Chris Hedges: Don Corleone Trump - Read by Eunice Wong

As always, Chris Hedges is exemplary in his wisdom and knowledge, integrity and courage, awareness and profound commitment to bringing us the darker realities and truths too often missed, minimized, denied, and distracted from by the mainstream media — while also being essential for us to be empowered to know, understand, and act upon. Please also know that Chris Hedges has been warning us about where we find ourselves at today for decades. Which is exactly why mainstream corporate funded American media never features him. And I do mean never. Chris embodies a strong and unrelenting threat to the neoliberal and now fascist status quo. Which is what makes him so dangerous to the most wealthy and their devastating corruption and unquenchable greed. And so vital to the rest of us. — Molly

The Don – by Mr. Fish.

Trump’s White House runs a mob-style extortion racket that will bankrupt the country the way Trump bankrupted his casinos.

By Chris Hedges and Eunice Wong

I visited Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City the day before it closed, in October, 2016. The casino had two huge white gates flanked by 2-ton white, cast-stone elephants. Its entrance was topped by an array of 70 turquoise and teal fiberglass minarets and a dozen gold-tipped domes. A neon sign with red and gold lettering read: “Trump Taj Mahal Casino and Resort.” A lighted fountain in front of the glass casino doors was decorated with two rows of six white-and-gold urns.

The Trump Taj Mahal, New Jersey’s tallest building and the world’s largest casino, cost $1.2 billion to build. The opulent suites, when they opened, were named after historical personalities — Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Napoleon and Cleopatra. The suites cost around $10,000 per day. Trump, whose name and image were plastered throughout the casino, employed his familiar hyperbole to call it the “eighth wonder of the world.” The casino operators were instructed to answer incoming calls with the words: “Thank you for calling the Trump Taj Mahal, where wonders never cease.” The waitresses wore “harem girl” outfits.

The casino went through bankruptcy five times.

Trump is doing to the country what he did to the Taj Mahal. His administration is operating well beyond its means with a budget of $7.4 trillion for fiscal year 2026, against projected revenue of just $5.6 trillion. Trump’s idiocy has embroiled the United States in an endless and unwinnable war with Iran, which may tank the global economy. He is set to cut health coverage for 15 million people, along with food assistance and other basic needs programs. He has terminated the jobs of thousands of government employees. He has shut down USAID, the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Kennedy Center. He gutted Voice of America and vows to close the Department of Education. He withdrew from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement (twice). He continued the suspension of funding for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which had begun under the Biden administration. He canceled thousands of U.S.-funded international development projects. He erased government datasets and climate-related web pages. He slashed the budgets for renewable energy initiatives while revoking federal carbon and pollution regulations.

His scorched earth policies, which are dynamiting the foundations of the republic, are accompanied by a culture of corruption and deceit that is unmatched in American history.

Trump, whose officials face accusations of insider trading and whose family has made more than $1.4 billion from crypto-related ventures since taking office, shamelessly profits from the fusion of unregulated cryptocurrency-based prediction markets and politics pioneered by gambling apps, such as Polymarket.

Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, is a major investor in Polymarket, where he sits on the advisory board. He has an estimated net worth of $400 million. He also serves as a strategic advisor at Kalshi, which gave him equity in the company worth some $300,000 — now estimated to be worth millions. Kalshi recently announced it will allow users to bet on whether the FDA will approve individual drugs as “safe and effective.”

Trump’s Truth Social is developing a prediction market called Truth Predict. His administration sued Connecticut, Arizona and Illinois in an attempt to block these states from regulating prediction markets. Truth Social also launched a $100,000 per month service offering quicker access to Trump’s market manipulating posts — a thinly disguised version of insider trading.

The White House, replicating the mob-style shakedowns of Atlantic City’s casino culture, demands huge payouts from corporations and billionaires in exchange for political favors and deregulation. The Wall Street Journal writes that Trump has amassed a slush fund of $800 million for pet projects, including his ballroom, presidential library, super PACs and political issue committees.

Trump’s chief fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, nicknamed “The princess of darkness,” collects the payoffs with the blunt pitch “The boss wants this money.”

The nonnegotiable demand is lifted from the playbook of Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, the head of the Bruno-Scarfo crime family, whose extortion racket collected millions from Atlantic City construction firms, businesses, bars, restaurants, unions – which saw their health and welfare funds looted – and casinos. And, just like the mob, once is never enough for the Trump crime syndicate.

It always comes back for more.

Trump, who like most mobsters is accompanied by a much younger goomah — his latest being his executive assistant Natalie Harp — has a long history of mob-like retribution. He issued executive orders targeting law firms that previously employed attorneys who investigated him. The firms lost security clearances and access to federal courthouses. Scrambling to placate Trump, they sheepishly succumbed to his demands.

When I arrived at Trump’s casino, the 22-space tour bus terminal was empty. Most of the 12 restaurants in the casino were closed. The casino’s arena, seating 5,500 people, had shut its doors.

The Trump Taj Mahal, like our republic, was about to die.

“When I walked inside the Taj, glittering Austrian crystal chandeliers, which cost $14 million each, dangled over the softly lit interior,” I wrote in America: The Farewell Tour. “Many were missing strings of beads. The walls were covered with mirrors. I looked out at rows of gaming tables, blackjack tables, roulette wheels, and three thousand slot machines that twinkled with colored lights. The slot machines emitted beeps, hums, and dings of various pitches. They stretched over an area the size of three football fields. The gambling floor was almost empty. The dealers stood in front of vacant, felt-covered tables. Most of the gamblers who slumped in the cushioned chairs in front of the slot machines were elderly and haggard. They robotically pulled down levers or pushed square buttons. They stared blankly at the spinning screens in front of them. One slot machine generates between $200 and $300 a day for the casino. The dedicated gamblers are given courtesy drinks. Housekeepers occasionally enter rooms to discover the corpses of elderly men or women who spent hours drinking more alcohol than their bodies could absorb. It is not uncommon for slot players to wet and soil themselves.”

“The seventeen computerized check-in desks near the entrance were empty,” I continued. “A lone clerk stood behind the long counter facing empty rope lines. Toilets in the bathrooms, adorned with Carrera marble, were covered with plastic bags and had signs reading ‘Out of Order.’ I walked along the soiled and worn carpet through long, deserted, and poorly lit corridors on the upper floors. Semicircular beige wall sconces, some of which enclosed burned-out bulbs, were placed every few feet on either side of the hall. The sconces were dirty and cracked. The ceiling had brown water spots. The air smelled of mold. Three quarters of the 1,250 rooms had been mothballed. The casino felt like a ghost ship.”

Gambling, like Trump’s sham university and his $TRUMP memecoin, is about selling escapist fantasies. It is about preying on people’s despair. The spinning reels on the slot machines, for example, are an illusion. They do not slowly run out of momentum. They are programmed to appear that way. Computer chips determine the outcome the moment the button is pushed or the lever pulled. Virtual reel mapping ensures that a jackpot symbol appears above or below the payline. The player has the impression of almost winning, spurring the gambler to bet more money.

Trump from his earliest days as a real estate developer was enmeshed with the mob, including his cutthroat lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn represented Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, the boss of the Genovese crime family, and Carmine Galante from the Bananno crime family. Trump was schooled by Cohn and others in the art of extortion, blackmail, threats and graft. He has, throughout his career, surrounded himself with mobsters, grifters and sycophants.

Joseph Weichselbaum, a three-time-convicted felon who was eventually imprisoned for trafficking marijuana and cocaine, managed Trump’s helicopter fleet. The helicopters ferried high rollers to and from Trump casinos. These high rollers could get anything they desired, from sex with escorts to cocaine. Weichselbaum’s easy access to drugs was probably an asset. When Weichselbaum was awaiting sentencing, Trump wrote to the judge that he was “a credit to the community.” The trafficker received a three-year sentence, although he served only 18 months. The couriers who physically delivered the drugs for Weichselbaum got up to 20 years. When he was released from prison, Weichselbaum moved into Trump Tower with his girlfriend.

Trump’s casino opened in 1990 with a concert by Michael Jackson. It was an extravaganza built with $820 million of unsustainable debt, including the issuing of $675 million in junk bonds at a 14 percent interest rate.

Marvin B. Roffman, a casino analyst at the Philadelphia investment firm Janney Montgomery Scott, told The Wall Street Journal that the Taj Mahal would need to make $1.3 million per day to meet its interest payments. No casino had ever brought in that much money.

“The Taj was doomed from the start,” I wrote. “Trump soon had to service interest rates of $95 million a year. He was able to get new loans for a while and then went bust. It was a brief and giddy moment of insane excess. But it was good for his outsized brand, even if it showed an atrocious lack of business sense. Trump had borrowed money at high interest rates and lied about the rates to regulators. Trump dumped the losses on stock and bondholders, who were fleeced for more than $1.5 billion. Numerous local contractors and suppliers, never paid by Trump, went bankrupt.”

Trump made out like a bandit. He put up little of his own money. He shifted personal debts to the casino and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. His casino employees collectively lost millions of dollars in retirement savings, along with their jobs. His business debts were off-loaded on his investors.

Trump owned three casinos in Atlantic City and one in Gary, Indiana. The Trump Plaza and the Trump Taj Mahal casinos were shut down. The Trump Marina, his third casino, was sold to Texas billionaire Tilman Fertitta. Fertitta, currently Trump’s ambassador to Italy, renamed it The Golden Nugget. Trump’s casino in Indiana, a 340-foot vessel called the Trump Princess, declared bankruptcy in 2004.

All failed because of Trump’s insatiable greed and mismanagement.

Trump is doing to the nation what he did to the Taj Mahal. He is harvesting and extorting the organizations he oversees for personal profit, while the rest of us are left bereft amid the ruins.

__________

This article was read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.

Text originally published August 3, 2026.

Please go here for the original article and reading: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/don-corleone-trump-read-by-eunice

This is one of the numerous times that I saw Chris speak when he came to Portland. His books also line my bookshelves. I am inspired to continue to recommend the work of Chris Hedges to everyone.

https://chrishedges.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips

https://americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/chris-hedges/

Pema Chödron: Cultivating Kinship

Photo by Molly

Cultivating Kinship

Whatever you are doing, take the 

attitude of wanting it directly or indirectly 

to benefit others. Take the attitude 

of wanting it to increase your experience 

of kinship with your fellow beings.

—  Pema Chödron

EXCELLENT — Cristina Breshears: Inheriting and Perpetuating the Normalcy Of White Supremacy and Racial Terror

WOW! Thank you, Cristina Breshears! This is so excellent, so deeply important, so incredibly relevant to the collective tragic and violent patterns that we see playing out on repeat over and over again! That is, if we are courageous enough and care enough to see.

I deeply appreciate and respect Cristina’s courageous journey of inquiry and bravely and wisely following the threads wherever they may lead. This process is what I believe and experience is one of breaking our hearts open and leading us ever more deeply into fierce love and caring for all of life.

May we all be inspired to look and learn and love and care more deeply about all of our sisters and brothers everywhere. — Molly

What Story Do These Fragments

Tell Together?

By Cristina Breshears

For the past several years, I have spent hundreds of hours following my grandfathers through four centuries of American history. I’ve not been looking for villains, but I am finding patterns.

One deed meant very little by itself. Or one sermon or military record or newspaper clipping or family story. None of them individually explained a life much less my family. But eventually the documents began speaking to one another. Small repetitions became larger currents. What first appeared to be isolated incidents slowly revealed an inheritance.

I think we all know that patterns become habit. On average, it takes about sixty-six repetitions to build a habit (this is why I fail at my New Year’s Resolutions). Habit becomes tradition. And tradition becomes culture, it becomes etched into our national story.

My grandfather James probably never woke in the morning asking himself how he might uphold white supremacy. By the time he was born, much of it had become ordinary. His own father, my great-grandfather Joshua, had belonged to a generation that helped build that racial order through war, racialized terror, Jim Crow, and the mythology of the Lost Cause.

But Grandpa James inherited something different, something quieter and easier to overlook. He inherited its normalcy. White supremacy was already baked into Oklahoma law. It was writ large across political campaigns throughout the 1920s-1970s. And I remember the segregated hours at the swimming pool in that Oklahoma sundown town -- in 1972. I remember discovering the Anadarko lynching postcard tucked deep inside our family Bible.

None of these things announced themselves as extraordinary to the people living among them. They were simply the atmosphere. Accumulated dust particles that could lead to a dust storm.

That is how cultures perpetuate themselves. Not only through explicit hatred, but through an accumulation of inherited assumptions, familiar symbols, and habits so commonplace they become almost invisible.

Perhaps that is why certain images have unsettled me this year. Pantone's Cloud Dancer (I wrote about that earlier this year). A Target Halloween costume reminiscent of a minstrel performer. The Sydney Sweeney "Good Jeans/Good Genes" campaign. And now Converse advertisements whose imagery has prompted many people to see echoes of nooses, Klan hoods, or chilling photographs from America's long history of racial terror.

[Re the Converse print advertisement and commercial: the print ad is a composite of different historical traumas. It is a stark, high-contrast silhouette composed of a geometry of hate and empty shoes. The specific framing in the commercial with dangling jewelry and hands reaching upward closely mimics horrific historical photographs from the American South such as infamous Mississippi lynchings. Westerns and southern gothic films frequently use this exact framing to build tension right before a hanging like in the classic films like The Ox-Bow Incident, or dark thrillers where a character reaches up to a makeshift noose in a moment of despair.]

I don't know what any designer intended. No one does. So yes, some of these associations may be accidental and my own overactive mind being saturated with the acts of my great-grandfathers.

The images that are conjured may arise from simply careless choices on the part of the marketing team. But none of these examples passed through only one set of hands. A lot of time and a lot of attention from many, many people went into these choices.

The truth is, individual examples can almost always be explained away in isolation. But after spending years tracing my own family's inheritance, I have learned that history rarely repeats as a single event. It repeats as a pattern. And patterns deserve our attention.

Cultures often reveal what they have not fully examined through the symbols they continue to reproduce. That doesn't mean every image is secretly communicating hate. It means symbols carry memory whether we intend them to or not.

A noose is never just a rope in America. A hood is never simply a hood. "Strange Fruit" is never merely a song. ((There have been no fewer than ten incidents of “Strange Fruit” in this country this year.)) History leaves emotional fingerprints on ordinary objects. These are part of our cultural memory whether advertisers intend them to be or not.

When the same visual motifs keep appearing, especially at a time when our public discourse is increasingly comfortable with dehumanizing language and our institutions are under strain, dismissing every concern as "people are just looking for racism" misses something important. Cultural meaning isn't created only by artists or advertisers. It's created by history and by the people who have lived through it.

Intent matters. But impact, I think, matters more. My father taught me this without ever realizing it.

After he died, he left behind a box of maps, courthouse records, yellow sticky notes, penciled arrows, photocopies from archives scattered across the country. For years I thought he had simply collected boring genealogical facts. Now I think what he was really leaving me was a way of paying attention.

One arrow on a map means very little. But ten arrows begin pointing somewhere. One family story can be dismissed. A hundred years of repeating stories become inheritance. And four hundred years of perpetuating these patterns (even unconsciously) become who we are.

I think my father was trying to understand our family in the years before his death. In leaving me with his genealogical archive, he unknowingly taught me how to read history differently.

History leaves breadcrumbs. Years spent tracing my grandfathers have changed how I see the world. I no longer dismiss recurring symbols simply because each one can be explained away in isolation. I have learned to ask a different question: What story do these fragments tell together?

Standing on the shore, the ocean appears calm. Each wave looks separate from the last. Orderly. But beneath the surface, powerful currents move in directions we cannot see. They gather strength not because of one wave, but because of thousands moving together.

History feels much the same. One advertisement is probably just an advertisement. One slogan is probably just a slogan. One image may be coincidence. But when the same motifs return again and again, when they echo our deepest national wounds, when they stir memories we have not yet fully confronted and reckoned with, it is worth asking what current we are drifting into.

The opposite of forgetting is not remembrance. It is attention. And the work of history is not simply to remember what happened, it is to recognize when old currents begin moving beneath new waters.

Because undercurrents are easiest to escape before they become strong enough to pull us under. We do not honor history by memorizing it or by performing patriotism . We honor it by recognizing its patterns before they become our habits. It is a civic responsibility.

"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again." ~ Maya Angelou

Intensified by Fossil Fuel-Driven Climate Crisis, ‘Godzilla-Level’ El Niño Smashing Records Ahead of Peak

A firefighter douses flames as they push toward homes during the Creek Fire in the Cascadel Woods area of unincorporated Madera County, California on September 7, 2020. The El Niño event of 2026 is expected to cause a variety of extreme weather, including dry conditions in some regions and extreme rainfall in others, in 2027. (Photo by Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)

“As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels,” said one scientist, El Niño “occurs on an increasingly hotter baseline, making it much more difficult for communities to deal with the consequences.”

By Julia Conley

Although “El Niño comes and goes,” as one climate scientist said of the naturally occurring warm-weather phenomenon on Monday, experts are in agreement that this year is different—with meteorologists already recording a temperature rise of 3.07°C in the Pacific Ocean, putting it at a statistical tie with November 2015, when El Niño caused the ocean to warm by 3.08°C.

The temperature rise is not expected to peak until November and December, when an average of 14 models examined by Zeke Hausfather of Carbon Brief and Berkeley Earth found that a temperature rise of 4.1°C is forecast.

The event has been underway since June, Hausfather wrote, and has been gathering strength “faster than any previous event on record.”

Scientists typically track the strength of El Niño—which leads to heavy rainfall, higher global temperatures, and other extreme weather as warmer Pacific waters are pushed to the south—using the Niño 3.4 anomaly, or ONI, which determines how much hotter the central Pacific is compared with a 30-year rolling average.

A temperature rise above 2.0°C is considered a “very strong” El Niño, and scientists and policymakers are already calling this year’s event a “super El Niño,” with some experts using the terms “Godzilla-level” and “jaw-dropping” to describe the weather conditions that can be expected in the coming months due to the warmer climate.

As Common Dreams reported late last month, planetary heating driven by fossil fuel emissions is intensifying El Niño, while the naturally occurring phenomenon can in turn worsen the impacts of the climate emergency.

In the last 40 years scientists have recorded a 16% increase in the strength of El Niño events, according to a study published in Science last month. They’ve also gotten 36% stronger than they were before industrialization began.

The “double whammy,” as The Guardian called it, could make 2027 the hottest year ever recorded, blowing through heat records that have just been set this year—and that have been linked to the deaths of people around the world from extreme heat and flooding.

“This event is a huge redistribution of energy in the climate system and is dangerous because it is unfolding on top of a much warmer, human-influenced climate system,” climate scientist Friederike Otto of Imperial College London told The Guardian. “So, in many places around the world we will see never-before-experienced heat extremes, with all their consequences on health, food security, and water stress.”

Despite the fact that El Niño predates the human-caused climate emergency, Otto said, “as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels, it occurs on an increasingly hotter baseline, making it much more difficult for communities to deal with the consequences.”

This year’s event is likely to be the most intense El Niño in 1,000 years, reported to The Guardian, with hotter and drier conditions already linked to deadly wildfires in Indonesia and crop losses in Central America and the Caribbean region due to drought conditions. Rice production this season is expected to fail in Indonesia, according to the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University.

As the Southern Hemisphere’s summer months approach, southern Africa and Australia are at heightened risk of wildfires and droughts as well. Meanwhile, cocoa production could be damaged by extreme rainfall in parts of South America.

“All strong El Niño events on record have continued to strengthen well into the winter—and the models are in near-unanimous agreement that this one will, too,” wrote Hausfather at Carbon Brief. “If the forecast holds, the current event will peak between November and January at a level far beyond any event previously observed in the instrumental record.”

In California on Monday, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in an effort to prepare communities for El Niño’s impacts in the coming months, which could include coastal flooding and heavy snow in mountain regions.

Hausfather noted that strong El Niño events like those that occurred in 1997 and 2015 were also “associated with hundreds of billions of dollars in damages globally.”

“This event,” he told The Guardian, “is leaving those past ones in the dust.”

Please go here for the original article: https://www.commondreams.org/news/el-nino-2026

Not Just AI and Climate—Inequality Also an ‘Existential’ Threat That Demands Global Cooperation: UN Chief

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres speaks at the UNA-UK conference to mark the 80th anniversary of the founding of the UN in London on January 17, 2026. (Photo by Toby Shepheard/AFP via Getty Images)

UN Secretary-General António Guterres called on leaders to work together to solve the growing problem of global inequality at the UN General Assembly.

By Julia Conley

Sep 17, 2026

High-level meetings at the United Nations General Assembly are set to begin next week, and they come at a time when the threats to humanity posed by the climate emergency and artificial intelligence have never been clearer.

Those crises demand that policymakers work together to prevent catastrophic, permanent planetary heating and the creation of “runaway” AI technology, suggested UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Wednesday, but he emphasized that another pernicious, destructive problem cannot be overlooked.

Guterres also named “the intolerable deepening of inequalities” as another “existential threat” that leaders must address at the upcoming meetings.

Earlier this year, the anti-poverty group Oxfam International released a report showing that combined billionaire wealth stood at $18.2 trillion in 2025, having risen from $3.6 trillion in 2009.

At the same time, the number of food-insecure people on Earth shot up to 2.2 billion in 2024, rising from 1.5 billion a decade earlier.

“Nearly half of the world lives in poverty while a select few continue to gain extreme wealth and power,” said Oxfam at the time. “The amount of wealth owned by the poorest half of the world is less than the amount owned by just the 12 richest billionaires. This extreme concentration of wealth isn’t just making life less affordable for most of us, it’s creating harmful divisions. Billionaires, corporations, and politicians are taking away people’s basic ability to make choices about their futures and suppressing dissenting voices.”

An analysis focused on wealth inequality in the US by the Center for American Progress (CAP) this week also showed that the gap between the ultrarich and the rest of the American public has gotten significantly wider in less than two years since President Donald Trump was reelected, with hundreds of billions of dollars in financial backing from billionaires including tech CEO Elon Musk.

“Since Trump took office, the ultrawealthy (top 0.1%) gained more than 8,000 times as much wealth per household as those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution,” said CAP. “To provide an example of the extremity and exponential nature of wealth inequality in the United States, the 10 wealthiest Americans alone saw their real fortunes grow by a combined $259 billion over the same period, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index—about $26 billion per person, or 22 million times more than the bottom half’s $1,200 per household.”

Economic experts have found that the growing inequality crisis is entirely solvable. As Common Dreams reported last year, research from the European Union Tax Observatory found that a global 2% minimum tax on billionaire wealth “would generate about $250 billion in tax revenue—from just 3,000 individuals,” raising about $50 billion in Europe alone.

In 2024, finance ministers at a meeting of the Group of 20 in Rio de Janeiro agreed on the need to tax the richest people in the world at a higher rate to address persistent and worsening economic inequality.

As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, a study published in The Lancet found that the global inequality that’s been worsened by Trump’s foreign aid cuts could be addressed by a 3% wealth tax—raising a small amount of money compared to the total wealth of the world’s richest people, but enough to save 29.5 million lives over the next four years.

Climate campaigners in Africa, who have demanded an end to French company Total Energies’ East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), agreed with Guterres’ point that “climate, inequality, and international cooperation are inseparable.”

“People living along EACOP’s path,” said the group Stop EACOP, “are the first to bear the environmental and economic costs of decisions made far from their communities.”

Please go here for the original article: https://www.commondreams.org/news/global-economic-inequality

‘Drop the Genocide 20’: Activists Launch Campaign to Exclude Officials Behind Biden Gaza Policy From Democratic Politics

The horrors of the genocide in Gaza have been funded and made possible by both democratic and republican administrations and a deeply complicit corporate funded American mainstream media. This is profoundly unacceptable and truly heartless, morally bankrupt, and evil. 

We must band together and refuse to endorse and vote for anyone who is in the pockets of AIPAC. If you already haven't, please go to AIPAC Tracker to be empowered to see who is backing the genocide of the Palestinian people: https://www.trackaipac.com/. 

And please throw all of your weight in every way possible to stand with, endorse, donate to, and elect those who absolutely will not cross that line and are unwavering in their commitment to calling out and ending the atrocities, war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide of the Palestinians — all of which have been made possible by the American government. Sickening! Atrocious! Infuriating! This must end! 

I am also deeply encouraged by every single action and courageous voice and fierce love that is aligned with stopping the madness. Please also take the pledge given below in this article. Thank you. — Molly

US President Joe Biden is joined by members of his cabinet, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at the United Nations headquarters on September 24, 2024, in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

The organizers said the “culture of bipartisan elite immunity” was why “Biden officials knew they could arm, defend, and cover up the genocide in Gaza for 15 months, and simply move back into liberal spaces.”

By Stephen Prager 

As another presidential election approaches and a new Democratic administration may be on the horizon, human rights campaigners are trying to ensure that it won’t be staffed with the same policy officials who architected former President Joe Biden’s Gaza policy.

Most Democratic voters are now appalled by Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which leading human rights groups and scholars have recognized as a genocide. It has led to the deaths of at least 73,000 Palestinians, including more than 21,000 children, according to official totals, and left most of the population displaced and living amongst rubble.

But many of the Biden advisers and appointees who gave cover to Israel during its pivotal, exceptionally deadly early months have settled comfortably back into the respectable liberal intelligentsia, with roles at universities, think tanks, and media outlets.

As 2028 inches closer, a coalition of peace groups is urging these institutions to pledge that they will “drop the Genocide 20,” a group of 20 ex-Biden officials they deemed “responsible for promoting, lying about, and covering up the Gaza genocide,” even as Israeli officials made numerous statements indicating intent to fully destroy Gaza and its people.

Please sign the #DropTheGenocide20 pledge demanding liberal electeds, media and think tanks––and anyone claiming to care about human rights––drop the Biden officials who oversaw, supported and lied about their role in the destruction of Gaza

The list, published Thursday on the coalition’s website, includes:

• Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who denied before Congress that Israel was blocking aid to Gaza despite his own State Department’s assessment, a falsehood that allowed him to avoid following a US law that would have required the US to restrict weapons shipments to Israel. (Blinken is now a board member at the Center for American Progress.)
• Former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who said in May 2024 the administration categorically “does not believe” that Israel was committing a genocide. The International Court of Justice had already found a “plausible” genocide risk was present, while the United Nations special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe a genocide was occurring. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, meanwhile, had reported that Israel’s “siege” cutting off humanitarian aid had left more than 1.1 million Palestinians facing “catastrophic” food insecurity and on the brink of famine. (Sullivan is now the Kissinger professor of the practice of statecraft and world order at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a co-host of The Long Game, a national security podcast for Vox.)
• Former National Security Council Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk, who in November 2023 endorsed Israel’s strangling of humanitarian relief as part of a method to secure the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas and later denied a US Agency for International Development (USAID) report of starvation in Northern Gaza after Israel dismissed it. (McGurk is now a global affairs analyst at CNN and a partner at the New York-based venture capital firm Lux Capital.)
• Former Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer, who falsely claimed the US was putting “pressure” on Israel to reach a ceasefire and promoted Israel’s false narrative that the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza was a “command and control facility” for Hamas, helping to justify an attack that rendered the territory’s largest medical facility “completely nonfunctional,” according to the World Health Organization. (Finer is now a senior fellow with Yale Law School’s Tsai Leadership Program and co-hosts The Long Game with Sullivan.)
• Former White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby, who claimed that the Biden White House had “not seen any indication [Israeli forces] have violated international humanitarian law,” in April 2024, at which point more than 33,000 Palestinians had been killed, and systemic attacks on civilian homes, medical aid workers, and schools had been widely documented.
• Former UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who vetoed three ceasefire resolutions brought before the UN Security Council and denied that Israel was blocking aid.

“The purpose of the list is to demand these officials be removed from future Democratic administrations, as well as think tanks and academic and liberal spaces,” said the coalition, which includes Just Foreign Policy; Palestinian Youth Movement; Track AIPAC, which tracks lobbying by pro-Israel donors; Peace Action; the Democratic Socialists of America; and About Face, a group representing anti-war veterans.

“The culture of bipartisan elite immunity is what drives US war crimes and support for war crimes. From the Vietnam War to post-9/11 torture to the Iraq War, elite war criminality never receives any meaningful sanction from either party. It is treated as a mere policy disagreement among friends,” the coalition said. “This dynamic is a key reason Biden officials knew they could arm, defend, and cover up the genocide in Gaza for 15 months, and simply move back into liberal spaces, nonprofits, and future governments.”

The campaign urged these organizations to oppose any efforts to give the 20 people on the list “institutional or political power that positions them to continue to perpetrate harm.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the only Palestinian American lawmaker in the US House of Representatives, has signed the pledge, as has Pennsylvania state Rep. Chris Rabb, who is likely to enter the US House in January after winning the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District earlier this year.

Zeteo reporter Prem Thakker, who first broke news of the coalition’s effort, said more lawmakers were expected to join in support.

The coalition noted that there were “far more than 20 people in the US government responsible for the US-backed genocide in Gaza” but acknowledged that it needed to limit itself to those most responsible to remain actionable.

It also said that a parallel effort was in the works to hold members of the Trump administration accountable for their own policies in Gaza and elsewhere.

“The Trump administration’s time will come, especially given its attack on Iran and war crimes against the Iranian people,” the coalition said.

But for now, the activists are putting their focus on the Biden administration because “that’s who is currently out of power and actively engaging in reputation laundering and historical revisionism.”

The pledge comes as increasing numbers of Democratic politicians describe Israel’s conduct in Gaza as constituting a genocide, a position shared by the majority of Democratic voters. The coalition said that without consequences, this is meaningless.

“The word ‘genocide’ has certain implications and obligations. It’s not a buzzword,” the coalition said. “If an elected [official] says Israel committed genocide, as 22 members of Congress have, then it logically follows they would agree to not hire, work with, or otherwise validate those most responsible for that which they themselves argue is a genocide. It’s common sense.”

Please go here for the full original article: https://www.commondreams.org/news/drop-the-genocide-20