This 'essay' is the transcript of a live interview conducted in one night, during April 2021. Days prior to publishing, tragedy struck the interviewing journalists and publication was cancelled.
— Arian El-Taher
Contents
I. Introduction: How to analyze all this.
Damages, threats upon us, judging a POTUS.
II. COVID-19
III. Climate
Keystone XL, Paris Accords, Standing Rock, US Military, China, Kyoto, Marshall Islands, Madrid, Nigeria, Indigenous Activism, Brazil, Bolivia, Berta Caceres.
AOC, Congo, Apple, Tesla, Google, US Military, Latin America, AFRICOM.
V. Economic Aid
“$2000 Checks”, immigrants, homeless, corporate welfare.
VI. Racial & Reproductive Justice
Reproductive justice, voting, War on Drugs, policing, I.C.E., mass incarceration.
VII. Immigration
Muslims, Obama, Trump, Biden, Mexico, Haiti, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras.
VIII. Foreign Policy
Venezuela, Cuba, Panama, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Palestine, Africa.
IX. Nuclear Policy
US, UN, Iran, Israel, China, sanctions.
X. Conclusion: Extinction or Internationalism
One path to survival.
INTERVIEWER:
Historically, in the United States, these initial 100 days provide general insight into a POTUS’s strengths and weaknesses, as a forecast of what the world can expect throughout subsequent years under a POTUS’s tenure.
II. What are your expectations for his administration?
III. Do you think that Biden will be able to undo the damages of the previous administration?
HOW TO ANALYZE IT ALL
ARIAN EL-TAHER:
Before I dive into your first two questions, the third merits priority: Will Biden be able to undo Trump’s damages? 'Damages' that should concern us all are those imposed on ordinary peoples and other life forms on Earth, not just in the US, but all people and all beings across the world.
Trump's damages — and their history — deserve careful exploration, because Biden campaigned as the candidate most equipped and eager to rectify those damages, and also because many of Trump's damages were set in motion long before he arrived in office. And that latter fact must direct our focus to a higher, broader vista from which we can examine the structural, historical sources for the current miseries — those known and those I'll make known here — so that we may together find their true sources and collectively build anew.
The Trump administration did not invent but rather exacerbated the existing channels that directly and indirectly cause needless loss of life, health, prosperity, and justice for peoples everywhere, and the worst afflicted having been minoritized peoples. In other words, he harmed people in ways similar to prior US leaders, but through an unusual overtness with his depravity and, in some ways, causing unusual cataclysms.
Trump's damages extend beyond people. He accelerated, with open malice, human society's pace towards the two forces that ensure the complete termination of organized human life: climate catastrophe and nuclear war. To be clear, every prior POTUS, including Barack Obama, committed harms on both the group level (upon minoritized peoples by race, class, etc.) and on the species level.
Trump simply outdid them all, with dazzling candor.
As a consequence of Trump's presidency, the famous Doomsday Clock from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists now stands at 100 Seconds to Midnight, “the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse”. "Apocalypse" is not hyperbole. It evokes the only term capable of describing the sole possible outcome of impending climate and nuclear catastrophe.
Contrary to the talking points in prevailing media and ivory-tower political scientists, pathways to nuclear disaster are not confined to the actions of nuclear-armed nations. Instead, the increasing nuclear weapons proliferation by these nations, which I'll unpack later, has raised the grave likelihood that nuclear weapons will fall into the possession of groups, like ISIS or the Taliban, the latter of which will inevitably resume its stronghold over Afghanistan in the near future, presumably when the US fully withdraws, a topic that relates to President Biden to be discussed a bit later on in this conversation.
Of equal alarm is the third existential threat to human society, whose spread is insidious, but whose impact is astronomical: the spatial, psychological, and structural forms of hyper-individualism and their economic conduit, neoliberal capitalism, whose chief outcome is the erosion of social solidarity and therefore the erosion of the single most powerful party capable of stopping our nuclear proliferation and nuclear war. I am referring, of course, to the public, to human society. For the sake of time, I’ll reference your audience to my essay in which I laid that essential issue bare.
Undoing the previous administration’s damages — particularly towards the climate and nuclear war — is not a matter of Biden’s ‘will’, but a matter of Biden’s ‘must’.
Okay. Let’s start.
First, a note on the psychological lens through which we ought to judge a POTUS.
Aworthy analysis of whether any politician has fulfilled their campaign promises must always include a broader analysis — one that also assesses the quality of their promises. Of importance is not simply the content spoken in a politician's promises, but whether those promises are adequate for the health, justice and prosperity of the people, and whether they live up to at least the standards of international law.
Towards that end, we must constantly attend to political promises with questions about who their promises are supposedly helping, how many people they are helping, who is being excluded from such help. And to better determine ‘how good’ a promise really is, we should constantly juxtapose today’s US political spectrum and standards alongside the standards of other nations.
The moment you stop analyzing colonialism and imperialism, that is the moment in which they fester most insidiously.
By applying the above framework to Biden’s campaign promises for his “first 100 days” — of which less than 2-weeks remain — we come to see the broader inadequacy of his very promises, despite whether or not he has achieved those promises. Explaining ‘why’ requires some depth. Let’s instead begin by the promises he did make.
I will keep to a few central issues.
COVID-19
To understand Biden’s pandemic efforts, we need to understand some untold history. If we fail to grasp the background of this pandemic, we are doomed to fare worse through incoming pandemics.
WE WERE WARNED
By 2003, the SARS coronavirus had transmitted from bats to humans, resulting in a horrible outbreak that spread to 26 nations. But the outbreak was stopped before it reached a toll as devastating as COVID-19.
That achievement was due to global collaboration, including the United States under then-President George W. Bush, quite contrary to the US response under Trump. Back then, measures to control the contagion and to prevent further spread were enacted across the world, and the people of these nations adhered to these safety measures out of a pro-social understanding among the public that everyone's survival depended on each other, virtually the same precautions that, now during COVID-19, today’s American Conservatives — their politicians and public alike — reject as a conspiracy to deprive them of “freedoms”.
For a brief period, scientific research had skyrocketed in response to the SARS outbreak. Their discoveries were of profound import for the future: subsequent deadly coronavirus outbreaks would inevitably recur among humans. The scientific community had issued numerous warnings across the world to begin preparing for incoming pandemics. Global and US scientists began conducting massive research to understand, prevent, and prepare human society for subsequent outbreaks, including through the creation of vaccines.
BIG PHARMA'S ABANDONMENT
But, by 2005, US scientists suffered a drastic shortage in funding. 'Disaster capitalism’ was to thank. Like any corporation, the privatized US pharmaceutical industry invests only in what will achieve immediate, short-term profits, particularly from sources of crisis and desperation. Therefore, as SARS cases diminished, the threat of disaster supposedly 'disappeared', not in reality, but only from pharma's financial considerations. Thus, there remained no immediate 'demand' for vaccines and other research — again, from the perspective of pharmaceutical corporations. So, the industry abandoned the issue on the basis of 'no market interest’.
The US government did not step-in to fund what the pharmaceutical industry refused, nor did it join in global health treaties to prepare for and reduce the spread of these infectious diseases. This deserves special recognition. The US government has always intervened to prevent crises, however those have been financial crises, for which the government bailed out major banks, corporations, and industries during their financial collapse. But the US government would not step-in to ‘bail out’ the American public by funding life-saving research for pandemic preparedness.
EBOLA: PRESIDENT OBAMA’S RESPONSE
Several years later, now under President Obama, the H1N1, Zika, and Ebola outbreaks erupted. To his credit, Obama’s response was praiseworthy. He immediately empowered scientific researchers, the CDC, and the World Health Organization. He integrated the US into multinational efforts to fight these outbreaks, provided outbreak training to nearly 30,000 medical professionals in West Africa, contracted a large stockpile of low-cost ventilators, and his National Security Advisor, Susan Rise, founded the Global Health Security and Biodefense Unit (GHSBU), whose task was to prepare the US for future responses — the very agency that would have prevented the catastrophic toll of COVID-19 in the US.
COVID-19 UNDER TRUMP
What did Trump do? Immediately upon entering the White House, Trump disbanded the GHSBU agency and began defunding the CDC, and soon announced the US’s full withdrawal from the WHO, which receives 22% of its funding from the US and which Trump accused of having nefarious, anti-American biases.
And now, at the moment of this interview, nearly 560,000 Americans have died, and millions more across the world, as well, a needless horror of indescribable proportion, and much of it involving the US. Epidemiologists have projected that countless more will suffer and perish through incoming variants, poverty and lack of health insurance or access, national unpreparedness, shortages in medical supplies and medications and oxygen (in many places due to illegal US sanctions, embargo, and blockade), Western domination of the global supply-chain's raw-materials and technical know-how required for COVID-19 vaccination production by nations of the Global South, and the multifactorial vaccine apartheid.
VACCINE APARTHEID: SCILENCE OF COMPLICITY
Discourse on vaccine apartheid by prominent scholars has rightfully included most of the Global South's vulnerable peoples. But where and who are quietly excluded from mention by even the most 'courageous' intellectuals is of equal import for our discussion.
I'm referring to Palestine, where the grave injustice of medical apartheid not only proceeds with unfettered criminality, but does so in splendid openness, thanks largely to the American scientific intelligentsia by way of implicit and explicit support, whether by removing Palestine as a topic in their discussions on vaccine apartheid or by openly praising Israel's approach to COVID-19, yet without speaking a syllable of criticism about Israel's legal designation — as the occupier of Palestine — that prescribes Israel with responsibility for Palestine's COVID-19 response and outcomes.
The few who have addressed this are not veteran scientists or physicians, but three medical students at Harvard Medical School. Their statement on the issue — fortified by their grounding in international law — is proof that firm truth need not be buttressed with dazzling credentials or distinguished titles.
This selective 'conscientiousness' among many in science and medicine evokes an analogue worth our consideration here. There's a long-surviving and widely-believed myth about 'liberal' US corporate media (e.g., NY Times, MSNBC, CNN). This myth imagines major media as American society's bold, adversarial, subversive, crusading force of courageous truth-tellers, whose service is chiefly to the public, and who hold power accountable. This myth was unraveled in the timeless, seminal work of Professors Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their 1988 Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
One major achievement unveiled in this study found that major media performs a facade of 'objectivity', portraying itself as a body that 'speaks truth to power'. Beneath this facade, however, the study found that corporate media largely support and perpetuate the state-orthodoxy. Manufacturing Consent determined that a vast chasm exists between the media's implicit support for elite-power and its 'adversarial' persona — the persona beneath which media tacitly perpetuate positions that favor state and elite power. By masquerading as defenders of truth, major-media manufactures a credulous audience, an audience to whom the media then present the news with subtle tilt in favor of elite power.
The near universal neglect by a specific archetype of scientists and medical practitioners towards Palestine's needless suffering under COVID-19 confirms that Herman and Chomsky's findings are near-perfectly applicable to the American scientific and medical intelligentsia — no, not the scientific and medical community in general, but particularly those with overwhelming station and influence in the structural character and political function of these fields; who exploit our field's reputation as one courageously committed to unvarnished truths, operating with strict integrity towards our bioethical standards, oaths, and principles.
With regard to Palestine, the intelligentsia exploits this 'dignified' reputation and presents themselves as unbridled vanguards of empirical truth and moral authority, while erasing, marginalizing, and outright vilifying members of our science and medicine community who present robust evidence about crimes committed through the policies and practices of the occupying power's military and government.
This is an abnegation of our oaths and principles, an abnegation of indisputable international laws that are annually reaffirmed in the United Nations to restate the State of Palestine's existence and Israel's ongoing criminality, an abnegation to condemn this medical apartheid by the majority of the world's nations, and an abnegation of repeated rulings by the worlds supreme judicial organs that leave no question or legal controversy about Israel's responsibilities and violations.
And as I've demonstrated throughout my years, and so far in our conversation, all of these same principles and criticisms are applied to every other violator of international law. I say this with anticipation of my accusers who demand "why are you singling out Israel?" I am not. And, even if I was, it would be strictly on the basis of the "special" US-Israel relationship, unparalleled by military aid, diplomatic relations and alliances, and far more — all of these being conditions set by the two nations that precisely initiate the actual "singling out" of Israel. It is not I, nor others, who "single out" the newly manufactured nation.
Amidst all this abnegation, these members of the scientific and medical community should be viewed through a panorama.
A broader horizon provides a refreshing revelation: these intelligentsia — those guilty of abnegation and dereliction of their principles — are effectively aligned on this issue with former-President Trump and current President Biden, while the rest of the world stands in uniform opposition with well-verified truth and law in the world's possession.
COVID-19 UNDER BIDEN
Despite my harsh criticism of Biden — from his unmatched Congressional role in masterminding the New Jim Crow to his infamous role in the Anita Hill travesty — his response to the pandemic so far merits minor credit.
During his campaign, Biden promised 100 million vaccines administered within the first 100 days, mandatory usage of face masks thus far in the pandemic, expanding the number of mobile vaccination clinics, restoring the US’s cooperation with the World Health Organization, and expanding healthcare access. Biden has met these particular goals, with exception to the expansion of healthcare.
Furthermore, just a couple weeks back, he allotted $10 billion USD for the US Department of Health and Human Services to expand COVID-19 “equity” — namely testing and vaccination among poor, rural, Black, Indigenous, Latin American, and other minoritized communities, as well as towards building credibility and trust for the federal vaccine program. Of course, we await to see precisely how this funding is used and the measured outcomes. Biden's history, unfortunately, does not lend itself to the benefit of our doubt.
Certifiably disgraceful, however, is Biden's COVID-19 approach with Mexico. Mexico has not been spared from the horrors of this pandemic, nor from supply-chain hoarding by the US and its colonial allies. Thus, Mexico is in need, as usual, largely due to US policies and practices. Biden is in need, as well. As I'll discuss later, Biden's immigration and border promises leave him in need of Mexico's support. Towards this end, Biden has finalized a plan to send 2.5 million doses of the AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine to Mexico, though not without strings attached. Biden is presenting his offer with hope that Mexico will in turn support the US in cracking down on migrant refugees heading through Mexico for the US border.
This is a tacit quid-pro-quo, despite efforts by both countries and loyalists to legitimize it as “vaccine diplomacy”, a false characterization of reality.
- First, we know that it will be conducted by a militarized immigration force.
- Second, we also know the long-running history of US flow of arms into Mexico — military-grade weaponry, which is routinely transferred through corrupt officers to cartels and others responsible for the large share of murders of journalists, trans women, and other persistent crimes.
- Third, the Mexican government has recently launched a media campaign that warns against fleeing Central America into Mexico to reach the US.
- Forth, Mexico's anti-immigration forces have already mobilized to Southern Mexico, where they're cracking down on particularly those paths and railways used by Central American kids to reach the US. The synchronicity of this campaign launched during these US-Mexico vaccine discussions is not a coincidence.
- Fifth, Mexico recently announced that they will approve transfers of Central American families that President Trump expelled.
- Sixth, officials from the Mexican government also recently offered the US to reject freshly-passed Mexican laws that hold the government to higher standards and humane conditions for families captured by Mexico's anti-immigration forces. Until now, in the brief period of this law's existence, the Mexican government denied former-President Trump's attempt to use Title 42 in order to expel "illegal" immigrant families from the US and into Mexico. Now, amidst Biden's plan, Mexico's immigration authorities have taken a U-turn to betray these legitimate laws that demand human treatment.
- And, finally, seventh, we know of Biden's broader Latin America plan, which I'll discuss later. But worth noting here is that it involves further militarization and expansion of Mexico's own anti-immigration forces. Through these and other methods, the US continues to have hegemonic influence over Mexico's military, legal, and political spheres.
Further attention must be given to exactly what these innocent families are fleeing. I'll discuss that later, with ample detail. For now, it's crucial to understand that “help” from Mexico's immigration authorities in stopping migration to the US will enhance needless suffering on helpless, defenseless refugee families, who are fleeing exactly that type of cruelty in their own homelands, all of which has its origin in US intervention. Therefore, it's not “diplomacy” when it recruits violent force and dereliction of important laws.
Moreover, the US does not need the AstraZeneca vaccine, of which it possesses in surplus, the same surplus that Biden's plan commits to giving Mexico. Lastly, the AstraZeneca vaccine still does not have FDA approval in the US and therefore cannot be used and would otherwise go to waste. Biden is using is openly exploiting a pandemic and the Mexican population's vulnerability to orchestrate political chess, not to diplomacy.
HEALTHCARE
But Biden remains against Medicare For All and against any version of single-payer or universal healthcare, instead promoting a “public option” that is somehow expected to "compete" with the omnipotent private insurance industry giants.
Biden’s opposition to universal healthcare would be rightly considered a hostile attack on the public — a major scandal — if he'd campaigned in any other industrialized nation.
His opposition reinforces the devastating lie that the US — the wealthiest nation in human history — cannot "afford" universal healthcare, and thus cannot provide for its people what is guaranteed by comparable nations for their people.
Guaranteed healthcare — whether its providence or its deprivation — is the supreme expression of any government's sentiment for its people.
COVID-19 caused an unemployment disaster within the US, in which health insurance is tethered to employment, rendering millions without the finances or coverage for care during a deadly pandemic. And a public option is a deliberately irresponsible and inadequate response within a new geological epoch that promises future pandemics. Only universal healthcare — the bare minimum — would suffice. Anything less is social Darwinism.
CLIMATE
On the campaign trail, then-candidate Joe Biden pledged to be a globate leader in the fight against the climate crisis.
He promised to immediately re-enter the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, to cut electricity emissions to zero by 2035, to begin a plan for achieving zero net carbon emissions by 2050, to reverse Trump’s deregulations on methane emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, environmental reviews, oil and gas pipelines, offshore drilling, and to shut down the Keystone XL Pipeline, which leaked 210,000 gallons of oil in South Dakota during 2017.
Biden fulfilled these promises.
But just last week, he also refused to shut down the criminal Dakota Access Pipeline during its environmental review by the Army Corp of Engineers. The notorious pipeline invades and pollutes tribal lands and was opposed through the courageous indigenous protests at Standing Rock from 2016 to 2017, and which has since remained opposed by numerous indigenous tribes, including the Meskwaki Nation and the Dakota and Lakota Nations.
Biden’s deliberate permission to allow the pipeline to continue flowing is a squandered opportunity to honor past treaties with indigenous peoples and to prevent further ecological harm. And it will go down in history.
PARIS CLIMATE ACCORDS & MILITARY POLLUTION
The US’s re-entry into the Paris Climate Accords is a step in the right direction. But I caution people from applauding Biden too soon.
The Paris Climate Accords do not contain a single provision of accountability towards the world’s largest contributor to carbon emissions, oil consumption, and enforcer of the oil industry, the United States military, which emits CO2 by the millions of tonnes from its approximately 800 military bases that span the world — an empire of geologic destruction.
Not only is the US responsible for pollution through its military, but it is overall among the world’s leading source of air pollutants, not far from China’s contributions. In fact, up to 1/3rd of Chinese air pollutants derive from assembly plants and factories devoted to US exports, as was reported in a 2014 study out of Peking University. Furthermore, the environmental, structural, and labor conditions across many of those Chinese factories are effectively controlled by US corporate attorneys, who maintain inhumane factory conditions and labor standards as part of so-called cost-cutting measures. And yet, the American public rarely hear of this and are instead consistently told the simplistic notion that China is to blame for pollution and infectious diseases. Sinophobia and “Yellow Fever” rhetoric are classic motifs of racist US rhetoric to distract its own public from recognizing its own crimes.
And so, the US military is exempt in the Paris Accords from even reporting US military carbon emissions, let alone enforcing any cuts. So, the world’s climate efforts depend on indirect and external modalities to derive conservative estimates for the scale of US military contribution to air pollution and carbon emissions.
There is an important historical precedent for this exemption in the Paris Accords. During the UN climate discussions of 1977 in Kyoto, US military officials applied coercive pressure to remove the US military from accountability provisions and effectively from becoming a direct target in any future climate agreement. The US never ratified that agreement, and the message was sharply and dutifully understood by global climate leaders.
Among the most important flaws in the Paris Climate Accords is its temperature-reduction goal — to ensure that the global rise in temperature does not exceed 2ºC. However, a rise of 2ºC would still cause sea levels to rise at a height that would submerge indigenous atolls, like the Marshall Islands.
1.5ºC. As such, the Marshall Islanders were the first to sign the Accords, but they submitted their own plan, which achieves well beyond what’s outlined in the Accords and miles ahead of what the world’s largest carbon emitters have committed.
INDIGENOUS CLIMATE ACTION
From the US to the Pacific Islands to Latin America to Africa to East Asia, the poorest Black and Brown nations have already suffered the grimmest outcomes of the ongoing climate crisis. The outcry against climate racism is not against a looming horror, but against what is already happening.
The issue of Marshall Islands captures the tragic irony of the global climate crisis: the world’s wealthiest nations — most of them white — are consistently responsible for the overwhelming majority of the world’s looming geological and climate devastation.
Meanwhile, the world’s most progressive and selfless actions to mitigate the geological crisis have come from the world’s indigenous peoples, those who not only produce infinitesimally little carbon emission, but who are also pushed to the brink of their existence by the very empires responsible for the climate crisis.
This was perfectly captured at the UN’s December 2020 climate summit in Madrid. Hundreds of global indigenous activists journeyed from Nigeria, Brazil, and elsewhere to demonstrate and pressure global superpowers to commit swifter and stronger responses. Yet it was hardly reported in the West, to no surprise for any keen observer of US media patterns.
Elsewhere in the world — particularly in Latin American nations that remain languishing from the grim effects of murderous US imperialism — indigenous climate activists, most of them unknown and faceless to Westerners, are being consistently murdered by authoritarian groups that have been historically armed, trained, and funded by the US.
Most notable in recent times is the murder of Berta Cáceres, the honorable Bolivian indigenous climate activist, whose life and death should be taught in any and every education system in the US, if only our schools were devoted to democracy, justice, and anti-oppression.
GREEN NEW COLONIALISM
Biden endorses the Green New Deal (GND), virtually the complete framework proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's framework. This deserves to be discussed in far more depth than what little time we have at the moment. So, I encourage the public to investigate for themselves the particular set of prerequisites described in Representative AOC's GND, as well as in Europe's, in order to discern the unfortunate conditions upon which the GND relies.
The highly-praised GND, originally outlined in AOC's resolution, is one part of a two part plan, set to invest between $3-4 trillion across 8 years. On its surface, the plan is ambitious and praiseworthy for its broad initiatives ranging from green energy projects, infrastructural developments, "human infrastructure" (services that support the public, like healthcare, nutrition, and public education), and even social programs that are purported to uplift "disadvantaged" communities, all in pursuit of reducing the US's overwhelming contribution to the climate crisis.
But behind every sunshiny plan presented by the leaders of empire are consequences for subjugated peoples of the Global South. That is the definition of empire. As such, if I may be candid, the GND's "green energy" projects relies overwhelmingly on US resource-extraction (neo-extractivism) and labor exploitation of peoples across the Global South, peoples who continue to suffer the ramifications of ongoing US hegemony upon their political, economic, environmental, agricultural, and social spheres.
Western and Western-style resource extraction and labor exploitation are not built to coexist with the interests, health, and prosperity of the native inhabitants of the Global South. Instead, these rely on a population kept in sociopolitical destitution, desperation, and repression, which produces the intended submissive labor force that must accept inhumane wages and working conditions. This reality does not spring naturally. It requires anti-democratic, authoritarian power-elite that serve US political and corporate interests. These arrangements exist. They exist precisely through decades of US overthrow of democracies and installations of puppet-governments, dictators, and military juntas that have left nearly every region of the Global South in perpetual misery. The 'wretched of the earth' did not create themselves. They were produced. And its architect and architecture are embodied extensively throughout Representative AOC's widely-hailed policy.
Of course — the GND has commendable intentions to build a “green economy” by completely cutting the US’s usage of coal and petroleum, which would be replaced by renewable energy, green energy manufacturing, infrastructural advancements to meet climate needs, rehabilitation of federal lands and ecosystems, emptying of hazard waste sites, and international sharing of information so that other nations can produce similar approaches.
For Americans employed in environmentally-harmful sectors, these changes mean job loss. To the credit of the GND, their plan prevents such job loss through skills-training for Americans employed in the coal and oil industry.
However, the entire GND exists within an imperialist framework committed to “making the United States the international leader on climate change”. The GND and its version in the UK designate those nations responsible for the climate crisis as authorities in this effort towards replacing the entire US energy extraction network with green energy.
Cobalt and lithium for batteries, copper or indium for solar panels, and neodymium for wind turbines are among many “green” energy sources that will replace coal and oil.
The mission to abolish the use of carbon-emitting energies is rightful, necessary, and urgent. But where will these “green” elements come from? Does US geology contain within its borders these elements that must be extracted?
Of course not. And this begs the question: Then, from where will these resources be extracted?
Let’s stick with Cobalt as a prime example. Seventy percent of the world’s cobalt is extracted from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where the world’s largest reserves of cobalt exists. Cobalt is the essential mineral required for our car batteries and particular upon which US nuclear reactors, drones, jets, planes, space shuttles, televisions, and most of our key electronic devices depend for their ability to function. Virtually the same is true of another mineral, coltan, 70% of which exists in Congo’s natural reserves.
Without cobalt, the US military simply cannot exist as a global superpower. The great majority of US military technology relies on it, as do countless US corporations like Apple, Tesla, Google, Microsoft, among others. These corporations were subject to an earth-shattering US federal lawsuit for their exploitation of child labor in the DRC.
Congo is described as among “the poorest nations on Earth”, a false description of its reality. While the DRC suffers all the markers of extreme poverty, it’s mineral reserves appraise the DRC as being the world’s wealthiest nation in value. The DRC would very be as built up as Dubai, if only the profits of its extracted natural resources were kept by the people of the DRC, instead of by Western and Chinese corporations.
Congo’s current misery is a direct outcome of Western colonialism, which brutally captured, enslaved, and divided up the African subcontinent among itself through a competitive quest for global empire. Belgium colonized the DRC since 1884, ruled by King Leopold II, who exploited the DRC for its natural minerals and labor. Leopold waged among history’s most unfathomable genocides, killing over 10-million Congolese and severing the arms of countless children and adults who couldn’t achieve Leopold’s quotas of mineral extraction. Today, Congo remains destabilized as a direct outcome of this history and its legacy.
In order for the Green New Deal to exist in its proposed form, it must inevitably ramp up its demand on Congo’s cobalt production. In fact, virtually every mineral required for the GND’s “green energy” are sourced predominantly across the Global South, whose near entire span suffers the consequences of ongoing US imperialism and cataclysmic coup d’état.
Lithium, for example, is the key element in batteries, aerospace technology, US military weapons and technology, and electric automobiles. Bolivia contains among the world’s largest lithium reserves. Bolivia is also victim to the 2019 US-backed coup that overthrew the democratically-elected indigenous leader, President Evo Morales, for his “socialist” polices to redistribute wealth and land to establish equity and equality for the oppressed and impoverished from their living nightmare. Fortunately, he recently resumed his presidency, having triumphed over the coup. Elon Musk — whose Tesla automobiles rely chiefly on lithium, currently sourced in Australia — remarked on Twitter at the time, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
The same US history, for the same exact reasons, is indisputably true across nearly the entire Global South, whose sovereign lands, natural resources, and rare minerals have been dominated and exploited for US private interests, stretching from Latin America to the Caribbean Islands to Africa — where the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) operates its lawless multinational military bases to conduct drone warfare, which relies primarily on cobalt — to the Middle East to East Asia.
The point here is that the US has a long and violent criminal history of imperialist opposition to the democracies and resource-independence of those very nations upon whose resources the GND depends. And yet, the GND does not include a single provision to first establish and ensure justice in the Brown and Black nations of the Global South from which it must import its minerals.
Without an explicit commitment in the GND to first establish just, sovereign, humane, and democratic relations with the Global South prior to obtaining “green” resources from them, it remains an inevitable tool for imperial ambitions that will spawn more needless poverty, destabilization, and bloodshed among global indigenous, Black, and Brown peoples.
ECONOMIC AID
On economic aid to the American public, Biden promised a significant relief bill for US citizens, “lawful” US residents, small businesses, families, childcare, public health, and more. Within that promise, he and his campaign coalition repeatedly mentioned “$2,000 checks”.
Biden reneged on his promise of $2,000 checks, instead delivering $1,400, which was met with significant and rightful outcry across the country.
He did achieve a $1.9 Billion stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan of March 2021, and therefore effectively fulfilled the core of this campaign promise. This relief package has since enjoyed high praise, including by the New York Times and by renown economist Joseph Stiglitz, for its ability to cut child-poverty “in half”. And yet, as mentioned earlier, we must examine the quality of Biden’s promise and its fruition.
EXCLUDED FROM AID
Who is excluded from this aid? Virtually anyone without a valid Social Security number is ineligible, which renders countless undocumented immigrants without checks from this relief act, despite their massive contribution to the US economy.
However, one noteworthy difference in Biden’s relief bill does exist, as compared to the previous administration. Families with “mixed-status” residency are qualified to receive aid under Biden’s March 2021 American Relief Act, which provides some relief for many, but not nearly enough, of the 11-million undocumented immigrants in the US.
Moreover, while unhoused (homeless) American citizens and residents were made technically eligible under Biden’s relief act, receiving a check requires having filed a federal tax return in many if not most cases, which amounts to de facto ineligibility for many unhoused persons whose under-resourced conditions have inhibited them from filing taxes.
CHILD POVERTY
Furthermore, regarding child-poverty, the provisions for this are in fact temporary, rather than long term. So, as it remains, the bill certainly does provide a profound basis towards “cutting child-poverty in half”, but the provisions must be made permanent and enhanced in order to achieve the intended goal.
Not only is this absolutely possible in the US, but so is achieving much more. We can, in fact must, cut child-poverty by 100%, in the wealthiest nation in human history, which is the indisputable global hegemon of the international financial system and which transfers billions of US taxpayer dollars to multinational corporations, Wall Street, and even to foreign militaries that are consistently violating international humanitarian law.
STUDENT DEBT
Finally, on the campaign trail, Biden issued clear promises regarding student debt forgiveness; namely, “immediate” forgiveness of $10,000 USD for every recipient of federal student aid, as well as cancelling all undergraduate loans among attendees of public universities and Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Biden has failed to fulfill these promises, neither through his pandemic relief act nor through subsequent policies. In fact, he has sharply backtracked on these policies and has provided no map for future plans. He has so far simply paused student loan payments. Numerous other weaknesses of this bill exist and are of vital necessity to explore and understand, but I’ll stop there.
CORPORATE TAXES
On the economic front, among Biden’s most pronounced campaign promises was to raised corporate taxes from the current 21% to 28%.
Biden has not yet lived up to this promise. Despite consistently referring to his ‘talent’ of working with both parties, Biden currently faces significant opposition to raising corporate taxes, including from his own Democratic Party in the US Congress.
RACIAL & REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
On racial equity, Biden promised to restore and strengthen the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which he and the Democratic party have not yet achieved, but which remain under heated debates with the Republican Party in Congress.
He also promised “police reform”, instituting a National Police Oversight committee, passing the SAFE Justice Act to reduce mandatory minimum sentencing, legalization of marijuana, elimination of cash bail, and ending all for-profit detention centers.
Biden has not yet fulfilled any one of these promises, with one minor exception. On January 26, 2021, Biden signed an executive order that directed all US attorney generals to cut federal contracts with “privately operated criminal detention facilities”.
But this cancellation fo Federal contracts does not include immigration detention facilities, which can perfectly continue contracting with the Federal government. Additionally, this loophole allows Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to continue issuing their own contracts with private prisons, which is yet another loophole that allows private prisons to continue profiting from the inhumane caging and warehousing of human beings.
Moreover, this executive order fails to address the unsafe and unsanitary conditions in immigrant detention facilities, which expose its captives to toxic chemicals and to denial of medical service, among other inhumane conditions.
HYDE AMENDMENT
On reproductive rights, Biden had promised to repeal the Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment is the name of a law that disallows the use of federal funds for abortion, with the only few exceptions that would therefore allow the use of funding for abortion being in those cases where a pregnancy is due to rape, incest, or if a pregnant person's abortion would be life-saving.
Repealing the Hyde Amendment would require the cooperation of both the House and the Senate. During his campaign, as mentioned earlier, Biden repeatedly branded himself as the only candidate who can work with both parties, lambasting Bernie Sanders as too leftist 'to get anything done'.
Biden justified his correct opposition to this amendment on the basis of health care equity, stating that "health care is a right that should not be dependent on one's zip code or income."
Currently, at this point in 2021, Biden has still failed to achieve this. The Democrat-majority House will likely pass a spending bill without the amendment (a half-win), but it will still have to pass through Senate Republicans, where Biden has failed so far to convert any Republicans into allies sympathetic with the pro-choice movement. And I see no evidence that shows any promise that Biden himself can achieve that.
CODIFY ROE V. WADE
IMMIGRATION
Idescribed earlier that Biden's executive order to stop the privatization and profiteering from federal prisons did not include “immigration detention facilities” — the US government’s euphemism for the prisons and concentration camps in which it warehouses undocumented families and children in the US, who exercise their human right to seek asylum from homelands in which they languish under virtually no human, civil, legal, or political rights.
In the background, the American public remains constantly showered with xenophobic messages about the “expanding” immigration “crisis”. The public hears often that the “threat of invasion” by “illegal” immigrants from Latin America and the West Indies has grown exponentially since the 1970s.
But Americans are not told — not even by President Biden — about the preceding events in those regions that have led to such fleeing. Today, tens of thousands of undocumented refugees, including countless children, are warehoused within inhumane “immigrant detention facilities” stretched across the US with no standardized transparency for the conditions of these prisons.
While on the campaign trail in 2020, Biden promised — on World Refugee Day — to raise the US's refugee acceptance ("resettlement") limit to 125,000 refugees per year. Biden's promise was praised in comparison to Trump's limit of 15,000 refugees annually, a historic low, even compared to President Ronald Reagan's limit. And Trump's 15,000 annual limit wasn't just numerically low, but also morally, as it also banned 100% of applicants from Muslim-majority nations, namely Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen. Those with some recollection of history will note that these are peoples — particularly peoples of color — whose homelands continue to suffer misery and mortality that either began or was exacerbated by histories of US imperialism.
By hardly one-month into his Presidency, Biden proposed a staggering cut in his campaign promise of 125,000 — instead offering an annual limit near 63,000 global refugees. Now, after months of stalling, finally yesterday (April 15, 2021) Biden signed a Presidential Determination — the type of executive order through which a US President sets the annual refugee resettlement cap — to formally continue Trump's refugee cap of 15,000 refugees annually, the most conservative resettlement cap, and therefore the smallest number of refugees allowed entry into the US, in the program's 40+ year history.
In doing so, Biden dropped a sledgehammer on his own campaign promise.
Biden's other promises pertaining to immigration included making permanent the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Biden did fulfill this on day-one.
He also promised to stop Trump’s practice of family separations at the US-Mexico border, as well as to create a pathway to citizenship for all 11-million undocumented immigrants, and to stop President Obama’s practice of “metering” asylum seekers — the practice of sharply limiting daily asylum applications and forcing asylees to remain in Mexico for weeks or months before receiving US court-dates for their cases.
Unfortunately, Biden has fulfilled only the one promise of stopping family separations via Executive Order, and not yet creating a pathway for citizenship. Nor has he truly ended the inhumane practice of “metering”. As a result, “thousands of asylees remain stranded in Mexico”.
Furthermore, whereas Trump absolutely denied entry to “unaccompanied minors” into the US, while abducting and caging "illegal" entrants in de facto concentration camps, Biden has instead taken a slightly altered approach. He has allowed “unaccompanied minors” into the US, but remains warehousing them in detention facilities, some of which his administration describe as “pods” in an effort to whitewash the severity of the issue. “Pods” are plexiglass prisons with a handful of basic resources for children. These standards still fall drastically beneath those enshrined in international humanitarian law.
Elsewhere, Biden continues using numerous detention facilities from the Trump era, and he has also committed to creating more detention facilities. Ultimately, he has recreated Trump’s policy, with slight cosmetic improvement in the cages.
Continuing with immigration policy, Biden issued multiple promises on deportation. He had promised to revise Trump’s deportation criteria, so that only immigrants deemed as posing a “national-security risk” or who have committed various crimes would be subject to deportation.
Biden also promised to stop the deportation of Americans protected under DACA. And he similarly promised to stop the deportation of Haitian refugees, who are the primary population against which former-President Obama instituted the inhumane “metering” practice”.
Of these promises, Biden has fulfilled only the minor revision in Trump’s deportation policy through an executive order on day-one, as well as stopping deportation of people under DACA.
His unfulfilled promises far outweigh his achievements.
HAITI
The people of Haiti have languished under relentless torture for so long a history, which warrants this topic deserving far more time than what's available here, in order to understand the significance of Trump's actions and Biden's promises and actions. I trust that Westerners of conscience will have the concern to independently trace the hideous history of French and US torment upon Haiti.
Anti-immigration policies were principal goals and achievements for the Trump administration. Trump's devastation to immigration and immigrants was not limited rhetoric and ideology. He caused widespread material harm, politically and legally. From the multibillion dollar "border wall" plan, to cutting US acceptance of refugees and asylees to levels as low as the Carter and Reagan presidencies, to massively expanding militarized border patrol, to expansion of family separation and detention, and more. Trump enacted over 400 Executive Orders and other actions that ravaged every dimension of US immigration policy. But, thankfully, since his actions were through those avenues, Biden, as sitting President, holds the authority to reverse virtually all of Trump's orders, so long as Biden is willing, which his campaigned claimed he is.
In late 2017, the Trump administration announced its termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provided nearly one-million undocumented Americans temporary protection from deportation.
Not long after, Trump was exposed for his "shithole countries" remarks about African countries and Haiti, during an immigration planning meeting, whose purpose was to discuss DACA and other immigration programs.
TEMPORARY PROTECTED STATUS
Then, between that late 2017 and early 2020, Trump enacted a series of sequential Executive Orders to terminate the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program for many of the 12 nationalities that depend on this program to avoid deportation. But Trump particularly targeted nationalities from Latin America and the Caribbean.
TPS is a humanitarian program — albeit inadequate. But that's another story.
It was enacted in the early 1980s to protect immigrants in the US from deportation back to their countries of origin that are devastated by war, natural disaster, famine, epidemic, human rights atrocities, and other severe conditions that are incompatible with conditions that sustain life. TPS also provides its holders with the legal permission to employment.
TPS recipients can live in the US for the duration of their specific 'designation' — a period that ranges from 6 months to 18 months, on a case-by-case basis. Designation is issued and determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security, who judges the applicant's conditions in their country-of-origin. If approved, then about 2 months prior to the expiration of one's TPS designation, their case is reviewed by that same Secretary, who decides whether or not the severe conditions in their country-of-origin persist. If yes, then the holder is issued another designation period of however many months.
Nationalities accepted under TPS:
- Burma
- El Salvador
- Haiti
- Honduras
- Nepal
- Nicaragua
- Somalia
- South Sudan
- Sudan
- Syria
- Venezuela
- Yemen
Please recognize that the US has historically or continuously been directly or indirectly responsible for the unlivable conditions in most of these nations. This is a large reason for why TPS is inadequate as a "humanitarian" measure.
Nearly 330,000 people from these nationalities are in the US through TPS. Thus, over 300,000 people are here, living through precarious 'designation' periods with bated breath.
In the US, nearly 60K Haitians, 200K Salvadorans, 60K Hondurans, 3K Nicaraguans, and many more from other nations are authorized to live in the US, yet constantly on the edge of deportation, whose consequences are routinely deadly for deportees. El Salvador is just one example. Human Rights Watch (HRW) carefully investigated the killings of at least 138 Salvadorans murdered after their deportation from the US, by the very gangs from which they originally fled El Salvador as asylees. Most individuals were killed within 1-year of their deportation from the US. The investigation affirmatively reports that US (anti) immigration policy is in direct violation of international law.
HRW's report, however, did not describe the history of murderous US imperialism in El Salvador since 1980, during the civil war between the grassroots 'peasants' and the Right Wing oligarchy with its military, paramilitary, juntas, and death squads. The oligarchs' agenda was expressly aligned with that of the US: to crush the democratizing, grassroots movements spreading across the Central American nation by funding, arming, and training counter-revolutionary forces in pursuit of the US's "anti-communist" agenda. Over 75,000 Salvadorans were killed, overwhelmingly by these US-backed forces. Mass executions, torture, and other untold atrocities upon Salvadoran civilians were committed—entirely well-documented—in this process, each of them 'peasants', many of them murdered while fleeing.
El Salvador — the land of an ancient, noble, and brilliant people of a well-resourced but plundered nation — remains a site of coerced poverty and organized violence, not by its own doing, but by way of US imperialism. Such is the background of today's 'migrants' fleeing El Salvador for a perilous journey towards asylum in the US.
Returning to the matter of Haiti, a similar story of US colonialism, with similar outcomes, through a similar agenda, comprises the current reality of this courageous nation, except more protracted, more gruesome, and driven by anti-Blackness.
The plundering, destabilization, and perpetual pauperization of Haiti was a deliberate outcome of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)'s history in the island nation, which was designated the most impoverished nation in the Western Hemisphere in 2009.
The history of US imperialism resulted in Haiti's massive infrastructural vulnerabilities, which made the 2010 earthquake as devastating as it was — within seconds "killing 222,570 people, displacing 2.3 million others...and destroying more than 300,000 homes".
Shortly after the earthquake, then came the October 2010 Cholera outbreak across Haiti, infecting nearly 1-million Haitians and killing nearly 10,000. Cholera was thought to be a disease largely beaten by modern sanitation. Its outbreak was the direct result of the same poverty that allowed earthquake to be so destructive.
Six years later, in 2016, Hurricane Matthew struck Haiti, killing over 500 people and causing approximately $2.8 billion in damage. The scale of devastation, once again, was rooted in the poverty enforced by the West upon Haiti.
The same is true about virtually every other nation of Latin America that has been colonized by Western intervention. This history, let alone the emerging influence of climate change, is of vital importance to understand today's 'immigration' patterns — a history erased from all discourse among mainstream Democrats.
This history underscores the significance of Trump's successive acts to end TPS, which chiefly targeted Haitians, Salvadorans, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans.
Fortunately, numerous lawsuits from human rights and grassroots organizations succeeded in achieving injunctions that blocked some of Trump's Executive Orders, allowing for at least a brief extension of TPS for these nations.
BIDEN BETRAYS HAITIANS
As such, while campaigning in Miami, Biden promised Haitian recipients of TPS to extend Haiti's protections under the program. During this promise, Biden expressly acknowledged that deportation of Haitians would return them to extraordinary hardships and indignities.
And yet, as President, Biden has still not extended TPS for Haiti.
It gets worse.
The Biden-Harris Administration has ramped up deportations of Haitian refugees and asylees through Trump’s infamous “Title 42” policy, enacted by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to expel any noncitizen without due process, human rights reviews, or the legal right to request asylum procedures.
According to a shattering new report, between February 1, 2021 — the first day of Black History Month — and March 25, 2021, the Biden-Harris Administration not only “doubled down” on perpetuating Trump’s deportations of Haitians, but “more Haitians have been removed per the Title 42 policy in the weeks since President Joe Biden took office than during all of Fiscal Year 2020.”
During less than 100 days in office, Biden has already deported between 1,300 to 1,500 Haitian refugees to the deadly conditions from which they fled, well documented by numerous human rights organizations, including in the report described [linked above].
“FOUR-YEAR $4 BILLION CENTRAL AMERICA PLAN”
Of central importance is Biden’s promise and planned 4-year $4-billion development plan in Central America, aimed for Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador (the “Northern Triangle”).
Biden has not yet achieved this, but his plan merits careful attention. It effectively allocates funds across two categories.
First, it increases funding in Central America for militarized police, the so-called US drug wars, and militarized border control systems. Second, it re-establishes the US’s century-old corporate-investment economic model in Central America, which restructures the economic landscape for US private investors, who use Central America for resource-extraction, labor exploitation, and exports.
To make this point clear, we have to unpack a bit more history — just the surface.
US HISTORY IN CENTRAL AMERICA
The two categories that I’ve outlined from Biden’s Central America plan may appear lovely and harmless, but they operate through the very dimensions that have historically reshaped Central America’s economy, labor conditions, worker’s rights, militarized policing, paramilitary forces, death squads, land distribution, and national debt — each influenced and thus revolving around the particular interests of foreign US corporations, US consumers, and the US State Department.
I want to be very clear. For the exact purpose of private investment in Latin America — as embodied in Biden’s plan — the US has consistently sabotaged Latin America’s redistributive economic efforts to raise minimum wages, worker’s rights, land rights, and unionization efforts in favor of poor people, as well as through weapons transfers to parties guilty of grave human rights abuses.
This is the history that spawned the very devastation in Central America that created the ongoing “immigration crisis” at the US-Mexico border.
US history in Guatemala is one example that captures that exact pattern of devastation.
GUATEMALA’S GENOCIDE
In 1944, the Guatemalan Revolution overthrew a brutal dictatorship and established for themselves a real democracy, whose economic framework was inspired by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal program.
Throughout the next decade, Guatemala’s economy achieved impressive and independent growth, leading to the 1951 democratic election of Jacobo Arbenz as Guatemala’s president. Arbenz sought to restructure Guatemala’s land and wealth systems to achieve equity across its own population, who suffered under the tyranny of The United Fruit Company (UFC), a mega US corporation that ran a powerful empire across Central America.
UFC held enormous control over land, resources, government, and the people across Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Honduras. It maintained overwhelming sociopolitical power, inhumane and exploitative labor practices, and plundered natural resources and foods for the company’s own export profits. So, Guatemala’s move towards sovereignty and democracy — by improving living standards for its own people over the profits of US corporations — was a devastating change for UFC.
In response, UFC pressured the US government to overthrow Arbenz. This pressure campaign, among other geopolitical interests, activated the CIA. By 1952, the CIA — as is confirmed through declassified internal records — targeted Guatemala’s independence as a threat “to US interests” and party to “Russian Communism”, a patently false and fabricated justification to prepare the contours of an overthrow.
Guatemala’s only crime was to simply begin using its own resources for the benefit of its own people and to free itself of military dictatorship and US corporate “economic colonialism”. A major crime. As such, the CIA launched a worldwide propaganda campaign to demonize Guatemala and isolate it on the world stage before launching a US-led coup.
In 1954, the US conducted that coup d’état, overthrew President Arbenz, and installed the CIA armed and trained Castillo Armas. Guatemala swiftly descended from the promising Arbenz era into a 1960 genocide led by US trained, armed, and funded militias that massacred over 200,000 Guatemalans, most of them the indigenous Mayan people. For readers who are skeptical about the veracity of this verified and declassified history: as the genocide continued with full US knowledge, US funding and arms-flow increased to the very militias who were conducting this genocide.
Guatemala is today a site of extreme poverty, abject human indices, and unspeakable violence on a harmless population, a grim reality that stems directly from US intervention as the literal reason to why Guatemalans flee to the US. We destabilized peoples’ homeland, and then we reject them from ours when they flee here with nowhere else to go.
We can run through the historical record, and we’d find this exact same model of violence — both ‘soft power’ and ‘hard power’ to establish US economic and geopolitical might — conducted virtually everywhere across the Global South, especially across the very Central American nations that migrants are today fleeing.
Nicaragua is yet another example of destabilizing democracy for US corporate interests. In 1984, the US was found guilty of large-scale terrorism by the International Court of Justice. Similarly in Haiti, whose US-enacted horrors deserve a detailed analysis beyond the scope of this interview.
Same history in Honduras. In 2009, Honduran President Zelaya attempted to enact redistributive policies in favor of the poor to increase the country’s index in the human development scale, which establishes a sociopolitical context averse to the type of worker insecurity, miserable labor rights, or land and political subservience required for US corporations to maximize their profits. As such, President Obama swiftly conducted a coup, which overthrew Zelaya — a matter of public record.
Till this very day, US private-investment profits rely on Central America’s ‘cheap’, unprotected labor, as well as on a political and military landscape that is not accountable to democratic and humanitarian standards. In other words, private US investors rely on totalitarian political arrangements in foreign nations, because that's what represses and subordinates the populations who desire higher wages, human rights, and prosperity, all of which are fundamentally antithetical to US corporate profits.
Biden’s plan does not “galvanize” or restore anything in favor of the Central American poor and disenfranchised — it restores the very factors that destabilized democracy, economic, human rights, and civil rights.
FOREIGN POLICY
VENEZUELA, CUBA, PANAMA, BRAZIL
Elsewhere in Latin America, particularly in Venezuela and Cuba, President Biden has enforced Donald Trump’s unilateral economic sanctions — illegal and catastrophic by its humanitarian toll — which have killed over 40,000 Venezuelans since 2017. This is not surprising. Biden had never promised diplomatic talks or negotiations with democratically-elected President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela.
Instead, Biden continues to pursue Trump’s coup d’état in Venezuela and maximum-pressure sanctions on Cuba, despite the illegality of such sanctions and the repeated calls and formal declarations by most of the world's nations, including the United Nations, that these sanctions are not only counter-productive, but are catastrophic, inhumane, and directly responsible for the misery, de-development, and hampered ability for these nations to respond to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, let alone to the inevitably COVID-19 variants that will likely be far more transmissible and possibly deadlier.
Were there were more time available here, I would have liked to unpack the 60+ year history of US tormenting Cuba, particularly as Cuba conducts an honorable internationalist position amidst this pandemic. Of note, Cuba has deployed 29,000 doctors and nurses to nations suffering under the COVID-19 pandemic.
Contrary to Cuba, however, the US has carried out the opposite by pressuring Panama to reject the much-needed help of Cuban doctors.
BRAZIL — COVID-19, DEFORESTATION, INDIGENOUS
Brazil is suffering the world’s 2nd highest death toll from COVID-19, under ultra-Right President Jair Bolsonaro. Much like his US role-model, Bolsonaro has adopted Trump’s approach of denying, under-preparing, and sabotaging the Brazilian people amidst their fight against the raging coronavirus, with particular cruelty towards the Amazonian indigenous.
Why them? Many of Brazil’s indigenous inhabit the State of Amazonas — a remote and sacred region in the Amazon rainforest — nearly 100% reserved indigenous land.
Bolsonaro won Brazil’s 2018 presidential election on the promise of stealing the Amazon rainforest and transforming it into Brazil’s economic powerhouse through a neoliberal program that allows vulture industries — corporate developers, agribusiness, and mining tycoons — free reign over Amazonas.
Bolsonaro had openly promised to leave not “one square centimeter” of indigenous land.
He has fulfilled this promise in multiple ways, one being the deliberate delays in medical supplies to Amazonas, and the other being through environmental terrorism by literally leaving them without “one square centimeter”. This criminality is killing vulnerable indigenous people and expanding the decades of violence they have suffered.
Among them are the Kokama indigenous people of the Amazon, whose death toll from COVID-19 is of such alarming and disproportionate magnitude that new cemeteries have been dug to accommodate mass burials.
Mid-January 2021, nearly 40 COVID-19 patients in Manaus — capital city of Amazonas — asphyxiated to death in local hospitals that ran out of oxygen supply.
One week earlier, the Brazilian government received a grave warning that the oxygen supply in Amazonas was at a dangerous shortage, soon to run out. Their Supreme Court ruled that the President must act immediately. Bolsonaro stalled. Scores of people perished.
Venezuela’s democratically-elected President Nicolas Maduro immediately sent a life-saving shipment of oxygen to the deprived Amazonas, despite Bolsonaro’s reckless aggression in lockstep with the US towards Venezuela’s Maduro.
Under Trump, while COVID-19 was rampantly killing countless in Brazil, the US pressured Brazil to reject Russia’s effective COVID-19 vaccine .
Biden has not distinguished himself from Trump. Let me be clear. Biden has been in contact with Brazil on other issues [discussed below]. Those conversations have provided Biden ample opportunity to conduct “vaccine diplomacy” with Brazil, as he has been called to do. But he has not.
Now, the second issue, deforestation.
Brazil’s rampant deforestation and invasion of indigenous land — particularly in the Amazon — by illegal loggers and miners is occurring daily, under the direct aegis of Bolsonaro. This is a major and illegal scandal with grave humanitarian consequences, both for the indigenous and for the world.
Deforestations are continuously terrorizing, displacing, and dispossessing indigenous peoples of their homes and livelihoods during an ongoing pandemic that requires physical-distancing.
Amidst this, Biden is currently holding talks with Bolsonaro’s administration to establish a multi-billion dollar climate “agreement” between Brazil and the US. Brazil has demanded the US to pay $1 billion USD annually in exchange for stopping only 30% to 40% of the deforestation, but Brazil refuses to commit to any specific percent in reduced deforestation. This hasn’t stopped Biden.
If this agreement is achieved, Biden would be sending $1 billion USD every year to a government committed grave human rights violations on Brazil’s most defenseless populations, a move that not even Trump committed.
Indigenous communities, Brazilian state governors, and human rights observers have pleaded with Biden to revoke his offered plan and instead to work directly with indigenous leaders and state governors. But Biden has refused to hear them, instead holding closed-door meetings with Bolsonaro’s faithful “Minister of Environment, Ricardo Salles, who has permitted this very deforestation and gutted environmental protections, even as the massive fire engulfed the Amazon rainforest in 2020. So, there is absolutely no rational evidence to suggest that Bolsonaro’s administration would honorably abide by any agreement with Biden.
The US President is actively negotiating with a criminal actor at the cost of squandering any hope for indigenous peoples. He should instead hold his talks, negotiations, and plans directly with the indigenous peoples and state governors of Brazil, perhaps also by incentivizing the authoritarian Brazilian government to adhere by using “vaccine diplomacy” — instead of annual transfers of $1 billion — as his negotiating tool. Instead, Biden is allowing Brazil’s authoritarian administration to dictate the terms of agreement.
An influx of US vaccines into Brazil would not only prevent further COVID-19 deaths in Brazil, but, if done correctly, would also stop or drastically reduce Brazil’s deforestations that directly torture the indigenous and indirectly injure global efforts to mitigate the climate crisis.
SAUDI ARABIA
Biden's bluster didn't end there. “We are going to make them pay the price”.
Elsewhere, Biden exclaimed that America “would not check its values at the door” with regard to MBS's centrality in the gruesome murder of Khashoggi.
"We are going to make them pay the price."
— Former Vice President Joe Biden, on the 2020 Presidential campaign trail.
Then, in late February 2021, under now President Biden, the US intelligence report was declassified. The CIA confirmed that Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman (MBS) did, in fact, authorize the murder and dismemberment of the US resident, Khashoggi.
Biden has since taken a 180º turn away from his campaign declarations by refusing to hold MBS accountable in any way at all, even refusing to answer questions from reporters.
Under Biden’s watch, the US Treasury Department has implemented sanctions only on Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence President, Ahmad al-Asisir, the Rapid Intervention Force, and revoked the visas of Saudi nationals who may be involved in the repression of journalists.
Not one action against MBS. That is the literal extent of Biden’s fulfillment of his bold promise. Meanwhile, MBS continues to wreak havoc on dissidents, journalists, activists, and many other groups in and beyond Saudi Arabia.
Biden’s implicit message to the world is that it will continue to provide tacit impunity to the most egregious murderers in human society, so long as they enrich US corporate profits, just as Saudi Arabia enriches Raytheon, Boeing, and others through its massive weapons purchases.
We shouldn't be surprised if he were to normalize his shoulder-rubbing with MBS and continue selling lethal weapons to Saudi Arabia in their genocide of Yemen.
YEMEN
The United States is the single most influential foreign actor in Yemen's ongoing catastrophe. As such, during his campaign, Biden promised to “end US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen”, which has killed over 233,000 civilians till this present moment.
This genocide is ongoing within the context of Saudi Arabia’s US-approved complete land-air-sea blockade of Yemen. The blockade exacerbates and facilitates all the other sources of devastation upon the population of Yemen. It is, by definition, collective punishment — a supreme violation of international law. These factors together have killed hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians.
Much of this has been preventable, if not by Obama then by Trump, who notoriously vetoed the historic bipartisan bill that would’ve ended US support, without which Saudi Arabia could not continue this genocide.
And what has Biden achieved?
In early February 2021, Biden announced, “This war has to end. And to underscore our commitment, we’re ending all American support for offensive operations in the war on Yemen.” Take careful notice of the term “offensive”.
But the devil is in the details. Biden’s policy cancels “offensive” weapons sales, but permits the flow of so-called “defensive” weapons sales.
What is a “defensive” or “offensive” weapon, and what is an “offensive operation”? These are not terms of legal discourse, but arbitrary terms of political propaganda that capture such a broad-sweeping range of actions, which therefore affords powerful parties to conduct any action whatsoever under the pretext of 'self defense', in order to continue committing atrocities. That's how power works. 'Might is right', as the saying goes. When you have the biggest guns and the loudest voice, you seem to do what you want and the follow that by creating a narrative about your actions, a narrative which is dutifully parroted by the most influential media outlets, until it becomes 'fact' in public perception. The manufacture of consent.
Contrary to imperialist grandstanding, Biden’s policy, however, simply provides Saudi Arabia further arbitrary power — the power to arbitrate for itself what counts as “defensive".
“Offensive operations'' and “offensive” weapons are terms devoid of concrete meaning. The are instead deliberately slippery and shape-shifting terms deployed historically by those parties to a conflict that possess monopoly power in arms, in the world stage, and in the media.
In Yemen's context, this language in Biden's plan provides a loophole through which the US can continue selling Saudi Arabia billions of dollars in taxpayer-subsidized military arms under the auspices of Saudi Arabia’s “right to self-defense”, so long as Saudi Arabia continues to commit atrocities under that pretext and so long as it remains a major geopolitical asset for the US in the Middle East.
Biden, then, in regard to Yemen, and as we will continue to see throughout his overall foreign policy, is indistinguishable from Donald Trump, both weapons salesman, except that one man's sales are issued through bluster and the other's through sanctimonious speeches and the facade of sentimentality.
Saudi Arabia's solitary 'right' — under international law — to violent means of self-defense is lawful only after first having exhausted every peaceable option, which Saudi Arabia has not even remotely attempted, instead manufacturing catastrophe in Yemen, far beyond the confines of “asymmetric warfare” and well into the dimension of genocide.
PALESTINE
Like all international affairs, there's a background to why this matters for the US public. In brief, as a matter of public and diplomatic record, the US is single-handedly responsible for enabling Israel's 40+ year rejection of the UN peace settlement — supported by over 70% of the world — on the table since 1976. For that reason, when people hear of "aid" to Palestine, they should know that US 'aid' to Palestine is not a function of US generosity; it's a lot closer to resembling an indemnity paid by the US for its central role in the horrors afflicted on Palestine.
During his campaign, Biden spoke rhetoric of opposition against Israel’s (lawless) annexation of the West Bank, pledged to restore US aid to Palestine, resume the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington D.C., and support the so-called “two-state solution”, all of which have suffered under every US administration, only most unabashedly under Trump.
In 2018, the Trump administration cut all US aid for the United Nation Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). UNRWA is the UN agency that, until Trump severed this funding, had annually provided Palestine approximately $350-million USD in humanitarian aid, which is dwarfed by the $3.8-billion USD given to Israel for military aid that is used to commit war crimes in Palestine.
Of his promised aid, Biden has so far transferred only $15-million USD to Gaza and the West Bank to aid their devastation under COVID-19. Last week, he also lifted Trump's economic sanctions on the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) top officials. Trump had imposed those sanctions to block the Court’s historic investigation into Israel’s war crimes in Palestine and the US’s war crimes in Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, while the Biden administration correctly ended US sanctions on the ICC, they still, nonetheless, condemned the ICC's investigations into Israel and the US's war crimes, making Biden's position against international law rather clear.
This should comes as no surprise to anyone who's stopped to examine how their leaders treat vulnerable people, near and far.
As a reminder, Biden's history on so-called "US-Palestine" has long embodied a staunch bias for Israel. In 1986, Biden infamously stated, "It's about time we stop apologizing for our support for Israel...there's no apology to be made. It is the best $3 billion investment we make. If there weren't an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region."
AFRICA
On Africa and the imperial US AFRICOM program, Biden during his campaign released only one solitary paragraph on US relations for the entire continent of Africa, the US military presence there, and the US’s ostensible ‘war on terrorism’ in the region.
The glib sentimentality, lack of detail, and shallowness echo the same posture towards Africa embodied by Biden's predecessors. The paragraph is worth quoting in full:
We will also continue to build partnerships in Africa, investing in civil society andstrengthening long-standing political, economic, and cultural connections. We will partnerwith dynamic and fast-growing African economies, even as we provide assistance to countries suffering from poor governance, economic distress, health, and food insecurity exacerbated by the pandemic. We will work to bring an end to the continent’s deadliest conflicts and prevent the onset of new ones, while strengthening our commitment to development, health security, environmental sustainability, democratic progress, and rule of law. We will help African nations combat the threats posed by climate change and violent extremism, and support their economic and political independence in the face of undue foreign influence.
No specifics about "partnerships" with who. Nor any specifics in the statement against "the continent's deadliest conflicts" and "undue foreign influence". Perhaps because the US cannot point to specific conflicts without having its own massive military presence in the continent, and its own African dictator allies, each exposed as hypocrisy.
As such, there's no mention of "partnerships" with the US's chief allies across Africa — like Egypt's el-Sisi, Uganda's Museveni, Rwanda's role in the horrors of Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and others — each being verifiable war criminals, dictators, and despots, who enjoy "strong" ties with the US.
Nor is there any mention of the legacies of "Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)", implemented since George W. Bush, whose main trade impacts have not been to establish economic and food stability and equity for the poor (read: the exploited), but instead to persist the history of Western (and Far Eastern) exploitation of Africa; namely, to allow oil giants (e.g. Exxon) pipelines to continue running unregulated and continue devastating its natural resources, like the Niger River, with oil spills; and to allow East Asian corporations to build countless sweatshops across the African continent, whose manufactured products are then imported to the US without tariffs.
Candidate Biden's lack of clarity on Africa, like that of his predecessors, is not by accident, but by design — a design that allows obfuscation of the US's lawless role in the plunder and pollution of Africa and obfuscation of the ever-expanding US military presence in sub-Saharan via AFRICOM by shifting German-based US troops increasingly into Africa.
NUCLEAR POLICY
IRAN
Biden famously promised in ambiguous terms to re-enter the US into the “Iran Deal” — officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of 2015 — which was originally endorsed and enacted by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).
In order to understand Biden’s current stance on Iran, we have to first disentangle a bit of history.
The JCPOA legally bound the P5+1 (US, UK, Russia, Germany, France, China) and Iran to the terms outlined in the agreement and was verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — it became explicit international law.
Despite Iran’s verified and meticulous adherence to the nuclear agreement, in May 2018, the US under Trump’s authorization unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA, a direct violation of UNSC resolutions and international law.
Then, the US ramped up brutal and illegal economic sanctions, widely known as “maximum pressure” sanctions, in further violation of international law, amidst a backdrop of ongoing sanctions upon Iran that crippled its ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
US sanctions on Iran have been active, without pause, since and because of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the US-installed dictatorial regime under the Shah, which committed among the most heinous crimes-against-humanity on its own population under US aegis, in order to crush public opposition against imperial foreign investors and US corporate profits.
Despite US State Department claims that essential medicines and critical sectors are not targeted by these sanctions, US sanctions have, as a matter of fact, ravaged Iran, plunging millions into poverty, as well as into deprivation of access to shelter, water, medicine, food, and healthcare. US sanction have been repeatedly 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 determined as causing catastrophic shortages in essential medical equipment (including ventilators and devices for heart surgeries), essential medications (including pediatric cancer treatments, chemotherapies, antibiotics, antifungals, insulin for over 600,000 Iranian diabetic patients, antidepressants, and more), among many other life-saving measures amidst the pandemic.
The Iranian government manufactures approximately 90% of the country’s own pharmaceuticals, unlike private industries in the West. Thus, sanctions on Iran’s financial sector, commercial industry, international trade, and more, all contribute towards an accumulative devastation of overall national financial system required to procure and produce medicine.
Of equal brutality is the issue that direct US sanctions on Iran are amplified by “third party” sanctions on Iran. Since this is an issue virtually untold, I’ll explain.
Trump and Mike Pompeo’s unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA ("Iran Deal") occurred with sharp disproval and consternation from the UN Security Council (UNSC), notably across Europe, which strongly supported the JCPOA. But since the US maintains dominant control over the global financial system, it therefore tacitly regulates the economic fate for many of the world’s nations. As such, Mike Pompeo boldly demanded of the UNSC — the world’s greatest powers — that they must cooperate with the US’s sanctions by similarly refusing to conduct trade with Iran. Thus, “third party” sanctions followed and have since additionally crippled Iran.
Were almost any nation to defy these US demands, they would face the grim likelihood of being removed by the US from the global financial system and possibly also suffer sanctions of their own, sanctions to whose cooperation, obedience, and persistence the US devotes inordinate sums to monitor and ensure.
Since his inauguration, Biden has not only failed to fulfill his promise of re-entering the JCPOA, but he has openly refused to do so. Biden has expressly adopted Trump’s policy on Iran by demanding even harsher conditions on Iran than those outlined and verified by the UNSC and protected under international law, most notably the complete cessation of — rather than the previous limitation on — uranium enrichment.
There are no exiting precedents or provisions anywhere in international law or demanded by the UN Security Council that warrant such demands, particularly given that Iran faithfully abided with every demand, verification, monitoring, and inspection mechanism outlined in the JCPOA.
Contrary to common claims, the “maximum pressures” sanctions have achieved many of their aims, namely to devastate Iran across multiple indices, including plunging Iran’s middle class into poverty levels. But it has not broken and reduced Iran’s threshold for compromise, rightfully so.
There exists no evidence whatsoever that Iran is enriching uranium for nuclear weapons. In fact, the US Defense Intelligence Agency conducted a thorough analysis of Iran’s “threat perceptions”. In it, the DIA repeatedly reported that virtually every feature of Iran’s military policy is deterrence — meaning, to try to prevent an external attack from the US and Israel, as Iran cannot and will not conduct an offensive attack on US power. It is worth quoting:
“Iran has focused on preparing and equipping its military forces for defense against air attack and ground invasion by a technologically superior adversary, primarily the United States. The U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s Iran has focused on preparing and equipping its military forces for defense against air attack and ground invasion by a technologically superior adversary, primarily the United States. The U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s and international scrutiny of Iran’s nuclear program raised Iran’s fears of encirclement and potential Western attack. Tehran recognizes that it cannot compete with the United States on a conventional level and has prioritized the development of defensive capabilities that emphasize asymmetric tactics to protect the country and the regime.”
As Alena Douhan — the esteemed United Nation Special Rapporteur and expert on unilateral coercive measures (sanctions) and human rights — has repeatedly investigated and determined, US sanctions on Iran, on Venezuela, and on Syria achieve no outcome other than to wage savage, illegal, and deadly punishment upon vulnerable civilian populations.
NUCLEAR-FREE ZONE
If the US sincerely wanted to abolish the threat of nuclear catastrophe, it would join the ongoing calls for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, as was historically achieved in July 2009 in Africa by 47 of the 53 nations of the continent. First and foremost, Iran has long been calling for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, which would subject every party to inspections, international monitoring, and meticulous verification mechanisms.
The Arab states have been demanding this, as well, for over two decades. The full 134 nations of the G77 have been calling for this, similarly. Nor is there any objections from Europe. So, what’s stopping the nuclear-free zone from being implemented?
Two nations: the US and Israel.
Only these two nations oppose a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, for obvious reasons, rooted in preventing inspections of Israel’s nuclear weapons stockpiles, which would then subject US military aid to Israel to numerous investigations and thus accountability.
CHINA
Discussion of nuclear policy brings us to the matter of China. Trump was perfectly open about his hostility towards China, both on the economic and military front. And Biden, on the campaign trail, had promised to partner with China to diplomatically ensure a nuclear-free North Korea.
However, he has demonstrated no other forms of diplomatic will towards China, instead persisting with the same position and approach as Trump. In mid-March 2021, the Biden Administration conducted their first in-person meeting with China in Anchorage, Alaska. During this meeting, both the US and China exchanged rhetorical blows over human rights, the South China Sea, the COVID-19 pandemic, authoritarianism, cyberattacks on the US, and more.
If the Biden Administration is at all committed to restoring diplomatic international relations with China, there was no indication of that in this meeting.
This US hostility emerges out of a growing understanding in the Biden Administration that China is not necessarily a military threat to the US, but primarily an economic and technological threat to US global dominance, most notably by China’s growing economic presence across Latin America and Africa, the former of whose economy and militaries were overall ruled by the US, for nearly a century and which the US has been expressly committed to re-establishing.
If history has taught us human rights defenders anything, it’s that imperial powers don’t simply accept their defeat and politely disappear.
CONCLUSION
This analysis has not been ambitious. Much more remains to be said on each of these and other crucial topics in relation to Biden and his administration.
And yet, this overview does suffice to conclude that there is yet no qualitative difference in foreign policy and immigration between Biden and Trump, and only marginal differences across their economic policy, climate policy, nuclear policy, and few other domestic policies, particularly for the populations of Black, Latin American, MENASA, and Indigenous peoples.
Thus far, while numerous minor differences exist between Biden and Trump, with few days before his 100-day milestone, the solitary distinction of substance between the two Presidents exists primarily in Biden’s COVID-19 response, which has been somewhat praiseworthy, but 'praiseworthy' only when juxtaposed to Donald Trump, and shameful when juxtaposed to other global leaders, particularly those of Cuba.
Other distinctions between the Biden and his predecessor exist only in the realm of rhetoric, public behavior, and oratory, rather than substantial outcomes.
If the US tradition of this 100-day milestone portends any truth about Biden's remaining presidency, as it has for his predecessors, then it portends that neither he nor the US Congress will implement any satisfactory improvements to the structural sources to the current perils of our country and our world — that is, unless large-scale, unwavering, well-coordinated grassroots organized pressure of internationalist character sweeps the country, making its intersectional demands known, heard, and realized.
UNDOING THE DAMAGE
Emancipation from the oppressions of white supremacy, prisons, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, ableism, misogyny, climate and nuclear catastrophe, and otherwise, these can only be achieved through the leaderless and sophisticated coordination of all peoples.
It must be conducted largely outside of the electoral arena by grassroots pressure firmly placed on every level of elected leadership.
There are no magic or new formulas required of us to achieve this. Just the same hard work of organizing ourselves from small-scale towards large-scale, globalist activism. It demands of us a humane, supportive, self-sustaining, nurturing, and global movement of solidarity, appreciation for each other’s differential struggles, passionate commitment to restorative justice, interpersonal conflict resolution, and the decolonization of ourselves and the spheres that we inhabit.
We have only ourselves and our half-realized potential for global solidarity.
The alternative is extinction — extinction of organized human life.
Grim, but no longer deniable.