By Jeff Mackler
Journalist Adam Johnson’s startling new book on Gaza, “How to Sell a Genocide,” is a profound exposé of the U.S. corporate media’s twisted Palestine coverage. Described as “… a nihilistic campaign of starvation, bombing, arbitrary detention, shooting and sexual violence,” the details are recounted in an August 24 Electronic Intifada (EI) livestream interview with Johnson by EI reporters, Ali Abunimah and Nora Barrows-Friedman.
Two examples among hundreds cited in Johnson’s book suffice to make the point. Of CNN’s 119 articles on Gaza, all but one were mostly unfavorable to the Palestinian cause. The NYT’s figures were similar, registering 99-1 in largely blaming the Palestinian victims for the U.S.-Zionist atrocities.
The figures for today’s U.S. unprovoked wars against Cuba, Iran and Venezuela are similar, not to mention the interminable U.S. wars against poor and oppressed people and nations everywhere. Need we mention that the U.S. imperialist war machine maintains some 1,100 military bases in 100 nations around the world – none for peaceful purposes – all to extract, imperialist-style, the wealth and resources of its victims?
Johnson’s Gaza data parallel the figures for literally every major issue in U.S. and world politics. They reflect the views of the billionaire corporate elite that own and control literally every newspaper and major media outlets. Today’s media are monopolized as never before, in increasing number of large cities reduced to a single newspaper, sometimes “supplemented” by state or city subsidized papers to maintain the illusion of a “free press.” Today’s “Fourth Estate,” including its now dominant electronic components, in past centuries referred to as free and independent, has long ago been disappeared. Multi-billionaires the likes of Elon Musk, aided by the government’s secret implanted CIA journalist staffers present the ruling class’s “news” as it sees fit to print.
But it is not only the “news” that is daily falsified by the corporate media; it is literally the entire U.S. political system, dominated as never before by capitalism’s twin parties of war, racism, sexism, and oppression.
Today this misinformation-specializing behemoth is engaged in frenzied efforts to convince the American electorate that the forthcoming midterm elections will decisively determine the future of the nation. Their focus is on a handful of Senate elections – perhaps four – and less than a dozen in the House, that each party asserts will grant them the majority legitimacy to rule in the name of the “people.” The remaining electoral contests, literally hundreds and thousands, nationally and locally, are assumed to be pre-determined, that is, already formally in the red and blue camps!
But it is this handful of contested seats that has so fascinated the corporate media that leading publications like The New York Times Magazine have jumped into the fray with headline articles like the August 3, 2026 “Socialists have wanted to take over the Democratic Party for Years: They’ve never gotten this far,” cynically suggesting that perhaps this outcome is conceivable.
Meanwhile, the record of yesterday’s warmongering Democratic Party presidents, Clinton, Obama and Biden, is conveniently obliterated as are Trump’s innumerable lies promising to immediately end this or that war where U.S. forces reek endless horrors on the world’s people.
That both parties combine to draft and approve a war budget that exceeds the rest of the world combined is largely absent from the basic coverage. Today’s $1.5 trillion is the official annual figure but when the military expenditures of the dozen-plus agencies that also receive military allocations – another $2 trillion – the U.S. outspends the rest of the world combined. The vast majority goes to line the pockets of literally a half dozen or so monopoly corporations whose CEOs rank among the richest individuals on earth and who rotate between government, military and corporate posts.
The same holds for the U.S. annual federal budget of $6.28 trillion, every penny of which is overseen by a handful of representatives of the superrich assigned to guard their financial interests, whether via outright conveyances to the corporate hierarchy, to their various banking and related financial institutions and/or to the associated panoply of financial devices that are known only to the designated few.
In summary, regardless of which of the twin parties of capital holds a majority in congress, or in any other capitalist governing institution at any particular time, none of their fundamental interests, U.S. laws notwithstanding, are seriously subject to confiscation!
Indeed, only the vast wealth produced by the broad working class, mercilessly extracted from us at the point of production via capitalist profits, or via endless taxation, is subject to confiscation.
Capitalism’s ever deepening crises are the central explanation for its endless heinous deeds, whether they be endless wars, massive social cutbacks, racist/sexist, homophobic, anti-immigrant attacks on the oppressed, punishing tariff wars against much of the world, and today’s increasingly deadly and irreversible environmental catastrophes.
All of the above stem from capitalism’s inherent contradiction, the unceasing competition among and between the world’s leading players that relentlessly results in the replacement of human labor power – the central source of profits – with machines and increasingly today via artificial intelligence. Those mega-capitalists that do not enter the race for domination are inevitably driven from the market place by increasingly monopolized giants.
Capitalism’s twin parties are inherently driven to counter this decline whether the system is led by overt reactionary racist bigots like Donald Trump or their more disguised and less bombastic bigots like former President Biden, who began his career as the Northern Democrat’s liaison with its Klan-favoring Southern segregationists. No doubt, other former southern racist-associated bigots, Jimmy Carter (Georgia) and William Clinton (Arkansas), were selected to keep their party’s northern liberal/southern racist alliance intact. The same with the 2008 Obama-Biden duo.
It matters little to the ruling rich which capitalist party holds the top offices. Indeed, virtually every poll demonstrates that both register near-historic lows in public approval, with some three-quarters of voters indicating disapproval of Democrats and Republicans.
Society’s political contradiction are today glaring. The vast majority opposes not only both parties and their top candidates but also their endless wars, from the slaughter of the Palestinian masses to the massive destruction and murder of Iran’s people and its vital infrastructure.
Regardless, the ruling rich press on, spending countless $millions to convince working people that the super rich are best suited to rule society. On occasion, the Democrats offer a prettified version of yesterday’s warmongering past, today offering voters “promises” to vote first in congress before conducting the next war.
Both parties have also learned some critical lessons from past defeats, as during the Vietnam War era that slaughter some four million Vietnamese in a decade. The motor forces that ended that genocide were the unprecedented mass mobilization of the American people in nationally coordinated protests that dramatically exposed the undeniable truth that the vast majority stood squarely opposed to the war. Indeed, toward the war’s end polls showed that nearly 80 percent of the population supported the demand, “Bring the Troops Home Now!” President Lyndon Baines Johnson was literally unable to participate in public events. He was compelled to abandon any notion of running for re-election. Massive crowds screaming in defiance “Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?” greeted his planned appearances and often forced their cancellation.
Today, the ruling rich and their kept media are a bit more skilled in presenting reactionary politicians and their parties. In sharp contrast to the Vietnam era, Democrats today orchestrate mass rallies, as with “No Kings Days” – mobilizations where they posture as peace candidates and parade a slew of liberal Democratic Party politician posing as progressives. Trump and his cohorts do the same with Trump ever promising the media assembled crowds that he will end U.S. wars in literally days. The ruling rich no longer leave the streets exclusively to the left.
Democratic Party/Independent reformer Bernie Sanders and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are one day offered as “leftwing” alternatives: the next as the warmakers’ faithful supporters. Sanders ran against some dozen Democrats in the last Democratic Party primary as an “independent, only to drop out soon after to support “Genocide” Joe Biden and later, “Killer” Kamala Harris. Yesterday’s “dissident” Democrat/DSA NYC mayoral winner Zohran Mamdani is today partnered with racist NYC Police Chief, billionaire Jessica Tisch and New York governor Kathy Hochul, with not a week passing when Mamdani reneges on one or another campaign promise. As we go to press Mamdani is suggesting that he might consider a modest real estate tax on the second homes of the NYC elite provided they are valued at greater than $5 million!
No doubt “lesser evilism” has taken its toll on much of today’s “left” with one after another current today citing Trump’s noxious proto-fascist rhetoric as justification to back capitalism’s less offensive sounding electoral offerings. These include the largest of today’s Democratic Party-associated reformist groupings the DSA, as well an assortment of former “socialists” who either dissolved their organizations (ISO) and/or entered the DSA and disappeared.
Today’s political contradictions are massive; the vast majority of youth and working people stand opposed to capitalism’s endless wars, environmental destruction and racist attacks. Literally 25 million mobilized in the nation’s streets to challenge the Minneapolis racist police murder of George Floyd and other Blacks in cities across the country only to see this powerful upsurge channeled into the Democratic Party by Democratic Party-funded NGOs like Black Lives Matter, to elect Genocide Joe Biden.
Resolving this contradiction must stand at the center of the left’s priorities today. Breaking with capitalism’s twin parties of war, racism and repression and building united front style independent, democratically-organized mass action coalitions is a basic starting point. The objective here is to mobilize capitalism’s victims to champion their own interests. This includes united mobilizations defending working people and organized labor’s interests in the social arena and at the point of production.
It includes building rank-and-file union struggles that break with today’s labor bureaucrats, who subordinate workers’ interest to the capitalist bosses. It includes a massive expansion of the organized trade union movement, today standing at the lowest point in the modern era. It includes the formation of a fighting Labor Party in alliance with the organizations of the oppressed that fights for working people in the political arena and on the job.
It includes re-building a revolutionary socialist left that rejects any and all support to capitalism’s twin parties and those who seek to pressure them to change their corporate stripes, as with the Greens.
That today’s youth, according to every poll, overwhelmingly support socialism over capitalism is undeniable. It informs us yet again that today’s anti-human, racist exploitative system increasingly does not represent the interests of the vast majority. Join us in building toward the revolutionary socialist future, Join Socialist Action! socialistaction.org socialistaction@lmi.net
