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The most recent development marks a shocking advancement in Israel’s wholesale disregard for human life but it is not new, even if you would never learn that from reading the Western press.
The massive unfolding attack in Lebanon targeting personal electronics belonging to members of Hezbollah, which has so far killed at least 20 people and wounded roughly 3,000, is already beyond doubt Israel’s work. The attack that began on Tuesday has continued into a second day, with more reports of other personal communication devices exploding, killing at least nine people and injuring dozens of others at a funeral on Wednesday for people who had been killed in the first attack the day prior.
The ongoing attack, which can only be described as terrorist in nature, is unprecedented in its scope and method, but the nature of its indiscriminate attack is far from unique for Israel. In fact, Israel’s doctrine of inflicting massive harm to civilians is named after the area of Beirut, Dahiya, where this very attack was centered. The most recent development marks a shocking advancement in Israel’s wholesale disregard for human life but it is not new, even if you would never learn that from reading the Western press.
The New York Times team of Patrick Kingsley, Euan Ward, Ronen Bergman, and Michael Levenson covered the attack, and while they did name Israel as the culprit, it worked to include Israel’s blatantly false PR angle that it was a targeted attack.
The Times reported:
According to American and other officials briefed on the attack, Israel hid explosive material in a shipment of Taiwanese-made pagers imported into Lebanon. The explosive material, as little as one or two ounces, was inserted next to the battery in each pager, two of the officials said. The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from the Gold Apollo company in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials. According to one official, Israel calculated that the risk of harming people not affiliated with Hezbollah was low, given the size of the explosive.
The Times also wrote that “the blasts appeared to be the latest salvo in a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah that escalated after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7,” giving this an aura of mere military activity, rather than a blatantly imprecise and deadly attack on a civilian population. American whistleblower Edward Snowden, cited on this site yesterday, correctly summarized the focus and impact of the attack:
What Israel has just done is, via *any* method, reckless. They blew up countless numbers of people who were driving (meaning cars out of control), shopping (your children are in the stroller standing behind him in the checkout line), et cetera. Indistinguishable from terrorism.
Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara provided a reality check, perhaps most pertinent for Western audiences:
For our viewers around the world, it is probably helpful to do some “role-play” here. Imagine if 1,200 people, active in the Pentagon, State Dept. and CIA, had pagers explode in their faces, arms, and abdominals. How would you think the U.S. would feel about that?
The Times notes Israel’s “long history of using technology to carry out covert operations against Iran and Iranian-backed groups” as if it were some impressive technological achievement. But really, in order to understand what Israel is doing here, we must look at its track record of indiscriminate attacks. And this is, in fact, not only historically relevant but strategically and geographically relevant as well.
The name of the Dahiya Doctrine stems from the Dahiya quarter of Beirut that Israel targeted and leveled during the 2006 war, a quarter where many families affiliated with Hezbollah lived. In 2008, then military Chief of Northern Command Gadi Eisenkot (later chief of staff and centrist minister), coined the doctrine and outlined “what will happen” to any enemy that dares attack Israel:
What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… We will apply disproportionate force on [the village] and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.
Israel applied this method already in its 2008-9 Gaza onslaught. The United Nations “Goldstone Report” of 2009 concluded that Israel had conducted a “deliberately disproportionate attack, designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population,” and noted that the Dahiya Doctrine “appears to have been precisely what was put into practice.” Just to reiterate: “Punish, humiliate, and terrorize.” That last word, “terrorize,” should give us all pause, especially in this particular context.
The recent Gaza onslaught has in its way been the implementation of this doctrine into full-blown genocide. This is not surprising, since the vein of deliberate harm to civilians as a logic of “warfare” has been in the DNA of this doctrine to begin with.
So now, Israel is blowing up pagers. The prospect of this being called an act of terror by Western media appears to be very low. That is still considered a radical notion, when it comes to Israel because terror is a political term that is only reserved for enemies of the West. For the readers of The New York Times, it is just a “latest salvo” and not a reflection on the nature of Israel itself.
Rising interest rates were hampering efforts to decarbonize energy supplies and electrify transportation, housing, and other key sectors.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday announced that the Federal Open Market Committee is lowering the federal funds rate by 50 basis points, yielding an effective rate of 4.88%. Finally. The Fed should have provided interest rate relief months ago. While this overdue move is welcome, we must reiterate that Powell’s deferral of interest rate cuts has hurt the clean energy transition and inflicted other economic harms.
I wrote at length about this problem in January 2024:
It has become ever more apparent over time that rising interest rates are hampering efforts to decarbonize energy supplies and electrify transportation, housing, and other key sectors. High interest rates have had the dual effect of rolling back productive investment and lowering consumer demand, causing substantial drops in the stocks of major solar, wind, and other renewables-based companies; undermining the deployment of offshore wind projects; delaying the construction of electric vehicle (EV) factories; and slowing the installation of heat pumps.
In effect, Powell is exercising veto power over the Inflation Reduction Act and ruining “the economics of clean energy,” as David Dayen explained recently in The [American] Prospect. President Biden’s signature climate legislation contains hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies for green industrialization, but repeated interest rate hikes have driven up financing costs enough to outweigh them. As Dayen noted, this is especially the case because the law’s reliance on tax credits requires upfront investment decisions.
Last month, Dominik Leusder explained why rate hikes have been particularly destructive for the green transition. Leusder drew attention to the capital-intensive nature of renewable power projects, which “tend to trade lower operating costs (the input into wind farms and solar plants is ‘free’) against higher (in relative terms) up-front costs.” As he noted:
By one estimate, 70% of the expenditure for an offshore wind farm derives from capital costs, compared to 20% with a gas turbine plant. This means that the vast majority of IRA-related projects require a lot of debt-financed spending up front. As the cost of the debt increases with higher interest rates, so does the levelized cost of energy (LCOE), a measure of the average cost of producing a unit of energy (kilowatt- or megawatt-hour) over the lifetime of the plant. And it does to a greater degree with renewables, the swift adoption of which is premised on them being cheap and profitable for investors.
As a result, a lot of the much-needed expansion in renewables capacity and storage—which is highly time-sensitive given the escalating effects of the climate crisis—is offset until borrowing costs adjust to the point where new projects become viable. What is more, while rates are high, the larger and better capitalized firms can gain a higher market share. Their deeper balance sheets also make it easier to accept higher borrowing costs now in the hope of refinancing these loans at lower rates later. The concentration of market power in the renewables sector would have all the usual implications for consumer welfare and innovation, the latter being seen as key to the energy transition.
His essay goes on to detail the devastating global impacts of the Fed’s monetary austerity, which hits developing countries especially hard, and is worth reading in full. At home, Powell’s maintenance of a higher-for-longer interest rate environment has also exacerbated the housing affordability crisis.
Ironically, raising the cost of borrowing did little to alleviate inflation (the stated reason for the rate hikes). This should come as no surprise. The cost-of-living crisis of 2021 to 2024 wasn’t the result of a wage-price spiral of the kind that neoliberal economists like Larry Summers and Jason Furman said can only be contained through demand destruction (i.e., engineering higher unemployment). Instead, as I wrote earlier this year:
[I]t was fueled by sellers’ inflation, or corporate profiteering, and exacerbated by the elimination of the pandemic-era welfare state. When the onset of Covid-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended international supply chains—rendered fragile through decades of neoliberal globalization—corporations bolstered by preceding rounds of consolidation capitalized on both crises to justify price hikes that outpaced the increased costs of doing business. That safety-net measures enacted in the wake of the coronavirus crisis were allowed to expire only made the situation worse.
Given that the recent bout of inflation “is inseparable from preexisting patterns of market concentration, progressives have argued against job-threatening rate hikes… and for a more relevant mix of policies, including a windfall profits tax, stronger antitrust enforcement, and temporary price controls,” I pointed out. “Unlike the blunt instrument that Powell has been wielding ineffectively, those tailored solutions—the last two of which are within the Biden administration’s ambit—have the potential to dilute the power of price-gouging corporations without hurting workers.”
It’s noteworthy that during Powell’s August 2024 speech at the annual gathering of central bankers in Jackson Hole—where he signaled Wednesday’s pivot on monetary policy—the Fed chair excluded any mention of how the consolidation of corporate power contributed to rising prices in his explanation of the latest inflationary period.
This is significant because the Fed’s traditional inflation-fighting tool (i.e., raising interest rates to increase unemployment until demand and prices decrease) is ill-suited to confront our worsening polycrisis. It couldn’t effectively combat the supply shocks and corporate profiteering underlying the 2021-2024 cost-of-living crisis (disinflation occurred without mass joblessness despite Powell’s actions, not because of them). It also cannot solve cost-of-living struggles stemming from the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis.
The Roosevelt Institute’s Kristina Karlsson and Lauren Melodia showed in a 2022 paper that besides warming the planet, fossil fuel-based energy systems are inherently price volatile and a significant driver of inflation. The upshot is that shifting from coal, oil, and gas to renewables can permanently lessen inflationary pressures. Dovish monetary policy can help propel investment in wind, solar, and other green power sources.
Our movement's best hope for change lies in growing our anti-war organizing power, and that power would be severely undermined by a Trump administration. Pro-war forces like AIPAC may want to drive us out of the Democratic Party, but we’re here to stay.
Note: At the conclusion of our historic sit-in at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, we at the Uncommitted National Movement asked Vice President Harris to respond by September 15 to requests to meet with Palestinian American families in Michigan who lost loved ones to U.S.-supplied bombs in Gaza and to discuss their demands for halting arms to Israel and securing a permanent ceasefire. In response to the campaign’s failure to address these requests, Uncommitted National Movement leaders released the following statement on Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024.
The Uncommitted National Movement was born out of historic anti-war organizing by people across our country witnessing a genocide unfold in Gaza against Palestinians whose humanity we recognize as no different than our own. We came together, first in Michigan, and then in state after state to insist that even through our pain and grief, we must organize to save lives, advance policies that build rather than destroy, and create a future where not another bomb from our country drops on a civilian anywhere in our world. We are proud to have grown our movement, even as our government continues to send bombs that destroy families. Our organizing around the presidential election was never about endorsing a specific candidate; it has always been about building a movement that saves lives.
Our organizing around the presidential election was never about endorsing a specific candidate; it has always been about building a movement that saves lives.
Today, the Uncommitted National Movement announces that as we continue advocating for lifesaving policy change which ends the bombing of Gaza and ends U.S. support for the Israeli military's war crimes, Vice President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing U.S. and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her. At this time, our movement 1) cannot endorse Vice President Harris; 2) opposes a Donald Trump presidency, whose agenda includes plans to accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of anti-war organizing; and 3) is not recommending a third-party vote in the Presidential election, especially as third party votes in key swing states could help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency given our country’s broken electoral college system.
For months, we have urged Vice President Harris to shift her Gaza policy so we could mobilize voters in key states to save lives and our democracy. The DNC and the Vice President’s campaign fumbled even a small gesture to unite our party ahead of November by rejecting the simple request for a Palestinian American speaker. Now, the Vice President’s campaign is courting Dick Cheney while sidelining disillusioned anti-war voices, pushing them to consider third-party options or to sit this important election out.
The Uncommitted movement began in Michigan with 1.5 million voter contacts in three weeks, delivering 101,000 anti-war votes and was one of the first organized efforts to spotlight Biden’s electability issues. Nationally, we grew to 740,000 pro-peace voters, securing a historic 30 delegates to the DNC. Since then, we’ve expanded to over 300 “Ceasefire Delegates”—Harris supporters who have joined our fight to end Democratic Party leadership’s policy of backing bombs. Their efforts have been supported by our Not Another Bomb campaign, which has brought together dozens of organizations and mobilized over 100,000 people in 35 states nationwide.
We must block Donald Trump, which is why we urge Uncommitted voters to vote against him and avoid third-party candidates that could inadvertently boost his chances, as Trump openly boasts that third parties will help his candidacy.
In our assessment, our movement’s best hope for change lies in growing our anti-war organizing power, and that power would be severely undermined by a Trump administration. Seventy-seven percent of Democrats and 61% of Americans oppose weapons aid for Israel's assault on Gaza, which is preventing a ceasefire and blocking the reunification of Palestinian and Israeli captives with their families. Trump himself has bragged about accelerating the genocide against Palestinians and promised to intensify the suppression of pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S. We must block Donald Trump, which is why we urge Uncommitted voters to vote against him and avoid third-party candidates that could inadvertently boost his chances, as Trump openly boasts that third parties will help his candidacy.
We urge Uncommitted voters to register anti-Trump votes and vote up and down the ballot. Our focus remains on building a broad anti-war coalition both inside and outside the Democratic Party. Pro-war forces like AIPAC may want to drive us out of the Democratic Party, but we’re here to stay. Movements have long worked to rid the Democratic Party of hateful forces—segregationists, anti-union, anti-choice, and anti-LGBTQ proponents, the NRA, and Big Oil—and we will work in that legacy to rid our party of AIPAC’s pro-war extremism.
Building on the work of ‘Uncommitted,’ we invite stakeholders in the Democratic Party coalition—progressives, civil rights, labor, racial justice, reproductive rights, climate, immigrant rights, disability justice, people of faith, young people and more—to join us in our campaign to push our Democratic Party leadership to align with the majority of Democratic voters who support the urgent call for a stop to illegal and morally reprehensible weapons transfers through our campaign, "Not Another Bomb," both now and in the next administration.
Vance's shameless lies, and Trump’s too, are deepening the deterioration of American politics.
“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” —from Profile of Hitler created by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the US intelligence service during WWII.
Imagine if this piece started with this headline: Vance Urged Routh to Purchase AK-47 Used in Trump Assassination Attempt.
If I were a big-time pundit, that libelous headline would make news. But I’m not a big-time pundit and the headline is untrue, but that’s OK according to the logic J.D. Vance has used to justify his lies about the Haitian citizens of Springfield, Ohio. I would be justified in spreading falsehoods, according to Vance, as long as they served a higher calling. In my case, banning assault rifles.
Vance has admitted he is spreading lies about Haitians eating dogs and cats. But he feels righteous in doing so. Here’s how he put it to Dana Bash on CNN:
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Vance, however, ignores how he has directly added to the suffering of the people of Springfield, who have faced a series of bomb threats due to his repeated fabrications. That’s apparently justifiable collateral damage in service to a loftier goal, and fellow Republicans officials have been more than willing to follow along. They keep repeating the big lie that Haitian immigrants are eating American pets, claiming it raises the profile of the immigration issue. That, they believe, is a solid justification for spreading the lie.
Let’s concoct a Vance-like lie, I mean “story,” in the name of banning AK-47s. The “story” is about how Vance met Ryan Wesley Routh and encouraged him to purchase his weapon. To give this lie an air of truth we build upon what Vance said after the recent Georgia school shooting by a 14-year-old using a AR-15-style rifle: “Now, look, the Kamala Harris answer to this is to take law-abiding citizens’ guns away from them.” Which is a lie. That isn’t Harris’s position.
To make the story more potent we add two embellishments. First, we put into Vance’s mouth something he might have said, though we have no record of him saying it: “The Constitution gives you the right to own an AK-47, and we will not let the Democrats take that right away from you.”
Secondly, we mix in a bit of “some claim” hearsay, the kind Trump/Vance repeatedly use: “Some claim that when Vance defended the purchase of AK-47s, Routh was in the audience.”
So, one real statement from Vance plus two we made up equals a more powerful “story”—one lie perhaps big enough to take off like a “cat meme.” All in the service of our desire to end gun violence in the United States.
Most of us were brought up to know such fiddling with the truth is utterly immoral. But using Vance’s amoral logic, our made-up “story” of Vance and Routh is justified because we want to protect the American people from gun violence.
Vance’s shameless lies, and Trump’s too, are deepening the deterioration of American politics that harkens back to Senator Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting crusade. During the 1950s, lies about Communist Party affiliations were used to destroy the livelihoods of political opponents and enhance the political power of the liars.
But take heart, maybe the tide is turning. Bill Maher recently said, “It’s over for Trump. I just think he’s going to lose.” Maher too sees a Trumpian parallel to McCarthy, whose public support eventually collapsed after it became clear his claims about Communist infiltration were lies. But what Maher failed to mention was that McCarthy went down only after he attacked the Army. At that point, the most popular person in America, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, turned on him, as did most of the elite political establishment, including McCarthy’s fellow Republicans.
Today, however, the Republican elites are still sucking up to Trump, which means more Trump/Vance lies will be disgracefully repeated by their Republican sycophants, large and small.
Fortunately, we’re not yet near the dark days of McCarthyism and much further from Nazi Germany. At least until this November. In the meantime, you’ve got to wonder if Trump, Vance, and the Republican elite have memorized the OSS profile of Hitler, or if they conjured it up again on their own.