The Descent of America

John Feffer

Complaints about American decline have been commonplace since at least the Vietnam War era.

In the late 1980s, declinism experienced an upsurge with the publication of The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, by Paul Kennedy, which warned of the dangers of imperial overstretch. Even America’s putative victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War represented only a minor lull in the chatter about the erosion of U.S. status relative to other countries, particularly a rising China.

Closer to home, meanwhile, the grumbling over America’s crumbling usually spikes around the release of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ quadrennial infrastructure report card.

In 2017, the ASCE awarded America a D+ for the state of its roads, bridges, schools, parks, and public transportation. The grade was no surprise to many Americans. “This is an advanced economy?” people ask themselves as they wait for a broken-down bus, hit a pothole on the highway, turn away from the undrinkable water coming out of their taps, or drop their child at a school that’s just a few steps away from being condemned.

In U.S. schools, D is unsatisfactory but still officially passing. In terms of infrastructure, the United States teeters perilously on the edge of failure.

In the last few months, however, America has gone over the edge. The country has quickly, recklessly, impulsively entered the failure zone.

First, there’s the failure of leadership. The country has been ruled for the last three years by a corrupt, incompetent, would-be dictator who, when faced with a spate of crises, has proven spectacularly unfit for the job.

Second, there’s the failure to protect American lives. More than 100,000 people have died from the coronavirus, a level of death generally seen only in wartime.

Third, there’s the failure of the American dream. The economy has collapsed due to the coronavirus, and the unemployment rate has surged to nearly 20 percent.

Finally, there’s the chronic failure of American racism. In the last week, people have taken to the streets to protest the death of yet another African American at the hands of the police. On May 25, a police officer in Minneapolis handcuffed George Floyd on suspicion of forgery, pinned him to the ground, put a knee on his neck, and killed him. Floyd was one of over 7,500 people killed by the police since 2013.

Protestors are fed up with police profiling, targeting, and killing. But they are also outraged at the disproportionate impact of the pandemic and the economic collapse on people of color. The anger is entirely understandable. “I can’t breathe” applies to victims of police violence and the coronavirus both.

The protests themselves are a sign of hope, notwithstanding the over 60,000 National Guard that have poured onto the streets in 24 states.

Also hopeful are the expressions of solidarity during these protests. Cops in a number of cities have gotten down on one knee with protestors. Several mayors, like Atlanta’s Keisha Lance Bottoms, have spoken truth to the power of the president. Here in Washington, the owner of a restaurant burned by looters said, “Any kind of issue like this seems pretty minor. We have been through three months of being closed; we have seen 100,000 people die. I think the protests are great, and I think they are warranted.”

And yet, if you add up the economic, political, social, and medical deficits, it’s hard to imagine calling America an advanced industrialized nation at the moment. It is extraordinary to see such a rapid loss of status in real time, as opposed to a time-lapse animation of the rise and fall of some ancient civilization. “I’ve seen this kind of violence,” a former CIA analyst responsible for tracking developments in China and Southeast Asia told The Washington Post. “This is what autocrats do. This is what happens in countries before a collapse.”

The middle and upper classes may well be caught by surprise. But the current protests are a potent reminder that for a sizable portion of the American population, the country has never been advanced because they live in what Michael Harrington, nearly 60 years ago, called “the other America.”

Trump’s Racist Response

Donald Trump has always positioned himself as a law-and-order politician, even as his words and actions create disorder and violate laws.

He never possessed much if any empathy for victims of police violence. In response to George Floyd’s death, after a cursory expression of condolence, Trump quickly pivoted to deriding protesters, Democratic governors, “THUGS,” and the like. He promised that anyone who breached the White House fence would be met by “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons.” He announced that he would declare the antifa movement a terrorist organization. He sounded like a minor-league dictator with his tweet that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Later, on a call with governors, he suggested that “if you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time — they’re going to run over you, you’re going to look like a bunch of jerks.” He added, “You have to arrest people, and you have to try people, and they have to go jail for long periods of time.” Afterwards, in the Rose Garden, Trump said, “If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”

Despite Trump’s calls for law and order, the far right is actually cheering on the occasional violence of the protests because it feeds into their attempts to push the country into a race riot. Militia members, white extremists, and “boogaloo bois” want to take advantage of the coronavirus crisis to “accelerate” the demise of liberal, multicultural America. They’ve even showed up at the protests against police violence and promoted their own violent actions online.

Militant disruptions of otherwise peaceful demonstrations ultimately advance this far-right agenda. Such violence also advances Trump’s agenda.

Following his own version of accelerationism, the president has done everything within his power to destroy the country from within, using hateful language, implementing polarizing policies, and seeming to revel in the chaos that his administration has fostered. Declaring some version of martial law to contain the chaos he has helped to create — but in reality to promote more chaos and himself as the only person to address it — may be the only hope he has at this point of gaining a second term in office.

As Edward Luce writes in the Financial Times, “Trump makes little disguise of conjuring a pre-civil rights America where white males held uncontested sway.” Ultimately, though, it’s Trump himself who wants uncontested sway, and he thinks he can crowd-surf the unrest toward that goal.

America’s Racism Is a Foreign Policy Problem

There’s always been an element of racism to Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

From day one, for instance, Trump favored predominantly white countries in his immigration policy, instituting a Muslim travel ban and denigrating “shithole countries” when “we should have more people from places like Norway.” He told four U.S. congresswomen — three of them born in the United States — to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” He relishes blaming the coronavirus outbreak on “the Chinese,” knowing full well that his conspiracy theories feed into anti-Asian sentiment.

Of course, either money or nuclear weapons can turn a “shithole” country into a friend, with Trump cozying up to Kim Jong Un of North Korea and Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. That’s always been Trump’s modus operandi: he is truly race-blind when it comes to the powerful.

Donald Trump didn’t suddenly introduce racism into U.S. foreign policy. As I wrote back in January 2018, “Trump was only putting into words an underlying principle of U.S. foreign policy. For decades, the United States has treated countries like ‘shitholes’ even if policymakers haven’t called them such, at least not in public.” Racism is reflected in U.S. budget priorities, in the minuscule size of foreign aid programs, in the pattern of U.S. interventions, in the racial composition of the U.S. Army’s “essential workers” (otherwise known as grunts), and even in the Pentagon’s militarization of domestic policing. Trump certainly didn’t create any of these dynamics, though he has often aggravated them.

Still, the current president’s elevation of racism is not simply rhetorical. There is method to his mania.

Trump is using racism as a tool to destroy whatever lingering commitment the United States has to liberal internationalism. The latter philosophy inspired Americans to help create the United Nations, launch the Peace Corps, administer foreign aid programs, and collaborate with other countries to fight global warming. This liberal internationalism has always had its defects, from paternalism to naivete. But it’s a damn sight better than the illiberal nationalism that Trump offers as an alternative.

Trump’s deployment of racism at home and abroad cuts the legs out from under liberal internationalism. No other country can take America’s human rights rhetoric seriously. No other country can accept America’s claim to impartiality as a broker of peace deals, climate deals, any deals. First put your own house in order, they will say.

Putting our own house in order has long been the motivation of U.S. social movements. Think of the civil rights movement, the LGBT rights movement, the Black Lives Matter movement. They have also inspired human rights movements devoted to home improvement in countries around the world. Even today, the U.S. protests against police violence have inspired nearly 15,000 people to demonstrate in Paris, 10,000 demonstrators in Amsterdam, tens of thousands in Auckland, thousands in London and Berlin and throughout Australia.

U.S. support of human rights abroad can and should be an extension of these social movements. That’s something that Trump’s racism at home and attacks on liberal internationalism abroad threaten as well.

“Let’s hope the demonstrations all over the world will help remind Washington that U.S. soft power is a unique asset, setting America apart from other great powers — from China, Russia, and even from Europe,” observes Wolfgang Ischinger, former German ambassador to the United States. “It would be tragic if the Trump administration turned a huge opportunity for the U.S. into a moral abdication.”

Unfortunately, Trump has his own ideas of how to put the American house in order up to and including burning the house down. The antidote to Trump’s racist nationalism is not less internationalism but more: rejoining the international bodies that Trump pulled out of, reentering the accords that Trump unsigned, patiently rebuilding U.S. engagement in the world on an equal basis.

Such a re-engagement has to go hand in hand with a difficult reckoning with America’s own racism, for the inequality perpetuated domestically mirrors the inequality maintained on a global scale.

Only in this way can America stop its descent and climb back into the community of nations.

Economic Collapse and Unemployment Councils – Then and Now

W.T. Whitney Jr.

Hunger, homelessness, and evictions were features of the Great Depression in the United States. Jobs disappeared and working conditions deteriorated. Some “250,000 teenagers were on the road.” And how many others? By 1933 one third of farm families had lost their farms. Unemployment that year was 25 percent. The lives of working people were devastated.

The federal government’s New Deal led to political and social reforms. Now the U.S. government once more has a big economic crisis on its hands, this one associated with the COVID 19 pandemic. It’s providing mostly financial relief, with a lot going to big economic players.

During the Great Depression, people responded at the grassroots level too, particularly in urban neighborhoods. In the midst of another economic crisis, it makes sense that something similar happen again. This report is about a grassroots tool of 90 years ago and about its potential usefulness now. As will be seen, assaults on working people are harmful enough now to provide ample justification for possibly picking up that tool again.

In fact, workers and their families created their own means of rescue as the Great Depression took hold. Demanding food, housing, and jobs, they organized, agitated, and prodded politicians to provide relief and reform. They did so through the Unemployed Councils. New in early 1930 and organized by the Communist Party USA, the Councils took root in many cities.

They came into being step by step. In 1929 the Comintern decided that capitalist crisis manifesting as a worldwide economic depression required a “revolutionary offensive.” Responding, the CPUSA formed its Trade Union Unity League. That organization set up “Councils of Unemployed Workers.” According to a Party publication, “the tactical key to the present stage of class struggle is the fight against unemployment.”

At once the Unemployment Councils organized unemployment protests that swept across the country. March 6, 1930 was designated as “International Unemployment Day,” a day when one million demonstrators filled the streets of cities.

Thousands of police violently attacked more than 100,000 workers filling New York’s Union Square. Demonstrations continued over several months in many cities, as did police harassment. New recruits flooded the Unemployment Councils. March 6 became an annual occasion for repeat nationwide demonstrations.

The Unemployment Councils, functioning autonomously in urban neighborhoods, pressured local relief officials to assist individuals and families. They badgered utility companies to restore gas or electricity to non-paying households. The Councils organized rent strikes beginning in 1931. They recruited crowds that, having overwhelmed the police and local officials, allowed evicted tenants to return to their dwellings. Council activists besieging city offices demanded reduced rents and no more evictions.

The Unemployment Councils reached out to Black workers, even in southern cities. Actions of the Unemployment Councils helped provide impetus for New Deal reforms like unemployment insurance, protection of labor rights, and security for elderly Americans and children.

Hunger marches organized by the Unemployment Councils took place in various cities from 1931 on. The police killed five people marching in the “Ford Hunger March” in Dearborn, Michigan on March 7 1932; 60,000 people joined the funeral procession. At a national hunger march converging on Washington on December 7,1931, marchers demanded unemployment insurance and a “social insurance system to cover maternity care, illness, accidents, and old age.”

A year later even more marchers, mainly Communist Party members, descended on Washington for a repeat national hunger march. They called for jobs, relief measures, taxation of the wealthy, and an end to racial discrimination. Members of Congress met with march leaders. The Roosevelt administration would soon direct states to expand relief efforts and promote job programs.

The CPUSA set up “The Unemployment Council of the U.S.A.” in 1931 in part to deal with rapid turn-over of community activists affiliating with local Councils. The problem would remain. The national Council provided local Councils with guidance on national and international issues. Even so, individual Councils focused primarily on the hardships and needs of workers and their families, in their own neighborhoods.

The national organization in 1932 published a 20-page pamphlet titled: “Fighting Methods and Organization Forms of the Unemployed Councils: A Manual for Hunger Fighters.” The introduction begins:

“The Unemployed Councils base their program on a recognition of the fact that those who own and control the wealth and government are willing to allow millions to suffer hunger and want in order that their great wealth shall not be drawn upon for relief. We know that the living standards of employed and unemployed alike will be progressively reduced unless we organize and conduct united and militant resistance. We know that the amount and extent of relief which the ruling class can be compelled to provide depends upon the extent to which the unemployed and employed workers together organize and fight….”

The trajectory of the Councils changed. New Deal relief programs took effect, and the Communist Party, following the lead of the Comintern, turned to alliances with other progressive forces. This was the Popular Front. The Unemployment Councils gradually gave way to the Workers Alliance of America, formed by the CPUSA in 1936 and based in Washington. The Alliance welcomed Socialist Party unemployment groups and pacifist A.J. Muste’s Unemployment League. Its activities centered on lobbying for relief measures and worker protection.

Pandemic and sick economy

The Unemployment Councils were new and, within the context of that era, were extraordinary. They attended solely to the needs of workers. They were based in local communities. And they were a creature of the Communist Party. Their time may have come again.

One determining factor is the severity of the current economic collapse and its impact on the lives of working people. Indeed, this crisis looks like it’s going to hurt workers and their families as much as did the Great Depression. The assumption here is that the extraordinary nature of the present danger to working Americans must be appreciated in order to accept the idea that an extraordinary instrument of repair, the Unemployment Councils, is required once more.

Unemployment – As of early June, 42.6 million U.S. workers had filed unemployment claims. The official unemployment rate was 14.7 percent in April, 13.3 percent in May. In May the official rate for Black people was 16.8 percent and for Latinos, 17.6 percent. However, “a quirk in BLS methodology” (Bureau of Labor Statistics) misclassified people absent from work due to COVID 19. The actual unemployment rate in April was 23.6 percent. According to economist David Ruccio, the total of the underemployed plus the officially unemployed represents 31 percent of the U.S. labor force.

Significantly, ”39 percent of employed people in households making less than $40,000 lost their job or [had] been furloughed in March.” Official unemployment figures don’t include the chronically non-employed. The Brookings Institute reports that, in 2017, 15 percent of “American men between the ages of 25 and 54” were not working for a variety of reasons, imprisonment and others.

Housing Loss – That many workers can’t pay rent sets the stage for evictions. Signs of tenant resistance have cropped up. For instance, Rent Strike 2020 is a “disaster relief organization owned and controlled by regular working people.” It demands that states “freeze rent, mortgage and utility bill collection for 2 months, or face a rent strike.” According to the website westriketogether.org, 33 percent of residential tenants didn’t pay rent in May and almost 350,000 tenants have signed a rent-strike pledge.

Access to Health Care – Many of the newly unemployed have lost their employer-based healthcare insurance. They can’t pay for health care and soon will total 11 million working people. A crisis of access existed already. In 2018, no less than 30.1 million people under the age of 65 lacked health insurance. In 2019, 28 percent of adults with employer-based health insurance were underinsured.

Food is short – The Brookings Institute recently declared that, “By the end of April, more than one in five households in the United States, and two in five households with mothers with children 12 and under, were food insecure “ In April, “21.9 percent of households with nonelderly adults were food insecure”.

Dairy farmers are dumping milk. Hog and chicken farmers are killing their animals and growers are plowing crops into the ground. These are “scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression,” and, says the Guardian, “overproduction will sour the market.” This is a crisis of capitalism.

Racism – Non-white populations are vulnerable. They are generally sicker than white people from illnesses like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, asthma, HIV, morbid obesity, and kidney disease. That’s mostly because racial discrimination encourages low-quality health care, reduced access to care, and lack of preventative care. Racism forces a disproportionate number of non-white workers to live in places full of environmental toxins. The stress of living under racism may lead to or worsen physical illnesses.

These points of vulnerability translate into high risk, plainly evident as African Americans and Latinos people confront the COVID 19 virus. One report has it that “COVID-19 mortality rate [in May] for Black Americans is 2.4 times as high as the rate for Whites and 2.2 times as high as the rate for Asians and Latinos.” Latinos, 18 percent of the U.S. population, in April accounted for 25 percent of COVID 19 deaths. Death rates for Blacks and Latinos living in cities range from two to four times higher than white people living in cities.

At issue here is suffering caused by economic crisis. Resilience helps economically-abused victims survive, and resilience may be in short supply for a class of people hit exceptionally hard by the COVID 19 virus. Besides, most of these victims are members of the working class, and they are more likely than higher-income employees to have been working “in public-facing occupations” and to experience “inequitable distribution of scarce testing and hospital resources.”

Women are victims– According to one report, the “hardest hit [during the pandemic] will be the world’s women and girls and populations already impacted by racism and discrimination … Women are 70 percent of the global health workforce and the majority of social workers and caregivers.” They “deliver 70 percent of global caregiving hours.” The report does not mention that these multitudes of women doing necessary work belong overwhelmingly to the working class, in the United States and elsewhere.

The broad conclusion here is that the impact of this economic downturn has been and will be disastrous for working people, extraordinarily so. The usual governmental remedies seeking to balance worker and business interests won’t adequately serve the working class. Too often what is done ends up pitting the needs of workers against the needs, real and imagined, of those who lack for nothing. And guess who losses out!

The Unemployment Councils provided an extraordinary boost in their time to workers and their families. A return engagement is in order, in one form or another.

A peripheral concern must be attended to. The argument may be advanced that this economic crisis will be brief and so why go to all the trouble? No, it will not be brief.

U.S. delay in preventing spread of the virus allowed the pandemic to build. Lax social-distancing and irregular quarantine will ensure its prolongation. A comprehensive regimen of testing, tracing of contacts, and quarantine would have made all the difference, according to a medical expert.

The virus has charge of the U.S. economy, said Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell: “We are now experiencing a whole new level of uncertainty, as questions only the virus can answer complicate the outlook.” (NY Times, May 21)

Besides, an already flawed U.S. economy doesn’t rate a quick fix. It was already stumbling due to “stagflation” (inflationary tendencies co-existing with stagnant economic output), unpayable debt, and financialization. The latter signifies diminished productive capacity.

Correlations

This report on the potential usefulness now of Unemployment Councils is of an introductory nature. Even so, it does appear that the Councils have great potential to meet the needs of many working people in great trouble now in the United States – but not all of them.

The Councils’ usefulness would rest on conditions under which they would be applied. One would be that they deal with unemployment, lack of housing, and hunger. These are problems presenting both now and then in roughly similar fashion. Another would be that Councils of today pay heed to features characterizing their performances then. These included: attention to workers’ most pressing social and economic needs, rapid response, militancy, and long-term revolutionary goals. All were crucial to the Councils’ achievements.

Other problems of today don’t fit with interventions of the kind offered years ago by Unemployment Councils. These are: reduced access to healthcare, racial inequalities, and gender inequalities. They were as problematic then as they are now, but society and even worker organizations of that time either accepted the injustices they represented or weren’t prepared to engage with them.

Those still unmet needs do demand attention now and any version of renewed Unemployment Councils would have to accommodate them. The difficulties in doing so represent a threshold that revived Unemployment Councils would have to overcome. How that would happen without major revamping is unclear.

This inquiry is incomplete. The feasibility of bringing back Unemployment Councils hasn’t been dealt with. At first glance, the people-power needed for strengthening new Councils and for maintaining their working-class orientation looks to be missing. It was different earlier. Communist organizers drew upon enthusiasms left over from socialist and workers’ movements that had peaked two decades earlier. They took new encouragement from socialist revolution in Russia in 1917. But to know about any resulting advantage and much more, detailed exploration is required.

Worker-to-worker solidarity, the business of the Councils, never involved ideas of mutual aid often associated with anarchist or libertarian political movements. The Councils never embraced doctrinaire resistance to state authority, or self-reliance of local communities, or exclusively horizontal power relationships. This is another instance of investigation left for another day.

Saudi Arms Sales, the Ghost of a Reporter, and America’s Oil War in Yemen

Charlotte Dennett

The brutal killing of George Floyd by police, followed by the president’s calls for military intervention against protestors, are causing words like “dictatorship,” “authoritarianism,” and even “fascism” to become part of the national discourse. But the president has been dismantling constitutional safeguards for a long time, and the racism he and his administration have broadcast across the nation extends around the world, too.

In Iraq, where civilian populations have long suffered under the heel of American militarism, protesters applauded the demonstrations in American cities. In Yemen, now in its fifth year of a US-armed Saudi war that has decimated civilian populations, its desperately poor people are bracing for an onslaught of covid-19 due to cuts in UN assistance by Gulf countries allied with the US. But while this tragedy is going largely unnoticed, some key American lawmakers are trying to hold the Trump Administration — and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in particular —accountable for mishandling the war in Yemen through illicit arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

A Congressional hearing on June 3rd focused on the abrupt firing last month of the man looking into the arms sales, the Inspector General charged with oversight of the State Department, including the secretary of state.

IG Steve Linick, who accused Pompeo of misconduct, has become the latest victim in a string of politically motivated firings of government watchdogs. If the president’s bunker mentality isn’t disturbing enough, a deeper look into this scandal shows how racism lies at the heart of Trump’s and Pompeo’s foreign policy. And how oil, most notably in the Middle East, and most particularly, in Yemen, is the driving force.

Trump’s Love Affair with Oil

Donald Trump, a mere real estate developer before becoming president, has not been shy about his love of the powerful oil industry, whether domestic or Middle Eastern. Defying Washington’s tradition of hiding the role of oil in foreign policy, he has embraced oil power exuberantly and unapologetically, as when he appointed Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon-Mobil, as his first secretary of state shortly after taking office. Then last fall he scandalized the international community when he redeployed American troops to Eastern Syria to “secure our [sic] oil.” Most recently, his administration secretively doled out at least $113 million to oil companies in taxpayer-backed loans under the Paycheck Protection Program, intended for small businesses hurt by Covid-19.

Now Trump’s brazenness is backfiring against his most recent Secretary of State. Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigating Linick’s firing last month want to know if it was an act of retaliation by Pompeo. The secretary has denied the charge, but his timing was certainly suspect.

As first reported by the Washington Post on May 16, Linick was wrapping up an investigation of Pompeo’s approval one year ago of unauthorized arms sales worth $8 billion to Saudi Arabia, defying the will of Congress. The weapons’ ultimate destination: the Saudis’ widely condemned war in Yemen, deemed the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis.

Linick briefed the State Department of his findings before issuing his report, which assuredly set off alarm bells in Pompeo’s office and plausibly resulted in Linick’s abrupt dismissal. The congressman who originally asked for the investigation, Representative Eliot Engel, Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Washington Post, “We don’t have the full picture yet but it’s troubling that Secretary Pompeo wanted Mr. Linick pushed out before this work could be completed.” In his testimony Wednesday, Linick said a top department official “bullied” him, pressuring him not to pursue his investigation into arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Democratic lawmakers, in a statement released after the testimony, urged the administration “to immediately comply with outstanding requests for additional witness interviews and documents.”

As with all things Middle East, it’s never easy to get the full picture right away. With oil riches gumming up so many human interactions, including war and pretexts for war, assassinations and regime changes, the path to the truth can be littered with lies. It took me decades of research and years of filtering that research into a book, for instance, to figure out what the Great Game for Oil had to do with the death of my father in a mysterious plane crash following his top-secret mission to Saudi Arabia.

Now, at least, I know where to look and how to look when questions loom. I  analogize this to peeling an onion, beginning with the most obvious question.

First peel: Why did Democrats and Republicans object to arms sales to Saudi Arabia last year?

The answer, in this case, can be boiled down to three words: cold blooded murder. The murder victim in this case was a Washington Post columnist and an exiled Saudi national named Jamal Khashoggi. Two months before his death in October, 2018, Khashoggi had written disparagingly about the Saudis’ disastrous war against Yemen, then in its third year. The war had become an acute international embarrassment, especially after Saudi coalition forces bombed a school bus on August 9, 2018 killing forty children and thirty-two nearby civilians. By August 19, CNN reported that the bomb used in the attack was a US-made, 227-kilogram laser guided bomb manufactured by Lockheed Martin.

News like this was not helpful to Saudi Arabia’s reigning crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (nicknamed MSM), nor to his closest allies, Donald Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who strived to turn Saudi Arabia into a mecca for international investment (think hotels and resorts along the Red Sea). Those ambitions crystallized a few months after the newly elected Trump took then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on his first official trip overseas in March, 2017 — not (as is tradition) to visit any of our democratic allies, but to visit Saudi Arabia, one of the most oppressive regimes in the world. That trip was made memorable by images of Trump jubilantly dancing the sword dance with his white-robed royal hosts.

As I pointed out in The Crash of Flight 3804, they were dancing for joy after negotiating $350 billion in US aid, including the sale of $100 billion in US armaments to the kingdom. It was a nice quid pro quo: You have oil, we have arms. We can make a lot of money from US arms sales and hotel tourism. provided you modernize Saudi Arabia and institute some reforms like letting women drive. In return, we will help you win your unpopular war in Yemen.

But Jamal Khashoggi kept getting in the way with his Washington Postcolumns. ”Saudi Arabia must face the damage from the past three plus years of war in Yemen,” he wrote on September, 2018. “The conflict has soured the kingdom’s relations with the international community and harmed its reputation in the Islamic world.” But Khashoggi didn’t stop there. He singled out Donald Trump’s “good friend,” crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, for additional criticism: “The crown prince must bring an end to the violence,” he wrote, concluding with a fatal barb, “and restore the dignity of the birthplace of Islam.”

One month later, Khashoggi was brutally murdered, hacked to pieces in the Saudi embassy in Turkey by a bone saw wielded by the head of Saudi security forces. During the ensuing investigation President Trump kept prevaricating over holding MBS (now widely referred to as Mohammed Bone Saw) responsible for Khashoggi’s murder despite international cries for accountability and the CIA’s assessment that MBS was behind the killing. Trump repeatedly reminded Americans of the kingdom’s importance as a “strong ally,” especially as a counterweight to Iranian ambitions in the Middle East. Pompeo, pictured here with the Saudi king just days after the Khashoggi murder, agreed.

Trump simply attributed the murder to “rogue killers” while making no commitment to lessening arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The armaments industry was, after all, creating a lot of jobs, he argued. It didn’t matter that the death toll in Yemen was fast approaching 100,000 since the war began in 2015.

This was just too much for Congress. Democrats and Republicans alike insisted Saudi Arabia would have to be punished for the war in Yemen and the murder of its most ardent critic, who, after all, had written for the powerful Washington Post. In early April, 2019 both the House and the Senate passed the Yemen War Powers Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at stopping all US involvement — including arms sales — to Yemen. On April 19, President Trump vetoed the bill.

The following month he and Pompeo declared emergency powers in order to bypass Congress and deliver $8 billion worth of arms sales, mostly to Saudi Arabia and its wartime ally, the United Arab Emirates, in order to stop “the malign influence of Iran in the middle East.” Once again, members of Congress cried foul, questioning Trump’s legal justification for invoking emergency powers and reiterating their concerns about Saudi Arabia’s dismal human rights record and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

Apparently, Representative Eliot Engel never got over Trump’s act of impunity, and so he called upon the Inspector General to investigate.

Second peel: Is there an oil connection to the US-Saudi war in Yemen?

It stands to reason, since Saudi Arabia ignored widespread condemnation to pursue its war in Yemen at all costs. That term, “at all costs,” has been employed repeatedly through decades of endless wars in the Middle East, beginning when my father wrote in a memo to his superiors at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1944 that the oil of Saudi Arabia was so vitally important to US interests that it had to be protected “at all costs.” Protected, that is, by vast amounts of US military assistance to the Kingdom, which from 1950 to the present amounts to trillions of dollars.

Fact is, Yemen is swimming in oil. Equally significant, the crown prince’s main concern has been “freedom of navigation” for oil tankers carrying Saudi oil, whether they pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow chokepoint at the bottom of the Persian/Arabian Gulf that separates eastern Saudi Arabia from Iran, or the Bab el Mandeb Strait on the western side of the Saudi peninsula. Problems arose in 2015, when Shiite-backed Houthi rebels gained control over much of northern Yemen, pushed out its corrupt pro-Western leader, and took control of Yemen’s capital. Next they began advancing on the oil-producing province of Ma’rib and beyond, toward the Bab el Mandeb Strait. To alleviate these worries, Saudi Arabia has embarked on building a pipeline–despite local protests — that will carry its oil straight to the southern Yemen port of Mukalla, on the Gulf of Aden, avoiding the two chokepoints.

The war in Yemen and the projected Saudi pipeline through Yemen, pictured in “The Crash of Flight 3804″.

At the same time, MSM made multiple trips to Washington seeking military aid, part of which would go toward protecting the pipeline.

Third peel: Did alleged threats from Iran warrant Trump’s declaration of emergency?

A series of attacks on oil tankers did, in fact, occur during the spring of 2019 that brought the world perilously close to another Middle Eastern war. The thing is, the identity of the perpetrators remains unresolved. Four oil tankers were damaged in early May, 2019, causing Pompeo to blame Iran, although “without citing specific evidence,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The Iranians vigorously denied the charges, and accused the US of trying to pull Iran into a war. Leaders around the world cautioned against war, including US allies. Pompeo accused Iran again of attacking two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman in June, again providing no evidence.

Small wonder, with skepticism about Iran’s involvement mounting at home and abroad, that Pompeo’s claim of a national emergency, caused some members of Congress to see the emergency as “phony.”

On September 14, 2019 another international crisis erupted when a series of drone and missile attacks hit Saudi oil facilities in Riyadh, causing significant damage and prompting a warning from President Trump that the US was “locked and loaded” in its readiness to respond. Pompeo declared the attacks an “act of war,” and tried to pull together a coalition at the UN to “deter” Iran. Once again, Iran denied responsibility, this time before the UN General Assembly, and challenged the US to provide evidence. Saner heads prevailed and war was narrowly averted.

But the attack on Saudi Arabia had one salutary effect: a surge in crude oil prices. Who benefited? One group in particular: US shale oil producers, who early on in Trump’s reign became overnight billionaires through heavy borrowing and financial mismanagement. Noted Bloomberg.com, “American shale producers, one of the worst-performing segments on the stock market this year, jumped Monday morning after an attack on a Saudi Arabia oil production facility over the weekend sent crude prices soaring.The spike in oil prices offers relief at a critical time for U.S. shale producers, which have seen investors flee after the sector largely failed to generate shareholder returns while rapidly growing output.”

Could this mean President Trump created a phony emergency and risked war with Iran to help his embattled friends (described in my previous blog) in the shale oil industry? So far, Pompeo has yet to turn over witnesses and documents. But if the truth ever comes out, it will surely confirm that protecting the riches of oil, “at all costs,” will trump protecting the rights of ordinary individuals here and abroad.

COVID-19 Will Devastate Indonesia Which Is Already Collapsing Under Brutal System

Andre Vltchek

In Jakarta, doctors are dying, while common people do not know which data to believe, anymore. It appears that even some government officials do not trust government statistics.

People in the slums are attacking ambulances, preventing patients infected with COVID-19 from being taken to hospitals. The novel coronavirus is a stigma. Tests are resisted, death certificates falsified. Social distancing, even basing norms of it, is ignored.

At the beginning of the pandemic, for weeks, the Indonesian government was pretending that there is no problem whatsoever, insisting that number of cases was zero, thanks to prayers and divine intervention.

While talking about God and prayers, the President was advising to drink traditional herbal medicine as prevention. Well, at least he was not pitching detergent or disinfectant, for oral consumption.

In February, after I finished filming in Borneo (Indonesian part of the third largest island on earth where it is called Kalimantan), my Garuda Indonesia flight from Pontianak to Jakarta was full of people coughing, apparently sick; very sick. While other countries in the region were already measuring temperature and introducing comprehensive measures to curtail the pandemic, Indonesia was shockingly but determinately doing absolutely nothing.

As always, in the fourth most populous country on Earth, there was no budget, no willingness, no enthusiasm, and zero know-how how to tackle the emergency.

It goes without saying that even without pandemic, the entire country is one huge health hazard. It has one of the lowest numbers of beds and doctors per thousand citizens, anywhere on Earth.

Since the 1965 U.S.-sponsored coup, Indonesia has been in turbo-capitalist mode, neglecting everything public, from sanitation to garbage collection, but especially education and health. “If it does not bring profits right away, then why to bother dealing with it”, could be the regime’s motto. Quite the opposite of what could be observed in two socialist super-stars: China and Vietnam.

After the last visit to Borneo, my guts were, for weeks, destroyed, and I experienced temporary near-blindness, as my eyes were attacked by some parasites.

While the present administration of President Joko Widodo (known in Indonesia by his nickname “Jokowi”) is getting ready to abandon Jakarta (which is overpopulated, unplanned, plundered of almost all green areas, full of misery and health-hazards) and move the capital to Kalimantan, at the cost of tens of billions of dollars, the medical facilities of the country are desperately inadequate, and on par with the poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

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Since March, my friends in Indonesia have written to me that there has been an absolutely unprecedented number of funerals, broadcasted by loudspeakers of local mosques.

Everybody knew someone, usually at least a few people, who either died from the COVID-19 or were suspected by relatives of dying from it.

An anonymous, man, 34 years old (a researcher/student, living in Jakarta), wrote to me:

“Here, people die for nothing. Our government treats human beings only as numbers, be it in connection with the presidential elections last year, or with the corona outbreak. People are angry and have lost their trust in the government. In dealing with the coronavirus outbreak, the central government interference only makes the situation worse. Our government has never felt guilty neither apologizes to its own people for incompetence in managing the country; for the 1965 genocide, the May 1998 riots, or now, for the mismanagement during the coronavirus disaster. One day, this will be all written in history books.”

Almost all disasters in Indonesia have an extremely devastating character. Tsunamis kill an unacceptably high number of people, because the early warning systems get stolen, but also due to lack of planning of coastal communities, as well as corruption. Earthquakes, volcano eruptions: all the same – no planning, no support for the poor. Lethargy, acceptance of fate, and sluggishness.

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Fear of COVID-19 triggered at least some initiatives among Indonesian citizens.

Bloomberg reported on May 29, 2020:

“Indonesia’s spiraling coronavirus crisis has citizens taking matters into their own hands, with networks of volunteers compiling data that shows the death rate in the world’s fourth-most populous nation may be three times higher than what the government says.

Concern that the country’s low testing rate means virus deaths were going unrecorded spurred citizens, health workers and scientists to set up LaporCovid-19 and KawalCOVID19, two open-source data platforms that allow people around Indonesia to report suspected Covid-19 deaths via WhatsApp and Telegram.

More than 4,000 deaths among suspected Covid-19 patients since early March haven’t been included in the official numbers, according to data collected by the platforms. That’s on top of the government’s tally of 1,520 fatalities, which already gives Indonesia the highest virus death rate in Southeast Asia.”

But even the estimates of extra 4,000 deaths seem to be extremely low. Some experts believe that both the number of cases, as well as fatalities, might be 15 times higher than the official numbers. That would be in line with the estimates for Brazil, yet another country which is governed by the extreme right-wing regime.

In a stark departure from the common Western mass media rule of not criticizing submissive, anti-left, and pro-market Indonesia, several mainstream publications in North America and Europe decided not to remain silent. That itself is news. On May 28, 2020, The New York Times fired a detailed and very accurate report on the COVID-19 which has been devastating the archipelago:

“In an alarming glimpse at what could be runaway transmission, a random sampling of 11,555 people in Surabaya, the country’s second largest city, found last week that 10 percent of those tested had antibodies for the coronavirus. Yet the entire province of East Java, which includes Surabaya, had 4,313 officially confirmed cases as of Thursday.

“Massive infection has already happened,” said Dono Widiatmoko, a senior lecturer in health and social care at the University of Derby and a member of the Indonesian Public Health Association. “This means it’s too late.”

Yet even as the country’s caseload accelerates, the Indonesian government has said that national coronavirus restrictions, already a scattershot effort, must be relaxed to save the economy.”

Indonesian leaders collaborate, in the most embarrassing and servile way, with all U.S. administrations. Democrats or Republicans, it does not seem to matter. But the current President Joko Widodo (Jokowi), is doubling his back in front of President Trump and his market fundamentalism. It is done in the most embarrassing and, for Indonesia, a destructive manner.

That may be the reason why the “liberal” press in the United States, generally hostile to Mr. Trump and his allies, is now ready to provide objective reporting about the dire state of the collapsed Indonesian state, which includes misery in which more than half of the population has to live, tremendous environmental devastation, or the COVID-19 disaster.

The New York Times report continued:

“There is widespread concern among public health experts, however, that Indonesia’s health care system will break down if the coronavirus spreads as intensely as it did in the United States or Europe.

Worryingly, more than half of Covid-19 deaths in Indonesia were of people below age 60. In the United States, most deaths have been among the elderly. The relative youth of the victims in Indonesia, health experts say, hints at hospitals that are unable to provide the kind of lifesaving treatment offered in other countries.

And epidemiologists fear an even bigger surge in cases next month. Last week, in a country with the largest Muslim population in the world, millions of Indonesians gathered to pray and travel at the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month. In the capital, Jakarta, more than 465,000 vehicles left the capital during the holiday period, according to a toll operator.

While the Indonesian government announced some coronavirus travel restrictions in late April, they have not been enforced rigorously, critics say. Loopholes abound. Airport staff have complained about entire families, including children, flying under exemptions meant for business travelers.

Modeling by epidemiologists at the University of Indonesia forecasts that up to 200,000 Indonesians may require hospitalization for the virus because of Ramadan-related activity.”

“Indonesia’s testing rates are the worst among the 40 countries most affected by the virus — 967 per 1 million people, compared to 46,951 per 1 million people in the United States, as of Wednesday — Indonesians, especially those with asymptomatic or mild cases, are unknowingly spreading the virus, infectious disease experts warn.”

And then, predictable and correct punch:

“The disaster is still coming,” said Dr. Pandu Riono, an epidemiologist who led the University of Indonesia’s modeling effort. “Even after many months, we still have leaders who believe in miracles rather than science. We still have terrible policies.”

For weeks, Jokowi’s government lied about the number of cases. “Not to cause panic’, he ‘explained’ later. As mentioned earlier, the government was bragging that there were no infections, because of the “prayers”, and prayer is what was suggested by the Minister of Health, to avoid getting infected by the virus. It was also advised, by the President, that people drink traditional herbal drinks, and exercise, as prevention.

For months, at least until March, the Indonesian government had been lying to the world and its citizens. Or, as some put it mildly, the government “was in denial”. While neighboring countries, like Singapore and Malaysia, were combating virus since January, Indonesia was sweeping facts under the carpet until March. Hospitals in Java were overflowing with pneumonia cases, but as many experts now suggest, the bodies were buried and coronavirus tests discouraged.

Consequences are often grotesque. Truth comes in bizarre ways. A university professor recently wrote to me that her husband, government official and city planner, was told to return to his office. She elaborated:

“He went back to work but lasted there only for a couple of days. Several of his colleagues, in one single building, fell ill with COVID-19. So, it was back to work from home. The government really does not know what it is doing.”

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Lying virtually about everything is a remarkable feature of the Indonesian regime. It lies about its past (whitewashing all about the 1965 fascist US-backed coup in which 2-3 million people were slaughtered), about its social collapse (much more than half of its citizens live in misery, but the government acknowledges only around 10%), even about the number of people who actually reside in the country. Ten years ago, I worked with the top U.N. statisticians who insisted that more than 300 million people were living in Indonesia, while the government claimed it was around 250 million at that time. Why? So, the most deprived people would not be scarring those lovely reports which have been glorifying extreme-capitalist country. And so that the budgets could easily disappear in deep corrupt pockets of government officials and corporate bosses, instead of feeding the poor.

Now, Jokowi’s government is ready to “open the country again”, in order to improve the economy. Pandemic will now, after Ramadan, most likely explode, but that does not seem to matter. Things can always be hushed, in a unique Indonesian way.

The Minister of Finance is already talking about the fight against poverty being pushed back, by many years. She is preparing people for upcoming suffering. That, while big Indonesian business is getting billions of dollars in bailouts and support.

She is an “expert”. She knows how the poor can get robbed efficiently. After all, Ms. Sri Mulyani Indrawati used to be Managing Director of the World Bank.

So far, despite social collapse (which goes so far unreported at home and abroad), environmental disasters, and on-going COVID-19 fiasco, one of the most heartless systems on Earth is surviving.

The logic is simple, but only if one is ready to see: If a country can deny the existence of over 50 millions of its citizens if it refuses to admit misery in which the majority of its people is forced to subsist if the ‘elites’ are allowed to steal endemically from the nation, then why wouldn’t regime just write-off tens of thousands of mainly poor people who are dying, undiagnosed and with hardly any help, from the COVID-19 or any other disease?

Indonesian blood-lettings are historically massive; millions of people, or at least tens of thousands at each time. Nobody remembers. Truth is never told. Communism and socialism are banned. Religions are obligatory. People are conditioned to accept their fate. Nothing new!