The Anti-Racist Feminist and the Corporate CEO

Thomas Klikauer & Nadine Campbell

In 2016, the former corporate leader and TV show host Donald Trump became US president. In the night that his victory was announced, previous Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader David Duke described the event as one of the most exciting nights of my life. A year later, the FBI revealed that hate crimes increased for a second consecutive year, with attacks targeting Muslim and Jewish people as well as the LGBTQ community.

Corporate leaders and right-wing leaders are legitimized through German sociologist Max Weber’s l’idée fixe of the so-called charismatic leader. The grant certifier of the Kaiser’s Wilhelminian Empire, Max Weber, not only legitimized corporate leaders but also domination. Soon, Weber’s charismatic leaders mutate into Managerialism’s favorite hobby-horse, the transformational leader, even though Weber also thought there are visionary, authentic, spiritual, and wise leaders.

Over the last four decades, business schools and an ever compliant business press have done everything in their ideological and broadcasting powers to cement the l’idée fixe that business organizations need leaders, corporate apparatchiks, and of course, the heroic CEO. Since leadership does not come naturally, it had to be socially constructed. In the case of corporate leaders, the ideology of leadership is largely managerially constructed in business schools. Despite rafts of business professorships, management leadership journals, leadership conferences, MBA degrees, thousands of articles in the business press, and in semi-scholarly outlets like the Harvard Business Review, the fact remains that there is no core universal truth of leadership to be discovered.

Still, the ideology of corporate leaders remains a very good business even when it mostly sells taken for granted ideas – often presented as leadership theories. In the real world of corporate leaders, they are more often than not defined through two key elements. Firstly, almost universally, they are men, and secondly, corporate leaders tend to be white. Rarely is this made part of the business school curriculum apart from an elective run as a Friday night class. This is done so that business schools can claim, “oh, we cover this”. Almost all business school professors just don’t write on white supremacy because writing about supremacy is painful, and might even point the finger at themselves. Business school professors are – more often than not – white, middle-aged men, more or less mirroring the world of management.

Ever since management writer Henri Fayol’s rather militaristic “chain-of-command”, Frederick Taylor’s authoritarian management ideas, and Alfred Chandler’s “field units”, the idea that militaristic leaders mirror corporate leaders have taken hold and has been re-told ever since in management, business school, and its ideological pamphlets called academic journals. In standard business school writing, is not at all surprising to find highly ideological passages like these,

The English would undoubtedly have lost the battle of Agincourt if they had underestimated the importance of the leadership factor. Any astute observer of organizations will notice that CEOs have a considerable impact on their companies.

This is the love-song of a white man for the militaristic, corporate, and above all-male, leader. This is designed to legitimize the white supremacy and masculinity of corporate CEOs of which, in 2018, just 27 of the Fortune 500 were women (barely 5.4%), and just three were black men (0.6%) – not women. From Bezos to Musk to Zuckerberg to Gates, and on it goes, corporate power means the power of the white man. To legitimize their domination, business school professor and the corporate business press sells the need for corporate leaders as common sense, as normal, and even as natural. Ex-CEO Donald Trump just represents a slightly more extreme version of macho-management.

Like Donald Trump, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, Branson & Co have all but transmuted into celebrity CEOs reinforcing the domination assuring ideology of patriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism – now sold as globalization. To legitimize this even further, token-females like Sheryl Sandberg have been wheeled out, occasionally that is. It is conservative feminism recast in terms of Hayek’s neoliberalism. This is individual advancement – not social progress. Almost self-evidently, the false promises of feminine corporate leadership had to remain unfulfilled.

In the conflict of feminism against Marx and the ever-alluring question: will women feminize and thereby humanize the workplace or will the power of capitalism, companies, and corporations force women to become just like male CEOs, Marx won hands down. In other words, female CEOs operate like just men taking on the ruthless traits of the corporation and corporate capitalism. Just as Maggie Thatcher caused the death of men in an isolated, if not desolated, place called the Falklands Island to get re-elected. It worked – they died, and she got re-elected.

Like business schools, corporations like to present themselves as an inclusive place with lovely pictures on their websites showing a diversity of people and, of course, plenty of smiling women. Often, it is not much more than visual branding. In reality, it deliberately over-represents the diversity found in corporate management and the average business school. Still, the image of a colorful happy face aids the false picture of inclusion and even progressiveness. More often than not, corporate apparatchiks interpret diversity through the logic of capital, focusing on how companies and corporations can use people of color to further their corporate agenda.

The very same corporate agenda is secured when the media reports of – yet another – business scandal. In cementing the “bad apply” ideology, these reports tend to focus on an individual CEO while never questioning the system of corporate apparatchiks, CEOs, and corporate capitalism. Instead, a glorification of heroic leadership takes place. During corporate scandals, the media sacrifice one in order to save the many. Beyond that, scandals are used to show that the system is working and business ethics – a contradiction in terms – is here to do two things: it identifies the bad apples, and it assures the continuation of the “nothing wrong with the system” ideology. This is the raison d’être of business ethics as much as of corporate social responsibility.

Undeterred from business scandals, leadership fantasies continue to be perpetrated by corporations, the media, and business schools. Everyone is it, and everyone is a winner. Corporations and good corporate leadership are shown to be needed and good. Business schools run business ethics classes to show that corporations are good. They receive full-fee paying MBA students and employ business professors. The business press receives advertising from corporations and even from business schools that often function look-a-likes of corporations. Finally, business school professors and deans can fly business class and meet important clients in the business lounge and for business lunches. It is an ingenious set up that severs all those who are part of it – not the precariat and not the women toiling away in outsourced sweatshops in Bangladesh. Meanwhile, business schools sell all this as ethical leadership or even more fashionable: as ethical stewardship.

The key to all this is that the faith is in the heroic leader. Of course, this also includes The White Man’s Burden, as presented by Rudyard Kipling, author of the Jungle Book. This is the image of the white savior bringing civilization to non-whites. Much of this reaches deep into popular culture with Harrison Ford (the white leader) freeing enslaved and non-white children in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett carry the same ideology forward. Two old white men are saving non-white African children from the misery the white man has brought to Africa with highlights like the slave trade, also known as the Triangle of Death. Like Harrison Ford, corporate leaders like Gates and Buffett, as well as Donald Trump, are well aware of the power of impression management. This is not really all that new. Historically, Robber Barons, like John D. Rockefeller, turned to philanthropy to save their reputation – it worked rather well. The Rockefeller Foundation is well known – Rockefeller’s Ludlow Massacre is mostly forgotten. Propaganda works. In the world of corporate propaganda – now called public relations, the center for sustainable leadership is by no means the height of all this.

Corporate PR ideologically underpins the masculine ideal of corporate leadership, cementing a Euro-American dominated culture designed to present domination not only as eternal but also as inherently good. One of the most common ideologies found in business schools, for example, is the l’idée fixe that the world had always had leaders. In her insightful book, Redeeming Leadership, Helena Liu, for example, argues that,

the typical business school degree reinforces imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist and patriarchal ideologies equipping graduates with the hegemonic values they then identify and reproduce in their everyday lives at work and beyond.

The quote shows how Managerialism works. Trained in business schools, corporate apparatchiks and managerial leaders run corporations with the dehumanizing gaze of a dominator. Their entire system enforces the hierarchical “Class Ceiling” legitimized through the worker-leader ideal. It conjures up fantasies of a society in which everyone can rise to the top – just look at Zuckerberg – and the fata morgana of a fair workplace based on meritocracy where ability prevails and where the old boys club no longer runs the show.

In reality, these workplaces are still run by corporate apparatchiks glorifying the ideal of the business conquest in which the male CEO is in control of “his” business organization. On the other side of the coin are those structurally disadvantaged and defined as non-dominant groups, the subordinates, underlings, or simply a human resource – a resource just like cattle, an apparatus, or implement. When non-white underlings highlight white power in management and the self-assign privileges of the corporate apparatchiks, they will be accused of “play the race card”.

What works in management works in management studies just as well where so-called “leadership studies” have mutated into a preferred playground for white, middle-aged business school professors. Being part of the boys club and being friends with the gatekeepers of academic journals – known as editors – they, again, get preferential treatment in so-called ‘prestigious journals‘.

These journals tell anyone to think outside the box but exist inside a tidily controlled box. In many cases, these are nothing but the outlets of the ever same. They publish the same meaningless trivialities in various versions over ten years. This is called “having an established track record”. It adds very little to scientific advancement, which is no longer the point anyway. The point is individual advancement – the next job or the next promotion. Candidates for university promotion often face managerialist committees staffed all those who have never had an original thought in their entire academic existence. Failing scholarly and worse, failing intellectually, they become corporate apparatchiks hooked on Impact Fetishism (output rather than sense) like being addicted to crack cocaine.

Here, another white, middle-aged gatekeeper assesses a candidate’s academic work. It is, most likely, a person put into place because of admin credentials. The appointment to a selection committee comes via other corporate apparatchiks – this time, they are university apparatchiks. In business schools, both are highly similar. The dress code, the managerialist language, the superior behavior, etc. mirror those found in the average business class lounge and almost any corporate office. These are the engineers of structural violence. They smile in your face and tell you how much they support empowerment.

“Despite the celebratory and celebrated language around female empowerment, emerging ideals of female leadership bear a similar imperialist heritage to masculine leadership models”, writes Helena Liu. The irony is that much of this is often implicit or structural violence. It has become naturalized. In business schools, it is assumed to be natural. The same goes for management in universities.

Leadership, structural violence, and domination are normalized and unquestioned just as the denial of the fact that managerial leadership not only means followers, subordinates, and underlings, but it also means the exclusion of democracy. Still, every manager of corporate affairs and even those inside universities and business schools will tell you that we live in a democracy. This marks yet another Spectacular Achievement of Propaganda.

Set against that are four options for resistance against the structural violence that governs university and corporate leadership. It all starts with decolonizing one’s mind or what might also be called “A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense – Find your inner Chomsky“. Secondly, find non-abusive and non-violent ways of relating to other people while trying to escape the pathological nightmare of Managerialism that governs our workplaces. Thirdly, re-imaging social meaning beyond the myths of leadership; and fourthly, read Helena Liu’s exquisite book “Redeeming Leadership” published by Bristol University Press.

Conspiracy Panic

Nicholas Levis

The most consequential false conspiracy theory of the last twenty years in the United States centered on fabricated accusations raised against the Iraqi state in 2002-3. These claimed that Iraq maintained secret stores of “weapons of mass destruction” and intended to use them against the West, perhaps imminently. Most versions also insinuated the Saddam regime was involved in some vague manner in perpetrating the 9/11 attacks together with its sworn enemies, the jihadi movements then doing business as al-Qaeda. That is what the vice-president running the regime, Cheney, repeatedly said. His president, Bush, just repeated the magic words 9/11-Saddam-9/11-Saddam-9/11 for months, until it was taken to be true by enough people to allow a smooth start to the carnage. The claims were actively fabricated by officials and agents at several agencies of the U.S., UK and other national security states, by various client groups and allied journalists, and by freelance assholes looking to get a piece of the action. The fabricators knew they were lying, and they knew that they lied so as to sell a planned, unprovoked war of aggression to the American, UK, and other western publics. The resulting war destroyed a nation, led to more than a million deaths, and accelerated the establishment of an archipelago of torture centers under U.S. control.

In short, the “Saddam-WMD-9/11” conspiracy theory was a top-down psychological operation conducted by state-based agents against the public, and freely trumpeted by nearly all organs of the U.S. corporate media. It has been completely discredited, but rarely will you here it called a conspiracy theory. None of the perpetrators of the campaign have been prosecuted, and most have continued their career trajectories unhindered by their participation in this well-known crime. Today many of them have been embraced by the Democratic establishment as heroic fighters against Trump — the same Democratic establishment that always seeks distance from actual fighters against Trump.

The most consequential American conspiracy theories ever were the Red Scares of 1919-21 and the late 1940s and early 1950s. Both met with a degree of popular enthusiasm and broad fear-based assent, but both were initiated and run by state and corporate-based elements as top-down psychological operations against the public, specifically targeting the left, labor organizers, and journalists, celebrities or teachers who showed insufficient anti-Communist fervor. Both campaigns succeeded in transforming American society and politics in a right-wing direction, and helped in partly dismantling the progressive, leftist and honestly liberal movements of their times.

A recent conspiracy panic campaign, #Russiagate, presented a mythic (and facially laughable) explanation for how the Democrats managed to lose the unloseable 2016 election. It appears to have been intended to weaken or to knock Trump out of office. If so, it backfired completely, presenting a fictional distraction from the far-worse realities of the regime’s violent policies and incipient fascism. Every time that the ludicrous and byzantine accusations fell apart (predictably, in every case), Trump’s position was strengthened, and that of real opposition to Trump’s barbarities was weakened.

Given their failure to actually fight Trump on policy, and given the Democrats’ embrace of Bushian politics and Bush-era war criminals, austerity, and imperialism, and given their propping-up of a right-wing candidate who has his own degree of involvement in Trump-style nepotism and is visibly suffering from cognitive impairment, Trump would be cruising to reelection. Cruising, that is, except for the unpredictable factors of Covid, the Depression, and the open outbreaks of organized fascist street violence that he praises. And because a real opposition to this regime’s particular horrors exists, and has not surrendered. (If they lose, the Democrats will blame the real opposition, and are already doing so preemptively.) Thus, for the moment, Trump is well behind in the polls, despite the four-year favor to him delivered by the #Russiagate operation with its demand for 24/7 coverage and predictable serial failures.

However, the #Russiagate conspiracy panic operation also succeeded, insofar as it has functioned to condition most Democratic-type liberals (and some of the left) to uncritically accept a xenophobic explanation for the rise of an all-American fascism, and insofar as it has gained much support among them for a bellicose, new-Cold War stance and widepread favor for censorship measures (run by private mega-corporations) to combat “propaganda” and “conspiracy theory.”

It cannot be known at this time, but the QAnon narrative appears likely to have also originated with an intel operation, or the action of a Trump-friendly outfit, with the design of casting noise over a story that sounds just like it, but is actually true. Trump, Bill Clinton and various celebrities and intellectual hooligans were all tied to the long-time human trafficking and rape-ring run by likely intelligence asset and “billionaire” Jeffrey Epstein. He was convicted, and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell stands accused. The operation’s apparent purpose was to gain material for political blackmail. Trump’s former labor secretary, Acosta, was formerly the Florida prosecutor who made a deal to allow the convicted Epstein to walk free in 2008, and to seal the records of his clients. It’s fine to condemn QAnon, but when you spend your hours talking about how ridiculous and hateful and wrong the story is, you are not talking about Epstein and Trump and Clinton (and the various other Epstein “friends”). You are not talking about or acting on a million other things that matter. From the perspective of the QAnon propagators, you are helping to promote and reinforce the ruse.

America, like many places, is home to fantastically, facially false grand conspiracy narratives positing that the political economy (so evidently managed by a ruling class of owners and corporations and policy-makers reigning over large instituions, who act mostly in the open) is secretly run by a single, smaller, invisible cabal of satanically-inclined mystery men who just want to do evil because they hate America, or maybe because they want to destroy Trump’s beautiful white race. There are many varieties of grand-global conspiracy theories, but they often pander to odious, hateful, and exterminationist politics. The latter are often modeled on the old European anti-Semitic blood libel, or, in fact, repeat the old European anti-Semitic blood libel.

Grand-global conspiracy narratives can appeal to a common socio-psychological make-up that hankers for denial and magic and simplicity, for stories that attribute social ills and human troubles to a corruption that can be theoretically excised, restoring a normality that never really existed as it is now imagined. In this they are akin to other quick-fix narratives, many of them based in religious dogmas (e.g. bad things happen because people reject Jesus and commit acts the Bible supposedly prohibits; or, to take a now-abandoned version, alcohol consumption is the true primary cause of social ills and prohibition can fix it). For most, the reality that their society is systematically rotten to the core, burning the planet, and heading for a predictable fall, and that any change to this reality must be revolutionary or will be nothing, is much harder to process, above all emotionally. It also subjects one to the accusation of radicalism, extremism, or “conspiracy theory.”

I dispute that very many people change their politics or prejudices or world-view as a result of exposure to one of the global-type conspiracy theories. On the contrary, these are devised to aggrandize and manipulate already-existing political tendencies. People tend to believe what they were long-ago conditioned to believe, and they tend to see what they believe. And remember, the most effective and consequential conspiracy theories in the modern milieu are rarely products of autopoeitic convergences of mass psychology. They almost always have original authors who know that they are inventing this shit, like QAnon. They are the products of modern public relations and popular mood management.

Granting that grand-global conspiracy narratives exist, the use of the phrase “conspiracy theory” in American discourse has always been rotten as fuck. Whether true or not, whether or not believable or grounded in evidence, any claims that attribute malfeasance to the American ruling class and policy-making power elite, or to the actual owners and runners of a system in which high-level crime was long ago legalized, is derided as “conspiracy theory” by the very same ruling class, power elite, corporate media, punditry, and liberal-authoritarian establishment. However, claims that mirror the same narratives, but allege them against an officially designated enemy, are never called conspiracy theory. In fact, once the latter tales are circulated within the corporate news media, to question them comes itself to be classified as conspiracy theory. You are a conspiracy theorist if you reject the outlandish #Russiagate conspiracy theories. And, once called a conspiracy theorist, you are supposed to be automatically and forever discredited from participating in public discourse. Increasingly, you are seen as the bearer of a dangerous and contagious disease, associated loosely with all other persons categorized as “conspiracy theorists,” and treated as fair game for censorship.

Conspiracy panic is a propaganda weapon that props up an overall portrayal of the mass of the people (and especially critics of the ideological hegemony, of whatever stripe, good or bad) as ipso-facto stupid, preemptively discredited, crazy, unworthy of participation in discourse, and dangerous. Conspiracy panic nowadays is a go-to for liberals to deny and distract and divert to incremental bullshit, and not have to think about systemic irrationality, falsehood, evils and failures, and how most of the unfolding disasters — including Trump himself — are not aberrations or surprises but predictable and systemic. It’s easier and more comforting to affect being appalled at the stupidity of QAnon (or the supposed millions who were moved to vote for Trump only because they saw a “Russian” post online), and to virtue-signal that you are different from the dumb right-wing patsies who eat that shit up, than to spend too much time being aware that the billionaire and corporate and ensconced policy-making ruling class as a whole — their names are known and plastered in the headlines — is by definition a predator class, professionally incapable of mercy, with overwhelming power over the rest of us, acting in ways that guarantee capitalism and its “ways of life” will continue burning the planet, literally, until the ecosystem’s capacity to sustain the present human civilization and population collapses. Which, speaking in historical lengths, is imminent, and possibly no longer reversible. Fight this anyway.

Repeal Section 230 to Fix Facebook

Dean Baker

Many people are worried that Facebook is playing the same role in the 2020 election that it did in the 2016 election, acting as a conduit for massive amounts of false and misleading information. They hope that Mark Zuckerberg will rise to the task and act to limit the spread of false and hateful stories.

This blind faith in Mark Zuckerberg is bizarre. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are there to make money. Fostering democracy is not really on their agenda, in the same way that helping the Kansas City Royals win the World Series is not on their agenda. If we want to be serious about limiting the sort of abuses that happened in 2016 we need to recognize that Facebook is about making money: full stop. And, we have to make sure that Facebook, or a Facebook like entity, is not making big bucks pushing nonsense stories related to the election.

The quickest way to fix the problem is the repeal of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. This provision exempts Facebook from being liable for material that is passed along through its network, either as ads or through individuals’ or groups’ Facebook pages.

This provision means that if someone buys ads on Facebook, or spreads a false story through a Facebook page, say that a prominent person is actually a serial killer, Facebook would face no liability. The person who spread the story could be sued for libel, but the victim of this libel would have no case against Facebook itself because of Section 230.

There would be logic to this exemption if Facebook were a common carrier like a telephone company. A telephone company charges people for use, either by the minute or the month, it doesn’t make a profit from the content of people’s calls. For this reason, it makes sense that AT&T can’t be held liable if people spread false and damaging stories over its lines.

We might feel differently about exempting AT&T if it was monitoring our calls and selling ads based on the things that we said or heard on these calls. However, this is exactly what Facebook does. They know everything we post and everything we look at. This is how Facebook makes its money, they can sell our eyeballs to advertisers since their system allows them to know in very great detail who we are and what we are interested in.

This is why exempting Facebook from facing the same sort of liability as its competitors in traditional media, like the New York Times or Time-Warner, makes zero sense. If these media outlets have to be responsible for the material they carry, why shouldn’t Facebook also be held responsible?

To be clear, the issue is not a direct act of libel by Facebook. If Facebook were to directly post a false and damaging charge against someone, it could be sued for libel in the same way as a traditional media outlet. The issue is with third party posters. If the New York Times runs an ad, a column, or a letter to the editor, it can be sued for libelous content.

In fact, the famous New York Times v. Sullivan case, which established that to win a libel suit public figures had to overcome a greater burden in establishing reckless disregard of the truth than an ordinary citizen, was over an ad placed in the New York Times, not the news or editorial content of the paper. In spite of this fact, there was no legal question that the New York Times would have been forced to pay damages, if it was determined that the ad actually met the standard of being libelous. It doesn’t make sense that Facebook should be subject to a different standard just because its medium is the Internet rather than a print publication.

Removing Section 230 protections would mean both that it could be sued for libelous content in a paid ad and that it could also be sued for libelous content transmitted through its system on individual or group Facebook pages. The first sort of liability is straightforward, just as traditional media outlets know they have to scrutinize ads for libelous material before accepting them, Facebook would have to go through the same process. This would make the process of buying ads on Facebook more time-consuming, and impose more costs on Facebook, but so what? If traditional media outlets have to spend resources to prevent the spread of libelous material through their ads, why shouldn’t Facebook have to incur the same costs?

The issue of individuals’ or groups’ postings is a bit more complicated, but not too much more. It would be unreasonable to expect that Facebook would scrutinize every item someone wants to post on its system for libelous content before it is actually posted. However, it could do this after the fact, when a complaint was brought.

The way this could work is that if a person, group, or corporation believes that they are being libeled by material posted on a Facebook page, they would bring their complaint to the company’s attention. Facebook could be allowed some reasonable period of time to assess the complaint. If it determined that the material is in fact libelous, then it would be obligated to remove it from the page(s) where it appeared.

Since Facebook’s system allows it to know everyone who viewed the libelous material, it would also be required to send out a notice to all these people indicating that the material was libelous and had been removed from the page where it had appeared. If Facebook failed to take these steps in a timely manner or determined that the material was not libelous, then it could be sued just like the New York Times was in Times v. Sullivan.

Mark Zuckerberg would undoubtedly be appalled at the idea that his company could potentially be held liable for all manner of nutty posts that appear on his system. He would have to spend large amounts of money paying people to evaluate the claims. Facebook would end up being a much less profitable, and likely a far smaller company. In that world, there would be little reason to care what Facebook’s policy was on political advertising since it would matter much less.

People obviously like Facebook, since they use it, but changing the law would not mean that this sort of social network type system would go out of existence. While Facebook may be hugely downsized, there could be other competitors that would step up as competitors.

We may also see systems set up that actually are common carriers, that would get the exemption laid out in Section 230. These would be systems that charged a flat fee, say $10 a year, to carry people’s pages, and allow them to interact with others on the network. (I have no idea if $10 would be a reasonable fee to cover costs and allow for a reasonable profit, but since this sort of system should require minimal labor inputs, hopefully $10 a year would be in the ballpark.)

These systems would not sell ads, nor would they acquire personal information on the people that used them. They would be similar to the on-line bulletin boards that many of us used in the early days of the Internet, although advances in technology would allow them to have much more sophisticated graphics and video material.

It is absurd that so many people are in the position of hoping and praying that Mark Zuckerberg will be responsible in how he deals with the 2020 election. We should never be in the position of having to rely on the goodwill of a billionaire to allow democracy to work. Repealing Section 230 will put an end to this problem.

Digital Polarization and the Religion of Profit

Sandeep Pandey & Shivi Saba

What purpose does a religion serve? It serves you the meaning of living a life in the right way. Lately, the sentiment around the religion in our country is undergoing transformation, religion has become a marker of character. Earlier this thinking was limited to a very small section of society but now the politics of majoritarianism has taken over. It has influenced the government, administration, police, judiciary and the media. By conflating majority Hindu religion with nationalism the problem has been further compounded. So much so that every wrong, such as violence done in the name of religion, is sought to be justified. On the other hand Muslim citizens become a suspect in the eye of system. Innocent Muslims as well as those who are critical of the Hindutva ideology are falsely implicated in legal cases because they are viewed as anti-nationals. Laws like sedition, Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and National Security Act are invoked so that the accused have to spend years in jail without trial and bail. In Uttar Pradesh, where the police have failed to control the law and order situation, out of 139 cases registered under NSA, 76 are related to cow slaughter. It shows the misplaced priorities of and the abuse of police to achieve its political agenda by the Bharatiya Janata Party government which is being played up by the media of our country. People are using digital platform to incite hate and anger, sadly there is no control over it. This politics of communalism is creating mistrust among the communities as never before and has led to many dreadful events, taking a heavy toll on social fabric of this country.

We live in a society with over 3,000 castes and over 10 major faiths. Yet a kid won’t know when he will call his friends for gully cricket their faith or caste but as they grow society molds our thinking. Our syncretic culture has an inbuilt tolerance. People of different religions and castes have learnt to live together over generations respecting each other’s views and often go out of their way to help each other. For every communal incident we also hear stories of how Hindus saved Muslims and vice versa. But unfortunately politics of communalism is polarizing the society resulting in mental ghettoisation.

Mob lynching incidents, which initially targeted Muslims and Dalits, are now on the rise as people are emboldened to take law into their hands even in other matters. Pure human emotions like love have not been spared. Love jihad is used as a pretext to hound inter-religious couples, just as inter-caste couple are persecuted. The jihad concept was extended to COVID-19 crisis accusing Muslims of spreading the virus. And now one channel has come out with a story that Muslims are infiltrating the civil services. Sachar Committee report tells us that Muslims are under-represented in service sector in proportion to their population essentially because education levels among the community are comparatively lower, but that is how the media is distorting the reality, implications of which are very dangerous for the well being of our society.

Our morality has been numbed by this communal-patriarchal-casteist thinking that our conscience is not pricked by even the cruelest acts. When a barber Ikhlaq from Uttar Pradesh went to Haryana in search of work his right hand which had a ‘786’ tatoo on it was amputated by a saw machine. 786 has religious significance in Islam just as ‘Om’ in Hinduism. It has nothing provocative about it, yet Ikhlaq has been permanently disabled to pursue his vocation for livelihood. Slogans like Jai Shree Ram and Allah-O-Akbar have become war cries defeating the whole purpose of religion. What purpose this hate campaign can serve except to create long lasting fissures in society?

When Wall Street Journal recently carried a story on how Facebook deliberately allowed hate speech content by some BJP leaders including T. Raja Singh to keep the government in good humour, even though it played a role in instigating communal riots, it has sparked a debate on free speech. Ultimately Raja Singh’s content was removed but a number of BJP leaders including the Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad objected to the curb on right to freedom of expression of their colleagues. Does the right to free speech give one a right to endanger somebody’s life? It is interesting that BJP leaders advocate for their freedom of speech but anybody else found to be crtical of their government or leaders or even past Hindutva leaders are likely to be booked by the police. Recently UP police went all the way to Odisha to arrest a Muslim youth who made some adverse comments about Yogi Adityanath and Narendra Modi on social media. And now the UP government is creating a Special Security Force with a power to search and arrest without warrant. We can very well imagine who the likely victims will be.

Media, with some exception, has readily propagated the right wing ideology either to curry favour from government or under duress. The manipulation by the media channels, trying to feed the negativity to serve their rating, has been damaging to our society. The social media platforms have spread fake news sometimes resulting in violent incidents. Hatred and stupidity are on brazen display on these platforms. Innocence of human beings has been replaced by cunningness.

During the time of pandemic when people are mostly at homes the news channels have stooped to a new low in indulging in sensationalism. Journalism is losing its essence, it’s no longer about issues but it has taken the role of judging people’s character. To ensure that no hard questions are asked about its inept handling of the crisis at border created by China, the BJP has invented enemies like Rhea Chakraborty and Shiv Sena so that energies of its supporters are directed internally. Nobody is interested in the real question of how drugs make it to our society with the collusion of authorities. Meanwhile, the BJP is unashamedly using Sushant Singh Rajput’s issue as an election issue in Bihar diverting the attention from the misery of migrant workers who are facing a dual crisis due to floods. The media is simply lapping it all up.

We have to ask some serious questions. How is the national politics and media relevant to a child who sleeps without food at night because there is unemployment? Is poverty no longer an issue in a country with most number and proportion of poor in the world? Where is the conscience of media which is required to play the role of fourth pillar of democracy?  With unemployment going up the information broadcasters are earning enough money to feed gossip but will they be able to feed an empty stomach of a family whose lives have been devastated by the lockdown? What we see or listen we tend to believe, that’s the power we have given to the TV channels and they are abusing the power of information. An uneducated man or a villager is not interested in the Bollywood. The journalism in our country is dying and the people are enjoying the funeral because they are getting their daily soap fun. Journalism means research and showing the truth, posting the current events and not twisting a person’s mind with false fancy information.

It’s no secret how the elections of 2014 and 2019 were influenced with the power of technology. The feed on our Facebook and other platforms are customized menu offered to us, the fashion videos or the food videos are not randomly there on your feed.  Sure, it is easy to just be glued to your phone and watch or get served what you ordered thereafter the rest of the menu follows without you searching for it. The extensive reach of the platforms has posed a danger to our society as whole. Since the feed for each individual is customized the opinion of a person is shaped accordingly but the downside is the race for attention of the masses and the electronic media is the most aggressive player in the game. Electronic media in India is more of drama than actual journalism. As a human mind is more prone to sensationalism, the advantage is being taken by the electronic media. The real issues like the falling GDP, the situation of migrant workers, farmers’ misery all fade vis-a-vis the suicide of a Bollywood actor, Shiv Sena leader equating demolition of Kangana Ranaut’s office to Babri Masjid’s or the politics of Hindu Muslim binary. People get carried away as they are being fed the drama and tend to forget about the actual problems, this has created polarization to a great extent in India. People hate each other for their ideology, even in families there is polarization among the kids and their parents because the kids are critical of the Government.

Is that the world one wants to live in? Where we have differences among our family members? Hate boiling in our blood for our ideology? Use of religion or caste to demean others?The external threat faced by the country can be countered only by fostering equality, liberty, and most of all fraternity, amongst its citizens and not by playing the divisive politics internally.

Maybe it’s time to rethink our actions and conscience! Remember that Idea advertisement? Where people had no religion, no caste just their phone numbers as their identity.

If people were more thoughtful there would be less hatred and violence and more love in our world.

Isolation and Opioids During the Pandemic

Mattea Kramer

In our new era of nearly unparalleled upheaval, as a pandemic ravages the bodies of some and the minds of nearly everyone, as the associated economic damage disposes of the livelihoods of many, and as even the promise of democracy fades, the people whose lives were already on a razor’s edge — who were vulnerable and isolated before the advent of Covid-19 — are in far greater danger than ever before.

Against this backdrop, many of us are scanning the news for any sign of hope, any small flicker of light whose gleam could indicate that everything, somehow, is going to be okay. In fact, there is just such a flicker coming from those who have been through the worst of it and have made it out the other side.

I spoke with Rafael Rodriguez of Holyoke, Massachusetts, on a sweltering Thursday afternoon in late July. He had already spent hours that day on Zoom and, though I could feel his exhaustion through our pixilated connection, he was gracious. His salt-and-pepper beard neatly trimmed, he nodded gently in answer to my questions. “Covid-19 has made it more and more apparent how stigmatizing it is to be less fortunate,” he said. As we spoke, the number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits had just ticked up to around 30 million, or about one in every five workers, with nearly 15 million behind on their rent, and 29 million reporting that their households hadn’t had enough to eat over the preceding week. Rodriguez is an expert in what happens after eviction or when emergency aid dries up (or there’s none to be had in the first place) — what becomes, that is, of those in protracted isolation and despair.

Drug-overdose deaths were up 13% in the first seven months of this year compared to 2019, according to research conducted by the New York Times covering 40% of the U.S. population. More than 60% of participating counties nationwide that report to the Overdose Detection Mapping Application Program at the University of Baltimore saw a sustained spike in overdoses following March 19th, when many states began issuing social-distancing and stay-at-home orders. This uptick arrived atop a decades-long climb in drug-related fatalities. Last year, before the pandemic even hit, an estimated 72,000 people in the United States died of an overdose, the equivalent of sustaining a tragedy of 9/11 proportions every two weeks, or about equal to the American Covid-19 death toll during its deadliest stretch so far, from mid-April to mid-May.

What people do in the face of protracted isolation and despair is turn to whatever coping strategy they’ve got — including substances so strong they can be deadly.

“I think of opioids as technologies that are perfectly suited for making you okay with social isolation,” said Nancy Campbell, head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and author of OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose. Miraculously, an opioid overdose can be reversed with the medicine naloxone, commonly known by the brand name Narcan. But you can’t use naloxone on yourself; you need someone else to administer it to you. That’s why Campbell calls it a “technology of solidarity.” The solidarity of people looking out for one another is a necessary ingredient when it comes to preserving the lives of those in the deepest desolation.

Yet not everyone sees why we should save people who knowingly ingest dangerous substances. “I come from a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania and I have a large extended family there,” Campbell told me. She remembers a family member asking her, “Why don’t we just let them die?”

Any of us can answer that question by imagining that the person who just overdosed was the one you love most in the world — your daughter, your son, your dearest friend, your lover. Of course you won’t let them die; of course it’s imperative that they have another chance at life. There are people like Rafael Rodriguez who have dedicated themselves to ensuring that their neighbors have access to naloxone and other resources for surviving the absolute worst. One day, naloxone may indeed save someone you love. Perhaps it already has.

Another technology of solidarity has recently become commonplace in our lives: the face mask. Wearing such a mask tells others that you care about their well-being — you care enough to prevent the germs you exhale from becoming the germs they inhale, and then from becoming the germs they exhale in the company of still others. Face masks save lives. The face mask is a technology of solidarity. So is naloxone. And so is empathy.

“The Sheer Power of Being With Someone in the Moment”

As Rafael Rodriguez slowly told his astonishing story, I could see on my computer screen a spartan office behind him and a single bamboo shoot, its stem curled beneath a burst of foliage. When he was younger, he said, he used food as his coping mechanism for an embattled life, over-eating to the point where doctors worried he would die. Then, at age 23, he underwent gastric bypass surgery and lost a dramatic amount of weight. The doctors were pleased, but now his only means of coping with life’s hardships had been taken away. When three of his dearest family members died in rapid succession, he began drinking. Eventually he sought something that could help him stay awake to keep drinking, and so he started using cocaine. Later on, he needed something that could ease him off cocaine in order to sleep.

“That’s where heroin came into my life,” he told me.

Using that illegal drug left him feeling ashamed, though, and soon he found himself pulling away from his remaining family members, becoming so isolated that, in 2005, he fell into a long stretch of homelessness. Only after he had spent almost a year in a residential rehabilitation facility and gotten a job that left him surrounded by supportive colleagues did Rodriguez begin to name the dark things in his past that had driven him to use drugs.

“No one ever knew that I was sexually assaulted as a child,” he explained. After years in recovery, he is now in possession of a commanding insight. During the most troubled years of his life, he was punishing himself for someone else’s grim actions.

Portugal famously decriminalized all substance use in 2001 and multimedia journalist Susana Ferreira has written that its groundbreaking model was built on an understanding that a person’s “unhealthy relationship with drugs often points to frayed relationships with loved ones, with the world around them, and with themselves.” The root problem, in other words, is seldom substance use. It’s disconnection and heartache.

In 2016, Rodriguez was hired by the Western Massachusetts Recovery Learning Community in Holyoke, where heroin use constituted a crisis long before opioid addiction registered as a national epidemic. Rodriguez now dedicates himself to supporting others in their recovery from the trauma that so often underlies addiction. And while tight funding and staffing limitations have led many community organizations across the country to reduce services during the pandemic period, the Recovery Learning Community has sought to expand to meet increasing need. When state restrictions capped the number of people the organization could allow into its indoor spaces, Rodriguez and his team improvised, offering services outside. They prepared bagged lunches, set up outlets so people could charge their phones, and distributed hand sanitizer and bottled water. And they continued to offer compassion and peer support, as they always had, to people wrestling with addiction.

Helping those in the midst of painful circumstances, Rodriguez says, isn’t about knowing the right thing to say. It’s about “the sheer power of just being with someone in the moment… being able to validate and make sure they know they’re being heard.”

In many situations, he adds, he has helped people without uttering a word.

Criminalization Versus “Any Positive Change”

It’s something of an understatement to say that, in the United States, empathy has not been our go-to answer for addiction. Our cultural tendency is to regard signs of drugs or the persistent smell of alcohol as marking users as outcasts to be avoided on the street. But medical science tells us that addiction is actually a chronic relapsing brain disease, one that often takes hold when a genetic predisposition intersects with destabilizing environmental factors such as poverty or trauma.

Regardless of the science, we tend to respond unkindly to folks in the throes of addiction. In her book Getting Wrecked: Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis, Dr. Kimberly Sue describes a complex and corrupt system of prosecutors, forensic drug labs, prisons, and parole and probationary systems in which discipline is meted out primarily to low-income people, disproportionately of color, who use illegal substances. An attending physician at Rikers Island in New York, Sue is also the medical director of the Harm Reduction Coalition. The philosophical opposite of criminalization, “harm reduction” is an international movement, pioneered by people who have used or still use such drugs, to reduce their negative consequences.

“Treat people with dignity and respect, respect people’s bodily autonomy” was the way Sue described to me some of harm reduction’s core tenets. In this country, we typically expect folks to cease all substance use in order to be considered “clean” human beings. Harm reduction instead espouses a kind of compassionate incrementalism. “Any positive change,” from the decision to inject yourself with a sterile needle to carrying naloxone, is regarded as a stride toward a healthier life.

In tandem with its decision to decriminalize all substance use, Portugal put harm reduction at the heart of its national drug policies. And as of 2017 (the most recent year for which data are available), nearly two decades after that country’s groundbreaking move, the per-capita rate of drug-related fatalities in the U.S. stood 54 times higher than in Portugal.

Now, the pandemic has made addiction even more dangerous. In addition to inflicting the sort of widespread hardship that can drive people to opioids (or even greater doses of them) and to take their chances with the potent synthetic opioid fentanyl, Covid-19 has stymied efforts by Dr. Sue and others to provide effective guidance and care. In normal times, opioid users can at least protect themselves from dying of an overdose by using their drug in the company of others, so that someone can administer naloxone if it becomes necessary. Now, however, that safety mechanism has been fatally disrupted. While social distancing saves lives, stark solitude can be deadly — both as further reason for using such drugs and because no one will be present with the antidote. Referring to naloxone as a miracle medicine, Sue said that there is no medical reason why people should die of an opioid overdose.

“The reason they die is because of isolation.”

Rx: Friendship

Back in March, one of the first recommendations for reducing the transmission of the coronavirus was, of course, to stay home — but not everyone has a home, and when businesses, restaurants, libraries, and other public spaces locked their doors, some people were left without a place even to wash their hands. In Holyoke, Rafael Rodriguez and his colleagues at the Recovery Learning Community, along with staff from several other local organizations, rushed to city officials and asked that a handwashing station and portable toilets be installed for the many local people who live unhoused. Rodriguez sees such measures not only as fundamental acts of humanity, but also as essential to any viable treatment for addiction.

“It’s really hard to think about recovery, or putting down substances, when [your] basic human needs aren’t being met,” he said. In the midst of extreme summer heat, he pointed out that there wasn’t even a local cooling center for people on the streets and it was clear that, despite everything he had seen in his life, he found this astonishing. He is now part of a community movement that is petitioning the local city government for an emergency shelter.

“When you have no idea where you’re going to rest your head at night, using substances almost becomes a survival tactic,” he explained. “It’s a way to be able to navigate this cruel world.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Sue continues to care for her patients whose maladies are often rooted in systemic injustice and the kind of despair that dates back to their early lives. Affirming that substance use is indeed linked to frayed relationships, she told me that, in this pandemic moment of isolation, what drug users most often need is a sense of connection with others.

“How do I prescribe connection?” she had asked during our phone call. “How do I prescribe a friend?”

Several days later, while writing this article, I left the air-conditioned space in which I was working and walked a couple of blocks to run some errands. In the stifling midday sun, I saw a woman sitting on the ground. I realized I’d seen her before and guessed that she was homeless. Her arms and face were inflamed with a rash. She said something to me as I passed. At first, I didn’t catch it. Her words were garbled and she had to repeat herself several times before I understood.

She was asking for water.

I blinked, nodded, and went into a nearby drug store where I grabbed a water bottle, paid in a few seconds at self-checkout, and gave it to her. And yet, if I hadn’t been working on this article, I might not have done that at all. I might have passed right by, too absorbed in my life to realize she was pleading for help.

Amid the sustained isolation of a global pandemic whose end is nowhere in sight, I asked Rafael Rodriguez what lessons could be learned from people who have long experienced isolation in their lives.

“My hope is that, as a society, we gain some empathy,” he replied.

Then he added, “Now that’s a big ask.”

The Abraham Accord: Realignment, Containment, and Militarism

Jon V. Kofas

On 19 August 2020, an article in Foreign Affairs argued that a “botched peace plan” in the Middle East accidentally produced the Abraham Accord between the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Israel and the US. On the surface, the Abraham Accord appears to be a ‘botched peace plan’. However, it is consistent with the goals of the Trump administration to forge closer ties between pro-US Arab countries and Israel for several reasons that help promote America’s Middle East and global geopolitical and economic interests, while coinciding with Trump’s reelection efforts to contain Iran, limit China’s regional role, and achieve a diplomatic victory amid high unemployment and an economic recession right before the election. These goals do not amount to anything of historical significance that entails lasting peace, but do signal a hasty attempt to preserve Pax Americana amid China’s rising global economic power that will eventually translate into geopolitical power.

Among other Arab nations, the UAE has been quietly moving toward closer ties with Israel for the past decade, especially amid Saudi-Israeli-US efforts to isolate and weaken Iran and its allies China and Russia that have coalesced in the UN Security Council against the US. Considering that the Trump administration withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – Iran Nuclear Deal – on 8 May 2018, largely to pursue a tougher containment policy that would weaken Iran’s role in influencing the regional balance of power, especially in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the Abraham Accord was a logical conclusion to salvage US efforts at a regional peace deal. The goal is in essence continued militarization as leverage to maximize the influence of regional US allies coalescing around Israel and Saudi Arabia.

At the same time, given that Iran has forged much closer ties with China and Russia, US containment strategy imbedded in the Abraham Accord follows the long-standing US policy of relegating the Middle East as its historic zone of influence ever since the Truman Doctrine (1947) that created the “Northern Tier” as a buffer zone against the Soviet Union. As reflected in the Accord, Middle East realignment under the aegis of the US uses Iran, and to a lesser degree Turkey, are catalysts to a containment policy along the lines of Cold War “containment militarism”, as Jerry Sanders argued in his book forty years in analyzing NSC #68 of 1950.

The State Department has made it clear that the Abraham Accord aims to counter Iran, although Israel and to some degree want Turkey included in the containment policy. However, this accord, as opposed to the Truman Doctrine of 1947 when Greece, Turkey and Iran were US strategic satellites, China’s economic and geopolitical expansion is what the US fears more than any other power in the world, including Russia. Former Russian Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Andrei Baklanov has argued that Russian trade would actually benefit from the UAE-US-Israel deal. Moreover, Russia advocated regional rapprochement since 1992 under Boris Yeltsin. At the same time, Russia’s concern that the Abraham Accord could signal an end to UAE as a peace broker between Iran and Saudi Arabia has forced Moscow to consider strengthening ties with Tehran. Therein rests Moscow’s ambiguity about the deal which China views in somewhat the same light. With expanding economic ties throughout the Middle East and Africa, China praised the Abraham Accord, especially since it sees Erdogan’s Turkey, not Iran, destabilizing the region with aggressive adventures of recapturing some of the Ottoman Empire’s glory. More so than Russia, China views the Abraham Accord as a containment policy toward Iran and Turkey, but also commercial containment of China in the region, as the US is committed to greater militarization of the Gulf States.

In delivering the Abraham Accord, Trump, who takes pride in bypassing America’s NATO partners and pursuing unilateral policies, has provided the US defense industry with pre-election gifts. Considering the Abraham Accord was contingent upon US sales of EA-18G Growler, made by Boeing, and a pledge to sell more advanced weapons to placate Israel, is it any wonder the Arab-American scholar Hussein Ibish noted that: “The president (Trump) thinks like a salesman, and this is what he wants in the Middle East.” In August 2020, the US announced the sale to UAE of advanced weapons (F-35 fighter jets and Reaper Drones, and EA-18G Growler jets — designed for stealth attacks by jamming enemy air defenses).

Privately approving the arms deal, Prime Minister Netanyahu publicly denounced US arms sales brokered by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Some Democratic congressmen immediately objected on the grounds that Arab buyers of US weapons have used them in the protracted Saudi-led war in Yemen, mostly targeting civilians suffering the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The UAE have withdrawn their forces from Yemen, but they are involved in the Libyan civil war where the US and its Western European partners have sunk into chaos and destruction since 2011.

Although the Abraham Accord reflects American unilateralism, US Western allies are limited in how much they can criticize Washington’s efforts at realignment in the Middle East, even if such efforts signal very little peace as a goal and greater possibilities of militarism. Domestically, not just Trump’s supporters, but even establishment Democrats backing Biden, have no objection to the US selling more weapons to Middle East allies, while forging new coalitions. This regardless of the objections that some Democrats make about lack of consultation that is typical of the Trump administration across the board.

Some have compared the Abraham Accord with the Camp David Accord during the Carter administration when Egypt normalized relations with Israel in March 1979. Both the Camp David Accord and the Abraham Accord are partly symbolic owing to realignment and the projection of “making progress” toward resolving the long-standing Arab-Israeli conflict owing to the Palestinian question. While this is one dimension, the reality is that the Middle East will not change for the better because of the Abraham Accord. The US is using the Accord as a way to maintain its historic role to determine the regional balance of power, contain/isolate Iran while keeping China’s role limited, sell more weapons, and project a foreign policy victory to the American people right before the presidential election.

When considering whether more Arab states will follow the UAE example, it is important to ask whether the Middle East became more peaceful and the plight of the Palestinians ended following the Camp David Accords in 1979. It is inevitable that the so-called diplomatic breakthrough projected in the Abraham Accord will serve as an incentive to other nations closely allied with the US and Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel, no matter what Tel Aviv does with the Palestinians.

Surprised by the accord, Palestinians denounced it as treason, as did Iran and Turkey. It is expected that besides UAE joining Egypt, Jordan and Mauritania in recognizing Israel, other Arab states, including Oman, which has ties with Iran but welcomed UAE’s move, Sudan and Morocco will follow as they see benefits to such realignment and nothing to gain by ideologically backing the Palestinians whose global leverage is currently at its lowest level in history. Like the UAE, other Arab states will argue that having normalized ties with Israel and by extension stronger ties with the US, they can be a voice of influence from within such an alliance to mitigate Israel’s apartheid policies toward Palestinians.

No matter who is president, the historically unwavering US commitment to Israel will drive foreign policy. This means offering weapons sales as incentives to other Arab states to join the Abraham Accord. Militarizing the region will escalate a regional arms race and further destabilize all of them; much to the delight of weapons manufacturers, but to the detriment of the people in those countries where civilian economies will suffer in the process.

Besides a far right wing Norwegian politician nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, many within the US and in the pro-US camp around the world have applauded the UAE-Israel-US deal as a historic foreign policy achievement. We need to keep in mind that in 2009 President Barak Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize and then became militarily involved in both Libya and Syria, while CIA covert operations raged during the Arab Spring uprisings. In his memoirs, in 2015, Geir Lundestad, the non-voting Director of the Nobel Institute and secretary for the Nobel Committee, noted that he had reservations about awarding Obama the prize. After 2009, Geir Lundestad witnessed Obama’s reckless military adventures and failed commitment to peace, forcing him to argue that the US president had not lived up to the Nobel Peace Prize values.

Highly unlikely that Trump will receive the Novel Peace Prize, he has been praised by people already committed to his administration ideologically and politically. Unlike Obama, Trump as a unilateralist has been more reluctant to engage in US overt and covert military operations, partly because he sees the competition with China taking precedence over all other commitments. He has been more interested in strengthening the defense industry by providing more US contracts and lobbying other countries to buy more weapons. This will be his legacy, despite criticizing the military industrial complex for domestic political reasons and uncontrollable ego.

Coinciding with the pre-election season, the Abraham Accord will not have any impact in American voters, for they do not cast a ballot on the basis of foreign policy deals that have no impact on their lives. At the same time, with the exception of benefiting defense contractors, Israel and the Gulf States allied with Saudi Arabia, the Abraham Accord will do nothing to end Israel’s apartheid policy, any more than it will limit Iran’s regional role in determining the balance of power with China and Russia on its side. Large in its symbolism, the Abraham Accord will prove far less than the failed Camp David Accords of 1979.

Will They or Won’t They? Saudi Recognition of Israel is the $64,000 Question

James M. Dorsey

Will the Saudis formalize relations with Israel or will they not? That is the 64,000-dollar question.

The odds are that Saudi Arabia is not about to formalize relations with Israel. But the kingdom, its image tarnished by multiple missteps, is seeking to ensure that it is not perceived as the odd man out as smaller Gulf states establish diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.

Bahrain’s announcement that it would follow in the footsteps of the United Arab Emirates was as much a Bahraini move as it was a Saudi signal that it is not opposed to normalization with Israel.

Largely dependent on the kingdom since Saudi troops helped squash mass anti-government protests in 2011, Bahrain, a majority Shia Muslim nation, would not have agreed to establish diplomatic relations with Israel without Saudi consent.

The Bahraini move followed several other Saudi gestures intended to signal the kingdom’s endorsement of Arab normalization of Israel even if it was not going to lead the pack.

The gestures included the opening of Saudi air space to Israeli commercial flights, and publication of a Saudi think tank report praising Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s stewardship in modernizing the kingdom’s religious education system and encouraging the religious establishment to replace“extremist narratives” in school textbooks with “a moderate interpretation of Islamic rhetoric.”

They also involved a sermon by Abdulrahman al-Sudais, the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca – the world’s largest mosque that surrounds the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest site, that highlighted Prophet Mohammed’s friendly relations with Jews.

Mr. al-Sudais noted that the prophet had “performed ablution from a polytheistic water bottle and died while his shield was mortgaged to a Jew,” forged a peace agreement with Jewish inhabitants of the Khaybar region, and dealt so well with a Jewish neighbor that he eventually converted to Islam.

The imam’s comments, a day before US President Donald J. Trump was believed to have failed to persuade King Salman to follow the UAE’s example, were widely seen as part of an effort to prepare Saudi public opinion for eventual recognition of Israel.

Criticism on social media of the comments constituted one indication that public opinion in Gulf states is divided.

Expression of Emirati dissent was restricted to Emirati exiles given that the UAE does not tolerate expression of dissenting views.

However, small scale protests erupted in Bahrain, another country that curtails freedom of expression and assembly. Bahraini political and civil society associations, including the Bahrain Bar Association, issued a statement rejecting the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel.

“What results from normalization will not enjoy popular backing, in line with what generations of Bahrainis have been brought up on in terms of adherence to the Palestinian cause,” the statement said.

Bahrain has long been home to a Jewish community and was the first and, so far, only Arab state to appoint a Jew as its ambassador to the United States.

The criticism echoes recent polls in various Gulf states that suggest that Palestine remains a major public foreign policy concern.

Polling by David Pollock of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy found that Palestine ranked second to Iran.

Earlier polls by James Zogby, a Washington-based pollster with a track record that goes back more than a decade, showed Palestine ranking in 2018 as the foremost foreign policy issue followed by Iran in Emirati and Saudi public opinion.

The same year’s Arab Opinion Index suggested that 80 percent of Saudis see Palestine as an Arab rather than a purely Palestinian issue.

Mr. Pollock said in an interview that with regard to Palestine, Saudi officials “believe that they have to be a little cautious. They want to move bit by bit in the direction of normalizing at least the existence of Israel or the discussion of Israel, the possibility of peace, but they don’t think that the public is ready for the full embrace or anything like that.”

Gulf scholar Giorgio Cafiero noted in a tweet that “Israel formalizing relations (with) unelected Arab (governments) is not the same as Israel making ‘peace’ (with) Arab people. Look at, for example, what Egypt’s citizenry thinks of Israel. Iran and Turkey will capitalize on this reality as more US-friendly Arab [governments] sign accords [with] Israel.”

This year’s Arab Opinion Index suggest that in Kuwait, the one country that has not engaged with Israel publicly, Turkey—the Muslim country that has taken a lead in supporting the Palestinians—ranked highest in public esteem compared to China, Russia, and Iran.

A rift in a UAE-backed Muslim group created to counter Qatari support of political Islam and promote a state-controlled version of Islam that preaches absolute obedience to the ruler serves as a further indication that Palestine remains an emotive public issue.

In Mr. Al-Sudais’ case, analysts suggest that the criticism is as much about Palestine as it is a signal that religious leaders who become subservient to the whims of government may be losing credibility.

Mr. Al-Sudais’ sermon contrasted starkly with past talks in which he described Jews as “killers of prophets and the scum of the earth” as well as “monkeys and pigs” and defended Saudi Arabia’s conflict with Iran as a war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

The criticism coupled with indications earlier this year that Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment was not happy with Prince Mohammed’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic may be one reason why Saudi Arabia is gesturing rather than formalizing already existing relations with Israel.

Authorities reportedly arrested in March Sheikh Abdullah al-Saad, an Islamic scholar, after he posted online an audio clip criticizing the government for banning Friday prayers. Mr. al-Saad argued that worshippers should be able to ask God for mercy.

An imam in Mecca was fired shortly after he expressed concern about the spread of the coronavirus in Saudi prisons.

Scholars Genevieve Abdo and Nourhan Elnahla reported that the kingdom’s Council of Senior Clerics had initially drafted a fatwa, or religious opinion, describing the closing of mosques as a violation of Islamic principles. They said that government pressure had persuaded the council not to issue the opinion.

Concern among the kingdom’s ultra-conservative religious scholars that the ruling Al-Saud family may break the power-sharing agreement with the clergy, concluded at the birth of the kingdom, predates the rise of King Salman and Prince Mohammed.

Indeed, the clerics’ concern stretches back to the reign of King Abdullah and has focused on attitudes expressed both by senior members of the ruling family who have since been sidelined or detained by Prince Mohammed and princes that continue to wield influence.

The scholars feared that the ruling family contemplated separating state and religion. This is a concern that has likely been reinforced since Prince Mohammed whipped the kingdom’s religious establishment into submission and downplayed religion by emphasizing nationalism.

Ultra-conservative Saudi religious scholars are also certain to have taken note of post-revolt Sudan’s recent decision to legally remove religion from the realm of the state.

Ultra-conservative sentiment does not pose an imminent threat to Prince Mohammed’s iron grip rule of a country in which many welcomed social reforms that have lifted some of the debilitating restrictions on women, liberalized gender segregation, and the as yet unfulfilled promise of greater opportunity for a majority youthful population.

It does however suggest one reason why Prince Mohammed, who is believed to favor formal relations with Israel, may want to tread carefully on an issue that potentially continues to evoke passions.

Deadly Dark Ages USA–“Herd Immunity”

Nayvin Gordon

If Covid-19 was as lethal as Ebola, the six million US infections registered on 9/1/20, would have already resulted in 3 million Covid -19 deaths.  This is the reality of the murderous; let them die “herd immunity” policy the administration is intentionally following, by forcing us back to unsafe work/school.  How many deaths will they accept with this abuse and misuse of science?? https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-coronavirus-scott-atlas-herd-immunity

“Herd immunity” is a concept primarily used for the science of vaccinations to PROTECT THE PEOPLE from dangerous infectious diseases such as measles and smallpox.  Greater percentage of vaccinations (90% plus), mean greater protection for the population, or herd immunity.

If no vaccine is available, we use the science of Public Health to PROTECT THE PEOPLE with testing, contact tracing and isolation.  For a hundred years this science has been used to treat and prevent infectious disease such as sexually transmitted diseases and tuberculosis. The robust Public Health

System in Taiwan has been able to suppress and eradicate Covid-19.

“Herd immunity” that follows as a result of deliberately allowing an infection to spread through the community does not protect the people, it allows them to sicken and die. This policy is responsible for the deaths from Covid-19 in the US now approaching a quarter of a million.  Only those who survive may have herd immunity.  This is the horror people faced in the 1800’s before the development of the science of Public Health. This is not science but a deadly return to the Dark Ages.

Over the last 40 years the politicians have closed public hospitals and massively defunded and cut back on the people’s Public Health Facilities to privatize the health system.  Now that the for-profit system is clearly unable to protect the people, the government has abused and misused the science of “herd immunity” by intentionally promoting this homicidal policy as a legitimate scientific approach to the pandemic.  It is simply eugenics, homicidal criminal negligence, and a crime against humanity.

The government did not spend $Trillions on the people’s Public Health System

The government did not spend $Trillions on a massive national strategy to test, trace and isolate infected individuals.

The government did give $Trillions to bail out the financial elite of Wall Street.

How many preventable deaths are we willing to accept??

Time for a radical change, towards a society built on the people’s health needs and an egalitarian world.