Water Rights on a Hot Planet

 

[Photo: Chaco Canyon in northeastern New Mexico, the site of a flourishing civilization c. 800-1250 C.E.]

The Supreme Court told the Navajos almost literally to pound sand in its June 22 decision in Arizona v. Navajo Nation, a case dealing with the ongoing struggle over water in the increasingly parched Southwest. The decision was 5–4 because a Trump-appointed justice, Neil Gorsuch, sided with the marginalized court liberals this time and, in fact, wrote quite an eloquent dissent to the majority opinion.

That majority took a look at the 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo between the United States and the Navajo Nation and did not see any explicit language there that compels the U.S. to provide Navajos the water they need. No matter that the tribe wasn’t asking for that. The court said the U.S. had no “affirmative duty”—surely a provocative choice of language these days—to do anything other than what is expressly stated in treaties, statutes, or regulations.

Gorsuch gave his fellow justices a history lesson that I will bet a large sum they either didn’t read or could care less. The 1868 treaty arose from a sorry, though familiar, history of genocidal destruction of Navajo life through forced resettlement into a desolate, virtually uninhabitable tract of land in eastern New Mexico. While the Navajo rebelled and eventually won the right to return to their ancestral territories in what became Arizona, it’s hard to argue (though the Supremes’ majority implies it) that they were in any condition to establish fair terms given that their choices were either to sign the treaty or slowly die off.

Gorsuch also points out that the Navajo lawsuit didn’t ask for concrete actions by the U.S. government to meet their water needs but merely a full accounting of what their water rights are, which has never been determined despite the tribe’s many formal requests dating back decades. The majority’s pearl-clutching that the Navajo might demand infrastructure improvements if the Court were to rule in their favor is ironic given how much wealth Washington has poured into the Hoover, Glen Canyon, and a dozen other dams to harness rivers for the benefit of burgeoning settler populations throughout Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.

Gorsuch is an oddity on the ultra-conservative court with whose other members he shares a wide range of views. He sat on a western circuit and was known as a Native-friendly judge there, too. The fact that he has an enlightened view of sensitive environmental issues affecting the tribes is curious given the role his mother, Anne Gorsuch, played—as Ronald Reagan’s first director of the Environmental Protection Agency—in making that agency a bastion of corporate coziness and a flaccid defender of the selfsame environment.

Incidentally, Ms. Gorsuch was the boss of the notorious Rita Lavelle, whom Reagan appointed to head the Office of Toxic Waste, an accidentally appropriate post for her. I observed Lavelle close-up as a Washington reporter in 1981: she was the “lady who lunched” with every corporate lobbyist who asked her out. Lavelle turned out to be too corrupt even for the Reagan team and eventually got the boot. (She also was convicted ofperjury in “Sewergate” and did time.) But I digress.

Luckily, we are not responsible for our parents. Gorsuch’s sympathy with Indian tribes is a welcome relief from the ideological moonscape of the current court.

It would be easy for us to shake our liberal heads at the increasingly despicable court, its slapdash arguments, and its partisan jiggering of the law for predetermined ends. But when it comes to stealing water rights of the defenseless, the entire U.S. political establishment is still at it. Even the arguments marshaled in the 19th century—and quoted by Gorsuch—to justify the destruction of the Navajos have a familiar ring.

Here is Gorsuch waxing emphatic on the tactics used to compel the Navajo to leave their homes. What are the chances that study of this opinion would be allowed in a Florida classroom given how “divisive” it is?

[U.S. agent James Henry] Carleton picked the location himself: an area hundreds of miles from the Navajo’s homeland commonly called the Bosque Redondo. Warning signs flashed from the start. Officers tasked with surveying the site cautioned that it was “remote from viable forage” and that building material would have to come from a significant distance. Worse, they found that the water supply was meager and contained “much unhealthy mineral matter.” Carleton ignored these findings and charged ahead with his plan.

That left the not-so-small matter of securing the Navajo’s compliance. To that end, the federal government unleashed a “maelstrom of destruction” on the Tribe. Before all was said and done, “the Navajo had to be literally starved into surrender. Thousands of U. S. troops roamed the Navajo [Country] destroying everything the Navajo could use; every field, storehouse, and hut was burned.” The campaign was “brief, blunt, and, when combined with a particularly difficult winter,” effective. That period of violence led to “the Long Walk.” In truth, it was not one walk but many—over 53 separate incidents, according to some. In each case, federal officers rounded up tribal members, “herded [them] into columns,” and marched them hundreds of miles from their home. “Many died en route, some shot by the souldiers.” As one Navajo later recounted, people were killed “on the spot if they said they were tired or sick or if they stopped to help someone. Others fell victim to slavers with the full complicity of the U. S. officials.”

Details aside, the overall strategy is hardly a thing of the past. How many similar stories do we read of these days, from the Buddhist reactionaries chasing Muslim Rohingya out of their homes in Myanmar to the ongoing saga of Jewish supremacist settlers exploiting Palestinian lands (and water) for decades, destroying their crops, and attacking them with impunity?

It’s easy to lament past abuses, much harder to recognize current ones.

Why I Won’t Be Joining PRIDE This Year

PRIDE is a nice weekend in New York City. The streets are swarming with all sorts—I mean ALL sorts—of people who, perhaps more than any other time of the year, feel welcome to express their quirky uniqueness.

Sadly, I’m not feeling it this year, and it’s not for lack of trying. Emancipation is always a fine thing, and I wish everyone well. But the LGBTQ+ “community” (which incidentally may be more of a yearning than a reality) is shooting itself in both kneecaps in a way I won’t be part of.

Historically, one of the worst things we had to combat was the nefarious idea that adult Ls and Gs and whatevers were a danger to children because of the historic association in the mind of straight society between same-sex behavior and pedophilia. That was never true, and for the most part people finally realized it. After the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision of 2015, that old canard seem to be put permanently to bed, and the culture war about whether to leave adults alone in their private behavior looked to be mostly over.

Now, it’s back with a vengeance. Reactionary forces are eager to eliminate all aspects of rainbow-hood from libraries, schools, and even some public spaces. And it’s all in the name of protecting minors.

The point of the lance is the LGBTQ+ insistence that underage kids must be eased into gender transition with minimum obstacles and with no further public debate. This is not about putting a ring through your lip or even permanently inking your skin. Parents might not like those actions, but teen rebellion has a long history among the human race and probably won’t go away.

No, this is about permanent medical intervention based on what a sometimes very young or even pre-pubescent individual has decided to do with and to, er, themself. And sorry, gang, I think that at the very least we need deep and sustained debate on the wisdom of this course—placing me outside the bounds of permitted opinion in the LGBTQ+ “community.”

Examples of the suppression of dissident views on the recent explosion of gender questioning are legion. In the most recent case, a tenured academic, Northwestern professor Michael Bailey, published a study of what he termed “rapid onset gender dysphoria” among a non-random sample of hundreds of concerned parents whose children had declared themselves non-binary or the like. The study is a modest contribution to understanding this phenomenon, but it was quickly shouted down in the modern style of vigilanteism, and the journal retracted it (though it is still available online with a big RETRACTED stamp across its quite interesting pages).

We can discuss the details of that or many other studies and commentaries, and I’d like to. But that’s not allowed any more because any deviance from the official line on transgender issues is cause for expulsion from polite LGBT+ society. (I don’t doubt someone will invite me to climb on an ice floe upon reading this.)

It’s pointless to argue in advance that I have some credentials in the area, but I will anyway. I led an AIDS prevention and advocacy group in downtown Santiago, Chile, for seven years whose headquarters stood at the exact intersection where trans prostitution was practiced for a city of 5 million. (They had a lot of clients, especially married men.) We interacted with those women for years, defended them, and learned much about their difficult lives.

None of that will matter if my unease with the idea of 12-year-old girls independently deciding to get their breasts surgically removed becomes widely known. I expect to be cast into the outer darkness and told to keep quiet. Maybe I’ll even be expelled from the “community.” That’s why I’m taking the initiative to say in advance that joining with others for emancipation has meant a lot to me over the years. Also, I will be okay without it.

Meanwhile, that community is pushing forward to provide the most hateful elements of an unenlightened society with a gold-embossed invitation to resuscitate the worst historical fears of sexual minorities—that we are a danger to children. Don’t be surprised if the advances and gains of recent decades suddenly go into reverse, including, I dare to predict, marriage rights.

America went into a war footing in Europe a year ago convinced that an easy victory would follow. That was delusional, but the war-cheerers aren’t alone. My LGBTQ+ friends are riding a similar wave of dangerous overconfidence that will cause all of us to pay a devastating price. I’ll be watching from the sidelines while they proceed and will not be waving the rainbow flag.

May 9 is Russia's Victory (over the Nazis) Day. Maybe we should learn what they're thinking.

Karl Rove told us long ago that he and his boys were in charge of reality. I think those days are over.

Our guardians make sure we don’t hear much from the Russians except for the occasional phrase from Vladimir Putin that is promptly spun so for us that we don’t have to read it ourselves. It might be a healthy exercise to get out of the post-Rovian bubble and see what the Russians are thinking on the 78th anniversary of Victory Day, what we call V-E Day (and don’t celebrate).

RF Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov gave an important speech to his UN Security Council colleagues in late April, which got pretty much zero attention. It has some significant content.

Lavrov’s first statement was a reference to the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany by the “decisive contribution of my country with allied support” and the subsequent foundation of “the postwar international order” based on the UN Charter. Right out of the gate, Lavrov signals not only that the Red Army beat the Nazis but also ties that victory to the creation of the UN system. He is saying that the USSR and its descendant, the Russian Federation, laid the groundwork for a world consensus on how to maintain international peace. He insists that the UN’s guiding documents—especially “universally recognized standards of international law”—must form the basis of world security.

In contrast to the UN system that emerged from that war, Lavrov states, the US has devised a mysterious alternative called a “rules-based” order to replace international law. He complains that “Nobody has seen these rules. No one has discussed them.” Given that these “rules” have never been agreed to, it’s easy for the US and its allies to create them as they go along, which he says is exactly what they’re doing.

Lavrov criticizes what he says is a recurrent practice by the US of convening an international meeting on a given topic, selecting who can attend, and then declaring that the policies articulated there represent an “international community position.” This undermines the UN system by creating parallel procedures that inevitably produce outcomes favorable to one side, he says.

(Editorial insertion: The Russians are doing something similar through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Eurasian Economic Union, and the BRICS. One difference is that they don’t presume that these outfits represent some sort of “international community” aside from their member states.)

Returning to the WW2 theme later in his speech, Lavrov accuses the Kiev regime of “introducing the theory and practice of Nazism in everyday life,” including “huge torchlight processions under the banners of SS divisions” while “the West kept silent and rubbed its hands together.” In Russian eyes, we might conclude, World War II isn’t over.

Lavrov points out the irony of the sudden jettisoning of globalization by its erstwhile champions: globalization, he says, was “touted as a great benefit for humankind” for years. But now, through its punitive measures on trade and finance, the West is destroying globalization in favor of “sorting things out on the battlefield.”

Lavrov notes that NATO always insists it is a defensive alliance, but look at their expansion to Asia where they now have “responsibilities” in the Indo-Pacific region. He reiterates Russia’s well-known beef with the eastward expansion of NATO in Europe.

Lavrov made special hay out of the notorious comment by the EU’s top “diplomat” Joseph Borrell that Europe is a “garden” and the rest of the world a “jungle.” I’m sure that went down well in Africa. Count on the Russians to remind people of that offensive phrasing for a good while.

Lavrov is on tricky ground when addressing the issue of the sovereignty of nation states. He makes a case for Russia’s action in Ukraine by arguing that the UN treats sovereignty as less than absolute, meaning that it is based on “representing the whole people belonging to the territory.” Since the peoples of eastern Ukraine did not accept the coup government in Kiev after 2014, which sparked the civil war, he implies that Ukraine does not fulfill these requirements.

He then reminds listeners that the sovereignty principle is only important when the US says it is: there follow some whataboutisms re Kosovo (no referendum before secession); the bombing of Yugoslavia; Iraq 2003; Libya 2011. The Brits, says Lavrov, consider the Falkland Islands issue settled because the people who live there voted to remain British. And Crimea?

Lavrov recalls the attempts to settle the Ukrainian civil war (he doesn’t call it that) embodied in the two Minsk agreements, which Kiev and the West “cynically admitted with a tinge of pride that they never planned to fulfil.” That is undeniably accurate.

Lavrov denounced so-called “color revolutions” in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, and Belarus. He refuses to grant citizens of those nations agency for their own fates though he’s certainly not alone in that habit.

Lavrov makes interestingly gloomy statements about the future of the UN, whose foundational instruments he calls “a threat to Washington’s global ambitions.” He adds later that even the Secretary-General’s own staff are no longer behaving in the spirit of neutrality and instead are acting like agents of the West. He says the UN’s role in maintaining international peace is “crumbling before our eyes” and calls for the Security Council to be expanded to include Global South countries to replace the “overrepresented West.” Lavrov doesn’t elaborate on what should or might happen if that does not occur.

In short, Russia’s leadership sees today’s day of remembrance of their 27 million dead as a somber reminder of what the West is up to. Americans may see things differently, but I’m not sure how much that matters.

You’ll Need a Neck Brace To Prevent Narrative Whiplash

Remember when it was a “conspiracy theory” to question the natural origin of Covid-19, to dare to suggest that a lab leak might have started the epidemic that killed millions of people? You could get thrown out of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and your own family for promoting such a totally wacko, fat-redneck-knuckle-dragger theory.

Well, lo and behold! It’s now about to officially become Received Truth, endorsed by government officials, scientists, the Great, the Good, and Reasonable People. The explanation is pretty simple:

When the lab leak idea suggested negligence and/or misconduct by Americans, it was a thoughtcrime.

When the lab leak idea can be pinned on the Chinese enemy, it’s definitely probably almost certainly true.

Here’s Christopher Wray, renowned expert in molecular biology moonlighting as FBI director, assuring us that Now We Know. “You’re talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab that killed millions of Americans, precisely what that capability was designed for.” What conviction, what clarity now that the Wuhan lab is “Chinese-controlled” and no longer swarming with Americans funded by the NIH!

We don’t do propaganda here, do we? That’s the purview of non-democracies run by dictators who hate freedom. Then again, how long will it take for this Chinese-coverup trope to penetrate our discourse and become the new conventional wisdom? I’d say about a week.

Since our attention span is approximately that of a single-celled organism, few will recall that the new theory was recently the subject of a concerted campaign to dismiss it by high-level scientists, led by the inestimable Dr Fauci. His emails with ex-NIH director Francis Collins are revealing in that regard as they demonstrate a fevered scramble to get experts to pooh-pooh the lab leak notion. Back in 2021, our “intelligence” agencies promptly cooperated: they issued a reassuring statement that a lab leak was ever-so-unlikely. But that was then when U.S. scientists were deeply involved in the Wuhan lab performing the same gain-of-function research Fauci flatly denied compared to gambling in Casablanca.

How times have changed now that we have to gin up mass disgust with China and its leaders in preparation for Washington’s next war. Today, not only is lab-leak okay, it’s Essential Thinking. The new line is that evil empires are cooking up a dastardly plot to release deadly bugs onto the world. Who knows what will be next??!! I guess we’ll have to attack them right away. Before it’s too late! (Smoking gun, mushroom cloud, etc.)

Incidentally but perhaps not coincidentally, the Russians are claiming that the West is preparing “large-scale provocations involving toxic chemicals” to then blame Putin. Given the thin evidence for things like the alleged 2018 novichok poisoning on the since-disappeared Skripal family and the unlikely Douma chlorine attack in Syria, one can at least prepare to be skeptical. But so far, the zigzagging Beltway narrative has little competition in the public sphere.

Just for the record, here’s what the Russians said earlier this week:

On 22 February, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan made the statement, ‘Russian troops plan to use chemical weapons in the special military operation area.’ Russia regards this information as the intention of the United States itself and its accomplices to carry out a provocation in Ukraine using toxic chemicals. They expect that amid hostilities, the international community will be unable to organise an effective investigation with the result that the real organisers and executors may escape accountability and the blame is going to be placed on Russia. In our opinion, the preparations are in full swing.

Why would the winning side in a war resort to an action sure to bring worldwide condemnation? Maybe for the same reason the Russians blew up their own multi-billion-dollar pipeline. Choose your parallel reality: there are several on offer.

"It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder."

—erroneously attributed to Talleyrand, Napoleon, and others

In viewing the amoral world in which nations pursue their self-interests, we often adopt moral attitudes as well we should: sympathy with human suffering befits our better natures. But states don’t feel remorse, and their leaders are more often ruthless than humane. That said, while crimes are appalling, blunders are unforgivable because they expose not only that immoral acts were committed but that they were unnecessary.

Even a casual observer of the run-up to Russia’s invasion a year ago would have noticed the enthusiasm of Biden’s foreign policy team at the prospect of war. Biden himself assured skeptical reporters that a Russian move into Ukraine was imminent. But rather than express alarm or rush to emergency negotiations to forestall it, Biden seemed eager for the confrontation.

Biden’s neocons, Blinken, Winken, and Nod Sullivan, and Nuland, thought that a war would achieve the twin U.S. goals of crushing Russia and preparing the ground to confront China over Taiwan. They were convinced that unleashing an arsenal of economic punishments would cripple the Russian economy. They believed that the incomparable might of the NATO alliance would lead to triumph on the battlefield. In fact, they were probably helping Ukraine prepare a strike into the Donbass early last year knowing that Russia would be drawn in.

They turned out to be wrong on all counts. They have achieved precisely the opposite of their aims. Russia’s economy is at least at resilient as ours and arguably more so. The Russian military-industrial complex not only survived the attack, but now produces much more useful war materiel than the American version that churns out expensive gewgaws but can’t keep an army supplied with ammunition.

World condemnation of the Russian invasion is less uniform than our media pretend; here, we don’t dare say Biden’s neocon cabal had any role in starting the war, but plenty of studiously neutral countries around the world think it did. Not only that, a number of middlingly important countries are slowly edging out from under U.S. hegemony and looking east for their economic and perhaps eventually political alliances. Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Brazil, and plenty of others show early signs of what used to be called “non-alignment,” which should worry the Beltway Band.

If the U.S. had practiced diplomacy—a lost art in Washington—Ukraine could have preserved its national boundaries by granting autonomy to its Russian-speaking minority as outlined in the two Minsk accords. (Those, it turns out, were just delaying exercises not meant to be taken seriously, as admitted by both Merkel and Hollande in recent weeks.) But peace has no place in the neocon hivemind.

Now, Ukraine is near collapse and will end up a rump state west of the Dnieper River, having lost its industrial heartland, large portions of its territory and infrastructure, and tens of thousands of its young men. Even after the annexation of Crimea, a deal to avoid a battlefield confrontation was within reach, but as recently as last month the neocons were discussing how, victory in hand, they would proceed to break up the Russian Federation into various mini-states.

As the scale of the debacle becomes clear, Biden’s incompetent dreamers will be temporarily set back and probably ousted from power. But they will learn nothing from this failure just as they learned nothing from their string of previous ones. They can be counted upon to get back to work cooking up the next war over Taiwanese “independence.” They’ll manage to lose that one, too, and we will find ourselves—little by little, then all at once—slipping into the status of just another country that once thought itself indispensable.

When that happens, perhaps we can get a hearing on our leaders’ long string of blunders, costly to ourselves and catastrophic for others, that led to the deaths of millions in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere. If these immoral acts had produced a measurable success, they would still be despicable. Because they solved nothing, they are worse than crimes.

Ironies of Overdevelopment

A common explanation for the end of the Cold War was that the Soviet Union was forced into unsustainable competition with the U.S. through the arms race. According to this theory, the USSR’s demise occurred because a “flagging, state-owned economy simply couldn’t match the escalation in defense spending” initiated by Ronald Reagan, especially the hyper-expensive (for the time) Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. Star Wars, that was intended to militarize space.

This explanation is convenient for proponents of ever-greater spending of our national treasure on arms and weapons. After all, if we felled the Soviet adversary by building up a vast arsenal of fear-inducing armaments, what new candidate for seriously rivalry to America could possibly arise as long as we keep up the flow of cash to Raytheon and Northrup Grumman?

As a result, we have enthusiastic backing for fancy new weapons like the trillion-dollar F-35 fighter jet and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, recently given a Hollywood/TopGun-style unveiling [above]. These big-ticket projects are lucrative sources of contracts certain to warm the hearts of elected officials standing by to welcome the jobs and economic stimulus to their districts, along with the loot needed for their next campaign. Given our system of legalized bribery, this arrangement is the classic self-licking ice cream cone.

For example, the bat-winged B-21 Raider will cost $700 million each, and the plan is to build at least 100 of these babies at an estimated cost of $32 billion, including research and development, over the next 5 years. Earlier this month, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2023 sailed through Congress authorizing $857 billion in “defense” spending, $45 billion more than Biden had requested. The measure included the establishment of a “multiyear, no-bid contract system” for Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and other weapons manufacturers to “expand their industrial base” and assure ongoing production of essential munitions.

That sure makes it sound as though the U.S. has the wherewithal to put machinery and equipment on the battlefield at almost a moment’s notice, reminiscent of the enormous U.S. industrial mobilization that took place in the run-up to World War 2. In fact, the U.S. has rushed $20-some billion worth of weapons to Ukraine in the last nine months.

So why is Ukraine running out of ammo? Ukrainian president Zelensky recently announced his wish list for replenishing his army’s supplies, including 300 new tanks, 600 to 700 new infantry fighting vehicles, and 500 new Howitzers, and, one assumes, the ammunition, spare parts, and technical assistance to make this ordnance usable.

That sounds like a lot of hardware. But when comparing those figures to the amount of weaponry already lost, we get a slightly different view. Ukraine started off the war with 2430 tanks, ranked 13th in the world. Ukraine also had 11,435 armored vehicles and 2040 artillery batteries. Where did it all go?

Without having a clue about military matters, I would hazard a wild guess that it’s mostly been blown up by the Russians, who must have even more, plus total dominance of the skies as the Ukrainian air force was destroyed in the first week of hostilities. Furthermore, despite regular announcements that the Russians are about to “run out” of this or that essential piece of weaponry, they miraculously seem to keep churning the stuff out.

By contrast, NATO has completely depleted its reserves of useful materièl according to multiple reports. What about the back-up supplier, the US of A? Well, turns out the industrial capacity of the American powerhouse, unequaled in history, second to none, etc., etc., can’t crank out the supplies until, in some cases, the middle of next year.

Don’t take my word for it: here are Bradley Bowman and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery (ret.) writing in Defense News this past October. Year after year, they write,

. . . budgets were proposed and approved that saw crucial munitions purchased at the lowest possible rate companies could sustain, hollowing out the industrial base. Now, Washington can no longer disregard a munitions production shortfall that endangers U.S. military readiness.

What we need to do now, they argue, is to fund “major production increases of key munitions, targeted measures to expand industrial capacity, and the provision of multiyear procurement authorities that incentivize private sector investment.”

In other words, the U.S. has shot itself in the foot through its lean-and-mean (“just-in-time”) industrial policy in which companies were encouraged/permitted to locate production offshore and pocket the nice difference between what American factory workers used to get and the poverty wages they paid to virtual slaves in Honduras, Pakistan, or Cambodia. Turns out that’s actually not too smart when applied to tanks, trucks, and ammo IF you turn out to actually need them in a hurry.

But the big bucks were always in the F-21s, nuclear weapons upgrades, and the like, so everyone in Washington could bask in the bright sunlight of the MICIMATT (the Military-Industrial-Counter-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank complex) and refill their poolside cocktails from the bountiful overflow of U.S. Treasury cash without worrying about actual preparedness. How ironic it will be if financialized late capitalism turns out to be incompetent at sustaining the military machine that made its global domination possible.

Russia, on the other hand, seems to have developed an industrial/military policy that enables it to produce everything it needs for war at a fraction of the cost, perhaps because financiers and rentier capitalists have not been permitted to take over the Russian economy—which incidentally is doing just fine.

Maybe the referee of the great Cold War World Cup has not yet blown his final whistle. Now that would be an own goal for the ages.

The political class reminds us of its [class] interests

The comfortably bipartisan display of disdain for the needs of a group of essential railroad workers—led by Lunch Bucket Joe of Scranton—is yet another reminder that the fibers that bind our multicolored rulers together are far more durable than the hues of their respective ribbons.

It was truly a Bastille Day moment to see the assembled millionaires and beneficiaries of generous federal benefits, exhorted by “Labor” Secretary Walsh and Mayo Peter the transport minister (fresh from his multi-month paternity leave), smash rail workers’ fight for adequate sick leave in the wake of a HEALTH epidemic that killed off a million of us.

Not that anyone is digging up cobblestones for an assault on the headquarters of Berkshire Hathaway where railway tycoon Warren Buffett can now add a few billions to his unspeakable fortune. We’re too busy hating on either the “libs” or the “fascists” to realize that the great 99% without control over our own lives have a lot in common: the fact that we’re being equally screwed by our insatiable neo-feudal elites powerless over their addiction to acquisition.

Before this week’s tragicomically crude display of ruling class greed, we were living in a curiously insouciant time after the popcorn fart of the midterms when the Republican blowout did not occur. For a few days, the two factions, the reds and the blues, stared hatefully at each other in roughly matched hemispheres. It was easy to think that nothing much was going to change.

Although the current temporary lull is unlikely to last, the treatment of the railroad workers was a bracing reminder of what a puppet show we’re getting from these folks. The barons of late financialized capitalism are accelerating their class war, and on that score they’re fully on board with each other and against us.

Our inflamed national discourse, full of denunciation and alarm on either side, obscures the superficial nature of the political differences at the top. Do the two bands truly disagree about the country’s future course? If so, in what ways? Do they truly represent distinct social forces? If so, what are they?

On the surface, public policy disagreements are expressed in increasingly hostile language, suggestive of profound and fundamental differences on all manner of issues, things like abortion access; crime control and policing; social benefits and their expansion (or reduction); lately, public health measures; perhaps the content of education and educational materials; the eternal blame for the cost of everyday necessities. But how much do the two teams really diverge in their proposed responses once we look past the rhetorical variants?

Who represents the working classes in the face of economic turmoil and suffering? Republicans classically carry hod for big business, but the world of big finance has tilted toward Democrats in recent years. Both insist that long-standing elements of the New Deal are or soon will be on the chopping block as amply demonstrated this week. Workers are expendable, and the bosses have no problem shoving that fact in our faces because the much vaunted “resistance” promptly collapses when they do. (Some “progressive” email lists and FB sites leapt to the defense of Biden so quickly I had to be careful not to drink coffee while reading. The DSA camp, mercifully, is having none of it.)

We shouldn’t be surprised. For years unions have backed Democrats and got very little in return while rural voters and angry blue-collar workers cheered Trump and got even less. Whichever party is in power, the beleaguered masses face impossible housing costs, medical bankruptcy, educational debt peonage, and only by accident a bit of economic relief via an accidentally favorable job market.

Republicans beat the drums of crime and capitalize on people’s fears, steadily inflamed by tabloid-style coverage of the day’s horrors. For their part, Democrats go defensive and backtrack on any nuanced approaches to public safety and criminal justice—New York City is a prime example. They fall back on demagogy, call for more police, more jail time, and harsher conditions, so while the rhetoric shifts a tad this way or that, the end result is largely the same: violent crimes continue to plague us, and prisons bulge with ever more discarded lives.

Which is the party of peace? Which is the party for reining in the military industrial complex, for seeking savings in our bloated military budget? Republicans denounce the Democrats in power as too stingy with cash for the Pentagons and the arms industries; Democrats in power now outdo them in shoveling money to new initiatives and break all records with multi-billion-dollar packages for their failing adventure in Ukraine.

Which is the party defending our privacy from the intrusions of the security state and the snoops of Silicon Valley? Neither. Which is the party against regime change in foreign countries? Trump made noises against that idea, then hired a passel of neocons dedicated to keeping it up. Democrats openly claim America’s right as the shining guardian of virtue against foreign despots and criminals, conveniently defined to justify the next war, the next invasion, the next militarized hotspot.

Which party promises to preserve our civil liberties and the rule of law, the party that established dungeons in Guantánamo where detainees languish without criminal charges for 20 years or the party that promised to abolish them and never did?

Which is the party for fair terms of trade, for protecting American workers from foreign quasi-slave labor? Which party is prepared to face down the monopolies and cartels that are gobbling up the economy and turning us all into serfs?

Which is the party for preserving Medicare benefits, for protecting Social Security? The party that encouraged deep invasions by private insurance to extract juicy profits from government reimbursed programs? Oh, that would be both.

No doubt partisans of each camp will insist that they represent virtue, and the others, vice. They will point out areas where their side actively works in favor of one policy item or another that clearly distinguishes them from the others. Democrats could credibly argue that the antitrust awakening engineered by Biden appointees is a concrete break with decades of past practice. Republicans could claim they are the ones truly hostile to monopolies, especially those headed by Silicon Valley moguls who ban Trumpian speech on social media.

But which of the parties will resist the mountains of cash available at the commanding heights of the finance sector, ready to rain down on the favored to crush the rebellious? Which will defy Northrup Grumman and Raytheon and dare to propose a modus vivendi with Russia and China in a world slipping from decades of U.S. domination?

The cheers of World Cup fans at the entry of a spherical object into a net are comforting. The goals act as substitutes for the desire of our clannish biped race to plunge knives into hated foreigners, and as such I enjoy seeing their energies dissipate harmlessly. In the end, though, what do we celebrate when our team, in hockey, basketball, politics, or synchronized swimming, emerges with the gold or the trophy or the Senate seat? Those who live for “owning the libs” or crushing the Trumpian meatheads can expect only temporary relief from the gnawing doubt that our creaking, hyper-financialized, irrational economic system headed by experts in propaganda and not much else is capable of navigating the ship of state increasingly lost at sea.