We are horrified to daily witness the monstrous deeds of a crisis-ridden world capitalism that knows no way out other than by inflicting new waves of catastrophe on the world’s people. Today’s US-backed and orchestrated Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people is but one more glaring example. But a broader assessment is essential.
President Biden repeatedly sends to Tel Aviv his top imperial agents of doom – Secretary of “Defense” Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, General CQ Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and National Security Council adviser, Jake Sullivan. They take turns in photo ops advising Israel’s neo-fascist Zionist murderer, Benjamin Natanyahu, on how to prettify his army’s ever-intensifying genocide in Gaza.
Before the corrupt corporate media, whose twisted accounts are routinely overseen by CIA censors or imbedded US government agents, they counsel the butcher Natanyahu to demonstrate a modicum of “restraint” while instantly replaces every 2,000 pound bunker-buster bomb and all other advanced weaponries Israel deploys to pulverize defenseless people.
Sullivan claimed last week that Israel would be “transitioning to another phase of the war focused on more precise ways of targeting the leadership of Hamas.” Netanyahu instantly denied Sullivan’s assertion, emphatically repeating Israel’s position that all Palestinians are in the daily crosshairs of the Zionist killing machine, literally among the most powerful in the world.
That two-thirds of Gaza has already been obliterated/leveled and three quarters of its 2.3 million inhabitants made homeless does not factor into US empty calls for “restraint.” Neither does the fact that 70 percent of the Palestinian dead are women and children.
The genocide continues uninterrupted. 20,000+ innocent Palestinians have been slaughtered to date. Multiple thousands more are buried beneath the rubble of a carpet-bombed obliterated Gaza. 72,000 more are wounded. The great majority is starving. Infectious disease is rampant.
Yet, the US bans all measures of relief as the world’s working masses observe in horror and contempt the US-promoted genocide. A new generation of radicalizing youth is on the march across the country and worldwide. The vast majority of humanity condemns the Zionist regime. Unprecedented mass mobilizations are the norm around the world.
Israel is no newcomer to genocidal warfare. When a mass US antiwar movement forced the Jimmy Carter administration in 1978 to bar all Defense Department sales of military equipment to Guatemala, Israel was there to fill the gap, providing the death squad regime of Rios Montt with Israel’s state-of-the-art automatic rifles to secretly continue the US-backed genocide.
400,000 indigenous Mayan Guatemalans were murdered. One million more were forced to flee for their lives. (See: “Israel and Genocide: Not Only In Gaza,” Mark Lewis Taylor, CounterPunch, Dec. 22, 2023.)
Biden’s words of “restraint” notwithstanding, his US representative to the now, for all critical purposes, defunct United Nations, cast the sole Security Council VETO blocking a UN call for a Ceasefire.
And even if a Ceasefire resolution had passed, who would enforce it? Would the world’s military superpower and Israel’s near total military and financial benefactor, turn on a dime and deploy its forces against its Zionist Middle East gendarme killer ally? Would the US withdraw its fleet of aircraft carriers aimed at delivering more weapons to Israel and blocking humanitarian aid to Palestine?
A toothless “ceasefire” resolution was approved by the UN General Assembly with 153 in favor, 10 against and 23 abstaining. Widespread applause was reported to have engulfed the General Assembly Hall. Those voting against were the US, Israel, Austria, Czechia [formerly Czech Republic], Guatemala, Liberia, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea and Paraguay.
The United Kingdom, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Argentina, Malawi, the Netherlands, Ukraine, South Sudan, and Uruguay abstained. But the UN General Assembly’s sound and fury came to nothing. The US imperialist beast and its Middle East military enforcer prevailed. The horror continues.
The US Congress soon after passed the largest military appropriations bill in history. At $886 billion, “official” US annual military expenditure – three percent more than the previous year – the figure does NOT include hundreds of $billions more for the CIA and related military expenditures. A total of $1.4 trillion is spent annually on the US imperial war machine, or better, for the largely-monopolized military-industrial complex that registers corporate profit rates in the high heavens and rains death and destruction on the world’s people. The maxim, “war is good for profits,” has always been Congress’s guiding principle.
The $886 billion was approved by the House of Representatives by a vote 310 to 118, with 73 Republicans and 45 Democrats opposed. It passed the Senate a day earlier by a vote 87-13. Today, the US spends more on the military than the rest of the world combined! With 1100 US military bases in 110 countries US imperialism is truly “The Cop of the World,” the self-appointed gendarme/defender of the “national security interests” of the US ruling class. Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, left no doubt, stating that the bill would assure that, “America’s military remains state-of-the-art at all times all around the world.”
A product of the usual back room deals, the bill, in the name of “fighting terrorism,” continues various programs that allow US intelligence agencies to secretly spy on the entire world’s population, civil liberties be damned!
The Dubai, United Arab Emirates-based COP28 was chaired by UAE politician Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber, who also heads the UAE’s National Oil Company (ADNOC). Al Jaber is also the UAE’s special envoy for climate change.
Prior to the conference he made clear his orientation when he publicly debunked as “fake science” the base findings of the world scientific community that absent a massive and immediate coordinated worldwide effort to eliminate all fossil fuel use in the next few decades, only catastrophic and irreversible consequences will result.
Replete with literally thousands of top representatives of the world’s fossil fuel corporations, the conference once against failed to announce a single binding resolution limiting fossil fuel production!
Indeed, the facts demonstrate that every leading fossil fuel producer in the world, headed by the US and China, has significantly increased fossil fuel drilling and production!
The final COP28 text vaguely called for “winding down” and transiting away” from deadly fossil fuels.
In 2023, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, our planet recorded its warmest November ever with 2023 on track to be the hottest on record.
COP25‘s Paris goal to stay below an increase of 1.5°C warming over pre-industrial levels – the worldwide temperature increase over which only deepening and irreversible climate catastrophe will inevitably result – has been essentially abandoned. With zero concrete implementation measures, the conference, as with all UN climate deliberations, left the field once again wide open to the world’s corporate elite to pursue profits above all else, the world’s people, as with imperialist war, be damned.
And, again, the world’s poorest nations are the hardest hit, with small island nations sinking, if not disappearing into ever-rising seas and devastated by murderous hurricanes, while imperialist-dominated continents in the “Global South” are subjected to capitalist-induced killer heat waves, deforestation, desertification, and massive pollution of vital water supplies.
The COP process today has devolved into an annual stocktaking exercise, at best a review of what all nations contemplate they might do to mitigate climate catastrophe. In fact, “Global Stocktake” is the official name of COP’s final empty declaration.
With the adoption of the 2018 Paris Agreement – which abandoned the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and its so-called binding emission targets and timetables – the battle for any legally binding agreement on the international level has been tragically abandoned.
Once again, capitalism’s inherent contradictions are fully operative. Ever-intensifying economic competition, over time, invariably reduces average profit rates, compelling all the leading players to resort to endless horrific measures to survive. All these measures are focused on making working people pay.
Jeff Mackler is a staffwriter for Socialist Action. He can be reached at jmackler@lmi.net socialist action.org
Source: CounterPunch
