by RICHARD D. WOLFF

Fans of capitalism like to say it is democratic or that it supports democracy. Some have stretched language so far as to literally equate capitalism with democracy, using the terms interchangeably. No matter how many times that is repeated, it is simply not true and never was. Indeed, it is much more accurate to say that capitalism and democracy are opposites. To see why, you have only to look at capitalism as a production system where employees enter into a relationship with employers, where a few people are the boss, and most people simply work doing what they are told to do. That relationship is not democratic; it is autocratic.

When you cross the threshold into a workplace (e.g., a factory, an office, or a store), you leave whatever democracy might exist outside. You enter a workplace from which democracy is excluded. Are the majority—the employees—making the decisions that affect their lives? The answer is an unambiguous no. Whoever runs the enterprise in a capitalist system (owner[s] or a board of directors) makes all the key decisions: what the enterprise produces, what technology it uses, where production takes place, and what to do with enterprise profits. The employees are excluded from making those decisions but must live with the consequences, which affect them deeply. The employees must either accept the effects of their employers’ decisions or quit their jobs to work somewhere else (most likely organized in the same undemocratic way).

The employer is an autocrat within a capitalist enterprise, like a king in a monarchy. Over the past few centuries, monarchies were largely “overthrown” and replaced by representative, electoral “democracies.” But kings remained. They merely changed their location and their titles. They moved from political positions in government to economic positions inside capitalist enterprises. Instead of kings, they are called bosses or owners or CEOs. There they sit, atop the capitalist enterprise, exercising many king-like powers, unaccountable to those over whom they reign.

Democracy has been kept out of capitalist enterprise for centuries. Many other institutions in societies where capitalist enterprises prevail—government agencies, universities and colleges, religions, and charities—are equally autocratic. Their internal relationships often copy or mirror the employer/employee relationship inside capitalist enterprises. Those institutions try thereby to “function in a businesslike manner.”

The anti-democratic organization of capitalist firms also conveys to employees that their input is not genuinely welcomed or sought by their bosses. Employees thus mostly resign themselves to their powerless position relative to the CEO at their workplace. They also expect the same in their relationships with political leaders, the CEOs’ counterparts in government. Their inability to participate in running their workplaces trains citizens to presume and accept the same in relation to running their residential communities. Employers become top political officials (and vice versa) in part because they are used to being “in charge.” Political parties and government bureaucracies mirror capitalist enterprises by being run autocratically while constantly describing themselves as democratic.

Z Network for more

by LEONARDO FLORES

A massive cyberattack, a global disinformation campaign and armed gangs are key elements in an attempted coup in Venezuela following presidential elections on July 28. The results of those elections, in which 10 candidates competed, saw President Maduro win 51.2%  of the vote against opposition leader Edmundo González’s 44.2%, with 80% of the vote counted. The remaining eight candidates combined for 4.6%, in a vote that has become controversial for all the wrong reasons. González and his far-right allies rejected the results and alleged fraud. 

For months, the Venezuelan government has been denouncing the far-right’s strategy for these elections: use friendly pollsters to disseminate wildly inaccurate polls, favoring Gónzalez; denounce the elections before they were held; denounce the results before they were announced; and lead violent street protests similar to those of 2014 and 2017 (guarimbas). 

As predicted, the far-right forced a narrative of fraud into social and traditional media, while armed gangs and paramilitary actors sowed terror in the days following the election, attacking public institutions, security forces and innocent bystanders. Chavismo responded with a massive rally in Caracas to  support the electoral results and oppose the violence. 

Although tensions remain, the government appears to have snuffed out the coup. The situation is complicated by the fact that Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (an independent branch of government solely responsible for elections) was hit by a massive cyberattack the night of the elections, that continues to affect its website as of July 31.

Venezuela’s Electoral Process and a Cyberattack

Anyone familiar with Venezuela’s electoral process would know to be skeptical about allegations of fraud in the vote count. This process, the same one lauded as the “best in the world” by Jimmy Carter twelve years ago, is renowned for its safety and transparency. This two-minute video by Venezuelanalysis is one of the best explainers of why fraud is nearly impossible. 

The CNE is led by a council of five rectors; currently, three are aligned with the government, while two are aligned with the opposition. If there was widespread fraud, why have the opposition members of the CNE stayed silent? 

Key to understanding the claims of fraud is that once polls close, the voting machines print out the local results (actas) before transmitting them to CNE headquarters for a complete digital tally. Copies of the actas are given to witnesses from any political party present at each precinct. 

Venezuela Solidarity Network for more

by CLAIRE AINSWORTH & NATURE MAGAZINE

Biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male

As a clinical geneticist, Paul James is accustomed to discussing some of the most delicate issues with his patients. But in early 2010, he found himself having a particularly awkward conversation about sex.

A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby’s chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine—but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother’s womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male. “That’s kind of science-fiction material for someone who just came in for an amniocentesis,” says James.

Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD.

When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person’s anatomical or physiological sex. What’s more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. “I think there’s much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can’t easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London’s Institute of Child Health.

These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms. Few legal systems allow for any ambiguity in biological sex, and a person’s legal rights and social status can be heavily influenced by whether their birth certificate says male or female.

Scientific American for more

by GABRIEL WINANT

Everything Is Possible: Anti-fascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism
by Joseph Fronczak. Yale, 350 pp.

In? 1963, June Croll and Eugene Gordon took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Gordon was African American, raised in New Orleans; Croll was Jewish, born in Odessa at the beginning of the 20th century. Both fled their home cities as children to escape racial violence: Gordon, the Robert Charles riots of 1900, in which a mob of white Southerners murdered dozens after an African American man shot a police officer who had asked what he was doing in a mainly white neighbourhood; Croll, the Odessa pogrom of 1905, in which more than four hundred Jews were killed. Their story, uncovered by Daniel Candee, a former student of mine, forms an epic political anabasis. Croll became involved in communist politics and labour agitation in 1920s New York. Gordon, fresh from Howard University, became part of the New Negro movement and transformed the nationalist politics of Black self-defence, learned in his childhood, into communism in the early 1930s. Their relationship began at roughly the time the Popular Front was founded, and the movement offered them a way to universalise their early political commitment. They took part in workers’ struggles, but also fought for Black civil rights, women’s equality and decolonisation. As Richard Wright wrote, ‘there was no agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the people upon it as the Communist Party.’

After Hitler came to power it soon became clear that the Comintern directive t0 national communist parties to adopt a sectarian ultra-leftist strategy wasn’t working, and that some form of co-operation with other parties was necessary to counter the fascist threat. In July 1935 the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern instructed national communist parties to form ‘popular fronts’ with anti-fascist forces, including factional rivals and liberal parties. Joseph Fronczak’s Everything Is Possible describes the consequences this decision had all over the world. Black activists in Paris, London and New York united across factional lines to challenge white rule in the Caribbean and fascist aggression in Africa, accompanied by all the classic acrimonies. At a 1935 meeting of the Comintern-backed Union des Travailleurs Nègres (UTN) to organise against Italian designs on Ethiopia, white communists who had read about the event in L’Humanité that morning outnumbered Black attendees, and reacted indignantly to the UTN’s interpretation that ‘the French working class had allowed itself to be co-opted by imperialism.’ At a mass demonstration for Ethiopia in Trafalgar Square a few months later, C.L.R. James, Amy Ashwood Garvey and Jomo Kenyatta approached the colonialism question more subtly. ‘You have talked of the “White Man’s Burden”,’ Ashwood Garvey observed. ‘Now we are carrying yours and standing between you and fascism.’

During the Arab revolt of 1936-39, Palestinian and Jewish revolutionaries formed an organisation called Antifa of Palestine which, according to Fronczak, rejected ‘the whole idea of “national domination”, “national sovereignty”, “national privilege”, or as Lenin called it, “the hyper-chauvinism of the dominant”’. Trade union organisers convinced workers to down tools, join picket lines and occupy factories. One of the most famous is the ‘sitdown strike’ at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan in 1936-37, which led to a huge growth in membership of the United Automobile Workers – from 30,000 to 500,000 in the year following the strike. Fronczak notes that there were waves of sit-ins around the world, carried out by dressmakers in Paris, textile workers in India, laundry workers in Johannesburg and crew on dredgers in the Mekong Delta.

It was a ‘decade of heroes’, as E.P. Thompson put it. ‘There were Guevaras in every street and in every wood.’ Popular Front coalitions won power in France, Spain and Chile, and sympathisers with the movement played a key part in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. Communists had a critical role in campaigns against fascist aggression. ‘In a struggle that is national in character, the class struggle takes the form of national struggle,’ Mao Zedong declared in 1938, elevating the practical necessity to a theoretical maxim. Still, they would exact a price, as Orwell saw in Spain. Everywhere, Fronczak argues, the Popular Front represented a worldwide left-wing identity, as particular ideologies of nationalism and sectarianism suddenly became compatible.

Communists and their sympathisers gained a new popularity by laying claim to local symbols and patriotic traditions. But the Popular Front also blurred distinctions that had an important political value. Authorising party members to work with progressive causes of all kinds – including those independent of party direction – and to join in coalitions with larger and more powerful liberal and socialist rivals threatened communism’s distinctiveness, its oppositional consciousness and organisational world. In many cases, this was a right turn, undermining years of effort under repressive conditions building disciplined and durable organisations. Black communists in the American South, for example, found that the party’s new orientation in the 1930s implied collaboration with Jim Crow Democrats and abandonment of the anti-racist working-class militancy that had begun to cohere early in the decade. Trotsky (not an advocate of a ‘popular front’ strategy but of the more rigorous ‘united front’, excluding liberal groupings) was scornful, writing in December 1937 that the Frente Popular in Spain was a ‘political alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, whose interests on basic questions in the present epoch diverge at an angle of 180 degrees’.

In the ‘Third Period’ that preceded the Popular Front, communists refused to collaborate politically or organisationally with socialist, social democratic, anarchist or liberal forces. The first two periods in this chronology were the revolutionary turbulence that began in 1917 and the capitalist retrenchment and restabilisation of the mid-1920s. During these years, debates had raged on the left about the nature of the emerging fascist threat: was it old wine in a new bottle, as the Italian communist Amadeo Bordiga insisted, or ‘an exceptionally dangerous and frightful enemy’, as the German Marxist Clara Zetkin believed? The answers to these questions had practical consequences. Should communists support street confrontations with fascists, a tactic Bordiga opposed, despite his rival Antonio Gramsci taking a different view? Should they form a ‘united front’ against the threat – as Zetkin argued, and the German communist Willi Münzenberg attempted in the form of the Comintern-backed Action Committee against War Danger and Fascism?

For Fronczak, the debates in Moscow and Communist Party headquarters across Europe are important chiefly as the distant echo of active anti-fascism – an emerging political identity in cities around the world. ‘They came,’ as Vivian Gornick put it in her classic book on American communism, ‘from everywhere.’ This was more true than Gornick realised, as Everything Is Possible shows. ‘The mid-Depression years,’ Fronczak writes, ‘were when the basic idea of the left as some great aggregate of people who find common cause with each other the world over finally took form.’ When the Comintern abandoned its Third Period view that liberals and even socialists were accomplices of fascism, it was following rather than leading a force that had already emerged. Wherever they appeared, the fascisti had been met by organised opponents. As Fronczak writes, the Arditi del Popolo in Italy anticipated the Popular Front. They were the vanguard not of the workers, but of ‘the people’: bruisers who went onto the streets to punch and shoot back. ‘Mass ecstasy’ was the way Eric Hobsbawm, then a teenager in Berlin, described street confrontations with the Nazis in the early 1930s.

The political concepts of left and right originate in the seating plan at the National Assembly of the French Revolution, but the rise of international socialist and communist movements at the end of the 19th century made it possible to identify groups in different countries that were like 0ne another in some abstract way – the British left, the Russian left and so on. Yet the term was more often used to describe a position within a workers’ organisation than in relation to society as a whole – as in Lenin’s diatribe against ‘left-wing communism’. A coherent global left appeared only with the arrival of the fascist threat. It did not take long, as Fronczak emphasises, for fascism to provide a way for right-wing elements to identify themselves and their goals. In addition to German, Italian, Romanian, Spanish and Japanese far-right groups, there were blackshirts in Buenos Aires and Detroit, blueshirts in Paris and Peking, greyshirts in Beirut and Johannesburg, greenshirts in São Paulo and Cairo, silvershirts in Minneapolis, goldshirts in Mexico, as well as Falangist formations in South and Central America: comrades of Franco’s clerical-military fascism, but with an extra emphasis on the racial unity of white Hispanic-Americans, or la raza, a group they thought had conceded far too much ground to Indigenous peoples and to democracy.

London Review of Books for more

by SEAN MATHEWS

For over nine months, oil-rich monarchies in the Gulf have deftly manoeuvred to avoid becoming entangled in Israel’s war on Gaza, and the spillover conflicts it has spawned across the region.

Now, some Gulf states appear to be inching closer to entering the conflict’s forefront by participating in a US-backed peacekeeping force in the Gaza Strip when the war ends.

Last week, for the second time in a month, the United Arab Emirates called for a multinational force to deploy to Gaza to provide security after a permanent ceasefire is brokered. The decision represents a remarkable about-face for the UAE, which in May pushed back forcefully against Israel’s claim that it could assist in governing the enclave.

Bahrain, an arch-opponent of Iran, has also signalled privately it will participate in the force, which is likely to see officers and senior non-commissioned officers who are Gulf nationals working on the ground with Palestinian security forces, a US official told Middle East Eye.

If Gulf boots touch the ground in Gaza, it would represent a profound shift for the region, putting the royal families who rule the Gulf in uncharted territory. 

The monarchs have spent decades brushing aside the Israel-Palestine conflict to focus on intervention in poorer Arab states like Libya, Syria and Yemen – but more recently, have focused on economic growth at home. 

But the Hamas-led 7 October attacks and Israel’s subsequent bloody offensive on Gaza have jolted the Gulf states back into the Palestine-Israel arena, much like it has the US, analysts say.

“Saudi Arabia was not interested in the internal political arrangements of how a Palestinian state was to be governed [before 7 October],” Yasmeen Farouq, a Gulf expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said at a virtual event hosted by Chatham House on Thursday.

“Now Saudi Arabia is interested in the details.”

‘Cost-free’ way to make friends in Washington

The UAE and Bahrain are also chalking up diplomatic points in Washington by promising to participate in a peacekeeping force, underscoring their importance as partners to the US and Israel. But with the conflict still raging, they have very little skin in the game at the moment. 

Middle East Eye for more

by ANDREW FIRMIN

It’s risky to try to protect the environment in authoritarian Cambodia. Ten young activists from the Mother Nature environmental group have recently been given long jail sentences. Two were sentenced to eight years on charges of plotting and insulting the king. Another seven were sentenced to six years for plotting, while one, a Spanish national banned from entering Cambodia, was sentenced in absentia.

Four of the activists were then violently dragged away from a peaceful sit-in they’d joined outside the court building. The five who’ve so far been jailed have been split up and sent to separate prisons, some far away from their families.

This is the latest in a long line of attacks on Mother Nature activists. The group is being punished for its work to try to protect natural resources, prevent water pollution and stop illegal logging and sand mining.

The more you repress us, the more resolute our fight to protect #Cambodia ‘s nature will be.
The more you to try to break our spirit, the stronger we will be.
Ratha, Kunthea, Daravuth, Akeo and Leanghy: We love you & respect your immense sacrifices. #FreetheMotherNature5 pic.twitter.com/2CoMwyHpjw

— Mother Nature Cambodia (@CambodiaMother) July 3, 2024

An autocratic regime

Cambodia’s de facto one-party regime tolerates little criticism. Its former prime minister, Hun Sen, ruled the country from 1985 until 2023, when he handed over to his son. This came shortly after a non-competitive election where the only credible opposition party was banned. It was the same story with the election in 2018. This suppression of democracy required a crackdown on dissenting voices, targeting civil society as well as the political opposition.

The authorities have weaponised the legal system. They use highly politicised courts to detain civil society activists and opposition politicians for long spells before subjecting them to grossly unfair trials. Campaigners for environmental rights, labour rights and social justice are frequently charged with vaguely defined offences under the Criminal Coder such as plotting and incitement. Last year, nine trade unionists were convicted of incitement after going on strike to demand better pay and conditions for casino workers.

In 2015 the government introduced the restrictive Law on Associations and Non-Governmental Organisations (LANGO), which requires civil society organisations to submit financial records and annual reports, giving the state broad powers to refuse registration or deregister organisations. In 2023, Hun Sen threatened to dissolve organisations if they failed to submit documents.

The state also closely controls the media. People close to the ruling family run the four main media groups and so they mostly follow the government line. Independent media outlets are severely restricted. Last year the authorities shut down one of the last remaining independent platforms, Voice of Democracy. Self-censorship means topics such as corruption and environmental concerns remain largely uncovered.

This extensive political control is closely entwined with economic power. The ruling family and its inner circle are connected to an array of economic projects. Landgrabs by state officials are common. These means land and Indigenous people’s rights activists are among those targeted.

In 2023, courts sentenced 10 land activists to a year in jail in response to their activism against land grabbing for a sugar plantation. That same year, three people from the Coalition of Cambodian Farmer Community, a farmers’ rights group, were charged with incitement and plotting. The LANGO has also been used to prevent unregistered community groups taking part in anti-logging patrols.

The activity that saw the Mother Nature activists charged with plotting involved documenting the flow of waste into a river close to the royal palace in the capital, Phnom Pen. It’s far from the first time the group’s environmental action has earned the state’s ire. The government feels threatened by the fact that Mother Nature’s activism resonates with many young people.

Inter Press Service for more

by PEPE ESCOBAR

The Beijing Declaration cements the idea that global conflict resolution is now Made in China. But it also throws a wrench in US–Israeli efforts to manufacture a collaborator Palestinian government after the war in Gaza.

HONG KONG – The Beijing Declaration, signed earlier this week, constitutes yet another stunning Chinese diplomatic coup, but the document goes far beyond affirming China’s pull. 

The gathering of representatives of 14 Palestinian factions to commit to full reconciliation showed the entire world that the road to solving intractable geopolitical problems is no longer unilateral: it is multipolar, multi-nodal, and features BRICS/Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member China as an inescapable leader. 

The concept of China as a peacemaking superpower is now so established that after the Iran–Saudi Arabia rapprochement and the signing of the Beijing Declaration, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba chose to tell his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Beijing that Kiev is now finally ready to negotiate the end of the NATO–Russia proxy war in Ukraine. 

Palestinians who came to Beijing were beaming. For Fatah Vice Chairman Mahmoud al-Aloul, “China is a light. China’s efforts are rare on the international stage.” 

Hamas spokesman Hussam Badran said the Palestinian resistance movement accepted the Chinese invitation “with a positive spirit and patriotic responsibility.” All Palestinian factions have reached a consensus on “Palestinian demands to end the war,” adding that the “most important” part of the declaration is to form a government that builds Palestinian national consensus to “manage the affairs of the people of Gaza and the West Bank, oversee reconstruction, and create conditions for elections.”

The “three-step” Chinese proposal 

Wang Yi cut to the chase: the Palestinian issue, says the Chinese foreign minister, is at the core of everything in West Asia. He emphasized that Beijing

… has never had any selfish interests in the Palestinian issue. China is one of the first countries to recognize the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] and the State of Palestine and has always firmly supported the Palestinian people in restoring their legitimate national rights. What we value is morality and what we advocate is justice.

What Wang did not say – and didn’t need to – is that this position is the overwhelming BRICS+ position, shared by the Global Majority, including, crucially, all Muslim countries. 

It’s all in a name – everyone in the foreseeable future will note this is the “Beijing” declaration unequivocally supporting One Palestine. 

No wonder all political factions had to rise to the occasion, committing to support an independent Palestinian government with executive powers over Gaza and the occupied West Bank. But there’s a catch: this will take place immediately after the war, which the regime in Tel Aviv wants to prolong indefinitely.   

What Wang Yi left somewhat implicit is that China’s consistent historical position supporting Palestine may be a decisive factor in helping future Palestinian governance institutions. Beijing is proposing three steps to get there:

First, a “comprehensive, lasting and sustainable” ceasefire in Gaza as soon as possible, and “access to humanitarian aid and rescue on the ground.”

Second, “joint efforts” – assuming western involvement – toward “post-conflict governance of Gaza under the principle of ‘Palestinians governing Palestine.’” An urgent priority is restarting reconstruction “as soon as possible.” Beijing stresses that “the international community needs to support Palestinian factions in establishing an interim national consensus government and realize effective management of Gaza and the West Bank.”   

Third, help Palestine “to become a full member state of the UN” and implement the two-state solution. Beijing maintains that “it is important to support the convening of a broad-based, more authoritative, and more effective international peace conference to work out a timetable and road map for the two-state solution.” 

The Cradle for more

DEMOCRACY NOW

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday to defend the ongoing war on Gaza as thousands of people outside protested his appearance. The speech came two months after Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, announced he was seeking an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for committing war crimes in Gaza. Over 100 Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, skipped the speech, but those in attendance gave Netanyahu numerous standing ovations as he painted a distorted picture of what’s happening in Gaza, making no mention of efforts to reach a ceasefire or the more than 16,000 Palestinian children killed in Israel’s assault. Foreign policy analyst Phyllis Bennis says the speech was “horrifying,” but says it showed that “support for Israel has become a thoroughly partisan issue.” Bennis adds that peace activists in the U.S. have built a broad consensus against the war on Gaza and military support for Israel, and says Vice President Kamala Harris has an opportunity to chart a new path on Middle East policy as she runs for president.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Washington, D.C., Wednesday as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress. Netanyahu had been invited by Republican and Democratic congressional leaders.

The speech came two months after Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, announced he was seeking an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for committing war crimes in Gaza. During his speech, Netanyahu thanked the U.S. for its support and defended Israel’s actions in Gaza.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has shamefully accused Israel of deliberately starving the people of Gaza. This is utter, complete nonsense! It’s a complete fabrication. Israel has enabled more than 40,000 aid trucks to enter Gaza. That’s half a million tons of food! And that’s more than for 3,000 calories for every man, woman and child in Gaza. If there are Palestinians in Gaza who aren’t getting enough food, it’s not because Israel is blocking it. It’s because Hamas is stealing it! So much for that lie.

But here’s another. The ICC prosecutor accuses Israel of deliberately targeting civilians. What in God’s green Earth is he talking about? The IDF has dropped millions of flyers, sent millions of text messages, made hundreds of thousands of phone calls to get Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way. But at the same time, Hamas — Hamas does everything in its power to put Palestinian civilians in harm’s way.

AMY GOODMAN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking Wednesday in his fourth address to a joint session of Congress. During the speech, he made no mention of the more than 16,000 Palestinian children killed by Israel since October 7th. Netanyahu’s critics said he repeatedly distorted the true picture of what’s happening in Gaza. The U.N. says 500 aid trucks are needed every day as Gaza faces famine. On an average day, Israel allows in just over a quarter of the trucks needed. Netanyahu also never mentioned the word “ceasefire” during his speech.

More than a hundred lawmakers, mostly Democrats, skipped Netanyahu’s address, including Senators Dick Durbin, majority whip; Chris Van Hollen; Jeff Merkley; Patty Murray; Elizabeth Warren; and Bernie Sanders. Vice President Kamala Harris declined to preside over the Senate chamber during his address. She instead was in Indianapolis.

Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, opted to attend, but protested Netanyahu by holding up a sign that read “guilty of genocide” on one side and “war criminal” on the other.

Ahead of Netanyahu’s address, Democratic Congressmember Cori Bush discussed why she was boycotting the speech.

REP. CORI BUSH: It’s absolutely shameful that after the murder of over 39,000 Palestinians, human beings, after the repeated bombing of hospitals, after witnessing the bombing of religious institutions, schools, humanitarian convoys, refugee camps, and fathers collecting their children’s remains in plastic bags, holding their beheaded children, that my colleagues in Congress choose to celebrate Prime Minister Netanyahu, a whole war criminal, by bestowing him the honor of addressing Congress. Because standing up for human rights is more than a talking point to me, I’m boycotting his address.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Outside the Capitol, thousands took part in protests calling for Netanyahu’s arrest and for a U.S. arms embargo on Israel. Emerson Wolfe came to the protest from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Democracy Now for more

by JORGE ELBAUM

On June 2, elections were held in Mexico, the second most populous State in Latin America and the Caribbean, with around 130 million inhabitants. Another 11 million Mexicans live in the United States. Of those, around 98 million were eligible to choose between three candidates: Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (continuator of the legacy of current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO); the representative of the conservative right-wing alliance, Xóchitl Gálvez; and the social democrat Jorge Álvarez Máynez, of the Movimiento Ciudadano party. The different polls predicted an overwhelming triumph of Sheinbaum, the former Head of Government of Mexico City.

The causes of this expected triumph of the ruling party were related to AMLO’s success in his fight against poverty. According to indicators shared by local and international agencies, nine million Mexicans have been lifted out of poverty due to income improvements motivated by two factors: the increase in pensions and the sustained growth of salaries, which improved 3.3 percent with respect to inflation during his six-year term. The Gross Domestic Product grew 5.7 percent in 2021, after the pandemic, 3.9 in 2022 and 3.2 in 2023, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). The current year’s increase is expected to reach 2.8 percent.

Conservative sectors were at war against AMLO and against Sheinbaum, and that offensive had/has foreign partners. The main one resides in the United States, for whom the outgoing government was a nightmare because it had broken the agreements that the narco-oligarchy of the PRI and the PAN had established with the transnationals. Three of the dimensions through which the interference from the north was instituted were: illegal arms trafficking, migratory processes and drug trafficking.

Last January, AMLO succeeded in filing a lawsuit against US arms manufacturers that were the driving force behind the smuggling of rifles for the benefit of drug trafficking cartels. In 2021, AMLO’s government initiated legal action in US courts for ’negligent and unlawful business practices that facilitate illegal arms trafficking, generating enormous human and material damage.’ The lawsuit was filed against Smith & Wesson, Beretta, Glock and Colt, among others. According to the Mexican government’s statement, illegal commercialization involved the entry of 342,000 to 597,000 weapons each year. When Mexico made the original presentation in the US courts, its then Foreign Minister, Marcelo Ebrard, advanced that his country would seek compensation of at least 10 billion dollars, linking illegal arms trafficking to the number of homicides, which in 2020 reached 36,579 murders.

Regarding the migration issue, between 2018 and 2023 there had been the entry of 1.2 million Mexicans to the United States, 58 percent more, on average, than previous years. The vast majority of those migrating north were hired at pauper wages and contributed exponentially to the exploitation of the labor force, reducing the so-called ’labor cost’ of employers: while Washington ranted against immigration, employers extended the exaction of value to Latino workers. Nearly 79 percent of migrants were male and half of them were between 15 and 29 years old.

Drug trafficking was another of the dimensions that appeared thematized in the elections. The State Department insisted on making visible the (foreign) supply that had the Mexican cartels responsible for border trafficking. But it refused to make visible the commercialization within the United States, linked to the local mafias that are articulated with the laundering of assets in the financial lairs controlled by Wall Street. To face part of these scourges, AMLO’s government had decided to apply measures against the so-called FINTECH, platform companies used by cartels to launder assets.

Alternative International for more

by JAWED NAQVI

There was a time in India when the display of wealth and conspicuous consumption was frowned upon as an immorality associated with parvenu classes. Leaving food on the plate was similarly considered sinful. There were good reasons. Shiploads of wheat and milk powder were procured from the US under the PL480 deal paid for in rupees. Not being wasteful was also a way of teaching the young to be sensitive about the visitations of the manmade Bengal famine, triggered by the siphoning of food for Britain’s war effort.

The stock market too was seen as villainous, and it was censured persuasively in popular poetry and movies. Dev Anand’s Kaala Bazar, Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420 and Dilip Kumar’s Footpath shone at the box office as successes that projected the lure of easy money as a social evil. Food adulteration and spurious medicines marketed by unscrupulous magnates were condemned as obstacles to nation building, as was the widespread stealing of the peasant’s land by moneylenders. Since Nehru fired his finance minister over allegations of corruption, levelled by his own son-in-law, the public was sanguine about the government’s probity. Ministers like Lal Bahadur Shastri set the bar high by example. He quietly resigned as railway minister owning responsibility for a fatal train accident, unthinkable today.

The budget was presented in the Lok Sabha at 5:30 pm in keeping with a British tradition. Its highlights came unhurriedly as headlines in the morning dailies. Yes, a day before the budget, cigarette shops would remove the more popular brands from the shelves and put them back at marginally higher prices a day later to accord with the new taxes. The overnight hoarding would fetch the vendors a small windfall. Likewise, suspending the sale of vegetables, dairy items, bread, etc. ahead of the budget would produce a small gain for the vendors. Police would raid ration shops if hoarding of essential commodities was suspected.

In the corridors of the parliament house, reams of budget papers were packed securely in unwieldy gunny bags weighing several kilos. As the finance minister finished the speech, couriers would line up with special tokens, would rush the sacks to the news editor’s room of business dailies or to the offices of magnates where expert teams pored over the fine print to take a quick profitable call.

Manmohan Singh’s embrace of the free market economy in 1991 tipped the social balance in favour of tycoons and punters who were until then kept on a short leash. Nehru had jailed the most prominent of business magnates. Indira Gandhi nationalised their banks, and Rajiv Gandhi forbade the lot against “riding on the backs of Congress workers”. Which explains the business-backed Narendra Modi’s call to rid the country of the Congress party. It also explains Rahul Gandhi’s persistence in projecting the underclass, the indebted peasants, the unemployed youth, students traumatised by a dubious system for competitive tests to professional colleges, and of course, runaway food prices, as areas needing urgent redress.

A curious feature of Manmohan Singh’s pro-business budgets and those of his successors has been that they were seldom discussed threadbare as budgets ought to be. The key reason was that Singh’s advent as a globally applauded economic wizard and L.K. Advani’s rise as a Hindutva rabble-rouser arrived intriguingly together.

In the run-up to the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992, few noticed that the Rao government had bribed a group of MPs from Jharkhand to vote to pass Singh’s budget. The bribe-takers were later jailed but only after the completion of the pro-market Rao government’s term. The budget speech became more sacrosanct as it began to be televised to world markets. A debate on the budget, if any, hardly made it to the headlines.

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