Reagan administration. 

As late as April 1990, Wyoming Republican Sen. Alan Simpson participated in a friendly meeting with Saddam. Iraq had just executed a reporter from the Guardian; Simpson seized that moment to commiserate with the Iraqi dictator about the criticism he’d received from what Simpson called the “haughty and pampered press.” 

But again, this is not an American problem. It’s a primate problem. Our genetic relatives have less complicated minds. They can’t conceive of agriculture, or antibiotics, or airplanes. They also can’t conceive of the possibility that there can be more than two sides in any conflict. They certainly don’t ask themselves whether their tribe’s leaders are often in a weird, tacit alliance with their enemy tribe’s leaders, as a way to keep all the regular tribe members in line.

However, we can do all of these things, thanks to our large prefrontal cortex — the part of our brains that does the most thinking and is much larger than what baboons possess. Or we can do what we’re doing now, and discard our human capacity for thinking, and punish those who wish to protect civilian lives. As a BBC Earth documentary about rival tribes of baboons puts it, “Acts of disloyalty in a time of war are given swift and brutal punishment.” 

The human version of the baboons’ swift and brutal punishment is being meted out now. Decreeing that large swaths of people around the world calling for a ceasefire are “pro-Hamas” and hence in favor of its vicious murders, is tremendously alarming. It damages individual lives and will likely get people killed. It makes a mockery of our purported belief in free speech and association. This kind of screeching will make it even more difficult for this tormented region to find peace.

The post GOP and Dems Unite to Smear Gaza Ceasefire Supporters as “Pro-Hamas” appeared first on The Intercept.

Wars, assassinations, coups — the perpetrators of violence confidently believe that the consequences will be discrete and limited to their own goals. They’ll kill their enemies, raise their arms in simian triumph, and that’s the end of the story. 

In reality, committing violence is like kicking a football covered in razors into history, where it lunges around, bouncing this way and that, slicing open random people across the world in a trajectory so complex that no human being can predict it.

This is frightening to think about, especially because there are thousands of these footballs caroming around the globe at any one time, occasionally smashing into each other and each then spiraling off in even more erratic directions.

But there’s good news. Standing up against the aggression of your own country or faction or “side” has effects that also travel in unpredictable waves across space and time, just more softly and quietly, without the exploding joint direct attack munitions. It often seems futile, but that’s an illusion: Just as no one can perceive the infinitely complex results of violence, no one can see the subtle effects of resisting violence. Both are equally real.

So if you’re considering participating in tomorrow’s demonstrations against the U.S.–Israeli assault on Gaza, I hope you will. You just have to make peace with the fact that you may never, ever know what you accomplished. The appalling reality is that you might not save the lives of any Palestinians. However, you will quite likely participate in saving someone’s life, even though you will never know who they are, and even though they will never know they’re alive because of you. This will even be the case if the person whose life you save is you.

Here’s one peculiar story about how violence begets more violence, far beyond what its instigator intended, setting death zigging and zagging around the earth.

On July 3, 1988, the missile system supervisor on the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf pushed a button, firing two surface-to-air missiles toward Iran Air Flight 655. By doing this, he killed my high school biology lab partner Sam 181 days later, at 3:10 a.m. on December 31.

The Vincennes had been sent to the Persian Gulf to prevent attacks against oil tankers by either side during the Iran–Iraq War. Flight 655 was a civilian airliner with 290 people aboard, scheduled for a 28-minute trip from Iran across the Strait of Hormuz to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Thinking Flight 655 was a jet fighter attacking it, the Vincennes shot it down, killing all 290 people aboard. This was, depending on who you believe, either appalling recklessness or an innocent mistake anyone could make.

Five months later, on December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland. All 270 passengers died. According to the U.S. government, two Libyans were responsible. In reality, the bombing was almost certainly carried out at the instigation of the Iranian government as revenge for Flight 655. (The U.S. has preferred to blame Libya rather than Iran for various geopolitical reasons, including a wish not to open that particular can of worms.)

Sam and three of his fellow bright friends had been thrilled by the chemistry course of one of our high school’s best teachers. Having read about the Pan Am bombing, and filled with the sense of invincibility of teenage boys, they wondered: Could we make a similarly powerful explosive? They constructed their experiment in the garage of one of their families. While working on it in the middle of the night, they accidentally set it off, killing them all.

This is just one of millions or billions or trillions of tales like it. Essentially everyone who’s ever lived has been touched by violence in some way, even if they were unaware of its origin.

But there are other stories, ones just as complex and even harder to discern, about nonviolence.

During the 1980s, the Reagan administration helped kill perhaps 200,000 people across Central America via support for our allied governments in El Salvador and Guatemala and insurgents trying to overthrow our enemy government in Nicaragua. The violence was unspeakably grotesque.

And this was, as bitter as it sounds, a great victory for peace movements in the U.S. It’s forgotten now, but the Reagan administration came into office in 1981 with hopes of waging a full-scale war in Central America. The aim of one Reagan faction was to blockade Cuba, directly overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and possibly bring the entire weight of the U.S. military to bear in running El Salvador. However, as soon as the hawks began to mobilize, the remnants of the Vietnam anti-war movement mobilized in response, and the Reaganite plans never got off the ground. As movement participants have said, as bad as the U.S.-backed death squads were, Vietnam-style carpet bombing would have been even worse. 

Asking who specifically was saved is an impossible question; we will never know the answer. But given how the U.S. prosecuted the Vietnam War, the number of people is plausibly in the hundreds of thousands or millions.

A similar dynamic played out in 2002 and 2003 in the run-up to the Iraq War. Millions of people around the world came out in opposition to the war and were dubbed “the other superpower” — that is, in addition to the U.S. — by the New York Times. Then the war happened anyway, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. 

But what didn’t happen was more wars. A senior official in the George W. Bush administration at the time was famously quoted as saying, “Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran.” And not just Tehran: Wesley Clark, onetime commander of NATO, later revealed that a senior U.S. military official told him of plans to intervene in Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan.

Given the devastation of Iraq, it feels disrespectful to Iraqis, and generally excruciating, to say this was any kind of victory for the other superpower. But it was. The same may end up being true regarding Gaza. The death toll there is now over 9,000. As the things currently stand, it seems certain thousands more will be killed. Yet as horrifying as it is to say, Israel is likely restrained from killing even more by the pressure being generated by protests in the U.S., Europe, and across the Mideast. Moreover, many in the U.S. foreign policy blob are ardently pushing to widen the war to Iran. The greater the opposition to the attack on Gaza, the less likely that will happen.

Then there’s another reason for people in the U.S. and allied countries to oppose the current war: the most direct, visceral self-interest. 

Soon after the 9/11 attacks and the deaths of 3,000 people, Bush told Congress, “Americans are asking ‘Why do they hate us?’ They hate what they see right here in this chamber … They hate our freedoms.”

The people who run the U.S. are well aware that this was preposterous nonsense. Al Qaeda’s motivation was America’s foreign policy, not some kind of objection to our freedom. In fact, in a 2004 statement, Osama bin Laden quasi-joked, “Contrary to Bush’s claims that we hate freedom … let him tell us why we did not attack Sweden for example.” 

And a large part of Islamist hatred of U.S. foreign policy involves America’s unyielding support for Israel, no matter what it does. What was true 22 years ago remains true today, especially as the Muslim world watches President Joe Biden literally and figuratively embrace Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There are people who see this who will want to try to kill Americans in revenge.

What could plausibly give such people pause, however, is seeing large numbers of Americans turning out to say no to Biden and Netanyahu. Indeed, reporting in the 2000s found that this had happened regarding the Iraq War demonstrations. One would-be British Muslim jihadi was quoted as saying, “You’d see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think – anything is justified to stop this.” But after witnessing a million non-Muslims protesting the Iraq War in London, she concluded, “How could we demonize people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?”

Today, the same is even more true for the large, impressive protests about Gaza led specifically by Jewish Americans. There have also been smaller protests in Israel calling for a ceasefire.

Of course, there are Americans and Israelis who believe that obliterating Gaza will make them safer — or that even if it won’t, they support doing it anyway. For everyone else, however, this is a situation in which the moral thing to do and what’s best for you personally coincide.

If you are participating in the protests tomorrow, it is necessarily as an act of faith. Your faith will be rewarded. No such action can be wasted. But it is not given to us to understand exactly how.

The post The Gaza Protests Can Save Lives — Maybe Even Your Own appeared first on The Intercept.

After Elon Musk finalized his purchase of Twitter on October 27, 2022, I wrote an article in which I warned, “We need to take seriously the possibility that this will end up being one of the funniest things that’s ever happened.”

Today, I have to issue an apology: I was wrong. Musk’s ownership of Twitter may well be — at least for people who manage to enjoy catastrophic human folly — the funniest thing that’s ever happened. 

Let’s take a look back and see how I was so mistaken.

Musk began his tenure as Twitter’s owner by posting this message to the company’s advertisers, in which he said, “Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise. … Twitter obviously cannot be a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences! In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all.”

Musk had to say this for obvious reasons: 90 percent of Twitter’s revenues came from ads, and corporate America gets nervous about its ads appearing in an environment that’s completely unpredictable. 

I assumed that Musk would make a serious effort here. But this was based on my belief that, while he might be a deeply sincere ultra-right-wing crank, he surely had the level of self-control possessed by a 6-year-old. He does not. Big corporations now comprehend this and are understandably anxious about advertising with a company run by a man who, at any moment, may see user @JGoebbels1488 posting excerpts from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and reply “concerning!”

The consequences of this have been what you’d expect. The marketing consultancy Ebiquity represents 70 of the 100 companies that spend the most on ads, including Google and General Motors. Before Musk’s takeover, 31 of their big clients bought space on Twitter. Last month, just two did. Ebiquity’s chief strategy officer told Business Insider that “this is a drop we have not seen before for any major advertising platform.” 

This is why Twitter users now largely see ads from micro-entrepreneurs who are, say, selling 1/100th scale papier-mâché models of the Eiffel Tower. The good news for Twitter is that such companies don’t worry much about brand safety. But the bad news is that their annual advertising budget is $25. Hence, Twitter’s advertising revenue in the U.S. is apparently down 60 percent year over year.

I also never imagined it possible that Musk would rename Twitter — which had become an incredibly well-known brand — to “X” just because he’s been obsessed with the idea of a company with that name since he was a kid. It’s as though he bought Coca-Cola and changed its name to that of his beloved childhood pet tortoise Zoinks. The people who try to measure this kind of thing claim that this has destroyed between $4 and $20 billion of Twitter’s value. (As you see in this article, I refuse to refer to Twitter as X just out of pure orneriness.)

Another of my mistaken beliefs was that Musk understood the basic facts about Twitter. The numbers have gone down somewhat since Musk’s purchase of the company, but right now, about 500 million people log on to Twitter at least once a month. Perhaps 120 million check it out daily; these average users spend about 15 minutes on it. A tenth of these numbers — that is, about 12 million people — are heavy users, who account for 70 percent of all the time spent by anyone on the app.

Musk is one of these heavy users. He adores Twitter, as do some other troubled souls. But this led him to wildly overestimate its popularity among normal humans. A company with 50 million fanatically devoted users could possibly survive a collapse in ad revenue by enticing them to pay a subscription fee. But Twitter does not have such users and now never will, given Musk’s relentless antagonizing of the largely progressive Twitterati. 

So how much is Twitter worth today? When Musk became involved with the company in the first months of 2022, its market capitalization was about $28 billion. He then offered to pay $44 billion for it, which was so much more than the company was worth that its executives had to accept the offer or they would have been sued by their shareholders. Now that the company’s no longer publicly traded — and so its basic financials don’t have to be disclosed — it’s more difficult to know what’s going on. However, Fidelity Investments, a financial services company, holds a stake in Twitter and has marked down its valuation of this stake by about two-thirds since Musk bought it. This implies that Twitter is now worth around $15 billion.

The significance of this is that Musk and his co-investors only put up $31 billion or so of the $44 billion purchase price. The remaining $13 billion was borrowed by Twitter at high interest rates from Wall Street. In other words, Musk and company are perilously close to having lost their entire $31 billion.

In the end, I did not understand Musk’s determination to torment himself by forcing his entire existence into an extremely painful Procrustean bed. The results have been bleak and awful for Twitter and the world, but not just bleak and awful: They have also been hilarious. Anyone who likes to laugh about human vanity and hubris has to appreciate his commitment to the bit.

The post One Year After Elon Musk Bought Twitter, His Hilarious Nightmare Continues appeared first on The Intercept.

The Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy, an Israeli think tank, published a paper last week stating that thanks to the vicious Hamas attacks of October 7, “There is currently a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip.”

The paper continues, “There is no doubt that in order for this plan to be enacted, many conditions need to exist in parallel. At the moment, these conditions exist, and it is unclear when such an opportunity will arise again, if at all.” Approximately 1,400 Israelis were killed during the initial assault.

The think tank advocates a bizarre scheme in which Israel would ethnically cleanse the entirety of Gaza and pay Egypt to house its former inhabitants in currently empty apartments near Cairo. (The paper was first reported and translated from Hebrew by Mondoweiss.)

The Misgav Institute is headed by Meir Ben Shabbat. Ben Shabbat served four years as Israel’s chief of staff for national security after being appointed to the position in 2017 by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He previously was a senior official in Shin Bet, the approximate equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the U.S. Other former top members of the Israeli government have also held prominent positions at the institute, as Mondoweiss explains.

This specific language — right-wing leaders enthusing about the “opportunity” that arises from massive suffering of their own people — is a kind of macabre universal following eruptions of ultraviolence.

On September 19, 2001, then-President George W. Bush proclaimed, “Through my tears, I see opportunity.” Several months later, Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, explained, “[T]his is a period not just of grave danger, but of enormous opportunity. Before the clay is dry again, America and our friends and our allies must move decisively to take advantage of these new opportunities.” There were 2,977 people who died at the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and aboard United Airlines Flight 93.

Osama bin Laden also used language similar to that of the Misgav Institute — to describe the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and its allies. In 2004, bin Laden said in an audio message, “Targeting America in Iraq in terms of economy and losses in life is a golden and unique opportunity. Do not waste it only to regret it later.” Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed during the conflict.

For Netanyahu’s part, he spoke in 2002 of the “golden opportunity” presented by the Al Qaeda bombing of a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya. In that attack, 13 people were killed, including Israeli brothers Noy and Dvir Anter, ages 12 and 13. CNN reported at the time that “screaming children covered in blood searched desperately for their parents amid the wreckage.”

While he used different words, Netanyahu also saw a bright future on September 11, 2001, when he was working in the private sector after his first period as prime minister. Asked by the New York Times what the attacks meant for U.S.–Israeli relations, he responded, “It’s very good.” Netanyahu then walked back his first remarks, saying, “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” At that moment, it was believed that far more people, about 20,000, had been killed at the World Trade Center than later turned out to be the case.

As this all demonstrates, while the deaths of regular human beings are an unmitigated catastrophe for them and their families, our leaders often see a silver lining in our pain — a chance to do what they had always wanted to but had not been able to before.

The post Hamas Attack Provides “Rare Opportunity” to Cleanse Gaza, Israeli Think Tank Says appeared first on The Intercept.

On Wednesday, the United States was the only country to vote “no” on a proposed U.N. Security Council resolution authored by Brazil that called for “humanitarian pauses” in Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Twelve countries voted for the resolution, including several surprising ones, such as France and the United Arab Emirates. Two more, Russia and the U.K., abstained. But according to the Security Council’s rules, America’s sole “no” vote meant that the resolution failed.

Human Rights Watch criticized America’s actions, saying, “Once again the U.S. cynically used their veto to prevent the U.N. Security Council from acting on Israel and Palestine at a time of unprecedented carnage.”

The Security Council has 15 countries. Ten are rotating members, elected by the U.N. General Assembly and serving on the council for a period of two years. Five are permanent members: the U.S., Russia, China, France, and the U.K. If any of the permanent members vetoes a resolution, it will not pass, no matter how many votes are in favor. This means that any of the permanent members can veto any action by the Security Council.

Since Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has made impassioned speeches several times decrying the injustice of the veto power, which Russia has used on four occasions regarding Ukraine.

Here’s some of what Zelenskyy said directly to the Security Council six weeks after Russia’s attack on Ukraine: 

We are dealing with a state that is turning the veto in the U.N. Security Council into the right to die. This undermines the whole architecture of global security. It allows them to go unpunished, so that they’re destroying everything that they can. So, if this continues, the countries will rely only on the power of their own arms to ensure their security and not on international law, not rely on international institutions. The United Nations can be simply closed. … The U.N. system must be reformed immediately so that the veto is not the right to die, that there is a fair representation in the Security Council of all regions of the world.

Zelenskyy spoke again on this subject just last month in a long Twitter thread:

It is true Zelenskyy does not have any principled disagreement with the veto power. He has said nothing about the U.S. veto this week. Moreover, he also does not have any principled objection to a nation invading and occupying other people’s land, as illustrated by his unqualified support for Israel since the October 7 attacks by Hamas. Like most world leaders, he’s a hilarious, garden-variety hypocrite who wants different rules for himself and his allies of the moment.

Nonetheless, what Zelenskyy said about the Security Council veto power is accurate. It is a core flaw of the U.N. and must be rectified if the institution is ever to serve a useful purpose. It’s just difficult to see how that could happen.

To understand this situation, it’s necessary to go back and examine why the veto power was created in the first place.

The U.N.’s charter gives the Security Council “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security” — that is, anything involving war.

The structure of the Security Council was negotiated in San Francisco in 1945. The fights over it were so vociferous that the room where it took place was nicknamed “Madison Square Garden.” 

The strife was straightforward. The five countries that would become the Security Council’s permanent members were essentially the victors in World War II. (China’s seat was held by Taiwan until 1971.) They all believed that their possession of exclusive veto power was a super idea, while other countries could not muster the same enthusiasm. 

To the victors went the spoils. Democratic Sen. Thomas Connally of Texas was one of the main U.S. representatives in San Francisco. He straightforwardly explained that the U.S. would kill the U.N. completely rather than give up its own proposed veto power. “You may, if you wish, go home from this conference and say that you have defeated the veto,” said Connally, while tearing up a copy of a draft of the U.N. charter. “But what will be your answer when you are asked, ‘Where is the charter?’”

Francis Wilcox, a U.S. State Department official, later wrote an unusually honest academic article on what had happened. The veto was the issue “that raised the most controversy,” Wilcox explained, because it “reinforced the special position of the permanent members.” And not just that — they could also veto any attempts to amend the U.N. charter to take away their veto, thus guaranteeing that “their special position could not be changed.” For many Americans there, the veto was “defective because it would permit Russia, Great Britain, China, and France to block action in the Council,” yet “to many of those people its main virtue lies in the fact that it also gives the United States that same veto.”

The Security Council veto was used solely by the Soviet Union from the U.N.’s founding in 1945 until October 1956. Wonderfully enough, this streak was finally broken when the U.K. and France vetoed an American draft resolution calling on Israel to halt its attack on Egypt during the Suez Crisis.

Things have changed a great deal since then. The first U.S. veto to protect Israel occurred in 1972. Since then, the U.S. has vetoed about four dozen more resolutions criticizing Israel. In the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has similarly vetoed numerous resolutions to protect its own client state, Syria, as well as itself concerning Ukraine. 

In other words, since the U.N.’s founding, it has largely always been a debating society because the world’s most powerful countries, led by the U.S., want it that way.

There has recently been renewed energy at the U.N. to change things. However, given the fact that the five permanent members can block any changes, the best idea that anyone could come up with was to ask them nicely to change. France and Mexico proposed that the five powers “voluntarily and collectively suspend the use of the veto in cases of mass atrocities.” There has also been hopeful discussion about expanding the Security Council to 25 members, with Germany, Brazil, India, and Japan joining as permanent members.

The chances of any of this going anywhere are slim, however. Following the U.S. veto of Brazil’s resolution this week, Brazil’s U.N. representative observed, “Sadly, very sadly, the Council was yet again unable to adopt a resolution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Again, silence and inaction prevailed. To no one’s true, long-term interest.”

The post The U.N. Is Powerless to Help Gaza. That’s How the U.S. Wants It. appeared first on The Intercept.

Appearing on the London-based satellite network Iran International, Wallace explained, “In the wake of 9/11, we said that we would find every Al Qaeda terrorist wherever they were, hunt them down, and kill them or bring them to justice, and that we would bring a response to their state sponsors, at that point the Taliban in Afghanistan. Right now, that is Iran.”

Wallace loosely quoted Secretary of State Antony Blinken as saying, “There is no doubt that Iran is the primary funder and supporter and patron of Hamas.” 

Therefore, Wallace continued, “Whether or not Iran pressed the button to go into Israel is irrelevant. It all lies at the hands of Iran. So the debate of whether Iran was involved in the specific planning of individualized events is irrelevant.”

Wallace wrapped up by saying, “Let me send a message to the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] viewers in Iran that might be watching this: I look forward to seeing you hanged from the end of one of your own ropes.”

Wallace’s remarks are significant for several reasons, including United Against Nuclear Iran’s place in the D.C. firmament and the context of the past 22 years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

UANI was founded in 2008 by the late Richard Holbrooke and Dennis Ross. Holbrooke was a top Democratic diplomat who held various posts, including U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Ross played a prominent role in Bill Clinton’s policy toward Israel and Palestine and later was a special adviser to Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state. UANI’s current chair is Joe Lieberman, the former senator from Connecticut.

The name “United Against Nuclear Iran” is something of a misnomer. Similar think tanks focused on Iraq in the late 1990s and early 2000s, using the issue of Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction as a rationale for their actual goal: the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government. The Project for the New American Century was particularly influential in lobbying for the invasion of Iraq. The same dynamic applies to UANI, which uses Iran’s potential nuclear weapons program as a vehicle to damage Iran’s current government and potentially overthrow it.

One of UANI’s main funders is Thomas Kaplan, a billionaire investor in precious metals. UANI often functions as a sort of research arm for the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which enforces U.S. sanctions on Iran (and other countries sanctioned by the U.S.). In 2020, UANI led a push to stop pharmaceutical companies from doing business with Iran at the height of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Then there’s the peculiarity of Wallace’s analogy, given the relevant history. The U.S. did invade Afghanistan and dislodge the Taliban, and then occupied Afghanistan for 20 years. But this was not a notable success, given that the Taliban, in 2021, defeated the Afghan military set up by the U.S. and its allies, forcing a humiliating evacuation by the U.S.

Is this what Wallace is advocating — an invasion of Iran costing trillions of dollars and ending with exactly the same people in power? (Wallace did not respond to a request for comment.) Or does he simply want us to bomb Iran? UANI has released a statement calling “on our government in Washington, together with Israel, and our allies around the world to launch strikes against military and intelligence targets in Iran, including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) sites, and missile and drone bases, where Iran’s proxy and partner network is trained.”

But what will this accomplish, exactly? The UANI statement says the world has failed to “deter Iran.” But after 9/11, the bombing of Afghanistan, without an invasion, was seen as weak-willed appeasement, insufficient to deter the Taliban.

Also, does Wallace believe the U.S. should attack other countries that support Hamas, such as Qatar and Turkey? In fairness, Wallace has called for the U.S. to demand that Qatar, where Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh sometimes lives, hand over Haniyeh or experience “U.S. military action on its territory to bring him to justice.”

Finally, is this now a rule that applies to everyone? For instance, if another country considers the actions of Israel to constitute terrorism, can they attack the U.S., which is Israel’s “primary funder and supporter and patron”?

Meanwhile, others in the U.S. political system are also anxious to attack Iran. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina recent stated that “for every Israeli or American hostage executed by Iran, we should take down an Iranian oil refinery. … How much more death and destruction do we have to take from the Iranian regime? I am confident that this was planned and funded by the Iranians.” 

Wonderfully enough, Iran has its own list of organizations it’s designated as terrorists, and UANI is on it.

The channel on which Wallace appeared, Iran International, appears to be funded by Saudis. In 2018, Iran International hosted a spokesperson for a separatist group within Iran, who praised a terrorist attack in the Iranian city of Ahvaz. Twenty-four people, including children, were killed. The spokesperson added, “I insist that armed resistance is part of our resistance.”

The post Washington Hawk’s Call to Bomb Iran Cites Disastrous 9/11 Playbook appeared first on The Intercept.

On the night of September 11, 2001, I sat on the stoop of my apartment building in Greenwich Village and drank some abominable wine coolers with my neighbors. I’d bought them from a nearby store that had already started wild profiteering and was charging three times the normal price. We were two miles north of the site of the World Trade Center; the neighborhood smelled of acrid smoke, which turned out to be preferable to the stench of burnt, rotting bodies that would develop later that week.

Now, according to a plethora of voices, with the vicious recent attacks by Hamas, Israel has experienced its own 9/11. “This is our 9/11,” says the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. “This is our 9/11,” says the Israeli military’s spokesperson. “This is the equivalent for Israel of probably what happened in the United States in September 11th,” says Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. “Israeli Faces Its 9/11,” says the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. If you’d like to see 37,000 more examples, have at it.

The point of all these comparisons is obvious. Former Rep. Joe Walsh expressed it here:

In other words, Israel, like the U.S., had been innocently walking through the world when SUDDENLY, OUT OF NOWHERE, it was inexplicably attacked by inhuman barbarians. Therefore Israel, like the U.S. was, is entitled to do anything whatsoever in response. A recent estimate found that the U.S. war on terror has directly and indirectly caused over 4.5 million deaths.

I don’t agree with Walsh’s conclusion. But certainly everyone here is starting from the correct premise — that this is Israel’s 9/11 — even if they don’t understand why.

First of all, something like Hamas’s attack on Israel, as with something like 9/11, was going to happen eventually. Israel and the U.S. constantly deal out ultraviolence on a smaller scale (Israel) and a huge scale (the U.S.). Anyone in either country who believed this would never come home was living in a vain fantasy.

Likewise, the establishments of both Israel and the U.S. were well aware of this: that their policies would inevitably lead to the deaths of their own citizens. Richard Shultz, a longtime national security state intellectual, wrote in 2004 that “a very senior [Special Operations Forces] officer who had served on the Joint Staff in the 1990s told me that more than once he heard terrorist strikes characterized as ‘a small price to pay for being a superpower.’” Eran Etzion, onetime member of Israel’s national security council, just explained that from the government’s perspective, “the relatively small price that Israel paid every so often” for its policy toward Gaza was the deaths of dozens of Israelis.

What stunned both the U.S. and Israel was that anyone managed to briefly deal out damage on a scale they’re used to delivering. Israel killed over 10,000 Palestinians from 2000 through last month. God only knows how many hundreds of thousands the U.S. killed in the Middle East in the lead-up to 9/11.

Then, as now, anyone pointing out these obvious facts was smeared as “supporting” or “justifying” the vicious blowback. It’s frustrating and suggests that it’s impossible for human beings to be rational about this subject. If you tell someone that pouring gas on a pile of shredded newspaper and then throwing a match on it will probably make the newspaper catch on fire, you are not “supporting fire” or “justifying fire.” On the contrary, you’re trying to reduce the amount of fire in the world by describing reality.

Another similarity is that both Israel and the U.S. generated their own enemies. The U.S. famously nurtured fundamentalist Islamic opposition to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, said in a 1998 interview that this had been “an excellent idea” and he had no regrets about these “stirred-up Muslims.” Israel did essentially the same thing in miniature in the occupied territories, encouraging the growth of Hamas to damage the secular Fatah. “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” according to one of the Israelis who worked on this clever project.

As with 9/11, the attacks on Israel could only have succeeded on the scale they did because of the monstrous incompetence of the relevant leaders. “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” the CIA told George W. Bush in August 2001. Bush ignored this. Dick Cheney actually pushed back at the intelligence world’s many warnings because he believed Al Qaeda was merely feinting and trying to get the U.S. to expend resources preventing something that would never happen. Likewise, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was apparently warned by Egypt that something bad was coming but ignored it. We’ll inevitably learn shocking details soon about Netanyahu’s general indifference to what was on the horizon.

This is all of a piece with the irrelevance of citizens’ lives to leaders like Netanyahu and Bush. They gnash their teeth and rend their garments about how enraged they are by attacks by foreigners, yet in their hearts they don’t care about us at all. Immediately after 9/11, the Bush administration falsely told New Yorkers that the city air was perfectly safe to breathe.

Finally, the revenge that Israel will now exact will be hideous, as was that taken by the U.S. There is nothing on earth like the fury of the powerful when they believe they have been defied by their inferiors.

This is something my neighbors and I agreed on as we drank those awful wine coolers on 9/11. We were frightened deep in our guts by what had happened that morning. For anyone who wasn’t in New York then, let me tell you — Al Qaeda truly put the terror back in terrorism. But what we were most scared of was what our own government was about to do next. Ever since that moment, my dream has been that someday the regular people of the world — all of us, on every “side” — will form an alliance against our grotesque leaders.

The post Yes, This Is Israel’s 9/11 appeared first on The Intercept.

You may not know that there’s a memorial planned for the global war on terror. This would be understandable, since the global war on terror is like a toy that America was obsessed with for a short period of time and then grew tired of and has forgotten under the bed. To extend the metaphor, this would be the type of toy that continuously explodes and has killed millions of people.

President Donald Trump signed legislation approving the memorial back in 2017. The bill created an exception to the Commemorative Works Act of 1986, which requires the passage of at least 10 years after the official end of a war before a memorial to it can be constructed in Washington, D.C. That was obviously unworkable regarding the global war on terror, which is tentatively scheduled to conclude five billion years from now when the sun expands and engulfs the Earth.

There’s no design yet, but the foundation funding the memorial is conducting a public survey for ideas now through October 17. It includes questions such as:

Screenshot of a question from the survey created by the Global War on Terrorism Memorial Foundation.

You’ll note that none of the options are such emotions as “rage-filled sorrow” or “the urge to prosecute war criminals.” Given this, you may not be surprised to learn that the honorary chair of the foundation is George W. Bush, who happens to be the president who birthed the global war on terror with the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The foundation’s funders include 7-Eleven, Amazon, and Baker Botts, a powerhouse Texas law firm named after James Baker, secretary of state for the first George Bush.

However, one of the survey’s final questions is, “Do you have any comments or additional notes for the GWOT Memorial Foundation to consider?” This is a great opportunity to submit some suggestions for the foundation to ignore.

A recent estimate by the Costs of War project at Brown University found that over 4.5 million people have died thanks to the direct and indirect effects of conflict in post-9/11 war zones. Of these, about 10,000, or 0.22 percent, are Americans (including those who died on September 11, 2001, or during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars). 

The global war on terror memorial will be located on the National Mall near the memorial to the Vietnam War, which lists the names of over 58,000 American dead. It might be nice to do the same kind of thing here but include the names of everyone from every country who died thanks to the global war on terror. This would require a monument about 75 times bigger than the one for Vietnam.

The downside of this idea is that it is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. It’s true it’s not literally impossible, but it’s more likely that we will change the U.S. national bird from the bald eagle to the rose-breasted grosbeak, which is sexually nonbinary.

The Costs of War project has also calculated that the price of the global war on terror has been about $6 trillion so far, and we’ll have to spend another $2 trillion on care for veterans in the future, for an eventual total of $8 trillion. This sounds like a lot, but consider that it is only one one-millionth of $8 quintillion.

Some of this money was essentially set on fire and has disappeared. But a lot of it is still here in the U.S., in particular in the lovely suburbs surrounding the Defense Department in northern Virginia. Since the global war on terror memorial is going to be right by Arlington Memorial Bridge, there could be complementary bus trips across the Potomac, allowing visitors to gape at all the mansions, $180,000 Range Rovers, and, more recently, luxury pickleball courts they purchased for defense contractors. (From a distance, obviously — any regular people who get too close will experience an immediate armed response.)

Remember when George W. Bush’s CIA briefers gave him a presentation on August 6, 2001, titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”? And part of it warned that the FBI had information that “indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings”? And other warnings his administration received were titled “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” and “Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks”? And how Vice President Dick Cheney asked the CIA whether Al Qaeda might be pretending to be about to attack America just to fool us into expending resources in response?

I hope you do remember this, because the way this didn’t matter in U.S. politics makes me feel as though I am experiencing the Mandela effect, a name for a phenomenon in which people have specific false memories. For instance, lots of Americans apparently believe the comedian Sinbad starred in a movie called “Shazaam” in the 1990s. I don’t remember that, but I definitely do remember Bush and Co. being criminally incompetent.

In any case, if all this did happen, it seems like the kind of thing we might want to highlight at a memorial about the ensuing worldwide war. But I don’t think the memorial’s honorary chair is really up for that.

Back in 2004, at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Bush joshed about looking for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the Oval Office, since they hadn’t turned up anywhere else. This was funny because his WMD claims were the basis for his invasion of Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of people.

At the same event six years later, in 2010, President Barack Obama kidded about killing the Jonas Brothers with a Predator drone. Again, the joke here is that Obama murdered American citizens with drones and, according to a 2013 book, told aides that “I’m really good at killing people.”

Maybe these two videos could play continuously at the global war on terror memorial so everyone will realize there’s no reason we can’t have some fun with this whole thing. Let’s reach under the bed, grab this old toy, and build a memorial that shows our kids how we did pointless ultraviolence back in the day.

The post George W. Bush Is Building a Memorial to the War on Terror. He Wants Your Feedback. appeared first on The Intercept.

Tim Gurner, an Australian real estate titan and multimillionaire, made international news last week by being recklessly honest about his desire for unemployment to spike and regular workers to suffer. Gurner has been understandably condemned for this across the globe and has now issued a weak, vague apology.

What truly deserves attention is why Gurner feels the way he does — and how it’s precisely explained in an essay written in 1943, titled “Political Aspects of Full Employment.”

In it, Polish economist Michal Kalecki argued that government spending could ensure a permanent economic boom with both low unemployment and increased business profits. Crucially, however, Kalecki predicted that business executives would hate having what everyone else sees as a good economy, because it would allow regular people to be less subservient to them. For the business class, no amount of money can replace the daily joy of watching your inferiors grovel when in your presence.

Gurner made his remarks to fellow executives during an event called “The Australian Financial Review Property Summit.” (The Australian Financial Review is loosely analogous to the Wall Street Journal in the U.S.)

“Unemployment has to jump 40, 50 percent in my view,” Gurner explained, with the cool affect of a sociopathic surgeon explaining why he has to cut into your body. “We need to see pain in the economy.”

The initial Covid-19 era, with increased social spending and low unemployment, gave workers more power in the labor market and the willingness to use it. Ever since, business executives and government officials have been expressing sentiments like Gurner’s, if slightly less bluntly.

Last July, The Intercept obtained an internal Bank of America memo that stated “we hope the ratio of job openings to unemployed is down to the more normal highs of the last business cycle.” Translated into English, this means the bank was rooting for there to be fewer job openings.

Likewise, a California real estate CEO said on an earnings call last year that a recession could be “good” if “it comes with a level of unemployment that puts employers back in the driver seat and allows them to get all their employees back into the office.”

Around the same time, an anonymous Texas businessman told the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve about his delighted anticipation that “the workforce pulls its head out of its rear when a correction or recession makes jobs scarce and people start to feel the pain or fear of not providing for their family and loved ones.” He did have one concern, however  — that the government might “jump back into the fight and pay them to do nothing again.”

Even Janet Yellen, the current secretary of the Treasury and former chair of the Fed during the Obama administration, wrote this in a 1996 memo: “Unemployment serves as a worker-discipline device because the prospect of a costly unemployment spell produces sufficient fear of job loss.”

What’s striking about these sentiments is they don’t always involve complaints that low unemployment is allowing workers to bid up wages and thereby hurt businesses’ profits. Gurner’s soliloquy in particular has little to do with fears that he and his fellow titans of industry are making less money. The website of his company is filled with braggadocious reports about how it’s thriving. Australia’s GDP, after falling in 2020 during the first year of Covid-19, has bounced back vigorously and appears on track to grow at about the same rate as it has over the past 20 years.

Rather, his complaint is that regular non-titans have more leverage with low unemployment — and hence are getting uppity and not showing due deference to their betters.

“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around,” Gurner said. “There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. It’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude, and that has to come through hurting the economy.”

Kalecki perfectly understood the psychological suffering that low unemployment caused executives like Gurner 80 years ago.

He was writing in the midst of World War II, at a time when capitalism had produced catastrophic recessions for the past 100 years. Enormous swaths of the population had been intermittently thrown out of work and into terrifying destitution. This had culminated in the Great Depression of the 1930s, when John Maynard Keynes and other economists proposed a solution for these vertiginous falls: The government could just spend money to get the economy going again.

This had been proven to Kalecki’s generation by what they saw right in front of their eyes: a gigantic world war that put everyone back to work. Kalecki started his essay by declaring “a solid majority of economists is now of the opinion that, even in a capitalist system, full employment may be secured by a government spending program.” It didn’t require armed conflict, though: Socially productive spending or just handing out money to everyone would do just as well.

The key limiting factor, Kalecki believed, was not some shortage of money, since the government could create as much money as it wanted. Rather, it was the productive capacity of the economy. For this perspective he is recognized as a key forerunner of modern monetary theory (especially by people who hate him). As Stephanie Kelton, an economics professor and present-day proponent of MMT, has put it, “the government really could give everyone a pony … so long as we could breed enough ponies. … [The ponies] have to come from somewhere; the money is conjured out of thin air.”

At the time, given the incipient Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, you might imagine that business leaders would rejoice at this argument. After all, they could largely eliminate pressure for radical change, while keeping capitalism. Moreover, Kalecki argued, “higher output and employment benefit not only workers but entrepreneurs as well, because the latter’s profits rise.”

There was a big, big problem, however. Here’s how Kalecki described it:

Under a regime of permanent full employment, the “sack” would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow. … “[D]iscipline in the factories” and “political stability” are more appreciated than profits by business leaders. Their class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view, and that unemployment is an integral part of the “normal” capitalist system.

In the U.S., the issue was dealt with via subterfuge. There would be some government spending. One of the congressional proponents of the huge national highway system built during the 1950s explained that “it put a nice solid floor across the whole economy in times of recession.” 

But while government expenditures would reduce the severity of recessions and the concomitant unemployment, they wouldn’t be enough to eliminate them. And crucially, this spending would be focused on the military; the highway project was largely sold as necessary to national defense. (There’s even a page on the U.S. Army’s website about it.) 

The dream of a full-employment economy generated by social spending endured only at the fringes: At the same 1963 demonstration at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther said, “I take the position if we can have full employment and full production for the negative ends of war, then why can’t we have a job for every American in the pursuit of peace.”

In any case, Gurner’s class instincts are telling him exactly what Kalecki foretold. He informed the crowd last week that “governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment to get [worker attitudes] to some sort of normality.”

The reality is that we have the tools to create a much better, richer society for everyone. But the people at the top would prefer a worse, poorer country, if that’s what’s required for them to stay completely in charge.

The post The Secret History of How the Super-Rich Have Kept the Working Class Out of Work appeared first on The Intercept.

Which U.S. vice president said this, and when? 

“The time is not far distant when the working man can have a four-day week and family life will be even more fully enjoyed by every American. [These are] not dreams or idle boasts, simply projections of the gains we have made in the past four years.”

The answer is Richard Nixon, when he and Dwight Eisenhower were running for reelection in 1956.

When Nixon advocated for the four-day workweek, the demand to spend less time working had already been central to progressive politics for 90 years. After a long absence, it has finally returned. First and foremost, the United Auto Workers are preparing to strike, calling not just for better pay and benefits, but also a 32-hour, four-day workweek.

In the second half of the 1800s, new industrial employers regularly required 60 hours or more of work each week. On May 1, 1867, unions demonstrated in Chicago in support of a new Illinois law that mandated an eight-hour workday. This didn’t go anywhere: Employers largely ignored both the demonstrators and the law.

But in memory of the 1867 protests, a nationwide labor federation picked May 1, 1886 as the day for a universal strike calling for an eight-hour day. This was such a heartfelt desire that demonstrators sang a song called “Eight Hours”:

We want to feel the sunshine
And we want to smell the flow’rs.
We are sure that God has willed it
And we mean to have eight hours.

Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest
Eight hours for what we will.

The millionaires of the Gilded Age found this so charming that Chicago police shot and killed several striking workers at the city’s McCormick reaper plant. The next day, a striker threw a bomb at the cops, killing one of them. All of this became known as the Haymarket Affair, one of the most significant events in U.S. labor history.

However, this didn’t make much difference for a long time. Unions had only intermittent success fighting for a shorter workweek until the 1930s and the Great Depression. In 1938, Congress finally passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which created the minimum wage, prohibited most child labor, and effectively created a 44-hour workweek. This was lowered to 40 hours two years later.

The fact that Nixon — generally not seen as a left-wing radical — was calling for a 32-hour workweek by 1956 illustrates how deeply it had seeped into American consciousness that, over time, everyone would get to work less and live more. 

The fact that Nixon was calling for a 32-hour workweek illustrates how deeply it had seeped into American consciousness that, over time, everyone would get to work less and live more.

The general concept is simple, even if its manifestation is complex.

Over time, people figure out ways to produce more with the same amount of human labor. Looms made it possible for fewer workers to generate much more fabric. Legions of typists were replaced by computers and word-processing software. Eventually artificial intelligence may supplant, for instance, the radiologists who peer at scans of the inside of your body and try to puzzle out what’s going on in there.

This process is so powerful that even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels celebrated it in “The Communist Manifesto”:

The bourgeoisie … has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.

The bourgeoisie … has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.

We’re used to the idea that people in an increasingly productive society can be paid more. But we generally don’t realize they also can get paid the same but work fewer hours. If productivity goes up enough, they get both: making more money for fewer hours.

John Maynard Keynes, one of history’s most important economists, considered what this meant in a 1930 essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.”

As Keynes explained, “The economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race.” However, he argued, “the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years” — i.e., right about now.

Keynes speculated that people would still want to work, but perhaps only 15 hours a week. Then the rest of the time, each human would have to figure out “how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

Keynes wasn’t sure we had it in us to pull this off. Larry Summers, the prominent Harvard economist who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, agrees. He recently expressed distress about the prospect of regular slobs having too much leisure time, saying “for every nonemployed middle-aged man who’s learning to play the harp or to appreciate the Impressionists, there are a hundred who are drinking beer, playing video games, and watching 10 hours of TV a day.”

But what Keynes foresaw, and Summers fears, has been largely off the U.S. political agenda since 1956. Increased productivity can lead to better pay or less work for regular people. But we now know this requires an immense political effort. For the most part over the last 50 years, neither has happened. American society overall has gotten far more productive during that time. But most of the gains from this have accrued for the top 10 percent of Americans, to the tune of about $47 trillion total.

The UAW’s demand illustrates that, at long last, regular folks are realizing again that it is totally feasible for them to work less, yet make the same amount of money or more. 

The idea is slowly spreading through society across the world. The Maryland state legislature has been pondering a bill to encourage businesses to establish a four-day week. The Scottish National Party, the ruling party in Scotland, has called for a 32-hour week. Last year, 70 companies in the U.K. participated in a trial of a four-day week.

Making a four-day workweek the standard is obviously still far away. It will certainly face the same ferocious opposition as a five-day week did 100 years ago. But people simply understanding that it’s possible is a big, big step forward, and something to celebrate this Labor Day.

The post Four Days a Week: This Labor Day, Let’s Talk About Laboring Less appeared first on The Intercept.

Today is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It’s obviously most famous for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. And the best known part of that speech is King’s words expressing hope that his children “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

In a sense, it’s understandable that one of the greatest works of oratory in American history has overshadowed the rest of the day. Everyone remembers Abraham Lincoln’s 272-word address at Gettysburg. But we don’t talk much about the preceding speech that day by the politician Edward Everett, which was almost 14,000 words long. Honestly, that is too much freedom.

Nevertheless, it’s striking how much the “jobs” part of the March on Washington has dropped out of memory — because that was absolutely core to the message the marchers wanted the rest of the country to hear.

Start with the day’s program, which included a 10-point section called “What We Demand.” Number one is “comprehensive and effective civil rights legislation” that guarantees not just the right to vote, but also “decent housing.”

Number seven is “a massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers — Negro and white — on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.”

Number eight is “a national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living. (Government surveys show that anything less than $2.00 an hour fails to do this.)” At the time, the minimum wage was $1.15, or the equivalent today, adjusted for inflation, of $11.45. $2.00 an hour would now be about $20. The actual federal minimum wage today is $7.25

Even more succinctly, one of the most popular placards carried by marchers read, “Civil rights plus full employment equals freedom.”

King himself paired economics with civil rights. One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, he said, “The life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”

John Lewis, who was then chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, spoke before King. He began by saying:

All over this nation, the Black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of. Hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here, for they are receiving starvation wages or no wages at all. While we stand here, there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi who are out in the fields working for less than three dollars a day, 12 hours a day.

He went on to explain that while the march supported the Kennedy administration’s proposed civil rights bill, it was insufficient. “We need,” he stated, “a bill that will provide for the homeless and starving people of this nation.”

Right after Lewis came Walter Reuther, the president of the United Auto Workers. In his speech, he referenced the low rates of unemployment during World War II and told the crowd:

If we can have full employment, and full production for the negative ends of war, then why can’t we have a job for every American in the pursuit of peace? And so our slogan has got to be fair employment, but fair employment within the framework of full employment, so that every American can have a job.

But the most powerful case was made by A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and one of the key organizers of the march. It’s well worth reading what he said, because Randolph addressed head on the most profound questions of American society:

We have no future in a society in which six million Black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty. Nor is the goal of our civil rights revolution merely the passage of civil rights legislation. … Yes, we want a fair employment practice act, but what good will it do if profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers, Black and white?

The sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality. It falls to the Negro to reassert this proper priority of values, because our ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private property. It falls to us to demand new forms of social planning, to create full employment, and to put automation at the service of human needs, not at the service of profits …

The March on Washington is not the climax of our struggle, but a new beginning, not only for the Negro, but for all Americans who thirst for freedom and a better life. Look for the enemies of Medicare, of higher minimum wages, of Social Security, of federal aid to education and there you will find the enemy of the Negro, the coalition of Dixiecrats and reactionary Republicans that seek to dominate the Congress.

So once you understand the core purpose of the March on Washington, it’s clear that its dream remains, at best, half fulfilled. While segregation and discrimination still exist, they at least have been formally dismantled. But in economic terms, we have, if anything, gone backward. The federal minimum wage is less in real terms than it was in 1963. The idea of a federal jobs guarantee is barely even discussed. The chair of the Federal Reserve talks openly about the need to decrease the number of available jobs.

Four days after King was assassinated in 1968, his widow Coretta Scott King delivered a speech in which she said, “Now we are at a point where we must have economic power. … We are concerned about not only the Negro poor, but the poor all over America … Every man deserves a right to a job or an income so that he can pursue liberty, life, and happiness.”

If the marchers 60 years ago were correct, this agenda will have to be recovered if African Americans, and Americans in general, are going reach genuine freedom.

The post How We Forgot the “Jobs” Part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom appeared first on The Intercept.

Wildfires in Hawaii killing over 100 people. Antarctic sea ice hitting record lows. This past July breaking records as the hottest month in known history.

All these purported “events” and more have been drilled into the heads of every American. Except — none of it is actually happening. Nothing about global warming has ever happened. It is all a hoax concocted by China.

Many people, when forced to confront these facts, will respond “wrong” or “no” or “Do you consume enough iodized salt to prevent ‘brain collapse’?”

Let’s take a quick look at the evidence that Donald Trump was right about this all along — and that in fact the Chinese government has been fooling us for the past 160 years. 

1863

The Civil War was raging in the United States; Abraham Lincoln was president. And the Irish physicist John Tyndall proposed in a paper for the the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science that variations in atmospheric composition could cause changes in the climate.

China was then ruled by Emperor Muzong of the Qing Dynasty. In 1863, he was a devious, far-sighted 7-year-old. A message from him to Tyndall leaked from the Chinese imperial archives shows him directing Tyndall to concoct a false theory about weather — but to be sure to “make it sound science-y.”

In a separate memo, Muzong wrote a note in his own hand that roughly translates to “I adore climate misinformation and look forward to deceiving the West for 100 more years in collaboration with our Occidental lackeys, the Biden Crime Family.”

1896

At the end of the 19th century, the same publication, the Philosophical Magazine, ran a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius titled “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature on the Ground.” Except Arrhenius never existed: He and his paper were entirely fabricated by the Qing Dynasty, then in its final dotage.

In retrospect, it’s obvious they were yanking our chain, since Svante Arrhenius is not a real name. Then in 1903, “he” won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, illustrating just how deep this rabbit hole goes.

1912

After an extremely hot year, Popular Mechanics published an article in 1912 titled “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate — What Scientists Predict for the Future.” It stated that the effect of burning coal on the temperature “may be considerable in a few centuries.”

But who then owned Popular Mechanics? Would you be surprised to learn it was China? Perhaps you would, because there’s absolutely no evidence for this. But come on: The Republic of China had just been established following the Xinhai Revolution, and Job No. 1 for them as they consolidated power across a vast territory would obviously be undermining the industrial development of the United States.

Also, consider that the Chinese mandarins carrying out this plot would probably think that Americans had small heads and were asleep and easy to deceive. Chillingly enough, “Popular Mechanics” is an anagram for “Microcephalus Nap.”

1956

The Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass published a paper sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research titled “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change.”

Several years previously, the Chinese Communist Party had won the country’s civil war and established the People’s Republic of China. The little-noticed Chapter 2, Section VII of the new Chinese Constitution reads: “All aspects of society shall be continuously revolutionized, except like all previous Chinese governments, we’ll keep hoaxing Americans about global warming. One good way to do this is via our control of the U.S. Navy.” Then it says, “Don’t put this part on the internet.”

1969

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then serving in the Nixon administration, wrote a memo for his superiors warning about global warming. It could, he stated, cause “apocalyptic change. … [It] could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York.”

By then, China was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, following Mao Zedong’s May 16 Notification. A top secret annex to the document reads, “The objective of this great struggle is to obliterate representatives of the anti-Party and anti-Socialist bourgeoisie. But maybe we can make an exception for the ones like Moynihan. He does such great work.”

1977 – 2003

For a period of 26 years starting in the 1970s, scientists at Exxon Mobil produced internal studies that purport to estimate the impact of fossil fuels on global warming.

However, an examination of Exxon’s corporate archives shows repeated references by top executives to “those graphs and math stuff we fabricated at the behest of our natural ideological allies at the Chinese Communist Party. By doing this we will please our masters in Peking [Beijing] and also make this company less profitable. So a double win.”

Today

That brings us to now, and a new front launched by the Chinese government. Recently, homeowners have reported Ring security camera footage of legions of Chinese citizens sneaking into their homes at night. Meanwhile, high-resolution photographs taken by U.S. spy satellites show billions of intentionally defective thermometers being pumped out of factories in Sichuan. Put it together and you’ll realize they’re secretly replacing your red-white-and-blue thermometers with these CCP thermometers that look exactly the same, except they make us think it’s 20 degrees hotter than it actually is.

What can one do in the face of this monstrous Marxist fraud?

First, do your own research. Remember that all human institutions are corrupt, and thus you should only trust long, barely coherent threads by anonymous strangers on Twitter. 

Second, gather together with the like-minded, ideally at a remote location that could be referred to as a “compound.” Become conscious of the many traitors in your midst, and begin plotting to eliminate them.

Third, look into the moon landing. Did it really happen, or did China pay Stanley Kubrick to film it on a soundstage? Did Kubrick also direct the following moon landings, or were they done by journeymen and Kubrick just executive produced?

Fourth and finally, consider unloading that seaside timeshare, just in case Trump and Sen. Marsha Blackburn turn out to be wrong.

The post A Brief History of China’s Global Warming Hoax, From 1863 to Right Now appeared first on The Intercept.

This is the problem with talking about taxes, especially taxes on international corporations. In a famous essay 100 years ago, H.L. Mencken argued that the subject of taxation should be “eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it.” After all, with the possible exception of sex, there’s nothing that mesmerizes human beings more than money and who’s getting how much.

Yet somehow, as Mencken said, taxation and related topics remain “swathed in dullness.” It’s hard not to believe this dreary fog is generated on purpose. As John Oliver has said, “If you want to do something evil, hide it in something boring.”

The evil goal in this situation is various forms of international tax abuse, an umbrella term that covers both tax evasion and tax avoidance. In theory, these two things are different. Tax evasion is carried out largely by various terrible outlaw oligarchs and is against the law. By contrast, tax avoidance is conducted by the world’s most prestigious corporations and is totally legal, because the tax avoiders write the tax laws.

In practice, the line between tax evasion and tax avoidance is murky and shifting. The Tax Justice Network, which aims to shut down international tax abuse of all kinds, estimates that between them, the two practices will allow corporations and the superwealthy to underpay their taxes over the next 10 years by $5 trillion. A large majority of this will be thanks to the “legal” corporate tax avoidance.

That’s a lot of money, and it can purchase a lot of boredom, as illustrated by the fact that only 14 people will ever click on this article. But you happy 14 should know that this issue is fascinating and actually fairly simple — and the fixes are straightforward, even if they’re politically difficult. The significance of the new United Nations report is that it demonstrates real progress is beginning to be made.

The overall problem is easy to understand. It’s caused by the fact that 1) people and corporations don’t like paying taxes and 2) countries like collecting taxes. This dynamic creates a natural downward pressure on tax rates.

For their part, multinational corporations will claim that the most profitable subsidiaries of the company are located in countries with low tax rates. This has been an especially popular strategy for tech and pharmaceutical companies. Much of their value lies in their intellectual property, which is much easier than, say, factories to “relocate” to Ireland.

Meanwhile, nations like Ireland or Bermuda are happy to essentially steal tax revenue from other countries by offering tax rates to businesses that are far lower than in the countries where the companies do much of their production or sell their products. The current official corporate tax rate in Ireland is 12.5 percent. The top official corporate tax rate in the U.S. used to be 35 percent, and the effective rate — i.e., what companies actually paid — was 30 percent as recently as 2000. The official rate was lowered to 21 percent in 2017 by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and the effective rate is now about 15 percent. One of the arguments for the TCJA was that America had to compete with places like Ireland.

The key solution to this problem is an international agreement to set up a unitary tax system. Right now, the profits that a multinational company earns are attributed by the company to various subsidiaries (with the strong incentive to set up high-profit, largely bogus subsidiaries in low-tax countries). Under a unitary tax, all the company’s profits would be attributed to the company overall. Then the profits would be considered “earned” in different locations based on a straightforward formula, probably based on the number of workers and sales in each country. If half the business activity of, say, Apple, occurred in the U.S., the U.S. would have the right to levy taxes on 50 percent of Apple’s profits.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has purportedly been working on international tax reform for a decade. And indeed, it has made some forward progress. But the OECD consists of 38 countries that are largely the world’s richest, with the richest and most powerful corporations. It was always unrealistic to expect these governments to get together and crack down on their most important constituents.

The significance of the new U.N. report is that it was put together in a process that included much of the world, including countries that do genuinely want to limit corporate malfeasance and prevent their wealthiest citizens from spiriting their money across their borders.

The report from Guterres calls for the General Assembly this fall to consider “a legally binding multilateral instrument [that] would establish an overall system of international tax governance [and] would outline the core tenets of future international tax cooperation.”

That’s the key: Countries are realizing that, rather than compete against each other to raise a small amount of total revenue from big corporations, they should cooperate and raise substantially more. The only losers would be tax havens and shady billionaires. It’s an extremely non-boring battle of Lilliputians versus a huge Gulliver, and the Lilliputians can win if they manage to stay interested.

The post A U.N. Plan to Stop Corporate Tax Abuse appeared first on The Intercept.

The bank robber John Dillinger is one of history’s most famous thieves, absconding with the equivalent today of about $7 million. You’d think that if someone had stolen $7 million on each of 7 million separate crime sprees, you would have heard about it, right? But you would be wrong.

In 2020, the RAND Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, California, released a study with the humdrum title “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.” RAND itself resides at the center of America’s establishment. In the decades following its founding after World War II, it was largely funded by and served the needs of the military-industrial complex. Daniel Ellsberg was working at RAND when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, which he had access to because RAND possessed several copies.

Incredibly enough, this dreary-sounding paper describes what might be the largest material theft since human civilization began. It examines a simple question: If U.S. income inequality had remained at its 1975 level through 2018, how much more money would the bottom 90 percent of Americans have made during these 43 years? Put another way, how much additional wealth flowed to the top 10 percent during this time, thanks to increased income equality?

If you have a butt, you should hold onto it, because the answer is 47 TRILLION DOLLARS.

This is a number so large that it surpasses human understanding. There are only a few hundred billion stars in the Milky Way; $47 trillion is about twice the size of the annual U.S. gross domestic product.

This raises an obvious question. Traditionally, this kind of upward concentration of wealth has required mass slaughter. How did America’s elites pull this off without needing to mow thousands of us down in the streets?

The answer can be found in the new book “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.” It was written by Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard, and Erik M. Conway, a historian at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who previously collaborated on “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.”

As Oreskes and Conway explain, “The Big Myth” grew out of their previous book. While writing “Merchants of Doubt,” they discovered that the groundwork of global warming denialism had been laid in the 1980s by prominent scientists who understood the reality of the situation quite well. However, these scientists were convinced believers in what Oreskes and Conway call “market fundamentalism” (borrowing from George Soros, one of market fundamentalism’s loudest critics). This is a system of belief that holds that political and economic freedom are indivisible. They quote the physicist Fred Singer, who wrote that “if we do not carefully delineate the government’s role in regulating … dangers there is essentially no limit to how much government can ultimately control our lives.” 

In other words, government interventions in the economy — such as laws removing lead from gas, carbon taxes, or mandated cooling-off breaks for people working in 100-degree heat — not only make us all poorer, but also put us on the road to Stalinist tyranny. Hence it’s crucial to head them all off at the pass, even if that requires a vast misrepresentation of observable fact.

This worldview is such incoherent drivel that it’s hard to believe anyone with a functioning brain stem can buy into it. Meanwhile, market fundamentalists are oddly unconcerned with government intervention that’s profitable for large corporations. If you’re an entrepreneur who boldly tries to manufacture and sell any of the pharmaceutical industry’s patented products in a free market, you will quickly encounter the suffocating hand of the administrative state. Yet there are no Wall Street Journal op-eds decrying this injustice. (This doesn’t mean there’s no justifiable rationale for patents, but that there are rationales for other government regulations too.)

There’s also the reality that markets are a human creation, not a phenomenon like gravity that would exist whether or not people ever came along. And since markets are created by us, it is legitimate and within our power to alter them to better serve our needs.

Finally, there’s the historical fact that no country has ever gone communist gradually, starting with minimum wage laws and ending up with gulags. Rather, it happened in various fell swoops in places with glaring injustices and vicious capitalistic inequality, and even then generally has required contemporary wars. As the renowned Soviet expert George Kennan put it in 1946, “communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue.” Therefore, Kennan believed, “every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society” was a victory over communism. 

Markets are a human creation, not a phenomenon like gravity that would exist whether or not people ever came along.

This equanimity about using democratic power for the common good was common among U.S. potentates in the decades following World War II. Averell Harriman, the son of a 19th-century robber baron who later became secretary of commerce and governor of New York, believed that “Our social and economic system is working perhaps toward Swedish socialist concepts but not toward Soviet Communism. The government in Sweden has overcome poverty, achieved decent housing and medical services for all, but Sweden has in no way compromised the principle of representative government and concern for civil liberties.”

The story of how we got from there to here is shocking even if you consider yourself a wised-up malcontent, and “The Big Myth” tells it in granular detail. It’s a sweeping tale of what must be one of the most successful propaganda campaigns ever, one that transformed the intuitive common sense — what everyone “knows” without thinking about it — of both American elites and regular people. 

You know the drill. Lowering taxes on billionaires will unleash their wondrous creativity and make us all richer in the long run. Minimum wage laws make regular people worse off and must stop going up. (Incredibly enough, the federal minimum wage has not increased in real terms since 1968 and, adjusted for inflation, is now worth less than in 1950.) Stultifying environmental regulations are the reason your boss can’t give you a raise. Social Security was a mistake and is destined for extinction. 

The funniest part is that this indoctrination into the glories of the “free” market could never have happened via free markets. Rather, as Oreskes and Conway illustrate, it required enormous subsidies from corporate America, much of it going to tenured professors working at nonprofit universities. 

The book is an incredible work of scholarship, and every page has at least one sparkling, fascinating fact. Adam Smith’s 1776 book “The Wealth of Nation” is now seen as the key text proving the virtues (economic and political) of unregulated capitalism. This is not true at all: Smith argues that bank regulation is crucial; that workers should unionize; that businesspeople have often “deceived and oppressed” the public; and that any political proposal they make should be viewed with the utmost suspicion. George Stigler, a prominent economist at the University of Chicago and colleague of Milton Friedman, produced an edition of “The Wealth of Nations” that dealt with Smith’s inconvenient views by quietly excising many of them.

Also striking: Corporate funders realized that another book central to their cause, “The Road to Serfdom” by Friedrich von Hayek, was just too long and complicated for most people to get through it. So they paid for a simplified version that appeared in Reader’s Digest in the 1950s, where it found a devoted reader in Ronald Reagan.

“Ideas do not exist ex nihilo. They are developed, sustained, and promoted by people and institutions.”

And there is just so, so much more. It’s all enough to make you paranoid about what other thoughts were put in your head on purpose by people without your best interests at heart. The most important lesson of “The Big Myth” is a meta one. They write convincingly, “Ideas do not exist ex nihilo. They are developed, sustained, and promoted by people and institutions. [This] is the history of the construction of a myth.”

Speaking of, the RAND study was funded by the Fair Work Center in Seattle, which in turn is largely funded by the foundation of Nick Hanauer. Indeed, the question the paper answers was itself thought up partly by Hanauer, who’s a venture capitalist and early investor in Amazon — but one has with views much more in tune with the views of 1950s U.S. elites. Preposterous myths can be successfully promulgated with huge gobs of cash, but even getting the truth out there takes a lot of money.

Update: August 7, 2023

A previous version of this article stated that the federal minimum wage has not increased since 1968. It been updated to make clear that this refers to the fact it has not increased in real terms since 1968; it has been adjusted upwards on several occasions in nominal terms.

The post The Big Myth About “Free” Markets That Justified History’s Greatest Heist appeared first on The Intercept.

The measure was part of an amendment to a bill reauthorizing the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, and was reported out of the committee 17-3. It allocates $3 million for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to study different models to pay for the development of new drugs. NASEM, which was created by Congress to provide high-quality advice on technical issues, would have to produce the report within two years.

The bill’s language specifically instructs NASEM to examine two ways of funding new drugs: the government paying for it directly, and innovation prizes for inventors. Drugs created in this manner would presumably then be placed in the public domain and sold as generics.

This issue is almost never discussed in U.S. politics and would likely sound arcane and meaningless to most people if they ever heard about it. But in reality, it’s both easy to understand and powerfully relevant to all of our lives. Different ways of paying for drug development could generate more drugs that we desperately need, while at the same time saving regular people huge amounts of money.

The most important thing to understand about drugs is that they are expensive to discover and test for safety and efficacy — but once that’s done, they’re generally cheap to manufacture. According to the Food and Drug Administration, when a patent on a drug has expired and there are five generic companies producing it, the price will fall nearly 85 percent. In the 10 years from 2009 to 2019, the lower costs of generics saved the U.S. health care system $2.2 trillion.

The current way of dealing with this dynamic is so entrenched that it may seem like a law of nature. First, pharmaceutical companies pay the high costs of developing new drugs. (At least theoretically — the federal government often pays for a significant chunk of the upfront outlays.) Then, so the drug companies can recoup their investment and make a profit, they are granted a patent on their discoveries that lasts 20 years. This gives them alone the right to make and sell the drug. In other words, for two decades the government steps in to prevent a free market from functioning.

The most striking recent example of this is vaccines for Covid-19. Moderna raked in $36 billion for its vaccine in 2021 and 2022 — and if you try to make and sell a version of it yourself, you will go to jail. This case is especially galling, given that the government paid even more than usual for the drug’s development costs.

The proposed study could lay the ground for a new world, in which the government would use different mechanisms in another pandemic to create incentives for the creation of treatments. Pharmaceutical companies would still make money, just not gargantuan amounts of it thanks to a public health emergency.

You can measure the age of this current patent system by the fact that it’s mentioned in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution: “The Congress shall have Power … To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

It’s important to read this carefully, however. Congress has the power to grant patents, but the Constitution does not require it to do so.

Thomas Jefferson expounded on his perspective on this at great length in a letter he wrote in 1813. “Ideas,” he said, “should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition. … Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility. but this may, or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society.”

The time seems ripe now to consider whether our current system serves the the will and convenience of society. The U.S pharmaceutical industry is incredibly costly, with 2021 revenues of $550 billion and profits far higher than those of other industries. 

But the price may not be the worst part of it. Patents perversely disincentivize companies from developing actual cures — because when a patient is cured, they no longer will need the drug. As Chris Rock once said, “There ain’t no money in the cure. The money’s in the medicine. That’s how a drug dealer makes his money — on the comeback.” 

This has led to systematic underdevelopment of new antibiotics, with disastrous results: Over 1 million people worldwide are now killed every year by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, with the number potentially rising to 10 million by 2050. 

This is also a problem for new classes of drugs. Goldman Sachs analysts explained it straightforwardly in 2018, writing in a report: “The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy [but] while this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.”

Drug companies are also left unmotivated to research drugs to treat rare diseases, given the low number of potential buyers. This has long been recognized as a flaw in the patent system; the passage of the Orphan Drug Act in 1983 was an attempt to nudge pharmaceutical companies to make some effort in these areas. Notably, the Orphan Drug Act followed a 1979 FDA report examining the problem of drugs for unusual afflictions.

Meanwhile, patents incentivize the development and promotion of truly dangerous drugs. The Sackler family made billions from helping to generate an opioid epidemic, inventing drugs that were extremely profitable because they were addictive and patients were desperate to keep using them, up until the point they expired.

Thus, we might be much better off with the government simply absorbing all the cost of developing new drugs and then allowing any drug company to manufacture them. This makes particular sense because the government already pays for a large chunk of the expenses. Money from the National Institutes of Health contributed to the development of every single one of the 210 new drugs approved by the FDA from 2010-16, providing a cumulative subsidy to the drug industry of $100 billion. 

Dean Baker, a progressive economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, looks closely at this issue in his book “Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.” He estimates that if patent protection for drugs and medical devices ended, with the government covering the tab for research, the net saving for regular Americans would be in the hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

The proposed NASEM study would examine this issue and much more. But whether it will actually happen is still very much up in the air. The reauthorization of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act will have to pass the entire Senate, and the study would then have to survive reconciliation with the House version. (A House committee has approved its own PAHPA reauthorization, but without the study.)

Most importantly, the pharmaceutical industry will be doing everything possible to knife this positive development in its crib. PhRMA, the industry’s trade group, has released a statement that it is “deeply concerned” because a new system of drug development could let “the government pick winners and losers.” That’s a power they intend to keep for themselves, along with all the profits that flow from it.

The post Senate Committee Passes Potential First Step to Radically Lower Drug Prices appeared first on The Intercept.

What does EloN Musk firing 6,500 people at Twitter have to do with the Writers Guild of America and actors in SAG-AFTRA going on strike? How is Meta axing 21,000 employees connected to more and more doctors wondering if they have to unionize? And how is this all related to Donald Trump taking a government map of Hurricane Dorian’s projected path in 2020 and scrawling on it with a Sharpie?

The answer is that America’s owners have opened a new front in their battle against everyone else, declaring war on the class of technocrats who once were their greatest allies.

In Adam Smith’s famed 1776 disquisition on economics, “The Wealth of Nations,” he ponders the behavior of the “great proprietors” of feudalism. They owned the most valuable property available — i.e., land — and with their income from this property supported a class of attendants and retainers, and, below them, a class of tenants of the land.

But the proprietors gradually lost the taste for this. They eventually wished to consume “the whole surplus produce of their lands … without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

“The Wealth of Nations” is full of this kind of ferocious criticism of the psychology of the powerful, so it’s peculiar how today’s powerful champion the book so frequently. There was even a vogue among male members of the Reagan administration for wearing ties with little pictures of Adam Smith. The most likely explanation here is America’s top apparatchiks don’t waste their time reading stuff.

In any case, Smith’s perspective was generally correct: both about the way societies can develop three different tiers, and the overall view of the people at the top of them. Their vile maxim — all for ourselves and nothing for other people — seems to be reaching a level of virulence Americans haven’t experienced in living memory.

Like feudal England, America has, roughly speaking, three classes. At the top are today’s great proprietors. The basis of their wealth is no longer mainly held in land but in direct ownership of their own businesses plus financial instruments including corporate stocks and bonds. The top 1 percent owns over half of U.S. corporate stock.

The people just below them are no longer attendants and retainers but technocrats. They’re the people who go to school to develop the specialized skills that are necessary to keep society running day to day: doctors, lawyers, scientists, computer programmers, engineers. (Journalists are also technocrats but among the weakest of the group.) The rest of the top 10 percent — i.e., the 9 percent — owns almost all the rest of U.S. corporate stock.

Then there’s everyone else. They’re no longer tenant farmers, but they still have to get up every day and clock in at Home Depot and Walgreens and Chipotle to cultivate the possessions of the great proprietors. This working class has the least leverage and the fewest options.

In retrospect, it’s clear America’s masters of mankind were shocked enough by World War II to dial the vile maxim back. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his 1944 State of the Union address, “Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” Even if you were the son of a National City Bank executive destined to follow in your father’s executive footsteps, you would be able to hear Roosevelt’s message after spending time facedown in the mud on Okinawa, covered in your platoonmate’s viscera.

Thus the great proprietors were willing to share quite a bit with the bottom two classes — for a while. During the three decades after the war, median wages went up hand in hand with productivity. That is, as America overall got richer, so did regular people.

But by the 1970s, the great proprietors had gotten tired of this arrangement. The generation with direct adult experience of how destabilized societies can explode into a worldwide slaughterhouse was retiring and dying. 

So the masters of mankind decided to alter the deal vis-à-vis the working class. This was such a gargantuan success, it’s amazing they pulled it off without bloodshed. If the minimum wage had continued to go up in step with productivity, it would now be not $7.25 but about $25 an hour. A recent RAND study found that if the U.S. had remained as equitable as it was in 1975 for the next 43 years through 2018, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would have earned an extra $47 trillion. Instead that money flowed in a great flood to the top.

Meanwhile, the technocratic class watched this process with equanimity. Technocrats generally identify upward, and ally themselves with the great proprietors against everyone else. There had been a proprietor-technocrat peace for a long, long time, with the technocrats having the power to garner a big slice of society’s good things for themselves. This included not just money but also prestige and control over their working lives, even as they served as junior partners in the coalition.

The explosion of new wealth in Silicon Valley had also made the boundaries between the two classes enticingly fuzzy. Bill Gates is the son of Bill Gates Sr., who was a prominent corporate lawyer in Seattle. Billionaire Sean Parker, founder of Napster and the first president of Facebook, is the son of an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But just as America’s masters of mankind got tired of sharing with the U.S. working class, they’ve now become fatigued with their deal with the technocrats.

Something has clearly changed in the psychology of the people at the top of America.

It’s difficult to measure or define this. Like Galadriel at the start of the “Lord of the Rings” movies, you have to feel it in the water and smell it in the air. But something has clearly changed in the psychology of the people at the top of America, as Musk and Trump demonstrate every time they reach for their smartphones and start typing.

It’s partly about money. But the vile maxim is about everything, not just cash. What drives our overlords into a towering rage today is that technocrats still have some power to define reality. And the technocrats keep telling them they can’t have all their heart’s desires instantaneously.

Musk wants to live in a world of berserk ultra-right conspiracism in which all of humanity looks to him for his discoveries about The Truth. When a Twitter engineer explained to him that his engagement was down not because the algorithm was broken, but because people were losing interest in Musk, Musk fired him. Trump wanted to claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, so he just drew that on the map produced by NOAA (where Sean Parker’s father had worked) and made the head of NOAA frightened he’d lose his job. Doctors want to decide what their patients need but are losing that power to private equity.

Right now, we’re just at the start of what will be a titanic war between the masters of mankind and the technocrats. The masters hold most of the cards, including the fact that the technocrats largely don’t understand yet that they’re in a war and are not ready for it. Thus the technocrats will likely be defeated, unless they can do something they’ve never done before: Forge an alliance with the working class.

The post Today’s Class War Is the 1 Percent Versus the People Just Below Them appeared first on The Intercept.