Report: Trump Plans UK-Style Attack on Israel Criticism
November 4, 2024
Joe Lauria says the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” as covered by Drop Site News, replicates the U.K.’s use of a terrorism law to criminalize pro-Palestine speech and activism.
Former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Glendale, Arizona, on Aug. 23. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
A second Trump administration could criminalize criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza as support for terrorism, along the lines of the British Terrorism Act, according to a report in Drop Site News.
The report says the plan is to “break the pro-Palestinian movement in the U.S.”
“The plan, dubbed ‘Project Esther,‘ casts pro-Palestinian activists in the U.S. as members of a global conspiracy aligned with designated terrorist organizations. As part of a so-called ‘Hamas Support Network,’ these protesters receive ‘indispensable support of a vast network of activists and funders with a much more ambitious, insidious goal — the destruction of capitalism and democracy,’ Project Esther’s authors allege.
This conspiratorial framing is part of a legal strategy to suppress speech favorable to Palestinians or critical of the U.S.-Israel relationship, by employing counterterrorism laws to suppress what would otherwise be protected speech, legal experts told Drop Site News.”
The authors of the plan are part of the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Drop Site says. Former President Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 but he is a strong supporter of Israel, having moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and accepted Israel’s annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, considered illegal by the U.N. Security Council.
The Washington Post reported in May that Trump told donors in New York that he would deport foreign students if they demonstrate for Palestine. “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” Trump told the donors, the Post reported.
The report in Drop Site News, written by Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain, quotes an attorney at Palestine Legal as saying that
“concepts like the ‘Hamas Support Network’ or ‘Hamas Supporting Organizations,’ another term that the authors use to describe pro-Palestinian activist groups, is intended to construct a narrative justifying the use of counterterrorism and sanctions laws to suppress the First Amendment rights of individuals involved in the pro-Palestine movement …”
‘They need to make a claim that these organizations are being directed and controlled by Hamas, which they’re not,’ attorney Dylan Saba said. ‘So their claim now is that these organizations are effectively serving as a propaganda wing for designated terrorist organizations.’”
This is precisely what the British government has been doing.
2000 Terrorism Act
Using the 2000 Terrorism Act, authorities have been stopping journalists and activists at border entry points to interrogate them, sometimes arresting them, or conducting raids on their homes all because they dare expose and condemn Israel’s ongoing barbarism in Gaza and now Lebanon and misconstrue it as support for proscribed organizations, namely Hamas and Hezbollah.
Among those interrogated under the Terrorism Act for this purpose have been Craig Murray, writer, former British diplomat, new Consortium News board member; journalist Richard Medhurst who was held in a cell for 24 hours; and Asa Winstanley, an editor at Electronic Intifada whose home was raided by counterterrorism police.
[See: Police Escalate Britain’s War on Independent Journalism]
If Trump wins we could expect the same thing as is happening in the U.K. from his second administration, according to Drop Site News.
Heritage Foundation headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Ser Amantio di Nicolao, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
“To achieve its goals, Project Esther proposes the use of counterterrorism and hate speech laws, as well as immigration measures, including the deportation of students and other individuals,” Drop Site News reported.
The draconian measures being planned also include using racketeering laws “to help construct prosecutions against individuals and organizations in the movement,” the site reported.
[Related: Georgia Frames Cop-City Protest as Criminal Conspiracy]
The project would first attempt to purge “propaganda” from schools, then intimidate students not to take part in protests. This process is expected to lead to a point where “both the U.S. public and a preponderance of Jewish community perceives HSOs” — short for Hamas Support Organizations — “as a threat to their safety.”
Their aim is to crush the anti-genocide movement within 12 to 24 months.
As with most things in the duopoly, the Biden administration has given Trump a head start by designating a Palestinian prisoner support group named Samidoun a terrorist organization, the site says.
Israel has been accusing any critic of being pro-Hamas, such as how they smeared U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Or they accuse you of being part of Hamas. What is even more disturbing is that Western governments have taken up these ludicrous claims to ensure Israel remains above criticism while it openly commits genocide.
It is one of the most transparent tricks going back millennia for a government to smear its legitimate critics as being card-carrying members of its most ardent enemies — and Western governments are willfully falling for it, criminalizing journalists who oppose the slaughter.
If Trump wins and follows through with this plan he will be totally abrogating the First Amendment, which is supposed to separate the U.S. from the country it rebelled against a long time ago.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/11/04/r ... criticism/
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(Old news, but skip down to the charts.)
Flipping the Script
In tonight's presidential debate, both candidates should explain who will benefit from their proposed deficits.
Stephanie Kelton
Sep 10, 2024
Later today (9:00pm ET), Vice President Harris and former President Donald Trump will square off in their first (and perhaps only) debate before the November election. The moderators—two ABC News anchors—will press the candidates to answer questions about a wide range of important domestic and foreign policy issues. They will also, almost certainly, ask them to articulate their plans for dealing with government deficits and the (so-called) national debt.
As president, Donald Trump never gave the deficit much oxygen. He only used the word “deficit” twice during any State of the Union (SOTU) address, once in reference to America’s trade deficit and then again when he described the nation’s infrastructure deficit.
To those who squawk incessantly about debt and deficits, Trump’s indifference to the budgetary effects of his policies was seen as reckless and unserious. He simply didn’t care. In fact, back in 2019 when ABC News asked Trump’s Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, whether the president was going to comment on the government’s ballooning deficits, Mulvaney simply replied, “nobody cares.”
Trump was right. Almost no one in America is lying awake at night worrying about the government’s finances.
Every Deficit is Good for Someone
What Trump appears to have understood—and, frankly, what republicans have long known—is that every deficit is good for someone. Why is that? Because, as the sector financial balance (accounting) framework reminds us, on the other side of every government deficit lies a financial surplus that accumulates in some other part of the economy.1 Why do republicans tend to run up the deficit whenever they get the chance? Because they know that it produces a windfall for someone else.
Remember the sweeping tax cuts that were passed in 2017 when republicans had control of the House and Senate? They added an estimated $1.9 trillion to government deficits. Republicans voted for that legislation knowing that those deficits would feed almost two-trillion dollars into the non-government sector. But where did that windfall go? The answer is that the vast majority went to large profitable corporations and the wealthiest people in America. Remember, every deficit is good for someone. As you can see below, the deficits created by the Trump tax cuts were really really really good for the folks in the top 1%.
If given the chance, Trump will return to the White House with an agenda that would increase (primary) deficits by an estimated $5.8 trillion over ten years. The same budget model finds that Vice President Harris’s policies would increase deficits by $1.2 trillion to over the same period.
Is bigger better?
While it is an indisputable fact to acknowledge that every government deficit is matched, dollar-for-dollar, by a financial surplus in the non-government sector, it would be foolish to conclude that the best set of policies is the one that dumps the biggest pile of cash into the broader economy. Yes, every deficit is good for someone. But for whom? Can it be done without stoking inflation? And what are those deficits helping us to accomplish as a society? Fatter wallets for those at the very top or safer communities, better health outcomes, and a cleaner environment?
When the question is put to both candidates tonight, instead of pointing fingers and waging a rhetorical war against government deficits, both candidates should take a deep breath and explain how they plan to use the deficit to deliver material gains for the American people. The moderators should know this too. They should press each of the candidates to explain who will benefit (and how) from the contributions that their deficits will make to the broader economy.
For example, Donald Trump should be asked why, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the benefits of his large deficits would go—yet again— disproportionately to folks at the top of the income distribution. Instead of making him defend the budgetary effects of his agenda, make him defend the distributional effects!
When the moderators (inevitably) fail to do this, the Vice President should do it for them. She can point to the same budget model, which shows that her deficits are designed to benefit a very different constituency—i.e. the vast majority of working class Americans.
Voters care about what each of the candidates would do as president. Policy matters. But it’s at least as important—and probably more so—to show them who you’re fighting for.
1Over time, the flow accumulated deficits pile up into a stock of safe assets issued by the U.S. Treasury—government securities known as T-bills, notes, and bonds. The stockpile of Treasuries is, colloquially referred to as “the national debt,” an unfortunate way to refer to the funds held in these government savings accounts.
https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/ ... the-script
Well yes, 'show you who they're fighting for'. But have the Dems done that, has Harris done that, other than on a few culture war issues? Hell no, ya think they want to be accused of class war? The donor class might look dimly at that. And we know the priorities of either party, and it ain't us.
Which is not to say that the numbers here for a Harris regime are in any way satisfactory, they are far from that. The upper 10% needs to pay more taxes, not less. But they will not as long as they control the government. And so the Dems here might again be depicted as the 'lesser evil'. Which of course they are not, but the above does disabuse the absurd idea that Trump is a 'populist', something both his fans and the Dem establishment desperately believe.
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Sad West, what have you come to!…
José Goulão
November 5, 2024
Kamala or Donald are both part of the problem, not the solution.
We hear and read that the current episode of the North American presidential elections is the most important electoral act of all time in the country, perhaps in world history.
An alarm. Once again the empire is looking at its own navel and its satellites are anxious to know whether they will pay allegiance to a certain Kamala Harris, a loud-mouthed megaphone, or to the well-known Donald Trump, a populist and fascist narcissist who plays with the world as if it were a scoundrel imitating Charlot’s brilliant scene in “The Great Dictator”.
This is the “democratic” choice par excellence. The model of selection of “representatives of the people” that all “civilized countries”, the privileged members of the elite of the collective West, must follow in order not to be marginalized within this sacred Olympus. This is how “liberal democracy”, formerly “Western democracy”, works, the only one that is accepted within the framework of the “rules-based international order”, that is, international law bending to the interests, arbitrariness and expansionism of the empire. We have reached the moment when, in the West, the nominal head of the empire is designated with a happening in which one of two imbeciles is selected: one ignorant, hollow, functioning like a broken record but dangerous due to the apparatus that manipulates her; and ignorant, visibly sociopathic and dangerous for who he is and for the narrow-mindedness, alienation and potential violence of the layers of a sick society that support him.
The North American electoral duel between democratic Kamala and Republican Donald defines the virtues of our “liberal democracy” like few others. It imposes voters’ “freedom” of choice between candidates nominated by a duet of parties that differ little or nothing in practical action and are both emanations of the so-called military, industrial and technological complex, the real power in the United States and its Western satellites; a fusion between state and corporate power that, as far as we are directly concerned, manifests itself through the term “Blob” – created during the Obama administration and which reflects the bipartisan consensus on the need for a robust United States military presence throughout the world, also known as “Washington rules”. Figureheads associated with the “blob” concept are Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates – and that’s all said.
With no intention of distorting reality, the political system based on this fusion between the State and large corporations works, in practice, as a single party with two mimetic tendencies that have long since severed relations with voters, except in idiotic scenarios, but in filling the Hollywood-style eye, which multiply in times like this, of “electoral campaigns”.
Notice now how this model has been gradually exported to all agents of “liberal democracy” throughout the West: two political currents with a “vocation for government”, social democrats and conservatives, harmlessly divergent on social issues and absolutely convergent in the inhumane system neoliberal economic and financial, neoliberalism, to which all political activity is subject. Between “liberal democracy” and the one-party system there is a practical twinning, increasingly penetrated by the fascist environment as irreversible economic and social problems intensify.
Fake game
The alleged duel between Kamala and Donald is nothing more than the fulfilment of a ritual in quadrennial cycles that, one after the other, changes the faces (not always) that will be the protagonists of the tragicomedy brought to the scene, with unhealthy obsession, by the monster tentacle into which the global info-propaganda apparatus formatted as infotainment has become, information as alienating entertainment.
Despite the system’s stubbornness and the massive poisoning of the populations, there are encouraging signs that, although in a more or less long term, the spell could turn against the sorcerer. Imagine that, in the United States, the prestige of journalists is already lower than that of congressmen, according to the research company Gallup, unaware of their insertion in power environments. In the simplicity of its formulation, the Gallupian conclusion says everything about the decrepitude of the marvellous regime and sanctuary of “liberal democracy”, of “our civilization”, of the garden threatened by barbarism which, by the way, took on an even more demonic form at the recent summit of the BRIC held in Kazan, provocatively in Russia.
Research tells us that the prestige of congressmen, that is, of politicians “chosen” by voters to represent them, is traditionally known to translate the lowest level of credibility, which only ennobles the prestige of this type of democracy; because imagine that journalists, a layer for which North Americans still seemed to have some respect, managed to surpass the “elected” in this fall into the abyss of contempt. Nothing that surprises us or should surprise us: it is one of the misfortunes of our daily lives also in Portuguese lands, by its own vocation and also as subsidiaries of the miserable European and Western scene in general. Imperial osmosis is rapid and lethal in the strategic terrains of info-stupidification.
For the most part in relation to congressmen, the respectability of presidents will certainly be at a low level. Hence the duel between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is nothing “more important” compared to so many others. It is not because Joseph Biden, the incumbent president, withdrew from the scene because he had finally assumed (or had assumed for him) his physical and cognitive insufficiencies, that the United States stopped functioning. The state-corporate apparatus is always in activity, it governs 24 hours a day because this determines the permanent and globalist urgencies of its interests, the fulfilment of which is ensured by disposable entities that believe they live in or have found the “paradise of opportunities” before being thrown in the trash.
The fight between Kamala and Donald, as happens in wrestling sessions, is rigged by definition, although in fights in the ring it is not conceivable that there will be attempts to eliminate one of the competitors by shooting. Hence, as everything indicates that this has happened regularly, suspicions regarding the transparency of voting and unlikely confusion between electronic voting, in-person voting and voting by mail are to be expected. Distrust was further amplified by the fact that representatives of the candidates were not present at the counting events. What paragons we would be subject to if anomalies like these happened – which they don’t – in Venezuela, Bolivia, Russia, South Africa, Angola and so on. However, none of this should bother us, it is only up to us to vehemently deny the signs of fraud: the cyclical appointment of the president of the United States is the supreme act of “liberal democracy”, it has the seal of guarantee whatever happens, it is the model that we all must – rather, have – to follow.
It could be argued, as souls who do not allow suspicion regarding the perfection and superiority of “our civilization” and its respective democratic mechanisms always do, that there is no proof of this bias, the suspicions are nothing more than speculation, the bad loss of the defeated, or even fake news or ill-fated conspiracy theories.
Let’s be clear: do you think there is transparency in discrimination and differences in treatment between parties during pre-campaigns and electoral campaigns? Aren’t there parties that, by definition, have a “vocation” to govern while the others, mere supporting actors, are doomed to ensure innocuous pluralism? Are the financial means of candidates and applications fair and balanced? Are the financiers of parties and candidates people and entities interested only in the clear and limpid functioning of democracy and do they never intend to collect the agreed rewards downstream that justified the investments made upstream? And the insidious info-propaganda covers electoral events in a balanced way, does it give voice and opportunities equally to all competitors or just to the “appointed”, those who represent the two tendencies of a democratic regime as it should be, plus their respective adjacencies?
These and many other questions that we could add are pertinent to identifying and defining the democratic standard, our lighthouse and our guide; and, fulfilling the natural order of things, it applies equally to the proud and unctuous satellites orbiting the planet that reflects the sun of “our civilization”.
What will change
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The credibility of these candidates is such that for the first time in many decades the Washington Post, one of the regime’s instruments and a very faithful instrument of expansionism and imperial militarism, does not recommend voting for any of the putative presidents. Normally it does so to favor the Democratic Party candidate, wanting to be in harmony with the “fine” and “chic” clientele of the Beltway, the sanctuary of the powers that be. Kamala, however, does not fit into the standards of this elite, she cannot align two ideas with savvy, she does not meet the metrics of verbiage and borders on nonsense, she has frequent difficulties in repeating the messages, even if primary, that are explained and recommended to her – resembling – to Biden when dementia made him even more dependent on headphones and the teleprompter. Furthermore, he lacks style, the souplesse typical of politicians with pedigree. It can be seen that it was the possible solution, found outside the usual so-called democratic formalities designated as “primary elections”; was hastily removed from the vice presidency when it was realized that Joseph Biden would not notice the end of this term, much less a new term.
The Washington Post paid the price for its “abstention”: it lost 200,000 subscribers in the blink of an eye – Democrats do not forgive anyone who falters, even in the face of a stairwell candidate. Yet the influential Los Angeles Times and USA Today made the same decision. Kamala Harris is more or less left to her disabilities and a device that supports her unwillingly because she has no other choice. Research slays it but, as Western rules in this matter reveal, they are not reliable, because they essentially serve to lie and manipulate. Furthermore, depositing the ballot in the ballot box is just one detail of the “liberal democratic” game,
What about Donald Trump? It corresponds to what is most ultramontane in the United States, to the mafias of religious sects, to the ignorance that flourishes like thistles across the country. He’s a cheater and a liar. He ended the war in Syria but quickly decided to attack the country with missiles and occupy it with more contingents of troops to guarantee – he said – the theft of oil. He was withdrawing from Afghanistan but preferred to leave the NATO humiliation to Biden. The Guantánamo concentration camp, an exponent of imperial terrorism, has not yet been closed. The consequences of the logs he set on fire in the Middle East thanks to his unhealthy support for Zionist Nazism are visible.
We thus predict what will happen with his promise to end the war in Ukraine in the blink of an eye while ensuring that he “puts Putin in order”. An oligarch, kleptocrat and eternal politician’s apprentice, a dangerous, very dangerous unconscious.
What will follow this electoral scenario that unfiltered displays the degrading, painful, incompetent and disoriented state that a drifting West has reached?
The ruling military, industrial and technological complex, the centre of imperial power that functions as presidents and congressmen pass by, will continue to speak, as always, the decisive words.
These guarantee us more of the same, although variations can be seen so that everything remains the same regardless of the candidate to whom the White House tenant is assigned.
Domestically, more taxes, less taxes, the rich will continue to be even richer and the poor will become poorer and in greater numbers, whether the crisis is benign or catastrophic. Education will sink even further into starvation, health will continue to be less and less for some; Public infrastructures, from bridges to transport, schools and housing in disadvantaged neighbourhoods will continue to crumble due to lack of maintenance. The environment will deteriorate further as the “green transition” advances, genetically modified organisms will poison food more, crime will ruin and murder without rest, the trade and consumption of natural or chemical drugs, which are renewed every day , they will produce more zombies and liquidate millions of human beings on a scale. “Our” paradise tends to be confused with hell.
On the external front, with Kamala or Donald, war will continue to be the priority of priorities in the form of military aggression, colour revolutions or economic and political sanctions, no matter what they promise now.
Ukraine’s announced defeat by Russia raises doubts and uncertainties about the future behaviour of the Pentagon and NATO, regardless of the current president. The military and economic pressure on China and the terrorist manipulation of the situation in Taiwan will continue to escalate while Zionism will follow its path (and that of the planet?) towards the abyss, always with the support and protection of the United States and its respective satellites, commit whatever atrocities you commit. Ultimately, he is the defender of “our civilization” in the Middle East, Netanyahu dixit, and he has not been disproved.
Trump appears to be more threatening on Chinese and Middle East issues, but the Democratic Party’s foreign policy is not far behind in aggressiveness and irresponsibility.
The European Union and NATO are in tears, alarmed by Trump’s hypothetical victory. Needless desires: they should be more confident in the essence of imperialism. With one president or another, the mission of the Atlantic Alliance will be to continue expanding to the borders with Russia, tighten the siege around this country and divide it into a conglomerate of submissive states. The European Union will continue to be despised by Washington and enjoy being treated that way. Germany has just honoured Biden, the president who broke the Nord Stream, indispensable for its economic strategy and for getting out of the hole in which it continues to sink.
The plunder of world goods and wealth – or at least the continuous attempts to guarantee it – will not depend on the choice between Kamala or Trump: it is a routine part of the history of the last centuries of colonialism and imperialism.
In their conviction of civilizational superiority, which leads them to confuse desires with realities, to live in a parallel reality or to pretend the non-existence of developments that they do not control, the Western economic, military and political classes, under the command of the United States, make many mistakes often targets or confuses the sources of their concerns. In reality, choosing between Kamala and Donald should be far from his biggest problem. The transformations that are taking place in the world and quite consistently threaten the so-called “civilizing” authoritarianism of the “rules-based international order”, these are to be taken seriously, telling us that nothing will ever go back to the way it was just a short time ago, for example before of the open war started in Ukraine. The status of 500 years of colonial and imperial impunity is for the first time being questioned by an overwhelming global majority representing more than five billion human beings of the eight billion who inhabit the Earth. And in that regard, it doesn’t matter if Kamala Harris or Donald Trump are the imperial bosses on duty.
We also know that one or the other, whatever, will have their finger on the trigger of a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the planet and humanity several times over and that, regardless of who is chosen, both are driven by interests tempted to activate it as if it were possible. produce only “limited effects”; or even, as happens with the crazy Zionists in power, to prefer the hecatomb of the final judgment so as not to witness a hypothetical end of Israel.
And for that matter, Kamala or Donald are both part of the problem, not the solution.
This is what we must fear and fight with all our strength and means. We are part of the solution.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... u-come-to/
