multi_regime_enjoyer

https://xcancel.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1842789775968759982#m

María Corina Machado has not made any public appearances for almost 40 days. After ambivalent statements about her “clandestinity,” she has been accused of preparing to leave the country. She insists she is in Venezuela but has not given any proof of this. She affirms, as did Edmundo González when he was applying for asylum in Spain, that she will not leave the country.

Isolation and loss of traction
Her appearances have been telematic from closed places. Occasionally, she is seen distraught, despite her efforts to show confidence and forcefulness in arguments.

Their last “national mobilization,” scheduled for September 28, dispensed with the plan of mass gatherings and opted for the tactical resource of the “swarm.” The result was an atomized activity without assistance or relevance. In other words, the organization of opposition mobilization collapsed and demonstrated its weakness.

On social media, where the “queen bee” has ruled by riding on the favors of algorithms, she is increasingly criticized for a promise of “cashing out” (cobrar) that has translated into nothing.

The core of Machado’s political destiny lies precisely in that premise of “cashing out” or making an effective regime change, as she has incessantly promised. The mood changed drastically after Edmundo González fled to Spain through the asylum he requested and communicated to Machado just one day before boarding a plane bound for Madrid.

There has been no institutional breakdown within Venezuela. After various calls from both politicians [Machado and González], no military or police authority has taken up arms, and no preponderant element within the security sphere has mobilized in support of their agenda.

The big private economic actors organized in the main business associations have not actively participated in the postelectoral diatribe. They have made a few statements calling for “peace, stability, and work.” They do not participate in the diatribe and, therefore, have not played an open role in Machado’s insurrectional project.

Recently, the government set up a new space for dialogue with Venezuelan opposition parties. The notable absence was that of the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD) that supported Edmundo González. González, Machado, and the PUD had published a statement in which they indicated that a real dialogue would only be possible if they participated so that Maduro would give up power and begin a “transition.”

The clearly defiant message demands that Chavismo hand over power. Yet, that message resonates differently with the other opposition parties. Machado and González will once again repeat the strategy of abstentionism. They will pressure the parties not to work towards the next elections. They will call them “scorpions” and will try to contain, by force of pressure, further ruptures in the already fragile image of the anti-Chavismo consensus.

Obstacles and opposing forces
What are Machado’s real capabilities to materialize a regime change? With what force is Machado capable of demanding that Maduro begin an imaginary transition?

The leader lacks the basic features that could lead to a coup. If we look at the internal picture, there is no high-impact street mobilization, no support from economic actors, and no institutional breakdown in the military. She also does not have the support of all the opposition, and the “leader” is “in hiding.” That is, internally, there is no possibility of “cashing out” in sight.

The only real options for Venezuela’s extremist opposition are in the hands of factors outside the country.

Outside Venezuela, the US mercenary Erik Prince, together with former Venezuelan military deserters, has raised funds to finance a new private coup. This would not be a novelty given the failed “Operation Gideon” of 2020 by Jordan Goudreau’s contractor, Silvercorp, with support from the DEA.

Now, various leaders of the “Ya Casi Venezuela” platform are accusing each other of fraud and individual profiteering from the funds raised. So far, the funds raised seem to be insufficient for a mercenary mission on a significant scale in a place like Venezuela, which, according to its demographic proportion, is the most militarily equipped country in the region.

It is very difficult to know the actual dimension of the organization belonging to Prince and his associates because the flow of information—false or real—is part of the game in the shadows of intelligence and counterintelligence.

Meanwhile, the governments of the so-called “international community,” or rather, the United States and its allied countries, have taken a position not to recognize the re-election of President Nicolás Maduro. Yet so far, they remain reluctant to accept Edmundo González as “president-elect” in self-exile.

Machado, along with her allies and media operators, have launched a campaign to renew “maximum pressure” on Venezuela’s oil activities.

Venezuela has risen to third place among crude oil exporters to the United States. Meanwhile, military and geopolitical tensions in West Asia create a major obstacle for Washington, limiting its ability to apply more illegal sanctions or revoke OFAC licenses.

License 41-A was automatically extended for another six months without any statements from the US government on the matter.

Clearly, any possibility of calculation to effect a regime change, coup, or assassination in Venezuela lies in the designs and actors of the external front, meaning that these options are not in Machado’s hands.

The leader has probably exhausted all her resources and possibilities internally. Time and all elements of real power are against her.

By Kit Klarenberg – Oct 3, 2024

A little-noticed report published September 19th by JINSA laid out how the Empire will be on the defence, and at grave disadvantage, in all-out hot war with Iran.

On October 1st, Iran launched scores of missiles at the Zionist entity, in response to the murder of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, among many brazen provocations and escalations targeting the Resistance in recent months. Voluminous footage of key Israeli infrastructure, including military and intelligence sites, being comprehensively flattened by the Islamic Republic’s inexorable onslaught has circulated widely, amply contradicting predictable claims emanating from Tel Aviv and Washington that the blitzkrieg was successfully repelled by Western air defence systems.

It is the largest, most devastating attack on the Zionist entity in its 76-year history. The full impact is not yet apparent. While US officials worriedly warned hours in advance they possessed “indications” Iran was preparing to attack “Israel”, the incursion’s timing, scale, and severity caught all concerned by surprise. Washington dispatching thousands more troops across West Asia in the days prior, explicitly in “Israel’s” defence, was evidently no deterrent to Tehran.

That deployment came replete with a supposedly rock-solid Pentagon pledge to come to the rescue should the Islamic Republic seek to repeat the historic, wide-ranging drone and rocket barrage to which it subjected the Zionist entity in April. Department of Defense apparatchiks boldly declared they and Tel Aviv alike were “even better prepared for a new Iranian attack” than last time round. The ease with which “Israel’s” purportedly impregnable Iron Dome was bested exposes this braggadocio as hopeless hubris at best, dangerous delusion at worst.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is ever-cautious, and has acted with extraordinary restraint since the 21st century Holocaust erupted in Gaza. Some analysts have interpreted this implacable self-control, and Tehran’s lack of immediate backlash against acts such as the audacious assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil, as not merely rigid reluctance to escalate into all-out war with “Israel” and its Western backers, but an inability to respond at all. Tel Aviv’s unprecedented October 1st battering should dispel any such inference.

Senior Israeli politician Yaiv Golan, who returned to Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) service following October 7th, has branded Iran’s latest assault a “declaration of war” against the Zionist entity. Notorious Benny Gantz boasts Tel Aviv “has capabilities that were developed for years to strike Iran, and the government has [our] full backing to act with force and determination.” Meanwhile, IOF spokesperson Daniel Hagari declares, “There was a serious attack on us and there will be serious consequences.”

The IRGC appears to have calculated such threats and pronouncements are as empty and meaningless as the Pentagon’s pledge to be “better prepared” for a future Iranian strike. At the very least, the Islamic Republic fears no Anglo-Israeli retaliation to its latest broadside. That may mean Tehran has grounds to believe the balance of power in the region, and in any future large-scale conflict with the Zionist entity and West, has irrevocably tipped in favour of the Resistance.

Eerily, a little-noticed report published September 19th by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), a powerful and shadowy Zionist lobby organisation, inadvertently reached this same conclusion. It laid out in forensic detail how the Empire will be on the defence, and at grave disadvantage, in all-out hot war with Iran. Along the way, a blueprint for Resistance victory was plainly sketched. With Tehran having thrown down a gauntlet on October 1st, we could now be seeing that plan being put into action.

‘Gaining Overmatch’ Titled U.S. Bases in the Middle East: Overcoming the Tyranny of Geography, JINSA’s report was authored by former CENTCOM commander Frank McKenzie, who oversaw the Empire’s disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It appraises the viability, value, and force projection capabilities of current US military installations throughout West Asia, focusing on Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and UAE. The findings are stark, calling for an immediate overhaul of American basing across the region:

“Our current basing structure, inherited from years of haphazard decision-making, and driven by divergent operational and political principles, has yielded installations that are not optimally situated for the most likely threats of today and the future in the region.”

Despite mentioning “threats” in plural, JINSA’s sole focus is the Islamic Republic. While a myriad of issues with the Empire’s modern day positioning throughout West Asia are identified, the “most important” conclusion drawn is that Washington’s “current basing array detracts from our ability to deter Iran and fight them effectively in a high-intensity scenario.” McKenzie is nonetheless at pains to portray Tehran as somewhat feeble and vulnerable:

“The Iranians have no army that can be deployed as an invading force. They have a small and ineffective navy, and in practical terms, no air force. Their missile and drone force, though, is capable of gaining overmatch against many of its neighbors…they can deploy more attacking missiles and drones than can be defended against.”

Handing out Sweets: How British Propaganda Steers Events in West Asia

As such, JINSA notes, “a theater-level war with Iran would be a war of missiles and drones,” and Tehran’s April 13th attack on “Israel” was a “comprehensive demonstration of Iranian operational design.” The IRGC sought to overwhelm the Zionist entity’s air defences and radar systems with waves of low-cost drones and cruise missiles, to “make it difficult for Iron Dome or Patriot to engage the ballistic missiles that followed.”

Given what went down on October 1st, McKenzie correctly forecast that the April strike would “probably remain the basic template for large-scale Iranian attacks.” He appraised the effort – “at least conceptually” – as “a sound one,” from which “there are lessons for all to learn.” The most pressing and “obvious” takeout for JINSA was that, “for the defenders of the Gulf, it will be a war of strike aircraft, tankers, and air and missile defense…and here is the problem”:

“These aircraft are largely based at locations along the southern coast of the Arabian Gulf…an artifact of planning against Russian incursions in the 1970s, and the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns of the early decades of this century. They are close to Iran, which means they have a short trip to the fight…but that is also their great vulnerability. They are so close to Iran that it takes but five minutes or less for missiles launched from Iran to reach their bases.”

The “thousands of short-range missiles” Iran possesses are also a key negative “factor”, offering “no strategic depth.” While an F-35 fighter jet “is very hard to hit in the air…on the ground it is nothing more than a very expensive and vulnerable chunk of metal sitting in the sun.” Refuelling and rearming facilities on US bases in West Asia “are also vulnerable, and they cannot be moved.” Most damagingly of all:

“These bases are all defended by Patriot and other defensive systems. Unfortunately, at such close range to Iran, the ability of the attacker to mass fires and overwhelm the defense is very real.”

In closing his roadmap to Tehran’s victory, McKenzie bitterly laments, “It is hard to escape the conclusion that our current basing structure is poorly postured for the most likely fight that will emerge.” The Empire “will not be able to maintain these bases in a full-throated conflict, because they will be rendered unusable by sustained Iranian attack.” Imperial overreach in West Asia has now fallen victim to “the simple tyranny of geography.” And all along, the Islamic Republic has been taking rigorous notes:

“The Iranians can see this problem just as clearly as we do, and that is one of the reasons why they have created their large and highly capable missile and drone force.”

‘Nothing but force’ For all the JINSA report’s doom and gloom, McKenzie does express some optimism – of the most fantastical, self-deceived kind. For one, he suggests Iran cannot threaten the Empire’s “carrier-based aviation” capabilities. Still, he concedes “there aren’t enough carriers, and therefore naval aviation will probably not be the central weapon in a fires war with Iran.” The former CENTCOM chief also conveniently overlooks AnsarAllah’s recent crushing defeat of the US Navy during Operation Prosperity Guardian, which unambiguously exposed the redundancy of US aircraft carriers altogether.

Elsewhere, McKenzie declares that the Empire “needs to move aggressively to develop basing alternatives that demonstrate that it is prepared to fight and prevail in a sustained high-intensity war” with Tehran, and therefore “overcome unfavorable basing geography.” One radical solution proposed by the JINSA report is to “consider basing in Israel”. US military presence in Tel Aviv has already been slowly growing over recent years. While largely unacknowledged and downplayed, it has proven incredibly controversial every step of the way.

In September 2017, the IOF announced the arrival of America’s first permanent military installation in the Zionist entity. Such was the backlash domestically and regionally, that officials in Washington raced to deny this was the case, prompting a major cleanup of IOF websites referencing the site. Any move to create a fully-fledged US base in “Israel”, explicitly for war-fighting purposes, would inevitably spark even greater outcry, and be seen as a major escalation by the Resistance, demanding a drastic response.

Such an eventuality undoubtedly didn’t occur to the former CENTCOM chief. His analysis is hazardously unsound and fallacious in other areas too. On top of “Israel’s” “geographic advantages”, he praises Tel Aviv’s “powerful, proven air and missile defense capability.” It was this “competence”, combined with “US and allied assistance, and the cooperation and assistance of Arab neighbors”, that ensured Iran’s April strike on the Zionist entity was a “failure”, McKenzie muses.

He appraises this group effort, which supposedly prevented Iran from delivering decapitation strikes against the Zionist entity’s military and intelligence structure, as “in every measurable way…a remarkable success story.” If McKenzie’s view was shared by the Pentagon, this may explain why the US was so caught off guard by, and ill-prepared for, Tehran’s recent bludgeoning of “Israel”. Far from an embarrassing cataclysm, the April effort was a spectacular success, which exposed “Israel’s” fatal weaknesses, and reshaped West Asia forever.

Far from wanting too deliver a death blow, the Islamic Republic sought to deescalate via a measured, well-advertised show of strength, while avoiding a wider response. In the process, the IRGC demonstrated that if it wished, in future it could successfully bypass the Iron Dome, and would wreak immense destruction. Then, a “new equation” was spelled out by a Corps Commander:

“If from now on the Zionist regime attacks our interests, assets, personalities, and citizens, at any point we will attack against them.”

This message was evidently not received in corridors of power in Brussels, London, Tel Aviv, and Washington. Whether it will finally be comprehended now that Tehran has struck once again deep into the Zionist entity’s putrid heart remains to be seen. As Russian military strategist Igor Korotchenko once observed, “this Anglo-Saxon breed understands nothing but force.”

(Al Mayadeen – English)

**Reflecting on the mass protests that recently shook Kenyan society from top to bottom, Joel Mukisa argues that we must go much further than a choiceless democracy to find answers. A systematic questioning of the underlining political and economic structures underpinning the choices on offer must be undertaken.  **

By Joel Mukisa

If you asked a think-tank team leader, a social sciences Professor at Nairobi University if they anticipated the scale and popularity of the protests that rocked East Africa’s economic powerhouse Kenya, only a few months ago many honest people would simply retort, NO! 

The protests that rather appeared spontaneous characterized mainly by a young generation of Kenyans known as Gen Z protesting the Finance Bill (an annually produced document that lays out the government’s fiscal strategy) that would introduce a cocktail of new taxes on essential and basic commodities. This comes on the heels of an economy recuperating from the COVID-19, Ukraine War, the decpreciation of the Kenyan shilling, massive unemployement, massive debt and a divisive election.

The protests were characterized by incidents of violence among the deaths, shootings by Kenya’s Police, deployment of the Armed Forces, looting, plunder and the most dramatic, setting the national parliament ablaze. This all came as a surprise especially to Africanists that have viewed or tounted Kenya as a radical break with what it stereotypically labelled African.

Kenya is characterized as democratically stable and having strong democratic institutions. So the force meted out by Kenya’s police or even such rabid dissent with a leader of William Ruto’s stature and credentials can seem to be confusing. These tribeless protests can not be understood under the banal templates of “ethnic madness.” This is why I argue we must understand this protest movement as merely examples of something broader than even the protestors were saying which is characteristic of contemporary social movements.

Nomeclature

It may sound bourgeoisbut before we begin to understand the systemic shifts and questions the protest generated, we should understand it by the name under which it moves. The protests begun under the #OccupyParliament. Which was symbolic of the need to take a sovereign democratic institution and its symbolic power into the hands of the majority. This was after and slightly before parliament debated and passed the Finance Bill.

Despite objections raised and wide mass distemper against the law, parliamentarians of the Kenya Kwanza (the main party of governement) hurriedly passed the law with amendments from the minority. Government claimed that it had listened and hence the amendments. The tone shifted with Gen Z clarifying that they wanted: “Reject Not Amend.” The Amendment signalled the state’s ability to offer more if push came to shove and many urged those protesting to up the ante, and their gamble paid when Kenya’s President William Ruto declined to ratify the impugned Bill sending it back to Parliament.

It is in this context of democracy’s  failure that #OcuppyParliament must be understood.

#OccupyParliament is not a fresh lexicon in the Antropocene. It first emerged in 2011 with the #OccupyWallStreet as a left-wing anarchist movement against economic inequality, corporate greed and the influence of money in politics that had begun in Zuccotti Park, in New York City’s financial district, and lasted from September 17 to November 15, 2011.

How can we better situate #OcuppyParliament without reducing it to an analogous analysis but rather steeping it within both its national, regional and international histriocity.

We can glean from the foregoing that from the onset #OcuppyMovements are mobilized online, overcoming differences emanating from historical injuries such as race, tribe (in the African context) and class, gender (not so much) as bodies assemble on the streets to make the point that life is nolonger liveable.

These protests made known a hard truth that unity does not precede political praxis; it is produced through political struggle. They bypass established democratic institutions that they think are part of the mess. They are leaderless hence less prone to compromise and represent a shift in ways of political organization.

This spectre started in 1978 with the Soweto uprising that  changed the conventional understanding of struggle from armed to popular struggle. Ordinary people stopped thinking of struggle as something waged by professional fighters, armed guerrillas, with the people cheering from the stands, it continued to Tahrir square in Cairo in 2011 when Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign. Little wonder the protesters hope that for their mission to be complete, Ruto too, must resign and that’s why after him ceding to their demands and refusing to sign the law, they continued to protest insisting that he too resign under the hashtag #RutoMustGo.

The Metaphor

CNN journalist Larry Madowo interviewed two people who have been subject of humor and caricature. He asked them why they were on the streets. What particular  grievances they had against the state that perhaps prompted them to come to the streets? The  answers shifted from incoherent and incomphrensible to muffled and inarticulate hinting at a systemic problem from which the Finance Bill is the starting blocks through which mass hysteria could be immediately articulated. 

Kenya is part of what has been termed as the African crisis or African Tragedy. The foregoing are adjectives for endemic poverty, high unemployement rates, inflation, corruption, deterioting terms of trade, cronynism and debt dependence. These were in recent times compounded by the Corona Virus pandemic, a war in Ukraine, among an array of other international factors. In such a fix with a near financial crunch just pending, the Kenyan leadership was forced onto the IMF who imposed the usual straitjacket.

The IMF insists that the crises are budgetary, i.e, that government expendintures have excedded  revenues and the demand for foreign exchange outstripped supply. The short term antidote is to freeze wages, cut social programs and subsidies. Secondly, increase production from the supply side by transfering resources from the classes which have a tendency to consume to those that have a tendecy to invest. The recommendations at times include regressive tax regimes on the middle class. A middle class that  been vanishing since 2008 during the Kibaki administration. It’s the same middle class on whom the new taxes would be imposed – joined by their dependant subaltern kith and kin on the streets in protests that were reminiscent of the 20th  century bread riots that too, opposed IMF and World Bank Austerity.

Kenya’s path on this neo-liberal financing model must be one of the most ambitious on the continent and has been sustained across decades without proper scrutiny of its nefarious, cataclysmic implications such as the wide and dispropriate levels of inome inequality that has been an enabler in the reproduction of a political caste or aristocracy from which “alternatives” in the multi-party dispensations are to be chosen. The political economist Thandika Mkandwire refered to this as choiceless democracy given that it restricted sets of policy options available to African states, which find themselves strangled by a skewed international economic structure, the neoliberal economic and security demands of donors, and the pervasive presence of foreign NGOs and development agencies.

Therefore the inarticulate protesters referred to above speak against this context of an all powerful elite and under an ever contracted political landscape that benefits a few. The concrete example should be how the opposition had fielded amendments to this regressive bill in parliament that it later withdrew under the auspieces of a protest gaining momentum.

If the current state of democracy is limited in its scope to tackle the pervasive issues that bedevil us today and institutions of the global economy such as IMF and World Bank remain unfazed as we stand in the hot African sun to elect leaders, then democracy as it has been sold to us has failed.

So do we do as part of the  #OcuppyParliament movement? Do we continue reforming the political system to which this mess is greatly attributable.  As Zizek reminds us here, Marx’s key insight remains as pertinent today as it ever was: the question of freedom should not be located primarily in the political sphere – i.e. in such things as free elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, respect for human rights. Real freedom resides in the ‘apolitical’ network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed in order to make improvements is not political reform, but a change in the social relations of production. We do not vote concerning who owns what, or about the relations between workers in a factory and their bosses. Such things are left to processes outside the sphere of the political, and it is an illusion that one can change them by ‘extending’ democracy –  say, by setting up ‘democratic’ banks under people’s control.

The democractic illusion may thus be the real impediment to real time transformation of the social relations of production and the start of a conversation on the politics of redistribution that has been supplanted by the discourse of recognition that has atomized emanicipatory struggles.

Ruto is not the problem, the problem is sytemic and Kenyans should use this moment as an opportunity to seach for a new mode of democracy that is emancipatory. To return to the start of this blogpost, the answer as to why no one could have predicted this kind of event is simple, it required imagination, a break with the past for which most social sciences are totally incapable.

A version of this blogpost appeared as ‘Kenya’s protests as metaphors’ on 17 July 2024 in The Independent (Uganda).

Joel Mukisa is a** radical researcher with interests in political economy, agrarian question, human rights, philosophy and psycho-analysis****.**

10.03.24

This post is part of a series highlighting some of our favorite entries from the archives. Read the rests of the posts here.

***

What does history add to the study of law and political economy? As Karen Tani has observed, while history rarely provides an obvious road map to solving new legal problems, it can nevertheless help us understand why the legal landscape looks the way it does and illuminate the consequences of particular legal choices. It can also, Sam Aber & Caroline Parker have argued, reveal contingencies in the established order and make it easier to see potential alternatives. Finally, at its best and as some of the posts below demonstrate, history can offer detailed descriptions and analyses of domination’s force and show how social movements can obstruct, resist, and even bring to an end particular forms of domination. So without further ado, here are just a few of our favorite LPE & History posts.

The Making of a New Working Class – Gabriel Winant

Gabriel Winant’s *The Next Shift *is a historical study of care work, a subject so intimately tied up with law and political economy that the Blog published a symposium on it. In his opening post, Winant explains how industrial and labor policy reflected a too-narrow template of what constituted an industry, excluding healthcare workers from labor protections and producing a health care system that squeezed both patients and workers. As COVID-19 periodically resurfaces, each time sickening and disabling individuals, the lessons of Winant’s study—how the “crisis of care that we witness every day is both deeply historically rooted and, potentially, a lever of change for the millions of us whom the health care system touches”—becomes more urgent.

Tax Havens: Legal Recoding of Colonial Plunder – Vanessa Ogle

Vanessa Ogle, a historian of capitalism and empire, identifies a surprising connection between decolonization and the expansion of tax havens in the mid-twentieth century. To avoid the possibility of having to share the wealth they had extracted from their former subjects, white settlers in Kenya and Rhodesia sent their money to the Bahamas and British Channel Islands, while their counterparts in the French colonies of Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria sent their money to Switzerland. Ogle recounts how lawyers took on this work, creating tax havens and using legal recoding mechanisms to make capital more mobile, such that foreign investment in stocks and bonds outstripped direct investments by the 1970s. These former colonies were thus left with the project of developing new states without much in the way of a tax base and in extensive arrears from white settlers’ refusal to tax themselves during the halcyon days of empire.

K-Sue Park on How She Teaches Property

For K-Sue Park, “the histories of conquest and enslavement are key to understanding our property system, both why property remains such a major driver of racial inequality and also how it explains the shape and the dynamics of the real estate market today.” In this interview, Park offers a précis of how she teaches the history of discovery doctrine through Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) and how she teaches labor through the connection between John Locke and land acquisition. Park also describes her use of *The Antelope *to teach about the history of slavery. While these are not, Park explains, the extent of how one might teach about race in the property course, they offer focused descriptions of how to teach the histories of conquest and slavery, both of which are central to the law of property.

Historicizing Consumer Protection – Luke Herrine

If we hope to revive a moral economy framework for thinking about consumer protection law, Luke Herrine argues, we need to debunk the conventional story about what happened when the FTC supposedly imbued the notion of “unfairness” with too much moral content. According to this morality tale, when the FTC tried to use its unfairness authority to ban children’s advertising in the 1970s, the public recoiled, and Congress forced the FTC to develop a more objective standard for determining whether something is “unfair”—a standard grounded in consumer choice. As Herrine explains, however, what really happened was that the FTC was blindsided by an increasingly radical business lobby, and a faction of neoliberals within the agency took advantage of the moment to press their view of how the FTC should think about its authority.

The Young Lords: Building Power through Direct Action – Johanna Fernández

Creative and strategic militancy interrupts the normal functioning of society, shifts the terms of debate in public discourse, and expands the definition of the common good. Never has this been more evident than when the Young Lords barricaded themselves inside The First Spanish United Methodist Church in East Harlem. As Johanna Fernández describes, this Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panthers had simply been looking for a space to feed breakfast to poor children before school and the church was closed except for a couple of hours on Sunday. But after the priest denied their request, the Young Lords occupied the building and transformed it into a staging ground for their vision of a just society. They provided hundreds of free meals to children, ran a medical clinic and a lead and anemia testing drive, and used the Church as a headquarters for redress of community grievances and needs. After 11 days, the Young Lords abandoned the church; that same night, Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller proposed launching a breakfast program for 35,000 poor children in the city

The Long History of Anti-CRT Politics – Aziz Rana

Recent attacks on CRT often claim that the United States, since its founding, has been committed to principles of liberty and equality. As Aziz Rana reveals, however, this strategic use of American universalism, along with an explicit focus on public education, has been perhaps the dominant way of articulating white resistance to racial reform for the better part of a century. Since the early 20th century, such “civic nationalists” have argued that the enlightenment arrived in the US, as opposed to elsewhere, because of the culturally exceptional nature of the individuals that settled North America: Anglo-Europeans. And they have used such claims to justify restricting the immigration of disfavored groups and to promote an intense project of Americanization, in which those from less culturally “mature” societies were to be aggressively inculcated with American values.

Racial Myths, Market Myths, and the Policy Roots of Predatory Lending in 1970s Chicago – Beryl Satter

Beryl Satter’s contribution to the symposium on Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Color of Money focuses on the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968. As Satter recounts, lenders skimmed profits at every step—first by charging origination fees on inflated mortgages and then by selling mortgages to a secondary market. By contrast, buyers were the victims of accelerated foreclosure schedules, the result of FHA-insured mortgages’ perverse incentives to vacate homes as quickly as possible in order for lenders to collected payment on defaulted loans. The structure of the FHA and HUD Acts created asymmetric structures that spurred lending to a captive market of Black and Latino borrowers, enacting through law and practice a siphon of wealth from minority borrowers to lenders.

Plantation Capitalism’s Legacy Produced the Maui Wildfires – Uʻilani Tanigawa Lum and Kaulu Luʻuwai

In the aftermath of the wildfires that ravaged Maui in August 2023, Tanigawa Lum and Lu’uwai explained that while drought and high winds were the proximate cause of the disaster, there was also a deeper human-focused explanation: the history of plantation capitalism. Haole (foreign) capitalists established sugar plantations across the islands throughout the late nineteenth century, decimating the local biodiversity in favor of monoculture sugarcane and imposing the colossal irrigation systems needed to sustain it. Even as the sugar plantations have closed, Tanigawa Lum and Lu’uwai explain, “the tourism industry has mirrored and reinforced the legacy of plantation capitalism through power structures that persist in disenfranchising Kānaka Maoli and other marginalized immigrant communities living in Hawaiʻi,” including the large Filipino population living on the islands and serving as the primary low-wage workforce. Through recent litigation and legal reform, however, Kānaka Maoli are working to restore Hawai’ian self-determination and make the islands sustainable again.

Constitutional Political Economy for a Democracy, Not an Oligarchy – William E. Forbath & Joseph Fishkin

In this introductory post to the symposium on their *The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, *Forbath and Fishkin note that while their work has emerged amidst the blossoming movement for law and political economy, many in this movement are skeptical of the usefulness of constitutional argument, largely because they are skeptical of how such arguments play out in courts. While they share this skepticism of the judicial supremacy, they argue that for much of American history, constitutional arguments were not the exclusive province of courts. Instead, there was a vibrant  “democracy of opportunity” tradition that impelled legislators and executives to restrain oligarchy, build a broad, wide-open middle class, and construct a political economy that is inclusive across racial lines. By abandoning this tradition, late 20th century liberals mistakenly ceded the ground of constitutional argumentation to the right.

The Origins of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex – Claire Dunning

Despite receiving more revenue from the U.S. government than from private donors, the nonprofit sector is often cast as an independent realm that stands apart from both state and market. This picture, Claire Dunning argues, is not merely misleading, but dangerous, as it naturalizes the idea that the needs of certain citizens are best met by private supplement, rather than by more expansive, more equal government provision. As Dunning explains, the nonprofit industrial complex first emerged in the postwar city, where segregation persisted and demands for freedom and equality grew. While federal grants were, for a time, able to circumvent local governments committed to maintaining segregation, this outsourcing approach created organizations vulnerable to future budget cuts and cast the needs of those traditionally excluded from the full rights of citizenship as optional luxuries rather than essential functions of government.

What the Telegraph Can Teach Us About the Moral Economy – Evelyn Atkinson

Evelyn Atkinson argues that as we grapple with the law’s power to address corporations, one interesting yet largely forgotten set of cases can help us find our bearing: what are known as the “death telegram” cases. These suits, which occurred during the turn of the twentieth century, involved claims for emotional distress against telegraph corporations for failing to deliver telegrams involving the death or illness of a family member. Despite a long-established common law rule that mental anguish alone could not be recognized, the Courts made an exception because telegraph companies and patrons were understood not to be in an arms-length, impersonal market transaction, but one based on affective, emotional duties—in part because they were understood as “public service corporations.” This perspective, Atkinson suggests, can open up new ways of thinking about powerful, monopolistic corporations today.

After World War II, US hegemony faced a unique challenge. African and Asian countries began liberating themselves from their colonial masters, whose armies could no longer sustain the oppressive violence needed to maintain their colonies. Capitalism had been thoroughly discredited—not only in the Eastern Bloc, where anti-fascist governments took power, but in Western Europe as well. Intellectuals, artists, and musicians in Western Europe increasingly embraced Marxism as the prevailing ideology. While US industrial power had an awe-inspiring reputation for producing unprecedented consumer goods, culturally, the US was viewed as a backwater that created no innovative works of art, music, or literature.

Classical music was seen as a European creation. Hollywood still had not perfected its blockbusters. The American authors who were known abroad such as Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck had socialist leanings, which would not be of any help for the US government officials who were trying to sell American capitalism abroad.

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In the effort to win influence over the world, the US has two big problems: their actions around the world made it clear that the US wanted to replace former colonial powers, second, the racial discrimination in the US made it difficult to win influence in countries populated mainly by people of color.

Their efforts to win influence amongst people of color was severely hampered by the overt racial discrimination that black people faced in the USA. They could not convince African heads of state that they envisioned a partnership on equal footing, when most black people were oppressed at home through overt racial segregation and the more insidious economic discrimination.

In Western Europe, the traditional leftist artists, in their expressions, used art for politics, which often highlighted the crimes of colonialism. For example, Pablo Picasso, who was a Marxist, used his art for political messages. One example is his painting “Massacre in Korea” which highlighted the atrocities committed by the US in the Korean war.

Massacre in Korea by Picasso

A conversation on the grounds of colonial crimes, was one that the US could now win. Therefore, the US strategy was to change the conversation. This problem was tackled by two agencies: the United States Information Agency, which was created in 1953, and operated under the state department and within US embassies. The CIA also took to sponsoring many umbrella organizations aimed at this effort.

They focused on art forms that removed political messages from the traditional leftist art. One of the art forms that they chose to sponsor was modern art, whose abstract expressions steered the conversation about the boundaries and definitions of what is actually art and it steered the conversation away from political commentary. In fact, the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) was filled with national security ties.

MOMA was founded in 1929 by Abby Rockefeller. In 1939, her son Nelson Rockefeller became the President of MOMA. He was also appointed by the Roosevelt administration to serve as the Assistant Secretary of State in Latin America. Its executive secretary between 1948-1949, Thomas Braden went on later to join the CIA. In a Saturday Evening Post article entitled, “I’m glad the CIA Immoral”, he wrote that modern art “won more acclaim for the U.S. …than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have bought with a hundred speeches.”

Under the secret patronage of the CIA, MOMA arranged many art exhibits all throughout the world. In fact, the State Department in 1946 spent thousands top purchase modern art pieces featuring artists like Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollack.

In the field of literature, the United States Government sponsored many magazines around the world such as London-based Encounter and the French-language Preuves. They featured writers who strived away from critiquing concrete actions of the United States to celebrating more abstract notions like “freedom” and “democracy.” This helped create what later CIA employee Cord Meyer described as a “compatible left.”

The field of music was used to combat the most heavy criticisms levied against the US, namely the brutal racial oppression faced by Black Americans. The US had an uphill battle of convincing many newly freed African nations that it was interested in being an equal partner, when Black Americans faced overt segregation and more insidious forms of economic discrimination within the USA. Their answer to this was to promote Jazz music. In one embarrassing incident, two Ghanian Diplomats faced discrimination inside a Denny’s in Delaware, which prompted the Eisenhower administration to desegregate a stretch of highway between New York and Washington, which diplomats frequently travelled between.

Unlike classical music, Jazz music could be touted as a uniquely American form of expression. It started in New Orleans, mainly from Black Americans, who would use a mix of rhythms and fast-paced improvisation. With predominant artists being mainly Black Americans, they could showcase them on a world stage, which would alleviate the charges of the US engaging in active racial discrimination.

Under these guises, the State Department arranged for “Jazz Diplomacy” tours around the world. They sponsored artists such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong to tour around Africa. Of course, being sponsored by the State Department did soften the harsh critics both of these artists had about the racism at home.

In 1954, after the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs Board of Education that segregation, was inherently unequal, the instructed the states to proceed to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” But of course, most states did the opposite and tried to hinder any efforts at integration at every step. In 1957, when then Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to surround the Central High School, to prevent the nine students from enrolling in the school, Louis Armstrong’s critique was harsh and unwavering. He said, “The way they're treating my people in the south … the government can go to hell."

However, after accepting his position as a Jazz Ambassador in 1960, when asked about the race relations within the US, his reply was, “I don’t know anything about it; I’m just a trumpet player.”

On top of muting the critics of these once strong musicians, the Jazz tours did not only promote diplomacy, but they helped aid the efforts of the US National Security State, in other ways, unbeknownst to these musicians.

On June 30, 1960, Congo had just earned its independence from Belgium after one of the most brutal colonial rules. Joseph Conrad, in his book, “The Heart of Darkness” wrote about the depths of humanity’s depravity which took place in King Leopold’s Congo. King Leopold desperately wanted a colony, and nations such as the United States and the United Kingdom obliged in the Berlin conference by establishing the Congo Free State. Unlike other colonies, the Congo Free State did not belong to the country of Belgium, but instead of King Leopold’s personal fiefdom. With the patenting of rubber tires by John Dunlap in 1888, demand for a new resource skyrocketed exponentially. Congo, being rich in rubber trees was lucrative for the profit for the profiteers.

Brutality of the Free State of Congo Unprecedented

In order to meet the exorbitant demand for rubber, the Congolese people were forced to harvest wild rubber through daily quotas which was enforced through the vicious Force Publique, King Leopold’s personal mercenary force. Failure to meet the rubber quota meant that the Force Publique would chop off the hands of the Congolese villagers as one of the most brutal forms of retribution.

Later, in part due to the atrocities in Congo under King Leopold, in 1908, Belgium took over the management of Congo as Belgian Congo. Around this time, Congo’s rich deposits of copper became known, which led to the opening of the mining concession Union Minere, which exploited the rich copper deposits in the province of Katanga.

While Belgians exploited the minerals in the tune of billions of dollars, Congolese were left with very little to show for it. Besides the mineral-rich region of Katanga, there were not many highways joining the country together. Schools were few and far between and mostly serviced Belgian pupils. The Belgian colonization in Congo was so brutal that in 1960 when Belgian finally left Congo, the average life expectancy was 40.2 years. Diseases were rampant.

Amidst this backdrop, a young, visionary Patrice Lumumba was elected the first Prime Minister of an independent Congo, which became independent on June 30, 1960. During the independence day processions, Belgium King Baudouin took the stage, where he praised the King Leopold II. He also stated that he hoped the Congolese would prove worthy of the “trust” placed in them by the Belgian colonial powers. Soon afterwards, Patrice Lumumba took up the stage with a fiery speech that highlighted the brutalities of Belgian rule in Congo. He said, “We remember the ridicule, insults, and beatings we had to endure morning, noon and night, because we were ‘negroes’. We recollect the atrocious suffering of those persecuted for political opinions or religious beliefs. Exiled in their own homeland, their fate was really worse than death itself,” he said, recalling that this independence was indeed the fruit of a “struggle.”

Lumumba also expressed desire to use the vast mineral wealth in Congo in order to develop it economically. Immediately, this speech painted a target on his back where Washington and Brussels were concerned. On August 18, 1960, the CIA head Allen Dulles met with Eisenhower in order to plan the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba. Soon, the main plans were made, which involved supporting Joseph Mobutu and his militia to take over the country.

When Louis Armstrong began his tour in Congo in October, Lumumba was already under house-arrest. His tour was promoted in a west, as a way of distracting western audiences from the actual goings on in Congo. The first stop was Leopoldville (Kinshasa) where he played to a large crowd. The more curious aspect of his tour was the second stop: Elizabethville, which was what the capital of the mineral-rich province of Katanga was called.

While the US, formally, did publicly recognize Katanga as an independent republic, they provided the rebels with military support through back channels. The US had established a covert action program. Through, their allies in Apartheid South Africa, they created channels to recruit both mercenaries and also send arms to the rebel group.

While under the pretext of attending a Louis Armstrong concert, the CIA attache Larry Devlin, who was under the cover of being an embassy staffer was able to move freely in Katanga. Embassy staffers also met with the self-declared President in Katanga, without the US giving actual recognition. Ambassador Clare Timberlake went for the event, as well as the CIA chief Devlin. It was later admitted that ‘The object was to talk to Tshombe, the elected president of the Congolese province of Katanga, without recognizing him as the president of an independent state.’

While the concert itself did not enable the coup, it allowed for key meetings between coup-plotters and embassy staff to occur. It gave them the necessary cover to have these meetings without drawing attention to the planning of the coup. A few months after the concert, the Democratically elected leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. Of course, even without Louis Armstrong’s Jazz concerts in Congo, the CIA would probably have found a way to meet with key figures that enabled them to create an armed resistance to install the western-friendly Joseph Mubuto into power.

The mineral wealth of Congo remained in the hands of western companies like Union minere.

While the Jazz diplomacy ended in the 1990s, the State Department continues to sponsor similar programs in the interests of its national security state. Nowadays, much of the function of the CIA has been taken over by the National Endowment for Democracy, who continue to give grants to various artists and radio programs.

The US State Department and the US national Security state continues to use music and art to promote its agenda. Most recently, it named Rapper Chuck D, as the Global Ambassador for Rap, and we interviewed him about his transition from “Fighting the system” to “Representing the system.” In his interview with us, he tried to explain that “the devil does not use the same trick twice” and he is not being used in a similar manner as Luis Armstrong and other musicians from the past. But, only time will tell if that is indeed the case.