As the so-called Supreme Council of the Armed Forces increasingly cements, and in some cases flaunts, its firm grip on power, the revolution that inspired a region is beginning to look more like an old-fashioned military coup.

Military trials of Egyptian civilians persist and the military leadership has expanded and extended the 30-year-old, widely criticized Emergency Law once used by Mubarak to justify his authoritarian tactics.

Egypt’s police chief even announced this month that security would use live ammunition on protesters thought to be illegally entering certain government buildings.

Although the military leadership finally announced a date for the delayed parliamentary elections — Nov. 21 — few are optimistic that the vote will be either fair or help bring stability and security.

“It does not look like the army wants to transfer their power to a civilian government,” said Joshua Stacher, an Egypt expert and professor at Kent State University. “Just like any incumbent, they want to stay in office to preserve their interests.”

Those interests include a sprawling business empire cultivated over the decades by the coutry’s leaders, all of whom have been drawn from the Army’s top brass. As the former commander of Egypt’s air force, Mubarak oversaw the sprawling military complex that owned — and still owns — countless private businesses.

Not everyone, however, was cheering.

Outside the court, hundreds of Mubarak allies chanted and waived placards of support before and during his trial, which opened on Aug. 3 and met for a second session on Aug. 15.

“Oh Mubarak, hold your head high,” screamed protesters, according to Reuters. “We will demolish the prison and burn it down, if Hosni Mubarak is sentenced.”

These ardent supporters of the former president — the self-described “sons of Mubarak” — hope to spare their former president from the humiliation of detention and intense scrutiny of a public trial.

His most vocal backers may be in the minority these days — depending on who you ask — but they are unwavering, both online and on the street, in their conviction that Mubarak, who is under detention in a Cairo hospital until his next court date, is a national hero who led the Arab world’s most populous nation to 30 years of peace, prosperity and stability.

“We traded our national security for political corruption and economic chaos,” said Yousry Abdel Razik, a lawyer who attended the recent proceedings. “This was no revolution. Revolutions are supposed to make countries better, not worse.”

Abdel Razik recently signed on to give pro-bono legal aid to Mubarak’s defense team, which is led by veteran Egyptian lawyer Farid el-Deeb.

The charges Mubarak is facing — corruption, abuse of power and ordering his security forces to kill more than 800 protesters — could result in the death penalty if he is found guilty.

That harsh reality alone was enough to bring Abdel Razik, 35, to tears during the trial.

“The only other time I’ve cried in my lifetime was when my father died two years ago,” he said. “But I love Mubarak. He is my father too.”

On the west bank of the Nile River, a few dozen Mubarak supporters have set up a makeshift, Tahrir-like rallying point in a traffic circle. There, they occasionally meet to drink tea, discuss the latest news and reminisce about the old days.

They are angry that billboards carrying Mubarak’s once-ubiquitous image have been torn down, and that his name has been scrubbed from schools and subway station maps.

Most of them — men and a few women, young and old, rich and poor — are still dumbfounded by Mubarak’s ouster. They point fingers at various foreign elements, mostly the United States and Israel, as the ones responsible for his downfall.

They seemingly ignore the widespread criticism that frequently arose during Mubarak’s one-man rule — economic stagnancy, human rights abuses and corruption.

“My family and I never benefited at all from Mubarak, economically speaking,” said Karim Hussein, who grew up in a working class neighborhood near the Pyramids. “But I am proud to defend him even to this day.”

Hussein, a 22-year-old information technology graduate, seems a more likely candidate to join the youth activists who challenged Mubarak earlier this year.

But a day after thousands of young Egyptians descended on Cairo’s Tahrir Square on January 25, aided in part by the coordinated use of social media, Hussein launched his own Facebook page in support of Mubarak.

He said he was inspired to defend his president because he thought protesters were treating the elderly leader unfairly after so many years in power.

The Facebook group, translated as “We Are Sorry Mr. President,” organizes rallies and celebrates and defends Mubarak’s “achievements.” The page has attracted more than 100,000 fans to date, though Hussein admits some of those followers are hackers and naysayers.

In a troubling reversal, it is now these Egyptians, those that support Mubarak, who are on occasion the target of violence. They point to bandages, casts, scars and other battle wounds as signs that they have now become Egypt’s most marginalized minority.

Hassan Ghandour, a 30-year-old who claimed to be a former soldier in Mubarak’s presidential guard unit, unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a long, deep gash he received during clashes that erupted during Mubarak’s trial on Aug. 15.

Insults between the two opposing sides of protesters had escalated into an all out brawl, leaving dozens injured.

Ghandour denied that he or any of his comrades were “counter-revolutionaries” seeking to reinstall the former leader, as reform activists frequently claim.

“All of this chaos happening now is not from us,” Ghandour said. “It’s because of the revolution that burned and destroyed our country.”

Most of the “sons of Mubarak” believe their former president will soon have his legacy restored.

Abdel Razik, the volunteer lawyer, said he is confident that the former president will be exonerated within a few months.

At the very least, said a beaming Abdel Razik, the Egyptian public will no longer be able to watch live images of Mubarak in a cage — the judge ruled that the trial would no longer be televised.

That’s not surprising.  As I’ve written about several times, public opinion in those nations is so strongly opposed to the policies the U.S. has long demanded — and is quite hostile (more so than ever) to the U.S. itself and especially Israel — that allowing any form of democracy would necessarily be adverse to American and Israeli interests in that region (at least as those two nations have long perceived of their “interests”).  That’s precisely why the U.S. worked so hard and expended so many resources for decades to ensure that brutal dictators ruled those nations and suppressed public opinion to the point of complete irrelevance (behavior which, predictably and understandably, exacerbated anti-American sentiments among the populace).

An illustrative example of this process has emerged this week in Egypt, where authorities have bitterly denounced Israel for killing three of its police officers in a cross-border air attack on suspected Gaza-based militants, and to make matters worse, thereafter blaming Egypt for failing to control “terrorists” in the area.  Massive, angry protests outside the Israeli Embassy in Cairo led to Egypt’s recalling of its Ambassador to Israel and the Israeli Ambassador’s being forced to flee Cairo.  That, in turn, led to what The New York Times called a “rare statement of regret” from Israel in order to placate growing Egyptian anger: ”rare” because, under the U.S.-backed Mubarak, Egyptian public opinion was rendered inconsequential and the Egyptian regime’s allegiance was to Israel, meaning Israel never had to account for such acts, let alone apologize for them.  In that regard, consider this superbly (if unintentionally) revealing phrase from the NYT about this incident:

By removing Mr. Mubarak’s authoritarian but dependably loyal government, the revolution has stripped away a bulwark of Israel’s position in the region, unleashing the Egyptian public’s pent-up anger at Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians at a time when a transitional government is scrambling to maintain its own legitimacy in the streets.  

That word “loyal” makes the phrase remarkable: to whom was Mubarak ”loyal”?  Not to the Egyptian people whom he was governing or even to Egypt itself, but rather to Israel and the United States.  Thus, in the past, Egypt’s own government would have sided with a foreign nation to which it was “loyal” even when that foreign nation killed its own citizens and refused to apologize (exactly as the U.S. did when Israel killed one of its own citizens on the Mavi Marmara and then again over the prospect that Israel would do the same with the new flotilla: in contrast to Turkey which, acting like a normal government, was bitterly furious with Israel — and still is — over the wanton killing of its citizens; in that sense, the U.S. is just as “dependably loyal” as the Mubarak regime was). 

But as remarkable as it is, that phrase — “authoritarian but dependably loyal” — captures the essence of (ongoing) American behavior in that region for decades: propping up the most heinous, tyrannical rulers who disregard and crush the views of their own people while remaining supremely “loyal” to foreign powers: the U.S. and Israel.  Consider this equally revealing passage from The Guardian:

Israel fears that the post-Mubarak regime will be more sympathetic to Hamas and could even revoke the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. “They feel the need to respond to the [Arab] street,” said an Israeli government official. “Instead of calming things down, they are being dragged.” The Egyptian statement was “a very dismal development”, he said.

“Arab street”: the derogatory term long used to degrade public opinion in those nations as some wild animal that needs to be suppressed and silenced rather than heeded.  That’s why this Israeli official talks about “the need to respond” to Egyptian public opinion — also known as “democracy” — as though it’s some sort of bizarre, dangerous state of affairs: because nothing has been as important to the U.S. and Israel than ensuring the suppression of democracy in that region, ensuring that millions upon millions of people are consigned to brutal tyranny so that their interests are trampled upon in favor of “loyalty” to the interests of those two foreign nations. 

This is why American media coverage of the Arab Spring produced one of the most severe cases of cognitive dissonance one can recall.  The packaged morality narrative was that despots like Mubarak — and those in Tunisia, Bahrain and elsewhere — are unambiguous, cruel villains whom we’re all supposed to hate, while the democracy protesters are noble and to be cheered.  But whitewashed from that storyline was that it was the Freedom-loving United States that played such a vital role in empowering those despots and crushing the very democracy we are now supposed to cheer.  Throughout all the media hate sessions spewed toward the former Egyptian dictator — including as he’s tried for crimes against his own people –  how often was it mentioned that Hillary Clinton, as recently as two years ago, was saying things such as: ”I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family” (or that John McCain, around the same time, was tweeting: “Late evening with Col. Qadhafi at his ‘ranch’ in Libya – interesting meeting with an interesting man.”)?  Almost never: because the central U.S. role played in that mass oppression was simply ignored once the oppression could no longer be sustained.

And, of course, it wasn’t the case that the U.S. Government decided to cease its democracy-crushing, or that the American media one day decided to denounce the U.S.-backed Arab tyrants and celebrate democracy.  They had no choice.  These events happened against the will of the U.S., and only once their inevitability became clear did the American government and media pretend to suddenly side with “democracy and freedom.”  Even as they indulge that pretense, they continued — and continue — to try to render the ”democratic revolutions” illusory and to prop up the tyrannies that are still salvageable.  In sum, American discourse was forced by events to denounce the very despots the U.S. Government protected and to praise the very democratic values the U.S. long destroyed.

This is what Ignatius means when he decrees that the U.S. should not try to be on “the right side of history” but rather, “what should guide U.S. policy in this time of transition is to be on the right side of America’s own interests and values” and, most critically, that “sometimes those two will conflict.”  The U.S. has always subordinated its ostensible “values” (democracy, freedom) to its own “interests” in that region, which is why it has crushed the former in order to promote the latter.  As we prepare to celebrate the reportedly imminent fall of Gadaffi just as we once celebrated the fall of Saddam — Juan Cole is already declaring large parts of Libya ”liberated” — that behavior should be kept firmly in mind; whether a country is truly “liberated” by the removal of a despot depends on who replaces it and what their “loyalties” are: to foreign powers or to the democratic will of that nation’s citizens.

For Americans in such consensus to celebrate the fall of evil Arab tyrants without accounting for the role the U.S. played in their decades-long rule was bizarre (though typical) indeed.  That “senior intelligence officials” are regarding these fledgling, potential democracies with such suspicion and longing for the days of the ”dependably loyal” dictatorial regimes tells one all there is to know about what we have actually been doing in that part of the world, and have been doing for as long as that part of the world was a concern to American officials.

It was the first time Egyptians have seen Mubarak since Feb. 10, when he gave a defiant TV address refusing to resign.

“I am delighted that I see them in a cage. I feel that my son’s soul is finally starting to be at rest and that his blood will cool,” said Saeeda Hassan Abdel-Raouf, the mother of 22-year-old protester who was among those killed in the uprising. She spoke outside the trial venue at a Cairo police academy.

Mubarak, his former Interior Minister Habib el-Adly, and six top police officers are charged with murder and attempted murder in connection with the protesters killed during the uprising, according to the official charge sheet. All eight could face the death penalty if convicted.

Separately, Mubarak and his two sons — one-time heir apparent Gamal and wealthy businessman Alaa — face charges of corruption. The two sets of charges have been lumped together in one mass trial.

Outside the police academy where the trial was being held, hundreds of Mubarak’s opponents and angry supporters scuffled sporadically, throwing stones and bottles at each other while riot police with shields and helmets tried to keep them apart. About 50 supporters pounded on the steel gate trying to get into the compound, chanting “We Love you, Mubarak!” until police charged at the with electrified batons and dispersed them.

The clashes were a sign of the profound emotions stirred by the unprecedented prosecution of the man who ruled Egypt with unquestioned power for 29 years.

For many Egyptians, the trial is a chance at retribution for decades of oppressive rule in which opponents were tortured, corruption was rife, poverty spread and political life was stifled. But for others, Mubarak was a symbol of stability.

Mubarak was wheeled into the defendant’s cage on a hospital bed, a sheet pulled up to his chest alongside his nine co-defendants, including his sons Gamal and Alaa, his former interior minister Habib el-Adly and six top former police officials. Though he was pale and his eyes were ringed with red, he appeared alert and aware of what was going on. He showed little discernible emotion.

From time to time, Mubarak craned his head to see the proceedings. Other times, he crooked his elbow over his face as if in exhaustion. While the other defendants sat on wooden benches in the cage, Gamal and Alaa stood protectively next to their father’s bed in their white prison uniforms, leaning over at times to talk to him.

Defendants are traditionally held in cages during trials in Egypt. About an hour after the session began, there was a recess and the defendants were led out of the cage.

Up to the last minute, many Egyptians had doubted that Mubarak would actually appear at the trial. It was inconceivable that the man who vowed to rule the country until his last breath and who kept a near total grip on the levers of power, whose name once crowned public buildings around the country, could actually be brought to trial.

There was skepticism that he would show up at the trial up until the moment early Wednesday when Mubarak was taken from his hospital room in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to a military plane that flew him to a military airport in Cairo. From there, he was transferred by helicopter to the police academy where the trial was held.

Mubarak has been living in Sharm since he was ousted and has been under arrest in a hospital there since April, reportedly suffering from heart problems. His lawyer claims his health has been failing and he is extremely depressed.

Mostafa el-Naggar, one of the leading youth activists who organized the anti-Mubarak uprising, called it “a moment no Egyptian ever thought was possible.”

“I have many feelings. I am happy, satisfied. I feel this a real success for the revolution, and I feel that the moment of real retribution is near,” he told The Associated Press.

The courtroom itself was divided. Relatives of the defendants sat in rows of seats near the defendants cage, made of iron bars and mesh. A fence running through the middle of the chamber divided them from the rest of the audience of around 300 people, including a few relatives of protesters killed in the uprising, kept far enough that they cannot shout or throw anything at the former leader.

Much of the session dealt with procedural matters, as the three-judge panel officially took the names of the lawyers involved in the case.

Hundreds of Mubarak opponents watched the proceedings on a giant screen set up outside the police academy, at times waving shoes at the scene in a sign of contempt.

Also outside the court were hundreds of Mubarak supporters, furious at the humiliation of their former leader. They scuffled with the Mubarak opponents and threw stones at the screen showing the session.

“We will demolish and burn the prison if they convict Mubarak,” they screamed at hundreds of police and army troops backed by armored personnel carriers.

“He is our president and he is going to be found innocent,” said one woman in the crowd, Tahami Luteifi.

The trial answers, at least partially, a growing clamor in Egypt for justice not only for the wrongs of Mubarak’s authoritarian regime but also for the violent suppression of the largely peaceful uprising, in which 850 protesters were killed.

It came only after heavy pressure by activists on the now ruling military — one of the few demands that still unites the disparate protest movement.

In February, as protests raged around him, Mubarak vowed he would die on Egyptian soil. The last time Egyptians saw him, he appeared on state TV, handing most of his powers to his vice president but refusing to resign. He proclaimed he was “adamant to continue to shoulder my responsibility.”

The next day, his resignation was announced and Mubarak fled to a palatial residence in Sharm el-Sheikh. The ruling generals who took power from him — and who were all appointed by Mubarak before the uprising — appeared reluctant to prosecute him, but protests flared anew, pressuring action.

In April, Mubarak was moved to a Sharm el-Sheikh hospital and put under arrest while his sons and former cronies were held in Cairo’s Torah Prison.

Many Egyptians are eagerly anticipating the chance at retribution against the longtime ruler. But they also question whether the trial will truly break with the injustices of the past. Some worry that Egypt’s new military rulers are touting the trial as proof that democratic reform has been accomplished, even as activists argue that far deeper change is still needed.

The prosecution is an unprecedented moment in the Arab world, the first time a modern Mideast leader has been put on trial fully by his own people.

The closest event to it was former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s trial, but his capture came at the hands of U.S. troops in 2003 and his special tribunal was set up with extensive consultation with American officials and international experts. Tunisia’s deposed president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, has been tried and convicted several times since his fall several weeks before Mubarak’s, but all in absentia as he remains in exile in Saudi Arabia.

It is by far the most important of all trials held since February for stalwarts of the toppled regime and that is not just because Mubarak is its chief defendant.

Interior Minister el-Adly had for more than a decade led the 500,000-strong security forces blamed for some of the regime’s worst human rights abuses.

Gamal Mubarak had dominated the government in recent years, bringing into power a coterie of wealthy businessmen, many of whom have since been tried on charges of using their positions to amass huge fortunes.

Alaa Mubarak stayed away from politics but is thought to have used his father’s name to strike dubious business deals.

Near Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the protesters, a dozen people swarmed around newspapers at a stand, reading headlines about the trial. One man spit on a picture of Mubarak on a front page.

“When he is in the cage and we know he is there, then we know we have started to put our feet on the path of justice,” said the newspaper seller, Nabil Hassan, 65. “If he and his accomplices are in court, he becomes one of the people no different from anyone else facing justice. I have faith in Egyptian judges.”

AP correspondents Tarek el-Tablawy, Sarah El Deeb and Aya Batrawy contributed to this report.

And in each of these situations, the initial trouble was traceable, at least in part, to the price of that loaf of bread. If these upheavals were not “resource conflicts” in the formal sense of the term, think of them at least as bread-triggered upheavals.

Growing Climate Change in a Wheat Field

Bread has classically been known as the staff of life. In much of the world, you can’t get more basic, since that daily loaf often stands between the mass of humanity and starvation. Still, to read present world politics from a loaf of bread, you first have to ask: of what exactly is that loaf made? Water, salt, and yeast, of course, but mainly wheat, which means when wheat prices increase globally, so does the price of that loaf — and so does trouble.

To imagine that there’s nothing else in bread, however, is to misunderstand modern global agriculture. Another key ingredient in our loaf — call it a “factor of production” — is petroleum. Yes, crude oil, which appears in our bread as fertilizer and tractor fuel. Without it, wheat wouldn’t be produced, processed, or moved across continents and oceans.

And don’t forget labor. It’s an ingredient in our loaf, too, but not perhaps in the way you might imagine. After all, mechanization has largely displaced workers from the field to the factory. Instead of untold thousands of peasants planting and harvesting wheat by hand, industrial workers now make tractors and threshers, produce fuel, chemical pesticides, and nitrogen fertilizer, all rendered from petroleum and all crucial to modern wheat growing. If the labor power of those workers is transferred to the wheat field, it happens in the form of technology. Today, a single person driving a huge $400,000 combine, burning 200 gallons of fuel daily, guided by computers and GPS satellite navigation, can cover 20 acres an hour, and harvest 8,000 to 10,000 bushels of wheat in a single day.

Next, without financial capital — money — our loaf of bread wouldn’t exist. It’s necessary to purchase the oil, the fertilizer, that combine, and so on. But financial capital may indirectly affect the price of our loaf even more powerfully. When there is too much liquid capital moving through the global financial system, speculators start to bid-up the price of various assets, including all the ingredients in bread. This sort of speculation naturally contributes to rising fuel and grain prices.

The final ingredients come from nature: sunlight, oxygen, water, and nutritious soil, all in just the correct amounts and at just the right time. And there’s one more input that can’t be ignored, a different kind of contribution from nature: climate change, just now really kicking in, and increasingly the key destabilizing element in bringing that loaf of bread disastrously to market.

Marketing Disaster

When these ingredients mix in a way that sends the price of bread soaring, politics enters the picture. Consider this, for instance: The upheavals in Egypt lay at the heart of the Arab Spring. Egypt is also the world’s single largest wheat importer, followed closely by Algeria and Morocco. Keep in mind as well that the Arab Spring started in Tunisia when rising food prices, high unemployment, and a widening gap between rich and poor triggered deadly riots and finally the flight of the country’s autocratic ruler Zine Ben Ali. His last act was a vow to reduce the price of sugar, milk, and bread — and it was too little too late.

With that, protests began in Egypt and the Algerian government ordered increased wheat imports to stave off growing unrest over food prices. As global wheat prices surged by 70 percent between June and December 2010, bread consumption in Egypt started to decline under what economists termed “price rationing.” And that price kept rising all through the spring of 2011. By June, wheat cost 83 percent more than it had a year before. During the same time frame, corn prices surged by a staggering 91 percent. Egypt is the world’s fourth largest corn importer. When not used to make bread, corn is often employed as a food additive and to feed poultry and livestock. Algeria, Syria, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia are among the top 15 corn importers. As those wheat and corn prices surged, it was not just the standard of living of the Egyptian poor that was threatened, but their very lives as climate-change driven food prices triggered political violence.

In Egypt, food is a volatile political issue. After all, one in five Egyptians live on less than $1 a day and the government provides subsidized bread to 14.2 million people in a population of 83 million. Last year, overall food-price inflation in Egypt was running at more than 20 percent. This had an instant and devastating impact on Egyptian families, who spend on average 40 percent of their often exceedingly meager monthly incomes simply feeding themselves.

Against this backdrop, World Bank President Robert Zoellick fretted that the global food system was “one shock away from a full-fledged crisis.” And if you want to trace that near full-fledged crisis back to its environmental roots, the place to look is climate change, the increasingly extreme and devastating weather being experienced across this planet.

When it comes to bread, it went like this: In the summer of 2010, Russia, one of the world’s leading wheat exporters, suffered its worst drought in 100 years. Known as the Black Sea Drought, this extreme weather triggered fires that burnt down vast swathes of Russian forests, bleached farmlands, and damaged the country’s breadbasket wheat crop so badly that its leaders (urged on by western grain speculators) imposed a year-long ban on wheat exports. As Russia is among the top four wheat exporters in any year, this caused prices to surge upward.

At the same time, massive flooding occurred in Australia, another significant wheat exporter, while excessive rains in the American Midwest and Canada damaged corn production. Freakishly massive flooding in Pakistan, which put some 20 percent of that country under water, also spooked markets and spurred on the speculators.

And that’s when those climate-driven prices began to soar in Egypt. The ensuing crisis, triggered in part by that rise in the price of our loaf of bread, led to upheaval and finally the fall of the country’s reigning autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Tunisia and Egypt helped trigger a crisis that led to an incipient civil war and then western intervention in neighboring Libya, which meant most of that country’s production of 1.4 million barrels of oil a day went off-line. That, in turn, caused the price of crude oil to surge, at its height hitting $125 a barrel, which set off yet more speculation in food markets, further driving up grain prices.

And recent months haven’t brought much relief. Once again, significant, in some cases record, flooding has damaged crops in Canada, the United States, and Australia. Meanwhile, an unexpected spring drought in northern Europe has hurt grain crops as well. The global food system is visibly straining, if not snapping, under the intense pressure of rising demand, rising energy prices, growing water shortages, and most of all the onset of climate chaos.

And this, the experts tell us, is only the beginning. The price of our loaf of bread is forecast to increase by up to 90 percent over the next 20 years. That will mean yet more upheavals, more protest, greater desperation, heightened conflicts over water, increased migration, roiling ethnic and religious violence, banditry, civil war, and (if past history is any judge) possibly a raft of new interventions by imperial and possibly regional powers.

And how are we responding to this gathering crisis? Has there been a broad new international initiative focused on ensuring food security for the global poor — that is to say, a stable, affordable price for our loaf of bread? You already know the sad answer to that question.

Instead, massive corporations like Glencore, the world’s largest commodity trading company, and the privately held and secretive Cargill, the world’s biggest trader of agricultural commodities, are moving to further consolidate their control of world grain markets and vertically integrate their global supply chains in a new form of food imperialism designed to profit off global misery. While bread triggered war and revolution in the Middle East, Glencore made windfall profits on the surge in grain prices. And the more expensive our loaf of bread becomes the more money firms like Glencore and Cargill stand to make. Consider that just about the worst possible form of “adaptation” to the climate crisis.

So what text should flash through our brains when reading our loaf of bread? A warning, obviously. But so far, it seems, a warning ignored.

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Christian Parenti, author of the just-published “Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence” (Nation Books), is a contributing editor at the Nation magazine, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute, and a visiting scholar at the City University of New York.