Israeli (activists) block aid from Reaching Gaza. With Police Help

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim

Tuesday 25 August 2026 at 6:30 AM in Kerem Shalom Crossing: Israeli "activists" blocked aid from reaching Gaza today. The police not only did not stop them, here you can see an officer congratulating them on what they are doing. 

 

Mainstream media Channel 12 is there interviewing them in a friendly spirit. 

 

Then you can see members of political parties participating, including a member of Liberman's opposition party which is against Netanyahu. 

 

There is complete support for starving Gazans to death from the police, media and opposition. A genocidal society fully on view here.

Books: Fabian Holt, Organize or Burn: How New York Socialists Fight for Climate Survival.

order here

Fabian Holt, Organize or Burn: How New York Socialists Fight for Climate Survival. 

New York University Press: 2025.  229 pages.

Marian Swerdlow 

NYC

Fabian Holt, a Norwegian professor of the sociology of music, came to Brooklyn, New York in late 2019, to write about its music scene.  The pandemic disrupted his plans, and, instead, he ended up becoming active in NYC Democratic Socialists of America (NYC - DSA).  Fight or Burn is about the group and his experiences with it.

 

“I stumbled on volunteers petitioning to get a person named David Alexis on the upcoming [primary for the Democratic Party nomination for the] State Senate race, and they talked about democratic socialism and climate change    . . . The participants were different from the image I had of socialists.  They were not sectarian or intellectualizing.”(p. 22 - 3: All citations are from Holt: 2025)

 

Holt admits, if rather late in his book, “I do not think of myself as a socialist or call for the end of capitalism.  I have not participated in US electoral work before.  I am not a native English speaker and do not have local knowledge,” of Brooklyn (p. 115) “ . . . I became politicized and attached to NYC - DSA.”(p. 120) 

 

So, he’s not writing from a revolutionary socialist point of view, and he may not always know much about what he’s writing about.  For example, he apparently doesn’t know there was an important Socialist Party in the US around the beginning of the 20th century (pp. 8 - 9). 

 

Despite this, his experiences and the interviews he conducted with other NYC - DSA members are a revealing look into NYC - DSA, especially how its electorialism influenced its orientation toward the ecosocialist movement.  His book has important lessons about electorialism, regardless of which group, or where, it is adopted.  

 

Holt’s book is limited to only NYC - DSA: the reader should not assume it describes DSA in other cities or locations. Although Holt himself makes a case for why a book about DSA in NYC is especially relevant, calling NYC an “epicenter of the international democratic socialist movement” (p. 2) and Central Brooklyn “the epicenter of the ‘new NYC DSA,’” (p. 24) I believe it is most useful as a case study of what happens when a socialist group adopts a strategy that priorizes winning elections and passing legislation over all other tactics.

 

The history Holt relates involves two NYC - DSA “working groups,” and how their tactics, strategies and goals interacted.  The first was the Electoral Working Group (EWG). One of its members recalls how it began: a few of them who had been active with a campaign to elect a housing activist for State Senate in 2016 decided, “we can recruit, endorse, and win local socialist campaigns and build the political movement that Bernie Sanders started.” (p. 11)  

 

This group made a key strategic decision: “We want to change the political terrain in NY and we want to do that on the level of the state legislature, which controls the levers of so many people’s lives.  Basic material conditions are truly controlled by this group of people in Albany.”  (p. 164). 

 

The “Proposal for a Brooklyn Branch DSA Electoral Committee” was passed by the branch in December 2016.   It said in part, “  . . . we can use our victories to challenge the billionaire class directly, build the confidence of working class voters  . . . Recruiting socialist candidates to run in local elections  . . . voters can be mapped and mobilized  . . .   Learning and teaching organizing skills like canvassing and campaign planning.” (p. 184)  

 

The working class is conceived as a voting bloc, rather than producers of commodities let alone surplus value, with its power lying in voting, not in withholding its labor. “Organizing skills” are narrowly defined as those involved in an election campaign, not the broader range involved in workplace, community or grassroots organizing.  

 

The other working group was the Ecosocialist Working Group (ESWG) which started the following year, and “became a small and focused space, somewhat removed from the more mass-public spaces in NYC-DSA  . . . Over time, the group developed into a semi-professional entity . . .  ” (p. 203)  

 

In 2019, it reached a defining moment when one of its members pitched the idea of passing laws to expand the powers of a relatively small state agency, the NY Power Authority (NYPA) to give it the ability to build and operate renewable energy and make it “the decarbonization engine for NYS.”   NYPA provides electricity only to public entities, not residential customers or private businesses.  (p. 211) 

 

The book fails to discuss implications for this plan of the special nature of NYS  “authorities” such as the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the Port Authority.  Unlike other state departments or agencies, they have various levels of autonomy from the State, based on the powers and constraints built into their legislative mandate. Each is governed by a separate board of directors appointed by elected officials for varying terms of office. 

 

The ESWG got to work on a series of bills to change the NYPA for this purpose.  One of them would become the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA). The ESWG conceived of it as the centerpiece of the first stage of “Public Power NY” (PPNY), a broader movement vision of the state’s ecological transformation, and launched a pressure campaign to pass it (p. 194), developing a coalition of community-based climate justice organizations.  The PPNY campaign was elevated to a NYC-DSA priority campaign, and “a lot of effort coalesced around it.” (p. 212)

 

When the first attempt to pass BPRA in 2021 failed, ESWG felt betrayed by politicians who had seemed ready to support it and initially responded with a blockade outside legislators’ offices in NYC and exposing their donations from fossil fuel interests.  But the ESWG grew concerned about these activist tactics, by alienating politicians whose support was needed to pass BPRA.(pp. 219 - 220) 

 

As its way out of this dilemma, the ESWG decided to “electoralize” the PPNY, (p. 218) and that “. . . primary elections are probably the most important tactic that we have . . .” (p. 206). Coalition building, mobilization of community members to lobby legislators, and direct action, were all abandoned as ineffective.  According to the ESWG’s co-chair of strategy, “We couldn’t get past a certain point without having our own people in the legislature.”  (pp. 221- 222.)  The ESWG influenced the decision to run all the 2021 election campaigns on an ecosocialist platform. (p. 219)    

 

Professor Holt, roaming the streets of Brooklyn, came across NYC - DSA canvassers for one of those campaigns. The incumbent, State Senator Kevin Parker, was targeted because, as the head of the Senate Energy Committee, he had been delaying climate legislation for years. (p. 99) DSA lost this particular primary, but it was close enough to make Parker get behind NYC-DSA BPRA and it passed in 2023. (p. 107) 

 

Holt describes the passage of BPRA as “a significant event in the history of climate legislation  . . . [because it] directs the state-owned NY Power Authority to build enough renewables to meet the state’s 2019 landmark targets for reducing carbon emissions, the most ambitious targets in the country.  Also, this is the first law in the country to introduce democratic socialist Green New Deal principles of labor rights, climate justice for indigenous and vulnerable communities.” (p. 192 -3) 

 

Relying on the passage of a law, in and of itself, to achieve all this depends upon an assumption that the state is a neutral body without any class character, and that laws, once passed, are implemented effectively and in the way the bill’s writers intended them to be. Insofar as NYC - DSA accepts these assumption, they do not agree with the traditional Marxist concept of the capitalist state.  

 

Traditional Marxists would expect that in a capitalist country where the working class is disorganized and demobilized, as in the United States today, the government - to put rather crudely -  acts in accordance with the interests of the ruling class, and that if that class had wanted the NYPA to achieve significant reductions in carbon emissions, it wouldn’t have required a battle by NYC - DSA.  Furthermore, they would be skeptical that the NYPA’s Board of Directors would respond to the new law by drawing up a plan for how it could hit those targets.

 

Three years after the passage of BPRA, leading members of the ESWG are frustrated that the NYPA has done so little in response to the law.  A PPNY email in July 2026 celebrates,  “NYPA Considers 6.2GW More Public Power!” but goes on to say “it still falls short of the 15GW we need to be on track in New York State to reduce our emissions, take pressure off our struggling grid, and lower our unaffordable utility bills.” 

 

Furthermore, “so far, they have not broken ground on the Somers Solar project, slated to be the first public renewable project to begin construction,” and “Governor Kathy Hochul is giving discounted power to multibillion dollar corporations,” not to residential customers.  Although the email asks people to speak at public hearings, and donate money, NYC - DSA’s main strategy is to elect more DSA candidates to the NYS legislature. (p. 166)

 

This also reflects the idea that the capitalist state is a neutral instrument, where decisions are made by majorities and then carried out by class-neutral bureaucrats.  But there are visible mechanisms through which this illusory democratic decision-making is thwarted, and the wealthy and powerful play a disproportionate role.  Holt notes,  “The [state] legislative process has been described as ‘broken’”(p. 113).  It’s not broken: it’s fulfilling the role of the capitalist state.  Three people decide almost all of which NYS legislation will be passed in NYS, the governor, the assembly speaker, and the senate president.  The latter two are elected by a majority in the body they lead.  

 

So, for its electoral success to translate into making state law, DSA must get a majority in at least one legislative house, or win the governorship. In January, if all its candidates win, there will be eleven DSA-supported members in the 150-member Assembly, and four DSA-supported Senators among the 63 Senators.  The math is obvious.  This, along with the nature of NYS authorities, cast doubt on how realistic electing more state legislators is as a way to make the NYPA into the engine for progress toward more renewables and less use of fossil fuels in NYS.  

 

However, NYC - DSA remains firmly committed to electoralism. Holt quotes one member, “Electoralism is attractive because it’s clear what power is in the context.  It’s limited but at least it’s concrete.”  (p. 70 - 71) This begs the question of whether it’s part of a strategy that can have any impact on climate change.  Marxists from the tradition that supports independent social movements should be asking whether NYC-DSA’s electoralist orientation will build the kind of broad and powerful ecosocialist movement that will be needed to achieve that progress.

 

Holt observes: “NYC - DSA’s strategy in elections is to win them.” (p. 14) So when canvassers in the largely Afro-Caribbean Flatbush community in Brooklyn found that “[some] people say ‘ . . . what I really care about is my rent and my health care,’” (p.127) and Holt himself found “climate change was not the main grievance of the constituents I canvassed in Flatbush  . . .  their main grievances were crime and health care,”  (p. 223) that would be taken into account in how the campaign was run.  

 

If talking about climate change didn’t resonate with voters, they would pivot to other talking points.  Thus, Holt finds “‘Public Power’ was barely, if ever, mentioned in the canvassing introductions I attended,” (p. 222) and that “ESWG members did not make [PPNY] front and center of campaign communications.” (p. 223) By so completely “electoralizing” the cause of transition to green power, not even the volunteers, let alone the voters, were given a chance to learn about climate change and why it must be stopped.  As a result, the election campaign did far less than it might have to make the volunteers better climate activists, or to spread public awareness of the crisis of global warming.  In sum, it missed opportunities for building a social movement for renewable energy.

 

NYC - DSA’s electoral victories of the past two years have clear benefits for working people.  NYC has the most progressive, reform-minded Mayor since at least 1950, and Congress is about to seat two new members who will speak up for workers and the oppressed.  But the down side is, these victories reinforce NYC - DSA’s electoralism, and even encourage it among other DSA chapters, potentially taking time, energy and focus away from building social movements.  The “organizing” techniques in running to win - hitting on a popular message that will, in a short period of time, motivate the maximum number of people to do one thing: vote - is not the same as the process of building a social movement.  

        

Before the pandemic, in New York and across the country, large demonstrations were organized to raise awareness of the danger of climate change, and pressure government and business to switch to renewable energy.  The pandemic ebbed, but the movement did not resurge, possibly because there was a Democratic administration.  Now, with climate change deniers running the federal government, and terrible heat waves and wildfires affecting millions of people, there is desperate need for such mass actions.  NYC - DSA, as the largest left group in the city, is the force most capable of initiating a coalition for such actions.  However, this is clearly not on their agenda. 

Dolly Parton, an American Treasure. 1946-2026

By Sirantos Fotopoulos

 

Dolly Parton, 1946 — 2026. 

A small dilapidated cabin along the Little Pigeon River held 12 children and two parents who owned almost nothing but each other. The house had no electrical power, no indoor bathroom, and no running water. Water had to be carried from outside, and light at night sometimes came from fireflies caught in mason jars.

 

Dolly Rebecca Parton entered a household defined by scarcity, in a rural Tennessee economy where cash rarely circulated and survival depended on barter, kinship, and unpaid female labor. Her birth itself was paid for in cornmeal, a sack handed to a country doctor because currency simply had no place in that house. Appalachian subsistence life was stripped to its bones there, a family positioned entirely outside the wage economy yet fully subject to its verdicts.

 

Marxist analysis treats poverty as structural rather than moral, a product of land ownership, extractive industry, and the systematic underdevelopment of Appalachia by outside capital. Coal companies and timber interests had spent generations stripping the region's wealth while leaving its people without electricity, plumbing, or reliable healthcare. Dolly's family lived downstream of decisions made far away, by men who never set foot in Sevier County. Their poverty followed a clear economic logic, manufactured and sustained for profit that landed elsewhere.

 

She has said many times that deprivation itself was survivable. Cold nights, empty stomachs, secondhand everything, all of it could be endured within a family bound by love. What she named as the deepest wound was shame, specifically the shame of appearing in public dressed in rags stitched together by her mother, visible markers of class broadcast to children who had never chosen their station. Here sits the affective core of poverty under capitalism, where material lack becomes personal humiliation, where a structural condition gets misread by classmates and teachers alike as individual failure or moral defect.

 

Her father could neither read nor write, a fact she returned to across decades of interviews with an ache that never fully resolved. Illiteracy in Appalachia rarely reflected an accident of intelligence. It grew from chronic underfunding of rural schools, the demands of farm labor that pulled children out of classrooms, and a broader neglect of a region treated as a resource colony rather than a place full of people deserving investment. Watching her father live his whole life locked outside written language gave Dolly a direct, embodied understanding of 

how systems reproduce disadvantage across generations.

 

Her response bypassed charity in the narrow, condescending sense. In 1995 she launched the Imagination Library, mailing a free book every month to children from birth to age 5, a program that has since distributed hundreds of millions of books worldwide. Read through a class lens, the project functions as a redistribution of cultural capital, an attempt to hand working families a resource the market would otherwise price out of reach. She built it explicitly as a memorial to her father's exclusion, converting a private grief into public infrastructure.

 

In her home county during the 1990s she created a dropout-prevention initiative that paid cash to graduating students, conditioned on their helping a classmate stay enrolled too. The design carried real structural weight in how it worked. Rather than rewarding isolated individual achievement, it built solidarity into the incentive structure itself, tying one student's success to another's. Sevier County's dropout rate fell from above 30 percent to below 6 percent under the program, a collective result achieved through a collective mechanism rather than pure competition.

 

None of it required Dolly to adopt the vocabulary of theory. Her empathy operated instinctively, rooted in memory rather than doctrine, yet its structure lined up closely with a materialist reading of how poverty and dignity interact. She understood, from the inside, that the humiliation of poverty gets manufactured socially even when the poverty itself gets manufactured economically, and she spent decades building institutions that addressed both wounds at once.

 

We lost the wrong 80-year-old today. The other one is now busy trying to co-opt her legacy in his vain attempt to curry favor with white working class voters ahead of the midterms.

 

Pictured: Dolly Parton at her childhood home in Locust Ridge, Sevier County, Tennessee. 

The Trump Menagerie is Floundering. Iran Refuses to be another US Client State in the Region.

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Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
8-25-26
HEO/GED

The expression “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry” applies to those frustrating situations that appear to offer no means of escape. But whenever I am forced to return to the topic of the unprovoked US war against the Iranian people, a third alternative comes to mind: anger.

As I watch the video above, I feel intense animosity toward the menagerie of right-wing ideologues that has captured the US body politic, with a degenerate New York City con man as their mascot.

The speaker in the video, Trita Parsi, opposes the Trump administration’s war. He and other bourgeois strategists favor a more diplomatic approach—what they call "soft power," as opposed to the hard power of military might.

In truth, there has never really been a "soft power" approach. The diplomacy of capitalist states is always backed by the threat of violence. Long before military might is brought to bear, economic leverage is applied. The news reports we hear over the years regarding UN debates and votes obscure the reality: the US and former colonial powers routinely blackmail weaker economies to force votes in their favor.

In a completely unprovoked attack, the US and its Zionist partner dropped thousands of tons of bombs on Iran and launched hundreds of missiles, killing heads of state and the children of high-ranking officials. Yet this mass violence has failed to force the Iranian government to accept the status of another US client state in the region. Recognizing that bombing did not bring about Iran’s surrender, the US has piled new sanctions on top of those it has imposed for decades—an "economic D-Day," as the administration calls it.

Trump has been calling heads of state in the Gulf, warning of dire consequences if they continue to trade with Iran in violation of US sanctions. The Trump team arrogantly announces that the US does not have infinite patience.

What incredible arrogance.

The US is a declining world power, and Iran’s refusal to surrender its sovereignty to US imperialism reflects this shifting balance. For Iran, a country with thousands of years of history, the threat is existential. It is fighting for its very survival as an independent state. Surrender is simply not an option.

In the US, we have the famous slogan “Live Free or Die,” the state motto of New Hampshire. “These colors don’t run” is another favored American idiom. Yet American commentators rarely expect other nations—whose cultures and existence are just as vital to them—to demonstrate that same determination to defend their homeland. But Iran means it.

The current US stance proves that it is not Iran that has been intransigent in negotiations; it is the US and the real estate speculators representing American interests in these talks, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, both ardent Zionists.

While Trita Parsi chides the US in the video relying solely on hard power and insists a diplomatic solution is possible, he remains a representative of US imperialism. Factions within the ruling class may disagree on tactics, but they do not differ when it comes to defending the capitalist system and the so-called free market. He can only offer solutions aimed at maintaining the existing economic order. But capitalism cannot solve the very crises that are fundamental to its nature.

Ultimately, nothing that Mr. Parsi suggests will work in the long run either; and that long run is getting shorter.

The only solution to the capitalist system’s decline—which threatens to end life on this planet through climate catastrophe or nuclear war—is the ending of this system of production that has reached its historical apex. The only resolution to this crisis is the building of a global federation of democratic workers’ states in which production is consciously planned and set in motion on the basis of human need, as opposed to capital accumulation and profit for a tiny minority. This is not utopian. Thinking that humanity has a future under capitalism is.

The US/Canada Trade War

Image source: Fraser Institute

John Clarke

Toronto

8-23-26

 

I would like to offer some basic considerations that I think point in the direction of an independent working-class perspective on the present situation.

 

1. Trump has initiated this conflict in his usual bellicose and erratic fashion but the turn to protectionism isn’t simply the product of his administration’s quirkiness. The US is in decline as a world power and the resort to tariff measures is a questionable strategy to contain that decline. As such, the US is no longer focused on leading a global world order but is more interested in immediate self-interest. As part of this, it wants more favourable trading terms from its former allies and junior partners like Canada.

 

2. Canadian capitalism is in a particularly vulnerable situation, given the level of economic integration with the US and the volume of trade with it. The US has a major stake in trade with Canada but not nearly to the same degree. In a trade war with the greater power to the south, the balance of forces is not on the Canadian side and Carney and his allies know that very well.

 

3. The changed trading relationship creates an existential crisis for Canadian capitalism and the Carney government and its provincial counterparts, taking their lead from the main business lobby groups, have two ways to respond. They can try to alleviate the impact by negotiating terms with the US that are less punishing than they might otherwise be, although it is unrealistic to imagine they will be anything but harsh. On the other hand, they can try and diversify trade as much as possible so as to compensate for the impact of US protectionism. 

At present, Carney is trying a dose of defiance in the hope of blunting US demands somewhat but open trade hostilities will be very damaging and diversified trade can’t be achieved on anything like an adequate scale. A lowering of elbows is to be expected in the not too distant future.

 

4. Harsher trading terms will cut into Canadian profits, while diversified trade means an acute need to increase ‘competitiveness.’ Either way, the strategy of Carney and the capitalist class he represents is to impose the burden on workers and communities so as to maximize profitability and weather the storm at our expense.

 

The drive to preserve profits is well underway and we can see it unfolding at the federal, 

provincial and municipal level. Austerity, deregulation, attacks on public sector workers, increased military spending, destructive fossil fuel projects, a law-and-order crackdown, an assault on immigrants and an unprecedented effort to undermine Indigenous rights. These are the manifestations of this effort to impose the trade war burden on workers and communities.

 

5. We may place demands on the federal government with regard to trade negotiations, insisting that certain measures should be put on the table while others should not. What is absolutely essential, however, is to reject the notion that there is a ‘national interest’ to be defended and that we are ‘all in this together.’ We can’t become supporters or advisers in Carney’s ‘team.’ We mustn’t form an alliance with ‘our’ exploiters but we have to focus our attention on the brutal attacks we face in response to the trade war. We have to appreciate that Carney and those he answers to are our enemies, while workers and communities the US that are fighting back against Trump are our comrades in the struggle.

 

The trade war is becoming a class war and our side needs to engage in that struggle with the same determination that Carney and his allies are already displaying in an unmistakable fashion. 

The Deep State in the Real World: Beyond Conspiracy, Toward Understanding

by Alan Browne

What Are We Actually Talking About?

The term “deep state” has become linked to so much conspiracy-theory baggage that serious discussion of the topic is often dismissed before it begins. But beneath the noise lay two very important questions: To what extent do entrenched networks of power—spanning intelligence agencies, defense contractors, corporate lobbies, and political institutions—operate within the United States? And, what degree of autonomy from democratic accountability do they have while pursuing interests that are not necessarily aligned with those of the general public?

In academic and political discourse, the “deep state” refers to a covert network within government that exerts significant influence over national policy and decision-making. Sometimes, even operating beyond the reach of legitimate elected government. This is not necessarily a cabal of shadowy figures meeting in secret rooms like a James Bond villain. However, it is more accurately described as a “system of powerful, unelected bureaucrats who think they decide, that they govern, on all things more so than any elected official”. As one analysis puts it, the deep state is “a hard-to-perceive level of government or super-control that exists regardless of elections and that may thwart popular movements or radical change”.

This concept is not new.

In 1961, President Kennedy’s top adviser Arthur Schlesinger wrote a 15-page memo warning that the CIA had become a “state within a state”—a phrase that captures the essence of what we now call the deep state. Schlesinger expressed concern that “no one knows how many potential problems for US foreign policy—and how much potential friction with friendly states—are being created at this moment by CIA clandestine intelligence operations”. This warning, preserved in recently released JFK files, offers documented evidence that concerns about unelected power centers within government are not the product of modern paranoia. Even Kennedy’s predecessor, and former World War II general, Dwight Eisenhower, alerted the American public of their existence in his farewell address.

The State as an Instrument of Class Rule

To understand how such power structures operate, it is useful to turn to a thinker who analyzed the nature of the state with remarkable clarity: Vladimir Lenin. In “The State and Revolution” (1917), Lenin argued that the state is not a neutral arbiter of society’s interests but rather “a tool for class oppression, a creation born of one social class’s desire to control all other social classes”. Whether a dictatorship or a democracy, the state functions, in Lenin’s analysis, as “an instrument of class oppression”—a machine “for holding the obedience of one class to other subordinate classes”.

Lenin’s framework helps illuminate what the deep state represents in practice. It is the capture of state machinery by organized interests that use its powers—intelligence, law enforcement, contracting, and regulation—to advance their own agendas. The state, in this view, is not a neutral instrument but a prize to be won and wielded. As Lenin observed, the state “arises directly out of class antagonisms” and has “the ultimate purpose of suppressing the ‘wage-slave’ proletariat in favour of the ‘bourgeoisie’”.

This is not to suggest that the United States functions as a Leninist state in the early 20th century. But Lenin’s insight—that state institutions can become instruments of particular class interests rather than neutral administrators of the public good—offers a useful lens for examining how concentrated wealth and organized power shape policy outcomes. When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick remarked in 2025 that Lockheed Martin, which generates “97% of its revenue from the US government” is “basically an arm of the US government”, he was acknowledging a structural reality -- the line between public authority and private corporate power has become deeply blurred.

Jack London’s Prophetic Vision

More than a century ago, long before the term “deep state” entered popular discourse, the American novelist Jack London foresaw many of these dynamics. In his 1908 dystopian novel “The Iron Heel”, London depicted the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States—a future in which “the great capitalistic monopolies of the U.S. band together in a fascistic organization”. This oligarchy, which London called the “Iron Heel,” creates “a caste system with a plutocratic aristocracy at the top, supported by secret police, a military oligarchy, and a few powerful subsidized unions that aid in suppressing the majority of organized labor”.

London’s novel, written years before World War I, “anticipated many features of the past century, including the rise of fascism, the emergence of domestic terrorism, and the growth of centralized government surveillance and authority”. It was recognized by George Orwell for its “foresight regarding the rise of fascism in Europe”. London speculated that “the corporate oligarchy would stomp down the revolution by the workers and that it would take 300 years of underground resistance for the powerful 1% to be overthrown”.

The parallels between London’s fictional oligarchy and contemporary power structures are striking. The Iron Heel’s tactics—state propaganda, violent suppression of opposition, the manipulation of political outcomes, and the use of subsidized unions to control labor—bear an uncomfortable resemblance to real-world dynamics. London, a socialist who eventually resigned from the party amid the ideological turmoil of the early 20th century, understood that concentrated economic power naturally seeks to capture political power. His novel serves as a reminder that these concerns are not new; they have been part of American political consciousness for generations.

The Defense-Industrial Complex: A Case Study in State Capture

Perhaps the most concrete example of deep-state dynamics in action is the relationship between the US government and the defense industry. This is not speculation; it is documented fact.

Just this month, August of 2026, the Pentagon awarded Raytheon (an RTX subsidiary) a “$22.9 billion contract” to dramatically boost Tomahawk missile production. The contract will allow annual production to increase from just 60 missiles to more than 1,000. The US military, scrambling to rebuild depleted stocks after supplying large amounts of arms to allies and using munitions in ongoing conflicts, is brokering multi-year deals with the biggest US defense contractors. Earlier that month, the military signed similar deals to ramp up production of Patriot and THAAD interceptor missile parts.

But this is only the most visible part of a much larger pattern. Lockheed Martin, the nation’s largest defense contractor, generates “97% of its revenue from the US government”. As Commerce Secretary Lutnick put it, these companies are “basically an arm of the US government”. The Trump administration has even discussed acquiring equity stakes in major defense contractors. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has handed out millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants to these companies to expand factories while also looking to have a direct investment interests with those very same businesses.

These figures are not anomalies and they reflect a systemic reality. The defense industry is so thoroughly integrated with the state that distinguishing between public and private becomes almost meaningless. Private defense firms received a majority of the Pentagon’s $4.4 trillion discretionary spending budget and the elected representatives in Congress who are supposed to provide legislative oversight actual represent these firms and help pave the way for billions more in handouts. A review of the budget bill signed in July 2025, and the campaign contributions of those who voted for it, only proves this point and it is merely one example of countless similar cases.

This is the deep state in its most tangible form. A revolving door of personnel, a cascade of taxpayer dollars flowing to private corporations, and a policy environment shaped by the interests of those who profit from perpetual military spending. The Government Accountability Office found in June 2025 that major defense programs now take nearly “12 years on average” to deliver even initial capability. This is 18 months longer than the previous year, but way more expensive. Combined costs across 30 major programs has increased by “$49.3 billion”. The system is not only expensive, but it is profoundly inefficient. Yet, the money continues to flow.

The Broader Web of Subsidized Interests

The defense industry is far from the only sector where taxpayer dollars subsidize concentrated private interests. The food system offers another instructive example.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—commonly known as food stamps—has long been a major subsidy channel for food producers. Recent legislation has slashed “$185.9 billion from SNAP over the next 10 years”, a 20 percent reduction, while simultaneously showering cash on already lavishly subsidized farmers, mainly corn and soybean producers. As one analysis put it, “millions are likely to go hungry while Big Ag is showered with new subsidies”.

This dynamic—cutting assistance to the poor while increasing subsidies to powerful agribusiness interests—illustrates how government policy is shaped not by the needs of the general public but by the organized lobbying power of concentrated industries. The food stamp program is estimated to account for about “7.5% of sales” at major grocers and food companies, meaning that companies from Walmart to Smithfield Foods have a direct financial stake in maintaining the program—not as a matter of public welfare, but as a matter of corporate revenue.

When one in seven Americans lives on food stamps, the subsidy to food producers becomes, in effect, a subsidy to the workers who consume their products—a wage supplement paid for by the taxpayer, which allows corporations to keep labor costs low while still generating profits. This is not conspiracy. It is the documented structure of the modern American economy.

The K-Shaped Economy and the Wealth Gap

The economic context in which these dynamics unfold is stark. As of the third quarter of 2025, the wealthiest “1% of Americans controlled nearly 32% of the nation’s wealth”—a record high—while the bottom “50% held just 2.5%”. Imagine a society where one person out of every one-hundred people has more wealth than half of them combined. That is the U.S. today!

This represents the most extreme wealth inequality since the Federal Reserve began tracking the data in 1989 and this is not a temporary or cyclical phenomenon. As Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi noted, “This is a structural, fundamental problem”. The top 1% “holding a total of $55.9 trillion in wealth” while the bottom 50%, which consists of 67.7 million households, survive on a fraction of that.

The term “K-shaped economy” has been used to describe this divergence—one line going up for the wealthy, another going down for everyone else. Working-class Americans live in a substantially harsher economy, experiencing financial strain much more directly in their daily lives. Real wages declined “0.3% for low-wage workers in 2025”, while household electricity costs rose more than “9%”. A full-time worker near a large city must now earn “$33.63 per hour” to afford a modest two-bedroom rental home; more than half of all wage earners can't even afford a modest one-bedroom apartment.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour for the twenty states that use it as their default minimum and it hasn’t been raised since 2009. Food service workers across the U.S. get a pitiful $2 and change per hour depending on what state they live in. How are they to afford to live? Customers leave tips to “reward them” for good service while the restaurant owners, many of them major corporations, pay them less than $60 a week because they are all part-time. This is the “richest most powerful country in the world” in the year 2026!

Historical Patterns and the Question of Resistance

These conditions of extreme inequality, state capture by concentrated interests, and the systematic subsidization of corporate power are not unprecedented. Historians have identified three previous eras when oligarchs effectively took over the US government: the 1850s, the 1890s, and the 1920s. In each case, concentrated wealth captured the levers of state power, and in each case, popular resistance eventually pushed back.

The question for the present is whether—and how—working-class Americans can organize effective resistance to these dynamics. The early labor movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries faced similar challenges: organized capital, state repression, and the co-optation of union leadership by corporate interests. Jack London’s “The Iron Heel” dramatized these conflicts, showing how the oligarchy used “a few powerful subsidized unions” to suppress the majority of organized labor.

Today, the mechanisms of control are more sophisticated but no less effective. Surveillance capabilities have been largely auctioned off to private industry through mechanisms like the National Defense Authorization Act. Data centers house vast databases of personal information. Intelligence agencies conduct covert operations that destabilize democratically elected governments. The deep state, in this context, is not a single conspiracy but a complex ecosystem of interlocking interests that together shape policy in ways that are often invisible to the public.

Conclusion: Beyond Paranoia, Toward Clarity

To speak of the deep state is not to embrace conspiracy theory. It is to acknowledge a documented reality: that organized, concentrated interests—operating through intelligence agencies, defense contractors, corporate lobbies, and political action committees—exercise enormous influence over government policy, often with minimal democratic accountability.

The evidence is overwhelming: the CIA’s history of covert operations, from the Bay of Pigs to Iran-Contra; the defense industry’s near-total dependence on government contracts; the systematic subsidization of agribusiness while cutting food aid to the poor; the extreme concentration of wealth that leaves the bottom 50% with just 2.5% of the nation’s assets. These are not the products of fevered imagination; they are the structural features of American political economy.

Lenin’s insight—that the state is an instrument of class rule—helps explain how these dynamics persist. Jack London’s prophetic novel reminds us that these concerns are not new. And the current economic data makes clear that the stakes are high.

Whether working-class Americans can organize effective resistance to these dynamics remains to be seen. History suggests that when economic stress reaches a breaking point, popular movements emerge—sometimes peaceful, sometimes not. But understanding the nature of the power structures arrayed against them is a necessary first step. The deep state, in its real-world manifestation, is not a shadowy cabal but a system of institutionalized power that serves organized interests at the expense of the general public. Recognizing this reality is not paranoia; it is the beginning of clarity.

Sinead O' Connor Suffered For Her Defense of Children. She Was Not wrong.

by Mary Sculley 

This authenticated 2003 photo of then Pope John Paul II (pope from 1978 till 2005 when he died) blessing Epstein and Maxwell at the Vatican isn't particularly damning in itself since Epstein was not formally charged with raping minor girls until 2006. The pope couldn't have known he was dealing with two pedophiles. But the two pedophiles knew exactly who they were dealing with: a religious leader who was not only massively compromised on pedophilia among the Catholic clergy but one who used the Vatican to render legitimacy to Zionist colonization of Palestine.

 

In October 1992, Irish singer Sinead O'Connor stood on the TV show Saturday Night Live (SNL) and tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II to protest rampant child sexual abuse within the Catholic church. She was ruthlessly pilloried by media, celebrities of the disreputable kind like Sinatra and Madonna, and Zionist organizations like the Anti-Defamation League. 

Just two weeks after the SNL event, she was booed by the audience at a Madison Square Garden event to honor the music of Bob Dylan. Her career as a pop singer which had only begun in the late 1980s was over as a result of the backlash. Being the extraordinary young woman that she was--outspoken against misogyny, white supremacy, the abuse of children, injustice--she saw the backlash to destroy her as a way to get back to her musical and creative roots. The conduct of Pope John Paul II before and after her iconoclastic act on SNL prove O'Connor to be something of a prophet if not a goddess.

 

In the early 1990s, child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy was just beginning to be exposed by survivors all over the world who were suing the church for Vatican complicity in the crimes against them. Until then, it was covered up by Catholic authorities, including Pope John Paul II during his previous tenure as archbishop of Kraków, Poland beginning in 1958. In 2023, Dutch journalist Ekke Overbeek (who lives in Poland and has written extensively on child abuse in the Polish church) wrote 'Maxima culpa. John Paul II knew' where he draws his allegations from documents of the Polish secret service during communist rule. Since John Paul II was an aggressive anti-communist, it could be claimed that the secret service was slandering him. But in his tenure as pontiff, John Paul II continued to run interference between survivors of sexual abuse and the rapist clergy. 

 

As pope, John Paul II put all jurisdiction over sexual abuse cases under secret Vatican control. He ignored most allegations, defended many of the accused, and refused to turn pedophiles over to civil authorities for prosecution. Perhaps the most egregious case is that of Cardinal Bernard Law, the archbishop of Boston from 1984 until he was forced to resign in 2002 for 20 years of covering up for pedophile priests by shifting them around from parish to parish rather than report them to the police. Rather than defrock Law, John Paul II brought him to the Vatican and made him prelate of a basilica in Rome.

 

All that sexual criminality would have made John Paul II sympatico enough with Epstein and Maxwell. But then there were his political overtures to Israel when in 1993 he signed an agreement establishing formal diplomatic ties between the Vatican and Israel. To cement the deal, he made a state visit to Israel in 2000 where he did that thing all Zionist politicians do at the Western Wall--put a piece of paper in the wall asking God for forgiveness for crimes committed against Jews by Christians. Then he visited the holocaust museum to honor the six million victims of the Nazi genocide. Since the crimes against Jews, especially those crimes incited by the Vatican, are egregious throughout history, it's appropriate for John Paul II to accept responsibility and it is certainly right to honor the victims of the Nazi holocaust. But what about the Palestinians?

 

John Paul II met with Yasser Arafat during his visit since Arafat had signed the Oslo Accords in 1994 legitimizing Israel's occupation and expropriation of the West Bank. He said mass in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, stopped in at a refugee camp near Bethlehem to say hello, and shed a few tears about Palestinian suffering before heading back to Jerusalem. 

 

If you want to know what Epstein and Maxwell liked about Pope John Paul II, it is his monstrous compromises with sexual crimes against children and his support for Zionist colonialism. So this 2003 encounter at the Vatican does not damn the pope. But the cesspool of Vatican politics when it comes to protecting children, including Palestinian children, and when it comes to supporting Zionist violence against Palestinians does damn him. It also highlights the connection of Epstein and Maxwell to the world's civil, religious, and political elite and explains why there has as of now not been a single prosecution of the pedophiles identified in the Epstein papers.

 

(Photo from 2003 has been authenticated by several sources. It is not AI-generated. It became public in the 2020 prosecution of Maxwell)

History Will Not Be Good to Trump.

Richard Mellor

I remember when his show, The Apprentice, was all the rage. I never watched it. Apart from always seeing him as a repulsive individual, I certainly wasn’t drawn to a television show where a multi-millionaire (at the time) introduced the show with the phrase “You’re Fired”. Other than that phrase, I had no real idea what the show was about.

 

I have spent my conscious political life defending members of my own class from that fate, losing one’s means of subsistence. No small thing in a country where money is everything and when it comes to hardships and bad times, your own your own boy.

 

It didn’t surprise me one bit when he boasted of entering the dressing rooms where youn women on the show were changing. He could see them naked. He’s clearly a r*pist, a serial sexual abuser. 

 

While he is the most degenerate and disgusting example of the decaying US ruling class he is not the main problem here. He is the symptom of a social system in decay. US capitalism is engulfed in an economic, political and social crisis. It is under siege on the global stage and losing ground despite still being the most powerful economy and certainly the most powerful military. It is a wounded animal armed to the teeth. 

 

The assault on the working class at home has been intensifying under both Republican and Democratic Administrations alike as the era during which the two parties of capitalism that have dominated US political and economic life for over one hundred and fifty years comes to an end.

 

Yes Trump is despicable, but there are far nastier and more astute characters behind him. As I have stated before, those that seem to think the Democratic party is capable of defending the working class against fascism are terribly mistaken. It is not hard to see that this is the case both historically and in the present.

 

The US working class is not as infected with right wing racist ideas as the capitalist mass media would have us think. There are many reasons a cohesive, organized counter to the capitalist offensive has not yet arisen, both on the ground and in the political arena. What is certain in my mind is that it will. It must if we are to ensure that our children and grandchildren have a future, free from want and war, the two of the main pillars of capitalism

 

Reprinted from the UK Socialist website, Left Horizons

The media killed Jason Arday

18 August 2026

By Joe Langabeer

Over the weekend, it was reported that former Cambridge professor, Jason Arday, had been found dead in his home after a barrage of attacks from the press and institutions over plagiarism allegations.

The wholesale character assassination of Arday often had little to do with what he was being accused of doing. It was clearly a hit job on a Black man who had threatened the status quo of academia, and an attack, similar to those in the USA, on any institution that hires people from minority ethnic backgrounds.

It is one of those personal stories that has deeply affected me over the past couple of weeks. Having been in academia myself, and knowing the gruelling process of obtaining a PhD, I know Arday had far higher steps to climb because he was Black, and because the world of academia is still dominated by white men.

But with his rise, academics on the right attempting to discredit him at every chance they could get. Prior to the Telegraph article that smeared him and which fuelled the press fury against him, he had already been attacked over allegations of plagiarism a year earlier. There is an excellent interview on Owen Jones’s YouTube channel, with Kehinde Andrews, another Black professor and friend of Arday, who discusses the smear campaign in detail.

Wrongful accusations

According to Andrews, the plagiarism allegations began when a far-right academic, Nathan Cofnas, attempted attacked Arday, saying that his PhD thesis contained plagiarised passages from another PhD thesis submitted a few months before Arday’s.

When Arday was attacked by Cofnas, Arday’s university, Liverpool John Moores, reviewed his PhD and found that while his work contained “poor scholarship” — meaning there were some incorrect references and passages that he had clearly been reading and emulating in his own writing — there had been no attempt by Arday to pass someone else’s work off as his own, which is what would constitute plagiarism.

It should be noted that Cofnas himself is not a reliable academic, having producedresearch that is heavily biased and light on facts, as he seeks to pursue an agenda of “race realism”, where he argues that intelligence is based on different racial groups. It is a far-right trope that has been disproven by many academics and highly qualified scientists many times over.

A media onslaught: eleven articles a day, over 22 days

But, perhaps as the media seemed to be having a slow news period over the past few weeks, the Telegraph dredged this case back up, reporting on the accusation against Arday by Cofnas, and launching a renewed attack on him, despite the charge of plagiarism having already been proven wrong.

From that initial article came a barrage of attacks from all corners of the press, attempting to discredit him for the stupidest reasons: from whether he actually ran a marathon for charity, to whether his claims that he was non-verbal as a child were true.

In a report from the Good Law Project, with data collected from NewsCord, it found that the media published 249 articles over 22 days, discussing Arday and alleged plagiarism. That works out at roughly eleven articles a day from the press. The biggest offenders were right-wing newspapers like The Times and The Telegraph, but even supposedly “liberal” papers such as The Guardian joined in on the smear campaign in an attempt to discredit Arday.

One article from The Guardian, which I happened to read before Arday’s death, questioned his claim that he was non-verbal as a child. One claim came from a “YouTuber” called Jonathan Stewart, who suggested that Arday was chatty and loved making jokes.

I checked the YouTube channel that posted it, and it is a channel that had never spoken about Jason Arday or his academic work, only relationship advice. Stewart did release one video about Arday, claiming that he was not non-verbal, but that video has since been deleted.

The Guardian never thought to verify this YouTuber’s claims; it only had claims from another person that Arday was not non-verbal, and apparently thought that was enough to publish. Yet there were also verified accounts from other schoolmates of Arday’s confirming that he was non-verbal and struggled to communicate with his peers and teachers.

Two points arise from this abysmal reporting. First, we do not know if these people actually went to school with Arday and, in the case of Stewart, it seemed as though he made the video to attract attention to his channel. Secondly, why did The Guardianever feel the need to report this in the first place, rather than sticking to the false allegations of plagiarism and doing some actual decent journalism on the right-wing mob attempting to discredit Arday?

But it seemed that The Guardian wanted to stick the knife in with Arday, with countless opinion pieces attacking him, and the response of the left, because we knew that a racist campaign had been mounted by the right. It is this type of reactionary centrism, seen in recent reporting on Gaza and the Corbyn antisemitism smears, that shows papers like The Guardian are not friends of the left, but defenders of the establishment. The only difference is that they do it with a smile.

Media scrutiny

Since Arday’s death, there has been an outpouring of support for him, alongside serious questions about the media’s role in his death. The media have responded to those accusations with cowardly defences, claiming that people should instead blame how institutions such as Cambridge handled his mental health support.

An editorial piece in The Guardian about his death calls for “reflection” and argues that it was right to scrutinise his position, but even The Guardian itself did very little “investigative reporting”, although that was its apparent justification for publication. Only in this piece does it address the fact that the plagiarism accusations were not upheld by the university, and that the man who made those accusations was a racist attempting to discredit Arday based on his own racial prejudices.

What The Guardian did was not investigative reporting; it was tabloid reporting, the very thing institutions like The Guardian claim to be above.

And, according to Andrews, in his interview with Owen Jones, that is what hurt Arday the most, in the days leading up to his death. He expected the right wing to go after him. Earlier this year, he gave a speech to the British Sociological Association conference, showing how the press and right-wing academics attempt to smear Black academics by accusing them of plagiarism. In that speech, Arday referenced Claudine Gay, the first Black woman to become president of Harvard, who had been hounded out of her position due to allegations of plagiarism.

But he did not expect attacks from supposed liberal newspapers. Even supposedly left-wing media outlets, like Novara Media, did some reporting on this, apparently taking the line from the establishment press. Since Arday’s passing, they have only reflected on it, while still sticking to their guns that what they reported was justified.

The speech Arday gave at that conference unfortunately turned out to be prophetic. He would be attacked with the same smears, and those attacks would ultimately contribute to his death. The media should be ashamed of how they treated him. And as the Good Law Project has demanded a public inquiry into the role of the media in his death, we should also seek to change how the media operates, making sure it serves the public by reporting what actually matters.

This can only be done through democratically-owned public media spaces. It is time to regulate the right-wing press, most of which is currently owned by billionaire tax-dodgers. We should bolster outlets like the BBC, while making sure that the public has a say in what is reported — not appointed and board members, heavily skewed to Oxbridge graduated white men. That is how we can stop a tragic event like the case of Jason Arday from ever happening again.