1). “Chris Hedges: Israel’s Culture of Deceit”, Oct 18, 2023, Chris Hedges, Scheer Post, at < https://scheerpost.com/2023/
2). “How Media & Politicians Gave Israel the Greenlight to turn Gaza into a Graveyard”, Oct 20, 2023, Minar Adley, Mint Press News, at < https://www.mintpressnews.com/
3). “Biden’s demand for $105 billion in military spending: A declaration of war against the working class”, Oct 20, 2023, Eric London, World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), at < https://www.wsws.org/en/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: The depth and pervasiveness of the Israeli Propaganda and disinformation operations and practices are revealed by Chris Hedges in item 1)., “Chris Hedges: Israel’s Culture of Deceit”. Hedges spent years in the region and saw its problems and intricacies first hand, time and time again. He cites many of these experiences while challenging the latest major Israeli Propaganda and Disinformation effort. That regards the attempt by the IDF to blame the Palestinians for the bombing of the al-Ahli Arab Christian hospital in Gaza that killed around 500 people. Along with others Hedges points out the many inconsistencies of the “official story” that attempts to assisgn the blame to an errant missile from Islamic Jihad, an assertion that Hedges finds amusingly ridiculous.
In Item 2)., “How Media & Politicians Gave Israel the Greenlight ….”, Minar Adley looks at the support given to Israel in justifying and sanitizing its massive attacks on Gaza. The article looks primarily at Europe, but if anything the efforts by American politicians and other cultural and institutional leaders is even more favorable to Israel. Adley notes above the article that Youtube has recently placed many of their videos behind an age restriction and has demonetized Mint Press News' youtube channel. Adley, a Muslim woman who champions the rights of the Palestinians, is the founder and director of Mint Press News.
Finally the WSWS website published a very good analysis of the larger context of the U.S. financial and military support for Israel in their recent article in item 3)., “Biden’s demand for $105 billion in military spending: ….”. The monies, the larger amount for the Proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, are intended to support the major wars now raging in the favorite client / ally / master state of Israel and the less exalted junior partner (and victim) Ukraine.
It is no coincidence that funding for childcare and other minimal social welfare benefits are being cut just; as the Capitalist Rulers of the U.S. have no problem proposing another $105 billion be spent on their favorite clients and allies that are waging wars. The Imperialist operations of the Empire come first, before funding decent childcare for working people (70,000 daycare centers, that had received some modest subsidies and that had mostly cared for children of working people, will likely close over the next couple of months) Biden, no doubt, had hoped to skate through his current term as president without a crisis in Israel; a country with a very complex relationship with the U.S. and deep ties to an powerful interest group, The Israel Lobby. Ukraine's President Zelensky, even though he spoke to a joint session of Congress and was Lionized while here, would never have dared to visit the U.S. without a gilt invitation from the sitting President. Netanyahu, however, spoke to a joint session of Congress even though the President at the time, Barak Obama, had pointedly not invited him. The Republican leadership in the Congress invited him to give an unprecedented speech that had the usual 25 – 35 standing ovations.
Chris Hedges: Israel’s Culture of Deceit
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By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
Israel was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was largely unoccupied. The lie that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and villages during their ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by Arab leaders. The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war that saw Israel seize 78 percent of historic Palestine. The lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967, forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining 22 percent of Palestine, as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria.
Israel is sustained by lies. The lie that Israel wants a just and equitable peace and will support a Palestinian state. The lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The lie that Israel is an “outpost of Western civilization in a sea of barbarism.” The lie that Israel respects the rule of law and human rights.
Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians are always greeted with lies. I heard them. I recorded them. I published them in my stories for The New York Times when I was the paper’s Middle East Bureau Chief.
I covered war for two decades, including seven years in the Middle East. I learned quite a bit about the size and lethality of explosive devices. There is nothing in the arsenal of Hamas or Islamic Jihad that could have replicated the massive explosive power of the missile that killed an estimated 500 civilians in the al-Ahli Arab Christian hospital in Gaza. Nothing. If Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) had these kinds of missiles, huge buildings in Israel would be rubble with hundreds of dead. They don’t.
The whistling sound, audible on the video moments before the explosion, appears to comes from the high velocity of a missile. This sound gives it away. No Palestinian rocket makes this noise. And then there is the speed of the missile. Palestinian rockets are slow and lumbering, clearly visible as they arch in the sky and then tumble in free fall towards their targets. They do not strike with precision or travel at close to supersonic speed. They are incapable of killing hundreds of people.
The Israeli military dropped “roof knocking” rockets with no warheads on the hospital in the days leading up to the Oct. 17 strike, the familiar warning given by Israel to evacuate buildings, according to al-Ahli hospital officials. Hospital officials also said they had received calls from Israel saying “we warned you to evacuate twice.” Israel has demanded that all hospitals in northern Gaza be evacuated.
Following the strike on the hospital, Hananya Naftali, a “digital aide” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted on X, formerly Twitter: “Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza.” The post was quickly deleted.
Since the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Palestinian resistance fighters, which reportedly left some 1,300 Israelis dead, many of them civilians, and saw some 200 kidnapped as hostages and taken to Gaza, Israel has carried out 51 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza that have killed 15 healthcare workers and injured 27, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Out of 35 hospitals in Gaza, four are not functioning due to severe damage and targeting. Only eight of the 22 UNRWA primary healthcare centers are “partially functional,” the WHO says.
The brazenness of Israeli lies stunned those of us who reported from Gaza. It did not matter if we had seen the Israeli attack, including the shooting of unarmed Palestinians. It did not matter how many witnesses we interviewed. It did not matter what photographic and forensic evidence we obtained. Israel lied. Small lies. Big lies. Huge lies. These lies came reflexively and instantly from the Israeli military, Israeli politicians and Israeli media. They were amplified by Israel’s well-oiled propaganda machine and repeated with a cloying sincerity on international news outlets.
Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic regimes. It does not deform the truth, it inverts it. It paints a picture that is diametrically opposed to reality. Those of us who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories — required under the rules of American journalism — although we know they are untrue.
Israel has invented an Orwellian lexicon. Children killed by Israelis become children caught in crossfire. The bombing of residential districts, with dozens of dead and wounded, becomes a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. The destruction of Palestinian homes becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists.
The Big Lie — Große Lüge — feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit — racism among its supporters and terror among its victims. The Big Lies fosters the myth of a clash of civilizations, a war between democracy, decency and honor on one side and Islamic terrorism, barbarism and medievalism on the other.
George Orwell in his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” called the Big Lie “doublethink”. Doublethink uses “logic against logic” and “repudiate[s] morality while laying claim to it.” The Big Lie abolishes nuances, ambiguities and contradictions that can plague conscience. It is designed to create cognitive dissonance. It permits no gray zones. The world is black and white, good and evil, righteous and unrighteous. The Big Lie allows believers to take comfort — a comfort they are desperately seeking — in their own moral superiority even as they abrogate all morality. It feeds, what Edward Bernays called, the “logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence.” All effective propaganda, Bernays writes, targets and builds upon these irrational “psychological habits.”
Israeli supporters thirst for these lies. They do not want to know the truth. The truth would force them to examine their racism, self-delusion and complicity in oppression, murder and genocide.
Most importantly, the Big Lie sends an ominous message to the Palestinians. The Big Lie states that Israel will wage a campaign of mass terror and genocide and never take responsibility for its crimes. The Big Lie obliterates the truth. It obliterates the dignity of human thought and human action. It obliterates facts. It obliterates history. It obliterates comprehension. It obliterates hope. It reduces all communication to the language of violence. When oppressors speak to the oppressed exclusively through indiscriminate violence, the oppressed answer through indiscriminate violence.
The cartoonist Joe Sacco and I watched Israeli soldiers taunt and shoot small boys in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza. We interviewed the boys and their parents afterwards in the hospital. In a few cases we attended their funerals. We had their names. We had the dates and locations of the shootings.
Israel’s response was to say that we were not in Gaza. We had made it up.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Defense Minister and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) spokesperson immediately blamed the killing of the Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, on Palestinian gunmen. Israel disseminated footage of a Palestinian fighter they said shot and killed the journalist, who was wearing a flak jacket and helmet marked “PRESS.”
Benny Gantz, who was at the time Defense Minister, stated that “no [Israeli] gunfire was directed at the journalist,” and that the Israeli army had “seen footage of indiscriminate shooting by Palestinian terrorists”.
This lie was peddled until video footage examined by B’Tselem, The Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, identified the location of the Palestinian gunman depicted in the video. The video, the human rights organization found, was taken in a different location from where Shireen was killed.
When Israel is caught lying, as it was with the murder of Shireen, it promises an investigation. But these investigations are a sham. Impartial investigations into the hundreds of killings by soldiers and Jewish settlers of Palestinians are rarely carried out. Perpetrators are almost never brought to trial or held accountable. The pattern of Israeli obfuscation is predictable. So is the collusion of nearly all of the corporate media along with Republican and Democratic politicians. U.S. politicians decried the murder of Shireen and dutifully repeated the old mantra, calling for a “thorough investigation” by the army that carried out the crime.
A few months later, Israel admitted that there was a “high possibility” that an Israeli soldier killed the journalist by accident, but by then the eruption of street protests and rage over the killing of the journalist was over and her murder largely forgotten.
By the time the conclusive proof comes out about the bombing of the hospital, it too will be a distant memory.
There is dramatic footage captured in September 2000 at the Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip — where I saw a nineteen-year-old boy shot and killed by an Israeli sniper — by France 2 TV, of a father trying to shield his traumatized 12-year-old son, Muhammad al-Durrah, from Israeli gunfire that ultimately killed him.
The killing of the boy resulted in the typical propaganda campaign by Israel. Israeli officials spent years lying about the killing, first blaming the Palestinians for the shooting, later suggesting that the scene was faked, and finally insisting the boy was still alive.
When an Israeli soldier, in 2003, murdered the 23-year-old student and American activist Rachel Corrie, by crushing her to death with a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the illegal demolition of a Palestinian doctor’s home, the Israeli army said it was an accident for which Corrie was responsible.
The Israeli military has killed “at least” 20 journalists since 2001, with no accountability, according to a 2023 report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. “Immediately after a journalist is killed by security forces, Israeli officials often push out a counter narrative to media reporting,” the CPJ concluded. This includes blaming the deaths on “indiscriminate fire” by Palestinians or attempts to discredit those killed as “terrorists.”
Israel blocks the work of independent human rights organizations into atrocities and war crimes it commits in Gaza and the West Bank. It refuses to cooperate with the International Criminal Court into possible war crimes in the Occupied Territories. It does not cooperate with the U.N. Human Rights Council and prohibits the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, from entering the country. Israel revoked the work permit for Omar Shakir, the Director of Human Rights Watch (Israel and Palestine), in 2018 and expelled him. In May 2018, Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy published a report calling on the European Union and European states to halt their direct and indirect financial support and funding to Palestinian and international human rights organizations that “have ties to terror and promote boycotts against Israel.”
After the bombing of the hospital, Israel first released a video that purported to show Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets which struck the hospital. The Israelis hastily removed the video when journalists noticed that time stamps showed the images were taken 40 minutes after the strike on the hospital.
Israeli propagandists — aware that Palestinian rockets have little explosive power — then claimed that Hamas stored munitions under the hospital. This caused the massive explosion, they said. But if this was true, it would mean there would be a secondary explosion. There was none. And now Israel has released what they say is a recording of two Hamas militants discussing the missile strike on the hospital. The militants ask each other, in a self-incriminating conversation that is too ridiculous to believe, if Hamas or PIJ carried out the strike. Please. How was Israel completely in the dark about an incursion by thousands of armed Palestinian militants from Gaza into Israel on Oct. 7 and able to capture this incriminating conversation by two supposed militants?
“Israel has a whole unit of ‘mistaravim’, Israeli Jewish undercover agents trained to pose as Palestinians and secretly operate among Palestinians,” the reporter Jonathan Cook writes. “Israel produced a highly popular TV series about such people in Gaza called Fauda. You have to be beyond credulous to think that Israel couldn’t, and wouldn’t, rig up a call like this to fool us, just as it regularly fools Palestinians in Gaza.”
Israel has also long targeted medical facilities, ambulances and medics, as Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein points out. It bombed a Palestinian children’s hospital during the 1982 war in Lebanon, killing 60 people. It also carried out missile strikes on clearly marked Lebanese ambulances during the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon. It damaged or destroyed 29 ambulances and almost half of Gaza’s health facilities, including 15 hospitals, during the 2008-2009 assault on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead. It routinely prohibited wounded Palestinians from being picked up by ambulances during this operation, often leaving them to die. During Operation Protective Edge, the 51-day assault on Gaza in 2014, Israel destroyed or damaged 17 hospitals and 56 primary healthcare centers and damaged or destroyed 45 ambulances.
You can see my interview, released today, with Professor Finkelstein about Gaza and Israel here.
Amnesty International, which investigated the Israeli attacks on three of these hospitals in 2014, dismissed the “evidence” for the attacks offered by Israel as false. “The image tweeted by the Israeli military does not match satellite images of the al-Wafa hospital and appears to depict a different location,” the report read.
Expose Israeli lies and you are attacked by Israel and its supporters as an anti-Semite and apologist for terrorists. You are banished from mainstream media. You are denied forums to speak about the issue and, as has happened to me, disinvited from university events.
It is an old game, one I have played as a reporter many, many times. I bear the scars of the lies spewed out by Israel and its lobby. Meanwhile, Israel continues its butchery, endorsed and even lauded by Western political leaders, including Joe Biden, who accompany the torrent of lies from Israel like a Wagnerian chorus.
How Media and Politicians Gave Israel the Greenlight to Turn Gaza into a Graveyard
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Finish them! Level the place – These are calls for genocide rarely heard so openly in the West. Israel is pounding Gaza – a densely-populated open-air prison where mostly refugees live in a veritable concentration camp.
It’s an area populated with 2.3 million people, 50% of whom are children, and Israel is using U.S.-supplied bombs to do what it calls “mowing the grass,” committing war crimes in real-time, and American politicians and the media are enabling it.
In a matter of just seven days, Israel bombed the Baptist al-Ahli Hospital – the oldest Christian-led church in Gaza, two UN schools and shelters and 18 other health facilities across the strip. This has resulted in the deaths of over 1,000 people just this week, most of whom are women and children. These numbers increase by the day as bodies are pulled from the rubble.
The total death toll in Gaza is nearing 4,000, including over 1,000 children, 500 of whom are still infants.
And when influential leaders like Jordan Peterson, a personal friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, tweeted out, “Give em Hell Netanyahu,” he was essentially giving Israel carte blanche to turn Gaza into a graveyard. It’s clear that Western politicians, pundits, influencers and media alike are enabling the slaughter of Gaza by giving Israel the green light to commit major war crimes with impunity.
Take CNN and the BBC, for example, who for the last nine days have been giving around-the-clock coverage to alleged Hamas tunnels, claiming that they are beneath the feet of every Palestinian, including under schools and hospitals. The deceptive claim is an Israeli military talking point that has been debunked time and time again, and yet it’s being reported as fact without question for countless hours to millions of viewers.
What this does is brush off and attempt to justify civilian casualties, framing victims as legitimate targets and blaming Palestinians for their own deaths. But it is little more than gaslighting.
President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen, for example, affirmed Israel’s right to “defend itself” and repeated the tired trope that Hamas uses human shields.
There is, in fact, no evidence of Hamas using human shields. Yet multiple human rights reports have found that Israel consistently uses Palestinians – including children – as human shields.
It’s a blatant lie that the media pushes, which inevitably aids Israel’s agenda of ethnically cleansing Gaza, an agenda loudly and publicly proclaimed by Israel’s own leaders. In a message broadcast to the world on X (formerly Twitter), Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Palestinians are human animals.
And despite over half of Gaza’s population being children, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said recently, “There are “no innocents” in the Gaza Strip.”
This is the rhetoric of genocide. And if that wasn’t clear enough, member of the Knesset Ariel Kallner spelled it out openly:
Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join! Nakba, because like then in 1948, the alternative is clear.”
Kallner was referencing the 1948 ethnic cleansing of three-quarters of a million Palestinians to create the state of Israel.
While the world watches in horror and tries to stop the slaughter, the West is actively stopping any peaceful solution or calls for a ceasefire. A Russian and Chinese-supported ceasefire plan was blocked at the United Nations by the U.S., Britain and France, while American Jews calling for a ceasefire outside the White House were arrested en masse.
In Europe, the message from top politicians has been much the same. Israel can do whatever it wants. UK Labour leader Keir Starmer – a professional human rights lawyer, no less – was asked what he thinks about Israel cutting off food, water and electricity to over two million people. Here was his response:
So, Labour’s position is that major, genocidal war crimes like starving a huge civilian population are A-OK! And that is the message Israel receives every time a Western politician vacuously demands we stand united with Israel and uphold its right to self-defense.
Meanwhile, at home, this demonization of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims and associating us all with terrorism as unworthy victims is fuelling a wave of Islamophobic hate. In Illinois, a six-year-old Palestinian child was stabbed 26 times by a hate-filled landlord who had been radicalized by watching corporate media.
Now, Politicians are trying to save face by showing faux concern for Palestinian children after an entire week and a half of giving unequivocal support for Israel to take whatever action it wanted in Gaza.
While Western politicians will cry crocodile tears over the Palestinians slaughtered in the coming days and weeks, let’s never forget that it was them who enabled these massacres in the first place.
Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and is the founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the non-profit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the video series Behind The Headlines. Contact Mnar at mnar@mintpressnews.com or follow her on Twitter at @mnarmuh
Biden’s demand for $105 billion in military spending: A declaration of war against the working class
In his national address Thursday, US President Joe Biden demanded Congress allocate an additional $105 billion to fund the US military, escalate the US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and arm the Israeli military with bullets, bombs and shells for its genocidal campaign against the people of occupied Palestine.
This massive tranche of money is greater than the GDP of two-thirds of the countries on Earth and would cause unimaginable levels of death and destruction in the months ahead.
The latest demand includes $14 billion for Israel on top of the $260 billion the US has provided in military aid since 1948, and $61 billion for Ukraine, nearly doubling the $75 billion spent on the war against nuclear-armed Russia so far. Biden is also demanding $3 billion for military submarines, $2 billion for the military encirclement of China, and $14 billion to further militarize the US-Mexico border and criminalize immigration, as a sop to Trump and the far-right wing of the political establishment.
Biden said the $105 billion is necessary to make sure those who “cause chaos and death and destruction” are made to “pay a price for their aggression.”
Over 20 years ago, then-president George W. Bush used the same language to justify launching imperialist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which were to last 20 years, kill more than one million people, and cost more than $8 trillion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. A 2022 report published by the Pentagon admitted that each taxpayer paid $8,278 for the wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, though the true figure is likely an order of magnitude higher.
In concluding his speech, Biden called for shared sacrifice to fund the escalation of war on a global scale: “In moments like these, we have to remember who we are. We are the United States of America. The United States of America. And there is nothing, nothing beyond our capacity, if we do it together.”
Make no mistake, the US population will not pay for these wars “together.” The cost will be borne entirely by the working class, while the spoils will go to the rich. Biden’s demand is a declaration of war against the working class, and all talk about “shared sacrifice” to “defend democracy” is nothing but lies.
In reality, the US-led wars for which this money has been earmarked are wars of imperialist conquest, fought to enrich the ruling elite and secure the world’s resources and markets for Wall Street and corporate America, no matter the cost in lives or dollars.
The allocation of $105 billion for war comes at the direct expense of the working class, the vast majority of whom live paycheck to paycheck and nearly half of whom could not cover a $400 expense with cash on hand. Every dollar spent on the wars will come at the expense of social programs and entitlements like Medicare and Social Security.
According to a 2023 study from the National Priorities Project, $100 billion is more than the federal government will spend all year on education ($84 billion), transportation ($67 billion), or energy and the environment ($94 billion). It equals the total budget for healthcare ($100 billion). Total military-related spending this year will exceed $1.1 trillion.
The Biden administration’s demand comes as workers have been told “there is no money” to address the world population’s most urgent needs. For $100 billion, Biden could house every homeless person in America ($20 billion, per Globalgiving.org), feed every person facing starvation or acute malnutrition across the world ($23 billion, per Oxfam), forgive $30,000 in student loans for two million people ($60 billion), and still have almost $10 billion left over.
The same corporations braying for war and profiting from it will not be asked to share in the sacrifice. Earlier this year, a report from the Congressional Budget Office explained that tax revenue fell 9 percent in 2022 alone as a result of decades of tax cuts for the wealthy. According to the CBO, revenue on corporate taxes fell $5 billion from 2022 to 2023. A 2023 study from the Government Accountability Office reported that 34 percent of large corporations now pay zero in federal taxes.
As a result of the systematic slashing of corporate taxes, endless Wall Street bailouts and record military spending, the US budget deficit doubled in 2023, jumping from $1 trillion to $2 trillion, the New York Times reported Friday.
Biden’s demand exposes the totally anti-democratic character of the political system, where popular pro-Palestinian and anti-war sentiment finds no reflection whatsoever. On Friday, CBS released a poll showing that 57 percent of Americans support sending humanitarian aid to Palestine versus only 48 percent who support sending weapons to Israel. Regardless, the Senate passed a resolution supporting Israel on Thursday by a 97-0 margin. Pseudo-left figures like Democratic Socialists of America member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are enthusiastic supporters of the Biden administration and have openly endorsed arming Israel even as it engages in horrific war crimes.
Biden’s demand for $105 billion will be deeply unpopular, and his incoherent speech will convince no one. Substantial demonstrations have taken place in almost every major American city denouncing Israeli war crimes, and protests have only grown in the aftermath of the horrific bombing of the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City by Israeli forces, which killed nearly 500 people. Given the barrage of pro-war propaganda in the corporate media, such opposition marks a significant breakdown of the media-military-industrial complex.
In the face of growing opposition from below, Biden is demanding the total subordination of the economy to the needs of US imperialism. In his speech, he called for a transition to war production, saying that “just as in World War II, today patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom.” His demand for “replenishing our stockpiles” with an endless flow of weapons will require the suppression of the class struggle, dangerous speed-ups and the illegalization of strikes.
In this effort, Biden has a willing partner in the trade union bureaucracies, which have become inseparable from the Democratic Party and the imperialist state and have worked for decades to prevent strikes, maintain production and enable record corporate profits. Earlier this month, UAW President Shawn Fain appeared with Biden at the Willow Run plant in Michigan, noted that the plant formerly produced bombers, and referred to the union’s membership as part of the “arsenal of democracy.”
This is a direct signal that the bureaucracy is collaborating with the Biden administration to keep the flow of deadly weapons moving to all of US imperialism’s expanding theaters of war. War against American imperialism’s rivals and targets abroad means war against the working class at home.
Already the bureaucracies are struggling to contain the growing strike movement in the US, which has spread in recent days from Big Three workers and Mack Trucks workers to casino workers in Detroit. In all cases, workers are told by the corporations that wage increases are unaffordable. In reality, it would cost only $15 billion to pay all 150,000 Big Three workers $100,000 per year, and this represents just 15 percent of what Biden claims is urgently needed for war.
The stage is set for the next phase of the development of the global class struggle, in which strikes and protests are increasingly coinciding with a growing political awakening of workers and young people across the world. This raises the decisive need for political leadership, to prevent the imperialist governments and their pseudo-left cheerleaders from diverting and suppressing opposition as they have done in the past, and to fight for the development of an independent revolutionary movement against imperialist war and the capitalist system. That is the perspective of the Socialist Equality Party.
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