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I have considerable respect for John Mearsheimer. I believe he is a genuine character, though he does not place his considerable skills at the service of the working class by any means. I’m halfway through this but Mearsheimer is laying down the law. He must be despised by both the left and right of the US body politic and the US ruling class in general. He’s just reminded us that if there was a present day Nuremberg like in 1945 after the genocide that took place against the Jews at that time, “Biden and his lieutenants and Trump and his lieutenants would be hanged.”
Mearsheimer is a bourgeois strategist and since co-authoring a book about the Israeli Lobby or AIPAC in 2007, his views on the Middle East and the Israel/US relationship have been borne out to a great degree.
I do not agree though with his affirmation that Israel calls the shots saying that while countries have national interests and sometimes the national interests of countries can converge, when the US and Israel have opposing interests, the US acts in the interests of the latter against its own; this is due to the power of AIPAC is his argument. Some would call it the Jewish Lobby.
I believe the US has very important interests in the region being oil of course, as well as the Suez Canal and the general need for a global hegemon to maintain important footholds in other parts of the world and especially so as the US now has a peer competitor globally in the form of China.
US imperialism is losing its influence in this region and a significant defeat for Israel, its settler colony would be a humiliating defeat for US imperialism globally. It will hang on to Israel as it is the only reliable ally of the US in this part of the world. So it sees defending its proxy as in the interests if the United States.
Mearsheimer talks of the Israeli strategy to build a greater Israel and the need to ethnically cleanse the region, that is what it is doing in Lebanon, ethnically cleansing the southern part of the country below the Litani river and it has even greater ambitions for Syria, and beyond. I see this as driven by US imperialism’s interests. Israel could not have done what it has in Gaza or what it is doing in Lebanon and Iran now without US money and weapons and points out that Israel’s strategy is to weaken Iran and have a regime there compliant to the US, so does Washington. Washington is facing increasing pressure domestically given the cost to the US population of this venture not to mention the horrors that cannot be hidden given the role of social media.
To not see it that way and accept that AIPAC is the driving force to get the US ruling class to act against its own interests, what is it about AIPAC, a group representing a small country, and more importantly, a small population, specifically Jews both inside Israel and out, that makes it so powerful?
I know what some would say and I certainly don’t think Mearsheimer is proposing it although the Zionists have accused him of that.
But what do I know? Mearsheimer has a Phd. I have a GED
The only reason why I still have a Twitter account is that that's where you find the real tea
As you all know, Melania Trump held a press conference yesterday to tell the country she has nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. Nobody asked her to. Her husband says he didn't know she was gonna do it. Her own staff didn't know the topic until she started talking. The Epstein story had basically died down, 'cause everyone's been focused on Iran. And she just walked out there and revived it.
So why now? Her adviser said "enough is enough" and "the lies must stop."
Sure. But she did something weird.
She acknowledged the 2002 email she sent Ghislaine Maxwell, the one where she complimented a New York magazine profile of Epstein and signed off "Love, Melania." She called it a reply. Twice. Except the subject line was "HI!" and there's no prior email from Maxwell in the files. It wasn't a reply. She reached out. Maxwell wrote back and called her "sweet pea."
And then Melania pivoted to calling on Congress to hold public hearings for Epstein's victims - under oath. Her husband's administration has been doing everything possible to make this go away. Pam Bondi just refused a subpoena the day before to testify. The whole White House message has been "time to move on." And the First Lady is out here asking for sworn testimony. most of the reporting says that everyone in the White House was "stunned."
None of this makes sense - until you know who Amanda Ungaro is.
Ungaro is a Brazilian former model. She came to the US in 2002 at 17, on Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express. She's on the flight logs. Her agent was Jean-Luc Brunel, one of Epstein's procurers, who was found hanged in a Paris prison cell in 2022 while awaiting trial for raping minors and trafficking girls.
Ungaro told a Brazilian newspaper she saw about 30 girls on that flight, most of them between 14 and 16. She watched some of them disappear to the back of the plane with Epstein and Maxwell and never saw them again. Brunel tried to get her to carry a suspicious package. She refused.
After she landed in New York, she ended up at Paolo Zampolli's modeling agency. And this is where it all connects.
Zampolli is the guy who brought Melania to America from Slovenia in 1996. Got her the visa. Introduced her to Trump at a party in 1998. Trump has confirmed this himself. Zampolli is in the Epstein files dozens of times. He and Epstein tried to buy Elite Model Management together in 2004. Epstein visited his agency.
In one email from the files, Epstein warned a businessman that "Zampoli is trouble." Zampolli currently works in the Trump administration as special envoy for global partnerships and sits on the Kennedy Center board.
Ungaro and Zampolli were together for almost 20 years. They have a teenage son. They sat at Melania's table at the first inauguration dinner. Ungaro even held a UN ambassadorship to Grenada through Zampolli's connections. They split around 2018 and Zampolli later claimed they were never actually married, which was news to basically everyone.
Then last June, Ungaro got arrested in Miami on fraud charges at a medical spa. Her new husband made bail. She didn't. 'Cause according to the New York Times, Zampolli called a senior ICE official named David Venturella, told him Ungaro was on an expired visa, and asked about getting her transferred to federal custody. Venturella called the Miami field office. He mentioned the case was important to someone close to the White House.
Zampolli says he just asked what was going on. DHS says it wasn't political. But Ungaro got picked up by ICE before she could post bail and was deported to Brazil. She eventually agreed to leave because she thought staying in detention would cost her custody of her kid. Her son went to Brazil with her, then went back to Zampolli.
The man who introduced the President to the First Lady got the mother of his child deported. And this woman knew the Trumps for 20 years. She was at their events. She was close to Melania's parents. She rode on Epstein's plane as a teenager.
Now she's in Brazil posting on X, tagging Melania directly. Saying she'll expose everything she knows. Threatening legal action. Saying she has nothing left to lose.
But wait! There's more!
The Epstein files from January include a redacted FBI proffer from 2019, three days after Epstein's arrest. An immunity witness told federal agents that Epstein introduced Melania to Donald Trump. Not Zampolli. Epstein. Lying under a proffer agreement is a federal crime. The White House says the files may contain unverified claims. Melania has been threatening to sue anyone who repeats it. Wolff. Hunter Biden. The Daily Beast already caved and retracted. Hunter's response was "F**k that. That's not gonna happen." He refused to retract and basically dared them to depose both Trumps. Wolff sued her back.
And then Zampolli popped up after Melania's speech to tell the Daily Mail he's ready to testify under oath that he made the introduction. Melania just asked Congress to set up hearings.
So - to sum up - a woman who was on Epstein's plane, who spent 20 years in the Trump inner circle, gets deported by the man who introduced Donald and Melania. She starts threatening to talk. The Epstein files contain sworn testimony that contradicts the official story of how the Trumps met. And then Melania holds a surprise press conference to deny everything, while her key witness volunteers to back her up and her husband pretends he didn't know it was happening.
Melania doesn't do press conferences. She doesn't blindside the West Wing. She doesn't voluntarily bring up the one scandal her husband's team has been trying to bury. Whatever Amanda Ungaro knows, it was enough to make all of that happen on a Thursday afternoon. And good lawd - now everyone is talking about the Epstein Files again.
Ungaro was 17 on that plane. Her lawyers say Zampolli started pursuing her at 15, though some accounts say 17. Either way, he was 32. She spent two decades inside Trump world. And when she became a problem, they shipped her out of the country.
So - now we wait, I guess. To see if she follows through on her threats - or if this is all just another nothingburger.
I was talking with a Lebanese man I met recently who painted a similar picture that the author describes here with regard to Hezbollah and the Shia population in Lebanon. He was from that community. The Israeli regime fears nothing more than the unity of the various religious groupings in Lebanon, Shia, Sunni, Christian, Druze, and Hezbollah fears the same. I think I am correct in believing that the name Hezbollah, means “Party of God” which is enough to warn us of its reactionary character. Religious sectarianism here is the scourge of the working classes just as it has been throughout the world from Northern Ireland to India. Like racism and tribalism, this divide and rule tactic was central to British colonialism’s global power and is an important weapon in US imperialism’s interests in the region.
Sirantos Fotopoulos seems to me to have painted a realistic picture here but I am no expert on the events in this part of the world. and share the commentary for readers' interest. I am generally committed though to the view that it is only the working class of the region and indeed the world, that can resolve what are global capitalist crises and it is the weakness or absence of the working class and our organisations that creates the space for religious sectarianism and other divisive elements. So I would be interested in finding out more about the working classes of the region and their organizations which I accept have been weakened, if not destroyed in some cases due to religious extremism and interference in the form of US imperialism. RM FFWP Admin
Yesterday morning, the ink on the fragile ceasefire had barely dried when Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the largest single-day bombardment of Beirut in the current war. The operation was named, with an almost confessional candor, "Operation Eternal Darkness." More than 100 targets across five civilian neighbourhoods were struck within the space of ten minutes. At least 254 people were killed, among them mourners at a funeral in the Bekaa Valley, three girls in the coastal town of Adloun, and civilians whose charred bodies AP journalists photographed on one of Beirut's busiest intersections at rush hour. The American University of Beirut Medical Center urgently appealed for all blood types. Lebanon's health minister called it catastrophic. Lebanon's president called it a massacre.
The ceasefire in question had been brokered by Pakistan and explicitly stated, in the words of Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, that it applied to fighting "everywhere, including Lebanon and elsewhere, effective immediately." France's Emmanuel Macron said Lebanon was fully included. Iran's foreign minister also said Lebanon was fully included. A Hezbollah official said the group had halted attacks and was waiting for mediators. Netanyahu's office, releasing its statement only in English and not in Hebrew, said the ceasefire "does not include Lebanon." Trump, characteristically, said Lebanon was "a separate skirmish" and that it would "get taken care of too," as if a sovereign country of six million people were a minor errand on a to-do list. The legal and diplomatic ambiguity was, to put it generously, manufactured. To put it accurately, it was a lie.
This raises a question that polite diplomatic commentary persistently refuses to answer with the directness it deserves: is Benjamin Netanyahu constitutionally, psychologically, and politically incapable of making peace? The evidence is no longer merely circumstantial. His own opposition leader, Yair Lapid, said this week that there has never been "such a diplomatic disaster in all of our history," that Netanyahu "failed politically, failed strategically, and didn't meet a single one of the goals that he himself set." The left-wing Democrat leader Yair Golan was blunter still: "Netanyahu lied. He promised a historic victory and security for generations. The nuclear program was not destroyed; the ballistic threat remains; the regime is in place and is even stronger coming out of this war."
Netanyahu's governing coalition includes Bezalel Smotrich, the Finance Minister who lives in an illegally built home in an illegal settlement and whose Religious Zionist Party's founding documents derive their territorial claims directly from the Torah. When asked why Jewish people have an exclusive right to all parts of what he calls the Land of Israel, Smotrich does not reach for international law or demographic argument: he reaches for the Bible. His party's coalition agreement with Netanyahu states explicitly that "Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel," which includes everything between the Nile and the Euphrates, and since taking office he has announced 22 new settlements in the West Bank, calling it a "historic decision." Then there is Itamar Ben-Gvir, a Kahanist whose political background, in the assessment of multiple analysts, is rooted in a violently racist movement calling for the expulsion of Palestinians. Kahanism is a far-right, religious Zionist ideology based on the views of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, which advocates for Jewish supremacy, the establishment of a Halakhic (theocratic) state, and the expulsion of non-Jews who do not accept subordination. Ben-Gvir has been sanctioned by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, the Netherlands, and Spain for inciting settler violence. He was previously barred from military service due to his own extremist views. These are the men without whom Netanyahu has no current government coalition otherwise.
A significant current within Israeli religious nationalism holds that the territorial boundaries of biblical Israel, from the Nile to the Euphrates in some formulations, represent not a political preference but a divine mandate. Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the ideological father of the settler movement taught that Jewish sovereignty over the entire Land of Israel was a sacred commandment that preceded and superseded any state, treaty, or human law. This is the concept known as Greater Israel, and it functions not as a negotiating position but as an eschatological inevitability, a matter not of policy but of prophecy. From this vantage point, a ceasefire is not a strategic pause but a theological betrayal. Settlements are not provocations but sacraments. And perpetual war, conducted preferably by the American military, is not a tragedy to be averted but a necessary station on the road to messianic redemption.
What Netanyahu's government wants is not Israeli military victory in any classically defined sense. They have no interest in the kind of regional settlement that ends wars, normalises borders, and creates stable security arrangements. What they want is for the United States military to do the heavy work of destroying Iran's capacity while Israeli settlement expansion proceeds unimpeded and permanently, until the demographic and territorial facts on the ground make a two-state solution not merely difficult but impossible. They want an American war, American casualties, American financing, and American diplomatic cover, after which they will pocket the territorial gains and return, in their own time, to the systematic displacement of the Palestinian people and the annexation of whatever remains. Netanyahu's current performance, striking Beirut hours after a ceasefire to ensure he cannot be blamed for stopping the war prematurely, is a willful strategic attempt to sabotage the ceasefire.
There is, however, a second axis of cynicism in this catastrophe. The Iranian theocracy, whose proxies Israel claims to be fighting in Lebanon, has spent decades using Hezbollah not as a shield for the Lebanese people but as a weapon against them. Hezbollah emerged not from Lebanese resistance but from the Iranian Revolution, its founding slogans calling for an Islamic Republic from East Beirut to West Beirut. It has, since 1992, built a comprehensive state-within-a-state, with its own military, healthcare, education, and financial infrastructure operating entirely outside the control of any Lebanese government, and it has used that parallel state to hold Lebanon hostage to Tehran's regional agenda. When Hezbollah dragged Lebanon into war against Israel last month in support of Iran, the Lebanese government declared those attacks unlawful. The Lebanese president called for Hezbollah's disarmament and expelled Iran's ambassador-designate. Lebanon's foreign minister told Iran to respect sovereignty. None of this moved Hezbollah because Hezbollah answers not to Lebanon but to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The Lebanese Shia community that Hezbollah claims to represent has paid an extraordinary price for this arrangement. More than one million people have been displaced within days. Displaced families packing their tents on Beirut's waterfront yesterday, believing the ceasefire meant they could return home, were caught between Netanyahu's airstrikes and Hezbollah's refusal to honor the truce. The Lebanese economy has been in freefall since 2019, its currency depreciated by more than ninety percent; hospitals overwhelmed; public institutions decimated. A member of the Beirut municipality, surveying the wreckage of yesterday's strikes, said with a terrible simplicity: "This is a residential area. There is nothing military here." That statement applies with equal force to forty years of Iranian foreign policy in Lebanon. Iran has conducted a de facto colonial settler project in Lebanese territory, exploiting sectarian grievances to build an armed proxy that serves theocratic strategic interests and has been credibly implicated in the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. This is occupation by another name.
If the ceasefire holds, the Islamic Republic of Iran will have survived a war that killed its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, saw its missile production capabilities severely degraded, and reduced its nuclear enrichment program to rubble. Its new supreme leader, Khamenei's own son Mojtaba, is reportedly close to the Revolutionary Guard and considered more hostile to the West than his father. The political class devoted to the theocracy remains intact. Pro-government demonstrators in Tehran burned American and Israeli flags yesterday on news of the ceasefire announcement and chanted death to compromisers. Mass protests that erupted before the war have been crushed. Within weeks or months, when the noise of international diplomacy has faded and reconstruction aid begins to flow from the tolling of the Hormuz, that government will turn its instruments of repression inward once again. The women of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, who braved death to assert the most basic claims of human dignity, will face renewed state violence from a regime that has used the war as a pretext to silence them. A ceasefire that saves the Iranian theocracy is not, in any morally coherent sense, a victory for the Iranian people in their desire for liberation.
We are therefore confronted with the following tableau: a region in which two deeply reactionary forces, one theological-nationalist and one theological-revolutionary, have constructed a durable symbiosis around the perpetuation of violence, each requiring the other's menace in order to justify its own excesses at home. Netanyahu needs the Iranian threat to hold his coalition together and keep the Israeli courts from prosecuting him for corruption. The Iranian theocracy needs the Israeli threat to suppress its own population and justify its military apparatus. The Lebanese people need neither, and have said so, loudly and at mortal cost. The Palestinian people need neither, and have paid with generations of dispossession. The Syrian people, the Iraqi people, the women and dissidents of Iran, the Lebanese Christians and Druze and Shia who want a functioning state and not a permanent battlefield, need neither. What they need is what both Netanyahu and the Ayatollahs are constitutionally allergic to: a political settlement premised on the dignity and self-determination of human beings who are not on anyone's geopolitical chessboard.
There is a name for what Netanyahu did yesterday, hours after a ceasefire. It is sabotage. The Arab League called it that. Egypt called it premeditated intent to undermine de-scalation. Spain's prime minister said Netanyahu's contempt for life and international law was intolerable. France called the strikes unacceptable. These are not the words of enemies. They are the words of exhausted allies who have finally noticed that the man at the center of this catastrophe has a structural interest not in winning the war but in never ending it. History will record that Operation Eternal Darkness was not named after the darkness it intended to impose on Beirut. It was named, with all the inadvertent accuracy of authoritarian self-revelation, after what its architects have in mind for the future.
Israel’s targeting of over a hundred Beirut sites in under a minute today suggests their attack on Lebanon has now reached genocidal proportions. Given their new name for the assault, Operation Eternal Darkness, and their continual threats to turn Lebanon into Gaza, their genocidal intent should now be clear. Any time a group is committing genocide in one place, we should expect the violence they are carrying out elsewhere to turn genocidal if given time, for genocide is never so much an intention as it is an impulse—and Israel’s genocidal impulses should now be blindingly obvious.
In this way, Iran’s threat to withdraw from the recent ceasefire agreement if Israel continues with its assault on Lebanon might be said to constitute a humanitarian intervention. And while humanitarian interventions are so rare that many political analysts would argue they virtually never occur, this is at least the second on the part of Iran. The first happened in the early nineties in Bosnia, where they joined with H•zb•llah in breaking an arms embargo, which had been imposed by the West, to stop what would later be labelled a genocide, ironically… by the West.
But if we take western states at their word, and we treat Hez•ollah and the Ho•this as mere proxies of Iran, then we would have to label their intervention in Lebanon as Iran’s third humanitarian intervention, following their efforts to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Both groups sough to raise the financial and political costs to Israel of sustaining the genocide by, in the case of the Ho•this, closing off the Red Sea to shipping, and in the case of H•zb•llah, forcing Israel to divert a substantial portion of its forces to the north.
So, what we are seeing is a historical rarity.
The willingness of Iranian leaders to continue fighting is all the more extraordinary in that their lives are arguably more at risk than perhaps any other leadership in the modern history of war. There has certainly never been a case in modern interstate warfare where the leader of a country, the head of their judiciary, and the head of their legislature, along with a number of cabinet level officials, were all killed in so short a period—and the high level assassinations have been going on for years now, including two secretaries of defense. So, we cannot say that the Iranian leadership is simply risking the lives of their citizens while they punch buttons from afar.
Political pundits would not hesitate to call it a humanitarian intervention if carried out by western democracies, but we are so indoctrinated that even the most radical western news sites would not think of it in the case of Iran.
Still, it is not lost on the average citizen. A tremendous portion of the American electorate has sided with Iran, and so has most of the world, by the looks of most comment sections of major news sites. Genocide is the ultimate evil, and groups that carry it out tend to be despised, insofar as their crimes come to light. So, the targeting of Israel and American sites in the Middle East, along with the United Arab Emirates, which has been sustaining the genocide in Sudan, seems to have provided much of the world with a sense of relief—in spite of the substantial risks to the global economy and the possibility of nuclear armageddon.
And it seems to have provided many with the only real sense of justice they have experienced in global affairs in years.
These are simply the facts, framed so as to highlight what remains invisible to most people due to the spell of propaganda in which we are all immersed. It is not to endorse Iran’s government or H•zb•llah, which would be illegal in many countries in the West, in any case. Whatever might be said about Iran’s human rights abuses at home, and there is a lot to criticize; and however much the country’s experiment in theocratic democracy is in need of dramatic reform; they are stopping what a substantial portion of the planet has come to see as the greatest threat to humanity.
And at great risk to everything they hold dear, not least their own lives, Iran’s leaders have refused to let Lebanon go the way of G•za, at least for the moment—and that is more than can be said of any other state. And this raises a simple question: why has every single western democracy allowed itself to be shown up by a country whose military most of them have labeled terrorists? And why have so many of us, who have criticized the country’s failure to live up to our own highest standards of human rights at home, failed to sacrifice even a small portion of what their leadership is willing to risk in order to stop what many would now agree is the greatest threat to humanity?
Of course, my readership comes from all over the world, and many have put their lives at risk to stop Israel’s crimes against humanity; and many have done the same to bring greater freedom to Iran. We should honor them all, but we should not lose site of the complexity of international affairs. The villains of yesteryear are often driven to take heroic stands today; the heroes of today are often the villains of tomorrow. And a good cause under one set of circumstances can quickly sour as the ground moves beneath our feet and everything on the geopolitical chessboard changes places.
Hence, we should honor what is right and good when it is taking place, knowing every value system and ideology is prone to corruption, and everyone is capable of heroic stands—as anyone who has watched a few films can imagine.
It is even possible to work to stop a genocide while simultaneously supporting the extermination of a people. Iran might be said to have done this in fighting Isis in northern Iraq while supporting Assad’s extraordinary crimes against humanity in Syria; the Biden administration did this for a time in stopping arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which was starving Yemen, while sustaining the genocide in G•za—though they would eventually come to support the starvation of Yemen in solidarity with Israel, along with the genocide in Sudan, by upgrading America’s defense partnership with the United Arab Emirates, also for Israel.
We need not support a party to recognize its extraordinary stands for justice. But when the people we are accustomed to criticizing risk more than ourselves for our own causes, as so many of us have recently seen with Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, we should take this as an impetus to work harder. The fight for G•za is not over. Israel can be stopped. And it is quite possible it will go the way of the greater majority of states that define themselves around committing genocide—which is to say in the dustbin of history, unwept, unsung, and detested for the grotesque monstrosity it came to be.
Theo Horesh, author of The Holocausts We All Deny: The Crisis Before the Fascist Inferno
The title is not with the original article. FFWP Admin
This is a good article from Middle East Eye but I have consistently rejected the idea that the tail wags the dog in this Israel/US relationship as the author suggests. And it is not based on the manipulative powers of Netanyahu either.
Trump is a narcissist and a con man, possessing many other offensive habits, sexually assaulting and ra*ing women, or portraying the Obama’s as apes among them. So yes, he can easily be manipulated if the bait is right. According to witnesses that were present during previous negotiations with Iran, Trump was described as being dragged in to a war he was trying to get out of by his two main negotiators, the ardent Zionists, and real estate pimps Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.
Trump is not a smart man, he’s a con man and the idea that you have to be smart to get rich is a fabrication; let’s remind ourselves of one of Marx’s most important statements that the class that controls the manufacturing of goods in society also control the means of the manufacture of ideas; the dominant ideology in any society is that of the class that governs and the idea that being rich equals being smart originates there. It wasn’t the European peasant that promoted the idea that the King was King by Divine Right.
It is also true, as the article points out, that most Americans oppose the Iran war, over 60%, and most want Trump gone (only one in four registered voters voted for him) which is one reason for the massive turnout for the No Kings protests. However, the organizers that founded Indivisible, one of the main organizations behind the protests are former Democratic interns or Congressional staffers and their goal is to Vote Blue (Democratic) in the primaries and return the Democrats to power; a return to the status quo. But the status quo has been a disaster for millions of Americans as living standards and public services have been savaged over the past period. So the 8 million is not an homogenous bloc by any means and regardless of what happens, the war on US workers from both parties will continue. A defeat for US imperialism abroad, is a victory for the US working class at home.
I could go on and on but despite these findings, nothing changes. Wait, I stand corrected, conditions continue to deteriorate and that is one of the reasons Sixty-three percent of U.S. adults currently agree with the statement that the Republican and Democratic parties do “such a poor job” of representing the American people that “a third major party is needed.” Gallup
Millions of Americans have opted out of the electoral process altogether completely disgusted with the political system and the entire US body politic. They have drawn the incorrect conclusion that the US Congress is utterly corrupt and this is at the root of the problem; it is a flaw of personality, people are just greedy. This argument is backed up by religious authority rather than explaining that the root cause of the problem is that the two parties of capital do not represent the interests of the working and middle classes. The capitalist system is in crisis and it is their role to bail it out and that means making workers pay. There is no guns and butter in this scenario. The politicians are backed in this endeavour by the bureaucracy atop organized labor who are committed to capitalism and that the market has the answer to all things.
The reality is, as I have always argued, is that the US settler colony is the only reliable ally US imperialism has in this important region of the world. The Arab regimes, as unstable as they are, and we witnessed how rapidly these despotic regimes, all backed by the US, could fall in the Arab Spring of 2011, cannot be relied upon to defend US interests there. The potential power of the Arab working class is too great for these regimes to be trusted. Settler colonies, and in the case of Israel, a European settler state amid a sea of Arabism as one official once put it, has filled that role.
There is no doubt that the activities of the crazed Zionist Apartheid regime-----its genocide, torture and mass mu*der of children----- beyond fueling anti-semitism throughout the Middle East and the world, has weakened the US/Israel link and undermined support for the Zionists and Zionism in the US, particularly among young Jews.
But there has always been and is still support still in the US Congress. There are Christian Zionists, sections of the energy and tech bourgeois for example who are troubled by Israel’s behaviour but are not breaking ranks by any means. The likely leader in the race for the White House among Democrats is California governor Gavin Newsom who recently stated that he, “reveres Israel” and refused to call it an Apartheid state.
As I write and in the wake of a ceasefire agreed to between Iran and the US that included Lebanon where the Israeli’s are carrying out a Gaza style bombing of civilian infrastructure is weakening the US/Israel alliance. Despite Lebanon being included in the ceasefire, Netanyahu has said there will be no halting of the destruction the Zionist regime is waging in Lebanon. Netanyahu has admitted they are doing a “Ga*a style action in Lebanon. This is a humiliation for the US for sure. Iran has stated, according to Iran New 24 @IRanMediaco, that if Israel violates the ceasefire by bombing Lebanon, Iran will bomb Tel Aviv.
So there is no doubt that the tail of the dog is out of control and that is putting some pressure on the tail’s owner, but that is different than the implication that Israel is in charge here in my mind. How this will develop and to what degree the relationship between the US and its proxy will decline is hard to say. The Iranian resolve in the face of US aggression has changed the Middle East for good. And with the collapse of the US, and likely Trumps misnamed Board of Peace, we are in a new historical era and the multi-polar world that both Russia and China talk of.
I know that, as the author of the ME article says, South African Apartheid wasn’t allowed to exist. Na*i Germany wasn’t allowed to exists and Israel as it is should not be allowed to exist. Jews, along with Christian have lived in Palestine for millennia and when Palestinian’s have talked of Israel having no right to exist they refer to the colonial expansionist state. Jews have always been there and they have a right to be there. Zionism and settler colonialism is different.
n stating that, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump just threatened to commit genocide against a nation of 90 million people. And since the only way that could happen in a night is through nuking its major cities, it would instantly make Trump the most murderous dictator in history. And just to make sure you understood the significance of his statement, and that he was indeed speaking of an instantaneous genocide, he added that this would be “…one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
Of course, Trump is an unhinged tyrant, but he is also a fascist tyrant, and this is what fascists do—they murder people en masse and brag about it. And after having watched almost every major party in the western world support the most closely observed genocide in history in Gaza, it is no longer unthinkable that he would do it, and it is no longer unthinkable that they would learn to live with it. And it is no longer unthinkable that we would all be forced to grapple with its implications in our hearts and minds.
Never mind the fact that nuking Iran would make the Persian Gulf uninhabitable by making the water its states depend upon for desalinization undrinkable. Never mind the fact that this would mean the collapse of the global economy for many years to come, and the likely deaths of hundreds of millions of people by hunger related illnesses, since no one would be able to process oil in those states for generations, and this would raise to the price of food dramatically. Never mind the fact that Iran would surely strike Israel’s nuclear reactor in the south, thereby making much of the country, along with Gaza and much of the West Bank, uninhabitable as well.
The deaths in Iran alone would place Trump in the great pantheon of the most murderous tyrants in human history, like Hitler and the Mongolian Tamerlane.
It is not inconceivable, because a dehumanizing discourse of Islamophobia, on both the left and the right, has made it possible to kill Muslims with impunity. It is not inconceivable, because the United States has already done much the same thing in large parts of Japan, Germany, North Korea, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam—with the full support of both major parties. And it is not inconceivable, because even our most moral presidents like Jimmy Carter have armed genocides as a matter of course—with Carter himself having armed the genocide in East Timor and major crimes against humanity in El Salvador and Guatemala, where a genocide would occur under his predecessor, Reagan.
Trump makes the crude brutality of the American empire impossible to ignore. He makes its gangster tactics of coercion, which both parties have carried out for generations through financial means, evident for even his dumbest supporters. And he places the repulsive character of our abuses of power on display so that every leader from around the world must make a conscious decision about whether to support the empire, and all the more so because he has teamed up with the most Hitlerian leader of the world’s most murderous state in his attacks on the world. And that provides perhaps a silver lining to rule by fascist tyrants—their crimes are obvious whereas those of liberals are always well cloaked. But to threaten the extermination of a nation of 90 million people should be a step too far for all but his most sociopathic supporters.
Now, every single person around him, and every single world leader, has a legal and moral duty to remove him from power by any means necessary. Every single person lacking access to the levers of power must demand that he be removed from office, and every single person in his cabinet must take the necessary step of invoking the mental fitness of the president to hold office and remove him under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution—or else be held responsible for what could amount to precisely what he suggested: the greatest crime in history…
… and all for Israel.
Theo Horesh, author of The Holocausts We All Deny: The Crisis Before the Fascist Inferno
President Trump's budget request to Congress contains the largest counterterrorism spending increase in years — and buried inside it is a new FBI-led center dedicated to “proactively” hunting Americans the government classifies as so-called domestic terrorists.
The new center and funding boost represent the implementation of Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), the sweeping federal order I’ve been covering since it was signed last September.
Though public opposition to ICE succeeded at forcing the administration to back down in Minnesota — even firing both Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino — the FBI is doubling down its domestic terrorism obsession.
Now, Trump’s budget request reveals, the FBI runs a dedicated “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center”; with personnel from 10 federal agencies, it is busy “proactively” identifying domestic terrorists motivated by any of the following beliefs:
“anti-Americanism,”
“anti-capitalism,”
“anti-Christianity,”
“support for the overthrow of the U.S. Government,”
“extremism on migration,”
extremism on “race,”
extremism on “gender,”
“Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,”
Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on “religion,” and
Hostility towards those who hold traditional views on “morality.”
Graphic depicting FBI budget request
In other words, if your politics are anything other than MAGA, you’re on notice, courtesy of the FBI.
The new center combats these supposed threats “by integrating intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis,” the budget request says.
Its creation appears to be inspired by the murder of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk — an event that reportedly precipitated the formulation of NSPM-7 in the first place — according to the budget request, which alludes to “heinous assassinations” having “dramatically increased.”
The budget request also singles out social media as some kind of breeding ground for domestic terrorism, saying:
“Domestic terrorists exploit a variety of popular social media platforms, smaller websites with targeted audiences, and encrypted chat applications. They use these platforms to recruit new adherents, plan and rally support for in-person actions, and disseminate materials encouraging radicalization and mobilization to violence.”
Good thing millions of law-abiding Americans don’t use those!
In his testimony to Congress, FBI Director Kash Patel said that he would investigate every single person on the Discord channels used by accused killer Tyler Robinson. But leaked screenshots of those same Discord chats that I obtained, as well as interviews I conducted with its participants, made clear that these chats were about gaming, not politics.
This was far from Patel’s only overreach. Shortly after Kirk’s death, he announced the Bureau was investigating “the possibility of accomplices,” vowing to run down all “theories and questions” about outside involvement — including a possible foreign nexus.
Patel would later conclude that there was no evidence for any of it, but by then, baseless theories about an Israeli government role in Kirk’s death had proliferated across social media. Joe Kent, Trump’s National Counterterrorism Center director until his resignation last month, reportedly tried to investigate these claims while in government, and has since echoed them publicly.
Maybe these guys should’ve taken their own advice about the perils of social media.
It’s hard to overstate how much the FBI is focusing of domestic terrorism under Patel and the Trump administration. Yet the media have barely covered NSPM-7, let alone the FBI shift.
Shortly after Kirk’s death, FBI Director Kash Patel testified to Congress that he was overseeing a 300 percent increase in domestic terrorism investigations.
And in the first months of the administration, the FBI replaced the 9/11-inspired Terrorist Screening Center with the “Threat Screening Center.” As I reported at the time, the new mission broadened the scope to include “all national security threats,” which ostensibly was expanded to accommodate increased focus on transnational criminal organizations. Now the threat screening center oversees multiple terrorist watchlists that separate international terrorists, transnational criminals, and purely domestic “threats.”
Then there’s the fact that the FBI’s domestic terrorism watchlist is growing, as I reported last year.
Again, all of these developments have yielded virtually zero media attention.
The public might have won the battle of Minneapolis, but the White House hasn’t given up on its domestic terrorism fixation, even after virtually every official has walked back claims that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were “domestic terrorists.”
Subscribe if you’re wondering what “extremism on migration” even means
Back in 2012, I made an initial attempt to go beyond measuring the rate of profit on capital in any one country and calculate a world rate of profit. Then, I argued that it was important to test Marx’s law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall on a world level. As capitalism had spread its tentacles to all parts of the world through the 20th century, it was necessary to find better empirical support for the law by calculating a world rate because capitalism is only a ‘closed economy’ at a global level. The rate of profit in just one country or a few would not be accurate as it would not account for profits made from trade and investments abroad and each country’s rate of profit could have different trends.
In 2020, I updated and improved my measure for global profitability significantly. Then, my calculations were made for the average rate of profit on capital of top 19 economies (ie G20). My data source was the Penn World Tables 10.0 series. My results confirmed Marx’s law that there was a long-term tendency for profitability to fall. This was important because it led to the conclusion that capitalist expansion was transient and also subject to regular and recurring crises of production and investment. Indeed, crises were necessary to ‘cleanse’ the system of old capital and lay the basis for a period of upswing in what I called the ‘profit cycle’. The world rate of profit did not fall in a straight line, as the long-term tendency to fall was interspersed with periods when profitability rose, usually after a significant slump. This was what my graph of 2020 looked like.
In 2020, I divided the graph into four sections: the periods 1950-66, the so-called Golden Age after WW2 when profitability was high and even rose; the profitability crisis of 1966-82 when profitability globally slumped; the neo-liberal period 1982-97 when there was a (limited) recovery in the profit rate; and finally the period that I call the Long Depression from 1997, where the profit rate fell back, leading to the Great Recession of 2008-9, followed by stagnation in the rate up to 2019, just before COVID pandemic.
Then in early 2022, I published another post entitled A world rate of profit: important new evidence. That post highlighted a new study of the global rate of profit on the stock of capital invested as calculated by Deepankur Basu and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Their data are contained on their website here.Basu et al used a different database (the Extended Penn World Tables 7.0 series) and they calculated an average global rate of profit for 25 countries. Their results supported my 2020 measurement.
Now in a new study, Pooyah Karambakhsh of Sydney University has published a comprehensive update on the measurement of a world rate of profit. Karambakhsh explains that, while “the analysis of an individual country’s profit rate is invaluable in assessing national economic growth and crisis, I argue that assessment of the LTRFP should be done at the global level. Capitalism is in essence a global system with an intrinsic tendency toward the world market.” As Karambakhsh says, “Whatever the mechanism of value transfer, its existence indicates the possibility of discrepancies between surplus value produced and realized in each nation. A global perspective, with a “global pool of surplus value,” circumvents these discrepancies.”
Karambakhsh’ study applies multiple measures of the profit rate, including those based on the Marxian concept of productive labour. Using a sample of 32 countries, Karam also finds a downward trend in the world rate of profit between 1952 and 2019. Most important, he shows that this decline is due to Marx’s law of profitability, namely that a rising ‘organic composition of capital’, (more investment in technology over labour) exerts a downward force on profitability over time, while a rising rate of surplus value acts as a countertendency (but only dominates in the neo-liberal recovery period 1982-97). Moreover, his data show that this falling tendency has been common among nearly all developed and developing countries.
Karambakhsh correctly reckons that the Marxian rate of profit should incorporate the concept of productive labour. Marxian theory argues that new value and surplus value is created only in the productive sectors of the economy (eg. manufacturing, construction, transport and communications); not in unproductive sectors such as real estate, finance or government. The latter sectors merely redistribute surplus value created in productive sectors.
So Karambakhsh tries to delineate global profitability, using four different measures: one using a detailed breakdown of productive actvities; one using a simplified measure of productive sectors; and one as an overall average of profitability including unproductive sectors; and finally one that removes the impact of depeciation (which has become an issue of controversy) and so uses gross capital stock, not net of depreciation.This measure is used by Shaikh and Tsoulfidis and Tsaliki – but only for the US, not globally. Karambakhsh weights each country’s capital stock to reach a global average profitability.
Unfortunately, data measuring the rate of profit on productive sectors has a much shorter time series and fewer countries. So in the end, Karambakhsh looks at the global average rate of profit that includes unproductive sectors. He finds that this falls over the period 1950-2019 from a peak of 11% in 1966 to 7% in 2019 – see the black line in the graph below (Figure 1a). Moreover, he finds the same turning points in the rate as I did in my 2020 measure: 1950-66; 1966-82; 1982-97; 1997-19 (Figure 1b). But he shows that the other measures based on productive sectors only also match closely the overall average rate (Figure 1b). That tells me that, using the overall ‘whole economy’ measure (as I call it) of the average rate of profit is still a very good proxy for the rate a la Marx.
Figure 1. (a) Four estimates of the world rates of profit (WRP) by four definitions and (b) their normalized magnitude indexed to the year 2000.
In decomposing the components driving the rate of profit (RP), Karambakhsh finds more or less the same results as I did in 2020. He finds that the organic composition of capital (VCC), as defined by the ratio of the stock of fixed assets to the consumption of employees, rose over the period, while the rate of surplus value (RSV) varies. From 1952–1965, the world profit rate rises, and so do the rate of surplus value and the organic composition of capital. Both work toward raising the RP. In the second period, 1965–1982, the VCC rises strongly and, supported by the fall in the RSV, lowers the RP. From 1982–1997, the neoliberal era, the RSV rises and the VCC falls slightly. As a result, the RP rises, but not enough to fully compensate for the fall of the previous period of falling profitability. In the last period 1997–2019, the RP falls, mainly driven by rising VCC, but also supported by a fall of the RSV. By 2019, the RP loses all its gains from the neoliberal period. I found similar results in my 2020 calculations. What does this tell you? It confirms Marx’s explanation of why the rate of profit moves. When the organic composition of capital rises faster (or falls less) than any rise (or fall) in the rate of surplus value, the rate of profit will fall and vice versa.
Karambakhsh also shows that, although the world profit rate is a weighted average of individual countries’ profit rates, most of the countries within his sample had the same overall trend and driver as the global rate. He concludes that “Although the studied period may not be long enough for a definitive statement about cycles, the sequence of rises and falls suggests cyclical behavior with cycles of 30–35 years.” And he interprets Marx’s LTFRP as a “theory of the rate of profit cycle.” Indeed,this is something that I noted and argued since I first looked at the profitability of capital (only US capital then) back as early as 2005-6 (see my book, The Great Recession) and supported by my calculations since for the world rate of profit in 2012 and 2020.
Karambakhsh uses the Penn World Tables 10.0 series, which takes his calculations only up to 2019. We now have available the 11.0 series; this takes data up to 2023. My own calculations from the latest series show that the global rate of profit has only slightly recovered since the pandemic slump of 2020, so far. Moreover, in my new calculations, I aggregate individual country surplus value, the stock of fixed assets and employee compensation to come up with proper global figures for Marx’s rate of profit formula, doing away with the need to weight individual country capital stocks. (I shall publish these calculations in a future paper.)
Most important for me, considering that many authors reject it, is that Karambakhsh’ results also support my view that the underlying cause of the Great Recession of 2008-9 lies with falling profitability in the decade before. As he says “The US RP shows a clear downward trend starting in 1997, well before the latest crisis.”
Here is my own calculation for the ‘whole economy’ US rate of profit up to 2023, using the latest Penn World Tables 11.0 series and, in my case, including variable capital in the denominator.
He adds “not only did the WRP decline begin before the 2007–2009 crisis, it continued afterward. Although there was a quick bounce-back in 2010, there is no sign of overall recovery. One main driver of recoveries after crises is the destruction of capital, usually in the form of bankruptcies and devaluation of capital. Policies that prevented large-scale bankruptcies, with the aim of containing crisis contagion, likely reduced capital destruction and thereby muted post-crisis recovery in profitability.” Exactly so – see my posts on creative destruction.
Karambakhsh interestingly brings our attention to other factors affecting the growth of profits, if not profitability. “From a Marxian perspective, productive hours are the direct producers of surplus value, and their fall indicates the decline of profitability.” He shows that the share of wages has consistently declined since 1952, while the operating surplus (profits) has remained almost constant. Why? Because the depreciation rate of the stock of fixed assets has increased over the decades. If more profit has to be used just to replace depreciated capital, it will reduce new net investment and GDP growth.
Another result from Karambakhsh’ paper is that the developing world had a higher profit rate during the period than the developed capitalist economies.
This follows Marx in that the former countries generally have less technology compared to labour (lower VCC). But as these countries industrialise, the gap narrows in the rate of profit with the developed world. This supportsthe analysis that Guglielmo Carchedi and I made in our paper on modern imperialism, where we show that the higher profit rate in the developing economies has gradually narrowed towards the global north rates particularly with the big rise in the organic composition of capital in China. Indeed, Karambakhsh shows that the rise in China’s VCC translated into a sharp 51% drop in its RP, from over 15% to less than 8%, undermining China’s role as an engine of profitability. I find a similar result using the latest Penn Tables series, with a 55% fall in the ROP since 1950 and a 2.6 times rise in the VCC.
Like other authors, Karambakhsh measures the rate of profit against only fixed assets (machinery, plant, etc), and does not include in the denominator, variable capital ie employee compensation. Also he does not account for circulating capital (ie inventories of raw materials and components used). In my calculations, I often include variable capital. But as Karambakhsh and other authors say, if you don’t, it does not significantly change the results, only the level of profitability, not the direction or turning points. The same applies to circulating capital, in my view – but for a different take on this, see here.
Karambakhsh’s conclusions are pertinent. “The persistent fall in the WRP since the mid-1990s, together with the accelerating rise of depreciation from the mid-1980s and the long-run slowdown in productive hours and a growing share of hours devoted to unproductive activities, has contributed to slower capital accumulation and weaker GDP growth. These forces suggest intensified competition, higher bankruptcy risk, increased pressure on labor to extract more surplus value, and that a short-term reversal of global profitability is unlikely.”
But, he goes on: “Capitalism has strong adaptive capacities, with potential for technological and organizational shifts. In short, the evidence points to a prolonged period of constrained growth and heightened social and economic tensions, not an immediate or predetermined terminal crisis.” I think that is right. As I have suggested elsewhere, capitalism may yet get a new lease of life (after a slump) from the new AI technologies if they do indeed deliver higher surplus value at the expense of the shedding of labour.
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