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Follow the money to Israel

Fast forward to Israel, a nation that receives more financial support from the U.S. than any other nation since World War II. Under the current U.S. Israel agreement, the annual $3.8 billion consists of $3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing plus $500 million for joint missile defense programs.

But Israel receives much of its U.S. military assistance through Foreign Military Financing, which is subject to the Leahy Law. So that should be eliminating...limiting... at least curbing the money we send to it, no?

Not so much.

Here's the loophole.

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Fast-forward to the 1990s and Senator Patrick Leahy*, who proposed a different approach.

Since the 1970s, though, very few countries were actually cut off from U.S. aid because...well, strategic interests kept winning. The interest in keeping money flowing from our pockets into the pockets of the industrial-military complex, was the big one.

And to do that, the U.S. couldn't be too particular about human right abuses. So, they frequently invoked a convenient little exception called "extraordinary circumstances." If the administration determined that extraordinary circumstances justified it, then they didn't have to pull funding for the country. And almost every circumstance turned out to be extraordinary.

Senator Leahy saw that Section 502B wasn't really working. That even when governments were committing abuses right, left and center, the administration chose to ignore it. So, he proposed a solution. Leahy said, (I'm paraphrasing) Look, if you're not going to stop funding whole countries like Colombia, where paramilitary forces are committing gross human rights violations as we speak, then what if we stop funding only the specific military or police unit committing the abuses?

That idea became the Leahy Laws.

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And so, Chile became one of the first countries for which Congress imposed human rights-related restrictions on aid.

They said they would continue to support countries that needed their help, but not if the government engaged in a consistent pattern of gross human rights violations.

Up until then, the U.S. had been a generous sugar daddy, funding any country that claimed to be driving out communists. Even if the government doing the driving was itself authoritarian. Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Guatemala, Indonesia, South Korea, the Philippines all received U.S. military weapons and assistance during the Cold War. And happily used these weapons to kidnap, torture, kill or disappear their opponents.

But in the 1970s, after years of a failed war in Vietnam and an angry public exhausted and bereft, that changed.

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In order to explain why the U.S. is still funding Israel's wars, a nation committing a genocide against the Palestinians, we start in Chile, in 1973.

Salvador Allende was a democratically elected socialist president who wanted to nationalize major industries, including Chile's enormously valuable copper mines. But to the Nixon administration, Allende was just a another dangerous "communist" in America's backyard. And Nixon was ready to use taxes that came from the pockets of Americans to support efforts to remove him.

U.S. money flowed to Pinochet's military government, and much of that money was used to purchase American military equipment. In September 1973, Chilean armed forces carried out a military coup against Allende, installing Augusto Pinochet in the seat of power.

Win-win-win!

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The eternal lesson is that African-American voters are the backbone of the Democratic coalition. And African-American voters seem to be less interested in DSA-forward candidates than most other parts of the coalition.

Maybe that will change! But until it does, we should keep in mind that to succeed in Democratic primaries, candidates need to do well with African-American voters.

Black voters represent the dead-center of the party.

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The reason I'm picking apart the polling is because between Hong in Wisconsin and El-Sayed in Michigan, we're going to get a narrative about how DSA-branded Democrats always underperform.

And the reality is more complicated than that.

El-Sayed isn't actually a DSA Democrat. He's a normal Democrat who, for various reasons, codes as DSA-adjacent. Yet he underperformed much more than Hong. El-Sayed's polling average had him up by 13; he won by a point.

Francesca Hong is a real-deal DSA-er and she finished within the margin of error of where the polls had her.

So, at the broadest possible level, a narrative saying DSA Dems underperform their polls isn't right.

But there is a lesson in here and it seems important.

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If you missed Jasmine's Triad last week, go back and give it a read. It's so good.

Her thesis is that while "woke" eventually grew into an amorphous oppressive blob-if you like Thanksgiving or don't like bike lanes, then you are read out of the movement!-the original ideas behind "staying woke" are pretty valuable. And also turned out to be . . . right. Here's Jasmine:

Maybe at this point you're thinking I'm making a True Woke has never been tried! argument.

Not quite. My point is that "wokeness"-in an idealized form-is an argument for guardrails against unrestrained domination by the most powerful forces in society. It was in the calls for an end to extrajudicial police killings. It was in the demands for accountability when influential figures parroted harmful racist remarks. It was in the warnings of how easily civil protections for vulnerable groups-trans people or noncitizen immigrants or pregnant women-could be trampled upon.