Israel More Isolated Than Ever After Trump’s Recent Statements
Lucas Leiroz
March 29, 2024
Former American president recognizes that the Zionist regime made a serious mistake in showing the results of its war campaign in Gaza.
Former American President Donald Trump, despite maintaining a reasonably lucid stance regarding the Ukrainian conflict, is a radical Zionist and has shown on several occasions that he is willing to support Tel Aviv in its genocidal war against Gaza’s Palestinians. However, the strategic errors committed by the Zionist regime are so serious that they are forcing even Trump to object to Israel’s practices.
Recently, during an interview with an Israeli newspaper, Trump warned that Tel Aviv is “losing international support” due to its war in the Gaza Strip. He advised the Israelis to “end” the military campaign as quickly as possible, thus preventing Israel from becoming even more isolated on the international arena. More than that, the former American president condemned the Israeli anti-humanitarian attacks, describing the destruction of residential facilities in Gaza as a “big mistake”, severely criticizing the actions of the Zionist regime.
In a way, Trump’s speech is hypocritical, as he criticizes the explicit aspect of Israeli actions. He does not seem to be really concerned with the crimes committed by Israel, but with the fact that such crimes are damaging the international image of the Zionist regime. However, this type of connivance with Israel’s crimes was already expected from a Zionist leader like Trump, which is why the mere fact of criticizing Zionist explicitness is actually surprising.
“It’s a very bad picture for the world. The world is seeing this… every night, I would watch buildings pour down on people (…) Go and do what you have to do. But you don’t do that (…) And I think that’s one of the reasons that there has been a lot of kickback. If people didn’t see that, every single night I’d watch and every single one of those… And I think Israel wanted to show that it’s tough, but sometimes you shouldn’t be doing that,” he told journalists.
As is well known, Trump and Netanyahu were close allies during the Republican government in the U.S. Some analysts considered Trump the “most pro-Israel president in history.” The severe sanctions on Iran, the opening of the American embassy in Jerusalem and the mediation of the Abraham Accords are some examples of how Washington and Tel Aviv were close allies during the Trump era.
However, relations between Trump and Netanyahu entered into crisis after the Israeli leader recognized Joe Biden’s victory and congratulated the then new American president in 2020. According to several analysts, Trump felt “betrayed” by Netanyahu, changing his personal opinion on the Zionist politician. Obviously, it is not possible to assess how much Trump really felt affected by such actions by Netanyahu, but it is obvious that relations between the former American president and the Israeli prime minister are no longer as stable as they used to be.
Despite supporting Israel, Trump has maintained a critical stance towards Zionist actions in Gaza. According to the former American leader, Tel Aviv “was not prepared” to face Hamas. He admits that Israel has committed several serious strategic errors during the war, damaging not only its military interests, but also its international image, becoming an increasingly isolated state.
It is interesting to see that there is a growth in critical opinion regarding Israel among Trump and his supporters. This shows that the Zionist regime’s anti-humanitarian practices are damaging even Israel’s most solid and traditional alliances. The more Israel attacks civilians and destroys non-military infrastructure, the more public opinion endorses criticism of the regime and stops supporting it in the war against the Palestinians in Gaza. With this, Israel’s isolation on the international arena becomes a reality.
Despite being a Zionist, Trump is above all a “political businessman”. The former American president is known for his pragmatism, signing alliances or breaking agreements in accordance with the interests of the U.S. Trump increasingly seems to realize that continuing to support Israel unconditionally does not seem like an appropriate move, as this would harm Washington’s international relations with important countries that condemn Israeli crimes.
With the U.S. elections approaching and a Trump victory becoming increasingly possible, Netanyahu is certainly quite isolated right now. Israel has frictions even in its traditional ties with the U.S. and the EU, as its government’s explicit crimes generate condemnation around the world. Trump seems to be realizing this and trying to save his own political image from the usual association with Netanyahu.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... tatements/
Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
The 61bn dollar question is what Trump does now
Martin Jay
April 26, 2024
The southern border issue is still left hanging while Ukraine’s borders take precedent with U.S. lawmakers.
Until just a few days ago, no one in the world had heard of Mike Johnson. The Republican House speaker in the House of Representatives made world acclaim when he threw his weight behind an aid package for Ukraine totalling some 61bn USD and throwing the cat among the pigeons in so doing.
Johnson has made a lot of friends in the Democratic party and lost a few from his own party in making the aid package happen, while he insists that he was briefed by intelligence experts which urged him to rush the bill through. Perhaps he was offered incentives. We may never know. But the deal that went through was so unprecedented that it has left many Republicans wondering if there is any point in having a majority in the House at all, especially given that the southern border issue is still left hanging while Ukraine’s borders take precedent with U.S. lawmakers.
The move was a decisive victory for Biden though, at least in the short term whereas for Trump many analysts are saying that his one master card he had to play during the elections – that he personally will stop the war in Ukraine along with the spending – has now been shown to be a busted flush. For Biden and for his western elitist surfs, the objective was clear: keep the business of war going as long as possible with Zelensky in power to extract maximum profits. The flawed thinking is of course that those who signed off the aid package are literally using the plastic sacks of cash as a way of keeping warm as they chuck it onto the bonfire of the vanities otherwise known as the war that Biden didn’t want but was very much brought about by a nervous reaction to the so-called election interference in 2016.
The real flaw in the failed joined-up thinking is that the money will have some if any impact on the war itself. The real crisis Zelensky has is not so much with military hardware as he claims but more with infantry. This latest tranche of military aid will provide missiles, which is the new thinking from Kiev and the NATO knuckleheads. Just like the Americans were convinced they could win the war in Vietnam with air superiority, the thinking now in Ukraine is that missiles and missile defences are the game changer.
However, no one can blame Biden for the stunt which drew Trump in and made him now a signed-up member of the crankies. Analysts now point out that Trump has crossed one of his own red lines and will not have the punch it will require to win in December as he and many of his supporters actually backed the bill. Was he playing a bluff? Will he say once in office “I only signed it as I knew it would put Biden in a much tougher hole to climb out of but now I’m president, I’m going to stop the war in an instant by stopping the cash flow”? Hard to say. Hard to double guess Trump’s mind when he doesn’t even know himself and so many of his decisions about his own self-preservation and glutenous business cravings rather than salient political common sense. But can this money have any real impact between now and December, given what we know about stockpiles in the U.S. and how long it even takes to get kit to Ukraine, even if it is ready and good to go? Russia will of course take advantage of this military failure of Zelensky and push ahead with their tanks on firm ground now, with the winter well behind them, with Biden playing a high stakes gamble that Americans won’t be asking him in the mid-winter how is it that he can’t find 160 odd billion dollars for fighting poverty in the U.S., while he can to pay the salaries of civil servants in one of the most corrupt countries on the planet.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... -does-now/
Martin Jay
April 26, 2024
The southern border issue is still left hanging while Ukraine’s borders take precedent with U.S. lawmakers.
Until just a few days ago, no one in the world had heard of Mike Johnson. The Republican House speaker in the House of Representatives made world acclaim when he threw his weight behind an aid package for Ukraine totalling some 61bn USD and throwing the cat among the pigeons in so doing.
Johnson has made a lot of friends in the Democratic party and lost a few from his own party in making the aid package happen, while he insists that he was briefed by intelligence experts which urged him to rush the bill through. Perhaps he was offered incentives. We may never know. But the deal that went through was so unprecedented that it has left many Republicans wondering if there is any point in having a majority in the House at all, especially given that the southern border issue is still left hanging while Ukraine’s borders take precedent with U.S. lawmakers.
The move was a decisive victory for Biden though, at least in the short term whereas for Trump many analysts are saying that his one master card he had to play during the elections – that he personally will stop the war in Ukraine along with the spending – has now been shown to be a busted flush. For Biden and for his western elitist surfs, the objective was clear: keep the business of war going as long as possible with Zelensky in power to extract maximum profits. The flawed thinking is of course that those who signed off the aid package are literally using the plastic sacks of cash as a way of keeping warm as they chuck it onto the bonfire of the vanities otherwise known as the war that Biden didn’t want but was very much brought about by a nervous reaction to the so-called election interference in 2016.
The real flaw in the failed joined-up thinking is that the money will have some if any impact on the war itself. The real crisis Zelensky has is not so much with military hardware as he claims but more with infantry. This latest tranche of military aid will provide missiles, which is the new thinking from Kiev and the NATO knuckleheads. Just like the Americans were convinced they could win the war in Vietnam with air superiority, the thinking now in Ukraine is that missiles and missile defences are the game changer.
However, no one can blame Biden for the stunt which drew Trump in and made him now a signed-up member of the crankies. Analysts now point out that Trump has crossed one of his own red lines and will not have the punch it will require to win in December as he and many of his supporters actually backed the bill. Was he playing a bluff? Will he say once in office “I only signed it as I knew it would put Biden in a much tougher hole to climb out of but now I’m president, I’m going to stop the war in an instant by stopping the cash flow”? Hard to say. Hard to double guess Trump’s mind when he doesn’t even know himself and so many of his decisions about his own self-preservation and glutenous business cravings rather than salient political common sense. But can this money have any real impact between now and December, given what we know about stockpiles in the U.S. and how long it even takes to get kit to Ukraine, even if it is ready and good to go? Russia will of course take advantage of this military failure of Zelensky and push ahead with their tanks on firm ground now, with the winter well behind them, with Biden playing a high stakes gamble that Americans won’t be asking him in the mid-winter how is it that he can’t find 160 odd billion dollars for fighting poverty in the U.S., while he can to pay the salaries of civil servants in one of the most corrupt countries on the planet.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... -does-now/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy
Trump Promises to Deport All Undocumented Immigrants, Resurrecting a 1950s Strategy − But It Didn’t Work Then and Is Less Likely to Do so Now
Posted on May 7, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. I have to confess to not previously having heard of the Eisenhower “wetback” deportation scheme, which I find an interested bit of media-promoted amnesia. Since the 1960s press did give some attention to Cesar Chavez’s boycotts to get better labor conditions and pay for farmworkers, who were often seasonal migrants (the post mentions the Bracero program to regularize migrant farm workers with a sub-minimum wage but also called for decent working conditions, and hence regularized their status; it ended in 1964 and Chavez increasingly opposed illegal immigration). Irrespective of the history, illegal immigrants have become a hot button, with opponents (either to them at all or their current numbers) extending beyond the hard core right wing. So Gordian-knot-cutting scheme has voter appeal despite its practical failings.
By Katrina Burgess, Professor of Political Economy, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Originally published at The Conversation
While campaigning in Iowa last September, former President Donald Trump made a promise to voters if he were elected again: “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” he said. Trump, who made a similar pledge during his first presidential campaign, has recently repeated this promise at rallies across the country.
Trump was referring to Operation Wetback, a military-style campaign launched by the Eisenhower administration in the summer of 1954 to end undocumented immigration by deporting hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. “Wetback” was a widely used ethnic slur for Mexicans who illegally crossed the Rio Grande, the river dividing Mexico and the U.S.
Trump says that he can replicate Operation Wetback on a much grander scale by setting up temporary immigration detention centers and relying on local, state and federal authorities, including National Guard troops, to remove the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants now living in the U.S.
As a migration scholar, I find Trump’s proposal to be both disturbing and misleading. Besides playing to unfounded and dehumanizing fears of an immigrant invasion, it misrepresents the context and impact of Eisenhower’s policy while ignoring the vastly changed landscape of U.S. immigration today.
Operation Wetback
In May 1954, U.S. Attorney General Harold Brownell appointed Joseph Swing, a retired general, to lead the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, in a “special program to apprehend and deport aliens illegally in this country from areas along the southern border.” Until 2003, the INS was responsible for immigration and border control, now handled by multiple federal agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Swing ramped up a decade-long practice of using special task forces composed of INS agents who could be rapidly deployed where needed in order to locate and deport undocumented workers. The operation began in California and then spread to Arizona and Texas. INS agents set up roadblocks and raided fields, factories, neighborhoods and saloons where immigrants were working or socializing. The INS also built a vast wire-fenced security camp, according to the Los Angeles Times, in order to detain apprehended immigrants in Los Angeles before sending them to the border.
Captured immigrants were put on hot, overcrowded buses or rickety boats and sent to designated border crossings in Arizona and Texas, where they were forced to cross back into Mexico. Some found themselves stranded in the Mexican desert just over the border. In one incident, 88 migrants died of sunstroke before the Red Cross arrived with water and medical attention. Others were delivered to Mexican authorities, who loaded them onto trains headed deeper into Mexico.
By mid-August, INS agents had deported more than 100,000 immigrants across the U.S. Southwest. Fearing apprehension, thousands more reportedly fled back to Mexico on their own. Most of these immigrants were young Mexican men, but the INS also targeted families, removing nearly 9,000 family members, including children, from the Rio Grande Valley in August. There is also evidence of U.S. citizens getting caught up in the INS sweeps.
Operation Wetback wound down its operations a few months later, and Swing declared in January 1955 that “the day of the wetback is over.” The INS disbanded its special mobile task forces, and the deportation of undocumented immigrants plummeted over the next decade.
Not Just About Deportation
Operation Wetback made the headlines and disrupted countless lives, but it was more show than substance when it came to deportation.
The government’s claim to have deported more than 1 million Mexicans during the summer of 1954 does not stand up to scrutiny. The 1.1 million figure was for the entire fiscal year, which ended in June 1954, and a sizable share of these apprehensions were repeat arrests, sometimes in a single day. Moreover, over 97% of these deportations occurred without a formal order of removal. Instead, migrants agreed, or were coerced, to leave the country after being apprehended.
Despite Trump-like rhetoric decrying a “wetback invasion” across the U.S.-Mexico border, Operation Wetback’s main objective was not to remove Mexican immigrants but rather to frighten U.S. farmers, especially in Texas, into hiring them legally.
This tactic largely worked. A crucial but often overlooked detail about Operation Wetback is that it happened at the same time as the Bracero Program, a massive guest-worker program between the U.S. and Mexico. Between 1942 and 1964, U.S. employers issued over 4.6 million short-term contracts to more than 400,000 Mexican farm workers. Nearly three-quarters of these contracts were issued between 1955 and 1964 – after the INS carried out Operation Wetback.
Operation Wetback is unlikely to have led to a dramatic decline in undocumented immigration had Mexican workers not had a legal option for entering the United States. As one immigrant caught up in Operation Wetback commented, “I will come back – legally, if possible. If not, I’ll just walk across again.”
The INS explicitly recognized the connection between the Bracero Program and the decline in undocumented immigration in a 1958 report, stating that “should … a restriction be placed on the number of braceros allowed to enter the United States, we can look forward to a large increase in the number of illegal alien entrants into the United States.”
It is no coincidence that the lull in migrants illegally crossing the U.S-Mexico border after Operation Wetback did not last once the Bracero Program ended in 1964. Mexicans still had strong incentives to migrate, but now they had to do so without visas or work contracts, contributing to a steady increase in border arrests after 1965 that surpassed 1 million in 1976 and reached nearly 2 million in 2000.
Mexican agricultural workers are seen in California in 1943. Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information photograph collection (Library of Congress)
Real Lessons
If he were to win the presidency again, Trump would have the legal authority to deport undocumented immigrants, but the logistical, political and legal obstacles to doing so quickly and massively are even greater today than they were in the 1950s.
First, most undocumented immigrants now live in cities, where immigrant sweeps are more difficult to carry out. The INS learned this lesson when Operation Wetback shifted from the largely rural Southwest to urban areas in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest in September 1954. Despite transferring hundreds of agents to these locations and using similar tactics, INS agents produced far fewer apprehensions as they struggled to find and detain immigrants.
Second, the U.S. undocumented population is much more dispersed and diverse than in the 1950s. Today, Mexicans are no longer in the majority, and nearly half of undocumented immigrants live outside the six major hubs for immigrants – California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.
Third, most undocumented immigrants in the U.S. did not sneak across the border. An estimated 42% entered the country legally but overstayed a visa illegally. Another 17% requested and received a short-term legal status that protects them from immediate deportation.
Finally, mass deportations are likely to spark a more broad-based resistance today than happened in the 1950s. Once staunchly opposed to undocumented immigration, most labor unions and Mexican-American organizations are now in the pro-immigrant camp. Likewise, the Mexican government, which helped with Operation Wetback, is unlikely to allow massive numbers of non-Mexicans to be deported to its territory without the proper documentation.
Trump has not supported a way to provide undocumented immigrants with a legal alternative, which means that migrants will keep finding ways to cross illegally.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05 ... o-now.html
Posted on May 7, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. I have to confess to not previously having heard of the Eisenhower “wetback” deportation scheme, which I find an interested bit of media-promoted amnesia. Since the 1960s press did give some attention to Cesar Chavez’s boycotts to get better labor conditions and pay for farmworkers, who were often seasonal migrants (the post mentions the Bracero program to regularize migrant farm workers with a sub-minimum wage but also called for decent working conditions, and hence regularized their status; it ended in 1964 and Chavez increasingly opposed illegal immigration). Irrespective of the history, illegal immigrants have become a hot button, with opponents (either to them at all or their current numbers) extending beyond the hard core right wing. So Gordian-knot-cutting scheme has voter appeal despite its practical failings.
By Katrina Burgess, Professor of Political Economy, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Originally published at The Conversation
While campaigning in Iowa last September, former President Donald Trump made a promise to voters if he were elected again: “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” he said. Trump, who made a similar pledge during his first presidential campaign, has recently repeated this promise at rallies across the country.
Trump was referring to Operation Wetback, a military-style campaign launched by the Eisenhower administration in the summer of 1954 to end undocumented immigration by deporting hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. “Wetback” was a widely used ethnic slur for Mexicans who illegally crossed the Rio Grande, the river dividing Mexico and the U.S.
Trump says that he can replicate Operation Wetback on a much grander scale by setting up temporary immigration detention centers and relying on local, state and federal authorities, including National Guard troops, to remove the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants now living in the U.S.
As a migration scholar, I find Trump’s proposal to be both disturbing and misleading. Besides playing to unfounded and dehumanizing fears of an immigrant invasion, it misrepresents the context and impact of Eisenhower’s policy while ignoring the vastly changed landscape of U.S. immigration today.
Operation Wetback
In May 1954, U.S. Attorney General Harold Brownell appointed Joseph Swing, a retired general, to lead the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, in a “special program to apprehend and deport aliens illegally in this country from areas along the southern border.” Until 2003, the INS was responsible for immigration and border control, now handled by multiple federal agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Swing ramped up a decade-long practice of using special task forces composed of INS agents who could be rapidly deployed where needed in order to locate and deport undocumented workers. The operation began in California and then spread to Arizona and Texas. INS agents set up roadblocks and raided fields, factories, neighborhoods and saloons where immigrants were working or socializing. The INS also built a vast wire-fenced security camp, according to the Los Angeles Times, in order to detain apprehended immigrants in Los Angeles before sending them to the border.
Captured immigrants were put on hot, overcrowded buses or rickety boats and sent to designated border crossings in Arizona and Texas, where they were forced to cross back into Mexico. Some found themselves stranded in the Mexican desert just over the border. In one incident, 88 migrants died of sunstroke before the Red Cross arrived with water and medical attention. Others were delivered to Mexican authorities, who loaded them onto trains headed deeper into Mexico.
By mid-August, INS agents had deported more than 100,000 immigrants across the U.S. Southwest. Fearing apprehension, thousands more reportedly fled back to Mexico on their own. Most of these immigrants were young Mexican men, but the INS also targeted families, removing nearly 9,000 family members, including children, from the Rio Grande Valley in August. There is also evidence of U.S. citizens getting caught up in the INS sweeps.
Operation Wetback wound down its operations a few months later, and Swing declared in January 1955 that “the day of the wetback is over.” The INS disbanded its special mobile task forces, and the deportation of undocumented immigrants plummeted over the next decade.
Not Just About Deportation
Operation Wetback made the headlines and disrupted countless lives, but it was more show than substance when it came to deportation.
The government’s claim to have deported more than 1 million Mexicans during the summer of 1954 does not stand up to scrutiny. The 1.1 million figure was for the entire fiscal year, which ended in June 1954, and a sizable share of these apprehensions were repeat arrests, sometimes in a single day. Moreover, over 97% of these deportations occurred without a formal order of removal. Instead, migrants agreed, or were coerced, to leave the country after being apprehended.
Despite Trump-like rhetoric decrying a “wetback invasion” across the U.S.-Mexico border, Operation Wetback’s main objective was not to remove Mexican immigrants but rather to frighten U.S. farmers, especially in Texas, into hiring them legally.
This tactic largely worked. A crucial but often overlooked detail about Operation Wetback is that it happened at the same time as the Bracero Program, a massive guest-worker program between the U.S. and Mexico. Between 1942 and 1964, U.S. employers issued over 4.6 million short-term contracts to more than 400,000 Mexican farm workers. Nearly three-quarters of these contracts were issued between 1955 and 1964 – after the INS carried out Operation Wetback.
Operation Wetback is unlikely to have led to a dramatic decline in undocumented immigration had Mexican workers not had a legal option for entering the United States. As one immigrant caught up in Operation Wetback commented, “I will come back – legally, if possible. If not, I’ll just walk across again.”
The INS explicitly recognized the connection between the Bracero Program and the decline in undocumented immigration in a 1958 report, stating that “should … a restriction be placed on the number of braceros allowed to enter the United States, we can look forward to a large increase in the number of illegal alien entrants into the United States.”
It is no coincidence that the lull in migrants illegally crossing the U.S-Mexico border after Operation Wetback did not last once the Bracero Program ended in 1964. Mexicans still had strong incentives to migrate, but now they had to do so without visas or work contracts, contributing to a steady increase in border arrests after 1965 that surpassed 1 million in 1976 and reached nearly 2 million in 2000.
Mexican agricultural workers are seen in California in 1943. Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information photograph collection (Library of Congress)
Real Lessons
If he were to win the presidency again, Trump would have the legal authority to deport undocumented immigrants, but the logistical, political and legal obstacles to doing so quickly and massively are even greater today than they were in the 1950s.
First, most undocumented immigrants now live in cities, where immigrant sweeps are more difficult to carry out. The INS learned this lesson when Operation Wetback shifted from the largely rural Southwest to urban areas in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest in September 1954. Despite transferring hundreds of agents to these locations and using similar tactics, INS agents produced far fewer apprehensions as they struggled to find and detain immigrants.
Second, the U.S. undocumented population is much more dispersed and diverse than in the 1950s. Today, Mexicans are no longer in the majority, and nearly half of undocumented immigrants live outside the six major hubs for immigrants – California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.
Third, most undocumented immigrants in the U.S. did not sneak across the border. An estimated 42% entered the country legally but overstayed a visa illegally. Another 17% requested and received a short-term legal status that protects them from immediate deportation.
Finally, mass deportations are likely to spark a more broad-based resistance today than happened in the 1950s. Once staunchly opposed to undocumented immigration, most labor unions and Mexican-American organizations are now in the pro-immigrant camp. Likewise, the Mexican government, which helped with Operation Wetback, is unlikely to allow massive numbers of non-Mexicans to be deported to its territory without the proper documentation.
Trump has not supported a way to provide undocumented immigrants with a legal alternative, which means that migrants will keep finding ways to cross illegally.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05 ... o-now.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."