Opinion: YOU CAN BOMB A STRAIT SHUT. YOU CANNOT BOMB A STRAIT OPEN

YOU CAN BOMB A STRAIT SHUT. YOU CANNOT BOMB A STRAIT OPEN.

 

 

Lim Tean is the Secretary General of the People’s Alliance For Reform Singapore

Facts For Working People publishes this article for our readers interests and is not affiliated with the Alliance for Reform. Lim Tean on Substack FFWP Admin

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by Lim Tean 

 

Trump is being catastrophically advised by men who have never worked a single day in the commercial world. I spent more than three decades in shipping law. Let me tell you what his advisers cannot.

 

The Americans are bombing Iran again — coastal radars, air defences, minelaying capabilities — and telling the world they are doing it to “keep the Strait of Hormuz open.”

 

This is not merely wrong. It is legally and commercially illiterate. Let me explain why, on four grounds.

 

FIRST — THE MOU ITSELF, WHICH AMERICA IS DELIBERATELY FLOUTING.

Read Article 5 of the Islamabad Memorandum, which Trump himself signed. It provides that IRAN will make arrangements for the safe passage of commercial vessels. That IRAN will carry out the demining. That IRAN, in dialogue with Oman and the other littoral states, will define the future administration and maritime services of the Strait — “in line with the sovereign rights of the coastal states.”

 

Every operational obligation in Article 5 rests on Iran. Under this Article, it is Iran that decides how vessels traverse the Strait. And read that last phrase again: the sovereign rights of the COASTAL STATES. Iran is a coastal state of Hormuz. Oman is a coastal state of Hormuz. The United States is NOT. Washington signed a document that gives it no role whatsoever in the administration of the Strait — and Iran and Oman have already reached agreement on regulating traffic under Article 5, including the designated route past Qeshm Island.

 

So what has America done? It has unilaterally sponsored a rival “southern corridor” to bypass the Iranian routing altogether — a deliberate flouting of the very mechanism Article 5 establishes, and a direct repudiation of the document Trump’s own signature sits on. Iran’s Foreign Minister has formally accused Washington of violating the Memorandum. He is right.

 

And now watch the sleight of hand. CENTCOM and a chorus of Western governments have fallen back on the old refrain: Hormuz is “an international waterway,” they say, and Iran has no right to control it. Let me say this plainly: that argument is a RED HERRING. It is dead. Trump killed it with his own pen on 17 June.

 

You cannot sign an agreement committing the administration of the Strait to the coastal states — and then run back to the “international waterway” argument when the administration doesn’t go your way. Ask yourselves this: if Hormuz were simply an open international waterway requiring no administration by anyone, why does Article 5 exist at all? Why did America NEGOTIATE a clause defining who administers the Strait? You do not bargain over the administration of a waterway you claim nobody may administer. The moment Trump signed Article 5, the United States accepted that the Strait’s future would be settled by its coastal states — Iran and Oman — and signed itself out of the room. Whatever the “international waterway” argument may be worth in a law school seminar, it is no longer available to the United States. Washington is estopped by its own signature. Every diplomat and general now reciting this line is trying to confuse the world — and hoping you never read the document their President signed.

 

And it gets worse. The Americans are simultaneously bombing Qeshm, Bandar Abbas, and Iran’s coastal radars and mine-clearing capabilities — the very assets Iran requires to PERFORM Article 5. Every commercial lawyer knows this doctrine: you cannot demand performance of a contract while destroying the other party’s means of performing it. That is prevention of performance. The Americans are not enforcing the MOU. They are breaching it twice over — circumventing its mechanism and destroying its performance — and then blaming Iran for the consequences.

 

And what do America’s lackeys in the region and beyond say to all this? Nothing. They cheer. Not one of these client states has uttered a word about the plain terms of an agreement their patron signed barely a month ago. Meanwhile Israel, which always opposed the Memorandum, is straining at the leash — its Defence Minister openly declaring the army ready to resume bombing Iran “with even greater force,” while Iranian media report projectiles striking near Bushehr. The vultures are circling the corpse of a deal America itself killed.

 

SECOND — THE INSURANCE REALITY.

As I have been explaining for days now, wars at sea are not decided by admirals. They are decided by underwriters in London. War risk premiums, Joint War Committee listed areas, P&I cover — these are the invisible hands that open and close the world’s waterways. Every American strike sends premiums higher. No American strike has ever brought a premium down. The bombs are shutting the Strait more firmly with each sortie.

 

THIRD — THE SAFE PORT DOCTRINE.

Here is what Trump’s advisers plainly do not know. Under every charterparty, the charterer owes the shipowner a duty to nominate a SAFE port. The classic test, laid down in the case of The Eastern City nearly seventy years ago, is whether the vessel can reach the port, use it, and leave it without being exposed to dangers that good navigation and seamanship cannot avoid.

 

The House of Lords, then Britain’s highest judicial body, applied this to war in The Evia (No. 2) — Basrah, rendered unsafe by the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq war. I lived with these cases my entire professional life.

 

Today, with missiles and drones flying across the Gulf, EVERY port in the Persian Gulf is arguably an unsafe port. No charterer can lawfully order a vessel there. Every shipowner can refuse under the war risk clauses — CONWARTIME, VOYWAR — written into virtually every charterparty on earth. The lawyers will keep the Gulf closed long after the bombing stops.

 

FOURTH — THE MASTER’S OVERRIDING AUTHORITY.

And there is one final authority the Pentagon cannot bomb, sanction or overrule: the Master of the vessel.

 

Since time immemorial, the law of the sea has vested in the Master absolute discretion over the safety of his ship and his crew. If the Master judges a port unsafe, he may refuse to sail there — and NOBODY can compel him. Not the charterer. Not even the owners of the vessel. This ancient principle is now codified in SOLAS itself: neither owner nor charterer may prevent or restrict the Master from any decision necessary, in his professional judgement, for the safety of life at sea.

 

Think about what this means. Even if Washington declares the Strait “open,” even if owners are tempted by sky-high freight rates, thousands of individual ship Masters — men responsible for their crews’ lives — will simply say NO. And the law of every maritime nation on earth stands behind them.

 

THE VERDICT.

A strait is not reopened by CENTCOM. It is reopened by the Joint War Committee, the P&I clubs, the charterers’ lawyers, and the Masters on the bridge. None of them answer to Donald Trump.

 

And mark this prediction: if America continues down this road, the contagion will spread. The Red Sea will follow. Yanbu — Saudi Arabia’s great oil port — will itself come to be regarded as an unsafe port. Then the crisis will no longer be about one strait, but about the entire maritime architecture of the Middle East.

 

You can bomb a strait shut. You cannot bomb a strait open. Someone should tell the President before his advisers shut down world trade.

Ken Klippenstein:Lindsey Graham's Death and Iran

Lindsey Graham's Death and Iran

Diva down as FBI grabs spotlight

Ken Klippenstein July 12, 2026 

RIP

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Senator Lindsey Graham died last night at age 71, ending a three-decade career in Congress that started in 1995.

Washington is shocked. But 71 is roughly the life expectancy for a man in South Carolina, the state he represented.

Graham becomes the sixth “senior” member of Congress to die in office this term alone (assuming Mitch McConnell isn’t already dead), the other five listed below. But fear not: 78-year-old 13-term congressman Joe Wilson is reportedly interested in running for Graham’s seat.

• Rep. David Scott (D‑GA) died at age 80 on April 22, 2026;

• Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D‑AZ) died at age 77 on March 13, 2025;

• Rep. Gerry Connolly (D‑VA), age 75 on May 21, 2025;

• Rep. Sylvester Turner (D‑TX) died at age 70 on March 4, 2025;

• Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R‑CA), died at age 65 on January 6, 2026

One might think this would prompt a debate about gerontocracy, but the FBI wants you instead to worry about national security.

“The FBI is assisting local authorities and has made every necessary resource available,” Director Kash Patel said in a statement after Graham’s death. Patel’s strange intervention has prompted the conspiracy-minded to go wild.

Laura Loomer, a prominent conservative activist and confidant of President Trump’s, cited Patel’s statement as evidence of foul play in Graham’s death. (There’s zero evidence for this.)

“It’s more likely that Russia or Iran poisoned Senator Graham, which is probably why the FBI is now investigating his sudden death upon returning from Ukraine,” Loomer said in a post on X/Twitter, where she has 2 million followers. 

It’s a theme Loomer is hammering on, demanding that “the FBI should provide security to those who the Iranian regime is now promising to assassinate.” Loomer, an outspoken critic of Iran, thinks that she herself is a target of the regime as well. 

Given her popularity among conservatives online, you can expect to hear a lot of similar talk soon. 

Her fears echo messaging by the FBI that America faces a domestic threat from Iran — a line the media has amplified with its breathless coverage of every supposed Iran-backed assassination attempt on U.S. officials, no matter how harebrained or implausible they are.

As a senior Pentagon official once told me, the “intelligence” on any alleged Iran-backed assassination plans to kill Donald Trump amounts to far less than many imagine.

But Loomer and many others seem to genuinely believe this stuff, which is directly tied to the FBI’s constant invoking of threats to “national security.” Not only are we forbidden from knowing the factual basis for such claims, the rules of normal anything go out the window when it comes to national security. From UFOs to Graham’s death, the result is predictable conspiracy-mongering and panic. 

And lest you think this is just some obsession of Loomer’s, Fox News also referenced Kash Patel’s statement in a TV news segment. “The FBI are at Senator Graham’s residence,” the segment said, adding that “FBI Director Kash Patel said that the FBI would assist local authorities and make every resource available.”

The FBI under Kash Patel seems to take its orders directly from the White House, which wants to turn everything — from Graham’s death to public protest to journalism — into some kind of sprawling threat to the country.

This week, the Justice Department subpoenaed several New York Times reporters for revealing that the Qatari jet Trump wants to use as Air Force One lacks certain protective features. This was already pretty well known. But the Justice Department says the story spilled secrets that imperil national security. That’s how a straightforward corruption story gets transmuted into a state security story.

National security might not be good at forecasting events or winning wars or making us safer, but it is very good at manufacturing threats that confuse and disempower people and, perhaps worst of all, forego discussion of more important issues. 

Like, say, gerontocracy.

In fairness to Graham, I feel compelled to credit him for being a Senator more willing than almost any other to take phone calls from reporters of all stripes (including outsiders like me). In our age of media-shy members of Congress, I have to respect that. And though he'll be remembered as a Trump loyalist, he was willing to break with the president when he believed it mattered — on Ukraine, for example — while so many of his colleagues just went along.

Oh, and unlike so many of his male colleagues, no woman has ever accused Graham of sexual misconduct.

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250 YEARS: The United States – from independence to empire (part three)

From hegemony to decline 

by Michael Roberts

Part one here. Part two here

In just some 200 years from winning independence from the British empire in 1776, the United States had become the most successful capitalist state, leading all the major economies in the world in national output, in income per head, in productivity of labour, in financial dominance and in military power. 

That hegemony in global capitalism was established by the end of WW2, which had left Europe and Japan in ashes, Britain hugely in debt, and much of Asia, Latin America and Africa in poverty. Only the Soviet Union remained as a military rival to the US – but not in industrial output, trade, or financial power. From 1945 to the mid-1960s was the Golden Age for the major capitalist economies, as cheap and plentiful labour after the war combined with the spread of new technologies developed before and during the war. The profitability of capital was high and even rising through the 1950s and 1960s, especially for US capital.

However, this was not to last. The Marxist theory of capitalist crises argues that, as capitalists invest more and more into technology in order to lower the costs of production and boost the productivity of labour, the overall profitability of capital will tend to fall because profits only come from labour. If investment in labour power declines (relatively) to the investment in plant, equipment and technology, profitability will eventually fall. And so it did with a vengeance from the mid-1960s, generating the first simultaneous international slump in 1974-75, followed by the deep manufacturing double recession of 1980-82.

During this period, the first signs of a decline in US hegemony were exposed. Europe’s industry based on cheap labour, American credit and the latest technology, started to gain global market share from US industry. In the 1970s, Japan also began to eat away at US manufacturing’s global output and export share. Politically, America’s defeat in Vietnam and the fall of Saigon weakened their international dominance. Throughout the 1960s, the US current account surplus was gradually eroded until, by the early 1970s, the current account registered a deficit. The US began to leak dollars globally not only through outward investment, but also through an excess of spending and imports as domestic manufacturers lost ground. 

US current account balance to GDP (%), 1976-2020

The US became reliant for the first time since the 1890s on external finance for the purposes of spending at home and abroad. By the 1980s, the US was building up net external liabilities that have now reached 90% of US GDP. 

In 1971, President Nixon announced that the US was going to devalue the dollar and end its peg to the gold price. In effect, this was the end of the Bretton Woods agreement that had established a framework committing all to fixed exchange rates for their currencies and set in terms of the US dollar. With Nixon’s announcement, the US abandoned Bretton Woods and, with it, the whole post-war Keynesian-style international currency regime. 

The fall in profitability in the major economies, the accompanying stagflation in the 1970s and the slumps of the early 1980s led to a complete change of economic policy.  From the 1980s, during the so-called neoliberal period, capitalists ended macroeconomic management and moved to cutting public spending, privatising state assets, deregulating finance, weakening trade union power and above all, switching manufacturing out of the US into Asia, in particular China, to take advantage of cheap labour.

US imperialism had managed to see the collapse of the Soviet Union, but in th 1990s it was losing relatively in trade and output to other major economies, particularly China. Europe had integrated further into the Eurozone and widened towards eastern Europe using the cheap labour supply available there.  And the Asian tigers leapt forward with new technologies. China took over as the manufacturing and trading global power (partly driven by US multi-nationals which had located there in the 1980s).

This neoliberal policies helped to raise the profitability of capital in the major economies, including the US, for nearly two decades, during which the new technologies of computers, digital software and eventually the internet, were applied to boost productivity. But again, Marx’s law of profitability eventually exerted its downward pressure and by the end of the 20th century, all the major economies struggled to sustain the economic growth rates they had achieved in the 1990s (let alone the 1960s).  They entered what I have called a Long Depression, particularly after Global Financial Crash and the ensuing Great Recession of 2008-9. In the first three decades of the 21st century, the major economies have experienced slowing economic growth, falling investment and productivity growth, along with the two largest slumps in the 250 years of US capitalism: 2008-9 and 2020.  

G7 rate of profit on capital (%)

But at 250 years old, the United States still generates 26 percent of global GDP and is home to 59 of the world’s top 100 firms.

The US dollar is still the main reserve currency internationally.  Roughly 90% of global foreign exchange transactions involve a dollar leg; approximately 40% of global trade outside the US is invoiced and settled in dollars; and almost 60% of U.S. dollar banknotes circulate internationally as a global store of value and medium of exchange.  Over 60% of global foreign exchange reserves held by foreign central banks and monetary authorities remain denominated in dollars.

Having said that, the underlying relative decline in US competitiveness has gradually worn away the strength of the US dollar against other currencies, as the supply of dollars outstrips demand internationally.  Since Nixon’s momentous announcement, the US dollar has declined in value against other currencies by 20% – a good barometer of the relative decline of the US economy.

In the 21st century the US empire now faces a much more dangerous rival to its hegemony than the Soviet Union, Japan or Europe. China began expanding its industrial capacity in the 1980s, then ramped it up on a large scale in the 2000s, surpassing the United States in the share of global manufacturing output in 2010. China is now the world’s manufacturing superpower. Its production exceeds that of the nine next largest manufacturers combined. It took the US the better part of a century to rise to the top in manufacturing; China took about 15 or 20 years. In 1995, China had just 3% of world manufacturing exports. Now its share had risen to well over 30%. While China runs a surplus on payments and receipts with other countries of around 1-2% of GDP a year, the US runs a current account deficit of 3-4% of GDP a year.

All attempts to restrict China’s expansion into tech products, semi-conductors, etc have miserably failed.  China is catching up in the ‘chip war’and has launched its own ‘open source’ AI models like DeepSeek that are seriously undercutting the likes of ChatGPT and Claude, America’s expensive AI models.

China also dominates the entire range of renewable energy manufacturing.

And China leads by far in the use of robots, with installations rising at 7% a year, while in the US they are falling by 9% a year.  China now has more robots in industry than the rest of the world put together.

Source: International Robotics Institute

There is still a long way to go before the mighty US economy will be on its knees.  It may have the largest net liabilities globally, but it can manage that because it is also the only country that can issue dollars – and the dollar is still the international currency for trade, investment and reserves.  Trade surplus nations like Germany, Japan and China must use most of their dollar earnings to buy dollar assets.  So the ‘exorbitant privilege’ of the dollar keeps the US empire ticking over.

Moreover, US investments abroad may be less in value than foreign investment into the US, creating the negative investment position, but foreigners earn less income on those US assets than US investors do on their foreign assets.  So there is a net surplus in income for the US of at least 0.5% of GDP on average since 2008, to add to its domestic economy.  The US has not yet reached a ‘tipping point’ where the size of its net liabilities to foreigners is so high that its net income surplus disappears

In the 21st century, geopolitics increasingly boils down to a battle between a weakening hegemonic power, the US, and a rising economic giant that is China. The US still dominates in military prowess, spending more on armed forces than the rest of the world put together. It runs nearly 800 foreign bases worldwide – while China has one.  But even here, the war in Iran has exposed the inability of the US military to impose its will over a third-level economy and state and which has no nuclear weapon (shades of Vietnam over 50 years ago).

For the US ruling elites, China is the ultimate enemy and threat to its global hegemony.  That applies to both the MAGA wing supporting Trump in the White House and the ‘globalists’ in America’s ‘deep state’ and ‘neo-con’ circles in government. The policy difference is that the Trumpists want to concentrate US power in the Western hemisphere with a view to taking on China across the Pacific just as America did with Japan in the 1930s.  For the MAGA crowd, Europe can deal with Russia and Ukraine on its own and Israel can deal with the Middle East on its own. 

The globalists on the other hand still have serious ambitions to dominate globally. They want the war with Russia to continue until Russia is brought to its knees and there is ‘regime change’; and they aim to back Israel and participate militarily until Iran’s regime falls. Trump vacillates between the two policies, currently swinging to the globalists over Iran. But both wings are agreed: China must be eventually be ‘dealt with’; it must be weakened economically and finally forced to accept Western policies and control.

The US empire has no official emperor, although Trump is increasingly trying to establish himself as one, as he rides roughshod over Congress, the courts, financial rules and the electoral process. But the US empire is in trouble. This is why a significant section of America’s ruling elite are prepared to accommodate Trump and his MAGA supporters in trying to Make America Great Again, by ending international free trade rules and resorting to protectionist tariffs; by sharply increasing military spending; and by cutting taxes for the rich and mega companies while reducing healthcare and public services for the rest.  So the rich get even richer and the rest get poorer.

No wonder Americans now have a bleak outlook on the nation’s future after 250 years, with most saying the US has already seen its best days and a record-low number saying they are extremely proud to be Americans.

President Trump has the lowest approval level of any president.  But he rolls on regardless towards the mid-term Congressional elections.

He kicked off the 250th birthday weekend with an attack on what he called the “communist menace” in America, framing its supporters as “the enemy of July 4th, 1776”. He was speaking in the Black Hills, Dakota which the US government illegally seized from the Sioux Nation in 1877 after Congress forced the tribe to cede land it had been guaranteed under treaty. Apparently, communism is a greater threat to American liberty than both world wars (including the defeat of Nazism) and the September 11 2001 terrorist attack (made by Islamic fanatics previously funded by the US to defeat Russia in Afghanistan). Trump argued that communists do not love God or religion and have no respect for law, justice, principle, tradition or God-given rights (looking in the mirror here). 

“You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” Pledging to “vanquish communism quickly” and “send them into exile”, he told a cheering MAGA crowd: “We will send them quickly away, and we will continue to build our country bigger and better and stronger than ever before. America will never be a communist country.”

The ancient Roman republic was the model adopted by the Founding Fathers for the US constitution. But its ‘checks and balances’ to share power were abandoned when one of the elite achieved total power and Rome became an empire (with an emperor) around zero BC. The empire reached its pinnacle some 200 years later, but then began to decline through a combination of internal contradictions in its slave economy (no more slaves), hugely widening inequalities (land in the hands of an aristocratic elite) and externally from its weakening ability to police its empire from resistant forces (German tribes).  

The same trends exist now for the US empire.  Its capitalist economy is no longer a powerhouse of prosperous expansion; inequalities of income of wealth have never been so extreme in 250 years and are worsening. And the US has increasingly lost its power to police the world, as Vietnam, Iran, Ukraine and China show. Rome took two centuries to decline and fall. It won’t be so long in the modern capitalist world. It might yet become a communist country well before the end of this century – or we shall all be driven into the dark ages as the world was when the Roman empire collapsed – this time either by climate catastrophe or nuclear annihilation. 

Ken Klippenstein: Exit Mitch McConnell, Enter Abdul El-Sayed

Exit Mitch McConnell, Enter Abdul El-Sayed

McConnell's wife leaves country; Democrats leave old school politics

Ken Klippenstein July 6, 2026. On Substack

McConnell sits behind his wife, Elaine Chao

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“Elder abuse” — that’s what Charles Booker, the outsider Democratic candidate to replace Senator Mitch McConnell, calls the effort to keep the bedridden 84-year-old in office.

By saying what everyone is thinking but Washington refuses to acknowledge, he embodies the new generation of Democrats rejecting the time-honored tradition of saying nothing in favor of saying something. 

From Zohran Mamdani to Melat Kiros, the old guard extinction event is here. These new Democrats are unapologetic about their views. That stands in glaring contrast to their predecessors’ neurotic obsession with focus-grouped sound bites that might poll well but radiate insincerity. You might not agree with the new Democrats, but you don’t need a decoder ring to decipher their positions.

Charles Booker

If the polls are to be trusted, these new Democrats could make up nearly 10 percent of the Congress after the midterms. Wondering what’s driving this upheaval? Look no further than the old guard’s refusal to address the obvious reality that McConnell is circling the drain.

“I don’t want to speculate on anyone’s health,” Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear said last week when asked during a press briefing about McConnell’s hospitalization.

I, on the other hand, have no problem “speculating,” like about the fact that only a tiny fraction (fewer than five percent) of octogenarians survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest like the one McConnell suffered.

I’ll speculate further: even if he’s part of that lucky few, he’ll have brain damage, as the vast majority of survivors do.

Speculation is necessary here because McConnell’s office has refused to say why he’s been in the hospital for the past three weeks, what his current status is, or when he’ll be out. This has led to a lot of confusion, as seen in the following post from an X/Twitter account that provides daily updates on whether McConnell has passed. 

All of this “speculation” is common sense to just about any ER nurse or medical expert, who are all over TikTok expressing their bafflement that the media is entertaining the possibility that McConnell will soon be wheeled down the Senate chamber like Hannibal Lecter.

This Weekend at Bernie’s routine explains the success of all the current insurgent candidates: they’re willing to say and do the thing that’s obvious and necessary, rejecting the ways of those with political “experience” (read: expedience) whose slogan might as well be: The buck stops somewhere else. The old guard believes in procedures over results and hide behind things like decorum and civility as an excuse for doing and saying nothing. 

Let’s talk about decorum and civility.

McConnell, who has held his Senate seat since 1985, embodies the old ways perfectly. In his final years he became one of the only Republicans willing to break with Trump — voting against his most controversial nominees, including Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — and took to the Senate floor to call Trump “practically and morally responsible” for January 6 (while voting against his impeachment). He lamented that his party had grown too populist, too isolationist, too Trump. The decorous man was, by the end, a man without a party.

It’s hard to imagine now, but McConnell was once a moderate — a Rockefeller Republican, pro-choice and pro-labor, who in his first run for local office courted unions so aggressively that he won the AFL-CIO’s endorsement by promising to back collective bargaining for public employees. (Once elected, he reneged.) His biographer Alec MacGillis titled his book, bluntly, The Cynic, tracing McConnell’s shift “from a moderate Republican … to the embodiment of partisan obstructionism” — driven less by any change of conviction than by a bottomless appetite for power.

His first wife, Sherrill Redmon, a Democrat, divorced him in 1980 as he calcified into that operator; she became a feminist scholar at Smith, where she ran the Sophia Smith Collection and worked with Gloria Steinem on an oral history of the women’s movement. In 1993 McConnell married Elaine Chao, who would serve as labor secretary under George W. Bush and transportation secretary under Trump I — and whose family’s China-based shipping fortune, and the millions it delivered to the couple, has trailed him for decades. 

As transportation secretary she drew a criminal referral from the department's inspector general for using her staff and office to benefit her family; the Justice Department declined to pursue it. Chao resigned in the days after January 6, one of the “decorous” exits that changed nothing.

McConnell — a lifelong Washington operator who started as a legislative aide to Kentucky Senator Marlow Cook before becoming a deputy assistant attorney general under Ford — hated public speaking and courting voters, preferring a data-driven war room to the stump. This is exactly the politics voters are rejecting. They want to be in the room where it happens, as participants rather than spectators

Which brings us to the insurgent leading the Democratic primary for Michigan's open Senate seat: Abdul El-Sayed. He's a rejection of everything McConnell stands for, distilled into a single slogan: "Money out of politics, money in your pocket, and Medicare for All." Agree or disagree, you know where he stands.

An MD and epidemiologist, El-Sayed comes not from politics but from medicine — a world whose failures he's clearly passionate about fixing. He ran Detroit's health department after the city's bankruptcy gutted it, then led Wayne County's, serving 1.8 million people. This is not the usual lawyer-to-Washington pipeline of most career politicians like McConnell.

The dinosaur establishment, meanwhile, is spending real money to stop him, which tells you everything.

And McConnell? This weekend it was reported that just three days after his resuscitation and hospitalization, Chao traveled to Beijing to meet the Vice President of China, Han Zheng — for talks Chinese state media described as strengthening U.S.–China ties. Business ties, that is.

McConnell’s wife meeting with China’s VP last month

Contrary to the movies, CPR is brutal: it breaks ribs, cracks the sternum. McConnell, in what are very likely his final days, has been in excruciating pain — alone, at least from his wife.

How’s that for civility?

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