- The Guardian
- Issue #2129
It could be tempting to treat Elon Musk’s provocations as the attention-seeking of a petulant plutocrat who was born into the wealth of his father’s mining business in apartheid South Africa. Then there is the line from the most craven US allies – Britain’s laughable Foreign Secretary David Lammy and the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen – in response to Donald Trump mulling the annexation of Greenland and the Panama Canal. It seems not to take him seriously.
That would be a catastrophic mistake. Musk is in effect co-president of the US, having spent US$100 million (AU$163 million) on Trump’s election campaign.
He is in the company of other reactionary billionaires such as Peter Thiel, who has sculpted the nominal vice-president and faux blue-collar champion, JD Vance.
Trump may come across as a fruitloop but he is far from the clueless blow-in of liberal imagination. He represents US capital in its majority.
The centrist conceit 8 years ago was that Trump’s ruling-class backing came from a kind of lumpen bourgeoisie living in the segregationist past and running outdated industries. That was contrasted to the thrusting cosmopolitan tech sector with its global workforce in Silicon Valley.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg … one by one the tech oligarchs have come in behind Trump. They especially back his moves to curb China’s tech industry and any European regulation they don’t like.
Trump is acting for the US empire with a set of policies that are xenophobic and militarist, and in the end are nothing less than a threat to the existence of life on the planet.
PARASITE OF THE WEEK: is Israel: The number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli action in Gaza since October 2023 has been under-estimated by around 41 per cent, a new British study has found.
The estimates were published in the British medical journal the Lancet as the US House of Representatives voted to sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC) over its decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant.
The Lancet’s estimates put the true number of deaths caused by Israeli attacks at around 64,260, far higher than the official toll of at least 42,000.
Its figures showed that 59.1 per cent of those killed were women, children and people over the age of 65. The study’s figures represent 2.9 per cent of Gaza’s pre-war population.
The US House of Representatives voted in favour of legislation against the ICC for issuing arrest warrants against Israel’s criminal PM Netanyahu and his war minister Gallant.
Legislators passed the so-called Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act by 243 to 140. Some 45 Democrats joined 198 Republicans in backing the Bill. No Republicans voted against it.
The Bill proposes sanctions for any foreigner who helps the ICC in its attempts to investigate, detain or prosecute a US citizen or citizen of an allied country that does not recognise the authority of the court.
Neither the US nor Israel are parties to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC.
The sanctions would include the freezing of property assets, as well as the denial of visas to any foreigners who materially or financially contribute to the court’s efforts.
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of female-led peace group Codepink, described the Bill as “a direct attack on international law and justice, isolating the US on the world stage.
“We must fight back against these shameful efforts to protect war criminals!”
