Progressive Politics
www.propublica.org
## As people move away from flooding and heat, new research suggests that those who remain will be older, poorer and more vulnerable.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Liz Cheney, one of Donald Trump’s fiercest Republican antagonists, will join Democrat Kamala Harris at a campaign event in Wisconsin on Thursday aimed at reaching out to moderate voters and rattling the former president. It’s uncommon, to say the least, for a candidate to give a nod to the origins of the opposing party in the closing weeks of a presidential campaign. Not only that, the Cheney name was once anathema to Democrats who deplored Dick Cheney, Liz’s father, for his role as vice president under George W. Bush.
As Israel pounded northern Gaza with air strikes last October and ordered the evacuation of more than a million Palestinians from the area, a senior Pentagon official delivered a blunt warning to the White House. The mass evacuation would be a humanitarian disaster and could violate international law, leading to war crime charges against Israel, Dana Stroul, then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, wrote in an Oct. 13 email to senior aides to President Joe Biden. Stroul was relaying an assessment by the International Committee of the Red Cross that had left her “chilled to the bone,” she wrote. The emails reviewed by Reuters show a scramble inside the Biden administration to warn the White House of the impending crisis – and the White House’s initial resistance to a ceasefire in the early, chaotic days of war. The three sets of email exchanges began on Oct. 11, during Israel’s fifth day of air strikes after the Hamas incursion. After Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza’s hospitals, schools and mosques, the U.S. State Department’s top public diplomacy official, Bill Russo, told senior State officials that Washington was “losing credibility among Arab-speaking audiences” by not directly addressing the humanitarian crisis, according to an Oct. 11 email. Gaza’s health authorities reported that day a death toll of about 1,200. As Israel defended the strikes, saying Hamas was using civilian buildings for military purposes, Russo wrote that U.S. diplomats in the Middle East were monitoring Arab media reports that accused Israel of waging a “genocide” and Washington of complicity in war crimes. “The U.S.’s lack of response on the humanitarian conditions for Palestinians is not only ineffective and counterproductive, but we are also being accused of being complicit to potential war crimes by remaining silent on Israel’s actions against civilians,” Russo wrote Biden’s public comments on Gaza had largely given Netanyahu a free hand against Hamas. At the time, Biden faced only scattered protests from the left wing of the Democratic Party over his support for Israel’s counterattack. Israel’s likening of the Hamas assault to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington resonated widely in the U.S.
[Lebanese FM Claims Israel Killed Nasrallah Shortly After He Agreed to Ceasefire](https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/3/headlines/lebanese_fm_claims_israel_killed_nasrallah_shortly_after_he_agreed_to_ceasefire)
www.middleeasteye.net
More than 10,000 people have signed a petition demanding the reinstatement of a Cornell University graduate student who was suspended for participating in a pro-Palestinian action at the university’s career fair in Ithaca, New York. The petition for the reinstatement of PhD student Momodou Taal was released by the Cornell Collective for Justice in Palestine (CCJP), a coalition that includes faculty, staff and graduate workers at the university. “We demand an immediate end to his suspension, the lack of due process, and the disproportionate persecution of campus activists,” the CCJP said in a statement given to Middle East Eye on Wednesday. “It has been over a week. We demand that Momodou Taal's temporary suspension be overturned and that due process be followed."
www.propublica.org
## The decision comes after a ProPublica investigation revealed that the EPA had found that one of the fuels had a cancer risk more than 1 million times higher than the agency usually considers acceptable.
www.commondreams.org
"Remember that members of Congress are permitted to own stock in war manufacturing, so when they vote to send more bombs or send our loved ones to war, they profit personally," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
And both bear no responsibility for partaking in Genocide.
www.thenation.com
The true depravity of Joe Biden’s foreign policy, which Blinken was merely executing, was made clear in a feature article by Franklin Foer just published by The Atlantic. Both the author and the place of publication are significant. Foer is the author of The Last Politician (2023), an extremely sympathetic account of Biden’s presidency, based on deep access to the White House. The same access to top sources is evident in his latest article. The Atlantic is one of America’s most ardently Zionist publications, edited as it is by Jeffrey Goldberg, a former prison guard for the Israel Defense Force. On the matter of Israel’s man-made famine, Foer provides an interesting corroborating detail. In early April, national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with Israeli officials in the Situation Room and was prepared to tell them, “You’re about to be responsible for the third famine of the 21st century.” Sullivan never got to make his speech, because the Israelis sprang a new crisis on the White House by telling Sullivan they had just bombed an Iranian consulate in Syria, killing prominent Iranian military leaders. This is emblematic of the story Foer tells: a White House trying to do the right thing but being overmastered by events and Israeli recklessness. Antony Blinken’s unwillingness to be honest about the famine in Gaza is a particularly glaring example of Biden’s delusional and dishonest foreign policy. Blinken’s resignation would be welcome, but would achieve little. Positive change might come if Kamala Harris wins the election and replaces Biden’s foreign policy team wholesale. But she would also need to reject the delusional commitment to a Saudi-Israeli alliance that is the root problem. However desirable, this scenario remains unlikely unless there is a much wider public opposition to the bipartisan foreign policy consensus.
truthout.org
The president called Israel’s attack, which flattened a residential city block, “a measure of justice.”
www.commondreams.org
"It is hard to open social media without seeing cellphone videos from the cars-washing-down-steep-streets genre; everywhere the flows are muddy-brown, and swirling with power," Bill McKibben said.
theintercept.com
Maura Finkelstein never hid her support for Palestinian liberation during her nine years working as a professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, a small liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching,” Finkelstein told me. “It was never outside the bounds of what I do.” For Finkelstein, who is Jewish, this was not always easy. More than 30 percent of Muhlenberg’s 2,200 students are Jewish, many of them vocal supporters of Israel. In late May, however, Muhlenberg told Finkelstein that she was fired. The reason? She had shared, on her personal Instagram account, in a temporary story slide, a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters. “Do not cower to Zionists,” Kanazi wrote on January 16. “Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist.” At the time, Israel had already killed over 22,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom were women and children.
www.newsweek.com
My work with Democrats started in high school, when I was an alternate-delegate for Hillary Clinton. Later, I interned on Barack Obama's campaign. Most recently, I volunteered at last month's Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Initially, I was thrilled to attend this rite of passage for every political operative. But once there, wandering amidst the glitz and glam, imbibing the gloss and schmaltz of it all, I couldn't escape a sinking feeling. I felt submersed in a hollow chamber whose mottos were "Brat summer" and "Joy"—totally out of touch with regular, every-day Americans and their pressing needs; instead, the most elite people in the world chanted in unison that "We're not going back!" Many of my family members are proud construction workers and lifelong union members. I grew up believing that the Democrats were our party. Fast forward to today, and many of those same family members are no longer Democrats. They feel the party has changed, left them behind. At the DNC, I couldn't help but think about my family. Every time the elites chanted "We're not going back," what I heard was, "We're not going back to the party your union family members used to vote for." At first, I naively thought the system was broken. But now I realize, it isn't broken; it's doing what it was designed to do, which is to keep working class people from true representation. That is the point, a feature, not a bug.
www.kenklippenstein.com
Road Runner cartoons, for anyone who grew up under a rock, depict a never-ending battle between Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, Coyote using his ever more elaborate and diabolical Acme explosives. Yet for all his wiliness — a word that reasonably describes Israel’s operation — the coyote always fails. No matter how ingenious the Acme product, the Road Runner always eludes, zipping by, around, and under, always with a cheerful, Beep, Beep! Sound familiar? The Coyote in this metaphor isn’t just Israel. It also applies to the United States since 9/11. On the U.S. side, critics used to use the “Whac-A-Mole” image to refer to the war on terror: one al Qaeda “lieutenant” killed while another popped up. And the synergy goes even deeper. The very paradigm of a “war on terrorism” was borrowed from Israel’s security practices. The country’s approach to counter-terrorism was portrayed by Washington as something to be marveled at, with the Dick Cheneys of the world wanting the U.S. to emulate their ruthlessness. More than two decades later, Washington has shelled out untold billions of dollars and ruined thousands of American lives, god only knows how many foreigner lives, and look where it’s gotten us. Bin Laden is dead, but al Qaeda has proliferated beyond the Middle East, ISIS has re-emerged, Iranian-backed militias persist, Pakistani-based international terrorism flourishes, and the Coyote’s old foes Hamas and Hezbollah are as resilient as ever. That’s a lot of Acme products later. All the media hyperbole about the exploding pagers obscures the continuity between this latest caper and the never-ending warring we’ve been engaged in since 9/11. There’s no reason to think this latest Israel salvo against Hezbollah will be any different. The Hezbollah leaders who were killed will be replaced by the next generation. These younger Lebanese have spent their entire lives at war with Israel and are likely to be angrier and more hardline. That portends worse security for Israel, not better, especially in the long-term. Acme rakes in the dough, always, but can Israel say that it is any safer than before? Can the Israeli national security luminaries say that it is on a path to enduring security? I highly doubt it.
White House officials said Thursday they had coordinated a ceasefire plan that the US and France presented a day earlier with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and believed Israel was fully on board with it. And they indicated surprise and disappointment that Israel had rejected it and that the Prime Minister’s Office was now saying Netanyahu had never indicated he would back it. A French official also made clear to The Times of Israel that the ceasefire initiative had been coordinated with Israel. While still in the air, however, Netanyahu’s office issued a firm denial that he had assented to the idea, calling it an “American-French proposal that the prime minister didn’t even respond to.” [Archive link to article](https://archive.is/cJg0K)
www.algemeiner.com
Williams has condemned Israel’s defensive military operations in Gaza as a “war crime” and criticized the US Congress for inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak in July. Williams issued a statement on Oct. 11 of last year, four days after Oct. 7, lamenteing the attacks before calling not to retaliate and shifting attention to oppression of Palestinians. “We can, we have to be able to, at once grieve the hundreds of innocent lives taken in Israel, and oppose the escalating violence of retaliation, the endless war, the systemic violence and oppression of Palestinians too often ignored, excused, or condoned,” Williams wrote.
Matt Kennard | Real Talk
www.counterpunch.org
counterpunch.org
www.counterpunch.org
Counterpunch.org
theconversation.com
Should Americans be bracing for bloodshed if Donald Trump loses the 2024 presidential election?
Marcellus Williams was put to death despite questions about the evidence.
www.commondreams.org
"When a senior American official lies to Congress in the middle of genocide so that the government can keep funding that genocide, he is deliberately flouting the law and prolonging the suffering of millions of innocent people."
Progressive Politics
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