First up, BURN IT DOWN WITH KIM BROWN.
It's been a bit since we got a new episode but it was worth the wait. Now let's move over to the topic of labor. Lawrence S. Wittner (ZNET) explains:
Although Donald Trump has been eager to garner support from American labor unions for his re- election campaign, there are lots of reasons he’s not going to get it. Chief among them is his record in sabotaging the nation’s labor movement.
During his decades as a wealthy businessman, Trump clashed with unions repeatedly. And, upon becoming President, he appointed people much like himself―from corporate backgrounds and hostile toward workers―to head key government agencies and departments. Naturally, an avalanche of anti-union policies followed.
Under Trump, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)―the federal agency enforcing the nation’s fundamental labor law, the National Labor Relations Act―led the charge. Instead of following the intent of the 1935 legislation, which was to guarantee the right of workers to union representation, the Trump NLRB widened the basis for denying that right. According to the NLRB, the nearly two million Uber and Lyft drivers, as well as other workers in the gig economy, were not really workers, but independent contractors and, as such, not entitled to a union. The NLRB also proposed depriving graduate teaching assistants and other student employees at private universities of the right to organize unions and collectively bargain.
When it came to the reduced number of workers still eligible to form a union, the Trump NLRB adopted new rules making it more difficult for them to win the employee elections necessary for union representation. The NLRB hindered union activists’ ability to organize workers during non-working hours and, also, allowed employers to gerrymander bargaining units. In March 2020, the Trump NLRB used the excuse of the Covid-19 pandemic to suspend all union representation elections and, thereafter, allowed mail ballot elections only if the employer agreed to them.
Unlike their Trump-appointed managers, many NLRB employees, as career civil servants, resented the agency’s shift toward anti-union policies and sought to enforce what labor rights remained under the National Labor Relations Act. But the new management undermined their ability to protect workers’ rights by refusing to fill vacancies, thereby hollowing out the agency. As a result, the number of NLRB staff members dropped by nearly 20 percent.
Major federal departments moved in the same anti-union direction. Trump’s Department of Education scrapped collective bargaining with the American Federation of Government Employees and unilaterally imposed a contract curtailing the union rights of the department’s 3,900 workers. Trump’s Department of Labor removed requirements that employers disclose their use of “union-busting” law firms (a practice in 75 percent of union representation elections at an estimated annual cost of $340 million). And the Department of Justice, in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in the Janus case, delivered what was expected to be a devastating blow to public sector unions.
Donald Trump is no friend to workers. He has worked to destroy workers rights, he has repeatedly failed to honor his promises and his bankruptcy filings go to how he has no sense of obligation or decency. He's only one idiot these days.
During the proceedings, Padovano debated that the governor’s records are not free from the amendment allowing public access. Padovano argued that none of the preceding governors in the state had made such an exemption.
Padovano then traveled to Leon County from Tallahassee and argued before a three-judge panel of the 1st District Court of Appeals in the name of the court that a 1972 Florida constitutional amendment regarding public access to public records prohibited the governor from stopping access.
Doo=Doo DeSantis can't get flushed down soon enough.
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
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Amna Nawaz:
In 2021, an affluent suburban school district in Texas gained national attention when parents and local conservative activists accused the district of indoctrinating students with Critical Race Theory.
That drew the interest of Republican figures across the country and sparked a Christian movement beyond the district's borders to restrict what children are being taught in schools.
Laura Barron-Lopez has that story for our Bookshelf.
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Laura Barron-Lopez:
Mike Hixenbaugh has been at the forefront of covering the events in Southlake Texas.
What started as an earnest effort by the Carroll Independent School District to confront racist rhetoric and bullying devolved into a battle about much more. Conservative parents and activists turned a district cultural competence plan into a fight over protecting their — quote — "traditional way of life."
The result? Books and classroom discussion about race, slavery, and sexual orientation were effectively banned. In his book "They Came for the Schools," released in May, Hixenbaugh details how this school district became a blueprint for Republicans across the country and exposed their ambitions, which go well beyond controlling what version of American history makes it into high school textbooks.
I'm joined now by the author and senior investigative reporter for NBC News, Mike Hixenbaugh.
Mike, thank you so much for joining us.
Mike Hixenbaugh, Author, "They Came for the Schools: One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms": Thank you.
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Laura Barron-Lopez:
When you started investigating, you discovered that there were a number of racist incidents at the schools in Southlake, some that go back decades, but, in particular, in 2018, when a video of white students saying the N-word went viral.
And the district promised action. What exactly was their plan in response to that?
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Mike Hixenbaugh:
After the video came out, dozens of parents came forward and said, it's not just a video. My Black child has experienced these kind of racist slurs and jokes in the school for decades.
And so the district put together a committee. And they formed — they put together a plan called the Cultural Competence Action Plan. They worked for two years on this from 2018 to 2020, and the plan essentially called for diversity training for students and teachers, initiatives to try to hire more diverse teaching staff, a plan to go through the curriculum to make sure that kids were learning an honest and full picture of America's history.
But the plan was released in 2020 in the midst of backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement. And so when it was released into the community, some conservatives who I guess hadn't been paying attention to the two years of work on the plan, they saw it as this plan that was being shepherded in by the radical left to try to ruin this affluent, successful school district.
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Laura Barron-Lopez:
In response, a local conservative group, the Southlake Families PAC, said that they rallied what they called an army to their cause. How did they convince the community essentially to turn on school district leaders, school board leaders, teachers that many of these people had known for years?
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Mike Hixenbaugh:
It was remarkable to watch, because the people who were advancing this Cultural Competence Action Plan, many of them were themselves conservatives, Republicans.
But the Southlake Families PAC painted anyone who was pushing this plan as a radical leftist, as a Marxist. And it was around the same time that Critical Race Theory was entering the national conversation, this phrase that Chris Rufo used to try to describe any attempt to address discrimination in schools and other places.
It became a battle between adults over who was welcome in Southlake, whose ideas were welcome there. And that fight ended up spreading all over the country.
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Laura Barron-Lopez:
Chris Rufo, the national conservative activist, what role did he play in taking Southlake and spreading it elsewhere and making it a national cause?
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Mike Hixenbaugh:
After Southlake Families PAC got organized, they put together a slate of conservative school board candidates whose mission was to destroy and defeat that diversity plan.
The Southlake Families PAC candidates won in a landslide election in May of 2021. And Chris Rufo, after that, was one of many conservative voices who then held up the election in Southlake as a model to be copied in schools all over the country.
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Laura Barron-Lopez:
You say that the end goals were bigger than even just teachings about history, stretching all the way to making schools more explicitly Christian.
What is the end goal here, and where are we seeing it in other places?
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Mike Hixenbaugh:
There are elements of the Christian right in America that have long argued that the separation of church and state is a myth, that our country began to decline in the 1960s, when prayer and mandatory Bible readings were removed from schools.
And they have seized on this moment to say, parents are upset about schools. This is our chance to try to chip away at those foundational principles. And so you're seeing in Texas and all over the country moves to, in this moment, not just remove LGBTQ content from schools or to ban how — restrict how teachers talk about race and racism, but to replace those things with Christian symbols.
There's bills to mandate the Ten Commandments be hung in every classroom, to put Christian chaplains in schools to replace counselors and therapists, and to bring the Bible back into school and have kids read from that as part of their social studies curriculum.
They are counting on lawsuits. Some activists have said explicitly that — told school districts or school board members, hey, if you bring prayer back to school, hopefully, someone will sue you. We can take that to the Supreme Court and we can win this for America.
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Laura Barron-Lopez:
More than three years into this, what does the resistance movement look like outside of Southlake and the other communities that are facing book bans and having difficulty when it comes to being able to teach history?
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Mike Hixenbaugh:
What we have seen now all over the country in kind of purple or left-leaning suburbs coalitions of progressive and moderate conservative parents banding together, forming their own political action committees, running their own slate of candidates.
And so we're seeing that in different places across the country, where Moms for Liberty isn't winning in a lot of places. Their ideas are not necessarily broadly popular, even among a lot of conservatives. And so we have seen kind of a wave of victories for the other side.
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Laura Barron-Lopez:
Based on all of your reporting in Southlake and the larger movement to revise American history, what do you think is at stake this election cycle?
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Mike Hixenbaugh:
I think about stories like a teacher I highlight in the book named Christina McGuirk, a fourth grade teacher who got into education because she wanted to live out her own Christian faith by showing kindness to kids and teaching them a real accounting of America and how to be kind to each other.
But as a result of her speaking out about these issues, she was forced out of her job. And we're seeing that repeated all over the country. Teachers are weighing whether or not they're going to stay in the classroom.
And, at the same time, families, parents are looking at what's happening and wondering, do I want to keep sending my kid to this school? Do I want to still live in this community?
And, as a result, people's lives are literally being upended.
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Laura Barron-Lopez:
Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News, thank you.
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Mike Hixenbaugh:
Thank you.
“Since the beginning of the year until June 2024, the Turkish army has carried out 833 attacks and bombardments on Kurdistan Region’s territory, and eight civilians were killed in the attacks,” Kamaran Osman, a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a human rights organization that monitors Turkey's operations in the Kurdistan Region, told Rudaw.
The Kurdistan Region’s Duhok and Erbil provinces lead the charts in the number of attacks, with 365 and 356 areas respectively, followed by Sulaimani with 102 and the Yazidi heartland of Shingal in Nineveh province with 10 attacks, Osman said.
Israeli forces killed at least 17 people early Tuesday in attacks on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, the site of a recent operation in which Israel's military massacred more than 270 Palestinians to rescue four hostages.
Reporting from central Gaza, Al Jazeera's Hani Mahmoud said it has "been another bloody night" in the area, noting that Israeli forces attacked two homes in Nuseirat that were "accommodating displaced families who had recently evacuated from Rafah."
"The first strike killed 10 people, including women and children. Five of them were from the same family. We're looking at double the number of injuries. More people are still trapped under the rubble," Mahmoud added. "An hour later, the second attack targeted another family's home. The victims include not only the parents and their children, but also the grandparents."
"Another day, another Israeli war crime," Progressive International co-founder Yanis Varoufakiswrote in response to the strikes.
More than eight months of war have turned Gaza into “hell on Earth” for thousands of displaced families, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said on X.
The agency quoted Palestinian children caught up in the Israel-Gaza war.
“We are tired of displacement, not knowing where to go, fear haunting us everywhere, and the sounds of bombing and explosions,” nine-year-old Janna said.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Gaza, where the United Nations and other organizations are issuing ever-dire warnings as Israel’s assault stretches into its ninth month. The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned last week, quote, “A significant proportion of Gaza’s population is now facing catastrophic hunger and famine-like conditions.” The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, says over 50,000 children now require immediate medical treatment for acute malnutrition. Medical workers are struggling to treat sick and malnourished patients in Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure and water supply.
On Sunday, the Israeli military announced a daytime tactical pause in its attacks on Rafah to allow humanitarian aid to enter the strip, but the head of UNRWA says operationally nothing has changed in southern Gaza. Israel has been systematically blocking aid from reaching Palestinians in Gaza for the last eight months. Israeli forces have also targeted Palestinians seeking the scarce aid and have killed more aid workers than any war since the U.N. was formed.
Israeli forces have also killed Palestinians as they attempt to bring food home to their families, including last Wednesday, when troops fired at a group of fishermen in Gaza, killing two of them. That attack was witnessed by our next guest, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, who’s joining us now from Rafah.
Before we get to that larger issue, can you describe what you saw? What happened to these fishermen, James Elder?
JAMES ELDER: Amy, we were on a mission to take, well, lifesaving medical and nutritional supplies for UNICEF to 10,000 children in the north. We had gone through all the processes. It’s very complicated. It’s detailed. We’ve seen far, far too much aid denied and restricted for people who are in such desperate, growing need. It’s about a 25-mile journey from where we were, Deir al-Balah, to the north, to Gaza City. Amy, it took us 13 hours. Eight hours of those were near checkpoints. In the end, there was a “who said/she said” on how our truck was enclosed. They thought it was a van. We waited. We waited. We waited. In the end, it was denied that access. We were unable to get those supplies to those 10,000 children.
As we waited, Amy, ironically, I had been talking to a colleague about the fishing industry, about, you know, this destruction of education, of healthcare, of housing, of agriculture. This colleague friend of mine explained how his father-in-law had a fishing business, and he showed me videos of when his fishing business, the boats, when they just went up in flames, when they were bombed or missiled, boats, water and, of course, fuel. And he showed me this. He explained his father-in-law had a stroke at this time.
So, I was engrossed watching these fishermen. This was just eight or 10 men in knee-deep water in the ocean or in the sea with a single net each. And I was looking at each. I’m thinking, “You were probably a university professor. You’re maybe an engineer,” watching, watching for hours and hours whilst we waited to get our aid.
Suddenly, there was a tank. This was very near the Israeli large military checkpoint. There was gunfire. Next thing, two of the fishermen just on the beach were on the sand. Now, I was luckily with other colleagues, World Health Organization, a paramedic. They immediately rang to the authorities to get us permission, those people with emergency medical experience, get us permission to get onto the beach to see the state of these two fishermen. That was denied. That access was denied. Half an hour later, the other fishermen, just so desperate to get to see their friends, their family — I’m not sure — in the end, we gave them body bags. They went. They brought them back. And that’s where I saw that one fisherman had been shot in the back, and one fisherman, still with a fishing net around his ankle, had been shot in the neck.
AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can put this into a bigger context, James Elder? If you can talk about what’s happening right now, the scale of the catastrophe that is Gaza right now, when it comes to hunger and famine, not to mention the killing of Palestinians, where, what, right now the number is over 37,000 killed, well over 15,000 children — probably the number much higher because we don’t know how many people are dead under the rubble?
JAMES ELDER: Well, as you say, Amy, look at that number of children. I don’t know what number — my executive director, I think, captured it very well to the Security Council many months ago, saying that the killing of children in Gaza and the destruction of Gaza cannot possibly bring peace to the Middle East. We are now at this terrifying time where it seems like it’s being normalized. There is nothing normal about another night here where the bombardments are relentless, the drones are relentless. You do not sleep, OK? Obviously, children get bombed, as well, but there is the psychological torment of that. That’s ongoing. Just before we started, I heard more fire here, more bombardments that will be relentless. So, 250 days, Amy, children have gone through this. The physical and psychological exhaustion they face is, yes, almost impossible to capture, because on top of that, you have a nutritional crisis like the Gaza Strip has never seen before. And that’s why we’re trying to deliver aid to the north.
You have a water desperation that we have not seen here, that, normally, 50 liters of water is a bare minimum per person. And the bare minimum, that’s to clean, to drink, to wash. We’re down to a couple of liters of water. It’s the middle of summer here. It’s sweltering heat. I looked at a thermometer in a tent the other day. It was 55 degrees Celsius. I don’t know what that is. It’s way above 100 Fahrenheit. Yes, people in Gaza are used to the summer. They’re used to summer in their own homes, with a cross breeze, with ceiling fans. Now they are in tents, side by side, sweltering on the sand. So, that lack of water and lack of food is not just playing into disease on those most vulnerable, those most vulnerable being children. It’s also now we just have sheer risk of dehydration.
So, from the skies, it is relentless. I was at a hospital just a couple of hours ago before speaking with you, European Hospital. Within a moment, I see Hala, 4 years old. She’s blind in one eye, after the family home was struck. Wahid has lost his arm and his leg, after he was asleep and he woke up in rubble. And Yasim, Yasim has lost his right arm. This is within a minute of seeing it. There are — I don’t know what it is now. I got numbers when I was here in November, Amy, a thousand children with amputations. I don’t know the number now. We should stop these numbers. We have to focus on the human story. But, of course, the scale — the scale is unprecedented. And as hard as it is to believe, it continues.
And, of course, people ask, “Is it worse now?” Of course it’s worse. It’s worse every day. It can’t not be. Today it will be a bombardment. Today will be more people without food and water. Tomorrow will be worse. It will continue to get worse until those with the power of the pen, those looking over this ceasefire, start to understand and start to care about the level of suffering the children and their families are enduring here.
AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned 55 degrees Celsius when you looked at the thermometer. That’s actually 131 degrees Fahrenheit. We’re talking to James Elder, UNICEF spokesperson, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. He is joining us from Rafah, Gaza. You just said that you continue to hear explosions outside. So, can you talk about what this tactical pause is that the Israeli military surprisingly announced, kind of out of the blue, on Sunday, what exactly it means? It says around one emergency aid route in Rafah?
JAMES ELDER: Yes. I mean, look, any restriction in bombing, any pause in the bombing is good news for children. There are — most nights here, they’re almost sleepless nights, whether it’s the bombing or whether it’s the drones. The bombing is like, if it’s close — I thought I knew, Amy, what bombing sounded like. I had no idea. When it’s really close, it’s like someone banging pots next to your head. A drone is a lawnmower, and it’s relentless. There are attack drones, and there are surveillance drones. And there is more fire now. So, any restriction in bombing, any pause, whatever you want to call it, is good news for children.
But we have to wait and see what this will actually mean. This is a small portion of getting aid in through one part of the Gaza Strip. Now, to facilitate aid is good. But a much bigger picture than that, the responsibility of Israel as the occupying power is to enable aid to be distributed safely on the Gaza Strip. That’s not happening. Chaos is being sown, because there such high levels of desperation, because there is such a lack of security. As you said rightly, Amy, there are more United Nations colleagues having been killed in this war than at any time, at any time since the advent of the United Nations. So, whether this will mean smoother, faster, safer aid operations, we hope so. But what will really — for that to truly happen would be more crossings opening, many more crossings opening. We have been speaking about that, the secretary-general of the United Nations, for months and months and months. That’s one part of it.
The second part is, of course, just to just — well, we go back to a ceasefire. Ceasefire is flooding the Gaza Strip with aid, getting hostages home. Ceasefire will get hostages home. And a ceasefire would enable us to start to address the nutritional crisis. For example, Amy, UNICEF was treating 3,000 children with the most dangerous form of malnutrition here in Rafah, and then we had the military offenseive in Rafah, that we all begged not to happen but somehow feared would. That, quote-unquote, “limited military offensive,” limited offensive that led to a million people being displaced, it also meant that our stabilization center there, treating 3,000 children, was inoperable in a minute. Children getting treatment are suddenly — and they’re gone. Now we have to try and go back into those communities, back into these tented hellholes, to find these children, to find those families, because without that treatment, they will die. And Rafah crossing, which was the lifeline — Rafah crossing was the lifeline for humanitarian aid — has been closed for more than a month now.
So, there is such a constant war of words here. But we just need to look at evidence. Evidence is that humanitarian trucks coming in in May was half that of April. Evidence is there’s a fraction of routes open that should be. Land crossings are the most efficient and cost-effective way to get aid in. Evidence is that the pier is no longer functioning. Evidence is that we are catapulting, if you will, into a nutritional crisis. And the evidence is that as we try to deliver aid and as children try to be safe, bombardments continue.
AMY GOODMAN: You have talked about what’s happening in Gaza as a war on children. Earlier this month, U.N. added Israel to its so-called list of shame, a blacklist of nations and groups that violate the rights of children in armed conflicts. Other nations on the U.N. list of shame are Russia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Syria, Burma, Afghanistan, Haiti. U.N. also adding Hamas and Islamic Jihad to that list of shame. Can you explain practically what this means? And also, as you talk about children facing hunger — of course, adults, too — what are the long-term effects of this?
JAMES ELDER: Yeah, I think, three parts. UNICEF and the United Nations absolutely stands by that data and the robustness of that data. It is a secretary-general’s report, and I would have to leave it to their office to speak more to it. But, yes, we do, and we have for many months called this a war on children. And like everything here, we do that based on evidence. We don’t do that seeking a headline. We do that because of all the conflicts where UNICEF operates, or all the frontlines, from Afghanistan to Yemen to Ukraine to Syria, we have not seen the percentage of civilians injured, maimed, killed as high on children as here. That’s why. The evidence speaks to this being a war on children. And, yes, that is because there’s a large child population and a dense — it’s a dense population. It’s also because we have continuously seen an indiscriminate nature of bombings.
On Tuesday, when I was at Al-Aqsa Hospital in the middle area, how many families I spoke to? I speak to — and again, sometimes, Amy, I go into a hospital, and literally I — right? I’ve got to talk to the first person I see. And there are thousands of people. There are children on the floor needing attention, despite the best, brave, selfless efforts of doctors working 24 hours a day, who at the same time are thinking, “How do I get wood and water to my family tonight?” First family I saw was a little boy Ali. Ali was asleep in the third floor of his family home when a missile struck. Next thing, he’s in the rubble on the ground floor. I then learned that Ali’s mother was also in that bombing, that attack on the family home. I found her in the hospital. And I wanted to explain that I had found Ali, and so I thought I actually had good news for merely a second. I thought, in this darkness, I had something to share. In fact, she was aware that Ali was there, but she also explained that her two other children had been killed in that bomb attack. These are the — these are ongoing, last night, tonight. So, that’s the indiscriminate nature of this war, that continues. It continues.
Of the nutritional crisis, I’m sorry, you’ll have to repeat that last part of your question.
AMY GOODMAN: The effects, the long-term effects, of hunger on children?
JAMES ELDER: Yeah. Unfortunately, UNICEF has learned this because we operate north to south, south to east, on the — east to west, rather, around the world. They are many, and they worsen, just like trauma worsens. Nutritional status of a child, it’s the longer it is left unattended, the worse it gets. And in the youngest children, if we’re — obviously, the greatest risk is death. And a severely malnourished child is 10 times more likely to die from a common illness. And my goodness, there are common illnesses now here because of the deprivation of sanitation and water. But there are also risks just to mental development. There are great risks to physical growth and pyschological growth, mental development.
Now, that impact, long term, is on the society, is on their community, is on their income potential. All right? And that may sound like a long way off. It shouldn’t be. UNICEF is always looking at the whole age bracket of a child. And if we look here in Gaza, this young child population, any economist, any demographer will tell you, you get this right with a young child population. And it’s not hard. You get right training, the right skills, the right opportunity, and you have a demographic boom. You have the envy of aging populations. You get it wrong, and you have all the attendant risks of security and everything else that goes with it. And this is a paradigm example of getting it wrong.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, James Elder, going back to that issue of a ceasefire, what exactly that would mean?
JAMES ELDER: It means everything, Amy. It means everything. There’s times my own voice, that I’ve heard myself and feel tired saying, much as what people must think. But when you’re in Gaza and you still feel that hope among people, the number of women — I was meeting a man just earlier near the water. And he explained he has moved eight times. Eight times he’s moved. And he’s well versed on all the Security Council resolutions in this current one. And his words to me were, “We must continue to hope. But this feels like our last hope.” And I understand that, the decay of the psychological state. People are just holding on. I’ve had many women say to me words to the effect of, “Well, my husband has been killed. My home was destroyed. I’ve lost the ability to feed my children. And I’ve lost my job. All I have left is hope.” So they are holding onto hope. But they’re also aware that some of them have lost count of how many of these resolutions there are.
But a ceasefire means, in the most simple sense, hostages go home. That torment ends. It means a mother will promise her child, as a mother said to me exactly these words, “I will be able to go to bed at night with my child and promise her she can wake up.” You can’t do that here. As many people have said to me, living or dying is luck. It is luck here, given the indiscriminate nature. So, a ceasefire, for those with the power — the military aims, whatever they are, have created this war on children. Those with the power on this ceasefire, they need — as I say, they need to understand the suffering here. And as many Gazans are saying, this does feel like their last hope.
AMY GOODMAN: James Elder, UNICEF spokesperson — UNICEF is the United Nations International Children’s Emerg
Prem Thakker ency Fund — joining us from Rafah, Gaza.
Sixteen years ago, Riley Livermore enlisted in the Air Force. His path to the military was shaped by his evangelical Christian upbringing and growing up amid the war on terror. His ensuing career as a flight test engineer took him to Israel, where he spent two years doing missile guidance research. And shortly after October 7, he decided he couldn’t continue anymore.
Livermore is “utterly dismayed” by how President Joe Biden and the Department of Defense “has been complicit in the genocide in Gaza,” he told The Intercept. So much so that he is in the final steps of separating from the Air Force, a monthslong process he initiated in late October. Once he officially exits the military, he said, he will never again work in what he describes as the military–industrial complex.
“I don’t want to be working on something that can turn around and be used to slaughter innocent people,” he said. “I think the dissonance just kind of continued to get louder and louder, it’s like ‘I can’t really do this anymore.’”
Livermore joins a burgeoning wave of dissent within the Biden administration and the military over U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza — including nine prominent resignations in recent months; 25-year-old Airman Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation in February; and a new service member-led campaign to help soldiers speak out against elected officials’ support for Israel’s war.
The latter campaign comes in the wake of Jewish Maj. Harrison Mann’s public resignation from the U.S. Army, in protest of America’s “nearly unqualified support for the government of Israel, which has enabled and empowered the killing and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.”
In the weeks since Mann’s resignation, The Intercept has heard from members of the armed forces who expressed emotions ranging from guilt and frustration to outrage and repudiation regarding the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel, which includes billions of dollars in military aid as well as political and diplomatic cover. The testimonies, while limited in scope, nevertheless signal dissent within American power structures bubbling beyond the public resignations and protests seen thus far. The Department of Defense declined to comment.
Gaza remains under assault. Day 256 of the assault in the wave that began in October. Binoy Kampmark (DISSIDENT VOICE) points out, "Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion. The ongoing campaign in Gaza by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction. But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become a challenge for the propaganda outlets: How to justify it? Fortunately for Israel, the United States, its unqualified defender, is happy to provide cover for murder covered in the sheath of self-defence." CNN has explained, "The Gaza Strip is 'the most dangerous place' in the world to be a child, according to the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund." ABC NEWS quotes UNICEF's December 9th statement, ""The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. Scores of children are reportedly being killed and injured on a daily basis. Entire neighborhoods, where children used to play and go to school have been turned into stacks of rubble, with no life in them." NBC NEWS notes, "Strong majorities of all voters in the U.S. disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign policy and the Israel-Hamas war, according to the latest national NBC News poll. The erosion is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza." The slaughter continues. It has displaced over 1 million people per the US Congressional Research Service. Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) points out, "Academics and legal experts around the world, including Holocaust scholars, have condemned the six-week Israeli assault of Gaza as genocide." The death toll of Palestinians in Gaza is grows higher and higher. United Nations Women noted, "More than 1.9 million people -- 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza -- have been displaced, including what UN Women estimates to be nearly 1 million women and girls. The entire population of Gaza -- roughly 2.2 million people -- are in crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse." THE NATIONAL notes, "At least 37,372 people have been killed and 85,452 wounded in Gaza during more than eight months of war between Israel and Hamas, the enclave's Health Ministry said on Monday. During the 24-hour reporting period, 25 people were killed and 80 wounded, it said." Months ago, AP noted, "About 4,000 people are reported missing." February 7th, Jeremy Scahill explained on DEMOCRACY NOW! that "there’s an estimated 7,000 or 8,000 Palestinians missing, many of them in graves that are the rubble of their former home." February 5th, the United Nations' Phillipe Lazzarini Tweeted:
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Blade movies and Batman Returns9 hours ago
