Trump versus the Gulf of Mexico

 Al Jazeera English

This month during a rambling news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate, United States President-elect Donald Trump announced his latest vision for revising the map of the world: “We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring.”

He went on to reiterate approvingly: “That covers a lot of territory, the Gulf of America. What a beautiful name.”

The Gulf of Mexico, which runs along much of Mexico’s eastern coastline and abuts five southern US states, is a key international hub for shipping, fishing, oil drilling and other commercial activity. The body of water was christened as such more than four centuries ago before either the US or Mexico existed.

Of course, a unilateral renaming of the gulf by the US president would not require endorsement by Mexico or any other country. Additional cartographic adjustments recently floated by the incoming leader include seizing the Panama Canal, wresting away control of Greenland and annexing Canada. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Donald Trump and the great Panama Canal tantrum

Al Jazeera English

As he gears up to retake the presidency of the United States this month, Donald Trump has spontaneously begun threatening to retake the Panama Canal, as well.

Per the incoming president’s recent tantrums on social media, Panama is “ripping off” the US with “ridiculous” fees to use the interoceanic waterway and principal conduit for global commerce. As Trump sees it, the Central American country’s behaviour is especially objectionable “knowing the extraordinary generosity that has been bestowed to Panama by the US”.

Trump has also baselessly alleged that Chinese troops are currently operating the canal. In reality, of course, the Panama Canal was previously operated by none other than the United States, which built the canal at the beginning of the 20th century and only handed over control to Panama in 1999.

As for the “extraordinary generosity” allegedly extended to the country by the friendly local superpower, just recall the US military’s so-called “Operation Just Cause”, launched in December 1989, thanks to which the impoverished neighbourhood of El Chorrillo in the Panamanian capital of Panama City earned the moniker “Little Hiroshima”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

NYT ‘investigates’ genocide, uncovers nothing but ‘loosened standards’

 AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

On Thursday, The New York Times ran a bazillion-word would-be expose on the ongoing United States-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip titled Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians. It can also be listened to on the newspaper’s website – if you happen to have 28 minutes and 27 seconds to kill.

The word “genocide” appears exactly once in the article – and only as an allegation that Israel denies: “Israel, which has been accused of genocide in a case before the International Court of Justice, says it complies with international law by taking all feasible precautions to minimize civilian casualties.”

And yet as the article itself demonstrates, any such pretence of precaution was essentially thrown to the wind on October 7, 2023, when the Israeli military issued an order that gave mid-ranking officers unprecedented leeway in authorising attacks on Gaza. In previous conflicts with Hamas, according to the Times, “many Israeli strikes were approved only after officers concluded that no civilians would be hurt” – which would certainly be news to the thousands of Palestinians in Gaza slaughtered by Israel in the past 20 years alone. . . .

. . . the corporate media refuse to take even the Israeli leadership’s own word for it and the flaunting of genocidal intent day in and day out for nearly 15 months. Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi, for example, took to the platform X at the outset of the war to proclaim: “Now we all have one common goal – erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth.” Shortly thereafter, Israeli President Isaac Herzog chimed in with the suggestion that civilians in Gaza were absolutely legitimate targets: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

20 Years After His Death, Gary Webb’s Truth Is Still Dangerous

FAIR

Twenty years ago this month, on December 10, 2004, former San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb died by apparent suicide, following a stretch of depression. The subject of the 2014 film Kill the Messenger, Webb had left the newspaper in 1997 after his career was systematically destroyed because he had done what journalists are supposed to do: speak truth to power. 

In August 1996, Webb penned a three-part series for the Mercury News (8/18–20/96) that documented how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s had been funneled to the Contras, the right-wing, CIA-backed mercenary army responsible for helping to perpetrate, to borrow Noam Chomsky’s words, “large-scale terrorist war” against Nicaragua. At the same time, the crack epidemic had devastated Black communities in South Central LA—which meant that Webb’s series generated understandable uproar among Black Americans across the country. . . .

Webb was subjected to a concerted assault by the corporate media, most notably the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times, as detailed in a 1997 intervention by FAIR’s Norman Solomon (Extra!, 1–2/97). The media hit job relied heavily on denials from the CIA itself—as in “CIA Chief Denies Crack Conspiracy” (11/16/96), one of the examples cited by Solomon—which is kind of like saying that the bear investigated the sticky goo on his paws and determined that he was not the one who got into the honeypot. In December 1997, the same month Webb left the Mercury News after being discredited across the board and abandoned by his own editors, the New York Times (12/19/97) reassured readers that the “CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade.” . . .  

Now, two decades after Webb’s death, the US government obviously hasn’t managed to kick the habit of wreaking lethal havoc at home and abroad—including in the Gaza Strip, where US funding of the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians has been accompanied by a calculated media campaign to obscure reality. Rather than speak truth to power, journalists have lined up to faithfully spout one untruth after another on power’s behalf, rendering themselves effectively complicit in genocide itself. And as the major outlets trip over each other to toe the establishment line, the corporate media is more of a conspiracy than ever. READ MORE AT FAIR.

How a Sudanese refugee made my Christmas less pessimistic

 Al Jazeera English

As a child growing up in the 1980s in Washington, DC, Christmas was a time when the usual monotony of my Catholic school existence gave way to an indescribable magic. It was not so much the presents as the sense that reality had been temporarily suspended and replaced by something far more invigorating – which I suppose is part of the reason I insisted on believing in Santa Claus until I was 10 years old.

Of course, mine was a relatively privileged childhood in the United States capital, an imperial headquarters that continues to this day to embody the racism and socioeconomic inequality that governs life in the so-called “land of the free.” While I knew vaguely of such domestic issues growing up, I knew even less of my country’s contributions to global suffering; in my birth year of 1982, for example, Washington had greenlit the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of people.

Closer to home, the decade of the 1980s was characterised by US backing for mass right-wing slaughter in Central America, all in the noble pursuit of making the world safe for capitalism. That the tedium of Catholic school was my greatest earthly complaint meant that I was doing much better than a whole lot of folks – something that became even clearer when I abandoned the US in 2003, at the age of 21, in favour of an itinerant lifestyle that brought me into contact with the fallout of US misdeeds from Colombia to Vietnam. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Trump and the return of the National ‘Emergy’

Al Jazeera English

In October 2018, a “migrant caravan” bound for the United States set out on foot from Honduras. The group was comprised of refuge seekers of all ages fleeing contexts of acute violence and poverty – a regional reality shaped by decades of punitive foreign policy machinations by none other than the US itself.

Then-president Donald Trump, never one to pass up an opportunity for overzealous xenophobic spectacle, took to Twitter to broadcast a “National Emergy” [sic], warning that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” with the caravan. In preparation for the pedestrian assault on the country, Trump ordered 5,200 active-duty US military troops to be deployed to the southern border along with helicopters, heaps of razor wire, and other “emergy” equipment.

Obviously, the US lived to tell the tale – although the same cannot be said for the thousands of refuge seekers who have died over the years while attempting to reach perceived safety in the country. Now, as Trump gears up for his second round as commander in chief of the nation, we’re in for another round of the anti-migrant “emergy”, as well, which the president-elect has taken the liberty of preemptively declaring. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

Stronghold

Evergreen Review

To be sure, the Israeli strategy of slaughtering people en masse in order to turn them against anti-Zionist resistance movements has never met with much success. Then again, for a predatory state dependent on perpetual war, conflict resolution has never really been the point. READ MORE AT EVERGREEN REVIEW

What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Genocide

FAIR

Imagine for a moment that a magnitude 8 earthquake occurred somewhere in the world, and the Western corporate media refused to use the word “earthquake” in reporting it, instead talking ambiguously of a “tectonic incident” that had caused buildings to collapse and people to die.

Obviously, reporters would be called out for deliberate linguistic ineptness and a bizarre obfuscation of truth. And yet just such a verbal sleight of hand has been on display for more than 14 months in the Gaza Strip, where corporate media outlets continue to dance around the word “genocide” while the Israeli military carries out the systematic mass killing of Palestinians.

Since October 2023, nearly 45,000 people have officially been killed in Gaza—although as a letter to the Lancet medical journal (7/20/24) pointed out back in July, the true death toll at that time was likely to exceed 186,000. A new report (BBC, 11/8/24) from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights indicates that almost 70% of the over 8,000 Palestinian fatalities verified by the UN over a six-month period were women and children; a survey of medical volunteers in Gaza found that “44 doctors, nurses and paramedics saw multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest in Gaza” (New York Times, 10/9/24). READ MORE AT FAIR.

No surprise Americans are ‘rooting for’ the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s killer

 Al Jazeera English

On the morning of December 4, Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare – the largest health insurer in the United States – was fatally shot in New York City. The suspect has yet to be apprehended and a motive has not been established, although the words “depose”, “deny”, and “delay” were found written in permanent marker on bullet casings at the crime scene – a potential allusion to manoeuvres by health insurance companies to avoid paying for the things they are supposed to pay for.

In the social media world, the tears for Thompson were few and far between, with Fox News lamenting on December 7 that a commemorative Facebook post by UnitedHealth Group – the parent company of UnitedHealthcare – had already racked up more than 77,000 laughing emoji reactions. Other social media users scattered witty counter-condolences across various online platforms, such as “My empathy is out of network” and “I’m sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers” – a reference to another common tactic employed by UnitedHealthcare and similar firms to decline coverage and increase profit margins. . . .

[I]t’s not difficult to understand why many Americans would fail to mourn the death of a man who symbolised a willfully dysfunctional, for-profit US healthcare system that is literally deadly in itself. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Fear and loathing in Culiacan, Sinaloa

 Al Jazeera English

At around two in the morning on Monday, November 25 – just hours after my arrival in the city of Culiacan in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, home of the eponymous drug cartel – I was awakened by gunfire in the street that lasted approximately 20 minutes.

Later in the day, media reports of the night’s casualties began rolling in. According to the newspaper El Pais, at least seven people had been killed in various shootouts across Culiacan and two had been disappeared. A house had been set on fire, and 80 security cameras had been shot up, along with an assortment of shops, restaurants, and homes.

The following day, November 26, five bodies bearing signs of torture were dumped outside the faculty of agriculture of the Autonomous University of Sinaloa. Two more corpses then materialised elsewhere in the city, the latest victims of an internecine cartel war that has been ravaging this Mexican state since September 9. Culiacan is the epicentre of the conflict that, as of November 28, had killed at least 425 people statewide and disappeared more than 500.

This particular spate of violence was triggered by the capture in July of Sinaloa cartel co-founder Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who was subsequently hauled off to a court in none other than New York City to face trial. Never mind that the United States itself has been a key participant in the international drug trade since forever – or that the simultaneous US demand for and criminalisation of drugs is what makes their trafficking so lucrative, thereby enabling cartels. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.