Journalist Johnathan Cook says of Abby Martin's latest film:
"I just attended a screening of Abby Martin's remarkable new film Earth's Greatest Enemy, on the US military's unprecedented destruction of the planet. Find a way to see it if you can."
You can buy or rent Earth's Greatest Enemy on Amazon here. or at Apple TV
 |
| From Google images: Original source |
Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED
9-13-26
I was thinking the other day about some of the experiences I had on the job and in the community in which I lived and worked.
I worked for a water district, mostly fixing leaks in the streets. We also installed new water services—sometimes larger ones for commercial properties, sometimes standard services for houses—and occasionally hydrant runs.
I started as a utility laborer in 1976. In other words, you did whatever they wanted you to do. After about a year, I got a transfer closer to home, to the main Oakland Yard, along with a promotion to pipeline laborer and a small raise.
For a couple of years I worked as a pipeline laborer and then as a journeyman plumber. It wasn't the same as being a finished plumber in the building trades, but it was our version of it. Eventually, I got a position as a backhoe operator, which was easier on me in some ways. Better than being in the ditch, as we used to say. During all this time I became very involved in my local union, Afscme Local 444.
I remember one job on the Oakland-Berkeley border, somewhere around 60th and Sacramento. I think we were putting in a hydrant, but I'm not completely sure. That part isn't really the point.
The guys were down in the ditch working, and I had finished digging for the moment. I got off the backhoe and was just standing around looking at what was going on. It was an intersection with a liquor store on one corner.
Across the street, I noticed a young woman talking with two young men. From what I could see, she appeared to be working as a prostitute, and I assumed the two men were her pimps, although I could have been wrong about that. She was thin and looked worn down. The three of them seemed to know each other.
I watched for a minute or two, and then one of the men suddenly punched her in the face.
She dropped instantly, like a sack of potatoes.
It was horrible to see, especially in broad daylight.
It sickened me. I wanted to do something, but we were sitting ducks out there. We worked in some rough areas, and we'd seen things happen. Sometimes things even happened to our own crews.
One of the guys on the job said quietly to me, “Don't say anything, Richard. Don't do anything. We're sitting ducks.”
He was right.
The two young men walked right past me on the sidewalk. I remember feeling a surge of hatred toward them. But there was nothing I could do without putting myself and the rest of the crew at risk.
After they left, the woman got up. I think she went into the liquor store. I walked over there myself and told the people inside that they needed to call the police. I believe they did, although I don't remember whether the police arrived before we left.
What I do remember is the fear—the real fear—of being seen reporting something like that. I didn't want to draw attention to our crews.
As a public utility crew, we were exposed. That's one reason it always bothered us when we heard that police sometimes used fake utility trucks to watch drug dealers or police a poor community in general. . We already worked in some dangerous places, and having people believe that a utility truck might actually be a police vehicle could make our jobs even more dangerous.
I was also reminded of another incident involving an AC Transit bus driver who was shot right outside Neldhams Danish Bakery, at the bus stop across the street. Someone pulled over, got out carrying what looked like a semiautomatic rifle, and killed him.
I went to his funeral at the union hall, ATU Local 192. He apparently had nothing to do with whatever had happened. As I remember it, a bus had cut off someone's girlfriend, and the shooter took revenge on the first driver he saw.
That's how dangerous some parts of the US can be.
After the incident with the young woman, I was furious. I even had fantasies of coming back and doing a drive-by on those two men. It was anger talking, not something I was actually going to do. But that's how upset I was.
Eventually, though, I had to remind myself: this is the community.
It was a depressed and struggling community. It's expensive now, but back then it was hard, violent and worn down. I lived in an area like that myself. I knew the kids on the corner. Some of them used to play Dungeons & Dragons in my house when they were little.
Not all of them became involved in the violence around them, of course. But some did. And some of those kids eventually grew into the same violence they had been exposed to while growing up.
I remember one of those kids in particular.
He had grown older, and one day I was walking up to the corner store and saw him standing there with some of the others. I said hello, using his real name, the name I'd known him by for most of his life.
When I came out of the store, he approached me.
He asked me not to call him by his real name anymore. He wanted me to use his new street name.
I had no problem with that at all. I apologized and told him I understood.
That kid is dead now.
I think about that sometimes.
We can look at people who commit terrible acts and see only the person standing in front of us. We see the violence, and it's easy to forget that they were once children too. Before the street name, before the violence, before whatever choices they eventually made, they were kids.
Some of them had played Dungeons & Dragons in my house.
I couldn't help of thinking of that young woman standing in the street getting punched in the face; she must have been held in a mother's arms at some point in her life; it's sad.
Sweden goes to the polls today in an extremely close general election that could see the far right enter government for the first time if the country’s rightwing parties can form a majority. However, opinion polls show the centre-left opposition alliance ahead, with Magdalena Andersson of the Social Democrats the favourite to become prime minister again after four years in opposition. But her bloc’s lead has narrowed considerably in the final days of the campaign.
In 2022, the current prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, the leader of the centre-right Moderates, broke a longstanding taboo to make a deal with the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats (SD), so that his minority coalition could form a government. That agreement gave the SD outsized influence over government policy, especially on crime and immigration, and Kristersson has now gone further, promising ministerial posts for the SD if he is returned to power. In an attempt to win back voters, Andersson’s Social Democrats have also moved to the right on crime, immigration and integration, meaning that a win for the left was unlikely to mean a reform of current hardline policies. In effect, as in Denmark, the Social Democrats have adopted the immigration policies of the right.
And they have supported the ending of Sweden’s longstanding ‘neutral’ policy in foreign affairs and have enthusiatically supported Sweden’s membership of NATO, becoming one of the most belligerent in supporting the continuation of the war in Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Indeed, the perceived ‘Russia threat’ of invading Europe is a theme of nearly all the Swedish political parties. Andersson told the FT that her top priorities in government were Ukraine and “intensifying co-operation” with European countries – apparently not the cost of living or economic issues.
It was always an illusion anyway about Sweden being the ‘third way’ between untrammelled free market capitalism and command economy autocratic Communism. The great gains of the Swedish labour movement in the early 20th century have steadily been reversed. Just as in other capitalist economies, the polices of neoliberalism – a reversion to free markets, low taxation for the rich and corporations, cuts in the welfare state and in real wages, rising inequality etc – have been operating in Sweden since the mid-1990s.
Sweden may still have a more ‘equal’ income distribution than the US and the UK, but it is still very unequal – and inequality has been rising the fastest since the 1990s of all advanced capitalist economies. The top 10% of Swedish income earners take home (after tax), 33% of all personal income while the bottom 50% share just 20%.
Wealth inequality is even worse. In 1980, the top 1% of personal wealth owners took 17.7% of all personal wealth; now they have 22.5%. The top 10% had 54.4% in 1980; now they have 68.2%. The bottom 50% of Swedes had just 13.4% of total personal wealth in 1980; now they have more debt than wealth at -10.9%!, such has been the rise in borrowing (mortgages etc)! – WID figures. In Sweden, like in most other Nordic countries, tax reforms over the 1990s have decreased the tax burden for wealthier households, e.g. by decreasing capital taxation and lowering or abandoning wealth taxation. At the same time, there have been cuts in welfare benefits for the poor.
Sweden is no longer an epitome of state provision. The country is one of the world leaders in having public services supplied by the private sector, paid for by the government. About one-third of all Swedish secondary schools are so-called ‘free schools’, with the majority of them run by for-profit companies, while about 40% of primary healthcare providers are privately owned. Their shares are even sold on the stock market. Public provision has been outsourced to the detriment of quality. Sweden’s schools have slipped from being one of the world’s best in international ratings to “one of the most mediocre”. The Social Democrats have long been against independent schools being able to make a profit and pay out dividends. But they have never been able to muster a majority to end this.
And then there is immigration. Over 600,000 immigrants from the Middle East have entered the country since the Syrian/Iraq disaster. Many immigrants are young single men and they have helped capitalist enterprises and the state sector overcome an acute labour shortage for low skilled work. But the amount of immigrants per head of population is way more than in any other European economy and it has increased pressure on those public services, already suffering from neo-liberal measures. The small towns in Sweden have experienced low wages, poorer services and then were faced with an influx of new immigrants. This was the breeding ground for the Democrats’ racist and nationalist message of ‘Sweden for Swedes’.
The rise of the Swedish Democrats follows the pattern of so-called populism that we have seen in Germany, France, Italy, Denmark and other EU countries, as well as with Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US. It is the product of the failure of capitalism to deliver after the end of the Golden Age in the mid-1960s, but particularly after the global financial crash, the Great Recession and the ensuing Long Depression. Swedish capitalism, somewhat like Germany (only as a much smaller economy), has experienced a slowdown in economic growth in the last few decades and particularly since 2008.
Whichever political bloc – left or right – wins a majority in a new parliament, it will change little.
Susan Nevens
Here is a brief analysis of Yemen, a nation that has been bombed for the past 26 years, since the days of the George W. Bush administration. You might say, 'Well, Susan, this is not a brief analysis,' but there are some things that cannot be explained in a meme to fit within the mold of the American culture of a short attention span. There is no SparkNote to explain the political history of a nation, so I am afraid you need to read on if you want to learn something!"
Why did the Saudi backed forces in Yemen collapse?!
The entire citizen population of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain and Oman combined is smaller than the population of Yemen.
The combined number of citizens, not foreigners, in these Gulf states is approximately 26–27 million, while the population of Yemen is about 42 million.
There has long been a Gulf view that a unified Yemen represents a strategic threat to the demographically small, geographically limited Gulf states.
After the fall of Abdullah Saleh, Yemen entered a period of political turmoil. Islah gained considerable influence during the post-Saleh transition.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE later turned against Islah as part of their broader war against the Arab Spring. Islah eventually lost to the Houthis, who took control of Sanaa in 2014.
The Houthis received some Iranian support.
After getting rid of Islah's control of the capital Sanaa, Saudi Arabia and the UAE created and sponsored many factions in Yemen to fight the Houthis.
The factions in southern Yemen, like the Giants Brigades, received Emirati support, while most of the rest, like the Nation's Shield, Yemen Emergency Forces in Saada and al-Jawf, and Hadrami tribal forces, received Saudi funding.
Saudi and Emirati support was divided into two main parts:
Buying the loyalty of tribal leaders with money, and paying salaries to Yemenis fighting in their factions against the Houthis.
It is widely circulated in Yemen that Saudi backed Yemeni fighters are paid around 1000 Saudi riyals per month.
Because of the war, blockade and economic collapse, these salaries became a source of income for many Yemenis who joined these factions.
Unlike Iran, which provided decisive military aid to its Houthi allies in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the UAE intervened directly and wanted their Yemeni "allies" to follow their instructions, instead of following the Iranian model of providing similar military aid to Yemenis who don't agree with the Houthis and letting Yemenis decide for themselves.
The UAE interests later clashed with those of its ally, Saudi Arabia.
The UAE, as a tiny state with a citizen population, excluding foreigners, of 1.1 million, sought to revive the North-South conflict Via The STC as perhaps the most achievable goal, so that instead of 1 Yemen, there would be 2 Yemens, North and South.
This is not only an Emirati objective, but also an Israeli objective, as similar attempts were seen in Syria through attempts to establish a state for the Kurds and another for the Druze, so that Israel could fight smaller entities if necessary, and so that the UAE could overcome its demographic inferiority complex.
However, this objective is not limited to Yemen. Saudi Arabia may be the next target for partition after Yemen, because compared with the other Gulf states and Israel, Saudi Arabia has a larger population and a much larger territory.
This accelerated the Saudi-Emirati conflict, which ended with the UAE expelled from Yemen.
Below are 5 reasons for the military failure of the Saudi backed camp in Yemen:
1- Centralized command: The Houthi-led Sanaa government has 1 centralized leadership, while the Saudi backed forces are a mixture of several factions, each with its own loyalties and objectives.
2- The Houthis succeeded in neutralizing Saudi airpower by responding to airstrikes on areas under their control with attacks deep inside Saudi Arabia.
3- Military ideology: Fighters in the Houthi forces have a religious military ideology hostile to Israel and the US, and their fighters fight for this, compared with the salaries that fighters in the Saudi backed camp fight for.
4- Media propaganda: Houthi forces strictly prohibit their fighters from using phones, and all the information their fighters receive comes from their leadership.
This is the complete opposite of the Saudi backed camp, which greatly exaggerated its media propaganda.
5- The failure of Saudi religious mobilization:
When a Yemeni fighting in the Saudi backed camp reads that there are 200 American officers directing them from Saudi Arabia, while he knows about US involvement against his brothers in Gaza, and sees how Saudi media covers Gaza, its hostility toward it, and its complete adoption of the Israeli narrative, this alone is enough to deal a fatal blow to Saudi religious propaganda.
 |
If you’ve followed my interviews, you know I’ve been warning about the high likelihood of a third round of the war—one that would almost certainly be far more intense than the previous two. I’ve also argued that, given Trump’s erroneous reading of the current balance, perhaps the only diplomatic wildcard that could pull us back from this looming disaster is Beijing deciding to step in and force a settlement. I discussed precisely this with Glenn Diesen on his show just yesterday.
Hours later, President Xi Jinping declared China’s willingness to use its diplomatic clout to help end the war. “China is willing to work with fellow BRICS members to play a role in achieving peace and stability in the Middle East and the Gulf region,” Xi said at the BRICS meeting in New Delhi.
China traditionally avoids entangling itself in other countries’ conflicts—including by using its diplomatic heft to resolve them, even when its own interest in stability might justify mediation. Beijing wants to avoid both the embarrassment of a failed diplomatic initiative and the risk of inadvertently taking ownership of a conflict for which it otherwise bears no responsibility.
But Beijing may now sense that the trajectory of this war is moving in a direction where the costs can no longer be contained. In the previous rounds, Donald Trump stopped short of carrying out threats against Iran’s critical infrastructure and oil industry, knowing that Iran would retaliate against similar targets in Israel and the GCC states. In that scenario, an energy production crisis would emerge rather than just a bottleneck problem.
Such a scenario would make it much harder—perhaps impossible—for China to keep oil prices below $100 a barrel and thereby help avert a global recession. China’s decision to sharply reduce its oil demand was, after all, a key reason the previous two rounds of war did not send oil prices toward $150 a barrel.
Despite these challenges, China managed to largely insulate itself from the war’s energy shock while preventing a much deeper crisis for the rest of the world.
But in the third round, much indicates that Trump will escalate the war dramatically, leaving China exposed in a manner that may have shifted Beijing’s cost-benefit analysis in favor of intervening diplomatically.
And as I explained on Glenn Diesen’s show, China can make a difference. The current mediators—primarily Oman, Qatar, and Pakistan—deserve enormous credit for their ingenuity, creativity, and persistence. Mediation is often risky and almost always thankless. Just look at how Qatar and Oman have been treated in Washington despite the significant contributions their mediation has made to U.S. national security.
But for all their diplomatic finesse and impressive political endurance, none of these mediators possesses significant leverage over the two warring parties—the United States and Iran.
China does. And it was precisely that leverage that helped Beijing get the Saudi-Iranian normalization agreement across the finish line. Iraq and Oman had done much of the painstaking mediation, but the depth of distrust between Tehran and Riyadh ultimately required a power with enough leverage over both sides to hold them to their commitments. That was the crucial ingredient China brought to the table.
Both Tehran and Riyadh calculated that neither could easily violate a deal guaranteed by China without jeopardizing their relationship with Beijing. And because China is simply too important for either to risk such a rupture, Beijing’s role as guarantor proved crucial not only to reaching the agreement, but perhaps more importantly, to sustaining it.
China’s relationship with the United States is, of course, very different. Neither Iran nor Saudi Arabia views China as a rival or peer competitor. Washington does.
Still, China’s leverage over both sides may prove to be the missing ingredient that has made an enduring settlement so elusive. The current mediators may well broker another MOU, but there is little reason to believe it will prove any more durable than the last one.
To make a deal stick, China may prove indispensable.
PS. Here’s my interview with Glenn:
To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
What happened to the flowers?
Ken Klippenstein Sept 11, 2026.
 |
Twenty-five years later, 9/11 anniversaries have devolved into a grotesque fundraising orgy for the security state.
The families commemorate their loved ones while the very people and institutions that failed to prevent the attack in the first place tell triumphant war stories and warn that if we (the American people) let down our guard — by which they mean close our wallets to them — it will happen again.
“The 9/11 attack took place without warning,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio writes to his employees today, per a memo leaked to me. After opening with chest-beating (“We have hunted down the architects of the attack…”), practically all he can say is: don’t let your guard down.
 | ||
| ||
When it comes to the 9/11 anniversary, fundraising has become more and more dominant. But it used to have a heart as well. In the days after the attacks, Union Square in New York disappeared under candles and handwritten notes. Flowers piled up outside firehouses that had lost entire crews. People waited in line for hours to give blood, even though, as it turned out, there would be almost no one to give it to.
The outpouring of sympathy was international, too. In Paris, Le Monde ran a front page declaring “Nous sommes tous Américains.” At Buckingham Palace, the band played the Star-Spangled Banner at the changing of the guard.
Now it’s just a naked cash grab by the national security world, who congratulate themselves for a job well done while angling for more money.
 |
If this is all 9/11 remembrance is going to be, then I say: fuck 9/11.
Having no anniversary would be less offensive than what they’ve turned this day into.
The whole thing reminds me of those money booths on game shows, where a contestant stands inside a glass box while cash blows around them, grabbing at as many bills as they can before time runs out.
Then there’s the total lack of accountability from the security elite for what was the most catastrophic intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor.
“Whether you like Dick Cheney or not, he was incredible on that day,” Matthew Waxman, a Bush National Security Council official at the time, saidat a discussion panel about 9/11 at Columbia University this week.
Let’s assume that’s true. His job is to prevent attacks like these from happening in the first place!
“I think there were some things that we got wrong, but many things that we actually got quite right,” Waxman added.
Notice something about all these panels, interviews and anniversary addresses: The story always starts after the first plane hit. Never before. Nobody wants to talk about the August 6, 2001 President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” Or the FBI agent in Phoenix who warned about extremists training at American flight schools. Or the CIA knowing two of the future hijackers were in the country and not telling the FBI.
At that Columbia panel, Hillary Clinton recalled going to the Oval Office with Chuck Schumer two days after the attacks.
“I looked at President Bush, and I thought, you know, my gosh, my heart went out to him. I mean, just looking at his face, looking at his eyes, I thought, you know, he is now at a totally different level of responsibility for this country.”
Our political elites have turned 9/11 into an episode of The West Wing, starring themselves: the protagonists up on Mount Olympus, hitting their big cinematic moment. The families never figure into these stories. The nation, which has paid the greatest price in lost liberties, is never thanked or addressed much at all.
Then she got to the money. By her account, she told Bush the first bill his team sent up had no money for New York. He asked what they needed. She said $20 billion. Bush’s answer: “You got it.”
What happened next is the part she seems to relish.
“As I was getting up to leave the Oval Office, John Warner, one of my absolutely favorite colleagues, a long-serving Republican senator who had chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee forever, he touched me on the shoulder, and he goes, ‘Hillary, get him to say that in front of everybody again.’”
Here’s what didn’t make it into her story: Bush’s promise kicked off a fight in Washington, because the White House’s original $20 billion request was supposed to cover the entire federal response. Congress settled it by doubling the emergency package to $40 billion, with half set aside for recovery — and much of the rest flowing to the national security apparatus.
In other words, within days of the attacks, 9/11 was already a fundraising event.
These days, 9/11 anniversaries have about as much to do with the nearly 3,000 people who died as Christmas has to do with Jesus.
Consider an anecdote from retired Navy Capt. Brian Cullen, who had just been posted to U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, when the planes hit.
As U.S. bases across Europe went into lockdown, Germany rallied behind America in a way that’s hard to imagine today. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder pledged “unlimited solidarity.” Huge crowds filled the streets of Berlin. NATO invoked Article 5, its mutual-defense clause, for the first time in its history.
But what stuck with Cullen was closer to home: German neighbors, kids included, holding candlelight vigils outside the base gates — the same gates that usually drew anti-nuclear and anti-base protesters.
Then Washington pivoted to “you’re either with us or against us,” and the goodwill evaporated. The candles disappeared. The base walled itself off from the community around it. The alliance started to crack as the U.S. went it alone.
“Our base became a reflection of our nation: security at any cost,” Cullen writes.
That’s the real legacy of 9/11. It was the beginning of the national security state’s soft coup over American politics, as my editor Bill Arkin laid out in his profound book American Coup.
We’ll know that coup has ended when we see flowers again.
Subscribed
Subscribed