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Jim Kavanagh

Can we admit how completely fucked we are?

Donald Trump is destroying the American economy and the American empire. More precisely, the Trump administration is accelerating the demise of the United States, internally and externally, that's been underway for a long time.

We are truly at the end of the road. It’s a road along which we have been alternately force-marched and slow-walked for decades and we’re at the point where our toes are hanging off the edge of the cliff. The abyss beckons. No one is going to pull us back.

This is the culmination of capitalist decline, imperialist defeat, and Zionist fanaticism. It is the American answer to the question: Socialism or barbarism? It is the collapse of the post-WWII U. S.-dominated world order, of the American (and “Western,” Euro-Atlantic) project tout court, and of all pretenses regarding it.

Terms like “democracy,” “human rights,’ “international law,” or “peace and prosperity” are nothing but bad, unfunny jokes.

Donald Trump is an appropriate villain for this last act of the American tragi-comedy, which has always been plagued by a hubris based on ignorance and arrogance. But it’s a world stage, and he is just a crude personification and culmination of the domestic and global forces that have been at play. All the American and Western liberal and conservative actors have played their parts in setting the stage for the tragic dénouement we are living through.

The Trump administration is engineering the final collapse of the American economy and empire using aggressive, simplistic versions of bipartisan policy frameworks that have underlain American politics for a long time.

These have been combined with the exceptional decline in America’s economic infrastructure, the exceptionally sad state of American political consciousness, the exceptionally stubborn attachment to the atavistic Zionist colonial project, and with Trump’s exceptional narcissism, to create a perfect storm of aggressively stupid and self-destructive policies that will lead to a catastrophic collapse of America’s already fragile social economy and standing in the world, as well as all the fictions of exceptional historical and international virtue premised thereupon.

The Bygone World of Europe and Zelensky

 

The Bygone World of Europe and Zelensky
Ukraine was a project for regime change in Russia
Jim Kavanagh

 SAUL LOEB/AFP

This New York Times piece epitomizes the dangerous delusion underlying the brouhaha over the Trump-Zelensky Oval Office fiasco and the “West’s” Ukraine project in general:

Here are the highlights:

The gathering took on greater urgency after Mr. Zelensky’s heated Oval Office meeting with President Trump and Vice President JD Vance on Friday raised fears the U.S. would try to strong-arm Ukraine’s president into making a peace deal on whatever terms the Americans dictated…

Mr. Starmer told the BBC that he, Mr. Zelensky and President Emmanuel Macron of France had agreed they “would work on a plan for stopping the fighting and then discuss that plan with the U.S.” Any peace agreement “is going to need a U.S. backstop,” Mr. Starmer added, saying that British and U.S. teams were discussing the idea…

Mr. Zelensky “found every opportunity to try to ‘Ukraine-splain’ on every issue,” Mr. Rubio told on ABC News, “ 

Can you guess what’s missing here? Once Zelensky and the Europeans craft a plan, they have to present it to the U.S.? They're afraid the U.S. is going to dictate difficult terms of a peace deal to Ukraine?

News flash: If anybody is going to dictate tough terms or a peace deal to Ukraine, it will be Russia, not the U.S.—and certainly not the Europe of Macron and Starmer. Russia is winning the war on the battlefield. Russia has defeated the largest and best-equipped US/NATO army in Europe, manned by Ukrainians. Russia has set forth its specific objectives and its conditions for a ceasefire and negotiation (if Zelensky ever removes his self-imposed ban on negotiating with Russia).  Any plan that Starmer, Macron, Zelensky, and/or Trump “present” to Russia that ignores the Russian position will be dismissed by Lavrov and Putin. They hold the cards.

The Europeans (at least, Starmer and Macron) still presume that they, the Euro American Masters of the Universe, having negotiated the definitive “peace plan” among themselves, will then have Donald Trump, Grandmaster of the Universe, “present” it to the Russians, who will accept it as the default position to which they will have to accommodate themselves. They cannot imagine that the Russians will look at a plan the president of the United States presents them and tell him, politely, to shove it.

It is delusional, Euro-American, self-centered arrogance. Starmer, Macron, and Zelensky are projecting their own lapdog relation to the U.S. onto Russia. They just cannot believe the Russian bear is not intimidated by their kennel. They cannot imagine a world in which they don’t set the terms.

Surprising and strange as it is to say, it seems (don’t count any chickens yet) that Trump does understand that Russia is an powerful independent actor, in a dominant position in this situation and worthy of respect in general—the country that is going to make a peace deal, not have one “presented” to it.

The central point of what’s been going on with Macron, Starmer, and Zelensky over the last week, which culminated in the Oval Office slamfest, was stated by Starmer: “Any peace agreement [the lapdogs concoct] is going to need a U.S. backstop.”  Which is pipsqueak for: “The war is lost unless the U.S. joins it.”

Trump’s Exemplary Gaza Plan

Trump’s Exemplary Gaza Plan

Jim Kavanagh 

Donald Trump has presented the world with a spectacular plan to help the people of Gaza. He will take control of the strip and move all the residents of the demolished, unlivable territory to nice safe homes in other countries.

Now, many people, including myself, correctly denounce this plan as outright, egregious, ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. Not to mention unhinged. And so it is.

pic.twitter.com/JivikzDa3v

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 6, 2025

And what is their plan instead?

Unfortunately, most of the people now denouncing this plan have been part of that very plan, helping to carry it out all along. What were Israel and US government under the Biden administration doing by providing all the bombs and weapons that destroyed Gaza and killed many tens of thousands of Gazans over the past 15 months? What were the US and western media doing when they repeated the fake Israeli narrative and supported that killing and demolition in a myriad of explicit and implicit ways? What were all the U.S. and European politicians doing who welcomed Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders and praised the Zionist project that was carrying out that killing and demolition for the past 15 months? What plan did they think Israel and the U.S. were executing?

Now here comes Donald Trump, being crudely blatant, forgoing all the complex "peace process," "two-state" mumbo-jumbo, under which sanctimonious Western liberals pretend that they don’t know, and are not supporting, the criminal ethnic-cleansing project that Zionism is in Gaza. Trump is telling us that the U.S., now speaking in the same voice as Israel has been using 77 years, is a full-on, leading partner in the Zionist project of erasing the Palestinian people. It’s an exemplary case of stripping the supercilious, hypocritical lipstick from the U.S/Zionist pig. His discourse, in other words, undermines the soft-power face of U.S. imperialism in favor of identification with the utterly-indifferent-to-“soft power” Zionist project.

Gaza, Trump says, is “right now a demolition site,…a hellhole…the people…have been absolutely destroyed…they are living in hell.” True, as he should know, since every U.S. government, including his, has participated in making it so—as he himself admits: “It's just terrible. And that includes on the American side, by the way. We should have never gone in there a long time ago, spent trillions of dollars and created so much death. So it includes Americans.”

So, then, why not “give people a chance at life...a beautiful area with homes and safety and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony”? Let’s have Jordan and Egypt “open their hearts and…give us the kind of land that we need to get this done.” Because there is no other way: “they've tried the other…for decades and decades and decades. It's not going to work. It didn't work. It will never work. And you have to learn from history…you just can't let it keep repeating itself.”

Trump is here acknowledging the purpose and unity of the US-Israel Zionist project. He is saying, in effect: Gaza has been destroyed and made unlivable, by us along with the Israelis, and the necessary, as well as most humanitarian, result is to expel the Gazan people, whose homeland aspirations, we all assume, are irrelevant to all the important people. We’ll take that project over and finish it for the Israelis.

As I’ve said for over a year, the Israel plan in Gaza has always been to kill or expel the Palestinians—preferably “all of them,” as Trump said, but a great majority will do, for a start. For more than a year. Israel has been saying to the world quite clearly: “See us. We’re killing them all. We don’t care whether you call it ‘genocide’ or not. We have impunity from the U.S. If you’re so concerned for them and want us to stop killing them, and if you’re not going to make us stop, take them away. Otherwise, bleat your outrage and watch us keep killing them.”  The Biden administration quietly helped the plan, trying  to get Egypt to accept Gazan “refugees” in exchange for debt relief.

Everybody saw that and knew depopulation was Israel’s essential plan for Gaza. Western politicians and media pretended they didn’t, thereby enabling it. Donald Trump has made that pretense impossible anymore. He has now explicitly embraced that plan as President of the United States, adding the twist that the U.S. will “take over” the Gaza Strip and take charge of implementing the plan.

So now various Western politicians and media must express outrage. A “violation of international law,”  “a straightforward crime against humanity,” cry Western ethicists.  Yup, as was the establishment of Israel via the Nakba of 1948, the Israeli war of territorial conquest of 1967, the killings and maimings of Great March of Return protestors in 2018, the repeated previous Israeli demolishment bombing campaigns of Gaza, et. al.

It's easy to denounce Trump’s plan. But what are those outraged Western politicians and media going to do about it that’s different from what they did about the same plan they’ve been accepting for 15 months? What plan do they have that will put an end to the present and future “straightforward crimes against humanity” visited upon the Palestinians of Gaza, and make the Strip decently livable for them?

Joe Biden’s Marxism

Joe Biden’s Marxism

Jim Kavanagh

After all the ridiculous right-wing accusations that Democratic politicians like Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are “socialists” or “communists” or “Marxists,” we might as well take the opportunity to extract the lesson in Marxism implied in Joe Biden’s farewell address.

By way of preface, I’ll point out that accusing political opponents of being “Marxist” did not start in the era of Barack Obama and did not always come from the Republican right. One of the strangest such incidents occurred during a 1976 presidential debate between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, in which implications of Marxism were unexpectedly used to smack down an opponent. In trying to defend the recent Republican unemployment record, Ford demurred that unemployment during previous Democratic administrations was lower because more men were in the army fighting the Vietnam War: “I must remind him [Carter] that we’re at peace and during the period that he brags about unemployment being low, the United States was at war.”

To which Carter replied that Ford was “insinuating that ...unemployment could only be held down when this country is at war. Karl Marx said that the free enterprise system in a democracy can only continue to exist when they are at war or preparing far [sic] war. Karl Marx was the grandfather of Communism. I don’t agree with that statement. I hope Mr. Ford doesn’t either.”

Gerald Ford had indeed echoed the argument of Marxist economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, in Monopoly Capital, that roughly the same proportion of the workforce was either in the military, unemployed, or dependent on welfare in the 1960s as during the Great Depression, with the difference that a higher percentage were in the military in the 60s. Carter apparently recognized this source, and said—not that that Ford’s statement was false, but. essentially: “That’s a Marxist argument, so it can’t be entertained. As I’m sure Mr. Ford will agree.” Mic drop, American style.

Well, I’ll take the occasion to do a reverse Jimmy Carter, drawing out the Marxist implications in this excerpt from Biden’s farewell speech in order not to dismiss but to take them seriously:

That’s why in my farewell address tonight, I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is a dangerous — and that’s, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before.

More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts. They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had. Workers want rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again.

Actually, Joe, an oligarchy has taken shape in America. a “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people.”  Yes, “we’ve seen it before,” and neither the “trust busters” of over a century ago nor the New Deal and post-war policies ended that oligarchy, although the latter did for a while ameliorate its effects.

Jimmy Carter's Legacy

Jimmy Carter’s Legacy

Jim Kavanagh

I was part of the Carter Center’s election observation missions in Palestine (1996 & 2006) and Nigeria (1999), and I met Jimmy Carter personally. He was, in all my interactions with him, a very nice man. He impressed me as sincere in his humanistic Christianity and, above all, in his love and respect for his wife, Rosalynn. There were a lot of problems in the 1996 Palestinian election that caused many of us to urge him not to make a statement flatly endorsing it as “free and fair,” and it was Rosalynn who successfully insisted that he make a more nuanced statement, incorporating our concerns. That relationship with Rosalynn, along with his surprising passion for wild turkey hunting (I mean going on about it at great length and in great detail) certainly humanized him for me.

Of course, personal impressions do not determine political effects. On the occasion of his death, Carter is best known by most Americans for his "post-presidency,” which shines in contrast with the self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement of other ex-presidents.  Foregoing vanity “library” projects and collections of six-figure speaking fees in favor of physical labor for Habit for Humanity, respected international election and health work via the Carter Center (the latter less well-known but central to its mission), speaking forthrightly about Israeli apartheid, and meeting with Palestinian resistance groups like Hamas made him into our most admired ex-president.

His relative honesty about Palestine-Israel is the strongest lingering “political” trait associated with him, and one for which he was shunned by the Democratic Party, including Obama, who forbade him from speaking at the 2008 Democratic convention on the advice of Alan Dershowitz—though you’re not likely to hear that during the liberal mainstream media encomia today. Nor are you likely to hear much about his accurately describing the U.S. as an “oligarchy with unlimited bribery.”