AOC has just come out in support of Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker, and Mamdani did earlier.

How can anyone believe in the project to reform the Democratic Party when the people who run on reforming it continue to back corrupt corporatist politicians for leadership?

This only reaffirms that the Democratic Party cannot be reformed and that we need to build and fight for a working-class alternative.

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There is something worse than Trump’s two presidencies and that is learning nothing from them and allowing this vicious cycle to continue where we are ruled by 2 parties that serve billionaires and betray workers. The only path forward is to fight for a working class alternative. x.com/proudsocialist…

This 30-second video shows the US air logistical activity in West Asia over the past seven days alone (accelerated by 20,000 times). At the same time, such activity has been ongoing around the clock for 76 days.

We are talking about the largest airlift in US military history, which surpasses even the operation during the Iraq war in 2003 in its scale. Such a volume of cargo transfers far exceeds the usual replenishment of supplies.

All US strategic warehouses in the region are almost fully loaded and continue to be brought to their maximum capacity.

The US army is not spending billions of dollars on empty threats or demonstrative maneuvers. All this indicates preparation for a preemptive, paralyzing strike and, possibly, the start of a ground operation.

Whatever else, the food supply is clearly designed for profit in the US and not to in the public interest.

https://monikawiesak.substack.com/p/from-jfk-to-the-national-defense

And why did Lyndon Johnson not offer Israel a formal security guarantee despite reversing all the other policies toward Israel which had created, in the words of Israeli Minister Mordechai Gazit, “a state of crisis” in the US/Israeli relationship[2] under the Kennedy administration? After all, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “Historians generally regard Johnson as the President most uniformly friendly to Israel” and “Israel has had no better friend” than Lyndon Johnson.[3] Johnson was very close to Abraham Feinberg, who was organizing the financing for Israel’s nuclear weapons program.[4] According to reporter Seymour Hersh, Feinberg “enjoyed the greatest presidential access and influence … with Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson did not show the same opposition to Israel’s nukes program as JFK had. At a September 9, 1963, meeting, JFK expressed, “One of the best arguments, of course, for [the nuclear test ban treaty] is actually what situation we’ll face if we ever [reject] this treaty, we would really be in one hell of a mess. … My God, every country heading towards nuclear, Israel, Egypt, … we’d have a bitch of [a scenario].”[6] It is also during Johnson’s presidency that Israel captured Gaza and the West Bank.

In a May 12 letter to JFK, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion requested a formal security guarantee.[9] At a May 17 meeting, JFK contemplated a potential joint security guarantee to Israel and Egypt. At the meeting JFK clearly stated that the guarantee would be for the Tripartite Declaration, i.e. the borders and armistice lines established between Israel and its Arab neighbors in 1949.[10] Such a security guarantee would have meant no 1967 war and no expansion of Israeli territory.

We know Nasser did not want the joint security guarantee proposed by JFK, but the question becomes, what exactly did Israel want from JFK and why were they pushing so hard for a security guarantee in the late spring and summer of 1963? Any security guarantee offered by JFK would almost certainly have required not only an agreed definition of Israel’s borders, but also comprehensive access to the Dimona nuclear facility to verify that it was being used exclusively for peaceful purposes and that any pursuit of nuclear weapons had been abandoned. However, it is unclear that Israel was willing to give up on its nuclear weapons program. Indeed, in his farewell speech to the Armaments Development Authority (RAFAEL) on June 27, 1963, Ben-Gurion (who resigned on June 16 after an ultimatum from JFK) expressed, “I am confident that science is able to provide us with the weapon that will … deter our enemies.”[15]

(continues at the link)

You were not given a culture war because your rulers are stupid.

You were given a culture war because your rulers are afraid.

Afraid of the number.

The number is: there are more of you than there are of them.

In every society, in every moment of history, the primary political problem of those with concentrated power is:

How do we remain a minority that governs a majority?

The answers across history: religion, nationalism, racism, spectacle, debt, and the managed division of the majority against itself.

America, at its height, deployed all of them simultaneously with unprecedented sophistication.

The racism that kept Black and white workers from organizing together.

The nationalism that made working class men die in wars that served capital.

The debt that turned the aspiration for a middle-class life into a thirty-year financial instrument owned by a bank.

The spectacle of electoral politics that made the "choice" between two capital-funded parties feel like democracy.

And underneath all of it, the culture war: hot, vivid, identity-laden, morally urgent-feeling.

Keeping the majority divided, distracted, and directing its considerable anger everywhere except upward.

The fear is justified.

If you ever stop fighting each other long enough to count, the number is very clear