Author: admin

The small town of Trussville, Alabama, has proven that its tight-knit community is larger than the size of the town itself. After a falling tree struck star baseball player Grayson Pope during a storm, the community was quick to rally around him and his family.

On June 6th, Pope was enjoying a day on the golf course with his team when the storm suddenly started. In a single moment, his life changed dramatically – a tree fell and crashed directly onto the golf cart, knocking Pope unconscious in an unexpected “freak accident,” as reported by the Trussville Tribune.

Pope was immediately rushed to the hospital for examination and testing. By the night of June 7th, he had undergone multiple CT scans and MRIs, showing that he had experienced brain swelling and microhemorrhages on his brain and brain stem. Doctors say he is slowly starting to respond to pain but is not responding to verbal commands.

In a single evening, around 150 people showed up at a local church to pray for Pope’s accelerating recovery, and the next day an even larger group came together in a public park to pray and sing songs of support.

His family has felt immensely encouraged by the demonstration of care, which they describe as a source of strength as he continues his healing journey.

Emma, Pope’s older sister, shared a post on social media regarding his latest medical update. She explained that an MRI scan revealed further trauma on his brain and that there is “no surgery that can fix it.” Emma asked for prayers and a miracle, as Pope was in need of one at this time.

Pope’s Neurologist has stated that Pope will take an MRI in one week to asses where he is at. The strong and united display of support for Pope’s recovery speaks to the power of community in a small-town setting.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post A Big Pharma/Globalist Construct Fraud: Deadly Viral Pandemics Are Not Possible? appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post “Independent” Ukrainian “Kill List” Actually Run by Kiev, Backed by Washington appeared first on Global Research.

The state of democratic rights for journalists in some of the world’s leading Western powers is becoming increasingly worrisome.

A group protests in front of the British embassy in Paris to demand the release of French publishing employee Ernest Moret after he was taken into custody in London. (Telmo Pinto / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

On May 17, journalist Kit Klarenberg was arriving at Luton Airport on a visit to his home country of the United Kingdom when a group of British counterterrorism officers detained him and interrogated him for five hours. With the threat of arrest hanging over him if he didn’t comply, the officers fingerprinted him and took his DNA while seizing all of his electronic devices and forcing him to unlock them. They returned the devices after a week but held on to one of his SD cards.

Klarenberg has written copious articles critical of the British government’s foreign and national security policies for a variety of left-wing outlets: Electronic Intifada, MintPress News, the Cradle. But the British officers were interested in one outlet in particular: the Grayzone. According to Klarenberg’s account of the detention for that outlet, the officers questioned him about his pay from the news website, his contact with its editor, Max Blumenthal, and any hypothetical links between the Grayzone and the Russian government.

Over the last year, Klarenberg has written several major stories highly embarrassing for the British government based on leaked documents. One series of stories showed the plans of British intellectual Paul Mason — who has, since Keir Starmer’s right-wing takeover of UK Labour, positioned himself as the leading nominally leftist supporter of the Labour head — to collaborate with the UK government and UK intelligence contractors as part of an “information war” campaign against the British left. Another revealed an April 2022 proposal to British intelligence to help Ukrainian forces destroy the Kerch Bridge in Crimea, which Ukraine successfully suicide-bombed last October. Still another exposed British involvement in training Ukrainian soldiers for other attacks on the disputed territory.

Given this, it’s not hard to see how Klarenberg ended up in the British government’s crosshairs.

Klarenberg was reportedly detained under Schedule 3, Section 4 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Act, a controversial law criticized by human rights groups and the UN that was passed by the ruling Conservative government in 2019, ostensibly in response to the Skipral poisoning two years earlier. The law gives British law enforcement wide latitude to detain and harass individuals deemed to be taking part in a “hostile activity” on behalf of or in the interests of a foreign government.

In practice, this could mean almost anything. The law defines “hostile activity” as something that could threaten national security, threaten the British economy with implications for its national security, or is simply a “serious crime.” This applies whether or not the accused actually knows they’re carrying out a “hostile activity” — and even whether or not the foreign government whose bidding they’re supposedly doing is aware they’re doing it.

The harassment Klarenberg received at the British border seems to vindicate the warnings of the bill’s critics. But it would be a mistake to view this episode as being just about one particularly Orwellian British law. It’s part of a wider recent pattern in Western countries of government attacks on press freedoms and dissident speech.

Silencing Political Dissent

This past April, Ernest Moret, an employee of the left-wing French publishing house Éditions la Fabrique, underwent a similar ordeal, also in the UK. Detained in his case under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, Moret was questioned for six hours over his involvement in the protests against French president Emmanuel Macron’s deeply unpopular pension cuts, with officers asking him decidedly non-terrorism-related questions about his thoughts on the French retirement age, Macron, and COVID-19, and even asking him to name “anti-government” authors who had written for the publisher.

When Moret refused to provide the passwords for his seized electronic devices, he was arrested and held for nearly twenty-four hours, threatened with being banned from traveling to the UK. In this case, the British police never returned his devices.

This wasn’t the first time they’d used this exact law in a dubious way. Nine years ago, British police cited it to detain Glenn Greenwald’s late husband David Miranda while Miranda was carrying data leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that Greenwald was reporting on at the time. In 2017, they invoked it to detain the international director of CAGE, an NGO that advocates, ironically, against repressive “war on terror” policies.

British government officials have likewise been involved in a recent campaign to get the UK shows of former Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters canceled. Waters himself, Jacobin’s Chip Gibbons, and Electronic Intafada’s Asa Winstanley explain in detail how breathtakingly cynical and dishonest this effort has been, involving deliberately taking parts of Waters’s decades-old and beloved The Wall show out of context to present them as an endorsement of Nazism to unsuspecting modern viewers unfamiliar with his work. Waters has charged that the campaign is retaliation for his views on foreign policy, namely his criticisms of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians and of Western governments’ role in the war in Ukraine. (Incredibly, the US State Department has now also weighed in, absurdly labeling the show antisemitic.)

This smear campaign began in Germany, where Waters is currently being criminally investigated over his Berlin show. Waters’s critics contend that his dressing up in the style of a Gestapo officer and miming gunning down minorities is possibly antisemitic and runs afoul of the country’s harsh laws against hate speech and the promotion of right-wing extremism — despite the fact that not only is the spectacle quite obviously a condemnation of what it’s depicting, which is why an Israeli tribute band has performed the same show throughout Israel using virtually the same iconography that Waters is being condemned for now, but it’s been a part of the show going back more than forty years.

This is not the only dubious example of Germany’s famously strict laws against certain types of speech being weaponized against political dissent. This year also saw German peace activist Heinrich Bücker receive a criminal order and a fine of €2,000 for a twelve-minute speech he gave in 2022 on the anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in which he said that “Germans must never again be involved in any form of war against Russia” and accused the German government of collaborating with Ukrainian fascists. (He later made explicitly clear he wasn’t saying all Ukrainians are fascists, and that he was in favor of negotiations “so that the murder stops.”)

There’s much one could criticize about Bücker’s speech. But one doesn’t have to agree with all or even any of it to see the dubious nature of the central allegation — that he was publicly approving of a crime, specifically a war of aggression — or to understand the chilling effect of prosecuting someone for making what’s essentially a call for peace and strategic empathy, however flawed. Though Bücker successfully appealed the charge, the judge made clear he was only being acquitted because he had delivered his speech to a small audience that already largely agreed with him, leaving the door open to similar prosecutions in the future.

The Taxman

Despite its vastly more permissive constitutional protections for speech and press freedoms, the United States is also seeing a similar trend. Take the deeply strange IRS case against journalist Matt Taibbi, in which an IRS agent made the unusual move of physically visiting his home unannounced on the exact day he was testifying to Congress about his “Twitter Files” reporting.

Taibbi was later informed that his 2018 and 2019 tax returns had been rejected due to potential identity theft — even though Taibbi had documentation showing his 2018 return had been accepted, he hadn’t heard anything about these issues in the years prior, and the IRS owed him a refund. It later turned out that the IRS had opened their case against him on Christmas Eve last year, a Saturday, the very same day that Taibbi had posted a particularly explosive edition of his Twitter Files series.

If the IRS was being weaponized against Taibbi over his reporting, it would hardly be a first: the IRS has been used by Richard Nixon and the FBI in the past to harass the president’s political opponents and left-wing groups and activists, including Martin Luther King Jr.

But this followed several other menacing developments centered around Taibbi’s reporting on government-driven tech censorship. During Taibbi’s testimony to Congress, hostile Democratic lawmakers repeatedly pressured Taibbi and his colleagues to reveal their sources while suggesting they were not real journalists and, by implication, not covered by the First Amendment’s press protections. Later, when Taibbi was falsely accused of having invented the government’s role in pressing for tech censorship, one of his congressional critics threatened him with prosecution for perjury and a possible five years in prison.

Because of the widespread perception that Taibbi is now a right-wing reporter and that the “Twitter Files” are merely a PR stunt for billionaire Elon Musk, all this has been almost exclusively covered by conservative media. But given how damaging the reporting was to the growing national security–tech complex, it’s not a stretch to assume this was official retaliation or even intimidation related to Taibbi’s exposure of little-known government policy.

Recent reporting has added a new wrinkle to this. Back in April, a high-ranking official in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) — the country’s equivalent to the FBI, which has been targeting left-wing dissidents in Ukraine and has been accused of torture — revealed to former Intercept reporter Lee Fang that it was collaborating with the FBI to pressure tech companies to censor alleged and broadly defined Russian disinformation. This has recently been corroborated by the Grayzone’s Aaron Maté, who obtained documents showing that he and other North American journalists were among the targets of this joint SBU-FBI pressure. Last year, several left-wing press outlets that were critical of US policy toward the Ukraine war had their accounts shuttered by PayPal, hindering their operations.

In fact, the United States fell three places this year in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, owing in part to what the organization called “a troubling pattern of harassment, intimidation and assault on journalists in the field.”

That has often involved the use of state power to attack journalists for doing their jobs, whether county officials caught on tape discussing killing a father and son reporting team in Oklahoma, reporters arrested by police in both blue and red states for trying to do their jobs, or the two North Carolina reporters arrested and convicted for alleged trespassing while photographing the police evicting a homeless encampment. In the last case, body camera footage showed an officer explicitly urging their arrest “because they’re videotaping” — in other words, because they were reporting.

Left-leaning activists are bearing the brunt of this as both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations have moved the “war on terror” to the domestic sphere. Arguably the most high-profile such case right now is the absurd prosecution of Atlanta’s “Cop City” protesters under domestic terrorism charges, an alarming episode whose most recent development has been the unprecedented raid on and arrest of organizers of a bail fund for protesters.

And both the Biden administration and its UK counterpart continue to collaborate in the torture, imprisonment, and possible prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who this week lost his most recent legal appeal, putting him, in his brother’s words, “dangerously close” to being extradited to the United States to stand trial. According to the Daily Mail, the UK Home Office is already preparing extradition papers for Assange to be extradited as soon as in the next few weeks.

Assange’s treatment — based on the radical authoritarian theory that the US government is entitled to prosecute and jail any journalist on earth who reveals Washington secrets, wherever they are, whatever country they hail from, and even if they have no legal US connection — has already sent a menacing signal worldwide to reporters and publishers. But his prosecution would be a serious escalation on top of this if it’s successful, sharply curtailing US press freedoms to publish and report on government secrets by setting the precedent that news publishers can be criminally prosecuted for doing so — which is exactly why numerous press freedom, human rights, and civil liberties groups, as well as members of Congress and leading Western media outlets, have all demanded the Biden administration drop the case.

A Slippery Slope

Taken together, these stories paint a worrying picture of the state of democratic rights in some of the world’s leading Western powers.

Worse, it’s being enabled by the silence of those who should be checking such behavior. The Biden administration, which has framed both its foreign and domestic policy as a battle between the forces of democracy and authoritarianism, not only has nothing to say about these attacks on civil liberties — it’s deeply complicit in, and one of the leading culprits of, such attacks. In turn, the press outlets and media personalities that soaked up publicity when condemning Donald Trump’s verbal attacks on journalists are far quieter about the government’s material threats to press freedoms now that they’re taking place under a Democratic president.

Meanwhile, many of these cases are specifically related to foreign policy dissent, particularly on the matter of NATO policy toward the Ukraine war, which the US and allied governments have framed as an existential battle for worldwide democracy. Yet as has been clear since last year, the war and NATO countries’ participation in it is tragically having the opposite effect on both Ukrainian and Western societies, leading them to behave in more and more authoritarian ways on the basis of protecting Ukraine’s war effort — measures that, ironically, resemble the Russian government’s own authoritarian behavior.

But this is really a ramping up of trends that date back to at least the start of the war on terror this century, which saw governments, especially those of the UK and the United States, clamp down on civil liberties and basic freedoms on the basis of national security. For all the warnings then of the slippery slope we were on, successive administrations, sometimes from different sides of the political spectrum, have never dismantled these structures but rather added to them. And absent any sort of reckoning and mass action to oppose them, we seem destined to keep sliding faster and faster down until we find out what’s at the bottom.

Because of a Big Oil–backed exemption, federal air quality data won’t reflect this week’s wildfire smoke. The exemption allows states to ignore pollution from “exceptional events,” freeing polluters from reducing emissions to offset smoke impact.

The sun rises behind One World Trade Center, while the smoke from Canada wildfires covers Manhattan, New York on June 8, 2023. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez / Getty Images)

Seventy-five million people nationwide have been under air quality alerts, as days of smoke-filled skies sent soot levels soaring to more than ten times beyond what federal regulators consider safe for breathing.

But in federal air quality data, it will be as if those days never happened. That’s because a Big Oil–backed exemption in federal environmental law allows states to discount pollution from “exceptional events” beyond their control, including wildfires. And while environmental regulators are considering cracking down on soot and particle pollution, industry groups are opposing those reforms, too.

Under current rules, states like New York, where residents have been urged to remain indoors, won’t have their “hazardous” air quality index levels count against their compliance with the federal Clean Air Act — so emissions sources in the state, for example, won’t be required to reduce other discharges to help offset the smoke pollution.

“Every air quality monitor from New York to D.C. is going to blow past the limit,” said Sanjay Narayan, a managing attorney with the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program. But instead of localities counting that data toward the overall standards they’re required to maintain, he said, “They’ll say, ‘This is caused by wildfires, so we’ll continue to do what we normally do.’”

Environmental justice groups in cities like Phoenix, Chicago, and Detroit have previously accused states of exploiting the wildfire loophole to avoid cleaning up air that’s already dangerously dirty — often to the benefit of polluters that also helped push changes to the Clean Air Act beginning in the mid-2000s.

Those changes allow states to skip reporting pollution from natural occurrences like dust storms, thereby reducing the likelihood of triggering enhanced cleanup measures that could impact industrial activities. In 2016, the oil industry’s top lobbying group even took the rare step of siding with federal environmental regulators in a court challenge from green groups arguing that they had illegally expanded the reporting exemptions to include some human-caused pollution.

In an echo of their larger campaign of climate denial, oil lobbyists argued that it was virtually impossible to differentiate between “purely natural emissions” and those connected to human activity — so regulators should treat wildfires and other similar occurrences as “natural events.”

Last year, a panel of outside scientific experts took the opposite position, questioning whether federal regulators should continue to treat wildfires as “exceptional” given that they’re now seasonal events.

“The dramatic increase in wildfires over the last decade is not natural,” wrote the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee in its March 2022 recommendations, noting that the causes included both climate change and land management practices. “Given the potential for significant adverse health events, it may be time to reconsider the current approach.”

Dirtying the Clean Air Act

When Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, its advocates were concerned primarily with pollution spewing from industrial sources like smokestacks — problems regulators could pinpoint and reduce. Under the law, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets pollution control standards that states must find ways to meet and maintain. States are also required to report any air quality data falling below those standards.

The loophole for exceptional events, which was codified in 2005 amendments to the Clean Air Act, was intended to avoid penalizing states for events they can’t control. While New York City suffers through the worst air quality in the world this week, for example, there’s little state regulators can do to stop Canadian wildfires.

At the time, oil lobbyists praised the move, encouraging the EPA in 2006 regulatory comments to “expand the definition of exceptional events to include all emissions and events that are beyond the control” of states, and they explicitly cited particle pollution from wildfires as an example. Over time, the federal agency has continued to expand the definition, making it easier for states to receive waivers.

But while pollution from wildfires may not fit neatly into the existing regulatory paradigm, environmental groups say that regulators can’t afford to ignore it. Residents forced to breathe soot-filled air aren’t concerned about the source, and erasing smoke pollution from the record doesn’t undo the damage its buildup can cause to the heart and lungs over time.

Seasonal blazes have already reversed decades of progress on clean air, according to a recent study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Part of the problem, some wildfire science experts say, is a framework that can ding states for smoke from the kind of controlled burns that help prevent wildfires, while letting them off the hook for the larger, more dangerous conflagrations that often result.

In public comments on proposed changes to the EPA’s “exceptional events” rule in 2016, one fire science expert suggested that the agency take “the exact opposite” approach to regulating wildfire smoke.

“The state air regulatory agencies should count wildfire emissions,” wrote Scott Stephens, a wildland fire science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, arguing that doing so “would become a driver for ecologically appropriate prescribed fire and managed wildfire use.”

The Cost of Doing Nothing

The EPA didn’t incorporate suggestions from fire scientists in the 2016 changes.

But the agency did loosen the overall standards for what could be counted as an exceptional event — a move that the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil and gas industry’s top lobbying group, had backed in its own regulatory comments.

In prior years, the API had lobbied alongside Exxon on proposed legislation to relax the criteria for states seeking air quality waivers from such events.

Environmental groups challenged the laxer rule in federal court in 2016, arguing that it created too large a loophole for some types of human-caused emissions. In response, the oil lobby did something unusual: intervene on the side of the EPA.

The API’s attorneys wrote in a brief that overturning the agency’s rule would force states to report more data showing poor air quality — a move that could negatively impact its members’ operations. In other words, forcing states to more fully account for air pollution, even from sources they didn’t completely control, could mean a crackdown on more sources they do control.

The court sided with the EPA and the oil lobbyists. In recent years, states have increasingly relied on wildfire waivers to meet their required air quality standards, according to a March report from the Government Accountability Office — even as air quality has declined.

On multiple occasions, local environmental groups have challenged the federal agency’s decisions to sign off on the waivers. In March, a Detroit-based group contested an exceptional event waiver granted by the EPA for poor air quality registered in the city the previous year. State environmental regulators claimed that the readings were influenced by distant wildfire smoke.

But in a letter to the EPA, the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center said that the state was instead seeking “to delay and evade utilizing their regulatory responsibility to lower ozone pollution in the Detroit area,” which suffers from disproportionately high asthma rates. The federal agency approved the state’s waiver in May.

Federal environmental regulators are currently considering one measure that environmental justice groups say could help address rapidly declining air quality, including from wildfires — tightening standards for soot and particle pollution. That move is staunchly opposed by the oil and gas, mining, and chemical lobbies.

While there’s no single regulatory solution for wildfires, the eerie haze currently gripping the skies above huge swaths of the country should serve as a reminder of the urgency of addressing their underlying causes, said the Sierra Club’s Narayan.

“This is why it’s critical that the EPA regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act — that’s what the act was meant to do,” he said. “We hear industry complaining about the cost of greenhouse gas reductions, but this should be a reminder that the costs of doing something are a lot lower than the costs of doing nothing.”

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post Russian Neo-Nazi Fighting Putin Taught at Far-Right Camp in UK appeared first on Global Research.

Manchester City is the hot favorite to win tonight’s Champions League final with the best team that an oil-rich autocracy can buy. It’s the latest stage in a long-term process that has converted the people’s game into a plaything of wealthy elites.

The Premier League match between Brentford FC and Manchester City at Gtech Community Stadium on May 28, 2023 in Brentford, England. (Craig Mercer / MB Media / Getty Images)

Manchester City have just won their fifth Premier League title in six seasons, the culmination of a lavishly funded project to boost the prestige of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family. The Saudi monarchy has bought their domestic rivals Newcastle United and the rulers of Qatar own Paris Saint-Germain.

The financial gulf between the wealthiest clubs and their rivals is wider than ever before, depriving many national leagues of any element of surprise. But members of the self-perpetuating oligarchy at the top of the game are still looking for ways to strengthen their economic advantage. How did a sport deeply rooted in working-class communities become a multibillion-dollar industry where financial doping is the norm, and is there anything that can be done to reverse the process?

We spoke to Jonathan Wilson, a football columnist for the Guardian and the Observer, about the current state of the football industry. His books include Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics and Two Brothers: The Life and Times of Bobby and Jackie Charlton. The following is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast; you can listen to the interview here.

Daniel Finn

What do we know today about the circumstances in which Qatar won the right to host the World Cup, and how does it relate to the wider FIFA corruption scandal?

Jonathan Wilson

That’s a massive question. What we know is that of the twenty-two members of the executive committee of FIFA who made the decision, sixteen have either been convicted of corruption offenses or credibly accused of corruption. I don’t think there’s any direct evidence against Qatar or indeed Russia — the two hosting decisions were made at the same time — but certainly the body making those decisions has been shown to be flawed.

There were all the arrests in Zurich in 2015, when the FBI got involved. This is one of the problems with football corruption: because it goes cross-border, it’s very hard for anybody to have the authority to take proper action. I think what they actually got them on was fraud over some TV deals in South America: some of the interactions that were questionable were carried out in dollars and that gave the US authorities the right to intervene. It may not be coincidental that the US is hosting the next World Cup in conjunction with Mexico and Canada.

Because football corruption goes cross-border, it’s very hard for anybody to have the authority to take proper action.

That led to the downfall of Sepp Blatter. I personally don’t find Blatter as objectionable as a lot of people do. It’s very easy to think that FIFA’s corruption was embodied in him. It’s important to stress he’s never been convicted of any corruption, although I think he absolutely did pay himself an enormous salary and very generous expenses.

He was instrumental during the 1970s in helping João Havelange topple Stanley Rous in the presidential election of 1974, which is what led to FIFA’s modern age of corporatism and the corruption that has accompanied that. I think it’s probably fair to say that at some level, he had the best interests of football at heart. He genuinely was an evangelist for football. He believed that FIFA had a chance of winning the Nobel Peace Prize for taking the World Cup to South Africa in 2010.

He had wanted to take it to South Africa four years earlier in 2006. There was some very dodgy stuff going on that resulted in the 2006 tournament going to Germany. A delegate from New Zealand who would have voted for South Africa disappeared the night before the vote and went back to New Zealand.

It was never explained why he did that. If he had stayed, the vote would have been 12–12 and Blatter would have given his casting vote to South Africa. Instead, it was 12–11 in Germany’s favor. That’s never been properly investigated.

Sepp Blatter believed that FIFA had a chance of winning the Nobel Peace Prize for taking the World Cup to South Africa in 2010.

Blatter did take the tournament to South Africa in 2010. I don’t think it was a great World Cup, but the idea behind it was laudable. To an extent, Blatter was a realist. He thought that when you have enormous global corporations that essentially exist beyond the reach of any one authority, a certain amount of corruption is inevitable.

What Blatter did was keep an eye on that corruption and expose it when it was politically useful for him, as in the case of Mohammed bin Hammam, the Qatari who stood against him in the 2011 FIFA presidential election. He showed that bin Hamman had made payments to the Caribbean football union. He could take out opponents that way.

He didn’t crack down on corruption, but rather used it to his own ends. Whether that makes him personally corrupt is a slightly different issue. But he was toppled in the wake of the Zurich arrests in 2015. You then had a very strange campaign against Michel Platini, who was the obvious person to succeed Blatter.

Platini had been involved in the Qatar business in a direct way as the president of UEFA [Union of European Football Associations]. It looked as if he and the other two UEFA delegates would vote for the US to be host nation in 2022. Nine days before the vote, he went to a meeting at the Élysée Palace with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and the son of the emir of Qatar, who is now the emir himself. After that meeting, he and the UEFA delegates mysteriously switched their votes to Qatar, and there was then a big order placed by the Qatari government for French fighter jets. Make of that what you will.

In any case, Platini was seen as president-elect after Blatter, if you will. There was then an allegation made that he had taken two million dollars or Swiss francs in an illegal payment from Blatter. The evidence was always quite flimsy, and they were both exonerated earlier this year, but it was enough to end Platini’s political career in the world of football.

He was replaced by Gianni Infantino, the current FIFA president, who has shut down various ethics commissions. Infantino seems quite happy bantering on the world stage with Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman, and he lives in Qatar, which is also an interesting development.

Daniel Finn

Last summer, English clubs spent well over €2 billion on transfer fees — more than the next four European leagues put together. Do you think that the architects of the Premier League in the early 1990s had any idea that it would prove to be so successful in global commercial terms?

Jonathan Wilson

I’m sure they hoped it would be. It was part of a more general movement in football at the time. Silvio Berlusconi had bought AC Milan in 1986 and rescued them from probable bankruptcy. He gained popularity from that, and it helped launch his political career.

In the 1987–88 season, the Italian champions Napoli played Real Madrid in the first round of the European Cup, which in those days was a straight knockout competition. Berlusconi said this was crazy, because you had two of the biggest TV markets, Italy and Spain, playing against each other: whoever lost was out and you would have lost all that revenue. He said it was a crazy way to organize the competition.

There was a realization across Europe in the 1980s that the commercial potential of football wasn’t being exploited as much as it could be.

Berlusconi didn’t want his team to win the Italian league and find themselves playing against the Spanish champions or the German champions in the first round. He was very much the leader of a move toward what became the Champions League. The first season of the Champions League, 1992–93, was also the first season of the Premier League.

There was a realization across Europe in the 1980s that the commercial potential of football wasn’t being exploited as much as it could be. In the specific case of England, you had the ban on English clubs playing in Europe that had been imposed after the death of thirty-nine Juventus fans at Heysel stadium in Brussels when their club was playing Liverpool. English clubs were banned from European competitions for five years and lost a lot of revenue and exposure as a result.

Trying to obtain more revenue from domestic TV rights was not so much a bid for world domination as a way of staving off financial crisis. But they went on to market it brilliantly. Whatever you think of its founding principles, the Premier League has run itself better than any other league in the world. The result is that thirty years on, it is absolutely dominant in financial terms.

Daniel Finn

How important was the purchase of Chelsea by Roman Abramovich in shaping the economic development of English football?

Jonathan Wilson

It was hugely important because previously, you always had to do well on the pitch to generate money. Obviously when you generate money, you can buy better players and employ better managers, and you’re then more likely to be successful and generate more revenue in turn.

There had been a recognition that this was the case from the early days of the Football League in England, so there was a general levy of 4 percent of a club’s income that was then divided among all ninety-two league clubs. Twenty-five percent of gate receipts from ticket sales at matches went to the away club. As a result, even though you had an advantage if you had a big stadium, it wasn’t that much of an advantage.

It was only when the TV rights revolution began that you started to have self-perpetuating elites. The term “super club,” which is now bandied about quite freely, first appeared in the early ’70s. There was a recognition that the marketplace had changed with the launch of Match of the Day on the BBC in 1964. You could be a Manchester United fan without having to live near Old Trafford, since you could just watch them play on TV on a Saturday night.

That changed the parameters. In 1981, the English football authorities scrapped the protocol according to which the home club had to give a percentage of gate receipts to the away club. That allowed the big clubs to become bigger — an effect that was magnified after the coming of the Premier League. But even during the first decade of the Premier League, you still had to win games to make money.

Then Abramovich came along and suddenly a club’s wealth was not contingent on its performances. It decoupled success on the pitch from wealth: you could have money just because you had a megarich owner. Of course, this had sometimes happened in the past when a local businessman got involved. Jack Walker, for example, spent a lot of money supporting his local team Blackburn, who went on to win the league in 1994–95.

But the sums involved in those cases were much smaller than what Abramovich was now putting in. In the summer of Abramovich’s first year as owner, Chelsea spent more than the next nine clubs, I think, put together. They weren’t far off that in his second summer, either. It was an enormous investment from an external agent of a kind we’d never seen before.

Roman Abramovich decoupled success on the pitch from wealth: you could have money just because you had a megarich owner.

I had just started out as a journalist at the time, and I think we were pretty naive about it. We just thought, “Oh, it’s an amazing amount of money — this is all very exciting, all these players are arriving.” Alongside that, there was a slight feeling of distaste, wondering how moral it was that a very rich man could come along and break up the existing structures. I don’t think we really had any notion of what we now call “sportswashing” — of the reasons why Abramovich might be investing.

It was only nine or ten years later that we really began to interrogate the question of why he was doing it. We had bought the line that he watched the Champions League match in 2003 where Manchester United beat Real Madrid 4:3 and thought “I love this game — I must buy a slice of it for myself.”

If we looked further, the sense was that he was protecting his own position against Putin by making himself a figure who was well known in the West. Perhaps there really was an element of that because Abramovich subsequently took Israeli citizenship, which you could argue has given him certain escape routes. I don’t think it occurred to anybody to ask if this was part of a wider phenomenon of Russian money inveigling itself into West European society.

But in terms of the impact on football, the obvious comparison is to Arsenal. Around the same time, they had begun the process of moving away from Highbury, their traditional home, which had quite a small capacity and very limited corporate facilities. They realized that if they wanted to challenge Manchester United, they needed their own version of Old Trafford, which at the time was state of the art, with amazing commercial possibilities around it.

Arsenal thus began the process of moving to the Emirates stadium, but it came at an enormous cost. The interest repayments on the loan impacted their ability to pay transfer fees and wages for a long time, even after they moved into the new stadium. By the time that stadium was built, the idea of needing to generate your own revenue was already old hat: revenue had to come from a sugar daddy from abroad. Abramovich began that process of decoupling wealth in football from performance on the pitch or the ability to drag fans through the gate.

Daniel Finn

The Champions League has clearly widened the gulf between big clubs and small clubs and between big leagues and small leagues across the whole of Europe. Was that always the intention behind it, or is it a case of unintended and unforeseen consequences?

Jonathan Wilson

I think it’s very difficult to say. Clearly the fundamental urge was greed, with the big clubs saying we have to make more money. Perhaps there was an unwillingness or an inability to recognize that European football was an enormous ecosystem and that once you started damaging parts of it, that would have ramifications elsewhere. It was totally foreseeable, but I don’t think they did foresee it, if that makes sense.

Some people did, to be fair. Particularly with the Premier League, there was a lot of opposition to it in the early days, with people pointing out that this process of enriching the rich at the expense of the poor was inevitable. But that was never fully communicated to fans, and you didn’t get the same kind of backlash against it that you later had against the proposal for a European Super League.

I think it was an inevitable consequence, and it’s very difficult to put things right once that process has begun. There have been various tweaks made to the Champions League structure to try and encourage clubs from outside the big five leagues. But that brings problems of its own.

For example, a team from Cyprus, APOEL, reached the quarter finals of the Champions League a decade ago. You might think this was a great underdog story. But the money they got from that run completely destroyed the Cypriot league, because suddenly APOEL’s budget was ten, twenty, or even thirty times greater than that of their nearest competitors.

Not only are the richest clubs in the Champions League much stronger than the poorest clubs, but the poorest clubs are then much richer in turn than their domestic rivals.

Not only are the richest clubs in the Champions League much stronger than the poorest clubs, but the poorest clubs are then much richer in turn than their domestic rivals. That skews the domestic competitions, which means that those clubs carry on qualifying for the Champions League and receiving more money. I don’t really know how you put this right without wholesale redistribution, which clearly none of them will ever agree to.

Daniel Finn

What impact have the Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules devised by UEFA had in terms of leveling the playing field?

Jonathan Wilson

In truth, almost nil. They were introduced in 2011, just as Russian oligarchs were beginning to invest in Russian clubs like CSKA Moscow and Anzhi Makhachkala. The story behind Anzhi Makhachkala was bizarre: it seems to have been an idea of the Russian government to go to Makhachkala in the disputed region of Dagestan and give them a top-level European club to calm the waters. They invested enormous amounts of money, bringing in world-famous players like Roberto Carlos and Samuel Eto’o. That wave of investment in Russian domestic football slowed down dramatically after the FFP regulations were brought in.

But in terms of checking what Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) have done, the regulations have had virtually no impact. Every now and then, somebody raises a quibble and there will be an investigation that drags on and on. UEFA doesn’t have the financial clout to legally challenge a state-run club like City or PSG. Those clubs can afford to pay lawyers to drag things out until the statute of limitations has expired.

UEFA doesn’t have the financial clout to legally challenge a state-run club like Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain.

Manchester City were banned from the Champions League but got off on appeal — not because they hadn’t committed an offense but rather because the offense had been committed too long ago for them to be punished for it. There has been an investigation by the Premier League into payments made by City a decade ago that’s been going on for several years, with no sign of it coming to an end. Even if some punishment is finally imposed, it will be a decade or more after the offense took place, if indeed it was an offense.

In reality, FFP has had almost no impact. We’ve also discovered that state-run clubs have a lot of other state-run entities that can give them lucrative sponsorship deals. It’s almost impossible to say what a fair market price is for those deals.

Daniel Finn

Would you say the formation of a European Super League is inevitable in the long run, despite the setback to that project in 2021? And if it is, will we even notice the difference by the time that it happens?

Jonathan Wilson

I’m loath to say it’s inevitable, but it feels like the direction of travel. I think the Premier League is fine. Even though Manchester City are clearly dominant, having won five of the last six titles, it’s not like Germany, where Bayern Munich have won eleven in a row, or France, where PSG have won nine out of the last eleven, or Italy, where Juventus won nine in a row between 2011 and 2020. In Spain, there’s a very obvious duopoly between Real Madrid and Barcelona — if both of them have terrible seasons, Atlético Madrid can just about pinch the title, but nobody else can.

The leading countries are very worried by that because they realize it’s not a good product if the same team wins all the time. They’ve become trapped in a financial system whereby if a team is successful, it makes more money and can buy the best players. How do you get out of that without breaking the structures completely?

The pandemic has accelerated the process. The Premier League, because it’s wealthier and has bigger TV broadcast deals, was able to ride out the pandemic better than other countries. There’s a lot of economic pressure on the rest of Europe so they look at the Premier League and think “we need a way to combat that.” The Super League seems like an obvious way of doing it.

But how do you actually achieve that goal? PSG were against the Super League, because, I think, their owners were smart enough to recognize that fans don’t like the idea of a closed league. They like the idea that the Champions League is somehow still a meritocracy and that a team can fall or rise. However difficult that may be in practice, it is still at least theoretically possible, which wouldn’t be the case in a closed league. You would have quasi-franchises.

German fan culture would be very much opposed to it. There’s absolutely no reason for the English clubs to get involved and I honestly find it mystifying that so many of them were involved before. It’s significant that many of the clubs that went along with it have American owners who may have seen the possibility of an American-style system — a quasi-franchise system to lock in the revenues. The Premier League has such an advantage at the moment that I’m not really sure why they would give that up.

The leading football countries are very worried because they realize it’s not a good product if the same team wins all the time.

One key factor is a court case that’s been taken against UEFA by the three clubs that are still invested in the project: Juventus, Barcelona, and Real Madrid. They accuse UEFA of holding a monopoly position. The European courts will decide whether or not UEFA is allowed to hold that position.

If they rule in favor of the clubs, suddenly there will be nothing to stop them from setting up a Super League. Perhaps the leaders of FIFA could stop it, but they might opt instead to sit back and claim a slice of the club revenues they’ve been shut out from, while stabbing their old rivals from UEFA in the back at the same time.

If that was to happen, football might begin to splinter in the same way as golf or boxing. If you ended up with Manchester United belonging to one franchise while Real Madrid belonged to another so they couldn’t play each other, that would be a much less attractive product.

Daniel Finn

You mentioned earlier the role of Silvio Berlusconi, who famously launched his entire political career on the back of his position as chairman of AC Milan. Today’s generation of club owners don’t seem to be very interested in national political interventions in the way that someone like Berlusconi was. Is that a fair generalization, and if so, why do you think that is?

Jonathan Wilson

In Europe, it probably is true. You’ve got the case of Mauricio Macri in Argentina, who was the president of Boca Juniors. In much the same way as Berlusconi, that gained him the popularity and recognition to become president of his country.

But in Europe, the leading clubs are now just too big. An aspiring political candidate couldn’t afford them. In order to buy a club, you have to be either the sovereign wealth fund of a state or else an American hedge fund.

Daniel Finn

As you’ve alluded to, three major European clubs are now effectively state-run projects of the Gulf monarchies. What does that mean for the game in England, France, and the wider world?

Jonathan Wilson

It’s very hard to see it as anything other than terrible, on a number of levels. Take the case of Newcastle, a proud old club that has existed for one hundred twenty–odd years, representing the city and the people of Newcastle. It is now beholden in theory to a Saudi public investment fund, but realistically to the leaders of Saudi Arabia. Who’s to say that, if the oil price falls, they won’t think “we’ll get rid of that, we don’t need it”? And then what are the consequences for Newcastle?

What are their reasons for owning the club? Is it to win matches and titles? Is it to make money, or to promote the image of Saudi Arabia and give it an avenue into the society and business environment of Western Europe? If you believe that football clubs can and should be a representation of their area, that’s a major change.

A lot of Newcastle fans seem quite happy with the deal they’ve done. But you saw with Chelsea what can happen if you get involved in geopolitics. Your owner can suddenly be sanctioned, and then you could realistically be facing bankruptcy. As it is, Chelsea were taken over by Clearlake [Capital] and Todd Boehly, who I don’t think have made a very good job of it so far.

Ownership of football clubs has been taken away from the community, and that’s a very dangerous thing.

To an extent it’s true with hedge funds as well — ownership has been taken away from the community, and that’s a very dangerous thing. Fifty or sixty years ago, when clubs were owned by a local building magnate or haulier, that person might have had a lot of power, but he was still to some extent beholden to the community from which he came. That dynamic has changed.

The much bigger issue for football generally is that these clubs are not controllable, as I mentioned earlier. If they have the sovereign wealth fund of a state behind them, then how can the [Football Association] or the Premier League or UEFA control them? When it comes to any kind of legal battle, Saudi Arabia can afford the better lawyers and can afford to drag it out. They can win by draining your resources. In that context, the associations and organizations that supposedly provide the governing structure for the game are as good as meaningless.

Daniel Finn

During the first decade of this century, many English football fans looked to Germany as an alternative model for how football could be run in the modern age that wouldn’t have the same stark inequalities between clubs. Does the hegemony of Bayern Munich over the last decade mean that they had it wrong?

Jonathan Wilson

I don’t think they had it wrong, but they possibly hadn’t looked at the bigger picture. I totally get why the German model is attractive. They have the 50+1 rule, which states that the fans must control a minimum 51 percent stake in a club, with a couple of exceptions, such as Bayer Leverkusen, who are owned by the local pharmaceutical firm, and Wolfsburg, who are owned by Volkswagen.

Leipzig are now owned by Red Bull, who have shown that you can drive a truck through the spirit of the 50+1 rule while complying with the letter of it. But I get why that’s attractive — the sense that fans do have control.

When you compare the atmosphere of German grounds to the slightly anodyne Premier League crowds these days, you can see why that’s appealing to people.

German fan culture is also very attractive. When you compare the color and atmosphere of German grounds to the slightly anodyne Premier League crowds these days, you can see why that’s appealing to people. Ticket prices are much lower. There’s a much greater sense of fan engagement on political issues, taking strong stances against homophobia or in support of refugees. All of that is very attractive and I understand why people want to import some of that into the Premier League.

However, it didn’t alter the fact that Bayern were getting richer than everybody else, much quicker than everybody else, and nothing seems to have been able to stop that. That’s partly because Bayern were successful, and partly because Munich is a wealthy city with a lot of sponsors and investors. Bayern have around 70 percent more revenue than Borussia Dortmund, who are the second-richest German club.

Inevitably under those conditions, they win. They possess so much power that they can effectively neuter opponents by buying their best players. Jürgen Klopp’s Dortmund, when they were challenging Bayern, lost Robert Lewandowski, Mario Götze, and Mats Hummels, all to Bayern. It wasn’t just that they sold those players — they sold them to their direct rival.

When you look at German football now, it’s still a great league, but Bayern are so dominant that there’s no sense of a title race. That obviously takes a lot away from the attractiveness of it.

Daniel Finn

The traditional stereotype presents the US as having a more cutthroat, unregulated version of capitalism than many European states. It’s somewhat ironic in light of that stereotype that top-level American sports appear to be rather more egalitarian than European soccer in various ways, in terms of the draft pick, the distribution of television money, and so on. How did that American sporting model come about, and could it ever be replicated in Europe?

Jonathan Wilson

I don’t think it’s quite as straightforward as that. Yes, TV money is much more equitably divided, and you have the draft system, which makes competition much more equal. But that’s actually a very cynical, money-oriented way of doing things, because these are not organic clubs — these are franchises in a cartel. The cartel makes money and in fact it’s almost impossible to lose money, because it keeps everybody going on a level.

There’s no organic sense of a club representing its society, which for me is the great beauty of European football. I’m a Sunderland fan. The football club grew from a teachers’ team in the 1870s. A teacher called James Allen put the team together and it slowly grew into the Sunderland we know today, which has become probably the one thing that Sunderland has left as the heavy industries have fallen away. It’s the one reminder of the city that Sunderland used to be. It’s very difficult to get that with a franchise model.

Could you impose a franchise model on Europe? Let’s say you want thirty-two franchises across Europe — the same number as you have in the National Football League in the US. You wouldn’t put two of those franchises in Manchester and one in Liverpool, or three in London and two in Milan. Yet those rivalries between the Manchester clubs and Liverpool, or between the two Milan clubs, are among the great selling points of European football.

In US sports, there’s no organic sense of a club representing its society, which for me is the great beauty of European football.

The FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, has the idea for an African Super League. In Africa, you can make the case that football is in desperate need of investment and there is a system of club competition that is less wealthy and less well-established. That’s true to an extent, although the African Cup of Champions has been going since the early 1960s — almost as long as the European Cup.

Infantino’s idea is that you will have a closed league of twenty clubs that share all the investment arising from that between them. But you have an immediate problem: Where do you put those twenty franchises? Do you base them on existing clubs?

How can you choose between Al Ahly and Zamalek in Cairo, or between Raja and Wydad in Casablanca? Those derbies are still one of the big selling points of African football, so losing them would mean losing the one thing that people are still interested in.

The same problem arises in South America. Would you still have River Plate and Boca Juniors, both from Buenos Aires, if you had a league with franchises across the continent? You probably wouldn’t.

That’s an issue for US football. There’s no way for these organic rivalries, which mean so much more than football, to grow up. You can have a rivalry to some extent between New York and Boston (or between New York and New England, in terms of the franchises). But it’s not as visceral and deep-seated as Liverpool vs. Manchester United. That makes it a harder sell to a wider public.

Thursday marks the tragic death of a 23-year-old Russian man, Vladimir Popov, at the Elysees Dream Beach Hotel in Hurghada, Egypt. Video footage of the attack shows Popov struggling in the surf after being dragged under the water by a massive shark.

Popov’s stunned and terrified girlfriend managed to swim away to safety following the chaotic incident. Onlookers attempting to help Popov could not stop the attack, and he tragically died.

The Environment Ministry of Egypt confirmed that a man was brutally attacked and killed by a tiger shark in the waters close to Hurghada. In response to the incident, a 46 mile section of the waterfront has been shut down and will remain inaccessible until Sunday.

Tiger sharks are second on the list for most likely to attack humans, following great whites, says National Geographic. What sets tiger sharks apart is that they normally don’t swim away after taking a bite. The area where the attack occurred is a popular tourist destination, and shark attacks are rare. Although this is the third attack in Hurghada in the past year, the two others claimed the lives of an Austrian and Romanian tourist.

After the attack, authorities captured the shark in question and transferred it to a laboratory for further investigation. As a result of the incident, all water-related activities within the vicinity were restricted until Sunday.

Vladimir Popov’s sudden death reminds us to be aware of our surroundings in the ocean and how vital it is to protect our sea life and oceans. It also highlights the risks of swimming in the ocean and how important it is to be mindful of our safety.

…

The post Julian Assange: Ese pedazo de libertad que nos falta appeared first on Global Research.

Many commentators see the eccentric Robert F. Kennedy, Jr as an “antiestablishment” alternative to Biden. But he doesn’t even support single-payer health care, the brightest line dividing the centrist Democratic Party from its base.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr visits The Faulkner Focus at Fox News Channel Studios on June 2, 2023 in New York City. (Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images)

No elected president has been denied his party’s nomination for a second term since Franklin Pierce in 1856. The last time one even faced a serious primary opponent was 1992, when Pat Buchanan challenged George H. W. Bush for the Republican nomination. And the last time it happened on the Democratic side was when Ted Kennedy ran against Jimmy Carter in 1980.

But according to recent polling, only 37 percent of Democrats say they want Joe Biden to seek a second term. His age has a lot to do with that. But so does the state of the country.

Biden came into office surrounded by credulous journalists hailing him as a second FDR. He’s utterly failed to live up to the hype. If anything, the recently concluded debt ceiling negotiations made him look more like a second Bill Clinton — haggling with Republicans about exactly how much to shrink the welfare state. Meanwhile, the United States is becoming ever-more deeply involved in a potentially catastrophic war between Russia and Ukraine.

All of this creates an opening for a primary challenger. Ted Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, has stepped in to fill that niche. He’s not the only Democrat running against Biden — Marianne Williamson is too — but in most polls I’ve seen Kennedy is well ahead of her. And it’s not hard to see why he might emerge as Biden’s most prominent challenger. On the one hand, he comes from a lineage of Democratic Party royalty. On the other hand, he’s an edgy antiestablishment “populist.”

Or at least that’s how he’s been widely portrayed — both by commentators who are repulsed by Kennedy’s proclivity for anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and those who find his criticisms of the Biden administration compelling. But the populism label is false advertising. On key issues from Israel/Palestine to Medicare for All, RFK, Jr’s politics are a thousand miles away from his branding.

A Bold Truth-Teller?

Is Kennedy really a tribune of ordinary people screwed over by powerful interests? If so, it might be surprising that so many of his biggest fans are on the Right. He recently hung out on Twitter Spaces with union-busting billionaire Elon Musk, and last month a paean of praise for Kennedy appeared in the conservative journal National Review.

The author of the National Review piece, Matthew Scully, calls Kennedy “courageous of heart.” He writes that the mainstream media is hostile to the Kennedy campaign because of RFK, Jr’s “inability to tolerate the intellectual dishonesty he finds in his antagonists.” He says that Kennedy would still be in liberals’ good graces “if only he didn’t have so much integrity.”

Much of this is about Kennedy’s stance on COVID. It’s probably true that he wouldn’t be such a pariah if he weren’t a “skeptic” about vaccines and masking — although the claim that his positions on these issues display honesty and integrity is far more dubious. For example, Kennedy has claimed that there are “mountainous archives of peer-reviewed science supporting the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.” But meta–analyses of the research so far show exactly the opposite. Nathan Robinson and Lily Sánchez look at this and a number of other examples in a long article on Kennedy’s COVID conspiracism and conclude that “he’s telling people lies that will endanger their health.”

That would be bad enough if it were his only flaw. Part of the job of a president, after all, is to provide leadership during public health emergencies. But COVID policy isn’t likely to loom as large in the 2024 election, as some voters might care less about whether Kennedy thought they should get vaccinated two years ago than where he stands on health care policy in general right now.

Is Kennedy prepared to pick up where Bernie Sanders left off in 2020, continuing the fight to put an end to the parasitical private insurance industry and institute Medicare for All?

Antiestablishment, or Just Eccentric?

In a recent interview with left-wing journalist Krystal Ball, Kennedy was asked whether, given the hostility to the pharmaceutical companies he often expresses while talking about vaccines, he’d be willing to support a “public option” for pharmaceuticals or maybe even the outright nationalization of the industry. He immediately dismissed this, saying, “Oh I don’t think that’s the right thing,” and switching the subject to how to insulate regulatory agencies from the industry’s influence. He didn’t even pause to explain why it wouldn’t be the right thing. Apparently, he finds the suggestion too outlandish to even consider.

It’s worth noting that Kennedy’s hostility to even providing a public option to compete with privately manufactured medicine puts him to the right of California governor Gavin Newsom, a thoroughly mainstream Democrat who recently announced that California is going to start manufacturing its own insulin later this year.

The California news is one small indication of the way health care policy debates have shifted in the last decade and a half. I can remember watching then president Barack Obama on TV when he first rolled out the Affordable Care Act (the ACA, otherwise known as “Obamacare”) in 2009. Obama said that if the United States was starting its health care system over from scratch, he would prefer a “single-payer” system — what would later became known as Medicare for All. But because we weren’t “starting from scratch,” what Obama actually proposed was a market-based patchwork of regulations.

He never actually explained why the fact that we weren’t “starting from scratch” meant that we can’t switch to single-payer health care now. And it says a lot about the dismal political landscape of 2009 that hardly anyone at the time challenged him on that point.

Obama’s original proposal at least included a public option that would compete with private health insurance plans. This always would have been something much less than a half measure. Americans poor enough to qualify for Medicaid have long had a “public option” — and many doctors don’t take it. A proposal for a more widely available public option is still a proposal for two-tiered health care, and it would leave in place many of the deep injustices of the existing system. People would still stay in jobs they hated, for example, for fear of losing the better insurance they received from their employer.

Even so, a public option would be better than nothing. But Obama abandoned the public option by the time the ACA’s final form took shape.

Debates about abandoning the ACA in favor of Medicare for All dominated the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Bernie Sanders argued for Medicare for All, while Joe Biden said he’d veto any such proposal that crossed his desk as president. Biden did, however, say that he’d support a revival of Obama’s “public option” proposal.

Where does RFK, Jr stand on all this?

In the conversation last month with Ball and her cohost Saagar Enjeti, Ball asked Kennedy if he would support “universal health care through a Medicare for All program.” In his response, Kennedy shifted the goalposts in a more moderate direction, redefining “single-payer” health care to mean something more like the Obama/Biden “public option” proposal. “I would say,” he said, “[that] my highest ambition would be to have a single-payer program . . . where people who want to have private programs can go ahead and do that but to have a single program that is available to everybody.”

Or at least this is what he would support if he were “designing the system from the beginning.” But we aren’t. And he’s not sure enacting such a system now would be “politically realistic.”

Measuring Kennedy’s Foreign-Policy Courage

As bad as that answer is, there are other subjects where Kennedy’s pronouncements are more promising. For example, he’s advocated peace negotiations in Ukraine, and in his best moments he even talks about “unwinding” The United States’ global empire.

Actually doing any such unwinding as president would require tremendous courage and resolve, since he would be facing down fierce opposition from the “intelligence community” and America’s vast and multifaceted military-industrial complex.

How would a hypothetical President Kennedy hold up under such pressure?

We got a significant clue last week, when Kennedy made the mistake of praising Roger Waters — who’s recently been accused of antisemitism due to the rock star’s advocacy on behalf of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Whatever legitimate criticisms can be made of Waters, this one is a cheap smear.

Kennedy responded to anger about his praise for Waters not by mounting a principled defense of Palestinian human rights or condemning the weaponization of spurious accusations of bigotry, but by rolling over and playing dead. He met with a prominent supporter of Israel, Rabbi Schmuley Boteach, and abjectly apologized — pleading ignorance of Waters’s “antisemitism.” According to Boteach’s summary of the meeting, “Kennedy said his dedication to Israel’s security is unshakable and unalterable”:

I told him his father was one Israel’s greatest friends and we in the Jewish community mourn him till this day. I then asked him to please march with me tomorrow, June 4th, at the annual “Celebrate Israel Parade,” and he immediately agreed.

If Matthew Scully is right that Kennedy is “courageous of heart,” the candidate has a funny way of showing it. But Scully is probably right that Kennedy’s zany position on vaccines is the main thing keeping him out of mainstream liberals’ good graces.

As little as I like Kennedy’s stance on COVID, the way most coverage of his campaign zeroes in on that issue might be obscuring a more mundane reality. On issues ranging from Medicare for All to Palestine, he’s just another mediocre Democrat.