Global

Our post-election hope couldn’t be more fragile.

Does Joe Biden see his mission as merely reclaiming situation normal from Donald Trump? How aware is he of the big, beyond-our-lifetimes future and the crucial need to address climate change? Is he able to acknowledge that human “interests” go well beyond national borders? And if so, how much political traction would he have to have before he could begin turning vision into policy?

You may have heard that the U.S. House of Representatives just passed a bill to spend $741 billion renaming military bases that have been heretofore named for Confederates. You may think that’s a grand idea but still wonder at the price tag.

Of course, the secret is that — even though most of the media coverage is about the renaming of bases — the bill itself is almost entirely about funding (part of) the world’s most expensive military machine: more nukes, more “conventional” weapons, more space weapons, more F-35s than the Pentagon even wanted, etc.

Annually, the military appropriations and authorization bills are the only bills to go through Congress where the bulk of the media coverage is always devoted to some marginal issue and never to what the bill essentially does.

Almost never does media coverage of these bills mention, for example, foreign bases, or their huge financial cost, or the lack of public support for them. This time, however, there has been mention of the fact that this bill blocks the removal of U.S. troops and mercenaries from Germany and Afghanistan.

The story of the deceased pedophile and presumed Israeli spy Jeffrey Epstein continues to enthrall because so little of the truth regarding it has been revealed in spite of claims by the government that a thorough follow-up investigation has been initiated. The case is reportedly still open and it is to be presumed that Justice Department investigators have been able to examine certain aspects of what occurred more intensively. A major part of the investigation has been a review of actions taken by the four government prosecutors who were most directly involved with the negotiations with Epstein and his lawyers in 2007-8. The 22 month-long review, carried out by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), finally produced a 350 page report which was released on November 12th.

Just a few weeks ago, super hawk Michèle Flournoy was being touted as a virtual shoo-in to become Joe Biden’s nominee for Secretary of Defense. But some progressives insisted on organizing to raise key questions, such as: Should we accept therevolving door that keeps spinning between the Pentagon and the weapons industry? Does an aggressive U.S. military really enhance “national security” and lead to peace?

By challenging Flournoy while posing those questions -- and answering them in the negative -- activism succeeded in changing “Defense Secretary Flournoy” from a fait accompli to a lost fantasy of the military-industrial complex.

With some help we did two days of work to harvest the five olive trees in
our home garden (total 240 kilos) followed by six days to harvest the many
trees in the museum garden (still two trees left). Jessie, Zohar, and I
were thus harvesting for eight days. I counted 44 people who helped at
different times over these days (including Israelis and internationals). I
especially want to thank Mohammad Najajreh who was there throughout the
days of harvest at the museum garden and is now helping his family harvest
their olives in Nahhalin. While muscles are aching and skin is darkened,
the psychological boost of harvesting olives and the physical gain of
exercising is hard to describe. I did write one article many years ago on
the deeper meaning of the olive tree which was reprinted last year here:

Noam Chomsky is right when he says that, in the US, sports creates the necessary “fantasy world” required to shield people from understanding, organizing, and attempting to “influence the real world”.  

Referring to sports commentary and phone-in shows, Chomsky, in an interview with AlterNet, marveled at the intellectual and analytical skills of people engaged in the sports culture. Ultimately, however, this culture “has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere,” he said. 

There are certainly several threatened catastrophes that might greatly reduce the global population of humans. In a thermonuclear war, followed by nuclear winter, a large part of the world's population might perish.

See Trump flail.

He dreams the Supremes will hand him the presidency. (They could.)

Or that a closed session of Congress will flip him the Electoral College. (It could.)

Each would be a coup against American democracy. Because no matter how loud he screams ELECTION THEFT, Trump lost the 2020 popular vote by more than six million. Only two US incumbents — Hoover and Carter — have lost by more.

The reasons are threefold: paper ballots, Millennials, and what passes for “socialism” in this country.

Paper ballots accounted for as much as 90% of the 2020 totals.

If those votes had been cast on easily-hacked electronic voting machines, Trump could’ve won in a landslide.

The paper ballots came mostly by mail, because COVID made voting in person unsafe.

But the demand for hand-cast/hand-counted paper ballots has been at the core of the Election Protection movement since Florida 2000. Getting a paper ballot to all registered voters is now the gold standard for our democratic elections.

It is not often that one can agree with the pronouncements made by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan, but his tweeted comment on the killing of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh suggesting that the incident “…was a criminal act & highly reckless. It risks lethal retaliation & a new round of regional conflict. Iranian leaders would be wise to wait for the return of responsible American leadership on the global stage & to resist the urge to respond against perceived culprits” was both restrained and reasonable. Or it was at least so until sentence two, which was clearly intended to attack Donald Trump and praise the incoming Joe Biden administration, which Brennan just might be seeking to join.