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One of my favorite anecdotes occurred sometime after 9/11 when Tony Blair, the prime minister of Great Britain, joined in with America’s declaration of war against terrorism. The brilliant playwright Harold Pinter, who would be a bitter and prolific critic of the ensuing war, was invited to respond before the House of Commons. He began his talk with a tale from British history during a wave of terror in Ireland.
“There’s an old story about Oliver Cromwell. After he had taken the town of Drogheda, the citizens were brought to the main square. Cromwell announced to his lieutenants: ‘Right! Kill all the women and rape all the men.’ One of his aides said: ‘Excuse me, General. Isn’t it the other way around?’ A voice from the crowd called out: ‘Mr. Cromwell knows what he is doing!’”
In Pinter’s telling, the voice of support from the crowd was Blair’s. Today it could and would come from the lips of Vance, Bondi, Hegseth, or Noem. Never has a modern American president been surrounded by such self-important sycophants and a Republican-led Congress with little gumption. Trump’s lack of interest in nonmilitary briefing papers and his obsession with social and political gossip has moved from information known by a few to standard operating procedure.
The Marx Brothers aspect to all of this comes in the crudely staged televised Cabinet meetings that consist of Cabinet members competing with each other for the most extravagant compliments for the president. Disregard for details is one way to describe his lack of interest in facts that could affect the daily life of the vulnerable around the world.
How do you feel about Donald Trump ordering the US forces to conduct bombing raids on seven nations last year—Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria, Somalia and Venezuela—without significant complaint from the Republican-led Congress?
Do you think that he really knows the issues, all of the pros and cons of such warfare? America’s leading newspapers—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post—have done their part, but the president could not care less. Can it be that in some cases he is acting in an international crisis, dropping American bombs and conducting airstrikes on behalf of a fellow billionaire or a corrupt foreign leader and future investor?
His domestic policies have had nothing to do with making life in America better for all. Trump’s hiring of Elon Musk to slash the federal workforce is now written off as a failure, but it also did real damage. Even more toxic have been the similar, and far more widespread and permanent efforts of Russell Vought, the Senate-approved director of the Office of Management and Budget, to push hundreds of thousands of federal employees out of office. And then there are the racist policies—there is no other word for it—of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and major supporter of the Trump-approved national effort to use the National Guard and local police, along with immigration officers, to subject undocumented migrants and other foreigners who have overstayed their visas or arrived illegally in the United States to deportation without due process.
There have been abuses in border control and the monitoring of illegal immigrants, including the shameful separation of very young children from their detained or deported parents.
Trump has remained unmoved by the domestic chaos stemming from his immigration policies, just as he has remained unmoved by the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza as the Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued its policies of collective punishment in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.
Was he just obdurate or was in thrall to the possibility of future billion-dollar private investments in Gaza and the Middle East? Was it about good public policy or money?
The same questions have to be raised about his motivations regarding the war in Ukraine. He invested enormous time and energy early last year in dealing with oil and natural gas-rich Vladimir Putin in an attempt to end the war between Russia and Ukraine but has apparently lost interest because the going got hard. In recent months bombing, missile, and drone attacks have been causing increasing damage to both sides. There was a recent wave of optimism that I wrote about last month but that moment seems to have passed. American officials involved in peace talks are increasingly dispirited. The battered Russian troops have made gains on the ground, and the Russian Army aims to recruit a new wave of four hundred thousand troops in 2026.
There has been no significant public word from Trump about this moment, as a chance for a meaningful settlement. Is Trump bored or is it that the opportunity for a financial killing has slipped away?
A recent series ofreporteddrone attacks that may or may not have been perpetrated by Ukraine on one of the official state homes of Russian President Vladimir Putin—there was no word of Putin’s whereabouts at the time—prompted Sergey Lavrov, the longtime foreign minister, to return to harsh talk again about the Nazi influence inside the Ukrainian army and issue a blunt message to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “Keep up the terrorist attacks and there’ll be no negotiated settlement, but a settlement will be arrived by arms and dictated by Russia.”
If Trump has lost political and economic interest in the war, there are other Americans who have not.
Jack Matlock, a former ambassador to Russia, told me a few months ago that Zelensky is beholden to the Ukrainian neo-Nazis known to still have enormous influence in the Ukrainian army. His point to me then was that Ukrainian land seized by Russian forces since the war began in 2022 would have to be given up to get a settlement. “That,” Matlock said, “is probably going to require a different Ukrainian government because Zelensky will probably be assassinated by the neo-Nazis if he makes such a deal.”
Note: I read that since the events, it has been confirmed that Britain's Queen Elizabeth was not informed of the decision to oust Whitlam although I find that hard to believe. The CIA's involvement was confirmed by numerous sources, one of them being Jimmy Carter I believe. Anyway, in general, a politician, even a Prime Minister of a major US ally, would be likely be allowed to remain and the CIA has many methods at its disposal when it comes to interference in the internal politics of other nations including its allies.
Thanks to Chester Harris for sharing this though the source is unknown to us; we're searching. Richard Mellor Admin
Gough Whitlam
The US doesn't have allies and belligerents like most countries, they have competitors and sycophants.
Next week on 11 November it will be 50 years since the sacking of the Whitlam Labor Government by the Queen's representative Governor General Sir John Kerr.
On that day Australia lost more than our Prime Minister Gough Whitlam we also lost our independence.
The role of the United States in the dismissal of the Whitlam Government cannot be underestimated.
The US interference in the event was confirmed by President Jimmy Carter in an apology to Gough Whitlam via the President's envoy in 1977, and confirmed by Whitlam himself to parliament in the same year. Gough ended conscription in one of his first acts in government, released all the draft resistors from jail, and withdrew all remaining troops from the US war in Vietnam.
He demanded to know about the CIA spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs and threatened to close it down. Victor Marchetti, the CIA officer who helped set up Pine Gap,once admitted that: "the threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House...and a kind of Chilean Coup was set in motion."
The White House sent Marshal Green to Canberra as their Ambassador. Green was Ambassador in Chile when Salvador Allende's Government was brought down by a CIA backed coup in 1973.Green was known as the 'coup-master', and also played a central role in the 1965 coup against President Sukarno in Indonesia. Green and his masters saw Sukarno, Allende and Whitlam as communists who must be eliminated.
The Pine Gap Treaty with the US looked as if it was going to be terminated by Whitlam who stated that his government's policy on foreign military bases was "that there should not be foreign military bases, stations, or installations in Australia."
Whitlam ordered AISO to terminate all communications with the CIA, but the ASIO Chief Peter Barbour ignored the PM's order. He later sacked the heads of ASIS and ASIO for their insubordination, and also because the ASIS Chief was secretly assisting the CIA in covert operations in East Timor during the civil war there.
Early in November 1975 it was revealed that a former CIA Officer, Richard Stallings, had been secretly chanelling funds to Country Party Leader Doug Anthony, and other Opposition parties.
When Whitlam repeated these charges against Stallings and insisted on an investigation into Pine Gap to establish once and for all, it's true purpose, and also demanded a full list of CIA operatives in Australia, alarm bells no doubt rang at CIA headquarters in Langley in the US. On 6 November 1975 the Head of the Department of Defence met with Governor General Sir John Kerr, and stated publicly afterwards that: "this is the greatest threat to the nations security that there has ever been." On 8 November 1975, Kerr was also briefed by senior Defence officials regarding CIA allegations that Whitlam was jeopardizing the security of American bases in Australia.
The same day, the CIA in Washington informed the ASIO Chief that all intelligence links with Australia would be cut unless something was done about Whitlam.
On 11 November 1975 Kerr invoked his 'reserve powers' on what amounted to a coup to sack Gough Whitlam and the elected Australian Government."
After two years of Hell, being bombed, shelled, shot at and deliberately starved by the Israeli army, the population of Gaza will be hopeful for the future, as a result of the ceasefire agreement. There is even an understandable element of celebration as the rain of high explosives has stopped.
But their hopes are overladen with foreboding, as well they might be, because the ceasefire deal cobbled together between Trump, Netanyahu, and various Arab governments – the latter pressurising Hamas to agree – is a fraud and a trap.
There is nothing in the agreement, and even less in the track record of the Israeli state, to suggest that in the longer term there will be any kind of change to the decades-long denial of the democratic and national rights of the Palestinian people. As for a Palestinian state, it is only hinted at in the ceasefire agreement but, in reality, it is no nearer than before.
The pressure on Israel, the USA and the Arab states for an immediate end to the bombing of Gaza has come from the tens of millions of workers and youth who have demonstrated worldwide against the two-year slaughter in Gaza. It would be millions more, but for the fact that leading Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states do not allow pro-Palestinian demonstrations at home, for fear they will morph into something like a new Arab Spring.
These mass protests have shaken mainstream politicians to the core and the evidence of the killing and starvation of the Palestinian population has shifted public opinion on a scale unprecedented in the whole history of Israel. It has forced several governments, including the UK, to take the token step of ‘recognising’ Palestine, despite their support for Israel as it continued to put obstacles in the way of a Palestinian state.
Worldwide sympathy for Israel has been turned on its head
Eighty years ago, as a result of the revelation of the appalling Nazi Holocaust and the murder of six million European Jews, there was some measure of sympathy across the globe for the Jewish people struggling in Israel to create a ‘safe homeland’, even though it was at the expense of Palestinian rights and land.
But that world sympathy has been turned on its head. Israel is universally despised: it is now as a pariah state universally known to have committed genocide in Gaza and to be conducting a slow motion repeat in the West Bank. Israel is boycotted by actors, writers, academics and, not least, by labour movement organisations around the world.
Every genuine humanitarian and aid organisation on the planet has condemned the Israeli assault on the population of Gaza as a ‘genocide’, as have the UN and several governments. Opinion polls show, even among world Jewish communities, and even in the USA, a collapse in political support for Israel.
It is these factors above all else, that have pushed the main actors to the conclusion that they needed a respite from the war. There is something appallingly bizarre about Donald Trump, a key facilitator of the Gaza genocide, parading about as a ‘peace-maker’, and leading politicians, including a grovelling Keir Starmer, have rushed to his side to get a photo-opportunity beside the great man.
But even Trump – or at least his advisers – have seen the political damage that the Gaza killings and mass starvation have done to Israel’s and America’s international prestige. It only needed a modicum of pressure on Netanyahu – who was forced to apologise to Qatar for the missile attack on Hamas in Doha – to drag Israeli, kicking and screaming, to accept an agreement.
450 million Arabs will have followed the Gaza genocide on TV
In the Arab states, too, there has been growing unease over a one-sided military offensive that claimed nearly 68,000 lives, overwhelming non-combatants and including over 20,000 children. This, of course, is the figure on known casualties, and twice as many may be lying under tonnes of rubble.
Worryingly for Arab governments, the onslaught has been beamed by courageous journalists to the homes of 450 million Arabs around the Middle East. Arab dictators and sheikhs – with the exception of Yemen – banned pro-Palestinian marches and demonstrations, and the perception among workers and youth is that their governments have stood aside while fellow Arabs have been massacred.
The protests of tens of thousands of youth against corruption and unemployment, in both Morocco and Tunisia came as a reminder to Arab leaders that they are sitting on a volcano and for them the ceasefire is a means – they hope – of pushing the issue of Palestine off their domestic political agenda.
Yet the only concrete element of the agreement, is that part relating to the mutual release of hostages. As for the rest of the so-called peace agreement, there are no definite commitments and only vague references to negotiating a long-term settlement of all the outstanding issues.
Even the deal to release hostages had ‘grey’ areas. As was expected, Hamas could not easily recover the bodies of dead hostages. Nonetheless, pressure from the Israeli hostages’ families and fake outrage among Israeli politicians over delays became a pretext for the temporary suspension of food aid to Gaza. Worse may follow, if the Israeli government finds an excuse.
Whereever it is possible to ‘bend’ the hostage agreement, the Israeli government has done so. There is, as one would expect, a festive mood among Palestinians over the release of prisoners from Israeli jails, including some who have been incarcerated for decades.
But the vicious spite of the IDF is seen in their threats to communities on the West Bank not to ‘celebrate’ releases, as this would be interpreted as ‘support for terrorism’ and would invite IDF intervention. Some Palestinian hostages, whose homes and families are on the West Bank, have been released into ‘exile’ in Gaza and forbidden entry to the West Bank.
Palestinian hostages treated far worse than Israeli hostages
Commentators have also noted the difference in appearance between the Israeli and the Palestinian hostages who have been released. The Israelis have been for the most part properly fed, and they do not have the gaunt and unhealthy appearance of the Palestinians, kept in prisons where, according to B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, starvation, denial of medical needs and assaults are carried out as a matter ofpolicy.
Once the hostages from both sides have been released, what will happen next? Hamas has clearly not disarmed. Its military wing may have lost the ability to fire rockets into Israel, but it has enough small arms to re-establish its grip on what remains of the territory not occupied by the IDF.
There seems no possibility of an international ‘peace-keeping’ force entering Gaza, even one made up from Arab states. The continued presence of Hamas and its armed wing may yet provide a pretext for Israel to resume the war on Gaza, once again with catastrophic consequences for most of the population.
But even without a resumption of the bombing, the two million Palestinians are left in an infinitely worse position that were in two years ago. October 7, 2023 was not the start of the war, although recent news commentary has spoken of that date as if it was. Prior to then, for a decade and a half, Gaza had been kept as an open prison, surrounded on all sides by the IDF.
This narrow enclave was denied any possiblility of economic development. Its population were denied the right to travel. Israel controlled everything that went in and out of Gaza: electricity, water, food, medicines and other essentials. It was the deliberate policy of Israel to deny Gazans any hope and from that came despair and desperation.
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This podcast from the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, shows “how the Gaza War changed a generation of young Jews around the world, in their own words”.
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The so-called ‘military operation’ of October 7, 2023, may have been aimed to provoke a wider Middle East war, including Hezbollah and Iran, which Israel would lose. But, if that was the calculation of Hamas, it turned out to be a reckless gamble that was lost, and with an appalling cost for the population they claim to represent.
Gaza population infinitely worse off
Today, after the ceasefire agreement, the population of Gaza are immeasurably worse off. Over two million are crammed into a less land than before, an area utterly devastated by bombing. They are not only more hemmed in, but they are corralled by a far greater deployment of Israeli arms, tanks, drones and aircraft.
Is the Israeli government going to withdraw from the other parts of Gaza which it still occupies, as a result of this ‘peace agreement’? It is not – and Netanyahu has explicitly declared that Israel will retain ‘military control’ of Gaza.
This ceasefire agreement, in a nutshell, has brought about a short-term cessation of the bombing of Gaza, but it offers nothing in terms of peace or prosperity in the long-term. There is much in the agreement about investment in Gaza – it is at the moment a huge pile (fifty millions tonnes according to the UN) of rubble – and of movement towards a Palestinian state. But these are vague and pious words meant to appease those opposed to Israel, especially in the Arab world.
The 1993 Oslo Accords, agreed between Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and the then leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat, were understood to be the beginning of a negotiating process leading to Palestinian self-government in a separate state. The 1994 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Yasser Arafat, and Israeli leaders, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, for that agreement.
Yet everything that successive Israeli governments have done in the thirty-two years since have been in direct contradiction to the expectations raised in Oslo. European governments, including the UK – and even the Labour Friends of Israel – have paid lip-service to a post-Oslo “two-state solution”, even though it was obvious that the Israeli government was doing everything in its power to kill the idea.
A comment from the above podcast
Since the Oslo accords, Israeli has confiscated more Palestinian territory for Jewish settlers, who now number well over half a million. Since October 7, armed Jewish settlers, with the support of the Israeli government and army, have conducted one pogrom after another, driving thousands more Arab farmers and villagers off their land and into the larger cities where they can take limited refuge.
Palestinian Authority a vehicle for corruption
Although a Palestinian Authority was set up after Oslo, it been limited to a few cities in the West Bank and has never been more than a vehicle of corruption, despised by most Palestinians and, like a ‘pet’ of the Israeli government, incapable of defending the local population against ongoing raids and killings of the IDF.
Will Israel this time enter into serious discussions about a Palestinian state? It will not. It is a development explicity ruled out by Benjamin Netanyahu and most other political leaders. Once again, as it was with Oslo, it seems that the net result of this ‘peace agreement’ is to kick all the important issues into the long grass.
For now there is some respite from the daily bombing and shelling of Gaza, although the presence of the IDF near what used to be residential areas still poses danger to those returning. Three days ago, for the ‘crime’ of sifting through the rubble of their former homes ‘too close’ to the still-deployed IDF, six Palestinians were shot dead.
Without outside investment, Gaza will remain an economic disaster area. It has suffered more demage for its small area than most cities bombed in World War Two. The IDF has systematically destroyed all elements of normal civilian infrastructure – schools, hospitals, universities, power plants, water treatement, etc, etc – as well as eighty per cent of homes. This was not done for military advantage, but – like the Jewish settlements abandoned and demolished in 2005 – just to make the area uninhabitable.
The relief from incessant bombing and starvation is a huge plus for the Gaza population, but no-one should be under any illusion that anything has really changed for the longer term. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank. Both populations are inestimably worse off than ever before.
Israel still is and should remain a pariah state
Israel still is, and should remain, a pariah state. The international workers’ movement should take the marvellous example of the Italian workers and continue to deny trade, communication and any relations with Israel. Companies, businesses and governments should be pushed by the labour movement into into disinvesting from Israel and to support the BDS movement.
The collapse of political support for Israel will come to have a corrosive effect on Israeli politics, as fewer Jews around the world support its policies or see it as a viable ‘safe haven’ for Jewish people. It is a necessary corollary to the continued repression of half of the population it controls – a working definition of apartheid, if one were needed – that the Israeli state would increasingly turn towards greater authoritarian rule. This, too, will sharpen tensions and political conflicts in Israel.
It is only a minority of the Israeli population at the moment who see that an apartheid strategy that depends on military predominance and nothing else is unsustainable. But that minority will grow when dwindling international support is expressed by boycotts and by reduced diplomatic, economic and military support.
Meanwhile, it is the Arab working class which is potentially the greatest force in Middle East politics, although has a voice that has not yet spoken. That, too, can change, as Arab states are swept up in the tide of opposition among young people against corruption, nepotism and impoverishment of the many for the benefit of the few.
Those Arab workers and youth who have watched the reports on Al Jazeera and similar news agencies for the last two years will realise that their governments have fooled them over this ‘peace deal’ and, far from mollifying them, it will only increase their anger at their governments’ unwillingness to lift a finger to help Palestine.
So we have a pause in the Gaza war. But it is no more than a short interlude in a much longer struggle for the national, social and democratic rights of the Palestinian people. It has been the youth and the labour movement above all who have waved Palestinian flags in the past two years. We hope and expect that the sympathies of the workers’ movement will not be in any way diminished by this false dawn.
It didn't just start on October 7th 2023. And have people forgotten as the sheer brutality and violence of the Zionists regime has been exposed to the world, the shooting of Gazan's protesting on their own land and demanding the right to return to their homes and villages.
The Israeli's had snipers shoot at them from the Israeli side but not to kill. The object was shoot them in the knees and legs to disable them so they couldn't play football, couldn't work and would die a slow death as the calorie intakes the Zionists kept them on kicked in as well. They were probably the same guys that have been shooting young children in the head and chest this time around.
The Zionists are some murdering bastards and the US loves their leaders and sells them their weapons and has the US taxpayer pay for the wonderful health service they all have. The Gaza's broke out of a massive outdoor concentration camp. The people on the other side were having a rock concert within earshot of the Gazan's inside. What sort of monsters would organise a concert in that situation never mind attend one.
I remember reading about the liberation of one of the NAZI death camps by US troops who, when the German guards surrendered shot them there on the spot. No trial no jury, the scene was enough. No US solider was tried for that as far as I know and I have no sympathy for the German guards either and nor do I for the Israeli's that continued with their lives as if life was normal. It was for them I suppose but people will always fight back and that's what the Palestinians did on October 7th; they fought back and they took some prisoners of their own.
(1) It requires fixed capital investment and much of that machinery must come from China-Germany-Japan-South Korea. In order to build modern manufacturing, the US will need to increase its import of these capital goods.
(2) The supply chains for intermediate goods will need to be radically altered. Most of these intermediate goods do not come from the US. To build local supply chains for these intermediate goods will be time consuming and expensive, taking years, decades.
(3) Modern manufacturing requires stable energy at low cost, as well as stable 5G infrastructure to drive robotics and AI. (4) The new type of manufacturing requires workers that are more skilled and educated, with higher literacy standards.
All of this will be very expensive, require meticulous planning, state intervention and state planning.
In point of fact, US manufacturing has stabilized for the last 15 years in terms of numbers of workers and output. The Hallowing out was a long-term process after the end of the post war boom, around 1973.
After that, more machines replaced workers and a lot of Low skilled, labor manufacturing was outsourced. This is long before China enter the picture.
Remember, China only was admitted to the WTO in 2001. The more important factor was that money capital started investing in fictitious financialization schemes, giving rise to the large scale casino economy.
As for actual US manufacturing today, a lot of it is highly expensive stuff that is not competitive on the world market but find sales locally like cars. Canada is actually the biggest importer of US cars.
