Dear Youth of America, 

So, you’ve read Bin Laden’s letter and your mind is blown. How could such an obviously evil man have a somewhat correct analysis of the Palestinian conflict? I’m very sorry to have to blow your mind further. Osama Bin Laden isn’t really the anti-imperialist fighter he seems to be in that letter. 

Osama Bin Laden was born into the family of a billionaire construction magnate with close ties to the Saudi royal family. He first gained recognition in the West as a Mujahideen leader in the Afghan-Soviet War, in which he was funded by the CIA in order to foil the USSR. At the tailend of the 80s, guided by his extreme interpretation of Islam, he founded Al Qaeda in order to conduct Jihad against America and its allies. This included operations in Sudan and Somalia. However, operations conducted by his Mujahideen in Bosnia between 1994-1996 draw into question whether Bin Laden was ever truly free of his handlers in Washington, or always serving as their useful idiot.  

Bin Laden gained further notoriety in the West for allegedly financing the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, though he denied involvement. Eventually he would gain international infamy as the architect behind the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, though he remained ambiguous about his involvement for years afterward. Ultimately, by allowing the United States to create a terrorist mastermind mythos around him, Bin Laden was helping the ruling class to obscure an important detail about 9/11 — that everyone, from the CIA and FBI, to the zionist intelligence agency Mossad, to the Saudi royal family, was in on the plot, and could have prevented the attacks. If they’d wanted to. But why didn’t they want to?  

Saudi Arabia’s monarchy has been America’s second most solid ally in West Asia, surpassed only by the zionist occupation of Palestine, commonly referred to as “Israel”. These countries serve as the frontline for the U.S. Empire’s regional imperialist interests — they do America’s bidding, and are granted a degree of autonomy and a share of the spoils. They aren’t the only two regional pawns, however. The United States originally helped Saddam Hussein come to power in Iraq, but he proved to be an unreliable ally whose nationalism exceeded his loyalty to the Empire. Hussein disobeyed his overlords and they overthrew him. They garnered popular support to achieve this through now infamous lies such as Colin Powell’s assertion that Hussein “possessed weapons of mass destruction” and the Nayirah Testimony — in which Iraqi soldiers were accused of dumping premature babies out of incubators. Like Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden was a comprador who disobeyed and invoked the metropole’s ire. In Bin Laden’s case, his mistake was calling for the destruction of Israel and the overthrow of the Saudi royal family, who he accused of straying from Islam. Allowing 9/11 to occur gave the U.S. Empire a necessary excuse to solidify its regional control, and dispose of an asset who had outlived his use. 

Nobody went after the Saudi royal family for their role in 9/11 because they continued to obey America in every way. They normalized relations with the zionist occupation and continue to stoke the flames of the Wahhabi Islamic conservative movement. This strain of Islam is despised by millions of Muslims around the world because it’s insanely hateful to Muslim people who don’t follow its extreme interpretation of the religion. It’s similar to how the Christian fundamentalist movement hates any American Christian who doesn’t follow their interpretation of Christianity. It’s convenient for the U.S. to encourage Wahhabism abroad so they can stoke the fires of Islamophobia and fear of Sharia Law at home.

But what does this have to do with Palestine? Bin Laden’s letter talks about large “Jewish capital” taking control of the American state apparatus, and using it to attack Palestine.. This is a convenient lie for the large capital interests that actually control America (90% identify as Christians, for the record). It serves to disguise who is in control, and makes it seem that Israel is in control, when in fact the current president has said multiple times that Israel protects America’s interests in West Asia. Osama Bin Laden was highly educated and could have easily dispelled this myth, which is the most common and misinformed antisemitic myth on the planet, yet it appears in his letter. In fact, it’s clear from other letters and communications in which he distinguishes between Zionism and Judaism, that Bin Laden himself knew it to be untrue. Yet it appears in his letter. Of course this man, who was born into great wealth, could never tell everyday people that the real enemy is people like him and his family, that the wealthiest people of any country, including America, are their real enemies. 

This, my friends, is what we call shared class interest or class solidarity. The very wealthiest people pretend to fight one another in public, in front of us, but actually help each other behind closed doors. They teach us to suspect each other and prevent us from achieving the class solidarity that they have. They will always try to turn everyday Muslims and Christians against everyday Jews (including countless anti-zionist Jews), because that’s exactly what serves their interests most. Although Bin Laden’s letter rightly decries the occupation of Palestine, by misidentifying the enemy he still performs a useful role to the bourgeoisie. They try to set us against each other in many other ways — along racial lines or lines of gender and sexuality. All of it serves the purpose of a smokescreen, to prevent us from identifying them as the real enemy.

The ultimate result of 9/11 was the American government stripping its citizens of their constitutional rights through the Patriot Act. It was the pretext to re-invade Iraq and invade Afghanistan. Though 9/11 may seem like an attack on America, it allowed the ruling class to consolidate its interests. Though Bin Laden’s letter seems anti-imperialist, it serves imperialism by misleading the people about who their enemies are.

But having been misled is not an excuse for working class zionists in the West who engage in Islamophobic rhetoric to justify Israel’s occupation and genocide of Palestinians. If Osama Bin Laden’s letter can go viral and be widely read, there’s no reason the work of real anti-imperialists, such as Ghassan Kanafani, Leila Khaled, and George Habash shouldn’t — except if you consider the ruling class wants and encourages you to read Osama Bin Laden instead.

At a certain point, working class zionists are choosing to engage in cruel bigotry and sophistry, despite their class interests. They are no better than working class Christians who join the KKK or working class Muslims who joined ISIS. Like Bin Laden, they’re not fighting the real enemy. To paraphrase other genuine decolonial writers Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon: “Those who try to dehumanize others, in fact forfeit their own humanity. By justifying the murder and maiming of the civilians they oppress, oppressors sign away their own right to liberty.” The fate of such oppressors should be no less than that of Julius Streicher, who was rightfully convicted along with his Nazi friends, even though he never personally killed a Jew in the Holocaust. His hands were the bloodiest of all, because he published an antisemitic magazine which inspired countless others to take up arms against their neighbors.

The wars I’ve mentioned in this letter, from the two Afghan wars, to the two Gulf Wars, to the Bosnian War, murdered and maimed countless civilians in dozens of Global South countries. The survivors of these wars, who live with permanent disabilities, survivor’s guilt and immense grief over their lost loved ones, have for decades hated America. The writer of this piece is just one of millions of Global South citizens who have suffered incalculable losses because of America’s “foreign policy.” We don’t hate America or you because of your “freedom” — this is another lie your government tells you. We hate you because you allow your government to butcher us and destroy our freedoms.

You may feel it’s unfair of us to hate you — after all, you’re not in control of what your government does. But that doesn’t absolve you of your responsibility to the almost 200 other countries that you purposely repress (whether as allies or enemies). We’ve all been told that the American government is the Best Democracy on the planet and it’s this exemplary democracy that justifies forcing the same system on all of us. But America is no democracy — it’s a dictatorship of the ruling class. Everything the ruling class does — from the grandiosity of 9/11 to the viral Bin Laden letter, serves some role in their class interest. It’s designed to keep you from recognizing your class position, and that you don’t live in a democracy. 

When you don’t live in a democracy, it’s your responsibility to overthrow the political system which represses your voice and murders everyone else. It’s your responsibility to correct the historical errors of the country you claim as your own, and the first step on this journey is properly identifying who the real allies — and real enemies — are.

In Solidarity,

Comrade Leila’s Whitest Stan

Two particularly powerful forces are shaping the landscape of the negotiations: streaming technology and artificial intelligence (AI). In recent years, streaming services have grown to dominate the entertainment industry, and the new model for intellectual property monetization no longer conforms to the terms of the writer’s contracts. The WGA says that the changing landscape has effectively transformed the industry into a gig economy, leaving its members to fend for themselves between contracts.

After weeks of negotiations, the AMPTP ultimately refused to budge, causing the writers’ contracts to expire and leaving them with no choice but to go on strike. Recently, the writers have been joined on strike by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), motivated both by solidarity and by similar grievances with the studios. 

The Cutting Edge in Strikebreaking: Artificial Scabs

Just as a torturer must skillfully select the right implement to extract a confession from his victim, so too do the Hollywood producers have at their disposal brutal strikebreaking tools — the classic, of course, being the infamous “scab.” Sure enough, the AMPTP has already attempted to replace the striking workers with scabs. Alongside this tool, the producers are employing a fundamental tactic of siege warfare: cut off the enemy’s supply lines, and slowly but surely starve them out. Because the bosses can withhold the workers’ means of subsistence, that is, in the form of wages, and because they have a greater horde of wealth, the producers are betting that they can outlast the workers. One anonymous producer infamously stated as much with unusual honesty: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” In a now-deleted instagram reel, actor Ron Perlman said that he knows which “motherfucker” (sic.) producer said this, “and where he fucking lives,” suggestively adding, “There’s a lot of ways to lose your house. You wish that on people? You wish that families starve while you’re making $27 million a year for creating nothing? Be careful motherfucker. Be really careful.”

Mr. Perlman is right to call out the producers for living in extravagant luxury while the workers who actually create the value, who pay for the producers’ lifestyles, struggle to keep a roof over their head and food on their table. Perhaps most insidiously, these ungrateful parasites are attempting to entirely replace these very same workers, not just with scabs, but with machines. One need not cross the picket line to get a fill of their dystopian cyberpunk fantasies: artificial intelligence is already here! Only, the kind of “intelligence” in demand by the market is a very limited and mundane sort of intelligence: intelligent scabbing.

The final counter offers turned down by WGA and SAG included two critical “compromises.” In the first case, AMPTP maintained the right to replace writers with AI text generation. If you doubt the efficacy of existing AI technology, its capacity to replace writers, and whether this is an idle bluff by the studios, then I encourage you to re-read the first two paragraphs of this article, which have been co-authored by Chat GPT.

The studios also insist that they have the right to digitally scan background actors; the actors would be paid for a single day of labor, and the studio would walk away with full ownership of that actor’s likeness, to use as they please, forever, without even a single cent of compensation. This grotesque move has spurred the SAG to join their fellow workers in the WGA in protest.

Perhaps the AMPTP is bluffing. We can surmise that their plot to replace writers and background actors with AI was an empty threat, never intended to leave the negotiating table. Of course the studios knew this would be unreasonable and offensive to the workers before they proposed it — but that’s exactly the point! In both cases, the studios are challenging the power of labor by threatening to automate and thereby replace it with an unlimited supply of robotic “scabs.” They’re saying: “if you don’t step back in line, we will eliminate you, and you will starve.” The entertainment industry bosses have clearly signaled their unwillingness to negotiate in good faith. They’re confident that, one way or another, they will win — the workers be damned.

Indeed, it’s as the old saying goes: not all that glitters is gold. Nowhere is this truer than the entertainment business. As the bourgeois propagandists in the capitalist news media rally behind the corrupt studio executives and attempt to sow division between the workers, it is paramount that we not get beguiled or misled. Unconditional solidarity to the writers and actors in their fight against the producers is the only policy for the class-conscious proletariat. All power to the workers! Down with the producers and the executives! Down with the bosses! Down with all the parasites who feast upon labor!

Water is the most important resource on the planet. The need for water is one of the only material needs common to all living things. This fundamental need has driven all patterns of human migration and settlement throughout our history. Civilizations across the planet have, without exception, organized themselves around their ability to collect, transport, and use water. 

Innovation in water infrastructure has been the driving force that opened up new lands for human settlement. Irrigation technologies have allowed people to feed themselves farther and farther away from sources of water, and to produce greater surpluses of food to support expanding populations. Canals, wells, reservoirs, sewage lines, treatment facilities: these are all ancient technologies that have been improved and expanded throughout the millennia, giving us living conditions far beyond the “natural” limit. Water infrastructure is the bedrock of human civilization.

And yet, all around us, this crucial infrastructure is crumbling. The Flint water crisis highlighted a rampant problem in the US: lead leaching into the water supply and poisoning residents —  for years. Lead poisoning isn’t some distant Roman curiosity, it’s something that’s happening every day here in the United States Empire. In Hawaii, a military fuel storage facility leaked hazardous levels of contamination into the local water supply. Jackson, Mississippi has been quietly facing unsafe water for years, culminating in a boil water advisory that’s been in place for weeks. Recently, my hometown of Baltimore faced its own boil water advisory following contamination with E. coli in the poorest areas of the city. Ravaged by Hurricane Fiona, Puerto Rico is now staring down weeks or months without power or running water. Countless other failings of crucial water infrastructure continue to fly under the radar as we speak. It’s only a matter of time before they explode into the national consciousness, but only after these systemic failures ravage, sicken, and possibly kill entire neighborhoods.

Why do we see our most critical infrastructure failing? Why is this most basic necessity of life being left to the ravages of time? This is an ongoing pattern of abdication by the US government, intentionally removing itself from the role states have always played as the builders and protectors of infrastructure. Past infrastructure projects, such as the mass installation of sewage systems and water mains, were built with efficiency in mind, at a time when it was inconceivable that the maintenance of those systems would ever be abandoned by governments. And yet, abandon it they have.

For centuries, our water infrastructure has served us dutifully and invisibly, but decades of neglect are confirming a classic maxim of engineering wisdom: good engineering should go unnoticed. When you turn on the faucet, you expect clean water to immediately come pouring out. When you flush the toilet, you expect everything to be swept away in an instant. As long as everything is working as designed, you notice nothing. The second something goes wrong, the problem becomes the most obvious thing in the world. We only take note of the crucial role of our infrastructure once it starts to fail.

There are many ways for failing water infrastructure to impact us. The most obvious we tend to think of is a lack of water: reservoirs run dry or the water mains fail, and nothing comes out of your tap at home. It becomes impossible to drink, to bathe, to wash clothes and dishes, to even flush your toilet. This is often the result of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or droughts. A more common disaster is water contamination, which tends to go unnoticed, and to persist for far longer. This can take the form of old pipes degrading, allowing heavy metals to dissolve into the water, or it can come from outside contaminants getting into the supply. Whether it’s lead, industrial waste, microorganisms, or any of the many other dangerous contaminants, these failures are becoming increasingly common as outdated water lines start to break down.

It is often said in engineering circles that the goal of the engineer is not to make the most sturdy, long-lived infrastructure possible. The goal is to make the most efficient infrastructure by balancing cost, labor, and longevity. This isn’t simply a case of engineers being cheap and trying to save the most money in the short term: it simply doesn’t make sense to spend ten times as much to build something that lasts twice as long. As long as there is a commitment to continuously maintain and upgrade the infrastructure, it is worth it to do so efficiently.

The US state has, since its beginning, always served the interests of the wealthiest: the landlords, the slavers, the industrialists, and the financial elite. At times, those interests have lined up with the needs of the people. The maintenance of infrastructure is one such need. The capitalists want to be free of cholera and tainted water as much as the workers do, and it helps them to maintain their workforce if they aren’t dying of preventable diseases. However, over the course of centuries, the power and greed of capital has expanded, and those interests have shifted. More of the responsibility for public works has been offloaded to the private sector. Rather than hiring their own engineers, municipal governments give sweetheart deals to private contractors. Publicly-owned infrastructure is sold off to private corporations with the intention of raiding the public coffers. New infrastructure, such as telecommunications, is simply presumed to belong to the free market from the start.

The social context behind this shift is complex, but it can be summarized as a direct reaction to labor activism and socialist organizing. In the early 20th century, labor was ascendant in this country, especially among the sectors necessary for the construction of infrastructure: mining, processing, manufacturing, construction, and so on. The crucial nature of infrastructure for the functioning of society gave these workers tremendous leverage at the bargaining table, which made industrial capitalists very nervous. They began a protracted campaign of culture-crafting; a full scale assault on the public perception of unions. They smeared unionists, captured governments, laundered anti-worker policies through the media, and successfully turned the tide against organized labor. In the process, privatization became the law of the land, and our country’s infrastructure was stolen from us.

All of this privatization has been sold to the public as a way of enhancing these vital services, since private corporations are presented as being able to get the job done better and cheaper than governments ever could. (This, they attribute to the mysterious and illusory “market pressures”). In fact, the exact opposite is true. The only purpose of private industry is to produce profits, to give a return on investment in whatever way it can. It is possible for profit to be extracted by providing a public service that is efficient, cheap, and reliable, but this is not the rule. The most common way for a company to increase their profits is not by providing a superior product, but by cutting costs. This can be done by mistreating their workers, using cheaper materials, and neglecting maintenance, all of which the major infrastructure companies are constantly guilty of, and all of which lead to failing infrastructure. Because of the massive amounts of capital they control, as well as regulations and contracts from the governments they control, they cannot even be outcompeted by “more ethical” corporations.

The worst failures of water infrastructure have one major factor in common: they disproportionately impact the poorest sectors of our society, living on top of the oldest infrastructure. This is the result of decades of neglect, due to the perverse incentives listed above. The poorer a population is, the less profitable it is to install, upgrade, and maintain infrastructure for their use. This is the same reason it took massive government investment to get electricity and telephone lines to rural areas, the reason broadband internet is still unavailable in many parts of the country, and the reason giant shipping firms subcontract the USPS for many of their “last mile” needs. This ethos of private companies laying claim to the most profitable roles of infrastructure ownership while offloading the more costly features onto the state has created a system in which vast swathes of the country are left completely abandoned. When the water system fails, it’s the working class that shoulders the burden.

After extracting these massive profits, when these giant companies fail to fulfill their end of the bargain, what happens? Are they punished for the death, disease, and economic injury caused by their neglect of vital services? Are their ill-gotten gains seized and returned to the people they scammed? No. Instead, the government is tasked with picking up the slack, using money raised from the working class. Corporations retain their profits, retain their market share, and retain their iron grip on the infrastructure we need to live and thrive.

This fundamental failure of capitalism to provide vital public services is replicated across all sectors: healthcare, transportation, housing, energy, education, food, and especially water. The scam takes many different forms, but at its core it stays the same. There is massive profit to be made by promising the necessities of a functioning society, with none of the risk. Governments subsidize these sectors to keep society functioning, or they simply ignore the fallout of their failures. Increasingly, the ideology of the free market has shifted public policy towards the latter “strategy,” leading to a steady decline in every form of infrastructure. And we are positioned for this situation to only ever get worse.

Climate change is often presented simply in terms of rising temperatures, but the impact it is having is far more widespread, due mainly to water. More violent and unpredictable weather systems, caused by changing patterns of temperature and humidity, in turn cause unprecedented flooding. Floods wreak havoc with water infrastructure, drive people out their homes, and alter entire landscapes. Warming climates open up new aquatic breeding grounds for pathogenic bacteria, which contaminate downstream water systems. Higher temperatures encourage evaporation, leading to tinder-dry conditions that exacerbate wildfires.

The same perverse incentives that make corporations unsuited for maintaining and upgrading our infrastructure also make them wholly incapable of addressing the climate crisis and its many downstream effects. Their only role in society is to generate profits, and it is more profitable to degrade the natural world and imperil our society, rather than pay the costs of clean, sustainable infrastructure. Left to its own devices, capitalism will continue to poison our water and choke off the lifeblood of civilization itself. We leave this power in the hands of capitalists at our own risk.