Feed aggregator

 

Janine Jackson interviewed Black Alliance for Peace’s Chris Bernadel about Haiti for the April 12, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240412Bernadel.mp3

 

Chicago Tribune (3/27/24)

Janine Jackson: Columnist Clarence Page reflects US liberal media’s understanding of Haiti with a piece headlined “Haiti’s Tragic History Just Keeps Repeating Itself.” “The Biden administration,” Page writes, “shows little appetite to become deeply immersed in perennially troubled Haiti.” And “it’s no secret that many Americans have grown weary of trying to solve too many of the world’s problems.”

The Hill notes that more than 5 million Haitians, out of a population of 11 million, are at stage three and four levels of hunger—the fifth stage being famine. The US, described as “one of the largest donors for Haiti,” is reporting difficulties in delivering aid, but bravely plans “no change in strategy to address the crisis.”

A piece in the Plain Dealer suggests why we should care: Haiti’s “economic, social and environmental meltdown” is “sure to reach our shores.”

So, yes, you can learn something about Haiti’s current crisis, and the US view of it, from the news media. What you won’t learn about are the roots of the crisis, much less how they can be traced back to the US.

Chris Bernadel works with the Black Alliance for Peace Haiti/Americas Team and the Haitian grassroots organization MOLEGHAF. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chris Bernadel.

Chris Bernadel: Thank you for having me; I’m glad to be here.

JJ: The first, if not the only, thing that many US citizens will take away from media coverage about Haiti today is that “gang violence” is terrorizing the capital, Port-au-Prince. But when Americans think about gangs, their image is generally of poor, young, probably urban people, disaffected, unemployed, who are just grabbing whatever weapons they can and sticking up people on the street for money and for kicks. But that doesn’t really properly convey who the gangs right now in Haiti are, or where they come from, does it?

CB: No, not at all. And in the history of Haiti, there have been a number of times when armed groups have been involved in the political situation. These armed groups, or paramilitaries, as I like to call them, are funded by the ruling elite of Haitian society, the ruling elite that controls the ports, families like the Bigio family, and they’re made up of many of the young men from the poorest areas of the Haitian capital and other parts of Haiti. But many of the members and leadership of these groups are former police, former military; some of them have military training. So to call them gangs is a mistake. And I would say the proper characterization is paramilitary groups, armed groups, and they’re carrying out the interests of the ruling Haitian financial elite who have controlled Haiti’s economy for a long time.

JJ: Haiti doesn’t manufacture guns, right? So the guns are coming from somewhere else.

CB: Exactly. The guns are coming from the United States. Most are coming through Miami, through these privately owned ports, or ports that are owned by these wealthy families, and they’re being disseminated around the poor neighborhoods in order to try to carry out the political objectives of different sections of Haiti’s ruling elite. So they’ll arm one group to attack another group, and they’ll have groups protect certain areas and not go into other areas. But these armed paramilitary groups, for the most part, are carrying out the interests of the ruling elite.

The Hill (4/3/24)

JJ: Let’s talk about the so-called political landscape. The Caribbean Community and Common Market, CARICOM, has put forth a proposal for a transitional government that The Hill, just for one example, says “will be key to efforts to put Haiti on the path to restore security and wrestle control back from the gangs.”

You’ve already complicated the “gangs” part of that, but what is the response of Haiti advocates to this CARICOM proposal, both what it says and the way it came about?

CB: This CARICOM proposal is a new face for the same process, the same kind of thing that’s been going on. The main issue with Haiti, the main problem in Haiti, are not these armed groups, not these paramilitaries, as is being portrayed. The main problem continues to be what it’s been, specifically, since the 2004 coup d’etat against Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

So the main problem in Haiti is the international community, the so-called Core Group, US foreign policy implementing their will in Haiti, and not allowing for Haitian society to develop a government and a civil society that serves their interest and their needs. The constant interventions, starting with the MINUSTAH intervention in 2004 that lasted into 2017, which pretty much laid the ground for the crisis we have in Haiti today. That situation removed all of what was left of a legitimate Haitian government. We went from a period where we had around 7,000 elected officials to today, where we have zero elected officials in power.

Politico (5/4/15)

We’ve gone from one version of the PHTK to another to another, first one being delivered to us by Hillary Clinton, when she flew into Haiti to ensure that Michel Martelly would be able to pursue the presidency, and then followed by Jovenel Moïse, and then with Ariel Henry. And now that they’ve forced Ariel Henry to step down, in order to implement this transitional council, we’re seeing more of the same. These are the same political actors, the same political class that the Haitian people have shown time and time again they do not trust, and they see them as foreign actors, people acting on the behalf of foreign interests.

JJ: I know that a lot of listeners don’t know the deep history of US intervention in Haiti, and international intervention in Haiti. I would ask them to look back to 1791 and George Washington’s promise to help the French quell “the alarming insurrection of the Negroes.” Or they can look up the 1915-to-1934 occupation, or right up to the 2015 Politico headline calling Bill and Hillary Clinton “The King and Queen of Haiti.”

But it is, of course, as you’re saying, the 2004 coup—the role of that can’t be overstated. And I guess what I want to say is, if you have an illegitimate result, an illegal action, and then that leads to other illegal actions, it doesn’t get cleansed along the way because the facts on the ground change. There is no way to understand Haiti’s present without understanding its history.

Chris Bernadel: “The problem in Haiti is…the way that the economy has been artificially propped up to support foreign enterprises.” (image: The Narrative)

CB: Exactly. And the problem in Haiti is the socioeconomic problem, as far as the structure of Haiti’s economy, the way that the economy has been artificially propped up to support foreign enterprises and carry out the interest of the Core Group, primarily France, Canada, the United States. And also, the United States, using the 2019 Global Fragility Act, has plans to carry out further intervention in Haiti, and to further diminish the sovereignty of the Haitian people, by implementing more unelected governments, putting people into position without any legitimacy, without any constitutional reasoning, without any constitutional legality, they’re putting these people into office.

And what’s even more outrageous, now that the CARICOM community is acting in the same way that the Core Group has been acting in Haiti, they placed a requirement on all members of this so-called transitional council, where they must accept foreign military intervention in order to be a part of this council.

So this council is a US idea, and is being dictated by the United States and the State Department, as well as CARICOM, and it’s not in the interest of the Haitian people. The Haitian people have already rejected many of these actors that are taking seats on this council. A requirement to be in this Transitional Council, who will be selecting the next leader, the de facto leader of Haiti, is to accept this foreign military occupation, this occupation that the US has been trying to arrange, that has been characterized by some as a “UN intervention,” but it is not a UN intervention.

The UN won’t be sending in anyone. The US got the Security Council to rubber stamp this Kenyan police force that they’re funding to come into the country.

And so with the disaster that was the MINUSTAH occupation of 2004 to 2017, where they unleashed cholera into the country and killed over 10,000 people, as many as 30,000 people, killed by cholera released into the country by UN peacekeepers, so-called.

Now the US, for this intervention that they’re planning, it won’t even be a UN force officially. So whatever accountability that came along with a UN force being sent to the country, now that won’t even be there.

They were attempting to get a Kenyan force brought into the country, and they’ve faced some roadblocks with that, political and logistical, I’m sure. And now they are propping up this council to cover up for what they were trying to do under Ariel Henry, which they now see wasn’t possible. They’re trying to do the same thing now under this council that they’re controlling.

JJ: With the Global Fragility Act, supposedly it’s about countries that are “prone to instability” or something—I don’t know what the language says—without any understanding of what it is that is introducing instability to these places. And this is a new face. But what I hear you saying is, it’s a new face on an old story. Really, it’s the same thing.

CB: Exactly right. So-called fragile states, countries prone to instability, conflict and poverty, are being framed as threats to US security. And the Global Fragility Act is a means for them to more easily send out their resources and institutions from the Defense Department, the State Department, USAID and the Treasury, so-called international allies and partners, to deal with these situations.

Democracy Now! (3/11/24)

So this is just a new form of what they did in 1915, when they invaded the country and had to come up with excuses and reasons to cover up their real motivations. Same thing in 2004, when they did the coup d’etat against Aristide. And now again, we’re seeing the same type of intervention into Haitian politics, Haitian society, where the Haitian people, the masses of Haitian people, who for years have been coming out into the streets demanding a transition to a democratic government that represents their interest, the United States and their allies are doing the same thing they’ve been doing this whole time, implementing a foreign force, implementing foreign control over Haitian government and policy. And the results won’t be any different.

Now what we’re seeing with the so-called gangs, what we call armed groups and paramilitaries, are another way to find a reason to intervene into the country. But it’s not just as simple as that, because the dynamics of Haitian society, where you have a tiny ruling class propped up by this international community, but that really runs things from the shadows, and plays the role of doing the dirty business for the US, for the imperialist powers of the world, to control and dominate Haitian society. They have, in the past and today, found it convenient to fund armed groups, desperate young men in poor neighborhoods, but also, like I mentioned earlier, people who come from the military or the former military, people who come from the police, to enact their interest and will in this situation.

JJ: I think folks are going to read media, and they’re going to hear talk about the transitional committee and government, and all of these machinations, as being about supporting Haitian sovereignty. And “sovereignty” is thrown around with reference to officials who have been essentially appointed or installed by the US and international powers. And so every time we talk about “sovereignty” in Haiti, we’re kind of reifying this fiction of what’s going on, yeah? It’s deeply misleading.

CB: Yes, that’s exactly right. They did this with Ariel Henry, where they propped up Ariel Henry for months and months and months, even though the people of Haiti were demonstrating in the streets, coming out against every policy that he ever put out, coming out against the de facto ruler that was imposed on them that had no constitutional authority. And when they reached the end of that rope, when they saw that the situation had gone too far, and the armed groups had taken the step to actually keep Henry from reentering the country, they now have transitioned to a new strategy with this presidential council, or this transitional council, which will be more of the same.

JJ: Let me ask you, finally, what do real ways forward look like, and what must they include?

CB: Real ways forward must include the Haitian people being able to take control of this transition process. After the assassination of Jovenel Moïse, and even before that, like we spoke about before with the coup d’etat against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Haitian government, the Haitian state, has been pretty much destroyed by foreign powers. And the Haitian people have the right to go through their own process, their own domestic process, to develop a solution.

Black Alliance for Peace (2/24/24)

There are Haitian political organizations, like MOLEGHAF, who are on the ground, working with workers, students, people in the neighborhoods affected by some of this violence. There are other organizations throughout the country.

And another thing, as well: Haiti is not just Port-au-Prince. There are many other regions where the security situation is not the same, but the political and economic situation, due to the situation in the capital Port-au-Prince, is deteriorating. But not the entire country is in the same situation as Port-au-Prince.

But the Haitian people have the will and the right to work through their own process, to come up with a transition to get back to a constitutional government and a sovereign democratic state, where they can make decisions for themselves.

So it’s up to us, allies of the Haitian people, to call out the US, to see through their different tactics, like what they want to do with the Global Fragility Act, what they’ve been doing with this transitional council, their plans to bring Kenyan troops into Haiti as a blackface cover for US imperialism. We have to call them out. We have to hold them accountable, and we also have to support organizations in Haiti like MOLEGHAF. And we have to support the Haitian people in general, to allow them the space to develop a transition, to develop a solution to these problems. And they can do it.

The United States, the foreign powers, the Core Group will continue to intervene and try to control the process. But as we’ve seen, things have gotten out of hand; they can’t predict what’s going to happen next and they can’t control the situation. So they’re trying to look for new versions of the same solution they’ve always proposed to the situation, which is them dominating.

So now the Haitian people have an opportunity to develop their own processes, their own solutions, and it’s going to be up to them. All we can do is keep the US government out of it and try our best to keep the US government from overthrowing whatever democratic, sovereign form of Haitian government that can come out of that process.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Chris Bernadel from the Black Alliance for Peace Haiti/Americas Team, as well as MOLEGHAF, a Haitian grassroots organization. You can find information about what we’re talking about online at BlackAllianceForPeace.com. Chris Bernadel, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

CB: You’re welcome.

 

 

The post ‘Interventions Laid the Groundwork for the Crisis in Haiti Today’<br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>CounterSpin interview with Chris Bernadel on Haiti appeared first on FAIR.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240412.mp3

 

Washington Post (3/25/24)

This week on CounterSpin: US corporate media’s story about Haiti is familiar. Haiti, according to various recent reports, has “whipped from one calamity to another.” The country is a “cataclysm of hunger and terror,” “teetering on the brink of collapse,” “spiraling deeper into chaos” or else “descending into gang-fueled anarchistic chaos.” It’s “become a dangerously rudderless country.” According to one Florida paper’s editorial: “Haiti’s unrest” is now “becoming our problem,” as Floridians and the US “struggle to help people in Haiti, although history suggests there are no answers.”

Or, well, there is one answer: The Washington Post made space for a former ambassador to explain that 20 years ago in Haiti, “the worst outcomes were avoided through decisive American intervention. Today’s crisis might require it as well.”

At this point, the Austin American-Statesman’s “Haiti Cannibalism Claims Unfounded” might pass for refreshing.

AP had a piece that actually talked to Haitians amid what is indeed a deep and deepening crisis. A grandmother told the wire service, “We’re living day-by-day and hoping that something will change.”

We talk about what has to change—including, importantly, Western media presentations that ignore or erase even recent history—with Chris Bernadel, from the Black Alliance for Peace‘s Haiti/Americas Team and Haitian grassroots group Moleghaf.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240412Bernadel.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Elon Musk vs. Brazil.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240412Banter.mp3

The post Chris Bernadel on Haiti appeared first on FAIR.

 

“We can’t go beyond the laws of a country,” Musk has said (Wall Street Journal, 4/8/24)—unless, of course, he doesn’t like the government making the laws.

Elon Musk, the right-wing anti-union billionaire owner of Twitter (recently rebranded as X), has cast his defiance of a Brazilian judicial ruling as a free speech crusade against censorship. Such framing is, of course, bullshit. It is instead a political campaign by a capitalist to use social media to reshape global politics in favor of the right. And it’s important that we all understand why that is.

As Reuters (4/7/24) reported, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered “the blocking of certain accounts” on Twitter, prompting Musk to announce that Twitter would defy the judge’s orders “because they were unconstitutional.” He went on to call for Moraes’ resignation.

It isn’t clear which accounts are being targeted, but the judge is investigating “‘digital militias’ that have been accused of spreading fake news and hate messages during the government of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.” He’s also probing “an alleged coup attempt by Bolsonaro.”

The AP (4/8/24) then reported that the judge opened up an inquest into Musk directly, saying the media mogul “began waging a public ‘disinformation campaign’ regarding the top court’s actions.”

Musk claimed that he’s doing this in the name of free speech at the expense of profit, saying “we will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there” (Wall Street Journal, 4/8/24). He added that “principles matter more than profit.”

Michael Shellenberger (Public, 4/8/24), an enthusiastic pro-Musk pundit, was less restrained, saying the judge “has taken Brazil one step closer to being a dictatorship.” To Shellenberger, it’s “clear that Elon Musk is the only thing standing in the way of global totalitarianism.”

‘Par for the course’

Verge (1/25/23): “The documentary’s ban isn’t an example of Musk violating a vocal ‘free speech absolutist’ ethos. It’s a reminder that Musk has always been fine with government censorship.”

Anyone with a memory better than Shellenberger’s will recall that Musk’s Twitter has been all too eager to censor content at the request of the Indian government, including a BBC documentary that was critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi (Verge, 1/25/23). India under Modi, who heads the right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP party, has seen a steep decline in press freedom, worrying journalists and free speech advocates (New York Times, 3/8/23; NPR, 4/3/23; Bloomberg, 2/25/24). At the same time Musk was pretending to defend free speech in Brazil, he was bragging about traveling to India to meet with Modi (Twitter, 4/10/24).

Musk suppressed Twitter content in the Turkish election in response to a request from Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, saying the “choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?” This move, he insisted, was “par for the course for all Internet companies” (Vanity Fair, 5/14/23). Turkey, with its laws against insulting the Turkish identity (Guardian, 11/16/21), is a country that is almost synonymous with the suppression of free speech—it ranks 165 out of 180 on Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index. Yet Musk didn’t seem to feel the need to intervene to save democracy through his social media network.

The impact of Musk’s decision to censor Twitter when it comes to Turkey and India isn’t just that it exposes his duplicity when it comes to free speech, but it robs the global public of vital points of view when it comes to these geopolitically important countries. In essence, the crime is not so much that Musk is hypocritical, but that his administration of the social media site has kept readers in the dark rather than expanding their worldview.

Grappling with balance

AP (10/25/22) reported that Brazilian social media posts claimed that Lula “plan[ned] to close down churches if elected” and that Bolsonaro “confess[ed] to cannibalism and pedophilia.”

The context in Brazil is that in the last presidential election, in 2022, the leftist challenger Lula da Silva ousted the incumbent, Bolsonaro (NPR, 10/30/22), who has since been implicated in a failed coup attempt that closely resembled the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol (Reuters, 3/15/24). Ever since, tech companies have bristled at Brazil’s attempt to curb the influence of fake news, such as a bill that would put “the onus on the internet companies, search engines and social messaging services to find and report illegal material” (Guardian, 5/3/23).

Brazil experienced a flurry of disinformation about the candidates in the run-up to the election, inspiring the country’s top electoral court to ban “false or seriously decontextualized” content that “affects the integrity of the electoral process” (AP, 10/25/22).

The Washington Post (1/9/23) reported that social media were “flooded with disinformation, along with calls in Portuguese to ‘Stop the Steal,’” and demands for “a military coup” in response to a possible Lula victory. And while these problems existed in various online media, a source told the Post that this occurred after Musk fired people in Brazil “who moderated content on the platform to catch posts that broke its rules against incitement to violence and misinformation.”

While Turkey and India are brazenly attempting to suppress opinions the government doesn’t like, a democratic Brazil is grappling with how to balance maintaining a free internet while protecting elections from malicious interference (openDemocracy, 1/3/23).

Despotic future

Brazilian Report (4/9/24): “Billionaire Elon Musk joined this week a campaign led by the Brazilian far-right to characterize Brazil as a dictatorship.”

Lula’s victory, in addition to being a source of hope for Brazil’s poor and working class (Bloomberg, 4/25/23), was seen as a blow to the kind of right-wing despotism espoused by people like Bolsonaro, who represents a past of US-aligned terror-states that use military force to protect US interests and suppress egalitarian movements in the Western Hemisphere (Human Rights Watch, 3/27/19). As Brazilian Report (4/9/24) put it, Musk has joined a “campaign led by the Brazilian far right.”

Indeed, the Wall Street Journal (4/10/24) noted that Musk’s tussle in the Brazilian judiciary was an extension of his alignment with the Brazilian right:

Supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, who gave Musk a medal during his visit in 2022 to announce plans to install satellites over the Amazon rainforest, have reveled in Musk’s defiance, declaring him a “hero,” as the dividing lines in Brazil’s culture wars deepen.

Erdoğan and Modi represent more successful iterations of neo-fascist ideology over liberal democracy. The dystopian societies they oversee make up the political model that the MAGA movement would like to impose in the United States, where a caudillo is unchecked by independent courts, the press and other civil institutions, while rights for workers and marginalized groups are eviscerated.

Musk isn’t simply displaying hypocrisy when he pretends to fight for free speech in Brazil while Twitter censors speech when it comes to India and Turkey. If anything, he is being consistent in his quest to use his corporate wealth to alter the political landscape against liberal democracy and toward a dark, despotic future.

The post Musk Is Consistent in His Opposition to Internet Democracy appeared first on FAIR.

 

Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Robert Weissman about the Boeing scandal for the March 29, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240329Weissman.mp3

 

CNN (3/25/24)

Janine Jackson: Boeing CEO David Calhoun is going to “step down in wake of ongoing safety problems,” as headlines have it, or amid “737 MAX struggles,” or elsewhere “mishaps.”

Had you or I at our job made choices, repeatedly, that took the lives of 346 people and endangered others, I doubt media would describe us as “stepping down amid troubles.” But crimes of capitalism are “accidents” for the corporate press, while the person stealing baby formula from the 7/11 is a bad person, as well as a societal danger.

There are many reasons that corporate news media treat corporate crime differently than so-called “street crime,” but none of them are excuses we need to accept.

Public Citizen looks at the same events and information that the press does, but from a bottom-up, people-first perspective. We’re joined now by the president of Public Citizen; welcome back to CounterSpin, Robert Weissman.

Robert Weissman: Hey, it’s great to be with you.

American Prospect (10/31/19)

JJ: Boeing is a megacorporation. It has contractors across the country and federal subsidies out the wazoo, but when it does something catastrophic, somehow this one guy stepping down is problem solved? What happened here versus what, from a consumer-protection perspective, you think should have happened, or should happen?

RW: Well, I think the story is still being written. Folks will remember that Boeing was responsible for two large airliner crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed around 350 people. The result of that, as a law enforcement matter, was that Boeing agreed to a leniency deal on a single count of fraud. It didn’t actually plead guilty; it just stipulated that the facts might be true, and promised that they would follow the law in the future. That agreement was concluded in the waning days of the Trump administration.

Fast forward, people will remember the recent disaster with another Boeing flight for Alaska Airlines earlier this year, when a door plug came untethered and people were jeopardized. Luckily, no one was fatally injured in that disaster.

But the disaster itself was exactly a consequence of Boeing’s culture of not attending to safety, a departure from the historic orientation of the corporation, and, from our point of view, directly a result of the slap-on-the-wrist leniency agreement that they had entered after the gigantic crashes of just a few years prior.

So now the Department of Justice is looking at this problem again. They are criminally investigating Boeing for the most recent problem with Alaska Airlines Flight 1282. And we are encouraging, and we think they are, looking back at the prior agreement, because the prior agreement said, if Boeing engages in other kinds of wrongdoing in the future, the Department of Justice can reopen the original case and prosecute them more fully–which it should have done, of course, in the initial instance.

Public Citizen (3/25/24)

JJ: Let’s talk about the DoJ. I’m seeing this new report from Public Citizen about federal corporate crime prosecutions, which we think would be entertained in this case, and particularly a careful look back at choices, conscious choices, made by the company that resulted in these harms. And this report says the DoJ is doing slightly more in terms of going after corporate offenders, but maybe nothing to write home about.

RW: Right. There was a very notable shift in rhetoric from the top of the DoJ at the start of the Biden administration, and not the normal thing you would hear. Much more aggressive language about corporate crime, and holding corporations accountable, and holding CEOs and executives accountable.

However, that rhetoric hasn’t been matched in good policymaking, and we had the lowest levels of corporate criminal enforcement in decades in the first year of the administration. We gave them a pass on that, because that was mostly carrying forward with cases that were started, or not started, under the Trump administration. But we’ve only seen a slow uptick in the last couple years. So it has increased from its previous low, but by historic standards, it’s still at a very low level, in terms of aggregate number of corporate criminal prosecutions.

By the way, if people are wondering, what numbers are we talking about, we’re talking about 113. So very, very few corporate criminal prosecutions, as compared to the zillions of prosecutions of individuals, as you rightly juxtaposed at the start.

JJ: And then even, historically, there were more corporate crime prosecutions 20 years ago, and it’s not like the world ended. It didn’t drive the economy into the ground. This is a thing that can happen.

Robert Weissman: “There’s no sense in which holding corporations accountable for following the law is going to interfere with the functioning of the economy.”

RW: Correct. The corporate criminal prosecutions don’t end the world, and moreover, corporate crime didn’t end. So we ought to have more prosecutions than we have now. I mean, we’re just talking about companies following the law. This is not about aggressive measures to hold them accountable for things that are legal but are wrong, which is, of course, pervasive. This is just a matter of following the law. There’s no sense in which holding corporations accountable for following the law is going to interfere with the functioning of the economy. It doesn’t diminish the ability of capitalism to carry out what it does. In fact, following the rule of law, for anyone who actually cares about a well-functioning capitalist society, should be a pretty core principle, and enforcement of law should be a core requirement.

JJ: And one thing that I thought notable, also, in this recent report is that small businesses are more likely to face prosecution. And that reminds me of the IRS saying, “Well, yeah, we go after low-income people who get the math wrong on their taxes, because rich people’s taxes are really complicated, you guys.” So there’s a way that even when the law is enforced, it’s not necessarily against the biggest offenders.

RW: Yeah, that’s right. Although the numbers are so small, that disparity isn’t quite that stark. I think the big thing that illustrates your point, though, is the entirely different way that corporate crime is treated than crime by individual offenders, street offenders.

First of all, the norm for many years has been reliance on leniency agreements. So not even plea deals, where a corporation pleads down, or a person might plea down the crime to which they are admitting guilt. But a no-plea deal, in which they just say, “Hey, we promise to follow the law going forward in the future, and if we do, you won’t prosecute us for the thing that we did wrong in the past.”

Human beings do not get those kinds of deals, except rarely, in the most low-level offenses. But that’s been the norm for corporations, for pervasive offenses with mass impacts on society, sometimes injured persons, and instances where the corporations, of course, are very intentional about what they’re doing, because it’s all designed based on risk/benefit decisions about how to make the most profit. The sentences and the punishments for corporations in the criminal space and for CEOs in the criminal space are just paltry.

JJ: So if deterrence, really genuinely preventing these kinds of things from happening again, if that were really the goal, then the process would look different.

RW: It would look radically different. I think that there’s a lot of data when it comes to so-called street crime. You need enforcement, obviously, against real wrongdoing, but tough penalties don’t actually work for deterrence. It’s just not what the system is, in terms of the social system and the cultural system, people deciding to follow or not follow the law and so on.

But for corporations, deterrence is everything. They are precisely profit-maximizing. They’re the ultimate rational actors. If the odds are good that they will be caught breaking the law and suffer serious penalties, then they will follow the law, almost to a T. So this is the space where deterrence actually would work, and we see criminal deterrence with aggressive enforcement and tough penalties really missing from the scene.

And this Boeing case is the perfect example. The company was responsible, through its lax safety processes, for two crashes that killed 350-plus people; they got off with a slap on the wrist. As a result, they didn’t really feel pressure to change what they were doing, and they put people at risk again. If they had been penalized in that first instance, I think you would’ve seen a radical shift in the company, much more adoption of a safety culture. We would have avoided this most recent mishap.

Seattle Times (2/26/24)

JJ: Let me, finally, just bring media back in. There was this damning report from the Federal Aviation Administration last month, and the reporting language across press accounts kind of incensed me.

This is just the Seattle Times: “A highly critical report,” they said, “said Boeing’s push to improve its safety culture has not taken hold at all levels of the company.” “The report,” the paper said, “cites ‘a disconnect’ between the rhetoric of Boeing’s senior management about prioritizing safety and how frontline employees perceive the reality.”

Well, this is Corporate Crime 101. I mean, there are books written on this. It’s not a disconnect: “Oh, the company’s at war with itself; leadership really wants safety really badly, but the workers just aren’t getting it.”

This is pushing accountability down and maintaining deniability at the top. So the CEO doesn’t have to say, “Oh, don’t follow best practices here.” They just need to say, “Well, we just need to cut costs this quarter,” and everybody understands what that means. Anybody who’s worked in a corporation understands what “corporate climate” means.

And so I guess my hopes for appropriate media coverage dim a little bit when there is so much pretending that we don’t know how decision-making works in corporations, that we don’t know how corporations work, when I know that reporters do.

RW: Yeah, well, I’ll just say that is so 100% correct in characterizing what happened at Boeing, because not only is that fake, and obviously culture is set from the top, this is a place where the culture of the workers and the engineers wants to, and long did, prioritize safety. They’re the ones who’ve been calling attention to all the problems. So it’s management that’s preventing them from doing their jobs, which is what they want to do.

Public Citizen (3/18/19)

I think in terms of how media talks about this, I agree with your point, and I think the reporting on Boeing has been pretty good in terms of documenting what happened. But what is often missing from even really good reports in mainstream news media is the criminal justice frame.

Now, admittedly, that partially follows from the failure of the Department of Justice to treat it as a criminal matter seriously, but I think it does change the way people think about this stuff. If you call it a crime, it’s exactly as you said, it’s not errors, it’s not just lapses. It’s certainly not mistakes. These are crimes, and they’re crimes with really serious consequences, in this case, hundreds of people dying.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Rob Weissman, president of Public Citizen. You can find their work on Boeing and many, many other issues online at citizen.org. Robert Weissman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RW: Great to be with you. Thanks so much.

 

The post ‘Punishments for Corporations and CEOs Are Just Paltry’: <br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>CounterSpin interview with Robert Weissman on Boeing scandal appeared first on FAIR.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240405.mp3

 

Popular Information (4/4/24)

This week on CounterSpin:  In the final quarter of 2023, after-tax corporate profits reached an all-time high of $2.8 trillion. As reported by Popular Information, corporate profit margins were at a level not seen since the 1950s, as increases in prices have outpaced increases in costs—which Capitalism 101 says shouldn’t happen, because competing companies are supposed to step in with lower prices and grab some market share, right? What’s different now? Well, abject greed, abetted by policy and whistled past by the press corps. As one economist put it, “If people are paying $3 for a dozen eggs last week, they’ll pay $3 this week. And firms take advantage of that.” One reason we have details on “greedflation” is the work of the Groundwork Collaborative. We spoke with their economist and managing director of policy and research, Rakeen Mabud, a few months back. We hear some of that conversation again this week.

Transcript: ‘It’s Important to Focus on Big Companies Using the Cover of Inflation to Jack Up Prices’

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240405Mabud.mp3

 

Photo: Elvert Barnes

Also on the show: While much else is happening, we can’t lose sight of the ongoing assault on reproductive freedom, in other words basic human rights, being given tailwind by the Supreme Court. Advocates warned that overturning Roe v. Wade would not be the end, and it wasn’t. The court is now entertaining challenge to the legality of the abortion medication mifepristone, used safely and effectively for decades, including invoking the 1873 Comstock Act, about sending “obscene materials” through the mail. The Washington Post has described it as a “confusing legal battle,” but CounterSpin got clarity from the Guttmacher Institute’s Rachel K. Jones last year. We hear that this week as well.

Transcript: ‘People Who Don’t Support Abortion Ignore the Science and the Safety’

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240405Jones.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at NBC’s unhiring of Ronna McDaniel.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240405Banter.mp3

 

The post Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation, Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone appeared first on FAIR.

 

The editorial boards of the nation’s major media organizations must have been frantic last week.

Used to reporting on US foreign policy, wars and arms exports so as to portray the United States as a benevolent, law-abiding and democracy-defending nation, they were confronted on March 25 with a real challenge dealing with Israel and Gaza. No sooner did the Biden administration, for the first time, abstain and thus allow passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution that was not just critical of Israel, but demanded a ceasefire in Gaza, than US officials began declaring that the resolution that they allowed to pass was really meaningless.

It was “nonbinding,” they said.

The New York Times (3/25/24) reported that US’s UN Ambassdor “Thomas-Greenfield called the resolution ‘nonbinding’”—and let no one contradict her.

That was enough for the New York Times (3/25/24), which produced the most one-sided report on the decision. That article focused initially on how Resolution 2728 (which followed three resolutions that the US had vetoed, and a fourth that was so watered down that China and Russia vetoed it instead) had led to a diplomatic dust-up with the Israeli government: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a planned visit to Washington by a high-level Israeli delegation to discuss Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah and the future of Gaza and the West Bank.

The Times quoted Richard Gowan, a UN expert at the International Crisis Group: “The abstention is a not-too-coded hint to Netanyahu to rein in operations, above all over Rafah.”

Noting that “Security Council resolutions are considered to be international law,” Times reporters Farnaz Fassihi, Aaron Boxerman and Thomas Fuller wrote, “While the Council has no means of enforcing the resolution, it could impose punitive measures, such as sanctions, on Israel, so long as member states agreed.”

This was nevertheless followed by a quote from Washington’s UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who abstained from the otherwise unanimous 14–0 vote of the rest of the Security Council, characterizing the resolution as “nonbinding.”

The Times offered no comment from any international law scholars, foreign or US, to rebut or even discuss that claim. Such an expert might have pointed to the unequivocal language of Article 25 of the UN Charter: “The members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.”

If the US offered its claim that this language only applies to resolutions explicitly referencing the UN Charter’s Chapter VII, dealing with “threats to the peace,” an international law expert (EJIL: Talk!, 1/9/17) might note that the International Court of Justice stated in 1971, “It is not possible to find in the Charter any support for this view.”

‘Creates obligations’

The Washington Post (3/26/24) quoted an international law expert to note that the resolution “creates obligations for Israel and Hamas.”

The Washington Post (3/26/24), though like the Times a firm defender of Washington’s foreign policy consensus, did marginally better. While the Times didn’t mention Britain or France, both major US NATO allies, in its piece on the Security Council vote, the Post noted that the four other veto powers—Britain and France, as well as China and Russia—had all voted in favor of the resolution, along with all 10 elected temporary members of the Council.

The Post also cited one international law legal expert, Donald Rothwell, of the Australian National University, who said the “even-handed” resolution “creates obligations for Israel and Hamas.”

While that quote sounds like the resolution is binding, the Post went on to cite Gowan as saying, “I think it’s pretty clear that if Israel does not comply with the resolution, the Biden administration is not going to allow the Security Council members to impose sanctions or other penalties on Israel.”

The Post (3/25/24) actually ran a stronger, more straightforward piece a day earlier, when it covered the initial vote using an AP story. AP did a fairer job discussing the fraught issue of whether or not the resolution was binding on the warring parties, Israel and Hamas (as well as the nations arming them).

That earlier AP piece, by journalist Edith M. Lederer, quoted US National Security spokesperson John Kirby as explaining that they decided not to veto the resolution because it “does fairly reflect our view that a ceasefire and the release of hostages come together.”

Because of the cutbacks to in-house reporting on national and international news  in most of the nation’s major news organizations, most Americans who get their news from television and their local papers end up getting dispatches—often edited for space—from the New York Times, Washington Post or AP wire stories. (The Wall Street Journal, for example, ran the same AP report as the Post.)

‘A demand is a decision’

CNN (3/27/24) quoted US officials claiming the resolution was nonbinding—and noted that “international legal scholars” disagree.

In TV news, CNN (3/27/24) had some of the strongest reporting on the debate over whether the resolution was binding. The news channel said straight out, “While the UN says the latest resolution is nonbinding, experts differ on whether that is the case.”

It went on to say:

After the resolution passed, US officials went to great lengths to say that the resolution isn’t binding. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller repeatedly said during a news conference that the resolution is nonbinding, before conceding that the technical details of are for international lawyers to determine. Similarly, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby and US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield separately insisted that the resolution is nonbinding.

Those US positions were challenged by China’s UN Ambassador Zhang Jun, who “countered that such resolutions are indeed binding,” and by UN spokesperson Farhan Haq, who said Security Council resolutions are international law, and “so to that extent they are as binding as international law is.”

CNN quoted Maya Ungar, another International Crisis Group analyst:

The US—ascribing to a legal tradition that takes a narrower interpretation—argues that without the use of the word “decides” or evocation of Chapter VII within the text, the resolution is nonbinding…. Other member states and international legal scholars are arguing that there is legal precedence to the idea that a demand is implicitly a decision of the Council.

‘A rhetorical feint’

According to the Guardian (3/26/24), the US’s “nonbinding” interpretation “put the US at odds with other member states, international legal scholars and the UN itself.”

To get a sense of how one-sided or at best cautious the US domestic coverage of this critically urgent story is, consider how it was covered in Britain or Spain, two US allies in NATO.

The British Guardian (3/26/24), which also publishes a US edition, ran with the headline: “Biden Administration’s Gaza Strategy Panned as ‘Mess’ Amid Clashing Goals.” The story began:

The Biden administration’s policy on Gaza has been widely criticized as being in disarray as the defense secretary described the situation as a “humanitarian catastrophe” the day after the State Department declared Israel to be in compliance with international humanitarian law.

Washington was also on the defensive on Tuesday over its claim that a UN security Council ceasefire resolution on which it abstained was nonbinding, an interpretation that put the US at odds with other member states, international legal scholars and the UN itself.

But the real contrast is with the Spanish newspaper El País (3/29/24), which bluntly headlined its story “US Sparks Controversy at the UN With Claim That Gaza Ceasefire Resolution Is ‘Nonbinding.’” Not mincing words, the reporters wrote:

By abstaining in the vote on the UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the United States on Monday sparked not only the anger of Israel, which had asked it to veto the text, but also a sweeping legal and diplomatic controversy due to its claims that the resolution—the first to be passed since the start of the Gaza war—was “nonbinding.” For Washington, it was a rhetorical feint aimed at making the public blow to its great ally in the Middle East less obvious.

El País (3/29/24) quoted the relevant language from the UN Charter: “The members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.”

After quoting Thompson-Greenfield saying it was a “nonbinding resolution,” and Kirby saying dismissively, “There is no impact at all on Israel,” they wrote,

These claims hit the UN Security Council—the highest executive body of the UN in charge of ensuring world peace and security—like a torpedo. Were the Council’s resolutions binding or not? Our was it that some resolutions were binding and others were not?

The reporters answered their own rhetorical question:

Diplomatic representatives and legal experts came out in force to refute Washington’s claim. UN Secretary-General António Guterres made his opinion clear: the resolutions are binding. Indeed, this is stated in Article 25 of the UN Charter: “The members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.” Several representatives of the Security Council, led by Mozambique and Sierra Leone, pointed to case law to support this argument. The two African diplomats, both with legal training, said that the Gaza ceasefire resolution is binding, regardless of whether one of the five permanent members of the Council abstains from the vote, as was the case of the US. The diplomats highlighted that in 1971, the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) established that all resolutions of the UN Security Council are legally binding. The Algerian ambassador to the UN summed it up even more categorically: “Security Council resolutions are binding. Not almost, not partly, not maybe.”

Unlike most most US news organizations, El País went to an expert, in this instance seeking out Adil Haque, a professor of international law at Rutgers University, where he is a professor, and also executive editor of the law journal Just Security. Haque, they wrote, “has no doubts that the resolution is binding.” He explains in the article:

According to the UN Charter, all decisions of the Security Council are binding on all member states. The International Court of Justice has ruled that a resolution need not mention Chapter VII of the Charter [action in case of threats to the peace, breaches of the peace or acts of aggression], refer to international peace and security, or use the word “decides” to make it binding. Any resolution that uses “mandatory language” creates obligations, and that includes the term “demands” used in the resolution on Gaza.” He adds, “For now, it does not seem that the US has a coherent legal argument.”

It should be noted that the New York Times, when there is a dispute regarding a document, typically runs a copy of the document in question—or, if it is too long, the relevant portion of it. In the case of Resolution 2728, which even counting its headline only runs 263 words, that would have not been a hard call. Despite the disagreement between the US and most of the Council over the wording of the ceasefire resolution, the Times chose not to run or even excerpt it.

The post UN Tells Israel: Cease Fire; NYT Says: If You Want appeared first on FAIR.

 

Janine Jackson interviewed IPS’s Phyllis Bennis about the Gaza ceasefire resolution for the March 29, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240329Bennis.mp3

 

Reuters (3/22/24)

Janine Jackson: Reuters reported on March 22 that the United Nations Security Council had rejected a resolution, proposed by the US, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and a hostage deal between the Israeli government and Hamas. Russia and China vetoed the measure, readers were told, while Algeria also voted no and Guyana abstained on a measure that “called for an immediate and sustained ceasefire lasting roughly six weeks that would protect civilians and allow for the delivery of humanitarian assistance.”

US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, cited in AP, said that the US had been “working on a hostage deal for months” that would call for a “six-week period of calm,” from which, she said, “we could then take the time and the steps to build a more enduring peace.” Well, what does that wording mean, and what do UN resolutions generally mean, if politicians and news media interpret them variously?

So helping us to sift through these attempts to respond to the violence of Israel’s ongoing war on Palestinians in Gaza is Phyllis Bennis; she’s senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and international advisor to Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as author of, among other titles, Understanding the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict: A Primer.

She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.

Phyllis Bennis: Great to be with you, Janine.

JJ: So the US introduced a resolution at the UN, nominally calling for a ceasefire, but also vetoed another resolution calling for a ceasefire, because, Thomas-Greenfield said, it would interfere with negotiations around freeing Israeli hostages. And then there’s this effort to portray the current decision as non-binding. It’s very confusing, especially for laypeople. Does the US want a real ceasefire or not? What’s happening here?

Al Jazeera (5/19/21)

PB: You raise all the right questions, Janine. The real issue has to do with the US view of the United Nations, which is that it’s annoying at best and a threat to US domination at worst, from Washington’s vantage point. So that earlier veto by Russia and China and opposition by Algeria, the abstention by Guyana, of the US resolution came after a history, a long history that goes back years, in fact, of the US vetoing calls for a ceasefire in situations when Israel is attacking, mostly Gaza, on occasion Lebanon, and the Security Council calls for a ceasefire, and the US says, “No, we don’t need a ceasefire yet.” Always meaning, “We haven’t killed enough people yet.” So there’s a long history of that. We don’t really have time to go into that.

But the US did it twice in a row on the Gaza question, where there were proposals for a ceasefire that the US vetoed, which would’ve passed. The US refused. Then the US comes up with its own resolution, which was a very, very sneaky one, because that quote that you read about what it says, those words were indeed in the resolution, but it did not call for them. The resolution did not call for an immediate ceasefire. There was a recognition by the Security Council, according to this resolution, that a ceasefire would be a good idea, and then went on to say and  therefore the Security Council should go on cheerleading—they didn’t use that word—but saying should support the US-controlled negotiations that are already underway in Qatar.

So it was a fake resolution. That’s why others did not like it, and weren’t willing to accept it as if it were an actual call. In international law, which is very complicated in a lot of ways, but certain parts of it are pretty clear. One of the parts that’s pretty clear, Article 25 of the UN Charter, says that all decisions, all resolutions, passed by the Security Council are international law. They’re all binding. That’s what the real world of international law says.

So when a resolution is passed, it needs to say the Security Council demands a ceasefire, period, full stop. If it talks about how the Security Council recognizes that such and such would be a good idea, that’s nothing to be binding on, right? That’s just a statement of what we think is nice.

Common Dreams (3/25/24)

So that’s what was distinctive, the new resolution that was passed just a few days ago that the United States was willing to allow to be passed, 14-to-0, with one abstention—the US abstained rather than vetoing it; that was a great step forward. And that one, crucially, did call for an immediate ceasefire, and it also called for release of all the hostages and compliance with international law in the treatment of all those detained by all sides, which is a clear reference to the Palestinian prisoners that Israel is holding. And it also, crucially, demanded lifting all barriers to the massive amount of humanitarian assistance that’s desperately needed as famine is moving across Gaza. So that was a huge shift.

At the same time, the US had weakened it in many ways. It removed the word “permanent” from the description of the ceasefire it was demanding, and said, “We just want a ‘lasting’ ceasefire”; nobody knows what that means. And, crucially, the other weakness was that the ceasefire is only called for for two weeks. It said that the ceasefire should last for the month of Ramadan, but it was passed two weeks into Ramadan, so there’s only about two weeks left, so that’s way too short. And there’s other limitations as well. But it was a very significant shift in the US position, and it really speaks to how the Biden administration is hearing, if not yet fully responding to, but feeling like they have to answer, the demands of this rising movement that is so powerful across the United States and now globally, saying we need a ceasefire now, and we need access for massive amounts of humanitarian aid, without any of the barriers that Israel is putting up.

Those things are desperately needed, and what we’re looking at now is a question of how that movement is rising, what the impact could be on the elections, that’s one of the biggest pressure points for the Biden administration. If they want to win this election, they have to be seeing that the only way to do it is to change their policy on what has been, up until now, unconditional support for Israel.

With all the language about criticisms of Netanyahu, and the massive amount of press  about how there’s this big divide between Biden and Netanyahu, between the US and Israel, that’s true only on the level of talking. On the level of acting, the US hasn’t changed a thing. $4 billion a year as a starting point of military aid; all the additional weapons that Israel wants, Israel gets.

Al Jazeera (3/6/24)

There’s just been no shift in the reality that the US is arming and financing a genocide, and as long as that’s underway, there’s people across this country that are mobilizing this “uncommitted” campaign, in places like Michigan and Minnesota, where those votes really matter, and it’s spreading. It’s about to happen in Wisconsin.

And at the end of the day, this isn’t just about the election, this is about what has to happen to stop this genocide. And I think what has to happen is that there has to be a way of convincing Joe Biden personally, not just others in his administration.

And right now, the pressure is rising, and the issue is going to be, how much longer can he keep up the political credibility, when he has people in his own administration resigning in protest of his policies? He has the staff of his own Biden/Harris campaign committee coming out with a public letter saying, “Mr. President, we can’t do our job. We can’t get you reelected with this policy.”

You have the White House interns. This is my personal favorite of all these protests. These are the most ambitious kids in the country. They all want to be president, right? And yet they’re willing to come out and say, “Mr. President, we are not leaders today, but we aspire to lead in the future, and we can’t do it with this kind of a model, when there is a genocide underway.”

So the US can do all it wants to say that this is a non-binding resolution, but that’s just not true. They can go out of their way to say that the South African initiative at the International Court of Justice, that led to a finding that Israel is plausibly committing genocide right now, or is moving towards a genocide, that that extraordinary brief prepared by the South African legal team somehow is “meritless.” They can claim that, but the rest of the world isn’t buying it, and increasingly US voters aren’t buying it.

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, I do see also just a lot of regular folks reading things like US Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood calling for a “lengthy pause to this conflict” and saying, “Well, we’re not calling for a pause to the conflict. We’re calling for a resolution. We’re calling for a way forward.” And then you see with concerns about a wider war, we have folks like John Kirby, White House National Security Council, on the Today Show saying, “Well, we don’t want a wider war in the region, but we got to do what we have to do.”

This is terrifying, but I also feel like folks are seeing through it. And so maybe let’s end on that note, that folks are figuring out that this politics-speak, they’re seeing it for what it is—and, more importantly, for what it isn’t.

Phyllis Bennis: “What we need is a real ceasefire. That doesn’t mean two weeks to release all the hostages, and then we go back to war.”

PB: That’s exactly right, Janine, and I think the good news, if there is any in this extraordinarily devastating time of real genocide in real time in front of our eyes on an hourly basis, the good news is exactly as you say: More and more people in this country and globally are seeing through those false claims.

It’s a false claim that the UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire is not binding. It is binding. It’s a false claim that the South African charges at the International Court of Justice were meritless. They had all the merit in the world.

All of these claims are designed to distract us. It’s all a distraction. The change in language is a distraction.

What we need is a real ceasefire. That doesn’t mean two weeks to release all the hostages, and then we go back to war. That’s not the point here. The point is to stop the fighting, stop the slaughter, stop the denial of food and water and medicine, which is deliberately causing massive starvation on a level that all of the experts in international humanitarian crises admit is the worst they have ever seen—not in terms of ultimate numbers, because the population in Gaza is not very big, but in terms of the percentage of people. Never have we seen 100% of a population facing extreme hunger, with 55% facing immediate famine. This has never happened before, as long as the international humanitarian organizations have been tracking famines. It’s shocking.

And the fact that it is going on while we watch, with weapons we provide, that we pay for with our tax money, is finally reaching everybody in this country. More and more people are saying no, not in our name, not with our tax money, not anymore.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Phyllis Bennis. You can find her recent work on UN resolutions on Gaza on CommonDreams.org, as well as ips-dc.org.

Phyllis Bennis, we have to end it here for today, but of course we’ll stay in conversation. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PB: Thank you, Janine.

 

The post ‘This Is About What Has to Happen to Stop This Genocide’:  <br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>CounterSpin interview with Phyllis Bennis on Gaza ceasefire resolution appeared first on FAIR.