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Daniel Imperato For President 2024
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The decision would entail the complete closure of P.A. government offices, leading to possible instability in Judea and Samaria.
By JNS
The Palestinian Authority is mulling the possibility of declaring financial bankruptcy, Kan Reshet Bet, Israel’s Public Broadcasting service, reported on Wednesday
The decision would entail the complete closure of P.A. government offices, leading to possible instability in Judea and Samaria, as the P.A. is the largest employer in the areas under its control.
A large number of Palestinian security personnel have already resigned and are looking for work in the private sector, the news site reported. In recent months, they’ve been receiving 80% of their salaries, and many have gone into debt, upon which the banks close their accounts.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a Knesset panel recently that the Palestinian Authority would not be allowed to fail.
“We need the Palestinian Authority. We cannot allow it to collapse. We also do not want it to collapse. We are ready to help it financially. We have an interest in the P.A. continuing to work. Where it succeeds in operating, it does the job for us. And we have no interest in it falling,” said Netanyahu, according to Kan.
Tensions are already high in Judea and Samaria, as the P.A. appears to have effectively lost control of northern Samaria and violence has increased dramatically.
More right-wing members of Netanyahu’s coalition have called for a tougher military response following a string of incidents including a terror attack near the Samaria community of Eli on June 20 that left four Israelis dead, and an Israeli military operation that ran into tough resistance in Jenin, requiring the unusual use of an Apache gunship to ensure soldiers’ safe extraction.
On Monday, two rockets were launched by terrorists in Jenin, though without warheads.
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The shocking messages coming out of these protests are the same – the “enemy” is the Jew.
Same hate, same message. WATCH this VIDEO about the vitriolic language about Jews used by both @WOLPalestine and neo-Nazis. Do they coordinate?? pic.twitter.com/VGpli2CCT9
— Canary Mission (@canarymission) June 28, 2023
The post WATCH: Same hate, same message – Do neo-Nazis and Palestinian groups coordinate? appeared first on World Israel News.
Rep. Cori Bush at the “How We Win” conference in Washington, DC, held June 16 and 17. (Polina Godz / Jacobin)
On June 16 and 17, Jacobin, the Nation, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Fund brought together eighty socialist elected officials and their staff in Washington, DC, for the “How We Win” conference, the first gathering of elected socialists in the United States in decades. Rep. Cori Bush gave the opening plenary address. We reproduce that speech to an audience of elected officials here, edited for length and clarity.
I want to start by saying this: I love you. I love us.
I say it all the time, because love must be at the center of our work as a movement interested in the public good. I am someone who happens to believe that we cannot serve that which we don’t love, not adequately. There are a lot of people who think they’re doing good things. But while they think they’re doing good, they’re actually hurting others. Because the heart of it is, “I want to be seen doing good. I want people to say I did a good job.” Because the unconditional love for the people is missing, they missed the mark.
Voters have said to me, “Cori, I don’t really care if you love me or not — just serve me.” And I’ll say, “No, that’s what you’re used to. You’re used to people just doing something for you and then moving you out of the way.”
Rep. Cori Bush at the “How We Win” conference in Washington, DC, held June 16 and 17. (Polina Godz / Jacobin)
That’s not who you get when you have folk like us that actually love humanity. Because we don’t care if you voted for us or not as a condition of whether we help you. We care if you eat, if you have clean clothes, if you have clean air and clean water. We care if your child is safe in school. We care about all of those things, whether you vote for us or not. So know that when I go to work every single day, I do so with love.
I tell my folk in St Louis all the time, “Your congresswoman loves you.” Why? Because I learned on the streets of Ferguson [Missouri] that we have to put out our own narrative. We create it, and then we have to push it out. We push that narrative. I realized that so many people just don’t get to know, because they don’t hear it, that somebody loves them. I need people to know that’s who they get when they get me. I don’t care if you like me or not; I’m going to love you out of your mess or out of your heartache, out of your underresourcedness.
Shout-out to the St Louis Democratic Socialists of America for all that they’ve done for me. Shout out to all the elected officials that are here in the room. Thank you for what you’re doing in your communities. And I want to shout out to my team for being here. And my husband.
Senator Bernie Sanders — I want to shout out the good senator. Because Bernie Sanders believed in me in 2016 back when other folks didn’t. In my very first race, Bernie Sanders put me on his stage, at one of his rallies for president. He put this dark-skinned black woman with these braids on his stage. It was a big deal because so many people thought I looked unprofessional. I was still a Ferguson activist, so close to the movement. He didn’t care. That moment onstage changed my life. So I always have to shout out Senator Sanders for seeing and doing something that other people were afraid to do.
The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. This is what we know. This is the thing: it only does that if we pull it. Pulling that arc is hard; it’s tiring. Our collective struggle, our mission, is so intertwined. What happens over there happens over here. Our struggles are so connected, and therefore our push for equality and our push for justice is connected too.
I am one of the forty million people in our country who descend from enslaved Africans. Our ancestors were torn away from their homes and their families. Enslaved, brutalized, sexually assaulted. Forced to fuel this country’s economy since the day that it was founded, to the tune of over 222 million hours of forced labor, which today would look like somewhere around $97 trillion. Then they were left landless, impoverished, and disenfranchised. My people continue to bear the harms of slavery and its vestiges, through the racial wealth gap. We don’t get to hear enough about the black-and-white wealth gap being $14 trillion.
Participants at the “How We Win” conference in Washington, DC, held June 16 and 17. (Polina Godz / Jacobin)
In a just society, there would not be a wealth gap of trillions of dollars simply based upon race. Segregation, redlining, disparities in health care outcomes, a racist and destructive criminal legal system, and countless other toxic fruits of policy violence are perpetuated by our own federal government.
So I refuse to accept the status quo. That’s who the folks in this room are — you don’t accept the status quo. I refuse to accept the status quo, because the status quo of a system of oppression is oppression. I refuse to accept the status quo where our so-called justice system sees black and brown and indigenous people as more criminal. Seeing us as dangerous allows police to brutalize us and kill our people with impunity, then turn around and perpetually increase no-strings-attached money for policing and wars while stripping our communities of the critical funding needed for us to stay alive. I refuse to accept the status quo, where Juneteenth is a federally celebrated holiday but reparations are a nonstarter for the elected officials who will gladly go and attend those Juneteenth parades.
I refuse to accept the status quo where people are paid $7.25 an hour while corporate profits soar and executives capitalize off of the crisis of “greedflation.” I refuse to accept the status quo that allows our trans siblings to be targeted by legislation all over the country by people who want to attack and hurt other people. I refuse to be silent. I won’t be silent, and I know you won’t either.
I refuse to accept the status quo that funds the oppression of our Palestinian siblings and of communities striving for liberation and self-determination worldwide. I refuse to accept the status quo that says unhoused people are a stain on our society. Everyone deserves housing. And we have the resources to provide that as a guarantee. We just don’t use them.
I refuse to accept the status quo where we destroy our environment because big oil CEOs want another yacht. I refuse to accept the status quo that burdens everyday people with medical debt and education debt. In this nation, the wealthiest nation in the world, people should not have to go into debt to stay alive or to get an education.
Attendees of the “How We Win” conference in Washington, DC, held June 16 and 17. (Polina Godz / Jacobin)
I refuse to accept the status-quo immigration system that routinely defies international law over and over and over again and treats those seeking refuge in our country with contempt and with criminalization. I refuse to accept the status quo where police can shoot someone fifty-seven times for protesting “a training facility” being built. Rest in power, Tortuguita.
I refuse to accept the status quo that sees the issues I just named as acceptable, as part of society, as the way we’ve always done it — but the solutions to these issues, they see as radical. It’s the proliferation of these issues that is radical. The solutions to them are what’s rational, how we actually help people, how we touch our communities.
Because if people don’t feel the change, then you really didn’t change much harm.
We know that the people are with us. People are fed up with the status quo. We see it. We hear it all the time. And so we need that all-hands-on-deck approach to enlist people. To pull on that power. Like the folks in this room, like the elected officials — we need that. We need it at the local level. We need it at the state level. We need it at the federal level. The people-powered movement is gaining momentum each and every time another one of us wins, every time another one of us runs.
We are transforming the way that people do politics. It is with your help that more candidates like us get to Congress, more candidates get into races and seats all over the country. But I think about when people say to me, “Well, I didn’t win. So I’ll just go do something else. But I’m so proud of you.” I have to remind them that I ran three times. I ran consecutively three times without stopping, while my heart was bruised, while I was embarrassed and humiliated. Because people believed in me.
I thought I knew what I was talking about, and I thought people would support that. And people did, but it didn’t look like it by the vote. I just was crushed. But in all of my heart, I remembered the vision before me was to take care of all the people. I had to start with making sure I kept my own kids alive. So I couldn’t understand how I could be told, “You didn’t win. It’s because people don’t believe in you. So just don’t run again.” But how do I keep my son alive if I can’t use my voice? I’ve already been beating the street with my feet, my mouth, and my hands for hundreds of days. I gotta do something more.
I know that you’re going to keep working for policies that lift all of us up. I know that you won’t stop. For those of you who are running right now, I know you’re elected, but some of you are still running — don’t stop. Don’t stop. Even if you don’t get it, don’t stop. Don’t stop, because the momentum that you push in your community, somebody else is going to catch that. Now, it might not have happened for you, but it may happen for the person that was watching you. It may happen for the person that was next to you.
This movement is big. When people tell us, “The Squad is six people” — no, the Squad is all of us. We can’t do this alone. We need everybody’s support as we organize and legislate in Congress for an agenda that puts people first. We need more voices in Congress. We need more voices in our state legislatures. We need more voices in our city councils. We need your voices.
Rep. Cori Bush gives the opening plenary speech at the “How We Win” conference in Washington, DC, held June 16 and 17. (Polina Godz / Jacobin)
You are the light. “This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine.” I don’t sing that. I say, “This mighty light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine.” Because this is it. What I have, I take that, and I give it out to you, and then you take that, and you give it to somebody else. We need more of you that believe what you believe. Don’t just hold that for yourself. Make sure you’re passing it out to the folks next to you. So when you speak, make sure you bring in somebody else, because we’ve got to grow this movement. You’ve got to duplicate yourself. You’re not a leader if you can’t duplicate you in spirit.
I love you. I’m so grateful to every single one of you for your partnership. We fight forward to deliver student debt cancellation. We fight forward to expand voting rights. We fight forward to dismantle white supremacy everywhere. We fight forward to fix our US Supreme Court, to redefine public safety, to prevent hateful violence, to ensure environmental justice, to enshrine reproductive freedom, to transform our immigration system, to believe and support victims and survivors of sexual assault and intimate partner violence, to save lives through gun-violence prevention laws, and so much more.
Our work is just getting started, y’all. So let’s keep going. Let’s keep fighting this oppressive status quo in favor of a world that is fundamentally just, kind, and loving.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece’s prime minister and leader of New Democracy party, greets supporters as he arrives at the party headquarters during parliamentary elections in Athens, Greece, on June 25, 2023. (Konstantinos Tsakalidis / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The May 2023 Greek elections surprised most people on the Left within Greece and across the world. After four years of major political scandals, controlling the media, and accusations of illegally spying on political opponents and journalists, New Democracy won the elections with a twenty-point margin against Syriza.
Understanding how we ended up here is essential for progressive social movements and left parties to offer a convincing progressive policy agenda and return to power. Rejecting austerity policies altogether, reconnecting with social movements and unions, and offering reliable policy alternatives are arduous but necessary tasks. The return to power for the Left is likely to be a slow process, and avoiding the repetition of the fall of Syriza should be the main objective.
Syriza’s 2015 rise to power was the most significant political shock in Europe in recent memory. After five years of irrelevant austerity policies imposed on Greece by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund as part of the economic adjustment programs, the Greek people voted in favor of a potential rupture with the EU. Syriza promised a realistic possibility for progressive economic policies within the Eurozone.
Between 2012 and 2015, the right-wing New Democracy party and the formerly social democratic Pasok implemented austerity-oriented economic policy programs that led to mass impoverishment and social unrest. During this time, Syriza actively engaged with progressive social movements and openly critiqued the harsh and inefficient austerity policies. The story of the ultimate rise of Syriza to power is relatively well known. After forming a coalition government on January 2015, the Syriza-led administration attempted to convince EU institutions, powerful lobbies, and the political leaders of the EU North that a progressive alternative policy agenda is possible. But these aspirations were crushed after six months of negotiations.
The last act of Syriza’s attempt to change the direction of economic policies within the Eurozone was the 2015 Greek bailout referendum. While an overwhelming 61.3 percent of the popular vote was against new austerity policies and the support for a Grexit was higher than ever, Prime Minister Aléxis Tsípras decided to go against the result and sign a new bailout agreement. Leading members of the first Syriza-led administration, including the finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, resigned, and new elections were announced for September 2015.
Syriza issued an implicit promise that the new government would do anything to fairly distribute the costs of the upcoming austerity measures. People accepted that this was the only alternative after previous failed attempts to change EU economic policies, and Tsípras’s Syriza re-won the majority of the parliament and formed a new coalition government.
In the upcoming years, some limited social policies that protected poorer households were implemented, but economic policy has been focused primarily on maintaining budget surpluses and servicing public debt payments. Naturally, the process of creating a surplus that eventually reached thirty-one billion euros included heavy taxation and the stagnation of social spending, which particularly hurt the poorer segments of Greek society. Syriza argued that this was an unavoidable but temporary program that would be reverted once the memorandum agreements ended.
New elections took place in July 2019. Syriza’s narrative was that after the completion of certain austerity-oriented agreements, it was time to implement their own, more progressive agenda and return the accumulated budget surplus to society. Unsurprisingly, the majority of the voters were not convinced, and New Democracy won the majority of seats in the parliament, forming the first single-party government since 2009.
Under the leadership of the political heir Kyriakos Mitsotakis, son of a former prime minister and brother of a former minister, New Democracy absorbed various far-right politicians from smaller political parties. The party presented a xenophobic migration and foreign policy agenda. But in terms of economic policy, their narrative was that New Democracy was a party of well-educated technocrats that, unlike Syriza, knew how to efficiently implement trickle-down economics and create a more efficient, market-oriented public administration.
A few months after the reelection of New Democracy, the pandemic started and the new government had to abandon its austerity-oriented agenda out of necessity. Social unrest caused by the party’s authoritarian public health approach and disinvestment in public health care, which caused thousands of excess deaths, pushed the government to spend a big share of the surplus created by Syriza in wage subsidies and social benefits. Needless to say, this was not a deliberate policy choice, but a necessary measure to limit social unrest in extraordinary circumstances. In the meantime, the New Democracy administration also spent twenty million euros on COVID-19 public health media campaigns.
But soon after, criticism emerged claiming that the distribution of these funds was unequal and based on political affiliation with the governing party. This partisan favoritism, along with clear restrictions on journalistic freedom (Greece ranks 107th in a recent global press freedom ranking), strengthened the public’s impression of New Democracy’s corruption. On top of that, recent evidence also suggests that the Greek intelligence services, which are under the direct control of the prime minister, used illegal surveillance systems to spy on journalists and political opponents.
Last but not least, during the final months of the New Democracy administration, a major train crash killed fifty-seven people. This devastating event was largely the outcome of disinvestment in public infrastructure and the privatization of the railways, since no signaling system had been in place for years and the operators were not properly trained. And as a result of these black marks on New Democracy’s record, many believed that the Greek left’s chances to return to power have increased significantly.
The outcome of the 2023 elections is the most unexpected result in Greek politics in years. While the reelection of New Democracy was not unanticipated, winning with a margin of 20 percentage points against Syriza after four years of authoritarianism and scandals was unforeseen. At the same time, three smaller far-right parties managed to enter the parliament, where they now control over 10 percent of the seats.
How did we end up here? First, the temporary ease of fiscal constraints by the EU due to COVID allowed the New Democracy government to provide some benefits in cash as well as coupons in response to the cost-of-living crisis, using the budget surplus that Syriza generated. If the social unrest that COVID created had not pushed the government to provide such benefits, the actual economic policy agenda of New Democracy would look very different to what was actually implemented. Smartly, in the preelection period of 2023, New Democracy took advantage of this turn of events and argued that they, not Syriza, are the party that actually cares about working-class people.
Additionally, Syriza’s election strategy was to focus almost exclusively on New Democracy’s political scandals and blatant authoritarianism, without offering a more concrete economic policy agenda of their own. This approach missed that a precarious and impoverished population primarily cares about its economic survival and can be easily deceived by the rhetoric of the far right.
As for why Syriza toned down its economic promises, the party perhaps recognized that financial markets would have reacted very aggressively against the election of a left-wing government, leading to higher borrowing rates. As a result, a left-wing government would have had to implement austerity anyways, a lesson Syriza already learned the hard way — and which raises major questions about how financial markets constrain democracy, especially within an interconnected monetary system like the Eurozone.
Since New Democracy will control over half of the seats of the parliament over the next four years, party officials feel at liberty to state that their agenda for the upcoming years includes implementing the program they had in mind if COVID had not occurred. Consequently, the further privatization of health care is likely to continue, the establishment of private for-profit universities is planned to happen soon, and thousands of households that cannot service their debt face increasing risks of eviction.
What’s more, under the current constitution no party can independently propose a motion of no confidence against the government, since that requires holding at least fifty seats. The main opposition party, Syriza, will hold only forty-eight. The formation of wider coalitions among left-wing and center-left parties seem extremely unlikely, as neither the communist KKE party or the social democratic Pasok have shown any willingness or interest.
Fighting austerity and privatization and defending democracy will be very difficult tasks in the Greek parliament for the next four years. It appears unlikely that politicians associated with the first Syriza government are going to be able, during that time, to convince the voters that they can offer a reliable pro-labor alternative.
For that reason, the task of rebuilding left-wing social movements and political organization is more necessary than ever. New progressive social movements will inevitably emerge with the return of marketization and privatization. While painstaking and difficult, the Left must consolidate and organize them, leading to the creation of new genuinely radical political alliances. These must offer realistic and reliable progressive policies against the EU’s neoliberal policies to convince people that there is a viable alternative road. The big question that emerges is whether resistance can ever be fully realized within the Eurozone system.
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President Joe Biden confuses Iraq with Ukraine while speaking with reporters, marking the second time in just 12 hours he mixed up the two countries.
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