Palestinians walk by a damaged building following an Israeli army attack on Jenin refugee camp, West Bank, Sunday, Nov. 26, 2023
AT LEAST eight Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank on Saturday, Palestine’s Health Ministry said yesterday.
Five people were killed in the Jenin refugee camp and three more in other parts of the occupied territory even as Israel and Hamas observed a truce in Gaza for ongoing prisoner-hostage swaps.
An Israeli Defence Forces statement said troops entered Jenin to make arrests connected to the killing of an Israeli father and son at a car wash earlier in the year, and that the slain were “militants.” It also claimed to be using engineering equipment to uncover buried explosive devices in response to Palestinian accusations that military bulldozers were destroying infrastructure.
Since Hamas’s attack from Gaza on October 7, Israel has launched a wave of repressive violence in the West Bank alongside its war on Gaza, which has killed over 14,000 people.
Dozens of Palestinians have been killed by soldiers and scores by settler violence, with Israeli settlers leafleting Palestinian villages warning of a “second Nakba” (the Arab term for the forcible expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes when Israel was established in 1948). Thousands of Palestinians have also been arrested, doubling the number held in Israeli jails in a few weeks.
Zionist president Joe Biden. 27 July 2021 image by Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz. Original public domain image from Flickr
The request would remove most conditions on Israel’s use of a U.S. weapons stash, including a requirement that it only use surplus or obsolete weapons and a cap on how much the U.S. can spend resupplying the stash.
President Joe Biden has requested that Congress to lift most of the restrictions on Israel’s access to a U.S. stockpile of weapons in the country, The Intercept reported Saturday.
The request came in the administration’s supplemental budget request to the U.S. Senate, sent October 20. It concerns the War Reserve Stockpile Allies-Israel (WRSA-I) that the U.S. has stored in Israel since the 1980s for its own use in a potential conflict in the region. The U.S. allows Israel to access the stockpile under certain conditions, but Biden’s request would remove most of these conditions, including a requirement that Israel only use surplus or obsolete weapons and a cap on how much the U.S. can spend resupplying the stash.
“The President’s emergency supplemental funding request would essentially create a free-flowing pipeline to provide any defense articles to Israel by the simple act of placing them in the WRSA-I stockpile, or other stockpiles intended for Israel,” Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned over U.S. arm transfers to Israel in the midst of its bombardment of Gaza, told The Intercept.
“The Biden administration’s supplemental budget request would further undermine oversight and accountability even as U.S. support enables an Israeli campaign that has killed thousands of children.”
The news comes in the midst of a four-day cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, which has given journalists and humanitarian organizations a moment to assess the extent of the death and destruction unleashed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking around 240 hostages. In retaliation, the Israeli military has killed more than 14,800 people in Gaza, around 10,000 of them women and children. That means the number of women and children killed in Gaza in less than two months is more than double the number confirmed killed in Ukraine in two years of fighting with Russia, The New York Times concluded Saturday. One of the reasons for the high civilian toll, the Times said, is Israel’s use of 2,000-pound, U.S.-made bombs in a densely populated Gaza Strip.
Despite this, Biden’s request would allow Israel to access all weapons from the WRSA-I, not just excess or obsolete ones, something that could hurt U.S. preparedness, Paul told The Intercept. The request would also remove a requirement that Israel provide concessions to the U.S. in exchange for accessing the weapons, lift the $200 million per year restocking cap, and shorten a requirement that the government inform Congress 30 days ahead of a weapons transfer under “extraordinary” circumstances.
“The Biden administration’s supplemental budget request would further undermine oversight and accountability even as U.S. support enables an Israeli campaign that has killed thousands of children,” John Ramming Chappell, a legal fellow with the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept.
The U.S. typically provides Israel with $3.8 billion in military aid every year, more than it sends to any other nation, according to Al Jazeera. The House has already approved additional aid this year to the tune of $14.3 billion.
The Intercept story came the day after Biden seemed open to the idea of putting conditions on military aid to Israel while answering questions from reporters in Nantucket.
“I think that’s a worthwhile thought, but I don’t think if I started off with that we would have gotten where we are today,” Biden said, as HuffPost reported. “We have to take this a piece at a time.”
A reporter asked Biden his thoughts on calls to condition U.S. aid to Israel as a way to halt Israel's invasion of Gaza.
"I think that's a worthwhile thought, but I don't think if I started off with that we would have gotten where we are today." pic.twitter.com/Ur8pwN0qjX
On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden said the idea of putting conditions on aid to Israel was “absolutely outrageous.” But the administration’s seemingly unconditional support for Israel as it carried out its siege, bombardment, and invasion of Gaza has led to backlash among progressives, who have marched for a cease-fire and carried out direct actions in several major cities. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on November 15 found that 68% of the U.S. public backed a cease-fire.
In an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan did not rule out the idea that Biden would sign legislation putting conditions on military aid to Israel, though he said currently what was proving effective was behind-doors diplomacy with Israel and Arab nations.
“He is going to continue to focus on what is going to generate results,” Sullivan said.
An Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft developed by Joby Aviation Inc. is seen outside the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) during the company’s initial public offering on August 11, 2021, in New York. (Photo: Liao Pan/China News Service via Getty Images)
The Future Can Do Better Than Air Taxis for the Super Rich
Just imagine if all the investments and expertise going into turning our skies into air-taxi lanes for the richest among us were instead going into air-speed services that actually meet real public needs.
Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane, it’s… Wall Street’s electric air-taxi future!
Earlier this month, a flying machine from the California-based Joby Aviation became the first “electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft—“eVTOL”—to go airborne from the Downtown Heliport that services Lower Manhattan’s financial district.
Joby is now expecting, by sometime in 2025, to be regularly ferrying high finance’s finest from Wall Street to JFK Airport in a mere seven minutes. Mere mortals taking autos and subways routinely spend well over an hour making the same trip.
We must not let ourselves treat climate and inequality as “separate issues,” environmental activist Greta Thunberg adds in her foreword to Oxfam’s latest appraisal of our world’s environmental and economic crises.
Joby’s new one-pilot, four-passenger eVTOL figures to be only the first of many corporate efforts to speed New York’s deepest pockets on their electric way to destinations both lucrative and exotic. A host of corporations—from China’s eHang to Germany’s Volocopter—already have big plans underway for zipping the world’s richest up and over congested city streets.
But just imagine if all the investments and expertise going into turning our skies into air-taxi lanes for the richest among us were instead going into air-speed services that actually meet real public needs. Imagine air taxis, for instance, ferrying critically injured rural residents to distant emergency care.
Those sorts of efforts will have to wait. The vast wealth of our wealthiest is instead bending innovation and expertise to servicing the already rich. And that bending, new research out of Oxfam details, is keeping our planet’s richest entertained at a vast environmental cost.
The world’s wealthiest 1%, Oxfam’s latest research reveals, are now generating more carbon emissions than all the world’s poorest 66% combined. The carbon emissions from this 1% will—between 2020 and 2030—“cause 1.3 million heat-related deaths” worldwide.
The world’s bottom 99%, Oxfam adds, would have to consume away for 1,500 years to match the carbon output that billionaires now produce in a single year.
But, even so, the political impact of the super rich actually outpaces the impact of their personal energy consumption. Only our richest “have the wealth, power, and influence to protect themselves.” And that same “wealth, power, and influence,” the new Oxfam study lays out, is keeping governments worldwide doing no more than “incentivizing incremental change” in energy policy instead of phasing out fossil fuels and investing massively in renewable energy.
We must not let ourselves treat climate and inequality as “separate issues,” environmental activist Greta Thunberg adds in her foreword to Oxfam’s latest appraisal of our world’s environmental and economic crises.
“Either we safeguard living conditions for all future generations,” she relates, “or we let a few very rich people maintain their destructive lifestyles and preserve an economic system geared towards short-term economic growth and shareholder profit.”
The “twin crises of climate and inequality,” Oxfam’s Climate Equality: A planet for the 99% report goes on to spell out, are “driving one another”—and only “a radical new approach” stands any chance of “overcoming the catastrophe unfolding before us.”
That “radical new approach” must take on “the disproportionate role that the richest individuals play in the climate crisis through their emissions, investments, and capture of politics.”
How can we best realize this badly needed “new approach”? We would need, argues Oxfam, to start aggressively taxing our super rich and the corporations that fuel their fortunes “to help pay for the transition to renewable energy.”
Just one example: Some 45 major oil and gas corporations averaged annual windfall profits of $237 billion in 2021 and 2022, dollars that overwhelmingly funneled straight into rich shareholder pockets. Governments worldwide, Oxfam notes, could have increased global investments in renewable energy by 31% had they taxed this windfall profit at 90%.
The new Oxfam study surveys a wide range of other options the world’s nations could pursue to subject the rich to serious taxation. Govrnments could, for instance, levy “steep and progressive” tax increases on the incomes of the ultra rich—as well as on their property, land, and inheritances. They could raise taxes on corporate profits, fossil fuels, and financial transactions—or levy entirely new taxes on “high-emitting luxury travel.”
The world, in other words, could have plenty of money for social and climate spending “if rich-country governments were willing to implement bold and progressive tax reforms.”
“We cannot allow the richest countries to claim that they cannot afford to raise the trillions needed,” Oxfam ends up concluding. “Mobilizing this money simply takes political will.”
Set firmly within the BBC’s public service broadcasting ethos of informing, educating and entertaining, Doctor Who quickly became a mainstay of Saturday-evening viewing. By 1965, it was drawing in around 10 million viewers.
Throughout its history, Doctor Who has tapped into political, social and moral issues of the day – sometimes explicitly, other times more subtly. During the 1970s, when the Doctor was played by Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, there were a number of examples of this.
Doctor Who in the 1970s
The 1970s were a period of political and social divisions: relationships between the government the unions in the first part of the decade was strained, exemplified by the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974. The political consensus that had dominated since 1945 was under pressure with talk of a break-up of the UK in the form of Welsh and Scottish Assemblies.
In his cultural history of Doctor Who, Inside the Tardis, television historian James Chapman argued that the 1970s painted “an uncomfortably sinister projection of the sort of society that Britain might come”.
It was never clear if Doctor Who storylines during this time were set in the present or at some point in the future. The fact that one of the lead characters, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart of the United Nations Intelligence Task Force (UNIT), calls the prime minister “Madam” in a telephone conversation in one episode suggests the latter.
The opening credits for Doctor Who in the 1970s, with Jon Pertwee as Doctor.
As for some of the more politically engaged stories, The Green Death (1973), or “the one with the giant maggots” as it is known by fans, certainly pulled no punches. Described by Chapman as an “eco disaster narrative”, it pitted corporate greed and capitalism against environmental activists (portrayed here as Welsh hippies) and their concerns for the planet.
In the episode, Global Chemicals, run by a faceless machine, is tipping waste from its petrochemical plant into a disused mine in the south Wales valleys (cue awful Welsh stereotypes). The green sludge not only kills people, but creates mutant maggots which also attack. As fears grew and the green movement gained momentum in the early 1970s, this story would have resonated with large parts of the audience.
When the Doctor visits the planet Peladon in The Curse of Peladon (1972), the planet is attempting to join the Galactic Federation. There are those on the planet who argue for joining, while opponents are just as vociferous, arguing that joining the Federation would destroy the old ways of the planet.
Sound familiar? This is the time that Britain was negotiating to join the European Economic Community, as it did in 1973. Interestingly, the serial was broadcast during the time of the 1972 miners’ strike (leading to many viewers missing later episodes due to power cuts).
The follow-up story, The Monster of Peladon (1974), is set against a backdrop of industrial strife and conflict involving miners.
Tom Baker’s Doctor
In what many consider to be one of the best classic serials, Genesis of the Daleks (1975) Tom Baker’s doctor continued the tradition of raising complex political, social and moral issues.
Jon Pertwee’s Doctor regenerates to become Tom Baker’s.
Sent back in time by the Time Lords to change the course of history, the Doctor at one point has an opportunity to destroy the mutations which form the “body” of the Dalek (inside their metal casing) and destroy the Dalek race forever. Holding two wires close to each other, about to create an explosion in the incubation room, he asks himself and his companions: “Have I that right?”
Having the ability to see the future, he says that future planets will become allies in fighting the evil of the Daleks. Had he the right to change the course of history? Given the symbolism used in the story (salutes, black outfits, references to a “pure” race) this was a clear reference to the rise of the Nazis.
The political allegories didn’t end in the 1970s. One of the most blatant can be seen in the 1988 serial, The Happiness Patrol. The main antagonist, Helen A (played by Sheila Hancock), a ruthless and tyrannical leader is said to be modelled on Conservative prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. The fact that Hancock appears to be impersonating Thatcher lends a certain degree of credence to this belief.
Anybody who argues that the revival of Doctor Who in 2005 saw a more political edge to the storylines need only look back over 60 years. Now that we can do this thanks to the BBC uploading more than 800 episodes onto iPlayer, it will become clear to all.
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Some will rightly argue that Shell never embraced sustainable development, it only ever pursued long-term profitability at the expense of people and planet. The days of Mark Moody Stuart at Shell are long gone. The new boss at the helm is Wael Sawan, who joined Shell two years after the murder of the Ogoni 9 and Brent Spar, just at the time that Shell began to spin its image towards being a caring company.
Under Sawan’s leadership, Shell keeps courting controversy. Month by month, the company doubles down on fossil fuels, and sheds its last remaining veneers of being a company that cares about people and planet.
He has reversed what pitiful progress that Shell had made to address the scale of its CO2 emissions, angering climate campaigners and scientists. In June, the Guardian reported that Sawan “has rowed back on the oil giant’s climate commitments.” The paper added that since taking over, Sawan has emphasised financial returns for investors. He told financiers at the New York stock exchange that he wanted to “reward our shareholders today and far into the future.”
Greenpeace sign reads CHOOSE OCEANS, NOT OIL
In September, Reutersreported that Sawan “has come under pressure over his strategy from within the energy company after two employees issued a rare open letter urging him not to scale back investments in renewable energy.” The following month, in October, Sawan responded by cutting 200 jobs from the company’s low-carbon division to focus on high-earning oil profits.
And now, last week, the day before the Ogoni 9 anniversary, it was announced that Shell was suing Greenpeace for over $2.1million in damages. But that is just the start. The legal action also calls for an indefinite blocking against Greenpeace protests at all Shell infrastructure worldwide, otherwise, the claims could be as high as $8.6 million.
The lawsuit, which the Guardian notes is one of the “biggest ever legal threats against the group”, was served by Shell after Greenpeace campaigners occupied one of Shell’s moving oil platforms earlier this year.
…
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
Whenever Shell cuts a climate commitment or threatens its critics, it loses its social license to operate. Day by day, it looks like a corporate Dodo. It may not happen tomorrow or even in the next decade, but Shell’s days are numbered. A just, equitable future does not include the bully boys from Shell who still threaten their critics. In our collective future, they will become extinct.
